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It's a lazy morning of whatever day it happens to be, not too long after the cancelled Armagedon, and they're relaxing together in bed, when Crowley suddenly, but sort of hesitantly, asks: "Azirapahle...I've been thinking, after my little trip there...what happened to Heaven?"
Aziraphale blinks, surprised at the topic of Heaven coming up at all, and turns to look at him. "What do you mean?"
Crowley looks like the very last thing he wants to do is explain, but nevertheless, gets out: "I remember before the fall." He pauses to get over the lump that is suddenly in his throat, then continues: "I know I raree talk about it," and never seriously, "but I do. It wasn't...it wasn't like this. Was it?"
He wonders sometimes whether he forgot, or misremembered. It would be a first for him, but it is possible, he supposes, that he… well. Wishful thinking, and all that. Or would this be the opposite?
"No," Ayirapahle admits quietly, thankfully interrupting his tangling thoughts. "It wasn't."
It's something Aziraphale himself prefers not to think about either, to be entirely honest, let alone talk about. But it's the truth. Heaven used to be a place of love and happiness, no, outright joy. And not the sort of "love and joy" you get promised on church leaflets only to be faced with forced cheer, awkwardness, and people being way too interested in your personal life. No, Heaven used to be the feeling of all the best moments in human lives, the perfect orgasms and the laughter of one's children and the feeling of waking up next to someone you love and that moment when you're entirely understood by a friend, all of this and more, amplified, and nothing but those feelings. It was...not what it is now.
"So, what happened?" Crowley repeats.
"You - all of you - fell," Aziraphale replies simply.
Crowley stares at him, for once struck entirely mute. "I beg your pardon?" He manages after a while.
All at once, Azirapahle is exasperated. "There was a third of you that fell, Crowley. A third. How could that not leave its mark? And do you remember the Morningstar, before everything happened? How amazing he was, how bright, how...I think we were all a little in love with him. No one shone as brightly as him - except for the Almighty, of course, but then Her light was of the sort that made everyone else brighter, and when he basked in it he was…"
"Yeah," Crowley says roughly, "I know." That was, after all, the biggest reason he Fell. He didn't like admitting it, not even to himself, but it was like Aziraphale had said. They were all a little in love with him.
"After you fell," Aziraphale continued, "it...changed. We all missed you, painfully - there wasn't anyone who hadn't lost dear friends. But generally, it was felt we shouldn't, you know? Because you turned against Her, after all. So...we, or most of us, decided to push it away, and we...hardened, as a result, I suppose."
Crowley rises on one elbow to stare at him some more. "You're telling me," he says incredulously after a while, "that you lot are fallen too?"
Azirapahle scowls and opens his mouth, but then has to close it again.
There is a very long silence.
"I suppose," he says at length, "if you really want to put it that way, then in a manner of speaking, yes. But it was different, really. It was more a matter of circumstances changing us."
Crowley rolls his eyes at him. "There's always some choice involved, you know that perfectly well, angel. Just like there's always some circumstances." He grows serious, as serious as he ever gets. "There were circumstances to my fall, too. I was essentially just hanging out with the wrong crowd. But when I'm honest with myself, though I try not to do it too often, I do know I made that choice, in the end. That there was a moment where I could have said no, and I didn't. Do you want to tell me there wasn't, for you?"
Azirapahle, strangely, doesn't think of the mistake he made all those eons ago, when he first chose to pretend the Fallen Ones meant nothing to him, but of the millennia he had pretended Crowley could not be his friends, let alone a lover, because he was a demon. He feels, suddenly, that he is worse than all those others in Heaven, because he made the very same mistake twice. Love, he as an angel should have known, was never something to be ashamed of, or to deny.
That had been his Fall.
"There was," he says simply.
Crowley only nods, and doesn't ask. Some things, he knows perfectly well, are too unpleasant to remember, let alone to speak of.
They are both quiet for a time, contemplating these new discoveries.
"So," Crowley says when enough time has passed for them to settle into it a little, "Heaven and Hell are basically just two competing groups of fallen angels?"
Aziraphale nods distractedly. This isn't new, precisely. He hasn't known it before, factually speaking, but it's felt like that for a very long time. He's more bothered about something else. "So does this mean," he says, slow and incredulous, "that of all the immortal creatures the Almighty has created to keep Her company, all of us have failed and abandoned her?" He has never thought he could feel sorry for the Almighty, but here he is.
"No wonder She created humans," Crowley muses. "Even with the whole apple business - which I feel much more guilty about, really, in light of this - you still have the occasional saint, those honestly repentant sinners." He shakes his head glumly. "They're faring much better than we ever did. Whichever way you look at it, we've all just fucked Her over."
Somewhere, and nowhere at all, a voice that no one can hear and yet everyone can, would, possibly, say: "Not all of you."