31 Days of Kisses: A Good Omen Advent Calendar

Hard Nut to Crack

Prompt: Nutcracker

This one is book!Omens all the way

"I have no idea what  you are afraid of,” Aziraphale said, because it was clear Crowley was afraid. The demon was sitting with conscious elegance, legs crossed at his ankles, not at all in the relaxed slump he usually used in the shop’s backroom. It was irritating, and also endearing, and Aziraphale had long ago stopped trying to untangle the two responses when it came to Crowley.

“I’ll harm you,” Crowley said, in reasonable tones.

“If you think you are capable of doing me serious harm, my dear, I’m afraid you are rather flattering yourself.” He looked Crowley up and down rather pointedly, then down at himself. A skinny being in a fallen state compared to a solidly built angel in a state of grace.

“No need to be insulting about it.” Aziraphale fancied Crowley’s posture relaxed just a little.

“Then what? You’re afraid your saliva is laced with hellfire?”

“I’m more worried yours might be holy water,” Crowley muttered.

“So it’s not really me you’re concerned about after all.”

“Don’t be stupid, and don’t sound so smug.” Crowley ran his hand through the carefully unkempt looking black waves, turning them into actually unkempt black waves sticking in all different directions. There were two locks in the middle sticking up at angles like television antennas.

The scale was definitely leaning towards ‘endearing’.

Aziraphale looked at the bowl of nuts on the coffee table, next to the novelty angel nutcracker Crowley had bought him one Christmas. All the easier to crack nuts were gone, and the Brazil nuts, as often happened with nut selections, were left. The centres were tender and delectable, but it was so hard to get to them through the shell without destroying the fragile insides

“What are you afraid of?” he asked again, patiently.

“I’m venomous, you know.”

“Then don’t bite me.”

Crowley carefully looked everywhere but at him. “Might not be able to help myself.”

“I trust you,” Aziraphale said, patting Crowley’s knee encouragingly. It was bony under the expensive mulberry silk and wool blend trousers, or what would have been expensive trousers if Crowley bothered to actually buy them. The boniness tipped the scales even further towards ‘endearing’, and for some inexplicable reason added a solid weight of ‘arousing’ as well.

Whatever Aziraphale had dreamed or feared about Crowley’s response to a whispered “May I kiss you?”–which ran the gamut from gentle murmurs to mocking laughter, from being shoved passionately against a wall to being shoved away and not spoken to for decades–he had not expected to be sitting in the bookshop still discussing it twenty minutes later. Stone cold sober, too. He had clearly underestimated the hard shell the demon had grown around his soft interior.

But Crowley had not said no. He could have said no at any point, but he had very, very noticeably not said no. He was sitting there, closed away in a hard shell, not saying no.

Just not saying yes.

“So how do you think you will harm me?”

“You’re too intelligent for this. You’re an angel, I’m a demon.”

“Yes, yes. We established that back in the Garden of Eden.”

“Consorting with demons. Not exactly encouraged in an angel, is it?”