Work Text:
Okay so NOW I’m thinking about how I introduced the idea here that the place Heaven and Hell both watch most closely is a border–not just the border between Heaven and Hell themselves but the border between life and death.
And then I started thinking about what if it were an actual physical border and both places have fortified their side over time, which frankly feels very on brand for both of them. And, well, the main entrances to the head offices of Heaven and Hell for angels and demons are right next to each other so maybe it’s the same for human souls.
So you die and come through the veil into the afterlife and you’re in a kind of no-man’s-land, and Heaven is on one side and Hell is on the other, and they both have a wall. Heaven’s wall is solid marble slabs a hundred feet high, and they probably have celestial drones and biometric screening, and the pearly gates themselves are rather forbidding, with some sort of high-tech multi-stage locking system so that from outside the wall you can’t even see what’s on the inside.
And Hell’s side looks like a prison camp, with rusty concertina wire and trenches with spikes at the bottom and an observation tower with a creepy searchlight that shines right in your eyes as you enter, and it’s noisy and chaotic with a probably a lot of scary-looking demons yelling at you, and everything looks like it would impale you and give you tetanus and probably bubonic plague or something. Maybe the actual wall is something like those rusty slats some of the US-Mexico border wall is made out of–you can see the other side but you can’t escape.
And it’s clear that on the Heaven side all the defenses are designed to keep the unworthy out and on the Hell side all the defenses are designed to keep the damned in, but frankly neither place presents a particularly inviting welcome to eternity.
And some people don’t get let into either side; they’re just wandering back and forth under the drones and the searchlight, eternal stateless persons, and that’s Limbo.
ooooo but what if it’s less “let in” and more, souls getting grabbed forcibly by either side
like, you pass through the veil and see this horrifying razorwire encampment and majestic white citadel wall, but you barely get any time to take it in before you’re seized by winged figures in heavenly power armour and swept into a pristine white room and met by beautiful people with open HR smiles and given clean blue-white robes to wear
that conveniently mask any trace of individualityand don’t worry you’re in the Good one everything is fine here we love youno need to question your safetywe’ll take care of youthis is your only optionyou wouldn’t want to be There after all now would you this is the only place we are the only ones that matteror, you’re grabbed by slavering demons who drag you into dripping basement catacombs full of methane fires and torture and mould —not the interesting kinds of mould that make interesting patterns, just the kinds that fill your lungs with coughing and smell like death — and you are told you’re unforgivable, that this is your own fault, that anything could happen and you’d deserve every bit of it because of how terrible you are, until you believe it, because after all, you didn’t make it into the Good one, you ended up here
and there isn’t that much of a difference between the kinds of people, either, just sets of rules made by people long before, and maybe some of them are useful and maybe some are too out of context to mean anything any more, and maybe the only difference between them is whether the drones or the spotlights saw them first, and whether the winged bright defenders or the slavering guards of the horde saw them first
and either way, maybe the few who manage to slip between the gaps, find fairyland or hiding places or dark shadows to escape the eyes of the war, them, maybe they’re the lucky ones. maybe running and hiding is worth it, to avoid the erasure of heaven and the deletion of hell.
Oh FUCK YEAH, this is the kind of dystopian afterlife addition I am here for.
Ok still thinking about this! Because the thing is that the vast majority of humans weren’t spectacularly good or evil in their lives, they were just…human. And they don’t really particularly deserve either the eternal torment of Hell or the sterile conformist salvation that Heaven offers.
But neither side really cares about humanity; that’s well-established. So it’s just a numbers game as far as the Celestial Border Patrol is concerned. Maybe if a famous human comes through the two sides have a go at snagging them first, but most of the time, a soul is a soul is a soul. Just snatch and grab. Got a quota to meet. So that’s how some truly horrible people wind up in Heaven and a six-year-old who died in a fire ends up in Hell. They just don’t care.
yes this EXACTLY
bc neither side really has the will or the manpower to actually examine every single soul’s life so it’s more scanning the surface, just the most recent stuff, and with the amount of competition between angels and demons, anything counts.
like, an angel would find a memory of a middle aged man giving a toonie to a panhandler or thanking a waitress and use that “good” as a tether for the grappling hook of Divine Mercy to pull the soul through the ivory gates, in the process completely ignoring that the person had, like, murdered several neighbours and his wife in cold blood
or a demon siezing on the memory of a six year old putting a caterpillar on an ant nest and watching the ants drag it away, catching that “evil” with the dragline of Damnation to tow the kid to hell, while completely disregarding that. the kid was six. and didn’t really have a concept or understanding of predation or death, and could have grown to be anyone
just, the idea that “good” and “evil” only matter in that they serve as literal handholds. do angels and demons actually lack the capacity to interact with grey morality, or do they just ignore it when it isn’t useful to them, when the morality isn’t solid enough to grab onto? If you look hard enough you can find actions that could be justified as evil or good in any person, and maybe that’s all that matters. as long as they can find something that belongs to their “side”, they can tow the soul away, and who the soul was doesn’t matter at all.
I love that this is basically the opposite of the excessively pedantic system of The Good Place (which is also shown to be flawed), where the moral value of your every waking moment is calculated down to the nth decimal place. Instead of trying to justify things with formulas and accounting tricks, it’s just total chaos, with angels and demons going “eh close enough” as they try to grab as many souls as they can.
Aziraphale has never been to the border. Angels aren’t allowed to just go there, if they haven’t been hand-selected for the Celestial Border Patrol, and the border patrol angels never talk about what goes on there.
Crowley has been there, surreptitiously. Demons aren’t exactly encouraged to hang around the border either, but Crowley had to see it for himself. He had to know.
You’re really, really not supposed to tell the humans. The whole system kind of relies on the human souls not being prepared for what’s coming. And a whole lot of things on Earth rely on humans not knowing for sure what comes after death.
But.
There’s a girl, and she’s very sick. She’s been sick her whole life, and now she’s dying. And Crowley, like an idiot, has stumbled into caring a little too much, again.
The adults around her might find it a bit weird, a girl her age still having an imaginary friend, let alone an imaginary friend who’s a demon (“but a nice demon!”). But really, who are they to question the coping mechanisms of a girl who won’t live to see her fifteenth birthday?
Won’t live to see the end of the week, most likely.
“I’m dying for real this time. Aren’t I?” she rasps, lying very still in her hospital bed hooked up to tubes and monitors. She’d sent her parents to the cafeteria, because she hadn’t seen her mom eat anything all day. Her demon friend Anthony only shows up when no one else is there.
“You’re very close,” he says. It’s her favorite thing about him, that he never lies to her, the way the other adults around her can’t help doing.
“You can tell?”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t help me.” It’s not really a question. If he could, she’s sure he would have done it already.
Something like pain twitches across his face. “Not allowed. I’d get in a lot of trouble for that.”
She doesn’t want him to get in trouble. But there is one question she wants to ask.
“So…it’s all real? Heaven and Hell.”
“It’s real.”
“I’m…I’m not going to Hell, am I? I haven’t done…hardly anything. But I was good enough, right? I tried to be good.”
His face does that twitch again.
For a minute he doesn’t answer. Then he leans in close over her bed and slides his dark glasses down his nose a little, so she can see his eyes. He has yellow eyes. She thinks they’re cool.
“Listen,” he says, his voice quiet and urgent. “I’m going to tell you a secret. You can’t tell anyone else.”
She nods.
“When you get there, to the other side, this is what you do. Don’t look to your left. Don’t look to your right. You don’t want to go to either of those places. Just run.”
“I can’t…” She can’t even go to the bathroom by herself; how does he expect–
“You’ll be able to. You won’t be sick, or in pain. You’ll be strong. You run as fast and as far as you can, and you don’t let anyone catch you.”
The way he says it makes it seem very important, so she says: “I’ll try.”
“Good.” He gives her wink, and a little smile with only the corner of his mouth.
“What’s out there? If I keep running.”
“No idea. But you’ll be free.”