1945.
Crowley sat in his car, alone.
His head thumped against the steering wheel. "Idiot," he muttered, "you IDIOT. You barge in on him, while he's working, and expect him to come with you to--" he broke off.
Aziraphale was right. It wasn't safe.
He shouldn't even be here, to be honest, should still be in the trenches, making life even more miserable for all the people trapped there and under fire. He should be in the camps, saving anyone he can, emptying train car after train car into some safely hidden who-knows-where. He should be under a bridge, drunk off his arse and sleeping all this mess away until he woke up in a better world. Not here. In his Bentley. *Yearning*, for Satan's sake.
Absentmindedly, Crowley ran a hand down his leg, slithering down to his bare and scaly foot.
Ow.
Crowley frowned, lifted up that foot to inspect the sole. He winced. Blisters coated the bottom of his foot already, unhealthy pustules of orange and-- gross. Like being at the beach in bare feet, yeah, right. It'd have to be one of the beaches of Hell, rolling down to the boiling sulfur pits, to be as hot and generally awful as consecrated ground.
But at least he's gotten a bit of a break from all the things that made him want to sleep until a better world popped up around him. His feet now hurt enough to distract him, if nothing else. Crowley let his pain receptors go on functioning. Where could he go now?
Crowley had almost come to a decision when a bomb dropped.
It was reflex, not thought, that miracled the Bentley away. Reflex that tore him through the building that happened to be there, where he could already see Azrael waiting for the boom. Reflex that opened his wings and cradled a handful of primary school kids beneath his corporation's fragile flesh, a last ditch effort to keep them all alive.
Light.
Noise so loud it deafened him, all Crowley could hear was ringing.
Something cold and ribbed plunged through his wing, and he could not hold it back. The children screamed.
The concrete hit him squarely in the spine.
Crowley wasn't sure how long he'd been here, or how he'd kept this corporation up, rigid, shaking beneath the weight to keep from crushing them.
At least one of the children beneath him was dead. Blood loss, from where the pipe in his wing had scraped it. The others--he wasn't confident. One, at least, died of shock and cold. He wasn't sure of the others.
He was pretty sure the search parties had given up.
A chunk of rubble moved above him.
What was that?
Again, the rasp of concrete on metal, loud in what was otherwise a silent night.
"Crowley?"
Aziraphale. Crowley tried to form the name, but he couldn't seem to find a breath of air, and all he managed was a faint wheeze.
"Crowley," the voice prodded, "are you there?" after a moment with no reply, it muttered something to itself.
The rubble moved.
Crowley let out a moan as the pressure eased off him for a few seconds, his mangled back stinging in the dusty air. And then he squeaked, as another piece shifted, and the whole thing toppled onto his poor, impaled wing instead.
"Sorry, sorry," that angelic voice called. "I can't exactly see what I'm doing up here. Give me just a jiffy!"
This time, the rubble disappeared entirely, leaving only a swarm of butterflies in its place.
Crowley heard a gasp above him.
And then there were hands on his shoulders, his wings, working bloody flesh off of that awful length of pipe. He couldn't keep the sob from tearing out of his throat alongside the muscles of his wing.
"Crowley, my dear, what *have* you done to yourself?"
Aziraphale peeled him out of the wreckage, laid him back against the concrete. Sucked in another breath.
Oh good, Crowley managed to think. He found the children.
At which point, no longer needing to constantly miracle himself into continued existence, Crowley's world went black.