#a strongly fictionalized jesus (as if there is any other kind but we're running through some layers here clearly)

[todisturbtheuniverse]

FIC: The Devil Left Him

Rating: G Fandom: Good Omens Pairing: Crowley & Jesus, Aziraphale/Crowley Tags: Friendship, Established Relationship Word Count: 2,800 Summary: Crowley showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. The Bible recorded some version of this event, but left off the walk down the mountain afterward. Hard to find the right wording for, "And then the son of God befriended a demon. Don't try this at home." Also on AO3. Notes: I was really struck by the timing for Crowley's name change, and this was what came of it. The hilarity of me, a recovered Christian, writing about a friendship between Jesus and a demon has kept me amused all day.

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. (Matt. 4:1-11) 

In general, the different versions of the Bible—even the printings with deliberate errors—agreed: after the devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus shooed him away with clear hand gestures and admonishments that could not be misinterpreted, and the devil slithered off as angels landed on feather-light feet.

In reality, though, Crawley had already expended a lot of energy on what he'd suspected from the start to be a fruitless task. He wasn't about to slither anywhere. It took a lot of work to take a human with him when he willed himself from one place to an entirely different place, even when that human was the son of God. His bones were blessed heavy.

Maybe something of that showed on his human-but-not-quite-human face, because Jesus said, "You look weary, my friend," as if today's activities had all been an elaborate song-and-dance where they'd both played only a part, rather than themselves.

"It's not as easy as it looks," Crawley said. He seated himself on a nearby convenient rock. "I don't usually drag humans round with me."

Jesus seated himself on the ground. For unknown reasons, this made Crawley's insides squirm in discomfort.

"We should rest a while," Jesus said, "before we walk down the mountain."

"You might want to get a move on, actually," Crawley said, squinting down at him. Forty days of fasting was nothing for a demon, but it reduced a human to something horrifying, a skeletal nightmare with the skin just barely hanging on. Better not to even try to describe the hair. "Find something to eat on the way down."

"I will wait," he replied, peaceably.

So Crawley sat in resentful silence while he got his breath back, so to speak. Jesus closed his eyes and turned his face into the chill mountain wind and, for all Crawley knew, prayed. An old envy burned in his gut, an ulcer still barely sealed over. 

"I'm not going to walk down the mountain, you know," he said. In another place—no easier way to describe it than that—his wings did not ache so badly anymore.

"No?" Jesus asked, his eyes still closed. Starving and dirty and stinking, but the hint of a smile curled his mouth. "Do you not require thanks, then, for what you've shown to me? No interest in reciprocity?"

"I don't see how a walk down the mountain is reciprocity," Crawley said, more wary than sneering.

"You have seen the grander view," Jesus said. "Let me show you the smaller one."

Crawley laughed, because it was laughable. He had already seen every view, after all. He had seen the touch of both Her love and Her cruelty in a thousand, a million, big and small ways. He had seen children drown, magnificent creatures lost forever to a flood. He had more than seen his fill. As he'd displayed the kingdoms of the world, he'd looked away.

"If nothing else," Jesus said, undeterred by the vaguely hissing noise of Crawley's laugh, "it will allow you to gather your strength." 

He looked up, meeting Crawley's eyes. There was something terrible and knowing there, something depthless, that did not belong on a human face. It was a vision of agony, of endurance, of suffering. It was more than a person should rightly contain. Crawley could not look away.

"You will need it," Jesus said softly. It was not a warning or a threat; his voice, his sharp-boned face, was filled with compassion.

The breeze tipped from cool to cold, and Crawley stifled the question rising in his throat, though he wondered: What? What will I need it for? Do you know, or are you as vague and inaccessible as Her?

But when Jesus stood, Crawley followed him down the mountain, moving at the pace of the weaker human. They made meals of stringy rabbits caught in clever snares that Jesus fashioned, whatever fruits and roots they could forage from near-barren trees, handfuls of water from streams that ran too low. Crawley didn't need any of it; he left the too-bitter berries to Jesus and had only a bite of one of the rabbits. They were barely real, anyway. What sustenance existed this far up on the mountain had to be encouraged to show itself.

After one night sprawled in the too-thin grasses by the faint roadside, still practicing sleep, Crawley had the strength to leave. Jesus's feet cracked and bled, and he moved at the shuffle of a much older man, but he would make it down the mountain. Surely She wouldn't let Her son die in obscurity after being abducted by a demon. That couldn't be in the ineffable plan.

But in case it was, Crawley stayed. Occasionally he scoffed at the small wonders that Jesus offered up for his inspection—this flower blooming well past its season, that bird singing long past sunset, the pattern of those clouds descending low to the mountain—but mostly, he kept quiet, and kept his eyes open.

When they parted ways in the village at the bottom of the mountain, Jesus said, "You are welcome at my home, should you ever find yourself there."

Crawley gave him a disbelieving look, a raised eyebrow. Jesus smiled as he departed.

*

There was not much to do in Capernaum. Crawley had heard something—just a murmur—that sounded a bit like Aziraphale, and wouldn't it be fun to ruffle up those feathers again, but there were a lot of fantastical things happening now. The world folded on itself to accommodate the son of God. Could've been any old miracle. Jesus could've done it himself.

And Jesus was around and about, no mistake about that—there, by the low fountain in this tiny square, where some barefoot children occasionally splashed. He was surrounded by no less than four others, usually; Crawley had yet to see him alone again after that trek down the mountain.

But today, unlike the other days, his eyes—those terrible eyes—passed over the square and sought the shadows, and landed unerringly on Crawley.

He mastered the instinct to shrink from view and vanish. He gave a cheery little wave from within a flowing dark sleeve, a smirk paired with it, as if to say, Yes, the Temptation goes on forever; choose what I offered and all can be well.

Not likely.

But Jesus smiled his strange small smile, asked his companions to wait, and made his way over to Crawley. 

"It's good you're here," he said, with no irony at all. "We're going to repair a roof. Will you help?"

Strange man, this Jesus. Maybe the lower-downs had it wrong, and there had been some kind of mixup. Compassion and kindness was all well and good, but surely this kind of olive branch was not meant for demons. It never had been before.

"I hear that carpentry is more your area," Crawley said.

"It is simple enough to learn," Jesus replied, "for a creature as old as you." 

He beckoned, and Crawley, infinitely curious, followed.

They spent the afternoon in the hot sun, balanced by turns on the beam that would support the roof, laying in place a lattice of straw mats that were then smoothed with clay. Jesus's friends passed up materials, and Crawley mostly ferried them between points, watching. Jesus explained how to overlay the mats, where to apply the clay, how the beam at this point and this one supported the weight, and Crawley listened. He asked Crawley to smooth down one section of mat and clay and congratulated him on a job well done.

It felt like having his hands clasped around a nebula, drawing out a necklace of stardust, while She stood at his back and offered direction and encouragement. The sun shone like God had not vanished from the world—or at least, like God had not vanished from Crawley's.

But that same sun was setting by the time the roof was done, and all gathered on it for a simple meal, including the family who lived there. Some looked askance at Crawley, glances lingering on his eyes before darting away, but said nothing. It had rarely been a problem before, but he sensed a change coming. A world narrowing in some ways, widening in others. It would all come back around eventually.

Jesus came to the edge of the roof to offer him bread, which he took out of politeness more than a desire to eat the stuff. "What is your name?" Jesus asked, as if picking up a conversation they'd already been having.

Crawley opened his mouth to answer and closed it again. It seemed the depth of disgrace to give the son of God the name that had been foisted on him after his wings burned; it seemed a humiliation too great to endure. Salt rubbed in a great many wounds.

"Which would you prefer?" he said, the words biting. "The name She gave me? Or the name I answer to when my new master calls?"

Jesus chewed on the bread, swallowed, chased it with a gulp of thick wine. "Which do you prefer?" He didn't rise an inch to Crawley's tone. Crawley was beginning to think that patience was actually Hellish. It was annoying enough to be.

"Neither," Crawley said, and though it was knee-jerk, he found it to be true upon closer inspection. The old name—and he did remember, remembered like holy water had left a sizzling burn in its shape on his mutilated grace—didn't fit, now. Maybe never had.

And really. Crawley. No imagination at all, the first thing that had come to mind for a wretched snake.

"Perhaps you should fashion a new one."

"No suggestions?" Crawley said, vaguely heckling. "No offers to help me begin anew? To save my immortal soul?"

"Do you have a soul?" Jesus countered, with a trace of humor.

Crawley gave a very small, very quiet snicker of laughter. It surprised even him.

"The world is changing," Jesus said, gazing out at where the sun had vanished below the horizon.

"The world doesn't change," Crawley said, just for the sake of argument.

Jesus looked at him sidelong. "You'll have opportunity enough to begin anew. You should choose for yourself."

Crawley snorted, but Jesus only stood, no hard feelings, to return to the other humans. Crawley tried a bite of the bread and left the rest at the edge of the roof when he leapt back down to the ground.

*

"You know, my dear, I didn't know that you had any experience with carpentry."

Crowley, mouth full of screws, sizing up the shelf that had collapsed beneath another of Aziraphale's improbable stacks of books, shrugged. With an effort devoted to making sure he didn't accidentally swallow any of the bits of metal in his mouth, he said, "I helped Jesus fix a roof once."

"I'm sorry?" Aziraphale said, as if he thought he'd misheard.

"I didn't have any other plans," Crowley said, more defensively than he meant to. "And he asked."

Roofs and bookshelves were entirely different things. He shouldn't have even mentioned it; he could have pointed to any other example of a stupid human thing he'd picked up over the centuries. He could've lied.

But he and Aziraphale were trying this new thing where they were actually honest with each other, since they had the freedom to be, and his instinct was to not fuck that up. Even when he risked exposing as rotten a wound as this.

"He never asked me to help fix a roof," Aziraphale muttered.

"You weren't really up close and personal with the humans back then, were you? Did he even know who you were?" Crowley brushed away some of the sawdust created by drilling one of the screws in.

"I doubt it," Aziraphale said, and sighed the way he did when he was settling into the chair at his desk; Crowley didn't have to look around, or extend his senses, to know exactly how he looked, mug of cocoa cupped between his hands and balanced lightly on his stomach. "There were so many angels coming and going around him, I doubt that I stood out."

"You always stand out, angel."

He left it open to interpretation whether that was a good or bad thing (answer: both), but still he could feel the way Aziraphale smiled in reaction; the force of it warmed the entire back of him. Set a little more at ease by this, he returned to his work.

When the drill had gone silent permanently, and Crowley was fastening some clever little rubber stoppers over the ends to support the shelf—really, carpentry had come a long way in two thousand years, Jesus would have been impressed—Aziraphale said, "What was he like?"

Crowley considered, sliding the shelf back into place. The places where the wood had given out under the old screws was completely concealed, and the shelf was sturdy again; he started restacking the books.

"Ineffable," Crowley said, half-taunting, and Aziraphale gave a protesting little laugh at that. "No, he was...strange. Patient. I walked down the mountain with him because he asked. I helped with the roof because he asked. That was the sort of person he was. He didn't hold a grudge about the whole Tempting thing, like he thought I was just playing a part. Never had the stomach to tell him it wasn't that simple."

"Crowley," Aziraphale said, so quietly and so pained that Crowley had to steady the stack of books against the shelf for a heartbeat before continuing.

"Oh, right," he said, trying to sound indifferent, "the name change. I never mentioned it. His idea. Never got a chance to tell him what I'd settled on."

Aziraphale mulled that over quietly; Crowley fussed with the books, attempting to decipher what order they were meant to be in.

"I thought he might have been important to you," Aziraphale said. "But I never would have guessed…"

"Why would you? I never could figure it out, myself. Why he was so...nice...to a demon. Not like Upstairs at all." Crowley voiced the next almost tentatively, nearly afraid to hear Aziraphale's opinion. Not afraid enough, though. "Thought there might've been something wrong with him."

"No," Aziraphale said sadly. "There was nothing wrong with him. And they didn't learn anything at all."

"Well." This conversation was getting too maudlin for him; he stepped back from the bookshelf to admire his handiwork. "I learned something."

Aziraphale got up to look at the shelf, too; his hand slipped into Crowley's, and Crowley returned the pressure, held on tight. "You've always been more open-minded than the rest of us," Aziraphale said; the fondness in his face was too bright to look at head-on, so Crowley admired it from the side. 

"That's a low bar."

"I know," Aziraphale said, and then, more seriously, "thank you. For telling me. Now, can I treat you to dinner, as thanks for holding my bookshop together?"

"If you would just expand a bit, you'd have enough room for all the books, and this wouldn't happen," Crowley said, falling comfortably back into familiar, toothless bickering.

But over dinner, he told Aziraphale everything, everything he could remember about those brief moments two thousand years ago. Aziraphale was, as always, the perfect audience, scandalized and delighted at all the right places, and Crowley, as always, nearly liked him better scandalized than delighted.

They overindulged, as was traditional, and by the last drink, they were toasting Jesus. Crowley hoped he knew.

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #jesus (good omens) #a strongly fictionalized jesus (as if there is any other kind but we're running through some layers here clearly) #friendship #established relationship #universe writes