Illustrated fic! Part 1 of 2
Breathless Mouths May Summon
Story by vulgarweed, illustrations by quantum_witch
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Rating: NC-17 (story and some of the art)
Warnings: Passing allusions to pretty grim violence. Oh yeah, and a little dope-smokin.'
Summary: The Crusades could throw a spanner into any new and rather delicate Arrangement. Especially since it seems neither party has read all the fine print.
Disclaimer: Mr. Pratchett, Mr. Gaiman, we mean it as a compliment. Really.
Author's note: This is a sequel to the Dark Ages tale "Amid the Sacred Wreck," which is here, also illustrated by quantum_witch, here. While it's not necessary to read that to understand this one, there's a reference or two to events in that story and gives background on why their relationship is the way it is.
ETA: And the sequel to this one, set in the wonderful, awful 16th century, is The Phoenix and the Turtle.
Breathless Mouths May Summon
Nihil verus est, panton licitus est.
Constantinople, Byzantine Empire, 1105 A.D.
For all the alleged danger of the less fashionable part of town, Aziraphale had never felt himself directly threatened. It wasn’t as if he appeared to have anything worth taking, not even his life. Not until that particular night, when he whirled around just a bit too late to find a weak but ugly little demon about to spring upon him.
Frozen, he stared into its beady little eyes until it fell face forward upon the ground and then slowly faded away. There was another demon behind it - a much better-dressed one at least, for all that he was picking himself up off the street and conjuring slime off his knees and the one hand that didn’t hold an ichor-covered dagger that was curved in the Saracen style.
***
No matter what certain Dukes of Hell might think, lurking was a tedious business. The real fun was in stalking. Which was exactly what Crowley was trying to do, mostly for practice, watching a particularly slow-witted specimen of demonkind attempting to blend in with the nighttime crowds.
If it hadn’t been for this embarrassing but amusing critter, Crowley would never have been here. It was a neighbourhood for lepers and beggars and lost peasant Crusaders and camp followers who for one reason or another - and there were countless reasons - weren’t welcome or happy in the tenuous new Kingdom (maybe they’d never even got there) or capable or desirous of making their way back to the dreary louse-ridden villages they’d come from. It was depressing, and it wasn’t challenging.
The very very minor demon - for Crowley himself was frankly just a bit minor, but this fellow was hardly qualified to make shoe-shiner down below (actually a grueling job, considering the sort of thing that one had to walk through) - wasn’t quite so stupid that he didn’t realise how unconvincing he was, or that stray Crusaders tended to be rather trigger-happy with such holy objects as they had. He soon ducked out of the populated streets and down a particularly narrow and squalid alley. This made Crowley’s little project a bit more challenging and a bit more interesting.
It got more interesting still when Crowley realised his lesser colleague was doing a spot of stalking himself, his object being a very dejected-looking friar making his way across the foetid stones, doing his best to avoid the offal streams although his best was not very good. It got absolutely fascinating when Crowley took a better look and closer occult sniff of this man-shaped being, and was deeply, deeply horrified. For the first time, he reached under his cloak, fingering the jeweled hilt of the short, curved blade he affected.
Oh no you don’t, he thought with a sudden flaring rage. That one’s mine.
Demons are a competitive lot, after all. A bit of discorporation here and there was just gamesmanship. With every new bit of half-digested training he’d picked up lately in foreign parts (and weren’t they all), Crowley stalked seriously now, and with intent. When the minor demon tensed to spring upon the apparently unsuspecting victim - what the Antioch was wrong with him, anyway? - Crowley prepared his own pounce. He yelped as a loose paving stone turned his ankle and he fell wildly forward, dagger sinking into the other demon’s back.
“Got him,” he said with great self-satisfaction. The sad sack he’d just rescued looked at him in shock.
Crowley felt he was the one who should be shocked. In all the time he’d known Aziraphale, and that was saying something, he’d always been amazed by the angel’s ability to be so frumpy and so vain at the same time. He looked neither now. He looked terrible: aged-faced and colourless and dull-eyed and dirty and dressed in some thing that looked burlap-sackish even by Crusading peasant standards, and that too was saying something. He was wearing his body in much the same way - with utter lost indifference.
“Thanks,” the angel murmured blankly, just before he swayed sharply and fainted.
“Oh, for -“ Crowley muttered. He stood for a moment staring before deciding he simply had to get to the bottom of this; he bent low and picked Aziraphale up awkwardly, checking the alley for staring eyes to poke out before he unfurled his wings. Well, it wasn’t as if he were going to walk back to his own lodgings carrying that.
To his demonic discredit, perhaps, he forgot to be concerned with the state of his expensive embroidery when he held the limp, grimy angel tight from takeoff onward. Then again, he had no scruples about making dirt vanish - well, from himself at least. Aziraphale was going to need some actual work.
***
Aziraphale awoke fully to more colour than he could remember seeing in years. Harsh yellow sunlight gracefully spared the bed where he lay but shimmered grandly on a flourish of blue-gold tile work along the top of the wall, spilling up into curled ceiling mosaics. His nerves tried to make sense of the sensation surrounding him completely. Silk, he finally sorted out, all over his skin. There were more colours there too, so loudly and vigourously cavorting all over the sheets it was a wonder they hadn’t woken him.
Wherever he was, he had a nagging feeling it was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, his body itself felt like that sort of place. He’d have thought it was a new one altogether if it weren’t for a scar on his arm he’d decided to keep for remembrance’s sake. Jerusalem. Oh Lord, Jerusalem.
At last, though, there was a memory in between Jerusalem and here, and that’s what he could feel. His body had light hazy pleasant aches that came from languidness. The hair falling in his face was soft and sweet-smelling. His hands were clean, and he had forgotten what that felt like.
It was when he tried to sit up and felt something like a baby headache quickening that bits of recent sensual memory emerged in their full glories. There’d been light incense and a stranger smoke of a dark, loamy scent. Most of all there’d been food: grilled lamb and pomegranates and baklava; cool water and rich wine and olives and figs; grapes and cheese and bread and honey. He didn’t need to eat, true - but it was remarkable how much better he felt when he did, and ate well for the first time in…the thought trailed off when he couldn’t fill in the answer.
He remembered the warm water of a bath all around him, and a jug of it poured slowly over his head. There had been steady fingers combing herb-scented soap through his hair, freeing and loosening the tangles, turning his neck gently this way and that, washing him when he was too weak to do it himself. (Not that he really ought to need it, but he suspected he’d been nearly as filthy as it was possible for an angel to be. He could call it field research perhaps. Just learning where the limits were, that’s all.)
He remembered hands beneath the water exploring his back, and then an all-too-familiar hiss of disgust. “What in the Spheres have you done to your skin? You’re scalier than I’ve ever been.”
“The desert, remember? That’s where I’ve been. It does that.”
“Tch!” came a disapproving sound. “I’m not having that on my sheets!”
He’d made a mildly offended protest - really, how presumptuous - but it wasn’t as if he were going to go creeping back out right then and there and set up dwelling in the caves again.
If Aziraphale had suspected then that his host’s concern for his dermal integrity was partly an excuse to cover him in scented oils and touch him very, very thoroughly, he didn’t remember pointing it out at the time. But now he was remembering strong hands working long-knotted muscles loose; he remembered groaning and relaxing into this strange sensation of feeling lighter even as he was pressed down firmly into something soft. He remembered the view for some reason, all the lamplights and torches of Constantinople and the beacons in her many towers, a tambourine’s clipped silver chime wafting from somewhere. The mosaics of the ceiling seemed to twinkle like stars, border patterns undulating and stretching in their frozen choreography.
Crowley had really been furious with him. Aziraphale didn’t know why he should feel guilty, but he did. He hadn’t fussed, just acquiesced to every absurdly opulent bit of repair work his associate insisted on doing. While he was sure he’d had no sense of time at the time, it seemed he was adapting to this kind of treatment very quickly.
He was sure the uneasy bargains he and Crowley had made did not originally cover this. But it’s not as if they could have anticipated every contingency.
It did have the rarely-spoken-of space in it, though, for one particular contingency, the hard-to-pinpoint moment exactly when Crowley’s hands-on skin-care crisis-intervention had shifted by mutual escalation into a differently-toned and far more intense pleasure of the flesh. Said flesh now remembered this a half-second before Aziraphale's mind did: there’d been hot skin slick with oil and sweat; that lean, supple spine bending against his palms, a throaty voice in his ear praising and pleading in the way demons only do when they want something desperately.
Aziraphale had tried to even up the odds a little and wound up in Crowley’s lap, wrapped thoroughly around him and leaning on him with his mouth tasting and nibbling at the demon’s shoulder and neck and ear and lips as though he could still be hungry, being stroked and invaded at once and watching every slight shift of Crowley’s face until he’d had to close his own eyes and just feel. The position was awkward but worth it, at least at first. When he’d finally pushed Crowley’s shoulders hard against the pillows, rocking forward to get a better angle, the hoarse whimper he’d got in response had sent shock waves through his groin and his mind and his heart all at once.
As Aziraphale took stock of his very pleasantly - rather too pleasantly - readjusting body beneath the sheets, he saw just one minor wound left unhealed: a small curved, reddish-purple mark high inside his thigh. He remembered getting it now, vividly. The bastard had played around for ages with his clever tongue and fingers in all sorts of sensitive little regions down there, teasing him to madness - and paid him back for just one impatient hair-tug with such a bite…
So Crowley had fed him obscenely, pampered and pleasured him within an inch of his existence, and then signed him like an artwork. For how long had he lain here rotting in the lap of luxury while hellish wiles had free reign of this war-blasted part of the world that so desperately needed so much thwarting that Aziraphale started feeling worn-out again just thinking about it …
With his characteristic splendid timing Crowley sauntered in, dressed in tasteless splendour and carrying numerous packages, including what looked to be a very large jug of wine.
“Ah, the sleeper awakes.”
“How long?” Aziraphale said, low and darkly. “How long have I been indulging sloth, added on to gluttony and sodomy and who knows what else…”
“Sodomy?” the demon squeaked. “Are you accusing me of being a bad host?”
Aziraphale pinched his nose in sudden pain. “That’s not what that word means nowadays and you know it.”
“Yeah, but you should know better - you remember. The hospitality was terrible. I never had so much trouble getting laid anywhere.”
Aziraphale shook his head. Why was he still feeling so blurry?
Crowley took two beaten-bronze goblets from a cabinet and filled them with a rich garnet-coloured wine. The scent of it went straight to Aziraphale’s head and made it feel a little bit clearer, which had to be sheer illusion.
“Let’s try this again,” Crowley said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and handing the angel one of the cups with the rather sadistic nannyish air of one not to be denied when doing something for someone else’s own good. There was also an air of determination to be noticed while graciously ignoring someone else’s impressive burst of bad manners. “You’re angry at me for what, exactly?”
Aziraphale took the cup sullenly. “Taking advantage of my weakened condition. Keeping me here in your…lair…while I should have been out doing things…there is so much to do…I could really get in trouble if…”
Crowley stared at him for a moment and then slugged back his wine so hard a red trickle escaped from the corner of his mouth, which his tongue quickly caught before tearing into a spirited bit of lashing.
“Just what did you think you were going to be doing in the state you were in? You couldn’t have thwarted a horsefly. Look, I could get in trouble for keeping you out of trouble. I’m sure it’d go over real well Upstairs when you showed up leaving your ragged manky carcass lying around like a sack of rocks and trying to find a space in the forms to explain how you discorporated yourself out of neglect!”
“I really don’t think it’s possible to-“
“Were you determined to be the first to find out?”
Aziraphale stewed on that while Crowley stood up and stormed back towards the door, where he picked up a large package and unwrapped it. “Oh, and look, I’m not done,” he said ruefully, tossing a snarl of heavy silk in Aziraphale’s direction. Blues, mostly: peacock and sky and lapis and periwinkle; also cream and very pale pink and dove-grey and rain-cloud and iridescent silver. “I know you like them bought for real, not just wished up. Really, I was honest. Didn’t even haggle much. Oh, don’t rush to thank me. I always want to rip your clothes off and burn them, but this time I had to. I enjoyed it.”
Aziraphale fingered the luxurious fabrics with a guilty sort of longing while getting angrier and angrier. “I think….when we came to our understanding….you know…it didn’t involve you treating me like some kind of pet….or some kind of….” He could feel his face getting red and spluttery.
“Concubine?” Crowley filled in cheerfully. “Don’t be ridiculous. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I never thought it’d be nice to have one, but really, the upkeep, the overhead….Not worth it. In fact, trust me, it’s better to be one than to have one. You don’t think I got this place through honest work, did you?”
The angel’s expression made him smirk, and then draw back, and then take a very obvious mental note. “Joking. Joking. Truth is, the emperor’s cousin’s second son’s mistress’s sister needed to make an advantageous marriage, and quickly at that. Do you really want to know? It’s a very long story involving the financing of a fishing fleet with some extra features for smuggling, and a blockade and some reinforcements for Bohemond that needed to arrive late but not too late-” here he started counting off plots and subplots on his fingers-“There’s a very long chain of results promised and delivered - or not - and messages found and lost in a timely manner - or not - and bargaining for a dowry that wound up being mainly hush money. I assure you, as far as I know there was only one murder, and only the very occasional involvement of my sexual favours, on my terms strictly ….I can’t read that look you have right now. Are you being judgmental or jealous or just very hung-over?”
Aziraphale just took a deep drink of wine and stared into its dark surface fixedly. The wave of rage that had just passed through him left him feeling even more confused. “You’re talking too loud,” he said quietly.
“Hung-over it is then,” Crowley sighed. “Drink up.”
From across the edge of the cup Aziraphale watched as his demon companion - what an odd thing - twirled a strange object in his fingers. It was a sort of long, curved silver pipe. With a flicker of flame from his fingertip Crowley lit it and took a drag, and there was that strange scent Aziraphale couldn’t identify from the night before, dark and tangy and if it had a colour it would probably have been blackish-green - close to the colour of the serpent Crowley was when he was.
“I looked for you in Jerusalem,” Aziraphale found himself saying blankly. He was sure it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. He was still waiting for his answer.
“When the Army of Heaven - ahem” (here Crowley coughed most pointedly) “marched in? Whose side did you expect me to be on?”
“Hell’s side, of course,” Aziraphale said miserably, drawing the sheets closely around his shoulders. “When…”
“I heard,” Crowley said. “Killed them all, didn’t they? Everyone in the city - men, women, children? Horses up to their knees in blood and all that? Bodies lying around for weeks? All these Christian soldiers promised spoils, taking houses after they slaughtered everyone inside, running around wearing dead people’s clothes and dead people’s jewels, all for the Glory and all that shit?”
The angel drew up his knees and buried his face in his arms.
Crowley kept on. “The Jews burned alive in the synagogue? Children gang-raped until they died and even for a while after? Women dragged behind horses by their entrails? Crusaders burning the bodies and picking through the ashes for molten gold because they’d heard they swallowed their money to hide it? I heard. I heard a lot.”
Aziraphale wasn’t answering.
“You can’t tell me you were shocked!” Crowley said through a smoke ring. “It started back in bloody Semlin, didn’t it? Hadn’t even left Europe when they started hacking people to bits for no reason.”
“I didn’t want to be there,” came Aziraphale’s small, sad voice out of his hidden face. “There was nothing I could do. I looked for you. I wanted to see you for some reason. Were you hiding from me? I thought you meant it when we agreed to - I mean, I’m sure this is as stupid as it comes, but I did sort of almost trust you -”
“I wasn’t hiding from you,” Crowley said quietly at the last. “I wasn’t there.”
Aziraphale looked up suddenly. “You weren’t there?”
“You’d’ve found me if I was,” Crowley shrugged. He interrupted his own complicated process of packing a grimy tarry-looking something into the pipe. “And keep that quiet, because I was supposed to be there. I just got distracted.”
“Distracted? By what? Where?”
“I fucking hate Jerusalem. I dragged my feet. Got sidetracked. Wound up in Persia, in the mountains,” was all Crowley said, passing the pipe angelward.
“That’s a long way off…what on earth is this?”
“Something you seemed to like very much last night.”
Aziraphale took an experimental drag and started coughing horribly. Crowley sat back down beside him and patted his back until the hacks subsided and Aziraphale looked at him with accusatory watery eyes.
“You did that last night too,” Crowley said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“It tastes…odd.” Clearly he wasn’t sure yet if he liked it or not. But he took a second pull so it couldn’t have been that bad, and he barely coughed at all this time. He turned round to find Crowley sitting back on the bed, against the pillows, stiff brocade dalmatic and draping cloak and all the attendant garments exchanged for the simple robe he’d worn the night before, a sort of dressing gown in deep red silk, belted in front in the Far Eastern style. Aziraphale flushed a bit, his hands suddenly remembering how they’d wantonly untied that plain band, how the fabric seemed to just fall away, and beneath it how Crowley’s skin was smooth and warm, darker than it had been in Albion, so exquisitely responsive to his touch…
Aziraphale’s hands were tingling. So was most of the rest of him. His eyes itched and odd colours shifted about in their corners. And the ceiling seemed so far away. He thought it might be fun to fly up there until he bumped lightly against it and looked closely at what was in those negative spaces in those mosaics, and he chuckled very quietly, hoping Crowley wouldn’t notice. It wasn’t the sort of silly thought he could explain….
“Oh, come here already,” said Crowley a bit indulgently, and the part of Aziraphale that wanted to flee far, far away to somewhere he’d never have to formulate a thought for speech to anyone ever again flared up and rebelled. It was annoying, it was too much like Jerusalem and panic and nausea, and just to spite it Aziraphale turned away from it with a stubborn stiffness still in his back and shoulders and laid his head in the demon’s lap. Crowley’s fingers stroked his hair lazily, and Aziraphale felt every strand reaching out to entangle him.
“So you were a little delirious last night,” Crowley was saying, almost incomprehensibly because the syllables seemed to fit together strangely. Aziraphale could feel the vibrations of his voice. “You were talking about why you had to go. About Peter the Hermit and his visions of paradise, Kingdom of Heaven on earth and all that rubbish. About the way it seemed half the peasants in Europe were selling off their sad little farms and packing up everything on a beat-up old horse if they had one, on their wives if they didn’t, and going off to the Allegedly Holy Land to butcher and get butchered because this…person…could make them see…”
“Yes,” Aziraphale nodded, closing his eyes and finding the swirl of colours and strange seething alertness of his own skin was more intense when he did that, so he opened them again. “It was…powerful…at the time.”
“Nice bedtime story, that.”
“Sorry.”
“I could tell you one too. About Persia, about a castle high up in dry stony mountains, the sort of place you can’t imagine how anyone without wings could get there or why anyone at all would want to, but they do because they’re insane. It’s very nice inside now, though. And there was a battle too, but it’s really about one of the strangest humans I’ve ever met-“
“Islamic?”
“Yeah…some side sect, I can’t keep track…”
“Some good ones there,” Aziraphale sighed vaguely. “A little odd…but you know, the truth is, Gabriel always was the best poet, and like all the great ones he’s a little eccentric, but it’s really beautiful work, don’t you think…?”
“Sure, but that’s hardly the point. The point is….”
There was a long pause, during which Aziraphale looked up to see Crowley smoking on that pipe again - which was a surprising sight from this angle, especially the way the tiny flame flared orange in his eyes - and then passing it down. Wasn’t any easier lying down, that was for sure.
“The point is-?“
“Oh, sorry, I think I remember now. Anyhow. He could do that vision thing too. Show them Paradise, only theirs is a little more earthy. Quite vivid. They smoke this, you see. And they see feasts that never run out, fountains that never run dry, beautiful houris who turn virgin again every night - though why anyone would want that is beyond me - exquisite scents, music, you get the idea, plus the voice of Himself or whatever praising his faithful servants. Trite stuff really, but once they’d seen it, once they think they’re this close, they’d do anything for more of it. Including obeying their leader absolutely, of course. That’s the string that’s always attached, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely?”
“I saw him tell one to pitch himself off the cliff just because he said so. Poor bugger didn’t hesitate for a second.”
“What’s the point of making your followers do that?”
“Not all of them, silly. Just an example once in a while. It’s not the dying for him part he’s so interested in, he wants them to get really, really good at killing for him. Not like your pig-farmer army - with finesse. Even you would have to admire it, it’s so well done. I don’t think that’s really the point either….maybe it is, I dunno. I think the point is that…I don’t think he’s one of ours, though a lot of his followers certainly are, and someone who put his own son to death for drinking wine isn’t going to get tempted anywhere he doesn’t want to be. So I was going crazy trying to figure out how he could be one of yours. Bookish, though. Reading and writing all the time. Arcane scriptural justifications for everything. Maybe you’d like him.”
“Oh….hmmmm,” Aziraphale had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to be thinking about this for a very long time. “So how did you - I mean, did you blend in?”
“Well, I was invisible to them at first. Until - well, frankly, I got just a bit curious about this thing they were smoking. And I tried it and, well, I forgot myself a bit. So then I played along for a while. But the food was terrible, and obviously there was no wine, and except for the Old Man himself, I’ve never met such a humourless bunch of angst fairies in my whole existence. So the next time he wanted a volunteer off the cliff, I jumped at the chance.”
Aziraphale started to sit up in startlement, but even beginning made him a little dizzy. “Ouch, did you -?”
Crowley laughed. “Please give me some credit. He never said I had to hit the ground.”
Aziraphale did giggle at this in spite of himself.
“Ah-ha, you do like it,” Crowley said. “As you know, it feels really good if you…” His caresses dropped to Aziraphale’s collarbones, slow and light and thorough.
“Mm, I know. But I don’t know…if I even like you,” Aziraphale mused, arching up slightly into Crowley’s touch. “I don’t know if I should. I don’t know which way this whole horrible mess is supposed to go. I don’t know why all these nightmares have to happen. I want just knowing there’s a reason to be enough, like it’s supposed to be. Nobody tells me anything. You’re being so-“
“So…what?” Crowley smiled, his hand drifting further, starting to nudge aside the sheets the angel had protectively wrapped around himself.
“Pushy. Trying to take my mind off things. I don’t think I can trust you.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, I was just trying to -“ It was obvious from the destination of Crowley’s hand just what he was trying (and succeeding) to do at the moment, but both were aware he wasn’t quite talking about that.
“Show me a vision of paradise? It’s not as if I need it.”
“On the contrary, I strongly believed you did. But I won’t try to make you do anything because of it.”
“Not even -- ah!” Aziraphale whispered, thrusting up into Crowley’s hand and starting to feel a good bit less resentful.
“No, I think you want to do that anyway,”
That demon thought entirely too much. Aziraphale turned his head to one side, nuzzling through folds of cloth until his mouth found something rigid and responsive to tease and lick through the thin garnet silk, and then Crowley became a good deal less articulate.
***
They parted at last on the street some days later, sent to Antioch and Jerusalem and dreading much ugliness ahead. They had one day left to enjoy in the chaotic, bustling marketplace of the part of the city that was least like the part Aziraphale had been haunting before.
There’d been one of those rare moments Crowley talked without talking, a message in his refusal to sneer as usual at every scroll and trinket Aziraphale took a fleeting delight in.
You’ve got more to lose than I do, so this is what I think, for what it’s worth: a little gluttony, a little lust, sloth-- no big deal, you can afford it.
It’s despair that can do it. You were on thin ice.
Aziraphale felt stiff and ridiculous in the pretentious Byzantine couture the demon had bought him and taken so much smug pleasure in wrapping him in (“Look, I’m putting clothes on you, that’s new!”). He could have sworn that even more of those excessive little pearls appeared around his neck when Crowley straightened his collar and adjusted his cloak-pin.
“Mmm, not bad, not bad at all,” the demon said, appraising him. “Bet it won’t last.”
~end part 1~
Part 2
Story by vulgarweed, illustrations by quantum_witch
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Rating: NC-17 (story and some of the art)
Warnings: Passing allusions to pretty grim violence. Oh yeah, and a little dope-smokin.'
Summary: The Crusades could throw a spanner into any new and rather delicate Arrangement. Especially since it seems neither party has read all the fine print.
Disclaimer: Mr. Pratchett, Mr. Gaiman, we mean it as a compliment. Really.
Author's note: This is a sequel to the Dark Ages tale "Amid the Sacred Wreck," which is here, also illustrated by quantum_witch, here. While it's not necessary to read that to understand this one, there's a reference or two to events in that story and gives background on why their relationship is the way it is.
ETA: And the sequel to this one, set in the wonderful, awful 16th century, is The Phoenix and the Turtle.
Breathless Mouths May Summon
Nihil verus est, panton licitus est.
Constantinople, Byzantine Empire, 1105 A.D.
For all the alleged danger of the less fashionable part of town, Aziraphale had never felt himself directly threatened. It wasn’t as if he appeared to have anything worth taking, not even his life. Not until that particular night, when he whirled around just a bit too late to find a weak but ugly little demon about to spring upon him.
Frozen, he stared into its beady little eyes until it fell face forward upon the ground and then slowly faded away. There was another demon behind it - a much better-dressed one at least, for all that he was picking himself up off the street and conjuring slime off his knees and the one hand that didn’t hold an ichor-covered dagger that was curved in the Saracen style.
***
No matter what certain Dukes of Hell might think, lurking was a tedious business. The real fun was in stalking. Which was exactly what Crowley was trying to do, mostly for practice, watching a particularly slow-witted specimen of demonkind attempting to blend in with the nighttime crowds.
If it hadn’t been for this embarrassing but amusing critter, Crowley would never have been here. It was a neighbourhood for lepers and beggars and lost peasant Crusaders and camp followers who for one reason or another - and there were countless reasons - weren’t welcome or happy in the tenuous new Kingdom (maybe they’d never even got there) or capable or desirous of making their way back to the dreary louse-ridden villages they’d come from. It was depressing, and it wasn’t challenging.
The very very minor demon - for Crowley himself was frankly just a bit minor, but this fellow was hardly qualified to make shoe-shiner down below (actually a grueling job, considering the sort of thing that one had to walk through) - wasn’t quite so stupid that he didn’t realise how unconvincing he was, or that stray Crusaders tended to be rather trigger-happy with such holy objects as they had. He soon ducked out of the populated streets and down a particularly narrow and squalid alley. This made Crowley’s little project a bit more challenging and a bit more interesting.
It got more interesting still when Crowley realised his lesser colleague was doing a spot of stalking himself, his object being a very dejected-looking friar making his way across the foetid stones, doing his best to avoid the offal streams although his best was not very good. It got absolutely fascinating when Crowley took a better look and closer occult sniff of this man-shaped being, and was deeply, deeply horrified. For the first time, he reached under his cloak, fingering the jeweled hilt of the short, curved blade he affected.
Oh no you don’t, he thought with a sudden flaring rage. That one’s mine.
Demons are a competitive lot, after all. A bit of discorporation here and there was just gamesmanship. With every new bit of half-digested training he’d picked up lately in foreign parts (and weren’t they all), Crowley stalked seriously now, and with intent. When the minor demon tensed to spring upon the apparently unsuspecting victim - what the Antioch was wrong with him, anyway? - Crowley prepared his own pounce. He yelped as a loose paving stone turned his ankle and he fell wildly forward, dagger sinking into the other demon’s back.
“Got him,” he said with great self-satisfaction. The sad sack he’d just rescued looked at him in shock.
Crowley felt he was the one who should be shocked. In all the time he’d known Aziraphale, and that was saying something, he’d always been amazed by the angel’s ability to be so frumpy and so vain at the same time. He looked neither now. He looked terrible: aged-faced and colourless and dull-eyed and dirty and dressed in some thing that looked burlap-sackish even by Crusading peasant standards, and that too was saying something. He was wearing his body in much the same way - with utter lost indifference.
“Thanks,” the angel murmured blankly, just before he swayed sharply and fainted.
“Oh, for -“ Crowley muttered. He stood for a moment staring before deciding he simply had to get to the bottom of this; he bent low and picked Aziraphale up awkwardly, checking the alley for staring eyes to poke out before he unfurled his wings. Well, it wasn’t as if he were going to walk back to his own lodgings carrying that.
To his demonic discredit, perhaps, he forgot to be concerned with the state of his expensive embroidery when he held the limp, grimy angel tight from takeoff onward. Then again, he had no scruples about making dirt vanish - well, from himself at least. Aziraphale was going to need some actual work.
***
Aziraphale awoke fully to more colour than he could remember seeing in years. Harsh yellow sunlight gracefully spared the bed where he lay but shimmered grandly on a flourish of blue-gold tile work along the top of the wall, spilling up into curled ceiling mosaics. His nerves tried to make sense of the sensation surrounding him completely. Silk, he finally sorted out, all over his skin. There were more colours there too, so loudly and vigourously cavorting all over the sheets it was a wonder they hadn’t woken him.
Wherever he was, he had a nagging feeling it was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, his body itself felt like that sort of place. He’d have thought it was a new one altogether if it weren’t for a scar on his arm he’d decided to keep for remembrance’s sake. Jerusalem. Oh Lord, Jerusalem.
At last, though, there was a memory in between Jerusalem and here, and that’s what he could feel. His body had light hazy pleasant aches that came from languidness. The hair falling in his face was soft and sweet-smelling. His hands were clean, and he had forgotten what that felt like.
It was when he tried to sit up and felt something like a baby headache quickening that bits of recent sensual memory emerged in their full glories. There’d been light incense and a stranger smoke of a dark, loamy scent. Most of all there’d been food: grilled lamb and pomegranates and baklava; cool water and rich wine and olives and figs; grapes and cheese and bread and honey. He didn’t need to eat, true - but it was remarkable how much better he felt when he did, and ate well for the first time in…the thought trailed off when he couldn’t fill in the answer.
He remembered the warm water of a bath all around him, and a jug of it poured slowly over his head. There had been steady fingers combing herb-scented soap through his hair, freeing and loosening the tangles, turning his neck gently this way and that, washing him when he was too weak to do it himself. (Not that he really ought to need it, but he suspected he’d been nearly as filthy as it was possible for an angel to be. He could call it field research perhaps. Just learning where the limits were, that’s all.)
He remembered hands beneath the water exploring his back, and then an all-too-familiar hiss of disgust. “What in the Spheres have you done to your skin? You’re scalier than I’ve ever been.”
“The desert, remember? That’s where I’ve been. It does that.”
“Tch!” came a disapproving sound. “I’m not having that on my sheets!”
He’d made a mildly offended protest - really, how presumptuous - but it wasn’t as if he were going to go creeping back out right then and there and set up dwelling in the caves again.
If Aziraphale had suspected then that his host’s concern for his dermal integrity was partly an excuse to cover him in scented oils and touch him very, very thoroughly, he didn’t remember pointing it out at the time. But now he was remembering strong hands working long-knotted muscles loose; he remembered groaning and relaxing into this strange sensation of feeling lighter even as he was pressed down firmly into something soft. He remembered the view for some reason, all the lamplights and torches of Constantinople and the beacons in her many towers, a tambourine’s clipped silver chime wafting from somewhere. The mosaics of the ceiling seemed to twinkle like stars, border patterns undulating and stretching in their frozen choreography.
Crowley had really been furious with him. Aziraphale didn’t know why he should feel guilty, but he did. He hadn’t fussed, just acquiesced to every absurdly opulent bit of repair work his associate insisted on doing. While he was sure he’d had no sense of time at the time, it seemed he was adapting to this kind of treatment very quickly.
He was sure the uneasy bargains he and Crowley had made did not originally cover this. But it’s not as if they could have anticipated every contingency.
It did have the rarely-spoken-of space in it, though, for one particular contingency, the hard-to-pinpoint moment exactly when Crowley’s hands-on skin-care crisis-intervention had shifted by mutual escalation into a differently-toned and far more intense pleasure of the flesh. Said flesh now remembered this a half-second before Aziraphale's mind did: there’d been hot skin slick with oil and sweat; that lean, supple spine bending against his palms, a throaty voice in his ear praising and pleading in the way demons only do when they want something desperately.
Aziraphale had tried to even up the odds a little and wound up in Crowley’s lap, wrapped thoroughly around him and leaning on him with his mouth tasting and nibbling at the demon’s shoulder and neck and ear and lips as though he could still be hungry, being stroked and invaded at once and watching every slight shift of Crowley’s face until he’d had to close his own eyes and just feel. The position was awkward but worth it, at least at first. When he’d finally pushed Crowley’s shoulders hard against the pillows, rocking forward to get a better angle, the hoarse whimper he’d got in response had sent shock waves through his groin and his mind and his heart all at once.
As Aziraphale took stock of his very pleasantly - rather too pleasantly - readjusting body beneath the sheets, he saw just one minor wound left unhealed: a small curved, reddish-purple mark high inside his thigh. He remembered getting it now, vividly. The bastard had played around for ages with his clever tongue and fingers in all sorts of sensitive little regions down there, teasing him to madness - and paid him back for just one impatient hair-tug with such a bite…
So Crowley had fed him obscenely, pampered and pleasured him within an inch of his existence, and then signed him like an artwork. For how long had he lain here rotting in the lap of luxury while hellish wiles had free reign of this war-blasted part of the world that so desperately needed so much thwarting that Aziraphale started feeling worn-out again just thinking about it …
With his characteristic splendid timing Crowley sauntered in, dressed in tasteless splendour and carrying numerous packages, including what looked to be a very large jug of wine.
“Ah, the sleeper awakes.”
“How long?” Aziraphale said, low and darkly. “How long have I been indulging sloth, added on to gluttony and sodomy and who knows what else…”
“Sodomy?” the demon squeaked. “Are you accusing me of being a bad host?”
Aziraphale pinched his nose in sudden pain. “That’s not what that word means nowadays and you know it.”
“Yeah, but you should know better - you remember. The hospitality was terrible. I never had so much trouble getting laid anywhere.”
Aziraphale shook his head. Why was he still feeling so blurry?
Crowley took two beaten-bronze goblets from a cabinet and filled them with a rich garnet-coloured wine. The scent of it went straight to Aziraphale’s head and made it feel a little bit clearer, which had to be sheer illusion.
“Let’s try this again,” Crowley said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and handing the angel one of the cups with the rather sadistic nannyish air of one not to be denied when doing something for someone else’s own good. There was also an air of determination to be noticed while graciously ignoring someone else’s impressive burst of bad manners. “You’re angry at me for what, exactly?”
Aziraphale took the cup sullenly. “Taking advantage of my weakened condition. Keeping me here in your…lair…while I should have been out doing things…there is so much to do…I could really get in trouble if…”
Crowley stared at him for a moment and then slugged back his wine so hard a red trickle escaped from the corner of his mouth, which his tongue quickly caught before tearing into a spirited bit of lashing.
“Just what did you think you were going to be doing in the state you were in? You couldn’t have thwarted a horsefly. Look, I could get in trouble for keeping you out of trouble. I’m sure it’d go over real well Upstairs when you showed up leaving your ragged manky carcass lying around like a sack of rocks and trying to find a space in the forms to explain how you discorporated yourself out of neglect!”
“I really don’t think it’s possible to-“
“Were you determined to be the first to find out?”
Aziraphale stewed on that while Crowley stood up and stormed back towards the door, where he picked up a large package and unwrapped it. “Oh, and look, I’m not done,” he said ruefully, tossing a snarl of heavy silk in Aziraphale’s direction. Blues, mostly: peacock and sky and lapis and periwinkle; also cream and very pale pink and dove-grey and rain-cloud and iridescent silver. “I know you like them bought for real, not just wished up. Really, I was honest. Didn’t even haggle much. Oh, don’t rush to thank me. I always want to rip your clothes off and burn them, but this time I had to. I enjoyed it.”
Aziraphale fingered the luxurious fabrics with a guilty sort of longing while getting angrier and angrier. “I think….when we came to our understanding….you know…it didn’t involve you treating me like some kind of pet….or some kind of….” He could feel his face getting red and spluttery.
“Concubine?” Crowley filled in cheerfully. “Don’t be ridiculous. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I never thought it’d be nice to have one, but really, the upkeep, the overhead….Not worth it. In fact, trust me, it’s better to be one than to have one. You don’t think I got this place through honest work, did you?”
The angel’s expression made him smirk, and then draw back, and then take a very obvious mental note. “Joking. Joking. Truth is, the emperor’s cousin’s second son’s mistress’s sister needed to make an advantageous marriage, and quickly at that. Do you really want to know? It’s a very long story involving the financing of a fishing fleet with some extra features for smuggling, and a blockade and some reinforcements for Bohemond that needed to arrive late but not too late-” here he started counting off plots and subplots on his fingers-“There’s a very long chain of results promised and delivered - or not - and messages found and lost in a timely manner - or not - and bargaining for a dowry that wound up being mainly hush money. I assure you, as far as I know there was only one murder, and only the very occasional involvement of my sexual favours, on my terms strictly ….I can’t read that look you have right now. Are you being judgmental or jealous or just very hung-over?”
Aziraphale just took a deep drink of wine and stared into its dark surface fixedly. The wave of rage that had just passed through him left him feeling even more confused. “You’re talking too loud,” he said quietly.
“Hung-over it is then,” Crowley sighed. “Drink up.”
From across the edge of the cup Aziraphale watched as his demon companion - what an odd thing - twirled a strange object in his fingers. It was a sort of long, curved silver pipe. With a flicker of flame from his fingertip Crowley lit it and took a drag, and there was that strange scent Aziraphale couldn’t identify from the night before, dark and tangy and if it had a colour it would probably have been blackish-green - close to the colour of the serpent Crowley was when he was.
“I looked for you in Jerusalem,” Aziraphale found himself saying blankly. He was sure it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. He was still waiting for his answer.
“When the Army of Heaven - ahem” (here Crowley coughed most pointedly) “marched in? Whose side did you expect me to be on?”
“Hell’s side, of course,” Aziraphale said miserably, drawing the sheets closely around his shoulders. “When…”
“I heard,” Crowley said. “Killed them all, didn’t they? Everyone in the city - men, women, children? Horses up to their knees in blood and all that? Bodies lying around for weeks? All these Christian soldiers promised spoils, taking houses after they slaughtered everyone inside, running around wearing dead people’s clothes and dead people’s jewels, all for the Glory and all that shit?”
The angel drew up his knees and buried his face in his arms.
Crowley kept on. “The Jews burned alive in the synagogue? Children gang-raped until they died and even for a while after? Women dragged behind horses by their entrails? Crusaders burning the bodies and picking through the ashes for molten gold because they’d heard they swallowed their money to hide it? I heard. I heard a lot.”
Aziraphale wasn’t answering.
“You can’t tell me you were shocked!” Crowley said through a smoke ring. “It started back in bloody Semlin, didn’t it? Hadn’t even left Europe when they started hacking people to bits for no reason.”
“I didn’t want to be there,” came Aziraphale’s small, sad voice out of his hidden face. “There was nothing I could do. I looked for you. I wanted to see you for some reason. Were you hiding from me? I thought you meant it when we agreed to - I mean, I’m sure this is as stupid as it comes, but I did sort of almost trust you -”
“I wasn’t hiding from you,” Crowley said quietly at the last. “I wasn’t there.”
Aziraphale looked up suddenly. “You weren’t there?”
“You’d’ve found me if I was,” Crowley shrugged. He interrupted his own complicated process of packing a grimy tarry-looking something into the pipe. “And keep that quiet, because I was supposed to be there. I just got distracted.”
“Distracted? By what? Where?”
“I fucking hate Jerusalem. I dragged my feet. Got sidetracked. Wound up in Persia, in the mountains,” was all Crowley said, passing the pipe angelward.
“That’s a long way off…what on earth is this?”
“Something you seemed to like very much last night.”
Aziraphale took an experimental drag and started coughing horribly. Crowley sat back down beside him and patted his back until the hacks subsided and Aziraphale looked at him with accusatory watery eyes.
“You did that last night too,” Crowley said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“It tastes…odd.” Clearly he wasn’t sure yet if he liked it or not. But he took a second pull so it couldn’t have been that bad, and he barely coughed at all this time. He turned round to find Crowley sitting back on the bed, against the pillows, stiff brocade dalmatic and draping cloak and all the attendant garments exchanged for the simple robe he’d worn the night before, a sort of dressing gown in deep red silk, belted in front in the Far Eastern style. Aziraphale flushed a bit, his hands suddenly remembering how they’d wantonly untied that plain band, how the fabric seemed to just fall away, and beneath it how Crowley’s skin was smooth and warm, darker than it had been in Albion, so exquisitely responsive to his touch…
Aziraphale’s hands were tingling. So was most of the rest of him. His eyes itched and odd colours shifted about in their corners. And the ceiling seemed so far away. He thought it might be fun to fly up there until he bumped lightly against it and looked closely at what was in those negative spaces in those mosaics, and he chuckled very quietly, hoping Crowley wouldn’t notice. It wasn’t the sort of silly thought he could explain….
“Oh, come here already,” said Crowley a bit indulgently, and the part of Aziraphale that wanted to flee far, far away to somewhere he’d never have to formulate a thought for speech to anyone ever again flared up and rebelled. It was annoying, it was too much like Jerusalem and panic and nausea, and just to spite it Aziraphale turned away from it with a stubborn stiffness still in his back and shoulders and laid his head in the demon’s lap. Crowley’s fingers stroked his hair lazily, and Aziraphale felt every strand reaching out to entangle him.
“So you were a little delirious last night,” Crowley was saying, almost incomprehensibly because the syllables seemed to fit together strangely. Aziraphale could feel the vibrations of his voice. “You were talking about why you had to go. About Peter the Hermit and his visions of paradise, Kingdom of Heaven on earth and all that rubbish. About the way it seemed half the peasants in Europe were selling off their sad little farms and packing up everything on a beat-up old horse if they had one, on their wives if they didn’t, and going off to the Allegedly Holy Land to butcher and get butchered because this…person…could make them see…”
“Yes,” Aziraphale nodded, closing his eyes and finding the swirl of colours and strange seething alertness of his own skin was more intense when he did that, so he opened them again. “It was…powerful…at the time.”
“Nice bedtime story, that.”
“Sorry.”
“I could tell you one too. About Persia, about a castle high up in dry stony mountains, the sort of place you can’t imagine how anyone without wings could get there or why anyone at all would want to, but they do because they’re insane. It’s very nice inside now, though. And there was a battle too, but it’s really about one of the strangest humans I’ve ever met-“
“Islamic?”
“Yeah…some side sect, I can’t keep track…”
“Some good ones there,” Aziraphale sighed vaguely. “A little odd…but you know, the truth is, Gabriel always was the best poet, and like all the great ones he’s a little eccentric, but it’s really beautiful work, don’t you think…?”
“Sure, but that’s hardly the point. The point is….”
There was a long pause, during which Aziraphale looked up to see Crowley smoking on that pipe again - which was a surprising sight from this angle, especially the way the tiny flame flared orange in his eyes - and then passing it down. Wasn’t any easier lying down, that was for sure.
“The point is-?“
“Oh, sorry, I think I remember now. Anyhow. He could do that vision thing too. Show them Paradise, only theirs is a little more earthy. Quite vivid. They smoke this, you see. And they see feasts that never run out, fountains that never run dry, beautiful houris who turn virgin again every night - though why anyone would want that is beyond me - exquisite scents, music, you get the idea, plus the voice of Himself or whatever praising his faithful servants. Trite stuff really, but once they’d seen it, once they think they’re this close, they’d do anything for more of it. Including obeying their leader absolutely, of course. That’s the string that’s always attached, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely?”
“I saw him tell one to pitch himself off the cliff just because he said so. Poor bugger didn’t hesitate for a second.”
“What’s the point of making your followers do that?”
“Not all of them, silly. Just an example once in a while. It’s not the dying for him part he’s so interested in, he wants them to get really, really good at killing for him. Not like your pig-farmer army - with finesse. Even you would have to admire it, it’s so well done. I don’t think that’s really the point either….maybe it is, I dunno. I think the point is that…I don’t think he’s one of ours, though a lot of his followers certainly are, and someone who put his own son to death for drinking wine isn’t going to get tempted anywhere he doesn’t want to be. So I was going crazy trying to figure out how he could be one of yours. Bookish, though. Reading and writing all the time. Arcane scriptural justifications for everything. Maybe you’d like him.”
“Oh….hmmmm,” Aziraphale had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to be thinking about this for a very long time. “So how did you - I mean, did you blend in?”
“Well, I was invisible to them at first. Until - well, frankly, I got just a bit curious about this thing they were smoking. And I tried it and, well, I forgot myself a bit. So then I played along for a while. But the food was terrible, and obviously there was no wine, and except for the Old Man himself, I’ve never met such a humourless bunch of angst fairies in my whole existence. So the next time he wanted a volunteer off the cliff, I jumped at the chance.”
Aziraphale started to sit up in startlement, but even beginning made him a little dizzy. “Ouch, did you -?”
Crowley laughed. “Please give me some credit. He never said I had to hit the ground.”
Aziraphale did giggle at this in spite of himself.
“Ah-ha, you do like it,” Crowley said. “As you know, it feels really good if you…” His caresses dropped to Aziraphale’s collarbones, slow and light and thorough.
“Mm, I know. But I don’t know…if I even like you,” Aziraphale mused, arching up slightly into Crowley’s touch. “I don’t know if I should. I don’t know which way this whole horrible mess is supposed to go. I don’t know why all these nightmares have to happen. I want just knowing there’s a reason to be enough, like it’s supposed to be. Nobody tells me anything. You’re being so-“
“So…what?” Crowley smiled, his hand drifting further, starting to nudge aside the sheets the angel had protectively wrapped around himself.
“Pushy. Trying to take my mind off things. I don’t think I can trust you.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, I was just trying to -“ It was obvious from the destination of Crowley’s hand just what he was trying (and succeeding) to do at the moment, but both were aware he wasn’t quite talking about that.
“Show me a vision of paradise? It’s not as if I need it.”
“On the contrary, I strongly believed you did. But I won’t try to make you do anything because of it.”
“Not even -- ah!” Aziraphale whispered, thrusting up into Crowley’s hand and starting to feel a good bit less resentful.
“No, I think you want to do that anyway,”
That demon thought entirely too much. Aziraphale turned his head to one side, nuzzling through folds of cloth until his mouth found something rigid and responsive to tease and lick through the thin garnet silk, and then Crowley became a good deal less articulate.
***
They parted at last on the street some days later, sent to Antioch and Jerusalem and dreading much ugliness ahead. They had one day left to enjoy in the chaotic, bustling marketplace of the part of the city that was least like the part Aziraphale had been haunting before.
There’d been one of those rare moments Crowley talked without talking, a message in his refusal to sneer as usual at every scroll and trinket Aziraphale took a fleeting delight in.
You’ve got more to lose than I do, so this is what I think, for what it’s worth: a little gluttony, a little lust, sloth-- no big deal, you can afford it.
It’s despair that can do it. You were on thin ice.
Aziraphale felt stiff and ridiculous in the pretentious Byzantine couture the demon had bought him and taken so much smug pleasure in wrapping him in (“Look, I’m putting clothes on you, that’s new!”). He could have sworn that even more of those excessive little pearls appeared around his neck when Crowley straightened his collar and adjusted his cloak-pin.
“Mmm, not bad, not bad at all,” the demon said, appraising him. “Bet it won’t last.”
~end part 1~
Part 2