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Crowley’s first memory is a sunrise.
He will never admit this on any plane of his existence, but he doesn’t know if it was the sunrise. Could have been the second or third, for all he knows. Hell, the twenty-fourth. The eighty-seventh. In all honesty, he probably wasn’t the top priority on the creation list.
(Somewhere between geese and turtles, Aziraphale would say, but in a fond sort of way, like it’s a private joke. He does that sometimes, and Crowley pretends to get it.)
But it was The Sunrise to him. He still remembers that feeling.
The world was only half-finished around him, but the light was blinding. There was so little else. He hadn’t been corporal, hadn’t even been actually enough to even warrant the descriptor abstract. The color red hadn’t existed yet. Green and yellow, yes, and blacks and whites of course and he thinks he even remembers some blues at the very edges of the sky, though that could be his faulty memory, or his imagination even.
It was as if God, in all their mysteries, had said – hold on just a minute, abandoned the big paint pot of creation for a moment, created Crowley as a rough sketch on the grand cosmic blank paper that was the universe and then gone right back to making colors and sounds and shapes. Of course, moments hadn’t existed either.
Those are his first memories.
The light (was it even a sun yet? Is there a difference between a sunrise and a lightrise?) had made its way over the sky and in its wake, there were the colors.
Yellows at first. God was so fond of yellows back then. Pinks. Greens and blues, confusedly, and then others whose entire existence predates the concept of language, who only lived in that one sky on that one day, except it had not been a day yet, it had not been anything yet, there had not been time yet. And so they had lived forever.
Later, much later, Crowley will read an article in a bookshop in Soho about how language is related to color perception. If you spend your life without a word for the color green, it will be blue to you.
Aziraphale had saved it for him, another little of their inside jokes, at once a reminder to long-lost days in ancient Greece (the wine-dark sea, Crowley remembers. They’d had shellfish.) and a gentle sort of mocking the humans and their arrogance, like the little words they had made up had the power to change creation.
Their belief in that was what had made Aziraphale start collecting books in the first place, or rather, his complete lack of understanding for it. They think their limited little languages change the world, he had scoffed, they think that gives them power (a truth about angels and demons – they don’t particularly care about humans outside of the Ineffable Plan, but even the parts they care about, they have trouble understanding).
So Aziraphale ended up with a collection of Bibles with printing errors which, as he pointed out in the tone of a man describing a family pet's familiar and yet completely unreasonable behavior, failed to result in a universe with printing errors (or did they? Crowley will ask,much later again) and volumes upon volumes of prophecies that refused to come true.
Oh angel, he will have thought, somehow (this is not a linear thing. Crowley never leaves that sunrise. Crowley never leaves their London apartment on a Monday night.) and he will remember that he was almost alone with God that morning, that Aziraphale has not existed yet, or maybe he doesn’t remember, maybe in right this moment he looks at the very first sky and realizes it for the very first time.
The colors you see change you, but not as much as the words you have to describe them.
Within Crowley are things he cannot name.
It is still that sunrise and even after the world ends, that sunrise will be there.
It’s a comforting thought, the way thoughts about death sometimes are.
And then the sun had made its way across the sky completely and that had been the invention of time, the difference between “it is here” and “it is there”, the difference between “I am here” and “I am not here”, between what will be known as “pink” and “blue” and what will never be known at all. Simple as that, almost a byproduct, basically.
The first day, you must understand, only came to be because it ended. It wouldn’t have been the first day otherwise, or even day at all, it would have just been.
Hegel will try to express something similar with his concept of dialectics, except he will use bigger words and convoluted phrases and Aziraphale will read them out loud, he’ll be wearing that ugly sweater that is multiple centuries older than the city they stand in, and he will be laughing and Crowley will find colors within himself that he has no name for, will reach out and try and trace them with his fingers in Aziraphale’s skin that has only ever known a world without them. He will find them anyway.
The sea wasn’t wine dark, was it?
It was red, it was blue, it was black, it was gray.
I loved you, then. I loved you first.
“Maybe they were right after all,” Aziraphale will say, even later, it’s always getting later now, but in a circular sort of way, after the apocalypse. They feel drunk on it, their endless supply of new mornings. Each exactly like the last in that it is completely different.
Crowley will look up at him.
“The Bibles.”
The Bibles didn’t mention us, he wants to say, except that’s not scripture, it’s not even philosophy, it’s a 21st century pop song, in fact, the one he was humming that morning.
It all blends together in the end.
Aziraphale shrugs, clearly embarrassed. “I mean, there was something wrong with the whole Plan thing, right?”
Crowley throws his head back and laughs. “You mean we’re the printing errors in creation?”
Aziraphale wouldn’t phrase it like that, but he’s got a whole section in his bookshop reserved for prophecies only and he’s got a bowl of fortune cookies in the back and the books' success rate is only slightly behind that of the cookies.
In the beginning was the word, Crowley will not say, but it was only the beginning because it was the word, everything before it was speechless.
He’s still filled to the brim with colors nobody in the world but him has seen and a longing that is sweeter than melancholy.
They have a bookshop together, Aziraphale is the one running it, but that word has a meaning, together, so Crowley agreed and occasionally he’ll refill the fortune cookies or sneak books on the shelves, nothing major, just the ones he sometimes randomly finds on the sidewalks, with covers that have a gentle sort of loneliness about them.
In the end, there are words, basically, myriads, eons of them, books and crosswords that they do together and Aziraphale thinks it’s cute when Crowley gets frustrated sometimes, and they will kiss and it will be the end precisely and only because they have the words to express it.
The sky stays purple and wine-dark and completely, entirely new.