#frivolous miracles
thinkin bout that ask neil got. “why can’t aziraphale make the paint stain go away?”
“i would know it was there”
on the surface, it doesn’t make sense that it would be any better for crowley to make it go away. aziraphale can’t change the fact that he knows the paint stain was there whether he’s the one who disappears it or not.
you could suggest there’s some magic thing going on. like crowley is ‘better’ at cleaning. there’s no real indication that this is the case; while crowley tends to be tidier by nature, aziraphale acknowledges that he could make it go away, but he would always know it was there.
so the problem is that it was there in the first place.
brian had a really interesting suggestion, which was that maybe aziraphale feels like crowley got them into that situation, so he feels like crowley should be the one to take care of the consequence (the stain). i suspect that aziraphale probably does feel that way - just a little earlier in the episode, he’d been placing the blame for losing the antichrist squarely on crowley, which is why they’re here, in this mess. and although i’m sympathetic to all the things crowley was going through that led him to dump the antichrist with the nuns and leave ASAP, i can also understand why aziraphale would feel like it was no fault of his, because hell didn’t give him the baby, he didn’t even know it was coming, and he had no practical way of finding out they were following the wrong boy.
i know people are internally screaming “no livi, it’s obviously just because aziraphale wants crowley to do nice things for him!” i know you’re screaming that because it’s the same thing i scream internally every time someone tries to find a practical reason for why the stain can’t just be miracled away or why aziraphale can’t just remove his own chains. but look, what i’m saying is exactly the same thing, just with more history and rationalizing behind it. aziraphale cares about his relationship with crowley, and wants to be reassured that crowley still cares about him, too, so it’s more meaningful for crowley to “undo” the situation that he, according to aziraphale, got them into. it’s…it’s like an apology of sorts. and i think crowley knows this, which is why he shoots aziraphale that distinctive affectionately-exasperated look.
i mean, in a real life situation, if your partner spills something of yours by accident - let’s say they tripped and bumped into a table with a glass on it - you probably wouldn’t hold a grudge against them for that. mistakes happen. but you’d probably feel much better if they said “oops, sorry, i’ll help you clean up” than if they said “oops, you take care of it.”
so what “i would know it was there” really means is “i’m hurt that this happened at all.” and by removing it, crowley is essentially saying “i’ll make it as OK as i can.”
I have this headcanon that Crowley is indeed “better” at miracling stains away/repairing damage because he’s a Starmaker, and as such he miracles not just matter/space, but also time, and even when it isn’t primarily a time miracle, like his time stops, mucking around with time along with matter will come naturally to Crowley (because they’re one to him, they’re space-time), so the Crowley in my head repairs things by undoing, rewinding the damage, and thus, in a manner of speaking, the stain wouldn’t have been there. Kinda like, the matter the coat is made of “forgetting” about it?
But, not reblogging to disagree at all, just to add further thought, and another one of those is… Like, it’s about the favour, isn’t it? It’s about Crowley doing a nice thing for Aziraphale, and I think that goes without any further requirements to make it meaningful. It doesn’t even have to be sorta Crowley’s fault the stain got there, or Crowley doesn’t have to be better at miracling away stains, no, I mean… Aziraphale is saying he’d always know the stain was there, that he’ll always keep the bad memory anyway. But with Crowley miracling it away, the memory is no longer a bad one. No, the bad memory gets, like, overwritten with a much better one, one of Crowley doing Aziraphale a favour, entirely for the purpose of making him happy. This is a very nice memory to keep, so even if Aziraphale won’t ever forget about the stain, now it’s a positive memory, and he’ll remember it as long as he keeps the coat (and probably well beyond that). Does that make sense?
My take on it is this: Aziraphale has a pattern of regarding miracles as “cheating.” He doesn’t want to do “real” magic, because it’s more of a challenge to do it the human way. He doesn’t want to miraculously know French, he wants to learn French like a human does. He goes to a barber to keep that same haircut he’s had for millennia instead of miraculously styling it himself. He doesn’t want to make his clothes out of the ether the way Crowley does, he wants to buy them and meticulously care for them by hand, the human way.
But if Crowley does the thing for him, he doesn’t feel like he’s cheated. He doesn’t have to feel guilty about using a frivolous miracle/doing something he isn’t supposed to, either. A more extreme example of this kind of rationalization is when he suggests that Crowley should kill the Antichrist so that Heaven (and more specifically Aziraphale, acting as Heaven’s proxy) isn’t culpable.
At the same time, yes, I think it’s because he loves Crowley and likes the idea of Crowley doing kind things for him. But I think it’s also an example of Aziraphale’s just-a-bit-of-a-bastardness coming out, and an example of how he rationalizes things to himself. Let Crowley do the thing, he’s a demon and he doesn’t have to be held to the same moral standards as an angel!
(NB: I adore Aziraphale and I’m not saying this to bash him at all. My read on him is that he is a good person at heart and desperately wants to do the right thing, but he’s also very complicated, and that’s a big part of why I love him so much.)
