Will there be a happy ending for our long-suffering heroes? Or merely further interference from a sentient cottage with absolutely no respect for personal boundaries?
There’s only one way to find out:
Chapters 9 and 10
If you don’t know my silly little cottagecore haunted-house romance yet, now is the perfect time to start:
Thank you, @curiouspupsicle, my Fairy Fic Godmother. You are what this fandom is really about. Love, Happiness, Exuberance. 💖 I'm so glad I got to know you.
Two chapters again – I can’t wait to hear what you think. 😊
Crowley receives some unexpectedly good advice from a friend. Meanwhile, the cottage escalates its increasingly shameless attempts to set him up with Aziraphale.
What’s a poor botanist supposed to do except be thoroughly torn? 💖
Chapters 5 and 6
You don't know my silly little Cottagecore Haunted House Romance yet? Start at the beginning:
WIP Wednesday (20 May 2026) - Jasmine Cottage (M) by @thisisshiny
Do you appreciate sentient object stories (Bentley, bookshop, town square, etc.) as much as I do? Then you're in for a treat.
Aziraphale and Crowley are strangers who inherit half ownership interest in Jasmine Cottage from their distant relation, Agnes Nutter. The terms of Agnes's will require them to visit the cottage together each month. If they don't, ownership will revert to the National Trust.
Most importantly, the cottage makes its wishes known. It appears they have an interest in our pair getting along.
This fic will be updated 2x a week by a writer who doesn't begin posting until the story is complete. It's a low-risk WIP.
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Jasmine Cottage (6702 words) by thisisshiny
Chapters: 2/10
Fandom: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - All Media Types
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens), Muriel (Good Omens), Anathema Device, Newton Pulsifer, Eric | Disposable Demon (Good Omens)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Slow Burn, Pining, but no angst, Botanist Crowley (Good Omens), Bookshop Owner Aziraphale (Good Omens), Sentient Cottage, Matchmaking, By Architecture, romance tropes, So many tropes, Forced Proximity, There Was Only One Bed, repeatedly, Sharing Clothes, Snowed In, Locked Out In the Rain, Power Outage, Valentine's Day, Romance, Getting Together, First Kiss, First Time, Happy Ending
Summary:
When historical botanist Anthony Crowley and antiquarian bookseller Aziraphale Fell inherit a 17th-century cottage jointly from a distant relative, the conditions are strange, but simple: visit together one weekend per month, or lose everything to the National Trust.
The cottage, it turns out, has its very own conditions.
Jasmine Cottage is three hundred and seventy years old, and has been reading romance novels for fifty years.
It has a plan. It is not going to stop until things are arranged to its satisfaction.
A Good Omens Haunted House Romance. Well. Sort of.
When historical botanist Anthony Crowley and antiquarian bookseller Aziraphale Fell inherit a 17th-century cottage jointly from a distant relative, the conditions are strange, but simple: visit together one weekend per month, or lose everything to the National Trust.
The cottage, it turns out, has its very own conditions.
A Good Omens Haunted House Romance. Well. Sort of.
Jasmine Cottage, Chapter One and Two
This fic was written before the finale, because I’ve wanted to write a story where two intelligent, grown-up men arrive with remarkably little emotional baggage. Go figure. 😁
It is a gentle sort of slow burn with absolutely no angst. None. We all need a holiday from suffering. 💖
It's completely written and I'll post fast, Tuesdays and Fridays, as usual.
I really hope you like it. It's a bit ridiculous, but I'm extremely fond of it.
It's been almost 48 hours. I have processed the finale. I'm past my grievances. I've ran out of the conventional stages of grief and I'm currently on the secret 6th one. It's time for memes
One more positive thought about the Good Omens finale. Maybe a new perspective. Spoilers after the cut:
The more I think about the finale, the more convinced I am that the biggest reveal was not Aziraphale and Crowley choosing a new universe.
It was their decision to choose our universe.
Because Good Omens was never really set in our world. Soho always felt slightly unreal. Berwick Street became “Whickber Street.” History behaved strangely. Even London itself seemed softened around the edges, suspended, out of time somehow, curated rather than lived in.
And the finale finally explains why.
Their Earth really was only six thousand years old.
Young, in cosmic terms. Constructed. A reality actively governed by Heaven and Hell, shaped by rigid systems, binaries and assigned roles. Angel or demon. Good or evil. Obedience or rebellion. A controlled world.
And that is what Aziraphale and Crowley ultimately let go. This is not our universe already collapsing around them. It's theirs. They let it go for a reality not ruled from above.
That’s why the final human scenes matter so much. For the first time, the world suddenly feels real. Older. Authentic. Even the bookshop no longer looks like a mythical little pocket outside reality, but like an actual shop on an actual street in an actual city.
It is finally our world. Messy. Human. Uncertain. Free.
And because this new universe is no longer locked into Heaven and Hell’s rules, it opens the door to larger and stranger ideas: reincarnation, soulmates, souls finding each other across time and circumstance.
Honestly, I am convinced that if we had gotten a full third season instead of a single film, we would have seen exactly that.
Not just Crowley and Aziraphale as two nice middle-aged men, but fragments of them everywhere. Two women in one century. Two men in another. Lovers, strangers, rivals, spouses - every possible gender and version of humanity unfolding across history.
Different faces. Different lives. Same souls. The same impossible gravity pulling them together again and again.
Human now, yes. Fragile. Bound by time like the rest of us.
But still ineffable.
And honestly? I think that is far more romantic than eternity.
I seem to be in a small minority here, but I loved the finale. Entirely. Messily. With my whole heart.
No, it wasn't perfect. It was uneven and overstuffed, chaotic and occasionally frustrating and a little too ambitious for its runtime.
But honestly? So are people. And this ending finally allowed Aziraphale and Crowley to be people.
For six thousand years they existed inside systems that made every choice for them. Heaven, Hell, duty, fear, prophecy, survival. Even their love existed in the spaces around decisions rather than inside them. Stolen moments. Workarounds. Tiny defiances mistaken for freedom.
And now, finally, they got to choose. And they didn't choose safety. Not even each other, entirely.
They chose humanity. A future. The possibility that people should get to decide who they are without Heaven or Hell dictating the terms.
That is such an astonishingly beautiful, human conclusion to their story. Very Terry. 💖
And yes - I'm shallow and only human and I wanted a kiss. Of course I did. After all this time, I wanted tenderness made visible. I wanted certainty. I wanted them to choose each other.
But honestly? They did! Even if it looked like a goodbye for a moment, it wasn’t. That’s the thing that stayed with me: they did not need a goodbye kiss. They did not say goodbye. Not really. Not in any meaningful sense.
They were together at the end, choosing the same thing, standing on the same side at last. Their side. Our side.
And honestly, we were fed extraordinarily well along the way. Crowley lovingly feeding Aziraphale even through all that tension. Crowley's lonely little plant, still being loved and cared for. The Bentley being yellow. And theirs. The softness threaded through the fear. Their rituals surviving right to the edge of annihilation.
So much fanservice. So much love.
But the most important thing we got was bigger than fanservice.
We got Aziraphale’s love declaration. In front of God, no less.
Not just romantic love, but something far larger and stranger and older. A declaration that love is not obedience. That goodness is not submission.
And we got Crowley's love confession, the bravest of all. A demon who thinks that humanity, in all its chaos and contradiction and beauty, deserves the chance to choose its own fate.
And perhaps that’s why the ending moved me so deeply: after millennia of being defined by cosmic systems, they became small enough, and brave enough, to act like humans at last.
Just people choosing kindness in the face of annihilation.
And in a strange way, I think the finale made every human AU canon retroactively. Every coffee shop. Every university. Every Regency Romance. Every tiny flat above a bookshop.
Because the point is no longer what they are or who they are. The point is that they find each other every time. In every world. In every age. Against every system ever built to keep them apart.
I keep reading that people are unhappy with this 90-minutes masterpiece. I, for one, am not. The fat was cut away. No stupid side plots, no waste, just a focus on what we needed to know. And if, in the end, we didn't get something we wanted as individuals, well, you can't please everyone.
I really wanted three things:
I wanted them to make up. ✅
I wanted them to hold hands. ✅
I wanted them to end up together. ✅
I felt we needed to see Aziraphale apologize and Crowley accept that apology. I wanted them to hold hands because they never have--only with an intermediary (Adam, Jim). And I wanted them to end up together somewhere, in some way.
My feeling is that final scene, from the moment they are human until the very end, is one long ode to Sir Terry Pratchett (even his picture in the restaurant!), showing us the best of humanity (all of our favorite characters together in one place!), and moving on to show us Asa and Anthony as a married couple under the stars drinking cocoa.
I also feel that giving us that ending was a "they find one another in every universe" nod to the stories we have all been writing for decades. What a lovely gesture to the fans. ♥️
well apparently everyone else hates it. i do not. i love it. i love what they did with it, i love that crowley got to choose, i love that he chose humanity, that he did not choose to run away.
because THAT is who he is. he loves his stars and creations, he loves humanity, he loves the messiness, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, he loves watching them. he showed jesus all the kingdoms of the world to share that love with someone who he knows already felt it.
in the end, they made that choice together. it's a choice they have made before, over and over, saving humanity over themselves. no god, no angels, no demons, no thousands of years of suffering for all the millions of eternal beings.
personally, i choose to believe that god's last gift to them was integrating them into the fabric of the new universe, so they will find each other in every lifetime. but without anyone watching, without any plan behind it, without senseless suffering, without creating stars just to destroy them.
Chapter 1: 'He returned to this seat like an old friend, vanishing into the hush of old books.'
In the Margins by @thisisshiny , which finished today (and I'm coping well enough).
Chapter 2: 'Crowley paused, twirling his pen. This was either brilliant or completely mad. Probably both.'
Chapter 5: 'Wednesday morning found Aziraphale sitting in his favourite armchair with a cup of perfectly brewed Earl Grey.'
Chapter 7: 'He stood with perfect posture, one hand resting on a book spine while he read, completely absorbed in whatever poetry had caught his attention.'
I was thinking, a story about books should have traditional illustrations, think of the kind Austen books have, for example by Charles E. Brock or Hugh Thompson.
(Only problem is, I'm used to the complete control of digital, not to mention painting, which is in my opinion is a medium least prone to mistakes and errors. Absolutely terrifying trying out traditional ink. However, authenticity. Can't get this feel with digital "ink" brushes, I've tried. It works as well as a cure to perfectionism, in the best worst way.)
You may also have a bonus illustration, which I think I executed clumsily, so it's a little bit of a part of this series, but only by half. An honorary part.
GO3 soon, GOons
P.S maybe I just wont read the epilogue. Maybe I'll give it the Discworld treatment, as in if I don't read the last book, it'll never really end.
P.P.S if there are any typos in the illustration texts, that's just extra authenticity.