So! Here we are! The Good Omens Big Bang is drawing towards its end, and I'm here to contribute a 9 chapters long love-letter to the book (and TV series) and its amusing writing style.
If you find me on AO3, you can see the artwork too! Courtesy of Clenster and Desmyblack, and kind help from beta reader TheOldAquarian, Fox Populi, and Olivia!
(After this I go back to Blue Exorcist, this was an insane amount of work for comparatively little text, phew.)
All the best, everyone!
/Dimwit
Tuesday morning, a bookshop in Soho
Aziraphale knows exactly what he is doing.
Strictly speaking, all angels know what they're doing. It's very simple, when all you have to do is follow God's Will. Unfortunately, this entire worldview had been tipped on its head the day the Apocalypse didn't happen, and 10 million angels had discovered that none of them had the foggiest idea what they were doing.
That is to say, nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine angels made that discovery. Angels are very particular about numbers.
What Aziraphale discovered that day was that he had been carrying out his own will, and not God's, since, well, the Beginning, really. More precisely, he'd been winding Crowley around his little finger since the Beginning. And he had been aware of it. That was the problem. Knowing what you're doing is good, except for when you know that what you are doing is wrong and you still do it. That sort of thing is called temptation, if you take out all the unnecessary words Aziraphale had put in there to avoid facing the reality of the matter.
He had blamed it on Crowley for the first few centuries. Demons tempted, that was their nature, and Crowley had always been very talented, and clever, and wily, and... tempting. To leave such a skilled adversary unmonitored was out of the question. It would have been irresponsible for any angel, and even more so for one who was assigned to Earth for the express purpose of thwarting the evils of demons lurking about the human world.
The keen observer will point out that Aziraphale's verbose self-deception is called lying. He had become surprisingly good at that, for an angel. Just not good enough to fool himself.
It has been three days since the world didn't end, and Aziraphale knows exactly what he's doing: he's building a nest for himself and Crowley, and has been doing so for the past 200 years.
It should be pointed out that knowing what you're doing does not mean you know how to do it. At all.
Because Aziraphale has been working on his bookshop for centuries and it's still not right. There's comfortable furniture to lounge in, good wine they both like, and music Aziraphale enjoys and Crowley enjoys complaining about, yet something is missing. There's a demon missing, for one thing, but why? Crowley likes the bookshop, that much is evident from how often he drops by on some excuse or another. He just isn't registering it as a nest. Not one intended for him. What Aziraphale needs is something that tells him in no uncertain terms that he would like Crowley to drop by and never leave. And that something is missing.
The bookshop likes to think itself most helpful. It has attuned itself to Aziraphale over many years, and whenever he brings new additions the shop shuffles the books around to free up space. It regulates the temperature for the benefit of the more brittle works, and circulates the air just enough that it's saturated with dust and other things that irritate the eyes and throats of humans. It breeds the biggest, hairiest variety of spiders in a secluded corner under the radiator, and they are always on the books Aziraphale doesn't want visitors to touch, much to the confusion of the spiders.
The bookshop is mostly helpful, if you ask Aziraphale. Sometimes it puts all his antique Kama Sutra editions on the front shelf when Crowley visits, and no amount of stern – or flustered – glares will make it budge until he physically gathers up the volumes and puts them away.
In the spirit of helpfulness, a confounded house plant finds itself atop the couch table. It is a nice place for a plant, and the flower looks like something in the first edition volume of Curtis' Flora Londinensis that Crowley had happened upon at an online auction.
"Thank you, dear." Aziraphale smiles, and his chest fills with the blossoming sensation of a place well loved. "I'm afraid that isn't it, though."
The plant returns to the firmament with a wave of his hand. No, plants are what Crowley will bring with him when he moves in. That's the trick to making an appealing nest: you have to leave blanks. Furnish it with the comfort of you, but build it like praying hands cupped around the empty space in your heart.
A stack of books materialises on the table in place of the plant. They are spy novels, the covers say: historical spy novels, even, though Mrs Bourne clearly has her own ideas about what clothes looked like in the 1810's, and how they were worn.
"Definitely not it."
The books disappear and a complete collection of E.L. James novels manifests in their stead.
Aziraphale gives it a long, silent stare that ought to make the books shrivel to dust. "When I come back, that had better be gone." Upon which he turns on his heel and leaves the shop.
Needless to say, looking for something without knowing what you're looking for is almost as frustrating as knowing what you're doing but not how to do it.
A/N
The referenced works are the Spymasters series and the Fifty Shades series. Both of which are romantic, in a sense, if you lock your ethical concerns in the attic and down a few glasses of wine.