Have read several fics relating Crowley to kintsugi, and while it’s a lovely metaphor for people, I feel like there’s a more appropriate pottery metaphor for him...
I tried to come up with some way to work this into a narrative, but I’m not good at that. So enjoy an odd little thing born of wishing I’d taken a few more ceramics classes.
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No, he’s not kintsugi. Falling wasn’t a single drop that left you in large pieces, easy to reassemble. That would maybe describe what Aziraphale was now. Bog-standard white china teacup once, but loved enough by someone that he’d been saved, his flaws lined and polished with gold, making him precious in a way no other angel was. Crowley was raku. He’d been… fine enough at one point. But the potter wasn’t satisfied. Pulled him off the shelf with the other disappointments, thrown to the floor, broken. Then broken again, then crushed and ground into grog. Mixed into new clay, dark with iron inclusions, harsh and abrasive on the hands, making fingertips bleed after too long. Formed into something new. Then taken from the furnace and thrust upon creation, his own heat igniting the world around him into thick choking smoke. And when it was over, he was a charred, blackened thing. Then he’d met an angel who cared. And a little of the soot was wiped away. Sought him out again and again until he was as clean as he could ever hope to be. He’d never we a white china teacup again, he’d forever be blackened. But there was a gleam of something brilliant now, a quiet, golden luster that could only be formed in the airless misery of burning feathers.