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There is an art to falling, thought Furfur. Or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at a cause and miss.
From the very beginning, it turned out, Furfur had been excellent at both these parts. Thus, it made perfect sense that—again and again—they would prove quite adept at falling.
Their first fall was in time immemorial and into the arms of another angel. A simple stumble, one that happened on the regular for the heavenly Virtue. Normally they’d catch themself, make certain no one else had noticed, and brush it off like it had never happened. But that time, an angel with curling red hair swooped in and righted them just before skinned knees could be invented.
No one had so much as touched the Virtue before (beyond of course the Almighty.) Was it even allowed?
It felt… sturdy. And safe.
It felt right.
“Careful there,” said the other angel, a wry smile curving up one side of their face, brown eyes twinkling with the reflection of unseen stars. “Don’t want to fall, do you?”
There is a saying that humans came up with much later: the flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world. It is meant, ultimately, to illustrate that trivial events can have an unexpected impact on a larger scale at a later date. What the humans didn’t know when creating this phrase is that it actually should have been about angels, seeing as that was the first occurrence of such a monumental, rippling shift set out into the universe by a particular pair of dove grey wings.
The Virtue who would then one day be known as the demon Furfur stared, unspeaking, as the other angel stepped away and moved on with their day, unphased, unaware of their effect.
In the course of their existence, that moment was a drop in the bucket—that feeling grazing along their senses, thrilling, terrifying, new—but one drop was still infinitely more than zero drops. And there hadn’t been a metaphorical bucket to speak of before then, now had there? The true nature of the angel who would be Furfur got a faint patina of tarnish that day, and the angel who would be Crowley had barely lifted a finger.
The knock-on effects were incalculable.
As they returned to their celestial duties, their head echoed the words, Don’t want to fall, do you?
For poor old Furfur, they’d find that oh, yes in fact, they really did.