#godrabbles

[lineffability]

oh i like 16 for the kiss meme bc aziraphale does the nose scrunchie things

when one person’s face is scrunched up, and the other one kisses their lips/nose/forehead

[inspired by this wonderful art by @cliopadra except it’s set in the present]

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Aziraphale had said. 

“You never do,” Crowley had answered.

“Whatever should I wear?”

“Surprise me.” 

And surprise him he did.

;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

The place was packed. Crowley shook hands and exchanged nods and felt very much good in his costume, exactly for the fact that he was not. A demon, dressing up as an angel. Was there greater sacrilege? He grinned.

Better yet: a demon dressing up as the human idea of an angel, so very much not up-to-date with angelic fashion–which was ironic, since the angels also failed at keeping up with human trends. Both sides losers, in the end. In his white robes and flashing-LED-plastic-halo, the devilish grin on Crowley’s face looked slightly misplaced. Gabriel would hate this, which was exactly why he loved it a whole damn lot. He knew which side had truly won, and it was his*.

*His, of course, not extending far beyond himself–one angel excluded. 

Thinking of–where was Aziraphale?

He looked around, impatient. He had still not spotted his angel, poor Crowley, so very impatient to see the scandalized look on Aziraphale’s face as soon as he’d lay eyes on his costume. 

So very unprepared was Crowley for the possibility that Aziraphale might be the one to create the greater scandal that he did suddenly not know what to do with himself when he did, at last, find the angel.

Worst thing was: he had not even realized it was him. He’d been drawn to the costume, because–well, because he was just enough of a narcissist to be a demon. People dressing up as snakes immediately fell into his favour, and would receive a slightly less demonic misfortune than the other guests. (There was one fool who had accidentally dared to dress up as an angel also–he’d received a whole plate of canapées. Into his face. Followed by a tray of glasses filled to the brim with red wine. He’d left hurriedly, looking like an angel slain, and Crowley had watched pleasedly.)

Only one person he had expected to possibly show up as another angel (because his angel tended to be predictable like that), and the reality was so far from it that Crowley would have felt betrayed, had he not felt so very… very… flattered. Dumbstruck. (And in love.)

“Aziraphale?” His voice was a pitch higher than he would have liked, a little thinner, a little weaker. The snake, who was Aziraphale, beamed at the sound of his voice, turned his head, and gasped.

Here it was, the effect Crowley had anticipated the whole evening, and now it fell flat despite its glory. His mind was elsewhere, and it repeated like a broken record: Aziraphale. A snake.

Aziraphale, a snake. Azirapha–

“Wily serpent,” Aziraphaele scolded, and it took Crowley a second to register that he was referring to his angel costume, and then it took Aziraphale another second to get the irony of it all, too. “Oh. Well, in this case, I assume, I would be the wily serpent.”

He smiled, embarrassed, and Crowley wanted to be hit by a tray of canapées then and there, anything, anything to kill in him the urge to snog the angel senseless. 

“Nice costume,” he breathed, and watched the angel snatch a canapée off a tray that was indeed passing by dangerously close to their heads. Such a tiny miracle, for the waiter to slip… Almost. He considered it. 

Because Aziraphale was giving him The Eye: the sort of sweeping toe-to-head look that made it very clear he was judging Crowley’s life choices. The look that typically made the demon’s skin bristle with indignation, as if the angel had any authority to judge his style, looking the way he did–no matter how many times he called it standards. (Today, as an exception to the golden rule, Crowley guessed he deserved it.)

“Can’t return the compliment,” Aziraphale indeed quipped a heartbeat later, and Crowley’s grin was full of pain, and would have given little children trouble sleeping. 

“Gee, thanks. Have you considered that your costume might actually really underline your personality? Love it.”

Aziraphale’s sly expression fell. “Crowley! No need to be so, so… not nice!”   

“Nevermind, I take it all back.” Oh, he was having fun. Aziraphale looked like a child that was being sent to bed against their will. Except, he also looked like a snake. And, wait, was that–

“Is that an apple?!” Crowley gaped, and wheezed. 

It was true: The snake winding around Aziraphale was indeed opening its jaw to enclose around a red fruit, just over the angel’s shoulder. This was it; this took the proverbial apple cake. 

“Why,” Crowley spluttered, “Why did you do it?”

Aziraphale cocked his head, indulging another canapée. (They kept coming, now simply materializing in his hand, him not even bothering to have the waiter circle him any longer.) 

“The costume?”

Crowley assented. 

“Well… It wasn’t all bad, was it?” Aziraphale scrunched up his nose, trying to take the weight off his concession, and the emotions to go with it. “The snake. I mean. Knowledge isn’t bad… is it.”

Crowley looked at the angel, face slipping. Would he have ever dared to say things like this, with such levity, as he did now? With the same flabbergasted expression still stuck on his face, Crowley slowly leaned forward, and touched his lips to the angel’s forehead, lightly. When he pulled back Aziraphale gave him a small, sly smile, which made something in Crowley evaporate in the same way a horseshoe might evaporate a hellhound’s fury. The beast inside him, barely conscious anymore, closed its eyes. It wasn’t much of a beast to begin with, a fact he thought he was maybe finally able to (sometimes, just a little bit) acknowledge–just as Aziraphale was finally allowing himself to be loved by a demon, and to love him back freely. 

Crowley’s smile, when it came, was warm.

And then triumphant.

“Now you’re asking the right questions, angel.”

[lineffability]

"In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm, / And let us hear no sound of human strife / After the click of the shutting. Life to life— / I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm, / And feel as safe as guarded by a charm"

[i know this wasn’t a prompt but it reminded me of Them so much i just had to… extract from: E.B. Browning // Sonnets From the Portuguese]

The door falls to a close with a click, a barely audible little sound that nonetheless settles profoundly in the silence that comes after it. It is not an uncomfortable silence, and yet it is a silence deeply felt, and acknowledged. 

It is the beginning of a long-established ritual. They share a familiar gaze which lasts–as always, and yet every time just a fraction of more, don’t look away yet, hold my gaze, let me see–a little too long, and the ritual follows: the getting of a bottle of wine, the settling on the couch (not too far apart, not too close, either), the drifting of their conversation into absurdity with the passing of time and the emptying of the bottle. The inebriated companionship. 

It is when the ritual ends, and there are no more clear rules to follow except the one that would terminate their togetherness, the good night, the leaving, it is then that uncertainty and freedom await and beckon, sometimes, still for that ever-wishful More. 

“Well–” Crowley says and performs a little limb dance that signals his impending getting-up (the first step of the leaving), “It’s getting late and you know me, beauty sleep and all, don’t want this skin to wither and shed–wait, humans don’t shed, right, right.”

He mumbles on, words like a little stream that Aziraphale could forever sit by, legs dangling comfortably in cool-winding water around his ankles, and through this nice feeling of peace the angel indeed realizes he does not want to lift his feet yet, does not want Crowley to lift his feet either, and so his hand settles, before he can think better of it, on Crowley’s thigh, just short of the knee. 

The limb-wriggle stops, and the ritual is slightly altered and thrown off-course. 

And a ritual once thrown off-course can take on any new form, can break out-dated constraints and become something entirely new. 

This is new. It is also good. 

Aziraphale clears his throat (they are both looking at his hand on Crowley’s knee) but makes no motion to pull away. He lifts his gaze, and smiles faintly as he opens his mouth to speak, “Your skin won’t ever wither, dear.”

He says nothing else, though if he were braver he might have added something like and even if it did, you are forever beautiful to me, no matter the state of your skin or body or soul. Crowley makes an expression, half-agonized and half-hopeful, that makes Aziraphale think that maybe he can hear the unspoken words anyways. 

“So… one last drink?”

“That does sound like a jolly good idea.”

A little unsure, Crowley reaches out and pours them another glass, with wine that materializes in the empty bottle. It tastes a little sweeter, now.

“You know, you might as well–I mean, if you don’t want to sober up, to drive and all, it seems such a hassle–you can have the couch? If you want?” You can have my whole heart, too.

A heartbeat passes before Crowley slowly, casually, nods. “Sure. Couch sounds fine.” 

They sip their wine, trying not to exult too visibly. Aziraphale, setting the glass back on the table and rolling his shoulders in a manner that suggests he is trying to pretend the movement to be small and unnoticeable while making sure that Crowley certainly does notice it–as if he didn’t always notice every movement of his, anyways–grimaces slightly, and mumbles under his breath, “Bugger.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Ah, I must have read too long today, always sitting in the same position. My neck…” He trailed off, shrugging slightly, as if it was not worth mentioning.

My skin does not wither, Crowley almost says, so your shoulder surely does not either, but he stops himself. You could just miracle it away, he could say. He does not say that either. He is processing.

Aziraphale looks anywhere but him, and Crowley is reminded, faintly, of the last time he had this air of unexpectant-expectancy around him, not too long ago, on an old church compound, with a paint-blue stain on his jacket. 

“I could, er.” Gingerly he reaches out an arm, an offering, and already Aziraphale is slightly turning away, offering his neck with a devout bow of the head.

“Oh, that would be quite lovely, if you could…”

Crowley’s hands settle on his neck, first carefully and then with more assurance, to press and knead the skin. The silence is heavy between them, now, teetering between white-hot-comfortable and turbocharged. 

When his slender hands pull away, it is Crowley who clears his throat. But the sound dies without an answer, as Aziraphale, following the retracting hands, leans back into the space between them, and instinctively Crowley moves just that little bit forward, until they touch, shoulders to chest, and it feels the way a feather lands softly on the ground.

Soft, but final. 

They are treading on unchartered ground, and they are settling comfortably into their new reality, feeling safe and warm. Let’s stay here a little longer, like this, life to life, they both want to say. They don’t; but they stay anyways.

[lineffability]

Kenopsia, goodbye kiss, “Please. No.”

Kenopsia: the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet

There’s something about places that are supposed to be filled with life: when they aren’t, they feel wrong. They feel out of place, out of time, as if an integral part of them has been lost.

Like a cheap carbon copy, or a scaffold, or a ghost made of memories that is longing to fill the empty spaces of itself.

Aziraphale would never have thought that his beloved bookstore would some day feel like this.

Well, perhaps he had: he was no stranger to transience.

He hadn’t thought it would happen so soon. (It would always be too soon.) Can you ever get used to the fleetingness of life? Can you ever truly let go the things you love most in this world?

After all this time, Aziraphale didn’t have an answer.

“Ready, angel?”

I don’t know. “I suppose I am.” He said it, but he did not move.

In the bookstore, it was quiet. Outside, life was going on: life signs of a busy Thursday afternoon, voices drifting inside through the shutters as they passed by, fleeting. Aziraphale tried to print images into his mind. Everything was as it always had been, and he wanted to remember it all. The desk, the shelves, the books. Oh, the books. So many of them. So many old friends.

So many he had known (and loved, and lost). Some, he had inspired. Others, he had never known at all (but how he would have liked to).

Not even an angel’s life experience was unlimited: he was bound to one body, one place at a time. He had to go through time the same way as anybody else, though perhaps he understood it in a way that had taught him to tweak it, now and then. Time, and place.

“Aziraphale, I know— but we should leave, now.” Crowley’s voice was soft, careful.

“Please. No. Just a little while longer...”

The experience of time, as one of his old friends had told him, was relative. To Aziraphale, it had been mere moments that he had been standing amidst his collection, touching spines and dusting off long forgotten copies. A clock would tell you: several hours had passed.

To Crowley, who had arrived ten minutes ago, every second began to feel like an hour. Not because he wanted to leave, necessarily, but because he could feel Aziraphale’s anguish, and because it was a familiar one.

Aziraphale turned towards him, and Crowley clenched his jaw tightly shut. If hugging were a thing they did, he would have done it now. He considered making it a thing they did, because the angel’s look made his heart clench like a fist.

Instead of a hug, he offered careful words: “Angel, I think we both know that change is inevitable.”

“But why doesn’t it get easier?”

“It’s probably a good thing that it doesn’t.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I am.” Crowley sounded awfully pleased with himself, until realisation dawned. “Wait, no. I’m not right. I’m wrong. I don’t want to be right!”

“Then you really shouldn’t behave the way you do half of the time,” Aziraphale pointedly muttered under his breath.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.” Aziraphale smiled to himself, feeling his spirits rise a little. He was so easily swayed, by this demon. A demon who was so wonderfully un-demonic at times that it made him wonder... He had been pondering a question, these last hours. “Dear, have we gotten too... too human?”

“You know, I’m not sure anymore if there’s such a thing as too human.”

Aziraphale thought about that. He smiled again, gingerly, and the curve of his mouth looked both in and out of place on his sad face.

Crowley stepped forward, hesitated, reached out and took the angel’s hand into his own.

“They’ll still be here, angel. It’s a bit of a showy miracle, making people forget about the existence of an entire shopfront in Soho, but I do think we can get away with it for a while.”

“Yes. You are right of course, dear.” This time, Aziraphale’s smile reached his eyes. “Thank you for your help with that one. Still, it feels...”

“Like losing something you know will never be the same even if you find it again, because the absence will always have been there?”

“Say, have you ever thought about writing a book of your own?”

Crowley grinned. Their hands were still entwined, and the angel was holding on tight. “You know what I have thought of, angel? That appointment we have with the contractor in ——. It’s a little way to the South Downs, and I’m not sure how many more hours I can convince him that being a ‘little late’ is no big deal.”

“Well, then.” Aziraphale took a deep breath and let it go. There was fondness in his eyes as he surveyed the room once more, but there was a different kind of fondness in them when, finally, they ended their journey on Crowley’s face. “I guess this is goodbye,” he said, not taking his eyes off Crowley, and leaned in, towards him, and kissed him softly on the lips.

“Goodbye isn’t always forever, angel. Nothing is.” Crowley licked his lips. Oh, he knew the feeling of wanting something to last forever.

“Maybe some things are,” Aziraphale offered quietly, and the fist around Crowley’s heart let go, softly, as the meaning registered. The angel slowly released Crowley’s hand as he stepped forward, towards the door, and turned around with new flourish. “After you?”

They left the bookshop, and silence, absolute, settled over the room. No noise or sound reached inside; as if with the disappearing of its oldest friends the shop truly had fallen out of place and time. (It had.)

Had you walked past, the little bookshop sign might have registered in your mind, for just a second, before it would slip away like the faint memory of a dream, waiting to be remembered.

[lineffability]

❝ That was said so horribly wrong but you sounded very cute while trying. A for effort. ❞ (Crowley to an extremely rusty Aziraphale who is trying to speak a language he is really out of practice with? xD)

“Moi veux ...crèpe?” Aziraphale pointed animatedly at the hot black stone plate. The vendor raised a french brow, very frenchly. The single movement in an otherwise still face expressed disdain enough to last a life time.

Aziraphale was oblivious to the contempt as a matter of course (contempt he had managed to produce even without his posh clothes; there was just something in his manners—and his absolute inability to form even one correct French sentence...), but Crowley made a mental note to let one or two flies suddenly drop dead into the bowl of batter, after they’d left.

“Une crêpe avec quoi, monsieur?”

“Excuse me?”

The poor vendor turned his offended nose at the unpleasant sound of English syllables, his perfect little moustache quivering in offence, and even Aziraphale sensed he was treading on crêpe-thin ground. Desperate, he sought Crowley’s gaze in a familiar silent cry for help.

To Crowley’s infinite amusement, this situation produced far more unease in the Angel than the threat of discorporation he had escaped just minutes ago.

Sliding easily into the role of Saviour once more, Crowley turned to the vendor and, in impeccable French, ordered a crêpe. He didn’t ask what filling Aziraphale wanted, because while Crowley knew little about The Delight of Crêpe, he thought himself enough of a Connoisseur of Aziraphale to hit a sweet flavour jackpot, with a little praise heaped on top.

(And of course, he was right.)

“Ma cœur, Crowley, le crepe es delicieux! Comme la nuée! Molto bon,” he all but chirped, wiping a little cream off the tip of his nose.

“That was all manners of wrong, angel,” Crowley informed him amusedly, trying to miss the fact that he had just been called my heart. “But you sounded very cute while trying, throughout.”

Despite having added those last words thoughtlessly, and with an air of benevolence, Crowley almost choked on his non-existent crêpe when Aziraphale suddenly faltered and, almost imperceptibly but definitely, blushed. He looked very interestedly at his crêpe, licked his lips, and cleared his throat.

“Why, thank you, Crowley,” he said in a way that was far too genuine for a Crowley to handle. And so, when Aziraphale held out the crêpe to him, he took it in a daze, and bit into it just to do something.

It was, in fact, delicious. Crowley reconsidered his fly trap, if only for Aziraphale’s sake. He’d want to go back for seconds, surely.

And the vendor would get to listen to more of his abysmal french—which counted as more hellish punishment than Crowley himself could ever possibly dish out.

[lineffability]

A concept: Howl's Moving Castle except Aziraphale is Sophie and Crowley is Howl. Thoughts?

He hadn’t really minded it, being cursed. After all, what had changed, really? He’d been much the same, before, save a few wrinkles. Nobody took much notice of him anyways, and that was how he liked it. Binding books, in the quiet of his study, in his workshop, tracing his ever-same steps between the two places, thinking of books. That was what he did, and he did it well. 

Give him something to read, and he was fine. 

So Aziraphale continues as he has before the curse, and nobody pays it much notice.

–;–

Rumours spread and precede him, and arrive before he does. Only because he lets them, of course, and because he likes it. A. C. Pendragon, the great wizard. Crowley, who sold his heart to a snake, but that was a rumour he kept well under lock and behind closed doors, for reason of it being true. 

But when he arrives, to the city of Londary, it is in his fashion: he slithers unknown amongst the shadows, through dark alleyways and backstreets.

It is there he sees him. 

‘Sweetheart’, they say, and push him around, and he says nothing. A young man, caught in an old man’s body. Why’s that? 

Crowley (for this is what he likes to call himself, these days) disengages from the shadows, and his auburn hair burns like fire and curls like snakes, and the men shriek, and scramble. 

The wizard takes the old man’s hand into his, smiling benignly, and when he leads him away with him into the shadows, up the walls, and onto the roofs of the city, the young man gasps in delight. 

Crowley feels like a new adventure has spread its wings and is ready for take-off, much like a little fledgling, flapping its wings in the empty hollow of his chest. Ready to rise.

And as they step off the roof, Aziraphale, who looks first up, at velvet black wings, and then down, onto the town he has known all his life but has never seen like he sees it now, feels it too. 

[Yes, anon, I have thoughts.]

[lineffability]

For the three sentence fic thing, Ineffable husbands + coffee shop (yes I'm cliché)

Everything falls away: the hustle and bustle around him, the impatience and rush of working people and their daily trots and their general urgency of being at the next place right now and would you please hurry up, the smell of coffee and sugar and the pseudo relaxing music so adequately labelled as ‘coffee shop music’ by so many playlists on so many platforms designed solely to annoy him.

Crowley just looks at his nameless cup, a slow smile forming on his lips.

“Oh,” the barista says with a soft laugh as he catches his stare (he’s so calm, so impervious to the noise around him) and motions to the spot beside his ear, “I didn’t catch your name, so I just drew your tattoo?”

[lineffability]

Maybe Aziraphale/Crowley and space opera AU if you're feeling it? (Or wild west AU!)

[3 sentence fic–only to make it one, i have decided to not count the dialogue as sentences……dont question my life choices]

“Foul fiend! How did you get onto my ship?! And, and where are my pilots? Where are Adam and Eve??”

“Er…” The snake-like alien licked its lips, a slitted tongue darting out and disappearing just as quickly behind thin, bloodless lips. “Er. Well. Funny thing. See, it’s just the two of us, now. The two humans, uh, they… stole my ship? They’re gone.”

“The two of us… are alone… on the ship?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t eat you.”

“E-eat me?” His voice was faint, as if the thought had only just occured to him, this soft little human in his endearing space pyjamas. “Well, that’s good, then. The not-eating-me. But Adam and Eve… all alone, out there… will they be alright?”

“They abandoned you, and you’re wondering if they’ll be alright?” The curious narrowing of slitted eyes, a tentative step in his direction, then a slight softening. “Don’t worry, they took this flaming light-saber thingy. They’ll be fine. Just great, huh? Anyways, let’s just get this thing going; we need two people to drive the ship so I guess we’re lucky, and let’s just get to the nearest space dock and part ways and never talk about this again, all right?”

“Yes, well, uh. There’s just one problem…” The blond human coughed, and petted his stomach in embarassment, and Crowley thought he did not look like a space man at all, not like any human he had ever met in this century. “I don’t know how to drive it?”