Chapter Text
It is commonly thought that when Lucifer and his followers were cast out of heaven, that this was rather the end of the whole thing, and everyone could get back to what they were supposed to be doing - praying, rejoicing in the glory of the Almighty, guarding trees, and so forth.
But in actuality, although it doesn’t appear in the Bible, and has rather been hushed up by all parties concerned, there was one more angel who fell from grace. Not for his part in the Great Rebellion (violence, on the whole, made him feel slightly queasy, and he’d managed to be elsewhere on the day itself), but for his flagrant disobedience in following one of Her earliest commands.
In short, he gave away a sword.
*******
Crowley was a fairly low-level angel, if such a status could be said to exist for the most holy of holies. He had been nowhere near the front of the line when the good names were handed out, all the -el ones, like Gabriel and Samael. True, the Lightbringer hadn’t had one of those either, he comforted himself with, but then - well, look how that had turned out.
He was just finishing up his work on one of the smaller nebulae - coaxing the newly-formed photons to separate into a more aesthetic wavelength - when the archangel Michael approached, her wings a thunderclap in the silence of infinity.
“Oh,” said Crowley, trying not to show just how much she’d scared the crap out of him. “Michael, didn’t see you there. Good day, is it?”
She folded her shining wings behind her and regarded him with a stony glare. “You haven’t heard?”
“Er. No.” He dipped a shoulder, gesturing at the nothingness around them. “Not much reaches me out here, unless it's about helium. Was it about helium?”
“Crowley.”
He stuttered to a stop when he saw the gravity of her gaze. (It was very grave indeed. She had to bat away a couple of meteorites that were trying to orbit around her.)
“Another angel has fallen.”
“What?” He straightened up, dusted his palms against his robe, the stardust immediately disappearing from the pristine white. “Who? How?”
“Do you know the Principality Aziraphael?”
Guardian of something, Crowley thought, a wall? A gate? There were dozens of angels that had been guarding all sorts of structures in Eden before the Fall of Man (and Woman). Walls, Gates, Doors; he had it on good authority that there had even been a particularly important Bench somewhere near the South Gate with an archangel marching up and down in front of it, and that was one of the cushy jobs. Most angels would give their right arm to be Guardian of the Great Southern Bench, Crowley thought wistfully.
But there was something, some memory attached to the name. A slight figure, white curls, generally at the back of any given group of angels. Hands perpetually fidgeting with his clothing. A permanently apologetic expression.
“Oh, I do know him,” he said eventually, “We call him the Wandering Angel.”
There was a long pause.
“Because he’s always asking you questions. You know, ‘I wonder this, I wonder that...’. ‘Just one more thing, Crowley, my dear’-”
“He surrendered his flaming sword to the First Man, and then tried to conceal the crime from our Lord,” Michael snapped.
“Oh.” Crowley hadn’t been front and centre for the whole Fall business, either of angel or of man, and try as he might he couldn’t remember a great deal about Adam. Short man, he thought, didn’t say very much. Fewer ribs than you’d think. “Why’d he go and do a silly thing like that?”
Michael sighed. “It really doesn’t matter, Crowley. Who can fathom why anyone would go against the wishes of our Creator? It would be madness to even attempt to decipher the intentions of the fallen.”
“Right, yes. Still, though, did he really just give it away? Maybe he put it down somewhere and Adam, sort of, picked it up. ‘Oh, here’s a flaming sword, nobody will miss that, maybe I’ll-’”
“No. He gave it away, and when he was asked about it, he lied. To Her.”
Crowley made a face. “Yikes.”
“So, by order of the Archangel Gabriel, you are now the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. Report to the quartermaster to be issued your divine weapon, and-”
“Sorry,” Crowley interrupted, head spinning a little. Probably the lack of atmosphere. “I’m being promoted?”
Michael tipped her head back and forth, considering. “More of a lateral move, I’d say. Eden is empty, after all, but we still need to make sure that Man doesn’t try to sneak back in, steal some more apples.” Michael turned, bracing herself against a sprinkling of carbon atoms for her take-off.
“Wait, er-” Crowley held out a hand, “what about all of this? The nebulae?”
She looked over her shoulder, eyes sweeping briefly over the work that had taken him the better part of his existence. “Well, that shouldn’t take much longer, right? Once you add the hydrogen?”
“Shit!” He clapped a hand over his mouth immediately. “Gosh, sorry, that was - er - the bloody hydrogen though! I knew there was something.”
Michael was still standing half-turned, waiting to return to Heaven. She raised a single, perfect eyebrow.
Crowley managed a weak smile. “Yep, be done in a couple of ticks. See you there.”
He braced himself slightly as she launched into space with a noise like a jet engine (or what a jet engine would be in several millennia). Bloody he- heck, he thought to himself, what would have possessed an angel to give his sword away? Catch me anywhere near humanity with a ten-foot barge pole.
*******
Later, Aziraphael remembered, it wasn’t the actual Falling that was the worst part. Oh yes, trembling beneath the Almighty’s holy light as the ground cracked and bled around him, as he felt the Grace at the very heart of himself shrivel and turn to ash, and was plunged screaming into the abyss - at the time it had seemed like a pretty rough day. The needle-sharp winds streamed through him as he fell further than anyone would ever do again, struggling to right himself from his dizzying tailspin, tears freezing solid to his skin - not the best.
And it was no barrel of laughs once he’d arrived in Hell. Pandæmonium was already under construction. Thousands of demons were just starting to acclimatise to their newly fallen status, emerging from the cracks in the black rock where they’d hidden themselves in the weeks after the Fall, and beginning to create a place where they could, if not live, then perhaps survive. They were not prepared for another twisted mess of feathers and sinew to tear through the sky (or through what, by committee, they had for now decided to call ‘the sky’), crash-landing in one of Hell’s many pits of boiling acid, and creating somewhat of a tidal wave across the preliminary foundations for Lucifer’s dark throne.
(Aziraphael would often muse, after a couple of bottles of wine, that the Almighty wasn’t very up front on letting her servants know when they’d done a good job, but she certainly wasn’t subtle about the reverse.)
And yes, it had been a fairly tortuous couple of weeks once he’d dragged himself out of that whole thing. Physical pain, certainly, and the existential pain of losing one’s purpose, being torn away from the only love and security that one had ever known, et cetera. Several demons eventually formed a posse to carry him away from the up-and-coming city, not in a particularly unkind way, but because they had all passed through their own screaming-and-pounding-at-the-earth stage of the grieving process, and now they rather needed to get some things done without that infernal racket day and night, pun almost certainly intended.
Later, he heard that in those early days there was still some comradeship left over from Above, the feeling that if all demonkind worked together they could perhaps make something for all. But by the time Aziraphael’s wounds had healed, and he had pulled himself together enough to stumble through the wrought-iron gates of Pandæmonium, that feeling of brotherhood was rather behind them. Lucifer had changed his name to Satan, The Adversary, Father of Lies, and the city seemed to have rather a lot of what he’d come to think of as ‘office politics’. It turned out he wasn’t very good at that. In fact he fairly put his foot in it from the start.
*
“Because you have to change it,” Beelzebub said with a sniff. “We all changed our names. The Morningstar is no longer the Morningstar.”
Aziraphael waved a hand, hopefully in a subtle way, to gently bat away a fly that was getting dangerously close to his mouth. The look Beelzebub gave him indicated his subterfuge had been less than successful.
“But it’s my name,” he said weakly. “I don't even know how I'd choose another one.”
“Why don't we help you?” Pahaliah said from somewhere behind his left shoulder. That is, Aziraphael reminded himself, tutting - the demon who used to be Pahaliah, he with dominion over virtue and morality. He'd scowled when Aziraphael had attempted to embrace him as such - Hastur, now.
Hastur strode out from behind him - the toad on his head slipping one of its front legs over his eye as it struggled to rebalance itself - and created a full-length looking glass with a snap of his fingers.
Aziraphael gasped. “But how, without the Grace of-”
Hastur scoffed. “Such parlour tricks are not reserved for Above alone. Our Lord Satan has already exceeded the Almighty’s paltry gifts of power, and unlike Her, he has shared them equally with his brothers and sisters.”
If the Morningstar were so powerful, funny none of that came into play during the Rebellion, thought a small part of Aziraphael, but he didn't voice it aloud. Instead the only outward sign he gave was a small reflexive flinch and a dart of his eyes upwards, still expecting a scalding ray of light to appear and punish their blasphemy.
Hastur grinned, releasing a puff of foul-smelling air. “This is our place, brother.” He placed a hand on Aziraphael’s shoulder, and turned him roughly to face his own reflection. “And you must be one of us.”
Silly, really, thought Aziraphael, frozen with shock, to have walked through Pandæmonium seeing fallen comrades changed so completely that they were almost unrecognisable, but imagine oneself the same. One would think that the physical pain alone would have been a clue.
He hadn’t often had cause to look at his own reflection Above. Vanity was a sin, after all, and for perfect beings such as angels, a sin close enough to touch. Simply owning a mirror would have been enough to start tongues wagging. But Eden was a paradise, and as such contained many trilling little rivers and brooks, and more than one deep, silent rock pool, in which an angel who was passing by on his business might briefly catch a glimpse of himself. Not stop, nor even pause, but perhaps slow his steps infinitesimally, just enough to get a suggestion of shining white curls, vivid blue eyes, a gentle smile. An air of divinity.
And even stood between Hastur (whose skin was more grey-green than the toad he carried atop his head) and Beelzebub (whose flies were constantly settling and disturbing each other from the many boils on her face), he felt the most changed.
His hair was the same colour, still white, but matted, glued to his forehead with sweat. The colour now reminded him less of ivory and silver, but of old bones left to bleach in the sun. His skin was lined, the worry he had always felt inside now reflected in creases on his forehead, around his eyes, at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were no longer blue, but a dull, overcast grey, the bags under them heavy and dark. His skin had an oily sheen, sallow and slack. His once-pure robe he had thought simply burned, but now he saw it had transformed into an inky black, the edges fraying, his skin showing through here and there in - moth holes?
Sure enough, as he tipped his head to the left, he could see just under his right ear, a small tattoo of a moth. It felt as if its wings fluttered under his skin in Hell’s dim light. Suddenly he realised, focusing on the small shapes flitting around his head - not Beelzebub’s flies. Moths. Their soft wings brushed over his eyelashes.
His eyes darted back to the shadowed shape in the glass. He had worked tirelessly since the day of his creation, never ceasing, never resting, and had felt vital to the very end. But here, so far from Grace, he saw a man stooped by burdens too heavy to carry. Weary. Old.
“Plague?” said Hastur thoughtfully.
“Plague? Goodn- well, surely not,” Aziraphael managed, with dry, cracked lips.
“What about Ash? Or Bilious? Good name, Bilious.”
“It means ‘queasy’,” Aziraphael said with disbelief.
Hastur shrugged. “It’s your choice, little moth.”
Impossible, impossible to choose a name. Impossible to not be himself. How can I be anything other than what I know I am?
“No, I think on balance I'd like to keep my own name,” Aziraphael said finally. “But I thank you for your concern.”
Beelzebub sighed. “So be it. We have a fairly long list of other things we should be dealing with-”
“It’s not a matter of what he wants,” Hastur spat, dark eyes flashing. “It’s a matter of what he is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow?”
Hastur snapped his fingers and the mirror disappeared. “You can’t have a name that you can’t say.”
Aziraphael frowned. “What on earth do you mean? Why wouldn’t I be able to say Aziraph-”
The final syllables stuck in his throat as if they were a solid mass, a small piece of matter he was trying to expel, closing his airway and coming out as a strangled retching sound.
The suffix “-el”, as any Biblical scholar will tell you, means “from God”. Gabriel, for example, means “God is my strength,” as Gabriel himself will inform you should you encounter him on the way to the Great Beyond. It makes sense that a creature of pure evil would no longer be able to use a name given by God - though then again, all names come from God, and indeed, all people, creatures, and everything that ever was or is or will be, and that doesn’t seem to have stopped the inhabitants of Hell from putting their sticky fingers all over those.
But whether divine law or demonic superstition, Aziraphael was unable to say his name, until- “Aziraphale,” he choked out, finally. “Why wouldn’t I be able to say ‘Aziraphale’?”
Hastur rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on. You’re just changing the spelling?”
Aziraphale - his internal monologue already rewriting itself to accommodate his new identity - stood up a little straighter, brushing the dust from his threadbare clothing, tugging down the sleeves that were more hole than cloth at this point. “Well. If that’s settled, shall I get on with some bricklaying or something?”
Beelzebub waved a hand dismissively. “No, it’s time to start going above ground and causing trouble.”
Aziraphale fretted. “Oh. What sort of trouble?”
“Satan’s orders. Get upstairs and start interfering with Man. Temptation, corruption, that sort of thing.” She grinned, showing a row of yellow teeth. “Show Herself that her new pets aren’t as perfect as she thinks. Anyone can Fall.”
“Right. Temptation. No problem.” Aziraphale managed a weak smile.
Hastur put an arm around his shoulders roughly and dragged him off to Stores to get a standard human vessel. “Onwards and upwards.”