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The night had been long, and was only growing longer. The last time Aziraphale had heard a clock chime it had been, oh, three or four in the morning? And the sun was going to come up soon, and Crowley would melt away as ever, and that would be it until the next time Aziraphale got himself into a situation (handy way of bringing Crowley around, it had to be said).
Or.
“Well,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale could hear the reluctance in his voice. “Got to be getting on. Not rest for the wicked, heh.” He stretched, and then braced his arms on the table and pushed himself up to his feet. “Aziraphale … thanks. For the —” he twiddled the fingers of one hand in the air “— with the photo.”
“Are you sure you won't stay a bit longer?”
Crowley made one of his faces. “Better not. Right?”
It was true. They'd just been nearly caught fraternizing by demons, something that would have been much, much worse than being inconveniently discorporated. But Aziraphale still gently shifted some of the basics of his form, and when she responded, “I suppose … if you're really sure that you can't …” it was with a voice that was a touch higher and softer. It made Crowley's head whip around, golden eyes narrowed to pick up on the different way Aziraphale's body was rounded under the creamy wool suit.
She watched through her eyelashes as Crowley froze, looked down, swallowed, looked up again, and then miracled his own body with the air of someone throwing back one last whiskey double. Crowley was always admirable in every shape, all lithe lines and sharp angles, but there was something about seeing her in this rather snappy suit, trousers suddenly a tiny bit loose at the waist and breasts slightly pushing out the shirtfront and the braces that ran over them that made Aziraphale take a quick little breath in. Still lithe lines, but angles that weren't quite so sharp. Not at all like herself. She was really the lucky one in this little arrangement.
“For a little while,” Crowley said, with a warning tone to her voice, but Aziraphale knew very well how much that meant. Or didn't mean.
“Of course. Now, why don't you lie down and shut your eyes for a bit? I know how much you like napping. I'll just go slip into something more comfortable.”
Immediately, Crowley began muttering about she didn't like napping, she liked sleeping, and they were completely different activities with different connotations, but Aziraphale was off and headed up the stairs without listening. Crowley might be able to shift from male to female with only a few hints at her shape, but Aziraphale's shirt buttons were straining and her trousers were almost bursting at the seams.
Her wardrobe was very light on feminine clothes these days, not that she ever had too many gowns. She did still have that traveling gown from the 1870s, and a couple of sensible skirts and shirtwaists from about 1915 … but it was simply too late at night to bother with corsets and suchlike. After some deliberation, made while slowly unbuttoning and discarding her usual suit, she simply shrugged on a tartan banyan, still in excellent shape despite its age due to how rarely Aziraphale bothered to wear it.
When she wandered back downstairs, Crowley was lying bonelessly on the sofa, feet up on one arm and head tucked in against the other on top of her folded jacket, and arms crossed in a way that Aziraphale couldn't imagine herself being able to sleep in (not that she had slept since, oh, roughly the time she'd got this banyan). As her dark glasses were on, it was impossible to tell if she was awake or asleep, but after a moment she said, “Oh, you really did put on something more comfortable. You're probably the only person I've ever come across who would use that line literally.”
Aziraphale sniffed. “There's no need to be like that. Now, budge up.” With a sigh, Crowley dropped her feet to the floor and swiveled to sit, allowing Aziraphale to perch beside her. She very nearly cuddled up, but there was a tension to Crowley's posture that simply didn't invite it, and a general feeling of … something … that was ruining the mood. Something had to be done.
“Tea?” she suggested.
“What?”
“Do you want some tea? Why don't we have some tea?” Aziraphale sprang up again. “Yes, it's been a very harrowing night and we're both exhausted. I'll make us a pot of darjeeling.” And then she rushed back upstairs to her barely-used kitchen to boil some water to exactly the right temperature and pour it into a teapot, which she then covered with a knitted tea cozy from a charity bazaar in the 1920s specifically to give Crowley something to scoff at when she brought it downstairs again.
Crowley didn't really scoff at it, though. She definitely saw it and registered its ugliness (Aziraphale had in fact bought it because she'd felt sorry for the girl trying to sell it, and it was for a good cause), but made no comment beyond the rising of her eyebrows. They sat at the table for a good long while in not quite silence, but certainly not in what you’d call conversation. Crowley did at least sip at the tea, something she often wouldn't bother to do if there wasn't whisky in it, but it was in a mechanical way that implied she wasn't tasting it, let alone enjoying it. Bother.
“Do you know what we really need?” Aziraphale's voice was too loud in the silence of the bookshop, but she was starting to be unnerved by Crowley's manner. “Something to go with the tea.”
“What?”
“A little something sweet. Just a mo!” She dashed off again, telling herself firmly that she was imagining the tension in the air, and tried to recall where she’d stashed everything. There was a packet of iced shortbread squares holding Shakespeare and Marlowe apart in the bookshop, several scones arranged on a plate in a kitchen cupboard (unconsciously miracled to stay fresh, since Aziraphale could never remember how quickly things went stale), and, finally, the rest of a lovely madeira cake under a fallen stack of fifty-year-old receipts on the desk. All together, these made a creditable spread for the wee small hours of a night in the Blitz.
They did not make as much of an impression on Crowley as Aziraphale had hoped. “All this on one ration-book?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh, pish.” As though Crowley cared about rationing, and as though Aziraphale didn’t compensate for whatever she took. “Go on, dig in. One would think you of all people would revel in a bit of law-breaking.”
She didn’t dig in, of course. Aziraphale didn’t even know why she’d thought bringing out sweets would be tempting — only, once Aziraphale tucked in, Crowley did watch her through her own eyelashes and take long, slow sips of her tea, even allowing Aziraphale to fill up her cup again, which was reassuring. Yet through it all, the stilted tension held.
It wasn’t right. Aziraphale couldn’t let the night end like this, she simply couldn’t.
“What if,” she said before she had any real idea of what she wanted to suggest, “what if we — what if I run you a nice warm bath? You could stretch out and get comfortable. And then I could — I could read to you. Nothing heavy, perhaps even … oh, what about Elinor Glyn? She’s a little wicked.”
“Not on your life.”
“Well, fine —”
“Elinor Glyn? Seriously?”
“She’s scandalous.”
“She hasn’t been scandalous in twenty years. And she never scandalized me.”
“All right! Goodness me. I’m just trying to soothe your nerves.”
“My nerves? There’s nothing wrong with my nerves.” But the way that her shoulders hunched gave the lie to the statement, and she looked like she knew it.
“They’re frayed as anything,” Aziraphale asserted. “Rubbed raw.”
“I just need …” Crowley cast around for an answer. “To go back to my place and have a nap. Maybe until this war’s over, I dunno.”
“Aha!”
“What ‘aha’?”
“Aha, you’ve just admitted what you need. Well, I have a bed.”
“Good for you.”
“Well, come and lie down in it, then. Maybe not for a year, but for a few hours.”
Crowley wanted to argue, it was clear, her lips tightening, but instead she drained her cup in one go. “It’s almost morning,” she retorted, but there was hardly any bite to it, and she stood up anyway.
“Needn’t matter,” said Aziraphale, and she smiled.
They ended up in the bed together, Aziraphale in a nightshirt from the 1780s and Crowley in her undershirt and BVDs, as well as her socks and garters (an ensemble that Aziraphale pretended to be unaffected by, and one that was all the more affecting since the dark glasses were folded up on the bedside table). Aziraphale very rarely bothered with this sort of thing, because ultimately sleeping was doing nothing, and there were such better things to do — trying new restaurants, learning new hobbies, and so on — but she could see the merits of it when she did give in. The bed was rather old, a feather mattress over a lattice of ropes, wrapped in linen sheets, and it was incredibly comfortable even if it creaked. There was a thick quilt laid over the two of them, too, a comforting weight.
And Crowley was still tense.
“Are you worried about that demon and those undead idiots?” Aziraphale asked. “The zombies will simply fall apart within the week, I’m sure.”
“And nobody takes whatshisname seriously, his word doesn’t matter. Nah, it’s done.” That all had the ring of truth. So then, what was it?
“Is there …” Aziraphale groped for another sensible explanation. “Did being in the church … are your feet still paining you?”
“My … oh, yeah, the feet. Forgot all about that, to be honest.”
“All right.” It was really difficult to see what else might be bothering Crowley on such a fundamental level. Perhaps it was actually from farther back than just the events of the previous night. “You’re not still upset about the you-know-what, are you? In the park?”
Crowley shut her eyes. “No. That's not it.” Her hand rose up, a finger extended, and waved between the two of them. “I'm only saying this because, you know, the thing. The change from factory settings. Okay?”
“Well, all right. But you don't need to, if you don't want,” said Aziraphale, slightly nettled, and Crowley shook her head.
“Nnnnng. Just. Not used to talking, when we're …”
That was fair. Normally, they met up somewhat accidentally in female form, made wild and passionate love, and then left each other again to go back to what they were meant to be doing. This arrangement was about physical intimacy, not emotional.
“What I mean to say. Is.” Crowley swallowed. “The whole thing with the photo. If it had actually been taken back down to Hell —”
“They'd have punished you,” Aziraphale interrupted her gently.
“No. Well, yes. But that's not the point. They would have come after you, eventually.”
“What?” As she threw the quilt off them and half sat up, Crowley made a disappointed noise and tried to grab it, but Aziraphale refused to let it be caught. “Hell doesn't care about angels and what we're doing it! You might have even been able to spin it as … as successfully tempting an angel into doing your dark bidding!” She thought that the overwrought drama of “dark bidding” might have gotten a groan and a roll of the eyes from Crowley, but instead Crowley just put a hand over her face as if that would hide her flush.
“If they knew that we had anything to do with each other outside of thwarting,” she said firmly, perhaps something she was able to do because she was refusing to look at Aziraphale, “sure, yeah, they'd come after me. And then they'd come after you, because they'd know it was a good way to make the punishment stick. Especially since this would show that the last one hadn't.”
Aziraphale propped herself up on an elbow as she ran through the scenario in her head. “No. Kidnapping an emissary of Heaven — that would be a major escalation in hostilities. Like declaring all-out war!”
“Yeah.” Crowley relaxed a titch, then stiffened again. “Right. Except if they had some kind of parley and shared the evidence with your lot, then Heaven would be itching to punish you just as much as Hell would be with me. And frankly, I don't know which of us would be getting the worse deal.”
You, obviously, Aziraphale wanted to say, but after a second's reflection she decided she wasn't sure.
“They might even,” Crowley continued, “chuck you downstairs. And I'll be honest, demons have no imaginations and can't come up with half the stuff I could invent to really torture either of us, but I don't want to see you dropped into a pit of boiling acid or have your guts ripped out over and over for a century, either.”
She fell silent after that, and Aziraphale wasn't really sure what to say either. But a warm spark had started up in her stomach, and as the seconds passed it grew, spreading out into her limbs and up to her cheeks, which she knew had to be going pink. Of course, she knew that Crowley didn’t want to see her tortured. That was just common sense, because they’d been looking out for each other for thousands of years — it was obvious. But.
Crowley didn’t want to see her tortured.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, and nothing more than that. Instead of talking, she lay back down on her side, pulling the quilt back up with her and nestling her head into the pillow. Crowley was still on her back, elegant nose pointing toward the ceiling, and Aziraphale brought up a hand to rest mere millimeters from her cheek; from there, it only took the slightest of movements to brush a knuckle against Crowley’s cheekbone. In response, Crowley’s eyes closed — slowly, softly, not the way they’d been squeezed shut minutes earlier. “We’re all right now, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” said Crowley, and her voice was thick. “Yeah, we are.”
“Always make it through, you and me.”
Then they were quiet, probably the quietest they’d ever been in a bed in these forms. Aziraphale moved her hand the slightest bit to stroke Crowley’s cheek, back and forth, dragging against the skin that was always so much softer than she expected, and Crowley’s breathing gradually deepened until Aziraphale realized that she’d fallen asleep, going slack in a way she hadn’t managed to since they got back from the Windmill.
It was nice to watch Crowley sleep, Aziraphale decided, and despite her general lack of interest in beds outside of, well, you know, she allowed herself to stay basically motionless there as the daylight outside the window grew brighter and brighter.