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The first angel Crowley met on Earth went at him with a burning sword.
Crowley had thought it an overreaction, honestly. All he'd done was greet the guy. There had been no call for smiting, though Crowley would hardly call it that, sad as the attempt had been. The feathered prat had all the grace of a drunken rhino, and the brains of a fly. Crowley had escaped the encounter largely unscathed, save for his toga, which had lost a few feet of fabric at the hem. Turned out that things burned by angelic dick-metaphors couldn't be miracled back into shape. Crowley was forced to pick up a new uniform from Hell in what had practically been a miniskirt. It was a right hoot.
Turn about was only fair, not that Crowley cared about justice other than when it suited him. It'd taken hardly any effort at all. A whisper here, a nudge there, a cup of wine spiked heavens high with the fun kind of herbs, and a certain burning relic turned up mysteriously misplaced. The angel was packed off Earth with commendable haste, halo tucked snugly between his thighs and Gabriel's bootprint square in the middle of his blessed behind. Crowley hadn't had to lift a hand himself, when it was all said and done.
The second angel Crowley met was on the brink of Falling. So he gave her a push.
She was young and bitter, which was how these things tended to pair up. Crowley happened upon her in the midst of smiting some disaster of a human being. He'd seen hellfire in her eyes, and known her as kin. He might had told her so, but her idea of heavenly justice involved rather too much blood and gore, and he didn't want to linger long.
They'd met again in Egypt. She approached him first, and challenged him to a duel. Crowley had laughed so hard he'd spilled his wine all down his brand new robes.
"Nah," he'd told her, "It's not gonna be on me."
Angels weren't wont to listen to reason, however. Crowley found himself dodging a pearly shadow for the next thousand years. Annoyance grew into irritation; irritation bloomed into despondency so total it was sort of calming. They could had gone on in that manner all the way into the thousands, had it not been for that damn rock.
Crowley ran to the Americas. He'd hidden in a great canyon, then still tourist-free and nameless, and wiled away a couple of decades teaching the local human tribes about aliens.
The angel found him in the midst of a storm, the kind that carved the land and turned trees to dust. She followed him up a cliff, demanding all the same old things, looking for something to fight that wasn't her heart. Crowley had turned to hiss at her. Lightning streaked the sky at that precise moment, and a great big boulder came crashing down, right over the angel's head.
Crowley didn't remember moving. The world must'd turned, taking him with it, and the next thing he knew they were rolling down a broken path, out of harm's way. He'd lost a good deal of elbow skin in the scuffle, of which he complained loudly.
"Why?" the angel spat at him.
Crowley looked into those lost, burning eyes, and couldn't smile anymore.
"Why the fuck not?" he sighed.
The angel disappeared. The next time Crowley'd seen her, she hadn't had a halo.
There were more angels after that, and more headache. Heaven's HR department sucked balls; that, or competent angels chose to be otherwise engaged whenever the post on Earth was announced vacant. Crowley hardly bothered keeping tabs on his counterparts anymore. They mostly returned the favor, save a few ambitious souls who quickly found him too big a bite to swallow, whatever their professional goals. But it wasn't in good spirit to speak ill of the dead - or rather, the temporarily discorporated.
In any event, the twenty-first century rolled around and Crowley hadn't laid eye on a single blessed feather in good sixty years. He drank to that most nights of the week.
But no good thing lasts forever, not without turning into something else entirely. Crowley had been aware, in some distant and unwanted way, that he would cross paths with his heavenly brethren at some point. He was to be forgiven for not expecting it to go quite as it did, however.
"Did you just buzz my door?" Crowley asked, sort of flatly; he was too surprised to be properly incredulous.
The angel standing on Crowley's doorstep smiled bright enough to blind. "Hullo! My name is Aziraphale. I have only just come down, from," he made a stupid little gesture skyward, "- well, you know. I thought I'd pop over and introduce myself."
Crowley stared some more.
"I come bearing a gift," Aziraphale said, smile turning tentative, and offered a bottle of wine wrapped in an atrocious pink bow.
"That's a damn good vintage," Crowley said at last.
Aziraphale lit up like a tree on fire. "So it is," he said.
At that point, there'd been nothing else to do but invite the angel inside. Aziraphale cooed over Crowley's plants, complimented the decor, and dithered about this and that for good half hour. Crowley watched the angel over the rims of his glasses and drank. The man was strange, and silly, and overall much too soft a creature to be walking Crowley's Earth unsupervised.
"What're you doing down here?" Crowley asked sometime into the second bottle of wine, which he had supplied himself when the first one was drank dry and it became apparent Aziraphale had no intention of leaving just yet.
"Same thing you are, I'd reckon," Aziraphale said.
Crowley laughed, then, as obnoxious as he pleased, "I doubt that very much, angel."
Aziraphale smiled, and it was a different smile, a saucy quirk of the lips that had Crowley dropping his drink and nearly falling off his chair.
"Perhaps I can persuade you otherwise," the angel said.
Crowley'd snorted something incoherent, possibly involving polar bears. The conversation turned to more mundane topics. Aziraphale proved to know quite a bit about the world for one who'd just stepped onto this particular celestial pebble. Crowley couldn't be bothered to sober up, so he didn't think about it too much at the time.
Aziraphale departed in the wee hours of the morning. Crowley saw him to the door, then slunk off to curl up on his sofa, rusted gears turning in his head.
Aziraphale held a bookshop. He'd told Crowley so, left a business card with the address and everything. Crowley hadn't actually believed him until he set foot in the place. It was a cozy little thing, all warm and bright. It was also made up entirely of books, as far as Crowley could tell.
"I thought you said you'd just come down," Crowley said while browsing scrolls he vaguely remembered seeing in Alexandria, sometime in the early BCs. Pre-fire, naturally.
Aziraphale fluttered somewhere in Crowley's periphery. "Well, yes," he said, "But it is not like I never visited."
Crowley looked at the man, and found him busy preparing tea, which he had indeed said he'd be doing, only Crowley'd taken it as a joke. "Is that even allowed?" he asked.
"Angels follow the rules," Aziraphale said, which was in no way an answer, and offered Crowley a dainty blue cup.
"I don't drink tea," Crowley said.
"There are scones," Aziraphale informed him.
Crowley took the cup.
The scones were good. Aziraphale packed Crowley some to take home, and Crowley didn't stop him. Angels got off on giving; demons had no qualms in taking. It was the circle of life.
"So, those visits of yours," Crowley began.
They were in a park. It was a Monday morning, and they had a whole corner to themselves, if one didn't count the pigeons and the homeless guy three benches down. Crowley'd picked the spot. Aziraphale'd brought the blanket and the basket, the latter containing rather more booze than Crowley would had wagered. Not that he was complaining.
Aziraphale didn't pretend not to understand. "Couple hundred," he said easily, then proceeded to make an indecent sound around his fork.
Crowley cleared his throat. "The cake's good, huh," he said.
"Very," Aziraphale agreed, sort of breathy.
Crowley pushed his own slice the angel's way without comment.
"It's not that many," Aziraphale said later, after the cake had been consumed and the wine uncorked. "Spread over 6000 years, it's barely anything at all."
Crowley blinked slowly. The sun was high in the sky, and he was warm and content and a little drowsy. It took him a moment to recall that he was in fact quite interested in this particular topic.
"Earth is such a curious place," Aziraphale continued. The angel sounded like the sun felt, energy and life and fire. "Humans come up with wonderful things! Books, yes, but also music, and dance, and theater. It is all quite dear."
"Why didn't you come down from the start, if you were so interested," Crowley muttered, only half-awake.
"I was supposed to, to tell you the truth," Aziraphale confided, sounding sort of sheepish.
Crowley sat up. "How's that, now?" he asked.
Aziraphale fidgeted. A delicate blush spread up his neck and cheeks, making his eyes appear almost painfully blue. "I failed my evaluation," he said. "I asked rather too many questions, you see - about humans and free will, that sort of thing - and, well, my superiors deemed me too partial to be entrusted with the Plan."
Crowley thought he should laugh. He growled instead, and felt cheated, though if someone asked him of what, he would deny knowing. "So they sent down a bunch of fools instead," he hissed.
"Come, now, they were not all so bad. You seemed to enjoy yourself, at any rate," Aziraphale said.
"That's not," Crowley faltered. Aziraphale was smiling, just slightly, the same crooked smile that had caught Crowley by the balls the first time they'd met.
"What do you know about my enjoyment, angel?" Crowley asked, trying hard not to purr.
Aziraphale waved a hand dismissively. "One sees things," he said.
"One does, when one looks for them," Crowley pressed.
Aziraphale sipped his wine. "Well, you do draw the eye," he said, and appeared not at all concerned that he'd just admitted to watching Crowley over the course of six millennia.
"Got my very own guardian angel, did I," Crowley laughed, a little brokenly.
Aziraphale tutted at him, and steered the conversation to safer waters.
A month passed, then two, then six. Some of Crowley's plants migrated to warmer ground in Aziraphale's shop. Crowley got a bookshelf, and books to go with it, all of them picked out and hand-delivered by Aziraphale. They met roughly six times a week, often more. That one spot in the park became theirs, as did a table at the Ritz. It was all so sickeningly, alarmingly domestic.
Crowley knew it couldn't go on that way forever. Even so, he was not at all prepared to hear the actual words.
"Watch the road!" Aziraphale cried, clutching at his seat and wincing and generally showing more emotion than he had when he'd pranced into Crowley's Bentley and announced that the End was Near.
Crowley grabbed the angel by the lapels of his coat and shook him, gentler than he'd meant to, "What'd you say about Armageddon?"
"The car," Aziraphale tried.
Crowley growled, getting into the man's face so they were nose to nose. "Angel."
"Armageddon is coming," Aziraphale breathed, the words burning sweet on Crowley's lips, "but I think we can stop it from happening."
Crowley let the man go. He grabbed the wheel in time to avoid blasting through a fruit stand and eased on the gas, which Aziraphale greeted with open relief. The angel fussed with his shirt and vest. He watched Crowley from the corners of his eyes, much too obvious for someone who'd evidently been planning some major mutiny for the last couple thousand years.
"We, huh," Crowley said at length.
Aziraphale ceased his flustered fluttering. "If you are amenable," he said, blue eyes sparkling.
Crowley grinned, slow and wicked.
"Oh," he purred, "I am sure we can come to a suitable arrangement."