A/N: So, trigger warning. Mentions of gore and violence.
"He'zz a pitty angel, but apparently he's the one who's been in tiezz with Crowley."
Aziraphale woke up on the floor. He looked at the demon standing in front of him. Beelzebub was a demon Crowley had mentioned often. Aziraphale knew Crowley was terrified of Beelzebub, and he could see why.
Demons with knives aren't so fun. Beelzebub had lots of them. A whole selection actually. They never had a good chance to try all of them out. They were saving the chance for something special. This angel was very special.
They dug each dagger deep into the angel's flesh. They cut his wings off. When they were finished Aziraphale was a bloody mess all over the floor. He was hardly breathing, not far from dying. Beelzebub wasn't done with him, they wanted to watch him suffer.
Aziraphale bled on the floor for hours. Beelzebub just stood there and watched with a smirk on their face. In the meantime, the demon Crowley was being bribed. The deal was his little angel friend alive, for his return to Hell, to work as a slave. Of course the deal was unfair. Beelzebub knew Aziraphale would die.
Crowley just wanted his angel back.
By the end of the night he was marching into Hell. He made the agreement. A week and then he's a slave.
He planned on trying to heal Aziraphale in any way possible. Times like these make him wish that he hadn't fallen. He knew he could have helped Aziraphale, only if he hadn't fallen.
All he could do was clean and cover Aziraphale's wounds. Unfortunately the angel had lost a lot of blood. It almost killed Crowley to see his best friend with sunken in eyes and a shallow breath.
Crowley held Aziraphale close. He knew that the angel was going to die soon. It was just a matter of when.
During the night Crowley would watch over Aziraphale. The angel would occasionally mutter inaudible things to Crowley. The way Aziraphale sounded hurt Crowley. It shattered his heart like thin glass.
Aziraphale knew that at least. He felt out of it, and absolutely miserable. As he bled more, the more confused he had become.
Now in all theory an angel shouldn't be able to bleed to death. While the body would discorporate, the angel itself would just go on home. This theory happens to be wrong. Aziraphale was very well on his way to dying. Dying is the shadow of creation after all, and at some point Aziraphale was created. One would think that Crowley would be able to use some kind of demonic miracle to revive Aziraphale, but that's just not how things work. Not for a demon and an angel.
At least there was a way to escape death, for Aziraphale at least. It wasn't exactly voluntary.
In the eleventh hour, of the second night, Crowley had felt Aziraphale's death coming. He couldn't let his best friend die. He loved him enough to let him live. He loved him enough to sacrifice himself for Aziraphale. After six thousand years Crowley was willing to take the body of the angel he loved so dearly.
It was that night that Crowley died in Aziraphale's body. Aziraphale was now stuck in Crowley's body. He softly looked down at his old body, which was now lifeless. By the morning it would fade away. Crowley was gone forever.
Throughout the night Aziraphale would question why Crowley would do something like that for him. Aziraphale didn't know how much Crowley loved him.
He didn't hear any of Crowley's quiet whimpers filled with soft words of love. He didn't hear the way Crowley's heart was rapidly beating when he found Aziraphale lying on the ground of Hell. He didn't hear the way Crowley had cried so many times before because he was scared to love Aziraphale. Hundreds of times Crowley had fell on his bed, tears running down his cheeks, because he couldn't battle the way he had to fight against his feelings because he loved an angel so very much.
Crowley also considered himself to be a bad thing in the world. The world needed more angels, and less demons. If he could let one demon go on, the world would be that much better of a place. Crowley may have been a demon, but he cared enough to dismiss the fact that he was made to do the wrong thing.
Somewhere in with his final memories he was questioning if he did do the wrong thing in that situation. He hoped not. He just hoped that his angel would be okay.
It was the fourth day in Hell when Aziraphale was locked in a jail cell. He cried about how un-okay he was that day. He was still stuck in Crowley's body, in the middle of Hell. Aziraphale, an angel, wasn't made to do the work of a demon. It felt absolutely wrong and unnatural. It was absolutely wrong and unnatural.
The smell of sulfur burned Aziraphale's lungs. It was painful, and he was made to mine it. He was a slave now. He was taking Crowley's place. He couldn't imagine what this would have been like for Crowley.
The way that the chains burnt his wrists was almost intolerable. The way that wips struck his back and left nasty red marks made him cry. The fact that he had to act as Crowley, and behave like a proper demon hurt even worse.
It made him realize that when Crowley never acted like a proper demon. Not around Aziraphale at least, and they did spend quite a bit of time together. It was after Aziraphale's fourth whipping that he realized what Crowley meant by "sauntering vaguely downwards" instead of falling like the rest of them.
Crowley wasn't like the rest. Aziraphale would have gave the world to have Crowley back. His very own demon. A kind, beautiful demon. A demon that Aziraphale did truly love. The angel never got the chance to confess his love for Crowley. He thought that they had longer together. He thought that they had forever. He really did believe this.
It was Aziraphale sobbing that got him caught as an angel. Of course he stood trial. It was a proper trail. The angels had gave a go ahead for Aziraphale's execution.
At this point Crowley would have begged Aziraphale to run. He would have saved Aziraphale. He would have done anything to assure Aziraphale's safety.
But Crowley was dead, and he couldn't protect Aziraphale. If he were alive he would have done everything in his power to stop Aziraphale from being led into the fire. There was nothing to stop Aziraphale, unfortunately.
Dying did deeply upset Aziraphale. He didn't want to die. He didn't want Crowley to have died either. He knew that he could have saved Crowley if he had just did something differently. Unfortunately time rolls forward, not backward, and there was no way to get Crowley back now. To Aziraphale, a world without Crowley, wasn't a world at all.
So when the moment came, he took a deep breath, softly whispered, "I'm coming, Crowley," and stepped into the fire.
A crowd of cheering demons screamed as a particular angel, and a particular demon had been destroyed for good. The fire cracked and popped as the final remains of Aziraphale burnt to pieces.
This was how the angel had decided to go down. He died because he couldn't stand a life without a demon. That only happened because a demon decided an angel needed life.
If Crowley had been able to know all this, he would have decided that switching bodies with Aziraphale was a good and bad choice either way. Something about it seemed so wrong it was right. It was the kind of beautiful thing that love does to you.
A/N:urMumLikesMalfoy is this sad enough? I said I was planning something sad and I really meant it.