Disclaimer and Author's notes: Don't own them, dammit. I actually wrote this in July 2008, then I lost the paper and then when I eventually found it last month I was either too busy or too lazy to type it up. XP Apologies.

Creature of Opposites

Aziraphale is a creature of opposites.

Crowley is both intrigued and irked by this. Sometimes he spends hours contemplating how one being can be so many things at once. Aziraphale's hands, for instance; these days, they mostly steal chocolate biscuits or Crowley's dessert, and repair books, but Crowley can remember the first Battle before the Fall, and he remembers the way Aziraphale had wielded his flaming sword; he was, after all, one of the Cherubim, and one of the Guardians of Eden. Crowley also remembers that Aziraphale had once taken piano lessons, and he often wishes that he'd had a camera on hand to capture the look on the instructor's face when after his first lesson, Aziraphale had started playing the Moonlight Sonata beautifully. Yet the first time Crowley had let Aziraphale use his mobile phone, he'd ended up having to glare the keypad back into working order.

Although they don't look it, angel wings are capable of breaking a man's back. But before Crowley had learnt to prevent himself from dreaming, it was the soft caresses of Aziraphale's wings that calmed the demon after another nightmare about his Fall. The angel's halo, too, can be blinding, the pure white light around his head so bright that his features are obscured and Crowley's own eyes hurt, and yet can also be a soft, soothing golden glow (not that Crowley would ever verbally describe it as such).

The angel's blue eyes seem to hold endless love and compassion. But when Aziraphale is truly, righteously angry (and he hasn't been truly angry in a long time), his eyes are a cold, hard blue-grey, and no-one who sees them can doubt what he truly is, even without the wings. Crowley himself hasn't dared to look Aziraphale in the eye when the angel is angry since Babylon.

Most of the time, Mr. A. Fell the bookkeeper (he has long since given up the 'bookseller' pretence) seems like an ordinary man, in hopelessly outdated, rumpled clothes, messy hair and a flustered look. But there are times, when the light touches Aziraphale's hair just so, and he seems to be lit from within by a divine glow that enhances his compassionate smile and makes his eyes shine, that Crowley wonders how anyone could mistake his counterpart as being ordinary. Because surely, an angel of the Lord, who is in love with a demon and is loved back by that same demon, is anything but.

~Sivaroobini