Embarrassingly productive!
Now it can be told: I didn't write two stories for/inspired by GOE. I wrote three.
linnpuzzle did this amazing piece of art for me as my gift. (also found here at her slash art journal puzzling. Friendslocked, but you should join anyway.
Now, as a mod, obviously I knew who had done it. And I stared so long at it that the prompt she gave for own request burned a bunny-shaped mark into my brain. So, for her lovely art, linnpuzzle actually wound up with two gifts because I just couldn't help myself.
Two different writers went in very different directions with the same suggestion: musegaarid's story For Thy Sake, is very intense and dramatic. This one is fluffy and silly and porny. And look, visual aids! (But not for the porny part)
Endangered Species Recovery Program
For: linnpuzzle
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: hard R, maybe NC-17
Summary: A demon can get into real trouble, doing the right thing.
Author's Note: An answer to Linn’s GOE request: "Hmmm… Wings/handcuffs/ice cream…oooo… or shameless hurt/comfort. Pick and choose!” I neither picked nor chose - it’s all here. For some reason it wanted to emerge as a sequel to “Special Day” and therefore it is also a honeymoon fic. Go- Sa- Someone help me.
“No, no, not that way. That end goes up.”
“Please keep your eyes on the road, dear.”
“Why? It looks just the same as it has for the last two hours. I probably should be on the right side, though. You didn’t point that out.”
“I didn’t notice.”
And so it went. A demon, driving a cheaply-built modern rental car he hated, and an angel, who had no trouble reading road maps but lots of trouble folding them back properly, were driving down a very boring highway in the hot sun in the southwestern United States.
You might think they had some rendezvous with destiny, perhaps a meeting with other celestial or infernal beings at some crucial ley line or fissure point of history. You might think that one had a plan that the other had to counteract as well as vice versa, and that perhaps they were carpooling since fuel had got so expensive. You might think it had something to do with a nationwide religious awakening or a biblically-predicted war on the horizon or at the very least space aliens.
You would be wrong, and you might realise this as soon as you saw one of them take one of those many little accidental reveries in which he glanced in mild disbelief at the ring on his left hand. If you missed that, you would probably catch on if you overheard just a little more of the nature of their bickering. “Like an old married couple” would be an apt description. Old indeed they were, older than the world. The fact that they were really also a married couple was a much more recent development.
Crowley and Aziraphale were on their honeymoon. (And if you think it was excessive of them to stretch this out over several months and several continents, then you clearly did not overhear their argument about exactly how long their engagement had been. It is not especially relevant who won or who was right; what matters is that the figures they were debating were in centuries.)
Arizona
“Sure is wide. And deep.’
“Yes,” said the angel, a little misty-eyed about the wonders of Creation.
The particular wonder Crowley was most interested in was standing next to him, and proper enjoyment of such involved a hotel room, not so much standing in the blinding sun staring at a big crack in the ground. Had it been entirely up to him, they rarely would have left said hotel rooms. Except in Vegas. And New York. And Rio de Janeiro. And Buenos Aires. And Havana...
As Crowley eventually herded his Bermuda-shorts-wearing spouse back into the car, Aziraphale started shuffling dreamily through the mass of glossy brochures he’d collected everywhere they were available, which in America was everywhere. The car floor was coated with them.
Four Corners. Mesa Verde. The Dine lands. Big Chief Soaring Eagle’s All-Night Diner and Turquoise Jewelry Emporium. Billy Bronco’s Wild West Thrill Village.
The angel’s interest in sight-seeing was becoming an addiction, Crowley thought. And his interest in birdwatching meant that the clunky binoculars around his neck banged against the clunky camera in a most irritating way.
Crowley was finding out quickly that marriage was not remarkably different from their prior Arrangement--well, except for that mortifying little problem he’d briefly developed when it had first really hit him that he and Aziraphale were no longer, in fact, fornicating--and this was both distressing and comforting.
He didn’t mind the brochure-collecting so much as the dramatic reading performances.
“Oh, Crowley,” the angel said excitedly, from a dry-looking one about the California condor reintroduction program. “It’s working. They’re mating.”
“Good for them.” He tapped his nails on the steering wheel impatiently.
“But they’re still losing a few. Lead poisoning from bullets in carcasses, they get caught in power lines,” Aziraphale sighed. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to see one?”
“Sure,” Crowley shrugged as he started the engine.
They’d only gone a few miles when they passed the thirty-seventh scenic overlook of the day, and Aziraphale begged for one more last look (for the day) at the Canyon. Crowley sighed and pulled over.
And found his gaze caught by an epic struggle in the sky.
Far, far off over one of the many little canyon tributaries, the couple’s four keen eyes saw a teetering power line---and tangled in its clutches was something dark and very large with a majestic pair of black and white wings. It was battering at its mysterious captor frantically and awkwardly, so hard it was inevitable it would injure itself.
Aziraphale reached out to grab Crowley’s arm, but he was already gone--out of the car and into the air.
As Aziraphale raced to catch up with him, he watched it all like some horrible movie unfolding: two noble winged creatures flapping hysterically around a little cord on a pole. The huge bird saw the demon as predator rather than rescuer and whacked at him with its one free wing and raked at him with its one free talon and pecked at him with its only beak, which had never been trapped. Crowley was struggling to keep himself aloft, fight the beast off himself without hurting it, and get it disentangled all at once, and it wasn’t graceful.
He swore an oath that would have dropped any other angel besides the one streaking towards him, and with a frustrated wrench of the cord, finally got the bird free. The cord came loose in his hand. There was a horrible flash of blue sparks, a shriek, and a smell of singed flesh and feathers. There was a sympathetic shriek from Aziraphale as Crowley started to drop in exactly the way that winged creatures shouldn’t to the canyon floor hundreds of feet below.
With one of those legendary adrenalin surges, Aziraphale plunged into freefall himself to catch up, and then put a little extra spin of fall-power into it, drawing on the reserve of falling energy he had built up by somehow managing not to Fall all these millennia, and just a few feet shy of the dry ravine-bed, he managed to catch his--husband, dear God--by the wing and bring them both up short. There was a sickening series of little snapping sounds, but the worst of the impact was thereby broken before they hit.
“Crowley! Speak to me!” he was crying out, holding the limp, singed demon on his lap in the dust. Crowley was terribly still and pale. A few dreadful moments passed, complete with wind in the dry cottonwoods and a piddling trickle of a stream, before the yellow eyes opened and then squeezed shut again.
“FUCK, that hurt,” Crowley groaned. “Just let me die, will you? Just for a little while?”
“Absolutely not,” Aziraphale said, embracing him instinctively and flinching when that one wing flopped in a most unnatural way, making Crowley twitch with pain.
Number 122--according to the wing tag--had landed on a rock-fall nearby and was watching them with mild interest, craning his or her bald orange head and fluffling his or her relatively unimpressive 9-foot span. Aziraphale would have liked to think it was gratitude and concern, but it might just have been first hope and then disappointment on the part of a carrion-feeder.
Aziraphale looked up at the merciless sun and the canyon lip far, far above them, then down at Crowley, who was still pale and now starting to shade to an unpleasant green.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” he said quietly.
“Why? I could just lie here…” Crowley whispered with some effort. “Well, that’s all I can do really.”
“Dear, let me-“ Aziraphale started to collect him up, and Crowley yelped when his broken wing was lifted only a little.
“Can you do…that molecule thing? Because I’m going to have to…and you’re…”
“Oh. Right.” It was a wheezy whisper, and it didn’t sound good; Aziraphale flinched instinctively watching Crowley scrunch up his face and put the last bit of strength he had on reserve into…there. The rearranging. Not that big an effort, really, for them--just letting in a little air into the matter and going a little lighter…And then Crowley was about 30 pounds really, like the bird he’d rescued. It looked painful though, and as soon as he’d effectively gathered his partner up, Aziraphale touched his forehead.
“Sorry, but you’ll thank me,” he whispered as Crowley fell completely asleep.
***
Although carrying Crowley in this state--his good wing reeled in, his bad one dangling clumsily--was awkward, the flight was the easy part.
The hotel was suffering from a mysterious power loss, and the room was starting to get unpleasantly hot. Aziraphale had never been fond of desert climes really, much as he thought he ought to have been back in the old days.
At least flying let him reach the room on the second-floor balcony without passing the front desk again.
(“So your wives’ll be joining you then?” said the clerk jovially, noting their rings.
Right. And there were keys to two rooms for no apparent reason.
Crowley had been having a great time with it as they trudged up the stairs. “I do believe that is the first time in the history of the world you’ve been mistaken for a heterosexual. Only in America.”
That had struck Aziraphale as worrisome. “We’ll just tell them we’re English.” As if that had ever been in question.)
No, the hard part was what to do with his unconscious spouse and his broken wing. Aziraphale was no Raphael, yet still fancied himself not entirely useless in the healing department. Unfortunately, Crowley’s injury was complicated by three factors: (1) he was a demon, and angelic healing powers didn’t always take among the Fallen (not that there had ever been much field research done on this); (2) Aziraphale had always had a harder time healing injuries that he had, in fact, inflicted himself--whether done to prevent the entity involved from breaking everything else or not--and (3) it had been a really long time since he’d dealt with a wing injury, and those were complicated.
Now, had this been his own wing involved, or that of another angel in good standing, it wouldn’t be a problem to put in a quick prayer Upstairs to the appropriate medical facility and get some field advice at least. However, Aziraphale was a little reluctant to make the call in this case--it wasn’t that they didn’t know, he presumed, but it wasn’t the sort of thing to rub their faces in. Guiltily, he remembered how he’d been thinking about inquiring with HR (Heavenly Resources) about the feasibility of getting Crowley included on Heaven’s family insurance plans--certainly Hell’s policies left a lot to be desired--but he’d been putting it off, for the conversation would surely be awkward. He should have known better: these things were important if you’re traveling in the States.
He thought about it for a few minutes more, and then he went to dig in the desk by the bed and pulled out the local phone book. He dialed the National Park Service, who gave him the number for the Raptor Rehabilitation Center.
Their calm was reassuring, and as he talked with them Aziraphale stretched out a wing of his own for comparison. Clearly it was the ulna and some of the smaller carpals about the wrist joint, and if set properly and the combined healing forces of the two of them brought to bear, it should be just a matter of days really. But he still had to dodge some awkward inquiries about what kind of bird it was and what did its feathers look like and did he think it was an endangered species and perhaps he should just bring it in…
No matter. He feigned failure of the phone line (and the phone line was indeed down for an hour or so, due to his nerves).
So not so bad. Not insurmountable. It would take some splinting though, for that one long bone that was broken, and where in the room was there anything long enough to meet the job, and Crowley had never been the most still and peaceful of sleepers.[1] Indeed, he whimpered and clutched most piteously as Aziraphale maneuvered him into a better position, crying out in his sleep when the angel stretched out the injured wing, trying weakly to soothe him by caressing the feathers…oh no, was that blood? Bone poking through…oh dear. “You’ll thank me later,” he muttered as he grit his teeth and snapped it back where it belonged. Crowley screamed once, and yet didn’t wake up.
Once the makeshift job was done, Aziraphale realized he’d still have to go out for some supplies. The heat was getting intolerable.
***
So it happened that Crowley woke, many hours later, and found himself on the bed and propped half-vertically against the wall, a pillow jammed between his head and shoulder. He opened his eyes slowly, because the entire left side of his body ached and that couldn’t bode anything good. He was tangled up in sheets that were entirely too warm for the sweltering room and wearing only his dove-grey silk boxers and he had no bloody idea how long he’d been out.
It was fortunate that he didn’t panic and felt no urge to leap out of bed, because gradually he came to realise that he couldn’t have done so without hurting himself further. One wing was stretched out straight and tied with gauze to the length of the long wooden headboard of the kingsize bed. He would have leaned over to investigate this further, but he was prevented from doing so from the position of his arms, inexplicably behind his back and held tight to said headboard by something that felt suspiciously like the fake-fur-lined handcuffs he and the angel had bought on a whim in that curious shop in San Francisco. And the source of that cold wet burning that had been giving him nightmares about Russia--well, that was melting ice dripping down his feathers from a makeshift icepack tied to the leading edge of his splinted wing.
He took a deep breath. Someone was going to pay for this. And he suspected that someone was only one head-turn away.
Aziraphale was half-curled in the big comfy chair by the bed, in his shirt-sleeves and ridiculous tartan shorts, poring over a Peterson’s Field Guide and rather incongruously engrossed in an ice-cream cone. Vanilla--of course.
“Oh, you’re awake,” he said mildly, waving the book. “Well, I’ve been studying this, and there is no doubt that was a California condor.[2] It couldn’t have been anything else.”
“No shit!” Crowley snorted. “But what have you done to me? There’s even fewer of me than there are of them!”
“Well, there was a…mishap, you see, with a power line…”
“Oh, yes, I remember. I did something fucking heroic, didn’t I? You’re the worst kind of influence. But…” his brain worked feverishly under its load of sleep and pain and annoyance, “I should’ve broken a lot more. If I blacked out. Which I think I did. And then I fell, and then you must’ve...”
“I broke your wing. I’m sorry.”
“You caught me.”
“I tried,” Aziraphale said ruefully. “You had a big head start. Now, how are you doing?” With this, he rather awkwardly kneed his way across the bed, reaching out with his ice-creamless hand to touch Crowley’s wing gently. The bleeding had long since stopped and the swelling had gone down. The feathers were mostly undamaged, though he seemed to have lost a few alula on the leading edge. He stroked the underlayer of main coverts softly, watching Crowley’s face for signs of pain. If they were there, they were slight.
“How does it feel? Don’t try to move it.”
“Like I stuck it in a piece of crude farm equipment, what do you think?” He looked more anxious than he was willing to let himself sound. “How bad is it, Nurse Nightingale?”
“Well, I think you’ll definitely fly again, and pretty soon,” Aziraphale said, cutting to the chase. “As long as you hold it still.” He reached up to check the status of the ice-pack forgetting he only had one empty hand. A spatter of melting ice cream dripped across Crowley’s secondaries just under the wing-elbow, and the demon jumped. Apologetically Aziraphale mopped it up with a finger, which he stuck in his mouth.
“Do that again,” Crowley smiled.
“Do what?” Aziraphale said a little warily.
“That. But cut out the middleman.”
Aziraphale looked at him rather incredulously. Clearly he was feeling better. “It didn’t hurt?”
“Not in a bad way.”
Aziraphale gave a slightly put-upon sigh, and let another white glob drip on the shiny feathers. This time he leaned forward and ran his tongue up one gleaming feather-shaft, licking up the spill. Crowley sighed happily.
“Now come closer and let me have some of that.” The look in his eyes was unmistakable now. He might have been talking about the ice cream, but not only the ice cream.
Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “You’re recuperating. Only you could think of this in a sexual way…”
“It’s our honeymoon and you’ve got me mostly naked and handcuffed to a bed and you’re licking ice cream off me - only you could think of that in a nonsexual way.”
“I will not risk you injuring yourself-“
“Please?” Crowley said quietly. There is no such creature as a puppy-snake but if there were it would have eyes just like that. “Take my mind off the agony?”
“Well-“
“Just let me have some ice cream then,” he sighed.
He knew perfectly well that when Aziraphale moved close, within the circle of his aura and his body heat and his scent and watched that tongue lapping out and swirling itself in around the white scoop, the angel would succumb. And sure enough in no time Aziraphale’s hand was braced against the wall behind Crowley’s head and their mouths were sliding together full of melting vanilla, dripping out from between their lips and down Crowley’s chin and neck and leaving a trail for Aziraphale’s tongue to follow.
Crowley moaned encouragingly and yelped appreciatively when Aziraphale forgot the ice cream was in his hand again and brushed Crowley’s left nipple with it--and, cruelly enough, let the cold shock settle in before applying due diligence with his mouth. Crowley made a strangled sound and strained to press his chest against Aziraphale, who pulled away and looked at him sternly. “You can’t move, dear,” he said. “You have to stay very still.”
Crowley choked and nodded. Aziraphale resumed what he’d been doing. After a little while, and some desperate effort at self-restraint on Crowley’s part, he sat back up again and ran one hand along Crowley’s arm pinned behind him. “How’s your circulation, dear?”
“Just fine,” Crowley gasped, nodding at his groin.
“I meant your hands.”
“Fine,” Crowley whispered. “I want to touch you so bad.”
“I know,” Aziraphale said with a sort of sadistic pity. “But you can’t. You understand.”
Crowley growled and let his head hit the wall as a cold blast of ice cream hit his belly. Fucking bastard. But that was--oh!
He could, of course, have got out of the handcuffs easily: all his limbs were optional, after all. But he didn’t know what that might do to his wing, and he didn’t actually, being honest with himself, want to leave that exquisite sensation of helplessless, that terrible and delicious heightening of senses, the surges of little panic and wonder, and ohOHCOLD and Aziraphale’s teeth and now WARM, so WARM.
A little trickle of sweat down his temple stole his focus.
Smooth fingers reached up and wiped it away.
The angel was studying him, every sharp and instaneous response of little nerves as a warm hand slid up the inside of his thigh, stole over silk, and dug through the opening in his pants, finding, pulling out..
Oh.
Crowley panted and hissed as Aziraphale stroked him so cruelly slow, and then spasmed in shock when, sure enough, a splotch of ice cream hit him right there--there was no way the angel’s aim was unenhanced. He was going to croak out something obscene but it choked in his throat when the angel’s head dipped very low indeed and a warm, firm tongue laved over the head of his cock, cleaning it all off and changing cold to heat. And Aziraphale’s evil wasn’t sated yet, for through his eye-blurring fog of maddening arousal, Crowley watched him pull away just long enough to draw almost the last of that wondrous-awful cold stuff into his mouth, and then bow low again.
The noise Crowley made had never been heard on the surface of the earth before, nor had the answering smug rumble from the angel who had his mouth completely full of cold dessert and heated demon flesh and had nothing intelligent to say anyway--all his brainpower was being applied towards torment.
Involuntarily Crowley arched his back, pushing himself further into those sucking lips, and Aziraphale growled in warning, sticking the remainder of the ice-cream cone into the waistband of the traumatised shorts and holding the demon’s hips rigid with both hands. Only Aziraphale’s head was allowed to move, that was clear, and it was compensating very very well indeed.
But Crowley was being overtaken by tremors, sounds coming out of his throat and suppressed energy crackling along all his limbs. He channeled some of it to make Aziraphale’s sweaty shirt vanish, and some of it to test his healing bones, and some of it to unfurl the last upper limb he had yet to try to use. His one good wing rippled and rushed in the stifling air and covered Aziraphale completely, bony leading edge wrapped around his neck, spiky primaries erected as if for flight and raking the angel’s back.
Aziraphale groaned and vibrated and did something incredible with his tongue in response, opening his throat and sinking lower and lower with each stroke until Crowley cried out and tensed his whole wing and pushed Aziraphale down hard as his point of no return gathered inside him and broke open. What energy wasn’t pinpointed, razor-sharp, and released fully in violent waves into Aziraphale’s very willing mouth found itself shimmering all around Crowley, a dull throb in his injured wing, a quiet tingling all over his skin.
And there was still ice cream melting down his hip. Aziraphale was in his lap, kissing him and stroking his face, leaning back a little against the strong wing, savouring the feel of feathers against his skin. One shaking hand ventured out to the injured limb, just a ghost of a touch, and he smiled. “Do you know, I do think that might’ve helped?”
Crowley wasn’t surprised. But to be fair, he wasn’t much of anything except panting and blank-minded, and thinking that there was a job half-done here, and he had to find a way to get the angel to let him…He gave a little inquiring push of his hips, a little pressure with the wing, and Aziraphale smiled and shook his head. Blessed angelic willpower.
“Don’t worry about me, love,” he said. “Wait until you feel better.”
“I certainly do.”
“I should have said, wait until you are better.”
“Better at what?” Crowley leered exhaustedly.
“Not what I meant.”
Thwarted yet again, Crowley wondered if he was in fact hungry for some actual food, but this idea was never very well-defined, and eventually it disappeared into the ether of his battered mind that really wanted just to sleep again.
***
Aziraphale started to worry about getting him fed the very next day, though he supposed the sleep was more important. Room service would probably be ill-advised, considering the matter of half of Crowley’s wingspan being necessarily on display.
He didn’t mind a little grocery-shopping the peasant way, as Crowley called it, and since the demon wasn’t awake to sneer about it, that was the call he made.
He hadn’t expected the contents of the paper bags to go scattered across the hotel room floor--for as soon as he shut the door behind him, he found himself tackled and face down on the carpet, a lithe weight holding him down.
“Good as new,” he heard a low voice in his ear laughing quietly, and the rushing thump of a pair of majestic pinions flexing their power and accidentally taking out the tacky ceiling light fixture.
“Oh…I’m so glad!” Aziraphale cried, and turned his head to get a better look. Crowley just let him glimpse them, and his wildly smiling face and his tongue licking his lips before he started burning a trail of hot kisses down the angel’s back.
“I owe you,” Crowley admitted sloppily. "Payback time."
“You’re going to break my wing next…aahh?”
Ah, yes, the click. And the trappedness of his wrists behind his back. He should have seen that coming.
“I’m not going to be coy like you were,” Crowley said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to fuck your brains out.”
And that, more than anything, convinced Aziraphale that he truly was healed.
***
Three days later they emerged blinking into the bright sun and journeyed to the overlook where their rental car still sat, having been under angelic protection and thus unmolested. By human hands, anyway.
Tucked beneath the windshield wipers were two immensely long black primary feathers, almost as large as an angel’s, and on the car’s very top was the largest white splatter of avian message that either had ever seen.
~end~
[1] There was the Sprawl Diagonally Across the Mattress, Pushing the Angel into a Corner move. There was the Twitch Violently, Kicking the Angel Out of Bed move. There was the Shouting Strange Things in Best-Forgotten Languages, Making the Angel Wish He’d Never Gone to Arkham or Kadath At All move. Compared to these, the Grabbing the Angel and Unconsciously Acting Out Adult-Rated Dreams move wasn’t so bad at all, but still not conducive to the good-night’s-sleep said angel had only just begun to appreciate properly.
[2] He is correct. It looked like this:
Hope you enjoy it!
linnpuzzle did this amazing piece of art for me as my gift. (also found here at her slash art journal puzzling. Friendslocked, but you should join anyway.
Now, as a mod, obviously I knew who had done it. And I stared so long at it that the prompt she gave for own request burned a bunny-shaped mark into my brain. So, for her lovely art, linnpuzzle actually wound up with two gifts because I just couldn't help myself.
Two different writers went in very different directions with the same suggestion: musegaarid's story For Thy Sake, is very intense and dramatic. This one is fluffy and silly and porny. And look, visual aids! (But not for the porny part)
Endangered Species Recovery Program
For: linnpuzzle
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: hard R, maybe NC-17
Summary: A demon can get into real trouble, doing the right thing.
Author's Note: An answer to Linn’s GOE request: "Hmmm… Wings/handcuffs/ice cream…oooo… or shameless hurt/comfort. Pick and choose!” I neither picked nor chose - it’s all here. For some reason it wanted to emerge as a sequel to “Special Day” and therefore it is also a honeymoon fic. Go- Sa- Someone help me.
“No, no, not that way. That end goes up.”
“Please keep your eyes on the road, dear.”
“Why? It looks just the same as it has for the last two hours. I probably should be on the right side, though. You didn’t point that out.”
“I didn’t notice.”
And so it went. A demon, driving a cheaply-built modern rental car he hated, and an angel, who had no trouble reading road maps but lots of trouble folding them back properly, were driving down a very boring highway in the hot sun in the southwestern United States.
You might think they had some rendezvous with destiny, perhaps a meeting with other celestial or infernal beings at some crucial ley line or fissure point of history. You might think that one had a plan that the other had to counteract as well as vice versa, and that perhaps they were carpooling since fuel had got so expensive. You might think it had something to do with a nationwide religious awakening or a biblically-predicted war on the horizon or at the very least space aliens.
You would be wrong, and you might realise this as soon as you saw one of them take one of those many little accidental reveries in which he glanced in mild disbelief at the ring on his left hand. If you missed that, you would probably catch on if you overheard just a little more of the nature of their bickering. “Like an old married couple” would be an apt description. Old indeed they were, older than the world. The fact that they were really also a married couple was a much more recent development.
Crowley and Aziraphale were on their honeymoon. (And if you think it was excessive of them to stretch this out over several months and several continents, then you clearly did not overhear their argument about exactly how long their engagement had been. It is not especially relevant who won or who was right; what matters is that the figures they were debating were in centuries.)
Arizona
“Sure is wide. And deep.’
“Yes,” said the angel, a little misty-eyed about the wonders of Creation.
The particular wonder Crowley was most interested in was standing next to him, and proper enjoyment of such involved a hotel room, not so much standing in the blinding sun staring at a big crack in the ground. Had it been entirely up to him, they rarely would have left said hotel rooms. Except in Vegas. And New York. And Rio de Janeiro. And Buenos Aires. And Havana...
As Crowley eventually herded his Bermuda-shorts-wearing spouse back into the car, Aziraphale started shuffling dreamily through the mass of glossy brochures he’d collected everywhere they were available, which in America was everywhere. The car floor was coated with them.
Four Corners. Mesa Verde. The Dine lands. Big Chief Soaring Eagle’s All-Night Diner and Turquoise Jewelry Emporium. Billy Bronco’s Wild West Thrill Village.
The angel’s interest in sight-seeing was becoming an addiction, Crowley thought. And his interest in birdwatching meant that the clunky binoculars around his neck banged against the clunky camera in a most irritating way.
Crowley was finding out quickly that marriage was not remarkably different from their prior Arrangement--well, except for that mortifying little problem he’d briefly developed when it had first really hit him that he and Aziraphale were no longer, in fact, fornicating--and this was both distressing and comforting.
He didn’t mind the brochure-collecting so much as the dramatic reading performances.
“Oh, Crowley,” the angel said excitedly, from a dry-looking one about the California condor reintroduction program. “It’s working. They’re mating.”
“Good for them.” He tapped his nails on the steering wheel impatiently.
“But they’re still losing a few. Lead poisoning from bullets in carcasses, they get caught in power lines,” Aziraphale sighed. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to see one?”
“Sure,” Crowley shrugged as he started the engine.
They’d only gone a few miles when they passed the thirty-seventh scenic overlook of the day, and Aziraphale begged for one more last look (for the day) at the Canyon. Crowley sighed and pulled over.
And found his gaze caught by an epic struggle in the sky.
Far, far off over one of the many little canyon tributaries, the couple’s four keen eyes saw a teetering power line---and tangled in its clutches was something dark and very large with a majestic pair of black and white wings. It was battering at its mysterious captor frantically and awkwardly, so hard it was inevitable it would injure itself.
Aziraphale reached out to grab Crowley’s arm, but he was already gone--out of the car and into the air.
As Aziraphale raced to catch up with him, he watched it all like some horrible movie unfolding: two noble winged creatures flapping hysterically around a little cord on a pole. The huge bird saw the demon as predator rather than rescuer and whacked at him with its one free wing and raked at him with its one free talon and pecked at him with its only beak, which had never been trapped. Crowley was struggling to keep himself aloft, fight the beast off himself without hurting it, and get it disentangled all at once, and it wasn’t graceful.
He swore an oath that would have dropped any other angel besides the one streaking towards him, and with a frustrated wrench of the cord, finally got the bird free. The cord came loose in his hand. There was a horrible flash of blue sparks, a shriek, and a smell of singed flesh and feathers. There was a sympathetic shriek from Aziraphale as Crowley started to drop in exactly the way that winged creatures shouldn’t to the canyon floor hundreds of feet below.
With one of those legendary adrenalin surges, Aziraphale plunged into freefall himself to catch up, and then put a little extra spin of fall-power into it, drawing on the reserve of falling energy he had built up by somehow managing not to Fall all these millennia, and just a few feet shy of the dry ravine-bed, he managed to catch his--husband, dear God--by the wing and bring them both up short. There was a sickening series of little snapping sounds, but the worst of the impact was thereby broken before they hit.
“Crowley! Speak to me!” he was crying out, holding the limp, singed demon on his lap in the dust. Crowley was terribly still and pale. A few dreadful moments passed, complete with wind in the dry cottonwoods and a piddling trickle of a stream, before the yellow eyes opened and then squeezed shut again.
“FUCK, that hurt,” Crowley groaned. “Just let me die, will you? Just for a little while?”
“Absolutely not,” Aziraphale said, embracing him instinctively and flinching when that one wing flopped in a most unnatural way, making Crowley twitch with pain.
Number 122--according to the wing tag--had landed on a rock-fall nearby and was watching them with mild interest, craning his or her bald orange head and fluffling his or her relatively unimpressive 9-foot span. Aziraphale would have liked to think it was gratitude and concern, but it might just have been first hope and then disappointment on the part of a carrion-feeder.
Aziraphale looked up at the merciless sun and the canyon lip far, far above them, then down at Crowley, who was still pale and now starting to shade to an unpleasant green.
“We’ve got to get you out of here,” he said quietly.
“Why? I could just lie here…” Crowley whispered with some effort. “Well, that’s all I can do really.”
“Dear, let me-“ Aziraphale started to collect him up, and Crowley yelped when his broken wing was lifted only a little.
“Can you do…that molecule thing? Because I’m going to have to…and you’re…”
“Oh. Right.” It was a wheezy whisper, and it didn’t sound good; Aziraphale flinched instinctively watching Crowley scrunch up his face and put the last bit of strength he had on reserve into…there. The rearranging. Not that big an effort, really, for them--just letting in a little air into the matter and going a little lighter…And then Crowley was about 30 pounds really, like the bird he’d rescued. It looked painful though, and as soon as he’d effectively gathered his partner up, Aziraphale touched his forehead.
“Sorry, but you’ll thank me,” he whispered as Crowley fell completely asleep.
***
Although carrying Crowley in this state--his good wing reeled in, his bad one dangling clumsily--was awkward, the flight was the easy part.
The hotel was suffering from a mysterious power loss, and the room was starting to get unpleasantly hot. Aziraphale had never been fond of desert climes really, much as he thought he ought to have been back in the old days.
At least flying let him reach the room on the second-floor balcony without passing the front desk again.
(“So your wives’ll be joining you then?” said the clerk jovially, noting their rings.
Right. And there were keys to two rooms for no apparent reason.
Crowley had been having a great time with it as they trudged up the stairs. “I do believe that is the first time in the history of the world you’ve been mistaken for a heterosexual. Only in America.”
That had struck Aziraphale as worrisome. “We’ll just tell them we’re English.” As if that had ever been in question.)
No, the hard part was what to do with his unconscious spouse and his broken wing. Aziraphale was no Raphael, yet still fancied himself not entirely useless in the healing department. Unfortunately, Crowley’s injury was complicated by three factors: (1) he was a demon, and angelic healing powers didn’t always take among the Fallen (not that there had ever been much field research done on this); (2) Aziraphale had always had a harder time healing injuries that he had, in fact, inflicted himself--whether done to prevent the entity involved from breaking everything else or not--and (3) it had been a really long time since he’d dealt with a wing injury, and those were complicated.
Now, had this been his own wing involved, or that of another angel in good standing, it wouldn’t be a problem to put in a quick prayer Upstairs to the appropriate medical facility and get some field advice at least. However, Aziraphale was a little reluctant to make the call in this case--it wasn’t that they didn’t know, he presumed, but it wasn’t the sort of thing to rub their faces in. Guiltily, he remembered how he’d been thinking about inquiring with HR (Heavenly Resources) about the feasibility of getting Crowley included on Heaven’s family insurance plans--certainly Hell’s policies left a lot to be desired--but he’d been putting it off, for the conversation would surely be awkward. He should have known better: these things were important if you’re traveling in the States.
He thought about it for a few minutes more, and then he went to dig in the desk by the bed and pulled out the local phone book. He dialed the National Park Service, who gave him the number for the Raptor Rehabilitation Center.
Their calm was reassuring, and as he talked with them Aziraphale stretched out a wing of his own for comparison. Clearly it was the ulna and some of the smaller carpals about the wrist joint, and if set properly and the combined healing forces of the two of them brought to bear, it should be just a matter of days really. But he still had to dodge some awkward inquiries about what kind of bird it was and what did its feathers look like and did he think it was an endangered species and perhaps he should just bring it in…
No matter. He feigned failure of the phone line (and the phone line was indeed down for an hour or so, due to his nerves).
So not so bad. Not insurmountable. It would take some splinting though, for that one long bone that was broken, and where in the room was there anything long enough to meet the job, and Crowley had never been the most still and peaceful of sleepers.[1] Indeed, he whimpered and clutched most piteously as Aziraphale maneuvered him into a better position, crying out in his sleep when the angel stretched out the injured wing, trying weakly to soothe him by caressing the feathers…oh no, was that blood? Bone poking through…oh dear. “You’ll thank me later,” he muttered as he grit his teeth and snapped it back where it belonged. Crowley screamed once, and yet didn’t wake up.
Once the makeshift job was done, Aziraphale realized he’d still have to go out for some supplies. The heat was getting intolerable.
***
So it happened that Crowley woke, many hours later, and found himself on the bed and propped half-vertically against the wall, a pillow jammed between his head and shoulder. He opened his eyes slowly, because the entire left side of his body ached and that couldn’t bode anything good. He was tangled up in sheets that were entirely too warm for the sweltering room and wearing only his dove-grey silk boxers and he had no bloody idea how long he’d been out.
It was fortunate that he didn’t panic and felt no urge to leap out of bed, because gradually he came to realise that he couldn’t have done so without hurting himself further. One wing was stretched out straight and tied with gauze to the length of the long wooden headboard of the kingsize bed. He would have leaned over to investigate this further, but he was prevented from doing so from the position of his arms, inexplicably behind his back and held tight to said headboard by something that felt suspiciously like the fake-fur-lined handcuffs he and the angel had bought on a whim in that curious shop in San Francisco. And the source of that cold wet burning that had been giving him nightmares about Russia--well, that was melting ice dripping down his feathers from a makeshift icepack tied to the leading edge of his splinted wing.
He took a deep breath. Someone was going to pay for this. And he suspected that someone was only one head-turn away.
Aziraphale was half-curled in the big comfy chair by the bed, in his shirt-sleeves and ridiculous tartan shorts, poring over a Peterson’s Field Guide and rather incongruously engrossed in an ice-cream cone. Vanilla--of course.
“Oh, you’re awake,” he said mildly, waving the book. “Well, I’ve been studying this, and there is no doubt that was a California condor.[2] It couldn’t have been anything else.”
“No shit!” Crowley snorted. “But what have you done to me? There’s even fewer of me than there are of them!”
“Well, there was a…mishap, you see, with a power line…”
“Oh, yes, I remember. I did something fucking heroic, didn’t I? You’re the worst kind of influence. But…” his brain worked feverishly under its load of sleep and pain and annoyance, “I should’ve broken a lot more. If I blacked out. Which I think I did. And then I fell, and then you must’ve...”
“I broke your wing. I’m sorry.”
“You caught me.”
“I tried,” Aziraphale said ruefully. “You had a big head start. Now, how are you doing?” With this, he rather awkwardly kneed his way across the bed, reaching out with his ice-creamless hand to touch Crowley’s wing gently. The bleeding had long since stopped and the swelling had gone down. The feathers were mostly undamaged, though he seemed to have lost a few alula on the leading edge. He stroked the underlayer of main coverts softly, watching Crowley’s face for signs of pain. If they were there, they were slight.
“How does it feel? Don’t try to move it.”
“Like I stuck it in a piece of crude farm equipment, what do you think?” He looked more anxious than he was willing to let himself sound. “How bad is it, Nurse Nightingale?”
“Well, I think you’ll definitely fly again, and pretty soon,” Aziraphale said, cutting to the chase. “As long as you hold it still.” He reached up to check the status of the ice-pack forgetting he only had one empty hand. A spatter of melting ice cream dripped across Crowley’s secondaries just under the wing-elbow, and the demon jumped. Apologetically Aziraphale mopped it up with a finger, which he stuck in his mouth.
“Do that again,” Crowley smiled.
“Do what?” Aziraphale said a little warily.
“That. But cut out the middleman.”
Aziraphale looked at him rather incredulously. Clearly he was feeling better. “It didn’t hurt?”
“Not in a bad way.”
Aziraphale gave a slightly put-upon sigh, and let another white glob drip on the shiny feathers. This time he leaned forward and ran his tongue up one gleaming feather-shaft, licking up the spill. Crowley sighed happily.
“Now come closer and let me have some of that.” The look in his eyes was unmistakable now. He might have been talking about the ice cream, but not only the ice cream.
Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “You’re recuperating. Only you could think of this in a sexual way…”
“It’s our honeymoon and you’ve got me mostly naked and handcuffed to a bed and you’re licking ice cream off me - only you could think of that in a nonsexual way.”
“I will not risk you injuring yourself-“
“Please?” Crowley said quietly. There is no such creature as a puppy-snake but if there were it would have eyes just like that. “Take my mind off the agony?”
“Well-“
“Just let me have some ice cream then,” he sighed.
He knew perfectly well that when Aziraphale moved close, within the circle of his aura and his body heat and his scent and watched that tongue lapping out and swirling itself in around the white scoop, the angel would succumb. And sure enough in no time Aziraphale’s hand was braced against the wall behind Crowley’s head and their mouths were sliding together full of melting vanilla, dripping out from between their lips and down Crowley’s chin and neck and leaving a trail for Aziraphale’s tongue to follow.
Crowley moaned encouragingly and yelped appreciatively when Aziraphale forgot the ice cream was in his hand again and brushed Crowley’s left nipple with it--and, cruelly enough, let the cold shock settle in before applying due diligence with his mouth. Crowley made a strangled sound and strained to press his chest against Aziraphale, who pulled away and looked at him sternly. “You can’t move, dear,” he said. “You have to stay very still.”
Crowley choked and nodded. Aziraphale resumed what he’d been doing. After a little while, and some desperate effort at self-restraint on Crowley’s part, he sat back up again and ran one hand along Crowley’s arm pinned behind him. “How’s your circulation, dear?”
“Just fine,” Crowley gasped, nodding at his groin.
“I meant your hands.”
“Fine,” Crowley whispered. “I want to touch you so bad.”
“I know,” Aziraphale said with a sort of sadistic pity. “But you can’t. You understand.”
Crowley growled and let his head hit the wall as a cold blast of ice cream hit his belly. Fucking bastard. But that was--oh!
He could, of course, have got out of the handcuffs easily: all his limbs were optional, after all. But he didn’t know what that might do to his wing, and he didn’t actually, being honest with himself, want to leave that exquisite sensation of helplessless, that terrible and delicious heightening of senses, the surges of little panic and wonder, and ohOHCOLD and Aziraphale’s teeth and now WARM, so WARM.
A little trickle of sweat down his temple stole his focus.
Smooth fingers reached up and wiped it away.
The angel was studying him, every sharp and instaneous response of little nerves as a warm hand slid up the inside of his thigh, stole over silk, and dug through the opening in his pants, finding, pulling out..
Oh.
Crowley panted and hissed as Aziraphale stroked him so cruelly slow, and then spasmed in shock when, sure enough, a splotch of ice cream hit him right there--there was no way the angel’s aim was unenhanced. He was going to croak out something obscene but it choked in his throat when the angel’s head dipped very low indeed and a warm, firm tongue laved over the head of his cock, cleaning it all off and changing cold to heat. And Aziraphale’s evil wasn’t sated yet, for through his eye-blurring fog of maddening arousal, Crowley watched him pull away just long enough to draw almost the last of that wondrous-awful cold stuff into his mouth, and then bow low again.
The noise Crowley made had never been heard on the surface of the earth before, nor had the answering smug rumble from the angel who had his mouth completely full of cold dessert and heated demon flesh and had nothing intelligent to say anyway--all his brainpower was being applied towards torment.
Involuntarily Crowley arched his back, pushing himself further into those sucking lips, and Aziraphale growled in warning, sticking the remainder of the ice-cream cone into the waistband of the traumatised shorts and holding the demon’s hips rigid with both hands. Only Aziraphale’s head was allowed to move, that was clear, and it was compensating very very well indeed.
But Crowley was being overtaken by tremors, sounds coming out of his throat and suppressed energy crackling along all his limbs. He channeled some of it to make Aziraphale’s sweaty shirt vanish, and some of it to test his healing bones, and some of it to unfurl the last upper limb he had yet to try to use. His one good wing rippled and rushed in the stifling air and covered Aziraphale completely, bony leading edge wrapped around his neck, spiky primaries erected as if for flight and raking the angel’s back.
Aziraphale groaned and vibrated and did something incredible with his tongue in response, opening his throat and sinking lower and lower with each stroke until Crowley cried out and tensed his whole wing and pushed Aziraphale down hard as his point of no return gathered inside him and broke open. What energy wasn’t pinpointed, razor-sharp, and released fully in violent waves into Aziraphale’s very willing mouth found itself shimmering all around Crowley, a dull throb in his injured wing, a quiet tingling all over his skin.
And there was still ice cream melting down his hip. Aziraphale was in his lap, kissing him and stroking his face, leaning back a little against the strong wing, savouring the feel of feathers against his skin. One shaking hand ventured out to the injured limb, just a ghost of a touch, and he smiled. “Do you know, I do think that might’ve helped?”
Crowley wasn’t surprised. But to be fair, he wasn’t much of anything except panting and blank-minded, and thinking that there was a job half-done here, and he had to find a way to get the angel to let him…He gave a little inquiring push of his hips, a little pressure with the wing, and Aziraphale smiled and shook his head. Blessed angelic willpower.
“Don’t worry about me, love,” he said. “Wait until you feel better.”
“I certainly do.”
“I should have said, wait until you are better.”
“Better at what?” Crowley leered exhaustedly.
“Not what I meant.”
Thwarted yet again, Crowley wondered if he was in fact hungry for some actual food, but this idea was never very well-defined, and eventually it disappeared into the ether of his battered mind that really wanted just to sleep again.
***
Aziraphale started to worry about getting him fed the very next day, though he supposed the sleep was more important. Room service would probably be ill-advised, considering the matter of half of Crowley’s wingspan being necessarily on display.
He didn’t mind a little grocery-shopping the peasant way, as Crowley called it, and since the demon wasn’t awake to sneer about it, that was the call he made.
He hadn’t expected the contents of the paper bags to go scattered across the hotel room floor--for as soon as he shut the door behind him, he found himself tackled and face down on the carpet, a lithe weight holding him down.
“Good as new,” he heard a low voice in his ear laughing quietly, and the rushing thump of a pair of majestic pinions flexing their power and accidentally taking out the tacky ceiling light fixture.
“Oh…I’m so glad!” Aziraphale cried, and turned his head to get a better look. Crowley just let him glimpse them, and his wildly smiling face and his tongue licking his lips before he started burning a trail of hot kisses down the angel’s back.
“I owe you,” Crowley admitted sloppily. "Payback time."
“You’re going to break my wing next…aahh?”
Ah, yes, the click. And the trappedness of his wrists behind his back. He should have seen that coming.
“I’m not going to be coy like you were,” Crowley said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to fuck your brains out.”
And that, more than anything, convinced Aziraphale that he truly was healed.
***
Three days later they emerged blinking into the bright sun and journeyed to the overlook where their rental car still sat, having been under angelic protection and thus unmolested. By human hands, anyway.
Tucked beneath the windshield wipers were two immensely long black primary feathers, almost as large as an angel’s, and on the car’s very top was the largest white splatter of avian message that either had ever seen.
~end~
[1] There was the Sprawl Diagonally Across the Mattress, Pushing the Angel into a Corner move. There was the Twitch Violently, Kicking the Angel Out of Bed move. There was the Shouting Strange Things in Best-Forgotten Languages, Making the Angel Wish He’d Never Gone to Arkham or Kadath At All move. Compared to these, the Grabbing the Angel and Unconsciously Acting Out Adult-Rated Dreams move wasn’t so bad at all, but still not conducive to the good-night’s-sleep said angel had only just begun to appreciate properly.
[2] He is correct. It looked like this:
Hope you enjoy it!