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One morning he wakes up and decides to be a she.
There’s not much to change - mostly just her clothing and the way she styles her long red locks. She already miracles her clothing on a daily basis, anyway, so it’s a quick snap to make herself a high-waisted black gown with a wide neckline that almost falls off the shoulder, with delicate frills along its edges and subtle black-on-black embroidery worked into the hemline. She draws her hair up in an elegant bun, parted down the center, with ringlets cascading around her face.
It really is just two quick snaps, one for the clothes and one for the hair, and she’s ready.
Going out on the streets is sometimes harder, as a woman, but she can certainly take care of herself. And it’s fun, flirting subtly with the men who wander up the street, coquettishly coughing behind her hand and smiling as they walk past. She tempts more men into adultery in their hearts than she has in years, and though they never quite get to the follow-through, she had forgotten how much fun it could be.
She’s been a woman for about a week, and is having a good evening in an excellent little bar in one of the seedier areas of London when she hears a voice she really hadn’t expected to hear. Usually she’s the one to find Aziraphale, not the other way around, unless the angel has something to be done under the Arrangement.
“Crowley!” comes the delighted cry, and she winces.
She turns to see the angel, in his typical clothing - cream color scheme, gorgeously tailored waistcoat, and a coat that’s just a bit old-fashioned. He looks so delighted to see her that she can’t find it in herself to be mad at him for using the name. (At least it’s not Crawly.)
“It’s Carol, now, actually” she says as the angel sits down. “People don’t go around calling women by last name the way they do with men.”
“Oh! Of course, my dear, I’m terribly sorry,” Aziraphale says, and then an awkward silence starts to fester between them.
He’s going to ask the question, she just knows it, and she loathes it. Hell had asked her the same question the first time she’d been a woman, and she hated it then, and she is going to hate it now, and she absolutely positively does not want to justify her gender and sartorial choices to an Angel of the Lord, to hold it over her head for the rest of her life. Even if that angel is Aziraphale.
“So are you… doing gender now, then?” he asks, tentatively.
It’s not the question she had expected, and it catches her off-guard.
“What do you mean doing gender, what kind of question is that?” she demands, staring at him. “Of course I’m doing gender I’ve been doing bloody gender for thousands of years! I was a man the last time you saw me, you know!”
She’s incensed. The idea that Aziraphale only thinks that her being a woman is “doing gender” rubs her in all the wrong ways.
“Oh, were you?” says Aziraphale sheepishly, clearly embarrassed. “I’m - I’m afraid I hadn’t noticed.”
“What do you mean you hadn’t noticed, I was wearing proper men’s clothes, a coat and waistcoat and breeches and everything.”
“Well, I mean, I wear those sorts of things, too,” he says, almost distractedly. “Clothing hardly matters, does it? You’re the one who brought it up.”
There’s a pause as her brain cranks, and Carol registers that she may just possibly have got the angel a bit wrong.
“You’re saying you’re not a man?” she says, and it comes out like an accusation, as much as she’d rather it didn’t. “Mister Ezra Fell, who dresses like the most hedonist kind of fop, isn’t a man?”
Aziraphale looks uncomfortable, but also put out. “I like men’s clothes,” he says, primly. “I like the cut and the shape of them. And it’s not as though I can help the kind of assumptions humans make when they look at me, now can I? I may like this body but it does leave certain impressions when I dress it this way. And - and it’s not as though there’s really any good English terms for someone who isn’t anything.”
Carol feels her shoulders lower. “So you - all this time you’ve just - not had a gender?”
“No,” says Aziraphale. “And I don’t care to either. I had - well, I had rather assumed you were the same way, until just now.”
She thinks about this. “Hang on, now,” she says. “You’ve seen me in dresses and all that before. What about all that business with Nefertiti, huh?”
Aziraphale eyes her with something like disdain, and it always fills her with a kind of giddiness whenever the angel displays an emotion that clearly isn’t divine love for all God’s creatures.
“If we’re talking about gender, Nefertiti is hardly the best example of things being at all clear-cut,” Aziraphale says wryly. “And I did just say that clothing hardly matters.”
“So it wasn’t my clothes,” Carol says. “It was my name.”
“Well, most specifically, pointing out that men’s and women’s names work differently,” Aziraphale says.
“I’ve used women’s names before, too. Egypt comes to mind again.” Carol knows she is belabouring the point, but she also wants to understand.
“Yes, but not with me.” Aziraphale says it so quietly that she almost doesn’t catch it. When she turns to look at him, he clarifies. “It was always an alias for the benefit of humans,” he says. “You could hardly go around calling yourself Crawly without odd looks. And - and it’s not as if you call me Ezra.”
And he’s right. Back when she was still going by Crawly, she’d also assumed a variety of aliases, none of which lasted much longer than it took to get a temptation over and done with. And Aziraphale has used several different names over the years, and she’s never called him by a single one of them. He’s always been Aziraphale, and she’s always been Crowley - until now.
Carol hums and says, “Well, I’ve had gender since about the 23rd century. Akkad.”
“Good heavens,” Aziraphale says. “That long?”
“Mmhmm.” She takes another sip of her wine. “It’s changed a lot, over the years, obviously, and I went back and forth on whether or not to have one, but for the most part, yeah. One of those little human cultural inventions I’ve always sort of fancied.”
Aziraphale nods thoughtfully. “Well, I can understand an attachment to certain human inventions,” he says. He looks her in the eye and raises his glass. “To humanity.”
“Cheers,” Carol says, and clinks her glass with his.