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The tangled black bodies of power lines always looked a little too much like Aziraphale for Crowley’s liking. When they first started popping up in the 19th century, caught on the wooden poles at streetcorners, long tresses of filament and plastic going every which way, he had laughed at the human reimagining of what angels looked like. Artists these days, he scoffed in his reports to Downstairs.
It was only one step further than what they had already done: the nerve clusters that turned into eyes, the simultaneous invention of the wheel in the Neolithic (though it was more of a disc, really), the beauty of architecture dedicated to the churches, the train and the tram on axiomatic lines. Crowley thought ahead to the slowly building artificial intelligence, some hundred years in the future, and chuckled. They were trying so hard to build God — blessed fuck, that word still stung! — that they built angels instead.
Poor little ants, running around, replicating the shoe, the hand, the eye, the stick and not seeing that it was all one entity. Poor little ants, accidentally hitching a ride on an international flight and being deposited on an unknown tarmac.
Crowley doesn’t actually think that way but it’s easier to roll his eyes at humanity. It is easier to ignore his heart, conveniently located under his bottom left rib to make room for the loops of excessively long liver and stomach, which skips a beat when he sees power lines and cathedrals.
Angels aren’t supposed to be beautiful. They’re supposed to be practical. They have one purpose. They have no thoughts. They only have righteousness and justice and the joy of creation, and even that is not theirs.
They are God’s hands in the most concrete sense. Not tools, not autonomous beings, but extremities.
Aziraphale is no different. He is like a train, on a set track, on a set route. Crowley is Schrodinger’s penny on the rails as the wheels reach him. Will he derail the thing or be flattened?
He sometimes thinks that he has a chance of derailment, and that frightens him like not many things do.
Sometimes, he sees it happen. Aziraphale enjoys sumptuous delicacies at tiny little delicatessens, and suddenly there is something that strips away from him. He starts wearing scent, like some dandy, and the sharp metallic scent of him is replaced by human elixirs. Crowley imagines little women in lab coats, very nunlike, mixing together tinctures and titrating various chemicals; he imagines Aziraphale taking humanity and dabbing it on his pulse points. It stinks like lily of the valley.
He imagines each patch of skin going soft, like real skin, instead of the meatsuit angels usually wear when on earth.
He is frightened that one day, all of Aziraphale will look human. Soft. Cruel, in ways only humans can be. Changeable. Capable of making decisions. Capable of making decisions which would take him away from Crowley. Her light wouldn't shine through the angel the same way.
Right now, Aziraphale is Hers. Entirely, or almost entirely, Hers. His distance, his kindness, his stability: all of these things are Hers. Even his beauty, his sensitivity to beauty and indulgence.
Sometimes, Crowley thinks She speaks to him through Aziraphale and it stabs at him. He doesn’t want that to go away, no matter his job, no matter how much he likes the angel.
Aziraphale’s station on earth has made him beautiful and falling would make him look like Crowley. Or maybe, worse, falling would make him look human.
And he knows how much the angel prizes his aesthetics. He knows because he’s seen him.
Aziraphale’s true form had been revealed to him one Tuesday afternoon before there were Tuesdays (though maybe God had brought Tuesdays into existence from the very beginning because interesting things always happened during them). Crowley had been sitting on a boulder, taking a break from devilish thwarting, when the sun went out and he dissolved into shadow.
That wasn’t quite right.
It wasn’t that the sun had gone out, but that he had, slipping into a pocket dimension as easily as slipping into warm bathwater. And only one extradimensional entity felt like slipping into bathwater, with the aquatic stink of lilies of the valley (maybe Aziraphale had brought human scent back with him from the future).
“Hello Aziraphale,” Crowley had said. “Fancy meeting you—”
“You are not welcome, foul fiend!” warned a voice that Crowley felt in his nonexistent chest, a bass so low and soprano so high that it would have burned the hair right off him if he had any in or on his discorporated being.
The part of him that was not puffed up like a frightened cat wondered what his earthly form looked like on that boulder, as empty as a wine skin after a night of Dionysian revelry.
“You’re the one who summoned me,” he complained. “I didn’t choose to come.”
“You’re quite right, dear fellow, but customs must be observed,” said Aziraphale, in a dialect and tone that would have been quite correct for 1850s England but certainly not in Mesopotamia. Though, to be fair, they were not in Mesopotamia. They were in a void.
A dark one.
“Y’couldn’t turn on the lights, could you?”
A pause.
“Or get warm? A bit odd to not be able to see you. Where are you, anyway? I can only see the squiggly bit in the 15th dimension.”
After Aziraphale’s hurried apologies, the angel flickered on, white and red and yellow and green, like a bad thermal rendering. “Sorry,” he had said, with the impression of wringing his hands. “Can’t get every bit of me, but these are from the dimensions which have heat.”
Crowley took a bit of time to adjust.
Aziraphale looked like the inside of a domed cathedral, windows foaming over with needle-sharp fanged eyes, and thousands of long graceful wires attaching him to one cardinal direction. To heaven. To God.
Crowley looked something like that. Once.
“I’m afraid I can’t return the courtesy,” he had mumbled.
He hadn’t dared to show the coiled darkness that made him up: the scaled neutron core of a supergiant angel. The patterns of his divinity were mutilated, his wings tattered. He trailed cut filaments, dead as nails and hair, like jellyfish tentacles.
A fallen angel was the densest thing in the universe. The smallest too. All that crushed potential.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Aziraphale’s voice had glistened wet over his not-marble arches. He was more white than red then, contrasting against the blackness of the void. There was a warm smile in the eyes, the needleteeth dulled. “Don’t worry at all, Crawley. I know what you look like.”
Angel means messenger, Crowley knows. “I missed you,” he had said, and saw the echo of Her smile in the stained glass windows of Aziraphale’s body.