Chapter Text
Land of Uz, 2500 bc.
Crawley may have decided to not take the angel to Hell, but that didn’t mean God was of the same idea. Aziraphale had eaten human food. Had colluded with a demon. Had lied and defied Her orders.
He had played with his odds, and this time he’d lost.
They sat on the rock for hours looking at the valley, Job’s house far behind them. The weight of all that had happened there hung heavy over them, the weight of what was about to come still not fully crushing the angel, but slowly setting in. There were no words left to say.
He’d fallen.
Aziraphale gulped, feeling the tips of his feathers start to blacken. Something empty and dark was setting inside of him. The Fall, he imagined. All the holiness leaving his body as God threw him out of Her realm for his transgressions, as She burned his wings to mark him as fallen. Could be worse, he thought as his stomach turned and threatened to betray him. He’d heard being thrown into the sulphur pit was far more painful.
“I suppose you’ll have to take me to Hell after all.”
“I can hide you,” Crawley said softly after a few seconds, looking at him with that same compassion he’d shown before. That unwarranted, dangerous compassion.
“And then what?” Aziraphale wanted to sound casual, calm. Perhaps to sound terrified about whatever was to come. Or maybe to sound angry, to make the question a slap in the demon’s face. Instead it sounded hollow, defeated. If his idea was to put on a brave face, he was failing just as much as he’d failed at being an angel.
“We can figure it out. I don’t- um- I can tell them I need help here on Earth. Lots of evil deeds to do.” He flashed a smile at the angel. “I can’t fall much lower, can I?”
There were lots of ways in which he could fall lower, Aziraphale was sure, but Crawley was probably well aware of them already. No need to have them all laid out in front of him. The angel didn’t have the right, and certainly he didn’t have the courage for it.
Aziraphale had gambled with his holiness, and he had lost. It seemed She was looking after all.
His back now hurt badly, and he wanted to remove his clothes, to throw himself into a water pit, the ground, anything. Anything cold enough to ease the terrible burning sensation as his wings caught fire, hidden from the world but just as painful as if they were a gaping wound.
He instead just grabbed his tunic with trembling hands and gritted his teeth, knuckles white as he waited for the pain to stop. He refused to scream as he wanted to, instead just whining softly and pressing his eyes shut. At his side, Crawley silently kept him company, not getting closer, not offering him comforting words. He just waited.
And the pain did stop, after some hours. From scorching and unbearable, to uncomfortably hot, to sore, slowly the pain calmed down, leaving him tired and drained. Empty.
As night set in, Aziraphale allowed Crawley to silently take him by the hand, leaving the empty desert to enter the city, walking through darker and smaller alleys until they arrived at his house. It was on the bad side of the city, as it was expected. He was a demon after all.
“Won’t you go back to Hell?” Again his tone was plain, hollow. Aziraphale could barely bear to speak, throat so tight he wouldn’t have been able to bring air to his lungs had he needed to.
“Nah. Assigned to Earth.” Crawley shrugged with a smile, taking off his shoes, throwing the cape carelessly over a chair and freeing his hair from his ridiculous band. He lit some candles with a gesture of his hand, stretching and letting loose his robe. His lenses stayed on though, guarded in front of the falling angel.
It wasn’t a big house. Only one open space with a table and chairs, a bed against the wall, a small pantry. Why a demon even needed those things, Aziraphale had no idea.
“I suppose a lot of demons are,” Aziraphale tried to say nonchalantly, feeling his throat constrict again as he looked around.
He didn’t want to go down to Hell. Given the choice, he’d rather stay on Earth. Did he have any choice in it?
“Not sure ‘bout that. Most are part-time here. They come up to Earth, tempt someone, go back down there after they do whatever they were assigned to do. I’m the only one here all the time.”
“Why?”
“Beats me.” Crawley shrugged again, uncorking a bottle.
Aziraphale hadn’t quite felt interested in wine, but he guessed now was as good a time as any to go for it. See if it’d get him in that same comfortable and relaxed state the demon had been. Maybe help him forget a bit.
He’d fallen.
And he wished he could hide in a corner and shout and scream until he couldn’t utter a sound anymore, but what was the point of it? Who would he shout at? Why would he? He’d brought this on himself.
He’d fallen, and it was all his own doing.
So he just grabbed the cup being handed to him, drinking even if he didn’t quite like the taste. It was sour, not how he’d imagined it’d be. He felt tears prickling his eyes, and told himself it was because of the wine and nothing else.
He wouldn’t cry. He had no right to.
“Not much of a good wine, is it?” Crawley asked as he reclined on some cushions on the floor. Wherever the demon was, there seemed to be some surface, hard or soft, for him to lay against, apparently careless but making sure he was being looked at. Apparently careless, yes, but always with his guard up and inspecting everything and everybody.
“Wouldn’t know. Haven’t had wine before,” the angel tried to say politely, scrunching his nose at the taste and forcing himself to gulp it down.
“Nah, it’s bad, you can say it. The seller is going to Hell for it, I tell you.”
“Is it that easy? To go to Hell?” Aziraphale finally asked quietly.
“You’ve no idea. I’m surprised your lot has any souls at all,” Crawley snorted, raising his glass to the angel and lowering it when there was no reaction.
“Not my lot anymore,” Aziraphale said softly, feeling himself choke with his words.
“Right.”
There wasn’t much more to add. Whatever attempt at humour Crawley had tried there just died, crushed by the haunted expression on the angel’s face.
Eventually the demon sighed, taking off his lenses but not making eye contact with the angel and instead looking out at the lanterns being lit up in the streets. “We can… we can make it work.”
“Make what work?”
“You. Here. Up on Earth. Find a way to make you stay.”
What was even the point of it? Aziraphale just didn’t feel he had any more fight left in him. Earth, Hell. Whatever.
He’d been discarded. What was even the point of trying to ease the blow?
He wished he could cry. He had no idea why that wasn’t happening, how he was just holding it all together, feeling as if he wasn’t quite living inside his body but somewhere else. There were sensations washing over his corporation, but they felt like they belonged to someone else. Shame, guilt, fear, drunkenness, pain. They were all there but not quite registering in his mind anymore.
“Why would you do that?” Aziraphale just muttered instead.
Crawley shrugged in silence. Whether it was because he had no answers or because he didn’t care enough to tell the angel his reasons, Aziraphale was thankful. He wasn’t sure he was capable of handling it.
And now what? It was getting late, the wine bottles around them seemed to be magically multiplying, their quality improving every time they opened one. It didn’t feel like they were having an especially demonic time together.
Finally Crawley stood up and stretched his back, his robe rolling up a bit and showing more of his bare feet and ankles. Probably it was the wine at work, but Aziraphale felt he couldn’t stop looking at them. There was something mesmerising in the way the demon moved through the world, his body sinuous and lithe.
“It’s getting late, angel.”
Aziraphale just looked at him with puzzlement, slightly dizzy with all the alcohol. What did the demon mean by that? And why was he removing yet more pieces of his clothing? Crawley finally seemed satisfied when he was down to a short sleeved long shirt and a skirtlike black piece tied around his waist.
The falling angel followed Crawley with his eyes as the demon separated his makeshift bed from the wall and made it a bit bigger, some extra cushions appearing on it. He could feel himself staring as the freckled arms flexed, as the long fingers touched the dark fabric.
“What are you doing?”
“Sleeping. Nights are boring. Want to join me?”
Ah. That was the reason for making it bigger. He could have miracled a second one, to make it proper, but the former angel wasn’t about to be the one to point it out. Not when Crawley was laying down on his bed, half covered and with a bare foot comically hanging out of it.
Aziraphale gulped as he watched the demon curl on himself under the blankets and grab a pillow, turning a couple of times until he found a comfortable position. He wasn’t insisting, he was giving him the choice to go sleep at his side or not.
Sleep. What was it with Crawley and all those human habits? He finally sat at the edge of the bed, as far from Crawley as possible, feeling he still had to make it correct and perfectly innocent somehow, ready to be tempted once again anyway.
The demon’s breathing was even now, his eyes closed and back exposed to Aziraphale as he hugged the pillow with his arms and legs. He was ridiculous, maybe even a bit endearing, rather than evil and demonic.
“We don’t need to. Sleep, I mean,” the fallen angel complained in a high voice some minutes later as he looked out of the window. One of Crawley’s eyes popped open in annoyance. “We could, er, we could be out there doing…”
“Doing what? Thwarting evil?” Crawley quipped with an unamused smile, turning to look at him. It seemed he didn’t appreciate being woken up. “Go on if you want to. See the kind of people awake at night and try to make their lives better. I wouldn’t recommend calling attention to yourself.”
“I guess I shouldn’t anymore, should I?” Aziraphale said with a defeated expression, getting a bit closer to Crawley, still not quite sure whether he should indulge in this human habit or not.
“Most of them out there, things are already bad for them. They’ll go down to Hell even though they didn’t choose what they got dealt with. No need to add our influence to their disgrace,” Crawley yawned and turned to the other side.
Wasn’t it the most compassionate thing anybody in their line of work could say? Angels, demons, they all just rushed to influence humans, to try to lure them to their side, to judge them for that afterwards. Not Crawley. For him they weren’t just little pawns in a big and ineffable game.
Aziraphale had considered himself a bringer of light and hope as an angel, and feared he’d now have to be a force of evil. But maybe there was a secret third option there, one only Crawley was aware of.
The former angel had no idea what Crawley was talking about, what those humans could be doing at night, but for a demon, he seemed to be quite bad at inflicting pain. Full of excuses. Finding a way to not add to the unfairness of it all no matter what he did.
Aziraphale was out of his depth, kicked out of his pretty ivory tower and into the world. He’d need to learn how to live on Earth full time, now. No more being up in Heaven most of the time and only coming down to thwart some evil, to bear witness to something God had deemed important.
He looked at the sleeping demon, wishing he could stop his mind from overthinking, to stop worrying about the future, about what his new role in this new reality of his was. Wishing he could find it in himself to mourn for all he’d lost, instead of just feeling numb. Wishing his corporation would hurt more with the fall, so he’d have at least something else to worry about. Even the pain in his back was almost gone now, what once was a painful burn now feeling like tender scars but nothing more.
“So, how do we do this?” Aziraphale first sat more inside the bed and then laid on his back at the side of the demon, stiff as a plank as he looked at the ceiling.
“First, you should relax and find a better position. You look like a corpse,” Crawley laughed softly, putting the pillow under the angel’s head and finding no resistance as he softly manoeuvred and tucked him in. “Then just close your eyes and try to stop thinking. Or think of good things.”
Stop thinking. It shouldn’t be that hard. He hadn’t been thinking when he broke every single rule, after all. He didn’t think a lot, in Heaven. Or at least he didn’t think of useful things. He’d been told he didn’t quite think the way he should and — well, this wasn’t working. This most definitely was the opposite of not thinking.
He turned, his back now facing Crawley, eyes locked on the wall. Yes. Maybe the demon was right, this position was better, laying on his side and under the blankets, but still his mind wouldn’t stop and —
He yelped as he felt another body getting close to him, the heat against his back.
“Shut up,” Crawley grumbled as he pulled him closer, one arm around his waist as he snuggled on his white hair, grabbing him just as he’d grabbed the pillow some moments before, throwing one leg over his hips.
“You’re touching me.”
“Yes.”
“Er. You’re, um. Against my back.” A back that should be hurting, should be asking to be left alone, and instead was relaxing, the pain dulling in the presence of the warm body pressing on it, as if a demonic miracle was helping it heal.
“People do that when they sleep.”
“What — what should I do?” He heard the demon start grumbling at this side. “Alright, shutting up now.”
He hadn’t expected to be able to, but Aziraphale finally fell asleep, spooned by the demon. Feeling oddly protected.