More Fic
A crossover this time.
Title: Why lying to the Antichrist is generally considered a Bad Idea
Rating: PG-ish
Summary: Sometimes it's better to just admit it.
Fandoms: Doctor Who/Good Omens
Disclaimer: So don't own either.
A/N: unbetaed. All mistakes my own.
Why lying to the Antichrist is generally considered a Bad Idea
Saturdays, by their very nature, are eventful days. It is written into the very nature of reality. Saturdays are about curing hangovers with newer, shinier soon-to-be hangovers. Saturdays are for running the kids around to every conceivable sport in a car that is killing the environment (or possibly saving it, depending on the century.) Saturdays are for dying heroically, falling in love, eating fried crickets for the first time, not buying books at a second-hand bookshop, sunbaking, reading, and getting torn out of your probably-universe-or-perhaps-realm-of-reality and placed into some sort of cell that looks like it’s come straight out of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
The concluding possibility is exactly the situation the Doctor finds himself in. It is especially surprising since before he was torn out of his probably-universe-or-perhaps-realm-of-reality and placed into some sort of cell that looks like it’s come straight out of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, he had been watching the Spanish news from the 7th of July, 1987 on a Thursday in his TARDIS whilst floating near the Lagoon Nebula. Thursdays are, by all accounts, usually quite dull. Unless you’re a ninja or the Doctor. Which the Doctor is. Both, actually; but the former was mostly an accident and anyway, not the sort of ninja humans know about.
“Oh,” he said and then: “What?” and then, just in case he hadn’t conveyed his surprise sufficiently yet: “How?”
This is followed by some enthusiastic, thorough and decidedly inappropriate swearing, which is exactly in line with the etiquette of persons who find themselves in this situation[1]. He then proceeded to realise he couldn’t hear or feel the TARDIS, or any of the rest of the Universe like he’s used to. In fact, he felt quite frighteningly human until he realised he was talking three languages simultaneously and he still had a double pulse. This reassured him to the point where he felt he could dedicate all of his worrying capacity to the sheer magnitude of how terribly, awfully, ridiculously, truly bad his situation was. His not-worrying capacity was filled by admiring the interesting colour the slime on the floor went when it touched the toes of his converses.
This continued for exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds.
Then the door opened[2].
-
“-you a thousand chocolate croissants from the best patisserie in France that it won’t last.”
“I think you’re... oh.”
“What?”
“How?”
Crowley turned to say something snide and sarcastic to the angel about how the logistics of their predicament really wasn’t their primary issue right now, thank you very much, when he was struck by the realisation that sarcasm really, seriously wasn’t worth it. Also, Aziraphale looked a bit... something[3] when he was shocked. Instead he said:
“This isn’t the Ritz.”
“No,” agreed Aziraphale, “It reminds me of that room I rented in the seventeenth century.”
“That wasn’t a room, Angel, that was a broom cupboard with a desk.”
“Oh,” said the angel with some dismay. Crowley experienced a moment of blissful smugness before he realised that the dismay was not prompted by his charming wit, but something behind them.
“Where’d the door go?” he demanded.
“Bilocational portal door,” someone familiar-sounding informed him. “At least, that’s the direct English translation. It’s a lot more intelligent sounding in its original language. Basically, it existed as the door to the Ritz, I’m assuming, as well as a portal to... here. It only works as long as it has no impact on anything else, the second it even enters your consciousness that something’s not right the system shuts down in order to protect itself and you’re left in a room without a door. Or slime, anymore. Which is an improvement! ...For me at least. I once met a being whose respiration system wasn’t gas exchange but, well I was the first to meet him and I called it goo exchange, which sort of stuck, unfortunately. Not very scientific sounding. Hardly going to impress anyone, is it, saying ‘I was the bloke that discovered the first known species to respire goo’?” He smiled and then added, “It’s a very effective system.”
“Goo respiration?” asked Aziraphale faintly.
“No,” replied the Doctor with a furrowed brow, “The disappearing doors. BLPDs. Well actually I just made the acronym up, since technically it isn’t named with an alphabet that exists beyond the theoretical assumption of some linguists. Which I’ve always thought a bit presumptuous: just because they like alphabets doesn’t mean everyone has to. Humans can’t even hear the language, you know. Pity, they had some interesting theories on weight loss.”
“You don’t exist,” Crowley informed the Doctor firmly.
“That only works for bilocational portal doors, I’m afraid[4],” returned the Doctor with an eager grin. “I’m the Doctor.” He added and waved at them, rocking back on his heels with his smile still in place.
Crowley felt Aziraphale straighten and throw a calculating glance around the room, letting it rest both on himself and the Doctor.
“A J Crowley,” he said as he hooked an arm around Aziraphale and dragged him closer, offering a hand to the Doctor. “This is Mr... Fell.”
“Right. Great. Probably we should sit down, since we now have chairs, also. In fact this place looks exactly like a room in my... ship.”
They sat down in each of the three armchairs that had sprung into existence beside them[5] and endured the sort of pregnant silence that was seconds away from giving birth to millions of baby silences that would fill the room with awful, screaming silence for all eternity.
“I don’t suppose you were watching the Spanish news from the 7th of July, 1987, were you?” asked the Doctor.
“No, sorry, I lost my tape of it,” replied Aziraphale, with absolutely no sarcasm within a five hundred mile vicinity of his voice.
The Doctor frowned, ran his hands through his hair, bit his lip, ran his hands through his hair and placed his glasses on his nose. He winced and then tried, “Do you have any powerful enemies that might want to see you harmed? Or maybe just locked in a room with me?”
Crowley giggled a bit and then squashed it with a cough at a glance from Aziraphale. “Sorry,” he muttered, for the third time in his life[6].
“Is that a yes then?”
“Ours have the tendency to be fairly direct. If this was punishment we’d probably know it by now,” replied Crowley carefully.
“It’s Adam,” declared Aziraphale. “I told you those DBDs were a bad idea!”
“DVDs. V. And I was proud of them!” retorted Crowley.
“Because they were illegal and pirated?”
“Please, I’ve more class then that, Angel. It’s a pet project of mine.”
“What? Doctor Who? How?”
“Um,” said the Doctor, slightly confused. He was ignored.
“I... it was going to be an educational show about history, teaching young people about the past wrongs of humanity so that they’d learn from their ancestors’ mistakes. I couldn’t allow that!”
“So you made it into a show loved by thousands-”
“Millions!”
“- millions of people, that brings joy and good messages to some otherwise lonely and bored souls-”
“That bit was an accident!”
“You’re really quite adorable Crowley. And sweet.”
Crowley blushed a bit. Then frowned and pretended not to.
“I’m sorry to interrupt and all,” interrupted the Doctor, “but who is this ‘Adam’?”
Sighing they shared a glance and shrugged.
They told him.
-
“You’re mad,” said the Doctor[7].
“Not at the moment,” comforted Aziraphale with a light smile. One might even suspect him of irony.
Everything was silent as the Doctor thought for a bit.
“Alright. So assuming in this Universe there really is a Christian God and the whole shebang to do with it all except that the apocalypse failed, what has the Antichrist got to do with anything?”
“Crowley gave him a pack of all of the episodes ever of Doctor Who as a housewarming gift for finally moving out of his parents house. Which you are, coincidently, the main character of.”
“You think I’m a character in a TV series made up by a couple of humans? I’m sorry if this comes across as conceited but I’m a bit more bloody impressive than that.”
“Look what you’ve gone and done now, Angel,” said Crowley with the sort of smile that was so devoid of actual expression that it could only be rude, “you’ve hurt his ego. He might go sob in a corner about how he blew up his planet now. Or how his darling sweet Rose left him for an alternate reality. Or how he’s the Lonely God.”
“What did you just say?”
Everyone paused a moment. The Doctor, by all means, might’ve been a sixth of the age of both Crowley and Aziraphale, but he’d dedicated a good deal of that time practicing self-righteous fury and being really quite frightening.
“That was well done Crowley,” murmured Aziraphale before turning the Doctor, whose hands were shaking from the power of his grip on the armrests. “The point is, old boy, is that he could only know that if he knew about you by, say, watching a show about you on the telly. That’s not to say you aren’t real in some other realm of reality-”
“Universe,” the Doctor corrected.
“Realm of reality,” retorted both the angel and demon with the sort of promptness that implies a certain degree of knowledge.
“Anyway, what I’m saying is that just because you’re on a telly program over here doesn’t make you not real per se. Maybe the magnitude of your, er, realness permeated our reality and the consciousness of the creators of the program and prompted them to make the series about you!”
“Or maybe you’re both telepathic and insane and the cause of all of this,” suggested the Doctor with a cheery grin that was flirting unabashedly with insanity.
“Do you suppose he’s doing this on purpose?” Crowley asked Aziraphale, biting his lip, having decided to ignore the cheerfully fuming Timelord.
“Well he was looking awfully pale on Tuesday...”
“He’s the Antichrist. He can’t get sick. Actually,” a pause.
“Well, my dear, he could if he wanted. He’s a curious boy and he’s been reading an awful lot of philosophy-”
“Thanks to you.”
“- yes, well, education can’t harm him. He may’ve decided to take the natural course of it all, in an attempt to avoid all this tampering with Humanity.”
“So what you’re saying is that he decided that by putting himself in a position where he had little to no control of his fairly considerable powers would prove a sensible course of action.”
“This is the antichrist that was going on about what a ‘champ’ Marx was.”
“Yes,” said Crowley. “Well[8].’
-
“Your theory about bilocational portal doors doesn’t make any sense,” said Aziraphale eventually. “Especially since locational isn’t even a word, let alone bilocational.”
“Yet,” replied the Doctor.
-
Time seems to sit strangely on them, they’re so much more than any of the beings he’s met before, but less also. They’re not quite in focus, the humanness of their appearance starkly contrasted against some primal instinct in him to run from them, from here. This isn’t just some fix it and leave it situation, he can’t hear the TARDIS, can’t even hear the echoes of his people. All he can hear - in the non-literal sense that he’s very glad, really, he doesn’t have to explain to anyone, as he really couldn’t see that sort of conversation with any hypothetical companion going down well without copious amounts of either hallucinogenics or alcohol[9] - is the echoes of a war, far bigger than anything seen by humanity, seen by him. A war that is as unending as life, as eternal as death.
The Doctor decides all of this in the fraction of a second it takes any good Timelord, or, he amends hastily, the type of Timelord that passes everything. Mostly. Usually. He sighs and very determinedly doesn’t look at either of his unwitting companions; he has decided all that, he proclaims dramatically to the thousands of silently screaming voices in his mind, exactly in the fraction of a second it would take a Timelord who is capable of making such decisions in a fraction of a second. There. Much better.
-
“So,” said the Doctor, “How long have you two been... well you know... if you don’t mind me asking, of course.”
“Angels and Demons?” asked Crowley, running a hand through his hair and smiling charmingly.
“That book was terrible,” mused Aziraphale. “And as long as we’ve existed, well I’ve been an angel all of my existence, and you, well, you became a demon before any of us existed in the corporeal sense.”
“Oh,” said the Doctor, and smiled like they’d said something amusing.
-
“You have freckles!” Crowley exclaimed after a moment of embarrassingly intense scrutiny of the man-shaped being beside him brought on from boredom.
“Yes, well, you should’ve probably thought of that before you took me thwarting in the Caribbean,” replied Aziraphale with what might have been a fond smile hovering on his lips.
“Thwarting, eh?” said the Doctor, who’d accidently caught crudeness off an old friend of his, though he managed to repress it in all but the direst of circumstances[5].
Crowley scoffed.
Aziraphale frowned.
“He is wily and I thwart him. It’s what we do,” he explained patiently.
The Doctor was quiet for a remarkably long time as he pondered this, and then he laughed.
-
They sat in silence for awhile, contemplating several things which may or may not have included the relative existence of a charming jumper, the sudden overwhelming evidence that supported a monotheistic religion a certain Timelord had spent a good deal of his lifetime mocking, anti-gravitational hair and sex. This last thought, however, may have come from the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. Then again, it may not have. It mightn’t have been thought of at all.
“I am not,” said the Doctor, who had the misfortune of being vaguely telepathic, “going to sleep with either of you. Ever. I have a friend who would though,” he said a little louder, looking in a North-Easterly direction, “he has a charming American accent. Well technically... actually never mind, it’s American. Ish. Of the immortal, ‘I’ve survived longer than most civilisations’ kind. I hear it’s quite attractive, not knowing these things myself since I’m asexual. Ish. Enough to not ever, ever sleep with either of them.”
“Well,” said Aziraphale.
Crowley didn’t say anything at all, but raised one of his eyebrows in exactly the way that everyone wishes they could and blatantly, despite his sunglasses, gave the Doctor a once over. The Doctor sort of maybe blushed a bit. And ignored the smile the possibly-an-angel ducked his head politely to hide.
-
“Did you-?”
“No.”
The Doctor blinked. Apparently other beings-of-improbable-lifespans had non-conversations as well.
“Let’s play I-spy” he suggested, in order to cut the tense silence.
-
“I wish we’d had some warning,” murmured Aziraphale, after they’d agreed that they could all see the walls, roof and floor quite clearly. “I would’ve brought along The Horse and his Boy.”
“Here,” said the Doctor kindly as he passed it to him[11].
-
“Fine,” snapped Crowley into the otherwise peaceful silence. “You know I was joking Adam? I didn’t really defile her. We just got drunk. Probably she’d get angry at you if she found out someone who is - by earthly standards - seven-twelfths her age was trying to protect her suspiciously-lacking virtue in the stead of her unfortunate but predestined husband.”
Silence returned, though it forgot to bring with it the former peace.
At last:
“It was worth a try.”
Aziraphale rolled his eyes and turned the page. Carefully. The Doctor was going to ask him about his apparent bibliophilia when-
-
The Doctor opened his eyes, the TARDIS console was glowing mostly-greenly at him and in his mind he heard her murmuring again. He heard everything he missed and saw everything he hadn’t been able to. He thought, with sleepy conviction that this was a Very Good Thing.
“Hoy un chico reclama ver el futuro,” the television informed him politely from behind an open packet of liquorice allsorts.
“I am never going to eat liquorice allsorts ever again,” he informed the roof. Though, if one were so inclined, they might interpret this as an avowal to an omnipresent deity.
The Doctor frowned and leaned back in his chair. He felt... strange. It wasn’t just the possibly-a-dream, either it was...
Hope.
Or maybe he just needed more potassium. He always got those two mixed up.
(And a suspicion that something was going wrong with Earth in the form of Adipose Industries.)
-
Somewhere, in a different probably-universe-or-perhaps-realm-of-reality, a remarkably unruffled angel and demon took their seats[12] at the Ritz.
“Probably lying about defiling one of the Antichrist’s closest friends was not your wisest move, my dear boy,” murmured the angel.
“I was trying to prove a point,” growled the demon.
“What sort of point?” was the absent reply, most of the angelic concentration dedicated to the wine list between them.
“That we’re not,” a significant pause. “You know.”
“Asexual?”
Another significant pause.
“No.” [13]
1. This is because the Doctor has read (and accidently memorised) The Handy Handbook For When Something Totally Unexpected Happens.
2. The door in question hadn’t actually existed before the point in which it opened, or perhaps it did, but elsewhere.
3. Certainly not ‘fit in that ruffled, oblivious, really-incredibly-intelligent way’ that Anathema had insisted on when he’d gotten her drunk in an attempt to have his dastardly way with her in order to ruin the chances of a successful relationship between her and Newt (poor man). The fact that they’d ended up talking the whole night about predestination and relationships (or non-relationships, in the case of Crowley) and being given advice on how to have relationships (also in the case of Crowley), did not mean that the venture had been a complete and utter failure. Crowley who is perfectly capable of looking after himself and knows quite well the benefit of being ever-so-slightly misleading, was a tad untruthful in his report. They did, after all, spend very little of the night sleeping, and they were on his bed (the only comfortable piece of furniture in his flat) and he did touch her. Well, in any case, as far as the authorities were concerned it was not the kind of touching that involved face planting onto her stomach in a drunken attempt at changing forms for her entertainment.
4. This was, in fact, a lie. 4 species located in the heart of the Crab Nebula had an issue with this and Pluto had ceased to be a planet because a couple of blokes with big moustaches and coffee stains on their knitted cardigans had decided not to believe in its planetness anymore.
5. Not before Crowley glared his chair into being a sleekly designed fashion statement made from the sort of black leather that more or less ate light.
6. Don’t bother asking him about the other two times, he won’t ever, ever tell anyone, ever.
7. He had forgotten to say it in English, which wouldn’t have mattered if the TARDIS wasn’t somewhere else and unable to translate for him like usual. Luckily for him he was talking to two ethereal beings who were very capable of understanding and speaking every language spoken ever, in all of time and space. Except for Welsh.
8. Because, seriously, how many experiments did it take to disprove a theory?
9. Both of which the Doctor disapproves of heartily and would like to make clear that any reports of his consumption of a certain Unnamed Drink (the very same Unnamed Drink, actually, that was outlawed in all planets and galaxies within seconds of its creation but the Tttvikan Party Planet, which itself was outlawed by all other planets within seconds of its creation, or, more accurately, it’s transformation into a party planet.) are very, very unlikely. He has alibis, you see, several hundred of them and just because they all died millions of years before the event doesn’t discredit them. He’s an all-of-space-and-time traveller, they’ve a habit of being exactly where you least expect them to be. This also means that he’s the only one who knows for sure his own timeline, and there are some patchy bits even for him. Patchy bits which are in no way, shape or form associated with the Tttvikan Party Planet. At all.
10. i.e. boredom.
11. It had been in his pocket. Along with a yoyo, an old Yum-Yum-Uranus lollipop wrapper, three chess pieces, his sonic screwdriver and several frightening (and possibly alive) pocket-fluff balls.
12. Miraculously reserved despite no prior bookings.
13. Perhaps, if a certain angel had been paying more attention a discovery might have been made and a New Arrangement formed. Unfortunately for Crowley’s very existent libido, this particular angel was busy deciding whether he was in the mood for copious amounts of alcohol to assist in the repression of certain recent and should-be ineffable (though perhaps effable after all) memories; or a nice, comforting, sane, non-accidentally-temporal-shifting tea. There is, after all, a marked difference between appearing unruffled and actually being unruffled. Also, he’d recently managed to bestow a minor miracle on a new acquaintance that seemed to need it and acquired a signed first edition copy of C.S. Lewis’ A Horse and his Boy.