"Az, I am dying of boredom here," Crowley whined from where he lay on the bed, head hanging over the edge so that he was looking at Aziraphale upside-down. "Can't I please leave this room even when the humans are awake? I don't see why you can't just tell them I'm another angel dropping by to see how things are going," he reasoned.
"No," Aziraphale said simply, not looking up from the soft clay tablet he was etching glyphs into from his usual seat across the room.
It was the 150th day since the storm had stopped. 150 days of drifting aimlessly on smooth seas. Crowley had spent the majority of his time sleeping, taking short flights over the water — always keeping the ark in sight, of course — and reading with Aziraphale. They'd read through every single tablet on the ark by this point, even the ones recording nothing but grain sales.
"Angel, come on," Crowley wheedled, "I am begging you here. How many times in the history of the world have you heard of a demon begging an angel? That's how desssperate I am." He mentally chided himself for the slip of his lisp at the end — reminding Aziraphale of his serpentine origins was never wise.
At last his counterpart looked up. "If I tell them that you are an angel," he explained, "they will expect you to worship with them. I take it that is something you would not find favorable."
"All right, all right," Crowley conceded. Worshiping was not something that appealed to him at all. "But I get the feeling you just want to hog the attention for yourself."
Aziraphale opened his mouth to reply, and flew headlong off his chair. Meanwhile, Crowley found himself flung from the bed.
The almighty thud that had caused inertia to throw the two beings from their spots was followed by a great groaning and scraping of wood against stone: the ark had been beached.
Crowley sprang to his feet and helped the angel up. The two of them raced down the corridor, heading for the source of the ruckus, deep within the belly of the ark. Ahead of them, they saw members of Noah's family exiting doorways, likewise heading for the lower levels of the boat. Aziraphale stopped short, extending his arm to keep Crowley from running ahead.
"We can't let them see you," he said. "You'll have to wait back in the room."
"Seriously, angel?" Crowley protested. "I am not waiting in that stuffy room when something new and different is finally happening."
"I will not let them see you," Aziraphale warned, shifting into a more aggressive stance.
"Okay, okay," the demon backpedaled, "what if I…went as a snake?"
"A snake?"
"Yeah, here, I'll turn into a snake, and you can…hide me in your robes!" Before the angel could disagree, Crowley transformed. Suddenly only one man-shaped being occupied the corridor, accompanied by a small serpent looking up expectantly.
Aziraphale grumbled to himself, but he picked Crowley up and allowed him to slither into the sleeve of his robe.
"Just don't move around too much in there," Aziraphale griped; "I'm rather ticklish."
Off the angel dashed, a smirking snake in tow. They reached the vessel's lowermost chambers and Aziraphale raised his hand slightly so that Crowley could peer out through the cuff of his sleeve. As one, humans, angel, and serpent all gawked: much of the front of the wooden hull was ripped up, with solid rock piercing through.
"A mountain!" cried one of Noah's sons — Japheth, if Crowley was not mistaken. "We've hit a mountain!"
Crowley let out a hiss of delight, causing Aziraphale to fake a cough to cover up the noise. This was good news: at long last, at least some land poked out from the endless expanse of floodwater.
"We best hope the rain doesn't start up again," Ham, who was nearest to Aziraphale and his serpentine stowaway, remarked. "The ark won't sail again with this damage…"
"The rain will not start up again," Noah said from the other side of the chamber, giving his youngest son a reproving look. "The Lord will not command it, and so it will not be."
"Of course, Father," Ham said, lowering his head.
Besides the fact that the ark was now grounded rather than floating aimlessly like the world's largest piece of driftwood, not much changed after hitting the mountain. Only the tallest of peaks reached out from the water — the rest of the land remained submerged. Crowley added flying out every morning to check the water level to his daily routine; it, along with his tally marks, was the only way to keep track of change in the long, monotonous flat-line that life had become. Bit by bit, more mountain was exposed to dry air.
"This is worse than what I remember of Heaven," Crowley exclaimed one particularly tedious day, earning him a glare from Aziraphale.
As boredom sunk ever deeper into both of them, and they finished a second read-through of all of the ark's tablets, they began to tell each other stories.
Later on, Crowley would not be able to recall which of them had told the first one. But soon, the two beings who had lived on this planet for over a thousand years — give or take a few discorporations — were filling the endless hours with recollections of their adventures on earth.
They'd each traveled far and wide, to every continent of the globe — including the ones that humans in this portion of the world didn't know existed — but they had each done so at different points, in different eras, and so they had plenty to fill each other in on.
Some of Aziraphale's favorite places were the ones that humans hadn't reached yet, while Crowley preferred the bustling cities gradually springing up across Earth. Some of their stories left them both breathless from laughter; others were somber or violent, deepening an ache in both of their hearts.
Sometimes the one telling the story would stop abruptly, and the other would know that he had just remembered that every person, every setting, every thing within the tale had been wiped out, and they would sit wordless for long stretches of time, mourning silently together.
When the day came to leave the ark at last, after month and months of waiting for the water to dry up, Crowley found he wasn't ready for it.
Crowley had his companion almost in tears over a humorous account involving a Trojan market vendor when suddenly a painfully bright light beamed down into the room.
"Aziraphale," an authoritative voice echoed out from the beam. The smile dropped from the angel's face, replaced by sheer horror.
"Hide!" he mouthed at the demon, who didn't need to be told twice — quick as lightning, Crowley transformed into a snake and slithered into the crevice between the mattress and the wall.
"Aziraphale," the voice said again, sounding impatient.
"H-here I am, Gabriel!" the angel replied, standing.
"I bear good news," Gabriel's voice rang out, "for you to share with God's chosen people. The floodwaters have receded, and it is time for them to come out of the ark."
"That is good news," Aziraphale replied. "Thank you, Gabriel. I shall let them know."
The beam of light dematerialized, leaving angel and demon alone again.
Crowley slithered back out into the open and returned to his favorite form.
"Well," he said, brushing himself off, "that —"
"It is time for you to go, Crowley."
"Hmm?" Crowley said, still smoothing out his tunic — he never liked changing form; it always brought the risk of damaging his clothing.
"I said, it is time you flew far away from this place." This time the angel's message clicked. Crowley stared at Aziraphale, looking for a hint of — of what, exactly? Regret, sadness, any sign that the angel would be sorry to see him go. But Aziraphale's face was devoid of expression.
"Right," Crowley said, keeping his tone blank. "I guess this is goodbye, then."
"I suppose it is," Aziraphale replied.
The demon stuck out his hand. Aziraphale hesitated, then took it.
"Take care of yourself, angel," Crowley said. Then he turned and, taking one last glance at his tally marks, the mattress, the wooden walls, he climbed up through the hole in the ceiling and onto the ark's roof. Extending his wings, and took off into the azure sky.
He did not hear Aziraphale's murmured response, uttered after he had left the ark far behind: "You too."
Crowley flew far away, just in case Aziraphale was watching his departure, and then doubled back, flying low over the newly-uncovered ground. Many months ago, he had assured his superiors that he would corrupt a certain pious old man, and that task remained.
Alighting on a mountain peak neighboring the one on which the ark perched, the demon watched as a seemingly infinite line of animals filed from the massive door of the ark. Finally, they'd all trailed out.
Many of the creatures lingered nearby, munching on the sprouts of green just beginning to resurface among the rocks and loam — Crowley took a moment to rejoice at the fact that plants had made it through the flood, after all. Others broke into a run as soon as they'd escaped the confines of the boat, stretching their legs for the first time in ages. They bounded across the stretch of summit or even beyond it, down the mountain's sloping side and onward into the empty world.
As every animal and human alike made their way into the fresh air, Noah — spry despite his tremendous age — wasted no time in gathering together stones for an altar. Crowley watched as the ancient man and his grandchildren piled the rocks high, while his three sons rounded up animals.
Aziraphale had told Crowley far back in the trip that seven, rather than just two, of each of the animals considered "clean" had been brought onto the ark. Crowley now saw why, and rolled his eyes: sacrifice. It seemed an awful inconvenience to the demon to lug creatures onto a boat and feed them for the duration of a huge flood, only to gather them up and kill them as soon as they'd made it to dry land again. But that would be, as his heavenly counterpart always said, "the ineffable way."
How was he going to get such a revoltingly devout man to turn to sin?
The humans, and Aziraphale with them, gathered around the altar as the chosen victims — sheep, a bull, and several birds — were slain. After several minutes, they all turned their heads upward, and Crowley did likewise. He gasped as a multicolored arc appeared in the sky above, between two clouds. A sense of wonder came to him — the vibrant, translucent bow was beautiful and, for some reason, filled him with hope.
Crowley loitered around the encampment the humans set up, keeping out of sight but causing trouble where he could. Clothes hung out to dry came loose and whirled away in the wind, berries found growing close by turned out to cause rashes, and tools left unattended outside went missing.
It wasn't long before he'd devised a plan to corrupt Noah.
The humans set about farming the land — turns out they had brought some seeds on board with them, though only the kind they could plant for food — and Noah himself started a vineyard. It was this vineyard that sparked an idea in Crowley's brain.
Every night the demon stole into the encampment and tended to the grapevines springing up. With his supernatural care, they grew faster and more fruitfully than they would have otherwise, and soon enough the old man was able to prepare wine from them.
The wine was only several days into its fermenting process when Crowley decided tonight was the night to enact his scheme. The camp was quiet, and Aziraphale nowhere in sight, when he slipped into Noah's tent with a large bottle of wine, fully fermented, in his hands.
Despite being startled by a stranger's sudden appearance in his tent, Noah did not need much convincing after Crowley informed him he was an angel to accept the gift of wine.
They drank deep into the night, Crowley mentally nudging Noah along every time the old man seemed about to put down his cup. The bottle never emptied.
Not long before dawn, Crowley slipped from the tent, willing the alcohol from his veins as he went — now was not a wise time to be drunk. He'd left the old man passed out cold on his mattress, and naked — for some reason when he was about nine drinks in, Noah had decided to do away with his tunic.
Now for the final component of his plan. Crowley entered another tent, where he found Ham, his wife, and his young son fast asleep. Pushing aside the pang of remorse — once again he would be getting this likeable human in trouble — he prodded the man awake.
"Come to your father's tent," he said, casting a fog on Ham's mind so that he would not wonder who Crowley was; "he needs you."
Noah's youngest son hurried out into the pre-dawn stillness, rushing to his father's aid. With supernatural foresight, Crowley knew all that was to come from the seed he had planted in Noah's heart: Ham would see his father, sprawled and naked, and tell his brothers, who would enter the tent pre-warned, able to cover Noah's indignity without witnessing it for themselves. Ham would incur the wrath of his father for what he could not help seeing. He and his family would be cast out, forever cursed, and Crowley would follow them into their exile: while Noah's inheritors would enjoy a heavenly companion in their lives, Ham would have to make do with an infernal one. It was better for them, he figured, than being left utterly alone in the wilderness.
A rustle of noise from a far off tent — Aziraphale. Their gazes connected, and for one instant Crowley could have sworn he saw something like delight in the angel's eyes — but no, surely not, for a moment later those dark brown eyes held nothing but fury.
No time to fly away; Aziraphale would follow.
A small pop and a serpent was slithering, sleek body shimmering in the tendrils of sun just reaching over the horizon, into the grass, which had grown tall and thick.
The sigh of scales against the soil whispered regret: for forty days and nights and then some, an angel and a demon had learned to get along. Now, however, it was time for the demon to move on.
Author's Note:
Whew, sorry to end on a sort of sad note, but if you've made it this far, I hope you enjoyed this fic! It's not all sad, I promise - the bonds Aziraphale and Crowley formed on the ark will play a role in future relations between them and their eventual Arrangement. But that's all a story for another day.