Picky eaters [fic]
Title: Picky eaters.
Author: shadowbyrd
Rating: G
Fandom: Good Omens
Word Count: 662
Pairing: Hastur/Ligur
Summary: It's not about quantity, it's about quality.
A/N: Written for my lovely procellifer for making me feel more welcome on planet Earth. Apologies about the rubbish title, darling. <3
Some souls are like scabs; best left to themselves, though for the life of you, you can’t stop picking away.
However, picking at souls in this manner has made Ligur the best lurker of his generation - possibly even the best lurker in all of Hell (not that one brags about that sort of thing - Hell preferred such boasts be as empty as possible) and had also made him a master craftsman when it came to picking at souls.
Picking at scabs just leaves you with flakes of dead skin and dried blood under your fingernails.
Some would say that he chose easy targets; corrupt, money grabbing officials, ambitious peasants, hungry for power. But then that was half the problem these days; everyone was going after monks and nuns and priests and those crusaders that hadn’t already gotten there themselves. True, it was a noble cause, taking more souls from that Heaven-hole, but them problem was that when they came to Hell they were just another tortured soul. It might be easier to corrupt a politician, but you did it right, gave them enough careful attention and in ten or so years you’d be handing Downstairs a lesser demon to be apprenticed off to pick at souls.
Unfortunately Ligur seemed to be the only one who’d realised this - too many of the younger demons (angels that hadn’t even had the commitment or the decency to fall properly like everyone else, but had just wandered down when the pearly gates clanged shut behind them) were getting distracted by Earthly pleasures, whatever those were. They seemed to think that any soul would do, so long as it had been picked at for a while. And the higher ups seemed to just accept it.
And so Ligur kept picking away, jaded and alone.
It was when he went after that small time sheriff, quietly jealous of his brother, an Archbishop, that he met Hastur.
Not for the first time of course. They had been angels in Heaven together during the dark days, part of the celestial choir before breaking away and forming their own little torture chamber. But the celestial choir was mind-bogglingly, uncomprehendingly big.
(Really the word big and baffling enough to describe it hadn’t been created yet - someone had been put on the job, but hadn’t gotten around to it before the fall had thinned the ranks and by that point it was half the size and whoever it was decided that there wasn’t much point in making up a word. This inconvenienced any demons and angels who tried retrospectively to describe. Most humans who have tried have gone mad. Or, alternately, regained their sanity, realised what a waste of time it was and got along with something else. Like dissecting bodies. Or painting. Or inventing.)
Even [fallen] angels didn’t remember everyone.
But Hastur? Hastur understood. The Archbishop was all his own work, even more than the Sheriff Ligur was starting to work on, but he didn’t plan to just leave it at that.
“He is already ours, but if I am able to work on him a little longer I may be able to make a halfway decent demon out of him yet,” Hastur explained. “It will take time of course, but it will be worth it.”
Demons don’t have love - not for other beings, anyway; love of one’s own hide was very much encouraged. They gave up that hippy-drippy, feel-good, everyone-is-special crap when they split from Heaven.
(What they don’t know is that the archangel had already done away with it before the fall. One of the reasons why the other cheek was not turned and Michael instead proceeded to try and gouge at Lucifer’s eyes and rip his teeth out tooth by tooth).
And so Ligur instead fell into Respect for Hastur. And, after some time spent lurking together, demonstrating Ligur’s Olympic-level lurking techniques, Hastur fell into Respect for Ligur too.
It was the fourteenth century, A.D. The world was theirs.
Author: shadowbyrd
Rating: G
Fandom: Good Omens
Word Count: 662
Pairing: Hastur/Ligur
Summary: It's not about quantity, it's about quality.
A/N: Written for my lovely procellifer for making me feel more welcome on planet Earth. Apologies about the rubbish title, darling. <3
Some souls are like scabs; best left to themselves, though for the life of you, you can’t stop picking away.
However, picking at souls in this manner has made Ligur the best lurker of his generation - possibly even the best lurker in all of Hell (not that one brags about that sort of thing - Hell preferred such boasts be as empty as possible) and had also made him a master craftsman when it came to picking at souls.
Picking at scabs just leaves you with flakes of dead skin and dried blood under your fingernails.
Some would say that he chose easy targets; corrupt, money grabbing officials, ambitious peasants, hungry for power. But then that was half the problem these days; everyone was going after monks and nuns and priests and those crusaders that hadn’t already gotten there themselves. True, it was a noble cause, taking more souls from that Heaven-hole, but them problem was that when they came to Hell they were just another tortured soul. It might be easier to corrupt a politician, but you did it right, gave them enough careful attention and in ten or so years you’d be handing Downstairs a lesser demon to be apprenticed off to pick at souls.
Unfortunately Ligur seemed to be the only one who’d realised this - too many of the younger demons (angels that hadn’t even had the commitment or the decency to fall properly like everyone else, but had just wandered down when the pearly gates clanged shut behind them) were getting distracted by Earthly pleasures, whatever those were. They seemed to think that any soul would do, so long as it had been picked at for a while. And the higher ups seemed to just accept it.
And so Ligur kept picking away, jaded and alone.
It was when he went after that small time sheriff, quietly jealous of his brother, an Archbishop, that he met Hastur.
Not for the first time of course. They had been angels in Heaven together during the dark days, part of the celestial choir before breaking away and forming their own little torture chamber. But the celestial choir was mind-bogglingly, uncomprehendingly big.
(Really the word big and baffling enough to describe it hadn’t been created yet - someone had been put on the job, but hadn’t gotten around to it before the fall had thinned the ranks and by that point it was half the size and whoever it was decided that there wasn’t much point in making up a word. This inconvenienced any demons and angels who tried retrospectively to describe. Most humans who have tried have gone mad. Or, alternately, regained their sanity, realised what a waste of time it was and got along with something else. Like dissecting bodies. Or painting. Or inventing.)
Even [fallen] angels didn’t remember everyone.
But Hastur? Hastur understood. The Archbishop was all his own work, even more than the Sheriff Ligur was starting to work on, but he didn’t plan to just leave it at that.
“He is already ours, but if I am able to work on him a little longer I may be able to make a halfway decent demon out of him yet,” Hastur explained. “It will take time of course, but it will be worth it.”
Demons don’t have love - not for other beings, anyway; love of one’s own hide was very much encouraged. They gave up that hippy-drippy, feel-good, everyone-is-special crap when they split from Heaven.
(What they don’t know is that the archangel had already done away with it before the fall. One of the reasons why the other cheek was not turned and Michael instead proceeded to try and gouge at Lucifer’s eyes and rip his teeth out tooth by tooth).
And so Ligur instead fell into Respect for Hastur. And, after some time spent lurking together, demonstrating Ligur’s Olympic-level lurking techniques, Hastur fell into Respect for Ligur too.
It was the fourteenth century, A.D. The world was theirs.