LeoReadss

Autistic non-binary person. Love books and solve mystery. My gender is Azirphale in Heaven after the body swap. Basically, a demon in an angel's body.

[tweedfeather]

And we kissed as though nothing could fall.

[chrisantosstefanika]

devil on shoulder

[leoreadss]

my beautiful baby angel!!!!

[possibility-left]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Good Omens (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens) Additional Tags: Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Just an incredible amount of fluff tbh, Slow Dancing, Established Relationship, Inspired by Fanart, No Dialogue, (almost no dialogue), Romantic Fluff, Sharing Clothes, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Christmas Decorations, Not Good Omens Season 3 Compliant, Aziraphale Can Sense Love (Good Omens) Summary:

An angel and a demon share a cozy winter evening together, slow dancing for not the first and not the last time.

I was delighted to be assigned to @leoreadss for the N&AA Fic/Art Exchange and as soon as I saw this specific fanart I knew it would be the one I’d pick to write about – there were so many delightful little details in it that I kept zooming in to look at the photos on the cottage wall, the shoes tucked under the furniture, and so on.  Hope you enjoy it Leo!

[leoreadss]

This is so cosy!! I absolutely ADORE it!

[leoreadss]

I miss Aziraphale.

Just me?

No?

Good.

*virtual hugs*

[carry-the-sky]

piggybacking off this post by @aduckwithears: what if the bookshop was noah's ark 2.0, but for everything?

what if they end up in the shop after everything has been erased, only this time crowley thinks: was the place always this big? it’s more of a maze than he remembers, now that he’s properly looking. rows and rows of shelves twisting and turning in a dozen labyrinthine directions. staircases spiraling up to nowhere. hallways branching off the foyer like tree roots, that’s new.

aziraphale emerges from the bowels of the shop, successful in his quest for cocoa. a warm drink at the end of all things, how painfully british. as far as crowley can tell, nothing has survived; not the earth, or alpha centauri, or any distant stars and nebulas clinging to the skin of the universe. not even light, the fastest, most fundamental thing in all of creation. but somehow, fortnum & mason has. somehow, aziraphale’s chintzy mug embossed with the words HOT STUFF in blazing cherry red above a little cartoon devil has.

“don’t ask,” he says, pushing it into crowley’s hands.

crowley opens his mouth, several questions and a taunt or two already lined up in the wings— and that's when he sees it.

oh. 

that’s definitely new.

“angel.”

“it was a gift, if you must know, white elephant gone horribly, horribly wrong, and then i couldn’t bring myself to donate it, one can never have too much drinkware—”

“aziraphale, shut up a moment, would you, and look.”

to the angel’s credit, he shuts up and looks.

memory is a funny thing, unreliable, easily eroded. crowley would have sworn, cross his char-blackened heart, that the tree was taller. in his mind, the branches extend like reverent hands towards the heavens, heavy with fruit, wide and green and swallowing up the whole sky. he is very small, beneath it.

aziraphale’s hand finds his shoulder. “oh.”

“yeah.”

“well, that’s…certainly a design choice. did we…?”

“who else? we’re all that’s left.” but no, that’s not quite right. the dickens. crowley scoops it up, flips it open, then keeps flipping, eyes dancing over pages that are no longer empty.

next to him, aziraphale frowns into his mug. “but how? if this is some sort of, of…cosmic leg-pull, i confess i’m failing to see the—” his face goes blank, then lights up like a christmas tree, a study in giddy. “oh! oh, of course. even the dickens.”

“it was you.” crowley takes his time with the words, feeling each one rush through him. an equal yet opposite kind of flood. “you named him, and it brought him back.”

they gaze at each other, stunned.

“we need more books,” says crowley, at the same time that aziraphale declares, “we need more cocoa.”

and so it goes. they start with the classics, squabbling over semantics (“for the last time, crowley, twilight does not count. i don’t care how many copies were sold worldwide.”) they brave the jeffrey archers. they pore over encyclopedias, scraping their teeth on words like lithospheric mantle, reveling in the euphony of sonoluminescence. and something peculiar starts to happen, a sort of field of dreams situation.

people start happening.

they’re the only thing that could, really. if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it matter? the tree was there; the knowledge was there. it was real. it existed, in spite of. because of. what use does humanity have for a book that tells them, yes, you can be, i will allow it, i will permit it. we create our own mythos, simply by living, by looking at the rorschach blob and finding joy in the mess, beauty in the mundane. you’ve seen the post: forty-thousand years ago, humans stenciled their handprints on the wall of a cave, and this morning, my niece learned to fingerpaint. 

so yes, people start happening. friends curl up in the shop’s back room, trashing oprah’s book club pick of the month. lovers spin in a slow circle beneath the oculus as fred astaire croons from the gramophone. someone brings up the duct-taped banana (“how fucking pretentious. anyone could do that shit.” “yeah, but they didn’t. this dude did. in this essay, i will—”), and someone else says, have some art nouveau, maybe you’ll calm down, and the far atrium is suddenly a tribute to klimt, bursting with geometric golds and ornamental greens. in the foyer, a young man teaches amateur card tricks from a folding table that aziraphale will swear up and down isn’t his; the tag on his jumper reads, hi, my name is josh. here, a neolithic wheel. there, a 7th-century chaturanga board. paul blart: mall cop, wedged between the self-helps and memoirs. people begetting creation begetting people, an ouroboros of abracadabra, creating as they speak, until the bookshop is overflowing with it. bursting at the seams with humanity. the world is remade here, in the gaps between stanzas of that shitty poem you wrote when you were twelve, in the canned laughter on your best friend’s favorite sitcom. i am trying to get the seas back on the maps, where they belong. i am trying to love the world back to normal. we survive through storytelling, that ineffable collision of necessity and ingenuity, anchoring the world like the roots of a great tree. we tell stories to remind ourselves that we are alive. we are here.

slowly but surely, the void beyond the bookshop’s windows begins to brighten. human hands stitch the universe back together. and a small eternity later, crowley and aziraphale pull the stream of time around themselves like a cocoon, and rest.

“there’s nothing to forgive, you know,” crowley says. “i know i was flippant about it before, but the truth is— we were both a little bit right, in the end. weren’t we?”

“and a little bit wrong,” aziraphale agrees.

there is sunlight, their time-adjacent bubble. it catches in aziraphale’s cloud of curls, limning him in gold. not a halo, but a frame. the contour of a face and form freely chosen. every day for the rest of our lives, we’ll get to choose, crowley will think, the realization settling just behind his ribs. how about that.

he sees it, the moment aziraphale realizes it too.

“actually i take it back.” crowley grins, and the space between them contracts, then shrinks, a star collapsing. “yeah, i’d like an apology for the pointy teeth. my culture’s not your costume, angel.”

aziraphale’s smile is luminous. “crowley. beloved.”

“hm?”

“shut up a moment, would you, and kiss me. properly, this time.”

“such hard work,” says crowley, and he does. there might be supernovas. maybe another big bang. nobody is around to see it, celestial, infernal, or otherwise, but that’s alright. it exists, it has always existed. here, in the kitchen, loving the world. steadfastly loving.

see how easy it is.

[leoreadss]

Such a lovely morning reading! Thank you so much for writing and for the Kronk voice in your head! We love it!!!!

[carry-the-sky]

piggybacking off this post by @aduckwithears: what if the bookshop was noah's ark 2.0, but for everything?

what if they end up in the shop after everything has been erased, only this time crowley thinks: was the place always this big? it’s more of a maze than he remembers, now that he’s properly looking. rows and rows of shelves twisting and turning in a dozen labyrinthine directions. staircases spiraling up to nowhere. hallways branching off the foyer like tree roots, that’s new.

aziraphale emerges from the bowels of the shop, successful in his quest for cocoa. a warm drink at the end of all things, how painfully british. as far as crowley can tell, nothing has survived; not the earth, or alpha centauri, or any distant stars and nebulas clinging to the skin of the universe. not even light, the fastest, most fundamental thing in all of creation. but somehow, fortnum & mason has. somehow, aziraphale’s chintzy mug embossed with the words HOT STUFF in blazing cherry red above a little cartoon devil has.

“don’t ask,” he says, pushing it into crowley’s hands.

crowley opens his mouth, several questions and a taunt or two already lined up in the wings— and that's when he sees it.

oh. 

that’s definitely new.

“angel.”

“it was a gift, if you must know, white elephant gone horribly, horribly wrong, and then i couldn’t bring myself to donate it, one can never have too much drinkware—”

“aziraphale, shut up a moment, would you, and look.”

to the angel’s credit, he shuts up and looks.

memory is a funny thing, unreliable, easily eroded. crowley would have sworn, cross his char-blackened heart, that the tree was taller. in his mind, the branches extend like reverent hands towards the heavens, heavy with fruit, wide and green and swallowing up the whole sky. he is very small, beneath it.

aziraphale’s hand finds his shoulder. “oh.”

“yeah.”

“well, that’s…certainly a design choice. did we…?”

“who else? we’re all that’s left.” but no, that’s not quite right. the dickens. crowley scoops it up, flips it open, then keeps flipping, eyes dancing over pages that are no longer empty.

next to him, aziraphale frowns into his mug. “but how? if this is some sort of, of…cosmic leg-pull, i confess i’m failing to see the—” his face goes blank, then lights up like a christmas tree, a study in giddy. “oh! oh, of course. even the dickens.”

“it was you.” crowley takes his time with the words, feeling each one rush through him. an equal yet opposite kind of flood. “you named him, and it brought him back.”

they gaze at each other, stunned.

“we need more books,” says crowley, at the same time that aziraphale declares, “we need more cocoa.”

and so it goes. they start with the classics, squabbling over semantics (“for the last time, crowley, twilight does not count. i don’t care how many copies were sold worldwide.”) they brave the jeffrey archers. they pore over encyclopedias, scraping their teeth on words like lithospheric mantle, reveling in the euphony of sonoluminescence. and something peculiar starts to happen, a sort of field of dreams situation.

people start happening.

they’re the only thing that could, really. if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it matter? the tree was there; the knowledge was there. it was real. it existed, in spite of. because of. what use does humanity have for a book that tells them, yes, you can be, i will allow it, i will permit it. we create our own mythos, simply by living, by looking at the rorschach blob and finding joy in the mess, beauty in the mundane. you’ve seen the post: forty-thousand years ago, humans stenciled their handprints on the wall of a cave, and this morning, my niece learned to fingerpaint. 

so yes, people start happening. friends curl up in the shop’s back room, trashing oprah’s book club pick of the month. lovers spin in a slow circle beneath the oculus as fred astaire croons from the gramophone. someone brings up the duct-taped banana (“how fucking pretentious. anyone could do that shit.” “yeah, but they didn’t. this dude did. in this essay, i will—”), and someone else says, have some art nouveau, maybe you’ll calm down, and the far atrium is suddenly a tribute to klimt, bursting with geometric golds and ornamental greens. in the foyer, a young man teaches amateur card tricks from a folding table that aziraphale will swear up and down isn’t his; the tag on his jumper reads, hi, my name is josh. here, a neolithic wheel. there, a 7th-century chaturanga board. paul blart: mall cop, wedged between the self-helps and memoirs. people begetting creation begetting people, an ouroboros of abracadabra, creating as they speak, until the bookshop is overflowing with it. bursting at the seams with humanity. the world is remade here, in the gaps between stanzas of that shitty poem you wrote when you were twelve, in the canned laughter on your best friend’s favorite sitcom. i am trying to get the seas back on the maps, where they belong. i am trying to love the world back to normal. we survive through storytelling, that ineffable collision of necessity and ingenuity, anchoring the world like the roots of a great tree. we tell stories to remind ourselves that we are alive. we are here.

slowly but surely, the void beyond the bookshop’s windows begins to brighten. human hands stitch the universe back together. and a small eternity later, crowley and aziraphale pull the stream of time around themselves like a cocoon, and rest.

“there’s nothing to forgive, you know,” crowley says. “i know i was flippant about it before, but the truth is— we were both a little bit right, in the end. weren’t we?”

“and a little bit wrong,” aziraphale agrees.

there is sunlight, their time-adjacent bubble. it catches in aziraphale’s cloud of curls, limning him in gold. not a halo, but a frame. the contour of a face and form freely chosen. every day for the rest of our lives, we’ll get to choose, crowley will think, the realization settling just behind his ribs. how about that.

he sees it, the moment aziraphale realizes it too.

“actually i take it back.” crowley grins, and the space between them contracts, then shrinks, a star collapsing. “yeah, i’d like an apology for the pointy teeth. my culture’s not your costume, angel.”

aziraphale’s smile is luminous. “crowley. beloved.”

“hm?”

“shut up a moment, would you, and kiss me. properly, this time.”

“such hard work,” says crowley, and he does. there might be supernovas. maybe another big bang. nobody is around to see it, celestial, infernal, or otherwise, but that’s alright. it exists, it has always existed. here, in the kitchen, loving the world. steadfastly loving.

see how easy it is.

[leoreadss]

Even though I can contemplate the possibility that this Finale was the one Terry co-plotted, I refuse to believe he would have agreed to the memory erasure.

[adevilputaside4me]

On a meta level, Good Omens S3 was EMOTIONAL ABUSE.

... Meaning, I'm pretty sure Neil Gaiman did it ON PURPOSE, knowing how much it would upset the fans.

Neil knew how badly we wanted Aziraphale and Crowley (OUR version of Aziraphale and Crowley---the specific version of them we met in Season 1) to be together. He knew we wanted to see them resolve their issues and ultimately choose to be with each other in the end.

Instead, Aziraphale and Crowley forgo that emotional journey in favor of unnecessary pain. Neither of them experience real character growth in the finale; they are shown to be the worst and unhappiest versions of themselves, without getting a real shot at redemption. They never fix their communication issues. They don't express their true, authentic feelings for one another (don't @ me with that bullshit hand kiss thing). They never manage to get on the same page emotionally---even when they both agree to commit suicide (which I'm pretty sure was not the "one thing" Aziraphale wanted).

"Why give me Crowley? Why make me complete and then take it away?"

EMOTIONAL WITHHOLDING is a common abuse tactic utilized by men like Neil. They enjoy creating ATTACHMENT in their victims and then "TAKING IT AWAY".

It's easy to see how much Neil enjoyed frustrating his fans in retrospect. He actively taunted us on social media with the catchphrase "WAIT AND SEE" and threatened to make Aziraphale and Crowley kiss---but in a way we "wouldn't like". He loved dangling the implied promise of a happy ending over our heads, which we now know he never planned to deliver on.

Neil was unkind to his audience. He was also unkind to his characters. Aziraphale and Crowley are treated as punching bags throughout the entire series---shown to be "messy" for the sake of entertainment, but not as a real obstacle for either of them to overcome. God herself says she enjoys seeing how much Aziraphale values his relationship with Crowley. And this turns out to be her justification for "taking it away". (Tell me THAT isn't some fucked up shit.) Aziraphale and Crowley experience real emotional pain as the result of her actions---and this is demonstrated by the incredible acting of Michael Sheen and David Tennant.

Neil explicitly sold this as "a love story" when he created the show. Based on the tone of the book, an eventual union between Aziraphale and Crowley would have made the most narrative sense. It would have emphasized the overarching themes of love, agency, and the futility of "choosing sides". But that would have required Neil to possess the same ethos as Terry Pratchett---meaning LOVE AND RESPECT FOR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS.

We were never going to get a good love story out of Neil. Men like Neil get off on "PUNISHING" people for no apparent reason; he obviously did this with our beloved characters, to disastrous result. Nonetheless, we still manage to ascribe deeper meaning to Aziraphale and Crowley, thanks to the phenomenal acting team and the dedication of this fandom. Aziraphale and Crowley remain the greatest love story of all time, not because of anything Neil actually wrote, but because of everything that was projected onto them by the people who cared. We assigned their relationship a depth "Neil himself" never could have imagined---one that exemplifies our maximalist ideals of love and the decision to choose it again and again, in spite of everything. It is never going to "end" on Neil's preferred terms. In this rare instance, fan interpretation STILL MANAGES TO ECLIPSE THE SOURCE MATERIAL---and that is because LOVE is always a more powerful story than ABUSE.

[leoreadss]

Wouldn’t it be funny if we found out that Tumblr has a limited amount of accounts you can block and the Good Omens Finale is the one responsible for it?

And yes, Brenda, we are out here blocking accounts not because we can’t agree to disagree but because we are hurt by a beautiful story ended up in the trash.

[leoreadss]

Sunday (digital) sketches.

It has been a lovely, relaxed, peaceful weekend. I enjoyed good homemade meals, good books and a lots of cups of tea.

[hollow-head]

A missing scene. Thanks for all the fanart and fic throughout the years, you guys

[olfactoryventriloquism]

So, I’ve been obsessed with Pratchett since I was 15. That’s 23 years for those keeping count. I just finished GO3 and these are my initial thoughts:

Crowley and Aziraphale becoming human: I don’t love, but you could argue that that was what he planned, and I would buy it. It does follow some of his themes.

But there is a knife’s edge that Pratchett balanced between fury and compassion. He absolutely loved humanity, but he also hated what humans did to each other out of malice, spite, or even laziness. Good Omens the novel was filled to bursting with that.

The end here lacked all of that somehow. God in S1 is unknowable, but God is S3 is just a capricious bitch who seems to have it out for Crowley specifically and through him Aziraphale. The viewer certainly gets angry at God, but the narrative seems to be that, while cold, she is doing the right thing and giving them their happy ending. And while Crowley expresses compassion for humanity, it falls on such deaf ears that the narrative doesn’t actually support that.

The closing sentiment seems to be that we can make their lives better by just erasing all their trauma and baggage. No. Sam Vimes did not pull himself out of the gutter and bodily hold himself out of it every day to be told that actually amnesia would be best. If you wanted to make them human: make them keep their memories. That would have been fine.

Terry would have Crowley and Aziraphale say “fuck you” to God and protect the earth as it was. The way they protected Job’s children. The way they did at Tadfield Airbase. Here they just throw in the towel and start a new universe. They accept their failure so quickly as to be farcical.

And you will never ever convince me that TERRY PRATCHETT would have allowed the words “a story shouldn’t live past its ending” to be spoken without the speaker being immediately eaten by a banshee.

[leoreadss]

Absolutely! I agree on every single point!

[mrghostrat]

and they were streamers 👀

i've been wanting to rotoscope another gif since that kiss, and @blairamok's ice skating wip looks SO AMAZING i was inspired to have another go

(much to love the gif makers!! crowley + aziraphale)

[twilightofthesandwiches]

Today's vent:

[leoreadss]

It had to be done! Good job.

[leoreadss]

Not even the hottest cup of tea can solve this mess.

[leoreadss]

Ok I know we need to agree to disagree but if I see another ‘look, look, look, the stars at the end! It’s them!’ post, I will gently flip a table while being very disappointed ☹️

[leoreadss]

I just had the wildest dream.

Everyone thinks Muriel is weak, dim and practically useless. What if, when they are about to make the decision to unalive themselves, Muriel goes: “Ehm ehm, excuse me, is this the Ineffable plan?” And proceeds to unroll the longest, well, roll in Bildaddy style and shocked everyone cause she was actually taking notes when God was explaining the plan in a boring meeting where there was no coffee, and everyone was asking silly questions like “what’s a computer?”

So in the end nobody dies, and God go back to heaven and plays whatever game she wants to play, Satan does the same, and heaven and hell leave EVERYone alone.