Chapter Text
1274 Kinclaven Castle, Scotland
Crowley had to concede that deciding to attack the pope was not a smart move. Hell loved the pope and the entire Papal office, after all, they’d found a way to take a message about all of humanity being created equal, and then proceed to build a hierarchy around it. That was some truly evil ingenuity. Thus far there had not been a single Pope to end up in Heaven. Not a single one.
He didn’t think what he’d done was that bad, he’d really just ruined his ability to get on with the Eastern Orthodox church and when that had gotten boring, he’d decided to give the nasty STD he was succumbing to a bit of a boost. But Crowley’s bosses had decided it was enough to warrant real punishment.
That was how Crowley had ended up as a maid in a freezing cold castle in Scotland. She was supposed to be tempting Margaret of England to Hell, but with nothing to work with and a sour mood, it wasn’t really happening.
“D’you ever miss England, M’lady?” she’d ask as Margaret decided to take one of her strolls about the grounds on a particularly bitter night.
“All the time,” Margaret would reply, “the weather was far more agreeable.”
“And you weren’t being bartered around from castle to castle based on what your brother or husband want?” Crowley would say, knowing that on these walks, the Queen of Scots didn’t mind a dash of informality.
“No, that was just as bad there.” Margaret would laugh, a weak sound, like a chime behind a stone wall. She had essentially given up. Years of being a literal prisoner held hostage surrounded by years of being the metaphorical prisoner of the men in her life had ground her resolve to dust. He was resigned to her fate as a baby-factory until she finally died and passed on to anywhere. Hell, Crowley privately thought, was better than this.
The walks on the grounds down by the river were Queen Margaret’s only time when she was able to choose her company. On the July evening in question, Crowley wished she’d chosen her company better, a manservant, she hadn’t bothered to learn his name, was following along beside her, bringing news of England and her brother, the newly coronated king.
“And of course his highness had a great many ideas about what best to do about the border issues . . .”
Margaret didn’t have the strength to sigh, but Crowley did. This was something she could never avoid as servant to the English Queen of Scotland. All anyone wanted to talk about were the land disputes across the border. Behind Ingrid’s glasses, she shared a glance with Margaret.
By all accounts Margaret had been rather wild as a child. Crowley wondered what that must have been like, she never spoke even a word out of turn anymore. Crowley sent just a small trickle of energy to her, she wanted something, anything, to break this monotony, and she suspected Margaret felt the same way.
For the first time in decades, Margaret grinned. She looked over at the manservant and spoke slyly, “I don’t know why you’re so worried about the borders there,” she said, with a smirk that was Crowley approved. The manservant just looked at her, stunned.
“You should be a great deal more worried about the borders here!” She said, pushing him into the river. Hah! Crowley thought, now this was more like it.
The manservant stood and looked down at his muddy clothes. The expression on his face was likely to be the only funny thing Margaret saw for years, so she committed every detail of it to memory.
In all of human history, people have debated whether or not it is the acts of significant individuals or the movement of the masses that create history. The answer is neither. The biggest contributor to human history is random shit: Things that just sort of happened they were neither good nor evil, they just sort of happened. For example, earlier that day a person with no relation to the castle had tossed a few buckets of dirt into the river as she’d attempted to clean her house. The contents of those buckets happened to settle where they formed two sandbars (or dirt-bars in this case), with a small gap in the middle. Anyone who knows anything about water can tell you that this is one way sudden strong undercurrents can be formed. Unfortunately, when this unnamed manservant took a step in the river to regain his footing, he stepped into that undercurrent and was quickly carried away. The weight of his clothes did not help either, but you will not find anyone ready to blame his tailor, so there is no point blaming the woman cleaning her house, so there is no point in blaming Margaret.
Of course Margaret didn’t see it that way. She immediately called for a priest to hear her confession, but of course, the priest at the castle didn’t feel equipped to deal with a confession of such magnitude, so in an unusual show of honesty and knowing one’s limits, he sent out for another priest.
The new confessor was the kindest man Margaret had ever met, though she did not see his face. Through the grille in the confessional booth he eased her conscience, not by telling her to do x number of Hail Marys, but by listening to her fears and assuaging them. He could not heal away her guilt, but he could listen to her and be a voice of kind reason when her terror tried to obscure it. The confession lasted three days. Margaret was not cured of her guilt or the sadness she had had before, but she was able to shoulder the burden slightly better.
Confession was not an option for Crowley. She didn’t even think about it except to have a hysterical laugh at the idea of her trying to enter the church and Hastur’s face if he ever heard she had. She had spent the three days in the gardens, around a large oak tree that had all the stability she didn’t. On the day Margaret finally left the church, Crowley couldn’t find it in her to follow. She had seen and even caused so much death and destruction, and it felt like nothing. She hadn’t felt the rejection of God more keenly in millennia.
She was about to head down to the kitchens in search of copious quantities of alcohol when she heard his voice.
“I know you’re here, Crowley.”
“Down here,” she said, wondering if her voice would be enough to guide Aziraphale down to her nook in the tree’s buttressed roots where she was sprawled.
“I thought I might find you here,” he said, sliding down the tree trunk beside her. He was ill suited to priest’s robes, but at least the white matched what he always wore. “I always seem to find you in gardens.”
Crowley gave a non-committal hum. She couldn’t understand why Aziraphale was here. He’d been avoiding her for centuries and his sudden appearance had thrown her more that she’d ever admit.
“I understand you were there,” Aziraphale said and his time was so gentle. Crowley wanted to throw him across the castle, but that would require energy she just didn’t have.
“Of course I was bloody there,” she said, she didn’t even yell. “Been here for ages.
“And you are alright?” Aziraphale asked, peering at her, but not in the way she wanted to be peered at, like he was concerned for her.
“’sno different to any of the other times,” she said. And it was true, what had her so out of sorts (she would never use the word upset) was the reminder of how bullshit everything was.
“There are far too many other times,” Aziraphale agreed, looking away from her.
“Yeah,” she agreed, “I know I’m supposed to enjoy it, but it just feels like nothing.”
“Nothing?” Aziraphale asked. She just shrugged.
“I still feel bad about it. I try not to think about Sodom and Gomorrah, or the Ark, or even Milan.” Aziraphale said, so quietly it could have been a whisper.
“It was demons in Milan, though,” Crowley pointed out, the irony not lost to her, “and they only got discorporated.”
“It could easily not have been just demons, Holy Lightning is very difficult to control, and I don’t exactly practice its use regularly,” Aziraphale said, louder this time now that he had moved back to objective facts and away from his own fears.
Crowley just stared at him. God’s last order before the Fall had been for Her angels to love all of humanity and Her creations. Lucifer started the war then, by asking why he should love humans if he was so much better than them and then it had all gone downhill from there. Aziraphale was the only angel Crowley had ever known to obey God’s last direct order.
Pragma Diogenes’ voice whispered in her head. Shut up, she thought back.
Crowley looked away from Aziraphale to distract herself. The stars were out. Thousands of twinkling lights winking against an obsidian sky. They looked so different form far away.
“See that one?” She said, pointing to a constellation, “I think the humans call it Pegasus.”
“Yes?” Aziraphale said.
“I made that one,” she said, knowing her voice was filled with pride and self-pity, “I made so many stars.” She should stop talking. She should really stop talking, but she couldn’t. No one had spoken to her, the real her, for decades. “I wonder if they’ll be the last thing I ever make.” She said, so quietly no human would have heard it over the wind. But Aziraphale was no human.
Aziraphale looked at her again, she could feel his gaze. “Didn’t you invent the lute?” He said, very kindly offering her a change of subject.
“Not really,” she protested lazily, “I was in Arabia and made a few upgrades to a lyre, the humans did most of the work.”
“They also named your stars,” Aziraphale said, in the same near-inaudible tone Crowley had spoken in moments ago.
Crowley wanted to know why Aziraphale was there. Why was he comforting a demon? Why had he stretched his wing to shelter them both on the wall of Eden? Why did he care at all? But she couldn’t say any of that. He’d run away, just like Wessex, and she wasn’t sure she could give him up. She’d already had to lose God; she wasn’t sure her battered heart could survive losing Aziraphale too.
“They do that, don’t they?” Crowley said, thinking fondly of her favourite humans. “Humans don’t really need us at all most of the time.”
Aziraphale made a face, it was one Crowley had seen a lot, it was the ‘you have a point but if I agree I’ll be going against the doctrine of Heaven’ face.
“They don’t really need us for anything,” she continued, “Nothing I do really matters, it’s just so Hastur can cross it off his to-do list. It’s nowhere near as important as they keep telling themselves it is. Especially if your lot are doing the exact same thing to you. Acting like the Great Ineffable Plan is some universe-wide grocery list of us cancelling each other out.”
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said in his warning tone. But Crowley was just getting started. She was sick of this, sick of all of it. There was no point pretending she had a role in some great plan, the greatest plan she was involved in was probably just Hastur planning how to get her out of his hair.
In her dark pit of introspection, she found her own forbidden fruit, something so self-destructive that even moments ago she would never have done it. She wasn’t drunk or high or intoxicated on anything other than her own sadness. She felt like she had nothing to lose, even if she did, so she asked.
“Why comfort a demon anyway?”
Aziraphale froze, his shoulders tensed for just a moment. He stood up and she regretted her words immediately, but it was too late, she’d fucked this up too.
“Because someone should.” Aziraphale said before he left, disappearing into the darkness around him like a star snuffed out.
Crowley knew she had to go too. She would play off the manservant’s death as some kind of demonic intervention on the whole ‘Thou shalt not kill’ thing. And she’d get the Heaven out of Scotland, maybe try to bargain her way into something warmer. Maybe, if she ran from her problems fast enough, they wouldn’t be able to catch up and the sinking void in her mind would disappear.