Chapter Text
4004 BC
The first time it happened, it took him completely by surprise.
Crowley- then Crawly- had practiced during onboarding, of course. Everyone had. Before Earth had officially opened for business, the demons had attended a weeklong seminar titled “Your Corporation and You.”
“All right, maggots,” Lord Beelzebub had drawled, walking down the ragged line of them and sounding supremely bored. The maggot demons puffed up their chests a little. Duke Hastur, who could manifest as a swarm of maggots as well as a frog, or so rumour had it, put a hand to his chest in a pleased “Me?” sort of gesture. “You’re going to show me you can change between your human and your animal corporations. And that you can do it when I tell you- only when I tell you, Fenriz.” A few meters down from where Crawly stood, a lean gray wolf abruptly became human-shaped again with an expression of mild chagrin. “We want to see perfect control. Unexpected shifts in form will cost us souls, and if it happens in front of the wrong human, it’ll probably get you discorporated. Any demon ends up back down here because they forgot themselves at a dinner party and ended up a pelt on a wall ‘s on latrine duty for ten years, are we clear?”
“What’s latrine duty?” muttered someone on Crawly’s left. She had oversized eyes and patches of bright colour on her cheeks and forehead. As she spoke they cycled from bright blue to maroon to yellow-green, then vanished, quick as the wings of a hummingbird. Crawly seemed to remember that her animal aspect was a squid.
“Dunno,” Crawly whispered back. “What’s a dinner party?”
Swapping snarky, not-at-all bitter comments with the other ex-celestials about the flexibility of their new forms (angels couldn’t manifest as animals, now could they? It would give the demons a real leg up- or tentacle, or proboscis, as the case may be), Crawly had transformed smoothly from snake to human and back again. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual at the time except how strange it felt when the alignment of his lungs went from horizontal to vertical, like two huge leeches squelching over one another inside his narrow chest cavity. He shuddered.
Later, he’d practiced by himself, in front of a warped and tarnish-spotted mirror in the little walled-off area where he’d set up his workstation (contrary to popular belief, cubicles were invented in Heaven. The design was utilized by both Heaven and Hell until the 1960s, when Heaven got wind of the open office plan). With a little more time to concentrate on the process, he’d first noticed what he eventually came to think of as “the Transition Period.”
For thirty minutes or so after Changing, whichever set of organs he’d left behind insisted they were still present and fully functional, like an itch in a severed limb. His vision was at once human and snake, images superimposed over one another in a way he’d struggle to describe until the invention of the film camera. The tiniest imperfections in the surfaces he touched swam into sharp focus; every fleck of ash from the lake of fire (his quarters were close enough to smell the sulfur, to his profound annoyance, and the floor was constantly gritty) felt as large as a pebble underfoot.
All of this, as distracting and overwhelming as it was, was only a scaffolding, spare beams dwarfed by the enormous, opulent edifice that was his sense of smell and taste. Just after a Change, it was impossible to separate them, and the twinned signals from nostrils and tongue burst in flashes of brilliant color in the back of his brain. Some 3800 years later he’d witness the first fireworks display, and he’d think to himself, yes, this is what it’s like, this is how it feels. Every indrawn breath a fiery explosion of sensation, leaving trails of sparks in its wake that shivered through nerve endings and finally burned out at the tips of his fingers and toes.
He’d first noticed the Transition when he realized his freshly-human body was still behaving as though there was a row of heat pits along his upper lip. He swung his head towards Belphegor, sitting two cubicles over, and could just make out an orange-red outline through the wall- the thermal signature of his rat aspect. He flicked his human-shaped tongue experimentally, ran it over the roof of his mouth, and then wished he hadn’t- his sinuses were flooded with an explosion of oily smoke, unwashed-corporation odor, the sticky-sweet decaying smell from the meat Beelzebub fed to their flies, and dung from the Hellhound pits. He retched, downed a glass of hastily-miracled water, and buried his face in a filing cabinet whose paperwork hadn’t yet gone mouldy from the constant damp (the smell of clean paper would remain a comfort throughout his life, though for slightly different reasons). After inhaling deeply a few times, he shook his head to clear it and looked in the mirror.
His eyes were too round and too far apart. It wasn’t quite the lateral orientation that his snake corporation had, but it wasn’t quite human, either. There were black scales along his spine and a few red ones scattered over his windpipe and sternum, as if his body were being split down the middle by reptilian flesh. Instead of the usual thatch of copper hair around the base of his penis, two wider red scales formed a slight “v” and overlapped where they met in the center. Fine white spines lined the penis itself, although the organ was no longer paired. Every one of his digits was tipped with a heavy black claw... which was strange, since neither of his two forms featured talons. He supposed it was a demon thing.
Crawly narrowed his eyes and glared at his reflection until the scales faded and his eyes faced forward again. His vision both sharpened and settled, the tactile sensations dulled, and smell and taste faded into the background- though he still felt the occasional twitch. It was as if his nervous system were an exuberant puppy, brought to heel but unable to suppress the occasional wiggle. Crawly ran his tongue over his teeth, winced, and concentrated to blunt his canines. Then he sighed and turned away from the mirror. This blurring between the corporations at the time of Transition was… interesting, and he could think of a few things the heightened senses might come in handy for, but he didn’t want to go back and forth too often. What if something got… stuck? At any rate, he was enjoying walking with an upright pelvis and felt like he was getting the hang of it.
He’d been briefed that snake-form would be mandatory for his work in Eden. He’d grumbled a bit, but he could see that a being who appeared human but had the eyes of a snake might raise eyebrows. Presumably the humans would have been warned about The Adversary by the angels on the wall, whose faces looked scrubbed until they faintly glowed and who wore blindingly white robes that caught the sunlight. Crawly had glimpsed an angel’s breastplate that was a better mirror than his actual mirror. It was hard to look at them without getting a headache behind the eyes, whereas Crawly’s new human form was… well, it was what it was. You could miracle the dirt off after coming up through the earth, but he could still feel it there, deep down, a layer of grime on his skin that never completely went away. (Over the subsequent six thousand years, he would become so well-practiced at cleaning miracles that a certain angel came to think of him as his personal dry cleaner, but that was far in the future.)
The point was, the humans would know he was different if he showed up with arms and legs and slitted pupils, so it would have to be the snake.
Later, he put down what happened after the apple to surprise and nerves, but it still left a sinking, uneasy feeling in his stomach. Whenever he tried to unpack it a little- taking that sensation like a stone into his hands to turn it over, run his fingers along its surface, examine its damp underside- he felt like he couldn’t get enough air into the bottoms of his lungs, so he left it alone.
Following all the fuss (he’d slunk underneath a rose bush to avoid a very put-out Almighty while she gave her newest creations a thorough dressing-down. He’d been there recently enough to have no desire to relive the experience), he slithered up the wall. The angel with the flaming sword had seemed an all right sort, really, as far as angels went. He was sort of soft around the edges in the way that Crawly thought meant kind, and maybe a little stupid. He’d seen him smile while watching a small brown bird bobbing up and down as it searched for food in the tall grass; heard him say to anyone in earshot, “Why, it’s like a dance.” Crawly wasn’t sure what a “dance” was, exactly, but when he noticed the angel start to move his body in time with the bird’s, giving a series of head nods and increasingly ridiculous wiggles and appearing entirely unselfconscious, he figured at the very least this angel was less serious than his colleagues. The Garden’s other supernatural inhabitants were in constant, frantic motion, cataloguing the plants and animals on their various clipboards or striding along the wall like there was a fire lit under their celestial behinds (this was the first metaphor that came to mind for Crawly, who had some experience).
When he’d seen this angel alone on the wall shortly after the humans had made their exit, he’d made the impulsive decision to talk to him- only to realize, seconds before he reached him, that his snake form was perhaps not up to the conversational task. He’d never Changed in front of an angel before, but he’d practiced enough now to have gotten the physical lag of the transformation under control. There would be an unpleasant few seconds where scales melted into warm skin, organs compressed and hair burst out of follicles that hadn’t existed mere moments ago, but he no longer retained any snakey attributes unless he wished to. His appearance would be entirely human- well, as human as it ever got- in less than five seconds. (He’d tried to do something about the eyes, but that appeared to be a non-starter.) As for the Transition Period- well, he figured he could handle a little sensory overload for the sake of what might turn out to be a decent conversation, his first in weeks. It would be fine. Nothing at all to worry about.
Even before he spotted the angel's prim, pink heels over the lip of the wall, he’d smelled grass and clover, muddy water from the stream, and crushed violets- earthy smells. Underneath it, he tasted the flat, antiseptic not-odor of Heaven, which brought back a flood of memories he’d just as soon forget. He shook his head as he reared back and up, allowing his form to resettle along the way, letting the human aspect remind his corporation how to have limbs and hair and lips and eyelashes. Then he’d taken a deep breath through human nostrils, turned his head… and nearly fallen to his knees.
The angel... the angel was lit up like a bar of burning magnesium, white hot and blinding. If a demon’s heat signature was a glowing coal, the angel’s was an inferno, and Crawly didn’t know why this would be, but it was true all the same. His snake eyes felt glare-blinded and the sensation was making him dizzy, but at the same time his human eyes were cataloguing every detail of the angel’s face, down the very pore. He had short white curls that were being tugged by the cool breeze, large gray-blue eyes, an upturned nose, and a bit of loose skin under his chin that Crawly wanted to sink his teeth into, and where had that insane thought come from? The corners of his eyes were lined, much like Crawly’s own were. He was twisting his hands together in front of him, and the sound of skin on skin rasped and hummed in the bones just behind Crawly’s jaw.
He registered all this with a sort of vague appreciation, but then the visual and auditory information was roughly shouldered out of the way by the absolute behemoth that was the angel's smell and taste. Crawly had a slew of particles on his tongue from his last sniff of the air before Changing, chemical packets of scent produced by the angel’s human corporation. When he pressed his tongue to the sensitive patch on the roof of his mouth he froze, only his tonguetip still circling greedily, mouth and nose flooded with the scent. It was musky and nervous on the surface- the angel had a sheen of anxious sweat over his temples and brow, and dots of moisture on his upper lip- but then it bloomed, rich and marvelous and open, as if it were as eager to be tasted as Crawly was to swallow it down. His brain lit up, sending urgent messages down his spine, pulses of heat pushing into his fingertips and palms and soles with every beat of his heart. His skin tingled when he felt the breeze from the angel’s slowly moving wings, prickling like he’d just stepped out of an icy bath. The hair on his arms stood up as if jostling for more of that heady fragrance, and then- oh, and then he was hit with the scent of the wings themselves.
It was like burning candlewax, but shot through with lavender and cloves, peppercorn and lilacs, sweet and spicy and laced with want. The sudden, unexpected pulse of his arousal was an almost physical blow below his decorative navel, heavy and blood hot, piercing the core of him. It was like the angel had run him through with his sword- but instead of pain there was a searing, aching pleasure. He wanted to sink to his knees. Between his legs, his (entirely-human-thank-you-very-much) cock throbbed, twitched and began to harden.
Crawly stopped breathing then, in desperate self-defence. He muttered something about lead balloons. He thought, Get a bloody hold of yourself! But he couldn’t. The wind blew fine particles from the angel’s hair and feathers against Crawly’s skin and he shivered, trying not to let the angel know how affected he was, quaking lightly like a leaf. Then the rain started- Crawly tasted it before he felt it, even though he wasn’t breathing at all except when he needed air to speak- and the angel lofted one of those gorgeous, delicious wings over his head.
Suddenly Crawly, who was mostly human and still a bit snake and all demon, was enveloped in an inescapable cloud of the angel’s heady presence, and his skin felt as if it were cracking open. He breathed, he couldn’t not breathe, he was drinking the air in great gulps. He rubbed his tongue against his palate and savaged his lower lip as sensation crackled along his sensitive nerve endings and lust pooled low in his stomach.
After he’d Fallen, he’d fetched up against the bare earth on the basement level (no office space yet, but it wasn’t all boiling sulfur so the others were using words like “potential” and “good bones” before you could say “eternally damned”), hair singed, surrounded by the smell of burning feathers. He remembered realizing he couldn’t breathe- his body had still been shocked and still- before he even really knew what breathing was. He’d panicked, not knowing what this thing was that his body seemed to need so desperately, only knowing that he did need it, he needed it now, but he couldn’t get it, and that was unbearable.
This was like that. The angel’s scent was the turning of a blank page, a painting rendered in a colour palette Crawly had never seen. And now he could never not see it, never be able to unsee the shifting and wonderful complexity of it; his life would be divided into the time before he’d smelled it, and the time after. He gave a deep shudder as he breathed him in, knowing, knowing that he would need it now, he would crave it, and he couldn’t keep it. Would probably never smell it again.
(Years later, Crowley would catch pale shadows of that first, decadent drink of angel in sips of fine wine or bites of dark, bitter chocolate, but they never held a candle to it; never stood the slightest chance. Aziraphale asked him once why he didn’t seem to care much for food, and “Because of you, angel! It was you, you spoiled me for every other rich morsel on the planet the moment I met you, and you never even knew it. The way you smelled!” was what he did not say.)
The cynical part of his brain was screaming at him to leave; this was exactly what could happen to demons who got too close to the enemy, he was vulnerable like this, his defences were down and the angel could turn on him at any second, sword or no sword. But he didn’t feel vulnerable, somehow. He felt raw and cored open, and like he was going to suffocate in a bubble of lightly spiced floral lightning and enjoy every minute of it- but he didn’t feel defenceless. Oddly enough, the urge was less to submit than to reach out, to touch, to wind, to push his chin against the back of the angel's neck and…
“Ah, would you look at the time?” Crawly croaked.
The angel tilted his head. “I’m sorry. The… what, now?”
“The… uh, it doesn’t matter. Getting- getting late, isn’t it, and I, I should be getting back, they’ll be wanting a report…” Crawly was backing away, holding his hands out as if he could put a physical barrier between himself and the unrelenting assault of the angel’s pheromones.
“Oh. Yes, I suppose you’re right. Although I would have expected you to want to hang about a bit, I suppose.” The angel made a face that the small, rational part of Crawly’s brain thought was irritatingly superior. “Sloth, and all that?”
Crawly shrugged. “Not sure it can be a sin until it’s been officially invented. Anyway, the bosses down there might encourage that kind of thing in the humans, but not so much for us working types.”
“I suppose it’s the same everywhere, isn't it?” The angel started to smile, then schooled his face into seriousness again. “I mean. A sense of efficiency leads to greater virtuousness.”
“Sure, angel. Maybe we’ll see each other around- good luck with the, you know. Sword business.” Sword business, Crawly repeated to himself in a horrified tone, looking on as his body apparently decided to make a vaguely phallic gesture that could represent a sword or something else entirely.
“I… yes. Thank you Crawly. See you, then.” The angel turned and faced forward. Crawly, who felt he couldn’t handle another transformation in the state he was in, strode away along the wall as fast as his legs could carry him. When he reached the next pillar with its series of hand-holds, he lowered himself back to the earth and collapsed against a tree.
His body was trembling violently. His robe, wet now from the light rain, clung to his skin, the wet cloth chafing his nipples and his throat and the insides of his elbows. He could feel every damp, rough, prickling stitch of it. His toes curled in the grass, and as he looked down his body he saw the stubborn jut of his erection tenting his robe, hard as obsidian. Well, fuck, he thought unsteadily.
What on earth had that been?