Chapter Text
2 April 1054
Limoges, France
Dearly beloved, we are gathered tonight in vigil. To remember, to keep watch, to wait. Between death and resurrection there were three days of silence. Stay awake! Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. This is the night, a night of great auspiciousness. Adam’s fall reversed, the Red Sea parted, the gloom of sin dispelled, death conquered.
Don’t fall asleep!
Crowley is here to listen. He is standing in the narthex of a cathedral. Set outside the nave, behind the church proper. It is low-ceilinged and cramped, built of stark, unadorned sandstone. It is the realm of the unconsecrated, the unbaptized, the sinners. Kept from defiling the holy ground by a seam on the floor, a lintel, a doorway streaked with blood. The angel will pass over.
The narthex is drafty. Crowley shivers in his thin tunic. Wind whistles through the cracks in the walls, gusting down the unfinished bell tower. Clouds gather, the light greys, spring slipping back into winter with the close of day. He is here for one reason. This is the night.
Don’t fall asleep!
It is dark in the cathedral, the lamps unlit. Its loftiness is imposing in the dim. The holy water font is drought-dry. The shadows of the cloth-covered statues flicker, eerie and formless. Intricate mosaics line the walls. A sanctuary, a place where saints find veneration and sinners find refuge, genesis and exodus, shelter and shrine at once.
Candles crowd the altar. A dozen monks in long, white robes, cinched with rope belts, stand amongst the candles. They are reenacting a Biblical scene, singing each line, unaccompanied, harrowing.
Aziraphale, along with four other brothers, performs the role of the wise virgins. Crowley watches Aziraphale’s face, the intensity of his expressions, the belief in his slate-grey eyes, pale-cast and opaque. Winter eyes, buried by months of snow and sleet, icicle-toothed, frost-bitten.
Aziraphale’s cheeks grow pink as he sings, his skin ripening like fruit, like pomegranates. Every commandment gritted in his teeth. Crowley can hear him, as he always can, the lilt of his voice wafting like incense on the air. He can hear the severity of every word, each consonant clipped, dropping like knives. Clicking into place, like the heavy cathedral doors just in front of Crowley. Cast-iron locks, myrrh-drenched fittings. Resistant to fire and floods and storms. The stone floor is worn away from their swinging, open and closed. Separating the wedding feast from the darkness outside.
Don’t fall asleep!
Later, when the play is over, Crowley warms himself by a charcoal fire as the monks exit the church. Sub-deacons ferry the Paschal candle about, preparing for the vigil Mass. It will begin outside, around this fire, from which the great Paschal candle will be lit. The brothers join him, huddling around the brazier, pillars of smoke pluming into the sky.
Aziraphale. He is here, around the same fire, stretching out his hands over it. Crowley looks at him in stolen fragments, a mosaic constructed piece by piece. Warmth unfurls, washing away the chill settled deep in his bones completely. The memory of it erased. Unstained, unbruised. Aziraphale meets Crowley’s beeswax eyes, and his gaze is seamless, undivided. This is the night.
Don’t fall asleep!
The brothers tease Aziraphale mirthfully, who’s your friend?, oblivious to the way Aziraphale withdraws, locks himself away in an inner room. His face set like flint, the firelight receding from his eyes, the snowmelt refrozen.
“I do not know him,” he sniffs.
They press on, laughing. “You both are English-your speech gives it away.”
“England is not nearly so small that everyone knows each other,” Aziraphale objects, disdainful, haughty. Denial an armor, a breastplate, protecting his heart. Shrine and shelter, tabernacle and prison.
Don’t fall asleep!
---
“Oh, he’s not my friend. We’ve never met before. We don’t know each other.”
Don’t fall asleep!
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“If they knew I’d been…fraternizing…”
Don’t fall asleep!
Somewhere in the distant farmlands a rooster is crowing. Remember you are dust.