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#if aziraphale can make it through whatever disillusionment comes next with his courage and his tenderness intact
guardian-of-soho · 9 months
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Aziraphale is a guardian.
We left him at the end of s1 with the knowledge that apocalypse was still coming. He'd saved the world for that day, but Heaven was still bent on destroying it. The ones with the power to burn everything were still inescapably loveless. It really looked like he and Crowley alone of all the Earth-walking beings would fight for the world.
And he loves the world so much. The opening scenes of him in the record shop, buying his Shostakovich 78s? The warmth toward Maggie and her music and her heart? The generosity, and the delight in the shared understanding, and the pleasure in the discovery that he could make her life better? That he could spare her pain, give her a little more time with her joys? He knows how fragile those are.
He wants to give that to the whole world.
He wants to believe he can lift the doom hanging over them all, banish it permanently. He is desperate to believe it. Even if he wasn't longing so fervently to be seen, approved, affirmed by God's word (I was so undone by his jealousy as he watched Job speak to her) -- even without that I can't imagine him not wavering at Heaven's offer, faced with the chance that he could use all Heaven's might to guard the world again and get it right this time.
And then he's offered that power with apparent warmth, and feigned approval, and the shameless claim that at last they understand. They hear what he's been trying desperately to tell them as long as he's lived in the world. They're telling him that he's finally made his point -- that they are proud he's tried so hard for so long.
So -- the ending is shattering. It is maddening. It's utterly unfair on Crowley. And I didn't see it coming, and yet.
Aziraphale is a guardian. He really will have to see for himself that power won't love what's good; there is no way to make the world safe forever.
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