Chapter Text
Inhale. Exhale. Pause. Crowley seemed rooted in place, staring down in horror at the mangled form of his best friend bleeding out upon the covers of his bed. The spread of crimson had been lost to the dark grey cotton, staining it darker still in a pool that seemed too much for the angel’s too-small form.
He had never seen Aziraphale look so fragile. So small, so close to the edge that it seemed it would take absolutely nothing at all to tip him over. He wanted to touch, wanted to withdraw, to pull Aziraphale to him and never let him go while simultaneously pushing him away to pretend none of this had ever happened. A juxtaposition of warring emotions that left him useless.
Instead, he remained frozen, taking in the myriad of injuries that peppered Aziraphale’s face, chest, arms, legs - too many to fathom, and he knew there were yet more he could not see. They hadn’t bothered to remove his clothing before they started, and it hung from him in places where the seams had split or been cut open, where slashes across the fabric revealed damage so deep Crowley wasn’t certain it could be fixed.
Inhale. Exhale. Too long and too wet, and that in itself was proof enough that the damage internally was just as bad as the wounds he could see, if not worse. Aziraphale’s mouth hung open, nose broken and bent and bloody, rendered useless for anything save the pain it must be causing him.
Aziraphale hadn’t broken eye contact even once, the flicker of blue as he watched Crowley the only movement save for the occasional juddering rise and fall of his chest. There was familiarity there, laced with distrust, the two warring with one another in the angel’s gaze as he remained motionless upon the bed.
He blinked, the spell was broken and Crowley’s knees bit into the carpet as he landed.
“Shit!” The demonic miracle was nothing, a not-quite-thought bringing what Crowley needed most in that moment into immediate reality. He couldn’t outright heal Aziraphale, they weren’t quite that compatible yet and he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk trying in case he made the whole thing worse, but bandages and a bowl of warm water appeared almost without him willing them to. “What did they do to you?”
Reaching out to touch Aziraphale’s shoulder was perhaps not the best of ideas. Before his hand could make contact with the torn and bloodied fabric of what had once been a well-loved shirt, the angel jolted backwards with a hiss and a gurgle, eyes widening in fear and mouth moving around words that had no sound. Crowley whipped his hand back and stared in horror as Aziraphale writhed on the bed, trying to put some distance between them with limbs rendered close to useless.
“Sorry, I’m sorry!” He backpedalled to give the angel space he couldn’t manage to get for himself, knocking the bowl of water over and soaking the carpet. It soaked into the knees of his jeans, warm-to-cold too quickly against his skin, and it was almost one thing too many. For a single, ridiculous moment Crowley seriously thought he might burst into tears.
Except, Crowley didn’t cry. Ever. He could count on one hand the number of times he had genuinely shed tears and still have fingers to spare - and that was including the personal hell he had suffered through in watching that bookshop burn. He swallowed down the ridiculous notion, willed fresh water back into now the mostly-empty bowl and waited for Aziraphale to grow still upon the bed.
“I’m not going to hurt you, angel, but I need to touch you to be able to help.” Inhale. Exhale. Rattling and wet and fragile. No movement save for the flickering of Aziraphale’s eyes and the irregular expansion of his chest. Staring, always staring, and Crowley was starting to wonder if his friend was even present in there any more. “Please, let me help you.” He tried again, slowly this time, reaching out for the hand resting upon the sheets near to Aziraphale’s head. Fingers, thankfully mostly unscathed, twitched against the rumpled sheets but did not pull away.
They were cold beneath Crowley’s own. Cold, and too brittle, and they froze in place as soon as the brush of skin made itself known. Aziraphale’s gaze didn’t shift from his face even for a moment. Unnaturally focused, even as Crowley wrapped trembling fingers around the angel’s own still ones, hoping that some of his own warmth might seep into the hand that didn’t squeeze back. Shifting until they were almost palm against palm, three fingers curling into the gentle curve that held the smallest fragments of heat, Crowley let his thumb brush over the raised bumps of Aziraphale’s knuckles. They were dry yet soft, and felt somehow altogether wrong, memories of similar moments warring with the pain of a reality he didn’t quite know how to deal with.
When Aziraphale showed no indication that the contact between them bothered him, though the wary stare still did not waver, Crowley let his attention shift higher - up past a wrist, to a deep gouge in Aziraphale’s right forearm. Pushing the ruined fabric out of the way, wincing as the edges of the cotton shirt tugged a little where they had settled and dried into the scabbing blood from who knew how many days ago, Crowley set to work cleaning out the first - and seemingly smallest - of the open wounds.
It hadn’t reached bone, which was - well, good, he supposed. As good as it could be, considering the circumstances. Someone help him, how he wished he could simply heal the worst of the hurts and gather his angel into his arms, hold him until the worst had passed and Aziraphale was whole once more.
Except, he couldn’t. And this Aziraphale might not allow it anyway, with the way those distrustful blue eyes watched for every twitch, every flinch. Crowley ached in the knowledge that the one person he actually cared for no longer trusted him - just what had they done to him, down there? How had hell managed to get their hands on a fully-functioning angel without losing enough of their number for it to be noticeable, anyway?
Agares was powerful, certainly, but Aziraphale was a principality. One of heaven’s strongest warriors. Had he chosen to take up his sword against hell during the apocalypse-that-wasn’t alongside the other principalities, there was no doubt in Crowley’s mind that enough of their number would have fallen that winning would have been near enough impossible. For all the other angels seemed to look down upon Aziraphale, and their treatment of him over the years, they feared him just as much as hell did.
Which was why they hadn’t forced him to Fall, as they had done with so many other lesser angels that stepped out of line. As they had with Crowley. They couldn’t. Nor could they cut off his connection to the Host and his power, only the almighty herself could oust such a high-ranking angel by force, so how had hell managed where heaven had failed?
The first slash cleaned, though newly weeping and smeared red as the old blood and dirt was washed away, Crowley moved onto the next one. And the next. Hours passed, though he scarcely noticed, time sliding into one fluid stream of nothing as he worked around ruined fabric and an immobile patient for as long as he could. He wanted nothing more than to will the destroyed barrier of fabric away, but something stilled his hand - some sense that doing so would trigger a response from Aziraphale that he wasn’t equipped to deal with. Too-quick motions earned, at best, a full-body flinch, so how would he react to the instantaneous change caused by a miracle? It was best, for the moment, not to try. Some cuts were clean and shallow, taking very little effort and could be cleaned up in a matter of moments. Others were jagged and deep, down to the bone with the marks of teeth and it was a wonder Aziraphale hadn’t lost a limb or two if Agares had decided to bring his other form out to play.
It was a wonder he had been released at all, really, and while there had to be a meaning behind that - and the message his enforced return was apparently supposed to signify - though Crowley hadn’t the mental fortitude to spare to work that one out just yet.
The deepest injuries wouldn’t heal on their own - in fact, there were a few not so deep which looked as though they might struggle without proper treatment. At least, not without opening Aziraphale up to the possibility of an infection setting in, which - angel or not, he was badly hurt, and no amount of wishing it would prevent nature from taking its course on an already weakened corporeal form. He would need to worry about those later, gauze pads soaking up the worst of the newly-flowing blood, the white-to-crimson sickening in how quickly it seemed to spread.
Stitches. He would need stitches, and it would scar - Crowley wasn’t a doctor, hadn’t paid much attention to human medicine beyond an idle curiosity back in the eighteen-hundreds. Or, was it the seventeen hundreds? It had covered stitches, leeches, and cleaning infections out with alcohol - along with several other less pleasant procedures that he would really rather forget and had thankfully fallen out of favour in recent years. Hopefully it would give him the basics he would need as, short of ‘borrowing’ a doctor for a while and hoping that the clearly disturbed Aziraphale allowed an unknown human near him, he had little other choice.
Crowley’s second mistake - the first being his initial attempt to touch Aziraphale without asking beforehand, one which he wasn’t likely to repeat any time soon - was moving to clean the visible slash just above the angel’s hip. It sat perhaps a half inch above the bone, visible only due to the tattered state of Aziraphale’s shirt around that point, and curved over and around in a wicked arc up a good quarter of his back. It was a particularly nasty wound, the cloth miracled clean along with the water in the bowl and held at a logistically impossible temperature only a couple of degrees warmer than Aziraphale’s skin, making sure to remain in the angel’s line of sight as he leaned over the prone form. He had barely started, fabric just grazing the skin beneath the right shoulder blade, when Aziraphale reacted once more. Jerking, hissing, teeth bared and lips drawn back in an expression that was so contrary to everything Crowley knew of the other that he was stunned into inaction.
This was- this wasn’t Aziraphale. For a long moment, Crowley wondered if perhaps this might be a usurper, someone sent in Aziraphale’s place, a body-snatcher of the worst sort. Except, he knew that wasn’t right - couldn’t be right, not with a body that had been issued by the heavens themselves. Not when he could still feel his angel within the confines of mortal flesh, even if it was faint.
Because the more he reached out, felt his way around the wounded body of his best friend huddled on his bed, the more he found Aziraphale. He felt different, but it was still unmistakably him.
Aziraphale growled at him, the sound feral and broken. He was still in there, but his mind wasn’t - closed off by whatever Agares had done to him, shattered into pieces that Crowley wasn’t sure how to piece back together. Something inside Crowley broke with that sound.
“Oh angel.” Crowley let himself feel, let himself feel too much, and Aziraphale flinched slightly at the warm splash against his exposed hip. There was no point trying any further, and who else would see save the one person he had stopped hiding himself from too many years ago? And why did it matter, anyway? Crowley didn’t cry, except for where Aziraphale was concerned, and blue eyes tracked each sluggish tear down angled cheeks as though they were a fascination he couldn’t quite comprehend.