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mekachu04Fandom: Good Omens (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens), Original Angel Character(s), Canon characters mentioned in passing
Additional Tags: No beta we fall like Crowley, Missing Persons, Black Plague, Summoning Circles, Demon Summoning, Demon Traps, Imprisonment, Hell on Earth, Too much paperwork, Pre-Series, hurt!Aziraphale, Isolation, Trapped, Crowley Saves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Aziraphale Whump (Good Omens), Broken Bones, Wing Injury, Crowley Whump, true form injuries, Abandonment, Snake!Crowley - Freeform, Cuddling, Hurt/Comfort, sleeping pile, Darkness, Caves, possible cave related sensory deprivation, Huddling For Warmth, Hugging, Crying, Azirapahle's Halo comes out when he's feeling better
Title is from Queen's song "you're my best friend "
this is one of the short stories i wrote for nanowrimo this year; which i used the whumptober list as prompts (Muffled Scream & Trembling)
While Heaven might not have noticed a single angel's absence until Iadnal's discovery of a lack of paperwork more than 600 years later; a single demon had noticed said angel seemed suspiciously absent in the years leading up to what would later called the Black Death. He, too, at the time, hadn't given it much notice for the first few decades, as Hell had literally poured out onto Europe, and he was juggling keeping up appearances and staying the fuck out of everyone's way. When Dagon shown up in Scotland in 1310, Crowley said bye to his angel friend and spent the next two decades in Latin America with the Maya. He'd made his way back across the Atlantic in time to hear that Pestilence was about to start their walking tour in Kyrgyzstan, and while he'd attempted to look for where Aziraphale might have been working, it was the first time in their long history that he would make an effort to find the ethereal being and would fail completely.
He'd liked to have worried about that at the time, but Hell's royalty were still mingling on Earth, and were rallying to support whatever devastation Pestilence was up too. Heaven, naturally, was gearing up to thwart them, and Europe and West Asia were about to become a chess board between the two forces. Crowley got his marching orders, and tried his best to keep his head down, with various degrees of success.
He first started to actually worry about his friend when the plague hit England in 1346, and there was not a trace of Aziraphale. Aziraphale had a soft spot for the area; he'd been charged with blessing an early Roman venture to the island and had found the Celtic Brits to be charming, and had weaseled his way into many ventures back to the land as often as possible. While the people changed, the area still seemed to draw the angel to it, so much so that by the time he was accompanying King Arthur he was officially the Principality of England.
So, for the principality to be missing during such an event had Crowley worried. With the state of Europe, maybe he had been restationed for the time being. But then the plague ravished London again in 1361, and Crowley still could not sense Aziraphale anywhere on the mortal plane, and thought maybe he'd been recalled, or worse - discorporated. During round three, in 1369, he'd tricked a minor field angel into confessing that none of the principalities had fallen, confirming indirectly that Aziraphale was not in heaven either.
So where the blazes was he?
Hell had mostly packed it up and gone back below at that point, and Heaven had flaked off to leave the Humans to try and clean things up on their own. Crowley wanted nothing more than to curl up in a hole for a decade or so and sleep the rest of this awful century away. But he hadn't seen his best friend in nearly sixty years, and was looking at the fact that the angel had vanished with no one noticing somewhere in that time. It wasn't uncommon for them to go a few decades without running into the other, but Crowley had never not known where the angel was. He was a principality; he always shown a little brighter than the other field angels on purpose. It was his very nature to be noticed, to be an unconscious beacon for the downtrodden. Made him seemingly an easy demonic target too, if a demon didn't mind going blind trying to attack him, seeing as Aziraphale kept himself on the dimmest setting possible when going about his daily duties, and that was still enough to give Crowley a headache in those early days.
---
He'd heard rumors of a cursed place.
Now, following the Plague, many places were looked at as cursed. But what locals survived swore to him that the town was cursed years before people got sick. And the curse was weird - no one died, but people complained of headaches, and that food and wine tasted like ash. Crops grew, but never blossomed. Fields and fields of immature grain that never reached fruition. Sheep wool never grew out after the last shearing, and chickens never grew fat, and heifers stopped producing milk as soon as the calves were separated. Dogs and field cats fled at first opportunity and never returned. Deer and rabbits, even the song-birds, had vanished from the woods. Humans had left before the sickness had ever came.
Ironically, some had braved the curse during plague, not knowing where else to go. As long as they didn't mind the extreme shortage of food, anyone who sought refuge there survived the epidemic. Although many got sick and died after they left, most still said they'd take their chances with Death than stay there any longer than necessary.
The place reeked of Heaven, but only in the way spoiled milk resembled the fresh drink. It was how, in Crowley's opinion, heaven should smell, if Heaven was honest about how it was just as messed up as Hell was. (If Heaven was milk, Hell was rotten meat. It was vaguely related to milk, but it's own whole separate thing, and Hell was always up front with what a shit show it was). Most of the buildings had been wood, fallen and rotting away after years of disuse, but there was a stone structure in the center with a stone wall around it. A small, pathetic, strong-hold that likely only kept people's minds at ease than provide any true sanctuary to the town’s once-residences. It looks like a single family once resided there regularly, a small level lord of some kind. It’s also where the smell was the worse, the air putrid and almost palatable to a demon. Even if it had gone off, it was still holy, and Crowley could see why humans felt sick near it, even if they couldn't smell it. Maybe they could, but didn't have a point of reference for the smell. Might be why everything tasted dead to them.
The air burned, making his mouth numb, and the part of him that usually never stopped asking questions had gone deathly silent. Walking into the building made his knees feel like jelly, and bones and joints that already struggled to hold him upright threatened to mutiny outright.
Only the first room was unlocked; humans had not liked to come back into this place, and Crowley was very much in agreement on this place being cursed. It had been fifty years since anyone had been past that entryway, and even the stones told Crowley to Go Away.
Once he opened what might have been a sitting room, he understood why. Someone had marked up the room, an intricate weaving across wall, floor and ceiling of a demon trap of the caliber Crowley had never seen for himself. Crowley had talked his way out of many traps over his time, but most of them were simple ones, meant for ... Well field agents like him. It took a lot of power to draw something that could hold higher ranked demons, and most humans were smart enough to know that it was rarely worth the effort, because they'd also need an even significant more power to summon one.
This must have been drawn up when Hell's upper class have been on vacation. Some human must have caught on, and realized they didn't need to summon a powerful demon, they just needed to trick one that was already on Earth.
Unfortunately for all parties involved, what they'd tricked into the trap was not a demon at all, and the bindings were a bit too overpowered for the celestial entity inside. Crowley hoped that something horrible had happened to the humans, because the alternative was they'd willingly left Aziraphale behind, alone, and in agony.
"Angel?" Crowley couldn't get any closer yet, or risk getting trapped himself. Aziraphale had not reacted to him at all, just a lump of bone and feather in the center of the room. Even outside the binding, Crowley could feel the weight of the trap trying to force him to shaking knees. He had to leave the building entirely to shake off the yoke of the weavings, hands shaking at his side as he regarded the building. He'd have to break the circles, but he was going to have to do it without being close enough to see what he was doing, and hopefully without bringing the stone structure down on itself.
Although at this point, discorporation might be a welcome mercy. Crowley just didn't know how deep the damage went, and worried that the binding may have latched into Aziraphale's celestial core - and breaking the circles might do enough damage that he might not survive a discorporation.
He almost discorporated himself in panic when he did break the seal; because Aziraphale screamed.
It wasn't just vocal, but atomic, the cry caused his ears to bleed, he cried blood, and felt it pouring from his nose. His chest ached like he’d been kicked by a horse, and every joint in his body liquefied and he crumbled to the dirt as his muscles seized over battered bones.
He felt like death would be a mercy, and came back to himself staring up at a brilliant night sky dotted with stars.
Pulling himself to his feet was like pulling teeth, and, shamefaced, he crawled into the stone building when his legs refused to support him.
Aziraphale hadn't moved from the spot Crowley had seen him last, but the energy of the room was gone, and Crowley could smell the angel again. He collapsed on the floor next to his friend, and just lay starting at the quiet, still face next to him. Aziraphale's eyes were open, but dull, life sucked out of the blue seas that had held Crowley's attention for so many centuries. Angels do not need to breathe, and it was probably a good thing, because this one's chest was crushed under the long steady pressure of the trap. His wings were still out, mangled and broken down, like someone had tried to stomp them flat.
Aziraphale was, in Crowley's option, the definition of soft, cuddly and round. Right now he was none of these things, harsh starved edges, smashed nearly flat after decades of pressure. Pressure makes diamonds, he mind tried to help, and Crowley pushed himself up onto shaky arms, inspecting the angel's true form for damage.
Where to begin?
If Crowley honestly believed Heaven would help, he'd have called the Host down in a second to cart Aziraphale away, knowing that he'd be both unlikely to ever see the angel again, or even to survive the encounter in the first place. But he'd been at odds with some of the things Aziraphale had unknowing revealed about how Heaven was managed post-Fall, and he didn't trust them to have the delicacy needed for something like this. Because it wasn't just Aziraphale body - corporal or ethereal - that was damaged, but Aziraphale's very light. The spark of God's Grace that burned inside every angel that was just a little different than all the others depending on God's Purpose. Aziraphale's burned like clove and wistfulness. Once it was gone, that was the end of an angel. They dissipated back into the ether. Even the fallen still burned, but with dark void of fury where God's Grace had been ripped out.
The warmth that made Aziraphale anything more than stardust flickered, a flame that only still burned because it had been forced to consume its own ethereal core self.
Demonic miracles could fix Aziraphale's corporation with nothing more difficult than some fancy paper work, and Crowley wasted no time in righting, or even recreating, bones and muscles. Bodies were easy.
Celestial cores took a more personal touch. But again, Crowley had Heaven beat, because he knew what Aziraphale really looked like, not the shadow that Heaven tried to enforce. It did take a lot more effort on Crowley's part than it would have taken an angel, and Crowley felt time slipping away from him again as he fought off an increasingly desperate calling to rest as he poured himself into stabilizing his friend.
He would never accept thanks for such a gesture, but became increasingly worried when one was not offered; the blank gaze of Aziraphale continuing on unchanging.
