(no subject)

[nny]

A collaboration between the wonderful copinggoggles, who provided the pictures, and myself. This is for linnpuzzle, with much love.

Inexcusable fluff, Good Omens, A/C implied.

When Crowley slept, it was the sleep of the dead. Motionless, curled tightly in the precise centre of his kingsize bed, in a nest of sheets and blankets and pillows. Sometimes he woke covered in a thin film of dust, but there was nothing like getting out of a toasty bed and slipping straight into a ridiculously hot shower. He always woke feeling good; perhaps it was because he never dreamed. Used them, certainly, in all manner of ways, but never had them. Perhaps he would have used them less ruthlessly if he had.

Aziraphale, on the other hand, slept the sleep of the blissfully innocent. Occasionally he shifted slightly, tilted his head to one side, smiled gently, slept on. Currently he was on his back, hands laced over his stomach. His left cheek was flushed and scored with lines from where it had, until recently, been pressed against the battered and vaguely brown cushion that Crowley had never hated quite so much, before.

Crowley was sitting at the table in the back room, in one of the angel's terribly old-fashioned ladder-backed chairs, his chin resting on one hand and a frown creasing his forehead. He'd been there long enough to have watched the way the dust motes that he never would have allowed in his spotless flat flared in the early afternoon sun, to have seen how the sunset shot Aziraphale's greying hair through with gold. He kept intending to move, but so far he hadn't quite managed to follow through. The feeling of 'should' never quite outweighed the subtly hynotic movement of folded hands as the angel breathed.

The copy of The Waste Lands he'd evidently been reading when he'd dropped off was tented on the floor by the sofa, and a pair of glasses that he couldn't possibly need had slipped down his nose. Crowley had bent to pick up the Eliot when he'd come in, that had been what started this. That and the way Aziraphale's eyes had blinked open muzzily, the way he'd smiled so happily when he'd seen Crowley, the way he'd dropped straight back off to sleep without a care in the world.

Hadn't they been mortal enemies, once? Crowley was almost certain that wasn't the way this was supposed to work.

So he'd taken a seat, to think about it. Only somewhere along the way he'd had to admit to himself that it wasn't thinking he was doing, at all. He was watching the angel sleep. And he didn't seem too inclined to stop. It was alright, he supposed, so long as the angel... ...was awake. Shit. His mind raced, trying to think up some sort of reasonable excuse, some cutting remark that'd put the angel in his place, sure enough - catch Crowley watching someone sleep, likely story, pull the other one - except the angel didn't look like he was going to laugh. Blue eyes just blinked at him, slowly, for a moment. And then the angel smiled, that slow happy smile that twisted something in Crowley's chest and made him feel like someone had let ants loose in his stomach.

"Are you going to gape at me all day, my dear, or are you going to make a fellow a cup of tea?" There was a new note in his voice, something Crowley hadn't heard before. It made him grin around his retort. "I'm not your ssservant, angel." But he got up, anyway, and walked over to the kitchen. And on the way, heart in his mouth, he dropped his hand to brush over the angel's hair. Just for a second.