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aethelflaedladyofmercia · 2 years

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Perfection, Chapter 9--A Perfectly Lovely Day

Aziraphale and Crowley live in a heartbreakingly perfect world. There is no sadness. There is no loss. Every day, the sun rises on an idyllic peace far beyond mortal imagination.

The end of the old world brought Salvation. Justice. Perfection.

But not everything is what it seems. And one angel learns that perfection cannot be bought without great pain.

In this chapter, Aziraphale's day begins to get better, while Crowley's continues to get worse...

(Fic is rated M for violent/disturbing/dark content. Please check the tags)

Now on AO3!

Aziraphale sat in the bed, drinking the last of the broth. Chicken broth, not even full soup, hardly something that one would find in any of his favorite restaurants, but it seemed to be the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted.

The woman—Dolly-Rose—came back into the room carrying something in her hands. “Here, I thought this would help—oh! Finished already? Do you want another bowl?”

The angel scraped up the last few drops with his spoon. He could have had twenty more bowls, but that seemed an imposition. He set it aside on the little table and smiled, folding his hands.

“I… I suppose that’s a no. Well, I thought we could try this.” She held out a pad of paper and a pen.

Aziraphale stared at them. He hadn’t been allowed writing implements in so long. His fingers shook as he reached out, but instinctively pulled back as he looked over his shoulder for Gabriel, for the guards, for those who would punish him for breaking his sentence.

“Oh. Can you write? I mean, I assumed… never mind, then.” She started to turn away.

Desperately, he reached out, managing to catch her wrist before she left. Frowning in confusion, she handed them to him.

“English, right? I know a little French, too, but that’s about it. Certainly no fancy angel letters.”

His handwriting came out smudged and scribbled, not the neat calligraphy he’d practiced for centuries. But there it was, four words: My name is Aziraphale.

Just seeing it there, words, his words, seeing the comprehension on another face was enough to bring him to tears again. Not as many this time, but he had to put aside the pad lest he get it wet, and press a hand to his eyes. Dolly-Rose stood beside him, hand on his back. “It’s alright. You just let it all out, er, Az… Aza… Azer-a-fell?”

It made him laugh, silently. Close enough, he wrote, words coming faster now. Some people called me Mr. Fell back before…

He didn’t quite know what to put, but she nodded, sitting beside him on the bed. “Mr. Fell, then. How is it you came to be in my guest room, drinking my broth?”

Seeing as you brought me here, my dear, I believe you would know better than I.

Dolly-Rose laughed as she read. “Oh, I see. You’re a clever one, then.”

Quite clever, if I say so myself. But it’s been rather a long time since I’ve had the opportunity.

“Then I should ask, how is it you found yourself sleeping on the mountainside, covered in blood?” His pen hovered over the pad. “And not all of it your own,” she added more softly.

Ah. You noticed. He’d pulled the blankets up to his waist, but there was no point in trying to hide it now. She was the one who had washed and bandaged his wounds, and despite his earlier panic there was still plenty of evidence of the night’s activities. His robe was covered in rips and deep red blotches, some of the larger cuts were still scabbed over, and the piercings that had held his chains hadn’t healed completely.

“Not the only thing I noticed.” Dolly-Rose tapped a finger on his bicep. Though it was covered by the blood-stained white of his sleeve, he knew exactly what she was pointing at.

Aziraphale folded a hand over his Prisoner’s Mark, though his mind was remembering another one, glowing on Crowley’s arm.

Read the rest on AO3!

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pikatik · 17 days

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Also quick Ace Day doodle for you!! :D

#from an ace to all of you aces :D #good omens #good omens fanart #book omens #crowley #aziraphale #asexual #ace day

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shitpostingkats · 9 months

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An Asexual's love letter to Good Omens 2

There's an infamous quote by Neil Gaiman going around, regarding the general vibe of season 2, and many people (I believe humorously) yelling that it could not be further from the truth. Particularly in the last episode, where that happens.

I disagree.

The final episode of season 2 was deeply, deeply comforting to me.

I am asexual. Have been my whole life. Even before I had the words to describe what that was, child-me had this feeling in their gut of being an outlier, that everyone was exaggerating, or in on some joke, that I wasn’t privy to. Because I was bombarded on all sides by shows and movies and books, telling the same story of love, again, and again, and AGAIN. It’s drilled into our brains with the same fervor as the days of the week, or the quadratic formula. Meet-cute -> misunderstanding ->declaration of feelings ->kiss. More or less steps can be added to account for runtime or complexity of narrative, but that’s the basic structure that a relationship follows. It MUST be, because that’s the formula every character who's ever been in a story goes through, often times when it even feels like an add-on, like it’s only there because this is a story, there HAS to be a romance. And it has to follow the steps.

For a long time, I felt love wasn’t for me, because if there’s only one way to be in love, I sure as hell wasn’t feeling it.

Instead, the relationship I ended up in looked a lot like what Beezlebub and Gabriel go through. Meeting someone routinely until it starts to feel comfortable. Getting to know them and slowly growing more attached. Eating chips and listening to music.

We like to joke whenever someone asks us how long we’ve been together, because the answer is we just sort of slowly fell into it, and we honestly don’t know when the line got blurred between ‘friends’ and ‘partners’. And, at least for me, a good deal of that confusion, that hesitancy to label, came from the fact that what I was feeling, what we were, couldn’t be love. It couldn’t be romantic.

We were just quiet and gentle.

And that wasn’t love.

Because it was slow, because it wasn’t physical, because there was no structure aside from consistency and companionship. Because it didn’t follow the Rules.

Then I found myself in stories, and it felt like a revelation.

Beelzebub and Gabriel aren’t the first time I’ve seen a love like I feel represented in a narrative, but it never stops feeling special. And I don’t know if I’ll ever stop celebrating it.

Throughout the sequence in the pub, I kept expecting them to “confirm” Gabriel and Beelzebub. A dramatic line, a kiss, a whatever. That’s what I’ve been taught to expect, after all, that’s the only way a relationship is “real”. Of course, this doesn't mean Crowley and Aziraphale sharing a dramatic kiss is wrong, or that I can’t see why it resonated with so many people, but for me. Those moments in the pub are worth so much more.The last scene might have been literally showstopping, but those handful of moments between the duke of hell and an archangel were the beating heart of the season for me. A simple love story in four scenes. No kisses. No ‘I love you’s. Not even any definition of what. The love Gabriel and Beelzebub have is strong enough for them to both want to shatter their worlds and flee their lives and it's just.

It's just that.

Two people in a pub, playing the other's favorite song, giving a little gift, buying a packet of crisps.

That sequence means far more to me than any kiss ever could.

Love isn’t only real when it's hot and sudden and ephemeral, it can also be

Quiet.

And gentle.

And still romantic.

Still real.

#I sometimes remember this sequence and just feel so light inside #good omens #good omens season 2 #good omens season 2 spoilers #good omens s2 #good omens s2 spoilers #asexual #ace #ace pride #actually asexual #asexual spectrum #essays #ineffable bureaucracy #lord beelzebub #archangel gabriel

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vroomvroomwee · 4 months

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Lgbtq people saying it's queerbaiting because two people didn't kiss or fuck on screen has the same vibes as cisgender heterosexual people saying two characters aren't gay and completely missing romantic undertones just because the two didn't kiss or fuck on screen

Aphobia is just recycled homophobia

#ace #aro #aromantic #asexual #aromanticism #asexuality #queer #gay #lgbtq #lgbtqia #is this about good omens?#yep #good omens #goodomens #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands

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gyffindraws · 2 months

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butch aziraphale and her cool, mysterious goth partner

bonus pin close up cus its too blurry to see

#yes i will be making it extremely clear that my aziraphale is asexual and austistic #butch aziraphale #autistic aziraphale #asexual aziraphale #ineffable husbands #good omens fanart #good omens #my art #aziraphale #aziracrow #crowley #good omens 2 #ineffable spouses #fem!crowley #they can be non binary too honestly #fem!aziraphale

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7upslut · 8 months

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when I read good omens I fully interpreted ineffable husbands as an asexual couple because like.... they're supernatural beings that don't really jibe with human sex

but in the show they have so much sexual tension and I think that's because Michael Sheen always looks like he's ready to jump David Tennent's bones at any given moment and he's so real for that

#good omens #ineffable husbands #asexual aziraphale #asexual crowley #honestly i prefer asexual aziracrow #aziracrow

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mando-lore · 2 months

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Let asexual characters be asexual you horny bastards

#asexual #asexuality #good omens #hazbin hotel #aziraphale #crowley #alastor #the magnus archives #tma #jonathan sims #jon sims

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krakensdottir · 7 months

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Crowley and Aziraphale canonically do not have sex organs. There is no indication that they have ever experienced sex or have a desire to.

And apparently... people do not like this. They are resistant to accepting it in a way that, as an asexual, it's hard not to take personally.

But I don't really think it's personal. I think it's just that allosexual thinking is so prevalent, people default to 'but why WOULDN'T they?' instead of 'why WOULD they?' Even though the latter question makes a lot more sense in this context. Allosexual thinking has us expecting that love = sex, and that any being who enjoys good food or music or other Earthly pleasures must also want to try it. Even though many real human people enjoy those pleasures and have no desire for sex at all. Why wouldn't these ethereal beings be like us in that regard?

And look, I've been in enough fandoms by now not to be surprised by any of this. What DO you do with a ship if not have them fuck? That's always the end goal, right? But there's a fine line between fantasizing (always fine) and actually expecting reality - or canon - to work that way. Canonically, we have a sexless romantic relationship that does not, by any sort of default, have to turn into a sexual one to be valid. That's amazing. That almost never happens. But if you went by fan discussions, you probably wouldn't even realize that was the case.

The thing is... aphobia doesn't always look like hatred, or ridicule. Sometimes it looks like erasure. Sometimes it looks like a persistent tendency to sexualize the sexless in order to make it more interesting, or palatable, or to make the relationship 'complete'. It's not on purpose, like that. It's cultural normalcy talking. None of us are untouched by it, and it's easy not to realize.

I don't think I'm coming to a point here. I'd just like if fan discussions weren't always overrun by allosexual expectations. But I also don't really expect it to lead to a lot of self-reflection. I mean, it's fandom. It's whatever. It shouldn't even bother me. But apparently it does, so I wanted to talk about it. And put it out there in case, perhaps, anyone else has been sitting on these feelings and would like to vent.

#good omens #asexuality #if this gets ugly I'll block replies #but I'm not taking it down #read carefully before you reply and do not put words in my mouth

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inhonoredglory · 9 months

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Defining Ineffable Love (or, Aziracrow Learn the Rules of Romance)

(In response to this ask about ineffables and asexuality)

One of the major threads this season was Aziraphale and Crowley asking themselves what exactly is their relationship. Not what it is in terms of how much they love each other. (That's a given.) But what it is in terms of the human implications of their love.

Crowley and Aziraphale definitely come at the relationship with different perspectives, in terms of what they’re willing to admit to the relationship being. I don’t think we can entirely interpret it in human terms. –David Tennant (source)

For 6000 years, they’ve never put a name on their relationship. They didn’t, because they’re inhuman, genderless, sexless beings and they didn’t grow up (as it were) with labels. And even when they did learn them, they couldn’t say it was love, because admitting that was a death sentence.

All of Aziraphale’s heart eyes and pining could live comfortably in his mind if he never admitted what that said about him as an angel (trauma compartmentalization). Crowley tries desperately to be cruel and nasty to add white noise around the blatant reality of his constant loyalty to Aziraphale. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real and they can’t punish you.

After the Not-pocalypse, for all rights and purposes, Aziraphale and Crowley chose humanity as their identity. We see Aziraphale “playing house” in various human roles (as a landlord, a private eye, a magician).

We even see Crowley intentionally taking on human behavior to handle emotional issues: “Just breathe, that’s what humans do.” They’re slowly and intentionally enculturating themselves into the world they want to belong––earth.

Yet it’s setting up Maggie and Nina that makes Aziraphale and Crowley start thinking about their relationship as a human construct.

Because fundamentally, Aziraphale and Crowley are not human. Like Neil Gaiman tells us constantly, they can’t be defined in human terms when it comes to gender and sexuality. They can shift and move through each and any of those markers at will, purely for the pleasure of the thing: “angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort.”

IMO that makes them originally asexual, in the sense they were created without the need for sex. And it makes them fundamentally transgender and genderfluid, because while on earth, their sexless, eldritch spiritual bodies take on human, gendered forms and clothing. What gender (and sexuality) they identify with while on earth varies through the eras. Crowley definitely has a fluid gender identity, while Aziraphale appears to have settled on gay man (aka THE southern pansy) for his internal typology (although all of these identities are subject to change).

In the midst of all this fluidity, it’s no wonder Aziraphale and Crowley haven’t thought of their relationship in human terms before. There’s just so much different in them and their bodies than what they see in humanity. And there are no books and songs that show the kind of love they have, in the malleable, sexless bodies they have, with the background they have; it’s all ineffable.

Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t start out thinking they were in a romantic relationship. Whatever feelings they had were long repressed, redefined, and shuttled away. But they did love each other, without question. And it was that love which scared them, because it was bigger than anything they saw among humans, a love that was beautiful and blasphemous and unfathomable.

Kinda like what David Duchovny said about Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, “I don’t know if they’re in love. In a way, their relationship is deeper than that, because they cannot live without each other.”

Now take this profound, ineffable love and drop it into the little boxes and labels human culture has created for itself.

Full disclosure: I’m an asexual demiromantic person in a queerplatonic relationship, so I’ve done a fair bit of research on what romance is and how the rituals of romance are, in many ways, social inventions that vary from culture to culture. There’s love and then there’s romance, and they don’t always overlap. So my interpretation of Aziraphale and Crowley comes through this lens and the fact that Neil Gaiman has affirmed the validity of an ace-spec reading on our ineffables.

Which brings me back to my thesis: That only now are Aziraphale and Crowley thinking of themselves as a romantic couple, precisely because they are interfacing with humans and taking on their social rules.

I like this one asexual person’s description of their experience, which feels very much like our ineffables (from a very good article, I def recommend):

If there is a border between friendship and romance, then in my internal landscape, it goes right through a misty forest where no one has ever bothered to place signs.... Neither of us had intended to start anything even vaguely romantic, but the activities we did and the intense kind of immediate connection we had was coded as romantic in our culture.

That’s what Crowley realizes when Nina confronts him about his relationship to Aziraphale.

“It looks like that from here.” What Crowley and Aziraphale share is beyond definition, but Nina cannot imagine the anything beyond the human labels she was taught. The tragedy of an everlasting love is that it can only be conveyed properly to other humans if it is cast in such small human words––partner, boyfriend, husband.

Because when Crowley denied those human roles for Aziraphale, Nina slid down the path of thinking Aziraphale was just his “bit on the side,” because there were no labels left she could imagine for them. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real.

That’s the purpose of labels, to culturally validate a person's identity. Labels, of course, DO NOT create reality; people's experiences are always real, in all their varied ineffability. But labels allow a space for culture (ie other humans and political and legal society) to recognize formally your lived reality.

So Crowley started really thinking about him and Aziraphale, about the ineffable love between them and realized that in human terms, those would be the things he’d call Aziraphale, because those were the words that gave Aziraphale that place of importance in his life.

But with that realization comes all the human trappings and behavioral patterns around those words (the candlelit dinners, dramatic rescues, drinks at the Ritz, etc.) which Crowley had never thought of before, and yet… maybe romance is what he and Aziraphale have been doing all along.

That’s why this season centered so much around Aziraphale and Crowley using cultural artifacts (film and literature) to understand romance, because romance is so deeply socially-defined.

Aziraphale himself has been leaning hard into the romantic social cues (he’s more well-read in the cultural trappings of romance than Crowley is), especially post-Blitz. But when he watches Maggie and Nina dancing, he works up the courage to do something with Crowley that’s even more explicitly loaded as “traditionally romantic” than anything he’s done up to that point.

Because while risking their lives for each other and defying everything for each other is love in its purest form, dancing (specifically in Jane Austen’s world) is a public performance coded for potential marriage partners. It's an intimate ritual of the entire body. (And in British slang, dancing has been used as a euphemism for sex.)

Crowley's "We don't dance" is really telling, because it shows Crowley’s awareness of the unknowable devotion between them vs the human roles Aziraphale is asking him to fill, specifically its physical aspects. Aziraphale is asking to make their relationship more public, more physically explicit, more coded as romantic in a setting specifically intended to couple individuals.

While Maggie and Nina inspired Aziraphale to progress their relationship into a publicly physical direction, Maggie and Nina inspired Crowley to think of the emotional implications of their human roles: the commitment, security, and monogamy of a husband, a partner, an us.

That’s what he decides after Maggie and Nina confront him in the end. “You never say what you’re really thinking.” He wants to codify his relationship so they each become responsible to one another. Aziraphale has always been his soulmate, the one he could always rely on. But he wants to place a word and a role to their love that will bring with it Aziraphale’s commitment and dedication to him.

And that's another reason why Crowley kisses Aziraphale, because he knows Aziraphale was willing to make their relationship physical, and he wants that, too. To consummate this bond in the way humans do.

But Crowley doesn’t really know how to kiss; he’s not as worldly as he makes out to be. (It’s Aziraphale who owns the gun, and Crowley who’s never fired one.) He uses the kiss as a tool to get across to Aziraphale what he wants for them, in the physical language Aziraphale has been using, because "one fabulous kiss and we're good," right?

But it doesn’t work, because real life and real emotions don’t work like that; life and love don’t follow a script, despite the novels and plays and songs.

Aziraphale and Crowley spent this entire season trying to figure out what their relationship is and what they wanted out of it, trying to make sense of the unfathomable thing they share and the human implications of it, and not quite landing on the same page.

Part 2 of this Analysis, covering a correction in Crowley’s statement (“You don’t dance”) and the further implications of dancing/sex.

#please see the part 2 listed at the end for an analysis Crowley’s “you don’t dance #good omens #good omens 2 #ineffable husbands #go s2 meta #go meta #good omens meta #queer #asexuality #asexual #aromantic #genderfluid #gos2spoilers #go s2 #good omens 2 meta #ineffable romance #*mine #*mymeta

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