Crowley is an angel who does not Fall so much as Stride Furiously Downward. She does not get caught up with the wrong crowd; she simply lives too many millennia under His thumb, and, anyway, the shoes are better in Hell.

Do yourself a favor: listen, when the heavens open. Come now, sweetheart; did you think the patriarchy was something new?

Aziraphale would have missed (or perhaps deliberately ignored) the nuance of together, but Crowley was a man-shaped being of the world, and knew what was being asked. "We've been around since -- for a while," he said. "But it's not like that."

They say Man was made in God's image, and that's not wrong, exactly, except for how it's all wrong, except for how it's always been wrong, because Man was made in God's image, that first time, but man, lowercase, widespread, always evolving into something worse, man was made in the image of man, who was made in the image of Man, who spent too much time gorging himself on apples to remember much about whose image it was he was made in.

Crowley stopped by Sodom once, back when it was just starting to develop from a standing collection of tents to something more permanent involving actual stone, and reported back Below that it was a nice place with good fertile ground around it, and the sort of enthusiasm for sin and vice that ought to be encouraged.

"No. I mean, yes. We were assigned to Ducks."

Crowley tipped the plastic bag full of water into the bowl and watched with some satisfaction as the goldfish slid out. It made a tiny plunck as it hit the water, righted itself, and came face to face with another fish, known as The Great White Bastard, Jaws of Steaming Hot Death, Tour Guide of the River Styx, Gilled Terror, and Your Ass Between My Teeth.

These people were perhaps on his side. Theoretically. And they'd killed Crowley. That wasn't theoretical. His hands had begun to shake, he noticed.

"Wow. I just never thought, er, that you would." He picked distractedly at the loose threads on the shabby armchair. "Was it, er? Did you? With a human?"

"Did the Mayor send you? Just deliver your message and get out."

"Mistletoe," Aziraphale said from the top of the stepladder. "It's not so easy to get these days, but Christmas traditions are Christmas traditions." He looked at Crowley's face and sniggered. "Don't worry, you're not my type."

There's a hissing behind him, and Aziraphale knows it isn't Crowley.

Slow death by dehydration, or slow death by chemical poisoning? Decisions, decisions.

Of course, it was bound to happen sooner or later, and a certain pair of representatives from either side of the celestial aisle had worked hard for centuries to make sure it was much, much later.

Aziraphale was just going to have to "give him an earful". As it were. He really needed to learn more about human slang.

"I said, you KNOW THAT YOU LIVE IN A TIME OF SIN!"

He’s been human for thousands of years; it becomes unconscious eventually, the tensing of certain muscles. And right now Crowley’s shoulders, usually relaxed to the point of exaggeration, are stiff and clenched. Something is Up.

History has a funny way of repeating itself. A really, really funny way of repeating itself.