Chapter Text
It all started with Aziraphale’s journals. Or maybe it started when Crowley realized that Gabriel had taken away his own memories. Or it might have started in Eden. Or perhaps it started before time even began. At this point, it was all a bit fuzzy. Crowley hadn’t been sober in… months? That was a measurement of time, right? Months felt like it was probably accurate. He could ask Muriel; she liked to keep track of things. She was the one that found the journals in the first place. But she still seemed to be wary of him, being a former demon and all. Or maybe her wariness came from his constant inebriation. He was an especially sad drunk these days. There was a better than even chance she was just avoiding him.
It was Muriel’s fault he was even at the bookshop–being constantly not sober–to begin with. She’d been selling books. The hardcore collectors had already started sniffing around by the time Crowley reappeared and chased them away. After securing the premises, he had mostly sobered up enough to explain to her that the books were a collection. Most of them were more rare than she could even comprehend, and they weren’t meant to be sold, no matter what the actual purpose of a shop was. She hadn’t understood, not really. Frankly, neither had nearly sober Crowley. In response, he’d downed a bunch more alcohol to make some of the hurting fade into the background of his existence and then he had tried to teach her chess. And when that went sideways because he couldn’t keep the pieces straight, he pivoted to checkers. When he found checkers was still a struggle, they turned to 52 card pickup, which they had both managed to get a good handle on by the time the work day was done.
That was how it started. Each morning when the shop opened, the Bentley would be parked outside and each night when it closed, the Bentley would leave. Nina and Maggie had both expressed extreme dislike for the fact that he drove while under the influence until Crowley had demonstrated his ability to sober up. Which wasn’t what he had been doing before each drive, but he had decided he didn’t need to tell them that. At this point he’d just given up the pretense that he was the one driving at all. He let the Bentley take him where he wanted to go. The alternative was to just miracle himself to and from the shop but then he wouldn’t ever have taken the car out and that didn’t seem fair to something that had stuck by him for as long as it had. He’d had a bit of a cry over the loyalty of a good car being all he had left and had skipped a day at the bookshop. Muriel had been distressed when he’d shown up the day after. In response, Crowley had been an absolute arse to her for a whole week straight. Last thing he needed was another angel thinking they were getting attached right up until they realized he wasn’t worth their bloody time.
Days had turned to weeks and months and maybe more; time was all relative anyway. Crowley wasn’t sure there was a point to his existence. He despised himself for hanging around the bookshop like he was just waiting for Aziraphale to show up and offer him some scraps of attention. The worst part was, he wasn’t sure he could walk away again, no matter how much he was certain he had done the right thing. Really, he should leave for good and finally go off on his own. The women were worried about him, he saw the way they looked at him and fretted and he did not care for it. Each night, he told himself he was done and each morning, he would be outside the shop again just in time for it to open. And thus he drank in an attempt to forget so very many things.
The pattern continued until Muriel found the journals. She had noted an anomaly in the layout of the shop. A bit of missing floor space and once she started pulling at the thread of the mystery, she got Crowley involved. As much as he hated it, he knew how Aziraphale’s mind worked when it came to these sorts of things, so it didn’t take long to find the mechanism that revealed a secret cupboard that was full of Aziraphale’s personal journals.
Crowley glanced at one. It was enough to determine they were, in fact, a personal account of the angel’s existence. The thought of looking any deeper was enough all on its own to make him feel like he'd sobered up. Either he would find out that Aziraphale actually cared, and their last parting would hurt all the more, or he would only be disappointed. He couldn’t take any more painful revelations in his life. Not when there were places where holy water was easily accessible.
So he hadn’t read them. And he forbade Muriel from reading them, despite her insistence that it might help her understand her job on earth better.
“This wasn’t his job,” Crowley told her wearily. He’d seen that much from the small peek he’d taken. “This is who he was.” Was, past tense. Aziraphale was something else entirely now. Something to be feared, maybe. “We have no right to that.”
Crowley had closed the hidden nook and sealed it with a miracle to keep curious minds at bay and he’d fallen back to the reliable arms of excessive drinking.
“I understand you’re not human,” Nina had said in his general direction when she had stopped by to check on things later that same day, “but it can’t be good for you. You only drink alcohol and you never eat. Surely it will catch up with you eventually?”
“Constitution of an ox,” Crowley had muttered, remembering with startling clarity another time in history when he’d said the exact same words to a different, pesky human woman. That was the trouble really, the remembering. Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if he could stop remembering altogether?
The idea had started there, but it took another couple of hours for it to really develop. Jim–short for James, short for Gabriel–had been quite happy without his memories. Infuriatingly happy, actually. It wasn’t that Crowley wanted to lose all of himself. But the heartache wasn’t doing anyone any favors. Truthfully, he could do the numbing work of the alcohol but he could do it better and more permanently.
In the darkest recesses of himself, the place where he had locked away the sad broken thing that had once been his heart, something whispered that this was a bad idea. But the thought of release from the all encompassing darkness, the bleak, weight of sorrow that only strengthened its hold on him with each passing day, it was too sweet to ignore.
Muriel, Maggie, and Nina worried once he got started, but that wasn’t new. He sobered up in preparation; this sort of work took concentration. With a black bound journal and pen he began to write. Crowley started before time itself. His handwriting had always been terrible, but he laid each pen stroke with intention, pulling the memories from his mind completely as he laid them into the paper. Not just every time he had seen Aziraphale, but every time he had thought of him. It was a lot of ground to cover and it hurt.
He was shredding what was left of his heart, but what did a demon need a heart for anyway? He had hurt too much and for too long and now, he had finally found a way out.
Crowley no longer drank. He no longer left for the night and returned in the morning. He was completely devoted to the writing. And the women worried.
Crowley was crying as his pen scraped out the last word, but he couldn’t remember why.
The world held so many possibilities. It didn’t seem like there should be anything that could move him to tears. He was aware of the holes in his memory, but he knew they were his choice and there was so much… relief.
He had already made space in the hidden room to store his journals with the others. He dropped the last volume in and smiled at how symmetrical his dark books looked shelved beside the lighter set. There was even a similar number on each side. Balanced. He liked that.
He closed the door and set a miracle to keep it shut and another to forget it even existed. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to forget things, they should stay forgotten.
“Are you finished then?” Muriel asked very quietly as she peeked out at him from behind a bookshelf.
Crowley smiled at her. She was a good kid. Even if she was an angel. He wasn’t quite sure why she hung around his bookshop, but there would be anomalies like that, it was part of being willing to forget things. Best not to question the strangeness. And, since he’d spent a great deal of his extremely long existence learning to roll with the punches, this was a cake walk in comparison.
“I believe I am,” he said conspiratorially. “I suppose I’ll have to dream up something else to keep me busy from here on out. You know what they say about idle hands.”
“Not really,” she said hesitantly, but she was smiling back at him even if it was uncertain around the edges.
He gave her an assessing gaze and decided it was best not to mention the devil. Crowley knocked his shoulder gently against hers as he moved past her. “Gets you into trouble. Staying busy is best. I think it’s time we remodel this place, what do you say?”