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061 Winter.
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The cold bite of that first Winter had come as a shock to Crowley. He'd thought that the rain that had practically chased the humans away from the Garden would have been the worst of it. It had seemed quite the punishment at the time, considering the fact that the Garden had been in a state of perpetual, and very sunny Spring with perhaps a bit of Summer, and a dash of Fall thrown in for variety.
There had been nothing like this in Eden.
The biting cold wind which had come out of nowhere had caught him unawares, and he'd nearly been discorporated after the first hour of it, as the body he'd been given was made for warmth and sunshine, not...this.
The wind was a harbinger of worse to come. Rather than rain pouring out of the ominous clouds which covered the sky and presaged a storm to come, something white and above all frozen fluttered down from the clouds and slowly started to bury him.
By the time the sun finally came back out three days later, he'd been discorporated and pushed back out of Hell in order in order to test out a new body that had been forged in one of the colder parts of Hell which would hopefully be resistant to the strange change in climate.
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062 Spring.
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Crowley liked the Spring. In the springtime, his work was easier, and generally took up less of his time. That was because, in springtime, there was a general sense of optimism as the world re-awakened, and people's minds naturally turned towards Love, and of course, everything that went with it.
Human Love had always come hand in hand with Lust. After a certain piece of fruit had been eaten, mankind became aware of this fact. It didn't stop them though. Since time out of mind, human couples had run off into Spring mornings, ostensibly going out to pick flowers or something along those lines, while actually doing something else in the bushes that would earn said couple a charge for indecent exposure amongst other things if they were caught.
All Crowley had to do was line them up, and knock one down, and the others took care of the rest while he sat back and watched the fallout.
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063 Summer.
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Crowley dropped the open pack of condoms on the top of the pile of items in his bag, leaving his bag conspicuously unzipped. With that, he had finished packing his bag of completely unnecessary crap for his Summer holiday. It wouldn't be a Summer Holiday without packing the condoms.
When they went for what in recent times had become their annual holiday together, Aziraphale always reserved a room with only one bed, since he didn't need a bed, and almost always spent the entire night sitting up in an armchair reading (1), and Crowley had always had fun with this. The box of condoms at the top of his stylish black bag full of useless crap was the opening salvo in his campaign to scandalize and terrorize the prudish little old lady who inevitably ran whatever little miserable, and out of the way place Aziraphale checked them into that year.
The following shots usually involved making interesting noises behind the closed door of his and Aziraphale's room while doing an activity that didn't usually warrant such noises, turning up at breakfast with what looked like claw and/or bite marks on his person, and answering the door in the nude when the woman dropped by to poke her nose into his and Aziraphale's business.
While the angel was away buying ice-cream or another book, or somesuch, he would often do other things that were borderline unacceptable, but wouldn't actually get him and the angel thrown out. These little things, along with the empty condom box in the trash, were almost always the closing salvos in a week-long campaign.
It wouldn't be a proper Summer holiday if a rather puzzled Aziraphale wasn't asked to never return to whatever small inn or bed and breakfast they had been booked at upon check-out after all.
These days however, he'd had to resort to even more outlansish behavior while the angel was away, since people, even prudish little old ladies, had pretty much stopped even so much as batting an eye when a male couple went on holiday together.
(1) On one memorable occasion when Crowley had brought a woman back to the room to see how the angel would react, the only indication Aziraphale showed that he was aware of what was going on right in front of him was his catching Crowley's boxers before they hit his book and setting them on the table next to him before turning the page.
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064 Fall.
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The first sign of Autumn in Creation had ironically come from the Forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Crowley - who was starting to get used to and coming to dislike his new name of Crawly - had been lounging in his new serpentine body in a spot beneath the tree where the sun shone between its branches when a reddish orange leaf broke off from the upper branches far above him, and landed on his head.
It had been the landing of that leaf that had brought him to Eve's attention.
Eve had bent down, lifted the leaf a bit, and laughed at the surprised look that was still on his face. None of the leaves that he'd previously encountered had done that before, so it was a bit of a shock at the time.
A moment later, the still laughing Eve had picked him up, and called him a "silly snake".
It all went downhill from there.
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065 Passing.
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Crowley met many people in passing that millions of people the world over would give their souls to even catch a glimpse of in real life. Over the thousands upon thousands of years he'd been on Earth, he'd rubbed shoulders with conquerors and kings as well as other men and women who had changed the world in many profound ways, some positive, and some negative.
He'd drank with and tempted artists, and dreamers, and celebrities night after night while running with just about every "In" crowd that one could think to name.
Very few of these people if any have made a lasting mark on him. Whether this is a good or bad thing yet remains to be seen. What one generation views as perfectly acceptable, another views as immoral, and another views as horrifying, and yet another as absolutely unthinkable. Oddly enough, this principle seems to work both ways.
There are times when it was a good thing he'd only met these people in passing too, who knows where the world would be if the demon had managed to make a bigger mark on them than he had.
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066 Rain.
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Crowley didn't mind the rain too much just so long as it wasn't pouring out. Water was good for plants and all that. When it was pouring however, it brought back some unpleasant flashbacks of the Flood.
He'd been busy watching and laughing at the jackass who had been building the largest boat in the world on dry land when the Flood hit. The rain started pouring down harder than it had ever done before, and he'd raced towards the only bit of solid shelter in the area, the Ark.
Noah's brats had kicked him off before he could make it halfway up the ramp.
He didn't stay off however. He'd noticed all of the animals who were being hauled aboard, and got a brilliant idea as to how he could stow away.
Traveling in the snake enclosure had not been fun. In fact, "Wasn't fun" was something of an understatement. Almost every other snake he'd been boxed in with had agreed with him on that point, and wished that they'd been left off the list, preservation of their species be damned.
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067 Snow.
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Crowley didn't care too much for snow. Several of his worst discorporations had been due to hypothermia from cold weather, and the snow it brought with it. He could see the appeal it held, when it wasn't coming down from the sky too thickly though. That, and the temptation that was almost inherent in it.
A temptation that Crowley had decided to give into.
In a city, snow tended to turn yellow or brown or gray very quickly. The snow that had been deposited on the roof of the building which housed the angel's book shop by what locals and newscasters were already touting as the Storm of the Century was still white however. Cold, white, fluffy, and it wouldn't take too much effort to heave a shovelful of it down onto the angel the instant he stepped out of his door.
Crowley had been waiting for the angel to leave for his morning walk for two hours already.
As he debated on whether to settle down for the long haul in order to see the look on the angel's face when a couple of shovelfuls of snow were dropped on his head or to get up and go get something warm to drink to ward off the chill that was settling in his bones, he felt someone grab the back of his jacket collar, and before he could turn around, something cold and wet was forced into the collar of his shirt from where it slid down his back.
"I'm sorry dear." the angel who had just dumped a handful of snow down his shirt said. "I heard you tromping about up here, and I just couldn't resist."
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068 Lightning.
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Crowley had been struck by Lightning a number of times over his existence. It was one of the hazards of the job, as angels tended to have a bad habit of calling it down in order to smite demons. It had also been one of Aziraphale's favorite methods of getting rid of him for a time.
The first time he'd been accidentally electrocuted when he was fiddling with some wiring after he'd woken up to find the Twentieth Century and just about everything that came with it on his doorstep, he recognized the sensation immediately.
It was at that point that he confirmed beyond a doubt the long-standing suspicion he'd held that as well as being exceedingly clever, humans were also completely insane.
Who would willingly bring lightning into their homes in order to do tasks that they had done just fine without it for several millennia?
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069 Thunder.
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He flinched slightly as he heard the roar of thunder, knowing what usually came next. It didn't come next however, since the thunder was coming out of his expensive, state-of-the-art sound system rather than from outside. He relaxed when he finally processed the fact that the lightning wouldn't be forthcoming. Sighing, he ejected the CD on which the thunder had been recorded and set it aside in his "Either toss or give to the angel for Christmas" pile.
How could modern humans find this relaxing? A storm as severe as the one in the recording would usually send their ancestors scurrying off to huddle in corners, unless they were the few poor sods who couldn't huddle in the corner, or the rare few nuts who were what are called "Adrenaline junkies" nowadays.
It's possible that he didn't get it either because he wasn't human, or because the experience had been ruined for him long before because he'd been struck by lightning one too many times and had an near-instinctive fear of thunder as a result.
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070 Storm.
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It had been in the days long before the Arrangement. A storm had raged about him so fiercely that he'd been afraid that he would discorporate before he found shelter. Just when he was giving up hope of finding someplace dry and reasonably warm in which to spend the night, an opening to a cave in a nearby hill revealed itself to him.
When he entered the cave, it had been to find a rather surprised Aziraphale who had apparently moved in there a while back looking up from the scroll which he had been reading.
"Discorporate me here and now angel, because I am not going back out there." he finally said as he leaned towards the fire that was between him in the angel, relieved to be away from the cold and the wet if only for a moment.
The angel very carefully re-furled the scroll he'd been reading and delicately set it aside before briefly casting about for a weapon, and settling on using a log from the fire in order to comply with his request which had been rather stupid now that he thought about it.
"Well, at least I'm not cold." he muttered when he got back to Hell, as he headed to the end of the long line of demons who were waiting for new bodies.
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071 Broken.
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Not everything went back to normal after the Apocalypse that wasn't. Aziraphale's shop may have been unburnt and stocked with books, and his Bentley may be there as good as, well not new, but as good as it had been before it had caught fire on the M-25 which he was seriously regretting designing no matter how funny it had been at the time. His apartment was as pristine as ever.
Not everything in his apartment was back to normal however.
When everything had gotten fixed after Adam had stopped the Apocalypse, one thing had been missed. In the grand scheme of things, considering all of the things that had gone wonky, from Nuclear Power Plants losing their reactors and still putting out energy to Atlantis surfacing, it was small and insignificant. It shouldn't really matter, but it still mattered to him however.
Coming home to find that things weren't as perfect as he had thought them to be when he and the angel had found his Bentley parked outside the angel's unburned shop had disturbed him to no end, as he found himself sitting there staring at the offending item, and wondering what else Adam could have missed, and what the consequences of having missed those things would be.
Thanks to his and Hastur's little trip through it, his ansaphone was broken, and Adam hadn't fixed it like he had done everything else.
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072 Fixed.
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He'd found the half-starved creature shivering in an alley, and winced at the reaction he anticipated from Aziraphale when he'd picked it up and brought it home with him rather than leaving it to its fate. He hadn't done it out of kindness. At least, he told himself that. The kitten, once it was cleaned up, was a rather snowy shade of white that would go perfectly with his apartment's decor, and keeping animals was currently fashionable.
All in all, he was a reasonably good cat owner. The animal was clean and well fed. Every morning, its food and water appeared, its litter box was cleaned, and its fur vanished from the furniture with a snap of his fingers. As the kitten grew however, it became apparent that there was a task that he didn't quite know how to deal with, or even whether or not he should. When the kitten, who was now pretty much a full-grown cat was six months old, he was still trying to make a decision about whether or not he should.
One day however, he came back to his apartment after a day of tempting to find his cat gone and a note stuck to the fridge with a magnet he would never have owned in a million years.
Aziraphale, Mr. "All life is precious", had taken the decision out of his hands and gotten the cat fixed.
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073 Light.
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He could try to blame it on the fact that he had slept through the Nineteenth Century, but the fact was that electric lighting hadn't become a common household phenomena until well after the Twentieth Century had started.
The lights in his apartment all worked because he expected them to work. That was how it was with every mechanical thing he owned, from the Bentley, to the fridge which he'd never bothered to plug in.
He'd been surprised when he had been visiting his current "girlfriend's" flat, and the light burned out. He'd been somewhat at a loss when the woman turned to him and asked him to change the bulb. He'd been embarrassed when he'd been forced to call the angel over to deal with the problem. He'd been furious when the woman broke up with him since he couldn't change a stupid light bulb, and decided to attempt to pursue a relationship with the angel, destroying more than a year of work, since every woman who had pursued the angel ended up turning their lives around and finding Mr. Right-For-Them in rather short order.
That was one more lost to the Other Side. All because of a stupid light bulb.
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074 Dark.
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Hell is dark. Not only in the visual range. That is obvious considering the fact that it is Hell, but still, it is the first thing that impresses itself upon one's mind when one arrives. Crowley does his best to avoid Hell, but there are times when it is inescapable, when he his forced to go Below for business, most often when he has been discorporated.
The part of the darkness that impresses upon him the most isn't that of the pain that is ever pervasive, nor the shadows that surrounded and were barely pushed back by the ruddy light from the Lake of Fire that he'd woken up in after the Fall. It is the one thing that all other demons had gotten so used to ignoring that they had nearly forgotten it had ever existed in the first place...
His Light didn't penetrate the depths of Hell, leaving it in a darkness that was even more profound than that of the deepest moonless night night on Earth where, even when things got to be almost completely hopeless, His Light still shone.
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075 Shade.
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One of the few things that Crowley remembered about his time in Heaven was that it had been incredibly bright. White had been the predominant color, almost as if the Creator hadn't quite gotten the hang of that whole color thing before he'd created the place. Everything in Heaven from the top of the tallest spire to the mankiest cobblestone that paved a back alley in one of the less fancy districts had been radiant, and lit with the brilliance of His Grace.
Heaven had probably also been the one place in all creation where one was irritably waved away with an impatient comment of "You're standing in my shade." in a manner that would eventually be recognized by beachgoers the world over.
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076 Who?
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"Who is that angel?" Crowley asked as he entered the shop and found Aziraphale talking to someone who was standing next to the counter in a friendly manner, marking him as someone other than a customer. He didn't get a reply to his question, as the angel and the stranger were too busy talking to notice Crowley's less than dramatic entrance.
"So, will we be seeing you next week?" the man asked.
"Of course dear." the angel replied.
"Will we be seeing you next week as well Mr. Crowley?" the stranger asked.
"Yeah, sure." Crowley automatically replied.
The angel beamed at him from behind the counter as the man departed.
"Who was that angel?" Crowley asked.
The smile rapidly slipped from the angel's face.
"Mr. Dunn agreed to sponsor me." Aziraphale said in a neutral tone as he looked down at the counter where a book had been laid, left by the Mr. Dunn who was sponsoring the angel for something.
"So, are we on for the Ritz?" Crowley asked.
Rather than eagerly accepting his invitation immediately like he usually did, the angel looked strangely hesitant, almost as if Crowley had invited the angel to come along on a trip to tempt people that didn't include any miracles to balance out their evil deeds.
"...Sure." the angel replied after a long minute of silence.
The look on his face wasn't nearly as joyous as it usually was when he was invited to a meal at the Ritz for some reason.
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077 What?
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"Wha'sss tha angel?" Crowley drunkenly slurred as he watched an equally drunken angel fiddle with some sort of object.
"A month, only a month." the angel said mournfully as he continued to play with the object he was holding.
"Yes, it hass been a month since we las' met." Crowley said, wondering why the angel seemed so sad about it having been a month since they last met, as they'd gone years, decades, even a couple of centuries apart before.
Aziraphale turned and gave him a murderous look before throwing the object he'd been playing with at his head. From the look in the angel's eyes, it was obvious that he wished it were a weapon of some sort rather than a small token.
Crowley briefly studied the small item. It was something that one might pick up at an A.A. meeting if one remained sober for a set period of time.
"You're not still on about tha' angel." Crowley said, remembering how the angel had dragged him to an A.A. meeting the month before, after he'd pointed out that they got drunk just about every time they met, aside from work and the Apocaloops, and the angel had gotten it into his head that the two of them were alcoholics because of this. "Yer an angel, angels don't become alcoholics."
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078 Where?
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Crowley rolled over and vomited. He didn't know how, since he'd destroyed all extant written copies of it centuries ago, but someone had found and managed to correctly use what had to be the most painful (1) way of summoning a demon. He felt as if he'd been dragged through all nine circles of Hell backwards at the speed of light (2). When he regained his senses, he found himself in a men's room which had only been half-heartedly cleaned for the last several years.
When he looked about for his summoner in order to give him or her a piece of his mind - as that was all he could give them since he was correctly confined in the summoning circle - he found Aziraphale standing next to the door looking far too innocent to be so.
"What the He- Hea- Manchester did you do that for angel? !" Crowley yelled.
"You were late, and I thought you might have forgotten." Aziraphale said in a tone of voice that was as "innocent" as his expression. "You did agree to come after all."
"Where am I?" Crowley asked.
"At our A.A. meeting of course. You missed the last several, and I was afraid that you'd miss this one as well." the angel said in a sweet tone that raised the scales on Crowley's back and gave him a sudden desire to be somewhere else, anywhere else, Hell included.
"It's taking place in a loo?" Crowley said as he struggled to his feet, trying to regain his equilibrium.
"No, the meeting's just down the hall. I didn't think that the other people who are attending would be too happy if I directly summoned you into the room. I know that my sponsor wouldn't, he's the sort who generally frowns on demon summoning." Aziraphale replied as he walked forward, brushed Crowley off, and checked that he was reasonably presentable.
A couple minutes later, Crowley found himself forced (3) to make small talk with people who were serious about quitting drinking while the cup of tea that Aziraphale had shoved into his hand upon arrival in the meeting room went cold.
This was clearly his punishment for getting the angel to fall off the wagon after only a month.
(1) For the demon rather than the summoner. There were several ways of summoning a demon which were equally painful for the summoner.
(2) Which was close enough to the truth to be reasonably accurate.
(3) This wasn't entirely metaphorical, as his full participation in the meeting had been the condition of his release from the summoning circle.
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079 When?
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Crowley groaned as he awoke. He had gone out drinking alone in an act of defiance last night after the meeting that Aziraphale had summoned him to. He had drank far more than usual, far more than he did when trying to get plastered in order to forget something even. And, he'd done it alone.
He'd forgotten to sober himself up last night after he'd finished drinking, and he had a bit of a hangover. The headache and the nausea weren't something he hadn't experienced before, but the low feeling after a night of drinking was something new.
Usually, for him, drinking was either for work or fun. More often than not it had been both. Many of his happiest memories had involved times when he'd had a bottle in his hand and a good companion at his side. Last night most definitely wasn't one of those times.
When had drinking gone from being a fun activity he shared with the angel at times to being this?
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080 Why?
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As he sat there drinking some horrible tea out of a paper cup, he found himself wondering why he had come. He didn't have temptation in mind as a reason for his presence, even though tempting the people here would be like shooting fish in a barrel, and this place was firmly in the territory of the Other Side. He didn't need to be here either, as only his attendance the week before had been made mandatory by Aziraphale's summoning.
It was like he told the angel before, angels, and demons for that matter didn't become alcoholics.
That then begged the question of why he was here, especially since the angel had been forced to cancel this week due to a work emergency. That, and why he had avoided the clubs he usually frequented for work for most of the week, and hadn't ordered any alcohol with his meals when he'd eaten out.