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It was storming and Crowley was terrified. The small demon huddled up against the headboard, chewing a bit on the corner of their blankie. It was so loud. Right above their head. The sounds of thunder became Her voice as She cast them out.
And then they were Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Their wings flailed around, trying to catch them and stop what was soon to be a freestyle dive into the sulphur pit waiting below.
In reality, Crowley’s wings clipped the lamp on their bedside table and sent it flying.
Their desperate pleas that had gone unheard back then went unheard now - because of no one being around to hear them rather than plain disinterest.
Everything was so loud and so scary and Crowley was so small.
They wanted Zira. Wanted their angel to hold them and tell them that they were safe. Wanted Zira to protect them.
But that couldn’t happen. Angel could never find out they’re little. Ever. So Crowley curled up underneath their blankie and sobbed. Both from fear and sadness that swirled inside of them. Their arms were wrapped around their middle that, if they pretended hard enough, was a hug.
The little demon ended up crying themself to sleep. Their blankie hugged tightly to their chest.
Crowley woke the next morning to sunlight and the warmth of still being wrapped up in their blanket. Bigger than they had been when they fell asleep last night but still definitely small.
Their phone was ringing.
The happy moment of sleepy-content-settled shattered abruptly.
They blinked long and hard at his phone screen. Trying to make their brain less fuzzy. Trying to force themself firmly into a bigger headspace so that they could talk properly and wouldn’t do something embarrassing like babbling babyishly when they picked up the phone.
Zira — Aziraphale was calling them.
“Yeh, Angel?” they asked, after finally picking up.
Crowley ended up going over to the bookshop, as they had promised to three days before and then forgotten about.
It took just about everything within them not to bring blankie along with them. They got halfway to the bookshop before they felt like crying again. Crying over having to leave a blanket behind is so pathetic. Even if the blanket was an incredibly soft and fluffy black one with little stars and plants that big Crowley had sewn into it.
The demon sat in the parked Bentley in her usual spot for a moment longer before they headed inside the bookshop.
They spent the rest of the morning with Aziraphale scaring off humans who attempted to buy the books. When the angel noticed how uncharacteristically quiet they had been, they blamed it on not having slept well.
It was actually because they were trying blessedly hard to stay big. No matter how small they felt from Aziraphale calling them the same pet names he always did or from how warm and comfortable they were in the sun.
Just after lunchtime, Aziraphale ended up leaving to go meet with someone about a book that he had won in an auction on ‘the eBay’.
“For Somebody’s sake, Angel, not ‘the eBay’, ‘s just ‘eBay’,” they corrected with a sigh to cover the very un-demonic giggle that they almost made. “Do you wan’ me to come with you?”
Aziraphale shook his head. “No, that isn’t necessary. It’s not far, I’ll take the train. I should be back by three p.m.,”
He left for the station. Crowley was now standing alone in the middle of the bookshop they had been left to look after for the afternoon. They snapped. The sign on the door flipped ‘open’ to ‘very very closed’.
The fuzzy feeling was creeping back in again. Even stronger now that they were alone and not ignoring it anymore. Stuffing their brain with fluff. Crowley rocked on their heels slightly as they thought over all the things they could do now they were alone.
The same miracle that had flipped the sign also changed their clothes. Gone were their usual ones, replaced by a long-sleeve red shirt and soft black overalls. Their headphones appeared on the floor next to him. They sank down to sit cross-legged on the floor.
Their eyes caught on a brightly-coloured book cover and a small box on top of a stack of tomes.
What is that? Zira only has boring books in here. All browns and dark blues and dark greens.
Crowley scooted across the floor towards the interesting book.
It’s a colouring book, full of plants! And a box of crayons too!
The hand not already reaching for it flapped excitedly by their side. They pulled the colouring book down onto the floor.
Carefully, they opened the crayon box. Making sure not to rip it, at all. They didn’t want Zira to be angry with them, and if they ripped the box then Angel would be so mad.
They pulled out the blue crayon — the colour of Angel’s eyes! — and started to colour in one of the pots. The demon sat on the carpet, still cross-legged, with the book open in front of them. Their wings had materialised and were covering them slightly like a blackout curtain; blocking out the rest of the world until it was just them and colouring book.
Colouring…they’d never done this before. Not with proper crayons like these, that was. As much as they had longed to do for so many years.
The closest they’d come to this was colouring in an ‘adult’ colouring book, the ones with the tiny pictures and a ballpoint pen. It had been so hard to stay inside the lines that it ended with them a sobbing mess on the cold concrete floor of his flat with the book hurled across the room.
Crowley got lost in the motions of colouring. Being ever so careful never to go out of the lines. Because colouring outside the lines was Bad and would make Crowley Bad too. They didn’t want to be Bad.
Their headphones were on their head, music playing softly as they coloured. At some point, their favourite pacifier - the dark blue one decorated with tiny gold stars that reminded them of Angel - ended up in their mouth.
As time went on, the plants’ colours started to look less and less realistic. The demon’s singing was less singing and more babbling along to the music.
Crowley was so absorbed in what they were doing that they didn’t hear the chime of the door opening.
“Hello, my dear,” Angel’s voice said, right beside them.
Crowley dropped the red crayon they were holding as ice-cold terror washed over their corporation.
Their pacifier disappeared into a pocket of their overalls.
“Zira - Aziraphale!” Crowley scrambled to their feet, kicking the colouring book behind them as they did. Hoping desperately that the angel somehow hadn’t seen it (he had). “You’re back early!”
“I am,” Aziraphale agreed. “Don’t stop because I’m here, love,” he added softly as he knelt down and picked up the dropped crayon. The softness of words coupled with love made Crowley’s brain all mushy. Mushier than it had been earlier.
No.
It couldn’t — wouldn’t. They wouldn’t let it. Because they were big. They were gonna stay big. Aziraphale had to know that.
Oh Somebody, Zira knew. He knew and now he was gonna be disgusted and leave. Crowley was gonna be all by themself all over again. If Zira left, they would be small and sad and alone.
“No!”
“No?”
“No. I can’t,” they insisted. “‘Cause you know now ‘nd you can’t know,” They brought their wings up tighter around them. Like a shield. The demon hadn’t noticed that their snake stuffy was still tucked into the crook of their arm.
Confusion bloomed in Aziraphale’s eyes for a moment.
“Crowley, I have known about your regression for weeks now,” Aziraphale told them.
“What?”
“Do you remember that night two weeks ago, when it hailed?”
Oh.
“Yeh...” Crowley trailed off. They finally noticed their stuffy and buried their face in it. “‘sn’t disgusting?” they asked meekly.
Zira shook his head.
“Not at all,” the angel said. “What you do to cope is never disgusting,” he added. “But I believe that’s a conversation to have later,” Zira held the red crayon he had picked up out to them. “Now, I believe I interrupted you,”
“I can colour?” they asked timidly, looking up at Angel again. ‘With you here’ went unsaid but heard all the same.
“Yes, you seemed to be enjoying it earlier,” Zira told them. “As I said earlier, please don’t stop what you’re doing because I’m here now,” he added. “I can leave if it’s making you uncomfortable?”
The angel was already making to stand up again.
Crowley’s hand shot out to grasp tightly at Angel’s wrist. Angel couldn’t go. If Angel left, then they didn’t know if he’d ever come back. They wouldn’t let Angel go.
“No, Angel stays,” they said. “…Please?” they added quietly.
Angel resettled himself back on the rug.
“Alright, I’ll stay.”
And so Crowley returned to their colouring while Aziraphale watched on. At first, they were sitting cross-legged (honestly more mimicking a pretzel), as they had been before, but as they got more comfortable with the angel watching them, they lay down.
A comfortable silence fell over them. Until the hand not holding the crayon twitched and reached towards the pocket where Crowley had frantically shoved their pacifier earlier. The same pocket that they were more or less lying on top of.
Zira might know that they regress and seem to be fine with it, but them using a pacifier was so weird. He wouldn’t like it. So Crowley ignored their want for it, no matter how strong it was.
They were trying so hard to focus on colouring and not how much they wanted their paci, that they didn’t notice their hand had disappeared into the pocket until they were staring at it.
“You can use your pacifier if you want it, darling; I’m not going to judge you,”
Despite the clear permission, Crowley hesitated, looking between their pacifier, Zira, and their pacifier again.
Eventually, and slowly, they popped the teet of the pacifier into their mouth and started suckling on it. As they did, their eyes didn’t leave Zira’s face, waiting to see if he would react poorly, despite saying that he wouldn’t. He never did.
Zira ended up reading a book that he had pulled from somewhere - miracled it to himself, probably.
“You knew about my, ngk — how I do that,” Crowley said later when they were more or less big. It wasn’t supposed to be a question but came out sounding like one.
They were sprawled out across the bed — the bed the two of them shared more often than not, even if Aziraphale rarely slept.
“Yes, I do,” he confirmed. “That colouring book and the crayons are in the bookshop for a reason,”
“Thought they’re for kids that come in here?”
“No, they are not,”
“‘nd you know what regression is?” Crowley asked instead of thinking any harder on that and how Aziraphale was implying that the crayons and colouring book had been in the bookshop specifically for them. That he must have bought it specifically for them.
“Yes,”
“How?”
Why did Aziraphale look embarrassed?
“I…I run a caregiver blog on Tumblr,” he admitted.
“You know how to use Tumblr?” Crowley was more shocked to learn that their angel knew how to use even one social media well enough to run a blog than that he seemingly had learnt about age regression from the internet.
“Yes,”
The demon didn’t know what to say to that. They did, however, look up Zira’s blog. To their horror, they discovered that they had already been following it for months.
“You know how I went out this afternoon to meet with another bookseller to collect a book that I won in an eBay auction?” Aziraphale asked once the shock had worn off enough.
“Yeh?” they said, wondering where this was going.
“It is a first edition of Alice in Wonderland,” Zira told them as he picked up his bag off of the floor and pulled out the book. Its dark red cover was lined with gold and there was a gold silhouette of Alice on the front cover; ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ was pressed into its spine in the same gold.
“I noticed how interested you were in the copy at that estate sale that we went to,” Crowley’s cheeks were dusted with pink. They had no idea that Zira had seen that, they thought they’d been sneaky. “So I wanted to get you your own,”
It didn’t matter that their shock had already worn off, as that made it come back even stronger.
The little demon launched themself across the bed to pull Zira into a hug with such force that they both nearly toppled off.
“Thank you!”