#I like Aziraphale being a snob about stuff like that though

[shipaholic]

Omens Universe, Chapter 4 Part 2

Oof, I just finished this in time for my Sunday deadline. Er! Probably a bit more first-drafty than usual. Welcome to my extra-unfiltered brain-drippings, I guess?

Just a ton of weird body horror in this one. Why did I turn Crowley into a ball of black ectoplasm? Who knows, man.

btw the horse is a girl now. I’ve edited the last part to reflect this.

Onwards! On the quest for Hellfire to stick poor Crowley’s gem back together.

Link to next part at the end.

(last part)

(chrono)

Chapter 4, cont.

The route was ordinary, until it wasn’t.

On a damp country road indistinguishable from the mile of damp country road they’d already passed, Aziraphale nudged the horse towards a point where reality was slightly thinner than it should have been.

It was like a smoke hood snuffing out a candle. The wan sun vanished as though it had never existed. The soggy fields disappeared behind a curtain of fog.

Crowley bubbled to himself. He was slumped on the horse’s neck in a heap of misshapen armour. The horse, using horse logic, reacted to this by speeding up to get away from him, so they were now bouncing down the path at a nervous trot, jingling like a cutlery drawer.

Aziraphale leaned forward. “How are you holding up?”

“Ggggggggn.”

Crowley gave a long hiss, like steam escaping. Black tar oozed down the back of his neck. Patches of what looked like scales had broken out all over his face, like a teenage skin complaint. His right cheek was still swollen from the horse’s kick, and his broken gem was dull under the swirling fog. His eyes were unfocused. For a time, they had grown closer to passably human; now they were as snakelike as they ever had been.

Aziraphale contemplated him, his poison-yellow eyes and the creeping scales that covered his face. The thought occurred to him that demons had forms that were. Well. On the bestial side. Covered in bats or flies. Sometimes mould, if they couldn’t manage anything better. Crowley was the only one he knew of who looked, until now, mostly human. Mostly.

He thought about Crowley, straining with the effort of staying in one piece. Perhaps he had no energy to spare towards the little maintenance miracles he normally did without thinking about it. Like ensuring his hair was always perfect. Or that his clothes always hung just so. Or…

Or holding back some of the more obvious evidence of his nature. Aziraphale considered that what he was seeing now - the scales, the eyes - was what Crowley was meant to look like. How he looked in Hell, after the fall.

He said he disliked shape-shifting. But he still did it.

Aziraphale let this line of thought play out. Then he folded it away, for good. If Crowley wanted to look more human, that was nobody’s business.

The horse was far less generous. Her eyes rolled in a way that suggested everyone should brace themselves for an abrupt relocation. Aziraphale suspected the poor thing might have reached her limit, no matter how much serenity he projected at her.

A hiss came from within Crowley’s armour.

“Ssss… zsss… Aziraphale.”

He had to force the words out. Aziraphale leaned closer to catch them.

“You ssshould. Discorporate me.”

Aziraphale felt a cold swoop in his stomach.

“Don’t say that. Whatever for?”

“Horse. ‘Sss about to bolt.”

Aziraphale gripped the horse’s sides with his legs as they all almost jolted out of the saddle.

“Not at all,” he lied. “She’ll quiet down, eventually. She’s used to riding into danger for God and glory.”

“Don’t kid yourssself. If I’m in my gem, the damn thing ssstops freaking out. Jussst do it.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Stop it, Crowley. It’s not going to happen. What if you can’t reform?”

Crowley made a noise that could have been a sigh.

“Either the Hellfire heals me or it doesn’t.”

Aziraphale thought about it. Drawing his sword and… dispatching Crowley, for the first time since Eden. The first time ever on purpose.

He had suggested it earlier. But that was before Crowley lost form, and speech. Back when he thought they could solve this problem by popping Crowley’s gem in the post.

If this was the last -

If this was the last time they -

He couldn’t do it.

No, he refused to do it. He’d find another way. If Crowley wanted to argue, too bad.

“Angel, did you -”

“I heard you,” Aziraphale snapped. “The answer’s no. And I’m steering, so you’ll have to like it or lump it.”

Crowley undulated sulkily. “Gnnnggg.”

“Same to you. Now. Are we there yet?”

Crowley peered off into the fog. He took a deep sniff. Tendrils of mist curled into his nostrils.

He raised a dripping, gelatinous arm and shakily pointed left.

Aziraphale nudged the horse. They jingled on.

Aziraphale could swear the ground was flat, but it felt like they were somehow sloping down, down into the murk. Fog pressed in like shadows, dissolving the world. He could only guess the swooping sense of vertigo he felt was not in his imagination.

Then, from up ahead, came a deep, red glow. A sinister, hateful glow. A glow that wanted to envelop everything before it, then snuff it out.

The fog billowed as though stirred by wind. It rose, pulled back like a curtain, and revealed with a flourish the sweeping landscape before them.

A colourless sweep of grass led to the shore of a lake. The lake was small, but the waters were endlessly black. None of the fog, swirling at head-height, trickled down to brush the surface. The air above the water was dead. Aziraphale suspected if he tried to breathe it, he would find himself unable to.

In the centre of the lake was a tiny island, and on the island was a cave with a glowing red mouth. It was as red as Hell in a storybook.

On the shore sat a rickety wooden boat. It was big enough for two, if one was feeling generous. Someone had tossed an oar onto the seat.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. All the scene was missing was a few skulls and a flock of bats to really set the mood. Call it snobbery - and Lord knew Heaven wasn’t any better, what with the robes and the head-pounding light and the choirs of angels that knew no dynamic markings beyond fortissimo - but he found this kind of thing embarrassing.

He dismounted and helped Crowley down after him. The horse perked up as soon as she was rid of them. Aziraphale gave her an absent-minded stroke, and put the route back to the castle in her head. She gave the snake a dirty parting look, and trotted away with a flick of her tail.

There was nothing to do but get on with it. Aziraphale guided Crowley to the boat. Crowley walked like an empty suit of armour, its inhabitant long-deceased, now puppeted by something that didn’t quite get how people were supposed to move. From time to time, he flickered, and his entire body turned off. It happened too quickly each time for Aziraphale to feel the sting of panic until Crowley had already reappeared. A quiet roar of static emanated from him, intermittently, like a faulty connection.

They reached the boat. Aziraphale poured Crowley into the bottom, like black tar. He glooped like a cauldron and spilled between the pieces of his armour. He looked like a quagmire with the drowned remains of a knight floating in it.

Aziraphale settled across from him, dubiously, onto the half-rotted seat. He picked up the oar and pushed off.

The boat glided out in total silence onto the lake. There was no sensation that they were floating upon anything. They drifted, perfectly level, as if on casters. Aziraphale had no intention of putting his hand in the water to check what was there. Maybe they were sailing across sheer void, and if he looked down, the spell would break and they would plummet forever into empty darkness.

It might be dangerous to use a miracle to get to the island faster. This place was steeped in demonic essence. It would be like putting opposing magnetic fields together. Or possibly it would just cause an explosion.

He rowed. His oar passed through whatever was beneath them with no resistance. The boat glided forward at an even pace.

The island loomed. Crowley was a lumpy puddle at the bottom of the boat. More of him spilled over the top of his armour, submerging it like an oil slick. The snake’s smooth dark head swam on the surface, the only part of him that kept its form.

Then, like a sauce thickening, he suddenly expanded, bursting the bounds of his armour. Aziraphale jerked backwards, pulling his feet up onto the seat. There was suddenly twice as much of Crowley as before. Appendages that could be presumed to be arms and legs erupted from him like wet, black roots. He had outgrown the boat before Aziraphale could react. Crowley tried to pull in his spiralling limbs, and accidentally punched a hole in the side.

Black water rushed in. It was nothing like water at all.

A forsaken feeling washed over Aziraphale. It was as though his essence, the part of him that rang in tune to Heaven, had gone cold. The water moaned, and his heart wrenched out of his chest.

Crowley hissed like a kettle and scrambled away as though the water was scalding hot. His limbs gored more holes as he went, and the boat began to list. The terrible cold rose from the bottom and crept through Aziraphale’s body, numbing and burning as it went. He gripped the oar with frozen hands and rowed faster. The island, which had seemed in reach minutes ago, was now a distant speck. They weren’t going to make it. They were going to break apart and fall away into the endless dark.

Clammy hands brushed Aziraphale’s ankles. He gave one of them a smack with the oar. When he looked back up, the island was right there, spilling its angry red glow from the cave onto the grey sand of the shore.

The boat broke in half as they reached it. Aziraphale didn’t look down. He grabbed Crowley and leapt off. For an instant, he was treading water that wasn’t water. The cold of it stopped his brain and heart. Then his feet were churning up wet sand, and he staggered up a pale, dirty beach, the last tendrils of the waves sighing as they unstuck and let him go.

Aziraphale kept moving, although he couldn’t feel his body. He could only feel Crowley’s hand, clutched in his, oozing and damp and not hand-shaped at all, but warm, the only warm thing in the world.

When they were a safe distance from the water, he bent over, put his hands on his knees and gasped for a minute. Crowley sunk into a puddle beside him. It was hard to read his body language, but Aziraphale guessed he was also collecting himself.

They only took a few moments. Crowley’s hand wasn’t a hand any more, and they needed to find what they came here for quickly.

Aziraphale turned and faced the cave. The mouth of it glowed like an oven. He felt the hellish heat radiating out, waiting for him to step into its radius.

He mustered a smile for Crowley. “At least we’ll dry out.”

Crowley made a motion that Aziraphale interpreted as a grim nod.

There was nothing more to say. Aziraphale walked, and Crowley oozed, towards the cave. They stepped into the circle of searing light. It was hot, but it didn’t burn. It was more like the close, miserable heat of a sweaty little room crammed with people who know they can never leave. They went further, past the threshold, all the way inside.

The cave swallowed them up. They kept walking.

---

(next part)

#omens universe fic #omens universe #good omens #good omens fic #ineffable husbands #steven universe #oof it's a creepy angsty chapter of my *checks notes* romantic comedy... yes #rebecca sugar said recently that one of her unused ideas for steven was #what happens to a gem that's left in the dark too long #I feel like the answer to that question is definitely contained in this cave #I would have liked to include an exchange between Aziraphale pooh-poohing Hell's Very Scary lake of the damned #versus Crowley sticking up for the old firm and the old cliches are beloved for a reason ANGEL #but Crowley was too non-verbal by that point #I like Aziraphale being a snob about stuff like that though #deep down he feels if he were a demon he'd manage to scrape together something less hacky than THAT

[jimvasta]

Messrs Fell and Crowley at the Ritz

Aziraphale and Crowley think they’re blending in well, but they stand out, especially to the people who meet them regularly.

“They came in again today, the gay couple I told you about, the goth and the gent. They’re lovely. The goth can be really abrupt and a bit loud sometimes, but when his husband isn’t looking he always leaves a generous tip.

I know we’re not supposed to pry, but I know for a fact the gent is Mr Fell, I’ve been into his bookshop and I’m certain it’s a front for something. Selling rare and antique books makes money but not enough for him to be eating at the best restaurants in London virtually every night. As for the goth, the rumour is he’s Anthony Crowley, grandson of the world war two mobster, not someone you cross. Him having a lot of money, that I can understand.

They’re absolute proof that opposites attract, I know that much.

When I first started serving their table I was terrified of them, I thought they were some sort of religious nuts. They always talk about Heaven and Hell, miracles, blessings, temptations, all of that sort of thing, but it’s really code.

Mr Fell is angel and Mr Crowley is the snake, or the wily serpent. I’m sure they’re talking about business deals and it’s serious stuff. They act relaxed and casual but they really aren’t. I can tell when people are entertaining for business and these two may be a couple but they talk shop when they’re dining and it shows.

As I say, I used to be terrified of them, but honestly the way they swan around and their absent-minded good deeds completely make up for whatever horrible business they get up to. Whoever’s lives they ruin, they don’t do it to working folk like us.

There was something strange about them today though, Mr Fell ate only half what he normally does and Mr Crowley didn’t drink as much, but they looked so happy and relaxed. The whole atmosphere of the place was positive, it was as though they swanned in and ordered everyone to smile. Maybe I’m biased towards them, but they’re so wonderfully quirky and not as strict or stuffy as our other regulars.

They always order the best wine and champagne. Alf, our section’s sommelier, knows to make sure they get the special recommendations. We get plenty of wine snobs, but Mr Fell is a genuine connoisseur, he knows exactly what he’s talking about. Today was a champagne day, not just any champagne either, the best, even Alf was surprised, but they’ve never not paid up instantly, they get whatever they want. Then Mr Fell told me to surprise him with an afternoon tea selection. He’s done it to me before and apparently I’ve never disappointed because he always gives me that soft smile when I bring his order to the table.

Mr Fell’s card went through without any issues, as always, and a few minutes later they left. The moment his back was turned Mr Crowley whipped some money out of his jacket and placed on the table, giving me a look before he went. I think it’s silence money, he knows how much I overhear, but it was a lot today, more than I’ve ever had in one go even from my biggest table.

I shouldn’t say anything, even to you, but I have to say something to someone and you always were a good listener.

Anyway, Grandad, that’s today’s story, I hope you liked it.” He stood and leaned in to gently kiss his grandfather’s forehead. Visiting time was almost up and the nurses did not like family overstaying their welcome, even when he was the only family who kept coming back.

It was a year since his grandfather had a massive stroke and they said he would never speak again, but that did not mean he could not understand or hear anything. He was a career butler so he understood the life of being in service.

“I’ll drop in tomorrow for a bit before work, bye.”

“Goodbye, my lad.”

#good omens #aziraphale #crowley #minor miracle