Thanks to Yonmei for the title.

* * *

Angel of Death
by afrai

* * *

"I am Death," said Methos.

Aziraphale discreetly tried to move upwind.

He squinted uncertainly at the man on the horse. He didn't look much like Death as Aziraphale remembered him. Of course, Death could have just changed his image. Aziraphale knew angels like that, angels who had gone a little funny after staying too long on Earth.

Not that they had no excuse, poor bastards. Aziraphale nudged the previously dead body aside with his foot, and tried to look like an angel who wasn't illegally reviving dead humans on the sly. (Children. Some of them were only children. One woman, her belly large with child, such a mess -- in Egypt now, and forgetting, he hoped.)

"Are you quite sure?" he said, with the meaningless politeness he used to protect himself from the various lunacies of humankind. "Because you really don't look at all like him, you know. Death is . . . taller. And much thinner.

"Andnotsosmelly," he added, beacuse he hadn't had enough time yet to lose the habit of idiotically scrupulous honesty.

The man's eyes narrowed.

"Oh, really?" he said.

Then he cut off Aziraphale's head.

* * *

"Why didn't you just keep your mouth shut?" said Crowley much later. "You were on a field of rotting corpses. How bad could he be?"

"But that's it," said Aziraphale. "They couldn't help being a bit iffy, poor souls. It wasn't their fault. Their hearts were pure -- well, fairly pure," he amended. "His odour was simple obstinate lack of hygiene. And anyway, he was evil. His stench was the stench of evil -- it's not funny!"

Aziraphale thumped Crowley on the back rather harder than was absolutely necessary, Crowley thought.

When he was able to speak without more than the occasional weak hiccup, he asked,

"So, he's still alive?"

Methos stuck his head around a shelf. Crowley looked at the dressing-gown barely hanging off of his shoulders, examined his aura, and observed Aziraphale's studied and rather pink indifference. He put two and two together, and came up with five thousand.

Then he gave Aziraphale a look that should have given him frostbite.

"Ah, yes, well," said Aziraphale. "I was just getting around to that part."

"Hi," said Methos. In Aramaic. He turned to Aziraphale.

"There's no beer in the fridge."

"Thank goodness," said Aziraphale piously.

good omens | highlander: the series | fanfiction | mail