Crown of Thorns (The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse) 'Verse

Fanfiction
Title:	Crown of Thorns (The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse) 'Verse
Author(s):	irisbleufic
Date(s):	10/1/05 - 2/14/19 (source)
Length:	279,000
Genre:
Fandom:	Good Omens
External Links:	On AO3
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Crown of Thorns (The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse) 'Verse is a Good Omens book-verse Aziraphale/Crowley post-canon fic written by irisbleufic.

The main story is composed of 75 chapters posted between 2005 and 2019 as part of various challenges and exchanges. Some characters (Phillippa [Pippa] Morrison, the Mouse, Amanda [Mandy] Tomlin, Uriel, Raphael, et al.) first appeared in her other series, a "second-Apocalypse dark mirror universe, A Crown of Stars (AO3 posting of same) and its follow-ups, which predates this series considerably"[4]. While the two universes parallel each other, Crown of Thorns is post novel-canon and set in our reality.

It was adapted into a full-cast, 36-hour+ audio drama in 2020: the Crown of Thorns Pod'rama.

Author's Notes

This series was never intended to be a series as such: I wrote "A Better Place" in the wake of rather accidentally getting to ask a certain question (What are Aziraphale and Crowley doing on the South Downs, anyway?) of both authors within a week of each other back in 2005 and actually getting an answer (Sharing a cottage), thinking it'd just be a happy little one-off. But something curious happened when my Good Omens Exchange 2010 assignment resulted in "The Walls, the Wainscot, and the Mouse." From that point onward, interest in this little 'verse slowly, but steadily picked up momentum, and I kept finding more stories to tell. [...]

Origins of the fic

Gaiman and Pratchett had once hinted that the main characters would move to the South Downs, England, after the events of the story. In September 2005, upon managing to obtain tickets to two separate live-readings with each author, irisbleufic asked them both the same question about what exactly Aziraphale and Crowley were doing there, and Gaiman replied that they would be “sharing a cottage”. Fandom received the news with enthusiasm, and a month later, issued a prompt to irisbleufic to write something about that. They wrote A Better Place. Five years later, during a Good Omens Holiday Exchange, irisbleufic was asked to add to the story, and continued it at intervals until the 14th of February 2019 when the last chapter was posted. Crown of Thorns is therefore one of the first fanfics, if not the first, to elaborate on the “Cottage in the South Downs” trope.

From Lena Lawlipop's first interview with irisbleufic:

LENA: Was it from that question [to Neil Gaiman] that you decided to start Crown of Thorns[...]?

AJ: It was. So that was September of 2005. I moved to the U.K. October. [...] I'd already been having conversations with friends and they're like [...] you should do something with that. It's really [...] awesome that you were able to sort of draw that out, tease that out of them. And I thought, oh, that's [...] really a wonderful idea. So that evening I wrote A Better Place, which is the first chapter. And the second chapter actually didn't come along for like I think a few years after that, because I thought at the time I wrote A Better Place that it would make a good starting point for theories. But it took me until someone in [...] Good Omens Holiday exchange wanted- it was the first request for a South Downs story that I had seen since I wrote “A Better Place”. [...] And so the story I wrote, The Walls, The Wainscot and The Mouse, for that person in Good Omens exchange became the second chapter of CoT. And from there, I just never stopped. I had enough, I had the momentum I needed to turn it into a series.

From Lena Lawlipop's second interview with irisbleufic:

AJ: I had received the prompt from a friend asking me if you were to write something, it was the last time you could ever write about them. What would it look like? What would [...] you want to be the very last glimpse you ever had? So I was thinking very much about the signing [...]. So I wrote A Better Place, which became the first chapter of CoT, which I think it's ironic that something I wrote just meant to be this little snapshot of “If I could only have one last glimpse at them,” I would want to know if that's where they were and that they were happy. But the way things work for me is that I can never- something that I think is small and going to stay self-contained very rarely does. [...] And so I was like, OK, I can do more with that. [...] I'm not going to treat it like a little what if goodbye or like a little test situation.

Summary

“D’you realize,” [Crowley] said, “that we never tire of things humans get bored with on the regular?”
Aziraphale shrugged, lazily basking. “I’ve always assumed it’s that we don’t tire of each other.”

Related Fanworks

• Crown of Thorns Pod'rama
• Plausible Deniability by mizstorge, a Good Omens/River of London crossover