#cc rambles

And how Aziraphale’s choice (a terrible one) is born of a need for safety, and a belief that if you have a chance maybe you can fix terrible things. He sees the offer of Heaven, of the chance to be in heaven with Crowley is a chance for safety. They can be together. Safely.

There was something about the bookshop and the car that was niggling at me. Crowley has been living in his car. Because Shax has his flat. Hell took his flat.

And Aziraphale still has the bookshop.

An embassy.

Heaven didn’t take it.

And I wonder if that’s why he never asks Crowley to live at the bookshop. It’s Aziraphale’s, but it’s still not safe. Heaven’s fingerprints all over it.

And I think when your family of origin offers you something that looks like safety, that looks like freedom to be yourself, that it can be so easy to not see the trap. To not see the danger. To not see that they’ll call it a home but it will still be theirs and you will still be expected to live by their rules. They’ll just paint it up and call it a chance to do better.

But they mean you.

Not them.

I think the Metatron’s offer is entirely manipulative. And I think it plays directly on Aziraphale’s ache for acceptance and the chance to do and be good. And I think he fucks up absolutely horrifically by taking that offer. (It’s not really an offer though is it.) And offering Crowley a chance to be an angel again, to be “good” again - I think it’s all from a deep molecular need to feel safe and that if Aziraphale is good and does good and fixes what Heaven has broken that everything will be ok. They’ll be ok, and they can be together. And it’s all the wrong things in the wrong way.

He can’t see it until it’s too late. And then he steels himself, turns himself to stone and anger and idk defiance. But against the wrong person. The wrong thing.

It’s the wrong choice.