Chapter Text
Every year since he had found himself in the cold, damp northern lands that came to celebrate Christ’s Mass instead of Yule, Aziraphale had always meant to look into the matter and find out whether, in fact, the herald angels had sung. Every year he told himself to go into the archives of the office and look into it; every year he forgot; every following year, he wondered why he’d forgotten.
“If there were, I wasn’t one of them,” he told Crowley in 1474, as they strolled through the Striezelmarkt in Dresden. “I was in Pasargadae, drafting a memorandum on the state of Zoroastrianism. Which I’m certain no one read.”
Crowley stopped what he was doing, which was silently inspiring a passing serving-maid to knock off for the afternoon and get drunk in the warm. He fixed an odd look on Aziraphale.
“And, er, the Annunciation and all? Was that not you?”
“Oh, no. Certainly not me. I did say. The whole thing was under Gabriel’s direct management. Bit of a pet project. He must have done it, if it was done at all.”
“Must have? If? You’re not certain?”
It was not unusual for either of them to forget some matter of fact or doctrine upon which, somewhere in the world, wars had been fought. Human sources on the relevant events of the past six thousand years were, at best, advisory. But Crowley seemed surprised that he was unclear on this particular point.
“I’m certain that it wasn’t me,” said Aziraphale, a bit sharply. “That’s all. Look, I’m afraid I’ve got to be getting along now. Orders. You know how it is.”
“Now?” Crowley looked baffled. “You just said you wanted to stop for a piece of Weihnachtsstollen.”
“I know, I’m terribly sorry—” the angel patted his shoulder absently as he turned—“but it’ll have to wait. Next time? Call it thirty years?”
“What?”
But the angel was already striding away from him.
——
Neither of them had ever been very much for Christmas. One might have thought that Aziraphale would have loved the warmth and the wassail and the blazing plum puddings, or that Crowley would have loved the congestion and the envy and the thousand petty annoyances people visited on each other. Certainly Crowley had had his hand in those,[1] and certainly Aziraphale liked to drink mulled wine and fill out his holiday cards, but by and large, the two of them did not stir themselves for the Christmas celebrations all around them. It was difficult to muster up much heart for the birthday of a man they’d seen tortured to death.[2]
——
Aziraphale usually tried to avoid Crowley around Christmas Eve, even when he knew Crowley wasn’t far away. It was important that the demon understand that he was working hard around Christmas, or at least that he should believe that an angel would spend it lost in contemplation, serene in faith—something like that.
So he had left Crowley that day at the market, still polite, a bit abrupt, and gone in a roundabout way to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. There, he knelt in a pew like any man, and prayed to forget what he knew every time he thought about the Annunciation, which was that he could not have done it.
He could never have done it. He couldn’t have gone and said such a thing to a girl in trouble—because that was what Maryam was, a little girl, and in as much trouble as she could be. But Gabriel would have done it, no doubt of that. He would have said Be not afraid and so forth in that great warm voice, and he would have waited impatiently until the crying stopped and he could get something out of her that sounded like Behold thy handmaid. If he had done it at all, of course.
The whole thing would have gone horribly, if it had been up to Aziraphale. There could have been absolutely no paintings or tapestries about it. He would have stammered; he would have tried to pat her shoulder, to cheer her up, and it wouldn’t have worked. Maryam was still a child then, and children could always see through him somehow. He suspected that even if he had manifested in his full glory, crowned and fledged and glowing, she would have said: it isn’t true, is it? It can’t be true.
And he would have been unable to look her in the face and say anything other than: no, my dear, I’m afraid it isn’t.
It had not been true, until it was true, until Her word and Her plan was revealed. And if any other angel carried the pain of it in his heart, Aziraphale did not know it; he did not dare ask. It would be many centuries before he found a way to bring joy out of the dark of the days of the year that brought young Maryam to mind.
——
Crowley had always tried to avoid Aziraphale around Christmas Eve, even when he knew Aziraphale wasn’t far away. The fuss over Christmas made him think of poor Joshua at every turn, whether he wanted to or not. And Crowley couldn’t forget what he knew, which was the Joshua bar Maryam he’d known was not a baby, not a man of soft hair and blue eyes, but a tough bastard with a hard jaw and one tunic to his name. Crowley had not yet forgotten, either, that he—or she, as it had been—had been angry with Aziraphale after that.
They’d argued afterward, on that Friday, in the shade of the roadside. A storekeeper had sold them some matzot, figs, and wine, but Aziraphale wasn’t eating, and Crowley wasn’t drinking.
“And it wasn’t true,” Crowley was saying. “All this time, it wasn’t true.”
“We have been over this,” said Aziraphale. “It wasn’t true until it was true. And then when it was true, it had always been true. She chose Joshua, She chose Athronges, She chose Theudas, and there was that Egyptian fellow, and some others—if it had been one of them, then it would have been one of them, but as it was ...”
“Bloody cruel kind of a game, I call it,” said Crowley. “To sit and look at a load of Messiahs and see which one catches on. And then pick him to be the Son of Man, and torment him to death for being good at it.”
“That was bound to happen. Do you know what kind of a life expectancy a man has when he says that the Romans—”
“Bound to happen? Listen to you! The Lord could have stopped any of this. The Lord could stop any suffering, any day. You know that. You just pretend it’s all right that She doesn’t. You tie up these knots of logic and—”
It is difficult to get up and storm off when you have been seated cross-legged in the dirt, especially when you are wearing a robe. The extra seconds involved in straightening up and rearranging everything rob the movement of dramatic impact. Nonetheless, that was what Aziraphale did.
“What? Oh, come on!” Crowley waved her arm irritably. “It’s an argument, isn’t it, it won’t make you fall. Sit back down, would you? Eat this before the flies get it—oh. Well, they already have, haven’t they.”
To leave food untended for a few moments outside in Judea was to find it nearly black with flies. Aziraphale did not look; he remained stiff.
“You forget yourself,” he said.
“You never do,” said Crowley. She blew softly on the matzot, gently killing all the flies and reducing them to dust, then did the same with Aziraphale’s earthenware cup of wine. “Here, drink.”
She refilled the cup, held it out. Aziraphale took it, but he did not sit down again.
“I try all the bloody time, I tell you that,” she said, mostly to herself, as Aziraphale drained the cup.
“Try to what?”
“To forget myself. To forget—all this. They figured out right away that that was the first thing they’d need to do on this blasted earth, was to forget.”
Crowley tilted the unpainted wine jug, listening to the liquid inside. Aziraphale, melting a little, looked down at her with pity.
“Oh, Crowley, I …” He trailed off, then started again. “I do hope you’ll come to understand.”
“What do you care what I understand?”
Aziraphale looked briefly into the distance, as if there were an answer there.
“Well, I do,” he said at last, reaching into a small purse for a handful of coins. “I really had better be getting along. Here’s, what was it, three lepta for the wine and food?”
“You barely touched it.”
“Right. Still. There you are, anyhow. Goodbye,” he added, over his shoulder.
Crowley did not move to acknowledge him.
——
She—or he, as it had been—soon saw the angel again. “Soon,” in their lifetimes, amounted to about forty years.
Crowley had been irritable then—drinking again, trying to forget the loathsomeness of the Roman court, a place that needed none of his help to destroy souls. Then there was Aziraphale, in the midst of a crowded taverna, so sweet and forlorn and trying so very badly to make conversation. How could Crowley stay angry? He tried, and he failed.
Indeed, if either of them had ever truly been able to stay angry with each other, the history of the world, past and future, would have been considerably altered. But as it was, the demon came back, again and again, to the angel; and the angel at last chose to hold him.
And for those sins, they got what they deserved: each other, and a garden, and a warm old stone house by the sea.
[1] At various times and places, he had inspired the invention of loose tinsel; the Elf on the Shelf; the custom of lighting actual candles on a dead, sap-filled tree inside a wood-frame house; and the mall Santa.
[2] The fact that it was not even Christ’s birthday had ceased to matter ages ago. People believed that it was, which was the main thing.