I’ve awakened to a lot of posts on the tag wherein people are wondering where this assumption originated, and it’s a fairly straightforward story.  Back in early 2005, Neil made this post on his blog.  I wasn’t the only person who was idly curious as to what Neil and Terry had decided Aziraphale and Crowley were up to “on the South Downs” (see linked entry), so, given I knew both of them would be doing readings/signings within a week of each other in Cambridge, MA that autumn and that I planned on attending both events if I could, I was determined to ask both of them the same question if I was fortunate enough to be called on at both events (which I highly doubted would happen; I’m not good at making myself stand out in a crowd).  I had no particular motive.  I just wanted to know, and so did a number of my friends (both online and offline) at the time.  Terry’s event was first, and he did, in fact, call on me at the Q&A.  I explained that I’d read a reference on Neil’s blog to a conversation between the two of them regarding what Aziraphale and Crowley were doing on the South Downs, but that Neil hadn’t said precisely what.  Strangely, Terry’s answer had everything to do with the sequel-that-was-not-to-be and nothing to do with what I actually asked, so, while it was an entertaining answer regarding the rest of the conversation they’d had that day about the ill-fated sequel, he wasn’t forthcoming.  At Neil’s event a week later, which was held in a much bigger venue and attended by at least three times as many people, the Q&A had got down to the wire; I hadn’t been called on, and they could only take two or three more questions.  I don’t really know what happened, but I ended up being the second-to-last person called on.  I asked him the same question I’d asked Terry, almost verbatim.  Neil’s answer started out very much like Terry’s: how they’d been catching up with each other, reminiscing about the idea of a sequel (that’s where the whole pornography joke came up, which somebody did badly misremember in how they represented it on Wikipedia, and, actually, I have no bloody idea why somebody felt the need to put any of the information from his answer in a Wikipedia entry on Aziraphale in the first place), and generally chatting about the novel.  This is where Neil’s answer finally diverged from Terry’s, for which I was pretty grateful, because I was beginning to get the sense that neither one of them really wanted to fess up to what they’d decided.  Neil ended his answer with, “Well, what they’re doing on the South Downs is sharing a cottage.  Next question?"  I don’t even remember what the last question was at this point, because I couldn’t get it through my head that the answer was something so simple, yet so momentous.  I understand that it annoys the authors that it’s broadly interpreted as support for slash in canon, but that’s the domain of fandom: interpreting information in such a way that results in further exploration and character growth (just perhaps not in the way that the original creators intended).