It had been six days since he’d seen Crowley. Each had been a burden, made heavy by the hollow questions stitched into their seams. What had happened, what had brought him here, what had drawn over his mind with its own designs? Who was he, who was Crowley, who was anyone, anymore, in this strange illusion of a city? Why couldn’t he find answers, why couldn’t he simply know, why couldn’t he have even the slight comfort of the truth? What, who, why? What, who, why? What, who, why?
He hated thinking about these questions but continued to mull over them anyway. At work, he’d sit, absent and distracted, a new acquisition laying ignored upon his desk. At home, he’d become so lost in the labyrinth he’d forget about food on the stove, setting off the fire alarm twice in as many days. In bed, he’d tried so hard to escape into the gentle embrace of empty sleep, only to find jagged shards of memory driving themselves deep into the soft flesh of his dreams.
Some of them were mere impressions, a quick flick of a brush upon a canvas. They would leave a face here, a word there, all nothing more than shreds of memory traveling the undercurrents of his subconscious. But others were more concrete. Events turned into sequences, and sequences into histories. Soon enough, stretches of his life – his real life – were piecing themselves together before his very eyes.
First came the nineteenth century. How he’d gallivanted about then, dressing himself in the finest frippery and making a fool of himself at the dance hall! But alas, all good dreams had to come to an end. As the morning sun peaked over the horizon, Aziraphale saw Crowley’s face, sideburned and snarling, giving him the most pained, ugly look. Whatever had he done to deserve it?
Over the next three nights, his dreams skipped across time, sometimes bringing him to French prisons, other times taking him to foggy British countrysides. Every time, he became immersed in the memories, losing himself to the details and forgetting any existence outside of them. Yet, when it came time to wake once more, Crowley always found him. The harbinger of day wasted no time in chastising him for his foolishness, but always rescued him from spot of trouble he’d inevitably found himself in. Once safe, he opened his eyes and found himself back in his bed, only a few half-remembered snippets of his midnight adventures remaining to remind him of the truth.
On the fifth night, Aziraphale found himself in a lush garden. At least, his intuition told him that it was a garden. If anything, it looked more like a parcel of rainforest, rife will all sorts of exotic life and cut off from the rest of the world by a set of towering granite walls. Near him lingered two humans, both nude as they day they were born. From this, he could see that neither had a belly button but were otherwise entirely normal. In the back of his mind, he had a sense that they were his charges, that the only point of his life was to make sure that they were able to live theirs.
The sky above had darkened into a deep purple twilight. Embedded in it was a swathe of glittering stars, seemingly gleeful as they were afforded a chance to show off their beauty to their admirers below. One of them shown far brighter than the rest, a star he somehow knew to be Alpha Centuri. The others had worked so hard on it, he remembered, so that the humans could enjoy its gorgeous glow.
Then, one of the stars fell.
Streaming, streaking, screaming, shrieking it fell, followed by dozens – no, hundreds - more. Aziraphale recognized some of the cries, anguished and angry, pained and provoked. They came together to form a song, almost angelic but just a half-note off from harmonizing. Eve quickly noticed the cacophony, rushing to his side and fearfully pointing up at the brilliant streaks of red staining the sky. She was easily the more astute of the two humans, always discovering and investigating things long before her mate.
“Shooting stars,” Aziraphale reassured, struggling to offer her a smile. She simply couldn’t know, neither of them could. If they were aware that there was something out there other than Her goodness, they would be utterly ruined. “Make a wish on them, if you like. Perhaps She will hear you and make it come true.”
He awoke upon a bed of feathers. On all sides, he was cocooned by soft, silky plumage, the first gentle touch he’d known since Crowley’s a week before. In a sleepy haze, he tried to turn to his other side and snuggle into it, only to find that as he moved, something pulled obstinately on his shoulder blades. His half-closed eyes snapped open and he found that his feathery quilt was no quilt at all: it was a pair of wings.
Aziraphale slid out of the bed and onto shaky legs, letting the wings drag heavily behind him. Somehow, their weight felt natural, even though he could only remember a single time before where he might have known it. Carefully, he tried to open them to their full span, struggling with their heft as they slowly spread across the room. He winced as one thudded against a wall, hoping he hadn’t woken a neighbor.
The two wide windows on the far wall each captured part of a wing in their reflection. From the translucent images, he could deduce that they were enormous, each one far longer than he was tall. They caught the raw sunlight in their concave curves, using it to make themselves glow a white so bright that Aziraphale thought it would blind him. Meanwhile, their feathers trembled slightly, not so much from the gentle stream of air conditioning than from his own nerves. If only he had a halo! Then, he would have really looked the part of…the part of…
The frayed, long-suffering threads of the tapestry heaved one last heavy, defeated sigh before finally surrendering to the inevitable. As they rained down, loose and flowing, they revealed the rest of the mural. Aziraphale stood, one hand clutching the shawl collar of his plush robe as his eyes traversed the interconnected images. How…how? How could he have forgotten this? How could he have lived this? How could he have been this?
He didn’t know for how long he’d been standing there, watching the millennia, his millennia, play out before his mind’s eye. When he finally came to, he folded his wings and shuffled to the nightstand, reaching for his phone and opening his contacts. His thumb hovered momentarily over Crowley’s name, a mere millimeter from calling him, before scrolling down to his boss. There was no way he could go into work like this, not with his mind boiling and soul roiling. He simply would have to take a sick day, his first in six thousand years.
Aziraphale laid listlessly upon the bed, his weight forcing deep creases into the otherwise impeccable plaid comforter. The pair of long, graceful white wings erupted from behind his back, one running up the wall abutting the bed and the other spilling off the mattress and onto the floor. He blankly stared up at the old, cracked paint on the ceiling, his right hand crossing over his chest to rest upon the top ridge of his left wing. Gently, methodically, its fingers flexed, absently stroking the short, downy feathers. Beneath them, he could sense the powerful, rippling muscles that had once allowed him to soar through the skies as a bringer of blessings and defender of innocence. What a juxtaposition, he thought, what a foil to this strange, feeble thing he’d become.
And so the eons went by. Eden, Jerusalem, Britain. Life, death, love. The blurry faces of acquaintances surfaced and sank, all fleeting flowers in his garden of eternity. Yet, one pesky weed remained, always finding some way to survive despite his many attempts to kill it off.
No matter where he had traveled, Crowley had always found him. He’d found him in Eden, in Jerusalem, and in Britain. He’d found him at the dawn of life, the dusk of death, and the joyous midday of love. There had never truly been any escape from him, even in those decades where he had gone dormant. Aziraphale’s thoughts during those lonely days had always reached back toward him, all in the name of enmity but truly rooted in a yearning he had never allowed himself to admit.
Had that been the start of this beautiful thing they shared?
Suddenly, he was settled in the front passenger seat of Crowley’s car, handing him a thermos filled to the brim with contraband. His hand trembled as he offered the gift, partly out of fear that they would be seen and partly because he was worried that he hadn’t tightened the lid enough. One drop of holy water was enough to sentence a demon to the cruelest death, worse than any beheading, any blade, or any bullet to the heart.
He returned to his room. It was growing late now, and the vivid orange sunset filtered through his slatted blinds and threw a striped pattern onto his wing and wall. Had Heaven found out about his illicit offering? Is that why he had been thrust here, umbilical cord to the divine snipped and severed? Was this his punishment?
No, it wasn’t punishment. At least, it wasn’t punishment for the holy water. It had to be retribution for what had followed.
Life, death, love. Antichrist, Armageddon, abandonment. He and Crowley had cast aside their affiliations and stopped the destruction of the world, committing the gravest of all crimes against the celestial order. Now, they existed alone on their own side, two perfect, blank canvases painted over by humanity’s flawed touch.
Aziraphale’s chest tightened and he gawkily sat up, breathing hard as his wings shifted around him. One slid down from the wall while the other lifted itself off the floor, both settling behind his back.
Heaven was angry. Hell was even angrier. This had to be the reason why he and Crowley had been forsaken here, this strange little town in an even stranger alternate dimension. This had to be the reason why they had been wrenched away from humanity, the thing they had sacrificed all they had known to protect. This had to be the reason why this was their right and just punishment, the consequence of meddling with the ineffable.
He brought his knees up to his chest as he reached through a veil of feathers for his phone.
“I’m sorry I haven’t said anything. Please, come over. I’ll unlock the door before you get here, so you can just let yourself in,” he tapped urgently, stopping every few characters to correct the mistakes wrought by his trembling thumb.
The hand holding the phone then fell limp to the bed. His other arm wrapped around his knees, holding them tight as he buried his face in his kneecaps. Behind him, his wings stood high above his head. Their stark edges cut a dramatic figure against the beige wall, framing the empty space where once, many ages ago, a blessed halo had been bestowed upon Her Lordship’s loyal servant, the Principality Aziraphale.
