I know I have other stories I should be working on, but I just bought my own copy of Good Omens, and I just had to celebrate with a fanfic. This was mostly inspired by the last paragraph of the story; if you've got the warm fuzzies at the end of it, I've done my job right.

Afterword

Ten years after the apocalypse failed to happen in a rather spectacular fashion, many things were the same as they had always been. The sun still rose in the east and set in the west, the humans still squabbled with each other over the silliest things, and the rain still fell at the most inopportune of moments.

Moments like this one, in Lower Tadfield, on a cool May morning. If you can crane your neck over the hedge, you'll see a woman admonishing three six-year olds for how muddy they've managed to get in the space of ten minutes; the little girls, with their mother's eyes and their father's nose and their many-great-aunt's memory look at her with their solemn six-year old faces before initiating a massive mud fight that will draw their father out of his study and last until lunch.

Anathema and Newton Pulsifer-Device have settled into life in Lower Tadfield, and Lower Tadfield has (slowly) gotten used to the family that has picnics while they map key lines or blacks out the neighbourhood while changing a light bulb.

It's a good place to raise a family.

Head farther down the lane now; there's a coffee shop at the centre of the village that sells the sort of overpriced coffee enjoyed by intellectuals, and twenty-somethings trying to look like intellectuals. If you look through the window, you might even see them.

I mean Them.

As Adam is currently twenty-one and has just finished another year at university, the sudden appearance of a coffee shop like this shouldn't really surprise anyone. He and the rest of Them have taken up residence in the place like they're sitcom stars, spending their days sipping mixed drinks and arguing about Art and Literature and other things they're not quite sure about, but feel that as university students, they should talk about.

Wensleydale drinks straight espresso shots without grimacing at the taste like the rest of Them (even Adam) do. Pepper prefers café au lait with two shots of flavoured syrup, and Brian, who actually cannot stand coffee, drinks hot chocolate with extra cream, and gets it all over his nose. And Adam? He switches around. Sixty different sorts or drinks, he says, is almost as good as thirty-nine flavours of ice cream.

And the rain (falling harder now, did you remember your umbrella? Good.) beats against the window panes as the cappuccino machine shrieks and gurgles and the conversation drifts from Nietzsche to Plato to whether those Matrix people could really beat Captain Jack Sparrow in a fight. It's a different sort of summer then they used to have down at the Pit in the sun, but it's a good sort of different, Adam thinks, and he smiles as they begin to construct a model out of biscotti in an attempt to settle the issue.

Yes. It's a good sort of different.

Take the road out of the village now, where it merges with the highway, and head towards London. If you turn right at that road, you might eventually come to the cottage where Madam Tracy and Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell (retired) live, but we haven't really the time for it. Anyway, Madam Tracy's doing a séance right now, and Shadwell's knocking on the walls and making sure the sprouts don't boil over. They're busy.

If you can stand the M25 and make your way to Soho, you might find yourself at the door to a used bookstore that prides itself on both its collection of rare and antique books and its unwillingness to sell them. No, don't bother with the door; it's locked. Come this way, and peer in the back room, that's why we're here.

There is a table, and two comfortable chairs, holding two man-shaped beings who are arguing over cups of tea. It's a comfortable sort of argue that can bring up things from a thousand years ago or last Tuesday with a grin, even though Crowley is still quite adamant that the tower of Babel mess wasn't his fault.

Aziraphale nods and hides his smile behind his teacup as the rain (practically a monsoon now, soaking through your shoes and coat) thunders on the roof and the wind hammers at the door, and as Crowley frowns at his tea until it decides to turn into something a bit stronger. And Crowley hides his smle in his newly-manifested whiskey and procures a chessboard.

And they both think that there are some things that are more valuable than the riches of heaven and worth the torments of hell, and those sort of things come in small packages that smell of old paper and cigarette smoke, wrapped in wine labels and tied with a good conversation.

The rain continues to fall as the day goes by and we go our separate ways, on the muddy front yard and the coffee shop window and the Shangri-La seance and the bookstore roof. Soon enough, though, it will stop, and people will emerge in the watery sunlight to take walks, work in the garden, feed ducks, and life will go on as it always does.

And, far away (and very close, at the same time), as part of a great, complicated game where no-one is quite sure of the rules, Someone rolls a pair of dice. He already knows what's going to come up; that's ineffability.

The way they roll- how they bounce, and fall, and where they land- that's Life.

That's the important bit.

He smiles.