Chapter Text
They had agreed to meet for lunch. They often did, after the end-times-that-weren’t. Aziraphale checked his watch again for what was at least the fifth time; Crowley was late. And this was not fashionably late, as the demon often was. This was over half an hour, did-you-completely-forget, or did-you-sleep-through-your-alarm late.
First, Aziraphale tried to call him on his little flip phone. (Crowley had made him get it in the early 2000s because he was sick of not being able to call him. “Get with the times!” he had demanded for at least the 100th time in as many years.) When he got Crowley’s answering machine he left a polite message:
“Hello! It’s me. Just checking in about lunch. Call me back!”
Ten minutes later he tried again. Still no luck.
Five minutes after that he tried again. Then again, five minutes later, and again. And again. And again.
It had gotten too late now, an hour after they’d agreed (and he’d checked repeatedly that he hadn’t missed daylight savings again), and with eight missed calls it was getting out of hand. This had exceeded you-just-forgot late, and become I-need-to-track-you-down late.
Aziraphale left the restaurant and hailed a cab. It was likely nothing, surely. Crowley had likely just forgotten, or gotten caught up in some adventure, or lost his phone. He wouldn’t have been so worried before the non-pocalypse, he would have just assumed Crowley didn’t show up, but now they were really, truly friends. They weren’t trying to play nice with their bosses, and now, after all, they essentially only had each other. So he had to check, no matter how many rational explanations he could come up with for Crowley’s absence. It was just unusual enough. Better safe than sorry, but likely everything was just fine and this was all an overreaction. It would all be perfectly alright.
It became a little harder to believe that when he found the Bentley still parked outside Crowley’s apartment building. But perhaps Crowley really had just lost track of time, sleeping in.
He miracled (small miracles, an unlocked door, a distracted security officer) his way into the apartment, and found it dead silent.
“Crowley?” he asked, taking a hesitant step in the room.
No answer.
“Hello?” he tried again. The only response he got what the shuddering of leaves. Crowley’s plants were lovely, but also very high strung. “It’s alright,” he told them, walking past, “Is he here?” he asked, but of course, plants can’t answer.
The only substantial trace of Crowley was his abandoned phone, which Aziraphale found lying on the ground, with eight missed calls.
That was the farthest thing from reassuring Aziraphale had seen all day, and at that moment the panic set in in earnest. Crowley was very much missing. He’d abandoned both his phone and his Bentley, neither of which was to be expected, and Aziraphale realized, standing in the middle of one of Crowley’s barely-decorated rooms, he had no idea where the demon was.
For a human, of course, to lose track of someone is quite reasonable. Your mate goes out for a run, leaves his phone, you might not know where he is for an hour or two. But for Aziraphale, having genuinely no suspicion where Crowley was, especially when outright looking for the demon, was deeply unsettling. He would be the first to admit he didn’t consider it often, but for millennia, now, whenever he’d gone looking for Crowley he’d had some sense of where to start. Otherwise how could you find someone that you hadn’t seen in roughly a decade, and who could just as easily be in the next town over as across the globe? It was how he’d found him after being discorporated around the not-pocalypse. To not have any sense of Crowley being anywhere, it felt like when the power goes out and you realize just how loud all of your appliances sound. It felt wrong.
Aziraphale couldn’t help but consider the worst. But there was still the second-worst: if Crowley wasn’t on earth, he could only be in two other places.