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Sometimes Crowley wished she’d fallen. This was an extremely blasphemous thought, so she mostly only let it occur to her when she was drunk.
The other angels were just so … dull. Of course, she managed to do very well at evading them, putting them off, and impressing them (depending on what a situation called for), but wouldn’t it be something to, you know, collaborate? But it was impossible to collaborate with any of them because they lacked any semblance of imagination. They were still fixating on nudging the occasional human into sainthood or making images appear on pieces of toast, for Heaven’s sake! None of them could comprehend social media well enough to appreciate the amount of sheer goodwill generated by her wildly popular cat-video-focused Twitter account, and even the “pay it forward” chains she regularly started at local coffeeshops went unappreciated.
“It’s just a pound or two,” Gabriel pointed out. “And you’re the only one paying it. And only one human benefits from it in the end, so … how is this impressive?”
You’re not fucking getting it! Crowley wanted to howl. The effect of each individual human’s decision to pay for their own coffee and pass the donation on to the next one in line was minor, but they accumulated into something much greater – plus, as they went about their days afterward, they carried a bit of a glow with them that made everyone around them just a little bit happier as well. All for the price of a hot drink. (At least She understood. Metatron reluctantly passed Crowley Her commendations from time to time.)
It wasn’t that she wanted to do evil. It was just that anything had to be better than this.
Well, in another sense, Crowley did want to do evil.
Angels did not partake in carnal pleasures. That was something the humans had invented entirely on their own, and celestial beings generally found that sort of thing unnecessary, sticky, and requiring too much concentration for no purpose. The extent to which it was sinful was also a topic that brought forth long-winded and very boring debate that she’d much rather avoid.
And, when you got down to it, it wasn’t as though her interest in Aziraphale were strictly libidinous. From the moment she’d met the pretty little demon, wringing her hands because she’d just been ordered to get Eve to eat the fruit, she hadn’t known a snack would lead to all this, how would they manage out in the desert, Crowley had been captivated. Who’d ever heard of a demon being conflicted over temptation?
Being involved with the expulsion from Eden should have set Aziraphale up as a pretty high-ranker Downstairs, and yet she always seemed to get the scut work. Which she actually seemed to enjoy! Practically every time Crowley ran into her out and about through the centuries, she was “just finishing up a little job” and then was off to see the olive vendor, or to pick up a piece of masterfully painted pottery, or to examine this new codex – and did Crowley want to come along, too? And Crowley always did want to come along.
It wasn’t until they met one night in Oxford in the fifteenth century that her interest did take on a more … human nature.
Crowley had been out late to oversee the adoption of an infant left on a doorstep (she wasn’t allowed to interfere with the baby being taken in, but nobody had said she wasn’t allowed to chase away stray dogs). The kid had finally been found and as a little private celebration, she was enjoying the crisp air that the humans for some reason found unhealthy and looking up at the stars, which were so much better from below; because her head was tipped up, it was in the perfect position to notice a white-clad figure climbing carefully out of a window on the upper floor of one of the dormitories.
The figure was stretching one leg – one pretty shapely leg, by Crowley’s reckoning – out to find a ladder, the bare foot flexing as it found its target with its outstretched toes before said foot slid properly onto a rung; that leg and foot took their owner’s weight as the other leg and foot were brought around to join them on the same rung, the hem of the owner’s garment shifting and falling down over both legs once they were together. The climber’s upper half was still inside the dormitory at that point, and they brought their hands out beside their hips to grope at the top of the ladder, which they obviously couldn’t see. There was a moment when it seemed like they might not be entirely sure about this plan for exiting the building, but after a breather they began to make a slow and somewhat unhappy descent.
At first, Crowley had been watching out of a professional interest, because climbing out of a priest or student’s window in the middle of the night was usually related to two or three distinctly disallowed activities. (Not that she was likely to intervene. Her philosophy was that an angel was not a hall monitor. But it was good to be aware of what was going on in your own district.) However, once the person on the ladder had backed down enough for their head to come out of the window, it was clear from the long, pale curls – almost glowing in the starlight, in fact – hanging over their shoulders that, rather than some worldly miscreant, it was Aziraphale. Of course, after that realization, she strode directly over and grasped the sides of the ladder, putting a foot on the bottom rung to more firmly ground it.
“Is that you, Crowley?” Aziraphale’s doubtful voice floated down to her; when she looked up, she mostly got a look at draped white fabric, but it was clear that the demon was bent as much to one side as she dared to scout out who was hanging onto her ladder.
“The very same. What are you doing up there?”
“Oh, don’t interrogate me like this,” Aziraphale implored. “Just – give me a minute.”
It ended up taking more than a minute for her to descend, but Crowley didn’t mind. The time was well spent in coming up with friendly jibes that had just enough bite to make Aziraphale bristle without making her lower lip wobble.
Once she had one foot on the ground, the other dropped heavily beside it, and then Aziraphale leaned forward and braced her forehead against a rung of the ladder as she heaved a mightly sigh. When she turned around to face Crowley, she kept leaning back against it as though she were still emotionally attached. “Oh, that was dreadful,” she said with great feeling. “I didn’t like that one bit.”
The jibes dried up in Crowley’s throat. Aziraphale’s white garment was a linen shift, so fine that it was very drapey; if there had been more light than just the weak glow of the stars, Crowley was sure that it would have been transparent. It was also low-necked, made to skim under the collarbone, and Aziraphale’s skin was nearly as luminous in the night as her hair. And her eyes – they were wide and shining, partly out of anxiety and partly out of habit. “So,” Crowley finally managed, “what were you doing up there?”
“Temptation, I’m afraid.” She shrugged and flipped one side of her hair back over her shoulder with apparent artlessness, but it did a lot to emphasize the softer and, perhaps one might use the word, jigglier portions of her anatomy under the light shift. “Downstairs thinks that one of the priests here is in danger – well, not danger, you know what I mean – of becoming one of yours, so I’m supposed to chip away at his virtue.”
Crowley was not a stupid celestial being. She knew that Aziraphale was a demon and not an angel, and that she was probably incorporated to look more angelic to confuse onlookers, particularly humans, who were very easily confused when it came to appearances. She knew that fraternization between their two sides was, if not strictly forbidden, most unwise. She knew that tempting was something demons did, something many of them were supposed to be quite good at. In a sensible world, she would be only disgusted at the idea of chipping away at a potential saint’s virtue and would immediately set about thwarting the attempt. That was what angels did – thwarted demonic wiles.
But in this world, Crowley was instead immediately enraptured with a vision of Aziraphale in her linen shift, made sheer and diaphanous by candlelight glowing from behind her, tucking her hair delicately behind her ears and preparing to deliver temptations of the flesh, and just as immediately thrown into a panic at the idea of said temptations being delivered to some undeserving human priest who was not actually a saint yet, rather than to Crowley herself.
“What … ah … did that actually entail?” she heard herself asking from a distance.
Aziraphale grimaced. “Well, first I had to get this ladder,” she said, pronouncing “ladder” like it was a curse, or rather, a blessing, “and then I had to undress and climb up it in my underthings, which felt very stupid, let me tell you.” She launched into a tale of the mishaps involved in getting the ladder, and how a human watchman had nearly caught her while she was disrobing, and by the time she actually got into the priest’s bedroom Crowley felt like she had ants maddeningly crawling inside her skin. “And then I did my usual tempting and left.”
For God’s sake. “What’s your usual tempting, then?”
Aziraphale grimaced again. “Oh, you know. Sit on the bed. Touch on the arm. Lean forward and smile a lot. Make sure my shoulder comes out my neckline, that always seems to be a success. It’s a bore, really.”
“So you don’t …”
“Not if I don’t have to, of course. It’s even more of a bore, if I’m honest. Oh dear – I’m not sure I should have said all that!” Her eyes were wide again, and a little wilder than before. “Does confessing my methods count as being thwarted, do you think?”
Crowley assured her that it didn’t. “I haven’t done anything to stop your temptation, and I swear not to use this knowledge against your efforts,” she said, generally meaning it.
“Thank you, darling, that’s such a relief. Do you know, I had so many good ideas for chipping away at his virtue? There’s a gambling ring I could get him involved with, and a pyramid scheme I could get him to run, and a whole list of other things, but they are so obsessed with the old ways down Below. Hastur nearly bit my head off for giving my suggestions.”
“They’re like that Above as well,” said Crowley, glumly. “No imagination. They don’t spend enough time down here – out here, I think. But, look. When you think about it, it’s a lot of wasted effort for the two of us to work against each other the way we do, don’t you think?”
Aziraphale’s expression was very wary. “Perhaps – but it has to be done, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s the alternative?”
“If we had a sort of arrangement not to get in each other’s way,” Crowley plunged on, “we could just … skip it. You don’t really properly tempt him, and I don’t really properly bless him, and we can both report it as a job well done, well, mostly well done if it weren’t for my celestial counterpart, da– ble– expletive them, but at least the other side didn’t get him. If you know what I mean?”
“I see.” There was an agonizing moment in which Aziraphale’s brow furrowed and her lip was worried between her teeth and in which Crowley thought the demon might turn her down entirely. “That would be efficient, wouldn’t it? And we could meet up regularly to keep up with what we’re doing so we know where to not expend too much energy!”
It was perhaps an unorthodox way to do good. But the important thing was that Aziraphale could be prevented from delivering carnal temptations to anyone but Crowley. No, she hadn’t thought that. To anyone, she meant.
Aziraphale sometimes felt that her fall was such an obvious mistake that it could possibly be corrected if she could just fill out the right form and send it Upstairs.
But people Downstairs weren’t allowed to send petitions Upstairs, of course. You could send petitions to higher-ups Downstairs, but she knew from long, bitter experience that her higher-ups didn’t have the remotest interest in paperwork and would ignore it at best. At worst, it would result in a dressing down for not being able to take care of her own problems or not keeping her nose out of other people’s business. (And a dressing down in Hellish terms did not stop at a tongue lashing.)
Hell did not have much use for demons who couldn’t be impressive in some way, whether they chose to be impressively disgusting or impressively terrifying or something else. And Aziraphale was the least impressive demon in existence by any standard.
Surely Heaven had more tolerance for the soft and gentle, she thought treacherously.
The main reason Aziraphale came to this assumption was Crowley, which even she was aware was not entirely fair to the angelic realm – or rather, it was not fair to Crowley to assume that she was merely average. Crowley certainly didn’t consciously work to portray her colleagues as less intelligent and less compassionate than herself, but it was the unavoidable conclusion Aziraphale drew from her anecdotes and complaints. Really, when you got down to it, it rather seemed like Crowley ought to be an archangel at least, and it was an oversight of the Almighty to keep her working directly with humans on Earth (not that Aziraphale wasn’t selfishly happy about it).
But even if Crowley were the most angelic of the angels, the very fact that she did exist and was celebrated even to a moderate degree by her … employer would imply that Above was, all in all, a good and fair place to be.
She did recognize that Crowley’s association with herself was problematic on a number of levels. For one thing, if such a good angel were inclined to courteous interchange with a demon, even one as mediocre as Aziraphale, it implied that Heaven might be full of hypocritical Above/Below acquaintances! And that was not terribly hard to believe – from long experience Below, Aziraphale had developed a reasonably strong layer of cynicism – but it was unpleasant, as she liked to torture herself with the dream of an unreachable, perfect Heaven.
Another angle was less philosophical and more bothersome. Hypocrisy aside, beings like themselves were not supposed to have any interchange, and so if their arrangement were known to Crowley’s more difficult colleagues, it could be used as leverage against her. Aziraphale knew all about blackmail, backstabbing, and other tools in workplace drama.
She rarely felt guilty about her own work. It was what it was, and anyway, most of it was just giving humans permission to do whatever they already wanted to do. But her position – that was something else. Of course, it was Crowley’s choice to be an angel in association with a demon, however undemonic a demon, but the thought of being the potential cause of Crowley’s potential downfall did keep her up at night. (Metaphorically speaking, since she didn’t need to sleep.)
Because Crowley was the one thing that she truly accepted as unalloyed good. Despite her scathing remarks, her habit of bending the rules, and her willingness to do what could generously be considered “evil” as a favor to Aziraphale – in fact, not even despite that: because. It was more good of Crowley to befriend a demon and help her, offer her the chance to do good in exchange for doing evil, than it would have been to remain pure and pristine and righteous.
It perhaps did not make the most logical sense. But it made the most sense to Aziraphale.
She was not as oblivious as she sometimes came off. (The word “ditzy” had been known to be used as a descriptor by her human neighbors.) She’d realized that Crowley was fascinated with her immediately – it had started after what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, of course. Aziraphale had been … a little distraught.
“I just can’t believe it’s gone!” she’d wailed, wiping at her eyes with the end of her sleeve, a horrendousness she would have been disgusted with if she hadn’t been all to pieces. “The little shop where I get my olive oil every week – flattened. The potter down the street that makes those lovely ceramic animals – it’s just rubble now.”
“I know,” said Crowley, her lips a thin line. She was generally being much quieter than her usual self, which made it easier for Aziraphale to run over her and keep going.
“And the people! The family that lived next door to me – six children, and the grandparents in the house!” The youngest had been a year old. The family had just thrown a party to celebrate her survival through all the dangers of infancy, and they’d invited Aziraphale; she’d brought a little toy lion and the baby had screamed with joy when she saw it. “They’re all dead – horribly dead, not even a nice quiet little death, they were burnt or crushed or suffocated – and it’s supposed to be good? Some sort of learning experience?”
Crowley was wretchedly silent.
Aziraphale was shaking, the shock passing through her and leaving a dark, angry weariness in its place. “I don’t think your side are any better than mine,” she said, wiping the fresh tears away. “I really don’t. Worse, maybe, because at least my side – at least Hell would be gloating over how wonderfully foul this all is, not passing it off as a worthy judgement.”
Unfairly, perhaps, she wasn’t thinking of what Crowley might be going through, just rushing through her own fury. That made it a slight surprise when the angel pounced on her and locked her in an embrace, and it took Aziraphale a moment to react – to wrap her own arms around Crowley and press her into her shoulder. (It was nice to have an exceptionally soft body in these sorts of circumstances.)
“I’m sorry.” Crowley’s voice was muffled, but there was a sob in it. “I’m – you’re right, you know.”
That was also unexpected. Crowley was often vocal in her criticisms of Heaven, but usually with nitpicks on policies or remarks about incompetence, and when they debated specific points, they each might capitulate to the other, but always without actually stating anything as directly insubordinate as “I suppose Hell/Heaven is fundamentally wrong in its approach to such-a-thing.” It was “you know, Crowley, you might have a point there,” or “that’s rather convincing, Aziraphale.” Never “you’re right.”
“Oh, well,” she said uncomfortably, but she ran her hands up and down Crowley’s back in a soothing manner. Crowley had also not cried like this before, even after the Flood – but then, neither had she; they hadn’t spent as much time living among the humans then.
After a few minutes, she pulled back, no longer crying but with a hitch in her breath. Her hands cupped Aziraphale’s face, one thumb directly on a drying tear track, and she looked into her eyes. People rarely did that: her eyes were a lovely blue very much at odds with their strange slit pupils, and so humans looked away quickly and then decided they’d imagined any abnormality, because sweet Mistress Aziraphale couldn’t have anything as spooky as a snake’s eyes. Crowley never seemed to mind them.
“You’re a very good person, you know,” she said fiercely. “Fuck. I don’t know any angels better than you.” And Aziraphale would have had to be much thicker than she was not to pick up on the emotion riding on grief’s shoulders in that instant.
She hadn’t known what to do about it. Demonic instinct said that she ought to use Crowley’s fascination to persuade the angel to do her bidding, but that was too horrible to contemplate. A more interesting instinct said to simply watch, and wait, and figure out what exactly the cause could be apart from a willingness to blaspheme (which every demon was bles– was capable of).
And in the meantime, she would get to have Crowley’s lovely attention and company, which was the important thing.