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He spun the stars, once. Weaving hydrogen and helium with dust and gravity, creating nebulae and galaxies, bringing art and illumination into the void of the universe. Working with his team, artists all, brought together for the shared purpose of transforming the abundant formlessness of dark matter to light, heat, and beauty.
He spun the stars, and then he Fell.
He Fell, and left space forever out of reach, unfinished.
* * *
His first night in Eden, Crawly lay coiled in a treetop, soaking in the atmosphere of Earth for the first time, and looked skywards.
They shone on high, cold and distant and unattainable, looking nothing at all like they had when he had worked on them up close. Pointless pinpricks of glitter, sprinkled across the swathe of night at seeming random… and, in between those glowing flecks, spaces of darkness.
Spaces he had not meant to leave empty. Darkness that attested to the story of an interrupted design crew, called away to war and never returned to complete their artwork.
The haphazard patterns of the stars and the spaces between them spoke of what had been, and what was not. Of what had been lost, and what now could never be regained.
It wasn’t the stars’ fault, but Crawly glared at them anyway.
* * *
He got used to it, with time.
Reality was reality, he was a demon, the stars were as they were, and none of that was going to change. There was no use in dwelling on it. The ache, the grief, the bitterness evoked by the recurrent sight of incomplete galaxies and missing nebulae, testament to loss and failure… those feelings faded, gradually, as the sky did in the morning. There were plenty of other things to appreciate about life on Earth.
He took to sleeping, to avoid being out at the same time as the stars, and found that he liked the activity for its own sake as well.
The ache faded, and he got used to it. But it didn’t disappear.
* * *
“Do you know,” Aziraphale said one day, when they’d run into each other in the marketplace and were making small talk of the kind that was of course perfectly ordinary to make with one’s adversary, “they’ve found pictures in the stars?”
Crawly turned to stare at him, then quickly diverted his gaze back to the humans teeming around them both. “They found what?” he demanded.
“Pictures,” Aziraphale repeated. “In the stars. The humans have, that is.”
“In the…” Crawly started, and closed his mouth again. He swallowed.
“They make up stories about them, too,” Aziraphale went on, cheerfully oblivious. “About the star pictures, I mean. Some of them are quite exciting. There’s one they tell that’s about— Crawly, are you all right?”
Crawly wet his lips. “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Oh, good.” Aziraphale smiled. “You know, it looks like it’s going to be a clear night. I could show you. Er. If you’d like.”
Crawly opened his mouth to say no, thanks, sorry, he had another appointment.
“Sure,” he said.
* * *
“Those ones look like a human, they say,” Aziraphale murmured, pointing and tracing invisible lines between the luminaries. “And that group over there is meant to be a tortoise. And those three…”
Crawly lay back, his eyes tracking shapes that were not meant to be there, and listened to the rise and fall of the angel’s voice describing the stories that the people of Earth had found in their unfinished sky.
Meaning, beauty, and a new kind of artwork, spun from the stars.
Somewhere deep inside, where Crawly hardly noticed it, an ache faded.