Chapter Text
Some days, Crowley thought the entire story of his life - well, existence - boiled down to two moments of utter stupidity and fatal mistakes.
One was quite obvious: the day Lucifer and his entourage had been strolling along where he'd been fluffing a nebula into shape, and Crowley* had chosen to wave to them rather than mind his own business.
*He had not been Crowley then, of course, hadn't even been Crawly. But that old name was erased from reality, and Crawly hadn't ever been him, not really, so we must make do.
After that, the agony of the Fall was merely a logical conclusion.
(Now, wait a minute, you might say. Agony? I was under the impression Crowley did nothing more than vaguely saunter downwards!
And you would, of course, be correct, Esteemed Reader. However, we invite you to imagine walking in too-high heels five sizes too small, with your kneecaps taken out, your hip joints dislocated, and your trousers on fire.
This was roughly the kind of saunter Crowley had undertaken, and that's not even mentioning the worst part.
It's not the Fall that kills you, after all.
It's the sudden stop at the end.)
The second Mistake - capitalised for emphasis, and because Crowley liked to capitalise things* - occurred very shortly after.
*Crowley invented Noun Capitalisation,** in case you didn't know. Over the centuries, Aziraphale managed to nearly eradicate this demonic influence in the English tongue, but it doggedly persists in a number of other Indo-European languages despite his best efforts.
**A filing error in Hell resulted in him being credited for the invention of capitalism instead, which Crowley was a little disappointed by. For once he'd done sterling work, and then...
Oh well. Crowley doubted they'd have properly appreciated Capitalisation, anyway.
This was still before the apple and the sword and the wall and the rain, within that short span of Crowley's life devoid of Aziraphale, before he knew what love meant.
(Crowley doesn't like to think back to that time, nowadays.)
It had been a nice day - all of the days had been nice, really, which was just rubbing salt into the open third-degree burn if you were a newly-Fallen demon - and Beelzebub had come up to him and said "go up there, make some trouble".
Crowley, fool that he was, utterly idiotic imbecile with not a brain cell to be found within his skull...
Said no.
It might surprise you to hear that Beelzebub, by and large, was a comparatively lenient Prince. Taking zir leadership duties very seriously, ze had implemented a number of programmes designed to provide support to demons struggling with their tasks, ranging from holiday bonuses to anonymous counselling sessions.*
*Ze had even offered parental leave to those who had Nephilim on earth, but we all know how that turned out...
However, that was now.
Beelzebub shortly after the Creation of Man, shaken and still singed at the tips of zir wings, was a different beast.
Zir authority had never been questioned before. Ze was Prince, and the trauma of Falling too fresh in the demons' minds - usually a backstabbing lot - to rebel again.
And then there was Crowley, saying no.
(He couldn't even remember why, anymore. Not that it really mattered.)
Beelzebub snapped.*
*We would write 'panicked', but fear ze knows where we live, and might take rather drastic measures to make us reconsider our wording.
Before he could as much as blink Crowley found himself chained in the middle of a complicated incantation circle, with Beelzebub buzzing like an angry horse fly, going on about how he was to be made an example of, in case any of the other demons entertained similar thoughts about insubordination.
(The irony of punishing one of the Fallen for disobedience was entirely lost on zir. Demons suffered from two major deficiencies: a lack of imagination, and one of self-awareness.)
Crowley remembered very little of the early days BA.*
*Before Angel, obviously.
But he remembered that moment, kneeling in the soot and dirt of Hell, phantom pains still shooting through the empty space in his chest where God's Love had once been, and Beelzebub looming over him with a piece of Hellflint in zir hand.
"You'll never tell me 'no' again." Ze had hissed, and those words still echoed in his nightmares.
And then, ze had plunged the rock into Crowley's non-Grace, scratching a binding curse into his very being until he screamed.
When he'd come back to his senses, and ze repeated zir orders, Crowley had had no choice but to obey.
(He'd never have a choice ever again.
One 'no' had been all it took. One Mistake.)
"And be quick about it!" Hastur had called after him, and Crowley found himself hurrying.
"Oi, watch where you're going!" Another demon snapped as he barrelled past them, and Crowley suddenly couldn't look anywhere but the path ahead, the curse's sigils burning into his skin if he so much as blinked.
Luckily, he didn't necessarily need to. Perks of being a snake.
(You are likely appalled, dear reader. So were we.
But, already on this very first assignment, Crowley realised that an obedience curse could be made perfectly bearable if one was possessed of a vivid imagination and a talent for finding loopholes.
"Make trouble", ze had said.
How? Where? When? Well, turns out that was still up to Crowley, to a certain degree.)
The Forbidden Tree had been nothing special, really. Just a tree that was not to be touched. The Almighty had silly ideas sometimes, and luring the humans into a little bite would have been trouble, certainly, but no Trouble.
So Crowley had gone to Eve, sweet, foolish, gullible Eve, and talked to her about the Tree.
It never even occurred to her to say no. Never occurred to her that she could.
Given the situation, that had hit a little very close to home; so Crowley made a knee-jerk* decision, and it'd been, perhaps, the first right one in a long time.
*Well, he hadn't had legs at that point, but, y'know, figure of speech.
Taking a piece of his own Free Will - not like he was really going to need it, not anymore - and spinning it into an apple, he made the Tree the Tree of Knowledge, and told Eve to take a bite.
Nobody need ever know of it. God likely wasn't even paying attention to them anymore.
"It'll be our little ssssecret," he'd hissed, gently nudging Eve forward, and watched as humanity acquired Choice.
That had been Trouble, alright.
(Sometimes, Crowley thought he'd made a third Mistake in talking to the angel on the Eastern Wall of Eden.
Then he thought of Aziraphale's smiles, and discarded the notion immediately.)
All in all, it hadn't been the end of the world.*
*Still 6000 years to go for that.
The curse didn't extend to humans, for one. They could give him orders until they were blue in the face, Crowley was under no obligation to obey to any of it.
And as for the demons... well.
As previously stated, demons have, by and large, no imagination.
Crowley never received precise orders, simply because Hell couldn't really think of complex dastardly machinations they wanted him to carry out.
It was always "trouble this" and "murder that", and he quickly found that pushing a vase off the table or stepping on an ant was perfectly sufficient for the terms of the curse.
Report some purely human atrocity afterwards, and head office would send back a commendation, making future orders even easier.
"Do more of what you did during the Spanish Inquisition," eh? So, "nothing and lie about it", gotcha.
If there was any way, any way at all, to remove the curse, Crowley would've been free of it long ago,* seeing as how he'd done such exemplary work on earth.
*He would have been released, but not forgiven, as such. He was a demon. There was no forgiveness for demons.
Aziraphale, now...
Well.
He'd worried about Aziraphale, at the start.
This was the Enemy, after all, and back then Hell had not quite figured out how to distinguish between Heaven and the Fallen in their cursing. If Aziraphale knew he, too, theoretically had Crowley at his beck and call...
Demons had no imagination, and the tentative stirrings of something like "honour among thieves", but angels, well, angels...
(This had been back when God had still tended towards the vengeful, of course, and one would've been very unwise to put one's life in angel hands if one did not have absolute faith in one's pure and unblemished soul.)
Even if Aziraphale would not hurt him, he might well report Crowley's delicate situation to head office, and he was sure other angels had no qualms about telling him to go drink a Holy Water cocktail.
It wasn't worth the risk.
(Crowley had subsequently done his best to avoid Aziraphale as much as he could for the first 4000 years, even though something new and fragile deep within him protested against it.)
Only...
The more regularly they ran across each other, the more Crowley realised there was another viable option.
Aziraphale need never know.
Because, and this was the best part: Aziraphale never demanded a thing of him.
Wheedled, yes. Requested, suggested. But it was all "might we" and "wouldn't you", and the curse slept peacefully through it in Crowley's chest.*
*Much of it was about Intent, you see, and Aziraphale seemed to have no intent to bend Crowley to his will whatsoever.
(That Crowley wished, on occasion, to be bent over certain items of furniture by him, well, that was entirely inconsequential in this context, and we don't even know why we brought it up.)
For instance, Aziraphale invited him for oysters, after Lower Management had bullied him into a trip to Rome. He hadn't been invited to dine in years.*
*The last supper Crowley had been asked to attend had been, well, the Last Supper, and that had found him understandably glum.
When Aziraphale came to meet the black knight, did he order him to fight? To lay down his weapon?
No. They just talked.
(Didn't agree, but, well. Can't have 'em all.)
Disagreements regarding the Arrangement - Crowley's favourite capitalisation - were settled over coin flips,* and at that point Crowley was already so far beyond gone on Aziraphale that he miracled Hamlet into a success with barely any prompting.
*Crowley didn't even cheat, most of the time.
(He'd made it his mission in life to never obey the spirit of any order given to him, contrary on principle; except when Aziraphale was concerned.
In those cases, Crowley was happy to oblige.)
He rescued Aziraphale in France - "cause some deaths", "make some trouble", well, sending an executioner to the guillotine and breaking into a prison ticked those off the list - and was subsequently invited for crepes; and never was he as much as ordered to pass the jam.
It was around that time when Crowley began letting down his guard entirely.
Perhaps that budding trust was the reason it had hurt so much when Aziraphale refused the one time Crowley asked for something back.
Fraternising indeed.
Crowley had gone back to his apartment, and felt so tired of it all.
Humans died, even the best of them;* fellow demons only delighted in ordering him around.
*Though that never stopped Crowley befriending them, brilliant little mayflies that they were.
And the one angel he felt safe around, the one entity he loved, didn't want to fraternise.
Crowley did what one did when one had a bit of a crisis; slept for nearly a century - he'd accumulated quite a few days of paid leave by then - and, once he'd woken up, went and bought a fast car.
(The Bentley, at least, wasn't ashamed to be seen in his presence.)
WWII had worked out, somehow.
"Make trouble", Beelzebub had said, but, as usual, not specified for which side.
So Crowley had joined British counterintelligence.
There was no shortage of Nazi atrocities he could sell to head office when they came knocking, as long as he neglected to mention the dozens of other catastrophes he had worked to prevent.
Like the time he rushed into a church to protect Aziraphale, and saved his books for him - as one did, when one was desperately in love.
Bit hard to sell to Lower Management, that.
(He would never forget the way Aziraphale had looked at him that night. Never. There had been something wondrous in it, for those precious few hours, and though the angel was back to his guarded self in the morning, Crowley's delusions had been fuelled sufficiently.)
And then, 1967.
Aziraphale handed him the Holy Water, still no order passing his lips, but an unspoken plea Crowley could barely decipher.
And then he slipped into the night, gone in a blink, and if Crowley hadn't had the thermos*, well, he might've wondered if he hadn't dreamt it all up.
*Tartan-patterned. Of course.
Crowley was half convinced Aziraphale had chosen that deliberately. He couldn't very well refill the damn thing, could he.
Too fast. Crowley thought glumly, staring out at the flickering neon lights of Soho. Tell me to go slow then, angel, and mean it. I'll always do as you ask.
Whether I want to or not.
The 21st century came, and with it a summons to an old graveyard, the first non-negotiable order Crowley had received in years.
Always him, Crowley thought on the ride to the hospital, the dreadful monster crying helplessly in the back seat. He hadn't meant to Fall, hadn't meant to get humans cast out of Eden, hadn't meant to love Aziraphale and he certainly wasn't meaning this.
End of the world.
In Crowley's eyes, his world had barely started. He needed at least another century with Aziraphale, more, an eternity would be ideal.*
*An eternity was actually a precisely measured divine unit, determined by the average beak-sharpening rate of the African swallow - not the European one, Heaven Forbid - in regards to a certain mountain at the edge of the universe, factoring in travel time by spaceship.
It was a rather impractical unit, by and large, and not really in use anymore.
It was quite extraordinarily long though, and that was why Crowley found it perfect for the sentiment he wished to express.
He couldn't let it happen.
He'd think of something, Crowley was good at thinking of things, he was always angling for the next loophole, wasn't he?
This order was just a magnitude or two bigger than "make some trouble in Edinburgh", that was all.
Choice and Free Will, it all came down to Choice and Free Will, and Mistakes.
Crowley leaned over the back of the Bentley's front seat,* gazing thoughtfully at the child in the basket.
*The Bentley continued driving perfectly unfazed. Crowley's input was honestly more of a hindrance than a boon most days, as far as it was concerned.
It looked so very, very normal. Had Crowley not know better, he would've thought it a regular human. No horns, no sulphur, not even the vague impression of a single hoofiewoofie.
Choice, Crowley thought, and like the day he'd stood before the apple tree, an idea came to him.
Two Mistakes, and two Ideas. It all balanced itself out in the end.*
*Crowley secretly thought the Buddhists had the right of it, at the end of the day, but Hell's PR department preferred he align himself with something a little more Abrahamic.
One snap of his fingers, and somewhere not too far away, a woman by the name of Deirdre Young gasped and screamed "ARTHUR!" at ear-splitting volume.
Wrong child, wrong family. The hellhound would go to the wrong boy, no Apocalypse, Antichrist lost, whoops-a-daisy.
Nobody need ever know, not even Aziraphale.
"It'll be our little secret," Crowley told the baby, reaching over the back of the seat to awkwardly pat its head, bare of any horn-like growths and covered in a few fluffy tufts of golden hair.
The Antichrist, Lord of Darkness and Bringer of End Times, gurgled contentedly and chewed on Crowley's thumb.
Crowley took it as a good omen.