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There’s a fuck-ton of empty space in the universe. So much, that humans saw everything beyond their close-knit little earth, and called it Space. It wasn’t until academics built physics laboratories and analyzed Greek tragedies that they realized the empty space was there with them on earth, too. When you press two objects together, the matter in their atoms never really touch. There’s a tiny, vast emptiness between every proton and electron and photon and quark; She designed it that way.
Humans made festivals and music, dances and stories, to stave off the emptiness at night and in graveyards, but between every festival there were forgotten weeks, dancing bodies were always eventually still; within every musical phrase were beats of silence, and between every line there was space.
Closeness and connection, they were all illusions, from what Crowley had learned. The demon once saw a man die in the middle of a crowd. When everyone was rushing towards the sealed doors of Noah’s ship, an old carpenter was crushed in the tide of bodies, and nobody noticed before the rains started. He died like a bull before the butcher’s block. The farmer that saw the bull’s birth, raised him, fed him, saved his calf, and gently tended his sores and then so easily one day slit his throat. Was God the farmer? Were other humans or the land? Was Crowley?
Crowley thought about the man for years afterwards, staving off the rampant fear below his breastbone with festivals and music and dances and stories and gallons of stiff drink. And Aziraphale. Always Aziraphale.
Being a demon who entertained the company of an angel was like putting your head in a lion’s mouth and trusting it wouldn’t bite. Crowley told himself he couldn’t resist because he liked danger, because he was a rulebreaker with a penchant for challenges and temptations. A small, stuttering part of him whispered that he couldn’t resist because he was desperate. Aziraphale’s smile was the closest thing to heaven’s light that Crowley would ever get again; Aziraphale’s neatly folded hands were the closest thing to safety Crowley had felt since he was ignorant; and Aziraphale’s neat clothes and scent and knowing barbs smooshed Crowley so sweetly, he could pretend there was no space between them. But at the end of the day, there would be another mission from hell, and they’d be separated for another decade or century.
-1677-
When they were both stationed in London, Aziraphale took Crowley stargazing in the countryside. The week before, Crowley had mentioned that he hadn’t seen the stars in years. Aziraphale remembered that Crowley was once a star maker, and had found his statement terribly sad. Aziraphale supposed the city had too much smog, or hell kept him too busy, for Crowley to see anything at night.
Aziraphale planned the stargazing trip as a surprise, with a nice picnic basket and bottle of red wine. He surreptitiously requested that Crowley accompany him to specific coordinates for an important mission -for The Arrangement of course.
When Aziraphale laid out the picnic blanket, Crowley sat down in shock, and the angel bounced with glee. Aziraphale explained, lay out the charcuterie board, and poured the wine with a grin like an apple slice, waiting for Crowley’s reaction.
When it didn’t come, Aziraphale’s face fell.
Crowley checked over both shoulders to make sure there were no agents of heaven or hell about, then cautiously arranged himself on the corner of the picnic blanket most blocked from the footpath by a bush.
“You were a star maker before, yes?” Aziraphale said, “I thought- Oh goodness, did I bring up bad memories, or- perhaps I misread you earlier?”
Crowley shook his head numbly and took off his glasses. “This is great, Angel, really.”
Aziraphale frowned, stared at the starlight reflecting off Crowley’s slit-pupils.
Crowley pointed, squinted, “Lovely glow there.”
Aziraphale couldn’t see which star he was referring to; Crowley seemed to be pointing at the empty space between two particularly bright ones.
They both pretended to watch the heavens for a minute.
Aziraphale remembered reading something in a zoology text about the range of a snake’s vision. Survivalists theorized that snakes were much more limited in detail and distance than human eyes were.
Aziraphale had thought Crowley’s eyes weren’t limited by their serpentine form, in the same way an angel’s wings were too small to carry the weight of a human corporation -but did; the same way their bodies functioned like a human’s but never aged or got sick. A growing horror pooled in Aziraphale’s stomach.
Aziraphale had always found Crowley’s gold irises beautiful, a forbidden fruit hidden behind smoky lenses, but for the first time in a long time, he was scared to look into them.
As a perk of needing to blend in with humans on earthly assignments, Crowley’s corporation was much more human-like than other demons’. So why wasn’t his corporation given human eyes? Humans focused a great deal on each other’s eyes, and it was quite a hassle to hide them before humans had invented dark-glass lenses.
“Crowley?”
“Hmn?”
“When you’re in your snake form- And you shift out of it- why do your eyes not become human too?”
Crowley’s jaw worked on words that wouldn’t come; finally, he shrugged, “That’s just how it is, I suppose.” He went distant.
Aziraphale swallowed, “Did you ever try to change your eyes, so they’d be human? I mean, are you stuck with them, or…”
“Aziraphale,” he warned.
“Please?”
Crowley ran a hand over his face, “You’re asking questions you don’t want the answers to.”
“Why, I thought you encouraged asking questions.”
Crowley hissed, rubbing the heels of his palms over his eyes. To Aziraphale’s immense shock and horror, the demon sniffled.
Crowley fought for control of his voice, but it sounded as if it might break, fragile. “Woke up like this after the fall. She didn’t want me seeing what I’d made, I suppose.” The unspoken *She didn’t want me to have what I loved* sat between them like a murder weapon.
A hound bayed in the distance.
Crowley thought about all the space She had created as a balance for the few sparks of mater and energy floating in it, and thought his immortal life must be the same way. For every ebullient angel, there had to be a hundred suffering demons. He could live with that, if Aziraphale could be happy.
Crowley’s chest cramped with a sob he couldn’t let out.
The angel would just have to enjoy the stars for him.
Aziraphale took a deep breath. “Let’s go back,” he said, and began packing up the picnic, “I’m not going to sit here and watch you fritter away another evening without being able to admire the stars.”
Aziraphale chatted with the coach driver while Crowley watched the hills roll by in a stupor. He was so out of it, he didn’t notice that this wasn’t the way they’d come up. He drifted in and out of sleep.
The horses came to a stop, and Aziraphale held the door open for Crowley.
The angel’s face was an angry work of art. It wasn’t safe for Aziraphale to be angry at God, so he was only but completely angry at The Way Things Were. He was seething with it, sharp as obsidian beneath the surface of his cherubim cheeks.
Crowley was so startled, he laughed. “Hghk- what is this?”
“The Royal Greenwich Observatory. It’s a great big lens in a tube that scholarly humans use to watch the stars -whole hordes of star fanatics!- they call them astronomers.”
Aziraphale took Crowley’s hand, and the touch of a guardian angel’s fingers blazed courage down his spine. For once, Crowley didn’t fear being caught by heaven or hell. There was empty space, there would always be space, but right now, he didn’t feel it at all.
The star maker smiled.
He knew, logically, that closeness was an illusion. But illusions might be more tangible than he gave them credit for. Drawings were illusions, and so were magic tricks, feelings, stories, and thousand-year-old plays, but these things sustained all of humanity like a hearth fire. Maybe they could sustain a demon too.
When Aziraphale held Crowley’s hand, a cold fear in Crowley’s past folded to this new warmth.
“You deserve to see the wonders you created,” Aziraphale said, “And lucky for us, we’re on the humans’ turf now. They have a great deal of experience when it comes to defying God.”