Author's notes: Queries? Advice? Too many footnotes (which I apologise for awful formatting of, seeing as how they don't seem to come out looking half so good on the site - just look for the big numbers that seem to have been randomly scattered throughout the text)? I won't know if you don't tell me!!! Feel free to clutter my inbox with review alerts, and I shall be forever grateful! It's my first go at a Pratchett-style fic, so please, all feedback is welcome; even if it's to tell me that you wish my OCs would burn and you're wondering where I've put the real Crowley and Aziraphale ;)
Disclaimer: Buggre-alle-this, it's not mine! Good Omens, and all the characters therein, belong to the higher beings Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett and the wonderful Pratchett Hat! :D
--
There comes a time, in every child's life, when innocence must at last retire to the top shelf1 of being, and gather dust, never to glimpse the light of day again. What happens next, however, is then very much dependent on the gender of the child itself: if they are male, the gaping hole in the mind is then filled with a little message saying 'The address for this consciousness has changed - if you are not redirected to Down Below in 5 seconds, there is something abnormal about this boy'. If the child is female, on the other hand, the emptiness left by the absence of innocence is almost immediately filled by the metamorphosis of what used to be naïve play with dress-up dolls, mini prams and easy-bake ovens into a vicious, one-track instinct to hunt down a husband and spawn a family2.
This loss of innocence is generally termed as puberty.
The second change that tends to occur at this point in a child's life is shoulder entities. These are more commonly termed 'shoulder angels', but this would be a gross lie, as only one half of the pairing is angelic, and generally the kind of advice they give could only be labelled as anything but.
Another common misconception is that shoulder entities are with you your whole life. This is also untrue: shoulder entities only appear to certain, very special people, and are with them from the strike of puberty onwards. These very special people tend to be termed 'Independents'3 by the opposing sides of Heaven and Hell, for the reason that they defy the simple logic that states that the vast majority of the world's population can be divided into good or bad, whether they have only a marginal, gnat's-whisker-inkling towards one or the other, or are far right of fascism. When the term 'Independent' is used, it is used rarely - hardly ever - as it applies only to the truly, truly, truly grey areas that exist in creation, and these are few and far between.
The job of the shoulder entity is to convince them to pick a side. And it is only given to those angels or demons who have disgraced themselves in the eyes of their superiors and are - because not only God, but also God's creations are possessing of a strange sense of humour - unfortunate enough to be offered redemption4. Like, por examplé, a certain pair who stuffed up Armageddon.
But in this day and age, there was more than one Independent in the game, and two of them had just hit puberty...
--
It was a dark and stormy night.
As opposed to other eventful nights that begin this sort of story which are always meant to be dark and stormy, but never actually are.
But it actually was this time, which was quite a bit of luck, because it meant that people were probably too preoccupied with the smug feeling they get when they're inside a nice, warm, centrally-heated house, and sniggering at individuals without umbrellas5 to notice that lightning had just struck the top of a hill over-looking Gundle's Farm.
Gundle's Farm is a tiny hamlet6 in Hampshire that has a higher population of pheasants and cows than people, and a place that when its name is given in reply to the question 'Whereabouts have you come from?', the inquisitor will put on a polite smile and nod, indicating that they are no better informed than they were three seconds ago.
The first strange thing about this occurrence was that there was nothing for lightning to strike atop that hill, so logically speaking, it shouldn't have happened at all. But it did.
And it did because God had a sense of humour.
A warped one at that, too, as the rather dishevelled figure now standing atop the hill had very little in the way of clothing to shield her from the rain. She shivered, and then directed a rather envious glower at a group of cows who were all staring at her from where they had clustered under a tree.
She was the second strange thing about this occurrence: to look at her, you could quite easily have been forgiven for thinking she was a young woman looking for the Miss World pageant, who had found her way to the middle of a squelchy arable field instead. Everything about her, from the luminous crown of her blonde head to the shimmering cloth wrapped about her person7, screamed 'angelic' in the same way that expensive, late and useless screams 'British Public Transport'.
The angel made a complex gesture, and conjured an ordinance survey map of Southern England out of thin air. Unfolding it, she traced along the gridlines with a slight crease between her perfectly shaped eyebrows, before giving an angry sigh and throwing her hands up in defeat. The map stayed hovering three feet, eight inches off the marshy ground.
"Mighty heaven - they demote you, and then they can't even get the drop-off point right." She muttered.
Trying to fold the map up again, she battled with it for a couple of minutes, and finally surrendered to simply scrunching it into a ball. Then, with another flash of blinding light, she and the ordinance survey map of Southern England had vanished from the hilltop; the third strange thing about this occurrence.
Honestly - you wait ages for a weird phenomena, and then three come along at once.
--
The manhole cover in the back alley made a horrible, cavernous rasping sound as it slid back over the grimy concrete. So did the long string of expletives that came out of the mouth of the person who'd moved it.
A head poked out of the hole; its burning eyes dilated at the sudden light from the streetlamps at the end of the alleyway, and she hissed like a cat as they8 flashed a hellish orange. Just as quickly, they returned to a dark brown.
"Redemption. Redemption." The woman growled as though the very idea were sheer idiocy, hauling herself out of the sewer. "What the bloody hell do those bastards think they're doing giving me Redemption?!"
Reaching up, she distractedly plucked a long, black slimy thing out of her long, dark hair which was plastered, wet and reeking, to her head. The thing writhed in the pinch her nails for a moment as she considered it with some degree of surprise; then she tipped her head back and dropped it into her mouth. Wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, she climbed to her feet - to stand a good 5ft 9" tall, with a figure that an hourglass would kill for - and shook out her dripping locks.
A few streets away in Piccadilly, an inane little Pekingese called Mitzy - beloved of its owner, one doting Mrs McCowen - with large, doe-eyes devoid of any kind of intelligent and a little topknot tied with a pink bow fountaining out of the top of its head like an oil spout, pricked an ear at the sound of showering droplets of sewage in an alley 78 metres hence, tipped its head back and gave out a profoundly lunatic, blood-curdling howl9.
The demon glowered darkly at the manhole cover, which promptly sizzled into a tiny pool of molten iron in a burst of brimstone and hellfire, and then paused to listen to the distant roar of London traffic. There was gridlock at Junction 4 outside of Heathrow, and a delay on flight 47 to Saskatchewan; 200 people were seethingly furious. The woman smiled. How lovely.
"Come on, angel." She muttered then, wincing slightly as she stared up at the sky once more. "Let's get this kid evil and done with."
--
"Shoulder entities." Crowley said.
Aziraphale looked at him helplessly. Anthony J. Crowley had that look on his face; the look that said 'this happens to other people. Now it's happening to me, and I am entitled to barrel with violent panache through every reaction that that entails'. And from nigh on six millennias' worth of experience, Aziraphale knew that there was absolutely no logical reasoning to be had when that look occurred. Nothing to do but sit tight, hold onto something fairly durable, and wait for the lid to blow. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.
"Shoulder. Entities." Crowley said again, emphasising each word between his teeth.
"Do - er - do be reasonable now, dear - huh - dear boy?" Aziraphale reasoned, spreading his hands with a weak smile; it was worth a try. "It was Armageddon, after all. You didn't think they were going to let us get away scot-free, did you?"
"We. Have been demoted. To. Shoulder entities." There was now a dull red glow emanating from behind Crowley's sunglasses. Aziraphale resisted the urge to shriek and climb the nearest bookcase. "I don't think, Aziraphale, that you are quite getting my drift here."
"Oh, for heavens' sake." Aziraphale snapped at the demon, suddenly losing his tentativeness. "Yes, we've been demoted to shoulder entities. Don't think that I'm happy about it, either; you're not the only one who's being downsized here!"
Normally Crowley would have been at least a little taken aback by this uncharacteristic mood swing on Aziraphale's part, had he not been in a raging bout of fury and self-sympathy. But, of course, he wasn't, because he was.
They hadn't even had the courtesy to do it properly, he thought bitterly. No. They, as per usual, just went and dropped the new, chilly knowledge straight into his brain; the worst possible way to find out they were giving you a chance to be considered for Redemption. At least if it had been some sort of letter or messenger, he might have had a chance to prepare himself...
Crowley gave out an angry noise that was half groan, half 'gnaaaaaaAAAARGFH!!!', and threw himself down in a nearby chair, sending a large cloud of dust whoofting up into the main room of Aziraphale's bookshop. Aziraphale leaned back against the front of the counter and gloomily examined his brown leather shoes which he had polished this morning.
"One soul." Crowley mumbled through his hands, so that it came out more like 'Wumf-ole'. "One soul. For the rest of...for the rest of bugger-all, that's what!" He sighed heavily, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Pick, pick, pick, pick, pick!" He held up an index finger at Aziraphale with a desperate expression. "One soul! Can you imagine? All those possibilities for exerting our talents...all those opportunities for mass-temptation..." He whistled. "Gone."
"I don't tempt." Aziraphale sniffed. "I-"
There was a long silence.
"Yes?" Crowley prompted.
Aziraphale struggled with it.
"Well - I help people to do the right thing."
"Ah." Crowley said, a little bitterly.
"I suppose we'd still be doing the same things, though, really..." Aziraphale mused.
Crowley lifted his head out of his palms again.
"What?" He asked wearily.
"Well, think about it." said Aziraphale. "It'll be an Independent, won't it? The child, I mean. If anything, I think it should probably be more a challenge than the old 9-5 and all that. Trying to sway a neutral, one way or the other..."
Crowley was about to point out that no one had 9-5s anymore (job insecurity had been one of the better of his worst achievements - a time-filler, really) when another thought struck him.
He grinned at Aziraphale like a snake, to which the angel responded with a look of growing concern.
"Here'ssssss an idea," Crowley hissed, suddenly all sibilance and tongue. "Let'sssss get drunk."
--
1 Some have shoeboxes - it amounts to much the same thing
2 Or at least it used to be - now it's the vicious, one-track instinct to become a financially-independent career-woman and god-forbid-the-thought-of-ever-reproducing-or-being-motherly-should-ever-cross-their-mind
3 'Independents' are basically wild cards thrown into the ineffable cosmic game by God, because he has a strange sense of humour and wanted to make things more interesting. Just when you thought ineffability couldn't get anymore...well - ineffable.
4 This term, in the case of Hell's last-chancers, is only to be applied with extreme nonchalance
5 Or indeed with, which wouldn't do you much good in a storm anyway, because high winds tend to wreak havoc on anything of a vaguely non-aero-dynamic shape.
6 Note to Americans and non-rural-dwellers: a hamlet, in this context, refers not to the manic depressive of Shakespeare's well-known play, but to a modest smattering of houses isolated in large expanses of countryside, created when developers don't sneeze into a handkerchief.
7 The large feathery wings were also a big hint.
8 Her eyes, not the streetlamps
9 Little Mitzy was sped into the vet's the very next day. The vet took one look at Mitzy's loving and utterly vacant expression, and recommended less crumpets at tea-time.