Author's Note: Hello from Oxford! This past week or so has been absolute paradise, as I've been enjoying all that England has to offer. But yesterday on a bus-ride back from Canterbury, I came up with an idea for a new fic!

I'm experimenting with my style a bit; this story is almost completely devoid of dialogue. And because I haven't been giving dear Azi enough love in my fics so far, this first part of the story stars him and his first years on Earth! Like I said, it's experimental; it focuses less on an actual plot and more on an analysis of Aziraphale.

I'm already working on Part Two, so expect it fairly soon; it will feature Crowley as well, but still from the angel's point of view.

Please feel free to leave a review, all comments are very much appreciated! Whether you review or not, I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Angels are not supposed to feel lonely.

Not only is it not proper, it simply never comes across their ethereal minds that loneliness might be something they are capable of experiencing. In Heaven they bask eternally in the Presence, their beings mingling with each other and with that ineffable Light, never isolated, never cut off from the reassuring company of a million brothers and sisters.

But Aziraphale had been cut off from his brethren for quite some time now.

He had a body: the entirety of his considerable angelic might, the full intensity of his heavenly aura, was squeezed into one tiny corporeal form.

He remembered that first moment on Earth, after he'd been assigned to the Eastern Gate. He'd been standing (well, not literally standing, more like...floating, or simply Being...there are no human descriptions to fit the action his purely spiritual essence was performing) before the glorious Throne, accepting his commission—and then suddenly he'd been standing on two physical feet, the entirety of his essence compressed into one dense space.

After a timeless expanse of nothing but spiritual sensations in Heaven, suddenly he and the world around him were solid. It was, to make a gross understatement, absolutely overwhelming.

Imagine your body—skin, bones, and all—being crammed into a bottle the size of a pecan shell. Imagine also that you have been blind, deaf, and mute your whole life, that the nerves beneath your skin have never before been able to process feeling, so that your entire world has been composed of wordless thoughts wafting aimlessly through your mind. And imagine that suddenly, from within that ludicrously minuscule little bottle, sight, sound, and sensation are suddenly given to you, with light streaming mercilessly in and noises roaring all about and a gale of wind tearing about your skin. ...You cannot possibly, of course, properly imagine such a thing—and even if you could, it is a woefully inadequate analogy to what Aziraphale felt as flesh encompassed his ethereal form for the first time.

He reeled, tumbling backwards into the soft grass of Eden at the assault on his newly-acquired senses. His essence was bombarded from all directions by things his mind couldn't even begin to describe to itself.

He lay there for a long, long while—hours, if he'd had a strong enough grip on time yet to process them as they slipped by. The sun had set and an impossible number of stars—so that there was more white light than empty blackness in the sky—had appeared with a bright sliver of silvery moon high above him when he stirred at last.

Gingerly, he opened the eyes he'd kept firmly shut (the light forcing its way past closed lids had been overpowering enough without the addition of vision) and from where he lay on his back he stared awe-struck at the brilliant nighttime sky. After a while he managed to work out how to move, and clumsily sat himself up.

They didn't feel like extensions of himself, his limbs—not yet. They were cumbersome things, attached to his confining shell of a body. But once he'd had time to adjust, he found that the messages his flesh was sending to his new brain were really very pleasant—"breeze" was a word that flashed into his mind at the whispering feeling breathing softly over him, and "grass" for the "green" stuff poking gently at his bare skin from the "ground" below him. Words. They unobtrusively presented themselves to his thoughts as the need arose for each of them. He marveled.

Sky, rock, tree, stream. High, hard, tall, wet. Beautiful.

"Reflection" was the word for the picture the stream made as he leaned over it. "Face": tree-colour, earth-colour—oh, "brown"! He smiled; "lips" his brain informed him, and his smile grew, so that "teeth"—star-shiny, moon-white—was the next word to come to him. "Hair": this was darker-than-brown, this was like the spaces between the stars. He reached up and touched his hair with awkward hands, feeling its smoothness, how strands of it drew apart around his fingers. And "eyes"—he liked those, he liked them very much, glittering softly in the starlight. They reminded him of the water they were reflected in, only they shone with a darker hue. He shut them experimentally—no more pictures entering his brain. He opened them again—river, trees, and sky all reappeared.

"Wings" were the two feathery appendages springing from his back. They felt Right, more connected to his angelic essence than his bumbling arms and ungainly legs. He fluttered them experimentally, enjoying the gentle radiance they seemed to emit of their own accord, stark against his dark skin.

A glint caught his eye in the dimness, a shimmer like shadow, as a long thin shape moved lithely through the grass. Its onyx scales glittered each time the starlight caught them.

"Serpent," said his brain. Beautiful.

All the while, as he practiced with his new form and investigated his new world, Aziraphale could still feel the tug of his siblings, their beings still mingling with his own as they did in Heaven. He attempted to send images and words back through the link to share with them, but was only met with flickers of confusion. He gave up.

As the months, and then the years, passed, his memories of Heaven faded. The glories and tranquil bliss of that realm became like a dream, recalled fondly but pushed into the background by the more immediate Present. He grew accustomed to his vessel, his flesh as comfortable to him as his angelic spirit.

He wept bitterly one day, perhaps a decade later, when he realized he could scarcely feel the pull of all the essences of his brothers and sisters—what had been a strong bond had grown faint. Flashes of their bliss pulsed weakly along the link, but he hardly noticed them unless he concentrated. He was no longer part of the web, but a loose thread hanging off it, occasionally receiving a message down the line but not feeling every sway of the whole as he once had.

But he did not mourn for long—Earth kept him busy and there were always new sights, new sounds, new sensations to be had.

After the horribly botched incident with the Tree and the flaming sword, his last message from Above had been to assign him as Heaven's field agent. He was to keep an eye on the humans as they struggled through a world against them in so many ways—to guide them when necessary and attempt to steer them from sin, and above all to thwart the wiles of Hell's field agent, a pesky demon named Crawly whom he'd met in the Garden that while ago.

They'd had a more-or-less civil conversation there, he recalled, as the first rain released cold droplets over Eden, and the fellow hadn't seemed too horrible—for one of the Fallen, that was. But orders were orders, and Crawly was certainly a threat to the humans in Aziraphale's charge. So whenever he ran into the demon, thwart he did.

During those first few decades on Earth, Aziraphale interacted closely with the humans, and freely revealed his otherworldliness to them. Some he came to care for specially. With one little girl—one of Seth's daughters, a sprightly, inquisitive little thing—he'd spent many a merry afternoon in the fields, tending to the livestock and weaving flowers into crowns for their heads and fragrant wreaths for their necks. She loved to run her slim little fingers through his feathers, and sometimes, when she was very well-behaved, he even took her on short rides, holding her in his arms and soaring no more than a few feet above the earth as she giggled and shrieked in delight.

Then one day, only just on the cusp of womanhood, she'd died. She'd wandered to the river to bathe all alone when the water was high. They hadn't found her body, washed up on the banks, for several hours after it was discovered she was missing.

Grief, greater than he'd felt when he'd noticed his weakening bond to his brethren, flooded his body like the water she'd drowned in. Heaven's static bliss seemed hollow in the face of such anguish. He forgot joy, he forgot ineffability, he flew off to a mountain's peak and hid there with his tears and his broken heart. "Broken," that was the word for what he felt.

He didn't try to get so close to any one person after that. He watched from afar as the human race multiplied like rabbits and spread out across the land—always seeking, always hoping, always dreaming, searching for a better life and yearning for something they didn't themselves understand.

It wasn't until centuries had passed that he noticed a small, prodding feeling growing slowly deep inside him. It took ages to find a name for it, but at last the word came: "loneliness." He was…lonely.

Angels are not supposed to feel lonely. Solitude does not exist in Heaven. No part is isolated from the Whole. Loneliness is for the Fallen, severed from the Grace of God, a shameful and despairing emotion…yet Aziraphale could not deny what he felt.

Earth possesses many wonders with which to beguile and delight a visiting angel, but one thing it cannot provide: solid companionship. Surrounded by nature's beauty and humankind's inventiveness, Aziraphale lacked but one thing—someone with whom he could share it.

Just a quick end-note: if you noticed that previously my version of Aziraphale has been blond and lighter-skinned, the reason he's darker here is that in my head-canon, each time Azi is discorporated, Heaven assigns him a new body that fits the coming era and the location they want him to focus on next. So here, since Eden is (using the Bible as my source) in the Middle East, his first body has Middle Eastern features. Just in case you were wondering.