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kaylinelizabeth4004 · 7 months

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Here We Are In Heaven

A snippet of my longer story ‘Heaven is Here’ on ao3. This is chapter 10. Linked at the end! This just made me kick my feet and blush so I had to share.

Crowley and Aziraphale finally addressing their relationship.

It had been a few days since Y/N saw Crowley’s greenhouse, and the image of her inside it wouldn’t leave the demon’s mind. He felt that he saw her everywhere. And granted, to an extent he had. She was still interacting with them daily, but she was also a busy woman. Neither of them wanted to force her to change her lifestyle for them. But even when they weren’t speaking, even when she was at her flat and Crowley was dreaming on Aziraphale’s couch while the angel made diligent notes of his newest prophecy book, he saw her.

Crowley wondered if Aziraphale thought about Y/N the same way he did. Was everything this all consuming? Aziraphale certainly was for Crowley. Not all the time, perhaps all consuming wasn’t the right term, for there were times when the demon could go about his life and not think too much about him. But there were others when all he wanted, all he yearned for, was the sweet angel who loved crepes so much he risked his own life for them. The thought made him laugh slightly.

“A penny for your thoughts, my darling?” Aziraphale said into the silence of the night. It really was a wonderful moment they were sharing. Crowley was daydreaming, lounging on the couch and letting his imagination fly into all the most obscure realities. And Aziraphale was studying a book he’d recently acquired, 113 Partially Correct Prophecies for the Year 1922 by Oscar Wilde. It was turning out to be a more satirical book, mocking the different ways in which people were readily able to believe in prophecies, but Aziraphale still found it an excellent read. And he had been alarmingly correct about Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.

“Y/N,” Crowley answered.

Aziraphale didn’t try to fight the smile on his lips as he turned in his seat to look at the demon. “Ah, I see. And what about her has got you laughing?”

“It’snot her, it’sabout her.” He slurred his words slightly. “Do you… do you find yourself always thinking about the people you care for?”

Aziraphale nodded, “yes, I do.”

“Really?”

“I find that it’s not always the way the novels might describe it. It’s not always fiery and passionate, but it’s certainly there. In the subtext of your mind, so to speak.”

Crowley rolled his eyes, “stop being so bloody smart, angel.”

Aziraphale frowned, “you asked me a question, dearest. I was just trying to answer it.”

“I know,” Crowley said, shoving himself up off the couch and going to Aziraphale selection of vinyl. He started to thumb through them, hoping to find something that had lyrics. Of course he appreciated classical music as much as the next immortal fellow, but when your brain just couldn’t stop thinking, sometimes words were what you needed to distract you. Other words to silence the ones up there. Crowley smiled at the Etta James vinyl, he’d quite fancied her music. Thought she had an excellent voice.

“Angel,” Crowley said softly, his expression suddenly serious. He let his fingers trace along the Etta James vinyl, nail scratching along the letters.

“Hmm?”

The demon was not always known for saying exactly what he needed to say, communication could be very difficult for a demon when your entire mode of communication is based on lies. Or Freddie Mercury. But maybe it was the way he kept replaying his angel kissing her, or the way Y/N listened and loved all of his plants with a kind heart, but he knew exactly what he wanted to say. As adorable as Aziraphale was, Crowley was going to get these words out. “We need to do something about Y/N.”

The angel looked confused and his pink lips came in a little pout, “whatever do you mean?”

“She’s not immortal. She’s going to continue to age. I, I, I don’t want to go through this again.”

Aziraphale’s face fell and he removed his spectacles from the tip of his nose. The conversation had turned very quickly, and he couldn’t quite trace Crowley’s train of thought. Bugger, he hadn’t focused on that bit of everything quite yet. He was so excited with getting to know Y/N, getting to love her as her outside of the whole soulmate situation. Though the situation is what brought them together. He sighed, “I don’t know if there is much we can do.”

“C’mon, angel, think. Use that pretty little head of yours and think.” Crowley came to him quickly, imploring for Aziraphale to help him find a way. The angel’s lips parted when he realized Crowley had called him pretty. However, the demon was on a mission. As beautiful as Aziraphale was and as much as he would love to continue telling him that, he knew they couldn’t get distracted. He could still hear her giggle as rose bushes popped up when she said their name. “Angel, think about it. Y/N’s not going to stop aging. She’s going to die. She’s going to die and forget about us, and we might never get to see her again. And even if we do, she’ll die and forget again. It will never end.”

“Well what do you suggest we do, Crowley?” Aziraphale said with a little whine, he felt helpless.

“Miracle?” The demon said halfheartedly, knowing that it might not work but choosing to say it anyway.

“Heaven and Hell will know if we try to miracle her immortality, and they won’t leave us alone.”

Crowley straightened. Despite everything, despite the inner feelings of self hatred and the torment Hell had put him through, Crowley was an optimist. He believed in good, and he believed that things would work out. An apocalypse had been stopped by belief, by imagination. His Bentley had survived. Despite it all, he chose to be optimistic about their future with Y/N, he refused to let it die with her. “We have to try, Aziraphale. You know we do. She deserves it.”

“She does.”

There was a pause. The angel was thinking very deeply about what they could do, if a miracle would even work. Then the soft chords of Etta James’s ‘At Last’ started to play on the record player. Aziraphale hadn’t even seen the demon put it on, but he couldn’t fight the small smile as the music enveloped him. His eyes fluttered shut and he took in a deep breath.

Her voice was rich through the ancient speaker. Crowley and Aziraphale listened with intent.

“At last

My love has come along…”

Aziraphale’s eyes opened when he felt a pair of warm hands settle on his waist, pulling him closely to another body. Crowley let his head fall onto the crook between Aziraphale’s neck and shoulder, letting out a shaky breath. He worried the angel was going to kick him away, and was going to reject him. 6,000 years of pining and yet he didn’t know if a simple dance was too much to ask for. At first the angel didn’t know how to respond, but as Etta James continued and he took in the scent of Crowley, he felt himself melting into the touch. Aziraphale’s arms came up around Crowley’s neck, hands buried in the red hair as the couple swayed back and forth to the song. His nails scratched along his skin and Crowley let out a sigh of relief. Aziraphale rested his head against Crowley’s.

“At last

The skies above are blue

My heart was wrapped in clover

The night I looked at you…”

Crowley remembered one of the first times he’d seen Aziraphale, way back when he’d been an angel. He hadn’t noticed it then, he’d been too caught up in the creation of a galaxy too beautiful to comprehend, but he remembered Aziraphale had looked quite pretty. He looked soft and sweet. Like candy. Crowley couldn’t comprehend that this moment was real, that he was holding good personified and he was his.

It took Crowley three stuttering tries, but he finally managed to get out over the soft chords of the song, “you deserve it, too, Aziraphale. You deserve her, the love, all of it. You deserve eternity with her.”

They both pulled back slightly to look at one another. The angel soaked in the sight of Crowley’s amber eyes, so raw with unexplained emotions. He hadn’t seemed to expect that from him and his eyes darted back and forth, trying to gauge what Crowley was feeling. He seemed to know something the demon wouldn’t dream to express. Aziraphale brought a hand to cup Crowley’s cheek and without thinking, he nuzzled into the angel’s touch. “My darling, you deserve it too. You are deserving of everything.”

A tear slipped down Crowley’s cheek, and Aziraphale wiped it away with the pad of his thumb. The angel spoke softly, almost hiding under the music, but Crowley would have never missed his next words. “I love you dearly, my Crowley.”

Crowley didn’t hesitate this time to make the next move. He rushed forwards and took Aziraphale’s lips with his own. A crescendo to 6,000 years of pining and trying to understand themselves. It was all that Aziraphale had dreamed of and more. The demon moved with a raw passion, taking in the form of the angel’s lips, but he wasn’t demanding. Crowley tasted of whiskey and heat and his lips felt softer than sin. Etta James’s melody cried from behind them and they held each other closer, as though letting go would mean they’d never get to touch again.

“You smiled, you smiled

Oh, and then the spell was cast

And here we are in Heaven

For you are mine … at last.”

#good omens #good omens season 2 #fanfiction #aziraphale x crowley #good omens fanfiction #aziraphale x crowley x reader #crowley is a simp #crowley has self esteem issues #aziraphale #Aziraphale is hot ngl #this made me giggle #I love this #even if it’s shit I love it #fluff #dancing together because it’s fucking adorable

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joycrispy · 8 months

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One thing I love about Crowley --never stated, but consistently shown-- is that he is, at heart, an engineer.

I have a few different things to say about that. Let's unpack them.

As the Unnamed Angel, we see his designs for the Pillars of Creation are millions of pages long, comprised of cramped text, footnotes, diagrams, schematics, etc. It's very...Renaissance polymath, in the way it implies a particular intersection of artist and inventor.

Also: in the naked romanticism with which he views his stars.

We already knew he made stars, but in s2 we learn that he did NOT sculpt each of them by hand. He designed a nebula ("a star factory," he says) that will form several thousand young stars and proto-planets, and all --aside from getting the 'factory' running-- without him lifting a finger. We also learn that these young stars and proto-planets stand in contrast to those made by other angels, which are going to come 'pre-aged.'

...I'm reminded of Hastur and Ligur's approach to temptations. Damning one human soul at a time, devoting singular attention to it over the course of years or decades, and how that stands in contrast to Crowley's reliance on, quote, 'knock-on effects.'

Ligur: It's not exactly...craftsmanship. Crowley: Head office don't seem to mind. They love me down there.

Hm.

I'm also reminded of the M25.

The M25 may not be as grand as a nebula (sentences you only say in GOmens fandom...), but LIKE his nebula it's an intricate, self-sustaining engine that does Crowley's work for him, many times over. Again.

That's some pretty neat characterization --and so is the indication towards Crowley's disinterest in victimizing anyone tempting individual people. It takes a considerable amount of planning and effort (and creeping about in wellies), but in accordance with his design the M25 generates a constant stream of low-grade evil on a gigantic scale.

Cumulatively gigantic, that is. Individually? Negligible.

But no other demon understands human nature well enough to parse that one million ticked-off motorists are not, in any meaningful way, actually equivalent to one dictator, or one mass-murderer, or even one little influential regressive. That's the trick of it. Crowley gets Hell's approval (which he NEEDS to survive, and to maintain the degree of freedom he's eked out for himself), and at the same time ensures that any actual ~Evil Influence~ is spread nice and thin.

It's some clever machinery. And he knows it, too:

The Unnamed Angel and Crowley are both proud of their ideas.

(musings on professional pride, Leonardo da Vinci, the crank handle, and 'the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale' under the cut)

In the 1970's Crowley gives a presentation on the M25, projector and all, to a room full of increasingly impatient demons. Maybe the presentation was work-ordered; the 'can I hear a WAHOO?' definitely wasn't.

Before the Beginning, the Unnamed Angel can barely contain his excitement about his nebula. Aziraphale manages a baffled-but-polite, "....That's nice... :)"

11 years ago, Hastur and Ligur want to 'tell the deeds of the day,' and Crowley smiles to himself because (according to the script-book) he knows he has 'the best one.'

(Naturally, his 'deed' has nothing to do with tempting anybody, and everything to do with setting up a human-powered Rube-Goldberg machine of petty annoyance. Oodles of 'Evil' generated; very little harm done.)

Hastur and Ligur don't get it, of course. That's also consistent.

Nobody ever knows what the hell he's talking about.

It didn't make it on-screen, but, in both the novel AND the script-book, Crowley was friends with Leonardo da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance polymath. That's where he got his drawing of the Mona Lisa --they're getting very drunk together, and Crowley picks up the 'most beautiful' of the preliminary sketches. He wants to buy it. Leonardo agrees almost off-the-cuff, very casual, because they're friends, and because he has bigger fish to fry than haggling over a doodle:

He goes, "Now, explain this helicopter thingie again, will you?" Because he's an engineer, too.

(It is 1519 at the latest, in this scene. Why the FUCK would Crowley know about helicopters, and be able to explain them, comprehensively, to Leonardo da Vinci?

...Well. I choose to believe he got bored one day and worked it out. Look, if you know how to build a nebula, you can probably handle aerodynamics. And anyway, I think it's telling that this is his idea of shooting the shit. 'A drunken mind speaks a sober heart,' and all. He probably babbled about Aziraphale long enough to make poor Leo sick)

Apart from Aziraphale, Leonardo da Vinci is the only person Crowley has any keepsakes or mementos of.

Think about that, though. Aziraphale's bookshop is bursting with letters, paintings, busts, and personalized signatures memorializing all the humans he's known and befriended over 6000 years (indeed: Aziraphale has living human friends up and down Whickber Street. He's part of a community).

Crowley doesn't have any of that. It's just the stone albatross from the Church (for pining), the infamous gay sex statue (for spicy pining), the houseplants (for roleplaying his deepest trauma over and over, as one does), and this one piece of artwork, inscribed, "To my friend Anthony from your friend Leo da V."

To me, at least, that suggests a level of attachment that seems to be rare for Crowley.

...Maybe he liked having someone to talk shop with? Someone who was interested? Someone engaged enough to ask questions when they didn't immediately understand?

...Anyway.

There's also the matter of the crank handle.

This thing:

This is one of the subtler changes from the book. In the book, Crowley knows Satan is coming and, desperate, arms himself with a tire iron. It's the best he can do. He's not Aziraphale; he wasn't made to wield a flaming sword.

The show, IMO, improves on this considerably. Now he, like Aziraphale, gets to face annihilation with what he was made for in his hand. And it's not a weapon, not even an improvised one like the tire iron.

He made stars with it.

[both gifs by @fuckyeahgoodomens]

If you Google 'crank handle,' you'll get variations on this:

Crank handles have been around for centuries. Consisting of a mechanical arm that's connected to a perpendicular rotating shaft, they are designed to convert circular motion into rotary or reciprocating motion.

Which is to say they're one of the 'simple machines,' like a lever or a pulley; the bread and butter of engineering. You'll also get a list of uses for a crank handle, archaic and modern. Among them: cranking up the engine of an old-fashioned car... say, a 1933 Bentley. That's what Crowley has been using his for, lately. But he's had it since he was an angel and he's still, it seems, very capable of it's angelic applications.

Stopping time. For instance.

(This is conjecture on my part, but, I like to imagine that Crowley has the ability to stop time for the same reason I can --and should-- unplug my computer before I perform maintenance on it. Time and Space are a matched set, after all, and in his designs in particular, one feeds into the other.)

I know everyone has already said this, but: I REALLY LIKE that when he needs to channel the heights of his power, he does so not with a weapon but with a tool. Practically with a little handheld metaphor for ingenuity. One from long-lost days when he made beautiful things.

(And he loved it. Still loves it --he incorporated that metaphor into the Bentley, didn't he?)

Let Aziraphale rock up to the apocalypse with a weapon: he has his own compelling thematic reasons to do exactly that. Crowley's story is different, and fighting isn't the only way to express defiance. And if you've been condemned as a demon and assumed to be destructive by your very nature, what better way than this?

He made stars. They didn't manage to take that from him.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale are fighters, really --they have no intention of fighting in any war. They'll annoy everyone until there's no war to fight in, for a start. But between the two, if one must be, then that one is Aziraphale. Principality of the Earth, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Wielder of the Flaming Sword... all that stuff. Even if he'd prefer not to, it's very clear that Aziraphale can rise to the occasion, if he must.

Crowley was never that kind of angel. He wasn't a Principality. He doesn't have a sword.

...And yet.

It's Crowley who protects. He's the one who paces, who stands guard, who circles Aziraphale and glares out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near.

In light of everything else I've said here, I think that's interesting.

Obviously part of it is that Aziraphale enjoys it and, you know, good for him. He's living his best life, no doubt no doubt no doubt. But what about Crowley? What's driving that behavior, really?

Have you heard the phrase, 'loved to the point of invention'? Well, what if 'the point of invention' was where you started? What if where you end up involves glaring out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near? What is that, in relation to the bright-eyed thing you used to be?

What do we name the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale?

...Thinking about how an excitable angel with three million pages of star design he wants to tell you all about...becomes a guard dog. Is all.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #aziracrow #Crowley #Aziraphale #good omens 2 #good omens meta #unfortunately I do not have trains of thought #only long meandering strolls of thought #sorry about it #anyway tl;dr Crowley is a nerd #also I have a strange emotional attachment to the idea of 1500's Crowley...#...facedown in a pile of Mona Lisa sketches; drunkenly info-dumping about Aziraphale #and Da Vinci is just like. 'Ahhhh mio amico Antonio. You fucking simp.'

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