Always lowkey simmering a Leverage AU in the back of my head hear me out:

Ted is an ex-insurance investigator who was able to get his son life-saving medical treatment because his first, original Crime Pal Beard was like ‘Ted if your company doesn’t come through with the coverage, we’re doing things my way.’

The company did not come through. The company did let him go due to suspicion of Ted’s involvement in the incident, but Ted will happily remind folks that no charges were formally pressed. Henry is alive and healthy and living with Michelle, who divorced Ted shortly thereafter (not just because of pre-existing marital problems, but because Ted wouldn’t tell her anything about why the doctors “””suddenly decided to do the procedure for free”””). Shortly thereafter, Ted fled the country.

What Ted learned from the whole experience is that there’s a lot of people out there, good people just trying to live by the rules, but sometimes things happen that are just out of their control. And well- if we’ve got the means to help the good people out when no one else will, then shouldn’t we try?

“We’ve got means,” Beard agrees. “And motives.”

They do things Beard’s way now.

The Fernweh Saga by @lacunafiction - Davor edition

I-I think Ms. Verner doesn't like him...😳

Davor "Dove" Kovač 🐝 RO: Becca Warrick

Personality: cautious // aloof // pessimistic // flirtatious (only towards Becca ...and Reese??) Traits: head // independent // resistance // believer Past affinity: math Primary ability: extrasensory awareness Past susceptibility: forward. 'it’s better to push forward. don’t look back on the past when you have new places to be and things to achieve.' <<< his motto

🕊️ Fernweh: Davor lived a happy life there and didn't think about leaving in the future. Maybe for some trips, but he knew it would always be his place, his safe place... 'It was a mistake to come back here.' - that was his first thought when he tried to fall asleep on the first night in Fernweh. The nightmares came back as he thought they would. He wants to leave as soon as possible because he feels that it is not safe for Becca to be here.

🕊️ Gramps Dan: That was his gramps who taught Davor how to play the guitar. As a young child, Davor always admired him and believed he was the most intelligent person in the world. After the death of his parents and how his grandfather treated him, he was devastated and angry. He wanted answers soo badly but didn't get any. He lived loathing his grandfather ever since. The news of his passing stirred up a lot of negative emotions that Davor had previously managed to suppress. At the beginning of the story he couldn't care less about his grandfather, but because of his journal he started to believe him. Things that his granfather lived through made Davor even more angry at this messy town …but he's willing to forgive his gramps…

🐝 Becca Warrick: It was a ...funny story that brought both of them together and they look after each other ever since. He considers Becca as his precious (not in a negative-possessive way) treasure, he literally can't let anything bad happen to her. That was also she who came up with the nickname 'Dove'... (and she's literally the only person who calls him that, others wouldn't dare...). He had feelings for her for quite some time but didn't act on it... until now. Although he didn't express it, he felt very nervous about Becca being in the town where he grew up. He was curious (but also scared) about what she could think of this town. He felt like he was revealing more of himself to her…. and he forgot about any worries pretty fast, because the town started being weird as fu--.

🕊️ Reese Verner: Back then Davor was quite cheerful and enjoyed competing with Reese regularly. They teased each other a lot. Davor always thought that Reese had a crush on him, was it true tho? donut know, but he certainly had. ...why does he appear in his nightmares? Maybe the crush stage never disappeared...? Seeing him again was a nice experience, sure... but ignoring the circumstances, he is still unsure if it was worth it and is struggling with his thoughts… Would it be worth it to return to Fernweh just to see him... again? welp, good thing he doesn't have to think about it much, am I right?

🕊️ Sofia Dorran: The two of them maybe did not have a strong relationship, but he knew Sofia is the ideal person for engaging in intelligent conversations. He enjoyed spending time with her, solving the puzzles that gramps created for them both. Davor wasn't a fan of fantasy books, but she managed to change his mind about them. Davor knows that Sofia did take good care of his grandfather, but he still doesn't quite know if he's grateful for that or wished she spent her time more... valuably... He was tempted to ask Sofia to borrow that book she found in his grandfather's bedroom, but he thought better of it. It's better to leave Fernweh… Even so, his curiosity wasn't properly fed.

🕊️ James Corvin: Maybe not brothers by blood, but definitely brothers by choice. Davor treated him as if he was the brother he always wanted to have. Back then Davor always placed a high value on his family… until now. At the time, Davor tended to be more impulsive and James was usually the one who kept him from getting into trouble (which often involved Reese). It was really hard, for both of them, to see each other after so long. Their first interaction was pretty awkward... I would even say that most of their interactions were . James noticed how Davor changed the question is: for the better or worse? I don't even know. Everyone can sense, that things around them are different now, and they aren't as close as before. Will it change?

🕊️ Alek Corvin: …To say that Alek wasn't a fan of Davor would be an understatement. Was it because James spent most of his time focusing only on Davor trying to get him out of trouble? Did Alek observe any possessiveness from Davor towards James? Or maybe simply because of the bond between those two, which was truly something that others would envy and desire? Davor never considered it, especially when he left Fernweh permanently. :)) As you can imagine, Alek doesn't seem very happy about Davor's return… But he took an interest in his new friend, Becca, which did not go unnoticed by Davor and he isn't really happy about it.

🕊️ The Waitress: Oh boy, it seems that Davor has taken up a new hobby, which is glaring harshly at the waitress. He finds her mistrustful and he smells trouble. Had they met when he was younger, there may have been a slim chance of them getting along.

🕊️ Waffles!: So um… Davor has a little issue with dogs and because of that his relationship with Waffles isn't as wonderful as I wish it would be... However, I believe that with time and help from Becca, they will eventually become friends.

have you ever considered writing more about icemav's respective childhoods? i'm always thinking about val kilmer saying in his memoir and documentary that he had obsessive dreams about ice's father who made him feel he had to prove himself as The Absolute Ideal Man and that the interactions he dreamt about between ice and his dad surely "imbued ice with greater fury" and his obsession with perfection made him arrogant.

yeah i go into ice’s childhood a little in my slider one shot since they’re right out of high school when they meet. But val and I took it in two completely different directions. Val’s ice has daddy issues and a poor relationship with his father (extrapolating from excerpt above); my ice has lack-of-daddy-issues and NO relationship with his father. No dad = no man to model himself on = overcompensating. When I said, in mavericks POV (debriefing), that ice “clearly doesn’t know how to talk to other men,” I meant that with my whole chest.

i appreciate Val’s insight, and I’m not sure when his memoir was published, but i think TG86 Ice is complicated DEEPLY by his plot-necessary accession to COMPACFLT in TGM22. At least for me, his end rank of O-10 casts him in a totally different light. It implies that what he wants is not necessarily to be “The Ideal Man,” he wants to be The Ideal OFFICER. And there’s a lot of data to back up that claim in Top Gun 86, too: he’s so gentle with Maverick, even when he’s trying to intimidate him (take the intonation of “I heard that about you. You like to work alone,” for example—is that how you’d say that if you were trying to piss someone off?); and there’s also the fact that two of the five times Ice talks directly to Maverick are explicitly about his safety practices and how they affect the safety of the TEAM (“Who was covering Cougar while you were showboating with this MiG?” / “I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.”). I said in a post last week that I don’t think Ice is a team player—but a good OFFICER doesn’t have to be a team player to make sure that the rules are followed and everyone stays safe. I think if Ice were trying to be The Ideal Man, he’d look a lot more like super-cool bad-ass rule-breaker MAVERICK (the buff daredevil male protagonist of a pro-military propaganda movie), who is canonically overcompensating for HIS relationship with his father/his incredibly unhealthy toxic masculinity.

So, yeah. that’s just how i see it. Again, idk when Val’s memoir was published—the writers of TG and TGM treat Ice as a character very differently, and both characterizations necessarily reflect on the other. I did not get the sense that TGM Ice was “imbued with fury,” for instance. So I think Ice trying to be/feeling pressured to be the best OFFICER makes more sense in light of TGM than Ice trying to be/feeling pressured to be the best MAN.

I feel very shrug about mav’s childhood. Kinda seems like he got over that in TG86. He got to save his team the way his dad did, AND lived to tell the tale. Yay. His development’s pretty much done for the franchise.

a few days ago i was practicing my lecture on my mom and let me tell you. she got really hung up on (irl) dazai. like from the first pic of him she went "wow. he looks like my grandpa did in his youth". then "he is a very handsome man" ("yes he used that to manipulate and use women sometimes" "*nods* that makes sense"). "he is my favorite out of all of them. he was an interesting man". i think it's a sign I'm just not sure of what for

i just remembered i made bsd ocs with my friend and the two of them are in LOVE but it's like Forbidden love cuz mine is from the government and hers is from the pm so like hmm clashing morals hmmm "i highly suspect that you betrayed me for ur position" hmmm heartache and denial but also they look out for each other in discreet ways with the resources they have and the authority they hold in their positions and hehe they're so silly i need to lock them up and scrutinise them

i’ll be honest, the aeon/god concepts in hsr are really fucking cool?

like. take an abstract concept—preservation, abundance, destruction, elation, etc—now dial it up to a thousand percent. congratulations! you now have amoral, enigmatic beings who exist solely to embody their singular aspect—and they will take that aspect as far as they are able to.

it’s really driving home that Divine and Monstrous are not mutually exclusive

getting a new (quite large) editing project on friday... you know what that means! will be channeling any tense energy toward TA matty. maybe george gets to see him really in his School/Work Mode

“…The Anglo-Saxon era is often thought of as having been a golden age for women. Since the late eighteenth century, it has been a commonplace that women in England had better rights before the Norman Conquest than they did afterwards, and were held in higher esteem by society. Before 1066, said one eminent historian in the mid-twentieth century, men and women enjoyed ‘a rough and ready partnership’. As so often with golden ages, however, this picture rests on a selective reading of very limited and debatable evidence. One of its principal props is an account of German women written by the Roman historian Tacitus towards the end of the first century AD. These women, claimed Tacitus, were virtuous, frugal and chaste, and supported their sons and husbands by encouraging them to acts of valour. But this was simply a Roman praising ‘barbarian’ society in order to criticize his own. German women were portrayed as laudable because, unlike their Roman counterparts, they did not conduct adulterous affairs or waste their time at baths and theatres. The reality, unfortunately, seems to be that the status of women in first-century Germany and Anglo-Saxon England was no better than it was in later centuries.”

-Marc Morris, "Anglo-Saxons: The History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066” / Pauline Stafford, "Women and the Norman Conquest"

Anglo-Saxon England has thus been a Golden Age variously of women's domestication, women's legal emancipation, women's education and women's sexual liberation. The length of a tradition which has changed so fundamentally over time is no guarantee of its veracity. A cursory view of a range of evidence from either side of the 1066 divide casts immediate doubt on the idea of a brutal Norman ending of the Golden Age. The raw statistics of Domesday, for example, suggest a different picture of England on the eve of the Norman arrival. No more than five per cent of the total hidage of land recorded was in the hands of women in 1066. Of that five per cent, 80-85% was in the hands of only eight women, almost all of them members of the families of the great earls, particularly of earl Godwine, or of the royal family. By the tenth and eleventh centuries women other than the queen are virtually absent from the witness lists of the royal charters, and thus apparently from the political significance such witness lists record.”

i have to be a hater. i have to complain. this simply will not do. <- saw incorrect claims about the carapacians on youtube

I was thinking about how Ingo likely was training his pokemon to work in a variety of battle formats, because that's just how he's used to training them with Emmet and without memories he just kind of went on instinct as to how to train his Hisui team. And how he's also very, very good at strategizing and almost definitely still would be even with near complete amnesia. Then I was thinking about how he probably tried to help coach some of the Pearl Clan, like Irida, or Galaxy Team at the training grounds, on how to train their pokemon. I cannot imagine it going well.

To him, that's just how people should train pokemon, and it's important to him that his own be trained that way, so it must be important for all trainers to do it that way too. Except. Not many people can think the way he does, even in his own time. He and Emmet are experts, and as you've been talking to some people about their starters, they must have been good well before adulthood, which is not something just anyone can do. So trying to teach that to the people of Hisui? They must think he's absolutely bonkers.

He's clearly the best trainer they have, but it's so convoluted they just end up getting even more confused. But he's like, "no, you need to know how to fight with two pokemon at once too, what if you get surrounded by a group of wild pokemon? And yes, you need to be able to fight in coordination with other people. Again, what if you and someone else get surrounded and need to work together??" And that makes sense, so they do try, but also, what's up with all the weird signals he's trying to teach them? He didn't even use those himself, so ??? And how are they supposed to remember all the shorthand he insists will be more useful than spending time shouting the whole command, especially when they use two pokemon at once?

He makes it look so effortless when he battles, but trying to do it themselves? It's so hard to learn and most give up. Which is really disheartening to both him and them! His team probably went through a few who weren't suited for it either, but that just means he's got some pokemon in the Highlands who aren't on his team anymore, but are still friends.

even the very concept of being a "trainer" in the way he's proposing is sort of counter to the way the pearl clan thinks about things! they just don't have that level of formality about it. and they're already primed to Not Like the idea bc of the pokeball argument. he just wishes he had more people to spar with, he feels like he's getting rustyyyy (rusty with respect to what is a mystery, because he's objectively still capable of winning most battles, but the feeling is there)

semi-related but i actually had this thought a while back that i never polished up of ingo writing a book in hisui-times, which was meant to be sort of a primer on how to battle with a pokemon, and he was never expecting it to go farther than the security corps mostly but then fast forward to the future and it's become incredibly widespread because it IS a really good resource. even if it is... a beginner's guide for people who are terrified of starly so it starts out with some REAL baby steps. and also spends a lot of time countering rumors that seem hysterically far-fetched to modern readers, like, "bidoof do not chew through your floor to come up and eat you while you sleep i PROMISE it does not work like that."

once he gets on to like actually explaining type matchups and moves and stuff... it becomes one of those things where there are modern books that have trimmed the extra bits out, but if you're a history buff or whatever you could totally hand your kid this book and they'd be ready for playground battles within the week. or like, if you're an adult and you pick it up bc it's been referenced so much and you're curious, you'll still find it interesting bc even if this guy's toning it down he so clearly knows his shit. (and then there's also the moments where, because it's so old, it also drops in some random facts that make historians scramble when they see them. like, he's explaining how for dual-types an immunity for one type overrides a weakness for another, and uses zorua as an example, which makes everyone go WAIT WHAT because apparengly zorua in the area used to be fucking ghost/normal??)

anyway imagine. ingo returned to the present, walking around the house that is Apparently His, looking for things that could jog his memory, and then he stops dead staring at a bookshelf: "...that's my book." and emmet's like oh yeah! you bought that at a used book store, it was one of the first books on battling we had- and ingo's just goes "no no you misunderstand. that's my book. i wrote that. i sent it out with the guild a month ago, what the fuck"

do you have the meta essay about writing sex that you mentioned in the (sorry idk how to refer to it) disco elysium sex dynamics post? i've been thinking about how sex in writing is used for a very specific niche (just straight up porn or some sort of like, tragic character development; i'm also not sure how to phrase that but sex as a way of showing how Unhappy a character is?) so i'm interested in the essay. thank you!

it's by resonant, probably originally on lj but it's definitely on ao3 under that author! not precisely sure what fandom it might be tagged as but if you search their works page for meta / essay / how to write / etc im sure it'll come up.

Here’s the first chapter of the Titorelli fanfiction I’ve been working on since like June. I didn’t really know how I wanted this plot to go until recently. Chapter 2 will be up tomorrow! Read the summary below: 

Sarah Prynne is yet another fangirl of Titorelli, the handsome and charming painter in her village. She's so infatuated with him that she finally decides to see if she can make her way up to his attic without him knowing or being thrown out. So one night, while he's busy forcing his other fangirls out, she sneaks in and looks around until she has to hide under his bed. Unfortunately for her, he finds her and he is not amused. However, he lets her stay and soon she finds out not only the truth about him but also that this whole charade was nothing but a trap to get closer to her.

actually the more i think of this book i just finished the more bonkers it is. the author spent maybe triple the time talking about bill stone and chevé than the krubera team even though chevé is BARELY in the top ten deepest caves and krubera was solidly number 1 until 2016. and yet even in the last part he spent more time talking about stone’s failed expeditions not even IN chevé but in the area trying to find a connecting cave than. THE ACTUAL KRUBERA TEAM THAT FOUND THE DEEPEST PART OF THAT CAVE…

When Tina Turner left her first husband - who was also her boss, captor, and brutal tormentor - she snuck out of their Dallas hotel room with a single thought in her mind: "The way out is through the door." From there she fled across the midnight freeway, semi-trucks careening past her, with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card in her pocket. As soon as she decided to walk out that door, she owned nothing else. When she filed for divorce, she made an unusual request. She didn't want anything: not the song rights, not the cars, not the houses, not the money. All she wanted was the stage name he gave her - Tina - and her married name - Turner. This was the name by which the world had come to know her, and keeping it was her only chance to salvage her career. Things could have gone a lot of ways from there. She could have labored in obscurity for decades, maybe making records on small labels to be prized by vinyl connoisseurs in Portland. She could have stayed in Vegas, where she first went to get her chops back up, and worked as a nostalgia act. And, of course, given what she had been through, she might have … not made it. What happened instead is that Tina Turner became the biggest global rock star of the 80s. I'm old enough to barely remember this, but if you aren't, it was like this: The Rolling Stones would headline a stadium one day, and the next day it would be Tina Turner. A middle-aged Black woman - she became a rock star at 42! - sitting atop the 1980s like it was her throne. She managed this because of whatever rare stuff she was made of (this is a woman whose label gave her two weeks to record her solo debut, Private Dancer, which went five times platinum); because she decided to speak publicly about her abusive marriage and forge her own identity, and in doing so give hope and courage to countless women; and also because - in a perhaps unlikely twist for a girl from Nutbush, Tennessee - she had her practice of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, to which she credited her survival. She remained devout until the end. Tina's second marriage - to her, her only marriage - was to Edwin Bach, a Swiss music executive 16 years her junior. Of him, she said, "Erwin, who is a force of nature in his own right, has never been the least bit intimidated by my career, my talents, or my fame." In 2016, after a barrage of health problems, Tina's kidneys began to fail. A Swiss citizen by then, she had started preparing for assisted suicide when her husband stepped in. According to Tina, he said, "He didn't want another woman, or another life." He gave her one of his kidneys, buying her the remainder of her time on this earth and perhaps closing a cycle which took her from a man who inflicted injury upon her to a man willing to inflict injury upon himself to save her from harm. Born into a share-cropping family as Anna Mae Bullock in 1939, she died Tina Turner in a palatial Swiss estate: the queen of rock 'n roll; a storm of a performer with a wildcat-fierce voice; a dancer of visceral, spine-tingling potency and ability; a beauty for the ages; a survivor of terrible abuse and an advocate for others in similar situations; an author and actress; a devout Buddhist; a wife and mother; a human being of rare talent and perseverance who, through her transcendent brilliance, became a legend.

Credit: Will Stenberg

Awhile ago @ouidamforeman made this post:

This shot through my brain like a chain of firecrackers, so, without derailing the original post, I have some THOUGHTS to add about why this concept is not only hilarious (because it is), but also...

It. It kind of fucks. Severely.

And in a delightfully Pratchett-y way, I'd dare to suggest.

I'll explain:

As inferred above, both Crowley AND Aziraphale have canonical Biblical counterparts. Not by name, no, but by function.

Crowley, of course, is the serpent of Eden.

(note on the serpent of Eden: In Genesis 3:1-15, at least, the serpent is not identified as anything other than a serpent, albeit one that can talk. Later, it will be variously interpreted as a traitorous agent of Hell, as a demon, as a guise of Satan himself, etc. In Good Omens --as a slinky ginger who walks funny)

Lesser known, at least so far as I can tell, is the flaming sword. It, too, appears in Genesis 3, in the very last line:

"So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." --Genesis 3:24, KJV

Thanks to translation ambiguity, there is some debate concerning the nature of the flaming sword --is it a divine weapon given unto one of the Cherubim (if so, why only one)? Or is it an independent entity, which takes the form of a sword (as other angelic beings take the form of wheels and such)? For our purposes, I don't think the distinction matters. The guard at the gate of Eden, whether an angel wielding the sword or an angel who IS the sword, is Aziraphale.

(note on the flaming sword: in some traditions --Eastern Orthodox, for example-- it is held that upon Christ's death and resurrection, the flaming sword gave up it's post and vanished from Eden for good. By these sensibilities, the removal of the sword signifies the redemption and salvation of man.

...Put a pin in that. We're coming back to it.)

So, we have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword, introduced at the beginning and the end (ha) of the very same chapter of Genesis.

But here's the important bit, the bit that's not immediately obvious, the bit that nonetheless encapsulates one of the central themes, if not THE central theme, of Good Omens:

The Sword was never intended to guard Eden while Adam and Eve were still in it.

Do you understand?

The Sword's function was never to protect them. It doesn't even appear until after they've already fallen. No... it was to usher Adam and Eve from the garden, and then keep them out. It was a threat. It was a punishment.

The flaming sword was given to be used against them.

So. Again. We have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword: the inception and the consequence of original sin, personified. They are the one-two punch that launches mankind from paradise, after Hell lures it to destruction and Heaven condemns it for being destroyed. Which is to say that despite being, supposedly, hereditary enemies on two different sides of a celestial cold war, they are actually unified by one purpose, one pivotal role to play in the Divine Plan: completely fucking humanity over.

That's how it's supposed to go. It is written.

...But, in Good Omens, they're not just the Serpent and the Sword.

They're Crowley and Aziraphale.

(author begins to go insane from emotion under the cut)

In Good Omens, humanity is handed it's salvation (pin!) scarcely half an hour after losing it. Instead of looming over God's empty garden, the sword protects a very sad, very scared and very pregnant girl. And no, not because a blameless martyr suffered and died for the privilege, either.

It was just that she'd had such a bad day. And there were vicious animals out there. And Aziraphale worried she would be cold.

...I need to impress upon you how much this is NOT just a matter of being careless with company property. With this one act of kindness, Aziraphale is undermining the whole entire POINT of the expulsion from Eden. God Herself confronts him about it, and he lies. To God.

And the Serpent--

(Crowley, that is, who wonders what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway; who thinks that maybe he did a GOOD thing when he tempted Eve with the apple; who objects that God is over-reacting to a first offense; who knows what it is to fall but not what it is to be comforted after the fact...)

--just goes ahead and falls in love with him about it.

As for Crowley --I barely need to explain him, right? People have been making the 'didn't the serpent actually do us a solid?' argument for centuries. But if I'm going to quote one of them, it may as well be the one Neil Gaiman wrote ficlet about:

"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization." --Robert G. Ingersoll

The first to ask questions.

Even beyond flattering literary interpretation, we know that Crowley is, so often, discreetly running damage control on the machinations of Heaven and Hell. When he can get away with it. Occasionally, when he can't (1827).

And Aziraphale loves him for it, too. Loves him back.

And so this romance plays out over millennia, where they fall in love with each other but also the world, because of each other and because of the world. But it begins in Eden. Where, instead of acting as the first Earthly example of Divine/Diabolical collusion and callousness--

(other examples --the flood; the bet with Satan; the back channels; the exchange of Holy Water and Hellfire; and on and on...)

--they refuse. Without even necessarily knowing they're doing it, they just refuse. Refuse to trivialize human life, and refuse to hate each other.

To write a story about the Serpent and the Sword falling in love is to write a story about transgression.

Not just in the sense that they are a demon and an angel, and it's ~forbidden. That's part of it, yeah, but the greater part of it is that they are THIS demon and angel, in particular. From The Real Bible's Book of Genesis, in the chapter where man falls.

It's the sort of thing you write and laugh. And then you look at it. And you think. And then you frown, and you sit up a little straighter. And you think.

And then you keep writing.

And what emerges hits you like a goddamn truck.

(...A lot of Pratchett reads that way. I believe Gaiman when he says Pratchett would have been happy with the romance, by the way. I really really do).

It's a story about transgression, about love as transgression. They break the rules by loving each other, by loving creation, and by rejecting the hatred and hypocrisy that would have triangulated them as a unified blow against humanity, before humanity had even really got started. And yeah, hell, it's a queer romance too, just to really drive the point home (oh, that!!! THAT!!!)

...I could spend a long time wildly gesturing at this and never be satisfied. Instead of watching me do that (I'll spare you), please look at this gif:

I love this shot so much.

Look at Eve and Crowley moving, at the same time in the same direction, towards their respective wielders of the flaming sword. Adam reaches out and takes her hand; Aziraphale reaches out and covers him with a wing.

You know what a shot like that establishes? Likeness. Commonality. Kinship.

"Our side" was never just Crowley and Aziraphale. Crowley says as much at the end of season 1 ("--all of us against all of them."). From the beginning, "our side" was Crowley, Aziraphale, and every single human being. Lately that's around 8 billion, but once upon a time it was just two other people. Another couple. The primeval mother and father.

But Adam and Eve die, eventually. Humanity grows without them. It's Crowley and Aziraphale who remain, and who protect it. Who...oversee it's upbringing.

Godfathers. Sort of.