The Usual

by WolfieOnFF

This is where Aziraphale and Crowley find themselves. The after. The liminal, lost, nowhereland after. The "cleaning up after the party" after. The after that no one ever talks about. The one that hands you back your life and nothing else and says "my work here is done,' as if you could even begin to pick up where you left off. As if you could get straight back to The Usual...

1. Prologue

oOo
Prologue

...And They All Lived Happily Ever After

Twenty-four hours, from sunset to sunset. That was all that it took, in the end. Twenty-four hours to change everything. Twenty-four hours to get back to the usual. Twenty-four hours that started six-thousand years ago on the Walls of a Garden, and which still have yet to end in a hitherto undetermined location, possibly on the South Downs, if popular gossip is to be believed.

Granted, this might be slightly stretching the definition of " twenty-four hours ". Unfortunately, the universe has a stubborn tendency towards complication and chaos, and neither of those things fit very neatly into sensible boxes like "Twenty-Four Hours " or " Once Upon A Time..." or " ...And they all lived Happily Ever After ". Stories can be abridged, and motion pictures can be edited. Real life is rarely so obliging. It rarely has clear beginnings and neat endings.

But for our purposes, our story began with a boy, and his father, and his friends. It began with the end of the End of the World, and with an Angel and a Demon, lost and afraid and alone but for each other. It began with the realisation that the price of surviving is figuring out how to deal with having survived.

It began without a beginning, and it began with a sunset.