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“So,” Crawly said awkwardly, when they had stood amid the first raindrops for upwards of an hour. “So, uh, do you reckon this is going to be permanent now?”
“Pardon?” Aziraphale shook his water-logged wings out for the fifth time — a doomed cause, given that his feathers returned to collecting wetness before he’d even completed the motion. “Do I reckon what will be permanent?”
“Ehhh. This.” Crawly made a nebulous motion, starting out skywards and then transitioning into an all-inclusive wave around at their environment. “The water-falling. And the” — a jerk of the head, back up towards the cloud-packed sky — “the gray stuff up there. And all the rest.”
“I should hope not!” Aziraphale said feelingly, then frowned as his thoughts caught up with the conversation. To be perfectly honest[1] , the possibility had not occurred to him before this moment. He’d been assuming it was only a matter of time until the thunderstorm — thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and what Crawly so aptly described as gray stuff — would pass, and sunshine would reassert itself over the world again. Much in the same way it did every morning, after disappearing for the night.[2]
The notion that this bout of bad weather might not be a temporary inconvenience, that it could instead be among the permanent changes to the way of things that were being wrought as a result of the incident with the fruit, was… really decidedly unappealing, when he came right down to it.
“Me too,” said Crawly morosely. “Hope it isn’t.”
“Although,” Aziraphale made haste to qualify lest his previous statement be taken the wrong way — the fact that he was apparently in agreement with a demon was mildly alarming — “naturally the Almighty’s judgment is above all else and without fault. So if it were to be permanent, I am quite positive that it would be all for the best. Ineffably speaking, you understand.”
“Sure,” Crawly muttered, just a hint of a sharp edge to his tone. “‘Ineffably speaking. Course, I understand.” He scowled up at the clouds as if they had done him a personal injustice.
Crawly did look quite disconsolate, Aziraphale thought, with a pang of sympathy. Aziraphale’s upraised wings kept the majority of the rain off of them both, to be sure, but the occasional particularly obstinate gust did nonetheless make it through — and in any case, the wing cover did nothing at all to combat the vague damp in the air, the unsettling daytime dimness of the sky, or the generalized, all-encompassing dreariness.
“But,” Aziraphale offered bracingly, for his own benefit about as much as for Crawly’s, “I doubt it will come to that. It does seem like it would be a dreadful waste, doesn’t it? To go to the trouble of creating a sun and moon and other stars and everything, only to hide it away forever behind all that, erm, gray stuff. And after the starmaking team did such a lovely job on things, too.”
Crawly slanted an odd look at Aziraphale; opened his mouth; then, with a minute shake of the head, stayed quiet.
“What?” Aziraphale prompted. “Were you going to say something?”
“Ngh,” Crawly said. And then, “Nah. Nothing important.”
“Are you quite sure about that?”
“Yeah. Um. Yeah.” Crawly shook himself. “Just, I like the sun too.”
“Oh! You do?”
“Haven’t been up here that long,” Crawly qualified, “but I liked it right away when I noticed it.”
Aziraphale beamed, pleased. If a demon could admire such a grand part of the Almighty’s Creation, then surely he couldn’t be that bad. Aside from the whole business of being an Emissary of Evil, of course, but it didn’t seem quite fair to hold that against Crawly when it was just a matter of his fundamental nature. “It is quite pretty, don’t you think?” Aziraphale encouraged. “Though I can’t quite seem to look at it properly from my corporation, which is a trifle disconcerting. But the light is pretty, at any rate.”
Sunshine was quite different from the sort of light to which Aziraphale was accustomed, up Above. Approximately as bright, as far as the two utterly incomparable types of brightness could be compared, but more… comfortable, in an odd way.[3] Notwithstanding the sun’s determined and rather inconsiderate attempts to blind him whenever he tried glancing at it directly. Aziraphale did find himself missing that luminous, elevated orb a not-insignificant amount now that it was so effectively obscured from view.
Crawly emitted a multiconsonantal sound[4], then added more intelligibly, “‘S warm, too.”
“So it is!” Aziraphale cheerfully concurred — although, in his personal opinion, its warmth was the least of the sun’s merits.[5] “Have you ever seen it at dawn?”
“Dawn?” Crawly repeated, blankly.
“The early morning. When the sun is rising.”
“...Rising?”
Judging from Crawly’s confused expression, the answer to Aziraphale’s question was a definite no; Crawly had not been in Eden for long enough to have witnessed daybreak.[6] Which was, in Aziraphale’s view, a crying shame and injustice that — as a representative of Good on Earth, responsible for promoting Appreciation For The Almighty’s Great Works In The World — he could not in good conscience allow to stand.
“Well then,” Aziraphale said, “I simply must show you.”
Crawly made a startling, startled noise. “Show me?” he echoed yet again, looking around as if he expected Aziraphale to produce a sunrise right then and there.
“In the morning,” Aziraphale clarified, amused. An instant later, it occurred to him that his suggestion had been rather presumptive. “That is. If you are interested. And if you’d like to stay here until then. And if you have the time. I’m sure you have plenty of other places to be, so I would certainly understand if you—”
“Nowhere else to be right now,” Crawly interrupted. “Haven’t gotten any orders since the one about making trouble. S’pose I’ll have to go sooner or later to report on how things went down[7]... but, nhh.” He made an ambiguous head movement. “Not yet.”
Being in much the same position at the moment in regard to standing orders from his own superiors, Aziraphale nodded. “There’s a wonderful view from up here, you know,” he said coaxingly.
Crawly surveyed the panorama spreading around them. The Garden below, in all its drenched lushness, in one direction; the desert sands stretching to meet the horizon in the other; the curve of overcast sky and billowing clouds arching above it all. “It’s a view,” he acknowledged.
“And the sunrise really is quite beautiful.” Daringly, and with no especially rational basis for the assumption, Aziraphale added, “I expect you’d like it.”
“Guess I’ll have to stay and see it, then,” Crawly said, altogether too casually, and smiled. It was quite a charming sight, Aziraphale thought absently — and found himself moderately disappointed when, a second later, the expression faded to be replaced by something gloomier. “If the gray goes away,” Crawly amended his statement, assailing the rain with another pointed and futile glare.
“Indeed.” Aziraphale sighed, shook his feathers out once again, and hoped he wasn’t going to be doing so for the rest of eternity. “If the gray goes away.”
They lapsed back into rain-dappled silence.
~ ~ ~
The gray did go away, as it turned out, although not before nightfall; the sky had long since darkened to a drab sort of navy, and it had to be somewhere in the vicinity of midnight by the time the last of the raindrops petered out and the stars began gradually to emerge from hiding.
“Lovely, aren’t they?” Aziraphale remarked once, in a banal (though genuinely meant) attempt at making conversation, but Crawly didn’t respond. Unsure whether or not he’d been heard, but content enough to accept the continuing quiet either way, Aziraphale didn’t bother repeating the comment.
He shook out his feathers one more time, allowing himself a moment to take pleasure in the fact that, this time, they finally stayed dry once he had finished. There being no reason to continue holding them up over his and Crawly’s heads now, Aziraphale folded his wings[8], traced some of the stars with his eyes and counted until he lost track and had to start all over again, and waited for dawn.
And also hoped that Crawly would like the sunrise, when the time came. It would be a real pity, if he didn’t. Not to mention that it would make things rather awkward, after all that waiting and all Aziraphale’s lauding of its glory.
~ ~ ~
The first hints at daylight were just barely beginning to glimmer over the eastern horizon when Crawly said, “Is that it?”
Aziraphale, having gotten used to the silence, jumped. “Is what what?”
“Dawn?” Crawly pointed dubiously upwards, indicating the pale light spreading across the sky. “Rising sun? The thing you wanted to show me?”
“Oh!” Aziraphale laughed, a bit self-consciously. “No, no.” He paused. “Well, it’s part of it. But there’s more. Wait and see.”
“Mkay.” Crawly settled back, and waited to see.
~ ~ ~
“Colors!” Crawly announced a few minutes later, nearly at a shout. He twisted around, gaping almost incredulously up at the streaks of pink and lavender now gracing the firmament.
“Colors,” he said again — softer now, more wondering.
“What do you think of them?” Aziraphale asked, both out of politeness and genuine interest.
Instead of directly answering the inquiry, Crawly turned back to Aziraphale, eyes wide with evident interest and delight, and put forth a question of his own.[9] “Where do they come from?”
“Er.” Aziraphale blinked, thrown. He hadn’t quite thought about the source of the sunrise on previous mornings; he had been fully preoccupied with admiring the visual phenomenon itself. “Well,” he said.
“What?”
Aziraphale cleared his throat. “The sun. Obviously.”
“How?”
“Um.”
“You don’t know, do you?” Crawly’s words probably should have come across as accusatory, but they sounded more curious than anything else.
Nonetheless, Aziraphale felt affronted by them. “Of course I know,” he said defensively, though of course he didn’t.
Crawly looked quizzical. “How, then?”
“The Almighty,” Aziraphale hazarded, as confidently as he could. After all, he reminded himself, no matter what its Earthly explanation might be, everything ultimately went back to the Almighty. So he wasn’t wrong, per se. Even if it happened that there might have been another, secondary, more material answer as well.
Crawly raised an eyebrow. The expression could have been skeptical, annoyed, intrigued, or all of the above[10]; Aziraphale wasn’t quite certain how to read it, though he did feel a strong sense of foreboding that, whichever else it might have been, it meant that more questions were in store.
“But,” Crawly began…
…and didn’t finish formulating whatever question he’d been going to ask. Because at that moment, the sun itself emerged over the distant edge of the sands, golden rays flooding the wall with radiance and the sky with purple and orange, bathing them both in illumination, and at least for the time being, Crawly actually seemed to forget about talking.
Faced with such a sight, Aziraphale could relate.
The sunrise, in Aziraphale’s opinion, had to be one of the most marvelous pieces of Creation ever to be, well, created. That was what he had thought the first time he’d witnessed a dawning, at least — and then he’d thought it again the second time, and the third, and every other time since, each new daybreak sharing the same features as the last while, somehow simultaneously, achieving utter uniqueness.
This particular sunrise was, without a doubt, both objectively and subjectively just as beautiful as any other that Aziraphale had seen since the Beginning. And yet somehow, this time around, Aziraphale found his attention straying from the sky to the shamelessly gawking demon below it, face awash with practically infectious astonishment and admiration.[11]
The sun climbed higher, and gradually the remaining hues of dawn burned away, fading into the brighter blue of daytime. Crawly stood speechless for a while longer, head thrown back, all but basking in the morning sun’s warmth and glow.
“Gosh,” said Crawly eventually, golden eyes shining in odd complementation to the sunlight. “That was terrific.”
He paused for a moment, and added with an uplifted eyebrow, “Lots better than the gray stuff.”
Aziraphale smiled over at him, and down at the land, and up at the cloudless sky. The thunderstorm hadn’t been so bad, really, he thought now in retrospect, breathing in the refreshing air left in its wake. But he was certainly glad it hadn’t lasted forever.
Also, not that it was relevant to anything, but he couldn’t help but wonder whether he and Crawly would be able to stay on Earth long enough to watch another daybreak.
Footnotes
1 A mere and redundant figure of speech, of course. Aziraphale was an angel, so it wasn’t as if he could ever be anything but honest.
(The following day, Aziraphale squinted nervously into a blinding light and said, Sword? Must’ve put it down somewhere. Forget my own head next.)[return to text]
2 Except that this was a day version, and also much wetter, and also completely different anyway. But the general idea was the same: The sun went out of sight for a while, and then eventually (hopefully) it came back out again.[return to text]
3 Not that that was a criticism of Heaven’s lighting scheme, of course. It was just an observation. And the point of Heaven wasn’t to be comfortable, anyway. So there was nothing wrong with noting the distinction, thank you very much.[return to text]
4 Aziraphale wondered if the sound had been intended to include actual words. He hoped it hadn’t, because if it had, he’d entirely failed to comprehend them.[return to text]
5 Aziraphale had yet to experience winter.[return to text]
6 Actually, Crawly had been in Eden for both of the two previous mornings. But on the first of these mornings he’d been busy hiding under a rock lest one of the big scary flaming-sword-holding angels on the wall notice him, and on the second of these mornings he’d been busy experimenting with the sleep thing he’d seen the humans and other denizens of the Garden doing. As a result, he had missed dawn both times.[return to text]
7 Like a lead balloon, Aziraphale’s memory interjected with a certain dry, demonic inflection.[return to text]
8 And if Crawly felt a mild spark of disappointment at the removal of the now-unnecessary sheltering wing from above his head, it was also entirely possible that Crawly was in fact not the only man-shaped being present who felt such a spark.[return to text]
9 This, as Aziraphale would come to know, was a very Crawly sort of thing to do.[return to text]
10 It was all of the above. Plus a little something extra that, while not yet quite in the realm of endearment, was definitely well on its way in that direction.[return to text]
11 Although Aziraphale was not aware of it, the look on his own face, as he watched Crawly watch the sky, was startlingly similar to the one on Crawly’s.[return to text]