@guardiene said: dies irae ! / REQUIEM WRITING PROMPTS ! ( accepting. )
dies irae - how does your muse handle rejection?
aziraphale is pretty sensitive to rejection, but he’s also very well-practiced at hiding it. doin a deep dive, simplest answer is at the bottom.
he’s been rejected by heaven a lot, frequently told off for doing things differently or more excessively than he ought to, and heaven doesn’t treat him very well when he expresses doubts --- the scene in the series where he’s trying to explain that maybe they got the antichrist thing wrong and finally resorts to saying that he, aziraphale, might have messed up and not them, in order to get them to do something about it; the scene in the book when he’s talking to the metatron and the metatron is just goddamn annoyed with him messaging about stopping the war when it’s So Obvious that the war would be a good thing --- so one way he’s come up with to handle the constant backlash against his ideas and his worries is to blame himself. he kind of steps on himself and accepts the role of the fool, the one who fucked up, to keep his faith, to keep believing that heaven isn’t railing against individuality and fresh ideas, he’s just getting it all wrong himself.
in private, however, once he has time to think about it, he tends to get bitter and upset about it once he realizes that he wasn’t necessarily wrong, heaven just didn’t want to entertain his ideas. which of course, isn’t something that’s safe or smart to think when you are employed by said heaven, so he then resorts to blaming himself again in order to explain away the differences in attitudes and opinions. because if he wants to believe that heaven is Resoundingly And Always Right, then he has to explain why he would be disagreeing with them, and the simplest route is to blame himself for being stupid or foolish.
after six thousand years of the above routine, aziraphale’s become kind of jaded towards being rejected, by anybody, and tends to be snarky or sarcastic or downright bitchy if someone is so much as dismissive toward him. he's lowkey about it, of course, just does one of those tight little middle-aged-white-woman smiles ( unless he's really properly annoyed, in which case he can and will lecture someone on manners until crowley drags him away by the bowtie ). he does forgive far too easily for his own good, though, so he’ll have a moment of red-hot pique and then reason it out and be back to smiling pleasant politeness in about the span of two minutes.
