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The sky above Eden, 3966 BC
The being that used to be Aziraphale hadn’t meant to Fall.
That was the only coherent thought in his head as he plummeted through the air, the only thing that he could separate from the lancing, burning pain in his wings, the wind tearing the air from his lungs, the feeling of fire in his mane and feathers and fur, the sick, twisting, cracking feeling of his very essence re-shaping as he Fell, the fresh, aching emptiness in his chest, like someone had reached into him and tore out his very centre…
He landed with a splash and a crack in the lake of sulphur at the centre of Hell, and when the boiling burns began, he hardly had a voice left to scream with.
Distantly, he could hear voices, feel stares. They were watching him. Waiting for him to fail, again. To collapse, to give up, to sink to the bottom of the Lake and give in.
He wouldn’t.
He forced his aching, bruised, burnt, possibly broken limbs to move, dragged himself desperately to the surface of the lake, towards the edge, towards the shore. The pain was blinding, unceasing, but perhaps, if he got to land, if he got out of here–
A hand suddenly surrounded him, pulling him up out of the Lake, and he didn’t bother to fight it. He doubted that there was much that could be done to him at this point to make him feel worse.
“Look at you, little rabbit,” said a voice, deep and guttural and near-deafening. “Quite the jump you just took.”
He dragged his head up to look at the speaker. He hadn’t expected to recognise anyone Down Here, at least, insofar as he had expected anything, but this face… this wasn’t a face that anyone could forget. “Lucifer.”
“Ah, you still talk! I was wondering. Tell me, what’s your name?”
“Azira–” He choked, then, coughing, the word catching in his throat, refusing to come out. “Aziraph–”
“Oh, hush, don’t hurt yourself,” Lucifer said, his voice a mocking parody of gentleness as he shifted his grip to cradle the gasping demon, pulling him in closer. “She took that, when you Fell. You’ll always remember it, of course, but no one else will.” Lucifer sighed. “We’ll just need to give you a new name, won’t we? How does Azra sound to you, little rabbit?”
Azira– Azra nodded, still desperately trying to catch his breath through the pain and the burning and everything else.
“Oh, poor thing,” Lucifer said, running a finger down Azra’s back. As he did, the pain melted away, vanishing from everything but Azra’s wings.
Azra straightened up as much as he dared in Lucifer’s grasp, not quite able to meet the Devil’s eye. “What, um. What do you– what do you want with me?”
“Well, isn’t that a fascinating question,” Lucifer said. “What do you think I want?”
“Well, I’m afraid I’m not quite sure, sir,” Azra said, glancing away from Lucifer, only for his eyes to land on the dozens– no, hundreds, perhaps even thousands– of demons who had gathered to watch him Fall.
Oh, dear.
“Oh, I like this one,” Lucifer said, setting Azra down on the rocky shore of the Lake. Azra wobbled, his legs feeling strange and unfamiliar underneath him– he didn’t quite dare look to see how they’d been damaged, not yet– but ultimately holding his weight. Lucifer chuckled. “Yes, I like you quite a bit. Especially after that stunt you pulled Up There– clever little thing. Letting the humans eat from the Tree? Arming them? You are surprisingly interesting, little rabbit. It would probably be best for you to keep it that way, wouldn’t it?”
“I-I’ll certainly do my best,” Azra said.
Lucifer chuckled again, then turned and walked off, shrinking as he did so, though his voice grew no less booming. “Come now, little rabbit. You’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do down here, and I think you’ll want to rest before we send you topside, won’t you? Follow me.”
“Of course, sir,” Azra said, hurrying off after Lucifer, only stumbling a little. He desperately ignored the stares of the demons around him, the continued burning pain in his wings, the gnawing emptiness in his chest, the way nothing looked or felt quite right anymore.
He had Fallen. Fallen for letting dear Adam and Eve slip past his rather lacklustre guard and eat from the Tree of Knowledge, for giving them his flaming sword.
I didn’t mean to, he thought desperately, as though there was any way to change this. I swear, I just– it was an accident, I didn’t want– I didn’t mean–
But it didn’t matter, did it? His intentions didn’t matter. He hadn’t been able to convince the Archangels that he had acted in good faith. That he had been trying to help. Michael had stabbed him through with her sword, had pulled his Grace out of him, had shoved him down, and…
And that was that. Azra had Fallen.
And there wasn’t anything left for him to do but accept it.
Well, he thought faintly, I was always a rather shoddy angel. Gabriel certainly made a point of telling me so, especially after the War. I suppose this was inevitable, wasn’t it? And perhaps… perhaps I can be a better demon. After all… well, how hard can it really be?
###
Coriel registered another angel’s approach, but didn’t bother to look up from their latest star. Chances were this newest intruder was just here out of some notion of whatever “due diligence” they’d gotten so fond of after the War, and they wouldn’t care if Coriel spoke to them or not.
“Coriel!” It was the Archangel Gabriel’s voice. “How nice to see you.”
“Hm.” Coriel glanced up at the Archangel with a frown, then turned back to their work.
“Listen, bud, we need you back down on Earth,” Gabriel said. “Someone needs to take over the Eden project.”
“So get a Cherub to do it,” Coriel said. “That’s what they’re for, isn’t it? What happened to the one who was there?”
“He Fell,” Gabriel said.
Coriel froze. “Oh, shit. What’d he do?”
“He disobeyed. Listen, Coriel, the Eden project’s been ended. We just need someone to shift the Garden off of the mortal plane, so that the humans can’t get to it anymore. Especially now that we don’t have a guard. You’re the best angel for the job!”
Coriel bit back a groan. “There’s gotta be someone better than me.”
“You’re the one who figured out the… whatever was wrong with that one star, yeah?”
“Orbital issues when new stars are formed from nebulas,” Coriel grumbled. “Not that I’d expect you to get it.”
Gabriel’s stare turned dark. “You are still an angel, Coriel. And while you work on Earth, you are under my command. Do not test me.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Coriel said, holding their hands up in a sort of mock-surrender. “So. When do you need me?”
“The humans are out of range by now, so you can just vanish the whole garden without risking the Almighty’s pet project. Head down there now.”
Coriel grimaced. “I’m… sort of in the middle of something?”
“Dont worry, we’re phasing out the whole Creation thing. Just leave it, it’s not like anyone will notice. We want Eden gone by nightfall. We can’t have Hell getting their hands on anything else. You’ll get a new assignment after you’re done. Got it?”
“Ugh. Fine. I’ll handle it.”
Gabriel nodded, then vanished with a soft chime. Coriel sighed one more time, glanced down at the half-finished nebula they’d been working on, then headed off back towards Heaven. After all, they needed a body if they were headed to Earth.
###
“There is an angel in Eden again, little rabbit.”
Azra froze where he was seated at Satan’s feet, his breath stuttering ever so slightly.
Of course, Satan noticed. “Oh, you poor thing. What will you do about it?”
Azra swallowed nervously. “Ah. I’m not– not sure how much I can do? I- I already– well, the humans have already left the Garden, and they were what the Almighty cared about–”
Satan’s hand, where it had been stroking down Azra’s ears, went suddenly tense, his claws scraping the sensitive flesh. Azra winced, and Satan’s hand gentled again, stroking down the mark and healing it as he went.
“You know the humans, don’t you?” Satan asked, his voice unusually quiet. “You spoke with them, while you guarded the Garden.”
Azra nodded faintly. It had been… well, if he was entirely honest, it had been rather lonely, up on the Wall. And Adam and Eve had both been so wonderfully friendly, so kind and sweet, and even if Adam had been a bit slow at times, Eve was more than clever enough to make up for it.
She had been rather too clever for her own good, in the end.
Satan hummed thoughtfully, then redoubled his grip on Azra’s ears, tugging his head back in a way that could have been almost gentle, had it been done by anyone else. “Go to Earth. See what’s going on with Eden, and then talk to the humans. I want to see what else you can do.”
“Yes, sir,” Azra said, his voice a little strained from the angle of his head.
Satan let his ears go, and Azra took a deep breath, then squeezed his eyes shut, folding the ears down and away, hiding them as best he could. There wasn’t much he could do for his eyes– a little too round to be human, and a pale pinkish-red– or for the white fur that covered the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, he had learned that over the past couple of days, but the rest of it, the rest of the fur and the ears and the slightly-wrong teeth, he could hide those away well enough. It would have to do.
“I’ll, um,” Azra said, pushing himself carefully to his feet, not quite daring to look back at Satan. “I’ll just… just go, then?”
A hand, massive and clawed, fastened around his wrist, and Azra froze, glancing back to see that Satan’s eyes were boring into him.
“I like you, little rabbit,” Satan said quietly. “This is a big job. Don’t make me regret giving it to you.”
“You– you won’t, sir,” Azra said quickly.
Satan stared at him for a moment longer, then nodded, let his wrist go, and sat back.
Azra hurried out of Satan’s chamber before he could change his mind, moving carefully through the halls of Hell. He wasn’t entirely certain where he was going, but–
“Oh, look what we have here, Ligur,” a voice growled, and then someone was grabbing Azra, slamming him up against one of the slimy, cold stone corridors.
Azra gasped, his eyes darting between the two demons who’d cornered him. The one holding him was tall and pale, with a frog sitting atop his head and pitch-black eyes that reminded Azra uncomfortably of Satan’s. The other– Ligur, presumably– was a little shorter, but broad enough to make up for it, with dark skin and a chameleon where the other’s frog was. At the moment, both the chameleon and Ligur’s eyes were green.
“Looks like Lord Satan’s new pet,” Ligur growled. “All by his lonesome.”
“Looks like,” the other agreed, pressing Azra harder up against the wall. Azra winced faintly, quite against his will, and he brought his hands up to press against the frog-demon’s arm.
“Listen, I’m quite sure that this is all a misunderstanding,” Azra said, his pushing and squirming all proving to be utterly ineffective.
“Still so proper,” Ligur said. “Wonder how long it’ll take to get him to scream. What do you think, Hastur?”
The frog-demon– Hastur– grinned. “Think I’d like to find out.”
“Oi! You two! Get off him,” a new voice buzzed, and Hastur and Ligur immediately backed up, leaving Azra to fall back against the wall.
The newcomer was short, with pale skin, messy, dark hair, and a cloud of flies surrounding their head.
“Lord Beelzebub,” Hastur said, bowing. “We were just showing the new guy who’s boss.”
“He knows well enough who’s bosszzz,” Beelzebub said sharply. “And it’s not you, Duke Hastur. Now get out of here.”
“Sure thing,” Hastur said, throwing a dark glare over his shoulder at Azra before he and Ligur slinked off.
“Thank you,” Azra said.
Beelzebub rolled zir eyes. “I waszn’t doing you a favour. Boss wants you Up There. I get the boss what he wants. That’s it.” Ze turned to face him, zir eyes narrowed. It was, perhaps, the most emotion he’d seen from zir yet. “You want my advice, newbie? You don’t have friends Down Here. You, in particular? You’ve got nobody. The Boss thinks you’re a curiosity. Once he gets bored– and he will– you’ll be tossed aside, to join the rest of uszz. And no one will save you then.”
“Well. I shall take that under consideration.” Azra straightened up, fixed his robe, and then sighed. “If I’m meant to head Up, I ought to get going. I suppose I’ll see you later.”
“Hope you don’t,” Beelzebub said. Then ze was gone.
“Well. That was unpleasant,” Azra murmured. Then he shook himself slightly, and headed off to find Hell’s exit.
###
Coriel was staring at the Garden, their arms crossed, trying to work out the best way to get this bloody thing into another dimension. It was the smallest scale they’d worked on since helping work out some of the technical difficulties with the humans’ little meat-computers, and that was proving to be... a complicating factor. They didn’t want to move the whole planet, or even the whole desert, but they couldn’t risk leaving some of the Garden behind. And that was even before taking into account things like root systems, and the underground water that fed the springs, and…
Something shifted. The sand was moving, over by the Eastern Gate– or, rather, the hole in the wall where the Eastern Gate would have gone had it ever been built in the first place. The angel who’d been guarding over it, who had made the hole, had Fallen before he’d finished patching it up, so it was still there. And now, something was crawling out of the dirt nearby it.
Coriel spread their wings and took off, flying over the Garden to land next to–
It was an animal. A small, white animal, with tall ears and red eyes. A rabbit.
Then, before Coriel could land, the animal shifted, transforming into– well, it looked almost like a person, pale and white-haired, wearing a dark robe that only made him look paler.
He had wings, though, wings just as big as Coriel’s, though they seemed built for power rather than speed, and they were… they were black, and, honestly, a little scraggly. It looked like a lot of feathers were missing, and the ones that weren’t were oddly brittle-looking, like they were about to fall apart. Like they’d been burned.
Coriel landed on the sand next to the newcomer with a soft thump. “What happened to your wings?”
The creature jumped and squeaked, pressing an oddly furry hand to their chest. “Oh, my. Ah. Where– where did you come from?”
Coriel jerked their head to the sky. “Flew over. What happened to your wings? And why were you a bunny?”
The newcomer frowned. “You– you must know. Everyone knows.”
“Knows what?” Coriel asked. “It looks like they’re burnt. Did you–” Then they froze. They could think of only two reasons why an angel’s wings could be burnt. Either they got hurt doing Creation work, of which Coriel’s had been the last, or… “You Fell.”
“I’m afraid so,” the creature– the demon– said with a grimace. “I assure you, I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t think many of your lot actually meant to Fall,” Coriel said.
The demon sighed. “You’d be surprised.”
Coriel stared at him. “Why are you up here? Aren’t you all meant to stay in Hell?”
“Well, there’s not much keeping us down there,” the demon said. “I’m on assignment. And, well… I do rather prefer Earth to Hell.”
“Not really surprising,” Coriel said. “I heard Earth’s supposed to be nice.”
“Supposed to be?” the demon asked. “Have you not seen it?”
Coriel shook their head. “M’just here to get rid of the Garden. After that… I dunno.”
The demon’s jaw dropped. “Get– get rid– get rid of the Garden? What–?”
“Well, the humans aren’t using it, are they?” Coriel pointed out. “Head Office doesn’t want them stumbling into it again, now we have no one to guard it.”
The demon frowned. “Well, that hardly makes sense. It’s not as though I was particularly–”
Then he froze, clapping a hand over his mouth, his odd reddish-pink eyes going wide.
Coriel felt their own jaw drop. “Hang on, no way. It’s you! You were the Guardian of the Eastern Gate! You’re the guy behind the Fall of Man! You gave them a sword! How the Hell could you have not meant to Fall?”
“It was an accident!” the demon burst out, wringing his hands together nervously. “I was talking to Adam, we were talking about the creatures he’d been naming, and Eve ran off on her own– they had plotted it ahead of time, I didn’t know– and– and by the time I got to her, she had already... and then, then they were being forced out, and it was– it was going to be cold, and there were vicious animals, and she was expecting already, and so I just– I said here you go, flaming sword, don’t thank me, and don’t let the sun go down on you here… but, well, Gabriel saw. Pulled me before the Archangels. And Michael…” The demon shuddered. “Well. I suppose you know that part.”
Coriel stared at him, something deeply unfamiliar curdling in their gut. “Wow. Poor little bunny…”
Pink eyes snapped up to glare at Coriel. “I don’t need your pity.”
“Wasn’t pitying you,” Coriel said quickly. “I’m not about to pity a demon, don’t worry, bunny.”
“Azra.”
Coriel blinked. “Sorry?”
“My name,” the demon said. “It’s Azra. There’s no need to call me bunny.”
“It’s what you are, though, isn’t it?” Coriel asked. “What with the bunny-transformation– or can you do that with any animal?”
“Just a rabbit, as far as I’m aware,” Azra said. “That rabbit in particular. Though I suppose I haven’t tested it.”
“You should,” Coriel suggested. “It’s good to know what you can do, yeah? Just basic practicality.”
Azra frowned at them. “Are you… helping me?”
Coriel shrugged. “Figure we owe you one. Upstairs, I mean. If the humans had died straight out of Eden, then this whole Earth thing would’ve been a bust, and I reckon She’d be pissed. I’ve already seen your sword save their lives a few times, now.”
Azra’s frown only deepened. “You mustn’t let the Archangels hear you talking like that.”
“Eh, they’re just a bunch of pretentious bastards with sticks up their arses,” Coriel said. “I’m not worried about them.”
“They’re a bunch of pretentious bastards who have the power to make you Fall,” Azra said softly. “You shouldn’t anger them, dear.”
“You’re probably right,” Coriel muttered. “Ugh.”
They both stood in silence for a moment. Coriel watched the demon out of the corner of their eye. He seemed… nervous, somehow. Much more fretful than they would have expected from a demon.
“Is everyone Down There like you?” Coriel asked suddenly.
The demon jumped, glancing up at Coriel, then shook his head. “I– I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I haven’t been… well. It hasn’t been very long, you see. And I haven’t had the chance to meet very many demons yet. But, from my experience… it seems as though I’m rather alone.”
“Pity,” Coriel said. “Hell would be better off if more of ‘em were like you.”
“Come, now, don’t poke fun,” Azra muttered, wringing his hands together.
Coriel blinked. “I’m… not. I’m actually not? I mean it. I mean, no one else from your side actually managed to do a damn thing to Eden.”
“Oh... I suppose you’re right.”
“See?” Coriel grinned. “You’ll do just fine.”
“Oh,” Azra said. “Thank you.”
They stood in silence for another long moment, long enough for clouds to begin to darken the sky.
Azra looked up at them warily. “What’s all this?”
“Rain,” Coriel said. “Didn’t you see it while you were down here? She deployed it– oh. Right after the humans left the Garden.”
Azra winced, ever so faintly. “No, I was… ah. Otherwise occupied, by that point.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Got it,” Coriel said. “S’not so bad, from what I hear. Haven’t had a chance to see it in person yet, I just got here, but… seems all right.”
There was a faint rumble of thunder from overhead, and then the rain began, the gentle pattering of water droplets against the sand. Coriel inched ever so slightly closer to Azra, glancing up towards the sky…
To see a broad, black wing extended over their head, shielding them from the rain.
They glanced over at Azra, stunned. The demon had held his wing over Coriel’s head, just to keep them from getting wet, even though it meant that they’d get soaked in turn. And with the still-fresh Fall damage to his wings, it couldn’t have been comfortable. But… he’d done it anyways, seemingly without hesitation.
You’re kind, Coriel thought almost incredulously, watching Azra watch the rain. Even after Falling, even after what the Archangels did to you, you’re still kind.
I really hope it lasts.