AN: This fanfiction is based primarily on the TV Show Good Omens, rather than the book. If your humble author was any sort of quality writer, they would have finished the book version of Good Omens before beginning this. As it is, your humble author is still in the process of reading it.

This work will take a leaf from the book version, however, in that it will be written in third person omniscient, rather than the author's usual default of third person limited. This serves two purposes: one, that it flows more seamlessly with the original book's style, and two, that the author can assure themselves that this is a perfectly valid form of writing practice for their own novel, and not one long exercise in procrastination*.

Feedback will be duly devoured and felt wondrous over. Please do leave some.

(*Which it is.)

The weeks following a near-miss of the end of the world were particularly odd. They were odd in the same way the days after moving house were odd — a condensed flurry of utter chaos envelopes your life. You can't quite imagine getting out of the other side the same, and yet all of a sudden, normality returns. Only, it doesn't return gracefully or gently. It returns loudly, slamming down on your new sofa and reminding you that even though you're here now and not there, your life has followed along and nothing has really gotten better or worse. The grass isn't greener after all, and your life hasn't changed. It's just happening somewhere else than before. Only now, you have to eat takeaway for the next week until the oven is installed.

This crushing sense of normality had begun to take its toll on the demon currently driving through London, dodging pedestrians rather than slowing down for them. While it was pleasant to be able to get through a whole The Velvet Underground album without the potent boom of Satan's soul-crushing tones interrupting at any given moment, it was horrendously quiet. He didn't have to shirk his duties anymore. He didn't have duties to shirk anymore. Doing a little tempting or not doing a little tempting now resulted in the same risk: none at all. He didn't have to write little lies to head office anymore. Crowley was bored, and boredom was quite a lot more painful than fretting over the end of the world.

Still, today he had plans. Normal-people plans at that, which for a demon, was quite abnormal. Crowley was off to do something quite mundane, but wholly necessary, with his closest companion on this tiny rock of a world.

Crowley screeched his Bentley to a halt outside of the old Soho bookshop. He paused to check his reflection in the rear-view mirror and adjusted his sunglasses to the perfect degree, and slithered from his seat out into the bustling London street. A swagger perfected over many eons brought the demon to the front door, in total and unobscured view of the 'Sorry, Closed' sign. Crowley knew this was part of Aziraphale's ploy to keep his book sales cripplingly low — for the angel was not so much a bookseller as a book hoarder. The shop was merely a large storage unit for the angel's impressive collection, though when Crowley had suggested an actual storage unit, the angel had looked positively affronted at the idea of leaving his precious tomes 'shivering in the cold'.

The demon promptly ignored the closed sign, however, and with a careful flick of his wrist, the lock unfortunately broke. Letting himself in, another twirl of his hand miraculously locked the door behind him.

"Aziraphale?" Crowley called, swanning through the shop. He hadn't expected a response. For you see, although the sun may rise in the east, the angel of the eastern gate certainly didn't feel any great instinctive need to rise along with it. No, Aziraphale was no more a morning person than Crowley was a...person-person. Crowley was in no position to judge the other, not in the least because he was a demon and systematically wasn't qualified to judge anyone. Crowley himself had once slept nearly an entire century away, such was his enjoyment of slumber. But Aziraphale made Crowley look like a true morning lark by comparison.

"Wakey-wakey, angel, come on!" Crowley called as he walked through the back room, hands hardly in his pockets so much as his fingers were trapped halfway into the tiny slips at the front of his skinny jeans that claimed to be pockets. He made his way through the shop to Aziraphale's room, opening the door gently and then remembering he was actually trying to wake the angel. He then proceeded to nearly wrench the door from its hinges in order to make as much noise as possible.

Not a soul stirred in the bedroom, not that Crowley would have been able to see anything stirring there. Aziraphale's bed was, in a word, ridiculous. Giant plumes of fluffy white bedding billowed over half of the room, melted indiscernibly with white fur throws and silk bed-runners. It was the sort of bed where you ran the risk of being devoured by it if you so much as sat on the edge of it. Finding Aziraphale within its fluffy cloud-meets-marshmallow horrors was marginally more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack. Crowley had once taken part in such a lark one particularly boring year in the 14th century in order to while away some of the painful time. He had since experienced instances where finding a sleeping Aziraphale within the all-consuming airy quilt he called his bed had taken him longer by comparison.

Nervously, as though approaching a bear-trap with his last available limb, Crowley reached out one hand and tapped at the cloud of bedding. It immediately sank under his touch and he nearly fell into the plush nimbus of slumber. Catching himself, Crowley snatched his sunglasses off to try and get a better grasp of the situation.

"Oi! Angel!" He barked, finally finding something that looked like it might belong to the angel and not the half-sentient cloud he slept on — a bundle of white feathers poked out from somewhere within the thirty quilts and blankets. Crowley risked it. He shoved his hand out and grabbed what mercifully turned out to be one of Aziraphale's wings. The act brought a mewling complaint from somewhere to Crowley's left.

He shoved his left hand down and found a face. And another yelping complaint, muffled by Crowley's own hand.

With a sudden flailing of limbs and wings, Aziraphale emerged from the cloud-bed with the expression of someone who had been told all delights of the world had been cancelled forthwith with immediate effect. Sparkling blue eyes both pleaded and scowled up at Crowley. However, Crowley had become immune to that look sometime in 1632, and merely glowered down at the other.

"This is why we're buying you a mobile phone," Crowley pointed out. Aziraphale was already nestling himself back into the ivory oblivion of his bed, turning to smoosh his face into one of many cushions he had gathered within.

"M'okay...yes, a wonderful thought...we should arrange a time to..." The angel hummed sleepily, rolling over to drift off again. Crawley's jaw twitched; they had arranged a time. The time was now. In truth, the time was years ago, but Aziraphale had been frustratingly adverse to purchasing a mobile phone of his own. But Crowley had reached the end of his patience when it came to locating the only other supernatural entity on the planet. Satan forbid if the angel wasn't at his bookshop and had wandered off, led by nothing but his sweet-tooth and love for tiny, obscure, hidden-away coffee shops. Crowley had lost contact with Aziraphale for weeks in such instances.

Leaning back down to dig the angel out of his cotton nest, Crowley noticed something quite unusual. The two of them didn't have much by the way of secrets anymore. Six thousand-odd years of hanging around with another person did rather remove such boundaries. So it was with some surprise that Crowley discovered that morning that Aziraphale might indeed have one or two things hidden from him yet.

"Angel...what's that on your back?" Crowley asked. The angel slept without a pyjama shirt, presumably as a precaution against boiling alive inside the dense collection of cotton, silk, fur, and stuffing that made up his bed.

"...My wings, one would hope," came the muffled, unhelpful reply.

"Not them, the bits under them. They look like—" They looked like stumps at his waist, a few inches below were each of Aziraphale's wings sprouted.

Another jolting flurry of limbs and feathers brought Aziraphale abruptly awake, and several millimetres from inadvertently headbutting a demon back down to the fire and brimstone from whence he came.

"Ah! Nothing! Nothing, nothing," Aziraphale yelped, very much with the tone of urgency that often surrounded something as opposed to nothing. His eyes darted from Crowley to the walls, searching for a decent enough teensy white lie that wouldn't remove his status as an angel. "It's erm...a birthmark, of course!"

Crowley blinked. A single, swift closing and opening of his eyelids and Aziraphale was already looking up at him, guilty as all the sins of the world.

"A birthmark?"

"Y-Yes."

"That's what you're going with?"

"...May I?"

The demon rolled his eyes.

"Get up, angel, and I won't point out that you weren't born or marked. We've got shopping to do."

Technology wasn't so much as an Achilles' heel for Aziraphale, but more akin to politics. That was, he had neglected to keep up with it entirely for a short time, so when he was presented with it in any capacity now, his initial response was panic.

He looked over his shoulder at Crowley, who was lounging in a seat and scrolling through his own phone. Crowley glanced up at him. An eyebrow appeared from behind his sunglasses.

"Just pick the one you like," Crowley repeated, the mantra having been offered to Aziraphale a few times in the last hour. "I'll show you how to use it, whichever you pick. Promise."

Aziraphale chewed on his lower lip and went back to looking over the wall of expensive glass screens and lights. He didn't really see the need for a mobile phone, but if it made Crowley's life a little easier, then Aziraphale reasoned it would surely be unfair of him to object too much.

He turned back to Crowley.

"Will they all play that delightful game like yours does?" He pointed a manicured finger at Crowley's phone. "The one with the cats?"

Crowley's chest rose…then deflated with a sigh that was nearly as hefty as his phone bill had been the month Aziraphale discovered the wonders of Neko Atsume.

"Yes, Aziraphale. The cat game will be on it," he assured the other, as the angel turned back to the wall of mobiles with a much more positive expression and a mumbled 'Oooh, marvellous!'

As Aziraphale continued to do the unthinkable and actually read the specifications of each phone on offer, Crowley returned to his own mindless scrolling. Sixteen cat videos, three 'Fails of the Week' videos, and a spice challenge later (Crowley did enjoy the latter, and had been attempting to convince Aziraphale to eat a teaspoon of cinnamon since late 2012. To this day, Crowley's YouTube channel remains an untapped gem of opportunity), the demon's thumb paused over the screen.

A rising, verging-viral video begged for him to click it with a haphazard array of capital letters, a title that tempted you to hit it with your thumb if only for the satisfaction of smacking it with some sort of physical pressure: '100% LeGIt REaL DEmON SIgHtINg CaUGhT On TApE'.

Normally, Crowley would have saved it for bemused watching later. Normally, the video wouldn't have a slightly blurry image of his face as the thumbnail.

Leaning forward in his seat, Crowley peered at the screen a little closer, as though the pixels would sharpen for his glower. If they had any sense of self-preservation, perhaps they would have.

"Oh shit..." the demon snarled under his breath. "Shit-fuck-shit-shit—Aziraphale!"

The demon was on his feet and at a startled angel's side in a heartbeat, a hand clamping on Aziraphale's upper arm. The blond jumped a little, and looked up at Crowley with more than a hint of indignation.

"I've narrowed it down to a shortlist of four, just be patient with me a few more minutes—"

"Look!"

Crowley shoved his mobile phone under Aziraphale's nose. The other looked down at it, taking it from Crowley's hands carefully as though the glass would shatter in his light grip.

"Is that...you?"

"Yes."

"...And the number beneath, that's the amount of people who have watched your video?"

"It's not my video, but yes."

"Oh...oh. Oh, is that...the airfield?"

"Yes," Crowley took the phone back, stuffed it in his pocket, then led Aziraphale out of the store with a hand at his lower back. "Bloody CCTV at the military base, honestly, does there really need to be cameras everywhere?"

It was bad news. Bad news for them both. Humans were, by their very nature, rather blind to reality. But when they did look up and notice, they had an awful tendency to choose panic as their first reaction, followed by anger, and then a therapeutic session of blaming. It might appear as though such things shouldn't worry a pair of supernatural entities, and usually, it wouldn't. But the pair on earth were not usual supernatural entities. They had been on earth since the beginning. And they knew the truth of humanity. They knew the greatest lie mankind told itself, and it was both a shield and a sword.

Life's greatest lie is, of course, that humans are powerless and magicless. Humans are nothing of the sort, but their poor eyesight coupled with their expansive imaginations has rendered them somewhat desensitised to this. Their magic is not the power to summon dragons from the skies or bend water to their will, so really, anything else sort of pales in comparison. Reality always pales in comparison to the magic of human imagination — it's the blessing and the curse of it. It had to be, as imagination was accidentally created in the 4th century when a bet between an angel and a demon went horribly wrong, resulting in them both having to tickle a human soul as forfeit. And, as with all the greatest masterpieces of the world, imagination was created quite by accident, along with all the wonders and terrors it brought with it. Who could have known the laughter of the soul would invent something?

Yes, humans had a power that fuelled their imagination, one that demons and angels were quite envious and aloof of in equal measure: free will. This is underrated as a gift from God because it is a talent the species as a whole takes for granted, a muscle that is not often exercised as much it ought to be. And it is this free will that brings a troubled Crowley and a worried Aziraphale speeding through central London once more. As they did so, the angel tapped nervously on Crowley's phone, having retrieved it from the ruffled demon to scrutinise the video better.

"The number is much higher now. How could it have increased so swiftly, it's barely been ten minutes!" Aziraphale exclaimed, repeatedly refreshing the video as the numbers shot up before his eyes.

"Because it's a video with two winged men, a sword on fire, and what looks like the back of Satan's left shoulder," Crowley snapped, glancing at the angel then swiping his hand to try and stop him scrolling down too far. "Sodding heaven, don't look at the comments—"

This was certainly bad. Within 24 hours their faces would be all over major breaking news outlets, 23.5 hours after every social media channel on the planet had covered the story from every conceivable angle and gotten several hashtags trending. Indeed, if Crowley had been an irresponsible driver and looked at his Twitter account, or if Aziraphale had known what the blue icon with the little bird in was for, they would have seen much to Aziraphale's delight that #TeamWhiteWings was trending fourth place on the Worldwide Trending list, where #TeamBlackWings would trend fifth until around 2:32am the following morning, when a blossoming fandom dedicated to the red-haired demon would cause his respective hashtag to surge up to the number one spot.

Rhiannon Trinket was not a noted scientist, though she certainly worked hard in her field. She was not a noted anyone. Ms Trinket had led what could only be called the most standard of lives. She had a mother, and a father. She had gone to school, and she had made a few friends.

And then, she had disappeared. Not figuratively, as many people do. Literally. Rhiannon Trinket went missing aged 11, but not a single poster went up to urge anyone to keep an eye out for her. No news bulletins or social media campaigns. It was as if the girl had never existed.

Only, she had. She knew she had, and so, she had. Rhiannon may have been removed from reality abruptly one day, but that didn't change the fact she knew she was real. But, away from reality as she had been so cruelly ripped from, Rhiannon found herself somewhere much worse.

She had been left in a void between reality and imagination. A sort of sketching room for all of God's great ideas, and all the little ideas mankind came up with. We call them concepts, and few things in the history of humanity are quite as terrifying as concepts.

You see, nothing is more powerful, nor more flexible, than a concept. Power and flexibility are, of course, the most dangerous combination on God's good earth. Imagine, if you will, the standard mad axeman chasing you through your worst nightmare. No doubt he's a cumbersome fellow, broad and likely wearing a fetching plaid shirt. Certainly terrifying, but right now, you're running ahead of him, leaping over tree roots and probably allowing yourself a slight delusion of grandeur when it comes to reflecting your real level of fitness.

Now imagine the axeman again, crashing through the trees after you.

Now, he's not just an axeman. He's also an Olympic-grade acrobat.

Suddenly, that lumbering axeman has become a horrifyingly nimble and swift-footed blade on legs like a gazelle. That is the strength of a concept born of the human mind.

But the thing about concepts is they root deeply into the mind and spread like parasites. A concept can be kind or cruel. But, most importantly, nothing is immune to it. It is a major design flaw in all of God's creations, and one God doesn't like to talk about much.

Concepts shape the self, which is something humans and angel stock both have in common. Yearning for someone, once upon a time, was conceptualised as 'adoration'. That's good, and because it's good, the angels were quite happy to claim that one. Adoration, how lovely. For a few centuries, it was quite trendy and romantic.

Then...it wasn't. People were enjoying it too much, and someone else came up with the concept that enjoying too much of a good thing somehow made it a bad thing. No one questioned that logic, and thus, yearning for someone or something became 'lust'. Now, that word doesn't even sound holy. It's the long 'sssss' and clipped 'tuh' that does it, and the angels didn't want that nasty concept. They let the demons have that one. Lust, not romantic-sounding at all. Into the sin bin it went, and thus, the concept of sin was born. Six more would later be added to the swirling pool of concepts.

Another powerful concept from the pits of human imagination, as Rhiannon found out that fateful day, is time. Time is truly bizarre, and makes little to no sense to anyone on the outside looking in. And Rhiannon was, for a long time, very much on the outside, floating in non-existence. This was all thanks to a sleight of hand at the time of her birth, a third baby, and some rather unobservant Satanic nuns.

Not to mention an angel and a demon who hadn't thought to consider where Baby B went after they realised the error of a certain demon's Son-of-Satan baby-swap. And the rather unexpected element of said Son-of-Satan doing something of a reset on the whole affair, altering reality, and making something of a conundrum of Baby B's existence at all.

And so, the poor third was spat out of reality as the Universe coughed away this now-unknown object in a void of unreality and fiendishly mallible concepts. What felt like ten years to her here crawled by as a little more than a few months in reality. But in her time, lost admits the maybes and could-have-beens, and if-onlys, and hard-to-describes, Rhiannon was far from alone. In those slow, peculiar ten years, she had been lucky enough to make a few friends. Friends who knew and shaped reality like the backs of their hands. Friends who could help her return to reality, albeit hazily and certainly changed for her trip; not the least that she had returned to reality ten years older than she had left it.

Nowadays, Rhiannon Trinket was simply one of the many people you may pass in the street, a face that you'd soon forget not out of malice, but sheer normality. In many ways, this worked quite well for her. It meant she could get on with her work without many questions.

Currently, her work was lying on a bench in front of her. Well, one of seven parts of her work, but dragging concepts from the netherworld she had spent the last ten years in wasn't exactly simple. The theory was, but the execution was far trickier. It would be a one-by-one task, cumbersome, yet careful. It was also not without some external help of a third party that Rhiannon had been able to accomplish this task, but she still felt a small sense of personal achievement as the human-shaped work on the bench before her opened their eyes and looked up at Rhiannon with a softened expression of an old friend.

"Good afternoon, Luxuria," Rhiannon offered by means of greeting, a small smile on her face.