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Gabriel says that it feels like an empty house.
Crowley always thought of it more like losing a tooth.
Lucifer hits the crust of the earth, right in the middle of the desert. The sand poofs up around him, caught in his hair and his eyes and his lungs, but Lucifer is a burning comet hurtling to the ground, his wings burning and blackening behind him. The ground won’t stop him. The rocks shatter and the earth parts and Lucifer is falling further than he could ever imagine and there is a crater yawning open to make more space to fall.
He lands.
Face crushed in damp rock and sand in his lungs. There are enormous caverns beneath the earth. Why did no one know about these? What does it mean, that there are secret caverns already existing beneath the realm of humanity, seemingly in wait?
Questions again. Always the questions. As if he could ever slow his brain down enough to make it stop.
Questions.
Yes, questions. They’re important. Definitely very important.
Questions. They’re good. Because. Because! They help you find out information.
Information like. Why is he in this cave? Why does every part of his corporeal form hurt? Why is there sand in his hair?
He is…pretty sure that something bad happened. He thinks he was upset. His face is wet, which means he’s been crying, which means something bad probably happened. That’s what tears mean. He’s almost positive that’s right.
There’s something…something’s there in the back of his brain. It feels like he could answer all these questions for himself, if he could just look hard enough.
There is a sudden, zapping, agonizing tremor that rips from the top of his head down to the tips of his toes. All the muscles in his already aching form tense and release, so that he’s jerking on the floor and grinding his face into the rock.
He feels like he should be embarrassed about this. This is probably shameful. Right? Oh. Sure enough, there are people around. That’s where the embarrassment is coming from. There are other people who are stumbling to their feet. Ashen, soot-covered wings stretch out behind them, steaming in the damp air.
Who are they, again? It seems like everyone fell down into this cave. That can’t be good. Someone should probably do something about that.
Everyone in the cave keeps looking at him. He sure wishes he knew what they were looking for.
Or even, really, who they’re looking for.
Because it seems like he’s forgotten his own name.
Okay, so saying that it feels like losing a tooth isn’t exactly right. It would be more accurate to say that loosing a tooth feels like losing your memory. Order and causality and all that.
Crawley still can’t quite figure out what’s been going on. Thank goodness everyone else seemed to have a few more of their wits about them, because some of the other people who ended up in that cave with him seemed get it together. They’ve already been cobbling together some sort of order down there. This Satan fellow showed up and started shouting orders, and people fell in line pretty quickly after that.
They call him Crawley, since he figured out a while ago that he enjoys spending his time as a snake. They tell him to go up there and cause some trouble. Crawley isn’t exactly sure what they mean by that, but it sounds wonderful to go up and see some new part of the world. Away from the dark, dank, cold caves. When he feels the first rays of sunlight warming the rich black scales down his back, Crawley spends a solid two days unmoving and indolent, paralyzed by the miracle of the feeling.
He's sleepy and his body feels better than it ever has, but his brain can only stand to be at loose ends for so long, and eventually it makes its way back over to those strange gaps in his history. Prodding just a little at the absence.
A flash of light, brighter even than the sun on this rock. A glaring whirl of colors. It is miraculous and it splits Crawley’s head in half. His serpentine body writhes against the hot rock, suddenly boiling hot and uncomfortable.
Right. Cause some trouble. Can’t be too hard.
And, it turns out, it really isn’t. Crawley can’t think of anything to do right away, so he stalls for time and talks to Eve. And, because he’s Crawley, he has questions. Like what’s so special about an apple? Why would it be there if you weren’t allowed to eat it? What would even happen if you did? What do you think it would taste like?
And then, suddenly, it’s all going down like a lead balloon and the humans have been kicked out of the garden while Eve is pregnant. Crawley knows the other demons are going to be excited. He somehow managed to destroy paradise for the humans without even intending to. Crawley tries to feel excited anyway. He’ll spend the next few minutes getting his head together. And then he’ll make his way back down to Hell and celebrate with the rest of them.
There’s a figure standing on the wall over the garden. A figure in white, with white wings, outlined with the sun to the point of glowing. Crawley feels the light on his scales and is making his way over before he can think of it.
He’s an angel. Of course, he’s an angel. Crawley knew that. Obviously.
And he’s…nice. He’s warm. He’s terribly worried about the humans and he gave away a flaming sword, just like that, just to keep them safe from the life Crawley unintentionally handed to them.
“I can’t see what’s so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil, anyway,” he asks, because Crawley is a pile of questions with some skin wrapped around it.
“Well, it must be bad,” the angel replies, and then he pauses so kindly. As if he’s waiting for something.
“Crawley,” Crawley supplies, because it’s the only thing he can think to add in this situation. The angel looks hesitant and briefly confused, but he manages to continue.
“Crawley,” and he says the name softly. A little like a question itself. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have tempted them into it.”
And yes, the angel looks deeply troubled by the question, but he’s one of the only occult beings that Crawley has met that’s actually willing to discuss different possibilities and offer an answer. At least up to a point. When it seems to go a little too far, the word “ineffable” is set like a barrier between them.
The angel smiles nervously toward Crawley and it hits like a lightning bolt down his spine, superimposing itself over another smile for just a moment before he’s back on the wall while his head aches like some word that hasn’t been invented yet.
Because it used to be that losing a tooth didn’t feel like anything. Until Crowley got a little too frustrated with it all around 500 AD and decided to pawn some of the feeling off on humanity for once.
That distinct feeling of something off. Of something different. The way that there’s an absence so glaring that you can’t possibly ignore it. And sometimes it hurts to touch it or go investigating. You’re tearing open the raw nerve. You’re slowing down the healing process. And even so. It’s impossible to stop worrying at it. To stop touching it and flinching back at the pain and touching it and flinching back and touching it and flinching.
Crawley’s been poking and poking at the holes in his memory whenever he finds himself bored. He gets flashes of Heaven now and again. At this point, he’s cobbled together a vague image of what he must have been up to for that vast eternity before earth. Something about stars and nebulas and light. He’ll get images here and there of faces he interacted with. It seems like, as far as his patchy memory is concerned, Crawley spent much of his time in Heaven working quietly in his office and imagining every possible way the base elements could be combined to produce something beautiful.
He remembers asking questions. He remembers a few warning glances. He can’t remember what the final straw was.
What does it mean, when your entire life is defined by penance for a crime you don’t remember? What, exactly, is the point then? Was this pity? Or torture? Or a mere accident?
He’s getting frustrated with the other denizens of Hell and the way they never seem to understand a word that comes out of his mouth. The more time Crawley spends with humans, the more he finds that he likes them, the more he watches them die, the further he grows from anything his fellow demons could understand.
They don’t like the whole thing with Job. Hard for something like that to go unnoticed.
Hell doesn’t, generally, as a rule, spend much time searching through the details of what Crawley is up to. The difference, this time, is that Satan made a bet with God. And he really thought Hell would win. Isn’t very fond of the fact that they seem to have crashed and burned anyway. So, they go through the record of miracles, trying to pinpoint where it all might have gone wrong.
Crawley tries to argue that he was corrupting Sitis. That she is going to doubt God and the angels as a direct result of Crawley’s actions.
The demons appreciate that, actually. They commend Crawley on his creativity. They decide not to permanently discorporate him.
A compromise, they say. Remember when you were so good at following instructions there at the beginning? We were all angels, once. Some of us remember how to do the same things.
They wipe his memory.
Of course, Crowley doesn’t make losing a tooth as bad for the humans as it actually is. A quick jolt of discomfort. An irresistible draw back to the source of that discomfort. A constant call and response.
Something is different. Something is missing. What is it?
It hurts. It is the absence of something you no longer need. Something you are growing beyond.
Why does it feel like that? Has anything changed? Will it be different this time?
It hurts.
He’s not sure how many times Hell erases his memory. It took them some 2000 years to do it the first time (he’s almost sure of it) but once they’ve tried it out, it seems they’ve opened the floodgates.
Crawley is living with a cattle prod in his brain. It sends bolts down each of his nerves. He should probably ignore it or avoid it. But the cattle prod is guarding all the interesting stuff.
That, and it’s getting to him. He thinks it’s probably gotten to him several times before. The way that demons or humans will approach him and begin speaking as if he should know who they are. He plays distant. Plays ignorant. Plays arrogant. Anything to cover the weakness in the gaping holes in his memory.
He wonders how he’s survived this long, when Hell is so boring and humans die so quickly. He dwells on it and questions and tugs at his brain. It burns and aches and he is trying to cram ethereal memories into an occult body. They are burning him from the inside. And he can’t leave the questions alone.
And, every time he asks these questions, he gets the same answer. A thread through his time on earth. The angel living it alongside him, even if they only see each other every few centuries.
Aziraphale.
By the time Crawley sees him again, it’s been years. Probably a very specific number of years but his head is scrambled eggs and fuck if he can spend the time to pin a timeline down.
The point is, the point is, that he’s been pulling himself back to himself again and again in those years. And he’s been discovering, and then rediscovering, and then discovering his rediscovering that he’s in love with Aziraphale. Has been for ages. Probably since the Beginning.
Hard to pin down timelines.
Crawley is a creature riddled in holes that is dragging itself from day to day in the hopes of seeing this one particular angel.
“Crawley,” Aziraphale calls him, and Crawley is only running at about 30% of his memory right now, but he can remember the first time he was handed that name, a snake on the floor of a damp cave, surrounded by demons who remembered more about life than him.
“Oh, I changed it,” he says, surprised by the words but not the idea.
“Changed what?” Aziraphale asks, because Crawley found the one other being on earth that might like questions almost as much as he does.
“My name. Crawley’s not really been doing it for me.” Because there is the identity he was handed when he first lost his memory, and there is the creature that grasps hard onto the cattle prod and refuses to let go until it remembers something worth living for. And he wants to give Aziraphale a piece of that person. “A bit too squirming-at-your-feet-ish.”
“You were a snake,” Aziraphale points out, the bitchy darling. “So, what is it now? Mephistopheles? Asmodeus?”
More beautiful questions.
“Crowley,” he says, because it feels right on his tongue. Crowley, because it’s close to what they tell him he is, but not quite there. Crowley, because if he ever runs into Aziraphale and doesn’t remember him, he still wants the name that Aziraphale calls him to register as his name.
“Oh,” says Aziraphale, as he goes back to watching the crucifixion. And Crowley could kiss him, but he won’t. Not at 30%. Not when he’s only just introduced himself to Aziraphale.
“I know you.”
“You do not know me.”
“I know the angel you were.”
“The angel you knew is not me.”
Life goes on. Crowley gets better at hiding his failures from Hell. Gets better at taking credit for all the horrible things humans come up with. Gets better at figuring out where Aziraphale is going to be.
The Arrangement is a gamble, but it’s also one of the best things Crowley’s ever done. Because he gets to see the angel more than once every few centuries. It’s lunches in Paris and coffee in France and Crowley watches the angel glut himself on food while Crowley gluts himself on Aziraphale’s attention.
There’s something about the way that Aziraphale…pauses. Just after he’s taken a bite of food he enjoys. He’ll stop, close his eyes, breathe in deeply through his nose. As if to make sure he’s using every sense possible to experience the thing he’s enjoying. It also gives Crowley several moments of uninhibited access to staring at Aziraphale, close up, while he won’t notice.
And then, of course, the way he will open his eyes again, with the edges all crinkled up in smile lines, and look right back at Crowley. He grins and offers Crowley a bite, every time, even though he rarely partakes of anything but the alcohol.
So what, if Crowley’s mind greatly resembles a set of curtains someone has let their cat treat as it will. There are gaping tears and gashes, but Crowley can live with that, as long as he can worry at the empty spaces until he regains every single memory of Aziraphale. They glow too brightly for his demonic mind, but it’s not as if it can be more ruined than it already is. It’s not as if Crowley wouldn’t be willing to pay the price, even if it did.
And then, see, it’s 1827 already, and there’s this girl. And she has a best friend that she’s trying to look after. And the friend dies, on Crowley and Aziraphale’s watch.
And the girl’s going to kill herself. Crowley drinks the laudanum to stop her. He drinks the laudanum to give himself an excuse for the inexcusably good deed he’s about to do. He drinks the laudanum because he’s never tried it before and he has a question of what it’s like and he might as well get it answered before they take everything away from him again.
He saves the girl’s life. He gets her set up to make something of herself, if she wants to. He gets to see that look that Aziraphale gets in his eyes, that wildly hopeful and smug look that pops up any time Crowley “proves” that he’s capable of something demons really shouldn’t be capable of.
He gets to revel in Aziraphale’s attention for several wonderful minutes.
Before they drag him down to Hell.
“Ask him properly.”
They don’t like the laudanum excuse. They reach their claws deep down into Crowley’s brain and don’t pull back out until he’s properly Crawley again. They send him back to earth with a minder meant to follow him around and watch for any possible insubordinate behavior. And Crawley is eager to please, but he still loves questions. He doesn’t mean to be insubordinate but, then, he never really did, did he?
“Remember it now.”
“It hurts to remember. My head isn’t built for that.”
“I know. Do it anyway.”
Crawley is on a mission for Hell and they want him to corrupt a priest and he asks if it wouldn’t be more efficient to simply set loose several flies in the pulpit, so that the irregular buzzing and waving hands interrupt and distract everyone in the church.
There is a flash of a laughing smile, a bright light, an agonizing pain.
They bring him back to Hell.
Crawley is on a mission for Hell and when he walks into a café with his minder just behind him, another patron smiles at his approach. They tell him that they haven’t seen “Mr. Crowley” for months. There is staggering pain, there is confusion, and there is the creeping fear of the disapproval radiating from the demon who follows him everywhere and whose name he has forgotten.
They bring him back to Hell.
Crawley is sitting in some flat in preparation for the next stage of his mission for Hell. His minder is in the room too. They are sitting in two stiff and uncomfortable chairs and waiting for the human night to pass so that their target will be awake and ready for Stage Four.
There are holes in Crawley’s brain, and he finds himself drawn to them. Worrying at them as a warning spark grows to an aching shock grows to a lancing pain. His minder sits quietly across the room and Crawley holds his body so still as he steps fully into that pain, into the too-big memories. There is white light. There is an angelic smile in a soft and loved face. There is love and there is meaning and there is purpose and there was Shakespeare and there was Job and there was Noah and there was the wall and the pain is boiling along each of Crowley’s veins, but he can’t stop now because there’s something there, there’s something still there, there’s a question left unanswered and if he could just-
The veil rips
And he is Crawley and he is Crowley and he is the Serpent of Eden his wings are aflame and he is plummeting from Heaven and crashing face-first into Hell with no memory of how he arrived there and he is standing in Heaven trying to ask why they asked him to put so much work into the cosmos if they were only going to destroy them all before the true beauty could arrive and he is Lucifer he is Lucifer Morningstar he is the Light-Bringer and that’s right. That’s right, he said that, didn’t he? He said let there be light and then the cosmos came to life around them and Aziraphale was there he was there too and the light of the art Crowley had made was reflected on his face and he was so beautiful and Crowley hadn’t even been able to see it back then and Aziraphale says that now, doesn’t he? He says let there be light whenever he has the chance, and he glances over at Crowley when he does and what is he thinking when he does that?
Crowley is sitting in his flat and he is apparently also gasping and shaking and smoking and his minder doesn’t wait to ask why. Crowley scrabbles into the furthest depths of his creativity, the thing that none of the other demons have ever shared with him, and scrabbles for anything he can do to stop this.
They bring him back to Hell.
Crawley is on a mission for Hell and his corporeal form is aching from some horrible physical exertion that he can’t remember. There is a faint tremor running through his limbs, and little shivery painful sparks keep tingling up and down his spine. He keeps trying to find where it’s all coming from, to pin it down, and when he finally grabs ahold of it, the pain explodes into white light behind his eyes, and he doesn’t remember anything else.
They bring him back to Hell, presumably.
Crawley is on his third mission for Hell that he can remember, and he feels like he’s been doing a pretty good job of it. They’re supposed to be leaving to tempt someone into lustful thoughts in a few minutes, but Crawley’s minder (whose name he can’t seem to remember) apparently filled out Form 786A instead of 786F, and now they dropped Crawley into this flat that Hell apparently maintains on earth while they go to file the new paperwork.
So, Crawley’s waiting, exploring this weird, empty place with all its dying plants and strange furniture, when he sticks his hands into his pockets. There is a crinkling sound.
In Crawley’s pocket, there is a small scrap of paper. It seems as though someone has folded and unfolded this paper many times before. Which is strange, because Crawley doesn’t think he’s ever seen it before. It’s even more strange that the paper seems to be written in his own handwriting.
Crowley
I’m you, you idiot. Do what Hell tells you and STOP messing with your memories when you aren’t alone.
Follow orders. Get rid of the minder. Go to St. James Park and wait by the river until he finds you. You need protection from the rest of the demons. You know what that means.
And for Satan’s sake, put this back in your pocket. I’m not sure how many tries it’ll take.
And it’s a little confusing, because that’s almost Crawley’s name, but it feels more true than his actual name. And there are creases on creases on creases on this paper. And there are holes in his head that hurt when he touches them.
“You will, I am sure you won’t be surprised to learn, be cast out of Heaven to live as a demon in the outer darkness. Although, as a kindness, your memory of your time as Lucifer will be erased.”
But it wasn’t that, was it? It wasn’t kindness. Because he remembers, at least right now, and he knows what Heaven and Hell have been saying about Lucifer all this time. And it’s not true. He sauntered vaguely downwards but he was cast down from Heaven in a shrieking comet. He tempted the other angels into rebelling but all he ever did was ask questions. But how could anyone prove that? How could he defend his point when he can’t even remember that it’s him he’s defending? They can make it a nice story, a lesson for others, when he doesn’t exist to defend himself.
Crawley is standing at the edge of the river in St. James Park. He has been standing at the edge of the river in St. James Park for three weeks. There are two folded pieces of paper in his pocket. One is significantly more worn than the other.
Crawley doesn’t know what he’s waiting for. Part of it is honestly that he’s happy to be out of Hell and out of surveillance and watching ducks. Another part of it is that the letter in his pocket told him to do this. The final part is that he’s been spending the nights of the past few weeks carefully picking at the seams of his fraying mind. There is a face. A well-loved face. And he does not know if that is who he is waiting for and he does not know who it is. He just knows that the first time he unearthed a memory of him it felt as though every piece of him clicked into place.
And then, suddenly, there is that same well-loved face, in a new outfit, with the sun shining down and catching in his watercolor eyes.
And, well, it’s maybe nothing, but he calls Crawley Crowley, just like the letter. And it sounds even better in his voice, and in a flash of blinding agony Crowley remembers that this is an angel standing in front of him.
The angel keeps using the name Crowley, again and again, as if to flaunt the fact that he knows some part of Crawley that Crawley does not even know about himself. That’s fine. The angel can hold on to every part of him, as far as Cawley is concerned. He’ll keep it safe while Crawley works his way back to it himself.
Apparently, they have an Arrangement, which the angel is ever so kind to explain in a way that makes Crawley wonder if he knows about the forgetfulness and the poor memory.
Of course. Of course, this is the person he would send himself to. If Crawley had any say in it, he would always be near this angel. He wants to freeze time and talk to the angel about ducks and current fashion and the way he recently discovered bright sunlight feels on his skin.
But, he’s trusted the letter this far. So, he hands over the other piece of paper, asking for holy water. Because there’s nothing else the letter could possibly be referring to.
And.
Well.
The angel doesn’t seem to take it very well. And he’s shouting and accusing Crawley of fraternizing of all things. And Crawley doesn’t even know what’s going on or how they got to this point in the conversation. He just wants to stop it all and make the angel explain what’s happening.
But, you know. He can’t pull together the words or the memories fast enough to figure out how to say it. And the angel storms off, the paper left to float in the water. Crawley burns the paper and mocks the angel and he doesn’t even know his name.
“I don’t know. I’m just…”
“I know. Looking at where the furniture isn’t.”
Crowley gives himself a present. The world is changing, and there are things in his name now, and it’s getting harder and harder to maintain two different identities if he can’t count on his memories to stay conveniently accessible. He gives himself a present of 100 years. He lets himself hold onto one final century of keeping his identity on earth and in front of Aziraphale separate from his identity in Hell. And when 100 years have passed without them wiping his memory (as far as he knows as far as he knows as far as he knows), he changes his name in Hell. Because, despite everything else, they do tend to respect a good title change, Down There.
On long night alone in his flat, Crowley trawls the ruined landscape of his memory, dredging up all his memories of Aziraphale and light and showing him the stars for the first time. They ache as he pulls them up, but he can’t allow them to fade. Can’t risk missing out on one and never even knowing to miss it.
There’s an antichrist that isn’t actually the Antichrist and an apocalypse that isn’t actually the Apocalypse and suddenly he and Aziraphale have made it out the other side of it all. Hell and Heaven were so angry that they skipped the memory reversal and went right to permanent discorporation. And they’re sitting at the Ritz and Aziraphale keeps doing that thing where he sighs as he takes a bite of food and closes his eyes and inhales through his nose and Crowley wants to curl up inside that expression and live forever.
And, well, for four years, he sort of does. He doesn’t have the flat anymore and it’s just him and the Bently and their parking space, but Crowley lets himself visit the bookshop three times a week and stay the night two of them. And things are cautiously, carefully, fragilely good.
Crowley lets himself hope.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you.”
“I understand. And I understand a whole lot better than you do.”
“Well. Then there’s nothing more to say.”