Chapter Text
Crowley had just left to go get groceries and run errands for an hour or so when Aziraphale decided to work on unpacking one of the few boxes in their guest room, leftover from when they’d moved. He’d been expecting to go through its contents and figure out what needed to go where, and what needed to be given away or thrown out. When he’d opened it, he’d been met with a view of four stacks of letters, tied up in red twine, and with a hastily written sticky note that said “1800’s” on the inside of one of the cardboard flaps. Once he took one stack out, he noticed that under the normal ones with yellow paper, the stack was mostly composed of envelopes that were still a crisp white, which meant they were old assignment letters from Heaven.
Aziraphale untied the stack, and read through the yellowing letters, fondly remembering various book appraisals and orders. One particularly nostalgic letter was one between himself and an eccentric man who had found a Bible that had intended to be a translated version into Dutch, but was actually almost entirely consisting of critiques from the translator, and had stopped after the book of Lamentations. Aziraphale chuckled a little under his breath after finishing reading that letter.
He then looked at the remaining letters in the stack, which were mostly assignment letters from Heaven. Aziraphale pursed his lips as he considered whether or not he should delve into those or not, or just throw them away. They were, after all, a reminder of all he’d done, even though he was no longer working for Heaven. Perhaps it would be nice to take a walk down memory lane... Settling on the compromise of reading through them one last time before getting rid of them, Aziraphale untied the stack and picked up the first letter.
Just for old time’s sake, he thought.
Seventeen letters later, each assignment was somehow feeling like it he was still at fault for not living up to the standards set by each assignment. After all, many of them he had traded off to Crowley —at least before his century long nap— and most times, when he received his quarterly review on assignments, every fault or shortcoming or misunderstanding was highlighted and laced with venom and shame.
There was a heavy, twisting feeling in his stomach, reading each page of miracles he was assigned over a century ago, and he didn’t really know why he was still reading them.
He slowly put down the letter he was holding, noticing that his arm wasn’t really moving as fast as normal, and furrowed his brow a little, trying to figure out what could be going on.
It wasn’t the first time he had felt like this, but he hadn’t experienced this sort of thing since not much after the Not-Apocalypse, which had been almost a year ago. The vague thought that I shouldn’t be feeling like this. I should be over this by now! ..Especially since Crowley and I moved in together six months ago and everything has been wonderful so far, wandered through Aziraphale’s mind, but he didn’t really pay much attention to it before letting it sink away.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting on the floor in front of the box of letters before he noticed that he hadn’t moved at all, and was sitting as still as a statue, not even breathing or blinking. Angels didn’t need to blink or breathe, of course, but it was momentarily bothering when Aziraphale realized that he hadn’t been doing either for quite a while.
He’d just been blankly staring at random points; the floor, the box, his knees, the wall, and unfocused points in the middle distance. Sometimes he would try to look somewhere else, then realize he physically couldn’t shift his gaze, but not be too bothered by that as the sinking feeling absorbed any other emotions.
After a while he noticed that he wasn’t numb, per say, but that he’d been sitting still so long that his corporation had started ignoring new sensations from most of his body, since there weren’t any new sensations. Other times he would try to move, but he could only move his fingers and only partially move his facial muscles. When he did manage to move, he found that he did so very slowly, agonizingly almost, and stopped after a few seconds to resume looking around and thinking about nothing.
Aziraphale swallowed hard, and tried to say something, anything, but the words were caught in his mouth. He couldn’t speak.
When he thought of what he might say or tried to put his thoughts into words, for all his knowledge of language and rhetoric, all he could manage were somewhat incoherent thoughts of “What..?” “I… uh... hm..” and “Can’t… I can’t…. Ugh, why…”
At one point, Aziraphale tried looking around the room, even though his eyes couldn’t seem to move as fast or smooth as he’d prefer. The room somehow seemed bigger than he’d remembered, even though he was facing the corner of it and couldn’t see the majority of it. Everything seemed so big, even though he knew logically that it was the exact same size, and there seemed to be too many things.
Too much, too much, too many letters, too many grains of wood in the floor, too much detail, too much space on everything, too much too much toomuchtoomuch.
It was overwhelming, and although the underlying sense of panic felt so deep under the layer of fog that Aziraphale couldn’t properly care about it, all he could do was keep looking around, almost unmoving.
He wished Crowley was there. He would be able to get me out of this, he thought. He had before..right? He didn’t know, didn’t know whether he had or hadn’t, but there was a distinct feeling that he hadn’t not helped him before.
He couldn’t think properly like this, couldn’t remember, couldn’t recognize things. Everything seemed so strange and surreal, and not in a good way. He kept looking around, making sure if everything really did look normal, and if it wasn’t just how he felt that had changed. Nothing had changed, yet everything had. There was just too much. It was all too big, and there was just too much.
As he drifted back into the rhythm of staring into nothingness once the overwhelming feeling of too much space had faded a little, Aziraphale tried something else. He wasn’t feeling like he was all the way there, like his corporation’s edges were blurring with his surroundings because of how long he had been sitting there, so perhaps pressure would help.
He put his hands on his legs, and slowly rocked forward, pressing down on them harder and harder. Nothing. He had no internal reaction besides vague acknowledgement of the discomfort that his ankles and knees were experiencing at the sudden added pressure.
He then pressed his hands together, so hard they began shaking, before parting them and staring at the wall until he could move again.
Aziraphale slowly shifted his gaze, once he was able to, to his hands, which were now rested in his lap. He very, very slowly willed them to rise, and turned his palms up, tracing the lines on his left hand with his right index finger, testing to see if he could still feel things. He could, and he could feel the sensitive feeling that came with lightly touching the very center of his palm, but it didn’t really feel like it mattered to him.
He then poked each finger’s joints, testing his senses even more, and not thinking, even squeezed his fingertips hard with his nails, testing his pain receptors. They were there all right, but he didn’t react to them.
He pinched the pad of his thumb hard, testing his pain receptors yet again, wondering if at a certain point he would start to care about the sensation. He then bent his fingers back, feeling the pain of the tendons in his hand exclaiming in protest when they reached their limit. He didn’t bend them back any farther, reflecting without words that breaking his fingers wouldn’t help him at all.
It was like he could feel, but it was like having a layer of impenetrable gloves on. Or maybe that was actually a layer of apathy. He could feel pain as usual, as he’d concluded, but he just didn’t care.
Deciding that maybe sound was the answer, he stopped moving yet again and just listened to his surroundings. There was a barking dog down the street, the crunch of footsteps as a person walked over an area where the sidewalk had been replaced by gravel, the sound of the wind in the trees, and the oh-so-faint sound of Aziraphale’s heartbeat. He raised a hand up to his ear, and softly snapped it, seeing if he would have any reaction. He didn’t, and lowered one hand while raising the other to have them hover near each other.
After an immense force of will, Aziraphale managed to clap his hands together, making a sharp sound. It startled him, and he could’ve sworn he had flinched before he realized that he’d only imagined the reaction. Nothing was really working.
He started staring again, resigned to what was going on, as his memory was too jumbled for him to function properly, his focus was shot, and the previous attempts at regaining his normal state blurred into the background. After a while he stopped moving entirely, except to occasionally rock left and right, ever so slightly. Even if he wanted to snap out of whatever was happening, he wasn’t sure that he could, and let himself drift further instead.