There are several ways to fall, and Crowley knows each one.
Before Time:
There was only Heaven. And behold it was good, et cetera, et cetera.
Then the questions. Lucifer's group attracted Crowley because finally, someone shared his thoughts and his doubts. Only as it turns out, Heaven doesn't like those.
Distance hadn't been invented yet. There was no physical plane of existence through which they passed on their way down. There wasn't even a down, really. Yet it was unmistakably a fall, and a long one, before the pain of transformation began. Broken halos forming horns, wings blackened in flame, a feeling of vertigo in the stomach that never really went away.
October 29, 4004 BC and onward:
Snakeskin wasn't Crowley's truest form, but it was comfortable. Learning to use legs, after the Garden, took more practice than he would ever admit.
Slipping, stumbling, tripping. There were so many words for falling flat on your face. Crowley spent the first few hundred years in this form picking gravel out of his chin and miracling away the scrapes. It wasn't the small aches he minded so much as the embarrassment, though there was never anyone else around to see; Crowley couldn't shake the feeling that someone was laughing at him. He would never understand humans' love for high heels.
Timeless:
Crowley cannot pinpoint when it began. Sometimes he thinks it began with the world; on other days he knows it is ongoing and eternal, with no more beginning than an end.
Its origins are meaningless. All that matters is how hard he's falling. Every quick glance, every secret smile, every little miracle.
Crowley thinks he ought to be used to falling by now, and yet when Aziraphale is around it's like it's his first fall again, dizzying and intoxicating and a bit terrifying, vertigo making him short of breath. But if this is falling, he'll willingly fall, again and again.
A/N: Title is from Queen's "Jealousy." Please leave a review to let me know what you thought!