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Crowley was watching the sunset when Aziraphale found him.
It had been a long month. Crowley had learned altogether too quickly why they called this place Tombstone, had seen more men shot and buried here than he had since the last time he’d seen war. But this was peacetime. There was no war to fight, only territorial disputes and financial disputes and you-slept-with-my-wife disputes, and they all ended in the crack of a Colt and a bullet in a chest and the spill of dark blood across the red, red sand.
Crowley hated being here. He should have been home in London with the damp and chill seeping into his bones, not here with dust in his lungs and a gun on his hip. But Beelzebub had said Go, and so Crowley had gone. He’d met Newman Clanton and his son Billy almost as soon as he’d arrived, and when he had, he’d known that his services weren’t much needed.
They were doing more than enough evil here all on their own.
Crowley didn’t have to lift a finger, and the bodies kept piling up. So did the gold, but that mattered less.
He’d done his time — a penance, a punishment, for Elspeth, for doing the right thing without hiding it — and when it was time for him to go home, he nearly jumped at the chance. But then he thought about going home, about having to sit across from Aziraphale and try to make light of the things he’d seen here (“Did you see what they got up to over there, angel? Forget the guns and the lawlessness, that’s the least of my worries. They all believe their white skin gives them some blessed right to be there.”), and he knew he couldn’t do that. Not yet.
And so he’d left Tombstone on horseback, because as hard as horses were on the buttocks and as much as he and all hooved creatures had a mutual disdain for each other, it was the way things were, here. He’d ridden into the desert, into a small valley between two red hills, and he lay with his hat on his chest and watched the sun set the sky on fire.
That was the one good thing about this place. The sunsets. They looked and felt almost like let there be light, like Creation, but it felt right to Crowley that the same colours were an ending out here. There were no grand beginnings in Tombstone, only fierce and violent ends.
The footfalls of a horse began to echo off the walls of the canyon. Over near an ironwood tree, Crowley’s own horse pricked up its ears, stopped chewing on a clump of dry grass for long enough to stamp and snort impatiently in Crowley’s direction.
Crowley didn’t move. Whoever they were, he didn’t mind if they found him here.
The sound of hoofbeats came closer and closer still, and when they stopped, Crowley shut his eyes.
“Go on and move along,” Crowley drawled, imitating the slow, drawling way that words slid from people’s lips in this part of the world. “Ain’t no one’s property out here. Let a man catch his rest in peace.”
There was a beat of silence, and Crowley listened for the click of a cocking gun, for the thud of boots on the ground, for the sharp smell of gunpowder. Nothing came.
And then a soft, fussy voice said “Crowley,” and Crowley sat up in a flurry of limbs, scrambling for his sunglasses, his spurs catching in the dirt beneath his heels.
Aziraphale was sitting astride a white horse, silhouetted in red dust and the golden light of the setting sun. He looked every bit the angel in a cream-coloured Stetson and clothes in varying shades of pale blue and sandy beige.
He should’ve been filthy. He wasn’t. It was as if the dust refused to settle on him, to ruin that perfect cleanliness. As if he was too holy, here in this earth-born hell, for even the dirt to lay a finger upon him.
Crowley knew what he looked like by comparison. There was dirt in rust-red patches on every piece of black clothing he wore, and sweat had dried white and crusty on the red bandana around his neck. He could feel the dust on his skin, the grime under his nails, knew there must be dead grass and small pebbles in the tangles of his hair. He looked like he belonged out here, or at least like he’d lived through it.
“Angel,” Crowley said, words no longer treacle-thick and long. It felt nice to sound like himself again.
“Can I join you?”
Crowley grunted an acknowledgement, then watched as Aziraphale dismounted and tied his horse to the same tree as Crowley’s, stroking its flank with the back of one well-manicured hand. Crowley kept watching as Aziraphale walked over and sat next to him, pushing the spurless heels of his own boots (made of a leather so light it was nearly white) into the ground.
They sat together in silence for several long moments, listening to the buzzing of flies and the chirping of crickets grow louder as the sun sank below the mountains. The sky had faded from orange to pink, and as Crowley watched, it cooled and darkened further still.
Eventually, Aziraphale said, “I heard rumours about you, you know. Up in Bisbee.”
“Mm.”
“A stranger with smoked glasses and bright red hair who rides a horse as black as night,” Aziraphale said with the ghost of a laugh. “Who else could it have been?”
Crowley said nothing. He laid back again, rested his hat once more against his chest.
“There’s talk of nearly everyone who runs with the Clantons, you know.”
“Wasn’t running with them by choice,” Crowley muttered. “Wasn’t really running with them at all. Just sort of hung around the right wrong people.”
“I know, Crowley.”
Aziraphale’s voice was soft but sure, laden with a kind of trust Crowley hadn’t ever been sure he’d deserved. It was the same trust that had been planted in Eden, that had blossomed in Uz. Aziraphale trusted that Crowley wouldn’t wilfully cause harm, which was a dangerous thing to believe of a demon.
Crowley turned his head to look over at Aziraphale. He was still sitting upright, unmoving from where he’d landed when he’d first taken a seat, and he was looking down at Crowley with lines of concern creasing his forehead.
Aziraphale looked like he wanted to say something else about the Clantons, about Crowley’s dealings with them, but he didn’t. Instead, he inclined his head toward the small creek a few metres away, and said, “This is a beautiful place, isn’t it?”
“S’pose so.”
“In its own way, of course. It’s very different from England.”
“Red,” Crowley agreed, “not green.”
Aziraphale huffed out a laugh. “And it’s dry, and the mountains are so sharp, don’t you think?”
“They’re newer than the ones back home.”
“Newer?”
Crowley gestured upward to the peaks over his head. “These were a last-minute addition. It had got a bit flat out here in the western bit of this continent, and someone tacked these on almost as an afterthought just before the start of it all. Didn’t have time to do the trimming and shaping, just whacked them in as-is.”
Aziraphale laughed again, still quiet and breathy.
“Kinda like ‘em this way, though,” Crowley said. “You’re right. Sharp. S’nice.”
“It is.”
They both fell silent again. Time slowed in the way that it always does in the quiet, seconds stretching sticky and long, minutes flowing like molasses. The sky was dark blue by the time either of them spoke again.
Aziraphale said, “You didn’t tell me you had business here.”
“I know.”
“I told you,” Aziraphale reminded him, as if it would have slipped Crowley’s mind. As though their every interaction wasn’t burned into the synapses of Crowley’s brain. “I said I’d be coming here. We could have, well. Arranged something.”
“I know,” Crowley said again.
“Why didn’t you, then?”
Crowley clenched his jaw, felt the uncomfortable squeaking grind of his teeth as they fought against the tension.
“Edinburgh,” Crowley said shortly. “Elspeth. Downstairs was, uh. Not happy with me, about that.”
It was an understatement of epic proportions. Hell doesn’t send rude notes, and all that.
“I remember you saying something to that effect,” Aziraphale said slowly. He looked briefly as though he was going to ask more questions, but he fell silent and set his hands behind him in the cooling sand, leaning back against them. He was still watching Crowley, eyes soft and wide.
“They sent me here to facilitate a massacre,” Crowley practically spat. Aziraphale flinched. “I’ve never been one to get my hands dirty. They know that, know I hate it. S’not properly demonic, that. So this was part of the price for what happened with Elspeth. Making me, y'know, remember whose side I’m supposed to be on.”
Aziraphale said, “I’m sorry, Crowley,” in a voice so gentle it almost got lost in the sound of the insects and the water, and Crowley stared at him.
“What?”
“I know you wouldn’t have done it,” Aziraphale swallowed thickly. “If you could have done anything else.”
Crowley didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
“I know you, Crowley.”
Know, Crowley understood, was not exactly the right word. It was not the word Aziraphale wanted to say. Same number of letters, a vowel in common, but they didn’t say the other word. Not out loud. Crowley had loved Aziraphale since Eden, and he knew by now that Aziraphale had felt the same for about half as long. But they never said it. They never had.
Crowley took a breath. It was shaky and wet.
“It would have happened anyway,” Crowley muttered around the lump in his throat. “Knew that as soon as I got here. They were thinking about it, planning it. Would’ve happened without me.”
But it happened when it did because of me, Crowley did not say.
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, “I rather think it would have.”
There was something about this shelter between the mountains, looming large and bathed in purple twilight, that made Crowley brave.
“I’d never have asked you to do this one, angel. Never.”
“No?”
Crowley shook his head. “Couldn’t, um. Hurt you like that. I wouldn’t do that to you. I won’t.”
Aziraphale said, “Oh, Crowley,” and then he reached across the divide between them and laid his hand on Crowley’s knee.
As a rule, they did not touch. There were the occasional accidental brushes of fingertips as they passed a wine bottle back and forth, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it knocks of their elbows as they walked together. In a graveyard in Edinburgh, there had been Aziraphale’s hand on Crowley’s waist to steady him, there one moment and gone the next. Crowley remembered all of them, had hoarded each one like a treasure and relived them all too many times to count.
There had never been intentional touches until now. Aziraphale’s hand was like a brand on Crowley’s knee, hot and new and a fucking five-fingered claim on Crowley’s body. Crowley wondered if it would leave a mark, even though he knew it wouldn’t. He wished it would.
Maybe the mountains were making Aziraphale brave, too.
“Do you ever think about being free?” Crowley asked, turning his gaze back to the sky. Waiting for the stars that his slit-pupiled eyes couldn’t see.
A beat, a breath, and then, “Yes.”
Which was blasphemy, probably, but then again, Aziraphale had been dabbling in that for millennia.
“Tell me,” said Crowley.
“Tell you?”
“What you’d do.”
Silence stretched between them again. It lasted so long this time that Crowley nearly took it as an answer, and he came very close to switching topics again to give Aziraphale an out.
“I think I’d be braver,” Aziraphale said quietly. “I’d do things I haven’t dared to, things I’ve wanted to do for ages.”
“Mm.”
“And I would like to travel to places I’ve never been without fear of being called away on assignment or being reprimanded for deserting my post.”
“Where?”
Aziraphale sighed, pensive. “Thailand, perhaps. Or Norway, maybe Iceland. Do you know, I’ve never seen the aurora borealis?”
“Never?”
“Not once.”
“Can see it in Scotland, if you get lucky on weather,” Crowley said. He’d seen the northern lights back in the late fifteenth century, alone on a mountain on the Isle of Skye. He had been captivated by them, had even danced along with them in a fit of absolute madness and joy, and when the lights had finally gone out, he’d found that he’d been crying. “I’d take you to see them, if we were free.”
Crowley caught the slip a moment too late, the substitution of we for I, and he froze. It was a bit too close to things they didn’t say.
“I would go with you,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley could hear the smile in it. “If we were able to do as we pleased.”
Crowley hummed an acknowledgement. Aziraphale’s hand was still resting on his knee, unmoving, as if Aziraphale hadn’t quite planned to put it there and wasn’t sure what to do about it now that he had.
Slowly, Crowley shifted his hand downwards and let it come to rest next to Aziraphale’s, the edges of their pinky fingers pressed together. Crowley could feel the cold metal of Aziraphale’s ring, the indents of the tiny carved feathers digging slightly into his skin.
Aziraphale sucked a breath through his teeth at the touch, but he still didn’t pull away.
“You said you’d be braver,” Crowley said, low and quick. “Do things you want to do. If you knew they weren’t watching.”
“Yes.”
Crowley exhaled forcefully, all of the air in his lungs leaving in a rush. He curled his pinky finger around Aziraphale’s and said, “Things like this?”
There was a stretch of silence long enough for several deep breaths, if either of them had been breathing.
“Yes,” Aziraphale said. It was hushed, like a secret. Like a confession.
Crowley was flayed open by it.
“It’s dark,” said Crowley. He could see in the dark — one of the very few perks of having the eyes of a snake — and so he could see when Aziraphale leaned toward him, confused at what must have been, to him, a nonsequitur.
“It is,” Aziraphale said slowly.
“They aren’t watching.”
Aziraphale shuddered. “You can’t know that.”
Crowley supposed that was true, somewhat. He couldn’t be certain. But he and Aziraphale had been in the same place at the same time in broad daylight dozens of times before, and no one from either Heaven or Hell had mentioned a thing.
If they were watching, Crowley reasoned, they would have done something by now.
“Worth the risk,” Crowley said, shrugging even though he knew Aziraphale couldn’t see it.
Aziraphale was shaking his head, muscles jumping in his jaw, but he didn’t pull his hand away just yet. “You could die. If they knew, Crowley. If they found out.”
“You could Fall,” Crowley shot back, and Aziraphale softened.
“No,” Aziraphale said, “I couldn’t.”
“You can’t know that.” An echo, softer in its repetition.
“I can.” Aziraphale did not have the eyes of a snake. He could not see in the dark. But he was leaning closer to Crowley, now, bending down, trying to meet Crowley’s eyes. “I would not Fall for this.”
There was subtext there, written in the language of silence that Crowley knew how to read. Love is not a sin, not a failing, not a choice.
Crowley could hear it again, that word they didn’t say, in the spaces between Aziraphale’s sentences and the soft breathing at the end of them.
The moon was starting to rise, its silver light a threat to this safety, this darkness. They were running out of time.
Crowley slid his fingers under Aziraphale’s and twined their hands together.
“Worth the risk,” he said again.
Aziraphale let out a very meaningful breath of air, and then he squeezed Crowley’s hand.
“You’d be brave enough to do this,” Crowley said. Talking for the sake of talking, afraid that the moon would rise faster, somehow, if he stopped. “If we were free.”
“I am trying,” Aziraphale said, trembling, “to be brave enough now.”
“You are brave, angel. You are.”
The sky was steadily lightening, going dark grey. Crowley would have stopped its path, would have frozen time for just long enough that they could have this, if it wouldn’t have set off every single alarm in Hell to do so.
“Angel,” Crowley said softly. Aziraphale’s hand was warm in his. “Is there anything— you said you’ve wanted. Do you want…” Crowley trailed off, the possible endings to that sentence getting tangled on his tongue. Do you want me? Do you want more? Do you want everything I have to offer? Because it’s yours, I’m yours, I am.
Aziraphale said, “Yes,” which didn’t make sense.
But then he was closer still to Crowley, half-lying on his side in this brutal desert sand, and Crowley could feel the warm puffs of Aziraphale’s breath on his lips, his nose, his chin.
Crowley wouldn’t do this, not unless he was sure. Unless he was sure Aziraphale was.
“What are you—”
“Crowley.” A breath. “Please.”
Not enough.
“Do you want me to—”
Aziraphale interrupted him again, which was just as well. Crowley wasn’t sure he’d be able to say it out loud. Yet another four-letter word that was impossible to say.
“Yes,” Aziraphale said.
Crowley shifted his face closer, brushed his nose against Aziraphale’s. Gave Aziraphale another chance to pull away, to change his mind.
And then Crowley kissed him, feather-light and dry as this damned desert. The briefest press of lips, and Crowley’s first.
It felt like waking up.
There was a moment where neither of them moved, and then Aziraphale’s hand wrenched free of Crowley’s grip. In the next instant, both of Aziraphale’s hands were on Crowley’s jaw and Crowley was being kissed again.
It was firmer this time. Aziraphale’s mouth was open against his, so Crowley responded in kind, moving his lips against Aziraphale’s in the hopes that he could quell their shaking. Because Aziraphale was shaking, quite violently now, as though he was freezing. An impossibility in this place.
Crowley thought about the first time Aziraphale had tried food, how he’d acted like he’d been starving for it. He’d devoured it, that new kind of pleasure, and he was devouring Crowley now. He was kissing Crowley like he was trying to carve out a place for himself between Crowley’s teeth, like he wanted to make a home on the tip of Crowley’s tongue. It was artless and inexperienced and beautiful and more than Crowley had ever dared to dream he might have, and Aziraphale wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Angel,” Crowley managed to say between kisses. His lips tingled, damp and swollen from the heat of Aziraphale’s mouth. “Are you okay? We can stop if you need, we don’t have to—”
“No,” Aziraphale said fiercely, and then he looked into Crowley’s eyes, and Crowley realised with a jolt that Aziraphale could see him.
Aziraphale realised it, too.
Above them, the mountains were awash in silver moonlight.
“Oh,” said Aziraphale.
Crowley said nothing. Aziraphale’s hands were still on both sides of his jaw, and there was a strand of Crowley’s hair tangled between his fingers.
And then Aziraphale leaned in again and kissed him once more, another dry press of lips, gone in an instant. There was light, they were exposed, and Aziraphale kissed him anyway.
Neither of them said much after that. Aziraphale’s hands fell away from Crowley’s face. There was distance between them once more. After several minutes, Aziraphale laid back on the sand, one of his saddle bags appearing under his head. He copied Crowley’s pose as he rested his hat on his belly and laced his fingers over the brim.
Crowley looked up at the moon, at the blank space around it that he knew was full of stars. He wondered which ones Aziraphale could see here, if they were different from the ones back home.
The mountains were still making Crowley brave, so he said, “Even if we don’t ever… y’know, again. You know, don’t you?”
It was a collection of words that meant nothing, but Aziraphale knew how to read silences, too.
You know that I love you.
“I know,” Aziraphale said. “I know.”
There was a slight pressure against the toe of Crowley’s boot. He looked down to find that Aziraphale had slid his leg across the gap between their bodies, had tipped his foot so that his boot was touching Crowley’s.
Just barely there, but there all the same. And that was enough for Crowley tonight.