Did I say productive?
May. 2nd, 2005 03:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vulgarweedIt's always a little weird for me when I get into a fandom and immediately start writing the most popular OTP. Seems I've been doing that a lot lately, and this is coming from someone who's written Melkor/Fëanor, Merry/Pippin/Treebeard, Witch-King/Snape, one drabble of Hagrid/Umbridge, one Harry/Remus cannibalism fic, and that's not even touching on the RPS atrocities.
Nevertheless, this is another from a Road Most Traveled, Good Omens-style. (There does seem to be a flowering of wonderfully weird Horsepersons smut over at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lower_tadfield which makes me oddly joyous even if I feel I'm neglecting my own crack!fic responsibilities.)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scieppan might remember I threatened an Aziraphale/Crowley sex comedy that somehow managed to be almost all het. What happened was that emjay recently posted this odd little image of Female!Crowley that for some reason bunnied me. Ow! Yes, it's weird. And a little drafty still. Not quite ready for the comm yet.
It's not the filthiest thing I've ever written, but I do think this is the greatest number of sex scenes I've ever shoved into a 6,000-ish-word fic. That's kind of the joke. :)
Wrong Turn at Yesod
Fandom: Good Omens
Rating: NC-17
A/C, both het and slash
Summary: Oops.
Wrong Turn at Yesod
The problem with immortality was that, on Earth, it was always made up of days. Which was all well and good when you had one of those days that was all soft painterly sunlight and lovely unhurried dust motes and the discovery of both very new baby ducks and very old books.
It was not so well or good when you had a day like Aziraphale had just had, when the bus with the intoxicated driver indeed doesn’t go over the edge of the median but spins out into the oncoming lane instead when you were too busy holding off the lady with the stroller yakking on her cell phone from trying to cross at the time, when the young girl does indeed walk away quickly from the drug dealer—and goes straight into the topless club instead, because the reason she wants to quit dope in the first place isn’t about what’s right or healthy but about saving money, and even more than that she wants to make some….
It was a crap day, that’s all, and running late was only par for the course, and finding that the blessed demon (in both the ironic and straightforward senses) had just let himself in and started drinking without him was of course the way it ought to be capped off.
But what he found was even worse than he’d expected (and considering his mood, that was saying something). Rather than swaying glazedly at the table as usual, Crowley had gotten not only into his booze, but his books. His precious books, sprawled and violated all over the floor, where Crowley lay on his back balancing an especially fragile and irreplaceable volume over his head, his long legs kicking in paroxysms of hysterical laughter, swinging the priceless 14th-century grimoire painfully close to a bottle (which teetered uncertainly on a stack of 9th-century Etruscan parchments).
Aziraphale performed a very minor miracle in self-defense.
Crowley barely seemed to notice. He was laughing too hard.
“There y’are! Ya gotta see this! Oh Lor- I mean t’other Lor—I mean bwhahahahahah!*SNORT*”
Not a good sign.
“Well, I…just have that one for historical value, it’s really not my kind of thing…” In truth, this particular volume wasn’t one of the ones Aziraphale really enjoyed touching.[1]
“Right. ‘T’so good! I mean it’s awful! Stupid even by human standards! Horny desperate half-literate wanker…I mean, Master of ye Black Artes, snicker…has a spell to…get this….call a succubus!”
“Oh dear.”
“Well…” Crowley cackled, sunglasses askew. “’S’not like they had the cards in the phone booths back then.”
Reluctantly Aziraphale padded over to the pile of crackling books aching at him to straighten them. And it seemed he had some catching up to do, drinkwise. “So…” he asked resignedly. “Do you think it would…work?”
“Oh bloody up there no, look at this!” Crowley slammed the book down on the floor and pointed mockingly at a complicated series of calligraphic atrocities. “Couldn’t find his Qlippothic spheres with both hands and a hunting dog, look – you wanna be tunneling out the sphere of Lilith to the Raven of Dispersion, and here they’ve got Oreb Zaraq…Bwahahahahaha!!”
He clutched his sides helplessly, hiccupping just once.
Aziraphale was just befuddled. “But…not that I’m an expert…isn’t that…?”
“Corresponds to bloody Hod, in your angel-babble.”
“I would’ve thought it was…er, Netzach. And isn’t that…well, that’s not the first tunnel, there’s also…?”
Crowley pierced him with his not-quite-best woozy “you’re-an-idiot” glare through his shades. Its effect was mostly lost on Aziraphale, because he knew behind those glasses the slitted eyes were woefully unfocused. Glare leaked out and spilled when he was like that, lost much of its pressure. “It is not fucking Netzach.”
“I thought…er…well, I do know Netzach rather well, but…” Aziraphale took a swig from the bottle grumpily. There was no way he was going to catch up with this kind of inebriation, and frankly he was in no mood to try.
“Crowley, dear, I have no energy tonight. It’s gone. I need to have a good liedown and make it all go away for a while. You’re welcome to stay. Please don’t destroy anything. Even if you think it deserves it.”
Crowley just laughed a little wheezily and pointed his finger past the book and up. “Fine – ‘s’not like you need any…’trocious incatna-…incansha…ssshpells to get a demon into your bed.”
Crowley’s leer was even sloppier than his glare, but it had an easier target. But they’d been at that particular permutation of The Arrangement long enough that Aziraphale was well aware the drunk-and-giggly/sober-and-cranky combination was not a fortuitous one. Rather like Lilith and Malkuth, or ammonia and bleach. “Please turn the lights out when you come in,” Aziraphale said sternly and walked away, forgetting that he had been the one to turn them on in the first place.
***
Aziraphale does not usually sleep, exactly, but the habit he’d fallen into lately (by his rather fluid definition of lately) was something like a pleasant drift through a haze of books and writings of all kinds that are so nearly perfect that their imperfections pained him; in his dreams he wields an angelic red pen. By the time the Metamorphoses had been slightly transformed and the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ remolded closer to his heart’s desire, he awakened to grey sunlight, a mattress unslept-in beside him, and an acrid smell fading in the air. His spurt of panic subsided when he realised it wasn’t burnt books. Just unmistakably brimstone—which wasn’t uncommon—and maybe a few other things, perhaps a hint of curry. And was that a whiff of cheap tarty perfume? From the usual low buzz of demonic presence, not to mention the clattering and banging from the kitchen, he deduced he was not alone.
The clattering and banging didn’t sound happy. Nor even just hungover. It sounded stressed somehow, so Aziraphale’s panic poked its head up again, just a bit, like a wormhead checking for robins in the vicinity.
“Crowley?” he shouted hesitantly. No reply. Well, unless a warning hiss counted, which he supposed it would have to. Quickly he threw on a flannel dressing gown, and headed to the kitchen.
He froze dumbstruck in the doorway.
Lounging on one of the kitchen chairs, menacing a cup of tea, was….a creature straight off the lower class of sailors’ tattoo, a little bit winged, a little bit horned—and very, very, utterly, unmistakably female. Rather splendidly so in its trashy way, he had to admit—all long legs up to here in shiny stiletto-heeled boots, tight black leather skirt with a slit showing…it…she…was wearing suspenders, not tights….a red blouse skimming full, high breasts like really good tires on a very curvy mountain road…
The long red nails on the slim, jeweled hands tapped the cup offensively, and the sneer of the pouty scarlet lips would have insulted the manhood right back off a lesser angel. The entity’s long, glossy raven hair seemed to seethe and slither.
Aziraphale started to speak. Actually, he felt he had started to speak a long time ago and just hadn’t arrived there yet. It seemed to be taking quite a while.
“Close your mouth before something flies into it, angel,” Crowley snarled in a throaty voice, crossing her luxurious legs and thrusting her chest upwards defiantly.
At last Aziraphale’s gaze zoomed back a little bit and took in the rest of the full effect: the smoking brazier, the long-guttered candles, the scorch marks in the parquet—and the book, looking much the worse for wear.
He closed his mouth. Nothing good was going to come out of it.
“It was Oreb Zaraq,” Crowley finally sighed, her voice thoroughly distaff. “I caught that in time. The problem was FUCKING Gamaliel. I took the wrong turn….or rather the right turn, which is wrong in the Qlippoth..”
“Oh yes…” Aziraphale mused, shakily. “Yesod. Who’d that be…underneath… Garg…” he balked at the name.
Crowley hissed.
It took several cups of tea before Aziraphale felt qualified to try to speak again.
By that time, Crowley had already resumed drinking. Aziraphale insisted she use a glass. It wasn’t ladylike to swill out of the bottle like that, and besides she was leaving lipstick smears.
***
It took a little more wine and a lot more lousy attempts at commanding to finally get something like a coherent explanation out of her. The obvious question was why, but Aziraphale knew better than to head for that directly. He was already learning all sorts of fascinating things in the monologue he was getting – She-Crowley was rather more talkative than He-Crowley. [2]
She also liked getting reactions just as much, if not more.
“Well, actually, I did once apply for the incubus/succubus detail. It would technically have been a bit of a demotion but I wanted something…lower-stress. This was way, way back. Long ago.”
“And?”
“No luck. They told me I was overqualified.”
Aziraphale took a big, rather undignified swig from the bottle.
***
The story as it emerged was that because of the wrong turn at the penultimate sphere (or second if you were headed that way, which of course Crowley wasn’t) the invocation had hovered around a bit, befuddled, and curled around the leg of the nearest sentient being like a spoiled cat smelling tuna on his person’s trousers and refusing to go out into the rain.
The best that Crowley could guess about what had happened next was that, as the damnedly[3] forgotten conjurer of olde had been a rather inflexible sort unwilling to even entertain the idea of male demonic consorting[4], the poor invocation, bound to work but not to work properly, was able to find only one demon at all (since it was, after all, looking in the wrong place), much less one who fit the criteria. But since an invoker is almost by definition opening up some part of his – or her- being to the invokee—and since in this case the invoker and invokee were in fact now the same entity …well, the poor invocation just had to get a little creative.
Aziraphale was going to have to find a good far, far-away private spot in which to laugh until he was sick.
Crowley anticipated this, and she stood up and stalked towards him with every bit of menace she could muster – and it was impressive for all that she hadn’t completely got the hang of the stiletto heels yet, for she-Crowley’s celebrated saunter was still smooth but had this certain sinuous ripple to it that…oh dear—and placed one pointy-toed, dagger-heeled shiny boot of leather right on the edge of Aziraphale’s chair, tip between his legs, giving him a long, fishnetted leg to look up and a flash of scarlet and skimpy knickers above at sightline’s end.
“If you even think about laughing at me – and I’ll know,” Crowley growled, “I swear to you that when I come to you tonight on a beam of leprous moonlight to exploit all your shameful desires, as succubi do, I will drain so much of your essence that your duck friends will have to come here and feed you. Through a tube.”
Aziraphale was appalled to hear himself actually whimper. He was used to Crowley’s threats of course, but the problem was that, as threats went, it was a little bit double-edged.
With that, Crowley angrily swayed out. Aziraphale winced at her slam of the door, and even more at the screech and bang of the traffic accident outside.
***
This day turned out to be better than the last, largely because Crowley wasn’t waiting til the traditional late night to get started on her new career path.[5] Aziraphale was sure Crowley was proud of herself for shagging two priests in one afternoon – only the angel knew that one of them had been suicidally depressed thinking himself permanently impotent, and the other had been on the verge of venting his frustrations on the person of an altarboy instead. Crowley had also managed to bang a member of Parliament who’d been left so limply exhausted that he’d missed a crucial vote that, had he shown up, would have had an effect of reducing pensions for at least 400 ailing WWII veterans in the London area alone.
If Aziraphale was concerned about anything, it was his own sorry performance of thwarting, which maybe didn’t even count as a truly sorry performance – it wasn’t as if he were actually trying and failing. Succubi and incubi are insidious, after all; they’re lured by frustration and shame. If he’d learned anything watching humans “suffer” under their ministrations [6] it was that the more moralists fulminated about carnal lusts for their own carnal pleasure of watching the entire congregation discreetly cringe and then check their neighbours for cringing, the more shame practically reeked out of them the second something made their bits tingle, and the greater the succubi/incubi numbers got. The 19th-century man who invented the elaborate cage system designed to somehow prevent teenage boys from playing with themselves at night, for example, died without having seen the moon in 20 years for the thick haze of sex demons hovering outside his window with their wings buzzing all the time like hummingbirds. Trying to thwart them by upping the puritanism ante was counterproductive to say the least, and Aziraphale really hadn’t had the time to come up with a better idea. Anyway, maybe it was better the poor sods get a wild guilty ride with a demon than troll for someone innocent, or capable of catching or spreading diseases.
As for Aziraphale himself, well, once he’d gotten over the initial shock of making the effort lo these several thousand years ago, he really hadn’t seen where much shame entered into it. Free-floating anxiety, insecurity, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and second-guessing certainly, but that was hardly the same thing. In fact, he wasn’t sure he would be very attractive to this version of Crowley at all, and he had a good deal of mixed feelings about that.
So mixed, in fact, that he decided to sit right where he was and keep staring at the book he wasn’t reading even when he heard the door opening and felt a cold blast of foggy drizzle. London weather had a way of being Gothic when Crowley wanted it to be.
Aziraphale meant to turn around, he really did, but by the time he had collected himself, the hum of Crowley’s presence — and the tug of that spicy tawdry perfume — was so strong around him he knew that if he turned around he’d be planting his face right into the center of a deep and flawless cleavage, and that was never the strongest position from which to start a Serious Talk. But he lost the thread of what he’d been about to say that was so serious anyway, because he suddenly felt that pillowy warmth against his back, right up on his shoulderblades, arms reaching around him, slim hands crawling up his neck. His mouth had gone suddenly very dry. And then very wet. “Er…Crowley…aren’t you a little…didn’t you have a busy day already?”
Smoky feminine laughter buzzed in his ear, soon replaced by a tongue that was still quite familiar. Aziraphale shuddered and slumped into the tightening embrace a little, still thinking it might be for the best he wasn’t looking full on at his other number just yet. Some things were best to get used to gradually — and those things included clever fingers opening his collar, a hand in his hair bending his head back just so, the supple mouth working with increasingly less gentle bites over the side of his neck and down his throat. He sighed with uneasy happiness and tangled one hand in Crowley’s hair, feeling the other feminine hand creep down his chest pausing at buttons on its way down, slipping underneath and startling his skin with its coolness and dampness from the rain.
Poor thing’s blouse is still wet, Aziraphale thought. She must be cold.
“I wasssn’t sure you’d ssstill want me like this,” Crowley whispered.
“What?” Aziraphale said. Of all the things Crowley could have said, he wasn’t expecting that. “You know I’ve…I mean, women, of course I..”
“I know that, sssilly.” She backhanded his cheek so gently it passed for a caress. “All of you lot have some paternity suitsss in your closets, don’t you? Quite a scandal, those Nephilim..” The hand that had just not-quite-slapped the angel closed pre-emptively over his mouth. “But…well, never mind. Just never mind.” And she turned his head around to look into her snakey eyes that faked being warm-blooded very well indeed, and penetrated his mouth with her tongue until Aziraphale growled in a very earthly way and turned himself with the chair around and dragged Crowley onto his lap, pressing her against him yes there, hands gripping her all too flawless behind, hearing her encouraging moans in his ear. That friction was too much, really too much, the twitches of the muscles in her lush little thighs…
He started to try to speak one last time.
“Ssssshh!” She pulled away deftly and hopped up on the table, daring him to chase her—which he did, it wasn’t far. And it wasn’t fair: her hand in his trousers knew him already, found the landscape familiar, all the responses that she already knew how to coax out with her flexing fingers: he was learning a new world with his hand up her skirt, all those silky ridges unusual in their soft slickness…But from the way she squirmed and twisted and demanded more with her whole being, he didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong yet. She wasn’t going to give him a chance; imperious legs wrapped around him and yanked him foreward and halfway over her. He braced himself with a hand on each side of her. “Angel,” Crowley snarled in a voice so throaty and deep she almost sounded like his old self, “Fuck me.”
He didn’t have time to blanch at the word; he was already making contact, riding into her on a terrible gravity. She was wet and hot and all enveloping, and impelling him to a lusty violence; her nails shredding his shirt and her sharp heels digging in the backs of his thighs. “Harder,” she begged, and he did, until he thought he had to be hurting her but that was the horrifically thrilling thing; he wanted to, if that’s what she wanted. “Harder,” she commanded, her teeth snapping at something, reaching out for some part of him to bite. His book-stacking miracles forgotten, books slid off the table and landed in ravished piles around his feet while he thought of nothing but getting further into her, a better angle inside her, satisfying her whatever it took…She arched slowly up towards him, eyes open and glazed as everything of hers clenched around him.
He came back to consciousness limp and weak, head resting on her shoulder while she stroked — was that sweat? — from his face.
“Niiice,” she sighed, her fingertip dragging across his bruised lower lip just before she kissed him.
***
It would have been alright if it had stopped there, perhaps. Because as Aziraphale lay there in the dark, he had to admit that had been extremely arousing. He also knew that it didn’t matter much what type of body Crowley had as long as it got along well with his own.
But the problem went deeper. He just couldn’t quite put a finger on it. So to speak.
Crowley came back that night cackling about some torrid and messy adventure involving a whole decaf-klatch of Mormon missionaries she’d managed to entice into something called a “circle jerk.”[7]
Aziraphale had tried to broach the difficult subject and hope Crowley had some insights of her own to offer, but he’d wound up flat on his back in the kitchenette with Crowley riding him, his hands wandering her lush body wantonly, grasping and directing her and finally completely overwhelmed by her rhythm and compelled by the sounds of violent ecstasy she made with the timbre — and vocabulary — of a wildcat in heat. [8]
He floated in a sated stupor while she purred and gloated, and he thought he should probably try again to bring it up in the morning. Crowley obviously still had a lot to get out of her system.
The conversation started bright and early, but Crowley got the last word [9]. Aziraphale ended up on his knees between her wide-splayed thighs, tongue otherwise occupied as her hand in his hair roughly directed his head this way and that. The angel chose not to breathe so as to never have to pull away from her; the demon chose to, emphatically, and her gasps and pantings and sudden choking stoppages were a coherent, expressive language, laying out a path for him to follow in pleasuring her.
***
By the fifth day, Aziraphale was certain he’d had quite enough, thank you.
He had had a dam — awfully long day cleaning up after his supernaturally slutty companion, who had in one day made a respected author on popular theology switch abruptly to writing the vilest pornography and incited a prison riot by taunting inmates who hadn’t seen a woman in decades.
And he hadn’t been feeling very energetic to begin with. He hadn’t liked the way his human form looked in the reflection from the window: rather gaunt and shadowed, hair and eyes a little dry and dull. He certainly hadn’t liked falling into something rather like sleep when he’d had no intention of doing so, and he liked even less waking up naked on the floor where Crowley had left him. His neck had been cricky all day. He had dim memories of being incited — nay, induced, or perhaps strongly requested — to bend Crowley over the kitchen table and take her from behind, and he doubted the table would ever be the same. He remembered those painful-looking heels doing dangerous things to the shape of her legs and her fine round bottom, the twist and bend of her slim waist with her skirt hitched up around it…
He pinched the bridge of his nose and stared glazedly into his wine glass. His hands had a bit of a tremor.
With a new determination, he went to the hastily restocked shelf that had been the cause of all this trouble and snatched out the offending volume, carrying it between two fingers to the already despoiled table, and slammed it down. With a grimace, he cracked it open to a small cloud of sulfurus yellow dust.
This thing was truly foul. The worst part was not really its demonic intent: for all Aziraphale had seen of human subterfuge and naivete, there was something refreshing about such nakedly greedy ambitions as this book laid out in deliberately overripe medieval German. The problem was that it was so utterly inept. Vitally important Names were off by a letter; talismanic seals had the wrong number of sides or just one sigil facing the wrong way; the less said about the Gematria the better, only that Aziraphale wouldn’t have trusted the writer to make change in the fish market.
In fact, it all looked so plausible on the surface but was so thoroughly dysfunctional that Aziraphale suspected the book’s author probably wasn’t human at all. In his experience, a human couldn’t produce something that was all flaws any more than he or she could make something with none at all. [10] That was only more confusing, as surely Crowley would have been able to recognize one of his own crew’s creative travesties, wouldn’t he? Er, she?
When he found the relevant passage, and corrected for the appropriate degree of sheer wrongness, he gazed upward to the waterstained ceiling, his eyes piercing the veils between himself and the surface of the celestial dome, looking for a time-reading and fast-forwarding it until he knew what he needed. He had just four hours. He had better get to work preparing.
***
When Crowley slinked in, heels clicking and hips swaying, Aziraphale could feel the smugness emanating from her in waves. She’d managed to cap off her day by getting the lead singer of a very popular band with a reputation for social activism and an inspirational, uplifting sound arrested on indecency charges after she, allegedly, performed a very lewd act upon his person in front of 20,000 people including the Prime Minister’s daughter. So much for the traditional privately shameful nocturnal emissions.
She clearly wasn’t expecting to meet Aziraphale with the angel’s full adamantine Will almost completely engaged, but she compensated quickly. For some time there it seemed Aziraphale’s counterattack was not going terribly well, as he found himself pinned, with his head indenting a row of books and his trousers yawning open like the very Ishtar Gate as Crowley went on her knees and down to work, using her full range of unfair physical advantages. [11] Wasn’t fair, the way Crowley could hiss and spit out all sorts of foul profanities when he writhed and twisted in erotic abandon, but if Aziraphale let fly with just the slightest hint of his holiness….well, was it? Was that…not the time to be thinking about it. His thoughts were whirling now, spinning down to one red point of pleasure. He looked down at her face, watched himself moving in and out of her ruby lips, saw those lascivious eyes fix upon him….Now, something cold and decisive in himself said, breaking through the haze. Now or never.
He grabbed her hair and yanked her head backwards, sinking down to his knees to face her directly, grasping her upper arms and shaking her just a little bit. “This has to stop.”
She blinked. Which was unusual.
“I mean it. I really mean it. It’s not just that I’m feeling…” No, he didn’t want to admit he felt weak. Scratch that. “If I were human I might be dead. You don’t even think. You just come in here, and…” No, that wasn’t the right track either.
She hissed and lunged.
Aziraphale realized that his trousers were still open, and that Crowley was being distracted as compulsively as a prize trout by a spinning lure. Not wanting to let go of her, he just wished them shut and himself less…well, just barely presentable.
“Don’t try to tell me you don’t like it,” she sneered.
“That is what I’m…All right, not exactly. But yes. You know what? You’re one-dimensional. You’re bloody boring. You’re a misogynist stereotype dreamed up by the kind of sour-faced church ghouls everybody Up There dreads having to have around. And you’re better than this. Or worse, or – oh, whatever. I miss the real Crowley, the one who has creative wiles. The one who’s always coming up with new atrocities. The one who’s unpredictable, though not half so much as he thinks he is. The one who lets me seduce him once in a while!” Oops.
“Well, if that’s what you like,” she purred, her face suddenly turning almost demure.
“NO! IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE! YOU’RE NOT YOURSELF AND I’M TIRED OF THIS YOU!” Was that a little loud? He really didn’t want to be Overheard delivering an impassioned monologue about exactly what kind of demon lover he did and didn’t want. But it was probably a little late to worry about that.
She broke one hand free and slapped him. Hard. Her nails raked his face. “You sanctimonious bastard! I’m out there doing what I have to do, it’s in my nature, but I try to save all the best for you! You let me think you loved it, and you’re just saving it all up so we can have Permutation 4,378 of the old Making Love Versus Fucking Argument, and –“
“Is that really all you think it’s about,” Aziraphale demanded in a cold, tense voice. “Really?” He grasped her wrist hard. It felt tiny in his hand. “Because I assure you, it is not.” Crowley started to lunge again, and while Aziraphale might have hoped briefly for some self-awareness to kick in, he could tell that what she was really gearing herself up for was the mother of all rage shags, the kind that would leave them both bloody but in a good way. It would have been a disturbingly appealing thought three nights ago.
Aziraphale let her push him backwards. He saw what was behind him. Backed up against the closet door, he let her crush against him and kissed her once, hard and deep. Then he ducked sideways and yanked the storage closet open at the same time and shoved her in. It was all ready in there: book, candles, incense, circle, correct astrological hour imminent. He threw his whole weight and then some against the door to shut it and lock it.
Crowley started to shriek a Word. Aziraphale got his Word out first. It was shorter. He finished his Sigil first. It was simpler.
He flinched just a bit at the violence of the pounding from the inside of the closet, and stood just an inch from the door. “If I could do this for you, or with you, I would,” he said. The blast of astounding feminine profanity blew his hair back. “It’s your choice,” he called, trying to sound resigned. “I’m walking away. The door will open at dawn. Either way.”
It wasn’t easy, but he did it too. He made it all the way back to his empty little bedroom with a bottle of brandy which he drank until he felt some dim facsimile of ability to do something resembling sleep or at least a state less focused on that horrible banging and shrieking. Which eventually did subside.
He found the door hanging open in the morning, and no sign of Crowley, either way. Well, he might have expected that.
***
On the third day after that, the phone was actually answered.
“Yeah?”
It was a thick, hoarse, and decidedly familiar masculine voice. Angels don’t dance, it’s true, but something in Aziraphale leapt up rather lightly and in a silly manner, delighted to be back on the head of the pin instead of the business end.
“Oh good, you’re…existing.”
“Sod off’n’lemme sleep s’more.” Click.
The angel felt three thousand years younger.
Crowley showed up two days later as if nothing had ever happened. Almost.
“Glad I got out of that racket,” he said darkly a bottle in. “Wouldn’t admit this to just anyone, but my cunt was getting really sore.”
“Crowley!”
“I always wanted to say that.” But he turned sulky again after that, and left soon.
He came back again, but they didn’t have much to say that didn’t concern It, and therefore not much to say at all.
***
It took a few days more for the tension between them to settle back down into prickly acclimation. A new reluctance between Aziraphale and Crowley to let each other out of their sight had developed. Whether this had to do with happy reunion or simply a sense that they couldn’t trust each other at the moment as far as they could throw each other even with wings factored into the equation remained unknown, as they steadfastly refused to discuss the matter.
Aziraphale sat on one end of Crowley’s stylish but miserly sofa with his brittle books, occasionally nibbling on a scone and dribbling a bit of dust and crumbs. Crowley lounged at the other end, staring through his opaque sunglasses at the television.
Aziraphale had feared a staredown that could stretch out for decades, but it started to seem that Crowley didn’t have the animus for it. Finally Aziraphale closed his eyes and let dreams wash over him, just to get away.
When he awakened, the TV was still squawking the same awful programme it had been when he blinked out (clearly one of Crowley’s little masterpieces, a shouting, loud-rock-music-blaring abomination full of artificial-looking Americans eating live scorpions and jumping bicycles out of helicopters to win money), yet it had been daylight before and now it was dark. A strange sense stirred in him, a little vibrating hum of relief that was hard to pinpoint until he contemplated getting up to stretch and realised that each of his thighs had a weight on it. On the right was the book. On the left was Crowley’s head.
Of course.
He picked up the book and reopened it as quietly as possible, not caring too much that his place was lost. His other hand trailed lightly through sleek dark hair. Crowley still had that ability to not look innocent in his sleep—but Aziraphale’s heart still swelled at the way he hummed and shifted a little happily when some part of him took notice he was being petted.
It was not Aziraphale’s intention to push his luck, but inasmuch as his book was holding his attention at all, it was only dimly distracting him from his stray hand, which slipped quietly of its own accord from Crowley’s hairline down his cheek, along his jawline, and creeping with featherlight strokes over his throat, then under the neck of his black t-shirt over the small rises of his collarbones.
Crowley leaned his head back a little, knocking his sunglasses askew. Beneath them his eyes were closed, but Aziraphale was almost certain he was faking now.
He decided to find out. One eye on his book for cover’s sake, he let his hand be drawn inevitably to a strip of pale skin exposed between Crowley’s jeans and his t-shirt hem. Aziraphale sighed in wonder at the silky warmth, savouring every centimeter as slowly as he could.
When he went just a little too far on purpose, nudging below the denim waistband, the golden eyes half-opened and Crowley gave a little hiss of desire, hips nudging upwards slightly, hand covering Aziraphale’s with obvious intentions of directing it downward.
Aziraphale’s book slid off the sofa’s arm and onto Crowley’s head.
“I’m sorry, my love,” said Aziraphale, tossing the book on the floor. Crowley flinched more at that than at the thunk. Aziraphale smiled indulgently.
Crowley deftly scooched himself up til he was sitting in Aziraphale’s lap, hand tangled in the fair hair, allowing the angel to bend him slowly backwards against the sofa’s armrest as they locked in a wet, sliding, restless kiss.
Aziraphale executed a move of his own, a little less deftly, but effective in having one widely-awake-now demon pinned halfway underneath him. This put him a good position to move his face slowly, trailing kisses down Crowley’s neck along with a long series of whispers - all his most heartfelt and saccharine endearments.
Crowley was moving against him in that ripply way of his, clearly eager to get the pace going a little faster. Aziraphale let his hand pay one almost-grudging visit to the front of his partner’s jeans, cupping and squeezing him, listening with satisfaction to the sounds that produced. But most of his attention was up higher, as he let himself wish Crowley’s shirt elsewhere and continued laying out his pattern of meticulous [12] lovebites down Crowley’s neck and left shoulder. “Oh rose-petal-lips, my cinnamon bun…want you so much…need you…love you…”
Long fingers dug their nails in his back.
“…oh my kitten, sweetmeat, my dearheart, do slow down...plenty of time…”
Crowley moaned his name just once and seemed to stop just short of something else, hand grasping the angel’s arse just a little too hard, trying to nudge him over.
“Snakelet, my darling,” murmured Aziraphale just a little bit sternly, having trapped one of Crowley’s wrists and being just about to apply his tongue to its pale underside, “To be fair, after what you’ve put me through, I think you really do owe me one. At least.”
Crowley struggled to slow down his breath, biting his lip, clearly working as hard as he could to at least salvage a little pride. Well, that was fine. It didn’t matter if certain key phrases like “I’m sorry” and “thank you” weren’t in Crowley’s vocabulary. Aziraphale was going to make sure “please” was.
~fin~
[1] Why the touching of a really pretty lamely demonic book should discomfit him more than his frequent, prolonged, and thorough touching of an actual demon was something it hadn’t really occurred to him to question.
[2] Stereotypes are true in Hell.
[3] in the sense that Crowley was pleased about it, of course.
[4] and the idea would have been bored silly by his notion of “entertainment,” anyway.
[5] She would later explain that it wasn’t the medieval age anymore, and with the inventions of modern Amsterdam, Ecstasy, and the Internet, anybody who couldn’t get their shameful desires exploited more mundanely just wasn’t trying. So a working girl had to put in a lot more effort.
[6] Not that he’d ever watched it that closely, of course. Or that often. Or even sometimes repeatedly.
[7] Aziraphale had always felt a little ineffectual about the Latter-Day Saints; that whole religious underwear business just puzzled him.
[8] Lest you think there’s a close relationship between the species, note that succubi make that noise mostly when they’re getting what they want and cats make it mostly when they aren’t.
[9] It was “there”, as in “ohfuckyesyesyesTHERE!”
[10] Although the Left Behind series by Jenkins and LaHaye comes eerily close. Perhaps it takes more than one human working in collaboration to achieve it.
[11] Ever seen how a size-small snake swallows a size-large egg? (Also an excellent parlour trick; beats the glass-eye-popper-outers every time.)
[12] Actually a little obsessive-compulsive, to tell the truth.
Nevertheless, this is another from a Road Most Traveled, Good Omens-style. (There does seem to be a flowering of wonderfully weird Horsepersons smut over at
lower_tadfield which makes me oddly joyous even if I feel I'm neglecting my own crack!fic responsibilities.)scieppan might remember I threatened an Aziraphale/Crowley sex comedy that somehow managed to be almost all het. What happened was that emjay recently posted this odd little image of Female!Crowley that for some reason bunnied me. Ow! Yes, it's weird. And a little drafty still. Not quite ready for the comm yet.It's not the filthiest thing I've ever written, but I do think this is the greatest number of sex scenes I've ever shoved into a 6,000-ish-word fic. That's kind of the joke. :)
Wrong Turn at Yesod
Fandom: Good Omens
Rating: NC-17
A/C, both het and slash
Summary: Oops.
Wrong Turn at Yesod
The problem with immortality was that, on Earth, it was always made up of days. Which was all well and good when you had one of those days that was all soft painterly sunlight and lovely unhurried dust motes and the discovery of both very new baby ducks and very old books.
It was not so well or good when you had a day like Aziraphale had just had, when the bus with the intoxicated driver indeed doesn’t go over the edge of the median but spins out into the oncoming lane instead when you were too busy holding off the lady with the stroller yakking on her cell phone from trying to cross at the time, when the young girl does indeed walk away quickly from the drug dealer—and goes straight into the topless club instead, because the reason she wants to quit dope in the first place isn’t about what’s right or healthy but about saving money, and even more than that she wants to make some….
It was a crap day, that’s all, and running late was only par for the course, and finding that the blessed demon (in both the ironic and straightforward senses) had just let himself in and started drinking without him was of course the way it ought to be capped off.
But what he found was even worse than he’d expected (and considering his mood, that was saying something). Rather than swaying glazedly at the table as usual, Crowley had gotten not only into his booze, but his books. His precious books, sprawled and violated all over the floor, where Crowley lay on his back balancing an especially fragile and irreplaceable volume over his head, his long legs kicking in paroxysms of hysterical laughter, swinging the priceless 14th-century grimoire painfully close to a bottle (which teetered uncertainly on a stack of 9th-century Etruscan parchments).
Aziraphale performed a very minor miracle in self-defense.
Crowley barely seemed to notice. He was laughing too hard.
“There y’are! Ya gotta see this! Oh Lor- I mean t’other Lor—I mean bwhahahahahah!*SNORT*”
Not a good sign.
“Well, I…just have that one for historical value, it’s really not my kind of thing…” In truth, this particular volume wasn’t one of the ones Aziraphale really enjoyed touching.[1]
“Right. ‘T’so good! I mean it’s awful! Stupid even by human standards! Horny desperate half-literate wanker…I mean, Master of ye Black Artes, snicker…has a spell to…get this….call a succubus!”
“Oh dear.”
“Well…” Crowley cackled, sunglasses askew. “’S’not like they had the cards in the phone booths back then.”
Reluctantly Aziraphale padded over to the pile of crackling books aching at him to straighten them. And it seemed he had some catching up to do, drinkwise. “So…” he asked resignedly. “Do you think it would…work?”
“Oh bloody up there no, look at this!” Crowley slammed the book down on the floor and pointed mockingly at a complicated series of calligraphic atrocities. “Couldn’t find his Qlippothic spheres with both hands and a hunting dog, look – you wanna be tunneling out the sphere of Lilith to the Raven of Dispersion, and here they’ve got Oreb Zaraq…Bwahahahahaha!!”
He clutched his sides helplessly, hiccupping just once.
Aziraphale was just befuddled. “But…not that I’m an expert…isn’t that…?”
“Corresponds to bloody Hod, in your angel-babble.”
“I would’ve thought it was…er, Netzach. And isn’t that…well, that’s not the first tunnel, there’s also…?”
Crowley pierced him with his not-quite-best woozy “you’re-an-idiot” glare through his shades. Its effect was mostly lost on Aziraphale, because he knew behind those glasses the slitted eyes were woefully unfocused. Glare leaked out and spilled when he was like that, lost much of its pressure. “It is not fucking Netzach.”
“I thought…er…well, I do know Netzach rather well, but…” Aziraphale took a swig from the bottle grumpily. There was no way he was going to catch up with this kind of inebriation, and frankly he was in no mood to try.
“Crowley, dear, I have no energy tonight. It’s gone. I need to have a good liedown and make it all go away for a while. You’re welcome to stay. Please don’t destroy anything. Even if you think it deserves it.”
Crowley just laughed a little wheezily and pointed his finger past the book and up. “Fine – ‘s’not like you need any…’trocious incatna-…incansha…ssshpells to get a demon into your bed.”
Crowley’s leer was even sloppier than his glare, but it had an easier target. But they’d been at that particular permutation of The Arrangement long enough that Aziraphale was well aware the drunk-and-giggly/sober-and-cranky combination was not a fortuitous one. Rather like Lilith and Malkuth, or ammonia and bleach. “Please turn the lights out when you come in,” Aziraphale said sternly and walked away, forgetting that he had been the one to turn them on in the first place.
***
Aziraphale does not usually sleep, exactly, but the habit he’d fallen into lately (by his rather fluid definition of lately) was something like a pleasant drift through a haze of books and writings of all kinds that are so nearly perfect that their imperfections pained him; in his dreams he wields an angelic red pen. By the time the Metamorphoses had been slightly transformed and the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ remolded closer to his heart’s desire, he awakened to grey sunlight, a mattress unslept-in beside him, and an acrid smell fading in the air. His spurt of panic subsided when he realised it wasn’t burnt books. Just unmistakably brimstone—which wasn’t uncommon—and maybe a few other things, perhaps a hint of curry. And was that a whiff of cheap tarty perfume? From the usual low buzz of demonic presence, not to mention the clattering and banging from the kitchen, he deduced he was not alone.
The clattering and banging didn’t sound happy. Nor even just hungover. It sounded stressed somehow, so Aziraphale’s panic poked its head up again, just a bit, like a wormhead checking for robins in the vicinity.
“Crowley?” he shouted hesitantly. No reply. Well, unless a warning hiss counted, which he supposed it would have to. Quickly he threw on a flannel dressing gown, and headed to the kitchen.
He froze dumbstruck in the doorway.
Lounging on one of the kitchen chairs, menacing a cup of tea, was….a creature straight off the lower class of sailors’ tattoo, a little bit winged, a little bit horned—and very, very, utterly, unmistakably female. Rather splendidly so in its trashy way, he had to admit—all long legs up to here in shiny stiletto-heeled boots, tight black leather skirt with a slit showing…it…she…was wearing suspenders, not tights….a red blouse skimming full, high breasts like really good tires on a very curvy mountain road…
The long red nails on the slim, jeweled hands tapped the cup offensively, and the sneer of the pouty scarlet lips would have insulted the manhood right back off a lesser angel. The entity’s long, glossy raven hair seemed to seethe and slither.
Aziraphale started to speak. Actually, he felt he had started to speak a long time ago and just hadn’t arrived there yet. It seemed to be taking quite a while.
“Close your mouth before something flies into it, angel,” Crowley snarled in a throaty voice, crossing her luxurious legs and thrusting her chest upwards defiantly.
At last Aziraphale’s gaze zoomed back a little bit and took in the rest of the full effect: the smoking brazier, the long-guttered candles, the scorch marks in the parquet—and the book, looking much the worse for wear.
He closed his mouth. Nothing good was going to come out of it.
“It was Oreb Zaraq,” Crowley finally sighed, her voice thoroughly distaff. “I caught that in time. The problem was FUCKING Gamaliel. I took the wrong turn….or rather the right turn, which is wrong in the Qlippoth..”
“Oh yes…” Aziraphale mused, shakily. “Yesod. Who’d that be…underneath… Garg…” he balked at the name.
Crowley hissed.
It took several cups of tea before Aziraphale felt qualified to try to speak again.
By that time, Crowley had already resumed drinking. Aziraphale insisted she use a glass. It wasn’t ladylike to swill out of the bottle like that, and besides she was leaving lipstick smears.
***
It took a little more wine and a lot more lousy attempts at commanding to finally get something like a coherent explanation out of her. The obvious question was why, but Aziraphale knew better than to head for that directly. He was already learning all sorts of fascinating things in the monologue he was getting – She-Crowley was rather more talkative than He-Crowley. [2]
She also liked getting reactions just as much, if not more.
“Well, actually, I did once apply for the incubus/succubus detail. It would technically have been a bit of a demotion but I wanted something…lower-stress. This was way, way back. Long ago.”
“And?”
“No luck. They told me I was overqualified.”
Aziraphale took a big, rather undignified swig from the bottle.
***
The story as it emerged was that because of the wrong turn at the penultimate sphere (or second if you were headed that way, which of course Crowley wasn’t) the invocation had hovered around a bit, befuddled, and curled around the leg of the nearest sentient being like a spoiled cat smelling tuna on his person’s trousers and refusing to go out into the rain.
The best that Crowley could guess about what had happened next was that, as the damnedly[3] forgotten conjurer of olde had been a rather inflexible sort unwilling to even entertain the idea of male demonic consorting[4], the poor invocation, bound to work but not to work properly, was able to find only one demon at all (since it was, after all, looking in the wrong place), much less one who fit the criteria. But since an invoker is almost by definition opening up some part of his – or her- being to the invokee—and since in this case the invoker and invokee were in fact now the same entity …well, the poor invocation just had to get a little creative.
Aziraphale was going to have to find a good far, far-away private spot in which to laugh until he was sick.
Crowley anticipated this, and she stood up and stalked towards him with every bit of menace she could muster – and it was impressive for all that she hadn’t completely got the hang of the stiletto heels yet, for she-Crowley’s celebrated saunter was still smooth but had this certain sinuous ripple to it that…oh dear—and placed one pointy-toed, dagger-heeled shiny boot of leather right on the edge of Aziraphale’s chair, tip between his legs, giving him a long, fishnetted leg to look up and a flash of scarlet and skimpy knickers above at sightline’s end.
“If you even think about laughing at me – and I’ll know,” Crowley growled, “I swear to you that when I come to you tonight on a beam of leprous moonlight to exploit all your shameful desires, as succubi do, I will drain so much of your essence that your duck friends will have to come here and feed you. Through a tube.”
Aziraphale was appalled to hear himself actually whimper. He was used to Crowley’s threats of course, but the problem was that, as threats went, it was a little bit double-edged.
With that, Crowley angrily swayed out. Aziraphale winced at her slam of the door, and even more at the screech and bang of the traffic accident outside.
***
This day turned out to be better than the last, largely because Crowley wasn’t waiting til the traditional late night to get started on her new career path.[5] Aziraphale was sure Crowley was proud of herself for shagging two priests in one afternoon – only the angel knew that one of them had been suicidally depressed thinking himself permanently impotent, and the other had been on the verge of venting his frustrations on the person of an altarboy instead. Crowley had also managed to bang a member of Parliament who’d been left so limply exhausted that he’d missed a crucial vote that, had he shown up, would have had an effect of reducing pensions for at least 400 ailing WWII veterans in the London area alone.
If Aziraphale was concerned about anything, it was his own sorry performance of thwarting, which maybe didn’t even count as a truly sorry performance – it wasn’t as if he were actually trying and failing. Succubi and incubi are insidious, after all; they’re lured by frustration and shame. If he’d learned anything watching humans “suffer” under their ministrations [6] it was that the more moralists fulminated about carnal lusts for their own carnal pleasure of watching the entire congregation discreetly cringe and then check their neighbours for cringing, the more shame practically reeked out of them the second something made their bits tingle, and the greater the succubi/incubi numbers got. The 19th-century man who invented the elaborate cage system designed to somehow prevent teenage boys from playing with themselves at night, for example, died without having seen the moon in 20 years for the thick haze of sex demons hovering outside his window with their wings buzzing all the time like hummingbirds. Trying to thwart them by upping the puritanism ante was counterproductive to say the least, and Aziraphale really hadn’t had the time to come up with a better idea. Anyway, maybe it was better the poor sods get a wild guilty ride with a demon than troll for someone innocent, or capable of catching or spreading diseases.
As for Aziraphale himself, well, once he’d gotten over the initial shock of making the effort lo these several thousand years ago, he really hadn’t seen where much shame entered into it. Free-floating anxiety, insecurity, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and second-guessing certainly, but that was hardly the same thing. In fact, he wasn’t sure he would be very attractive to this version of Crowley at all, and he had a good deal of mixed feelings about that.
So mixed, in fact, that he decided to sit right where he was and keep staring at the book he wasn’t reading even when he heard the door opening and felt a cold blast of foggy drizzle. London weather had a way of being Gothic when Crowley wanted it to be.
Aziraphale meant to turn around, he really did, but by the time he had collected himself, the hum of Crowley’s presence — and the tug of that spicy tawdry perfume — was so strong around him he knew that if he turned around he’d be planting his face right into the center of a deep and flawless cleavage, and that was never the strongest position from which to start a Serious Talk. But he lost the thread of what he’d been about to say that was so serious anyway, because he suddenly felt that pillowy warmth against his back, right up on his shoulderblades, arms reaching around him, slim hands crawling up his neck. His mouth had gone suddenly very dry. And then very wet. “Er…Crowley…aren’t you a little…didn’t you have a busy day already?”
Smoky feminine laughter buzzed in his ear, soon replaced by a tongue that was still quite familiar. Aziraphale shuddered and slumped into the tightening embrace a little, still thinking it might be for the best he wasn’t looking full on at his other number just yet. Some things were best to get used to gradually — and those things included clever fingers opening his collar, a hand in his hair bending his head back just so, the supple mouth working with increasingly less gentle bites over the side of his neck and down his throat. He sighed with uneasy happiness and tangled one hand in Crowley’s hair, feeling the other feminine hand creep down his chest pausing at buttons on its way down, slipping underneath and startling his skin with its coolness and dampness from the rain.
Poor thing’s blouse is still wet, Aziraphale thought. She must be cold.
“I wasssn’t sure you’d ssstill want me like this,” Crowley whispered.
“What?” Aziraphale said. Of all the things Crowley could have said, he wasn’t expecting that. “You know I’ve…I mean, women, of course I..”
“I know that, sssilly.” She backhanded his cheek so gently it passed for a caress. “All of you lot have some paternity suitsss in your closets, don’t you? Quite a scandal, those Nephilim..” The hand that had just not-quite-slapped the angel closed pre-emptively over his mouth. “But…well, never mind. Just never mind.” And she turned his head around to look into her snakey eyes that faked being warm-blooded very well indeed, and penetrated his mouth with her tongue until Aziraphale growled in a very earthly way and turned himself with the chair around and dragged Crowley onto his lap, pressing her against him yes there, hands gripping her all too flawless behind, hearing her encouraging moans in his ear. That friction was too much, really too much, the twitches of the muscles in her lush little thighs…
He started to try to speak one last time.
“Ssssshh!” She pulled away deftly and hopped up on the table, daring him to chase her—which he did, it wasn’t far. And it wasn’t fair: her hand in his trousers knew him already, found the landscape familiar, all the responses that she already knew how to coax out with her flexing fingers: he was learning a new world with his hand up her skirt, all those silky ridges unusual in their soft slickness…But from the way she squirmed and twisted and demanded more with her whole being, he didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong yet. She wasn’t going to give him a chance; imperious legs wrapped around him and yanked him foreward and halfway over her. He braced himself with a hand on each side of her. “Angel,” Crowley snarled in a voice so throaty and deep she almost sounded like his old self, “Fuck me.”
He didn’t have time to blanch at the word; he was already making contact, riding into her on a terrible gravity. She was wet and hot and all enveloping, and impelling him to a lusty violence; her nails shredding his shirt and her sharp heels digging in the backs of his thighs. “Harder,” she begged, and he did, until he thought he had to be hurting her but that was the horrifically thrilling thing; he wanted to, if that’s what she wanted. “Harder,” she commanded, her teeth snapping at something, reaching out for some part of him to bite. His book-stacking miracles forgotten, books slid off the table and landed in ravished piles around his feet while he thought of nothing but getting further into her, a better angle inside her, satisfying her whatever it took…She arched slowly up towards him, eyes open and glazed as everything of hers clenched around him.
He came back to consciousness limp and weak, head resting on her shoulder while she stroked — was that sweat? — from his face.
“Niiice,” she sighed, her fingertip dragging across his bruised lower lip just before she kissed him.
***
It would have been alright if it had stopped there, perhaps. Because as Aziraphale lay there in the dark, he had to admit that had been extremely arousing. He also knew that it didn’t matter much what type of body Crowley had as long as it got along well with his own.
But the problem went deeper. He just couldn’t quite put a finger on it. So to speak.
Crowley came back that night cackling about some torrid and messy adventure involving a whole decaf-klatch of Mormon missionaries she’d managed to entice into something called a “circle jerk.”[7]
Aziraphale had tried to broach the difficult subject and hope Crowley had some insights of her own to offer, but he’d wound up flat on his back in the kitchenette with Crowley riding him, his hands wandering her lush body wantonly, grasping and directing her and finally completely overwhelmed by her rhythm and compelled by the sounds of violent ecstasy she made with the timbre — and vocabulary — of a wildcat in heat. [8]
He floated in a sated stupor while she purred and gloated, and he thought he should probably try again to bring it up in the morning. Crowley obviously still had a lot to get out of her system.
The conversation started bright and early, but Crowley got the last word [9]. Aziraphale ended up on his knees between her wide-splayed thighs, tongue otherwise occupied as her hand in his hair roughly directed his head this way and that. The angel chose not to breathe so as to never have to pull away from her; the demon chose to, emphatically, and her gasps and pantings and sudden choking stoppages were a coherent, expressive language, laying out a path for him to follow in pleasuring her.
***
By the fifth day, Aziraphale was certain he’d had quite enough, thank you.
He had had a dam — awfully long day cleaning up after his supernaturally slutty companion, who had in one day made a respected author on popular theology switch abruptly to writing the vilest pornography and incited a prison riot by taunting inmates who hadn’t seen a woman in decades.
And he hadn’t been feeling very energetic to begin with. He hadn’t liked the way his human form looked in the reflection from the window: rather gaunt and shadowed, hair and eyes a little dry and dull. He certainly hadn’t liked falling into something rather like sleep when he’d had no intention of doing so, and he liked even less waking up naked on the floor where Crowley had left him. His neck had been cricky all day. He had dim memories of being incited — nay, induced, or perhaps strongly requested — to bend Crowley over the kitchen table and take her from behind, and he doubted the table would ever be the same. He remembered those painful-looking heels doing dangerous things to the shape of her legs and her fine round bottom, the twist and bend of her slim waist with her skirt hitched up around it…
He pinched the bridge of his nose and stared glazedly into his wine glass. His hands had a bit of a tremor.
With a new determination, he went to the hastily restocked shelf that had been the cause of all this trouble and snatched out the offending volume, carrying it between two fingers to the already despoiled table, and slammed it down. With a grimace, he cracked it open to a small cloud of sulfurus yellow dust.
This thing was truly foul. The worst part was not really its demonic intent: for all Aziraphale had seen of human subterfuge and naivete, there was something refreshing about such nakedly greedy ambitions as this book laid out in deliberately overripe medieval German. The problem was that it was so utterly inept. Vitally important Names were off by a letter; talismanic seals had the wrong number of sides or just one sigil facing the wrong way; the less said about the Gematria the better, only that Aziraphale wouldn’t have trusted the writer to make change in the fish market.
In fact, it all looked so plausible on the surface but was so thoroughly dysfunctional that Aziraphale suspected the book’s author probably wasn’t human at all. In his experience, a human couldn’t produce something that was all flaws any more than he or she could make something with none at all. [10] That was only more confusing, as surely Crowley would have been able to recognize one of his own crew’s creative travesties, wouldn’t he? Er, she?
When he found the relevant passage, and corrected for the appropriate degree of sheer wrongness, he gazed upward to the waterstained ceiling, his eyes piercing the veils between himself and the surface of the celestial dome, looking for a time-reading and fast-forwarding it until he knew what he needed. He had just four hours. He had better get to work preparing.
***
When Crowley slinked in, heels clicking and hips swaying, Aziraphale could feel the smugness emanating from her in waves. She’d managed to cap off her day by getting the lead singer of a very popular band with a reputation for social activism and an inspirational, uplifting sound arrested on indecency charges after she, allegedly, performed a very lewd act upon his person in front of 20,000 people including the Prime Minister’s daughter. So much for the traditional privately shameful nocturnal emissions.
She clearly wasn’t expecting to meet Aziraphale with the angel’s full adamantine Will almost completely engaged, but she compensated quickly. For some time there it seemed Aziraphale’s counterattack was not going terribly well, as he found himself pinned, with his head indenting a row of books and his trousers yawning open like the very Ishtar Gate as Crowley went on her knees and down to work, using her full range of unfair physical advantages. [11] Wasn’t fair, the way Crowley could hiss and spit out all sorts of foul profanities when he writhed and twisted in erotic abandon, but if Aziraphale let fly with just the slightest hint of his holiness….well, was it? Was that…not the time to be thinking about it. His thoughts were whirling now, spinning down to one red point of pleasure. He looked down at her face, watched himself moving in and out of her ruby lips, saw those lascivious eyes fix upon him….Now, something cold and decisive in himself said, breaking through the haze. Now or never.
He grabbed her hair and yanked her head backwards, sinking down to his knees to face her directly, grasping her upper arms and shaking her just a little bit. “This has to stop.”
She blinked. Which was unusual.
“I mean it. I really mean it. It’s not just that I’m feeling…” No, he didn’t want to admit he felt weak. Scratch that. “If I were human I might be dead. You don’t even think. You just come in here, and…” No, that wasn’t the right track either.
She hissed and lunged.
Aziraphale realized that his trousers were still open, and that Crowley was being distracted as compulsively as a prize trout by a spinning lure. Not wanting to let go of her, he just wished them shut and himself less…well, just barely presentable.
“Don’t try to tell me you don’t like it,” she sneered.
“That is what I’m…All right, not exactly. But yes. You know what? You’re one-dimensional. You’re bloody boring. You’re a misogynist stereotype dreamed up by the kind of sour-faced church ghouls everybody Up There dreads having to have around. And you’re better than this. Or worse, or – oh, whatever. I miss the real Crowley, the one who has creative wiles. The one who’s always coming up with new atrocities. The one who’s unpredictable, though not half so much as he thinks he is. The one who lets me seduce him once in a while!” Oops.
“Well, if that’s what you like,” she purred, her face suddenly turning almost demure.
“NO! IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE! YOU’RE NOT YOURSELF AND I’M TIRED OF THIS YOU!” Was that a little loud? He really didn’t want to be Overheard delivering an impassioned monologue about exactly what kind of demon lover he did and didn’t want. But it was probably a little late to worry about that.
She broke one hand free and slapped him. Hard. Her nails raked his face. “You sanctimonious bastard! I’m out there doing what I have to do, it’s in my nature, but I try to save all the best for you! You let me think you loved it, and you’re just saving it all up so we can have Permutation 4,378 of the old Making Love Versus Fucking Argument, and –“
“Is that really all you think it’s about,” Aziraphale demanded in a cold, tense voice. “Really?” He grasped her wrist hard. It felt tiny in his hand. “Because I assure you, it is not.” Crowley started to lunge again, and while Aziraphale might have hoped briefly for some self-awareness to kick in, he could tell that what she was really gearing herself up for was the mother of all rage shags, the kind that would leave them both bloody but in a good way. It would have been a disturbingly appealing thought three nights ago.
Aziraphale let her push him backwards. He saw what was behind him. Backed up against the closet door, he let her crush against him and kissed her once, hard and deep. Then he ducked sideways and yanked the storage closet open at the same time and shoved her in. It was all ready in there: book, candles, incense, circle, correct astrological hour imminent. He threw his whole weight and then some against the door to shut it and lock it.
Crowley started to shriek a Word. Aziraphale got his Word out first. It was shorter. He finished his Sigil first. It was simpler.
He flinched just a bit at the violence of the pounding from the inside of the closet, and stood just an inch from the door. “If I could do this for you, or with you, I would,” he said. The blast of astounding feminine profanity blew his hair back. “It’s your choice,” he called, trying to sound resigned. “I’m walking away. The door will open at dawn. Either way.”
It wasn’t easy, but he did it too. He made it all the way back to his empty little bedroom with a bottle of brandy which he drank until he felt some dim facsimile of ability to do something resembling sleep or at least a state less focused on that horrible banging and shrieking. Which eventually did subside.
He found the door hanging open in the morning, and no sign of Crowley, either way. Well, he might have expected that.
***
On the third day after that, the phone was actually answered.
“Yeah?”
It was a thick, hoarse, and decidedly familiar masculine voice. Angels don’t dance, it’s true, but something in Aziraphale leapt up rather lightly and in a silly manner, delighted to be back on the head of the pin instead of the business end.
“Oh good, you’re…existing.”
“Sod off’n’lemme sleep s’more.” Click.
The angel felt three thousand years younger.
Crowley showed up two days later as if nothing had ever happened. Almost.
“Glad I got out of that racket,” he said darkly a bottle in. “Wouldn’t admit this to just anyone, but my cunt was getting really sore.”
“Crowley!”
“I always wanted to say that.” But he turned sulky again after that, and left soon.
He came back again, but they didn’t have much to say that didn’t concern It, and therefore not much to say at all.
***
It took a few days more for the tension between them to settle back down into prickly acclimation. A new reluctance between Aziraphale and Crowley to let each other out of their sight had developed. Whether this had to do with happy reunion or simply a sense that they couldn’t trust each other at the moment as far as they could throw each other even with wings factored into the equation remained unknown, as they steadfastly refused to discuss the matter.
Aziraphale sat on one end of Crowley’s stylish but miserly sofa with his brittle books, occasionally nibbling on a scone and dribbling a bit of dust and crumbs. Crowley lounged at the other end, staring through his opaque sunglasses at the television.
Aziraphale had feared a staredown that could stretch out for decades, but it started to seem that Crowley didn’t have the animus for it. Finally Aziraphale closed his eyes and let dreams wash over him, just to get away.
When he awakened, the TV was still squawking the same awful programme it had been when he blinked out (clearly one of Crowley’s little masterpieces, a shouting, loud-rock-music-blaring abomination full of artificial-looking Americans eating live scorpions and jumping bicycles out of helicopters to win money), yet it had been daylight before and now it was dark. A strange sense stirred in him, a little vibrating hum of relief that was hard to pinpoint until he contemplated getting up to stretch and realised that each of his thighs had a weight on it. On the right was the book. On the left was Crowley’s head.
Of course.
He picked up the book and reopened it as quietly as possible, not caring too much that his place was lost. His other hand trailed lightly through sleek dark hair. Crowley still had that ability to not look innocent in his sleep—but Aziraphale’s heart still swelled at the way he hummed and shifted a little happily when some part of him took notice he was being petted.
It was not Aziraphale’s intention to push his luck, but inasmuch as his book was holding his attention at all, it was only dimly distracting him from his stray hand, which slipped quietly of its own accord from Crowley’s hairline down his cheek, along his jawline, and creeping with featherlight strokes over his throat, then under the neck of his black t-shirt over the small rises of his collarbones.
Crowley leaned his head back a little, knocking his sunglasses askew. Beneath them his eyes were closed, but Aziraphale was almost certain he was faking now.
He decided to find out. One eye on his book for cover’s sake, he let his hand be drawn inevitably to a strip of pale skin exposed between Crowley’s jeans and his t-shirt hem. Aziraphale sighed in wonder at the silky warmth, savouring every centimeter as slowly as he could.
When he went just a little too far on purpose, nudging below the denim waistband, the golden eyes half-opened and Crowley gave a little hiss of desire, hips nudging upwards slightly, hand covering Aziraphale’s with obvious intentions of directing it downward.
Aziraphale’s book slid off the sofa’s arm and onto Crowley’s head.
“I’m sorry, my love,” said Aziraphale, tossing the book on the floor. Crowley flinched more at that than at the thunk. Aziraphale smiled indulgently.
Crowley deftly scooched himself up til he was sitting in Aziraphale’s lap, hand tangled in the fair hair, allowing the angel to bend him slowly backwards against the sofa’s armrest as they locked in a wet, sliding, restless kiss.
Aziraphale executed a move of his own, a little less deftly, but effective in having one widely-awake-now demon pinned halfway underneath him. This put him a good position to move his face slowly, trailing kisses down Crowley’s neck along with a long series of whispers - all his most heartfelt and saccharine endearments.
Crowley was moving against him in that ripply way of his, clearly eager to get the pace going a little faster. Aziraphale let his hand pay one almost-grudging visit to the front of his partner’s jeans, cupping and squeezing him, listening with satisfaction to the sounds that produced. But most of his attention was up higher, as he let himself wish Crowley’s shirt elsewhere and continued laying out his pattern of meticulous [12] lovebites down Crowley’s neck and left shoulder. “Oh rose-petal-lips, my cinnamon bun…want you so much…need you…love you…”
Long fingers dug their nails in his back.
“…oh my kitten, sweetmeat, my dearheart, do slow down...plenty of time…”
Crowley moaned his name just once and seemed to stop just short of something else, hand grasping the angel’s arse just a little too hard, trying to nudge him over.
“Snakelet, my darling,” murmured Aziraphale just a little bit sternly, having trapped one of Crowley’s wrists and being just about to apply his tongue to its pale underside, “To be fair, after what you’ve put me through, I think you really do owe me one. At least.”
Crowley struggled to slow down his breath, biting his lip, clearly working as hard as he could to at least salvage a little pride. Well, that was fine. It didn’t matter if certain key phrases like “I’m sorry” and “thank you” weren’t in Crowley’s vocabulary. Aziraphale was going to make sure “please” was.
~fin~
[1] Why the touching of a really pretty lamely demonic book should discomfit him more than his frequent, prolonged, and thorough touching of an actual demon was something it hadn’t really occurred to him to question.
[2] Stereotypes are true in Hell.
[3] in the sense that Crowley was pleased about it, of course.
[4] and the idea would have been bored silly by his notion of “entertainment,” anyway.
[5] She would later explain that it wasn’t the medieval age anymore, and with the inventions of modern Amsterdam, Ecstasy, and the Internet, anybody who couldn’t get their shameful desires exploited more mundanely just wasn’t trying. So a working girl had to put in a lot more effort.
[6] Not that he’d ever watched it that closely, of course. Or that often. Or even sometimes repeatedly.
[7] Aziraphale had always felt a little ineffectual about the Latter-Day Saints; that whole religious underwear business just puzzled him.
[8] Lest you think there’s a close relationship between the species, note that succubi make that noise mostly when they’re getting what they want and cats make it mostly when they aren’t.
[9] It was “there”, as in “ohfuckyesyesyesTHERE!”
[10] Although the Left Behind series by Jenkins and LaHaye comes eerily close. Perhaps it takes more than one human working in collaboration to achieve it.
[11] Ever seen how a size-small snake swallows a size-large egg? (Also an excellent parlour trick; beats the glass-eye-popper-outers every time.)
[12] Actually a little obsessive-compulsive, to tell the truth.
