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There was someone at the door.
Not at all unusual for a Tuesday at 9 AM on a busy street in Soho, it was a work day after all, but it was perhaps a bit unusual for him— because he’d been asleep.
He still was not quite used to the habit of it: the strange languidness of muscles that had lain mostly inert for any number of hours, the peculiar bit of dream sand in the corner of his eyes, the genuinely unholy amount of heat radiating from the body that had been mashed up next to him. And there was a body— long, lean, twisted into an abstract sculpture in the sheets until only a mussed crop of brilliant red hair poked along the edge of the pillow.
He still wasn’t used to it. He wasn’t certain if he’d ever be.
“Crowley,” he whispered, because if there was one thing he was certain of it was that Crowley was not a demon who liked to be woken up. “I have to go downstairs,” he added, because he was also a demon who did not like to wake up alone.
The sheets shifted, as though a serpent rather than a human was beneath them.
“It’s too early.”
“It is past 9,” he murmured, tugging on a pair of trousers. “And besides, there is someone ringing the door.”
“I can make them disappear.”
Aziraphale shrugged into his housecoat, buttoned up his shirt.
“That won’t do, my dear. We don’t even know who it is.”
A pair of sleepy golden eyes regarded him from the scant light in his bedroom. Opalescent. As if they emitted their own light, or were somehow highly reflective, like a cat’s.
“Your hair looks like a haystack.”
Aziraphale raised a hand on instinct, to tame it into something professional.
“No,” Crowley said, sitting up. “I like it.”
The sheets flipped back and Crowley was there, beneath them, suddenly and without preamble. And even though Aziraphale had been fully aware of that fact, surely— he had at some point been mashed up against him, many times, in different configurations of sleep— it was still something of a shock. No expensive jacket. No indecently tight denim. Those articles had been hung neatly on the back of a chair, the same chair where his own clothes had spent the night.
He still wasn’t used to it. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be.
“You can stay,” Aziraphale said, and hoped that the colour in his cheeks was not wholly visible in this little light. “Go back to sleep.”
But of course Crowley could see in the dark.
“A stranger comes to the door and you want me to stay in bed? Let you wrestle books out of their hands all on your own? Not a chance.”
He stepped into jeans the colour of shadow, pulled up a shirt from somewhere in the firmament.
“Let’s go ruin this person’s day.”
“Fiend,” Aziraphale sighed, beneath his breath, full of fondness.
“Angel,” Crowley replied, and meant it.
And as their shoulders kissed on the way down the stairs, Aziraphale figured he might not ever get used to it, but he’d be grateful all the same.