Work Text:
Aziraphale had seen languages change – he had seen how words became interpreted differently by different people in different groups. Of course he had. He loved books. No matter the time or the place, he was always reading something. He believed the invention of books was human’s greatest one yet. It was why he decided to collect them, a collection he eventually turned into a bookstore that he would own for… oh, a hundred years?
There would be stories about how Aziraphale looked so much like his grandfather who owned the bookstore before him, stories humans told themselves to make sense of this elusive little man who ran the eccentric bookstore with odd hours. He liked it. Humans were always creating stories, always coming up with new meanings for things, and being in the bookstore, he got to examine all kinds of people. He was just a stop in their path, but it was enough to learn about them for only a brief period of time.
In those fleeting periods, he would occasionally hear new words, or words whose meaning had changed. He found it fascinating; it caused him to seek out some books on linguistics. He never understood how the words came to find new meanings but… he didn’t have to. Sometimes humans were wonderfully enigmatic, and he never wanted to solve their puzzle.
He learned how words changed when the word angel was no longer synonymous with ‘home’ to him. When Heaven became an enemy, words became their antonyms. For him, the definition of displacement became inclusion: he finally stopped feeling rejected by the place he was supposed to call home, because he had found his home in somewhere new.
He didn’t see his final separation with Heaven as a negative thing exactly. I mean, he did at first – a brief, fleeting moment of panic before reminding himself that this meant he had no side anymore. Not Heaven, not Hell. If anything, his “side” was humanity, was… Crowley.
The word demon no longer meant enemy. Not that it ever had… not that Crowley ever had. Still, he remembered a time that demon left a bad taste in his mouth, one caused by the angels that he used to so desperately try to please. He wasn’t subject to that thinking anymore, though it had taken a while to remember that demons were just angels who started thinking differently. And what’s so bad about that? After all… demons could be kind, despite Crowley’s protests.
Angel was something that Aziraphale always was. Inarguably, factually, he was an angel. The first time that Crowley had ever used the word in reference to him, it felt… impersonal, uncomfortable. Because then… it was. Back in the garden, when Crowley was meant to tempt and Aziraphale to protect. They weren’t supposed to end up this way.
But somewhere along the way, the way that the word “angel” fell from Crowley’s lips changed. It wasn’t said with mild disinterest, or performative hatred. First, it transformed into something neutral, something shorter than Aziraphale, a quick nickname, but then… somewhere along the way it became the most tender thing Crowley ever said. Humans used the term “angel” romantically, and maybe that stemmed from Crowley saying it to him so much that, unknowingly, subtly, they picked it up, language changing through usage. In the grand scheme of things, Crowley began to use the term angel endearingly pretty quickly. Aziraphale found himself preferring it when Crowley called him angel, it made him feel… something.
He’d wondered for a long time. Now he knew that “something” was home. Angel was once more synonymous with home. So was demon. But most of all, home was synonymous with Crowley. He had never felt this safe before, warm in the arms of his demon.
Yes, he finally understood how words, and the power of them, could change.