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Here's the thing they never tell you about accepting help: it's Hard.
No matter how much you wanted it before, how often you prayed for it, begged in silent spaces where no one else could hear you, no matter how hard you used to crave it.
Accepting it is an entirely different beast. One that spits and growls and screams every inch of the process, refusing to make the healing easier.
It drives Crowley up the wall.
You wanted this, he wants to scream at himself. This is exactly what you always dreamed would happen, so why are you acting like this now?
Unsurprisingly, he never seems to have an answer for himself. He can't think of one good solid reason for why he feels like this; pathetic and horrible and so goddamned angry, but he does.
He wraps it up and buries it deep enough where it could never even dream of touching Aziraphale, but when they depart for the night and Crowley goes to his apartment on his own, he feels like he's choking on everything that's railing inside of him.
He gets good at swallowing it down.
Just another part of the role he plays.
Things aren't smooth sailing after the apocalypse that wasn't.
Things could never be that easy.
They con their freedom from their respective sides, go to dinner, and go back to their own homes alone. Almost as if nothing has changed.
Crowley barely makes it past the threshold before his hip gives out from underneath him, worn thin and pushed too far by an occupant that couldn't feel its growing weakness. The impact of instinctively catching his fall nearly wrests his wrist from its socket.
Aziraphale knows now. Crowley could call him. Could even text. A quick two-second message, a simple request for help.
The pain won't let him sit up. His phone remains tucked in his pocket, perfectly within reach. He tells himself that he can get his own damned self up just fine, just like he has been for the past 6000 years. He can miracle himself somewhere better whenever he chooses to, can take care of himself. He just needs a couple more minutes.
Crowley doesn't move from the entryway for the next three days.
Crowley doesn't call and Aziraphale doesn't answer.
Crowley burns alone.
(Just like he's supposed to.)
"How can I help you?" Aziraphale had asked over dinner.
Crowley gaped and thought How should I know? When no one ever has before? and had tried to find a way to say it without sounding pathetic.
He'd failed.
(At least that was nothing new.)
Crowley spent 6000 years waiting for the courage to admit to having a problem. For the indulgence of sympathetic phrases. For the relief of getting some kind of help; any kind at all.
There was no relief in the confession. No absolution from the weight of its burden. Nothing but thick ice in his veins and a heavy weight in his stomach. Too seen to be comforting. Too pathetic to be known.
He's never deserved anything better.
As easy as it might be to just stay on the floor for the rest of eternity (it's not like he has a job to get back to anymore), Crowley knows better than to think it'd be a good idea to actually do it. He's done the 'Moping in one place for a century' Thing before, and the agony of his body when he'd finally gotten up had been far worse than anything that had driven him to trying it in the first place.
He takes it in stages, carefully curling his body together from where it had been sprawled out. Letting the slow curve of his spine settle until the pain rattling in the vertebrae stops. Shifts to put weight onto his arms and legs, letting them adjust.
Takes the time to feel pathetic for how long it takes.
Moves again. Lets his knees take his weight as he stretches, lets his too-tight muscles scream in agony, hears his shoulders grind in their sockets as his wrists pop and his spine feels like it might come apart piece by piece. Staggers to his feet and digs his toes into the ground until they hurt, and finally feels stable.
Takes the time to breathe, lets the pain ground him in his body until he feels connected and whole again.
Pulls his phone out of his pocket to call Aziraphale and asks if he wants to go to lunch.
No big deal.
Is it strange? That this corporation no longer feels like his own without the pain there to hold him in place? What could have happened if things had worked like he'd worried they might, if he had taken Aziraphale's body and found relief from that 6000-year-old pain? If he had held absolution and freedom in his hands and walked without having to calculate the effort of each individual step?
Would he have ever given it back? Would he have taken Aziraphale's corporation and never returned it? Damned his angel to his fate and taken off on his own to enjoy things in way he'd never been able to before?
Of course, he wouldn't have. It probably would never have crossed his mind for anything other than the sole purpose of torturing himself with the possibility that he might. Crowley wouldn't wish this on anyone, especially not the only other person in existence that he actually cares about.
But he wonders if the lack of pain would have been more terrifying than anything else.
(If it wasn't there to hold him inside of himself, where the fuck would he end up?)
It happens in slow stages. A cautious look as they climb up the steps to a restaurant, a longer stretch of time spent sitting on benches in the park, a sudden rush to get home instead of hours wasted standing in the cold, delaying the inevitable departure.
Crowley isn't sure what to make of it.
Oh, he knows what it's for. Isn't so oblivious or willfully ignorant as to not know what caused the changes. Remembers that reluctant confession spoken only for the sake of a plan constructed out of desperation and a need to survive.
He almost wishes he hadn't.
He can't regret the plan itself. The thought of Aziraphale in those clinical halls, surrounded by poorly faked sympathetic smiles and ice-cold tones (agonizingly hot flames), is one Crowley can barely stand. He doesn't regret taking his place. He might regret the admittance, though, ground out through clenched teeth, completely unnecessary.
He wonders if calling it 'unfair' would be fitting.
Decides that fairness had never been in the cards for him and supposes that it shouldn't start being part of the deck now.
(But there's a sad guilt between Aziraphale's eyebrows now, tucked behind his eyes and hidden in the aborted movements and the wringing hands. Crowley thinks he might hate it.)
(He wonders what that says about him.)
"Why's that guy walking like that?" a small voice in the park asks loudly, and Crowley bites back his startled laugh harshly enough to choke.
The response from the mother is a little less humorous, a panicked shushing and frantic scolding about speaking too loudly and staring too long.
Crowley turns just enough to see the outraged pout of a child who clearly has no desire to be oppressed in such a manner.
"I don't mind," he tells the mother, who pauses hesitantly in her vain attempts to drag her kid off to somewhere less populated.
He isn't lying, either. When it's kids, Crowley doesn't mind answering questions and being honest, because children are just curious and they can't help but want to learn things (and Crowley, who was wide-eyed and curious once, remembers the outrage and hurt of being punished just for wondering).
His knees hurt too badly for him to squat, but he walks just close enough to take a seat at the bench the two humans had been sitting on moments earlier. Aziraphale is waiting on a bench not too far away, but the premature break isn't going to hurt anyone, and it gets him on the boy's eye-level.
"My bones and joints don't work like they're supposed to," he tells him. "Sometimes I have to change the way I walk to make it hurt less, like when you walk funny after you scrape your knees."
The boy looks at him seriously. "I scraped my knees when I fell off my bike once," he recalls solemnly. "They bled all over, but my bones were okay. Do your bones always hurt?"
"Most of the time," Crowley says. "That's just how I was made."
"Hmmm." There's a long enough pause that Crowley begins to think that might be the end of it, and starts preparing himself to stand back up. He doesn't get anywhere at all before the boy has hunched over far enough to press a kiss to Crowley's knee. "There," he declares with an air of immense satisfaction. "Did that make it better?"
The mother flushes a dark red, but Crowley laughs with genuine amusement. "Absolutely," he says. "You've made my whole day better is what you've done."
The boy beams, retreating back a step to return to his mother's side, curiosity satisfied enough for now.
"Thank you," the mother says quietly, a sheepish smile on her face.
"Kids are curious," Crowley says, and shrugs. It's a delicate line to balance, this one. He can't exactly encourage them to walk up and ask anyone they see for the same spiel he'd just given them. Even he's not always so magnanimous as to provide it. Sometimes he just wants to get through whatever he's doing without being stopped and questioned or told things like -
"You're a real inspiration."
Crowley's smile goes fixed. He'd nearly gotten out of that one clean.
"Thanks," he says, instead of anything he'd rather say. Instead of I've done more impressive things than answer a child's question or dare to go out in public on my own, or What kind of inspiration did you take from this interaction, or If I have to hear that shit one more time I'm going to shut down your entire phone carrier's service for a week just to spite you, or It's almost never a good idea to say something like that; haven't you seen everything humans have been saying about things like that for years now?
Because to say any of that is to just become a lived experience of why one doesn't look at or speak to disabled people. Because to get angry is to just give them an excuse to be less kind to the next one - a caricature to pull out when the topic comes up and Those Rude and Pitiful People are brought up. After all, she was only 'being polite', she was only 'being kind', she was only 'telling the truth'.
Thanks, he says, and the anger doesn't settle.
Life is full of "should's".
He should be better, he should be different, he should be doing more, he shouldn't let it affect him this much.
He should be used to this by now.
Somehow every new incident feels like another kick in the teeth.
It never gets easier; you just get better at it.
"I don't think you can go on like this," Aziraphale says one evening. His hands hover without touching, twitching with uncertainty.
Crowley throws his head back and laughs, riding the electric pain in his hip like a high until his entire body spasms with it, spine arching and the back of his skull grinding against the couch.
"I've done it long enough," he says, too good at watching his tone to let the agonized gasp slip through. "Why stop now?"
Aziraphale doesn't answer, and Crowley decides now to dwell on the way his own body tenses like it's waiting for a blow.
(Aziraphale wouldn't, he tries to tell himself. He's not that kind of angel, not that kind of person. He's always cared too much for his own good.)
(But that's never stopped the worry, the suspicion he's had since he'd first considered spilling this secret and asking for help. The fact is that Crowley is the worst kind of thing to care for - temper short with insecurity and far too stubborn to truly listen to anyone else. He's a hassle. He's not worth the trouble.)
(Wasn't that why She had thrown him out in the first place?)
(Her patience was supposed to be endless. Unrelenting. Even Aziraphale's would have paled in the face of it.)
(What does it say about him that he wore it so thin it snapped?)
It's raining outside and there is someone knocking on the door of Crowley's apartment.
Shame that he can't stand well enough to answer the door on his own.
"Just open the door yourself," he shouts, probably loud enough to be heard. It's not as if he locks the damn thing anyway; Crowley expects that his apartment will remain unburgled, and so it does.
(Then again, Crowley expects a lot from his legs as well, but they seem entirely content to falter and fail on their own terms. Maybe he should invest in the habit.)
Aziraphale bustles his way inside (he locks the door behind him, because he, at least, has found a great appreciation for the simple and effective piece of technology after years of owning a bookstore on a relatively busy street corner), calling out greetings and the usual round of questions that humans ask when they don't expect a real answer.
"I thought you might like to stay in today," he says, finally rounding the corner to where Crowley lays sprawled on his couch. Aziraphale holds up a picturesque picnic basket with a smile, "I brought snacks!"
Crowley makes a valiant effort to keep the knot in his throat and the burning behind his eyes locked tight under his skin where no one else can see it.
Judging by the careful press of Aziraphale's fingers to Crowley's swollen knee, he fails.
(It doesn't feel as bad as he would have expected.)
Sometimes he wonders where the anger comes from. What parts of him hold onto it and foster it like something worthwhile and precious. Where it hides on the days when he feels almost alright.
And there are days when he feels almost alright. When he can fool himself into believing that the millennia of a solid pattern was just an off period, just a rough patch. That he's Fine, Actually and everything he's been putting up with has just been a little unfortunate, but not a big deal. Or the days when he still feels like shit, but decides that it's fine; just part of the routine, nothing to write home about.
But then something happens, or maybe nothing does, and the anger and the rage surge forward out of him like a raging animal held back by a thin loop of wire. Ready to snap and snarl at anything that happens to get too close. As if it had never gone in the first place, only watching from behind his rib cage with wary eyes and sharpened teeth.
He wonders if it will ever truly fade or extinguish. Will his body ever stumble upon the miracle of fixing itself? Will the Earth get better instead? Will humanity realize its shortcomings and resolve to fix them?
Sometimes he thinks the anger only stays because he doesn't have a choice but to hold onto it. Doesn't have a choice but to dwell on it and foster it because of the way this world was constructed and the way fate or God or coincidence played their hands.
He wonders if he deserves one.
Sometimes Crowley spends time as a snake, wrapped around Aziraphale's shoulders.
It doesn't help with the pain so much as it limits it. After all, it's rather difficult for your hips and shoulders to ache when you don't have any of them in the first place.
Aziraphale is patient enough. Complaining lightly, but not really protesting, when Crowley wiggles under his coats or slides his head or his tail between the pages of whatever book the angel is reading. He lifts Crowley with careful hands when he needs to be moved, and giggles faintly when Crowley flicks his tongue against the shell of one of his ears.
He might be tempted to stay like this all of the time, if it wasn't for the fact that part of him is terrified that he wouldn't be able to shift back.
(After all, isn't that what She had wanted, when She'd cursed him to crawl in the dirt? Crowley still remembers it vividly, the tears in Her eyes and the vicious snarl in Her throat as She had yelled at him for what he had done to Her creation.)
(She had never really been angry before, even during the Fall She had only seemed sad and disappointed. Then Crowley convinced Eve to take just one bite, and the anger had come forward, and then it had stayed.)
(Crowley watched when She destroyed whole swaths of humans, when She told humans to destroy other humans, when She poured out vengeance like fire from the sky.)
(He watched and wondered if this was all his doing too.)
(How could you?, She had demanded, all outrage and resentment, and wasn't it fitting that he had spent the next six millennia asking the same question of Her.)
(Neither of them ever gets an answer.)
He wants to believe that it could be easier with Aziraphale there.
There's nothing to be done about the pain itself, of course, but most days Crowley's frustration comes from external factors rather than internal ones. His body is what it is, there's nothing to be done about that, but there is something to be done (or rather, something should have already been done) about things like stairs and stares and seats.
But while Aziraphale is a literal miracle worker, it seems that there are things even he can't do.
"Sorry, dear boy," the angel says, his voice disappointed and upset, but not at Crowley.
Crowley looks up the full flight of stairs leading up to the art museum he'd promised to take Aziraphale to and acknowledges that he should probably have seen this coming.
(There might be a ramp, there might not be. It might function perfectly; it might be storing garbage bins or lead up to a door with a broken lock that no one deemed important enough to fix. It might be just around the corner, or a full block around.)
"No worries," Crowley tells him, and almost means it. Takes the step Aziraphale hasn't yet to brace his forearm against the thin railing and leans his weight just right to avoid putting too much pressure on his hip and knee as he pulls himself up.
Aziraphale makes an alarmed noise in his throat, taking enough stairs to look Crowley in the face. "There's no need to push yourself, you'll get hurt. It isn't that important."
"It's fine," Crowley says, honestly. "I'm used to it."
And he is.
"You shouldn't have to be," Aziraphale replies reproachfully.
"Maybe. Maybe not," Crowley shrugs. "But hey, do me a favor and walk behind me so I don't fall all the way down if I trip."
The angel blusters like he can't if Crowley is joking or not, but anxiously falls into step behind him, his eyes fixed on the careful effort of Crowley dragging his body up the stairs.
(Crowley, of course, isn't joking, but he's not about to make things worse by admitting it.)
(He'll leave the museum with a crick in his neck from the times he'd resigned himself to sitting on a bench, craning his head to look at the paintings placed too far above his newfound eye level. Even switching tracks to watch Aziraphale as he flits between each piece of art will be just this side of too uncomfortable to continue.)
(It might be worth it, just to see the happiness in the angel's eyes and hear his giddy recounting of conversations with artists and the process of their creations.)
(He consciously chooses not to wish it didn't have to be.)
Shouldn't things be easier now? Shouldn't he have calmed down? He's not on his own anymore, Aziraphale knows and he tries his best to help, and he does.
So why the fuck is Crowley still so angry?
"Am I supposed to be grateful?" he asks his ceiling, staring up at it despondently.
Humans say it all the time. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Pain is weakness leaving the body, fun little slogans they can toss out haphazardly. They say it about other humans too, that artists and creators could never have done what they did without dealing with the horrors of their minds or their bodies or their times. They tell it to him, surely the whole 'inspiration' shtick is brought about by something.
Maybe it's a lesson She wanted him to learn, and the fact that it's still around means that he's just too stupid to have learned it yet. If it is from Her, then should he be finding something good to take from it? Isn't She supposed to know what She's doing and aren't all of Her decisions meant to lead to something good?
Crowley sighs, letting the hot seizing of his spine wash through him. Tries to imagine what Aziraphale would say.
Aziraphale hates hearing humans say those things about artists and writers. He always did tend to hang around them, when they were alive, and sometimes he gets drunk and maudlin and will lament for what could have been if only those humans had been able to get the help they'd needed.
Tries to imagine what he might thing, if it was Aziraphale who had the body on its slow way to a complete collapse.
Even the thought of trying to tell Aziraphale he might be grateful for it makes Crowley hiss in anger.
Maybe it's not a complete stretch to have the same reaction for himself.
It could be worse, he sometimes tries to tell himself.
And it could be, truly. He could be a human, bound without the use of magic for quick fixes of locked elevators or blocked ramps. He could be a human, stuck with bodily functions you can't ignore even when food is too difficult to make or the restroom is too far for you to walk to. He could be a human, having to cope with doctors and hospitals and the insufferable horror of being verbally dissected and physically prodded only to be met with doubt or a sustained reluctance to provide any real help.
He could be a human, with a promised expiration date and the certainty that this will not be forever.
He wonders if that last one is a blessing or a curse.
"You have to let me help you," Aziraphale says, his voice high and desperate the way it gets when he's nervous. Crowley hates that he's the one who put that tone there.
"I don't know how," he replies, trying to make his own voice sound angry because it is so much easier to be angry than it is to be weak. (You learn that quickly in Hell, you don't have a choice. The heaven that Crowley remembers probably would have said the same thing, because to be a weak angel was to claim that God had messed up with you somewhere and left you lacking, and that would be Wrong.)
(Sometimes Crowley wonders if he was like this before the Fall, too.)
He doesn't say he doesn't deserve it, but Aziraphale has always had the awful tendency to see more than Crowley wants him to.
"You did not ask to have this body," Aziraphale says, holding Crowley's hands firmly but gently, and Crowley's fingers throb in response. "You didn't choose this, to hurt and be in pain, and you deserve to be helped with it."
Fucking Aziraphale. Fucking Aziraphale, with his soft face and words and uncanny ability to strike right at the heart of an issue as long as it's one that Crowley doesn't want him to pay attention to, and Crowley hears the words (hears that they're true, or at least that Aziraphale genuinely believes them) and doesn't last a goddamned second before bursting into tears.
"Oh, sweetheart," Aziraphale breathes, his own eyes filling with tears because he's him and Crowley has to break eye-contact because he wouldn't be himself if he could stand it.
Aziraphale pulls him close, forgoing the hesitant clasp of his hands in favor of dragging Crowley close and holding him there tightly, as if he could caress the lifetime of grief into oblivion for good and squeeze the agony away entirely.
He can't, of course. Of course, there is absolutely nothing that he could do about either of those things, or any of it really.
But Crowley weeps into his shoulder and hugs back despite the throbs of protest in his bones and believes, just for a moment, that it might just work anyway.