Happy Holidays, Staubengel!
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go_exchangeTitle: The Other Thing With Feathers
Recipient: Staubengel
Author: [redacted]
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: T
Word count: about 3000
Summary: Staubengel, I meshed two of your prompts, to wind up with the aftermath of a traumatizing accidental bodyswap, and lots of focus on WINGS!!! Friends to lovers, bickering, weirdnesses, and very odd forms of intimacy. Title and last line pay homage to Emily Dickinson.
“How do . . . you . . . feel?” came the tentative ask.
Crowley stood up gingerly and looked down at himself. Once again he was the self he usually expected to see - lean, mean, and unusually bendy. He dusted off his black suit jacket, kicked out each foot carefully - snakeskin at the feet, just like there ought to be.
“All right, I guess. Everything seems to be in the right place again. You?”
Aziraphale paced carefully. He winced just a little as he remembered that his legs didn’t quite do all the things Crowley’s did. Well, if he’d have to have spent some time in Crowley’s form instead of his own, at least it was the one that had legs. Aziraphale couldn’t imagine his own spine quite being up to all that wriggling, even though it wouldn’t technically have been his own spine at all. “All seems to be in order.”
Crowley breathed a sigh of relief. “Have to say, there’s one thing about getting my own body back that’s a bit of a let-down.”
“Really?” Aziraphale said, poking at his own rather lumpier form.
“All your, ah…” Crowley gestured about his waist. “...extra…”
Aziraphale’s eyes almost made a sound when they narrowed.
“No, no, it’s nice!” Crowley yelped quickly. “It’s . . . ah, warm. Warmer than mine. On the inside.”
Aziraphale’s eyebrows almost made a sound when they arched. Crowley’s face almost made a sound when it flushed.
“I just mean . . . it’s comfortable. No need to take that badly,” Crowley said.
“I suppose it is, and I’m glad to have it back,” Aziraphale managed to say from between lips pressed tightly together.
***
“When you think about it, something good came out of it,” Aziraphale said carefully.
“It’s hardly my job for look for the bright side. You lot go in for that,” Crowley shot back. “And I’m not sure I like that tone of yours.”
“Well, it’s just that - I mean, it was dreadfully awkward, and I really did not appreciate having to bow and scrape to Dagon for one bloody second, but let’s consider this. We found it by accident. And now we know how to do it again if we have to.”
“Do it - again?” Crowley gulped. “You want me to listen to Michael’s incredibly tacky Deep Thoughts on interior design for another seventeen hours sometime? I felt years peeling off my immortality, angel. Centuries. And I had to convincingly pretend to be you, which means I had to sit there clashing with his sofa, and sipping weak tea with my pinky finger sticking out, and I had to leave crumbs behind, and . . . well to be honest I came away rather impressed with just how passive-aggressive you really are. I thought you learned it from, your people, and now I think maybe you were the one to teach Heaven how it’s done!”
“I’m sure there’s a compliment buried in there somewhere,” Aziraphale sniffed.
“See? There you go. You just did it again. Masterful!”
“It’s not that negotiating with the Lord of the Files was a walk in the park, my dear. Your people tend to be a bit more . . . aggressive-aggressive.”
“I think that’s part of the plan, isn’t it?” Crowley asked while not really asking.
“Well, I suppose the next time you . . . encounter . . . Duke Hastur, he’ll expect you to know quite a bit more about snuffbox collecting than I suspect you actually do, my dear, so one of these days it would behoove you to not shut me up about that.”
Crowley decided he was still much too sober for this.
***
“It’s just I still feel - unbalanced somehow,” Crowley muttered, several bottles in. “It isn’t that I’m too sober. Pretty sure I’m not. It’s just that - when I try to stand up, something doesn’t feel right.”
“You’ve only been back in your corpse, I mean corpus, I mean…”
“Corpulent?”
“Watch it!”
“Don’t you feel it too? Something around about the spine not pulling or pushing the way you’re used to?”
Aziraphale started to contradict this out of sheer force of habit, and then realised he had not actually tested anything in a long time, being too well sat in his favourite chair to push the issue. Wobbily, he rose to his feet, leaning more on the armrest than usual.
He swayed experimentally. “Dare I say, I think you might not be wrong.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to say I might be right?”
Aziraphale very nearly chuckled. “Well, you’ve caught me out.”
“I know for a fact I’m right,” Crowley said. “Something about us is not right. Not just yet.”
“I feel I’ve gone over myself well enough. Let me have a look at you.”
“You are looking at me.”
“Let me look at you more. Turn around.”
Crowley leered half-heartedly. “Six thousand years of excuses to look at my backside. You’re like a dog chasing the postman, someday you’re going to catch it and you won’t know what to do with it.”
“Can’t chase you if aren’t running, now can I?”
“Running wouldn’t be sporting. How about a leisurely slither?”
Aziraphale started to work up a mild seethe, and then, a twinge in his spine suggested to him the possible nature of the problem.
Oh no.
He really really hoped he was wrong, but he really really also thought that he wasn’t. “Crowley dear . . . I think you ought to take off your shirt.”
Crowley’s wineglass fell to the floor, and spent several seconds shattered before the demon managed to bring up his dropped jaw - which dropped farther than most people’s - and rein in his tongue, and remember to bring his glass back intact to his hand. “Thought you’d never ask,” he managed to stammer.
“Oh, don’t make a big production out of it,” Aziraphale snapped, as he turned his back away and started to unbutton his own. “The reason is that I know how much you hate it when they get torn. You say they’re never quite the same after. I’m afraid we really need to have a look at each other’s wings. Right now.”
“Wingssssss?” Crowley hissed with a crackling undertone of terror, his fangs briefly showing. “My wings feel fine . . . oh no. Oh no. They don’t, now that you point it out. They don’t feel fine, at all. Why did you have to point it out? Now I can’t stop thinking about it!” Panic contracted his pupils to slits.
“Right. I’m sure it will turn out all right. Whatever is wrong, we can put right again. Somehow. Anyway, best to know right now.”
“You first,” Crowley picked up the wine bottle and slugged back the rest of it, pre-emptively. Seeing Aziraphale’s wretched look, he re-filled it with a thought and tried to convince himself it wasn’t pity or generosity or consideration, it was...well, it was camaraderie at worst, no matter how bad he tried to spin it. And the more he spun it, the faster and blurrier it got.
“Oh no,” Aziraphale said, taking the bottle. “Thank you dear, you’re so kind,” he said, knowing that was probably actually an unkind thing to say, considering.
“Together then,” Crowley said. There was no flaming sword and no tyre iron this time, and no threat of imminent destruction either, but Crowley and Aziraphale had learned useful lessons about unity in resignation. Lately, they often read the racing forms and news about Brexit together in much that same spirit.
“One . . . two . . . -wait, move that stack of books out of the way, it’s too precarious and it’ll get knocked over - three.
****
The fossil record tells that the largest known flying land bird that ever lived, Argentavis magnificens, once stretched out its 20-24 foot wingspan over the mountains and plains of what is now southern South America, during the late Miocene.
As we know, fossil records are tricks played by particularly crafty minions of the Fallen One, who are in good enough graces to avoid all the really sweaty screamwork and get to spend most of their time playing dinosaurs. (At least up until the sudden but inevitable betrayal.)
The inspiration for the rather terrifying and predatory Giant Teratorn was very possibly the sensation felt by a very small demon when the vast shadow of immense wings fell over most of a valley, stretching far further than that of any of God’s reasonably-sized birds and evoking pure primal eldritch terror. Exposed beneath a passing angel, the sensation of cowering squirrel to overhead hawk cannot be avoided as a metaphor. Oh, angels might say “be not afraid” to the occasional human, but so far as we know, only one angel in the history of creation has ever said anything of the sort to a demon. Generally speaking, angels prefer their demons frightened, and the reverse of course also applies.
The wings of Argentavis magnificens were sufficient to support a mass that weighed about 140-150 lbs, designed as they were for soaring great distances in a warm, dry climate. We can therefore conjecture that the traumatised minion who came up with this design was probably not that far off base from the actual size of an angel’s wings, at least in the humanoid-with-two-wings form (as opposed to the humanoid-with-no-wings form or the WHAT-THE-FUCK-IS-THAT-oid form that can have infinite wings and eyes and heads or at least things that look like heads, wheels of fire optional). Though probably understating it a little, give or take a few feet here and there based on a given angel’s height, muscle mass, or addiction to pastry.
Another little-known fact is that the wings of demons are exactly the same as those of angels, though often better-groomed. (The bat-wing image is artistic license based primarily on one artist early in the Byzantine era having got a glimpse of one with a very unfortunate case of mange.) Pure white and pure black are also probably artistic inventions borne out of laziness - virtually every angel, Fallen or not, has their own distinct colour pattern, individual as a fingerprint.
And Aziraphale would have been relieved to see his own - his blending of blues and creams and tans and golds - had it not been emerging from the back of Crowley. Out of the corner of his own eye, he saw where his own bronze pinions should have been: and they were black and red and copper. Quite lovely, really. Better-groomed than his own, he’d have been ashamed to admit if he couldn’t hide his own laziness beneath disdain of the sin of vanity.
Crowley’s horrified wail and violent thrashing did indeed bring down a Babel-like tower of books, and Aziraphale didn’t open his eyes again until the crashing had abated and Crowley was done sneezing from the dust - and shedding a few feathers that should have been combed out years ago.
“Oh stop your shrieking,” Aziraphale snapped. “They work fine.”
“They don’t go with anything I’d wear,” Crowley. “And they’re a mess!”
Aziraphale flexed his - Crowley’s - wings experimentally. They were awfully sleek, and probably slimmer than they ought to be, like Crowley's mobile phone or his trousers. They suited Crowley - beautifully, he had to admit - and didn’t suit him at all. He still couldn’t help but take mild offense at Crowley’s absolute horror to be wearing Aziraphale’s.
Of course wings are very personal and a sudden switch, well, Aziraphale had never encountered in his reading anything of the sort happening before, so they were on uncharted ground here, but there was no call to carry on like that, was there? Crowley kept trying to snatch at the disordered primary coverts in ways that even he couldn’t quite bend enough to get at.
“Crowley, stop picking at them like that.”
“Don’t you ever groom them? They itch!”
“Well….er . . . um . . . how, though?”
“You don’t have a scratcher?”
“A what?”
Crowley huffed in exasperation and reached out with this thoughts for anything resembling it in Aziraphale’s shop that he could put to the task. The closest he could find was a sad-looking threadbare broom buried under brittle newspapers from the 1950s. Amazing, he thought ruefully. Adam really did restore everything.
Brandishing it, he muttered over it, and in his hand it turned into a strange apparatus that looked like a carved human hand with curled fingers. On a stick.
Aziraphale blushed, and to his misfortune, Crowley noticed, and snickered. “Whatever you think this is for, you’re dirtier-minded than the inventor. It’s for back scratching, and it’s good for feathers. Of course, I can still never quite reach the dead center. I have a . . . scratching post.”
“A what?”
Crowley took on a hangdog look. “Like for cats. I put a brush on it. And some pomade, to shine them up.”
“You mean you can’t just . . . think them clean?” Aziraphale asked, as if it had ever occurred to him before this moment.
“I could, I suppose. But it wouldn’t be the same. You’ve got to really do the work.”
“I suppose . . . well. . . wouldn’t it be easier if someone else did it for you? Like, a hairstylist?”
Crowley was clearly taken aback and doing his best to hide it. Something sweet and hopeful poked out like an unrealistically cute garden creature, and then slithered back down behind the thin sardonic facade. “Bit forward there, don’t you think?”
“At your back, more honestly. I mean, if I’m going to be having your wings until we set this right . . . you want to teach me how to take good care of them, don’t you?”
“You’re really extremely manipulative, did I ever tell you that?” Crowley said with a whiff of admiration.
“All the time, my dear. And you can be very sweet.”
“No need for that. All right then. Bit weird, keeping my back to an angel this long. Bear with me.”
“Crowley, you slept on my floor for thirty years once. If I wanted to do you harm, I’d have done it.”
“Point taken. Just a bit - er - intimate, that’s all.” Crowley shivered as Aziraphale leaned in and ran a hand carefully through his feathers. (Aziraphale’s feathers really, but ownership of each pair of wings was in a state of limbo at the moment.)
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, and a shadow of his breath ruffled the soft tan down of the scapulars. “Let me know if it’s too much. I’ll start with a bit of combing, then? With this scratcher thing?”
Crowley nodded, and the sounds he was making once Aziraphale started weren’t quite words exactly. More like exactly the kind of sound a large snake would make if snakes could purr. The wings shivered and fluttered at his touch, and the immense flight primaries pointed out like splayed fingers. Watching his own wings respond this way - rather showy, one feels - prodded thoughts in Aziraphale that he could only barely remember having felt before and nearly always in the presence of Crowley.
They weren’t exactly sexual thoughts, he told himself, because he was an angel and angels didn’t have those - but if an angel did, these probably were exactly like the kind of sexual thoughts an angel would have.
Aziraphale was also certain that some demons did, but Crowley had never really seemed like that type of sin was his specialty or anything, so he hesitated to interpret those really very carnal-sounding noises that came out of his chest with each massaging tug and each plucked spent feather in that fashion.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked.
“Oh no, no,” Crowley moaned as Aziraphale spread out each of his secondary coverts and primary coverts, airing them out and then bringing them back together.
Aziraphale had to admit, the well-combed and massaged look of them, the oil glands giving a velvety sheen that looked fresh-moulted, well, that certainly was an improvement. And so was the very strange way Crowley went rigid all through his rippling spine and then yelped and then sighed.
“What was that?” Aziraphale asked.
“It certainly wasn’t pain, that’s for sure,” Crowley said.
“Oh dear.”
“Yes, I think we’re trying something new here. New for us anyway. Certainly not for the world or anything.”
“Oh. Well. It’s nice to know that we still can, isn’t it? After all these years.”
“After all these years, yes. Now turn around and let me do you. That finish needs maintenance. And that sensation - well, that really was something, and if it doesn’t make you squawk like a chicken because it’s inappropriate, I think you’ll rather like it.”
***
It wasn’t long until Crowley’s wings were as well-groomed as they’d ever been, although they were not the same wings they’d always been. The colours didn’t clash with basic black, or matte black, or satin black, or even Vantablack so Crowley’s style was really not that badly compromised in the long run.
Aziraphale liked to think his had some panache, and he thought if he stared at them cross-eyed long enough in the mirror, those red-and-copper lines started to look a little less Midcentury Modern and something slightly closer to tartan. They tended to run scruffy, because that made Crowley feel agitated, and then Crowley would calm himself by grooming Aziraphale and Aziraphale rather liked that. Crowley was absolutely right about how manipulative Aziraphale could be, and Aziraphale was pleased to note that Crowley played along with his eyes wide open (since he so rarely blinked). If someone’s going to have your back, they ought to know what you’ve been hiding behind it. And he did, the old serpent.
And if they never quite managed to recreate the exact circumstances that had bodyswapped them in the first place, nor the exact ones that had brought them back to themselves almost completely - it had something to do with a circle on the floor and a shaft of blue light from Heaven crossed by a blue police box floating in space at the exact same moment Crowley’s superiors had tried to commandeer Freddie Mercury’s voice at the exact same moment the actual Freddie Mercury had got his wings, so to speak, as a powerful public egregore once again - well, having a bit of each other intermingled wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to happen to them.
There was nothing Crowley liked better than to take a nice long nap on the sofa after a long flight together, feeling Aziraphale drinking wine beside him and idly stroking each sleek pinion as he turned the pages of an ancient book - singing the tune without the words, and never stopping at all.
Recipient: Staubengel
Author: [redacted]
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: T
Word count: about 3000
Summary: Staubengel, I meshed two of your prompts, to wind up with the aftermath of a traumatizing accidental bodyswap, and lots of focus on WINGS!!! Friends to lovers, bickering, weirdnesses, and very odd forms of intimacy. Title and last line pay homage to Emily Dickinson.
“How do . . . you . . . feel?” came the tentative ask.
Crowley stood up gingerly and looked down at himself. Once again he was the self he usually expected to see - lean, mean, and unusually bendy. He dusted off his black suit jacket, kicked out each foot carefully - snakeskin at the feet, just like there ought to be.
“All right, I guess. Everything seems to be in the right place again. You?”
Aziraphale paced carefully. He winced just a little as he remembered that his legs didn’t quite do all the things Crowley’s did. Well, if he’d have to have spent some time in Crowley’s form instead of his own, at least it was the one that had legs. Aziraphale couldn’t imagine his own spine quite being up to all that wriggling, even though it wouldn’t technically have been his own spine at all. “All seems to be in order.”
Crowley breathed a sigh of relief. “Have to say, there’s one thing about getting my own body back that’s a bit of a let-down.”
“Really?” Aziraphale said, poking at his own rather lumpier form.
“All your, ah…” Crowley gestured about his waist. “...extra…”
Aziraphale’s eyes almost made a sound when they narrowed.
“No, no, it’s nice!” Crowley yelped quickly. “It’s . . . ah, warm. Warmer than mine. On the inside.”
Aziraphale’s eyebrows almost made a sound when they arched. Crowley’s face almost made a sound when it flushed.
“I just mean . . . it’s comfortable. No need to take that badly,” Crowley said.
“I suppose it is, and I’m glad to have it back,” Aziraphale managed to say from between lips pressed tightly together.
***
“When you think about it, something good came out of it,” Aziraphale said carefully.
“It’s hardly my job for look for the bright side. You lot go in for that,” Crowley shot back. “And I’m not sure I like that tone of yours.”
“Well, it’s just that - I mean, it was dreadfully awkward, and I really did not appreciate having to bow and scrape to Dagon for one bloody second, but let’s consider this. We found it by accident. And now we know how to do it again if we have to.”
“Do it - again?” Crowley gulped. “You want me to listen to Michael’s incredibly tacky Deep Thoughts on interior design for another seventeen hours sometime? I felt years peeling off my immortality, angel. Centuries. And I had to convincingly pretend to be you, which means I had to sit there clashing with his sofa, and sipping weak tea with my pinky finger sticking out, and I had to leave crumbs behind, and . . . well to be honest I came away rather impressed with just how passive-aggressive you really are. I thought you learned it from, your people, and now I think maybe you were the one to teach Heaven how it’s done!”
“I’m sure there’s a compliment buried in there somewhere,” Aziraphale sniffed.
“See? There you go. You just did it again. Masterful!”
“It’s not that negotiating with the Lord of the Files was a walk in the park, my dear. Your people tend to be a bit more . . . aggressive-aggressive.”
“I think that’s part of the plan, isn’t it?” Crowley asked while not really asking.
“Well, I suppose the next time you . . . encounter . . . Duke Hastur, he’ll expect you to know quite a bit more about snuffbox collecting than I suspect you actually do, my dear, so one of these days it would behoove you to not shut me up about that.”
Crowley decided he was still much too sober for this.
***
“It’s just I still feel - unbalanced somehow,” Crowley muttered, several bottles in. “It isn’t that I’m too sober. Pretty sure I’m not. It’s just that - when I try to stand up, something doesn’t feel right.”
“You’ve only been back in your corpse, I mean corpus, I mean…”
“Corpulent?”
“Watch it!”
“Don’t you feel it too? Something around about the spine not pulling or pushing the way you’re used to?”
Aziraphale started to contradict this out of sheer force of habit, and then realised he had not actually tested anything in a long time, being too well sat in his favourite chair to push the issue. Wobbily, he rose to his feet, leaning more on the armrest than usual.
He swayed experimentally. “Dare I say, I think you might not be wrong.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to say I might be right?”
Aziraphale very nearly chuckled. “Well, you’ve caught me out.”
“I know for a fact I’m right,” Crowley said. “Something about us is not right. Not just yet.”
“I feel I’ve gone over myself well enough. Let me have a look at you.”
“You are looking at me.”
“Let me look at you more. Turn around.”
Crowley leered half-heartedly. “Six thousand years of excuses to look at my backside. You’re like a dog chasing the postman, someday you’re going to catch it and you won’t know what to do with it.”
“Can’t chase you if aren’t running, now can I?”
“Running wouldn’t be sporting. How about a leisurely slither?”
Aziraphale started to work up a mild seethe, and then, a twinge in his spine suggested to him the possible nature of the problem.
Oh no.
He really really hoped he was wrong, but he really really also thought that he wasn’t. “Crowley dear . . . I think you ought to take off your shirt.”
Crowley’s wineglass fell to the floor, and spent several seconds shattered before the demon managed to bring up his dropped jaw - which dropped farther than most people’s - and rein in his tongue, and remember to bring his glass back intact to his hand. “Thought you’d never ask,” he managed to stammer.
“Oh, don’t make a big production out of it,” Aziraphale snapped, as he turned his back away and started to unbutton his own. “The reason is that I know how much you hate it when they get torn. You say they’re never quite the same after. I’m afraid we really need to have a look at each other’s wings. Right now.”
“Wingssssss?” Crowley hissed with a crackling undertone of terror, his fangs briefly showing. “My wings feel fine . . . oh no. Oh no. They don’t, now that you point it out. They don’t feel fine, at all. Why did you have to point it out? Now I can’t stop thinking about it!” Panic contracted his pupils to slits.
“Right. I’m sure it will turn out all right. Whatever is wrong, we can put right again. Somehow. Anyway, best to know right now.”
“You first,” Crowley picked up the wine bottle and slugged back the rest of it, pre-emptively. Seeing Aziraphale’s wretched look, he re-filled it with a thought and tried to convince himself it wasn’t pity or generosity or consideration, it was...well, it was camaraderie at worst, no matter how bad he tried to spin it. And the more he spun it, the faster and blurrier it got.
“Oh no,” Aziraphale said, taking the bottle. “Thank you dear, you’re so kind,” he said, knowing that was probably actually an unkind thing to say, considering.
“Together then,” Crowley said. There was no flaming sword and no tyre iron this time, and no threat of imminent destruction either, but Crowley and Aziraphale had learned useful lessons about unity in resignation. Lately, they often read the racing forms and news about Brexit together in much that same spirit.
“One . . . two . . . -wait, move that stack of books out of the way, it’s too precarious and it’ll get knocked over - three.
****
The fossil record tells that the largest known flying land bird that ever lived, Argentavis magnificens, once stretched out its 20-24 foot wingspan over the mountains and plains of what is now southern South America, during the late Miocene.
As we know, fossil records are tricks played by particularly crafty minions of the Fallen One, who are in good enough graces to avoid all the really sweaty screamwork and get to spend most of their time playing dinosaurs. (At least up until the sudden but inevitable betrayal.)
The inspiration for the rather terrifying and predatory Giant Teratorn was very possibly the sensation felt by a very small demon when the vast shadow of immense wings fell over most of a valley, stretching far further than that of any of God’s reasonably-sized birds and evoking pure primal eldritch terror. Exposed beneath a passing angel, the sensation of cowering squirrel to overhead hawk cannot be avoided as a metaphor. Oh, angels might say “be not afraid” to the occasional human, but so far as we know, only one angel in the history of creation has ever said anything of the sort to a demon. Generally speaking, angels prefer their demons frightened, and the reverse of course also applies.
The wings of Argentavis magnificens were sufficient to support a mass that weighed about 140-150 lbs, designed as they were for soaring great distances in a warm, dry climate. We can therefore conjecture that the traumatised minion who came up with this design was probably not that far off base from the actual size of an angel’s wings, at least in the humanoid-with-two-wings form (as opposed to the humanoid-with-no-wings form or the WHAT-THE-FUCK-IS-THAT-oid form that can have infinite wings and eyes and heads or at least things that look like heads, wheels of fire optional). Though probably understating it a little, give or take a few feet here and there based on a given angel’s height, muscle mass, or addiction to pastry.
Another little-known fact is that the wings of demons are exactly the same as those of angels, though often better-groomed. (The bat-wing image is artistic license based primarily on one artist early in the Byzantine era having got a glimpse of one with a very unfortunate case of mange.) Pure white and pure black are also probably artistic inventions borne out of laziness - virtually every angel, Fallen or not, has their own distinct colour pattern, individual as a fingerprint.
And Aziraphale would have been relieved to see his own - his blending of blues and creams and tans and golds - had it not been emerging from the back of Crowley. Out of the corner of his own eye, he saw where his own bronze pinions should have been: and they were black and red and copper. Quite lovely, really. Better-groomed than his own, he’d have been ashamed to admit if he couldn’t hide his own laziness beneath disdain of the sin of vanity.
Crowley’s horrified wail and violent thrashing did indeed bring down a Babel-like tower of books, and Aziraphale didn’t open his eyes again until the crashing had abated and Crowley was done sneezing from the dust - and shedding a few feathers that should have been combed out years ago.
“Oh stop your shrieking,” Aziraphale snapped. “They work fine.”
“They don’t go with anything I’d wear,” Crowley. “And they’re a mess!”
Aziraphale flexed his - Crowley’s - wings experimentally. They were awfully sleek, and probably slimmer than they ought to be, like Crowley's mobile phone or his trousers. They suited Crowley - beautifully, he had to admit - and didn’t suit him at all. He still couldn’t help but take mild offense at Crowley’s absolute horror to be wearing Aziraphale’s.
Of course wings are very personal and a sudden switch, well, Aziraphale had never encountered in his reading anything of the sort happening before, so they were on uncharted ground here, but there was no call to carry on like that, was there? Crowley kept trying to snatch at the disordered primary coverts in ways that even he couldn’t quite bend enough to get at.
“Crowley, stop picking at them like that.”
“Don’t you ever groom them? They itch!”
“Well….er . . . um . . . how, though?”
“You don’t have a scratcher?”
“A what?”
Crowley huffed in exasperation and reached out with this thoughts for anything resembling it in Aziraphale’s shop that he could put to the task. The closest he could find was a sad-looking threadbare broom buried under brittle newspapers from the 1950s. Amazing, he thought ruefully. Adam really did restore everything.
Brandishing it, he muttered over it, and in his hand it turned into a strange apparatus that looked like a carved human hand with curled fingers. On a stick.
Aziraphale blushed, and to his misfortune, Crowley noticed, and snickered. “Whatever you think this is for, you’re dirtier-minded than the inventor. It’s for back scratching, and it’s good for feathers. Of course, I can still never quite reach the dead center. I have a . . . scratching post.”
“A what?”
Crowley took on a hangdog look. “Like for cats. I put a brush on it. And some pomade, to shine them up.”
“You mean you can’t just . . . think them clean?” Aziraphale asked, as if it had ever occurred to him before this moment.
“I could, I suppose. But it wouldn’t be the same. You’ve got to really do the work.”
“I suppose . . . well. . . wouldn’t it be easier if someone else did it for you? Like, a hairstylist?”
Crowley was clearly taken aback and doing his best to hide it. Something sweet and hopeful poked out like an unrealistically cute garden creature, and then slithered back down behind the thin sardonic facade. “Bit forward there, don’t you think?”
“At your back, more honestly. I mean, if I’m going to be having your wings until we set this right . . . you want to teach me how to take good care of them, don’t you?”
“You’re really extremely manipulative, did I ever tell you that?” Crowley said with a whiff of admiration.
“All the time, my dear. And you can be very sweet.”
“No need for that. All right then. Bit weird, keeping my back to an angel this long. Bear with me.”
“Crowley, you slept on my floor for thirty years once. If I wanted to do you harm, I’d have done it.”
“Point taken. Just a bit - er - intimate, that’s all.” Crowley shivered as Aziraphale leaned in and ran a hand carefully through his feathers. (Aziraphale’s feathers really, but ownership of each pair of wings was in a state of limbo at the moment.)
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, and a shadow of his breath ruffled the soft tan down of the scapulars. “Let me know if it’s too much. I’ll start with a bit of combing, then? With this scratcher thing?”
Crowley nodded, and the sounds he was making once Aziraphale started weren’t quite words exactly. More like exactly the kind of sound a large snake would make if snakes could purr. The wings shivered and fluttered at his touch, and the immense flight primaries pointed out like splayed fingers. Watching his own wings respond this way - rather showy, one feels - prodded thoughts in Aziraphale that he could only barely remember having felt before and nearly always in the presence of Crowley.
They weren’t exactly sexual thoughts, he told himself, because he was an angel and angels didn’t have those - but if an angel did, these probably were exactly like the kind of sexual thoughts an angel would have.
Aziraphale was also certain that some demons did, but Crowley had never really seemed like that type of sin was his specialty or anything, so he hesitated to interpret those really very carnal-sounding noises that came out of his chest with each massaging tug and each plucked spent feather in that fashion.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked.
“Oh no, no,” Crowley moaned as Aziraphale spread out each of his secondary coverts and primary coverts, airing them out and then bringing them back together.
Aziraphale had to admit, the well-combed and massaged look of them, the oil glands giving a velvety sheen that looked fresh-moulted, well, that certainly was an improvement. And so was the very strange way Crowley went rigid all through his rippling spine and then yelped and then sighed.
“What was that?” Aziraphale asked.
“It certainly wasn’t pain, that’s for sure,” Crowley said.
“Oh dear.”
“Yes, I think we’re trying something new here. New for us anyway. Certainly not for the world or anything.”
“Oh. Well. It’s nice to know that we still can, isn’t it? After all these years.”
“After all these years, yes. Now turn around and let me do you. That finish needs maintenance. And that sensation - well, that really was something, and if it doesn’t make you squawk like a chicken because it’s inappropriate, I think you’ll rather like it.”
***
It wasn’t long until Crowley’s wings were as well-groomed as they’d ever been, although they were not the same wings they’d always been. The colours didn’t clash with basic black, or matte black, or satin black, or even Vantablack so Crowley’s style was really not that badly compromised in the long run.
Aziraphale liked to think his had some panache, and he thought if he stared at them cross-eyed long enough in the mirror, those red-and-copper lines started to look a little less Midcentury Modern and something slightly closer to tartan. They tended to run scruffy, because that made Crowley feel agitated, and then Crowley would calm himself by grooming Aziraphale and Aziraphale rather liked that. Crowley was absolutely right about how manipulative Aziraphale could be, and Aziraphale was pleased to note that Crowley played along with his eyes wide open (since he so rarely blinked). If someone’s going to have your back, they ought to know what you’ve been hiding behind it. And he did, the old serpent.
And if they never quite managed to recreate the exact circumstances that had bodyswapped them in the first place, nor the exact ones that had brought them back to themselves almost completely - it had something to do with a circle on the floor and a shaft of blue light from Heaven crossed by a blue police box floating in space at the exact same moment Crowley’s superiors had tried to commandeer Freddie Mercury’s voice at the exact same moment the actual Freddie Mercury had got his wings, so to speak, as a powerful public egregore once again - well, having a bit of each other intermingled wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to happen to them.
There was nothing Crowley liked better than to take a nice long nap on the sofa after a long flight together, feeling Aziraphale drinking wine beside him and idly stroking each sleek pinion as he turned the pages of an ancient book - singing the tune without the words, and never stopping at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-07 04:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-10 12:38 am (UTC)