Wednesday

A Good Omens fanfiction

Part 5 of 12

"Well, seeing that today certainly is my day – why don't you call me Wednesday?"

– American Gods, Neil Gaiman

"And I'm afraid you'll have to keep waiting – I'm busy." Raphael shuffled a stack of clumsily connected papers, glanced back down at the blueprints in front of him, and groaned, "Come on, this is not the nebula design everybody agreed on! Someone's changed it. Probably that ass, Ramiel. Where's what I drew up? I spent ages on that, and we had clearance to spread it out just north of–" He petered off, realising the only person with him in the room was the hand-wringing principality, looking politely discomfited on his behalf yet making no motion to go and leave him in peace. "All right, all right, what's happened? What's so blasted important they sent a principality to tell me?"

"No one sent me, Raphael – that is, er, most Holy Archangel Raphael..." He began to stammer.

"Just Raphael's fine, thanks."

"Ah. Too formal?"

Peering up for the briefest of moments, Raphael quirked an eyebrow. "Just a bit, yeah."

"I came because I needed some guidance," he admitted, fiddling with his fingers in his lap, cheeks reddening. "It's far from an easy thing to admit, but I've been–"

"I'm going to stop you right there," Raphael interrupted. "Question for you."

"Yes?"

"What choir are you from?"

"Ninth."

"Well, then, fabulous news." He smiled sardonically, reaching for a fresh sheaf of paper and – after catching a tall, smudgy pencil just before it rolled off the side of his desk – hastily drawing, on the topmost bit of visible parchment, something which clearly had nothing to do with his visitor and everything to do with whatever project gone wrong he was fixated on. "This is very easily resolved."

"But I haven't even told you what I've... That is... It can't be that simple," murmured the principality, and yet there was a trace of hope lacing his tone. "Er, can it?"

"As a matter of fact, it can – you're in the Ninth Choir, which means you're under Gabriel's jurisdiction, not mine." Lifting the pencil, he pointed over the principality's shoulder. "Four offices down, make a left, then a right. You can't miss it."

The principality blanched. "No, I don't think you understand. I-I've spoken to Gabriel already. Or tried to. It... It didn't go well."

"Oh? Is that right? How about that."

"The other archangels, I can't... That is, they don't..." He trailed off again. "But you're not usually here, and when I saw you, I thought you might...You looked so kind. Naturally, I thought..."

"Look, whatever it is," sighed Raphael, resting an elbow on the edge of his desk and leaning on it wearily, still not really looking at the distraught principality, "you're just going to have to work it out with Gabriel. You're his problem."

"Problem," echoed the principality, sounding bitterly disappointed. "Yes, I suppose I am." Swallowing, he turned to go. "I'm sorry I wasted your time." His gleaming, white-knuckled hands lingered on the side of the door for a moment longer. "Thank you for seeing me."

And then he left.

And Raphael didn't try to stop him.

Crowley paused the footage and shrank back, ashamed of his past counterpart in this parallel world. Suddenly something Aziraphale said, back in his Mayfair flat, made sickening sense.

There was a time I did want to be your friend. These days, I have no idea why that was.

What made it worse was Crowley could recall having several similar conversations to this one with other angels in the old days back home. None of them had been Aziraphale – of that much he was gratefully, mercifully certain. And probably none of them had Fallen as a result of being put off on a bad day when he was preoccupied; indeed, there, he'd been the one who joined Lucifer.

Still, that didn't change the fact that this Aziraphale, in his wavering faith, had turned to a version of him for help, possibly as a last, desperate resort, and had been called a problem and waved away.

No wonder he took such devilish glee in discorporating him!

Crowley watched the footage of Aziraphale leaving Raphael's office again. And again. Then he pushed the intercom button and asked if there was any way he could see what happened right outside his office when he'd left. For some reason he wasn't automatically accessing it.

"Yeah, we've got the surveillance," said the cherub, a touch sheepishly; "but there's no sound available."

And just like that, it began to play; it was the most heartbreaking silent film he'd ever seen.

Hand over his mouth, jaw clenched with dread, Crowley watched none other than Lucifer, waiting patiently outside Raphael's office, hold his arms out to Aziraphale – who was very visibly struggling not to cry – and say something to him.

Aziraphale buried his face in Lucifer's shoulder. Lucifer stroked the angel's hair and the back of his neck.

They left the immediate area together, Lucifer's arm wrapped possessively around Aziraphale's wide shoulders. The future devil was visibly mouthing what Crowley imagined were treacly, empty consolations.

Exactly the sort of things Aziraphale would have longed to hear after being coldly dismissed like that.

"Oh, you sorry bastard," snarled Crowley, knowing from personal experience Lucifer didn't really love the discouraged angel, or care what happened to him, that it was just a damned popularity contest.

He couldn't watch any more of this. He had the files and footage cleared away and curled in the corner, pulling his knees to his chest and resting his bent head on them. The rotten feeling, like a heavy stone in his nonexistent chest, refused to pass.

What now? Did he find a way back to this broken version of Aziraphale and apologise for the actions of a clueless archangel that – technically – wasn't him, not really? Did he tell him the truth, about being a demon from another reality, and beg him to understand?

Except he was Raphael here, and no amount of self-loathing was going to change that frustrating fact.

Aziraphale would probably tell him the same thing, even if, by some miracle, he believed him; he was irritatingly logical like that.

But what was the alternative?

He didn't know how to get back home, and he didn't know if staying here in this version of Heaven was going to break the time-loop he was seemingly trapped in.

The door swung open.

Crowley staggered to his feet and tried to look casual.

It was Gabriel, looking resigned. "It's your lucky day, Raphael. It seems the Almighty wants you back below, on earth."

"So... I can leave?"

"That's right. You can leave." Gabriel snapped his fingers; a stack of paperwork materialised. "Just as soon as you fill out the usual forms." He cracked a brittle smile that didn't reach his gleaming purple eyes, which contained a small, whirling trace of leftover malice. "Have fun with one-A, section 55 – it's a real doozy."

'ello, it's Wednesday morning!

"Ngggh..." Crowley dramatically flung the back of his hand over his eyes.

Here it all went again.

It's overcast today, with a fifty to sixty percent chance of rain, so you best have your brolly on hand just in case–

"'nough!" he whined, rolling over and murmuring angrily into the pillows. "I know what bloody day it is."

The alarm clock radio switched off miraculously.

He stayed there for a bit longer, unmoving. He vaguely wondered if he'd ever feel the compulsion to move again – if he'd ever find the raw energy, even.

The landline began it's shrill ringing, right on time.

"Michael," he sighed. "Calling to tell me Aziraphale wants to kill me – as if I'm too stupid to work that much out for myself."

What would happen if he didn't answer?

She'd call again, that was what.

But what if he disconnected the phone and barricaded himself inside this loft above what should have been Aziraphale's bookshop?

He could stay here, all day. Then he wouldn't have to deal with any of it.

He wouldn't have to talk to Michael, or ponytail girl downstairs. She'd knock, probably – no doubt clutching that stupid, trite book he still couldn't believe had been written by a version of himself – and eventually have to give up.

If she didn't, Crowley could always call the police on her, have her hauled off – or at least moved along. (The irony was it didn't occur to him he'd need a connected telephone in order to do so.)

He wouldn't have to face anyone. Not devil nor angel.

Angel.

Remembering the look on Aziraphale's face when Raphael rejected him on that footage made his chest tighten, constricting painfully.

It had been exasperating not knowing why Demon-Aziraphale resented archangels – specifically him – so much. Knowing, though, now that he'd finally learned the truth...

Oh, God, knowing was so much worse.

Any hope of casually befriending Zira seemed like a pipe dream now. You couldn't make up for something like what Raphael had done with a slice of cheesecake and a cup of cocoa.

He'd practically shoved him into Lucifer's waiting arms, right into the heart of the rebellion.

If he'd looked up – just talked to him – listened to him – for a few minutes – this Aziraphale might not be a demon right now. All stupid Raphael had had to do was look bloody up!

This wasn't a matter which could be resolved with a free dessert and a megawatt smile.

Aziraphale didn't know, either, that this version of Raphael, the one he was currently dealing with, wasn't like that – at least, not any more. That the Raphael he was thinking of disgusted him.

There was no Crowley here.

Here he was, stuck in a world in which he didn't properly exist, forced to be discorporated over and over. This was a sick, sick game, and he was choosing now – utterly exhausted and several steps beyond merely fed-up – not to play it any more.

He'd be up here, far away from Aziraphale's plans of ropes and pulleys and Goddamn Piccadilly line trains, waiting it out.

This time, he'd make it to Thursday.

And, after that, who knew what would happen?

After disconnecting the landline and switching off the glittering mobile he found in a drawer, the first thing Crowley decided to do was take a bath.

He pushed the wrong button (there were too many options) and took an entire layer off his skin with water hot enough to boil a lobster, but he still felt somewhat better as he stepped out, followed by a cloud of steam, and crawled – striped red and loose limbed, with soaked, dripping hair plastered to his back – into bed again.

He sprawled out and stared up at his reflection in the mirrored ceiling. Puffy blue eyes blinked down at him. He closed them and lolled his head backwards, and – for an hour or two – he slept, if a little fitfully.

But eventually Crowley was forced to confront that confounding question all working man-shaped creatures ask themselves on their unexpected days off when they can't fall into the greatly desired deep sleep of a very good nap.

Namely, what did people who stayed home all day and didn't talk to anyone, who avoided looking outside, bloody well do?

Out of boredom, he tasted the fizzy health drink beside the alarm clock radio. Then he made a face, spat into a conveniently placed waste-basket, and set the bottle back down with a shudder.

"Bleh." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Tastes like bollocks."

Wednesday wasn't a good day for television, but Crowley found an old set and dragged it out in front of his bed anyway.

He'd discovered it in a bottom cabinet, behind two cracked cans of pesticide. It was from the early 1990s and missing the plug; however, because Crowley – rather innocently – simply didn't notice either issue, the picture and sound were quite perfect. Once he wiped the dust off and turned it on, it was like watching a brand-new High Definition telly, and it readily picked up every channel within range (as well as a few that technically weren't).

Although there was no plug, there was a remote control (which may or may not have actually belonged to that particular television set) and it worked well enough for Crowley despite part of the bottom being missing and the batteries being dead.

What there wasn't, however, was an on-screen menu.

That didn't matter to him – he just flicked mindlessly through the channels.

When that five-dollar-bill makes its way back into my hands, I'll be able to call you; and when you hear my voice on the other end, then you'll believe in fate, won't you?

"Wot? Whooo-eee, that woman's insane. You know, I'm suddenly thinking maybe my life isn't that bad," Crowley mused, leaning heavily on the pillow he'd readjusted in his lap and flipping over to the next channel. Click. "Those two idiots are completely deluded. Fate! Ha! That's a laugh. I bet they never see each other again."

Cuz you're so...thick... You're Mr. Thick, thick, thickety thick-face from thicktown, Thickannia. And so's your dad.

"Yeah, I don't think that guy's a real doctor – what else is on?"

Click.

Hey, baby, I hear the blues a-callin'... Toss salads and scrambled eggs... Oh my. And maybe I seem a bit confused...

"Nope."

Click.

Ducktales...wooo-ooo...

"Ducks!" Crowley waved the remote and pointed emphatically. Animated ducks, that could talk, but ducks all the same.

Click.

The hiiiills are aliiiiveee with the sound of–

"Oh, for badness sake, when is this movie not on?"

Click.

Want to know if there's love in your future? Call Madame Tracy today! Lines open every afternoon except Thursdays!

"Oh, good for you, Madame Tracy – getting your own commercial! Look at you!"

Click.

Tomorrow, tomorrow! I love ya tomorrow! You're always a day...aaaaaway...

"Bit like salt in a wound, isn't it?"

Click.

Coming up next, enjoy the dulcet tones of Cabaret Classics... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaonce-opon-a-time-dere-was LITTLE WHITE BOOOOL...

"Right – that does it – I'm going to get up and make some popcorn."

After searching the loft, nearly from top to bottom, Crowley did eventually find a small box (past its expiration date) of microwavable popcorn (and it took another twenty minutes to locate a microwave under the same cabinet where he'd found the television set earlier).

Apart from that, the only other food item was a bag of multigrain bread. After a couple seconds of apathetic deliberation, Crowley decided to take it – and the shiny chrome toaster – back to the bed with him along with the steaming popcorn bag.

He ate half the popcorn and two bites out of a slice of toast before getting full and deciding to start stringing the remainder of the popcorn to pass the time.

Perhaps it was the old star-making twitch deep within his fingertips and anxiously-spread knuckles that had never really left.

These same fingertips that had spread stars like gauze and lit up nebulas into spectacularly painted light shows also spent a large number of years – back home – stealing car radios and letting out tyres and moving markers across muddy fields late at night and typing wrong codes into computers on purpose to make them go boom when the wrong person touched them. (Just general mischief, the sort of thing that barely got you a thumbs up in Hell.) What these fingers had never done was excessive nothing. It was the idleness that was driving him completely bonkers. And he couldn't bring himself to look at the alarm clock radio, having turned it to face the wall an hour ago.

If he learned it wasn't even two in the afternoon yet, he was going to tear his hair out strand by coppery strand.

There had been a time when Crowley really believed he was lazy – that he liked cancelled plans and long stretches of unclaimed time – but he was coming to realise the real reason behind that was because he always had – via his overactive imagination and Aziraphale's company – something to fill those glorious free hours with.

Here he was faced with pure empty nothing, hollowness, like being swallowed into a black hole – this dull, dull void.

He'd have said it was like Heaven, written it down on a post-it and stuck it beside the alarm clock radio in a mad scribble for future generations, but he was certain the world would have misconstrued his meaning entirely.

So he counted popcorn, praying the seconds and minutes – and then, mercifully, hours – would tick away quickly with each murmured number, and kept on stringing.

It was dark – and he'd left all the lights off – when Crowley decided to chance looking at the alarm clock radio again.

11:55 glowed back at him, casting reddish light onto his hopeful face.

"In five minutes," he murmured to himself, "it will be Thursday, and I won't have been discorporated." Perhaps that was how this nightmare ended. Not with a bang, but a sweet digital beep-beep. "Then I just have to work out how to get home, once I've got this time repeating debacle under control."

11:56

A horrible thought hit him.

11:57

"No," Crowley shouted aloud to nobody, craning his neck backwards, "that's not fair! That's not my fault. It's not like I can do anything about it!"

A sliver of his reflection glared down at him condemningly from the ceiling with narrowed blue eyes.

The eyes of the saints in the pictures on the creamy-hued walls followed him, too, despite the dark. They were sorrowful.

What was haunting him now was the inescapable fact that – if he let this day stand, if he made this Wednesday the lasting reality in this world, if time really did go back to normal as he hoped so desperately it would – Aziraphale would have suffered, alone, the burning up of his lounge and the beating from Satan.

Nobody would have been there for him.

"S'not like I was there when I got hit by a train – or that bus," he tried to reason with himself; "by my choice or his, I always left him."

Except that didn't stick, did it? It all reset. If this time stuck, whatever happened to Demon-Aziraphale today could be permanent. The image of Aziraphale's bruised face and broken nose pulled itself to the forefront of his mind and refused to go away.

He probably should have thought of this sooner, and made up his mind to do something about it while there was still time.

11:58

"Fine." With a frustrated huff, Crowley kicked a coiled rope of entwined popcorn-strings off the side of the bed, picked up the toaster, and rushed into the bathroom, hastily filling up the tub. "Come on, come on."

11:59

"There. Done." Grimacing, he climbed in, still clothed in loose-fitting pyjamas. Leaning over the edge of the tub, he pushed the lever on the toaster down and then dramatically lifted it up above the sloshing bathwater.

He'd seen this in a film, once.

"Allons-y!"

He let the toaster drop.

There was a jolting zap and a flash of pure white.

"Hi, guys." Crowley waved nonchalantly at Gabriel and Sandalphon.

"The demon Zira again?" Sandalphon asked.

"Nah, had an accident."

"Thoughtful of you to roll in, at midnight, with no body." Gabriel looked put out; he was tapping his right foot impatiently on the pearly floor. "Michael has been trying to reach you all day."

"Phone stopped working."

"I see." He pressed his lips tightly together. Then, "Whoa. You're shaking."

"Well, I got electrocuted," Crowley told him. "So, you know, that'll do it."

"What was the nature of this accident?" Sandalphon demanded suspiciously.

"Er, I wanted to eat toast in the bathtub and I accidentally" – on purpose – "uh, you know, dropped the toaster in the water...while it was still on..."

"This wouldn't have happened if you didn't feel the need to sully the temple of your celestial body with gross matter," huffed Gabriel, rolling his violet eyes. "I hope you realise you've just earned yourself a whole lot of paperwork."

"Yeah, I'll get started on that right away, but Gabriel–" There was something he wanted to know.

"Yes?"

"Do you remember before the rebellion, before Zira was a demon, and he came to you for..." He couldn't say 'help', that would just make Gabriel close off defensively. "Uh... To talk to you about something...right before he joined up with the..." He gestured downwards. "Other side?"

"You want to know what it was he said?"

"Yeah."

"Why the sudden interest in that vile creature?" Gabriel exchanged a puzzled glance with Sandalphon then looked back at him with a raised eyebrow. "Just yesterday, you told Michael you thought Zira was the most infernally tainted being you'd ever met apart from the devil himself."

"That was yesterday – I can assure you I was a completely different person then."

"If it makes you feel better, it wasn't anything important," Gabriel said, a little too coolly. "Just sedition about sympathizing with the enemy and feeling like he wasn't wanted here. Which, of course, he wasn't. I told him as much."

"For heaven's ssssake, Gabriel!"

"What? It's not like I was wrong. Look where he is now. God knew his heart wasn't with us."

"It wasn't your place to decide that!"

The archangel's expression remained obtuse. "I didn't, he did."

"But–"

"He's a demon, he was kicked out, he Fell – if that doesn't prove it was in him all along, I don't know what does."

"Yes, a nasty business, but thankfully in the past." Sandalphon readily changed the subject back to the one at hand. "You've got to start being more careful with these bodies, Raphael. They don't grow on trees."

"Sandalphon, I'm sure Raphael does his b–"

Crowley sank to the floor, collapsing on all-fours, utterly despondent.

"Hey!" Gabriel reached down and touched his flickering shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"Everything," he groaned, what would have been his forehead if he'd had a body nearly touching the floor, "but I'll fix it."

And somehow, he promised himself, he would.

Things always had a way of working out, in the end; you just had to hold on until they did.

Letting out a carrying, throaty scream, Crowley crumpled up form one-A, section 55, threw it down, and stomped on it with both his insubstantial, blinking feet, cursing profusely.

Gabriel reached over and grasped his blinking wrists. "Calm down, Raphael, just take it easy – we'll skip it if you're that upset." He patted him on his newly solidifying right shoulder blade. "What's a couple of form pages between fellow archangels?"

'ello, it's Wednesday morning!

Crowley rolled onto his back and stared up at his reflection determinedly. "Right. Today, we figure out a way to help him – no more excuses."

A/N: Reviews welcome, replies may be delayed.