onelater fics & things

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny by George Lange 1996.

I'll reblog and add a link so this stays in the tags. Lemme know what you think!

more of the occult boyos

Now I’ve moved into the dangerous territory of B99 quotes as TMA characters and like— Georgie and Jon’s dynamic tho

wahoo

feels loved

[full size]

There’s a lot of really excellent fluff in @dragonquill‘s “The Cottage, the Husbands” series, but this particular scene and line from the Storm just absolutely transfixed me. I instantly wanted to do something with it. (Aziraphale should be in pyjamas but it wasn’t working for me.) 

And Crowley, out of necessity of course because of Hastur, hangs up on him. So Aziraphale gets discorporated not knowing if Crowley has forgiven him, and uses his final desperate effort to go “I’m sorry, I trust you and I’ll prove it: here’s the information that I swore I’d never share with you.”

My point is: the popular bar misunderstanding (that Aziraphale doesn’t realize he’s Crowley’s best friend) isn’t the correct one – but that isn’t to say there was no misunderstanding at all: I don’t think he realized Crowley thought he died. There was a lot going on at the time, and it might’ve happened that he just didn’t put what Crowley said together the right way. So when Crowley said, “changed my mind. Stuff happened. I lost my best friend,” he probably thought Crowley meant, “you said no. It hurt me and anyway I would’ve missed you if I actually went, so here I am,” but Crowley was trying to say, “how was I supposed to go? Your bookshop was on fire, and I couldn’t tell what kind. I thought maybe I had lost you for good, and then what would have been the point?”

Many people attribute Aziraphale's glib tone in that scene, especially his seeming nonreaction to Crowley's despair, to the British tendency to keep calm and carry on (read: to bottle up emotions for a later, more convenient date). While I think this is part of it, I don't think it's the whole of it. He took the facts he was presented with at face value, carrying too quickly on to understand what they meant as one complete narrative. Basically-- the majority of that keeping calm happened without him even recognizing from what he was carrying on.