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mekachu04Fandom: Good Omens (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens), Original Angel Character(s), Canon characters mentioned in passing
Additional Tags: No beta we fall like Crowley, Missing Persons, Black Plague, Summoning Circles, Demon Summoning, Demon Traps, Imprisonment, Hell on Earth, Too much paperwork, Pre-Series, hurt!Aziraphale, Isolation, Trapped, Crowley Saves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Aziraphale Whump (Good Omens), Broken Bones, Wing Injury, Crowley Whump, true form injuries, Abandonment, Snake!Crowley - Freeform, Cuddling, Hurt/Comfort, sleeping pile, Darkness, Caves, possible cave related sensory deprivation, Huddling For Warmth, Hugging, Crying, Azirapahle's Halo comes out when he's feeling better
Title is from Queen's song "you're my best friend "
this is one of the short stories i wrote for nanowrimo this year; which i used the whumptober list as prompts (Muffled Scream & Trembling)
If there is one good thing about Head Office - they're quick about punishment, and fairly straightforward about it. Be it reprimands, or execution, Heaven and Hell lack the creativity needed to make it hurt.
Humans don't have that hang up.
When miracles, holy or demonic, were more casually used, representatives from both sides learned very quickly that humans didn't care much for the preternatural. Oh they prayed, and they cowered, but worshipers on both sides also coveted. They'd bent the knee all the while planning ways they could use the powers that-be better. How to harness said power for themselves, and not be bound by the whims of their celestial guests.
Angels managed to keep their noses clean longer only because of their self-righteous holier-than-thou opinions. Demon's shot themselves in the foot early on, when an upstart thought they could get themselves a promotion if their boss suddenly just went missing. So they taught humans how to summon other demons - planning on said summoning to happen right before their superior was supposed to have a meeting with their boss. And for this one demon, it worked brilliantly, but it also started a few centuries of turn-about being fair play as humans turned demons into their own personal playthings.
And, enraged at having been summoned and trapped, most demon's traded the names of less liked demons for freedom. Or more powerful demons for freedom with a side of spite. Soon there were lists of demonic names being traded back and forth between humans, leading one angel to begin what would be a lifelong hoarding of human written word as he tried to hunt down every copy. Even if the only ones he bothered to destroy where the ones that had a specific serpent listed on it - he'd initially hoarded those too, but a cheeky human had managed to rob him while he was back home giving a report to Gabriel. It had taken him months to track the stolen lists down, clay tablets moving much faster than one would have expected. (there had been writing for much longer than tablets, on furs and such, but Aziraphale hadn't given them much mind yet. Sure, he'd become enraptured by oral tradition, and would often linger to listen to the storytellers. But Angels were not meant to own things, so written words where useless to him. But he'd made an inquiry to a 'pagan' priest he was supposed to be bringing back into God's Grace, about one of the tablets he was copying, and the man had read off each name once he was done copying it. Many were pronounced horribly, but Aziraphale could decide if that was because of the limitations of this written media, or if the priest had done it intentionally as to not accidentally summon one of his 'gods.' The first time he'd seen his hereditary enemy's carved out into the clay, his first thought as 'what a pretty design'
Ironically the priests tablets were also the first thing Aziraphale had ever 'liberated' from a human. For their own safety you see.)
Angelic names were harder to come by, but, and as such as both sides will argue otherwise, angels and demons are from the same stock, and while it may be harder to summon an angel, demonic traps work for them in exactly the way the work for their demonic counterparts. Although one'll likely have to listen to the angel bitch about how garish the trap looks, and did it really have to drawn in blood? (It does not. Even for demons. One particular snake-ish demon had only told humans that in an attempt to get them to slow down on the summoning and trappings, thinking humans might back off their search for power if it involved the suffering of other humans. It did not help matters for any party involved) And since very few true angelic names where known, at first, trapped angels could not be forced to help, although some of the more naïve ones could be tricked into it.
Deals with demons have consequences if the demon doesn't hold up their end. Deals with humans have no such backlash. Sure, humans breaking a deal with an angel means a permanent bar from heaven, but very few humans willing to trap an angel where going to getting in to begin with. So in the early days, angels who didn't know better, unwittingly gave humans the tools to hurt them back, and things spiraled out of control very quickly.
Humans killed an archangel. Heaven ended up wiping several human cities off the map. Hell didn't even try to intervene. Humans lost all the true names of the host, and Heaven was so shaken up by it that they all took aliases when visiting Earth, and field agents were not allowed to, at any time, use any names but these new aliases. Sandalphon got a promotion.
Most demonic names where lost too, as well as some of the means to trap preternatural beings. But humans where gossips, and the designed were moved about the human world, sometimes completely unknowingly to all involved.
Summoning demons would fall in and out of favor though-out humanity, and Hell learned to roll with the punches.
Heaven really didn't have as much experience.
Which is how the Principality of the Eastern Gate ended up missing for the better part of the 14th century with absolutely no one realizing it. While it wasn't an end of the world event, the 14th century had three of the four horsepeople all in the same general part of the world at the same time, while it also coincided with many of Hell's Higher Up's Vacation requests. Heaven was completely blind sided by the overlap - which ironically was not done intentionally, but really was just a paperwork cock up where no one bothered to check if the vacations were overlapping with each other. It had left Hell in a lurch because suddenly there was no one in charge, each and every demon refusing to change their vacation, citing they already had an approval stamp on theirs and it was someone else's problem now. Heaven was also flooded with help requests from their own agents in trying to combat Death, Famine and Plague, and being overrun with Hell's vacationing princes and dukes all at the same time. Their paperwork was so backlogged, no one noticed when multiple agents didn't check in for their regular briefings. (Angels were still sorting these files out up to the End of the World; half of them secretly hoped heaven would lose just so they didn't have to look at anymore forms. The world not ending actually generated less work for them than if heaven won, so they all grumbled about the End that Wasn't when outside the office, but ultimately, it was just another day - and that was okay with them)
Heaven wouldn't notice Aziraphale had gone MIA in the 14th century until about three weeks after Nope'geddeon. The Principality was to check in on the century and half century, but missed his 1350 check in. Up until 3 weeks After, it was assumed the paperwork to that meeting was lost in the shuffle. The angel Iadnal was the one to realize that the Principality Aziraphale also performed no miracles from 1318 until 1373, which was a big deal since that Particular Field agent consistently had the largest file of miracles per decade than all the other field agents combined, along with the largest number of inquiries for justification behind said miracles. He was so bad about it that they actually ignored more of his lower scale miracles after the Flood and only reported the larger ones for questioning, just to save themselves some time. Heeoa had been called in for several audits to the field agent, and had come back so exasperated by the whole ordeal they needed a few weeks off before returning to work.
So, three weeks after Aziraphale was no longer employed by the Host, Iadnal sat in a quiet cubicle in Heaven, wondering if this needed to be reported too, or if they should just wash their hands of the whole file and leave it be. Who would they report this to at this point? Gabriel and Michael wouldn't hear the blundering angel's name in their presence. Maybe Iadnal should just sit on it for a few decades, wait for the whole Not End to not be such a touchy subject. But the bane of their department's existence had gone quiet for more than 50 years. Why? Aziraphale couldn't go a single earth day without at least 10 miracle reports popping up on Iadnal's desk for approval. Even under heavy reprimand, Aziraphale had never managed to get that number to zero for a single day.
55 years. During one of the few times when Heaven had given angels a free pass to try and get things under control.
Heeoa was their friend in audits - maybe they'd pulled Aziraphale's files from that century already.
"Principality Aziraphale? I'm not sure," They'd pondered over it as the two angels took a break watching a sunrise over Australia, "Michael requested his complete file last month, and then after," they made a non committal gesture. "Well, everything is confidential now. I know your office just finished the Black Death filing, did he do something?"
"That's just the thing," Iadnal explained, "I can't find any of his paper work for it. And no one else in the department seems to remember seeing it. And I have complaining about him enough, you know how prolific he was on miracle uses."
Heeoa laughs at that, the sound of starlight passing through the leaves in spring, "I think in the last five centuries there wasn't a single decade we didn't file complaints. In fact, he was our go-to for interoffice disciplinary actions. 'Be late to work again, and we'll make you audit Aziraphale this quarter.'
