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“Y’r soft,” Crowley mumbles one day, drowsily nuzzling into Aziraphale’s well-cushioned lap. “Ssosoft.”
Aziraphale blinks, smiles bemusedly, and ruffles his partner’s hair. “Yes, dear, I’m well aware. Go back to sleep.”
It’s not the first time he’s been told as much, and he knows it to be truth. Aziraphale is undeniably soft, in almost every sense of the word. Soft of body, soft of heart. It is not always meant as a compliment, when others point it out — among the other angels, pointing out his many weaknesses both literal and metaphorical, and his perpetual inadequacy at being a lean, mean fighting machine — it certainly never was a positive trait. But from Crowley, he doesn’t mind hearing it.
With Crowley, Aziraphale is more than happy to be soft. Strength and hardness are overrated, he finds himself thinking more and more often these days. He especially thinks that when it means they can sit together like this, Aziraphale and the most softhearted demon he’s ever met, Crowley dozing off while Aziraphale sips tea and they share in the domestic content of closeness.
“Ssssoft,” Crowley repeats, more insistently, and it seems he hasn’t quite dozed off again after all, fixated now on whatever thought grabbed his half-asleep and half-inebriated brain. He lifts his head, rolling so he’s looking up into Aziraphale’s face. “You. Soft. S’good. Good thing. Y’know that, that, that s’good, right?”
“I… what?” Having consumed his own share of stronger beverages earlier in the evening, it takes Aziraphale a minute to piece the words together and process the question. Apparently, that’s a minute too long, because Crowley abruptly sits up altogether, head almost knocking Aziraphale’s teacup out his hand on the way up.
“Soft is good,” the demon repeats, emphatically and somewhat less incoherently than before. Aziraphale suspects him of having sobered up, at least part of the way.
Mildly taken aback by the force of his partner’s declaration, Aziraphale follows his example. “Thank you?” he tries, cautiously, when his own system is once again mostly free of alcohol. And then, since Crowley doesn’t look satisfied by that answer, he adds, “Did you, er. Did you have something else you wanted to say about it?”
“Nnh.” Crowley looks and sounds unsure of what, exactly, he wanted to say… but determined to say it anyway. “Just, well. It is.”
“Ah,” Aziraphale says wisely. “Well, then. If it helps, I quite agree with you.”
Really, he does. It is no six-thousand-year accident, after all, that Aziraphale is who he is. Whether it be giving a sword away or eating a plate of sushi, his softness is a long-established series of decisions… and even back in those days when he used to wrestle with the fear that being soft was not Good, even when he couldn’t admit the distinction even to himself, that was still never precisely the same thing as believing that it wasn’t good.
And evidently his expression of agreement does actually help, because Crowley nods approvingly, and now he does at least attempt to add a bit more elaboration to his statement. “‘S nice.”
“Isn’t that a four-letter word?” Aziraphale teases.
“You’re an angel, I can call you all the four-letter words I want. Soft has four letters, too.”
“I see. Do you know, I was just thinking about how soft your hair is when I was petting it a moment ago. You and your hair both.”
Crowley makes barely even a token attempt at an affronted glower; if Aziraphale has become much more comfortable embracing his own softness of late, then the same could be said of the demon’s willingness to acknowledge his own four-letter side.
“Anyhow,” Crowley goes on, when it is clear to them both that the attempted glower is an utter failure. “I was saying. You’re soft. And ’s good.”
“Indeed,” Aziraphale concurs patiently.
“Makes you… comfortable. To be with. And safe. Kind.” Crowley grins. “There you go, more four-letter words.”
“Ah.” Aziraphale’s cheeks grow pleasantly warmer, ridiculously touched. “Well.”
“Also makes you a good pillow,” Crowley adds, with the exact same amount of gravity.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Aziraphale returns gravely. “I daresay you would know better than I.”
“I do know,” Crowley confirms with more than a little smugness. “Anyway. Comfortable, safe, kind, good pillow. And, uh.” He pauses, seemingly searching for any other descriptors that he might have missed in his apparent mission to dissolve Aziraphale under an onslaught of sweetness. “Strong!” he adds.
“I’m sorry?” Aziraphale says before he can help himself. That last was… not expected. Comfortable, certainly. Safe, he hopes. Kind, he tries. Strong, though?
Picking up on Aziraphale’s hesitation, Crowley’s shoulders straighten again, the demon appearing to have finally seized upon a suitable target at which to direct what seems to be an urgent, out-of-the-blue need to counter Aziraphale’s mostly-obsolete insecurities. “You are,” he asserts. “I’m telling you, you are.”
“I wasn’t arguing with you,” Aziraphale assures him placatingly, since he isn’t in the mood for an argument on a subject like this. “It’s only, I was… surprised. Because I thought we were talking about softness. Strength just seems in… in a bit of a different category, that’s all.”
“Nope,” Crowley says firmly. “Same category.”
“No?” Now Aziraphale is genuinely confused. He’s accustomed to Crowley leaping from point A to point C with no B to be identified in the middle, especially when drunk or sleepy. But…
Crowley glances around, scanning the room, then in one quick movement snatches Aziraphale’s teacup from his grip.
“Hey!” Aziraphale protests. “I was going to have another sip.”
“What would happen if I threw this at the wall?” Crowley demands, raising the cup into the air and holding it aloft.
“What? Don’t throw my tea at the wall!”
“Relax, I’m not going to throw your tea at the wall,” Crowley says, as if he didn’t just ask a question strongly implying that he was about to do exactly that. “But what would happen if I did?”
“I’d be very annoyed with you,” Aziraphale answers pointedly. “And you’d ruin the carpet, and waste some perfectly good tea, and then I’d have to get up to make more and that would mean we had to stop cuddling. Why would you even—”
“Not what would happen to the tea,” Crowley says, as if it were painfully obvious. “I mean, to the cup. What would happen to the cup, if I threw it?”
“Um.” Aziraphale looks at the ceramic cup. It’s not exceptionally fragile, as teacups go, but definitely not built to be thrown against walls. “It would shatter, I expect.” He glares at Crowley. “One more reason not to throw it.”
Crowley hands the teacup back, much to Aziraphale’s relief. To be on the safe side, he drains the rest of the cup’s contents (miraculously still warm, and he’s not even sure whether he or Crowley gets credit for that) before putting it down again. “Now, what was that about?”
Ignoring him, Crowley picks up one of the loose cushions sharing the sofa with them, hoists it aloft… and hurls it, straight at the wall opposite the sofa.
The throw falls short, and the cushion lands on the carpet. Out of a combination of tact and, mostly, sheer bewilderment, Aziraphale refrains from commenting. Crowley stares daggers at the cushion until it returns to his hands, then throws it again. This time, it successfully reaches the wall, bounces off, and lands once again on the floor.
Crowley turns triumphantly to Aziraphale. “There you go, see?”
“No,” Aziraphale says honestly.
“You said the teacup would shatter if I threw it. But I just threw the cushion, and it didn’t break at all.”
“Well, of course it didn’t. I could have told you that it wouldn’t. It isn’t a teacup, it’s a cushion. ”
“Exactly!”
“...What.”
“Cushions,” says Crowley, “are soft. Teacups aren’t. And one of them breaks, when it runs into a hard place, and one of them doesn’t. And the one that breaks isn’t the cushion.”
“I…”
“And if making it through everything you did and coming out as you isn’t strength,” Crowley persists — only the argumentative tone of his recent disquisition is now replaced by a softness of his own, so achingly gentle and sincere Aziraphale still hardly knows what to do with it, even now he’s had ample opportunity to grow used to exposure to this part of Crowley — “I don’t know what is.”
“Oh,” says Aziraphale, and his throat feels suddenly tight with unlooked-for emotion. The thing is, he’s long accepted that strength isn’t one of his, well, strengths. And he was okay with that. He really was. He’d chosen his priorities, grown comfortable with who he’d become, and made his peace with the fact that, after all, one couldn’t be everything. The absence of strength, he’d decided, didn’t necessarily have to be seen as a weakness.
He’d gotten that far… and it had indeed been far. But he had not, quite, considered that softness could itself be a kind of strength. He is not sure what to make of that notion now.
He looks at the cushion on the carpet, and over at Crowley at his side, and down at himself. And back at Crowley.
“Okay?” Crowley asks, quiet again, intensity easing.
Aziraphale thinks about it. He has things to think about. Things to process, and feelings to deal with, and his plans for the evening didn’t include unexpected new insights or emotional conversations. He’s fairly sure Crowley’s plans didn’t include such things either. It’s funny, how plans can go astray.
But right now, there is a question to be answered, and there is no doubt at all of the accurate answer. Aziraphale smiles at his partner. “Okay.”
“Good,” says Crowley, and yawns.
A few minutes later, his head falls sideways, sliding down Aziraphale’s chest and ending up, quite predictably, back in the angel’s lap.
Aziraphale resumes hair-petting, and the drowsy sense of comfort settles back around them: strong, soft, and safe.