No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

macgyvermedical

Hey whumplings- Medical professionals and first responders typically won’t say “Its going to be okay.” We don’t know that, and since we’re a voice of authority, it would be a huge betrayal of trust to promise a positive outcome if the outcome turned out to be… less than positive.

Here are some alternative words of encouragement/comfort for your fics:

“You’re in good hands here”
“We’re going to do everything we can for you.”
“It’s (patient action, emotion, reaction) okay.”
“You’re doing great.”
“We’re going to do _________”
“_______ is working the way we expected.”
“It hurts/it’s unfair/its crappy (mirroring/validating/paraphrasing emotion or discomfort)”
“We’re doing this together”
“I see you trying- keep it up! (validating/rewarding a struggle/attempt)”
“Take it easy, we’re going to do a lot of the work here/relax- we’ll tell you when to help us/we’re going to help you but you’re going to do most of this yourself/we need to know/see _____ (generally managing patient expectations for their involvement in care)”
Little tricks and tips that make the med person look more competent, especially before something more in-depth (smelling alcohol pads for nausea, putting two tourniquets on for blood draws/IVs in hard-to-stick patients, coffee grounds to make the room smell nicer, telling the person to wiggle their pinky toe to take their mind off of something briefly unpleasant).

portraitoftheoddity

I’ve been seeing a lot of Good Omens (TV) meta about Aziraphale’s assumption that Crowley wants the holy water for himself as a suicide pill instead of as a weapon. So here’s my take on why Aziraphale jumps to that conclusion:

In 6000 years, Crowley has never been a killer. Not directly.

Sure, he’s done things that led to people dying indirectly, but he’s always been a few steps removed, and he very clearly puts the actually fatal choices in other people’s hands, usually as a direct result of their own actions and associations: When he drops a bomb on the Nazis in the church, he gives them ample warning to run away. They don’t listen and continue instead to threaten Aziraphale, leading to their deaths at the hands of their own side’s bombs.

When it comes to the opportunity to kill people a bit more directly, however, such as changing all the paintball guns to real guns in the former convent, Crowley ensures that there are no actual fatalities. Part of this is also Crowley’s aversion to killing innocents – These people have some bad impulses, but aren’t actually evil, and thus don’t really deserve to die. Similarly, he balks at the idea of innocents – children specifically – being wiped out by the flood. (And in the book, when he finds out what’s going on with the Spanish Inquisition after being given a commendation for it simply for being in the area at the time, he gets so upset he goes and gets drunk for a solid straight week).

So in all this time, Aziraphale hasn’t seen Crowley as someone who would personally and directly annihilate anyone else. It doesn’t occur to him that Crowley has it in him. Leading him to the conclusion that if Crowley wants holy water, it’s for his own escape, not as a tool to destroy others – not because he especially thinks Crowley wants to kill himself, but because it’s so hard to imagine him ruthlessly killing others.

And curiously, even when Crowley DOES use the holy water, he doesn’t actually put it in the plant mister where he can pull the trigger with his own hands; he puts it all in a booby trap that Hastur and Ligur trigger themselves when they make the choice to go after Crowley. Once again, Crowley sets things up so that others are destroyed by the choices they make in pursuing their own wicked impulses when presented with the opportunity; it’s how he always operates. Temptation, Free Will, and the opportunity for choice between Good and Evil, since The Beginning™.

apprenticenanoswarm

I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS SHOW

sorry, I really do. I love it, I’m in love with it, and I want to try and shine a light on where that love comes from. so, apologies, gonna ramble, block me if u don’t want none of that, it’s cool.

so that up there is the first page of the book. what’s fun is to see what the show did with it.

for 1 thing, the show made it fuckton more queer (and btw if we could start saying that instead of describing the show as ‘gay’ that would be awesome, thx, ace pride, nb pride, etc.).

in the book, we open on aziraphale and crowley mid-conversation. in the show, we see how they met.

and it’s CROWLEY (crawley but the book lets us know that he doesn’t like that name on the second page so i’m sticking with crowley) who makes the first move.

in fact, through the entire opening scene it’s crowley putting in the donkey work to get the conversation going. he’s the one who approaches aziraphale, just slithers right up to his mortal enemy and starts talking like that’s a normal thing to do when, really, aziraphale’s reaction suggests that it isn’t

like. here’s zira’s face before he notices crowley, when he’s still watching adam and eve walk away

*fret fret fret oh dear oh dear*

EH?

what. what is happening.

he’s clearly not sure how to deal with this; his opposite number sidling up all casual-like and providing commentary. should he attack? best not, he just gave away the flaming sword. stiff politeness, then.

(btw in the book, crowley’s a snake for the entirety of this sequence, we won’t meet human-shaped crowley until he picks up the antichrist. which is one of many many small ways in which the tv show works to make the subtextual romance significantly less so. bit difficult to have chemistry with a reptile. not impossible, god loves u monsterfuckers, but difficult)

oh but crowley plays it cool, he doesn’t treat this interaction like it’s in any way weird or unprecedented. ‘that went over like a lead balloon’ he opens with and then repeats it, in a lazy drawl, when zira’s like wtf

it’s crowley who keeps the conversation going, commenting about how kicking adam and eve out of eden seems unduly harsh, and what’s wrong about knowing the difference between good and evil, and why was the tree in the middle of the garden and not on the moon, questions questions questions. he’s so curious and confused and he really wants someone to help him work all this out

hungry for knowledge, just like eve

and aziraphale has no clue what to do with any of this. this isn’t what he signed up for. he tries to stick to the party line, with all its circular logic and platitudes, ‘it’s ineffable’, ‘best not to speculate’, ‘it’s not for us to know’, ‘you’re a demon it’s what you do’

he’s doing his best to be a good soldier.

at this point crowley’s starting to tune him out, he’s bored and a little depressed, he’s had the party line recited at him before

and he just wanted someone to talk to and

THEN

crowley notices that the sword’s missing

‘…?’

and he asks what happened to it and at first zira won’t say and then finally zira admits ‘I GAVE IT AWAY!’

it’s the first really honest thing he’s given crowley, that guilty wail

crowley’s reaction:

‘…OH. oh. you’re special.’

they both surprise one another; crowley surprises aziraphale when he slithers up and initiates the conversation for no apparent nefarious purpose; aziraphale surprises crowley when he reveals he disobeyed orders just to be kind.

oh, also you know how there’s that parallel between crowley and eve’s yearning for knowledge. there’s another parallel; while they talk, adam’s protecting eve from the lion