Aziraphale is warm. Crowley can feel it from the opposite side of the fashionably-long couch, a soft, radiating heat, wrapping around him like an angel-down blanket, or a pair of gosling-soft wings. Comforting.
Crowley is drunk. He must be, though he doesn’t remember engaging in the actual physical act of drinking, because his tongue is running away with him in a way it only does after about six bottles of wine – or rather, six bottles split between him and Aziraphale, who always drinks more than his share even if he denies it. Of the two of them, Crowley thinks Aziraphale has held on to more of his faculties than Crowley has, but then again, he is putting off angelic heat like a particularly virtuous furnace, so he can’t be in complete control of himself.
Crowley, already liquor-warm, finds himself swaying towards that enticing heat like a creature starved for it, a lizard making its slow, cold-blooded way to a sun-warmed rock. Or a snake, more properly, he supposes.
“Can you remember a time before I knew you?” he asks.
Aziraphale frowns fuzzily. “Well, surely – “
“Because I can’t.”
Aziraphale digests that. Crowley waits, loose-limbed and patient, for his reply.
“Before the Fall?”
“Well, yeah, but I can’t remember that. Not really. Do you?” Crowley asks, with a touch of trepidation. The point he is trying to make is predicated on their shared recollection of their shared past. If Aziraphale remembers things differently, the point might get muddled.
“Less well than I used to,” Aziraphale admits. He doesn’t sound as sad as he would have a century ago, before chocolate and sushi and comfortable sweaters, Crowley thinks. Wistful, of course, but content. It’s good. What they have is good.
But Crowley has a point to make.
“It’s nice. Having you here,” he says, and frowns, because that isn’t right. “Having you – having you.”
Aziraphale smiles a fond, indulgent smile, as familiar now as the golden, wine-scented warmth suffusing the air around them. “I enjoy your company too, dear boy.”
The heat has gone to Crowley’s head, turning his thoughts as languid as his limbs. He speaks, then, without considering his words. “No, no, you don’t – people leave. Always. That’s just how people are. But you don’t – you’ve always been here.”
“Of course I have,” Aziraphale says, still with that gentle smile. Crowley can’t tell if he’s placating or just drunk.
“Promise me you always will be.”
Aziraphale hesitates. “Crowley, you know there are forces beyond our control – “
“Promise me.”
Aziraphale’s eyes go soft in a way that isn’t drunkenness, not quite kindness; something simply warm and willing and fond. “If you want me, I’ll be here.”
“I always want you,” Crowley mumbles.
“Crowley –“
“In a completely normal way, of course,” Crowley says hurriedly. “None of that sins-of-the-flesh, tempting, sort of nonsense. I know you’re not – I just, I. I value you.” He shrugs, a dangerous gesture when one is supporting oneself on their elbows, but even in his inebriated state he makes it work.
Aziraphale blinks, something indecipherable in his features. “I hadn’t thought you meant it any other way.”
“Well. Good.”
“Before you – I remember – warmth,” Aziraphale says, like an offering.
That’s you, Crowley would say, if he had one ounce less of self-preservation. You’re the warmth. You’re what I remember.
“Angelic, I suppose. I haven’t felt it since.”
Crowley grieves for him in that moment, a little, because Crowley has gained what Aziraphale has lost, and he can offer nothing in return but cold-hearted regard.
“But then there’s you,” Aziraphale continues, like a confession. “Always in my way. Always at my heels.”
“Always by your side,” Crowley corrects.
“Yes.”
“I remember – one night, in Jenne –“
“I thought you’d leave.”
“So did I.”
“What made you stay?”
Crowley remembers it; the despair, the frustration, the thwarting, thwarting, thwarting, thwarted ambitions and thwarted plots, human dynasties he’d worked so hard to build crumbling before his eyes, powerless to stop it. And then that warmth. A small, understanding smile in a pale face.
“You.”
“I’m not much of a reason,” Aziraphale says, wry, self-deprecating. Crowley doesn’t like it. Those are Crowley’s offices; that rueful smile doesn’t belong on Aziraphale’s face.
Crowley can’t explain it, not well enough to banish that expression, but he can try. “You are, for me. You are that warmth.”
Aziraphale smiles a real smile, a private joke with only himself. “Angelic, I suppose.”
Well, yes, Crowley might say, if he had the courage, and no. He knows the warmth Aziraphale means, bathing the whole room in calm and stillness. That’s angelic. The warmth Crowley means is a different creature, something magnetic and enticing, impossible to fight and better for the acquiescence.
“And I could never leave my angel,” he says instead, because wordplay is the refuge of the cowardly.
Aziraphale raises intrigued brows. “Your angel?” He slides down the leather sofa cushions in a near mirror of Crowley’s casually-crafted sprawl, but his drink-heavy arms won’t support his weight, so he rests his chin on his chest, blinking owlishly at Crowley. One socked foot bumps up against Crowley’s knee.
Crowley lets himself collapse, pushing his leg into Aziraphale’s foot, thrilling in that one spot of contact, one pinprick of heat to stand out from the rest. “Do you deny it?”
Aziraphale hums. “It is rather presumptuous.” His lips twitch in a small, pleased manner, not quite a smile. “But I suppose not.”
Crowley watches that almost-smile fade back into sleepy content, enthralled. Slowly, he straightens his leg, tangling it with Aziraphale’s. Aziraphale shifts, obligingly, and they fit together perfectly, like Crowley knew they would, calves pressed together and that warmth making its lethargic, inexorable way up to Crowley’s chest.
“And if I give myself to you in return?”
Aziraphale’s eyes, which have drifted shut, blink once, twice, to peer at Crowley. “I would accept, of course.”
“Wholly?”
“And completely.”
They met in a sauna, once, in Finland, in the eighteenth century. Crowley remembers how the heat of the sauna mixed with the heat of Aziraphale like steam, intoxicating.
What self-preservation he had is slipping away, melting like the snowbank around a wooden shelter, just the two of them and the quiet and the pristine white world beyond. Crowley levers himself off the arm of the couch only to pitch forward, landing braced on his forearms just above Aziraphale. Soft, startled eyes blink up at him, and a genuine smile spreads across Aziraphale’s face.
“Well, hello. What are you doing all the way over here?”
Crowley isn’t sure. He had no plan when he moved, and all he has now is the beginnings of an idea, a proposition without words.
His arms give out.
Aziraphale bears the shock of his weight well, breathing a surprised grunt as Crowley collapses onto him, blanketing Aziraphale with his own warmth.
“This is what you feel like. To me,” Crowley mumbles, hazy. Aziraphale is comfortable, and so, so warm, and Crowley is drunk.
“Heavy?”
“Like a blanket.”
Aziraphale laughs, jostling him. Crowley makes a sleepy noise of discontent into Aziraphale’s shoulder. “You’re cold,” Aziraphale says.
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re – you’re like a sea breeze in summer, or the crisp air of the first days of autumn. The kind of cold that makes you want to breathe deeper, just to feel it in your lungs,” Aziraphale explains. “That’s what I remember. After the warmth, nothing. And then you.”
Crowley feels relief course through him, twining itself around his lungs like Aziraphale’s sea breeze. His breath comes easier, compressed as it is against Aziraphale’s chest, heartbeat to heartbeat.
He can offer something in return. Crowley has gained what Aziraphale has lost, but Aziraphale has gained something else; not a replacement, but something new, something only Crowley can give him. Something thrilling and invigorating, as magnetic as Aziraphale’s warmth is to Crowley.
“We’re perfect for each other, then,” he says; merely an observation, a stray thought spoken aloud. Aziraphale laughs again.
“Presumptuous.”
“But not wrong.”
Aziraphale inhales deeply, and Crowley wonders if he is bracing himself, drawing Crowley’s bracing cold into his throat before he speaks. His eyes are the warmest part of him, Crowley thinks.
“No.”
Somehow, without his knowledge, Crowley’s head has moved, hovering inches above Aziraphale’s, and Crowley was wrong. Aziraphale’s breath on Crowley’s face is the warmest, the most intoxicating part of him.
“If I give myself to you – “
“I accept,” Aziraphale says, without hesitation. They are a symbiosis, Crowley thinks; Aziraphale breathes in Crowley’s cold and Crowley breathes in Aziraphale’s warmth, and together they are perfect.
“I lied,” he murmurs. “It is in a sins of the flesh way.”
Aziraphale raises an eyebrow. “You don’t say.”
They are pressed together, head to foot, and Crowley knows how it seems, remembers Aziraphale’s body beside his, glimpsed through the steam. It is in a sins of the flesh way, but it doesn’t have to be, not right now. Right now Crowley is content, warm and drunk and sleepy, and Aziraphale is a sauna and Crowley is the snow, and between them they have drunk six bottles of wine.
“I don’t want to remember a time before I knew you,” Crowley admits.
Aziraphale’s smile doesn’t change, but his eyes, warm like dying coals, blaze brighter. “Then let me help you forget.”
It doesn’t have to be, not tonight, but this Crowley can do. It is what he should have done, centuries ago, millennia ago, when he first turned towards Aziraphale like a lizard turning to face the sun, and Aziraphale first breathed him in.
“Breathe,” he tells Aziraphale, and lowers his face to kiss him.
Aziraphale’s lips are warm.