Archive of Our Own ^beta

Aziraphale fussed with a button on his waistcoat, careful fingers tracing over the chain of his pocket watch as he slipped forefinger over thumb, idly twisting the worn button in and out of its matching hole. 

Fashionable barriers. Obstacles created by long-dead Victorian costumiers.

Let me see you. Let me see all of you, Crowley would like to say. Let me see everything beneath your layers, under those damnable buttons. 

He wasn’t drunk enough for these thoughts — he wasn’t drunk at all, unfortunately, although Aziraphale’s stash of 1946 Macallan was promising to get him there — but the thoughts were there still, lurking somewhere in his reptilian hindbrain as he stretched out on the not-remotely-comfortable antique settee in the backroom of the shop, watching as Aziraphale fondled the same button over and over again. The angel leaned back in his desk chair, tugging at the hem of his waistcoat next, as he said something about miso or dashi or —

It was just that it was hard to concentrate on whatever Aziraphale was saying when he practically pawed at his clothing like that. Aziraphale was shrouded in sheets of cotton and linen and velvet; crisp broadcloth or twill in winter and a fine seersucker in summer, but always concealed, sheltered. Couched in overlapping fabrics, the cuts of which swallowed his figure. Like armour from a time now relegated to myth, shielding and defensive, and Crowley thought his abraded velvet waistcoat was as impervious as platemail — or as good as for the likes of a demon anyway.

Once, when society demanded little more than loose tunics — if even that — Aziraphale had been less guarded, and in the midst of another cold, British December requiring coats and boots and scarves and sweaters, Crowley remembered the lightness of Sumerian kaunakes and Grecian himations and Roman togas. Glances at bare skin that could hardly be counted as stolen because the flesh was freely given, it seemed to Crowley. But he had been ever furtive, regardless.

Even still, had he been too obvious in looking, too desperate? Probably. And when society moved to coveting reams and reams of fabric, when the fashion of the day asked for bolts of it and the climate required heavy wools and canvases and corduroys, had Aziraphale been relieved, now free from not noticing a sideways flash of golden eyes whenever his tunic rode up his thighs? Probably. Cover yourself up. Another boundary, another wall between us. Just another divide among thousands to remind us both how very separate we are.

Crowley sipped his scotch and failed at faking interest in whatever restaurant Aziraphale was lauding.

The curves of Aziraphale’s body must be like the underdrawing of a Renaissance portrait, Crowley sometimes thought when wandering the National Gallery alone on an evening that would have been better spent in the company of ethereal compositions, not earthly ones, and he thought it now too amidst Aziraphale’s own haphazard collection of Renaissance portraits still stacked three deep against the wall, centuries after Aziraphale swore he would get around to hanging them. 

Gossamer skin obscured beneath heavy oil paints, naked flesh hidden behind textured strokes and raised gypsum edges. Something akin to the buried artistry inaccessible to the masses who strolled through the meticulously lit halls of the National Gallery to see only the final work, the finished, polished version the artist intended. The artist’s secrets remained under the gesso: tentative kohl lines about rounded hips; languid, crosshatched shadows falling across the inward curve of the small of the back; a redrawn stroke, evidence of a quiver, of a brief hand tremble as the artist crafted the graceful lines of the inner thighs. Let me strip the paint from your canvas; let me see a master’s work detailed in nothing but delicately sketched lines, free of artifice or unnecessary technique. Just the core of you; no adornments.

Angels and their pretences be damned. He was threaded in pennaceous feathers that protected the soft down underneath. 

Aziraphale’s whole self was a collection of perfectly chosen veneers, chromas of oil and latex, tempera and acrylic, stains and varnishes hardened so that he sheened like enamel. Glimpses below that glossy surface were rare, even after six thousand years.

A slip of a tongue after too much wine; words that shouldn’t have been spoken. Lowered inhibitions. Eyes locking for a moment too long to be casual. An eyebrow raised in a sly challenge that would default after Aziraphale sobered up. “Let me tempt you,” he’d said once, words still lodged in Crowley’s mind, and then an awkward laugh at the presumed absurdity. How little you see, angel, for someone with a curator’s eye.

Aziraphale was more a curator than an archivist, a selective hoarder of past ephemera long forgotten to all but a few scattered historians interested in obscure domestic histories of textiles and homeware and lapsed philology. His personal museum was spread throughout this shop, the overcrowded apartment above, his person, and the contents seemed to Crowley to be themed along the same guiding principle of Aziraphale’s prim wardrobe: civilized, cultured, enlightened, above base desires, holier than thou. He’d collected bits and bobs from every decade: Regency-era snuffboxes; Etruscan bronzes; da Vinci codices; classical Grecian urns; and millennia later, an early 1819 draft of a Romantic poem inspired by those urns that told of sylvan historians befitting Aziraphale himself. He’d woven all that eclectia into his being, and Crowley revelled in the occasional drunken evening in his collection, sprawled out across the same Victorian settee he’d had for over a hundred years now, full and glutted on the warmth of Aziraphale’s hoard. The sheer amount of it all seemed to trap the heat in the shop, unlike the cold, barren stretches of marble in his own flat.

So too, Aziraphale’s clothing was curated, pieced together over millennia. A ring from before now made into a signet. A Regency — or was it Victorian? — necktie that became a bow tie decades later. Shoes that would have been restored several times by now, if Aziraphale wasn’t just miracling the leather new himself. A chafed velvet waistcoat that suggested he wasn’t in that habit. Buttons like armour.

Layers and layers and layers. Walls consciously constructed throughout all of human history. Barricades.

And if Crowley mourned the way the old himations would cling to Aziraphale’s legs when a Mediterranean gust blew by, the coloured silk drapery of them caught in the wind, giving shape to the contours beneath the slippery fabric, well — Crowley nursed his scotch and nodded along to whatever Aziraphale was saying, watching him continue to fiddle with the uppermost button of his waistcoat.

Get it together, he thought as he drank.

“And I told the waiter — very kind fellow — I enjoy gochujang just as much as anyone, but this trend is really getting quite out of hand if they’re serving it at an authentic Japanese establishment. I’d really much prefer wasabi or even karashi with my sushi. It’s not that I don’t enjoy Korean, certainly, but if I had wanted to eat that on this particular evening, I would have dined at —” Crowley watched Aziraphale stop and shake his head a little. “I’m prattling on again, aren’t I? You haven’t heard a word of anything I said, and I don’t blame you.”

“It’s not you,” Crowley managed through a reverie. “But I can only take the ponzu versus soy sauce debate for so long.”

The amber light from the filament desk lamp reached Aziraphale’s eyes when he smiled. “Oh, we’re well past that, I’m afraid.”

“You lost me around yakisoba.”

“Full marks for pronouncing that correctly though,” Aziraphale said, sipping the last of his scotch. “So how’s business?”

Crowley only shrugged.

“That poorly?” Aziraphale topped up his glass. “I suppose I should be relieved.”

Crowley shrugged again. “Takes care of itself, doesn’t it? I have been working on something with the mobile networks though. It’s a bit inspired, really.”

“Mobile networks?”

Crowley looked to the rotary dial on the edge of the desk. “Don’t worry, angel. You won’t notice a thing.”

A satisfied hum and Aziraphale immediately dismissed whatever fiendish plot the demon across from him was concocting, instead reclining in his chair and returning to fidget with his buttons. No employee of the month award for you, Crowley thought fondly. 

“Time for a new waistcoat?” Crowley asked. “Or, imagine this: perhaps ditch it altogether and opt for something more modern. Let’s say paisley shirts and Hammer pants?” He quirked an eyebrow above his sunglasses.

Aziraphale stopped playing with the button, instead strumming his fingers against the arms of his chair. “Oh yes, very amusing,” he sighed. “If you must know, I think I may need to have it let out. It’s become quite tight around the middle. It’s rather embarrassing.”

Crowley pointedly looked away as Aziraphale wiggled back and forth on his chair while adjusting the fit again. You look good, angel, and not in the capital G sense of the word — godly Good, angelic Good — no, you look good good. You’d look better if you lost the waistcoat entirely, though.

Instead: “You could just miracle it —”

“Oh no. I’d much rather leave it in the skilled hands of a tailor.” Aziraphale perked up a bit, appraising Crowley’s outfit. “Who did your jacket?” he asked. “I haven’t had something fitted in ages.” He paused, eyes flitting back and forth as if reading; Crowley recognized it as Aziraphale’s telltale method of calculating the passage of time. “I suspect my last tailor is quite dead,” he said finally. “Can I inquire about yours?”

“Little shop off Grosvenor not far from my flat.”

“I’ll stop in the next time I’m in the area,” Aziraphale said, finally giving in and undoing the top button.

A press of a forefinger, a turn of a thumb, and the button popped free with ease. One-handed, a hand that must have secured those buttons every morning and unfastened them just like this every night thousands of times now. A flick of a finger and another button was freed, then another. He unclasped the pocket watch from its place tucked into the buttonhole and folded it in a spare linen from his desk before making quick work of the remaining buttons.

Like it was nothing. Because, Crowley knew, it was nothing. Just fingers on buttons, fingers that seemed impossibly delicate despite their age, laying bare one of their many boundaries, and that seemed distinctly like something, not nothing. Although Satan only knew what that something was.

Crowley adjusted his glasses, thankful for their opacity, and tried not to picture those fingers venturing lower still to the buttons of his trousers.

“Can I have the address?” Aziraphale asked, shrugging the waistcoat from his shoulders to reveal the miraculously iron-crisp poplin shirt beneath.

“Hmm?”

The angel folded the garment neatly on his lap, once then twice over, palms smoothing the creases with a gentle reverence bordering on veneration, and Crowley tried not to focus on the caress-like ghost of his fingers over the fabric. “For your tailor?”

“Oh, right, yeah, ‘course.”

“Just let me get a pen.” Aziraphale deposited the waistcoat on his desk with a soft pat and stood, reaching up to the shelf above the desk for a pen and a pad of paper. In taking off his waistcoat, the tail of his shirt had ruffled up from its usually tidy spot tucked into his trousers, and Crowley glimpsed a naked patch of skin on the small of his back and, was that —?

Lace.

Just a hint of it: white, peeping out from under the waistband of Aziraphale’s trousers. A finely woven pattern of sprigs of roses and briony linked together with intricate diamond thread work. There was something vaguely Victorian about it, suggesting a handcrafted wedding veil or perhaps the contents of a hope chest. The lattice clung tightly to the pale skin beneath it, pearly lace on pearly skin, creating an almost tattoo-like appearance as if the design was threaded onto his very flesh in only a shade lighter than his own tone.

Well, fuck. 

Crowley stared.

To feel the raised edges of that lace. To slip fingers under it.

Aziraphale extended his arm up further to the top shelf and exposed just another half-inch of lace, barely a glimpse more, and Crowley swallowed, his brain quite silent for once as he followed the soft web downwards as it curled around what must be equally soft skin.

Underdrawings in white chalk then, not kohl. Deftly sketched petals evoking the pastoral. A finespun garden scene drawn beneath a painting finished in clumsy, superfluous oil paint, unneeded when the line work was so very fine. Spring blooms protected from winter frost by layers of veneer. An artist's secret beneath the completed work, now known to Crowley.

“Are you quite all right, my dear?” Aziraphale was passing him the pen and paper. “You look quite flushed.”

He shouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t say anything, of that he was confident. He never did, no matter how much he longed to mention these sorts of things — although, to be honest, there had never been anything quite like this before — poking fun at Aziraphale’s thoroughly unangelic behaviour only courted discord, he’d learned over the centuries. Eating and drinking that verged on gluttony, a rare book collection that suggested both pride and greed, a slothful streak best demonstrated by the Arrangement, and now this. Whatever this even was — more pride through some run-of-the-mill vanity or something else, something lustful ? — and the possibility of that sparked a node somewhere in the back of Crowley’s brain that he was sure had never been ignited before. A brief flare of familiar want and need now tinged with something that Crowley thought might feel a bit like hope.

They couldn’t possibly be comfortable, he thought. Did anyone wear lace knickers just for the Hell of it? They must dig in; the thread work must prick and pull, no matter how well-made. They seemed the sort of thing a person would wear only for someone else —

Crowley banished the thought. Dangerous thinking, that. The sort of thinking that would send him into some sort of spiral, and he was millennia past those. Usually.

No, this was nothing more than fodder: a fact to file away for use on a lonely evening.

“Fine, angel,” he said, and he knew Aziraphale noticed the catch in his voice, the hitch on angel.

As he began to scrawl his tailor’s address on the paper, already thinking of ready excuses for him to leave so he could retreat to his cold flat and process this somewhere far away from the angel in question. Aziraphale sat back down on the chair opposite him and immediately yelped, quietly, faintly, stopping dead mid-sound as if cut short unnaturally, alarmed by the very noise he’d made. 

Crowley’s head snapped up to see Aziraphale reaching behind his own back, apparently having noticed the pull on his shirt, and he hastily tucked it back into his trousers.

Blue eyes searched the protective shade of Crowley’s glasses, and there was a mutual recognition of what had happened, what Crowley saw and what Aziraphale knew that Crowley saw and Crowley knew that Aziraphale knew he knew and and and recursively like that for long, unsure seconds.

Silence as Aziraphale looked away, flushed red as a child’s cartoonish drawing of a devil.

“It’s no big deal,” Crowley managed, trying to persuade eye contact again. “You don’t need to look so terror-stricken. Can’t very well scandalize a demon now, can you?”

But Crowley was sure he looked scandalized, flushed equally as red as Aziraphale, mouth dry, eyes surely dilated behind his glasses. He didn’t feel scandalized, though. He felt a little light-headed perhaps and quite enlightened, like he had to reassess the things he’d thought he knew about Aziraphale, working assumptions that he’d carried with him over the centuries that shaped his interpretation of all of their ever-present boundaries.

Angels are sexless, aren’t they? Had there been some bureaucratic policy change in the intervening six thousand years? 

But even if there hadn’t been, Aziraphale had never exactly been the typical specimen.

Their eyes caught again, and something passed between them. A tacit acknowledgement that they’d crossed a line they’d mutually drawn some millennia prior without even discussing it; an inherent you versus me, there versus here, opposing sides — a demarcation to keep everything in order because Aziraphale had always needed it that way to make sense of the universe and their places in it, it had seemed to Crowley, and this was just a further blurring of that line. It had been messy since the beginning, a line more real in theory than in practice, a fairy story Aziraphale told himself. Angel versus demon, sure, but there were still dinners and drinks and laughs and so many evenings spent together such that any casual observer would surely mistake them for friends, at the very least. But some boundaries had remained staunchly in place: waistcoats and yards of fabric, some old sense of propriety that kept Crowley just beyond arm’s reach.

If he didn’t see it before — it: the explosion of light in Crowley’s eyes every time Aziraphale so much as deigned to look in his direction — well, he certainly must now, glasses or not. Millennia of wanting, and sunglasses could only hide so much.

“That’s what, Alençon lace?” Crowley asked too casually, the silence finally overwhelming. He managed to restrain himself from downing the remainder of his scotch in a single nervous gulp.

“Honiton, out of Devon, actually.” Aziraphale’s voice was barely above a whisper.

Crowley nodded as if any of it mattered. “Very patriotic.”

“Queen Victoria’s wedding veil was the same sort.”

“Oh yes, I think I remember that.” He didn’t really. “Caused a bit of a rush on the stuff.” 

Hell, this was ridiculous.

Tick tick tick of the antique grandfather clock.

Aziraphale was staring fixedly at something in the front of the shop, concentration so rigid that Crowley was sure that whatever book was his target may well burst into flames.

Tick tick tick.

Crowley emptied his glass and fought the urge to pour another.

Tick tick tick.

The snow came down in such great, fat flakes that Crowley could almost hear them striking the shop windows if he strained his ears away from the ominous ticking that sounded more and more like a bomb’s detonation clock with every passing second.

Well, I’m already damned as it is. 

He took off his glasses, threw them on the desk, and impulsively said, “So can I see ‘em?”

Aziraphale’s head whipped around. “I beg your pardon?”

Crowley wanted to smirk, wanted to plaster on cool, indifferent confidence and say something, anything that he could play off as a joke or nonchalance when the inevitable rejection came, but he could only manage a half-smile, a deferential knitting of eyebrows together, too fucking sincere for a demon, broken open. “Let me see ‘em?”

He braced himself for divine fury.

A long pause, all quiet except for the soft in and out of Aziraphale’s breathing and the tick tick tick of the clock.

Then, “All right.”

It was like a foundational brick had been removed from the wall that had always separated them; a little glimpse of the private was all it took. The world didn’t end, nor did God in Heaven descend, and with that tacit permission, that removal of the one underlying brick, the whole wall came down layer by layer.

The noise of the clock was washed out by the frantic drumming in Crowley’s ears; a pulse he’d never had issues regulating now raced uncontrollably, beating so loudly it seemed to echo throughout his body, reverberating in his throat and between his ears. He was up from the settee — when had that happened? — and Aziraphale must have stood also because now he’d pressed the angel right up against the edge of his desk, too close for any sort of plausible deniability.

Aziraphale was leaning into him. “You like them?” he asked. It would have been coy, coquettish coming from any other person, but Aziraphale’s voice was soaked in genuine incredulity.

“Yes.” Crowley didn’t hesitate to answer.

Crowley watched as Aziraphale’s lips parted for a breathy exhale.

He wanted to kiss him — Crowley’d always wanted to kiss him, ever since the beginning; he’d spent entire human lifetimes thinking of little else other than closing the distance between them, a tilt of a head and then lips on lips, and the sort of startled noise Aziraphale might make — and now they were close enough. It would be so easy.

He could hear the slamming beats of Aziraphale’s pulse mimicking his own.

Crowley didn’t get the chance to kiss him; Aziraphale pressed in first.

It was hesitant only for a moment. A brief few, restrained seconds of doubt, and then Aziraphale’s lips parted, wet and honey-sweet in a way that couldn’t be because of the scotch or the lingering taste of Darjeeling. Crowley opened up to him, and the rhythm of it was immediate, the pace instinctual, like they’d done this a thousand times already, synced with the practised ease of old lovers. 

Aziraphale’s hands found the lapels of his jacket, and with a slight pull, Crowley felt himself prompted forward, bodies nearly flush. And oh, Aziraphale was warm, radiating an ethereal sort of heat Crowley only somewhat recalled from before, and so he closed what little space remained between them to sidle nearer and feel the heat of him on his face. Or perhaps that was just the flush still spread across his cheeks.

Crowley slipped his fingers into the belt loops at Aziraphale’ waist to anchor himself there, the pads of his thumbs circling the heavy fabric, and he was fully aware that only that layer separated his hands from the silken lace beneath that clung to Aziraphale’s hips like a second skin.

Aziraphale broke away suddenly, breathing hard only inches away from Crowley so that the demon could feel angelic puffs of scotch-scented air against his chin.

“I’m not sure what’s come over me,” he said with a demure laugh.

Crowley didn’t say anything, prepared for the retreat.

“This is…” Aziraphale drifted off for a moment, “...not what I was expecting from tonight. Or any other night for that matter.” The angel must have seen a flash of something — insecurity, doubt, or some other inconvenient human emotion — cross Crowley’s face, as he then added, “Not that I’m complaining.”

Well then.

“So you just wear those often? You weren’t planning on —”

“No, I wasn’t planning on anything! I have a whole drawer —”

“Fuck,” Crowley breathed.

“Wait,” Aziraphale said, putting on an affected little show of shock. “You thought I was trying to seduce you?” He laughed, light and airy.

And it was all rather easy again, the tension and the worry drained as if they’d never been there at all, as if Crowley’s stomach hadn’t been knotted for the better part of six thousand years. Because it was always easy with them, once they put aside work and its complications. When it was just them, with the outside world of both Above and Below was forgotten — well, they fit together.

Crowley smiled too. “No, but is that such an absurd idea?” An exaggerated rise of an eyebrow, familiar bravado to hide behind.

Aziraphale’s lips quirked up again, an invitation. “I suppose the situation would indicate it’s not altogether ridiculous.”

They kissed again, Crowley unsure of who initiated it, just that Aziraphale’s mouth was warm against his, reassuring and heady and coaxing Crowley’s lips apart with the press of his tongue. A nip on his bottom lip, and Crowley squeaked as he felt Aziraphale’s mouth curve into a smile.

Hands slid down his lapels and under his jacket, rucking up the fabric of his t-shirt. A tentative pause as Aziraphale traced the cotton before slipping underneath it, and then well-manicured nails dragged over Crowley’s taut flanks, digging in as Crowley moaned into Aziraphale’s mouth.

The same fingers that unfastened his waistcoat every night now etched into Crowley’s sides, marking his skin like it was worn, loved velvet, and that thought — that he wanted nothing more than for Aziraphale to just use him, rough him up with casual, regular touches until he was threadbare and timeworn at Aziraphale’s hands — that thought was everything. Crowley ground into him, hips jerking down into Aziraphale’s.

A yelp not unlike the one Aziraphale had made when he discovered his knickers were showing, and he heaved back against Crowley. Friction, so much of it, and Crowley bit back a cry as Aziraphale’s hips lilted up and — Satan in Hell — Aziraphale was hard, obvious even through his thick trousers. Hard and rubbing off against Crowley’s hip bone as they rocked together.

“This all right, angel?” he asked through the fog of it, breaking the kiss.

“My dear,” Aziraphale answered, “I thought you wanted to see them? Don’t tell me you’re backing out already?” A grin that couldn’t be described as anything short of wicked spread across angelic features.

Crowley’s mouth found the sensitive juncture between Aziraphale’s jaw and ear, and he kissed up it, sucking the skin just behind his earlobe. “Most definitely not,” Crowley hissed next to his ear with more confidence than he possessed. “You’re overdressed.” Aziraphale shivered, still smiling.

Crowley fumbled with the bow tie, pulling on one ribbon and then another until it finally loosened, and he slid it out from underneath the pressed collar. The iridescent collar button of Aziraphale’s shirt was smooth between his fingers, slippery as he tried once to catch it through the neat buttonhole, and then again, and then once more, and bollocks this was just embarrassing. Aziraphale’s hands met his, and he freed the button himself with a plain twist of fingers. “Nervous?” he baited.

Crowley didn’t cop to anything.

Aziraphale pushed Crowley’s jacket off and took the time to lay it gently over the back of the desk chair.

Back to his neck, kissing the outer shell of Aziraphale’s ear, a light tug of teeth on the lobe and then down the supple skin towards a pillowed collarbone, flesh smooth and generous unlike his own sharp edges. Aziraphale’s skin was malleable, impressionable; it depressed ever so slightly when Crowley pressed his tongue to it. He was responsive, pliant, and that Crowley was the one touching him, affecting his body so — it still seemed impossible even as Crowley kissed beneath the folds of Aziraphale’s neckline, forcing the next two buttons to pop open with a hurried snap of his fingers.

“Oh, that’s very bad for the material,” Aziraphale said through a stuttered breath as Crowley kissed below his collarbone. Ethereal fingers slipped between them again, and Aziraphale unhooked the remaining buttons so that his shirt fell open.

It was almost too much. Too much naked, exposed skin to touch and taste; too much opportunity after so many years of little more than brief glances at forearms under rolled-up shirtsleeves, and Crowley knocked Aziraphale into the desk again as their lips met, hips level and rocking.

Aziraphale’s hands laced through Crowley’s hair, tucking stray locks behind his ears as Crowley’s hands strummed lower over gentle contours, across the perfect swell of his navel and into the peach-soft, almost white hair that marked a path to his trousers; curls so fine that it was almost as if the hair had been stippled on with a fanbrush, daubed by an artist’s hand.

Their eyes caught again — a silent inquiry — and Aziraphale smiled something that was most certainly coquettish now.

The buttons on his trousers were larger, blunter than those on his button-down, and Crowley had no issue unhooking them despite the slight tremor in his hands, the dewy sweat on his palms that he couldn’t quite seem to miracle away. An inhale that may have been his, may have been Aziraphale’s, may have been theirs both, and he pushed the waistband down, uncovering the trim of the lace beneath. His hand slipped under the now loosened fabric of Aziraphale’s trousers, skimming the raised edges of the lace’s ornate pattern.

Slim-cut. Smooth, not prickly, and made from a silken or satin thread. The fabric was almost wet in its luster; Crowley grazed his fingers down the curve of Aziraphale’s hips, dotting over the embossed inlets of skin between each woven latticework casing. Floral motifs decorated the skin across the expanse of his ass, and Crowley buried his face in the crook of Aziraphale’s neck as he dipped his hand lower, past the back trim of the knickers where Aziraphale’s cheeks positively spilled out from the insufficient fabric.

“You’re full of surprises, angel,” he managed, just barely, voice throaty as he squeezed — Satan, I can’t believe this is happening — actually squeezed those voluptuous cheeks, scooping under the sinfully plump curve to feel the full breadth of him.

Aziraphale was clinging to him, nails skittering across Crowley’s shoulder blades, breath hard and fast in Crowley’s ear. “I suppose I like the feel of them,” Aziraphale said with more composure than his breathing indicated he possessed. “It’s nice to have something of a secret. You know, something that’s just mine?” he added, almost unsure. An underdrawing. Crowley’s palm caressed back up the naked flesh of his cheeks, finding the trim of the lace again and fingering the rounded edges of an embroidered rose. “Well, I suppose that’s just ours now,” he laughed.

Ours.

Another kiss, harder, more desperate, and it was like a dam broke — no, like a wall crumbled, millennia’s worth of defences down — and Crowley needed him now, here. He pulled Aziraphale’s trousers down a bit more, feeling the hard lines of a lace-covered erection before he dared even look down at the straining filigree, the open trellis pattern revealing ruby-red flesh pressed firm against the round curve of his stomach.

Crowley’s hand stuttered, unsure of where to touch, where to hold. He wanted everything, all at once, and it was choice paralysis.

“You can touch me,” Aziraphale whispered.

“You’ve come ‘round quick.” What he had said, not so long ago; words still burned into where his soul should be: You go too fast for me, Crowley. But this was fast.

Aziraphale took Crowley’s hand in his. “What’s that delightful human saying? Go big or go home.” Aziraphale’s hands were warm and soft like the rest of him, uncalloused and regal, the sort of hands painted by the likes of Titian and Botticelli; lounging gods and goddesses with languid, outstretched palms looking to sample the world. “You can touch me,” he repeated, guiding Crowley’s hand between his legs.

A shaky intake of breath as Crowley’s hands curled around the thick of him, the silken lace a poor barrier between his palm and Aziraphale’s cock. 

“Like this?” Up, then down. A gentle stroke that tugged the lace with it, smoothing over his hard flesh like a silk handkerchief. Aziraphale nodded, Crowley only feeling the movement of it as he watched his own hand like it was someone else’s, skimming over the wet tip of his cock with a flick of his thumb. A small pearly bead dripped down, spreading into the fabric, across a sprig of briony that was stitched near the head, and Crowley sucked in a breath, readjusting his grip so he could brush the covered slit with every stroke. Aziraphale’s hips rocked forward.

It was something out of a dirty fantasy or a video on a well-trafficked corner of the internet: the strain of Aziraphale’s cock against the fabric; the small hollow between the underside of his cock and his stomach, and how the lace stretched over that gap, pulling the waistband of the knickers away from his stomach every time his cock flexed up; drops of precum sticking obscenely to the latticework; the way the pads of Crowley’s fingers slipped from skin to silk, silk to skin with each stroke, and how Aziraphale gasped with every transition.

Aziraphale tugged at Crowley’s fly, prior grace and patience quite gone as he gave a little yank on the zipper before cursing and snapping his fingers.

“It’s bad for the material,” Crowley parodied back at him, grinning at the exasperated sigh he was rewarded with.

“Oh, tosh,” Aziraphale said. Then, “We could go upstairs,” he suggested as he folded the open zipper forward, and Crowley bit back a moan at the relief. His cock twitched, formerly trapped at an awkward angle under the zipper and now tilted up in his briefs.

It was a sinful image, the idea of stretching Aziraphale out on his ruffled Victorian duvet, stripping him down until only the lace remained. Some sort of play on a blushing, virginal bride in white lace, someone to be deflowered: a holy angel spread out like a centrefold in lingerie. 

But the bed was all the way upstairs, and Aziraphale was hot against him here, pulsing in his hand, and it all seemed so precarious still, as if in the brief moments they parted to go upstairs Aziraphale might look rationally at what they were doing and decide it was best to stop. “Too far,” he said.

Aziraphale didn’t waste any time — go big or go home — and he pulled Crowley out from his briefs, hands shockingly confident given their position. Crowley touched Aziraphale like he was drawn in lines of chalk; like he might smudge or blow away, like Crowley would be his careless self and blot the sketch, ruin the artistry. But Aziraphale’s hands were sure, skilled like a master craftsman, taking him at the root and stroking up with an experienced twist of the wrist, and Crowley bucked into him, groaning.

“You look quite shocked, my dear.”

“Told you before, you’re full of surprises.”

Aziraphale kissed him again and stilled Crowley’s hand. “Trust me?”

“‘Course.”

A devilish smile and Aziraphale turned around to lean over the desk, coaxing his pants down and stepping right out of them.

What a fucking sight.

Aziraphale bent forward over the desk, shirt unbuttoned and uncharacteristically wrinkled and hiked up above his waist, buxom ass spread apart so that the knickers hugged barely half of his cheeks, the rest of the flesh overflowing past the neat, lacy trim. From this vantage point, Crowley could see only the barest hint of tightly drawn balls held snugly in place by the constraint of the lace.

“You’re trying to discorporate me,” he breathed against the nape of Aziraphale’s neck. “This is some new Heavenly tactic to get an advantage.”

“You see right through me, Crowley. I’m a terrible liar,” Aziraphale heaved dramatically like a heroine in an old black and white film.

“You’re a fucking honeypot,” he hissed, hands slipping under the lace, feeling the fleshy curves of his ass as Aziraphale laughed softly. “No, I’m absolutely serious. You’re wanton.”

In response, Aziraphale looked over his shoulder at Crowley, and with a challenging quirk of an eyebrow, he pressed back into Crowley so that lace met flesh. “Fuck,” Crowley swore, hands digging into Aziraphale’s thighs as he thrust against him, sliding his cock along the lace-covered cleft.

Beneath him Aziraphale rested his arms on the surface of the desk and laid his head on them, angling his ass up further.

He thrust again, cock slipping over the satiny strands of thread that made up the lattice. The texture of it was surprisingly gentle on sensitive skin, ridged but smooth, allowing for an effortless grind with just enough friction to make him ache for more, Aziraphale’s pliant body a pillow underneath. Again and again, and fuck, he wasn’t going to last, miracle or not. Just touching Aziraphale before — feeling his skin naked like this, tracing the hard lines of his cock through the lacy cage — that had almost been enough, and this: this was more than he could fucking handle.

A frenzied kiss on the nape of his neck, open-mouthed and messy, and Aziraphale slanted into it, rubbing back against Crowley’s cock as he panted into the wood of his desk, arching up so that he was on the balls of his feet, ass tilted up as high as he could manage.

Crowley reached around Aziraphale’s hips, desperate to touch him through the lace again, but Aziraphale shifted his hips away. “Wait, wait —”

He wiggled his hips, hands pushing down the taut fabric of his underwear so that the back and sides of the fabric slipped down from his waist and over the expanse of his cheeks, pooling just under the lower cusps of the mounds and coming to rest stretched across the weight of his uppermost thighs, the front of his knickers still hooked over the bulge of his cock.

Crowley couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe — he was pretty sure he’d stopped breathing a while ago actually — and all he could do was the obvious, what Aziraphale clearly wanted him to do. He rubbed the head of his cock, already dripping thick strands of precum matching the ivory of the lace, against Aziraphale’s now naked cheek before angling his cock between heavy thighs so that he pushed in just above the stretched out knickers.

Underneath him Aziraphale bucked back as Crowley fucked his thighs, the head of his cock grazing the underside of Aziraphale’s strained balls with each thrust.

“This good, angel?” he asked, already knowing the answer from Aziraphale’s quiet gasps, the way he gripped the far edge of his desk as he leaned up on the balls of his feet again. But Crowley wanted to hear him say, wanted the confirmation that he wanted this from him.

“Please, please, Crowley,” was his response.

Then Aziraphale clenched his thighs together, and what little ability Crowley had to think clearly shredded entirely, the world reduced to the tight heat of Aziraphale’s thighs and the friction of the lace rubbing the length of his cock with every heady push. Harder against the tender perineum, and Aziraphale moaned, so Crowley angled up and found the spot again and again until the moans were continuous; a litany of please and more and yes.

Crowley slipped his hand by Aziraphale’s hips again, and this time Aziraphale didn’t shift away but twisted into him so that Crowley could palm the slick-red girth of his cock, pulsing under lace so soaked from precum that its already slippery texture was almost glistening, the fine thread coated in need. He wrapped his digits around Aziraphale’s cock, stroking upwards in time with his own thrusts behind, using enough force that the already stretched out lace moved easily with every touch, despite how tightly it pulled around Aziraphale’s thighs.

The friction of it was incredible. Crowley rutted in again, striking the impressible crevasse of his perineum, his own dripping cock rubbing both Aziraphale’s balls and the lace that contained them, slicking his path between Aziraphale’s thighs.

Creation, that’s what this was, Crowley thought fleetingly. The first stage in an artist’s production of a work; too early and rough and ill-conceived to envision the final draft, the polished version the gallery would hang and all would recognize. No, this was that initial figuring of things out, that private experimentation only the artist would truly know: the hesitant first sketch on a blank canvas as something, something beautiful and unknown begins to find its eventual form.

A brush of a thumb over the damp slit of Aziraphale’s cock, a stroke bordering on too hard, too much, and Aziraphale was suddenly still and quiet beneath him as he spilled over Crowley’s hand, soaking both his fist and the ruined lace. The sound of nails on the surface of his desk seeking purchase, fingers closed over the edge as if that hold was the only thing keeping Aziraphale from ascending, and a cry so quiet Crowley thought he may have imagined it into being, “Crowley.”

Crowley almost didn’t feel his own orgasm coming, too focused on Aziraphale’s, on the way the angel’s come washed over his hand like an artist washed the canvas with gesso. But suddenly it was propulsive and all-consuming, and he moored himself to Aziraphale’s thighs as he jerked up involuntarily, coating Aziraphale’s ass and the small of his back in thick streaks.

Quiet. Awkward quiet that Crowley couldn’t begin to interpret, and he didn’t dare move as Aziraphale caught his breath beneath him. Crowley waited for a cue, for a tell, for any hint at what his next move should be.

Tick tick tick of the antique grandfather clock.

And then quite suddenly Aziraphale laughed softly, straightening up as Crowley pulled back from the desk. “These are thoroughly destroyed,” he said, stepping out of the lace with a put-upon frown that lasted only a moment before the smile returned to his eyes. Light, easy, as if this — whatever this was — hadn’t irreparably harmed them, and Crowley exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Well, what do you expect, angel? You said you’ve had them since Queen Victoria —”

Crowley tucked himself back into his pants as Aziraphale miracled himself clean before retrieving his trousers from the floor, shaking his head.

“That’s not remotely true. I said they were in the same fashion. But they’re quite new.”

Faux ease, like his heart wasn’t threatening to beat out of his chest, “So for you that’s, what, several decades?”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, ready to retort, but seemed to think the better of it as he fastened centuries-old trousers. “Underwear is not made to last, unfortunately, but I find the new styles are rather refreshing.”

“Surprises, surprises tonight.”

The angel hooked his last button and surveyed Crowley with an appraising eye that Crowley found a little discomforting. “I have a rather impressive collection upstairs.” Ever the curator. “Would you like to see?”

Crowley did.