#weiwritesfic

Warnings for descriptions of OCD, panic attacks, and intrusive thoughts (I don’t describe the thoughts themselves, but Aziraphale does react negatively to them).

--

“Angel?”

Aziraphale startled, clattering his fork against his plate. “Yes, my dear?” he said hurriedly as he sat up straight in his chair. “I’m so sorry, I must have drifted away for a moment. What was it you were saying?”

He tried to focus on Crowley, sitting at the opposite end of the table across from him. It was more difficult than he expected, like some part of his mind wasn’t yet fully there. He could only process fragments of the whole picture -- Crowley’s thin fingers wrapped around the stem of the wine-glass, his tie slightly loosened, Aziraphale’s own reflection in the glossy surface of Crowley’s sunglasses. He couldn’t see Crowley’s eyes like this, but the way Crowley leaned forward to peer more closely at him had a concerned air.

“Are you alright?” he said. “You seem a bit... out of it.”

Aziraphale smiled weakly. “Just a little too much wine, I think,” he said, hiding his grimace behind his napkin. “Please, do continue.”

Crowley studied him for a moment longer. “If you say so,” he said, a trifle dubiously. He launched back into his retelling of that one time in ancient China, when he’d sidled up to a scholar’s side and pointed out that hey, the number six in Chinese sounded awfully similar to the Chinese word for “flowing”, and wouldn’t it make a nifty pun if you combined three sixes together to mean “everything goes smoothly”? 

Crowley stopped short at the threshold of the bookshop and stared. He blinked. The baffling tableau before him did not change. Aziraphale was sitting in his armchair absorbed in a book, which was usual for him. What was unusual was the grey tabby cat curled up on Aziraphale’s legs, purring to its heart's content.

“There’s a cat in your lap,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale looked up, a smile already spreading over his face. “Hello, my dear,” he said, beaming. “I wasn’t expecting you until six—”

“There is a cat,” Crowley repeated, stepping forward, “in your lap.”

Aziraphale looked down at the cat, as though he himself had forgotten it was there. “Oh, yes,” he said, stroking a hand down the cat’s spine. “Crowley, meet Dorian. He’s a dear little fellow, aren’t you, darling?” The cat purred louder and arched its back, and Crowley tried not to feel envious. Then he remembered he was a demon, meant to encourage the spread of deadly sins among the populace, and he stopped trying to hold it in.

"Why is there a cat in your lap?”

“It’s rather a funny story, actually,” Aziraphale said absently, scratching the cat under the chin. “I have this customer, you see, who’s been coming to the shop for years now, ever since 1981—”

Crowley sighed. “The short version, please, angel.”

He extracted the story from Aziraphale eventually. Said customer[1] had an old relative who had passed away recently. The passing itself hadn’t been all that tragic, as the old relative had apparently been “a bigoted fool who’s surely among your coworkers Down There by now”, as Aziraphale put it. However, the relative had owned a cat who was nothing like his owner, and who had quite suddenly found himself without a home after his master’s timely death.

[1: Evidently, no person who actually bought books would ever be allowed to step foot in the shop again. However, Aziraphale had a small group of dedicated “customers” who were permitted to leaf through his books to their heart’s content, so long as they handled the manuscripts carefully and didn’t try to purchase anything.]

“...and so I told Xiuying that I could certainly help find a home for him, and that home was with me,” Aziraphale finished. He rubbed Dorian’s furry ears, to the cat’s delight.

“So you’re keeping him,” Crowley said slowly, still wrestling with the concept of a cat sitting in Aziraphale’s lap where there hadn’t been one before. “Forever.”

Aziraphale visibly drooped a bit. “Not forever, I suppose, in the strictest sense of the word. He still has another good twenty years in him, if we care for him well, but…”

“Never mind that,” Crowley said hastily, heart dropping at Aziraphale’s expression. He went up to the angel’s side and pressed a kiss into the halo of thick black curls. “Just — Dorian, really? I thought you said his former owner was a bigot.”

Aziraphale relaxed and twined their fingers together. “He had a different name before he came here, of course. But it just seemed terribly unfitting, and, well. I reckoned it was about time for a change.”

From the way Dorian looked up expectantly at the sound of his new name, he seemed to agree. Crowley studied the rotund ball of grey fluff, and thought he could understand where Dorian was coming from.

“I think it’s a great name,” Crowley said, perching on the arm of the armchair. He flinched a bit when Dorian craned his neck over to sniff his hand, but Aziraphale only chuckled.

“He doesn’t bite, my dear. You have nothing to fear. Now, Dorian,” he said sternly to the feline, “I trust you will conduct yourself in a manner befitting your station. Crowley here is my dearest friend and I love him very much, so I expect you to treat him just as well as you have treated me.”

Whether or not Dorian heeded the gentle scolding didn’t seem to matter. He bumped his nose against Crowley’s curled fingers, and then, apparently deciding that this new man-shaped creature was a satisfactory addition to the bookshop, pressed his furry head hard against Crowley’s hand, purring up a storm. Crowley had turned into a puddle of befuddled-but-warm mush at Aziraphale calling him “my dearest friend”, but he collected himself enough to reciprocate Dorian’s affections, tentatively scratching the cat’s ears and then more boldly stroking through his soft fur. Dorian melted into fourteen pounds of fuzz and feline bliss.

Eventually the three of them found themselves in the back room of the bookshop. Logically the settee shouldn’t have been able to hold two fully-grown adults and one large cat all curled up together, but a discreet miracle ensured that they could all fit without anyone rolling off.

Crowley buried his face in Aziraphale’s sweater and breathed in the comforting smell of old books and starlight. Then he wrinkled his nose and withdrew.

“You’re covered in cat hair,” he complained.

Aziraphale was already half asleep, but the corners of his lips quirked faintly upwards. “I could say the same of you, too, my dear,” he murmured.

Crowley thought of his nice black suit all covered in clinging light grey cat hairs, and groaned. “I’ll never get them off my clothes at this rate,” he muttered. “Furry little devil.”

The furry little devil in question was curled around the region of Crowley’s back, rumbling away like a particularly contented mini-lawnmower. Crowley had to grudgingly admire his air of smug feline satisfaction.

Aziraphale hummed. “He’s only a cat, my dear. Not hellish nor heavenly in the least.”

He opened his eyes to meet Crowley’s, and smiled.

“After all,” he whispered, with a sly glance, “There is only one demon in the universe whom I love.”

Crowley caught Aziraphale’s lips in a kiss. They continued along this vein for quite some time, and would’ve gone on for much longer, had Dorian not grown tired of the proceedings and eventually yowled for his dinner.

(And if, in years to come, Dorian survived long past the possible lifespan for a mortal cat, no one else was around to notice.)

[click for part two] [three]

[ao3]

Warnings for descriptions of OCD, intrusive thoughts, panic attacks. 

[ part one ] [ ao3 ]

- - -

As he usually got after such episodes, Aziraphale felt muzzy and slow when they pulled up at the bookshop door. Crowley was a reassuringly solid presence as he helped Aziraphale out of the Bentley, and when they finally made it to the sofa in the bookshop’s back room, he knelt down in front of Aziraphale and took the angel’s hand. 

“All right?” he asked eventually, searching Aziraphale’s gaze. His sunglasses had long since been discarded on the coffee table. 

Aziraphale catalogued himself. He felt steadier but still shaky, and had the beginnings of a headache pounding at his temples. He tried to miracle the pain away, but it stubbornly persisted. “Not really,” he said, looking away.

Crowley ran his thumb over the back of Aziraphale’s hand. “Anything I can do to help?”

Aziraphale sighed. “Not really. One simply has to wait it out.”

Crowley settled on the sofa beside him and slipped an arm over Aziraphale’s shoulders. Aziraphale accepted this invitation to curl into Crowley’s side and press his face into Crowley’s neck. He was suddenly exhausted, which likely contributed to the sudden hot flush of tears down his cheeks. Crowley’s pulse sped up, but he didn’t show it outwardly, only rubbing Aziraphale’s back and occasionally nuzzling into his dark curls to press comforting kisses upon his head. 

Aziraphale soon cried himself out, and found himself resting against Crowley’s chest as the demon lay back on the settee. Some part of him thought he ought to be embarrassed after such an emotional display, but the rest of him was too tired to care. 

Crowley stirred beneath him. “Angel?”

Aziraphale lifted his head, and saw Crowley watching him with immeasurable fondness and a hint of worry in his yellow eyes. 

“D’you mind if I try something?”

One of these days I’ll actually finish these fics instead of just posting excerpts from them. I hope to be finished by the end of this week, and I’ll be sure to post them when I’m done.

What strikes me the most about this particular exchange is just how much Aziraphale’s response reads like my own dysfunctional, OCD-driven thoughts when I’m having an episode. It’s actually so scarily similar to how my OCD manifests that the first time I read Good Omens -- several months before I was diagnosed and in therapy -- I nearly put it down again because that particular description was so triggering.

I’ll elaborate. Obviously OCD appears in a variety of different forms and symptoms, and it’s not the same for everyone. But one symptom that can appear in OCD is all-or-nothing thinking. Basically it becomes impossible to look at the “in-betweens” of a subject -- there are Only Two Sides of Right and Wrong and Nothing Else (sound familiar?) Maybe the one logical part of you can recognize that this kind of thinking is not quite right, but that part is drowned out by the brain gremlins yelling that it can only be one or the other and you’re evil and wrong for ever daring to think outside that box.

Now, as to how this applies to Good Omens, and this scene in particular. Aziraphale has his world divided neatly into Good and Evil. If something is said to be Good, then it is Good, and anything that is not considered Good must therefore be Evil, with no room for exceptions or error.

Crowley here is the voice of logic, the one that some part of Aziraphale secretly knows has a solid point. But Aziraphale is unable to accept it. One part of him wishes to, but another part of him so deathly fears that he would be sympathizing with “Evil” if he agrees that he immediately retreats into denial as a safety net. It must be bad. Even if he doesn’t understand why it’s bad precisely, this is what he knows to be true, so he shouldn’t argue against it because otherwise that means he’s Evil too, and God knows he doesn’t want to be Evil.

When it comes to OCD subtypes like scrupulosity (c’est moi), this kind of thinking can be so overwhelming that you basically get caught up in a perpetual moral argument with yourself, trying to find one “right” answer or condition that doesn’t exist. Eventually you retreat to the “safety” of extremes; if you just stick to the Good side, then you won’t be Evil. Of course, that also means that any questioning of the Good side whatsoever automatically = evil, and the fear that that causes makes it difficult to break out of these harmful patterns of thinking (and that fear is very strong, and the guilt of thinking you have done “evil” is even stronger). 

I always felt that Aziraphale’s struggles with Heaven and the ineffable plan throughout the book mirrored OCD’s distorted lines of thinking in a way that was painfully familiar. He makes mistakes based off these thoughts -- making excuses for Heaven’s conduct (because questioning it otherwise must mean he is allowing Evil to happen, or else committing Evil himself), retreating behind the safety net of extremes when his firmly drawn lines are threatened.

But at the same time, let’s consider incidents like the flaming sword. For all of Aziraphale’s internal debate over whether the banishment of Adam and Eve was the right thing to do, he still gives them the sword to keep them safe, then lies to God about it afterwards. Then, of course, we come to the Apocalypse-that-wasn’t, in which Aziraphale finally shakes himself free of the tangled web of all-or-nothing, good-or-unforgiveable ‘logic’ that has kept him trapped for millennia, steps forward, and dares to say, “This Great Plan... this would be the ineffable plan, would it?” 

There’s a lot more I can say here, and I’m not even sure if what I wrote makes sense or not. I’m just... emotional at how he manages to break himself free of that futile cyclical way of thinking and forge his own path. At a time when so much seemed hopeless with my own mental health and no help was forthcoming, and I was breaking down over believing I was a fundamentally unforgivable person, Good Omens was such an anchoring story.

Many thanks to @goodm-omen-ts for their wonderful post here that finally motivated me to write this meta. 

Now for some miscellaneous Aziraphale with OCD headcanons:

“Crowley!” Aziraphale called, pushing open the door of the bookshop with a tinkle of the bell. He hefted the paper bags in his arms and set them down on the nearest table. 

“My dear, there’s a new bakery that’s just opened up not two streets away,” he said cheerfully, hanging his coat and scarf. “Run by a lovely young couple who just moved here from Sussex, if you would believe it, though they say they’re adjusting to city life wonderfully well. I asked --”

Aziraphale stopped short and looked around. Crowley hadn’t greeted him. Crowley wasn’t even in the room at all. Only a few short hours ago, he’d been sitting on the front counter playing a game of some sort on his mobile, only pausing to give Aziraphale a goodbye kiss before he left. Now the only evidence that Crowley had been there at all was his mug of cocoa on the desk, now cold and congealed.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale called again, a trifle more warily. He probed the area for supernatural traces and found nothing out of the ordinary, but didn’t allow himself to relax just yet. Now that he thought of it, Dorian hadn’t come to the front door to greet him, either; Crowley was still adjusting to the cat’s presence, but he certainly wouldn’t allow Dorian to escape outside or get stuck somewhere in the shop. Aziraphale eyed the hallway that led to both the kitchen and the back room. Worst case scenario, he had a wickedly sharp serrated sandwich knife in the drying rack. Hardly a flaming sword, but it would do for his purposes.

He edged down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen, but a movement from the back room redirected his attention. A shape appeared to be huddled on the settee, and Aziraphale quickly discovered, to his relief, that it was only Crowley, snoozing soundly away beneath a knitted blanket. Headphones covered his ears, which explained why he hadn’t heard Aziraphale return. 

Crowley was not alone on the couch, however. Dorian lifted his head and looked over inquisitively as Aziraphale approached, but otherwise didn’t move from his established seat atop Crowley’s stomach. Aziraphale laughed softly and ruffled Dorian’s ears, careful not to awaken the demon.

“Keeping him warm, are we?” 

Dorian shook Aziraphale off and sprawled out even more across Crowley’s torso, as if to say yes, and I am taking my job very seriously, so kindly cease from interrupting me.  

“‘Just tolerating the beast’, indeed.” Aziraphale shook his head fondly and took out his phone. Crowley had taught him how to take photographs with it shortly after the Apocalypse-that-wasn’t, and Aziraphale put this skill to good use over the next few minutes. 

(Later, Crowley would roll his eyes when Aziraphale showed him, muttering about cat hair all over his trouser-legs and paws digging into his ribs. Despite these complaints, Aziraphale, with a knowing smile, didn’t fail to notice that Crowley had a brand new lockscreen wallpaper on his phone the following morning.)

[ao3]