#also I found out ryoji is like. you have several very specific things to do on certain days or else you fuck his SL up

[clownowo]

Persona games be like “here you go random unremarkable choice that if you answer wrong locks you out of an event for the entire rest of the game :)”

i'm so mad. i was planning on romancing akihiko and i even had his wiki page open to get the most amount of points on his social links and i fucking. missed the first romance flag. and didn't realize. because the option i chose gave more points. and then saved over my previous save. i'm locked out of romancing him. agony.

[pleasespellchimerical]

the opening of that Good Omens/Evangelion crossover that I’ll never finish

Sometimes it’s a relief to admit I’ll never finish a fic and that’s ok

anyway, things that will never be:

Angels! Demons! the end of the world!

Heaven is responsible for this mess. Hell can’t figure it out, so all the demons get sent to infiltrate Nerv

Ryoji Kaji is a low level demon who hero-worships Crowley (and also falls in love with a human. Demons can, in fact, love)

Crowley and Katsuragi are besties. He hangs out at her apartment a lot, and they drink absurd amounts of booze together

Crowley feels really horrible for these kids, so he does his utmost to protect them from the psychological consequences of this war. His efforts are not enough, but they do make things a little better than canon NGE

Crowley steals an Eva

Everyone’s out of town to deal with the crisis with Sandalphon, Crowley’s alone at HQ, and oh shit another angel

So he up and steals one of the production units

Guess who this angel is! (no angels have been seen on Earth since the Second Impact. Until now)

Crowley doesn’t want to fight his old friend, but Aziraphale isn’t acting like himself

When defeated, Aziraphale’s soul jumps into the Eva and he possesses the unit. Humans can no longer pilot it, and Crowley’s in deep shit for stealing it in the first place, so Crowley is forced to pilot it as punishment (it’s not a punishment bc he’s got his old friend back)

Crowley and Kaworu are old frenemies. Crowley’s jealous of the whole “free-will” thing

The ending is very different, but humanity and love wins. Humanity and love always win <3

The piece of fic itself is under the cut. Enjoy!

London, AD 2000, September

It was raining that night.

In a worn-down bookshop in the Soho neighborhood of London, an angel and a demon had holed up with several glasses of wine while the rain poured down.

Until there was a knock on the bookshop door.

They both started, and glanced at each other.

The angel got up to answer the door. "We're closed—" he started, but stopped when the girl huddling under an umbrella held out a book to him.

He took it gingerly, as though expecting it to explode, and whitened when he saw the worn cover.

"What—?" was all he could muster.

The girl looked at him like he was holding her first-born child. "She said to. I don't know who you are or why this is so important, but Agnes said that you need to have it."

The angel took a small breath.

The girl hesitated. "It's a family heirloom, all right? I'm her last descendant. So please—" her voice cracked. "Take care of it."

"I—yes, of course." The angel cradled the book to his chest. "Do you want to come in? Out of the rain? I can get you a cuppa—"

She shook her head. "I need to go. And—" one last plaintive look. "—be careful."

And the girl vanished into the rainy night.

The angel slowly shut the door and made his way to the back room, where he'd left the demon and the bottle of wine.

"Wozzat?" said the demon as he sat back down.

The angel held the book out in front of him reverentially, fingers gently stroking the cover. He carefully opened to a random page, observing the centuries of notes scribbled in the margins.

"There's something sticking out," the demon pointed out helpfully.

The angel paged to where the bookmark was. One section of the text was circled in pencil.

He read it.

And then he read it again.

And stood up.  "I think we need to call it a night."

The demon shrugged. "Sure. I take it this is one of your special books?"

"I've been coveting a copy for centuries…" the angel murmured. "And a girl just appears in the rain and hands one over. Here, take a look." The demon stood and peered over his shoulder at the circled section.

A pause. "Well," the demon said, "That can't be good."

Another pause. "I," the angel said, "need to do some research."

"Right, right. I'll leave you to it then." The demon shuddered, shaking the alcohol out of his system. "See you tomorrow? Don't lose yourself in this book completely."

"Of course." The angel waved a hand, pulling out some scrap paper and pens.

"Right. Night then."

"Good night." The angel was already distracted. The demon mentally shrugged, and headed out into the darkness and the rain.

Several hours later found the demon sprawled out on his couch with a half empty bottle of gin while the telly played late-night reruns. He was dozing, not really paying attention, while the light flickered in front of his face.

There was a click, and the power cut out.

The demon started, surprised by the absence of light and sound. He set the bottle down on a table, stood up, wandered over to the window, looked out.

Whatever had happened, all of London was affected. There was no light as far as the eye could see.

He played with the blinds for a moment, wondering. Thinking back to the bit in the book earlier that night…

And the world exploded.

That's what it felt like, anyway. More specifically, the floor heaved, the demon fell, there was a massive roaring sound, car alarms blared in the streets, and there was screaming.

When the shaking stopped, he got up and pulled open the blinds completely.

A few emergency lights had clicked on in windows and in the street. Where the water was rising.

His eyes widened.

He scrambled for an end table, where he kept an emergency radio. Had done, ever since the Blitz. He cranked the handle until static erupted from the speakers, then twiddled the dial, listening for something, anything…

CROWLEY.

"Fuck! What? I mean, what, my lord?"

SOMETHING IS WRONG.

Yeah, no shit, the demon thought to himself, but wisely kept his mouth shut.

THIS HAS HEAVEN'S STENCH ALL OVER IT. BUT THIS IS NOT THE PROPHESIED END TIMES. THEY HAVE ACTED WITHOUT OUR KNOWLEDGE.

"Wait," the demon croaked, "you mean to say that Upstairs did this?"

THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT WE MEAN. WE NEED INFORMATION, CROWLEY. WE NEED YOU TO INVESTIGATE.

"What do you need from me?" the demon asked, mentally wincing. His plans, all his plants—he'd lived in a state of not-being-disturbed-by-work for a few years now, and had started to get rather comfy with the whole thing.

Complacent, more like.

WE NEED YOU IN JAPAN, CROWLEY. THERE ARE HUMANS INVOLVED. WE NEED YOU TO INFILTRATE THEIR ORGANIZATION, DISCOVER WHAT THEY KNOW.

"はい," the demon said.

A pause. WHAT?

"It's Japanese," the demon muttered, then shook himself. "Right. Of course. I just need to check one thing, then I'll be off."

WE'LL BE IN TOUCH.

And the radio clicked off.

The demon stared at it for another second, then sighed and tucked it into his pocket.

A few minutes later, he was wading through knee-deep water, the stench from the Thames hanging in the air. Some poor fools had tried to start their cars, which promptly sputtered out.

He hadn't even bothered with his car. Mourning its loss, he soldiered through the flood.

Back to Soho.

The rain hadn't stopped. His hair plastered itself to his face. He'd pulled off his sunglasses (omnipresent, even at night) and stashed them in a pocket as well, not being able to see through the water that beaded up on the lenses.

He finally stood in front of the store, mentally bracing himself for an angel very upset about the water damage.

But as he opened the door, the water swirling, all he could feel was a cold emptiness from inside.

"Angel?" he called.

No answer. He pushed further into the shop.

A few loose pages were floating in the water. He winced. Centuries of books the angel had accumulated, his precious treasures, now waterlogged, no doubt the ink running. "Aziraphale?" he called again.

No answer.

The demon started to panic then, looking around frantically, his dilated pupils having no trouble with the thick darkness inside the shop. No angel.

Not even a hint of him, no angel-y sense of old books and fresh ink and light.

The bookshop was cold, dark, and empty.

"AZIRAPHALE!"

Silence.

The angel was gone.

Like he'd never been.

Like the two hadn't spent hours in there, bickering and drinking and being friends—

The demon looked around one last time, and his eyes lit upon a book.

A worn-out old book, sitting on a table next to some notes and a lamp.

The book that the girl had brought, just hours (was it only hours?) ago.

The demon hesitated, then picked it up.

The gold-embossed title leapt out at him. The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.

And the words he'd read earlier echoed in his mind.

Heart sinking, he opened his suit jacket and slid the book into an inside pocket.

And then, not looking back, he strode back out to the street. Shook out his wings, and took off into the dark and rainy night.

He had a long journey ahead of him.

 Tokyo-3, AD 2015, March

"Honey, I'm home!" Crowley yelled, shutting the door behind him and bending over to take off his shoes.

"And what sort of time do you call this?" a woman answered.

"There was a long line at the store!" Crowley grabbed his bag and sauntered into the kitchen, plopping it down on the table. "I wasn't gonna come over without your shitty beer now, was I?"

The woman poked her head out from a bedroom, and her face lit up. "You brought me beer? Everything's forgiven." She skipped over to him and stretched up to kiss his nose, then turned her attention to unpacking the bag.

"The things I do to enable your bad habits," he grumbled, secretly not minding.

They plopped down at the table together. Captain Misato Katsurgi passed over a more expensive bottle of wine to him, slid over a corkscrew, then popped the tab open on a shitty can of beer and proceeded to drink almost the entire thing.

Crowley watched in amusement, the corkscrew forgotten for the moment, then shook his head and stabbed the pointy end into the cork.

Although their tastes in alcohol were very different, Crowley and Misato had quickly become friends. He'd been cooling his heels in Japan for almost fifteen years now, grappling with the formality of the culture and the lack of good food available after the Second Impact. She was a breath of fresh air—extremely casual, quick to tease, and subsisting almost entirely off of cheap instant meals. They had a routine now. Whoever got off their shift first would pick up wine and beer, plus a few cartons for dinner, and they'd crash at her apartment. Either on the balcony or in the kitchen, depending on the weather. And they'd eat their cheap food, get extremely drunk, and blather on like schoolgirls.

It was a sort of friendship that the demon had very much missed.

Then at midnight, he'd say his goodnights, head back to his apartment, and crash until sunrise.

And then report to work, and repeat the whole thing again.

They never talked about anything personal. Neither of them ever asked or volunteered. Much to Crowley's disappointment, their discussions never got metaphysical either. He'd tried once, tried to emulate a million conversations he'd had a lifetime ago, but Misato had no patience for anything that she couldn't confirm with her own two eyes.

Tonight, they lounged out on the balcony, listening to the cicadas scream, and talked about the future.

When he'd first come to Japan, the cicadas had scared him almost to death. You never heard them in London. Dr Akagi had laughed herself almost senseless when he'd asked why the trees were screaming, and proceeded to tell him about the very large bug that would emerge from the earth after years of dormancy, climb a tree, and tell the world that it wanted a shag.

Crowley thought that it might be very nice to do a similar thing himself: climb a tree, and scream to the world what he was thinking. After that discussion, he'd become very fond of the buzzing that pervaded the listless summer days.

"It took ages to track him down," Misato said, dangling her arm over the balcony rail, catching the currents of wind with her hand.

"Where was he?" Cowley asked.

"Living out in rural Yamagata with his uncle. Took even more ages before his uncle would even let us speak to him. But we finally did, and he agreed. He'll be here in three days, so get ready for some excitement."

Crowley groaned. "I don't want any more excitement."

Misato shrugged. "Me neither. But we gotta do what we gotta do, I guess. It's 2015. The angels won't wait for us."

"Yeah, and that's the other thing," Crowley said. "How the fuck is the Committee so sure that fifteen years is the magic number? How do they know all this shit? They just give us cryptic deadlines and vague warnings, and we're expected to jump when they say so."

Misato's eyes grew hard. "I trust them."

Crowley's mind flickered back to the book sitting on his kitchen counter. The only obvious answer in his mind was that someone at the top of Nerv had a copy as well.

An idea that made him twitchy.

Aloud, he said, "All right," and raised his hands in mock surrender. And then to deflect: "I'm curious what this kid'll be like. Hope he fell far from the tree where his father is concerned."

Misato grinned. "I don't think you have to worry. He sounds like the complete opposite of Gendo."

"Good." Crowley did not like Gendo Ikari. As far as he was concerned, Hell had a lock on that particular soul.

Still it was one thing to look forward to in this hellhole. Which seemed kind of mild epithet. In Hell, at least you knew who you could trust, which was to say, nobody. In Nerv—well, fifteen years and Crowley still felt like he was swimming in a hole of scorpions, only he wasn't sure which were deadly and which weren't.

When midnight rolled around, they said their goodbyes, and Crowley sobered up and headed down to the streets, pausing to pat Misato's sports car on the way and spend a moment mourning for his Bentley.

Which was much easier than mourning the other things he'd lost fifteen years ago.