Illustrated fic: part 4 of 4
the long-awaited conclusion of...
THE PHOENIX AND THE TURTLE
A Metaphysical Romance
Pt. IV of IV
story by vulgarweed, illustrations by quantum_witch (beta'd by waxbean)
For overall summary, disclaimer, warnings, ratings etc., see Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Rating: NC-17 (and NWS images)
Warnings: (secondary) character deaths, sex and violence, cracktastic metaphysics, abuse of Shakespeare.
Summary: In which mortals do what mortals do and lovers do what lovers do; Azrael finds other beings always underfoot, and Crowley and Aziraphale receive unexpected messages--they've been noticed and (redundantly) immortalised.
London, 1589
Had Crowley not been in an uncharacteristically literary mood due to a most enticing run-in with a certain spy with a penchant for playwriting (and, in Crowley’s opinion, a misreading of the Faustus incident that was just wrong enough to make for a play that could keep all the little Inquisitors uneasy in their beds for years), he wouldn’t have been near the booksellers’ row at all (or so he told himself) and would have missed the following fascinating and disturbing scene:
“Where did you come by these? Tell me, or you’ll have even more curses on your head than you already do, and that is saying something.”
One man held another up against a wall in the classic fashion of imminent beatdowns the whole world over and throughout time. One of them was not exactly a man at all.
“From Saunder…he got them from a dealer in Rotterdam, he says, all fairly done and…”
“That’s a bloody lie.”
Pages littered the cobblestones all around where the two snarled at each other, and Crowley knew the younger-looking of the two booksellers was lying, all right. The bits and scraps of tomes on astronomy, on demonology, on horticulture, on seafaring, on the early church and on the birds of Armenia, all had margin notes in a familiar hand. Crowley ground his teeth. All right, so he’d messed around with Dee a fair amount himself. Messing with the man’s library, though, while he was out of the country, as his former friends and neighbours had done…that had been the lowest of the low. Maybe Aziraphale had at last got him trained somehow, but Crowley now thought there were always new definitions of the depths to which only humans, not demons, could sink.
“You’re just jealous you didn’t get to the old charlatan’s stash first,” the dealer smirked. “Know you’d love to buy yourself some new clothes.”
“You’re a disgrace to our profession. Get out of My Sight,” said Aziraphale in a terrifying voice, and Crowley wondered if the human had heard the capital letters as clearly as he did.
Then Aziraphale punched the man in the mouth--hard. Leaving him lying there, he stormed away down the alley, and walked straight into Crowley, who took his arm without a word.
Two blocks later, Crowley said quietly, “If you want, I’ll take the credit for that. So you don’t get the blame.”
Aziraphale was still trembling with rage. “I shouldn’t have snapped like that. It’s hardly a shock - I’ve been finding John’s things in the stalls for months now. I get them back when I can.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation I can see right through that one,” Crowley said. “He’s been ours a while. Your curse was just the cherry on top, and he deserved a good beating too.”
“Is it wrong of me to be glad of that?”
“Since when am I a good judge of that sort of thing?”
London, 1592
Crowley was footsore and furious when he returned from the Continent, his resolve to swear off the obligatory black horses made final one last time as a pair of them had insisted on pitching his carriage into an especially unpleasantly-textured river somewhere cold outside of Vienna.
For once, the dingy little bookshop was all but warm by comparison. Aziraphale’s eyes were flinty and angry, though, as he clutched a pamphlet with no trace of his usual reverence for the printed word.
“Which friend of yours is getting denounced this time?” Crowley asked wryly.
“Raleigh, nominally,” Aziraphale grumbled. “School of Night, my arse.”
“Language, angel!” Crowley laughed. “I suppose he wanted to seem mysterious. That’ll come back to bite him. And…?”
“Goes without saying, doesn’t it? Rumour has it Kelley’s dead, you know.”
“Ha! They wish. Fallen to his death from a window in Prague, is that the latest story? You know what they say when there’s no body.”
“You look like you’ve been on a bad job yourself.”
Crowley sat down heavily on a rickety chair that dared not tilt further and rested his chin on his hands. “The Continent is a bad job right now…I don’t know if Dee was smarter or just luckier but Bruno’s gullible in the worst ways, and I can’t follow where he’s gone. Churchmen and scoundrels…buying themselves indulgences by selling friends out to Hell. He’ll have to trust to fortune now, and his own silver tongue, I can’t…”
Aziraphale just peered at him steadily, tiny quirk of a dark smile. “If I wanted to be a bastard,” he said, “I could ask why you care so much.”
“Funny how that happens, isn’t it?” Crowley said. A glass of wine appeared by his right hand, and he drank it unquestioningly, sighing and unpinning his cloak. Aziraphale locked the door.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve had a rough week too. Why don’t we take it out on each other?”
“Like in the bad old days?” Crowley grinned.
“Not quite,” said Aziraphale slyly, sinking to his knees before Crowley’s chair, caressing the soft leather of the demon’s high boots, vanishing every bit of clothing that got in his way. Crowley tightened his hand in silken hair, let his head fall back in the rush of sudden pleasure and imagined for a second he could see the stars through the waterstained wood of the bookshop ceiling as he felt himself hardening quickly to fill Aziraphale’s insistent mouth.
***
Some miles away in Mortlake, John Dee stood alone, surveying the repair work in the library of his cottage and tried not to think of everything-and everyone--gone missing, books and children and friends and possibilities and irrevocably lost years. Almost idly, rather absently, he rolled a crystal ball in his aging hands, imparting to it some warmth as he looked out the window at the stars.
He could barely believe it when the heat of his hands turned to mist within the stone, and he himself, without a medium, for the first time, began to see.
“Did you think I had led you astray?” asked Madimi.
“To be honest, yes,” said John.
“You took my leap of faith, did you not?”
“I did,” he said.
“Before long,” Madimi said. “I shall tell you stories. I shall draw aside many veils.”
Amazed, John sat down in Kelley’s old chair a bit creakily, staring past the mist into the images unfurling against a field of green and flowers.
London, 1598
It was a calm afternoon in the bookshop, and Aziraphale was enjoying it so much that it was inevitable something would ruin it-and probably even inevitable that it would have been Crowley. But when he saw how unhappy the demon looked, standing there with a letter in his hand, he couldn’t bring himself to grouse about it.
“Bruno’s trial has started,” Crowley said, leaden and hopeless.
“Oh no,” Aziraphale sighed. “Or maybe that’s good, right? He’s been in prison so long.”
“I’m going to go back.”
Aziraphale dropped the tome in his hands. “What? Why?”
“Sick of running from things. Going to make one last try.”
“One last try for what?!”
“Seeing if he’ll let me…”
Aziraphale reached out, tried to take Crowley’s hands in his, but his associate was having none of it. “You’ve tried before.”
“Twice, maybe third time’s the charm.”
“He won’t recant, and he won’t take the chance to escape. Sounds like an almost-willing sacrifice to me.”
Crowley’s eyes flashed dangerously. “It’s all about the victory for your side, isn’t it? Fucking Army of Heaven always up my arse. Don’t you get it? The Inquisition is ours! We didn’t come up with it, they did, and it’s still the best machine for dragging ‘em down since the bloody Crusades!”
“All the more reason for you to stay out of it, then!” Aziraphale cried.
“You’d’ve done it for me, you said!”
“Yes,” said Aziraphale, very quietly. “I would have. And I wish I had.”
“I don’t,” Crowley snapped. “I learned something from that. You can’t Fall twice, so all the things I wish I didn’t know get put somewhere else. Makes me want to use them somehow.”
“You’re going to go no matter what I say.”
“You got it, angel. Very swift of you.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Oh Kent, no.”
“You can’t shake me.”
“You can’t thwart me.”
“I can, but I won’t. Unless I have to.”
They stood there staring at each other in a perfectly frozen impasse until a book hit the floor elsewhere in the shop and they both hit the ceiling, quite literally.
“Oh…I’m so sorry to disturb you…”
“Gyah!” Aziraphale cried, steadying his hands.
Curse Will and his bloody historical research. The playwright moved on cat feet, melded into the shelves, and made it all too easy to forget he was there. He was trying not to look as stunned or puzzled as he must have been. Crowley, unhelpfully, hissed at him.
Rome, February 1600
There was a crowd in Campo de’Fiori; there was almost one above it too.
The smell was all too familiar, but the proud angle of the heretic’s chin was something relatively rare. He’d been gagged, but no one expected a recant anyway. There wouldn’t be any mercy either.
Two beings sat on a nearby roof, trembling. The fair one held the dark one’s arm-perhaps as much to restrain him as to comfort him.
But it wouldn’t have mattered. The time for heroics was past, and the angel, the demon had to admit, might be right. Certainly the man himself had thought so.
Crowley was still shaking, though. “You have no idea how much it hurts…I hope to everything I can think of you never do.”
“My dear, we don’t have to watch,” Aziraphale pleaded.
“Yes, we do. Getting a weak stomach?”
“Please. Jerusalem.”
“Sorry.”
Crowley was biting his nails until Aziraphale lightly touched his hand. “You told me what he said: ‘Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.’”
“Yeah,” smiled the demon weakly. “Good one, eh?”
“Yes, very good,” said the angel sincerely. “Worthy of - well, never mind. Did you think maybe you’re feeling more fear than he is?”
“It’s certainly possible.”
The flames were rising. It had to be fucking awful in there. All the wise words in the cosmos weren’t going to get you out of…
“Take my hand,” said Aziraphale. “We can do something.”
Crowley did so and closed his eyes and gasped when he realised what Aziraphale meant, and they did it together. It didn’t take long. It was easy. The involuntary screams stopped.
There was a third pair of wings.
RATHER OVERSTEPPED YOUR BOUNDS THERE, DIDN’T YOU?
“The quality of mercy,” said Aziraphale in his best Heavenly tone, “is not strained.”
OH WELL. LESS WORK FOR ME. I DIDN’T SEE A THING.
“Thanks,” said Crowley.
“No, thank you,” said Giordano, taking hold of Azrael’s cloak as they faded. He winked at Crowley and nodded at Aziraphale and didn’t seem surprised to see either of them through the true sight of the dead.
It may have been emotion, it may have been weariness, or a certain defiance of defiance, but Crowley rather compliantly let himself be comforted, sinking his face into Aziraphale’s shoulder and slumping down into his arms. They clustered together for long-very long-moments in stillness and silence, just the tiny sound of Aziraphale’s palm against Crowley’s hair.
Crowley sighed and tugged a little at the angel, wrapping his hands in the soft cloak, and then something rolled out of Aziraphale’s pocket and bumped up against the parapet.
It was a small crystal ball, about the size of the palm of his hand, and as Aziraphale reached to reclaim it, it shimmered. Aziraphale blinked. It was John’s - it had never shown anything to him before, and judging by Crowley’s boggled expression, he was seeing something too. But he recognised the smiling, pretty, slightly mad face in the glass--although it was a different face, it was somehow the same.
“Am I not a fine little maiden?” asked Madimi, again.
“I don’t think you’re a maiden at all,” said Crowley. “You look like a boy to me.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure myself,” Madimi shrugged, the golden-haired child with the crystal ball in her or his own hand that also had a crystal ball with a child in it, on and on until infinity, wherever that was. “Not as if it matters.”
“What did you mean by--?” Aziraphale asked hoarsely, “You know, to John, when you…”
“Oh, I don’t explain,” said Madimi. “I just am. It’s the best I can do. And I should go, for that matter. But I know you two. We will meet again…do keep it up!”
The crystal was just an inert object once more, and Crowley and Aziraphale looked at each other so helplessly the glance was an implicit agreement to never speak of it again.
“How do you feel?” Aziraphale finally asked, holding Crowley’s hand and stroking it gently.
“Better than I thought I would, actually.”
Aziraphale smiled. “Let me inspire you to some wine.”
London, 1601
It was a reversal of their usual places, that was for sure.
Morning started to fill up the little room over the bookshop with its audaciously yellow light, and it had no effect whatsoever on a very soundly sleeping angel. It was unwelcome, though, to a demon who was feeling very awake and a bit agitated, and would have got up and indulged in some quality pacing time were he not ensnared and weighted down by said angel. So he had to do his restless thinking in one place, and that was never good.
Aziraphale rarely slept this long, or slept at all. He’d told Crowley once he thought he’d done it for a week after the Crucifixion and for a day or two during the Black Death, but wasn’t sure. Oh yes, and after Jerusalem. Most vexing, those Crusades.
Indeed. It had been three days that the exhausted and restored angel slept. Crowley had let Aziraphale go on thinking it had been only one for five hundred years.
And the other circumstance was-well, that counted then too-was that he did sometimes drop off like a stone right after he and Crowley had…mm, yes. Usually just for a few hours, though, and Crowley was rarely in much of a state himself to fully appreciate the limp, sweaty, smiling mass the angel turned into, being much more of a well-studied sleeper himself and having much more of a natural talent for it.
Crowley was far more used to scheming to get under Aziraphale than to get out from under him, but one solution came to his mind immediately. He closed his eyes, changed form, and then slithered through the sheets--moving a little more slowly over the hill of a hip than was strictly necessary--and didn’t resume his favourite shape again until he’d coiled up into his discarded cloak on the floor. Was this room ever warm, in any season?
Aziraphale made a little protesting sound at Crowley’s escape, but didn’t wake.
Crowley stopped staring at him with a heroic effort. How had their Arrangement, on its face at first a mere sort of non-aggression pact, turned into this messy thing that turned the mere thought of parting into sorrow that, no, actually, was not the least bit sweet? Why had he hopes and dreams that hadn’t occurred to him for millennia blossoming all over the place now, mostly about getting his hands all over that fusty, dumpy angel-touching him, tasting him, getting him to feel…Well, he knew, really. He’d figured it out sometime long ago. Maybe in Samarkand, the night Tamür died. It was that when he did those terribly, deliciously human things with Aziraphale, it wasn’t just his human body that felt everything, and he was fairly sure the angel’s pleasure was the same. Once he knew that, he couldn’t un-know it.
They couldn’t go on like this, acting as if this world were going to last forever and they were always going to be able to carry on chasing each other all over it, arguing and gossiping and negotiating and drinking wine and eating and shagging like bloody humans, as if that were anything so great to aspire to. There was an Above and a Below, the Sephiroth and the Qlippoth, and never the two should meet except in the great Confrontation. Weren’t even the stars fixed in their dome? Well, Bruno hadn’t thought so, and he’d certainly thought it was important enough to go down for in the worst way...
The pounding he was hearing wasn’t all in his head as he’d thought. There was someone at the door downstairs.
With a frustrated hiss-he’d been on the verge of thinking something important, he thought-he blinked himself back into his clothes (and mending their rips; Aziraphale could be overzealous) and stalked into the shop.
The courier was little more than an urchin, but he smiled at Crowley’s scowl as he held up a letter. “Are you the bookseller?”
“No, but I’ll take it to him.”
The boy looked uncomfortable. “Well, Mr. Shakespeare told me to give it directly to…”
“Oh, him, eh? Listen, he’s right upstairs, and I’ll tell you this, you do not want to wake him. Trussst me.”
And the boy did, and handed him the letter with a shaking hand. Crowley had a way of making himself seem both very trustworthy and quite frightening at once.
Crowley had never respected Aziraphale’s privacy before and wasn’t about to start now. He was still reading as he climbed back up the rickety stairs and into the little bedchamber, where Aziraphale was staring at him in disbelief.
“Are you reading my letters now?”
“Yes, of course. It’s from that Will. He’s sent you a poem.”
“Give it to me!” Aziraphale ordered testily, reaching for the paper, sheets falling away most fetchingly from his bare chest.
“That’s not the way you said that last night,” Crowley smirked, holding it away. “Listen to this: ‘As you have been so kind as to give me constructive criticism in the past, perhaps you would appreciate this small gesture of thanks.’ Well, I could’ve given him some criticism too…”
“There’s a reason he asked me and not you,” Aziraphale said.
Crowley snickered. “I’m sure there are many. Don’t panic, I don’t think it’s a love poem. Not to you anyway. Oh, here we go: ‘This is my humble attempt to directly address themes of matters much of interest in philosophy…’ I think I smell a didactic alchemical metaphor coming on. It smells just like that time Dee got his beard caught in the burner.”
“You were there?”
“Yes, I told you his wards were shit, didn’t I?”
“I still can’t believe you did that. All in some misguided attempt to protect me?”
“Well, that and I wanted to see what he was really up to. And to know if you were fucking him.”
“Crowley!”
“You threatened to do something like that, remember? He even was the next poor sod who walked into your shop. Not that it would have bothered me if you did.”
Aziraphale looked at him very askance. “I think you’re lying about that.”
“Nope. It’s just that if you were, I wanted to watch.”
“Give me that letter!”
“Oh no. Let me read this to you. I thought you went for this kind of thing. Hmm, it’s about birds. Having a funeral…thingy. ‘Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right.’ Has Will ever heard a dying swan? ‘And thou, treble-dated crow, That they sable-gender mak’st / With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st, ‘Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.’ I thought it was cats that stole breath, not crows.”
This conundrum puzzled Crowley long enough for Aziraphale to snatch the letter.
Crowley sulked as Aziraphale read. It did sound better in the angel’s voice.
“Here the anthem doth commence; Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the turtle fled / In a mutual flame from hence.”
“Wait, what do turtles have to do with it?”
“Turtle dove, Crowley, it’s symbolism.”
“Right, symbolism’s always the excuse. But they’re different, y’know, species.”
“I think that’s kind of the point. 'So they lov’d, as in love in twain / Had the essence, but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain.'"
“Wouldn’t that be kind of like bestiality in a way?”
“No, they’re both birds.”
“Well, people and sheep are both mammals.”
“You’re missing the point by a mile. ‘Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance, and no space was seen / ‘Twixt the turtle and his queen; But in them it were a wonder.'”
“One’s always got to be the girl, right?”
Aziraphale just smirked. “Poetic convention, my dear. Really, this is very nicely done: ‘So between them love did shine, That the turtle saw his right / Flaming in the phoenix’ sight / Either was the other’s mine.’"
Crowley shuffled around and read over Aziraphale’s shoulder. “’Property was thus appalled / That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was call’d.’ You’ve got to admit, that’s a bit tortured.”
“True, and the next stanza’s worse. Over all, though….’To the phoenix and the dove / Co-supremes and stars of love’-that’s marvellous.”
“Depressing, isn’t it? ‘Death is now the phoenix’s nest; And the turtle’s loyal breast / To eternity doth rest.’”
“Well, Will does like his tragedies,” Aziraphale sighed.
“Yes, and the audience cries and cries and goes home and shrieks at their kids and kicks their dogs same as always. Oh, this is a doozy: ‘Leaving no posterity / ‘Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity.’”
“The one virtue I would never accuse you of. ‘Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be.’ Well, Truth and Beauty can’t die, so it has to really mean something else.”
“Are you so sure they can’t?” Crowley asked.
“Not forever, no,” Aziraphale said firmly. “But it is an alchemical metaphor, though, you were right, the red and the white…”
Crowley thought that he had been about to think something important before the messenger showed up, and he tried for it again, but it was dancing just beyond his reach. Well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. There were, he suspected, certain words of renunciation he might be utterly incapable of speaking even in full possession of his occult faculties.
Aziraphale’s brow was slightly furrowed as though he were still trying to figure it out.
Crowley took the poem out of his hand and set it down on the night-table.
“You know,” Aziraphale said, “Will seems a bit of a medium himself. I wonder how much of what he writes he really understands.”
“Well, I hope someone understands it,” Crowley said.
“Hm” said Aziraphale, and the silence between them was almost-almost-uncomfortable. “I suppose I should open the shop soon.”
“Later,” said Crowley with a sly grin, “Let’s have some more of that ‘married chastity.’”
“You’re insatiable,” Aziraphale whispered as Crowley pushed him slowly down on the bed; he did not look at all displeased about it.
Mine, Crowley thought, unbidden and unbanishable, as he licked his way down Aziraphale like a stag at a salt vein. Throat with its racing pulse; collarbone rising up against him; right nipple, rosy-tan and vulnerable, making Aziraphale sob with lust as he sucked it hard and bit a little.
Aziraphale started to try to speak, his hands rising and spreading up Crowley’s shoulders.
Crowley looked down at him, rubbing the rough embroidery of his clothes against Aziraphale’s bare skin before divesting himself entirely. He’d never wanted so much to just shove himself into the angel’s mouth to shut him up in case he said something fearful, but those darkened, pleading eyes gave him different thoughts-tender ones he also couldn’t banish. His hand slid down Aziraphale’s belly, slightly round, warm; his fingers started teasing the underside of Aziraphale’s very hard cock in a way that made the angel writhe and swear--that always made Crowley just want to play with it ruthlessly until Aziraphale cried out and attacked him. He paused for one smug smile before dipping down and taking the tip in his mouth, and got the reaction he wanted, with vibrations he could feel against his tongue and in his throat and down into his chest where his deepest desires held their throne.
“You-you-oh, that’s--!”
Oh yes indeed, thought Crowley and only murmured, “Mm-hmm” as he moved, making it as slick and wet as he possibly could.
He did it to watch the look on Aziraphale’s face shift and change when Crowley suddenly sat up and straddled him, sinking down slowly and taking him inside. Aziraphale grasped his hips and thrust upwards hard, and Crowley cried out with joy to see that wild little snarl on the angel’s lips, the mad hunger in his eyes.
“Did I hurt you?” Aziraphale whispered.
“No,” Crowley breathed back, leaning forward, starting to ride him with a delirious deliberateness, doing something really weird with his spine, “but…you know…sometimes…I want you to.”
“I know…I…” Aziraphale couldn’t finish what he was going to say, he just tightened his grip on Crowley’s hips, placing him right where he wanted him, moving in just the way that hit Crowley inside right there, oh fuck yes…
Crowley made sounds that could not possibly be misinterpreted-by anyone who happened to be near the building, not just Aziraphale-shot through as they were with the occasional actual word, all of them being crass and lush vulgarities in praise of angelic anatomy and the specific sensations it was causing in his own, none of said words having more than two syllables. Aziraphale writhed and thrashed and shuddered under him, fighting to lead the dance despite his disadvantage, changing it all at last when a hand of his closed around Crowley’s needy erection, moving up and down, and he whispered, “Come for me…all over me.”
Crowley had never obeyed an angel with less resistance in his existence; he’d wanted to last longer but oh, Aziraphale back arched off the bed in complete abandon, damp-haired and lusty, forcing it out of him… clearly Crowley’s shivering, his high-pitched gasp, and that sudden hot mess struck a deep and thick angel nerve as taut as a viol’s string, because through his helpless falling spasms he felt Aziraphale bucking up beneath him as he panted helplessly, flooding him inside, praying in some way Crowley didn’t find offensive in the least.
“Oh, Crowley, you’re…” Aziraphale rasped, pulling him down into his arms. Sticky. Heady lingering scent of sex, rich and magical. The demon traced a pattern with his finger in the puddle on Aziraphale’s chest before breathing it away. Aziraphale nuzzled his ear.
“Spent,” Crowley murmured against his shoulder. “Consumed.”
“We’ll have to find ourselves a better metaphor for it, dear boy,” Aziraphale said, his breath returning, pulse slowing. “I know you’re tired of that one.”
But he didn’t get a response - their places had reverted back to their natural order, and Crowley was quite thoroughly asleep, his weight and his limbs entangling Aziraphale firmly in place. Realising this situation wasn’t going to change anytime soon, Aziraphale acquiesced to it, slowly caressing the lean arm flung across his chest and trying not to think of this complex, problematic sweetness as something he could have lost.
Mortlake, 1609
It was hardly standard operating procedure, Aziraphale thought as he held the frail hand in his own. But it felt proper to do, somehow. The man had outlived his wives and most of his children and the Queen he served to the end, and now he looked completely towards the eternal.
“I was such a fool,” John whispered.
“You lost everything,” Aziraphale said. “As far as I’m concerned you did wonderfully, considering. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“Oh no. Not everything,” said the old mystic. Weakly he beckoned Aziraphale to lean close. Then he rasped, mischievously, “You’re not the Angel of Death, are you?”
“No,” Aziraphale said, relieved. “I’m afraid he’s on his way though.” He could feel the shiver as the curtains of air parted to admit the chill of Azrael’s wake.
“Right,” John said. “Not your detail. You watch over the fates of this world.”
Aziraphale blinked.
“A Principality, right?”
Dumbstruck, Aziraphale nodded before he caught himself.
“Then I know I leave my world in good hands,” John smiled. “You and your demon leman.”
Aziraphale tried to bite down his shock, but he squeezed John’s hand a little too hard.
“Fear not. I don’t. I was tested. It is all one,” said the dying man, his eyes going misty. “I see the pillars now. Mercy and Severity, and between them, a great light…”
The whirr of wings in the room felt like more than one pair; the newest arrival’s wingbeats were as silent as an owl’s and as shot through with twilight.
FANCY MEETING YOU HERE.
“Sshh,” Aziraphale whispered peevishly.
NO RUSH.
“I think I’m ready for you,” John said in a clear, strong voice. He was looking straight at Azrael, and Aziraphale realised he had not even noticed the particular moment, but the doves at the window had, and they ruffled their wings.
THAT’S VERY REFRESHING. I APPRECIATE IT.
As they faded away, John was beginning to talk Azrael’s ears off (or would have, if he had them) about the weight of the soul.
There was someone waiting for Aziraphale too, just outside the gate.
“I’m sorry,” Crowley said quietly.
“I’m not, particularly,” Aziraphale said. “I’ll miss him, but it was a good death.”
“So I take it he’s not going…downstairs.”
“I most seriously doubt it.”
Crowley shrugged resignedly. “That was pretty half-arsed on my part. Now, if I’d really been trying…”
“You wouldn’t be the Crowley I know. He’s frightfully lazy, that one.”
“Except in bed,” Crowley whispered and planted his hand at the small of the angel’s back as they walked down the lane.
“Do you think of nothing else?”
“Lots of things, when you’re not around. I thought you were going to scold me for being disrespectful to the dead or something.’
“No, not this one,” Aziraphale cast a strange little glance at his opposite number. “He knew, you know.”
Crowley blinked. “He knew…how much?”
“Entirely too much. It’s not in his diaries, though. He stopped writing them years ago.”
Crowley shuddered. “That’s spooky. And not in the way I like.”
Aziraphale took his hand. He’d been about to say something about ineffability, but thought better of it. But Crowley just shook his head and said “Now is a veil drawn before all, and all things appear beautifuller than they ever did.”
“I remember that,” Aziraphale said. “Probably one of the very statements that first convinced him. Kelley wouldn’t’ve thought of that on his own.”
“Surprised Uriel didn’t take red ink to it, as ‘beautifuller’ is hardly a word.”
There were plenty of ways to get back to London, but they opted to walk. The chill of the March air was mitigated by a little spring and slight scent of flowers, rising out of the ground at the graves of John’s wife and children (for Pestilence too had weighed in) as they passed by in quiet.
They paused in a little oak grove. Last year’s Maypole stood leaning and fading, its ragged ribbons grey with winter and waiting for their renewal. They had a quick picnic lunch of bread and cheese and wine-and a lingering dessert of each other-before continuing on. Crowley had matters to attend to in the New World; Aziraphale had to see a royal typesetter about a Bible. Pleasure had to yield to business sometimes; after all, that wheel would surely turn again.
Far away, Will was writing a play about plots within plots, a kind but cunning wizard, a fey spirit, a ship, and a storm.
~fin~
Quantum Witch's Artist's Notes and References.
Vulgarweed's Bibliography and Writer's Notes.
I hope readers enjoy this at least half as much as we enjoyed ourselves working on it!
THE PHOENIX AND THE TURTLE
A Metaphysical Romance
Pt. IV of IV
story by vulgarweed, illustrations by quantum_witch (beta'd by waxbean)
For overall summary, disclaimer, warnings, ratings etc., see Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Rating: NC-17 (and NWS images)
Warnings: (secondary) character deaths, sex and violence, cracktastic metaphysics, abuse of Shakespeare.
Summary: In which mortals do what mortals do and lovers do what lovers do; Azrael finds other beings always underfoot, and Crowley and Aziraphale receive unexpected messages--they've been noticed and (redundantly) immortalised.
London, 1589
Had Crowley not been in an uncharacteristically literary mood due to a most enticing run-in with a certain spy with a penchant for playwriting (and, in Crowley’s opinion, a misreading of the Faustus incident that was just wrong enough to make for a play that could keep all the little Inquisitors uneasy in their beds for years), he wouldn’t have been near the booksellers’ row at all (or so he told himself) and would have missed the following fascinating and disturbing scene:
“Where did you come by these? Tell me, or you’ll have even more curses on your head than you already do, and that is saying something.”
One man held another up against a wall in the classic fashion of imminent beatdowns the whole world over and throughout time. One of them was not exactly a man at all.
“From Saunder…he got them from a dealer in Rotterdam, he says, all fairly done and…”
“That’s a bloody lie.”
Pages littered the cobblestones all around where the two snarled at each other, and Crowley knew the younger-looking of the two booksellers was lying, all right. The bits and scraps of tomes on astronomy, on demonology, on horticulture, on seafaring, on the early church and on the birds of Armenia, all had margin notes in a familiar hand. Crowley ground his teeth. All right, so he’d messed around with Dee a fair amount himself. Messing with the man’s library, though, while he was out of the country, as his former friends and neighbours had done…that had been the lowest of the low. Maybe Aziraphale had at last got him trained somehow, but Crowley now thought there were always new definitions of the depths to which only humans, not demons, could sink.
“You’re just jealous you didn’t get to the old charlatan’s stash first,” the dealer smirked. “Know you’d love to buy yourself some new clothes.”
“You’re a disgrace to our profession. Get out of My Sight,” said Aziraphale in a terrifying voice, and Crowley wondered if the human had heard the capital letters as clearly as he did.
Then Aziraphale punched the man in the mouth--hard. Leaving him lying there, he stormed away down the alley, and walked straight into Crowley, who took his arm without a word.
Two blocks later, Crowley said quietly, “If you want, I’ll take the credit for that. So you don’t get the blame.”
Aziraphale was still trembling with rage. “I shouldn’t have snapped like that. It’s hardly a shock - I’ve been finding John’s things in the stalls for months now. I get them back when I can.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation I can see right through that one,” Crowley said. “He’s been ours a while. Your curse was just the cherry on top, and he deserved a good beating too.”
“Is it wrong of me to be glad of that?”
“Since when am I a good judge of that sort of thing?”
London, 1592
Crowley was footsore and furious when he returned from the Continent, his resolve to swear off the obligatory black horses made final one last time as a pair of them had insisted on pitching his carriage into an especially unpleasantly-textured river somewhere cold outside of Vienna.
For once, the dingy little bookshop was all but warm by comparison. Aziraphale’s eyes were flinty and angry, though, as he clutched a pamphlet with no trace of his usual reverence for the printed word.
“Which friend of yours is getting denounced this time?” Crowley asked wryly.
“Raleigh, nominally,” Aziraphale grumbled. “School of Night, my arse.”
“Language, angel!” Crowley laughed. “I suppose he wanted to seem mysterious. That’ll come back to bite him. And…?”
“Goes without saying, doesn’t it? Rumour has it Kelley’s dead, you know.”
“Ha! They wish. Fallen to his death from a window in Prague, is that the latest story? You know what they say when there’s no body.”
“You look like you’ve been on a bad job yourself.”
Crowley sat down heavily on a rickety chair that dared not tilt further and rested his chin on his hands. “The Continent is a bad job right now…I don’t know if Dee was smarter or just luckier but Bruno’s gullible in the worst ways, and I can’t follow where he’s gone. Churchmen and scoundrels…buying themselves indulgences by selling friends out to Hell. He’ll have to trust to fortune now, and his own silver tongue, I can’t…”
Aziraphale just peered at him steadily, tiny quirk of a dark smile. “If I wanted to be a bastard,” he said, “I could ask why you care so much.”
“Funny how that happens, isn’t it?” Crowley said. A glass of wine appeared by his right hand, and he drank it unquestioningly, sighing and unpinning his cloak. Aziraphale locked the door.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve had a rough week too. Why don’t we take it out on each other?”
“Like in the bad old days?” Crowley grinned.
“Not quite,” said Aziraphale slyly, sinking to his knees before Crowley’s chair, caressing the soft leather of the demon’s high boots, vanishing every bit of clothing that got in his way. Crowley tightened his hand in silken hair, let his head fall back in the rush of sudden pleasure and imagined for a second he could see the stars through the waterstained wood of the bookshop ceiling as he felt himself hardening quickly to fill Aziraphale’s insistent mouth.
***
Some miles away in Mortlake, John Dee stood alone, surveying the repair work in the library of his cottage and tried not to think of everything-and everyone--gone missing, books and children and friends and possibilities and irrevocably lost years. Almost idly, rather absently, he rolled a crystal ball in his aging hands, imparting to it some warmth as he looked out the window at the stars.
He could barely believe it when the heat of his hands turned to mist within the stone, and he himself, without a medium, for the first time, began to see.
“Did you think I had led you astray?” asked Madimi.
“To be honest, yes,” said John.
“You took my leap of faith, did you not?”
“I did,” he said.
“Before long,” Madimi said. “I shall tell you stories. I shall draw aside many veils.”
Amazed, John sat down in Kelley’s old chair a bit creakily, staring past the mist into the images unfurling against a field of green and flowers.
London, 1598
It was a calm afternoon in the bookshop, and Aziraphale was enjoying it so much that it was inevitable something would ruin it-and probably even inevitable that it would have been Crowley. But when he saw how unhappy the demon looked, standing there with a letter in his hand, he couldn’t bring himself to grouse about it.
“Bruno’s trial has started,” Crowley said, leaden and hopeless.
“Oh no,” Aziraphale sighed. “Or maybe that’s good, right? He’s been in prison so long.”
“I’m going to go back.”
Aziraphale dropped the tome in his hands. “What? Why?”
“Sick of running from things. Going to make one last try.”
“One last try for what?!”
“Seeing if he’ll let me…”
Aziraphale reached out, tried to take Crowley’s hands in his, but his associate was having none of it. “You’ve tried before.”
“Twice, maybe third time’s the charm.”
“He won’t recant, and he won’t take the chance to escape. Sounds like an almost-willing sacrifice to me.”
Crowley’s eyes flashed dangerously. “It’s all about the victory for your side, isn’t it? Fucking Army of Heaven always up my arse. Don’t you get it? The Inquisition is ours! We didn’t come up with it, they did, and it’s still the best machine for dragging ‘em down since the bloody Crusades!”
“All the more reason for you to stay out of it, then!” Aziraphale cried.
“You’d’ve done it for me, you said!”
“Yes,” said Aziraphale, very quietly. “I would have. And I wish I had.”
“I don’t,” Crowley snapped. “I learned something from that. You can’t Fall twice, so all the things I wish I didn’t know get put somewhere else. Makes me want to use them somehow.”
“You’re going to go no matter what I say.”
“You got it, angel. Very swift of you.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Oh Kent, no.”
“You can’t shake me.”
“You can’t thwart me.”
“I can, but I won’t. Unless I have to.”
They stood there staring at each other in a perfectly frozen impasse until a book hit the floor elsewhere in the shop and they both hit the ceiling, quite literally.
“Oh…I’m so sorry to disturb you…”
“Gyah!” Aziraphale cried, steadying his hands.
Curse Will and his bloody historical research. The playwright moved on cat feet, melded into the shelves, and made it all too easy to forget he was there. He was trying not to look as stunned or puzzled as he must have been. Crowley, unhelpfully, hissed at him.
Rome, February 1600
There was a crowd in Campo de’Fiori; there was almost one above it too.
The smell was all too familiar, but the proud angle of the heretic’s chin was something relatively rare. He’d been gagged, but no one expected a recant anyway. There wouldn’t be any mercy either.
Two beings sat on a nearby roof, trembling. The fair one held the dark one’s arm-perhaps as much to restrain him as to comfort him.
But it wouldn’t have mattered. The time for heroics was past, and the angel, the demon had to admit, might be right. Certainly the man himself had thought so.
Crowley was still shaking, though. “You have no idea how much it hurts…I hope to everything I can think of you never do.”
“My dear, we don’t have to watch,” Aziraphale pleaded.
“Yes, we do. Getting a weak stomach?”
“Please. Jerusalem.”
“Sorry.”
Crowley was biting his nails until Aziraphale lightly touched his hand. “You told me what he said: ‘Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.’”
“Yeah,” smiled the demon weakly. “Good one, eh?”
“Yes, very good,” said the angel sincerely. “Worthy of - well, never mind. Did you think maybe you’re feeling more fear than he is?”
“It’s certainly possible.”
The flames were rising. It had to be fucking awful in there. All the wise words in the cosmos weren’t going to get you out of…
“Take my hand,” said Aziraphale. “We can do something.”
Crowley did so and closed his eyes and gasped when he realised what Aziraphale meant, and they did it together. It didn’t take long. It was easy. The involuntary screams stopped.
There was a third pair of wings.
RATHER OVERSTEPPED YOUR BOUNDS THERE, DIDN’T YOU?
“The quality of mercy,” said Aziraphale in his best Heavenly tone, “is not strained.”
OH WELL. LESS WORK FOR ME. I DIDN’T SEE A THING.
“Thanks,” said Crowley.
“No, thank you,” said Giordano, taking hold of Azrael’s cloak as they faded. He winked at Crowley and nodded at Aziraphale and didn’t seem surprised to see either of them through the true sight of the dead.
It may have been emotion, it may have been weariness, or a certain defiance of defiance, but Crowley rather compliantly let himself be comforted, sinking his face into Aziraphale’s shoulder and slumping down into his arms. They clustered together for long-very long-moments in stillness and silence, just the tiny sound of Aziraphale’s palm against Crowley’s hair.
Crowley sighed and tugged a little at the angel, wrapping his hands in the soft cloak, and then something rolled out of Aziraphale’s pocket and bumped up against the parapet.
It was a small crystal ball, about the size of the palm of his hand, and as Aziraphale reached to reclaim it, it shimmered. Aziraphale blinked. It was John’s - it had never shown anything to him before, and judging by Crowley’s boggled expression, he was seeing something too. But he recognised the smiling, pretty, slightly mad face in the glass--although it was a different face, it was somehow the same.
“Am I not a fine little maiden?” asked Madimi, again.
“I don’t think you’re a maiden at all,” said Crowley. “You look like a boy to me.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure myself,” Madimi shrugged, the golden-haired child with the crystal ball in her or his own hand that also had a crystal ball with a child in it, on and on until infinity, wherever that was. “Not as if it matters.”
“What did you mean by--?” Aziraphale asked hoarsely, “You know, to John, when you…”
“Oh, I don’t explain,” said Madimi. “I just am. It’s the best I can do. And I should go, for that matter. But I know you two. We will meet again…do keep it up!”
The crystal was just an inert object once more, and Crowley and Aziraphale looked at each other so helplessly the glance was an implicit agreement to never speak of it again.
“How do you feel?” Aziraphale finally asked, holding Crowley’s hand and stroking it gently.
“Better than I thought I would, actually.”
Aziraphale smiled. “Let me inspire you to some wine.”
London, 1601
It was a reversal of their usual places, that was for sure.
Morning started to fill up the little room over the bookshop with its audaciously yellow light, and it had no effect whatsoever on a very soundly sleeping angel. It was unwelcome, though, to a demon who was feeling very awake and a bit agitated, and would have got up and indulged in some quality pacing time were he not ensnared and weighted down by said angel. So he had to do his restless thinking in one place, and that was never good.
Aziraphale rarely slept this long, or slept at all. He’d told Crowley once he thought he’d done it for a week after the Crucifixion and for a day or two during the Black Death, but wasn’t sure. Oh yes, and after Jerusalem. Most vexing, those Crusades.
Indeed. It had been three days that the exhausted and restored angel slept. Crowley had let Aziraphale go on thinking it had been only one for five hundred years.
And the other circumstance was-well, that counted then too-was that he did sometimes drop off like a stone right after he and Crowley had…mm, yes. Usually just for a few hours, though, and Crowley was rarely in much of a state himself to fully appreciate the limp, sweaty, smiling mass the angel turned into, being much more of a well-studied sleeper himself and having much more of a natural talent for it.
Crowley was far more used to scheming to get under Aziraphale than to get out from under him, but one solution came to his mind immediately. He closed his eyes, changed form, and then slithered through the sheets--moving a little more slowly over the hill of a hip than was strictly necessary--and didn’t resume his favourite shape again until he’d coiled up into his discarded cloak on the floor. Was this room ever warm, in any season?
Aziraphale made a little protesting sound at Crowley’s escape, but didn’t wake.
Crowley stopped staring at him with a heroic effort. How had their Arrangement, on its face at first a mere sort of non-aggression pact, turned into this messy thing that turned the mere thought of parting into sorrow that, no, actually, was not the least bit sweet? Why had he hopes and dreams that hadn’t occurred to him for millennia blossoming all over the place now, mostly about getting his hands all over that fusty, dumpy angel-touching him, tasting him, getting him to feel…Well, he knew, really. He’d figured it out sometime long ago. Maybe in Samarkand, the night Tamür died. It was that when he did those terribly, deliciously human things with Aziraphale, it wasn’t just his human body that felt everything, and he was fairly sure the angel’s pleasure was the same. Once he knew that, he couldn’t un-know it.
They couldn’t go on like this, acting as if this world were going to last forever and they were always going to be able to carry on chasing each other all over it, arguing and gossiping and negotiating and drinking wine and eating and shagging like bloody humans, as if that were anything so great to aspire to. There was an Above and a Below, the Sephiroth and the Qlippoth, and never the two should meet except in the great Confrontation. Weren’t even the stars fixed in their dome? Well, Bruno hadn’t thought so, and he’d certainly thought it was important enough to go down for in the worst way...
The pounding he was hearing wasn’t all in his head as he’d thought. There was someone at the door downstairs.
With a frustrated hiss-he’d been on the verge of thinking something important, he thought-he blinked himself back into his clothes (and mending their rips; Aziraphale could be overzealous) and stalked into the shop.
The courier was little more than an urchin, but he smiled at Crowley’s scowl as he held up a letter. “Are you the bookseller?”
“No, but I’ll take it to him.”
The boy looked uncomfortable. “Well, Mr. Shakespeare told me to give it directly to…”
“Oh, him, eh? Listen, he’s right upstairs, and I’ll tell you this, you do not want to wake him. Trussst me.”
And the boy did, and handed him the letter with a shaking hand. Crowley had a way of making himself seem both very trustworthy and quite frightening at once.
Crowley had never respected Aziraphale’s privacy before and wasn’t about to start now. He was still reading as he climbed back up the rickety stairs and into the little bedchamber, where Aziraphale was staring at him in disbelief.
“Are you reading my letters now?”
“Yes, of course. It’s from that Will. He’s sent you a poem.”
“Give it to me!” Aziraphale ordered testily, reaching for the paper, sheets falling away most fetchingly from his bare chest.
“That’s not the way you said that last night,” Crowley smirked, holding it away. “Listen to this: ‘As you have been so kind as to give me constructive criticism in the past, perhaps you would appreciate this small gesture of thanks.’ Well, I could’ve given him some criticism too…”
“There’s a reason he asked me and not you,” Aziraphale said.
Crowley snickered. “I’m sure there are many. Don’t panic, I don’t think it’s a love poem. Not to you anyway. Oh, here we go: ‘This is my humble attempt to directly address themes of matters much of interest in philosophy…’ I think I smell a didactic alchemical metaphor coming on. It smells just like that time Dee got his beard caught in the burner.”
“You were there?”
“Yes, I told you his wards were shit, didn’t I?”
“I still can’t believe you did that. All in some misguided attempt to protect me?”
“Well, that and I wanted to see what he was really up to. And to know if you were fucking him.”
“Crowley!”
“You threatened to do something like that, remember? He even was the next poor sod who walked into your shop. Not that it would have bothered me if you did.”
Aziraphale looked at him very askance. “I think you’re lying about that.”
“Nope. It’s just that if you were, I wanted to watch.”
“Give me that letter!”
“Oh no. Let me read this to you. I thought you went for this kind of thing. Hmm, it’s about birds. Having a funeral…thingy. ‘Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right.’ Has Will ever heard a dying swan? ‘And thou, treble-dated crow, That they sable-gender mak’st / With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st, ‘Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.’ I thought it was cats that stole breath, not crows.”
This conundrum puzzled Crowley long enough for Aziraphale to snatch the letter.
Crowley sulked as Aziraphale read. It did sound better in the angel’s voice.
“Here the anthem doth commence; Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the turtle fled / In a mutual flame from hence.”
“Wait, what do turtles have to do with it?”
“Turtle dove, Crowley, it’s symbolism.”
“Right, symbolism’s always the excuse. But they’re different, y’know, species.”
“I think that’s kind of the point. 'So they lov’d, as in love in twain / Had the essence, but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain.'"
“Wouldn’t that be kind of like bestiality in a way?”
“No, they’re both birds.”
“Well, people and sheep are both mammals.”
“You’re missing the point by a mile. ‘Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance, and no space was seen / ‘Twixt the turtle and his queen; But in them it were a wonder.'”
“One’s always got to be the girl, right?”
Aziraphale just smirked. “Poetic convention, my dear. Really, this is very nicely done: ‘So between them love did shine, That the turtle saw his right / Flaming in the phoenix’ sight / Either was the other’s mine.’"
Crowley shuffled around and read over Aziraphale’s shoulder. “’Property was thus appalled / That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was call’d.’ You’ve got to admit, that’s a bit tortured.”
“True, and the next stanza’s worse. Over all, though….’To the phoenix and the dove / Co-supremes and stars of love’-that’s marvellous.”
“Depressing, isn’t it? ‘Death is now the phoenix’s nest; And the turtle’s loyal breast / To eternity doth rest.’”
“Well, Will does like his tragedies,” Aziraphale sighed.
“Yes, and the audience cries and cries and goes home and shrieks at their kids and kicks their dogs same as always. Oh, this is a doozy: ‘Leaving no posterity / ‘Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity.’”
“The one virtue I would never accuse you of. ‘Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be.’ Well, Truth and Beauty can’t die, so it has to really mean something else.”
“Are you so sure they can’t?” Crowley asked.
“Not forever, no,” Aziraphale said firmly. “But it is an alchemical metaphor, though, you were right, the red and the white…”
Crowley thought that he had been about to think something important before the messenger showed up, and he tried for it again, but it was dancing just beyond his reach. Well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. There were, he suspected, certain words of renunciation he might be utterly incapable of speaking even in full possession of his occult faculties.
Aziraphale’s brow was slightly furrowed as though he were still trying to figure it out.
Crowley took the poem out of his hand and set it down on the night-table.
“You know,” Aziraphale said, “Will seems a bit of a medium himself. I wonder how much of what he writes he really understands.”
“Well, I hope someone understands it,” Crowley said.
“Hm” said Aziraphale, and the silence between them was almost-almost-uncomfortable. “I suppose I should open the shop soon.”
“Later,” said Crowley with a sly grin, “Let’s have some more of that ‘married chastity.’”
“You’re insatiable,” Aziraphale whispered as Crowley pushed him slowly down on the bed; he did not look at all displeased about it.
Mine, Crowley thought, unbidden and unbanishable, as he licked his way down Aziraphale like a stag at a salt vein. Throat with its racing pulse; collarbone rising up against him; right nipple, rosy-tan and vulnerable, making Aziraphale sob with lust as he sucked it hard and bit a little.
Aziraphale started to try to speak, his hands rising and spreading up Crowley’s shoulders.
Crowley looked down at him, rubbing the rough embroidery of his clothes against Aziraphale’s bare skin before divesting himself entirely. He’d never wanted so much to just shove himself into the angel’s mouth to shut him up in case he said something fearful, but those darkened, pleading eyes gave him different thoughts-tender ones he also couldn’t banish. His hand slid down Aziraphale’s belly, slightly round, warm; his fingers started teasing the underside of Aziraphale’s very hard cock in a way that made the angel writhe and swear--that always made Crowley just want to play with it ruthlessly until Aziraphale cried out and attacked him. He paused for one smug smile before dipping down and taking the tip in his mouth, and got the reaction he wanted, with vibrations he could feel against his tongue and in his throat and down into his chest where his deepest desires held their throne.
“You-you-oh, that’s--!”
Oh yes indeed, thought Crowley and only murmured, “Mm-hmm” as he moved, making it as slick and wet as he possibly could.
He did it to watch the look on Aziraphale’s face shift and change when Crowley suddenly sat up and straddled him, sinking down slowly and taking him inside. Aziraphale grasped his hips and thrust upwards hard, and Crowley cried out with joy to see that wild little snarl on the angel’s lips, the mad hunger in his eyes.
“Did I hurt you?” Aziraphale whispered.
“No,” Crowley breathed back, leaning forward, starting to ride him with a delirious deliberateness, doing something really weird with his spine, “but…you know…sometimes…I want you to.”
“I know…I…” Aziraphale couldn’t finish what he was going to say, he just tightened his grip on Crowley’s hips, placing him right where he wanted him, moving in just the way that hit Crowley inside right there, oh fuck yes…
Crowley made sounds that could not possibly be misinterpreted-by anyone who happened to be near the building, not just Aziraphale-shot through as they were with the occasional actual word, all of them being crass and lush vulgarities in praise of angelic anatomy and the specific sensations it was causing in his own, none of said words having more than two syllables. Aziraphale writhed and thrashed and shuddered under him, fighting to lead the dance despite his disadvantage, changing it all at last when a hand of his closed around Crowley’s needy erection, moving up and down, and he whispered, “Come for me…all over me.”
Crowley had never obeyed an angel with less resistance in his existence; he’d wanted to last longer but oh, Aziraphale back arched off the bed in complete abandon, damp-haired and lusty, forcing it out of him… clearly Crowley’s shivering, his high-pitched gasp, and that sudden hot mess struck a deep and thick angel nerve as taut as a viol’s string, because through his helpless falling spasms he felt Aziraphale bucking up beneath him as he panted helplessly, flooding him inside, praying in some way Crowley didn’t find offensive in the least.
“Oh, Crowley, you’re…” Aziraphale rasped, pulling him down into his arms. Sticky. Heady lingering scent of sex, rich and magical. The demon traced a pattern with his finger in the puddle on Aziraphale’s chest before breathing it away. Aziraphale nuzzled his ear.
“Spent,” Crowley murmured against his shoulder. “Consumed.”
“We’ll have to find ourselves a better metaphor for it, dear boy,” Aziraphale said, his breath returning, pulse slowing. “I know you’re tired of that one.”
But he didn’t get a response - their places had reverted back to their natural order, and Crowley was quite thoroughly asleep, his weight and his limbs entangling Aziraphale firmly in place. Realising this situation wasn’t going to change anytime soon, Aziraphale acquiesced to it, slowly caressing the lean arm flung across his chest and trying not to think of this complex, problematic sweetness as something he could have lost.
Mortlake, 1609
It was hardly standard operating procedure, Aziraphale thought as he held the frail hand in his own. But it felt proper to do, somehow. The man had outlived his wives and most of his children and the Queen he served to the end, and now he looked completely towards the eternal.
“I was such a fool,” John whispered.
“You lost everything,” Aziraphale said. “As far as I’m concerned you did wonderfully, considering. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“Oh no. Not everything,” said the old mystic. Weakly he beckoned Aziraphale to lean close. Then he rasped, mischievously, “You’re not the Angel of Death, are you?”
“No,” Aziraphale said, relieved. “I’m afraid he’s on his way though.” He could feel the shiver as the curtains of air parted to admit the chill of Azrael’s wake.
“Right,” John said. “Not your detail. You watch over the fates of this world.”
Aziraphale blinked.
“A Principality, right?”
Dumbstruck, Aziraphale nodded before he caught himself.
“Then I know I leave my world in good hands,” John smiled. “You and your demon leman.”
Aziraphale tried to bite down his shock, but he squeezed John’s hand a little too hard.
“Fear not. I don’t. I was tested. It is all one,” said the dying man, his eyes going misty. “I see the pillars now. Mercy and Severity, and between them, a great light…”
The whirr of wings in the room felt like more than one pair; the newest arrival’s wingbeats were as silent as an owl’s and as shot through with twilight.
FANCY MEETING YOU HERE.
“Sshh,” Aziraphale whispered peevishly.
NO RUSH.
“I think I’m ready for you,” John said in a clear, strong voice. He was looking straight at Azrael, and Aziraphale realised he had not even noticed the particular moment, but the doves at the window had, and they ruffled their wings.
THAT’S VERY REFRESHING. I APPRECIATE IT.
As they faded away, John was beginning to talk Azrael’s ears off (or would have, if he had them) about the weight of the soul.
There was someone waiting for Aziraphale too, just outside the gate.
“I’m sorry,” Crowley said quietly.
“I’m not, particularly,” Aziraphale said. “I’ll miss him, but it was a good death.”
“So I take it he’s not going…downstairs.”
“I most seriously doubt it.”
Crowley shrugged resignedly. “That was pretty half-arsed on my part. Now, if I’d really been trying…”
“You wouldn’t be the Crowley I know. He’s frightfully lazy, that one.”
“Except in bed,” Crowley whispered and planted his hand at the small of the angel’s back as they walked down the lane.
“Do you think of nothing else?”
“Lots of things, when you’re not around. I thought you were going to scold me for being disrespectful to the dead or something.’
“No, not this one,” Aziraphale cast a strange little glance at his opposite number. “He knew, you know.”
Crowley blinked. “He knew…how much?”
“Entirely too much. It’s not in his diaries, though. He stopped writing them years ago.”
Crowley shuddered. “That’s spooky. And not in the way I like.”
Aziraphale took his hand. He’d been about to say something about ineffability, but thought better of it. But Crowley just shook his head and said “Now is a veil drawn before all, and all things appear beautifuller than they ever did.”
“I remember that,” Aziraphale said. “Probably one of the very statements that first convinced him. Kelley wouldn’t’ve thought of that on his own.”
“Surprised Uriel didn’t take red ink to it, as ‘beautifuller’ is hardly a word.”
There were plenty of ways to get back to London, but they opted to walk. The chill of the March air was mitigated by a little spring and slight scent of flowers, rising out of the ground at the graves of John’s wife and children (for Pestilence too had weighed in) as they passed by in quiet.
They paused in a little oak grove. Last year’s Maypole stood leaning and fading, its ragged ribbons grey with winter and waiting for their renewal. They had a quick picnic lunch of bread and cheese and wine-and a lingering dessert of each other-before continuing on. Crowley had matters to attend to in the New World; Aziraphale had to see a royal typesetter about a Bible. Pleasure had to yield to business sometimes; after all, that wheel would surely turn again.
Far away, Will was writing a play about plots within plots, a kind but cunning wizard, a fey spirit, a ship, and a storm.
~fin~
Quantum Witch's Artist's Notes and References.
Vulgarweed's Bibliography and Writer's Notes.
I hope readers enjoy this at least half as much as we enjoyed ourselves working on it!