#metatron: oh he's a shrewd one he's playing me for all i've got the only way out is to give him the power he so clearly craves

[sunderwight]

Scenario where Crowley, actually being crow-like rather than snake-like in this regard (or perhaps dragon-like) has spent a lot of his time on earth accumulating a hoard of supernatural treasures that he just sort of keeps shoved in a storage unit somewhere.

Most of it are things that other demons or angels have lost on Earth, or occult tools that humans have made that proved a little too effective at doing dangerous or inconvenient things that like, threaten to unleash the hordes of hell onto the world (Hell approves of intervening because the understaffing issue means they don't actually want a whole bunch of demons suddenly taking unsanctioned holidays on Earth). But basically if an angel accidentally drops their celestial harp or some guy comes up with a way to hack a direct line to Satan, Crowley goes and fetches the relevant artifact and then, because Hell's bureaucracy is a joke and they never actually check, he just sort of keeps hold of them instead of sending them back to head office.

Crowley's got his own unit somewhere full of Indiana Jones style treasures. Holy grail, Ark of the Covenant type shit. Half of it is broken and a lot of it even he is uncertain of the provenance of, whether it was made by angels or demons or humans in some cases is tricky to discern, and some of those things are just objects that were causing trouble or seemed liable to and so he grabbed them and stuffed them in a box and forgot about them.

Usually he brings the books to Aziraphale first, but there are some he's grabbed while they were in "not speaking to one another" phases of their relationship, and Crowley only cared to remember to show them to the angel if he thought that Aziraphale would find them interesting. (Crowley, despite having spent a lot of time listening to Aziraphale talk about books, still does not actually know a lot about books, and so is not always a good judge of what might be interesting.)

Basically where this is going is: Crowley has had the Book of Life moldering in his storage locker for decades, and he has no idea. It just looks like a kind of shabby, big old book! There isn't even a title on the cover, and he could never get it to open, so he thought it was a dud book or something (again, he doesn't really 'get' books). He got it off of some charlatan occultists in the 1500's who were running a con about being able to summon angels, but then actually did manage to summon Aziraphale, which annoyed Crowley (interrupted dinner) so he stormed in all demon-like, put the fear of Satan into them, and took away all of their stuff. He would have shown Aziraphale the book, but they got into a fight straight afterwards so instead Crowley just added it to his hoard of crap and completely forgot it existed. The renaissance was going on, there were a lot of distractions! How would Heaven even lose something as important as the Book of Life?

Anyway, this has led to a massive misunderstanding that coincided with Aziraphale's genuine interest in books, where the Metatron thinks that Aziraphale somehow figured out that the Book of Life went missing and has been covertly blackmailing him for centuries with the offer to discreetly find it (via various rare book dealers and underground book circles specializing in occult books, like prophetic tomes and etc), and Aziraphale just thinks he's successfully convinced Heaven's upper management that a bookshop is a perfectly good celestial embassy.

#good omens #dunno where else to go with this #but the thought amuses me #metatron trying to get muriel to find the book of life in aziraphale's bookshop #meanwhile it's shoved in a box underneath a bunch of other crap in a storage place near heathrow #maybe crowley lapsed on his payments after he went rogue from hell so the world's most dangerous locker auction is about to kick off #aziraphale: *blithely talking about books in a way that has no actual double-speak but metatron assumes it does anyway* #metatron: oh he's a shrewd one he's playing me for all i've got the only way out is to give him the power he so clearly craves #god -- as the only being who knows whats up -- has been sniggering about this for centuries