Falling.

The ultimate disgrace, to be cast out of Heaven, to be thrown from the Gates into the empty air below.

To have your wings burn black, the flames engulfing you, feathers turning to char, skin blistered and bloody.

To have to navigate Hell alone, as a newborn demon, your lungs burning with each inhale of sulphur, every angelic instinct in your formerly celestial body screaming that this is wrong.

Time held no meaning as you clawed your way up from the pits of the earth to the mortal realm above. You are changed past recognition.

Your flowing white locks are now the color of dull rust, your skin marred and ruptured from the sheer amount of damage you took during your Fall. Your eyes, once a sweet, soulful amber, are now a sickly dun-yellow with slitted pupils. You’re a fledgling demon.

Every fiber of your being aches, but worse is the grief that claws open your concaved chest.

Your mother, your God, abandoned you. And that is a pain that will never leave. She tossed you aside like a scrap of trash, She, who you had been so devoted to and loved so dearly.

Were you not once her favorite young angel, still practically a child? Only a few hundred years old. Not even having lived long enough to have seen the Romans or the Dark Ages, for pity’s sake!

But She twisted her Divine Plan and left you for dead anyway.

And now you are nothing. Haunted by your shame and by a bone-deep longing for what you once had, for the home you had adored. Heaven.

There will never be a place for you there now. Any Angel who sees you will likely kill you on sight.

And so you lurk in the alleys. Starving, but too deep in despair to eat. Weak and fading, but too miserable to care. Nearing discorporation from sheer neglect.

It’s nearing nightfall when he finds you. Anthony Crowley, the demon who fraternizes with the Angel Aziraphale.

He likely sensed you and then hunted you down. He stands over you, unblinking. He knows what you have gone through.

“You look like hell, kid.”