#too many bottles of this wine we can't pronounce;; inspo

[bendickson]

tag dump

[hypahticklish]

gently play on your heartstrings

Summary: Where Aziraphale challenges Crowley's understanding of what intimacy can look like...and it backfires.

Word Count: 1657

Setting: Good Omens, post end-of-the-world

A/N: I wanted to write something in celebration of Good Omens receiving a second season. I love these two so much, it's about time I dabbled in writing them. I took inspo from @wordstrings naming conventions via using Queen lyrics. And I'm also posting a day early because I have no chill.

~~~

It was a Tuesday.

There were never any deals on a Tuesday worth pursuing in Crowley's expert opinion. And yet,

"Curry has been all the rage in London, what'd'you mean you're not interested?"

Aziraphale huffed from the passenger seat of the Bentley. "I mean I'm not in the mood for it. No, the shop is much too hot during the day as it is; I don't think I'd be able to stand more heat."

They pondered from deep within the white noise of the road. "Have we tried...foe? Po?" Crowley asked, his eyes narrowing as he puzzled out the pronunciation.

"Fuh, and we have."

"Take that as a no as well, then."

"Gabriel interrupted me the last time I had sushi." Aziraphale frowned.

"Did he now?" Crowley smoothly circled the Wellington Arch back towards Soho. "Can't have that."

~~~

"Canoodling?"

Aziraphale's cheeks were contentedly flush from shared bottles of umeshu. The dessert wine was the perfect complimentary night cap to their meal. "You know what I mean."

"I assure you we-we-we...I haven't the foggiest." Crowley sprawled across the loveseat in the bookshop's cluttered back room. His arm was slung across the back while his opposite leg dangled to the floor at the knee.

"Surely you do. Look at you, picture of a cad!" Aziraphale motioned from his plush chair adjacent to him.

"Proper harlot, I am." Crowley smiled broadly. His head tilted back to hang off the armrest and he nonchalantly adjusted his hips. "Still, what's canoodling got to do with anything?"

Aziraphale's eyes wandered along black fabric hills and valleys. "It's, uh, it's something Madam Tracy specialised in… don't laugh! I shared her mind - she is a professional!"

Crowley continued to chuckle. "You wouldn't know a canoodle if I found a VHS demo. Really, Aziraphale, a Blu-ray player wouldn't kill you."

"Intimacy, that's the word. And of course I know how - I'm an angel! Love is our thing."

"Sex isn't always love."

"Intimacy isn't always sex."

"Right," Crowley said. "Of course you," he spat the word while gesturing vaguely toward Aziraphale, "would figure all touch counts. Holding a hand equals a kiss, a cuddle equals a fuck -"

"And why wouldn't they?" Aziraphale countered.

"They just don't - oomph!" A sudden stubborn Angel sat heavily between Crowley's bowed out legs at the other end of the couch. He lifted his head enough to look startled. "What the heaven are you doing?!"

"Proving you wrong. Your hand, if you please. Thank you."

Crowley's fingers were long and slender things. Had he had the interest, he could have made a phenomenal musician. Aziraphale cupped the back of his hand and rubbed his thumb across the small bulge of muscle at the side of Crowley's palm. His other hand melted, casually, purposefully, into the hollow as they sought the pair of small buttons securing the cuffs of his long sleeve shirt. They eagerly popped free. Aziraphale slipped his fingers under the loosened hem and drove it slowly toward Crowley's elbow to expose his forearm. His skin had taken on many shades over time, depending upon how much sun it saw during an era's given fashion, yet his palms and wrist remain the same pale ivory since the garden. The tips of Aziraphale's fingers swept back to his wrist and traced the pronounced tendon. As Crowley reflexively went to close his hand, Aziraphale tightened his grasp with his thumb and pinky across his fingers and gently stretched it taut instead. He fluttered along Crowley's wrist, up over the heel of his palm, and walked circles around the crisscrossing lines for several minutes...months...millennia...

"Well?"

Crowley choked on the breath he hadn't noticed shivering in his chest. "Well, what?" He made a show of rolling out his shoulders and laid his head back again. He tossed his free arm back to dangle beside his head and did his very best to power past the relaxed smirk teasing his lips.

Aziraphale sighed softly and stilled his fingers. "You leave me no choice." He set Crowley's hand down at his side and carefully fell into position. It wasn't smooth yet him bumbling around on the small sofa made it all the more charming. By the end, Aziraphale was snuggling his face into Crowley's neck, one arm keeping him from falling off the edge while the other bent and held Crowley's side. His knees sank into the other cushion and left his legs pressed into the armrest with argyle socks crossed at the ankles.

"Ah, I see. Handhold and a cuddle." Crowley absent-mindedly wrapped his arm across Aziraphale's back. "This is your most devastating metaphor yet, Angel."

Aziraphale sniffed. "It was your metaphor. I'm merely proving these things can have the same intimacy as those other things." His fingers resumed their idle waltz, this time atop his ribcage.

"Have not," Crowley instigated. The fine hairs on his neck prickled due to the soft puff of air from Aziraphale breathing so close. The quiver in his lungs returned stronger as the ticklish touch brushed nearer to his open underarm. "Aziraphale," he warned from the back of his throat.

"Would you happen to be ready to admit you were wrong?"

"No, yo-HOO!!" Crowley's arm snapped down. A wild cackle escaped from the hundred's year-old cask of authentic mirth buried deep inside as fingers squirrelled away in his armpit. Aziraphale held fast and summoned an unnatural squeal with a direct stream of air blown exquisitely into his ear.

Crowley dug in his heels and bucked hard, flipping them off the loveseat and onto the rug covered floor. He took Aziraphale's soft tan lapels in his fists to pin his chest down and loomed inches from his face. Malevolent brows furrowed over fiery eyes bisected with a thin slit pupil. "Now you've done it!"

"C-crow-crowl-ley," Aziraphale badly stammered, pale faced and with both hands hanging onto his fiendish friend's wrists. The tumble had taken him quite by surprise and knocked some of the intoxicated wind out of him. Along with the righteous defiance he previously had been wearing. And the upper hand in these sorts of games they played. "I was only-"

"Proving a point? Yeeeaaa, fine job you've done with that. But now it's my turn," Crowley snarled with a manic smile that was all teeth. Had it been missing a distinct mischievous sparkle, he could have been perceived as a genuine threat. He leaned back onto Aziraphale's thighs and wrestled with his hands.

"Don't be silly!" Aziraphale half-heartedly struggled with wide eyes and a damning smile of his own.

"Much too late for that, I'm afraid." Crowley grappled the smaller celestial's wrists and tucked them carefully under the pressure of his legs. "You brought up canoodling." He flicked away the edges of Aziraphale's suit jacket and made short work of the buttons of his vest.

"Wait, Crowley -"

"You started the tickling." Crowley stretched out all of his fingers, fluidly pulled them to his palm and rotated his wrists. "Knowing full well how much more sensitive," poke, "and vulnerable," pinch, "and susceptible you are to it."

Aziraphale squirmed underneath him. "W-well tickling can be an expression of intimacy!" He swallowed hard as he watched where Crowley's hand would go next.

"And of canoodling."

"I misspeak one time -" Aziraphale's groan rapidly dissolved into cheerful giggles from a squeezing claw to his pudgy belly.

Crowley dropped to Aziraphale's ear by resting on his elbow, all the while pinching his soft sides. "Listen here, Lover Boy," he said, low and menacing. "How 'bout we explore just how intimate laughter can be, eh?" Crowley's fingers ran ribbing relays from sternum to where his Angel writhed into the ground. "Maybe I'll miracle up some scarves and feathers? Perhaps test finger tickles and mouth tickles and find where tickles the most tickles."

"St-stop saying the word!" Aziraphale pleaded.

Crowley nudged Aziraphale's head to the side so they were cheek to cheek and his lips brushed his ear. His fingers slowed to a crawl, and did so back toward his stomach. "Does the word tickle make you more ticklish?" Crowley chuckled as he felt his friend's blush burn his cheek. "Figured as much. To think, heaven's finest, so defenseless to a bit of tickling that simply speaking the word tickles them."

Aziraphale whined.

"I ought to thank you, Angel, for this opportunity to learn all about this intimacy you were talking about. It just tickles me."

"Oh, shut up alread-eee!" Aziraphale shrieked, followed by a full-on snorting guffaw from Crowley blowing noisy raspberries into his neck and kneading his love handle at the same instant.

His feet kicked helplessly behind them. Aziraphale tugged uselessly from where his hands were trapped. Peals of laughter were coaxed out with ease as Crowley made rude noises and nibbled hungrily at his throat. He switched hands to pinch and squeeze and play with the length of his untouched side, leading to robust waves of squeaks.

"Too tickly for you?" Crowley taunted.

"I-I-I-," Aziraphale attempted to respond and fell apart again due to Crowley copying him and blowing in his ear. "Crowley!"

Smirking with pride, the demon rocked back onto his heels, releasing Aziraphale's hands but remaining hovering over his body. Crowley rested his elbows on his knees and allowed his fingers to idly brush Aziraphale's panting stomach until they were blocked by crossed arms.

"You are a nefarious hellion," Aziraphale said once breath had returned to him. He sniggered and curled from the prods his insult earned him.

"Come on, you love it. I feel closer to you already." Crowley grinned down at Aziraphale, his pupils now perfect circles. "So, have you had enough yet or shall I tickle you some more?"

A slightly goofy smile slid across Aziraphale's face. He was disheveled and buoyant. "Would you happen to be ready to admit you were wrong?" He repeated.

The little old bookshop on the corner was definitely the loudest, and happiest, building in all of Soho that evening.

[bendickson]

Benedict Masters Aesthetic ― 001/?

“Work hard in silence.                                           Let your success                   be your noise   .”