DISCLAIMER: Good Omens is the property of persons who are not myself. This is a fanfiction site; I think it would be safe to presume that this is fanfiction.
A/N: Thanks as always to everyone who is reading and following. Believe me when I say that every single one of you are absolutely appreciated and your support is coming at a time when I can really use those little feel-good pitter patters of the heart :)
Good Omens-ervation of the day: When Aziraphale and Crowley were reporting into Heaven and Hell in episode one, they entered the Broadgate Tower lobby at the same time. The. Same. TIME.
It's like; guys, HELLO? If you don't want your superiors catching on that you're 'fraternizing' with one another, maybe don't enter the building at the exact same moment. "Oh, it's a wonder Crowley hasn't spotted you, yet." SPOTTED HIM? Crowley probably gave him a LIFT to the bloody building and then they went out to get a drink afterwards. (Rolls eyes)
Honestly, I think it says a lot more about the morbid stupidity of their superiors than it does Aziraphale and Crowley.
Yet another update for you, gentle readers. I'm sorry this subdivision process isn't going quite as quickly as I had hoped. Lots of RL stuff going on at the moment and there is, actually, a bit more editing required with this than I expected. I promise I will get there as quickly as I can!
~X~
~Monday, April 8th - 2019~
The Grange Estate Nursing Home
Nine months to the Apex...
Crowley finished work at 8:35pm. He'd been there nine hours and might have left early if not for an incident having occurred with a client falling in the bathroom whilst attempting to use the toilet. He'd been taken into hospital for routine observation and Crowley had been held up pecking out an incident report.
Paperwork. One of the things he most definitely did not miss about the old job.
He was very tired and very ornery. He hadn't had a chance to really eat anything either and his human stomach felt tight with hunger pains. His chest hurt with thoughts of Aziraphale. His brain swirled with memories of the kiss they had shared.
What had he been thinking? If subtle insinuations slipped slyly into surreptitious place over the passing of sixty centuries was going too fast, than all but shoving his tongue into the angel's gob was equivalent to jamming the blessed thing into overdrive!
What was quite worse however, was that Aziraphale had not merely tolerated it. Which was what Crowley had been setting himself up to expect.
The angel had started to respond. Crowley had felt it. Felt it in the more obvious gestures of the hand upon his face, the accommodating parting of Aziraphale's lips. In more subtle variations, too. The sinking of each of his muscles, the slight push forwards, that ever so tiny dart of air inward...
Oh, I would have had you then. Have you have me, one or the other.
He'd never felt so ravenous. It was a hunger he had never before understood. Not when it came to food, anyway.
Food was fine. Excellent at times. You picked away at it. It passed over your tongue, gave you a transient, temporary experience of satisfaction and pleasure. Passed on through. Not quite so elegant from then on out.
But a kiss... a kiss was ever the more delicious than anything else what had graced his lips in all his six thousand years on earth.
It was Aziraphale's kiss and his taste was sweet.
Crowley was, in near direct juxtaposition to how Aziraphale supposed him to have been, every bit as confused as was the angel. He was frightened, to boot.
Frightened of himself.
There was so little free will in Hell, as there had been in Heaven. And the transformative sulphur possessed its own distinct set of inherent directives. Of drives. A blueprint which became ever so succinctly a part of a demon's structure as was the DNA code of a human being. Certain behaviours, emotions, reactions and learned and innate responses alike were integrated within this topography.
Demon's exalted in sin. In deceit. In temptation.
Crowley was especially adept at temptation. It was pretty much considered to be his raison d'etre in times past.
This, quite so much as Aziraphale's struggles against the abstinent template what composed his own angelic soul, was to wit what Crowley struggled to pull apart and discern the differences of.
Was this desire he was feeling a largely falsified sensation? A facet of a demon's innate drive to subvert and capitalize the nature of innocence? To corrupt? To indeed devour; much as he devoured the sight of Aziraphale taking such pleasure in partaking of a delicious meal most night after night?
Being alone. It... might not be a choice. It might indeed be something to which Crowley would be required to accustom himself.
Better that then allowing his jaws to unhinge. Swallowing alive the very person he cared for most in all the world. With no true insight as to whether this want was truly his alone, or something base and instinctual and entirely demonic.
He was not however alone that particular evening.
The sight of two very familiar demons leaning and perching apiece upon the bonnet of his Bentley came as a most unwelcome gift. He would prefer the loneliness, far more than the company of a pair of nether dwelling degenerates who would sooner see him reduced to blithering nothingness in a tub of Holy Water.
They hadn't yet caught wind of him. This was due, in no small part, to Crowley having holed up behind one of the large, decorative shrubs bordering the nursing homes gate. Resolutely finishing the cigarette he'd lit the moment he stepped snakeskin booted foot out the front door.
The breeze was in his favour. It was a still night and the air was blowing towards him. He'd caught Hastur's distinctive scent almost immediately, though he was quite certain even a human wouldn't need much help in this regard. That was one distinctly whiffy demon.
"Shit, shit, shit." He quietly cursed, taking yet another drag from the dart and flicking ash beneath the hedgerow. A vehement snort proclaimed itself from somewhere beneath the tangled roots of the topiary, suggested he had likely upset another otherwise circumspect hedgehog going about their prickly business. "What do they want? Why now?"
It was a conundrum, to be certain. Crowley wasn't a fighter. Never had been. There were much cleverer ways to subvert conflict than to directly engage in it. He had in fact devoted a great deal of his six thousand years to systematically avoiding conflict. Much like a snake he would turn tail at the first sign of the ground trembling and bite only when backed into a corner.
There was however a more pressing matter at hand. One of which Crowley's racing, panicky mind lit upon with such sharpness of clarity that it voided much of the inert concern he had otherwise been hogging for himself.
If the demons had come for him, had the angels in turn come for Aziraphale?
This was a thought terrifying enough for him to conclude that hunkering in a bush for the next however so many hours was just not going to cut the mustard. He needed to get right on back into town as though all the demons of Hell were, appropriately enough, alit to the seams of his leather trousers.
And he wasn't about to go leaving his Bentley in the work car park. Where he went, so too did his car. All for one and one for all, and all that.
Crowley's quick mind stitched together something of a patchwork plan. It wasn't the most stylish of plans, but it would do. More to the point, it would serve its purpose and be ever so inherently satisfying to boot.
He snapped the fingers of the hand currently not occupied with the dwindling stub of his fag. The Bentley's engine roared to life, the lights snapping on and illuminating the hedgerow in front of it.
The demons had barely a moment to acknowledge that something was happening before, with a secondary snap of his fingers, Crowley sent the car screaming into reverse, resulting in Lord Beelzebub tumbling off of the bonnet and onto the road. (Oh yes. That in itself was satisfying enough to warrant the lighting of another smoke).
The car turned sharply, rocketed up to alongside the gate and swung its passenger side door open. Crowley flicked aside his expired filter, diving in through the open door and commando rolling into the drivers seat.
He flung his middle finger out through the window, tossed the crumpled ball of his work uniform into the backseat (Aziraphale would have had a field day of disgust at this show of garment related disrespect) and stapled the accelerator to the floor; speeding off out of the car park with a generous spritzing of gravel casting a wave over the pair of demons that were currently floundering about on the ground like a couple of blow flies on their backs.
"Get on after him, Hazztur." Beelzebub said, with far more composure then one might expect from a venerate being whom had been so inelegantly turfed onto the tarmac. Hastur, shaking gravel from his badly manifested weave of straw like hair, did something he never thought himself capable of doing. Disobeying a directive from his far the higher ranking and ever more deadly as a result, superior.
"Get on-? This bastards immune to holy water! I saw what he did to Ligur, I'm not jumping in a car with him! I discorporated the last time!"
"Fine." Beelzebub grunted and within a moment had snapped out of sight with a scent not dissimilar to that of a cap gun going off.
Meanwhile, in a Bentley now approximately three streets away, the Greatest Hits of Queen was blaring (such was the norm) and the demon Crowley was feeling particularly pleased with himself. He was also attempting to drive one handed, whilst thumbing Aziraphale's mobile number with the other. The attempt was summarily shot to shit, by the appearance of Lord Beelzebub popping into existence in the passenger seat with an expression akin to someone who might have been stuck doing petty cash collation for the majority of a sunny Friday afternoon.
"Crowley." They said, in a voice of such flattened affect you would hardly have expected it to have roused any sort of alarm in return. Crowley to the contrary was extremely alarmed, finding Beelzebub's stowing away to lack quite the charm that Aziraphale's had done a few days earlier.
Once upon a time, Crowley might indeed have maintained a great deal of smarmy respect so far as the lord of Hell was concerned. These were not those times. He was no longer in hells employ. He owed no loyalty, no allegiance. And certainly not so much as anything resembling a modicum of civility.
Crowley snapped his fingers and the passenger side door blew open. In the same gesture, he twisted about his seat, bringing his knee up to his chest and lashing out with his left foot as hard as he could, striking the other demon square in the chest. The momentum might have driven the petite form of Lord Beelzebub right out onto the road, had they not snared the edges of the door with their fingers and waylaid their imminent ejection at the very last moment.
"What the heaven are you DOING, you stupid idiot?!" They yelled, losing their cool for one of the very few times they had ever, so far as recorded history would suggest, done so. They pulled themselves back into the vehicle, encountering increased levels of resistance in the process. Crowley was a fairly flexible creature and he was putting this manoeuvrability to good use, having half twisted in his seat to employ the use of both legs now, keeping the accelerator pinned to the floor by pure force of imagination alone.
He peddled them wildly, as though he were riding an invisible bicycle, landing repeated strikes against Beelzebub's face, chest, arms and stomach. It resembled a couple of liquorice straps being whacked about by a group of kids doing jump rope in the schoolyard; such as you might have found in the days before mobile phones, drones and cyber bullying made the world a much better place for the likes of growing minds.
"Get the fuck out of my car you maggot munching, shit-sniffing, harpy from Hell!" Crowley yelled, grunting as one of Beelzebub's hands managed to squeeze through his onslaught and grab a hold on the front of his shirt. The car was fairly much hugging the curb now, the hubcaps shearing sparks all over the likes of frightened pedestrians and idling house cats alike. He barely avoided hitting a parked car, keeping the open door of the Bentley from being snapped off at the last moment. Thank... someone for his demonic reflexes or this would be even more of a ridiculous clean up.
"I want to talk, would you SSZTOP, for the love of all that'z unholy?!"
Crowley took one hand off of the wheel and started slapping at Beelzebub's diminutive fist, attempting in rather poor fashion to dislodge it from his person. A couple of buttons popped free of his shirt and he felt the night air alight to far more of his chest than even he was comfortable having on display.
From the corner of his eye, he saw through the windscreen the great oak which had sprouted from the grass of the curb some hundred or so years past. It might have been lit in a holy light, such was its convenient appearance but there was, of course, nothing holy to be discerned in this instance. Divine provenance or not, it was a convenience and one of which he was all too happy to take advantage of.
"Go hug a tree." He said, bringing both knees up against his chest and executing some lumberly variant of a donkey kick, which otherwise had the intended effect he'd been going for.
Beelzebub was hurled spectacularly from the open door of the Bentley, slamming into the oak and all but wrapping themselves about the trunk with rib cracking complicity. Crowley snapped his fingers to bring the Bentley's door shut, twisted back into a regulation drivers position and pawed about on the floor near his feet. He found the phone, realised that the call he had been making prior to Lord Beelzebub's having humped barge, had actually gone through.
He set it to speaker.
Sounds of things crashing, thumping and lots of very incensed yelling. He recognised Aziraphale's voice. There were others as well. One more the distinct for how it was ever so perfectly burned into the nodes of Crowley's preternatural memory.
Gabriel. No mistaking that slimy, seersucker tone.
Crowley jammed his foot hard to the accelerator. There was no time to waste. And that was just taking into account the two or so police cars he needed to shake first.
~X~
~Monday, April 8th - 2019~
London, Soho...
After piling Alice into a taxi and handsomely extolling the driver all the required funds to see her safely home, Aziraphale, sans the cash he might well have used to have taken a taxi in the opposite direction, was required instead to catch a bus back to the bookshop.
It wasn't so bad. It wasn't as though he was unaccustomed to taking the bus, after all. The driver was a great deal more conscientious than Crowley concerns safety. He did however miss the comfort of the Bentley. The seats were softer. And he had Crowley's company for another.
Aziraphale might usually have read a book, or caught up on the world's happenings in the newspaper; should he have either in his possession. Done a crossword or two. Being that he had just come from dinner, he of course hadn't bothered with carting such things along with him. It might have appeared rude to have done so. Instead, he used his time in an otherwise productive, through contrarily circulatory, inconclusive manner, to muddle over what Alice had told him during dinner.
About Crowley.
He was ever so worried as to how the demon was coping; or rather NOT coping it would seem. He wondered most of all about the reasons as to why Crowley felt he needed to maintain space between them.
He thought a very great deal about what Alice had said about Crowley feeling as though Aziraphale were ashamed of him.
It was heartbreaking, this particular thought. For Aziraphale might have felt any number of things where Crowley was concerned, but shame was most definitely not a one of them. Not in so far as being ashamed applied.
Aziraphale did in fact feel ever so proud of him. Especially as of late. Crowley was a clever, funny, caring and wonderfully kind person, despite what protests he might have made to the contrary. He worked hard. He was wise and thoughtful and far more courageous than he, Aziraphale, could ever hope to be.
His thoughts drifted (as they so often did these days) to the kiss.
He felt in turn that subtle stirring of desire flutter through his chest. The tightening which found space in the gnawing gap in what might otherwise have been a full and contentedly round and protruding stomach.
And once again, those ever present celestial spikes striking up into his mind; like having your fingertip burned for letting it to the edges of a hotplate.
It was immensely frustrating. He wanted to think about the kiss. He wanted to work through it, to explore his own desires concerning it.
He missed his stop; which would have to have been a first. It wasn't a long walk back. He cut his losses, muddling a few additional considerations over in the meantime. Barely missed being hit by cars whilst trailing across the road, distracted by all the tangled avenues which currently wove their befuddling pathways through the recesses of his human shaped skull.
What did the kiss entail? What sort of dynamic did Crowley envision their relationship taking on? Humans who kissed one another habitually developed a new means of interacting with one another. They held hands. They embraced. They kissed; sometimes for a very long while. They ran their hands all over one another, sometimes across body parts that were not typically encountered between the likes of cut and dry friends.
They made love.
This was the one of which Aziraphale found most difficult to imagine accommodating naturally, if his and Crowley's relationship were to integrate a... physical component.
He quite liked the idea of holding hands. It seemed very warm and loving. As did the embrace. He felt a little more uncertain concerns the kissing and touching, for this encompassed a sexual element of which the angel was so far the rather unaccustomed to. But he HAD enjoyed the kiss, despite his having some natural reservations given his angelic status.
But making love.
One would be quite wrong to assume that Aziraphale had no such idea as to how these things worked. He'd been around a long time. He'd read many a book. He'd lived through the time of Caligula, which was a learning experience in and of itself. He knew how sex worked between men and women and those of the same sex alike.
And it was a quite wrongly perpetuated myth that homosexuality was considered to be sinful. God could not give two twaddles as to who you slept with, so long as the act was one of informed consent and did not incorporate the likes of children or animals. God wouldn't even care if a person jumped a lawn chair, if the urge so seized them. So long as the lawn chair was appropriately and consensually accommodating where said jumping was concerned, of course.
Besides, it wasn't as though they were in fact men. Not in so far as their preternatural spirits were concerned. But their bodies both currently were. And that was par the course the form that sex would take for them if they were to engage in the act. The ways in which two human males might initiate physical intimacy.
There could be no means by which to be physically closer.
A thought that was every bit as replete with desire so much as it was anchored by angelic consternations.
Why did the thought of making love with someone to whom he clearly retained extraordinarily feelings of reverence and adoration make him feel somehow... cheap? As though he would be degrading both himself and Crowley in doing so?
It was true that sex was everywhere. The human race had quite a way of wringing the romance out of what Aziraphale viewed as a primarily loving, sacred act and commercialising it much as you might a new feminine hygiene product. Or worse, some sort of caffeinated energy drink.
It all seemed very nice in the books he had read. Especially the books from the days preceding the twentieth century; when it had all become a little bit tawdry. Sex had a sort of piquancy and mysteriousness back then. Now you were lucky if you had but a day when you were not bombarded in some way shape or form by someone's genitalia being all but shoved in your face with an offhand disclaimer concerning subsidiary exceptions to any most sale items not found within the greater London area slapped upon their right buttock.
To say nothing of making love with a demon. They had swapped bodies without any observable negative side effects but what would that level of intimacy truly entail? Would they in fact explode if they were to attempt intercourse?
Aziraphale was not quite so pure that he was immune to the double meaning of this internal statement and spent rather so long blushing in the company of himself, that he did in fact breeze right on by the bookshop. It was the ringing of his mobile phone what brought him back to reality. He turned most of his coat pockets inside out before locating the tiny device in the left hand interior compartment. His heart slammed in his chest when he saw Crowley's name and face appear on the screen (Crowley had of course taken the selfie himself) and almost fumbled the phone out of his hand in his rush to answer it.
"Yes, hello. Crowley?" His enthusiasm sputtered to a stalling grind at the sounds which erupted now from the speaker of the phone. Not Crowley's expected terse reply to his (admittedly) over eager greeting but what was distinctly the strains of Queen (the Bentley's ever eternal soundtrack) a whole lot of yelling and the exchange of physical blows.
-Shooting star streaking through the sky, like a tiger- "of my car, you-" (crack, smack, biffo) - like lady Godiva, I'm gonna go, go, go- "- harpy from Hell!"
And another voice. A horrifyingly familiar voice which struck cold fear into Aziraphale's belly.
"- jussztt want to talk-" I'm burnin through the sky, yeah - "-stupid bastard!"
Beelzebub. Lord of both flies and infernal regions alike. Currently installed head of Hell. The most dangerous demon in existence.
There with Crowley; the most approachable and least dangerous demon in existence.
"Crowley!" Aziraphale yelled, his outburst drawing the attention of a few passers-by, some of whom glanced between their respective companions in a silent question as to whether they ought do something beyond staring. (And or filming. A very millennial response, one might say). Aziraphale was not the least aware of them. "Leave him alone, you- you-" he felt those familiar barbs, warning him not to swear. They quite nearly worked. "- bloody... bounder!!"
There came a sharp, rather unexpected beeping sound in his ear. He checked the screen. Of all the stupid... he'd forgotten to charge the phone again. The battery was about to go flat.
Angelically cursing, heart pounding in his chest, Aziraphale rattled in his pocket for his keys and felt the left hand door of the shop sway inwards as he went towards it. He was so panicked he thought nothing of it in that moment and simply barrelled on through, spearheading for the study desk in which he kept his phone charger.
The Archangel Gabriel's toothy smile was waiting for him centre room, bracketed to one side by the Seraphim Sandalphon's usual solemn expression opined by upturned nose and an upper lip tucked so tight it might have resembled an army privates fitted sheets.
"Hi. Hope you don't mind but we let ourselves-"
He got no further than this before Aziraphale, responding with a high pitched shriek reminiscent of a tea kettle, hurled off and pitched the largest book he could lay his hands to. (Ever so astute person's might recognize it as being the very same book what Gabriel had picked up when meeting with Aziraphale concerns the coming of the Apocalypse less than a year earlier). It thumped bodily into Gabriel's broad chest, dropping to the floor between his smartly booted feet.
"We just want to-"
Aziraphale had no interest in whatever it was that Gabriel wanted. For it was nothing nice, surely. These were the very same angels who had attempted to execute him (or rather Crowley posing as him) by Hellfire. The very fact that they'd had the cheek to just swan on into his home after everything that had happened, to invite themselves in, to stand there with those looks on their faces as though they had quite every right to impose upon the one place in the world that was his and his alone, set something to churning in Aziraphale's effervescent blood.
He would not have it.
Once he might have simpered at their boots but those were days well and truly at his back. He had kept a civil tongue in the past, for he was a civil creature. There was likely no more a gentle, temperate being in all the world. Even the virtues of a Kindness and Temperance would have a run for their money where Aziraphale was concerned.
But his sanctuary had been invaded.
Crowley was in trouble.
And this was quite enough to push what was an otherwise unflappable angel into a well rather flappable state.
~X~
A/N: Thanks as always everyone for joining me on this bat-shit crazy little journey :) If you have any questions or comments to make about the piece, please feel free to ask! I also, of course, accept concrit.
See you in the next update, and as always, with all my infernal love,
~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo