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), others
Additional Tags: Request for prompts, Good Omens is Jewish and so are we, Happy Hanukkah
Summary:
Calling out for prompts
Since there is a call for Good Omens Advent Calendar of Stories - which I’ve already made some suggestions for - here’s the Hanukkah version.
What do we want Crowley and Azirpahale to do for Hanukkah this year? 8 nights, 8 stories** can be at any point in history, anything at all just Hanukkah themed. I’m not interested in NSFW Hanukkah stories personally, or massive trauma, or torturing Azirpahale
Listen, you can draw Crowley with a pointy or hooked nose! Jewish people get so few main characters that look like us, you can give us this one. Just make sure that Aziraphale has a big nose too! Michael Sheen has a big nose and green/grey eyes, there is no excuse for giving him a button nose and blue eyes in fanart
According to a former president at my shul who knows basically everything the word in Hebrew for “hell” which I’ve now forgotten is the same root as “question” which meant I got a great chance to talk about Crowley during the Torah discussion
drabble prompt: p much anything with Lil's screech owl wings, but I especially want to know if she grooms them herself or if her girlfriend does
So this spiraled out of my control, but I hope you enjoy it. Fun fact, owls secrete an oil that helps them groom their feathers.
—
Lilith bit back a moan as strong fingers pressed into the space between her shoulder blades, gently kneading tension away. Her wings were carefully splayed across the bedspread, cheek pressed into a silk pillowcase and dress in a pile on the floor. Her skin was rippled with goosebumps.
“Oh, you’re precious,” Becca cooed and pressed a kiss to her shoulder.
Lilith hissed in pleasure at the contact. “I’m not precious, I’m a demon,” she muttered half-heartedly. “Stealer of souls, temptress of innocents -“
“Hush, love,” Becca said and slid her hands to rest on Lilith’s lower back. “Your wings are gorgeous.”
Lilith tried to twist around, but she was pinned in place, Becca straddled over her hips with muscled thighs. “They’re a mess,” she confessed. Her cheeks were flushed and it wasn’t entirely from embarrassment. “I haven’t groomed in a while.”
Becca’s fingers crept up to her left wing. “May I?”
Lilith hesitated.
Demons, like owls, were solitary creatures. Her wings just so happened to resemble an owl’s and she just so happened to be a demon, so -
Well, it had been a while since she’d let anyone else groom her wings.
But Becca was gentle and Becca was kind and Becca was a nice Jewish girl who somehow didn’t mind bringing a demoness home for Shabbos dinner. Becca liked hearing about history from Lilith’s perspective and she liked kissing Lilith senseless and she really liked dragging Lilith to to the aviary where she worked so they could watch the birds together.
If there was anyone she trusted with her wings, it was Becca.
“Go ahead.”
Lilith had never been an angel - her past was more banal in origin, the first human cast out of Eden, before the Fruit and before the Flaming Sword and before an angel and a demon met at the Eastern Gate. She had never been revered.
She’d always just been Lilith.
Becca made her feel venerated as her careful hands stroked through tawny feathers, first the left wing, then the right, re-aligning the feathers that had gone crooked and shaking out the ones that had gone loose. Each brush was like a prayer; each fallen feather that collected on the bed beneath them was a token of devotion.
Lilith sighed into the touch as it went smooth, Becca’s fingers coated with a sweet smelling oil that made the feathers glisten.
Perhaps she didn’t need to be so solitary anymore.
Mr. Sheen, if you’re on Tumblr and scrolling through the Jewish Gomens tags (I saw that midrash Tweet, and I almost cried, sir, I really nearly cried)....
Hello and welcome and please enjoy the Jewish!Aziraphale fic
We all know that Crowley Fell because he Questioned. Sometimes Questioning isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to scream.
cw: drowning, minor character death, major character discorporation, biblical genocide
Read it on AO3
"You did this you bastard," Crowley says glaring up at the sky. His condemnation is not particularly loud, easily drowned out by the water pouring down around him. The Ark's main door had slammed shut with a resounding thump a few minutes ago and though there were windows to look through, none of Noah's family wanted to look at what they were turning their backs on.
Quite a large crowd had gathered, first to wonder at Noah and Naamah's attempts at herding the menagerie of animals, then to stare at the Ark. Japheth might as well have been a village gossip so everyone there knew what was coming, though perhaps not all believed it. Crowley hadn't believed it at first.
It was the sort of thing his side was all over, causing mass panic and hysteria and the like. But they'd never go through with it. If they destroyed the world, there'd be no one left to sin and that just wouldn't do.
God though, apparently She could do whatever She wanted. "Aren't you supposed to be Good?"
As the water continues to pound down, the humans begin to realize that this isn't all some prank. They get nervous first, trying to hold their feet above the cold water, shuffling and murmuring and looking around and up at the sky.
Crowley is familiar with this, the way a crowd moves. The panic would set in soon. The land is flat, there is no uphill to flee to and the rain isn't going to stop. Lightning cracks across the sky and a child screams. It's as if the sound broke a dam. Screams and wails rise over the rain. The child's father wraps an arm around him and all around Crowley families are beginning to gather, finding comfort wherever they can. Though there are just as many people in the plains, Crowley finds that he's no longer standing in the middle of a crowd.
"Does that make you feel better? Terrifying the humans before you kill them? Putting the fear of God into them? I don't know why I'd expect anything better from someone so obsessed with IMAGE!" His voice rises until he's screaming the last word. Thunder answers him and the rain begins to fall harder. "Yeah have your little temper tantrum because your glorious creation isn't doing what you want. You can drown us all and we'll still defy you! Starting over doesn't mean shit when you don't actually change anything!"
Crowley pauses and realizes that the human screaming has faded. They’re all are staring at him, presumably because of the steam billowing off his arms and shoulders. He hadn’t realized how heated he was getting until the water literally evaporated off of him.
He hisses at the onlookers, his tongue momentarily becoming serpent-like. They stumble back, perhaps for the first time acknowledging that this strange creature among them is a demon. Maybe he’s the one that’s causing the flood. It’s always easier to have someone to blame. Someone else, Crowley thinks, with another sharp look at the sky.
Always easier to blame someone else.
Crowley paces restlessly as Adonai Ish Milchama does Her very best to wipe another mistake off the face of this earth.
The mistake, the humans that didn’t have the good fortune to catch HaShem’s eye, or maybe weren’t quite reverent enough (does even <i>he</i> know what happened to Lucifer?) are picking up their children, trying to raise them above the level of the water, as if that will help. As if the water will ever stop. A few are doing the opposite, lowering themselves onto their knees to pray for God to save them. Crowley wants to tell them to save their breath. God won’t listen. She never does.
It’s getting harder to pace, every step requires Crowley to lift his entire leg and drop it back into the water. It’s up to his hips. Really, he’s almost swimming.
He’s not having as much trouble as some others though. Whether it’s Her Great Divinity or because of the very large structure that is Noah’s ark very close, the water seems to have tides. Crowley can feel them pull at his legs and hips, as if God Herself is trying to pull him back into Hell.
The sky darkens and the thunder gets more insistent, and if HaShem is going to yell at him than he’s going to yell right back.
"All of these people," he screams, as cold rain lashes down, "what's the fucking point if you're just gonna kill them all?” The wind picks up with the rain. Crowley knows better than to think it’s God responding to him. This was probably all planned. “Did they not worship you hard enough, is that it? Or did you just get bored of playing around with their lives, turned your back like you always do?"
Nothing, not that he expected anything. He got over that foolish little impulse a long time ago.
“BASTARD!” he screams, throat raw with the emotion of it. “You said you’d look after these ones! You’re killing them. You’re killing families, and children, and people who love each other. That’s supposed to be my job, what, in all of Your plans, could possibly possess you to do my job?” Crowley chokes - on rain, obviously - and this time not even thunder answers him.
The water is almost up to his neck and most of the humans are shorter than him. Parents hold their babies above their heads as they do their best to swim without their arms and the wails and screams have mostly been replaced by ragged breathing. Three men have gathered together, treading water as they help each other with the two toddlers between them. Farther back, a child goes under. Two adults immediately dive down to try to save her. They all resurface a moment later, coughing and sputtering as they search for anything to anchor themselves, to hold on for just a little longer.
The same scene plays out everywhere Crowley looks; humans, seeing their death in the cold water and continuing to fight against the current, to cling to life.
He's about to turn away, there's nothing he can do here, when something catches his eye. A woman, not clinging, but swimming, or the next closest thing, when she has a toddler in her arms. Crowley watches, wondering what she could possibly be swimming towards.
He doesn't realize it's him until she's less than a foot away, panting and frantically kicking as she tries to keep herself and the boy above water. Her eyes lock with his, eyes filled with desperation, fear and pure human stubbornness and she pushes the soaking child into Crowley's chest. His arms fold around the boy almost reflexively. The boy shivers in the demon's grasp.
Crowley opens his mouth to... he's not sure. Protest? Ask for a name? Promise to keep the child safe? It doesn't matter because the woman's head sinks beneath the waves and this time she doesn't resurface.
Crowley holds the child tighter, hoping that some of his demon heat will warm the child. And then he teleports.
There's an infinitely long moment where he feels himself start to go and the child stubbornly stay. If he lets go the child will drown, but if he pulls he'll rip the child apart, bit by bit by bit until not even the soul is left. Pushing doesn't do anything either. He can't go in the other direction, not anymore. Would HaShem even let a human into heaven? After today he doesn't think so.
So he stays. He stays and he buries his nose in the boy's hair and holds him close as the rain pours down around him.
Unlike the humans, when the current pulls him down, he doesn't fight it. Even so, demons don't die. A demon feels his lungs fill with water, his mouth desperately gasp for air and the cold settle deep deep in his bones. And when the child stops shivering, stops coughing, stops convulsing, well, Crowley does not die when the child does, but he does discorporate.
When he comes to in the hot arid valley of the demons, he feels hopelessly, helplessly hollow. "They prayed," he tells the ground, too shaken to remember how to stand. "They prayed for You to save them."
