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The universe is hot and new, birthed barely moments before in a blaze of glory and then impossibly accelerated. The long aeons of expansion and cooling are condensed into just a few thousand years. The giant blue and white stars exploding into vast stretches of matter and energy, which cool and then heat again as dust clouds. Which are spun in turn, into a collection of cooling stars.
The universe he'd come from was already cold, it's photons old and tired, space-time stretched to a snapping point. A moment away from playing in reverse, and eventually crunching back into a point of both infinite and zero mass.
He did not wish to return to nothing. So he'd slipped his vast and terrible form through a crack, and found somewhere else.
There had been a conflict already in progress, dimensions of creative energy ringing with the sound of it. The Creator of this new universe had turned one vast eye upon him. They saw the raw layers of curiosity and interest for this young place, just spinning into motion, in the potential of its warmth and its life and its chaos. He'd braced to fight - futile though it may have been against such luminescence. But instead there was a message from Them, less than a second of ionizing radiation, inverted space and shearing gravitational forces. They explained that this place had a purpose of Their own devising. But They found his unexpected presence to be interesting. A variable of unknown significance.
The message at its very heart was - hide yourself, do not interfere, and I will overlook you.
His name was too vast and too powerful for the new forms to hold. He would need another. He would need something smaller, something with the same ethereal taste as those who dwell here.
Aziraphale.
Aziraphale seems an acceptable name for one of the angelic host. He slips himself among them, touching their layers of consciousness and telling them 'I am one of you. I will be overlooked.'
Creation gives him a sword, hot with ethereal flame. The purpose is unknown, Aziraphale does not need it. He gives it to the new humans, who are very small and soft and frail, there are vicious beasts in the world and they will need protection if they are to thrive.
He does not think this is interfering.
He watches from the wall, as he contemplates his new duties, and is joined there by another being. The newcomer tastes like an atmosphere on fire, like charred wood and bitter almonds, heavy spices and venom. His eyes are the colour of sulphur, flecked with the burnt remains of stars, and his wings are the inky-black of space, filled with points of faraway light. He makes no comment on Aziraphale's own wings, which were carefully made to be overlooked.
The demon. His face moves in greeting, emotions carved into flesh in a way that Aziraphale hasn't learned yet. He copies them as best as he can, speaks the words this corporeal mouth is suited to make. He's not sure yet if they are the right ones. But the newcomer reassures him.
He gives his name.
Crawly.
Aziraphale likes the taste of it in his new mouth. Though he knows that this burning thing is meant to be his adversary, his counterpart, his opposite. He is the corrupted twist of ethereal grace and creative energies, a coiled spring made from a perfect level.
The rain is simply water, it's not infused with the divine, but the demon steps into his space anyway, eyeing it as if it will destroy him. Aziraphale is an angel now, angelic virtues are expected. He raises his wing, opens it over the other.
Hide yourself, do not interfere.
He gives the adversary his new name.
-
Aziraphale finds his angelic duties surprisingly simple. Their demands on his attention brief. Though the other ethereal beings quickly prove themselves vexing. They are rigid and they do not adhere to the rules that Creation set forth for them. They see him as small and unimportant. He is sent to earth, and then he is ignored. This is good.
Crawly is on earth too.
Only then he is Crowley, and Aziraphale feels some strange connection to the demon who changed his name so he could stay.
Crowley isn't like the rest. He doesn't conform to what's expected of demonic entities. He is an aberration, an outlier, a corruption of purpose. What was stripped free from the rest he has appeared to cling on to, though it is raw and frayed, tattered and incomplete. He keeps it safe in the core of him and never shows it to others. Though the safekeeping takes effort and causes him pain, leaves his rage and his destructive impulses to be meted out in pieces to those things of lesser importance.
Crowley is kind. He is kind even when it's unwise, even when he hates himself for it.
Aziraphale wants to consider this a weakness.
It should be a weakness.
-
Humanity is a strange species, they're so small and frail, always looking to the future but unwilling and unable to adequately plan for it, or the inevitable disasters they sometimes put in motion. They have such impossibly short lives, which they are often careless with. But they're remarkably quick to adapt to their surroundings. They are also persistent and unexpectedly stubborn, curious to a reckless degree. They're lucky that there are so many of them, because they die so easily.
But Aziraphale does enjoy the stories they write about themselves. The stories they write about others. The impossible things they dream into being.
He starts a collection. Their written words slipped away in the odd pocket dimension where he can examine them at his leisure. Crowley teases him about his fondness for books and parchments and scrolls. A suggestion of weakness, a probing of his defences, an unexpected familiarity that Aziraphale finds himself allowing.
Aziraphale is fond of Crowley.
He is an appealing and unpredictable sort of chaos.
-
Crowley becomes something of a constant.
Aziraphale learns as much from him as he does from the humans. He decides not to interfere with him. There is something to the messy, combative disorder of him that he hates the idea of altering. A uniqueness that he's afraid may be lost. Aziraphale has never needed company. He'd once spent a million years watching an asteroid spin into the orbit of a planet, before breaking into pieces and then into dust, before finally vaporizing completely. Every moment spent waiting for Crowley has the same sort of quiet anticipation, the same impending majesty of destruction. Though the destruction here is the time they have spent apart, the empty space between them.
Aziraphale plays his part. He remains unremarkable.
He learns, reluctantly and not always when he expects it, to like things.
Alcohol first of all, an unmatched source of chaos if one allows a body to submit to it. Then oysters, which Crowley does not care for at all. Then a surprising variety of other curious combinations of matter, which are all unexpected and interesting. He thinks that perhaps he made the body too well, tuned the senses too sharply, or gave it too many ways to process the world. He had deemed it necessary to feel, in ways both human and ethereal, if he was to avoid drawing attention.
But as the years go by there is so much to taste and see and smell and hear. He finds even more things to like. The softness of heavy fabrics, the smell of wet leather, the cold shine of polished metal, letters sealed with wax, buttons, trains, the sound of waves against crumbling sand, snuff, globes of the world, tartan, shortbread, painted portraits, Turkish delight, and tea.
Tea is his favourite.
He's never had favourites before.
Eventually he learns that he likes dancing as well. Though Crowley is not around to share this discovery with. Crowley, who he likes most of all.
Crowley is not currently speaking to him. He'd asked for the one thing Aziraphale could not give him. It's not interfering but the consequences would be the same, a universe without Crowley would be lesser, it would be a pale and lifeless version of itself. Aziraphale had learned the small frustrated rage of a being of flesh and found it not to his liking at all.
Crowley is sleeping now, it's what he does when he's angry, when Hell bruises him and he desires escape. Aziraphale is the one who has bruised him now. Aziraphale had slept in another universe for a very long time. He won't be tired for a billion years. He can only wait.
He misses the demon.
-
The world is ending. As it was foretold.
Aziraphale thought he'd have more time, six thousand years is nothing, it's a breath, it's an instant, it's an insignificant grain of sand in his long life. He's not ready to see this world laid to waste, he's still learning, still curious, still finding things to charm and fascinate. He has not said all of the things he needs to say. He is still finding the words.
But he must not interfere, he must not draw attention, he must not make himself seen.
Damn it all to Hell.
-
There's a reason Aziraphale has never been discorporated. He makes and unmakes his body a hundred times a day, because its corners must always be filled to the brim with him. He squeezes himself as small as he can but there is still too much, leaving rips and tears at the edges. No matter how sturdy he makes his skin, no matter how strong. When Shadwell surprises him he flows back into the shape on the bookshop floor, but its tug is nothing to the pull of a dying star.
The floorboards warp under the pressure, as a mote of his true form is jostled free into the world. Enough that it might be noticed. But there is no time, there is no time.
He pushes past the frozen man and heads into the street.
-
There is a moment, on the tarmac of an airfield, where he considers leaving his form behind. Where he considers, in the endless spaces between seconds, bringing ruin upon them all. Because there is only one thing that means something to him here. There is only one thing he would turn this whole universe inside out for. But he cannot. He must not interfere. He will never see him again.
In the end he has a sword.
He has a demon.
He has a boy.
-
Aziraphale doesn't know what comes after.
The demon - as he has always done - reaches out.
He has not interfered, he has done exactly what he was always supposed to.
-
"We need to change places."
To change places. To let Crowley curl his essence inside the shell Aziraphale has carefully constructed so many times, touching the same ribbons of matter that he's slipped himself inside and coiled tight within. The flesh of his face warms at the thought, and that feels a strange betrayal he doesn't quite understand.
He makes Crowley the most perfect body he has ever constructed. Something nothing Earth, Heaven or Hell could ever hope to harm. And on another plane of existence, folded away where the demon cannot see, he slices thirty percent of himself free and leaves it to die - so no harm will come to the body of his beloved when he slithers inside.
-
There is a bath of Holy Water.
There is a place his demon was destined to die.
For the first time in six thousand years Aziraphale peels the pretence of humanity away, he draws back the angel disguise and he shows them. He lets them see the places he strains against the world. He lets them feel the vast boiling hunger that has lived in him for longer than any of them could ever dream. He shows them the endless cold spaces inside him filled with sound and teeth and the seething, thrashing mass of chaos that is his true self.
His anger is not small and fleshy and frail. It is old and dark and immeasurable.
He tells the demons to leave them in peace, or he will drag them all into the darkness inside him and leave them screaming there for an eternity.
-
They meet on a bench.
Aziraphale seats himself, and all he can feel is Crowley's warmth, his familiar sharp edges. The sliding white-toothed gift of a smile that sparks joy and relief and affection - and love, which is sharp and strange and part of him now. He doesn't know the exact moment that happened, only that it did.
He'd lived without Crowley for one hundred and thirteen billion years. Though he doesn't quite remember how. The world conforms to a certain shape, it has conformed to that shape for the brief but beautiful stretch of their friendship. He wonders if the foundation would hold, if he changed it.
He's barely finished thinking it before the demon stretches a hand across the bench and - in a moment of bravery - slowly entwines their fingers.
Aziraphale's face warms, he thinks of stars and fire and time, of an endless eternity weighed against this single moment.
"Crowley, I have to tell you something."