Technical Difficulties, a gift for conjure_lass!

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Title: Technical Difficulties
Recipient: conjure_lass
Author: irisbleufic
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 2,000
Author's Notes: The prompt of yours I went with, dear recipient, goes something like this—Long distance fail!sex involving Crowley, Aziraphale, and their respective webcams; lots of laughter and good humor, please. Thank you for this delightful opportunity, and Happy Holidays! I enjoyed this immensely, and I hope they did, too.
Summary: Sometimes carpe diem doesn't begin to cover it.


“How's that?” Crowley asked, angling the desk-lamp. “Less grainy, more grainy? Kind of crap, but nonetheless acceptable?”

“Muddled,” Aziraphale confessed. “Not as sharp as it should be.”

Crowley fiddled with the webcam's focus next, studying his own image on the screen where it hovered next to Aziraphale's feed. Briefly, he experienced an unpleasant flashback to his ash-smudged reflection in the Bentley's rear-view mirror. That's behind you now, he told himself, might as well be forever ago, smiling apologetically at Aziraphale.

He minimized his feed to the task-bar and ventured, “Better?”

“You look a bit peaked,” said Aziraphale. “Is everything all right? No emergencies, I trust?”

“No, nothing of the sort,” Crowley reassured him, adjusting the volume so that Aziraphale's voice came through the speakers as more than a faint murmur. “The phone hasn't rung since you left.”

“You haven't got the land-line unplugged, have you?”

“No, angel. And my mobile's right here, see?”

Aziraphale squinted and adjusted the feed on his end, resulting in a moment of comically blurred features. “You got bored and went shopping,” he said. “Which model is that?”

“It's an iPhone 4S,” Crowley muttered, tapping through screens till he'd got out of iTunes, and deleted a few errant texts from Anathema (she seemed to be under the erroneous impression that his brainstorming abilities were a suitable substitute for Aziraphale's). “Sixty-four gigs. Doesn't come close to holding my entire music library, but that's a start. I won't touch the 5.”

“Nothing's been quite the same since Jobs passed, or so I'm told,” Aziraphale said.

“Your lot must have got him,” Crowley mused, setting the phone aside with care on top of Aziraphale's sudoku books. “I bet he was in for a nasty surprise when Gabriel unveiled his plans for a network overhaul. Enough to make him wish he'd been less virtuous.”

“I don't know about him, but we'll certainly get Gates,” Aziraphale replied.

“Charitable giving is all well and good, but does it make up for Windows Vista?”

“Come now, my dear. I'd say he more than redeemed himself with XP, 7, and 8.”

“For what it's worth, you're still running XP,” Crowley said, quickly nosing into Aziraphale's My Computer folder. “Conveniently forgot to upgrade this time, did you?”

“What about your philosophy of not fixing something if it isn't broken?”

“Oh, fine. Rub it in,” Crowley sighed. “Bloody PC users.”

“Where's your MacBook got off to, then? More battery woes, one fears.”

“Charging in the bedroom. Don't look at me like that!”

Aziraphale smirked at him, teasingly affectionate.

There it was, a sharp twist in the gut: Crowley missed him.

"Where are your kind hosts tonight?" he asked.

"Out," said Aziraphale. "There's a trendy night-club several blocks from here. It's not—how do you put it? Not my scene."

“You probably would've enjoyed the cocktails,” Crowley replied. “Why didn't you go?”

“They'd left the desktop booted up, Skype and all. You were logged in, so I thought—”

“For the record, I was playing Minesweeper and contemplating a de-frag. You've accrued so much spyware it isn't even funny. How's Apple sounding to you now, eh?”

“I'd rather spend time with you than while away another night drinking.”

“Ah,” Crowley said, lowering his eyes. “Out for the evening, you say?”

“I wouldn't expect them till dawn,” said Aziraphale, encouragingly.

Crowley rose and drew the curtains, and then sat back down again.

“What time is it over there now? I'm fuzzy on how many hours behind you are.”

“It's just turning nine o'clock. What time is it at home? I'm not entirely clear, either.”

“Almost five in the morning,” Crowley said, idly tugging off his socks.

“Good gracious,” said Aziraphale. “Why aren't you asleep?”

“Couldn't,” Crowley replied, shrugging. “So I came out here.”

“Poor love. Seems to me you could use a little wearing out.”

Crowley felt his cheeks heat, but he couldn't help grinning. He hadn't miscalculated his offhand remark upon how long Aziraphale's hosts planned to stay out. However mystifying he'd found it initially, he'd finally got the seduction game down pat—at least where Aziraphale was concerned, and, quite frankly, that was the only place it mattered.

“There's a first time for everything,” he said, untying the belt of Aziraphale's dressing-gown. He'd thrown it on over his pyjamas, because the cottage was rather chilly in the early morning hours this time of year. Aziraphale watched intently as he shrugged it off his shoulders and plucked at his t-shirt. “Although I don't know if skipping the phone and going straight for cyber-sex is advisable.”

“Would you rather we logged off? I could just ring you,” Aziraphale suggested, his voice somewhat muffled, as he was already struggling out of his slipover jumper. For a moment, Crowley found the style-choice baffling given that Aziraphale was currently in a warmer part of the world, but he supposed cold wind and rain weren't unusual even there during winter. “That way,” the angel continued, “you could just nip off back to bed and get comfortable.”

“No, that's all right,” Crowley heard himself saying as he watched Aziraphale discard the slipover somewhere off-camera. He'd scooted the chair he was occupying back just far enough from the desk to give Crowley a decent view from his lap upward, and Crowley supposed he'd better do the same if they expected this to work. He pushed back what he hoped was a reasonable distance, not too far for visibility's sake, and took off his t-shirt. He dropped it on the floor, blinked, and brushed the hair out of his eyes.

Aziraphale had paused in the middle of unbuttoning his shirt to watch.

“Makes multi-tasking a bit difficult, doesn't it, having to watch the screen in addition to stripping off?” he asked, proceeding with the buttons without looking down. “Move a bit closer.”

Crowley scooted his chair forward a fraction, suddenly self-conscious.

“Can you still see...er, well, down below?” he asked, hooking one thumb beneath the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, and then thought better of it. He unbuttoned the flies instead, but let the dark flannel stay where it was, stroking himself once through the fabric. His nerve-endings sparked as his eyes drifted up to the screen; Aziraphale, newly shirtless, was watching his every move.

“Yes. And you're every bit as much the prick-tease I'd expected.”

“What does that mean?” Crowley asked, leaning forward in his chair to jab a finger at the webcam. “Eight years of sharing my bed and, I don't know, you'd somehow failed to notice?”

Aziraphale sighed and casually reached down to unzip his trousers, which were...ah. Already visibly strained, and there was the tell-tale flush from chest to belly, too. Crowley's mouth went slightly dry; even as worn and yielding as they were, his pyjama bottoms suddenly seemed far too restrictive. I'd be in his lap by now, Crowley thought, brushing the unfastened flap aside in order to give Aziraphale some idea of just how much he was beginning to appreciate this.

“It means you're every bit as much a tease as I'd expect you to be in this particular medium,” Aziraphale clarified, his voice satisfyingly hoarse. “Simply put, you don't disappoint. Of course, you'd be in my lap by now—”

Crowley let out a breathy laugh and stroked himself so Aziraphale could see he hadn't bothered with the usual shorts under his pyjamas, dimly aware that his left hand had the arm of the chair in a vise-grip.

“That's a relief, then,” he said, “because I really, ah, really wouldn't want to waste your...”

He lost the thread of what he'd been saying, not least because he couldn't drag his eyes away from Aziraphale simultaneously trying to watch him and shimmy out of his trousers. Just over five thousand miles away, someone else's desk-chair was squeaking and doing its best to scoot out from under Aziraphale's arse while he got undressed. It was funnier than it ought to have been.

“Why don't you try it, Crowley, since you're so keen?” said Aziraphale, huffily, situating himself back in the chair wearing nothing but sedately striped cotton boxers and a pair of argyle socks. He didn't do simultaneously-turned-on-and-irritated terribly well.

Still, Crowley found the entire situation just as hot as it was ridiculous.

“Shortcut,” said Crowley, standing to get rid of his pyjama bottoms. “Much easier,” he explained, knowing that everything above his waist was now cut out of the feed, “and you get a bit of a close-up while I'm at it.” He dropped the garment and paused for a moment, steadying himself with one hand on the edge of the desk. Aziraphale was staring glassy-eyed at...well, at whatever he could see, and Crowley didn't doubt that was mostly everything between his thighs and his bellybutton. He palmed the head of his cock and hissed at the contact; he was already hypersensitive, his body eagerly expecting any number of the things that usually came next.

Only none of those things were going to happen, given Aziraphale's physical absence.

“Sit down, please,” said Aziraphale, breathlessly. “I can't see your face.”

Crowley took one shaky step backward and did exactly as he was told. The lacquered wood felt strange under his backside, and while he hoped there weren't any splinters ripe for catching, he also found that he didn't particularly care. What mattered most was the fact that Aziraphale had taken off his socks and was lifting his hips just enough to make getting rid of his shorts easier. Seeing Aziraphale stark naked on a computer screen was...strange. The thought that he was sitting in a house that belonged to a pair of the most shameless voyeurs either of them knew made the situation ten times worse—and, somehow, that much more compelling.

“Can you see me now?” he asked once the angel had got situated.

“Yes,” Aziraphale sighed, both hands restless on his thighs, but the dithering gesture didn't last for long. Eyes fixed on the camera, he curled his left hand around his erection, by now in the same desperate condition as Crowley. His eyes slid shut at the touch, and while it would have been easy to tell him not to do that, to focus, Crowley bit his lip and mirrored the action on himself.

“You'd better wish it was me,” he said, voice faltering as he stroked. “I wish this was you.”

Aziraphale's eyes flew open; it had been the right thing to say, but at absolutely the wrong time. Crowley watched, dumb-struck with fierce fascination and even fiercer desire, as Aziraphale leaned forward to brace himself against the desk and, with a few more unsteady thrusts into his fist, come with a sharp, silent gasp. His own pace faltered a little even as he felt his own climax gathering; the urge to reach out was even stronger than the urge to watch, but what could he have touched except for dense, pixel-lit glass?

What he ached for was a kiss—

He came with one palm braced flat against the monitor and his eyes shut tight.

The white noise cleared eventually, giving way to Aziraphale's voice.

“...at me, my dear,” he was saying gently. “Look at me.”

Crowley swallowed thickly and opened his eyes, letting his hand drop to the desk.

“I don't know about you,” said Aziraphale, already mopping at himself with a handful of tissues, “but I could really use a cigarette.”

“Only if you don't mind this place smelling like smoke when you get back,” Crowley replied, leaning bonelessly forward to rest on his elbows. “Five more days. Can't you leave early?”

“You could've tagged along,” Aziraphale reminded him. “The invitation was open.”

“I know,” Crowley said, clearing the mess he'd left on the chair and on the floor with one distracted thought. “But someone had to stay behind this time. Just in case.”

“Give them all my best,” Aziraphale replied. “I hope Anathema hasn't pestered you horribly.”

“Just a touch,” Crowley said with a wry, tired grin. “Newt's blown something up. First time that's happened in ages, of course, so it's understandably given her a fright.”

“Sleep for a while, my love,” Aziraphale said. “I'll be back before you know it.”

“Three or four days ought to suffice,” said Crowley, yawning. “Don't mind if I do.”


—Continue: And Pardon'd the Deceiver—