Work Text:
"Crowley," said Aziraphale as he looked up from carefully tapping at his mobile phone device (1). "I do believe that there is some sort of controversy regarding our, ah, modern media counterparts."
"That so?" Crowley was currently folding origami shapes out of junk mail. The shapes had far too many legs. Some of the legs twitched.
"It's actually dreadful!" Aziraphale looked properly upset as he returned his gaze to the mobile phone device. "It seems that we, that is, they, failed to stop the end of the world once again--“
“No surprise there, honestly.” The many-legged little figures were swatting experimentally at each other and a nearby glass of whiskey. Crowley frowned and shooed them back towards the stack of junk mail (2).
“But instead of, oh, I don’t know, doing something clever, or asking those creative humans for help, they chose to mmmmm…..”
“Chose to what, angel?”
“Chose to ask God to end everything! Including themselves!”
Crowley froze, and the origami wavered uncertainly. “Ugkghhh… that’s…. but WHY? That’s properly bonkers!”
Aziraphale shook his head. “Apparently God promised to then create a universe with nothing divine, nothing diabolic, no greater powers at all. A free humanity, at the price of oblivion and the end of the current universe.”
“Humanity’s plenty free,” groused Crowley, “free to do good, free to do bad, we’ve been over this! Ancient history. That deal seems awfully fishy to me. God? In person? Never ends well. Burning bushes is the least of it. And who’s going to make sure God keeps their word?”
A pause. “I don’t believe they covered that.”
“Well. Clearly a muck-up from start to finish then. Come on, angel!” Crowley slanted to his feet and swept the table clean of mail and little paper figures alike. “That new restaurant you’ve had your eye on just opened up a table and we’ll make it if we hurry.” He strode out of the cottage and toward the Bentley, muttering about free will and poor choices and no one doing it better on TV than the Golden Girls anyway.
Aziraphale looked at his mobile phone device one more time with a sort of pitying, exasperated expression. Then he carefully placed the device on a side table, shrugged on a well-worn knit sweater, and followed Crowley out to the door and to dinner.
(1) Crowley had bought it for him. He occasionally tried “scrolling” although most of what he saw seemed to be advertisements, which surely couldn’t be right. He was probably scrolling it wrong.
(2) Junk mail had been one of his. Always seemed to have a life of its own.