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#it's IN mY hEAd
lineffability · 8 months
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in which God gives them the happy ending they deserve!!!! (and the best one i could think of) This is set in the bookshop. It is also set during the second coming/advent of the final war storyline that will be s3. I'm starting very much in medias res bc i needed to write this scene specifically first or my body would have IMPLODED, so this is where we are: Aziraphale and Crowley have reconciled --and just decided that, if they have to join the war, it will be on the side of the humans--when the Metatron arrives in the bookshop with the intent to kill. The armies of heaven and hell stand united and ready for the war, and he cannot have his plans thwarted by THEM. But then, someone else appears. @gooodomens i agree i think she is Her
The doorbell chimed. It was the lady from the shop next door. The jeweler.
"Oh. Bad time?"
The silence that greeted her was an unmistakeable answer.
"Well. Always a bad time." She smiled. Looked at the old man.
The Metatron suddenly stood frozen in fear.
The implications of this fact slowly dawned on Crowley and Aziraphale.
By sheer instinct alone, Aziraphale reached for Crowley. Caught his arm, slid his hand blindly downwards until it reached Crowley's. Heard him suck in a breath. Their fingers slid into each other and combined into a strained fist, so close that every last atom was squeezed out of the space between them. Don't you dare let go.
The lady looked at the metatron, sighing inaudibly. She looked him up and down, and when she looked up again he was a little boy. She motioned for him to leave, which he did, slightly confused but without objection or malice, and with a skip in his step that seemed so innocent he might have been playing in the park with his friends. "Will have to start that one again," Azirapahle thought he heard her say, but she had not talked at all, had she? She just stood there.
"Is this--" Crowley hissed.
"Believe so." Aziraphale somehow managed to squeeze out between pressed lips, and swallowed.
"Fuck."
"YES" God said. And suddenly there was no sound in the room, no air, no static, just the idea of a bookshop. Her gaze now moved towards them, and when it hit they could do nothing but stare back like deer in the headlights of a car--a Bentley, perhaps.
"AZIRAPHALE" He stood perfectly still, the weight of her word, his entire being, resting on his shoulders. It did not feel heavy. She turned her head. Almost smiled. "CROWLEY." His eyes were wide, sunglasses gone. He stared back. His name. His self.
She looked at them. Fixed them with a gaze human eyes could not comprehend. And in it was everything. God smiled. An unreadable expression.
"SO?"
And for once, both of them, the angel and the demon, were completely and utterly speechless.
And then God asked them a question.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"
They stood there with their hands clasped so tightly together that one began where the other ended. They stood there, together, before God. Not a judgement, but a question. Crowley moved his lips, shaking, finding his voice. He held on to Aziraphale for dear life -- and love, too. Aziraphale held on tight.
"Answers," said Crowley.
God smiled, and gently shook her head.
"Peace," said Aziraphale.
God continued smiling. And lifted a hand. Gently moved a finger. Understanding passed between them, settled deeply in their souls.
"VERY WELL. GOODBYE."
And a million bells softly chimed. The sound was all-encompassing, everywhere, in every crevice and every atom and the spaces in-between, too. It was light and it was blinding, and when it faded away, God was gone.
A low rumbling, gone, too, a sound they never even knew had been there, all this time, under everything. Then a groan, a sigh of a billion voices, a laying down of arms, relief, nothing, nothing at all and yet the world, still. After everything.
God, gone, the angels and the demons, too. Gone from earth. Completely. Forever.
(Not from existence, never that, but from this universe. Crowley's creation. The stars were still shining. A home he had built.)
They were all alone.
They knew this with utter certainty.
"It's just us," Aziraphale breathed. Slowly, finally, he turned his head to look at Crowley.
"It's just us," he confirmed. Looked at Aziraphale.
They looked down at their clasped hands.
"Well." Crowley cleared his throat, tried to find some ease in his tone. "That went better than expected."
"Crowley, God has abandoned the earth!"
"Not abandoned, Aziraphale," Crowley breathed. "Left the earth alone. Has given it actual freedom. And...and we, I mean us, we're still here. Angel--" And he suddenly stopped, tripped over the word. It carried a different weight; it felt lighter. There was something gone from it. He tried again. "Angel."
For the fraction of a moment, he was terrified. If Azirapahle was no longer an angel, did that mean--?! No. No, that was not it. His terror was reflected in Aziraphale's eyes, but it slowly drained out as he raised their clasped hands. He let go gently, opening up their palms.
"I feel it, too," Azirapahle whispered, except his face was suddenly joyful. "I'm not an angel anymore. But I'm not--"
"You're not fallen, no," Crowley breathed, and the relief he felt could have moved mountains.
"Crowley, you're-- you're not --"
"I know." Relief gave way to confusion. Crowley groaned. This felt entirely new. But they knew who they were, they remembered everything. "Are we human?"
"I'm not sure. No."
"You're right." Crowley knitted his brows. Felt into his being. "I think we could be. If we wanted. But we're not. But I don't have any powers. You?"
"No. No, I don't."
"What does this mean?"
"I don't know."
They stared at each other. The war was over. There would never be another, save from the many that humanity would inevitably wage. As was their choice. And when they died, they would be dead. Nothing more, nothing less. Earth and decay and the natural cycle of life. And they would be good, too, and insurmountably kind, and would receive no divine reward for it.
They knew this to be true with utter certainty.
"Gonna have to tell the atheists they're finally right," Crowley said and laughed incredulously. He stopped when he saw the expression on Aziraphale's face, who was staring somewhere far away. For once in his life, he could not read it.
There were too many emotions on it at once.
Then his eyes snapped back to Crowley's--and his emotions singled in on one feeling alone. "Crowley-- it's just us. We're, we're here. On earth. Together."
The words hit Crowley like a pile of bricks, the joy in them almost toppled him off a cliff. Yet there he stood, in front of Aziraphale, who had been abandoned by God, stranded on earth forever, and had never looked happier. It was too much to bear. He wanted to bear it forever.
"I would like to do something very human," Aziraphale said. There was no doubt in his voice, no question. His smile was pure, angelic. He was not. (At last, at last.) He lifted his hands and gently grabbed the collars of Crowley's jacket. The softest of fists. Happy tears teetered at the edges of his eyes.
The way Crowley's heart clenched and released felt wholly human. He forgot to breathe.
And then Aziraphale kissed Crowley. No angels and no demons, only them, together, so close. It was fervent, and devoted, and joyous. And it was good.
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cookiepie111 · 3 months
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Thinking about ice hockey könig and figure skater reader
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ngl the mask from dff looks like the freddy you get when you run out of battery in fnaf one and he starts singing to you about bullfighters
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vintagesoul1975 · 11 months
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YOU STEPPED INTO MY LIFE AND I'M OH SO HAPPY
youtube
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kiatheinsomniac · 9 months
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*doesn't sleep for one night after weeks of consistent sleep cycle*
*auditory hallucination of cello on a loop*
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spikybanana · 1 year
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My Sharona by The Knack except I keep hearing "shawarma"
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st-just · 2 years
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Mri Caste as Gender
So the Faded Sun’s still kind of living in my head, and like specifically the lens of Mri caste-as-gender is lodged in deep enough I might as well try to exorcise it via writing it out.
Because, okay, in the book the Mri have three castes, Kel, Sen and Kath. Your caste is determined some time in adolescence, is by far the most important thing about you, determines your standards of dress, modesty, how and when it’s appropriate to interact with outsiders, what sort of labour it’s socially acceptable to take part in, and your political and economic claims and privileges, as well as your expected role in child rearing and how and what kind of romance is acceptable. It’s also totally nonhereditary (for reasons that will be obvious). So like, it’s being a bit precious still probably, but I don’t think calling them genders is completely off base.
And, so, to vastly oversimplify, the Kel are Toxic Masculinity: Noble Savage Warrior Aristocrat edition, the Kath are women-under-patriarchy-as-defined-by-a-radfem (and also children who haven’t yet settled into a gender of their own), and the Sen are celibate scholar-mystics, and the political elite, and also the only ones who are allowed to learn any sort of theoretical or academic knowledge. Or, like, read.
Which, stepping back, seems like a fairly typical sort of made-up-words-for-standard-gender-binary – leaving aside the celibate Sen anyway, you have the hypermasculine Kel and the hyperfemine Kath, and the social imbalance you’d naively expect, with (for example) sexual access to a Kath (though not necessarily a specific one) more or less on demand being a standard privilege of being a Kel in good standing. And then you’ve got the vaguely neuter Sen above/to the side, but I kind of feel like a third gender associated with knowledge and mysticism and learning isn’t that unusual in SFF? (Blame monasteries and celibate clergy, probably. Well I mean and third genders is most societies that had them being associated with the spiritual/supernatural generally, too).
But what gender you get sorted into is actually an open question. Because being a Kel or Sen isn’t actually limited by sex, either in principle or practice – being a warrior forbidden from ever doing any manual labour or learning anything not directly useful for warfare who might be compelled at any point to murder some poor idiot or get yourself killed defending someone’s honour is open to all! (This is also true of the Sen, but isn’t true of the Kath, whose entire social purpose is biological and social reproduction, and seem to have all the associations with fragility, kindness, softheartedness, etc, you’d expect from cloistered femininity).
And then at one point it’s mentioned that how it tends to work is that usually everyone tries to be a Sen or Kel, and if you’re female and don’t make it you kind of just fail down into being a Kath, and if you’re male and you aren’t Sen material then you’re going to keep trying to be a Kel until you either manage it or get killed (one way or another. Being a Kel but being bad at it provides an infinite number of ways for your peers and elders to honourably kill you). Which, well, certain I’m weighing it down with my own preconceptions here, but feels like there’s something to the perspective of it as ‘Try to make it as either Warrior or Intellectual. If you can have kids then if you don’t make it you fail down to Woman, if you can’t then if you can’t hack it you’re surplus to requirements.” (I may be being overly cynical in assuming that would-be Kath who are infertile aren’t treated any better. But given the amount of letting the unsuitable die off Mri culture does generally I’m skeptical).
But it’s more complex than that, because sex does matter for Kel and Sen, but only in a few circumstances. First, Kel can be ‘truemates’ – the closest to traditionally married couples Mri culture seems to have – and in the book this only seems to occur between male and female Kel. However, given the everything else about the general vibe of the book, I’m just going to choose to attribute that to ‘was published in the late ‘70s, not allowed to say gay people exist’, and consciously ignore it.
More importantly, sex does matter again at the very top of society. Specifically, the leader of any given Mri community is the She’pan – the spiritual mother of the entire group, who is elevated out of the Sen (but with the necessary support of a Kel champion, because this is a culture where single combat to the death between champions is how things are settled half the time). So she’s necessarily celibate (and that IS important, we eventually meet a related species whose equivalent of the She’pan seems to be a mother in a physical sense as well, and the idea seems to be the cause of some disgust and revulsion), but she does necessarily have to be female, no alternative is ever mentioned or even considered.
And, while they don’t necessarily seem to overlap with the actual highest ranked Kel, the She’pan is expected to have a harem of skilled Kel husbands to act as an honour guard. The ‘harem’ bit is mostly figurative, except that since she can’t have any children herself, any children her husbands have with anyone else are counted as being hers instead. (Which really feels like rubbing salt in the wound of the social inequality thing to me, but anyway).
Anyway I didn’t really have, like, a point or thesis for this, and did not arrive at one while writing it out at 1am on a Sunday. I just think made up alien societies are neat?
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dstarstories · 2 years
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If only AU Story Vince would catch up with the very smitten AU Save Vince, everything would be wonderful :P
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today’s heardle has got me just loudly proclaiming
JEREMIAH WAS A BULLFROG-
every few minutes
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xxatlasxx · 1 year
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Video
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loathsome-sickness · 3 months
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"people show their true colours in life threatening situations" no, they show you what they act like when they're mortally terrified, an emotion notorious for literally turning your entire brain off to the point where people who go into those situations as a profession need to be literally trained on how to not have that happen
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spacerockband · 3 months
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Strange Bird
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temporalteardrop · 2 months
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bass makes a dollar. i make a dime. that's why i think about lesbian sex on company time
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anxiousangerball · 8 months
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I don't know who needs to hear this, but
YOU DO NOT NEED TO START A NEW HOBBY!
STEP AWAY FROM THE TEXTILES!
YOU DON'T NEED MORE YARN!
THAT FABRIC IS NOT CALLING TO YOU! LEAVE IT ALONE!
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strats-blood · 5 months
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what studying literature feels like
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