kinkfest | Good Omens: Passing Time (Crowley, Zira)

Title: Passing Time
Rating: PG
Fandom: Good Omens
Prompt: June 7th: Good Omens, Crowley/Aziraphale: falling from grace - influenced by each other
Wordcount: 1048
Summary: Some things don't fall, they just... slide.
A/N: This is probably pre-e-etty far from what the prompter wanted, for which I apologise. D: Jetlag still has me in its grips!

They say, God and the Devil like to play games; they find it interesting, funny, a way to pass the time, a way to drown out the monotony of a hundred thousand eons just watching plants grow and men die and empires fall.

('I'm bored,' Crowley says to Aziraphale as they sit in the middle of the stadium and watch gladiators fight to the death/life; they keep tripping over each other with small miracles, which has made the match go on for far too long. Aziraphale keeps helping them to dodge, Crowley keeps giving their weapons sharper edges.

'I can't just let you win, you know,' Aziraphale says reproachfully. 'Though this is rather tedious.'

'I'm not talking about the fight,' Crowley sighs, glum. He makes one of them fall over. Aziraphale makes the other one miss a perfectly easy coup de grace. The entire audience hisses and boos. 'I think I'll go to sleep for a while. Maybe a couple of centuries.'

'What for?' Aziraphale asks, as if he believes that Crowley's just joking.

'To see if these humans have learnt anything when I wake up again,' Crowley shrugs, and after the match (a tie, since the lions ended up getting let out and no one wins if everyone dies) he goes off, and Aziraphale doesn't see him again until two hundred years later, during one of the best wine harvests the Empire has ever seen. They drink together.)

Then they always say, God and the Devil have the world at their feet, like a chessboard, and the people there are all their players. Quaint metaphor, but inaccurate: picture a chessboard where there are three sides – no chessboard of that sort exists, but that's how it is. Humanity (noun; bipedal primates belonging to the mammalian species Homo sapiens) belongs neither to the Big Good or the Almost As Big Bad; hard to say who they belong to other than themselves: so if you want to create a chessboard-type metaphor, you've got to call them the board and not the pieces.

('What's the point, really?' Crowley asks, as he drives them around London an age later. They're going to dinner. Neither of them find it quite so strange as they did in the Beginning, but Crowley not looking like a snake anymore tends to help matters a tad. 'Even the humans have got around to realising that you can't blame the supernatural for everything. So why haven't they?' He jerks his thumb upwards, and then downwards, and then shakes his head.

'Because there have to be forces for good,' Aziraphale replies with that damn- bless- weird placid smile. 'And for evil, of course.'

'Everything's sort of neutral, if you ask me,' Crowley shrugs. 'I corrupt one, you save another, at the end of the day it's just so much small change.'

'We have to believe that we can change people,' Aziraphale says, politely, but even he's starting to wonder when it will all start, or all end. Revelations isn't helping, considering that Aziraphale has thirteen different editions of it sitting in the back of his store.)

The pieces are an entirely different thing: one side Angels, one side Demon, both sides gunning for domination of the playing field they're set out on. Lucifer doesn't have it as good as God, because God knows everything, but Lucifer's of the opinion that God's just bluffing anyway, or maybe they've come to some tacit agreement, no one quite knows. The stalemate's been going on for a very long time, after all.

(You're not supposed to mess with humans, and for good reason: they're terrifying. Aziraphale's secretly a materialist; he can't let go of his books, he likes to indulge in fine food, and though he's an angel and meant to do good, he hasn't started any monasteries, hasn't founded any churches, hasn't burnt himself at the stake, hasn't done one of a thousand things that human believers have done. And Crowley's a demon, but he hasn't been able to learn from the dictators and despots and fake pastors who have characterised modern Evil in a new and confusing age.

Mostly they just sit around. In this case, on Crowley's couch, listening to the plants titter and gossip in the background. The fern, Crowley decides, has become quite unbearably talkative. 'Maybe I should roast it alive,' he says, with a smile.

'Yes, dear,' Aziraphale says, too busy watching an episode of Days of Our Lives to reply.

Crowley scowls, and the fern gets away with it – for now.

After the show's over, Aziraphale sleeps on Crowley's couch, and Crowley sniggers at the habit the angel's picked up. He goes to sleep too, only just on a big bed with 300-threadcount sheets, blanketed by the comfort of the familiar.

To the day, it's been over thirteen thousand years since they first formed the Agreement.)

Others say that there is no real quarrel; that it's all a family argument – just on a grander scale of things. You know – mothers, angry at their delinquent sons, throw hairbrushes and cry. God, angry at his rebellious angel, throws in a Great War and a eternal feud. Sounds about right. Angry mothers still feed their children at the dinner table and iron their clothes and give them allowance (well, most of the time, at least). Secretly all they want is resolution. Maybe they've been in peace talks. Who knows the ineffable?

('When was the last time you tried out your wings?' Aziraphale asks one day, uncomfortably.

'My wings?' Crowley asks, looking up from the newspaper he's reading. 'Don't know.' He twitches his shoulders. Nothing happens. He twitches them again. Nothing happens. 'Well,' he says, setting the papers down.

'Yes,' Aziraphale says, looking around.

'Does it bother you?' Crowley says, eventually.

The angel looks up, taken aback. 'What?'

'I said,' Crowley repeats, 'does it bother you?'

Are either of them surprised, really, after having come this far?

Aziraphale opens his mouth, starts to say y-, but angels weren't really made to lie.

Instead, he picks up a pot of tea. 'More?' he asks Crowley, and it doesn't sound like he's referring to tea, per say. There's a kind of ponderous tone to his voice, a question, a proposition.

Crowley holds up his cup, and grins and says 'Yes, please.')