Sunset ^beta

Chapter Text

Aziraphale rose over Crawly, pressing her down into the water, in a sacred paradisical garden guarded by flowers. Aziraphale’s breasts were smashed against hers, heaving and shifting with each breath she took against the sensitive skin of Crawly’s chest. Aziraphale’s lips were open against hers, her tongue insistent in Crawly’s mouth.

Aziraphale’s hands were gentle, brushing softly against Crawly’s hair, catching her before she fell against the hard riverbed.

Crawly couldn’t quite believe it was really happening.

Crawly had barely stepped off the boat from Lydia, new golden snake-shaped bracelet, tasteful eye makeup, and clever high-laced sandals proclaiming her the height of fashion, when she’d heard about a rehearsal that was supposed to be happening that night; apparently, a local chorus was going to debut a few new songs and poems, practicing and workshopping them before the next festival rolled around. Aziraphale was due back from Heaven right around then, and if she was returning to her previous posting in Lesbos, Crawly figured she’d probably be hanging around that; Aziraphale liked performance, liked the idea of putting on costumes and trying out identities. “It’s not lying,” she had told Crawly once, “if everyone knows it isn’t actually true, and moreover, there’s always a kernel of truth somewhere in the emotions of the thing.”

Crawly wasn’t sure how much she agreed, but it made Aziraphale happy as anything, so she didn’t argue the point.

Anyway, the sooner she saw Aziraphale the better. Just after she’d been summoned to report Upstairs, Crawly had seen something at the market in Sardis that would fit perfectly with Aziraphale’s fire-white hair and new love of (and hoarding of, gluttonous thing) clothing: a golden hairband, with a detailed motif of feathers. It would match the fibula Aziraphale had chosen to secure her peplos last time she’d seen her, the golden pair of wings raised in flight. They had been in the market together in Athens, debating whether Homer was a singular real person or a convenient group pseudonym [1], when Aziraphale had seen the fibula at a jeweller’s stand and just had to have it. They’d argued back and forth about whether it was a nightingale’s wings, like Aziraphale fancied, or pagan symbolism, which Crawly was very sure was correct, which did nothing to dim Aziraphale’s covetousness or Crawly’s own desire to fulfil it.

“The wings of Nike for my… companion,” Crawly had grandly ordered, golden coins appearing in her hand with just a frisson of a miracle as Aziraphale tutted and tittered, and the sparkle in the saleswoman’s eyes as she repeated back “for your companion” made it clear she meant, “for your girlfriend.”

“The perfect timing for it too, with spring around the corner!” she’d added cheerfully, making it clear she’d listened to their whole tete-a-tete about what the wings did and didn’t represent and came down firmly on the side of whatever made her a sale [2]. “The nightingale’s lovely voice is the angel of the spring, you know.”

Crawly had fastened it in place on Aziraphale’s left shoulder right there in the arcade, Aziraphale’s cheeks a rosy pink like the dawn, her eyes sparkling dark grey like the stars at dusk.

That was several years ago now, and they hadn’t seen each other again since, with Crawly assigned to go zigzagging across the Aegean Sea like Odysseus in that new epic and Aziraphale stationed on Lesbos.

That zigzagging wasn’t for naught—she’d done plenty of work, and taken credit for more, especially once she’d seen the Strait of Messina and realized that some Power had fucked up on QA and put a whirlpool too close to a rock formation. She took credit for the whole shebang, saying she’d personally installed the whirlpool, that she’d spread the stories of Scylla and Charybdis as sea monsters, that she’d even directly caused ships to sail into them and wreck. Nobody checked the schematics, she’d earned a commendation, and now she had enough slack and badwill built up in Hell to take a little vacation to a beautiful island with a reputation for licentiousness that also just happened to house an angel.

It also wasn’t for naught because she’d acquired a handful of little things to give that angel. Tempt her to a spot of greed, if she was asked [3]. The headband, a few garlands of miraculously-preserved flowers, some dried heather, strappy sandals that matched her own except, instead of being black, mingled colours of every kind.

Most of the stuff she left in the inn before making her way down to the amphitheatre, but she carried the headband with her. She wanted to see just how well it matched Aziraphale’s fibula.

Aziraphale wasn’t around when the chorus started. The moon appeared in its fullness above the horizon as women took their place around the altar at centre stage, but Aziraphale seemed to be a no-show. It was barely dark when Crawly felt her every hair stand on end, instinct sending her into fight-or-flight as she felt an angelic presence register on the earthly plane. She whirled around to see, in the back of the eastern part of the crowd, the exact moment Aziraphale arrived from heaven, wrapped in a purple mantle. She glowed, refined and bright and beautiful as the sun, until she realized what she was doing and dimmed the effect, visibly irritated. Crawly watched from afar as Aziraphale fiddled with her peplos, smoothing the patterned blue fabric and adjusting the sundry pins holding it closed and—

She was wearing the fibula.

She’d worn the nightingale fibula that Crawly had bought for her, had pinned on her in Athens, to report to Heaven. Crawly felt unaccountably warm for the chilly spring evening.

When Aziraphale met her eyes across the crowd and grinned, her pale face nearly silver in the moonlight, pin-fussing and hair-fixing stopped in favour of an exuberant wave, Crawly was helpless but to smile and wave back.

They watched the performance from opposite sides; or rather, Aziraphale watched the performance and Crawly watched her. After the social commentaries and recitals of stories about the gods of the Greeks, which Aziraphale met with visible and impersonal appreciation and approval, Sappho’s invocations of Aphrodite and Eros and descriptions of lust seemed to likewise invoke something restless in Aziraphale. She wet and licked her lips, she tapped her fingers, she crossed and uncrossed her legs. It was mesmerizing. Crawly had never seen a display like it from her. She wanted to know what it meant.

She’d also never seen Aziraphale vanish so quickly after a friendly greeting. Either something was very wrong, or something was about to be very wrong, and either way Crawly wanted to at least know what was going on, even if she couldn’t fix it. She followed the trail of luminescent dew left in the wake an angel still shaking off the aftereffects of a Heavenly descent, on the petals of blooming roses and frail starflowers and florid honey clover [Sappho LP 96], which led her to a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, the kinds of things the angel was drawn to on Earth. The things she valued most highly, really, even when explicitly ordered otherwise. Interesting.

She wandered around inside a bit, surprised that Aziraphale had come to such a place. Aziraphale was queen of loopholes, empress of figuring out how to get her way without breaking any rules, but surely entering a temple to the wrong god was actually against a rule, somewhere? One of those bridges Aziraphale really wouldn’t cross?

She opened an unassuming door with a casual kick, and when she saw what was on the other side, her jaw dropped so low it actually unhinged, something that she tried not to do in human form.

The door opened out onto a manicured grove lined by young, healthy apple trees undergirded by roses of every shade of pink, blooming and fragrant, a marble statue at least ten feet tall clad in cloth of gold overlooking the whole thing. Aziraphale stood inside in a brook that sprung from the centre of the garden, head bowed, facing away from the door. She seemed to be praying furiously. She was also entirely nude, her clothing and bag folded neatly on the temple’s portico by Crawly’s feet, as she had never been even in Eden. She was the image of divinity, the moon’s reflected splendour falling upon her like a spotlight. Her voluptuous figure rolled and curved and dipped, golden lines marking the places where it stretched and strove to contain the angel all her glory and joy.

Crawly was still staring when Aziraphale noticed she was there and turned around, her soft stomach and heavy breasts obeying the pull of the gravitational laws she had helped design. Her lips formed a perfect circle of surprise, emphasizing the softness of her features.

Before Aziraphale had the chance to object, to tell Crawly to get lost, Crawly decided the best tactic would be to disrobe herself, to put them on equal-ish footing, and hand over Aziraphale’s present.

Crawly pulled the pin from her own fibula, allowing her apple-red chiton to fall to the ground around her ankles, and carried the headband with her past the apples and roses as she sauntered to the centre of the spring beside Aziraphale. A mischievous grin overtook her as she watched Aziraphale’s expression morph from surprise to suspicious anticipation.

“Skinny-dipping with a pagan lust goddess, angel? What’s next, drunken cavorting through hill and dale with Dionysus?” she poked, seeing if Aziraphale would answer her unspoken question.

“Of course you know the name of the wine god,” Aziraphale said, in a tone that sounded like she was aiming for scathing but only really achieved fond. “How did you find me here?”

“Eh,” Crawly prevaricated, suddenly a bit self-conscious. “Just followed the trail of good deeds and benevolence ‘til I found the bastard spreading kindness around on my turf. Got a reputation to uphold.”

“Do you?” Aziraphale’s eyebrows raised with barely-suppressed laughter, the kind that rippled across her shoulders and caused her breasts to jiggle. Crawly lost track of what she said next, but it ended with “Isn’t that so?” so she nodded.

“I’m so glad you agree with me how nice certain snakes can be.” The smug bastard.

“Never yet, Aziraphale, have I met anyone more aggravating than you are,” Crawly groaned. “I should take this thing straight back to Sardis; it’d serve you right.”

“You mean that’s…. for me?” Aziraphale’s voice was suddenly hesitant, her whole posture turning shy.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” Crawly grumbled. “Thought it’d go with your fibula, is all. Make you vain.”

The smallest charm of a miracle shot past her, and Aziraphale suddenly held a silver tiara in both hands.

“It’s just… Well, Crawly, I have a gift for you as well,” she said, and held it out for Crawly to see. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, but just imperfect enough that she knew immediately it was of human manufacture. The snake motif in the centre and the surrounding apple bough and wings told her immediately that Aziraphale must have commissioned it; this was no idle fancy. Snakes were an Asclepius thing, apples Aphrodite; in this place, they would only come together specifically for Crowley. “May I?” Aziraphale asked, and Crawly bowed her head, allowing Aziraphale to crown her.

Aziraphale’s hands were gentle as they secured the tiara to her hair, fitting it in with the pins and thread that held the style together. When she finished, Crawly motioned for her to lower her own head a little, then placed the golden feathered hairband she had brought in Aziraphale’s impossible pomaded curls, a touch of a miracle to keep it where it was until Aziraphale decided otherwise.

Aziraphale looked up at Crawly through lowered eyelashes, her eyes so dark they appeared brown, and slowly raised her hand to rest underneath Crawly’s chin.

“Angel?” Crawly asked, heart racing in her chest, unable to quite believe that Aziraphale knew what, exactly, she was implying.

Aziraphale took a very deep breath, then crashed her face against Crawly’s.

Once she realized what was happening was real, Crawly’s mouth fell open under Aziraphale’s eager lips, eyes fluttering closed as she simply breathed Aziraphale in. She grabbed at her, grasping handfuls of lovely sweetness, the plush meat of her back. When Aziraphale’s tongue licked at her own for the first time, she felt herself go all buzzy, felt her knees grow weak. She tried walking them backward into something to hold onto, to steady herself so Aziraphale could kiss her harder, but her knees proved unreliable.

Aziraphale had caught her on the way down and steadied her in the water, her mouth never leaving Crawly’s, and oh, this was desire. She didn’t know what it was she yearned and longed for exactly but she knew it was Aziraphale Aziraphale Aziraphale, her wet tongue and clever hands and golden heart. Aziraphale above her, pressing her into the water with her kisses and taking Crawly’s tongue greedily into her own mouth, all the strength and softness of the guardian who took her role as protector of humanity to heart, the angel who had given away her weapon but not her duty, her edges but not her core.

As Crawly adjusted her position now that she had landed safely in the water, Aziraphale broke the kiss, only to begin sucking at Crawly’s thoroughly unnecessary pulse, making her similarly unnecessary breath catch. Crawly opened her legs to allow Aziraphale better access, so she could press in closer if she wanted, kneel between her thighs. Aziraphale’s hand below the water shifted, dragging across her ass, then her hip, until the palm rested on the jutting mound at the bottom of her pelvis that hid her genitals [4].

Crawly gasped with the sudden heat, the delicate ghost of pressure as Aziraphale’s dainty fingers curled ever so slightly, her palm cupping the mound and pads of her fingers brushing Crawly’s Adonis belt.

Aziraphale licked and kissed her way slowly down Crawly’s neck, slow and steady and sure, warm and unbearably sexy, and Crawly made sure she encouraged this, her own hands gripping Aziraphale closer, her neck twisting with inhuman flexibility to provide the best possible presentation of her flesh for her angel, not holding back on the noises she made once she realized Aziraphale liked them. They had to be discreet, of course, by a temple, but they could make some noise. They were the only ones here other than the sleeping priestesses on the other side of some very thick marble walls, after all.

Then, when Aziraphale reached the joint of her neck and shoulders, Aziraphale’s thumb slipped inside her under the slender cover of the water, a ghostly touch against something down there for a fraction of a second, and Crawly felt like she’d been shocked, every nerve standing on edge. She heard herself whine. Like a strike of lightning across a dark sky, the sensation was there and gone so quickly that she wouldn’t have known it was there if not for the afterburn image.

“Do that again, angel,” she asked, breathless, and Aziraphale sucked at her neck-shoulder-joining-place again like she could pull the marrow from Crawly’s bones, and it wasn’t what Crawly meant but it was so Aziraphale she could scream. As Aziraphale kissed it better, she brushed her thumb inside Crawly again, much more slowly against the place that had affected her, which she thought was that little nub she’d picked out. She’d liked the way it stood out just inside the first lip, a purely aesthetic choice at the time that was, like so many of her aesthetic decisions, having some entirely unforeseen consequences. “Yes,” she moaned, and Aziraphale’s mouth came up again to meet hers. Aziraphale retracted the hand that had been on Crawly’s pelvis and cupped her cheek, guiding the angle.

Aziraphale kissed like Crawly was a bowl of rosewater mahalebi, like she was something to be slowly savoured, like the tongue of a demon in the paradise of an idolatrous god was something she could give a Michelin star. It was everything Crawly had ever wanted, for Aziraphale to be with her, to enjoy her presence and to be the focus of her attention. She was safety, she was home, she was warmth and light and good and everything Crawly couldn’t be herself, even if she wanted to be, and she was here.

But now, like Eve tempted by the first taste of knowledge, Crawly also wanted whatever Aziraphale had been doing with her thumb. She wanted Aziraphale to touch her, to caress her most intimate places. She’d never felt anything like that little electric brush, and now that it was gone, she mourned its absence.

As she was kissed, as she kissed back, narrow tongue picking up the taste and scent of pure Aziraphale, she threaded her fingers through those of one of Aziraphale’s hands and pulled it down from her face, back down to where it had rested on the external part of the genitalia she had gone through some effort to acquire. She spread her legs open further, wrapping one loosely around the back of Aziraphale’s knees.

Aziraphale let her hand rest there, lightly trapped between Crawly’s hand and mound, just as she had before. It was warm and steady and grounding under the water, just as the rest of her soft, heavy, perfect corporeal body was above. She smiled into the kiss, pulling back just enough to whisper Crawly’s name. Like an old secret, like something she would protect, like the only word she wanted to pass through her lips.

Crawly grabbed at her desperately, pressing the hand she held down and tugging at the softness of her shoulder-blades, the place where the wings joined on a higher plane. She answered with her own whispered Aziraphale, a call-and-response they’d established nearly as long ago as Eden. Hello, I’m here, and so are you. It was the closest thing she had to a prayer, a blessing, a benediction, all the things Aziraphale richly deserved and so very rarely got.

The hand that remained on Crawly’s face moved to cradle the back of her head as Aziraphale stole the breath from her mouth. The cool water flowing around their hips and legs added to the sensation of warmth and safety from the press of an ethereal angel’s very physical body against hers above it, the swell of her breasts against Crawly’s chest in an uneven rhythm with their unsynchronized, rapid, human breathing.

Two of Aziraphale’s fingers slipped free of Crawly’s hold and entered her this time, one catching lightly on that nub that made her nerves buzz. Crawly pressed down on her hand, moaning yes, there into Aziraphale’s mouth, and Aziraphale mercifully allowed them to rest where they were instead of pulling away again. It was always a fifty-fifty chance with Aziraphale, whether asking for more would scare her off or give her an excuse, but today Aziraphale had proven she was content to stay, to let Crawly ask.

Then a slight shift of their kiss, or a muscle twitch, or perhaps some kind of unconscious magnetism, caused Aziraphale’s fingers to shift slightly against that nub, creating a delicious friction that Crawly chased, her hips attempting to buck up without her conscious input. With just the palm of her hand, Aziraphale held Crawly down and steady against the bottom of the bubbling spring, her fingers stilled again, then retracted that hand altogether.

“Aziraphale,” she whimpered, and didn’t recognize her own voice. She sounded desperate, which she was, and like she was about to cry, which she wasn’t, or at least she didn’t think so. “Aziraphale, please, that, more.”

“We shouldn’t,” Aziraphale replied, her voice hoarser than Crawly had ever heard it. “Not even here. We shouldn’t.” And then she started again, kissing apparently not off-limits. Slowly, Aziraphale worked her way down Crawly’s collarbone, from the central dip to the shoulder, devouring every inch of Crawly’s skin, hot and slow and savouring, making cute little humming sounds.

Aziraphale was beautiful. She always was, but Crawly had never seen her quite like this. Her hair was long and the curls much tighter than they were when short, and the crown and light of the full moon refracting through the windows made it an imperishable white gold, her face nearly silver; her lips were swollen and succulent and a deep, plush pink; she was naked in Crawly’s arms, fully present in the body and the space she had carved out on the physical plane for herself. Constant as the tide. Even when she retreated, she was always around, somewhere, and she would always come back.

Aziraphale sucked at a spot on Crawly’s shoulder she’d marked out on her little trip, and Crawly threw her head back and made a noise she didn’t know she could make, a guttural cluster of nonsensical consonants. Fuck whatever was going on with the weird whatever in her pubic area, she thought. She could get by on just this, the hot sensation of it, even just the memory of it: of Aziraphale finding something in Crawly that she liked and letting her know it, of Aziraphale being there with her and letting her feel it.

Aziraphale was licking and kissing the spot better when she found her words again, or at least the only words that mattered. “Aziraphale, come up here and kiss me,” she begged, and Aziraphale did, surging back up to meet her lips. She sucked Crawly’s tongue into her mouth, invited Crawly in to explore her taste and scent.

Below the water, two fingers hooked just into Crawly’s lower lips and gently massaged her little nub again, and Crawly burned with lust, as though delivered straight into her skull by Eros himself.

They were maddeningly delicate, those fingers. Only the very tips touched her, ghostly, uneven, arrhythmic, as though Aziraphale was afraid of committing to a decision. Each pass shot through Crawly like a spark, like an electron in the firmament, knocking her every quark and lepton out of alignment.

Slowly, Aziraphale slowed and then stopped, drawing a whine, and dragged her fingers across the spot as she raised her hand back out of Crawly, out of the water, to rest on Crawly’s waist instead. Crawly growled into her mouth in frustration, and Aziraphale giggled. Ridiculous bastard jackass of an angel. Crawly bit her lip in retaliation, far from firm but no longer as pliant as she had been, and Aziraphale drew back and frowned at her.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that!” she complained, somehow perfectly prim and schoolmarmish even in the midst of unwinding the frayed fabric of Crawly’s self-control.

“Well,” Crawly parroted back in a high-pitched mimicry.

Aziraphale couldn’t quite hide her amusement, not when she was bare so that Crawly could see every inch of her, the brief flex of her stomach and shoulders and neck as the smallest huff of laughter travelled through her body. Crawly loved her. And she was here.

“I suppose I have no other recourse than to kiss something that won’t bite me,” she said haughtily, with a sparkle in her eye, and Crawly had no idea what she was going to do next. Her whole body thrummed with anticipation.

Aziraphale put her mouth on one of Crawly’s breasts, enveloping the nipple, tongue slowly dragging across as though catching the juice from a ripened apple, and massaged the other with the hand not holding Crawly steadily by the waist, thumb coaxing it to hardness. The whole thing fit in the palm of her broad hand, setting Crawly’s nerves alight. It was really something to write home about, if Crawly both had a home and were inclined to write herself letters.

Crawly didn’t know her corporation could do that.

The whole thing worked, of course, and it hurt more to be hit in the chest when she altered it to be more feminine, but the transmutation of that sensitivity into pleasure was wholly new.

And then Aziraphale slowly dragged her hand down from its steadying presence at Crawly’s waist, back down underwater to the sensitive parts she had unearthed, and rested it, once again on Crawly’s mound with just one finger lightly touching the nub, and Crawly didn’t know if she should praise or curse her past self for what was happening now. The contact created some kind of feedback loop between the nerves Aziraphale was activating on her breasts and in her groin, a direct current circuit of Aziraphale and sensation, causing her back to arch and tears to form in her eyes as she mewled her pleasure. It was almost too much.

After a few moments, Aziraphale pulled back slightly, looking so smug that Crawly would have been annoyed if she had any room in her brain to hold onto an emotion that wasn’t desire or affection, eros and philia recreating her as a caduceus. “That should teach you, fiend,” Aziraphale teased her, like the ridiculous creature she was, and cupped and nuzzled at her cheek before delivering a soft, nearly chaste kiss to Crawly’s lips.

Then she opened Crawly’s lips with her tongue, and the kiss definitely tipped away from anything like chastity. As she devoured Crawly’s mouth, the hand that remained underwater began to rub firm fingers against that sensitive nub in tight, precise circles, overflowing Crawly with the sparkling, wonderful, overpowering sensation.

Crawly couldn’t keep up with the kissing. Her mouth worked, instead, on saying Aziraphale’s name between gasps and moans, incapable of anything else. Aziraphale responded by simply moving her mouth from Crawly’s lips to her ears, and began whispering things that didn’t help, like “good girl” and “you’re doing so well for me.” She couldn’t think, couldn’t hold on to anything, except the places where she and Aziraphale met, a constant warm line down her body from her ear to her knees, and the radiation of lightning and thunder and cosmic microwave background running from Aziraphale’s fingertips where they just barely tipped inside her.

The sensations grew until they overwhelmed her, all her senses shutting off except the nervous centre of her corporation’s human brain and the part of herself that was eternal, the part of herself that could see every star, the knowledge of celestial mechanics inborn and immutable. As she came, she saw behind her eyes the nebula where she first met Aziraphale, the place where it all began.

Cresting the wave of sensation took longer than she expected. As she opened her eyes again, Aziraphale slowed and stilled, uncertainty crossing her face for the first time all night.

“Are you alright, Crawly?” she asked, her voice wavering just slightly, and she was the most holy thing Crawly had ever seen.

“‘Alright,’ she asks,” Crawly joked weakly, her voice hoarse. “Aziraphale, I’ve never been more alright in my life.”

“If you’d like, er, if you enjoyed, I mean, I think you could, hm.” Aziraphale seemed to struggle with her words, and Crawly impatiently let her collect herself. “If you would like,” she tried again, cautiously, “I think you could orgasm again. Since the clitoris doesn’t have a refractory period, you see. And nobody came to investigate when you, er. Screamed.”

Her words were cautious, but she was smiling, just this side of smug. She wanted to be talked into it. She’d enjoyed it, Crawly thought, just as much as Crawly had. Well, maybe not as much, but if Aziraphale liked something and that something was also something Crawly liked….

“Oh, angel, I enjoyed,” she said as rakishly as she could. She must have looked a complete wreck, with her hair mussed and cheeks flushed with exertion, but Aziraphale smiled at her anyway. She did like to indulge Crawly too, Crawly supposed. “I might wither away unless you do it again, immediately. Pass straight into—what’s these peoples’ version of—pass straight into Hades if you don’t do whatever that was to me again right now.”

“Oh, well, if you insist,” Aziraphale hummed happily, and put her hand back to work.

This time, there was no teasing or dallying about. Aziraphale was immediate and firm in her ministrations, stroking and circling the thing—the clitoris—as she held Crawly steadily against her, Crawly’s head buried against Aziraphale’s neck.

Her hands clutched at Aziraphale’s hair, her stomach, as her hips bucked against Aziraphale’s hand and Aziraphale let them, as Aziraphale’s own hips ground against Crawly’s thigh. As Aziraphale stroked up and down on her clitoris and kissed her hair, she heard herself gasping Aziraphale’s name and Aziraphale calling hers. Again and again, she moaned, her hips and Aziraphale’s hand finding a rhythm and Aziraphale’s perfect voice playing the melody, until Crawly came again, Aziraphale following her. It was even more intense, if that was even possible. As her senses extended past her corporation, she felt Aziraphale’s cosmic essence enveloping her own, sensations of a comet shooting across the starry sky and a golden sapling of a pear tree and soft feathers in unkempt wings all at once.

She came back to Aziraphale’s fingers pressing down hard on her, hot breath on her ear asking “Crawly, may I? Good things do come in threes.”

“Yes, yes,” she panted. She could never say anything else to Aziraphale [5].

And then Aziraphale pulled away, and Crawly was instinctively, desperately terrified. She wouldn’t see her angel again for a year decade century angel angel angel “Angel, come back, come back, please,” she heard her voice beg.

“Shh, Crawly, I’m here,” Aziraphale said, and she was. She had only pulled back to rearrange herself to be sitting in the spring rather than kneeling, and she gently pulled Crawly into her lap. “I don’t want you to fall over,” she said as she returned Crawly’s face to its cradle, returned her hands to Crawly’s hair and cunt. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Crawly. Not when I can avoid it.”

This time she was gentle, drawing it out without adding on to her pro forma objections, her fingers on the one hand relaxing Crawly, petting her hair and scratching at her scalp like a bosom friend, her fingers on the other stoking her lust and arousal. She hummed tunelessly against Crawly’s temple as she pressed in slow, lingering kisses. Crawly luxuriated in that delicious attention, like drinks all night after an impromptu collaboration, like meeting eyes across a crowded symposium as a young woman sang a love poem, like finding a house or flat for a decade or two on some corner of this planet just around the corner from the only other person on this rock that really knew her.

Crawly almost didn’t notice when she came that time, as fuzzy and warm and surrounded by Aziraphale as she was. Of all the stars she had hung, of all the stars she’d seen that night as her senses expanded and contracted: of all stars, Aziraphale was the most beautiful. She was the one that Crawly saw in the throes of her third orgasm of the night, all her senses focused on this one angel; even her eyes alone were the two fairest stars in all Heaven. Golden-crowned Aziraphale let this be hers, let Crawly see her beyond the planes, not just the impression of her essence in its variable forms but also the weight and depth of her divinity, shining and sturdy and impossibly protective. Aziraphale cradled her overwhelmed corporation close through it all as Crawly’s limbs went loose and limp and impossibly heavy as the core of a neutron star.

After she finished, the arousal dissipated, but the fuzzy warm safety of Aziraphale’s embrace stayed with her. “Hello, angel,” she said, out of breath, probably smiling like a loon.

“Hello, Crawly,” Aziraphale replied. Hello, I’m here, and so are you.

“Want a go?” Crawly asked, lazily blinking up at Aziraphale, draping an arm around her shoulder and cupping one perfect breast, letting it overflow her palm. Crawly thought distantly that her eyes were probably fully yellow. If they were, Aziraphale didn’t seem to mind.

“Next time, perhaps,” Aziraphale said, in the most apologetic tone Crawly ever heard from her. “I’d just like to hold you, if that’s all right.”

“Of course,” Crawly said immediately. “Whatever you want. Thought I’d offer. You know, angel,” she said, trying for conversational and hearing herself land somewhere closer to blissed out, “that wasn’t in your pamphlet.”

Aziraphale sniffed. “Of course not, my dear. I got the pamphlet from Michael. She wouldn’t know an orgasm from an orangutan.”

“Might have said earlier that you could do more than tab A in slot B, is all I’m saying,” she teased. “I didn’t even know what the thing, the clitoris, was called until you said it just now. Since it wasn’t in the pamphlet.”

Aziraphale looked alarmed. “You mean you… didn’t know...?” Her alarm was slowly transmuting into horror. “Crawly, did you…?”

“I practically begged you, didn’t I? Just didn’t know it was an option before. Didn’t know it could do that.”

“Well.” Aziraphale looked mollified. “I think as long as we don’t do it too often, then. And nobody on either of our sides knows.”

“Of course, angel. Our little secret.” Crawly smiled at her, still hazy and happy and in the arms of God’s only really good angel. “Whenever you like. Or whenever you get a chance. Or if we just end up in the same city. Or the same room. Or—”

Aziraphale stopped her lips with a kiss, giggling into Crawly’s mouth adorably.

To think that she had lived her life until today not knowing what Aziraphale tasted like, not knowing how carbon and blue and autumn and honeyed nectar tasted when combined inside her mouth. It was Crawly’s new favourite flavour.

They held each other for a while, trading languorous kisses under the watchful carved eyes of marble Aphrodite, until Aziraphale startled.

“Did you hear that?” she asked Crawly nervously.

Crawly had.

“Just a nightingale, angel,” she reassured Aziraphale [6]. “They sing in pomegranate trees all the time. Every night, probably. Don’t worry about it.”

“No,” Aziraphale told her, pulling away. “No, it was a lark, I think.” She scanned the horizon [7]. “Dawn is about to break; you can see the clouds in the east. We have to leave.”

Crawly couldn’t argue.

The night, beautiful as it was, had to end eventually, transient as the roses that surrounded them. They would have to get dressed and part, walk back out into a world where they weren’t supposed to know each other. But Crawly would always know that there was a guardian angel looking out for their world, safe and warm and home. And, when Aziraphale was comfortable, when she allowed herself to indulge Crawly, they would interact, work together, grab a drink.

Maybe, eventually, someday, they would even have a night like this again, in one of their infrequent meetings. Perhaps Aziraphale would realize that she was the thing on Earth that brought Crawly the most pleasure, that the sensitive spot in the underbelly of Crawly’s soul was shaped, not as an apple or snake or question, but the clever, funny, good angel who was so often close enough to touch but remained tied behind enemy lines.

Maybe, someday, those lines might blur away and disappear, and their stars would uncross, as they left behind Heaven and Hell and all they stood for, off in a constellation of their own design.

Chapter Text

First: I am not a historian, a classicist, a sociologist, a musician, a queer theorist, or an anthropologist; I’m a librarian by training but not (yet, please let it be a yet, please send me good career vibes) by profession. I do not speak Greek, and I definitely can’t read it. Any mistakes I have made should be attributed to my own ignorance and misinterpretation, and not that of the scholars whose work has been so generously shared with the world through publications and public institutions. While I primarily used my university’s library to access books I cite, all of them should be accessible through any public library in the United States through inter-library loan programs, and articles are accessible to the public through JSTOR with an account. (With the exception of Ancient Sex: New Essays, which I did not access directly, but the chapter cited is accessible through JSTOR.)

This chapter is subdivided into three parts: my notes and explanations, a listing of specific verses from which I quoted or took inspiration, and the bibliography.

Research Note:

This fic is intended to be set on the island of Lesbos/Lesvos/Mytilene in approximately 600 BCE, while the poet Sappho was active. Sappho is perhaps the most famous woman of Ancient Greece, a person whose identity and relationships to gender, sexuality, and the literary canon has been under constant debate and revision for more than 2,500 years. Today, her legacy is inextricable from our understanding of both ancient and modern female homoeroticism and homosexuality. Our words for female sexuality, sapphic and lesbian, both derive from Sappho of Lesbos, and her poetry has resonated with and inspired many of our queer foremothers. This is for good reason: among her corpus are a number of beautiful and resonant poetic lines proclaiming the poet-narrator’s love and desire for women, proclaiming the love and erotic desire of girls for their female peers and mentors, and many invocations of Aphrodite that are, themselves, portraits of her feminine beauty through a female gaze.

When I first started this fic, I knew I had to incorporate Sappho into it. I have done this in three ways: first, by incorporating a performance of her poetry into the plot; second, by using the setting of her Ode to Aphrodite (LP 2) for the setting of the erotic action; third, by quoting her both directly and indirectly throughout. These quotations are labelled in the first chapter using hover-text, and a full list is below.

To better understand how female homosexuality was viewed in Sappho’s time, I turned primarily to Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome by Sandra Boehringer, originally published in French in 2007 but not translated into English until 2021, and the collection Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger. Like most things from the ancient world, what comes down to us is very patchy, and like most things in the ancient world involving women, it has been filtered through thousands of years of male gaze, decisions, commentary, and silence. Sappho’s legacy is the largest part, but not the entirety; other elements, including a visual representation of a clearly female-female amorous exchange on a ceramic plate held at the Archaeological Museum of Thera in Santorini, do exist, and from them the scholars I have read have reached a few conclusions:

1. Female-female relationships did exist (I know, water is wet, but scholars do have to establish these kinds of things! Can’t study what you don’t know exists!);
2. They do not appear to have necessarily conformed to the same kind of hierarchical structure as man-boy and man-woman relationships, although there is the potentiality of hierarchical woman-girl relationships which mirror the man-boy relationship, especially in Sparta;
3. This was an acceptable part of society, as evidenced by its inclusion in nationalistic and cultic songs in Sappho’s corpus in particular, as well as in some later humoristic poetry that appears to be in conversation with Sappho’s legacy;
4. It was not part of the male erotic imagination, as evidenced by the total silence on the subject by men, who make up the vast majority of the surviving corpus.

The ceramic plate, pictured below, was particularly inspirational to me. Boehringer’s description of it contextualized it beautifully, and I copied it closely in my writing. According to Boehringer, the exchanging of garlands and the touching of the chin are what mark this out as explicitly a love scene. In addition to the subjects both being depicted as female, the other thing that makes this unique is that the women are presented in equal height, their eyes on an equal line. Generally, in similar scenes involving man-boy and man-woman relationships, Boehringer says that the man is depicted as having higher status through literal positioning of him as taller than his counterpart. In ideal sexual relations as conceived by Ancient Grecian society, hierarchy was intertwined with penetration, and the man would penetrate the boy or woman who was his sexual partner. As I sought to portray Aziraphale and Crowley as social equals within the context in this society, like the women in the plate, I avoided acts that would include penetration during the part of the story where they are having sex.

In my understanding of how poetic performance fits into Greek society, I am indebted to A Companion to Greek Lyric, which I did not read in full but did read several chapters of by many different authors. Adrian Kelly’s chapter, Epic and Lyric, explains the performance contexts of lyrical poetry, as Sappho wrote, pointing out that while lyric poetry is generally associated with more private contexts like symposia, “choral lyric poetry […] obviously found a natural home in public performances.” As one of the few things about Sappho the historical person that can be considered relatively settled is that she certainly wrote choral poetry, it has seemed likely to many scholars and interlocutors throughout history that she was a chorus leader. Athanassaki’s chapter The Lyric Chorus was helpful to me in understanding the role chorus played in civic and religious life in Ancient Greece. Formal performances were given frequently for all kinds of civil and religious events, most notably for festivals, for both public and private occasions.

Sappho’s Fragment 2 is a beautiful poem, mostly complete, that envisions an idealized temple to the goddess in a sacred grove, complete with apple trees, blooming roses, and a babbling brook flowing through a meadow. It’s a gorgeous poetic setting, which Annette Giesecke explores and explains in methodical detail in her chapter Lyric Space: Sappho and Aphrodite’s Sanctuary. I used Fragment 2, Giesecke’s exploration of its spatiality in the literary mind, and the way its elements interact and intertwine with Good Omens and its basis in the English Christian tradition to, I hope, intertwine the ideas of the sacred grove of Aphrodite and the garden of Eden. While the association of apples and Crowley is obvious, the use of the rose is less common in Christian iconography. In my own mind, the two most obvious meanings of the rose in the English context are that of love and discord intertwined, exemplified by the rose in Romeo and Juliet that represents their love despite the war between their families: “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy / […] That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” I thought this a very fitting flower for the fraught relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale, as star-crossed as lovers can be, and conceived of this night spent together as analogous to Romeo and Juliet’s singular night together before the tragedy tragedizes.

Apples and roses are recurring motifs in Sappho’s poetry, as Aphrodite is the god she most often references; so are nightingales. Just as our Ineffables have special associations with nightingales through the song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” and the English canon is shot through with nightingales signifying the safety and anonymity of the cover of darkness including in Romeo and Juliet, Sappho references nightingales to invoke both the cover of night and the coming of spring. In fact, she even calls the nightingale the angelos of spring, a word which is usually translated in this context as “herald” or “messenger” but can also be translated as “angel,” as Ben Johnson, an Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, did when quoting Sappho in his incomplete play The Sad Shepherd. It’s also interesting to me to note that daimon, the word which would eventually become the English demon, in archaic Greece referred to minor gods, including Eros.

My method of selection for which translations of Sappho to use was very scientific: I went to the public library, located the poetry, and checked out the two collections that were on the shelf. Unfortunately, this means that the translation most people are familiar with, by Anne Carson in 1954, was not referenced in the writing of this fic. Happily, however, I found both Willis Barnesworth’s and Jim Powell’s translations more than sufficient for my purposes. Barnesworth’s collection included a lot of interesting information about his translation process, Sappho’s legacy in Greek poetic canon, the history of the fragments of her poetry which have survived and which have been destroyed, and some references to other translations, which is where I discovered Johnson’s use of Sappho. Powell’s 2019 translation included several fragments that have surfaced since Carson’s 1954 translation, including two that were discovered in 2014. I discovered Klinck’s Woman’s Songs in Ancient Greece late in the process, largely after I had already quoted Barnesworth and Powell all over the place, but her translations of other poets helped me understand more fully the role of women in general and of Sappho’s positioning in particular within the world of archaic Greek lyrical poetry.

As a final note, I used the terms peplos and chiton to refer to Aziraphale and Crowley’s dresses rather than Doric chiton and Ionian chiton. Following the rough timeline from Smith & Sneed’s blog post for UC Boulder’s Classics department, Aziraphale is lagging behind fashion by a good fifty years, but if she keeps lagging, in another hundred or so she’ll be back on trend!

What follows is a complete list of all poetry I directly or indirectly quote in this fic. I also took much inspiration from Sappho’s corpus as a whole, the play Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare, The Bible, and, of course, Good Omens.

Poetry used:

• “Hagesikhora, blossoms on her head / like imperishable gold. / And the silver look of her face— / What can I tell you openly?” Partheneion, Alcman, trans. Gregory Nagy, lines 53-56.
• “It is true: all the royal purple / in the world cannot resist. / No fancy snake-bracelet, / made of pure gold, no headdress / from Lydia, the kind that girls / with tinted eyelids wear to make themselves fetching.” Partheneion, Alcman, trans. Gregory Nagy, lines 64-69.
• “like some star shooting across the sparkling heavens, or a golden sapling, or a soft feather.” Fragment 26, Alcman, trans. Claude Calame, lines 66-68; from Boehringer, trans. Preger.
• LP 2, Sappho, which is too long to quote here, and which I referenced from Barnestone, Powell, and Giesecke.
• “Night // Virgins / with all night long sing / of the love between you and your bride / in her violet robe. // Wake and call out young men / of your age, / and tonight we shall sleep less than / the bright-voiced nightingale.” LP 30, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Please, my goddess, goldencrowned Aphrodite, / let this lot be mine.” LP 33, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “I long and yearn for” LP 36, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• To Eros, “You burn us” LP 38, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “__] but clever high-lace / sandals hid her feet, a delightful piece of Lydian” LP 39, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “Eros arrived from heaven wrapped in a purple mantle.” LP 54, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “Yet I love refinement and Eros has got me / brightness and the beauty of the sun.” LP 58c, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “blame / delicate / Artemis” LP 84, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Never yet, O Irana, have I met / anyone more aggravating than you are.” LP 91, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “In Sardis / her thoughts turn constantly to us here, // to you like a goddess. She was happiest / in your song. // Now she shines among Lydian women / as after sunset / the rosy-fingered moon // surpasses all the stars, and her light reaches / equally across the salt sea / and over meadows steeped in flowers. // Lucent dew pours out profusely / on blooming roses, / on frail starflowers and florid honey clover.” LP 96, lines 1-12, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “But a girl / with hair yellower than a torch flame / need wear // a wreath of blooming / flowers, or lately maybe / a colorful headband // from Sardis / or some Ionian city” LP 98a, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Of all stars the most beautiful” LP 104b, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• LP 136, Sappho
  • “spring’s messenger, the nightingale with her voice of longing” trans. Jim Powell
  • “Nightingale with your lovely voice / you are the herald of spring” trans. Willis Barnstone
  • “The dear good angel of the Spring, the Nightingale” Ben Johnson’s paraphrase in The Sad Shepherd.
• “mingled with colors of every kind” LP 152, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “The moon appeared in her fullness / when women took their place around the altar” LP 154, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Coming to Aphrodite’s temple, let us see / her image, how it is adorned with gold. / Polyarchis placed it there, for she gained great / wealth from her own radiant body.” Nossis, Epigram 5, trans. Anne Klinck.
• Act II Scene II and Act II Scene V, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare.

Bibliography:

Alcman (2016). Partheneion (Nagy, G., Trans.). The Center for Hellenic Studies. (Original work published circa 700 BCE). https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/alcman-partheneion-sb/.

Boehringer, S. (2021). Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (Anne Preger, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 2007).

Gilhuly K. (2015). Lesbians Are Not from Lesbos, in R. Blondell and K. Ormand (eds.), Ancient Sex: New Essays, Ohio State University Press. http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctv3s8shv.7.

Green, E. (2022). Subjects, Objects, and Erotic Symmetry in Sappho’s Fragments. In N. S. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger (eds.), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press.

Klinck, A. (2008). Woman’s Songs in Ancient Greece. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Sappho (2009). The Complete Poems of Sappho (Barnestone, W., Trans., 2^nd edition). Shambhala Productions. (Original work published circa 600 BCE).

Sappho (2019). The Poetry of Sappho: An expanded edition, featuring newly discovered poems (Powell, J., Trans., 2^nd edition). Oxford University Press. (Original work published circa 600 BCE).

Shakespeare, W. (1597). Romeo and Juliet. https://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html.

Skinner M. (2002). Aphrodite Garlanded: Eros and Poetic Creativity in Sappho and Nossis. In N. S. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger (eds.), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press.

Smith, S. & Sneed, D. (2018). Women's Dress in Archaic Greece: The Peplos, Chiton, and Himation. University of Colorado, Boulder Department of Classics. https://www.colorado.edu/classics/2018/06/18/womens-dress-archaic-greece-peplos-chiton-and-himation.

Swift, L. (2022). A Companion to Greek Lyric. John Wiley & Sons.

World History Encyclopedia (2021). Polychrome Plate from Thera. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14202/polychrome-plate-from-thera/. https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/14202.jpg.