Chapter Text
The span of thy life is as five little days,
Brief hours and swift in this halting-place;
Rest softly, ah rest! while the Shadow delays,
For Time’s self is naught and the dial’s face.
On the lip of Oblivion we linger, and short
Is the way from the Lip to the Mouth where we pass
While the moment is thine, fill, oh Saki, the glass
Ere all is naught!
—Hafiz, “Life’s Mighty Flood” (trans. Gertrude Bell)
Black is the color of destruction, created by destruction. The first black pigments were made from charcoal, brought forth from the ashes of dead things. Crowley remembers slithering through caves, the rough stone catching on his scales, and watching humans leave their mark on the walls. He remembers the scratch of charred bone forming the outlines of great beasts and the silhouettes of the hands that slayed them.
Crowley has worn black since before black dyes were created. It clings to him like the faint smell of sulphur on his ruined wings, marks him as clearly as his slit-pupiled eyes or the bone-black sigil on his face. Danger, it says, keep away. I’ll destroy you. He has had to learn how to mask the warning signs, to deflect human suspicion like water rolling off a duck’s feathers. He is able to move through the world unremarked upon, but still, somewhere deep in his rotten core, the stench of death lingers.
Over the years, he has tried to tame the beast inside of him. To gentle his hands, to blunt his claws, wear down his sharp teeth on oysters and wine instead of bone. Before they were thrown to the flames, these hands had once made stars. They have not forgotten. In Greece, Crowley’s skeletal fingers paint delicate figures in translucent slip. They gently cradle the soft clay of unfinished amphorae, and they cast the clay into flame, to be remade in its image, soot-black and inferno-red. In Alexandria, they card wool, pulling fleece through the sharp teeth of the cards until it becomes clean and malleable. They spin yarn, and they sink themselves into vats of dye, coming out blood-red as the day they were reborn, soaked in madder and wet wool. In Constantinople, his hands hold a blade. They score the bark of pine trees and extract their resin. They harvest galls from oak trees. They destroy, and they help bring forth new things from their destruction.
Sometimes, his creations wreak their own destruction.
In 1300 A.D., Crowley stands in the scriptorium of a monastery, steadfastly ignoring the discomfort that builds in the soles of his feet, the crash of God-fearing goodness against the shores of his monstrous self. He watches Aziraphale, bent over one section of a large cloth. His steady hands, stained dark with ink, are painting the scene of their first meeting, the place where humanity fell. Spread beneath Eden, enclosed in a circle to the east of the world, are the three known parts of the globe. Churches and city walls dominate the central portion of the map, fading out to guesswork at the edges, vaguely defined lands dominated by fantastic beasts.
The end of Aziraphale’s brush is coated with iron gall ink, created from the same gall-wasp corpses Crowley’s clawed hands had once helped to destroy. Iron gall ink begins its life as a ghost on parchment, quickly darkening to a rich black. It bores its way into the fibers of the cloth, the vellum, the paper on which it is spread, and it becomes permanent, not to be erased by water or too-rough hands. But iron gall is also a ticking time bomb, an hourglass running out of sand as the centuries pass. Eventually, it turns brown and brittle, corroding the fibers in which it has made its home, eating them away until nothing remains.
Aziraphale’s gaze darts nervously around the room, taking in the presence of Crowley here in this holy space, taking in the monks working around him. He brings his bomb-coated brush down to the surface of the cloth, and he paints a snake. Crowley watches Aziraphale’s gentle fingers guide the brush, forming the outlines of a darkly coiled beast, hanging from the branch of an apple tree. It hadn’t really been an apple, of course, and Aziraphale certainly remembers that. But some bloody clever human had thought up a pun a few centuries before that appears to have stuck (Latin, malus, mala, malum (adj): bad, evil; Malus sieversii: apple), and Aziraphale is bound by their symbolism as long as he pretends to be one of their own.
Crowley watches the angel pick up another brush, coated in the symbolic red weight of dragon’s blood. He watches the tool between Aziraphale’s fingers filling in fat, ripe fruits and the belly of a serpent with the devil’s red, and he feels the tips of his own fingers twitch in response. Crowley balls his hands into fists at his sides, forcing the claws to grow into his own palms, drawing shining red drops of dragon’s blood from his veins.
Crowley is the thing that lurks at the edges of the map, in terra incognita: lands unknown. Beyond the familiar outlines of the known world lie monsters, great and terrifying beasts the likes of which no one here has seen firsthand. Hic sunt leones. Here be lions. Crowley bites down on his tongue with teeth that have become too large for his mouth. He feels the flesh beneath them split, elongating to become the tongue of a serpent. He looks out on the world around him with eyes that see not colors, but heat and light. Everything has narrowed to the single bright point of the angel on the other side of the table.
As if sensing the monstrous eyes trained on him, Aziraphale speaks, picking up his brush of iron gall once more. “I’m nearly done, dear. We can take a bit of a walk, perhaps, just as soon as—Crowley?” He is looking up now, eyes gone wide.
“Yeah. Yeah, angel, I’ll jussst—be outside. Just come find me when…” Crowley gestures vaguely and makes for the doorway on feet that have begun to crowd against the toes of his shoes. He curls them in as best he can, trying to maintain his usual saunter, hoping that his newly-manifested claws don’t rip through the leather.
He takes refuge in the cloisters, collapsing onto the half-wall under the colonnade that rings a modest garden. He buries his face in his hands, pushing up the dark lenses that cover his eyes, and presses the pads of his fingers over the lids, sending up a silent thank-you to someone that he still has eyelids to close. The sharpened tips of his fingers prick at the soft flesh under his brow bone, and something warm and wet trickles down his cheek. He pulls his hands away to find them streaked with something his reptilian eyes register as heat, although he knows human ones would see red.
Red. He thinks of a forbidden fruit, crushed lightly between his fangs, sweet juice dripping onto a tongue ill-equipped to taste it. He thinks of the resin in which Aziraphale painted a pale imitation of the fruit, the vibrant blood of Dracaena cinnabari, harvested from trees hundreds of miles away and carried across continents for the purpose of representing Evil—for the purpose of representing him. He stares at the red warmth of his hands, and he thinks of the clever humans, cast out of Eden, who had taken shelter in caves and learned to use the remains of their hunts to decorate the dim gray walls of their surroundings. They had left behind the whorls of their fingerprints, cast in bright red pigment, this fossilized proof that they had once lived outlasted only by the monster that watched them from the shadows—and by his celestial counterpart, living somewhere out in the light.
Crowley presses his bleeding palm to the wall next to him, feels the sting and the sizzle of his infernal life force meeting the holy energy imbued in the stones. The burn of not-quite-consecrated ground is just enough to cauterize the wounds, and when he pulls his hand away, it is marred not by wet blood, but by a perfect line of pinprick scars, the blood that had spilled from them now dried and dark. A ghost of a palm print lingers on the stone, a twisted mirror of the marks once left on cave walls.
Crowley squeezes his eyes shut, breathing in deeply. He can taste the scent of the garden's flowers on the wind, the smoke emanating from a hearth somewhere inside. He focuses as hard as he can on his forked tongue, sending his consciousness down into the molecules that make up his mouth, and carefully rearranges them back into a human form. The slit in his tongue knits itself back together, the scent of the air around him fades, his canines shrink back to their usual length. As he turns his attention to each in turn, the claws retreat back into his fingertips, and when he finally opens his eyes, they see color once more. He cannot heal the pinpricks in his palms—the control he is supposedly granted over his corporation does not extend to such angelic acts as that—but when he waves a hand lazily across his face, the red stains disappear from his skin. (Not the black, though, never the black. His gall-dark sigil always stays, burned into his skin as a reminder of what he is, and what he will never be again.)
“Crowley?” a familiar voice asks from somewhere to his right, tentative.
Crowley whirls to face Aziraphale, his mouth curling automatically into a practiced smirk. The pieces of a casual expression slot into place, any lingering panic behind his poison-yellow eyes carefully masked by the dark lenses that cover them. Still, Aziraphale frowns slightly, brows knitting together over the tumultuous sea of his eyes, as though he can see a chink in the armor, a crack somewhere in the hastily-assembled puzzle of Crowley’s expression.
“Heya, angel,” Crowley calls out quickly, smiling a little too wide, showing off the blunt edges of his teeth.
“My dear, are you quite all right? You left in rather a hurry…”
“Yeah. Yeah, angel, I’m fine. Just, you know, a little holy in there for my taste.” Crowley’s smile falters. He clears his throat and looks away from the angel.
“Right.” Aziraphale looks unconvinced. “Well, I assume you came here for a reason…?”
“Oh. Yeah. Came to tell you that I’ve… been reassigned. I’m heading east.”
“Oh.” Crowley imagines he sees a flicker of disappointment cross Aziraphale’s face. On second look, those soft features carry only an expression of polite interest. His sky-blue eyes are clear and open, pale brows slightly raised in silent question.
“Persia,” Crowley offers by way of explanation. “The Mongols are fighting amongst themselves again. I’m supposed to… foment, and encourage their intolerance, I suppose.”
“Ah.” Aziraphale nods, his face settling into a familiar expression of vague disapproval. Despite himself, Crowley feels some of the tension drain out of his body. After five millennia, he has become accustomed to this dance of theirs.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” he tells the angel. “They have anything decent to drink around here?”
Aziraphale shoots him a wry look. “It’s a monastery in England.”
A quick huff of laughter escapes Crowley’s lips. “So do you have a secret stash of French wines somewhere, or are we relying on miracles?”
“I may have a jug around here somewhere…” Aziraphale replies sheepishly.
He does, in fact, have several, and they end up back in the scriptorium with them long after the monks have retired to their quarters.
“It is dreadfully boring,” Aziraphale is saying, wine-drunk and slouching in his chair. “But oh, the books…” He reaches out to caress a half-finished manuscript laid out on the nearest table.
“Angel, you’ve been obsessed with books since they were written on clay.”
“Pffft.” He pouts over at Crowley, clearly trying to look affronted and only succeeding in looking slightly cross-eyed. “I am not obsessed.”
“Angel.” Crowley grins, easy and automatic, forgetting to check that his teeth are still human in his mouth before he opens it. “That is the single biggest lie I’ve ever heard, and lying is in my job description.”
He is nearly overwhelmed by the warmth that bubbles up in his chest as he watches the angel splutter in response. He has been aware of the nature of his affection for Aziraphale since sometime after Rome, but he is careful to keep it concealed in the shadows, tucked away somewhere safe in the dark heart of him. His demonic love is a dark-stained thing, a black hole hell-bent on destruction, and Aziraphale is not marred the way Crowley is. He is a being of pure light, marked by it as surely as Crowley is marked by darkness and sulfur. But somehow his name has found itself etched deep into the flesh of Crowley’s heart in permanent ink. It’s wormed its way inside like iron gall spreading through the core of a manuscript page, its pale ghost slowly becoming visible on the verso. Eventually, the parchment will crack and the letters of the angel’s name will fall to the ground, leaving gaps with their shape in the ruined flesh of Crowley’s heart.
A pale pink flush is spreading high in Aziraphale’s cheeks, the wine and conversation taking their toll on the thin capillaries spread beneath his corporation’s skin. The beast in Crowley’s core aches to taste it, to pierce that delicate flesh with his fangs and to sample the salt of his skin and the iron running through the veins beneath. It longs to consume Aziraphale completely, to swallow his light and allow it to grind them both down to dust. (The few scattered atoms left of Crowley would take their mingled ashes and mix them in oil, would spread the bone-black pigment onto the walls of a cave and seal it against the passage of time, an eternal monument to their destruction.)
“...so very clever, really,” Aziraphale is slurring across the table. Crowley realizes that he has finally mustered his defense, and that the demon himself is far too drunk to listen. He allows his eyes to drift closed and the angel’s voice to wash over him, basking in the familiar comfort of its rhythm even without understanding the words.
“Crowley, dear.” A warm hand is splayed over his arm. “You can’t sleep here. Come, you can use my room.”
Crowley blinks blearily up at the outline of the angel above him, backlit by the flickering torches on the walls of the large room and looking for all the world like an artist’s rendition of an angel, haloed in shimmering gold. He allows himself to be led down a long hallway and into a small bedroom, outfitted only with a small mattress covered in coarse linen sheets and a plain wardrobe. Aziraphale sits him down on the bed.
“You should sober up,” he says. “You’ll regret it in the morning if you don’t.”
Crowley nods and sleepily complies. As the room comes into clearer focus around him, he suddenly notices the scant few inches separating them across the thin mattress, and his breath catches in his throat. He recoils, scrambling back toward the wall to put as much space as possible between his poisonous affection and its unwilling target before he does anything he will come to regret. “Thanks,” he tells Aziraphale, looking sheepishly over from the corner where he has shoved himself. “I’ll, uh… I’ll head out, then, get out of your hair.”
“Nonsense,” Aziraphale replies. “I don’t use the bed, and you clearly want to sleep. Take it for the night. I’ll go back out to the scriptorium.”
Crowley nods slowly. “Okay.”
True to his word, Aziraphale takes the torch from its sconce near the door and heads away down the hall. Crowley listens to his receding footsteps, unable to fully relax until he is certain that the angel is at a safe distance. He drifts into a fitful sleep with Aziraphale’s scent on his serpentine tongue and the echo of Aziraphale’s voice in his ears.
Later, Crowley sets off from Calais astride an expensive palfrey, weaving a jagged line across Europe, heading for the lands at the edge of the map. Persia is a step above terra incognita, not an unknown quantity, but it is still a land populated by monsters on the mappa mundi. Hic sunt dracones. Here be dragons. Each ambling step of his horse carries the monster closer to his homeland.
As he rides, Crowley periodically finds his vision fading once more into colorless patches of heat, finds his grip on the reigns impeded by his own sharpening fingernails. He sleeps between villages, laid out under the stars, unable to seek the shelter of the humans around him. His own soot-stained wings shelter him from the rain and the wind.
He finally ventures into a town somewhere in Anatolia, black-veiled with a long skirt swirling around his clawed feet. He seeks out an old familiar haunt, an unremarkable doorway tucked in an unremarkable corner of an unremarkable city. He is relieved and horrified to find that it is still there, just the same as it was several centuries before, when he last needed it. His heartbeat picks up as he draws one clawed hand out from the dark fabric that cloaks him and pushes it against the door.
Inside, an assortment of demons sit around large tables, nursing drinks or rolling dice. A few of them look around as Crowley steps through the door, and then quickly lose interest. He lifts his veil and heads for a doorway at the back of the main room. Beyond it, several suspiciously perfect men and women lounge on plush couches, dressed in fine silks and linens so thin that the outlines of their well-endowed bodies are visible through the fabric. Crowley stops just beyond the doorway and waits, silently.
This tavern, tucked away in a windowless mudbrick structure, is one of several dens of vice located near the doorways to Hell throughout the world. Crowley is the only demon who has been on earth from the Beginning, the only one who resides here full-time, but others often venture out for a bit of fun, or stop into one of the gateway taverns on their way back from a temptation. This particular tavern usually has a rotating crew of succubi who cater to the few masochistic demons who enjoy having the power drained out of them while they fuck.
One of these approaches Crowley now, rising from a corner seat in the form of a tall, broad-shouldered man clad only in light silk trousers. It stops before him and wavers between forms for a moment as it sizes him up, shifting from a square jaw and narrow hips to soft curves and delicate hands, and then back again, before it finally settles on something with just too many teeth in its wide mouth, sharp claws at the ends of its long fingers, and scales running down its exposed spine. It fixes him with a predatory stare, running a forked tongue over its blood-red lips. Its eyes are pure black, shining like pools of spilled ink, and it pins him in its gaze as it slowly advances. It takes his wrist in those spindly fingers, long claws pressing lightly against the delicate veins under his skin, and leads him through another doorway, to a room bare except for a large bed in its center. Darkly polished wood suspends the mattress in an ornate frame, grotesque faces peering out from its corners.
Crowley can feel his pulse all the way down to his fingertips, a frantic, staccato rhythm that seems impossible, given how much of his blood has already taken up residence elsewhere. The creature backs him into the center of the room, advancing on him with an inhuman hunger in its eyes, until his knees hit the edge of the dark bed and he collapses onto it. The other demon points toward him, wordlessly, and he suddenly finds himself stripped bare in its center. Thick ropes erupt from clawed fingers, winding their way around his limbs. He finds himself strapped to the bed by thickly braided silk wound around his middle. His wrists are tied to his ankles, holding his legs open wide and exposing his already-dripping cunt to the hungry gaze of the creature before him.
He is a bit surprised to find that he has unconsciously manifested the genitals to match his clothing, but it suits what he is about to do. The succubus crawls onto the bed after him, hovering above him and watching him with that predatory hunger in its dark eyes. It slowly extends one long claw and brings a hand down to his neck, dragging the exposed claw along the divot above his collarbone. A long tongue comes out to sample the blood it’s drawn, and a shiver racks Crowley’s whole body. He can feel the moisture building between his legs, his clit throbbing in terrified arousal as he finds himself completely at the mercy of a monster like himself, a creature with darkness in its eyes and a taste for blood.
It straddles his hips with a frustratingly empty space between its own, and it leans down to take his lips with that sharp mouth. Their serpentine tongues tangle together, sampling the intoxicating scents of each other’s bodies—the succubus somehow smells of incense and vellum, wine and acidic ink—and of Crowley’s arousal, heavy on the air in the room. Mixed with it all is the iron tang of his own blood, trickling slowly down his chest and still thick on the tongue in his mouth. He can feel the tingle of his infernal power being drawn from his own lips and into the other demon’s, and when it pulls away, he opens his newly-lidded eyes to find that the world has become slightly clearer around him.
The creature sits back between his legs and draws one long claw lightly down his body from the neck to the hollow between his hip bones, skipping nimbly over his bonds and coming to rest just above where he most needs contact. The touch is just enough to leave thin red lines down his chest and stomach, not enough to draw blood, and the maddening ghost of the contact he craves sets all of Crowley’s nerve endings on fire. His hips ache to buck up toward the hand that rests between them, but he is held fast by the ropes wound across his body.
The creature watches him, head tilted slightly to one side in curious fascination as Crowley struggles against his bonds and whines low in his throat. It raises its hand from its resting place between his hips, and suddenly, one sharp finger is pressed directly over his clit. Crowley screams in mingled pleasure and pain, his red-stained neck straining back against the mattress and his own claws digging into his ankles as his hips are still held down against the mattress. It circles his clit slowly, the pad of one long finger pressed firmly against his arousal and the claw at its tip catching lightly on his spread pink flesh as it moves, just enough to tinge the waves of pleasure building between his thighs with a delicious hint of pain. The creature continues its slow torture until Crowley’s throat is raw and the muscles of his scaled thighs twitch with built-up tension. It keeps him balanced on the edge, begging for more in each wordless cry it tears from his throat. Just when he thinks he can’t possibly take any more, its hand leaves him completely, and Crowley nearly sobs.
It lifts the hand and holds it where Crowley can see, dark claws shining with the evidence of his arousal. He watches as the claws elongate and soften at their edges, becoming twisting masses of shadow. One long tendril reaches toward his mouth, and Crowley clenches around the empty space inside of him. As it passes his lips, the shadowy tendril thickens, stretching him open and pressing up against the back of his throat. He moans, a wordless plea, and wraps his long tongue around the shadow as it begins to thrust. He feels something else rub up against his entrance, and tries desperately to move toward the contact, but he is still held fast, spread open and dripping with no choice but to take whatever the creature decides to give him. It circles him slowly, teasing at his hole, just the tip of one formless, shadowy limb smearing him with his own wetness. Meanwhile, the other tendril continues to fuck into his mouth, deep into his throat, absent of a human gag reflex in his still half-serpentine form. Crowley cries out around it, still teetering on the edge, maddeningly close but deprived of the contact he needs to climax.
Finally, it enters him in one sharp thrust, filling him completely and stretching him nearly to the point of pain. The tip of a forked tongue flicks over his still-raw clit, and every muscle in his body seizes up as he screams around the tendril in his mouth. Light bursts behind his eyelids as the creature sets a brutal pace inside him, fucking into him over and over and sending waves of pleasure careening up and down his long spine. He is helpless in the face of it, still immobilized completely. He can do nothing but scream his throat raw as he lets it overwhelm him, bringing him to one climax after another. The tendril in his mouth pulses, drawing out still more cries and swallowing them whole, feeding on the infernal energy he is unconsciously pumping out alongside them. The dark scales on his bound arms and legs recede back into his skin, the claws puncturing his ankles shrink back into his fingertips, and the tongue that was wrapped around one dark tendril shortens and thickens. Through it all, the shadows filling all the empty spaces within him continue to wring every ounce of energy and pleasure from his body. He pulses around the thing inside him, tensing and releasing over and over as it fucks him relentlessly. Fangs sink into the tender flesh above his Adam’s apple, the tendril pushes up into that spot inside him, and his breath leaves him completely, his entire body helplessly convulsing around the shadows.
When his corporation is once more fully human—save for the dark sigil and the jaundiced eyes that always mark him—and he has been drained of a dozen orgasms and all but the minimum power required to sustain his infernal life, the tendrils finally leave him. They retreat back into the succubus’s fingers along with the ropes that bind him, and its form shifts back toward human. It leaves him there on the wide bed, empty, with his thighs trembling and covered in his own slick, his neck leaking blood, and his voice dried up in his throat. Crowley closes his restored eyelids and does not open them again for several days.
Decades pass, and something begins spreading slowly across the map, like the spilled contents of a toppled inkwell. Once released, it cannot be put back into its pot. It passes from fiber to fiber, sinking deep into fragile human bodies and breaking them down from the inside.
They call it the Black Death, the Great Pestilence. Crowley sees it coming from the east, watches it begin its corrosive iron-gall spread across the continent toward Europe. He watches humans fall like flies from the poisoned air, their bodies swelling and their lungs expelling blood. He watches as they gather their dead and toss them unceremoniously into pits, the bodies piling up too quickly to fuss over proper treatment. Panic spreads alongside it, leeching across the map hand in hand with death.
He hears some proclaim the pestilence a punishment from God. Crowley remembers weeks of unending rain and the high wails of drowning children, too many to be saved. He remembers the smell of burning flesh as fire rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and he wonders if they’re right. The irony, of course, is that God’s most devoted are hit the hardest as they try desperately to nurse the affected back to health, to offer comfort while they thrash in pain through their final moments. Crowley watches holy men and women of every faith succumb to the illness, and he thinks of Aziraphale, cloistered among his books in what must soon become the site of another mass grave.
He rides his horse through the night to get ahead of the dark stain, to get back to the angel and warn him before it is too late. He stops only a handful of times, sleeping in fits and spurts when his horse is unable to continue. By the time he reaches the shores of England, the severely weakened palfrey left behind across the Channel, his face is drawn in a permanent state of exhaustion. He is hollow-cheeked and deathly pale, dark shadows creeping under his eyes, a walking preview of the news he carries with him.
“Something is coming,” he tells Aziraphale, standing in the open courtyard of the cloisters, among the garden. “Something horrible. A disease. It’s killing the humans so fast they can hardly bury their dead.”
Aziraphale takes in his ghostly appearance, a thin line of worry creasing his pale brow. “Surely we’re not vulnerable…?”
Crowley shakes his head. “I have no idea. These bodies we’re in are human enough.”
“We’ve never been discorporated by disease before.”
“There’s never been a disease like this before. Trust me, angel, I’ve seen what it does to them, and it’s not a chance you want to take.” He hesitates, drawing in a deep breath of the warm, perfumed air. “We should leave before it gets here. Go to America, maybe. They don’t know it exists yet, so it can’t spread there.”
“What?” Aziraphale is looking at him like he has just proposed something lunatic. Perhaps he has. Panic has been rising within him like the slow climb of the floodwaters since he first laid eyes on a cart piled high with the dead, and it threatens now to break the dam, to overtake them both in a massive wave.
“Come away with me,” he repeats, reckless, “before the pestilence comes.”
“No,” Aziraphale breathes, wide-eyed. “Crowley… you know I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”
(He does. He knows the truth of it now, and he will still know it, much later, when he offers again: let’s run away to the stars. If Aziraphale, too, thinks of the 14th century, of the dark stain spreading across the known world, he does not say.)
Crowley paces, weaving an agitated circle around the cloister garden. His hands tug at his overgrown hair, red as the dying breaths of plague victims, red as the flames that devoured Sodom. He twists the deep black fabric of his tunic between his fingers, and he thinks of the dying tissue of dying men, of the mottled corpses their survivors were forced to toss into the pits. He thinks of the hands of holy men, trained for writing and clasping one another in prayer, turned instead to draining the blackened buboes on the bodies of the doomed. He imagines Aziraphale’s hands turned away from his brushes and his books, laid out on the infectious bodies of untold dead and dying. He imagines the angel’s desperate outpouring of holy energy, draining himself in a futile attempt to save them, to stop a destructive force that cannot be halted. He imagines the dark stain taking hold of Aziraphale, pestilence seeping from plague-ridden humans and taking root inside the only pure thing to ever walk this godforsaken earth, and he cries out aloud, a strangled growl of frustration and fear.
“Crowley.” Aziraphale has inserted himself into the demon’s path. He holds out his palms, as if approaching a wounded animal.
The floodwaters continue to rise. The remembered burn of God’s vengeance builds in Crowley’s throat, claws its way up the back of his tongue until it bursts from his lips in a heated stream of panic. “Aziraphale, there’s nothing you can do! There’s nothing anyone can do! It’s worse than the flood! Just leave, for G—for someone’s sake. For your sake!”
Aziraphale shakes his head, palms still outstretched. “My place is here, Crowley. I can’t just run away, especially not with you.”
“Oh. Right, right. We can eat and drink together, I can perform blessings for you, but Satan forbid I try to look out for a friend—”
“We’re not friends,” Aziraphale cuts in. “We’re an angel and a demon. We’re enemies.”
The rational part of Crowley’s mind knows this dance well, knows that Aziraphale defaults back to the party line out of fear. But Crowley’s own fear is still hot in his throat, his lungs buckling under the weight of five thousand years’ punishment, refusing to draw breath. “Fine,” he says. “Have a nice discorporation, then.”
He turns on shaky legs and walks across the grass of the courtyard, heading nowhere in particular but away. He finally stops when he reaches town, several miles later, and he finds himself at the door of a tavern.
He doesn't notice until he reaches into his purse for coin to pay the innkeeper that his fingers have begun to sharpen. Panic rises once more in the back of his throat. A thick lump has taken up residence somewhere inside his chest, and his lungs struggle to expand and contract. He awkwardly pushes his coin across the counter with a closed fist, and then makes to retreat to his rented room.
A familiar figure is standing in his path, long and lean with hair as black as night—black as a gangrenous limb, a plague-infested rat, a bubo. Black and corrosive as iron gall.
"Crowley?" inquires Pestilence, smiling wide with blackened teeth.
"Uhhhnng… hey, Pest." Whatever is holding Crowley's lungs in a vice grip tightens its hold. The room begins to spin around him, going blurry at its edges.
"Don't look so happy to see me, Crowley. I take it you've heard of my recent activities?"
"Seen it," Crowley croaks out, "in Persia. It's… is it here already?"
"Oh, yes." Pestilence smiles somehow wider. Candlelight glints off his black eyes and his black teeth. "A ship landed this morning with some of my rats stowed away on board."
Crowley nods, swallows hard around the lump in his throat. The color is beginning to drain from his vision, and he can taste the stench of sour ale in the room. "Well. Niccce to sssee you, Pessst," he grates out around a rapidly-changing tongue, sidestepping the horseman and rushing toward the stairs as fast as his shaking legs can carry him.
Safely ensconced in his room, Crowley settles himself onto the bed, arms wrapped around his own shoulders and his still-growing claws tearing through the dark fabric of his tunic. The waters of panic and despair that have been rising within him for days, for weeks, finally break their banks. He lies motionless on the bed as his vision fades into a watery blur, and then into a serpent’s world of only heat and light. His eyelids disappear, his skin breaks into black scales, and his chest heaves with the effort of drawing breath in a world that feels like it has been drained of all oxygen.
He has no sense of how long he has laid there by the time his heart slows to its normal pace and the iron vice around his lungs begins to loosen. All the energy has drained out of his body, and gradually, the world goes dark around him.
Crowley finds himself in the dark, crawling on his belly through warm sands. Something looms in the darkness ahead of him, unrecognizable shapes of a darker black than the night around him. He slithers forward, lidless eyes trained on the blackness until it resolves itself into a familiar form. Aziraphale is standing a few hundred feet ahead, but Crowley’s eyes don’t register the angelic warmth he emanates, which he can usually see in this form. He realizes that another shape lurks behind the angel, and a chill runs down his spine from neck to tail.
A man with hair and eyes as black as night advances on Aziraphale from behind. Crowley opens his mouth to call out, to warn him, but no sound comes. The outlines of the looming figure begin to waver, and he breaks apart into a swarm of smaller creatures, running toward them both on four legs with long tails trailing behind them: black rats. Crowley tries to push forward, to unhinge his jaw to take the plague into himself and keep it away from Aziraphale, but he finds himself paralyzed. He sinks into the sand while the rats run over his back, dropping fleas that somehow burrow beneath his scales. He watches, helpless, as Aziraphale is overtaken. The color returns to his vision just in time to see the angel’s body begin to swell and blacken. He watches Aziraphale fall into the sand, his face frozen in a silent scream of pain.
Abruptly, Crowley comes back to himself, his lidless eyes once more able to see the room around him. He is still laid out on the inn bed, fully clothed, his blood-red hair plastered to his black-scaled forehead by a sheen of cold sweat. He sits up on the bed and stares down at his clawed fingers, the torn fabric of his tunic, the dark scales covering his skin. He breathes deeply and tries to close his eyes, forgetting that their lids receded into his brow long before. He brings his focus to the place where they would manifest and tries to draw the delicate flesh out from his eye sockets, but to no avail. He tries instead to force the claws to recede back into his fingertips, and succeeds only in sharpening them further.
A strangled sob escapes his throat, and he bites down on his forked tongue, tearing the flesh with his carnivorous teeth. The scent of iron fills his mouth. He gestures abruptly upward with one dark claw, and half the contents of the inn’s cellar suddenly find themselves piled in his room. On shaking legs, Crowley crosses to the pile and plucks out a jug of wine, breaking the seal with one pointed fingertip. He passes the next few weeks sprawled on the wooden floor, drifting in and out of consciousness, and haunted always by visions of Pestilence and Death, of mass graves and of Aziraphale’s corporation turned black and red, his own dark-scaled hands laid out on his corpse.
At last, he wakes to find his pale fingers curled around an empty cup, the room around him strewn with spent barrels and jugs. Sunlight streams in through the single window, piercing his sensitive pupils. He closes his eyes and covers his face with one hand, then abruptly sits up to take stock of his own appearance. The room spins around him, but his skin has once more turned smooth and white, the dark claws vanished from the ends of his blunt fingers. He runs a thick tongue over his teeth, finding them flat and human.
His last conversation with Aziraphale comes crashing down on him, along with the realization that the plague reached the shores of England weeks before. He thinks of the nightmares that haunted him throughout his drunken stupor, and he forces himself to his feet, miracling himself into a fresh black tunic to replace the one his claws had ripped to shreds.
Two hours later, Crowley is dragging himself on aching feet up a hill toward the monastery. As he approaches the gray stone walls, he catches sight of a mound of fresh-dug earth on the lawn outside, the telltale sign of a mass grave. His blood runs cold in his veins, and he forces his legs to climb faster, despite the incessant throbbing behind his eyes.
Inside, he finds Aziraphale surrounded by the living dead, dozens of swollen bodies laid out across the floor. The monks feed them useless potions, trying desperately to save them until they inevitably breathe their last. A few will walk away, but they all know that most will end up in another pit out on the grounds. Crowley watches Aziraphale as he kneels next to one trembling victim and lays a hand on the man’s arm. To a human observer, the angel appears to be offering comfort to a doomed man, but Crowley can sense the burst of celestial energy that erupts from his fingertips, bursting the swollen pockets of his skin. The man coughs weakly, but his shaking stops. Aziraphale sighs, his eyes sliding shut, and Crowley takes in the gray cast of his pallid skin, the dark flesh under his sunken eyes, the way his tunic hangs loosely off his frame.
“Angel.” Crowley’s voice is soft, the tips of his slender fingers just touching Aziraphale’s shoulder as he crouches next to him.
Something dark lurks behind the angel’s kaleidoscopic eyes as they slide up to his face. “Crowley. What are you doing here?”
“C’mon, angel.” Crowley pulls him to his feet and leads him out to the cloisters, to the closest thing anywhere this side of the Atlantic currently has to offer to fresh air. The faint stench of death still lingers here, but at least it’s mingled with the fragrance of the gardens and out of sight of the mounds of buried dead.
“You were right,” Aziraphale says quietly, staring somewhere into the distance. Crowley sucks in a sharp breath, feeling like all the oxygen has suddenly vanished from the world.
“It’s not too late,” he offers gently. “What is it they say? Cito, longe, tarde? You can still leave.” (He emphatically does not say we, but he knows Aziraphale will hear it anyway.)
The angel shakes his head. “I can’t. I’ve seen what it does now, and I can’t… I have to try.”
“Aziraphale, you’re obviously draining yourself dry here. It’s a wonder you haven’t already been reprimanded for all the miracles you’re using, and what difference has it made?” He gestures vaguely toward the eastern wall of the colonnade, beyond which the dead have been laid to their fitful rest.
“I have. Been reprimanded.”
Crowley stares at Aziraphale in disbelief. “But you…”
“I do what I can. My place is here, Crowley.”
“It won’t matter. Angel, you know we can’t stop this.”
“I know.” Aziraphale looks over to meet his eyes at last, a storm brewing within their gray depths. “But I’m not leaving. I think you should go, Crowley.”
He steals one last lingering look over his shoulder as he exits the courtyard. The image of Aziraphale, sallow-cheeked, bone-weary and supernaturally drained, will haunt him for the rest of eternity. By the time the first wave has run its course, half the population will be in the ground. Crowley will watch the pestilence recur for centuries, and always, he will see this moment in the back of his mind.
Crowley is the thing that lurks in the shadows, in the ill-defined lands at the ends of the earth. He can offer no comfort to dying men, only sharp teeth and claws and a place in Hell. Later, much later, he will don a sharp-beaked mask and let blood, he will hasten the doomed toward their fate, if only to protect Aziraphale’s gentle-fingered hands from once more brushing death.
His ink-stained heart beats on, the name in its flesh growing ever darker.