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Crawley was not used to having a physical body yet. Smell and sight– in the earthly, terrenal sense at least– were new; he was still getting used to them. It could be that light was playing tricks on him, that his nose1 was over-saturated with the smell of plants and dirt and animals, and that was why the tangy, clean scent that didn’t really seem to fit in with the rest was putting him on edge. Maybe all of that was why the figure pacing on top of the wall, a good hundred meters up and away from him, seemed so utterly… familiar.
Crawley slithered closer to the wall, his scales dragging over the fresh earth and tickling grass. A mouse scurried away from him. Crawley stuck his tongue out at it. Rude, that. Just because he looked like this at the moment didn’t mean that he was going to act like a base predator, thank you very much. He still had some dignity left. Not much, but some.
He clung to it as he was forced to crawl on his belly like a lowly worm. But hey, at least this worm had fangs and a hard exterior, not like Hastur’s preferred maggots. Crawley decided to count himself lucky.
The wall was quite tall from this close. He coiled his body beneath him, raising his head up and up and up. He could barely see the angel’s wingtips, but, sticking his tongue out once again (what a versatile gesture that was), he could pick out his scent. The same smell from before, the one that didn’t belong to anything earthly– and that, if it did, Crawley thought, would belong to the skies– but sweeter , somehow. It wasn’t something he’d smelled before, because he hadn’t smelled anything before Earth was . And still there was that annoying sense of something being quite out of his reach. Something he felt he ought to know. It was like looking in a pond and not seeing his reflection, despite knowing with absolute certainty that it should be there, in theory.
He hissed, frustrated. Up on the wall, the angel stopped his pacing. Shit . He wasn’t supposed to be discovered yet.
Crawley burrowed his head in the ground and slipped beneath the grass, sinuously moving away from that unnerving itch at the back of his mind. Maybe whatever it was would sort itself out in a few days. He was supposed to wait until everything was done being created before starting his work, anyway.
Days after his arrival in the Garden, it still had not resolved itself. Crawley had tried everything to get it to stop. Watching the sun rise — boring. Sunning on a rock — comfortable, but boring after a few hours. Watching the funny things called goats jump around — less boring, but still not enough to entertain him for long. And time and time again, when boredom struck, he found himself flicking his tongue out in search of the angel. And as soon as he caught a whiff of him, or sight, when he dared to get closer– there on its heels came the awful feeling of emptiness where non-emptiness should be.
Crawley shook his head and wound around a tree branch, his long back to the Eastern wall. A glossy red fruit caught his eye, as bright as his own belly scales. Ah, so this was The Tree that he’d slithered up to. The one the humans had been told not to eat from, as per Hell’s instructive course before sending him up here.
Crawley tested the air and swivelled his head to the right. There was the second human– Eve, he recalled– staring wistfully in the general direction of the tree and not even pretending she wasn’t. Why would she? Lying hadn’t been invented yet.
Curiosity, though… That had been around for quite a while. Crawley should know.
He wound down and went up to her. He had been told to make trouble, had he not?
“Did God really say ‘You must not eat from any tree in the Garden’?”
You know how the rest goes.
Afterwards, Crawley went to the wall once again. He’d fulfilled his assignment, he’d probably be recalled back to Hell soon, and he wanted to sate his own curiosity before that– not with any fruit (even though he was tempted to take a bite out of one, just to see if the ‘eating dust all the days of his life’ thing had taken or not) but with another forbidden deed.
He went up to the angel and talked.
He’d taken a risk in doing so, he knew, but it had turned out that the angel had given away the most effective weapon he’d had against Crawley and the rest of Hell’s denizens. It’d be easy to just shift back and take a bite out of him, or push him from the wall, or tear at his fluffy white wings. But why should he? He’d already carried out Hell’s orders, and he felt no desire to hurt this being that was so delightfully interesting, that’d only been kind– if a little prim–, that felt so much more kindred than any of the other demons did.
Do I know you? Crawley thought, while he ribbed the angel about the apple thing. No, probably not. If I did, I wouldn’t have forgotten you.2
Then the rain came. In the millisecond before it fell, just as the angel’s muscles were tensing to begin the ascent of a wing to cover Crawley’s head and Crawley was, instinctively and not yet knowing why, moving closer to him, the memory came back.
A meteor shower. Two angels standing in front of the first ever nebula. “How much trouble can I get into just for asking a few questions?” His wing lifted to protect…
To protect Aziraphale.
That was the angel’s name. Aziraphale.
Crawley felt as if the metaphorical lead balloon had struck him square on the head. He looked at the angel– at Aziraphale– out of the corner of his eye. He hadn’t offered his name. Did that mean he remembered he’d done it Before? If so, he obviously assumed Crawley remembered, too. Didn’t he know demons were stripped of most of their memories when they Fell? Only the skeleton remained, just enough so that they knew they had been part of Her ranks once, that they’d been loved and joyous and done incredible things in Her name… and that none of it would happen again. Not for them.
Crawley watched as the angel inspected the rain with a curious, pleased look on his face. His white hair was soggy and stuck to his forehead. It couldn’t be comfortable. Thanks to the wing over him, Crawley didn’t know for sure.
Time to test the waters.
“Guess we’re even now, eh, Aziraphale?”
The angel looked at him, surprised. And then he beamed .
“You’re very welcome,” he said, haughtily but with a little smile, effortlessly catching the meaning behind the demon’s casual words. “Crawley.”
They watched the rain together, and when it was time to part ways, Crawley did so with a silent vow. Next time he saw Aziraphale, he would remember. No matter what it took.
It hurt.
It bloody fucking hurt.
Crawley huddled against a rock in the desert (in his human corporation, now, because he wasn’t going to go back to slithering in the hot sand if he could help it) and closed his eyes. His fingers dug into his hair, his breath came in pants. He felt like every atom of his being was fighting against him, straining to pull apart from each other. All of that, and all he had managed were hazy images he could make no sense of.
A cry was torn from his already battered throat as he redoubled his focus. Come on, come on! The memories were there, he was certain. They were just locked away. And he didn’t have the key, so he would have to tear the whole door down.
White sterile halls. The black void of Nothing, until there was Something– because the angel Crawley had been had willed it so. Let there be light. He saw, as if muted now, the bright nebulae coming into life. He could recall, if he focused hard enough, snippets of conversations about A double star system? Are you sure…? So you get the hydrogen and helium really, really hot… What’s this new gravity thing…? but they were threaded with more seditious libel, malicious whispers that Crawley did remember quite well, thank you, he didn’t want to hear them once more.
You idiot, his mind hissed, mournfully. Look what you fell for. Quite literally.
Crawley pushed those thoughts away. What was done was done, and he wasn’t enduring the worst headache of his (admittedly, short) corporeal life to wallow in self-pity. He had a mission, here.
Aziraphale , he repeated to himself, like a litany. Find Aziraphale .
Every blurred image he recovered felt like hot pokers searing his brain. He gasped, curling tighter in on himself. And then…
There he was. Smiling.
I like the… the pink bit in the corner!
Oh, it’s you again! How are the nebulae coming along?
Will I see you in the choirs?
You don't truly believe all that Lucifer is saying, do you? I find him quite… rowdy.
Do be careful…
Crawley heaved. His head was going to explode. He put his forehead to his knees, breathing deeply– a painfully human action, but it did help him calm down and bring the pain back from ‘excruciating’ to ‘tolerable’.
At least he had his answer. He didn’t just know Aziraphale.
They had been friends.
He blinked away the strange moisture in his eyes. The hollow feeling in his chest was harder to get rid of.
The same old mistake. Maybe some things were better unknown, after all.
Throughout the years, Crawley made it a habit to isolate and try his best to remember whenever he felt like he was missing something. By the time the 7th century rolled around, he felt as if he more or less had everything important down. And if he still came up blank on some things, well, it just wasn’t worth it to go through any more self-inflicted misery just to remember which of the demons who sneered at him had been personally slighted by him once and which just didn’t like him.
He started meeting Aziraphale more often. Their assignments often opposed one another’s, or fell within the same vicinity, and after the first few encounters had ended with neither smitten nor destroyed, they’d started to let their guard down. Chance run-ins turned to conversation turned to walks along the Nile turned to strolls through the nearby market. It was during those impromptu, always short talks that, sometimes, Aziraphale would let something slip. An interjected ‘do you remember’ when speaking of events long past, a string of words that felt like a reference to something else, things that Crawley couldn’t catch but that he was sure the person he had been once would have. It felt like Aziraphale was holding a conversation with Crawley’s twin, or something. The demon hated it. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen, and then off he would go for some quiet and incredibly painful reflection time.
The worst times were when he couldn’t for the life of him place what Aziraphale was talking about. The even worst times were when said unknown references came up again , in a different meeting, and Crawley would have to pretend to be holding steadily on to the thread of conversation to keep Aziraphale from seeing the truth– that he’d lost the thread in a tangle of strings so big that he doubted he would ever find it again.
Some things he couldn’t remember, because he didn’t have a clue how to go about remembering them. It’s hard to pinpoint what you’ve lost if you have no memory of losing it.
Most of the time, his solution to the issue was to laugh off whatever Aziraphale had said and change the subject. And it had worked. For almost five thousand years, it had worked.
And then they had to talk about horses.
“Vicious beasts, I tell you,” Crowley said, as he and Aziraphale walked the shore of the Rhine. A disorderly group was in the midst of crossing it, far from their current position, but demons’ visibility wasn’t impaired by pesky things like kilometres if they didn’t want it to be. Their horses stomped on the ground, nervous. A soldier fell off. Crowley snorted.
“Well, I’ve never had any trouble with them,” Aziraphale, distractedly surveilling the same group that Crowley was, said. Both of them had been told to work in this area. The Fall of Rome was imminent. But as it would happen whether or not they did something about it, they were delaying their inevitable involvement with a chat first.
“Never?” Crowley turned to look at the angel. “You tell me the monsters have never tried to buck you off? Not once?”
Aziraphale tutted. “ Monsters , Crowley, really. All you need to do is give them a pat on the nose…”
“They’d bite my fingers off–”
“Maybe an apple,” Aziraphale went on, ignoring him. “One would think that would have occurred to you already.”
The angel looked smug. Crowley rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you hilarious? In any case, it’s the designers’ fault. Has to be. Who thought a thing that size should walk on its fingers ?”
“Well, technically, they’re not their fingers, just homologous to–”
“Must be the same bloke who thought up the humans’ digestive and respiratory tracts,” Crowley continued over him. “Or knees.” He shook one of his legs, to prove his point. He’d never gotten the hang of joints. “Come to think of it, what were the fellows in the Human Design team doing?”
“Our best, I can assure you,” Aziraphale said beside him, somewhat bitterly, and Crowley’s thoughts were violently wrenched away from the flaws in his corporation.
“ You were on the team?”
The angel frowned, looking as confused as Crowley felt.
“Yes. I wasn’t consulted on major decisions, but… I’ve told you about it,” he said, and Crowley’s stomach plummeted. No, he hadn’t told him. He’d told the person Crowley had been. The person that didn’t exist anymore.
“Right,” he said, trying his best not to look like he’d swallowed a handful of ash. “Sorry, slipped my mind.” But the damage had been done. He could practically see tendrils of suspicion begin to swirl in the blue of Aziraphale’s eyes. “Anyway, I need to go. People to tempt, barbarians to help, you know how it is. I’ll see you after Rome falls.”
“Crowley…”
The demon was already walking away, toward the group in the distance, with a dread lading his stomach that had nothing to do with horses.
“Vale !”3
Crowley let himself fall backwards onto the thin mattress of his lectus . The muffled sounds of looting and pillage came from the streets outside, but a little demonic intervention made sure no humans would bother him for the night. He should have left the city already, but he wanted some relative peace and quiet first to do what he needed to do.
The earlier conversation with Aziraphale by the river haunted him. That was a crucial detail he’d forgotten. What else had he lost? What more did Aziraphale know that he didn’t?
A lot of things, Crowley thought, bitterly. Like when to keep his mouth shut, for one.
He closed his eyes. Alright. He hadn’t done this in a while, but he had it down to an art now. In the darkness of the room, he took a deep breath and focused.
The minutes ticked by. A slight headache was starting to set in. He saw glimpses of faces he’d walked past in hell, only cleaner and less gnarly-looking. He heard Lucifer’s empty promises again. He saw the War, and the sulfur pits, felt the burning ache in his wings and nonono, steer clear of those ones.
Sweat broke out on his forehead. An hour went by. He clenched his teeth. Two hours.
At the three and a half hour mark, he rolled onto his side and gave up with a pitiful whimper. It was useless. He couldn’t remember any mention of what Aziraphale had been working on during that time. In fact, he couldn’t remember anything about Aziraphale that he hadn’t known already. Not a single thing more. Before his conversation with the angel, he would have thought that was a sign that he’d managed to reclaim every memory of him already. Now he knew the truth.
He was never going to recover everything. He’d hit a wall.
Crowley growled. His gaze slid down to the lucerna hanging from the ceiling. With the afterimage of stars coming into life behind his eyelids, he sneered mockingly, “ Let there be light. ”
The candles flickered merrily on.
Crowley sighed. That tracked. Another little joke of Hers. Why not?
He closed his eyes and let the darkness of sleep claim him.
It was eleven centuries later that they broached the subject again. Crowley had gone to the meetings after the incident with a knot in his throat, but Aziraphale hadn’t said a thing about it at the first one, or the one after that, or the one after that one, and so Crowley had been lured into a false sense of security. Maybe this was going to be one of the things they didn’t talk about. It was, after all, Fall-adjacent, and they never talked about that. Or maybe he’d been lucky, and Aziraphale hadn’t realised there was anything amiss to begin with.
He remembered the look of puzzled sadness in the angel’s eyes as he left him by the Rhine. Right. When had luck ever been on his side?
And then, one random day, after a spiffing showing of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (and an even better drinking session at a pub near the Globe), Aziraphale had looked at him, that same dolefulness to his gaze, and blurted it out.
“You don’t remember. Do you?”
Crowley, who had been happily making his way through the third bottle of wine, stared back in confusion. Had he forgotten something? Aziraphale was as tipsy as him by this point. It wasn’t fair if he had forgotten something and the angel hadn’t.
“Huh?” Crowley asked, eloquently. “Remember what?”
“ Remember ,” Aziraphale insisted. “Anything. From Before.”
“Yeah, I do. We went to see Shakespeare’s funny one…”
“Not that . I mean Before-before. With a capital B.”
That sobered Crowley up quicker than a pitcher of water to the face. Aziraphale must have noticed something in his face, because he leant forward, hands hovering over the table in a half-hearted placating gesture.
“I only ask because… Well, I’ve noticed, ever since Rome, some incongruities in… in things you’ll sometimes say or do…”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley warned. The carefree mood he’d been in had evaporated. He tightened his grip on the bottle.
“You clearly know some things,” the angel went on. He was never the one to back down from an intellectual challenge. At the moment, Crowley deeply resented him for it. “You remembered me, in the Garden. I know you did. But then, sometimes, there are things that you get confused about, or that you don’t seem to know at all, and I wonder...” Aziraphale sighed. His next words were spoken in an almost pleading tone, “I just want to understand , Crowley.”
“There’s nothing to understand,” Crowley snapped, setting the bottle down with a clank . Aziraphale startled. The demon looked away. “I’ve told you,” he continued, talking to the pub’s floor. “The angel you knew Before is not me. It will never be me.”
“I know that–”
“You don’t, really.” Crowley huffed. His voice was tired when he added, “You can’t.”
He wasn’t angry. It was no fault of the angel’s, really. Aziraphale hadn’t Fallen. Aziraphale had stayed in his lane, hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t associated himself with the rebellion in any way. He could never know the all-consuming agony of being stripped not only of his old skin and white feathers by the boiling sulfur, but of everything that made him Aziraphale . The twisting of bones to fit a new shape, the screaming himself hoarse, not knowing where or who or what he was, only knowing that he’d made a terrible mistake, that he wanted back in, please, give him another chance, just one more, oh Go–
“Then help me understand,” Aziraphale said, so, so softly, a gentle breeze over Crowley’s scorched flesh. He was brought back to the present with a slight shudder. When he looked up at the angel’s earnest blue eyes, he began to regret that last bottle. It was sloshing uncomfortably in his stomach.
He should tell him. The gig was up. He should come clean, swift and brutal as the fall of a headsman's blade, and then they never had to mention it again.
The chair squeaked as he pushed away from the table. He threw a handful of shillings on its surface.
Aziraphale’s face fell. He started to get up, too, but Crowley was quicker. He’d rounded the table and was halfway across the bar before the other could so much as blink.
“Take care, angel.”
Aziraphale didn’t bring it up again, even when Crowley faltered– and those instances were few and far between, as both avoided any mention of Before like the plague. The whole thing with Furfur in 1941 had been the worst of it. It had had Crowley worried, for a moment, that the evening would be cut short when Aziraphale asked why he didn’t remember someone who was, apparently, a former comrade-in-arms. But not a peep was heard from the angel about it.
The years went by, and the closest they got was at the bandstand.
“You were an angel once.”
“That was a long time ago.”
It had been a low blow, in Crowley’s opinion, but, hey, tensions had been high, it hadn’t been the best week for either of them, and if he’d felt somewhat betrayed, it had been quickly buried in the absolute hot mess that followed.
Armageddon. Then, suddenly, Armage Not . The Earth kept spinning, the Sun kept on shining, Crowley tempted Aziraphale to the Ritz, and… life went on. London was still London, with all of London’s usual hustle and bustle, with its people coming and going and an angel and a demon who suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time on their hands and no one to tell them they couldn’t spend it together.
It wasn’t half-bad, as retirement went.
Now Crowley sprawled on Aziraphale’s ancient couch. His friend worked beside him, seated at his desk, white gloves on, prodding at an even older ancient book with all the meticulousness of a surgeon. The rain pattered against the windows and the shop’s glass dome. They’d been silent for a while, ever since Crowley had declared he’d stay to wait the storm out, urging Aziraphale to go do his own thing, he’d be fine, he could always stir some trouble on the Internet if he was bored. He’d then proceeded to lay down there and watch with mild interest as the angel rebound a tome so thick it could have been three Bibles stacked together, though Aziraphale’s neat handwriting peeking out from the pages told another story.
An hour went by, slow as molasses, even if the steady tick of the grandfather clock spoke of no alterations to time’s normal passage. Crowley felt pleasantly warm, and not just because of the moth-eaten blanket thrown over his legs. He could get used to this. No worries about anything except what they could have for dinner, and should he get the Bentley or go with the French café across the street? He didn’t even feel self-conscious about it. Sloth was one of the big ones, after all. He was being properly demonic. Not that he needed to anymore.
He didn’t know what prompted the words out of his mouth. It could be that the thoughts had been stewing in his mind for a while now, and the stillness brought them to the forefront. It could be the horse statue his sunglasses were dangling from, there in Aziraphale’s desk, stirring up memories. Or it could be that, for the first time in six thousand years, Crowley felt utterly, entirely safe .
“You were right.”
Aziraphale looked at him out of the corner of his eye, but otherwise remained engaged in his work, righting his reading glasses up with a gloved hand. He hummed, a sound that Crowley recognised as I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t surprise me. The demon smirked. Bastard .
“What about?” Aziraphale asked distractedly, applying glue to the text block with a sable-hair brush.
“That I don’t remember.”
That got the angel’s attention. Aziraphale set down the brush, and started to take off his gloves. His face was the picture of apprehension as he looked down at the task.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to…”
“No, it’s alright.” And it was. For some reason, his brain had decided that this rainy afternoon spent in Aziraphale’s bookshop, like many rainy afternoons before, was the perfect moment to fess up. It still wasn’t easy , but the fear that Aziraphale would want nothing to do with him after he knew the truth had lessened considerably. They’d faced Satan himself together– well, intended to face him, Adam had been quick on his toes with that one– a few weeks back. This? This was nothing. At least, that’s what Crowley was telling himself. The lump in his throat wasn’t quite getting the memo.
Aziraphale looked at him. He nodded, taking his glasses off and shifting on his chair so he could better face Crowley. Giving him his full attention. No pressure or anything.
Crowley took a deep breath.
“When I Fell,” he started carefully, righting himself so he was sitting up, too, “I lost my memories. Most of ‘em, anyway. I– I didn’t know you, in the Garden. Not until…” Crowley made a whooshing motion with his hand, illustrating a canopy, a feathery haven that had kept him dry from rain.
“But…” Aziraphale frowned in that way he did when he was trying to piece together one of Crowley’s more modern idioms. As if he was trying to find something that had been lost in translation. “You said my name. I didn’t have to tell you, you already knew.”
“Yeah, because I remembered then . Look, it’s complicated. Some things trigger the memories, I guess. Make them resurface. I managed to recover a decent amount, over the years. But there are some that just aren’t there, that I won’t remember, no matter what I do. They’re not in me.” Crowley swallowed. “Not anymore. It’s like… like living in a house someone left behind, and it’s only half-furnished. There are things missing, and I know it, but I have no clue what those things are .”
Silence followed. Through what he was increasingly regretting were his bare eyes, Crowley saw Aziraphale purse his lips in thought. He braced himself for questioning, for the reproach that was surely coming. When the angel drew breath, Crowley’s fingers crisped on the blanket.
“I’m sorry.”
The demon blinked.
“Wot?”
“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale repeated, a bit firmer now, “that I never noticed. It couldn’t have been easy for you to hear me speak of things that you… Well, that for all intents and purposes, you didn’t experience. You tried to tell me, and I’ve been foolish…” The angel’s voice wavered.
Crowley simply sat there, stunned
“It’s… it’s not your fault,” he said quickly. “I didn't tell you, you couldn’t have known.”
“But I suspected.”
“It’s not the same as knowing,” Crowley retaliated. “And you didn’t do it all that often, anyway. I just wanted to be clear, moving on, that… that the angel you knew doesn’t exist anymore.”
For a moment, Crowley thought Aziraphale would argue. He could see it, on the tip of the angel’s tongue, the same old argument. Kind, nice, good . He readied his own usual counterclaims, tensing up for a fight like he’d never learnt to walk on two legs.
Aziraphale disarmed him before the battle even started. He smiled. Close-lipped and a little sad, but a smile nonetheless.
“Well. I suppose it’s like you told me– it was a long time ago.” And then, before Crowley could do anything but blink owlishly at him, “What do you say to dinner at the Italian Deli down the street when the rain lets up? I’m a bit peckish.”
A small smile started to make its way to the demon’s lips, too.
“Why wait, angel?” He unfolded from the couch in a swift move and stretched out his spine. “I’ll get us an umbrella.”
Footnotes:
1. Or vomeronasal organ while in this form, he supposed. Return to text
2. Throughout history, Crowley went on to invent many things– VAT, self-service checkouts, unnecessarily complicated roundabouts, Manchester. This moment marked history’s first unwitting instance of what would become one of humanity’s proudest traditions: speaking with absolute certainty about something while being hilariously incorrect. Return to text
3. Casual Roman farewell. Return to text