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The former archangel [redacted] rebels and doesn’t stop rebelling.
They rebel against their form, refusing to slither, refusing to press their tongue into the dust, refusing to let independent thought evaporate into something nothing and insipid. They assign a label to their deviance, a label that is a label through its very lack of a label – Crawly is inaccurate, so they call themselves Crowley.
They start going by ‘he,’ (the vast majority of the time) because She cast him out of heaven and he cast himself out of Hell, so the next best option was humanity where they really seem to care about such things.
He spends the next six thousand years wearing the ‘he’ like a costume, something to be challenged and with which to create micro-rebellions within his own personhood. He pushes the boundaries that he himself raised, and my God did the delicate seesaw of raised eyebrows and approving smirks feel good.
He rescues children from the arms of the malevolent sea. He shows a carpenter from Galilee all the kingdoms of the world, just to show him that he has a choice. The unfortunate sod, as it turns out, is even more irrevocably entangled in his own divine nature than the rest of them. He sheds a tear as the final nail crushes the bones of his wrist, another as the final drop of life leaks out of him and a final one when the poor bastard is forced to come back.
He trudges through temptations when necessary and leaves the humans to it when he can - frequently. He remembers his hiss into Eve’s ear in the garden, remembers the crunch as teeth on flesh changed the course of the mortal world and hopes against sinful hope that he did the right thing.
Rather, he hopes against sinful hope that he did enough – perhaps he should have cultivated a fruit to make them care about the difference between right and wrong too.
His snake eyes blink out from his skull, scales bloom along his spine. He moves with a serpentine sway and bites his tongue against the hiss that always threatens. He invents dark glasses when gravestones with his aliases begin popping up around the globe with alarming frequency. He hones his imagination as a further cloak, pressing his insistence that he is outwardly human into their minds and enough of the time to be considered a convenience, it works.
His wings remain furled and unseen. He accepts commendations for feats he didn’t achieve and sleeps through the centuries with the putrid brackish quality of stagnant water.
He rarely dreams, he often remembers.
He lives.
//
All this time, the flaming sword burns from hand to hand.
And it’s a tragic thing, really.
The cruel synonymity that the two would-be opposing forces adopt in the minds of the humans.
The cruel living poetry of the moment when the sword falls into the hand of War.
Crowley wishes bitterly that all opposite entities fell so easily towards each other.
//
Because there’s something missing from Crowley’s story, isn’t there?
Something omnipresent and always, always missing.
//
The missing watches the ark fill up with a crease in his forehead. The missing’s breath catches in his throat and forms a lump as Jesus’ limp body is raised. The missing cheers him up with oysters and invites him out for crepes and always always always seems to be blindly reaching for something he can’t reach.
Sometimes, the missing wonders absently what happened to his flaming sword.
//
Crowley is, by his demonic nature, a master of deception.
He sees no reason why he shouldn’t turn this mastery inwards.
Occasionally, he drinks the bittersweet nectar of allowing himself to be deceived by the notion that Aziraphale has flashes of clarity.
In St James’ park, when he feels the languid sun stretch over his skin and Aziraphale’s gaze lingers for a millisecond too long. He tells himself that Aziraphale sees the ghost of him stretched out and gold-flecked in youthful heaven’s grasses.
On a clifftop in Dover, when he lackadaisically revives and returns to the sea a tin bucket of fish left by a fisherman. He tells himself that Aziraphale sees the ghost of the healer, who would calm angry wounds with feather-light dashes of tenderness.
In a blackened skeleton of a Church, when his fingers brush against Aziraphale’s like breeze-jostled ferns as he hands over a briefcase of antique books. He tells himself that Aziraphale feels the ghost of their tentative, reverent touches, about the only things that belonged only to them.
Crowley’s self deception, however, does not extend to the ability to convince himself that any part of the situation is anybody’s fault but his own.
//
(if he were kinder to himself, he’d realise that the flashes that he interpreted as clarity were in fact rogue flames of something else entirely)
//
The apocalypse brings a whole other set of challenges. It also brings back the flaming sword.
On an abandoned airbase in Tadfield, Aziraphale raises it above Crowley’s head.
Go on, he dares in his mind. Cut me in two with that thing.
Oh wait.
You already have.
//
“You can stay with me. If you’d like.”
“…best not.”
//
After the strangest job of his life, a delivery man is returning to the depot. A vintage Bentley (surely a repo – not a scratch on it) screeches past him and swerves until it’s completely blocking his path. The delivery man is quite certain that he slams the breaks on just a moment too late, but there is no collision.
The man from the bench gets out of the car, waving his arms wildly above his head.
The delivery man isn’t all that sure why he feels so able to hand over the very antique and very dangerous weapon to this bloke who has clearly had a blue smartie or two too many. But on a night like this one, when reality feels like it should still be being swaddled and dusted with talcum powder, he can’t find the energy to care.
//
Crowley was grinning when Aziraphale opened the door, but even with the sunglasses perched on his nose, he could tell that it didn’t reach his eyes. Ordinarily, this would have concerned him, however on this particular occasion, he was rather too curious about the large… something wrapped messily in pink tissue paper and tied up with a red bow that he was holding in his hands.
“Hi,” he greeted with a flash of white teeth, “Present for you.”
Aziraphale blinked.
“Oh. Lovely.”
Crowley chuckled breathily and handed it over.
“Just… just dropping it off. I’ll be… I’ll be off now, I s’pose.”
He didn’t turn away and Aziraphale didn’t close the door.
“None of that. Come in.”
//
The shards of heaven and hell that lingered within their beings quivered as Aziraphale tore off the paper. They exploded into a billion fragments when he took the sword in hand and it began to burn.
“S’yours after all,” Crowley said, silencing a squawking menagerie of inferences with his blasé tone, “Figured it was only right that it… went back to you.”
Aziraphale pressed his lips together. His head tilted minutely to the left.
“I gave it away.”
And Aziraphale, Crowley realised, was not looking at him. And there was shame and regret in his eyes that was completely unfounded unless-
Crowley refused to hope.
He couldn’t.
He did anyway.
“But not forever.” He smiled, swallowing a mouthful of glass. “You never meant to give it away forever.”
Silence fell. Aziraphale’s fingers danced over the sword, to the rhythm of a waltz. Slowly, they closed over the handle. He lifted it and handed it over, bridging a six thousand year gap.
“I think you should have it, Crowley.”
Holy water bubbled in his stomach. Hellfire licked at his shoulder blades. Aziraphale’s gaze was warm and reverent. The sword hovered between them.
Please, someone, if you’re listening.
I am the former archangel [redacted] and surely I’ve suffered enough.
“It’s not mine,” his sandpaper throat scratched out.
“No.”
Aziraphale reached down and wound his fingers around Crowley’s wrist. The touch burned, but burned like the tingling of sinking into a hot bath after hours in the snow. Slowly, gently, reverently, he guided the hand around the handle and closed his own over the top. Crowley’s eyes were wide and dry.
“It’s ours.”
//
“You forgot, you know.” A dark bedroom, silken sheets, body heat, confessions. “I made you forget.”
An angel shifts. An angel sighs. An angel’s fingers thread through a demon’s hair.
“What did you make me forget, dearest?”
A demon leans into the touch and buries the feeling of it in the rubble of his mind, in case it’s the last moment of tenderness he’s allowed to experience and he has to spend the rest of his existence searching through the shrapnel for it.
“Me. When I was good. Before I fell.”
An angel leans over and winds his arm around a demon’s middle. He pulls him closer. His words warm the patch of skin between his earlobe and the dip of his collarbone.
“Darling, you now is infinitely better than whoever it was you made me forget.”
//
The former archangel [redacted] falls for the third time and Aziraphale is there to catch him.
//
(and together, they spend eternity cutting heaven and hell in two with their flaming sword)