#you go too fast for me

[crowleyholmes]

[vidavalor]

hi there 👋 i love reading your good omens metas. i'm wondering if you have any thoughts on aziraphale's line to crowley in 1967: "i can't have you risking your life, not even for something dangerous". this always sticks out as odd to me. obviously he doesn't want crowley risking his life for any reason, so why this weird qualifier?

Hi @mybelovedismine Thank you so much. :) I am so sorry it took me awhile to get back to you. Love me some 1967 Crowley & Aziraphale and this question is great. Cheers.

1967/Holy Water Era/some S2 Aziraphale meta under the cut.

If you go back-- and I mean way back-- to the very opening bit of GO 1.01, it opens with what seems at first like it's just a quirky, funny scene introducing God and her sense of humor and the show's sense of humor. It is all of that but it also contains what I think is a really important piece of information-- especially with relation to the 1967 scene-- which is the date that Earth began in the GO universe. Crowley and Aziraphale don't know exactly when the end of the world will come but they know "about" when-- and that is a ticking clock running in the background for them for millennia.

The date that God gives us for the creation of Earth at the opening of S1 means that 6,000 years exactly would math out to October 21, 2004... but we also know that they don't know if it's going to be *exactly* 6,000 years. It could have been 5,900. It could have been 6,500 or anything in between. It winds up the super-cruel 6,004 years, beginning in 2008 in S1. What is clear to Crowley & Aziraphale is that their experience is closer to that of humans in a way because even though 6,000 years would be a very long time to humans, it's "nothing", as Angel!Crowley put it in Before the Beginning, to Crowley & Aziraphale... and there has always been a very good chance that it's all they will ever have together.

Their relationship is like someone turned over an hourglass on the wall at Eden and it's been dripping sand steadily in the background this whole time. It's partially why their relationship accelerates a little faster over the last few centuries, imo. There is a chance they're running out of time together. Armageddon means the Great War between Heaven and Hell and they are an angel and a demon. Whatever side wins the war is the one who will live on for all of eternity. The other one won't survive it-- or, even if they did, they won't be able to be with each other. Not to mention that Armageddon means that, regardless of who wins the Heaven and Hell war, Earth will be destroyed and their life on it together will be over.

Aziraphale always thinks Heaven will win. He always thinks it's him who will have to spend eternity alone. Part of this is because he has to tell himself that Heaven is still the side of good, even if it's flawed, because he can barely deal with the guilt over being part of the machine that's caused Crowley so much pain. Aziraphale also thinks, though, that maybe when the time comes, they can find a way out of it all, somehow.

In close to 6,000 years, the best plan they've got for dealing with this is Crowley's plan to just run away to Alpha Centauri and hope that no one notices that they're deserters. (So, not a great plan, but also they're up against the will of God here so kind of hard to try to work out a way around that.) In S2, Aziraphale is so desperate-- SO desperate-- for a way to not have to lose Crowley that he is willing to entertain the idea that he can trust The Metatron's word and beg Crowley to come to Heaven with him and be an angel again just so that they can be together forever. Aziraphale doesn't need Crowley to be an angel to know he's good and to love him-- he already knows and feels those things. He loves him so much that he can't bear the thought that he could lose him. He's never been able to bear that thought.

In 1967, they were running out of time and it's something that became increasingly intense for them the closer the years got to 2004 and the day they would hit 6,000 years since the Earth's creation.

In 1967, they were down to 37 years until 6,000 years were up, so the end of the world was, to them, a moment away.

It's not hard to see how Crowley wants to carpe diem and go for broke, in case it's all they'll ever have. He wants to be a little less careful. To try for the things they haven't been able to give each other while they've had to be a secret for so long. 'Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all', right? And they have loved, do love, are loving in 1967... but Crowley feels the time slipping away and his anxiety is dialed up to eleven under that cool exterior and Aziraphale knows him like he knows the back of his hand and he can see where this is all going... and it's not where either of them want it to go.

Think of this from Aziraphale's point of view...

Aziraphale is an angel. His soul is saved. He is meant to survive Armageddon. That, to him, is actually something of a curse at this point because it means that he'll live for eternity. For *all* of time. An absolutely incomprehensible amount of time. Neverending time. The kind of amount of time that would make 6,000 years feel like less time than it took you to blink while reading this sentence. And if everything goes according to what they know of God's Ineffable Plan or Great Plan or Whatever The Fuck It Is lol, he's going to live through all of this time alone.

Without Crowley.

Forget even the end of Earth and humanity (and that's hard to forget lol), Aziraphale is slated for a post-apocalyptic return to Heaven and a celestial cubicle and spending all of time with Michael and Uriel and Sandalphon and no food and no books and no music and even all of that, he could stand, if only he could just have Crowley with him and he can't.

Because Crowley's a demon. He's fallen. He's eternally damned. Heaven has socialized angels to believe that the war between Heaven and Hell that Armageddon triggers will be the big triumph of Heaven over Hell. Aziraphale tells himself he believes it but he's honestly more *terrified* of it than devoted to the idea. Heaven triumphing over Hell could kill Crowley. It's what Aziraphale is *supposed* to want as an angel but it's actually *the exact opposite* of what he wants. He adores Crowley. He will never-- in all of the infinite time to come-- ever get over Crowley and he knows it.

Even if Crowley somehow survives The Great War 2.0, Earth will still be gone and Crowley's fate is eternity in dark, cramped, literally painful damnation in Hell. There is no way for them to be together without thwarting the will of God and Aziraphale is an angel-- his entire purpose as a being is to serve God. It's what he was made *by God* to do, as far as he's been taught, and he mostly believes it... it's just that he also thinks he was made for Crowley.

This isn't just what Crowley thinks. Crowley isn't wrong that this is a mutual feeling:

Aziraphale felt that then, too, and he's never stopped feeling it. It blends sometimes with his faith in God-- something that, ironically, he sometimes thinks Crowley somehow has more of than he does. If God made him and God made Crowley and if God made them for each other, then it can't really be just to take them away from each other after such a short time, can it? Maybe they're meant for some other purpose in all of it?

But this is the same God that Aziraphale knows can be cruel...

Aziraphale has gone up against the will of God countless times over the years now and he is, for reasons he doesn't understand, somehow still an angel.

It seems unjust and honestly pretty profane to him that *he* is the holy one when Crowley's been through--quite literally-- Hell, for thousands of years, and his biggest sin is being curious. It is very hard to be told that you were created for the purpose of representing the side of good in a war against good and evil but to then, over and over and over, find yourself believing that the good guys are maybe not so good... all the while falling deeper in love by the day with a being your side calls 'demonic' and 'evil' but whom you know to be a sweet, romantic, smart, gentle, funny, kind cinnamon roll. Crowley is a demon and he's the best angel Aziraphale knows.

Now imagine you've all those conflicts and you're running out of time and staring down the end game of all of this and when you've got maybe, if you're lucky, a century and a half left or so worth of sand is still in the top half of the hourglass (mid-1800s), Crowley starts to pull away from you.

He's honestly never done it to this extent before. He trusts you with a surprising amount of himself and has since early days and, in recent centuries, you were happy together-- as happy as your situation would allow and that was more than you ever thought you'd have. This is the same being whose willingness to push through his fear of being vulnerable to have something honest and intimate with you has had you in awe of his bravery since you met. He taught you how to do that and now he's putting up walls you can't scale and slamming shut every open door.

You were happy together and then, you went on a date in Edinburgh in 1827 and suddenly, the centuries of peace and of getting away with it all ended in a literal second when Crowley got dragged to Hell two feet away from you. Hell didn't find out about the two of you or about Elspeth-- they were pissed about the human grave guards that Crowley accidentally sent to Hell for shooting Wee Morag-- but Crowley comes back a couple of weeks later and it's like it's all over already.

He's badly shaken. They hurt him. He spent time in Hell not sure if they had found out about you or if you were still alive. The anxiety, depression, and PTSD he has from being cast out of Heaven and a lifetime of trying to survive being a demon of Hell goes into overdrive and you don't know what to do. You've always been good at helping him. Nothing works. The bookshop-- your home but his, too, in your mind, the safest space he can go to to get away from Hell and get some rest-- isn't enough. He's not coming around the way he used to. He doesn't want to talk about any of it. The connection between the two of you-- emotionally, sexually-- feels like it's eroding. It hurts more than you want to admit. Your relationship de-evolves for almost 35 years as you watch the spark seem to go out of him. You don't know how to fix it and you try everything you can think of. You can understand how the ticking clock makes it all hurt more and you don't want him to be in any pain-- ever-- and you'd go away entirely if it was what he really wanted but neither of you know how to say goodbye because you both know that neither of you actually want to.

He's your best friend. He's the only one like you in the universe. You're both miserable and lonely without each other and it seems stupid to spend the last years you might ever get together apart but it also seems impossible to ever get back to where you were. Then, one day, after *years* of this, he asks you for the one thing that can *kill him*...

In the moment, all you can think about is that he wants to die because he's seemed like he does for decades now. All you can think of is that he is in so much pain and he wants nothing from you but the means by which to end it.

He's your lover. Imagine being told by the being with whom you've spent countless pleasurable hours in bed that all he wants from you now is a suicide pill.

He used to laugh. He used to be silly and hilariously dry-humored. He used to flirt with you and gaze at you from the couch on the bookshop, all pretty yellow eyes and lounging limbs, and now he's spine-straight stiff, like the pain is what's holding up. He arranges meetings in the park instead of coming over. He wears his glasses, all the time. You can't remember when the last time you saw his eyes was.

All of it says to you that you aren't enough and then he asks you to give him a suicide pill and you're broken-hearted-- you're just broken, period at the thought of him in so much pain-- and you're angry. You're furious. How dare he do this to you? You've been in love for millennia. He is your best friend. How dare he shut you out and leave you alone when you are going to be alone without him for the rest of bloody time?!

You're so in your feelings about him shutting you out that you know you have been failing at caring for him and not really helping the situation for awhile now. Your defenses have been up for awhile. Years, probably. You're caustic and, frankly, pretty bitchy in your bitterness. It's a little twisted but you've tried everything else and maybe if you could even just make him angry, it'd at least be something. He's barely spoken above a whisper in thirty years and sometimes you think about him off his head on laudanum in Edinburgh, drawing you to him magically by your bow tie to look at you over his glasses, inches away, and how you didn't know that was going to be the last time he ever really flirted with you.

So, when he asks you for holy water in 1862, you do your best to piss him off, since he won't accept anything else from you lately. You used to be wildly compatible and now you're broken and you're angry because God was always going to break your heart by taking him from you but he was never supposed to. He was supposed to love you-- those things neither of you say-- to the end.

You did get him angry. You both got angry. So angry that it felt over.

It wasn't. You saw each other again in the interim and it didn't just magically heal itself, like you wished it would, because you regretted how you reacted to the request for holy water but somehow talking about it felt too much.

Because you thought you might have understood it more afterwards.

Because you began to understand that he felt vulnerable. That he needed to feel like he could defend himself and, if it came to it, you. That maybe he didn't want to die-- maybe he wanted to live. That this was him asking you to help him figure out how to feel safe again-- something you've actually always been good at-- and you were so afraid, too, that you handled it badly.

Maybe one of the things you were afraid of in the moment was the way he talked about it going wrong, going pear-shaped, about him wanting insurance... about how there wasn't a way to reframe that in your mind to not mean that he meant he was willing to kill a demon in your defense or his-- which could kill him. It could send a legion after him and destroy him. There was so much that could go wrong. No matter what Crowley wanted holy water for, his death felt like it was the end game. You would throw yourself into Hellfire before you did anything that could cause him harm.

He had been pulling away for years but there he was saying I would kill for you. I would die for you. and that was the closest either of you had ever come to saying I'm in love with you. and you weren't sure what was more dangerous: saying those truths you both knew and felt or holy water.

Crowley didn't bring it up again and neither did you. You're useless without one another so you saw each other again within the next couple of decades. The Old West in America. Back in London in the 1920s and times in between. Neither of you ever discussed the Holy Water fight or what it meant. You secretly learned to drive, for the future, just in case, when he turned up stupidly in love with a car in 1928. You would die for that dumb car if only because of how Crowley smiled when he turned up to take you for a ride.

Over time, Crowley seemed to get a bit better and your heart burst just looking at him, even if it also ached with the knowledge that you had made it harder and hadn't known that time how to help when he needed it.

Then, 1941. The Blitz. Bombs raining down over London and the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation and maybe, just like the humans, you both thought this might be it. Time slowed to surviving each night and every moment felt like it could be the last and maybe that's why you both wanted a different ending.

Crowley always did prefer the funny ones.

In the middle of it, Crowley joked about holy water-- the first time either of you had mentioned it in 80 years-- and you heard it there, woven into his quiet, coded but undisputable, confessions of love. It was for you, it was about you, it was to keep you safe... it was because you were two feet away from me when they took me and I want to be with you to the end and it's the only thing that can help me keep you safe from them.

He doesn't ask you for it again. You know why. Things are good. He doesn't want to fight. He doesn't want you to reject him again. He doesn't want to admit again that he feels unsafe. You think about giving him some after 1941 more than once but you are now afraid of what it might say to him if you do.

Because you could both be almost out of time, if everything goes pear-shaped when the clock runs out on about 6,000 years, and Crowley wants to try for more.

You both want forever. You both aren't sure that you'll even get tomorrow. The world is speeding up in 1967-- has been for decades now-- and you think Crowley is caught up in it. You both live in London, in SoHo, you'd be as safe as you could be. You'd blend in enough. It's too dangerous, though. It's not the humans you're afraid of, really-- not that the human world has ever been safe for your and Crowley's kind of love and you aren't sure that it will get there before it's all over. What you're afraid of is that you'll get caught by Heaven and Hell and you'll lose him before the about 6,000 years is up-- and then you will have no chance at all, whatsoever, of forever.

Crowley doesn't think he'll make it. He doesn't say so but his actions say so and his situation suggests it. He wants to go faster. He doesn't demand it, doesn't pressure you, but he periodically gently asks and you have to let him down somehow, you have to get him to slow down. It's not that you don't want him. If there were no risk to him, you'd never try to put up a speed bump. It's just that you are hopeful.

Ironically, you're hopefulness-- your optimism-- it comes from him.

He's brilliant. He's clever. Maybe, somehow, the two of you will find a way out of this.

You don't want to watch the world burn. You don't want to watch billions of humans and a whole planet and a whole solar system-- Crowley's nebulae-- destroyed for no reason and as much as you should be willing to go along with the Almighty's will, it's fucking ineffable and you secretly aren't sure if you believe in a God that would do this. You struggled during The Flood. You struggled over Job and Sitis' kids...

...if you are honest with yourself (and you are more than you care to admit), you struggle to be faithful to a God who has caused Crowley so much pain.

You think that, somehow, when the time comes, you and Crowley might find a way around it. How? You have no idea. None. But you think there is a chance that you could figure it out and so long as there is a chance-- even one, single, tiny, chance-- that somehow you and Crowley could survive it all and be together forever, you are not going to let him do something stupid and get himself killed trying to be together now.

You are not letting your far-sighted lover trip over his snake legs and go head-first into a faunt of stolen holy water that you could have given him safely 105 years ago, when he asked for it, and you fucked it all up...

You make him some. You use your powers and your essence and your body and turn water into a weapon for him. The real thing. The holiest.

You understand what it is to him now. It's not death; it's life. He doesn't want either of you to be in pain. He doesn't want to be left alone. He wants to feel safer. To be able to protect you from what Hell put him through and worse. He doesn't want to leave you. He wants a chance in Hell at surviving what's to come and an out for if it all goes pear-shaped and you want him to live and not to suffer and only you can give that to him.

You understand that now. It was never that you didn't trust him. It was that you didn't trust yourself.

You put it in a tartan thermos that silently says your anxious, emotional ass best thing of me before you ever decide to use this.

It also says this is for you to keep and it is of me and I know that's a risk if you ever get caught with it. I trust you to keep it hidden, like you do us, and protect me. This is for you and it looks like me and you know when the tartan started and why... you know it was because of our night in Edinburgh in 1827... you know it was the night they took you and I didn't know if I'd ever see you again and you know I've been wearing this pattern of us for 140 years and that I always will.

It's just that you also can't let him think that giving it to him is an assent of sorts. If Heaven or Hell ever found out you did this, they'd destroy you both.

So you rushed over with holy water, your tie undone, catching him before he can go any further with his scheme to pay humans to steal him some and you waited for him in the safety of The Bentley, one of the only places the two of you can actually talk with some expectation of privacy, and when he asks, you have to talk him out of it. You have to break his heart a bit. You have to disappoint him. You have to try to protect him from himself a bit or you'll lose him.

You tell him that you're giving him the holy water because you can't let him risk his life "not even for something dangerous." Dangerous is trying for more between you than there already is. You aren't rejecting him outright and he knows that. You never have, really. You see each other in secret. You have been for more years than either of you can count. You rely on each other to help each other to the right speed.

You need him to tempt you into giving yourself permission to do what you want and need but aren't sure you can or should. He needs you to help him keep from spiralling from anxiety.

He gets you to go a little faster-- not too much, at a pace you feel comfortable with. You get him to slow down-- gently, tenderly. You are both able to trust each other with your vulnerabilities and that's why it works.

He's blinded by the world changing in ways both exhilarating and also terrifying, by it breaking apart at the seams increasing his fear of running out of time.

You've been together for thousands of years.

You don't stay the night; you've never had breakfast together. You've never risked taking each other's hands in public. You've never directly said I love you.

If you can get him to see how dangerous it all still is-- because it is-- then maybe you can keep him alive long enough to have a shot of neither of you ever having to worry about losing each other again.

Somehow, it's not much different now than it was before the beginning. He's always been like this. Optimistic, progressive, free-thinking. Innovative. It might get you both out of all of it yet but it won't in 1967. He is caught up in the emerging new, human world and it's a heady cocktail when mixed with his existential terror. He's going to get himself fucking killed. You know better, just as you knew better before The Beginning. You know that too many questions, too much risk, will draw a metaphorical sniper's bead to his head. And you know that, on some level, he knows he needs you to rein him.

It's an era of freer sex and free love and wild, progressive music and art but... it's also an era of war and violence and assassinations... and Heaven and Hell are so far removed from Earth that it would take another 6,000 years to get them anywhere near close to this.

Crowley knows this, intellectually. You know he knows. He just feels the sand trickling faster and faster and there's hardly any of it left now.

You know how that feels-- you feel it, too. Every time you look at him. Everytime he slips away out the backdoor of the bookshop with a soft kiss and an even softer g'night, angel and you wonder if that was the last time.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

Crowley sees All You Need is Love but you can see December 8, 1980 coming at some point down the road. You've both been on this planet long enough to know what they do to the first ones who break away, to the ones who go against the grain, and the humans are no different from Heaven and Hell in that way. You cannot tell him yes or you will be killing you both.

You put it on yourself a bit. He goes too fast for you, you tell him. It's not untrue. He does. It's just that if it all were different, you'd never refuse him anything. You hope he hears it as your issue, not his, though you doubt he will. It is so hard to look at him and tell him no when all he is saying he wants is the chance to love you more.

God, there are days when you think he might kill you if he were to love you any more than he does. You don't know what you ever did to deserve his love. You don't know how you survived before you met him or how you are supposed to if you lose him.

"You go too fast for me" is what you say and you know he understands that it means:

You'll burn us fast and bright and it will be amazing but it will *end*. They will catch us. They will kill us. I can't lose you. If I thought all we could ever have would be just a short, few years, then I wouldn't deny you but I think we could find a way to have forever. Somehow. I have hope for that. I get that hope *from you.* I need you to slow down because I can't watch you get yourself killed. I'm not strong enough to lose you. I need you to let me pace this for awhile...

You want him to know you understand, that you feel it all, too. So, you tell him of the things you'd like to do, if it was safer, not knowing if it ever will be. The things you choose are of all of these holy water years. A picnic-- one implied to be in the daylight, in this future you're both imagining, this world you hope to one day see emerge. He had tried to take you on a graveyard one at midnight in 1827. You know that had been what that would have been had you not ran into Elspeth. The two of you sneaking around in the dark, as always, but together. Alive. Maybe, you tell him now, you could one day have that picnic together under the sun. You think you can see that world. You have no idea how it arrives but he's not wrong. You can see some things changing here and there's always hope that things could change with Heaven and Hell. He has taught you to keep the faith in how he's survived the worst and remains optimistic.

Maybe, one day, you could be angels dining at The Ritz. It is intentional that you reference World War II. It is a way-- the only way you can right now-- to tell him you love him, as you both did in your own ways during The Blitz. It is saying:

I love you. I would love that life with you. I won't give up on the idea of it-- of having more than a short burst of it. That is why I need you to slow down and stay safe. It's too dangerous for more right now. Take the holy water and take a breath. You're okay. You have me. We keep *each other* safe, remember? Slow down. I need you with me forever.

[hidingbehindmishacollins]

episode 6: ya know i think it’s actually working i think ofmd 2 is actually curing my good omens trauma

episode 7: FUCK

[ineffablebookgirl]

Um I just noticed while rewatching my "ugh good omens" fanvid playlist -- Aziraphale's not wearing a bowtie in the "You go too fast for me" scene, in the Bentley in the 60s. He's wearing a looser tie, like maybe an ascot? Still tartan, of course. But it's the only time in the 20th century he deviates from the bowtie.

I've written about the significance of the coat changing in the Blitz scene, and I have to think that this tie is meaningful somehow too. Aziraphale's look changes so subtly, every detail matters.

Maybe the more open collar signifies his deep vulnerability in this scene where he hands the holy water over to Crowley.

[pippa-frost]

Guys.

This time Aziraphale went too fast.

[acolorfulparadox]

sometimes I forget I do things like this

[soleilpirate]

Edward, my dude, Ed, my Blackest of Beards

Why WHY would you NOD to the offer of sex, and then THE NEXT DAY tell your lover he's going too fast?!!

[mostly-functional]

Here’s the thing about “you go too fast for me, Crowley.” What if he was just talking about the car? What if his only problem was that Crowley drives too fast? And now Crowley’s been beating himself up and second guessing every move he makes for no actual reason. And then that makes Aziraphale think that Crowley isn’t interested.

The angst potential is strong, that’s all I’m saying.

[abstractfanboy]

If I had a nickel every time David Tennant’s love interest in a film/series said he was going “Too fast”

I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s cool that it happened twice.

[korixae]

stoppp i’m rewatching good omens and i’d forgotten how, fucking-.. asjwdz pining they are 🥹

[johnlockifconvenient]

Okay, I started watching Good Omens (because I want you all to get your third season) and I get it. I totally get it. Crowley is so in love with that angel it’s stupid

[melbatron5000]

Fuck.

What they were really saying

[egophiliac]

time for skeleman

with the lack of any other info yet, all I can focus on are those Charles Lloyd-looking sunglasses. they are absolutely sending me. I feel like we're gonna fall through a tree or whatever and this stitched-up boney gentleman is gonna pop out from behind a gravestone and start serenading us with some smooth jazz on the saxophone.

or should I say...the saxoBONE???????

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I'm not going back to Gusu with you.

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[godfrey-the-chaos-duck]

excuse me whATWAITWAITWAIT

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

WAR IS OVER