#crowley is left vavoom-less

[actual-changeling]

Uh. Hi! I'm Alex and I love writing pain.

I've seen the angst war going on and I am incredibly tempted to contribute; I'm not quite sure of the rules (if there are any) so feel free to bring me up to speed. Updates will be at whatever pace is fun/doable for me, interactions, asks etc. always very much appreciated 💚

@goodomensafterdark @daneecastle @gleafer @gahellhimself-blog @vavoom-sorted-art @kotias

I will put appropriate content tags on every chapter and make a masterpost once I have a handful of posts. Please keep in mind that this series is going to deal with a heavy dose of unreality, self-injurious behaviour, substance abuse, erratic behaviour/mood swings, and more. There will be a happy ending.

Now, without further ado, the first instalment of what is going to be us following Crowley down the path of (hopefully temporary) insanity.

rest your head \\ chapter 1

(~800 w, no additional warnings)

Sleep deprivation, while usually not fatal, is not the least bit pleasant. Human brains require sleep to function—and not just their minds, either. The entire body breaks down oh so slowly as every system designed to keep it alive deteriorates without the comforting embrace of unconsciousness.

However, the actual cause of death is yet to be identified, and luckily Crowley's corporation functions on the principle of 'what it doesn't know won't kill it'.

Over the centuries, earthly indulgences have become more and more common, pleasures easily sought and found no matter where he went, although nothing ever beat a good night's (or decade's) rest. Sleep calms his mind and allows him to drift through time without a care, surrounded by ever-shifting dream clouds and the occasional vivid interference. In short, it takes away the pain, and Someone knows there is a lot to carry when he returns home for the first time in four years.

No dust had dared to settle on the furniture, and the familiar smell of damp earth welcomes him. Locking the door behind him, Crowley blindly finds his way through the corridors, kicking off his shoes as he goes and throwing his glasses onto the nearest surface. When he pushes into his bedroom, which is just as pristine as he had left it, the anger churning in his gut cools.

Home. Has he ever had a home? Once upon a time, maybe, before time had been born, surrounded by breathing nebulae and void, and then—

Eden. Him. Right, that's done.

A snap of his fingers and his clothes change into a set of silk pyjamas, the fabric brushing over his skin like liquid silver, and the black-out curtains snap shut. Darkvision is one of the advantages of being a demon, but he finds the dark has nothing to offer him today, so he closes his eyes and pulls back the sheets to curl around a pillow.

Images flicker in the pulsating emptiness left behind, piercing blue eyes and fluttering hands, a press of lips against his, words digging into his skull like tadpoles making a home within his brain matter. Electricity crawls over his slowly numbing body, urging him to disappear, to sink into nothingness and waste away until he is a dried stain on the mattress. 

No one will come looking for him, after all.

Maybe the world will be brighter once he wakes, the pain duller, the loneliness less aching and all-consuming. Within his chest bleeds a hollow, jagged wound, dripping black blood and drowning the radiant remnants of Aziraphale's presence; his essence is familiar, it's- home. 

Crowley does not need to sleep, yet somewhere between Rome and the present, he had forgotten about it, his corporation shifting and changing, craving rest and punishing him for its absence. It will not kill him, it does not even occur to him that it might, but there are countless fates worth than death and he is already living one of them. What's another added to the mess his life has become?

His nails dig into the pillow case, his consciousness choking on the scorched battlefield of the day, but no matter how hard he tries, how desperately he commands his body to bend to his wills, sleep refuses to come. A new, different kind of pain rises, worse than fatigue and infinitely more addictive. Its sting is battery acid on his tongue, infusing him with a restlessness that is scratching on his bones, and when blue irises keep mocking him behind closed lids, he forces his eyes open, turns onto his back, and stares at the ceiling, waiting.

Light wanders and shifts, barely visible through the heavy fabric adorning his windows, and it dips behind the horizon before reappearing on the other side. Crowley stares at white paint and counts the moving dots gradually clouding his vision, absently pressing his knuckles against his sternum over and over—whether to calm himself or to chase away mental pain with physical is beyond his awareness. 

Both, neither, maybe. 

His too-human body protests and whines, and once he begins to see blue shadows in his periphery, Crowley bites his tongue and gets up. Coffee will help, then a hot shower, and yelling his plants back into order is going to occupy most of his afternoon anyway, so what's a night without sleep?

The next one will bring him the rest he needs, and Aziraphale's eyes will stop striking him down whenever he blinks. He is alone now (alone in London, alone on earth, his chest constricts and twists at the thought, stealing his breath) and he will have to get used to it; it'll be fine eventually, right?

—

Three days later Crowley is staring at his bedroom ceiling, impatient, restless, exhausted, and attempting to chase away the bone-white teeth hovering underneath lightning-blue eyes.

"Fine, have it your way," he snaps eventually, his voice too loud in an empty room, and feels the smile breathing down his neck all the way to the kitchen.

[shipaholic]

Episode 3: “I Know Where I’m Going” / “The Resurrectionists”

I’ve slept for about two hours, so it’s episode 3 liveblog time! Spoilers under the cut.

- Goob gets his own hand-stencilled mug and hot chocolate powder. What a life.

- The mysterious Mrs Sandwich...! I know nothing about her whatsoever, and I still don’t.

---

- When Muriel sits down with the box visible over their shoulder, it feels less like they might see it and more like it’s watching them. I think the box itself is a good deal more important than any characters seem to be aware of.

- And now Aziraphale and Crowley have left Muriel alone with the box. HMM.

- “I don’t know how you lot have managed to stay in charge all this time.” “I’m not sure we have, have we?”

- “That’s how you lot measure miracles? How many times you could have brought someone back from the dead?”

- (Re. Nina and Maggie) “One fabulous kiss and we’re good” HMMMM. Something tells me Crowley is going to attempt one fabulous kiss himself and things afterwards will decidedly not be good.

- What was Muriel going to say about humans falling in love? They started to say, “Oh yes, especially -” gesturing back into the bookshop, and then Crowley finished the sentence for them. Especially what, Muriel? What opinions can you have already formed? Did you read all of Pride & Prejudice in the last three minutes?

- Crowley is so whipped it is actually embarrassing for him. Anyone less nice than Aziraphale would tease him about this until he disintegrated.

---

- Number of people meddling in Nina’s love life in first three episodes: Aziraphale + Crowley + Maggie  + Mrs Sandwich + Muriel = 5. She is the world’s foremost meddled-with woman.

- AZIRAPHALE DRIVES WORSE THAN CROWLEY THIS IS NOT A DRILL

---

- I realise that Aziraphale is very English (as am I), but it was still jarring to hear him pronounce it “A - Zed - Fell”. I have to admit A Zee Fell flows much better.

- Did. Did Aziraphale just shoot a dirty look at Crowley because he described Gabriel as beautiful. Guys. You cannot both be jealous of the same terrible man. No-one has ever been less of a romantic threat to your relationship.

- So far, in all the scenes set in the past, Crowley has been having a whale of a time, while Aziraphale slinks along miserably under the weight of one moral crisis after another. Meanwhile, in the present, Aziraphale is darting around absolutely having the time of his life while Crowley sulks and fumes in the background.

---

- Aziraphale gets to pick the tunes, and he immediately goes for Danse Macabre. Neither of them are beating the goth allegations.

- Ooh, Crowley taking over the radio and twisting it just like Hell used to do to him.

- The yellow Bentley: perfect no notes.

---

- Beelzebub seems surprised that Hell has no news about Gabriel. Admittedly that’s a dent in the theory that they want Aziraphale and Crowley to successfully hide him.

- Aw. Beez is having an emotional crisis. And confiding in a random demon about it. And not punishing him. You’re in charge, Bzzbzz. If you want people to have more job satisfaction in Hell, the change starts with you.

---

- My Best Games Of Chess. That is definitely a book that Gabriel can get nothing out of besides demonstrations about gravity.

- Crowley carefully carrying armfuls of books around the shop, only to toss them over his shoulder when he loses focus. He’s as much of a menace as Jim.

- Is this the most dressed-down we’ve ever seen Crowley? It’s a good look, tbh. Very slinky.

- Are those. Elbow slits. To show off his elbows. ?

- Crowley. My dear one. Please stop saying “Vavoom”. Even Jim is mocking you now.

---

- This is a contender for being the worst thing Aziraphale’s ever done. Just. Piously, obliviously cruel. Didn’t undo any of the ‘wickedness’ Elspeth committed that night, just ensured she wouldn’t get paid for it. I expected her to splash him with a good dollop of pickled herring-corpse soup.

- Ohhh we’re acknowledging that only Crowley is capable of stopping time. I’m prepared to wait patiently for an explanation of why he and only he has that power.

- Aziraphale won me back by tearfully rocking the jar with the tumour in. He just loves so much, and he lives surrounded by mayflies.

---

- OK this is a lot of clues all at once!! The publican mistook Gabriel for a mason (why a mason specifically??), and assumed so was the person he was with. And of the two of them, Gabriel was the most memorable. Who’s that going to be then? Not Beelzebub, surely? The Metatron, perhaps??

- When I paused the video, the notes on Amazon say re. the jukebox, ‘This is a Multi-Horn High-Fidelity Record player. Another definition of fidelity is “degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced”.’ So, Nice And Accurate, then?

---

- The laudanum is sold by “C.M.O.T. Dibbler”. Haha, nice.

---

- Crowley what in the world is this Alice in Wonderland shit.

- David Tennant is doing his utmost, but I cannot handle the cringiness of laudanum-drunk Crowley, I’m sorry. This is like “ETERNITAAAAAAAAY” on crack.

---

- Oh noooo oh myyy they’re walking along and Aziraphale has his arm around Crowley’s waist hellllp this is cute as all get out you guys stoppp I mean it

- Oop there he goes.

- “And then I never saw Crowley again (for many many years)” ERM. Oh God. That’s a bring-down. How. How long did Hell torture Crowley for this. ...Is this minisode set before the Victorian holy water scene in S1. Is it. ???

---

- I LOVE Aziraphale sweetly and with great prepossession handling himself like a boss around skinheads. Yeah he has nothing to fear from Mr NO RECEPTS. I wish good things for the grindr guy, though.

- All he’s doing is calling Crowley? No selfie with the Gabriel statue?

- Considering it was the whole point of this Edinburgh excursion, Aziraphale has been MISERABLE at bringing back clues. He didn’t ask anything useful about the jukebox or about the statue. This was basically just a nice holiday for the Bentley.

- He is the MOST cute though. His little face. <333

---

- Nina. How can you resist Maggie’s beautiful blue eyes.

- “Did they vavoom?” No Goob. They vavoomn’t.

- EEP, the one-two punch of Gabriel doing a creepy possession speech and Shax banging on the window got me. Whose voice was that underlying Gabriel’s? It didn’t sound like God - it was American and female, but different to anyone we’ve heard so far, I think. Tempests? A Leviathan reference, maybe...? We haven’t seen any weird weather so far except caused by Crowley. And God and Satan in the Job episode.

- The shot where Gabriel’s eyes go back to normal *chef’s kiss*

- The thing about Shax, is that even though she is an antagonist, she is completely honest and straight-up about everything she’s doing. There is no manipulation here. She is not just honest about her actions, but her limitations, too. She freely acknowledges she can’t enter the bookshop. (Or fix the boiler!) I still find it quite endearing.

- Also. Is Shax a vampire???

- Another puzzle piece about Beelzebub... after being told by another demon earlier in the episode that there was no new intel about Gabriel, Shax turns up with the apparent news that Beelzebub knows Gabriel is in the bookshop. Either Shax is bluffing (which she doesn’t seem capable of doing), or... Beelzebub is lying to other demons but letting Shax into their confidence. Not all the way in, I imagine, but more than Demon Bob or whatever he was called.

- Oh god. Crowley being so protective of Aziraphale, and at the same time so fatalistic. “It’s always too late.” That’s the third time he says “too late” this episode, and it’s clearly a reference to the time it always is in Hell. I guess it makes no difference having the ability to stop time, if it’s already too late.

---

- Bagpipes theme song is another winner.

---

General thoughts... I wasn’t really feeling this minisode, to be totally honest. I found it a bit cartoony. I think I prefer when Crowley and/or Aziraphale drive the action rather than tagging along behind someone. I greatly enjoyed the bits set in the present day, though.

[vidavalor]

Thanks for reading. 💕 Couple of things... I don't actually think it's Aziraphale who put the distance there. There's the dry tone to Aziraphale's arch "oh, it's you, dear me" bit in the Job minisode and Crowley's semi-guilty response. I'm pretty sure that what we'll find is that they vavoomed something fierce during The Flood and it was Crowley who left.

Aziraphale isn't the only one of the two of them who worries about them getting caught or hurt. I'd bet more on that first kiss winding up with Crowley being the one who says they can't do this and, I'm secretly hoping/theorizing, asking Aziraphale to forgive him because wouldn't that just be delicious considering the scenes we've already seen? 😉

Crowley was the one at the start being all m'a demon, you're an angel and hereditary enemies! and poor Aziraphale was thinking: do not care right now-- stop talking and kiss me again. 😂

If they're already reframing almost every scene there is by putting the first kiss so early on the timeline, then why stop there where the opportunity to then reframe our take on things they've said chronologically much later is concerned?

Aziraphale is already so tongue-in-cheek with stuff like the above gif scene that it'd just be even funnier if he's flirting here by recycling Crowley's words in that first kiss before Crowley took off in a panic and, as a result, they didn't have a second make out session for, like, 500 years. Aziraphale is just enough of a bastard to basically never let Crowley live that down (even if he thought the concern was romantic.)

<<Is that way Crowley/Bildad's hair is so wild? To be less distractingly handsome? And that beard? Could this even be part of why he started wearing sunglasses in the first place?>>

I'm going to presume you aren't meaning to slander Bildad. He might not be to your taste but there's a certain appeal to many. Aziraphale certainly found him distractingly handsome enough. 😊 I don't think Crowley would think that he needed to work on being less distractingly handsome because I doubt he thinks he's distractingly handsome in the first place. He's also pretty depressed at the start of the Job minisode so some of it could be that reflected in his whatever!hair and hiding behind the beard and the dark sunglasses.

Some brief thoughts about Crowley, the sunglasses, and gender expression below. Just throwing a cut in here to shorten the post a little.

The sunglasses are a defense mechanism and I'd wager he started wearing them because, as there grew to be more people on Earth and those people began to develop into groups and fear outsiders, the fact that Crowley has yellow eyes became something that was frightening people with its unusualness. Nearer to the start of Earth, the humans didn't know any differently so it didn't matter as much. Soon, though, Crowley was probably practically inventing the sunglasses to be able to go out without being instantly ostracized.

They also give him the ability to observe others without his expression being noted, which gives him more power in a social situations and helps him feel more in control. There could also be that he expresses gender in public in a way that others might view as more masculine when it allows him more social power and, so, more control, to do so. I think this is probably how Crowley went from being more overtly feminine in presentation in the earlier days of Earth to a long period of seeming to hide aspects of his femininity when in public, to the last few decades in the story, where he's become increasingly more comfortable with his public gender expression matching how he truly feels on any given day. He comes from a world with much different (and more positive) ideas about gender but he lives amongst the humans and how they see things affects him and his ability to safely be himself.

He's crabby in Rome for a variety of reasons but I'd imagine its hyper-masculinity was probably one of them. While he's pretty masculine in presentation in that scene, my understanding is that the curls in his hair are along the lines of a more common feminine style at the time and could be seen as reflective of him feeling a bit repressed by the environment. 1941 is like this, too, though, worse. London was crawling with Nazis and there's a subtle undercurrent, especially noticeable in Part 2, where Crowley is trying to pass for what those people might consider exclusively male and straight.

He's masculine presenting basically completely and changes his walk, most noticeable when he walks on stage to assist Aziraphale. Some others observed that he's wearing lipstick when they're onstage but that the middle bit on his lower lip is smudged, as if he was rubbing it off while chewing on his lip with nerves. He didn't have any on prior to this so the implication might be that Aziraphale snagged a tube from one of the ladies of Camelot and got Crowley to put some on when they were getting ready for the performance, under the guise that they'd be on stage so no one would notice, and that Crowley did but then gnawed most of it off nervously before he got onstage.

Even in London Soho in 1967-- one of the most progressive places to be in an era of rapid social change-- Shadwell brings up Crowley's gender and Crowley shuts him down hard when it comes to the idea that there's anything feminine about him. Even with the following Aziraphale scene suggesting that Crowley is trying to get holy water to protect them from Hell with the idea that they could try living together if he had it, Crowley doesn't actually feel as safe as he'd like to, as he's insistent to Shadwell that he's "not a witch"-- not a witch because not female.

By 2008 in 1.01, though, Crowley is starting to feel more comfortable with his public gender expression matching how he's feeling on any given day and that is increasingly true through the present of S2. He wears his hair longer at times, wears women's jeans and lipstick out in different scenes, etc.. In the opposite of how he responded to Shadwell in 1967, he clarifies his identity a bit to Mrs. Sandwich in S2. This is the first time that we've ever seen Crowley talking about his gender identity with anyone besides Aziraphale.

They're having a bit of a coming out party in different ways during The Meeting Ball, as it seems that, in addition to letting others know that they're a couple, Crowley's decided to trust Mrs. Sandwich with more of himself than he usually specifically shares with others. He feels safe enough-- both with her and in general-- to do that now, which goes along with progress in the human world in which he lives.

The sunglasses are a part of this, too, because the only person Crowley would take them off around through all of S1 was Aziraphale, as he could be himself with Aziraphale. In S2, Crowley adds a new name to that list: Gabriel. I have the feeling that the snarky angel who wears a suit like it is a suit of armor and who leans into hyper-masculinity as a means to survive but whose box might have been hiding an, um, box lol during his arrival and whose partner is non-binary, might be just the right, new person for some chats about gender, sex, and sexuality in Crowley's future.

I love how Aziraphale is so taken with Crowley in The Flood scene that he is actively trying to avoid looking into his eyes... all while Crowley, equally besotted, keeps trying to meet Aziraphale's.

Especially when you consider S2's whole thing about rainstorm-adjacent eye contact...

We start with the one moment where their eyes do meet, as Crowley slips around Aziraphale, causing Aziraphale to be caught in his gaze for a moment. Aziraphale has to steady himself. He doesn't breathe for a moment. He blushes. He looks away as soon as he can get himself together enough to do so. One day, he's going to paint his house the color of those eyes, but in this moment? His heart is going to beat out of his chest just looking at Crowley.

Then, Aziraphale keeps looking ahead and only glances occasionally slightly to the side, trying not to make it obvious that he is not looking at a flirting Crowley-- who, for his part, can't take his eyes off Aziraphale. Aziraphale avoids fully catching his gaze, looking away quickly, just undone by those eyes enough that he's too shy to meet them.

We get to a point where Crowley is literally *leaning forward* to try to get Aziraphale to meet his eyes, but Aziraphale is dodging by looking anywhere else.

Even when exchanging a brief look of understanding, Aziraphale looks in Crowley's direction but not directly into his eyes.

This keeps happening for the rest of the scene, with Aziraphale not directly meeting Crowley's eyes through telling him about the plan for The Flood, the rainbow, the Oi! Shem! unicorn moment, etc.. It ends with them both looking up as the rain begins. It is a whole scene showing us that Aziraphale's attraction to Crowley makes him shy away from his gaze while Crowley's attraction to Aziraphale makes him seek out his eyes. This scene, though?

It is the only scene where this sort of dance is taking place, is it not? There's no scene after it like it.

By the Job minisode, this eye contact issue not only no longer exists between them, but we have the scene where Aziraphale asks Crowley to take his glasses off and look him in the eyes.

So, back in Mesopotamia... come S3, might we see that this sudden rainstorm of The Flood eventually forced them together beneath a canopy where they looked into each other's eyes and... vavoom?