Chapter Text
Crowley was feeling objectively terrible. He had been for some time. There was no way around it, and no way against it. The feeling sat heavily in his stomach when he woke up around midday, then slowly crept up during the rest of the day. He would first feel it like an ache in his chest, almost painful enough to restrict his breathing, something he had never been conscious of before.
Then, it would reside at the back of his throat, like held-back bile. There were times at which he didn’t trust himself enough to speak, afraid that it would all come out, and never stop coming out, for eternity. At the end of the day it was all up in his head, filling it up to the brim and pounding, pounding like a drummer’s quartet. Buzzing, too. It was why he went to bed early, despite having been a keen enjoyer of night-life for most of his existence, and why he slept until at least noon.
There had been instances where he had slept through days, one time even weeks. It hadn’t been like the time of the fourteenth century, or the pandemic. Those had been moments where Crowley had taken a good, informed look at the outside and decided, you know what? I’ll give this one a pass.
Then, after all the undoubtedly terrifying horrors, he had woken up refreshed and, what’s more, into a new world. Now he woke up feeling like death, weeks had passed, and everything was still the same.
His car was empty. His apartment was empty. His message box was empty.
Of course, good demons preferred it this way. Crowley had especially designed his apartment this way, for Hell’s sake. Sleek black walls, high ceilings, combined with a styleful, purposeful, minimalistic nothingness. It had The Art Of Leaving Things Out written all over it.
The emptiness was what made it so classy.
And yet…
Yet, it didn’t feel that way anymore. The emptiness didn’t sit quietly in a corner like a well-behaved show dog any longer. It screamed at Crowley now.
He tried to scream back. First at his plants, which began to hear the grating sounds of the shredder at least one time a day, and, when that didn’t seem to help, at himself.
He screamed at himself with the utmost ferocity and rage he could muster. He stood in front of his mirror, sunglasses off, tongue forked and sharp, and screamed his lungs and blazed his eyes out. He aimed to direct the same hatred at himself as he had at Gabriel so long ago in the bookshop, and whenever he had the urge to look away from his own, reptilian eyes, he persisted to the point of nausea. The first time the mirror shattered he felt good. Successful. The second time he felt slightly worse. Now, way beyond the seventh time, it just made him angrier. He began to sleep even more, or he drove around aimlessly in his car the entire day.
Sometimes he drove past the bookshop. Most of the time, he hadn’t planned to. Either he steered that way unconsciously, or the Bentley had taken up new forms of protests.
At one point, way in the beginning, it had committed the mistake of playing Love Of My Life, and had quickly learned exactly how much it didn’t like being electrocuted.
Now it had resigned to byways past St James’ Park, or The Ritz, or to very short interludes of classical music, which morphed back into Best Of Queen before Crowley could even think of giving the dash-board an acidic look.
When he did drive past the bookshop, he could sometimes see Muriel behind the windows, either carrying stacks of books or walking around with the duster, looking uncertain. The sign on the door stayed on “closed.”
A couple of times Crowley had caught a glimpse of Nina or Maggie, at which he would always duck behind the steering wheel and speed out of the street. He hadn’t talked to them since they had talked to him, and if they weren’t aware of what the consequences had been of that talk, then they could certainly guess.
He wasn’t mad at them, of course. They had been more than right, and had spotted something in a day that had taken other, more oblivious people at least a good handful of centuries. It wasn’t their fault that, for all their quickness, it had still been too late.
He didn’t want to talk to them. Or to anyone, for that matter. Crowley had found that looking into someone’s eyes had now turned into something that was almost excruciatingly painful, and completely exhausting.
He stopped screaming at mirrors and now wore his sunglasses without fail.
The turning point came one winter morning, when the light shone cold and indifferent through the thin windows, and Crowley could feel every single snakey part of him screaming for a warm blanket and some sun.
But he was up anyway, doing his usual round-up of his plants. He had begun to feel foolish about driving around for the sake of it, like one of those people in old novels who just sit weeping underneath an oak tree after some gentlemen had not picked up their handkerchief or something. He felt pathetic. He shouldn’t sit around moping just because one angel had refused a trip to the stars with him.
But he had nothing else to do. He still met up with Shax, though less and less frequently lately. Walking outside, in the middle of seas of people, felt worse than driving. To add to this, he got an itchy feeling whenever he hadn’t checked on the bookshop for a while, as if he wanted to make sure everything was still there. So he didn’t abandon driving, but instead attached a visit to the Garden Center to every drive, so that he could pretend he was making an actual trip and not simply mindlessly fleeing from …. something.
This annoyingly resulted in a much larger amount of plants than one should expect to reside in a respected apartment. It did make it look less empty.
So Crowley did his rounds, spraying the plants with just enough water to survive (they should learn to hold their own during hardship, after all), and idly deciding which one would go to the shredder this week. He was just eyeing the new Fiddle-leaf in the corner, which was looking much too cheerful for his taste, when a sharp sound made him jump.
It was like the ding of an elevator, and Crowley felt something … angelic looming behind him. He slowly turned around, plant mister at the ready (though what good it would do, he didn’t know) and froze.
Aziraphale was standing in his living room.
It was him, most certainly. He had on a different suit, stood straighter than Crowley had ever seen him stand, and was looking just about everywhere but him.
Crowley reached up carefully to his sunglasses in order to get a clearer look, but thought better of it, and lowered his hand again. His mouth felt as if it were glued shut. His stomach felt hollow.
What was he doing-
“Is it on?”
Aziraphale looked confused somewhere in the direction of Crowley’s red velvet chair.
“Is it on? I hadn’t heard anything, so I’m not sure- Oh, it is? Great.”
Aziraphale stared blankly ahead, then glanced apologetically somewhere to his right.
He flickered.
“Terribly sorry, but where do I look again?”
A pause. Aziraphale nodded.
“Right, thank you. This wasn’t here you know, last time I- Oh, yes, you’re right, sorry. Better get on with it.”
The hologram turned his gaze to just past Crowley’s left side.
“Hello, good demon! Or, bad demon, depending on your point of view,” Aziraphale chuckled. “This is the angel- sorry, Archangel Aziraphale here, to remind you of the oncoming Second Coming that we will be endeavouring on soon. You must’ve heard all about it. We’re all terribly excited! It seems that this is to be the crux of God’s ineffable plan, so, obviously, it all has to go very smoothly, without any fuss. That is where you come in, my dear demon.
‘Obviously, it cannot be so that the Savior simply announces themselves, or everyone will-” Here he glanced to the side again “-what did you call it again? Ah yes, get the easy way out. Of course humans can only be actually good if-”
The hologram began to glitch here.
“-so they need … a choice … the wheat from the chaff as they say …. support and opposition …. inherently good …. we must trust in …. eclipse is on the table …. we all agree …. So, loyal demon, if you would like to support The Second Coming- which Hell has agreed to by the way, you won’t get into any trouble, I can tell you that!- please register at your local Hell’s Office and they will give you a list of possible jobs. I hope to see you there on earth, doing good- I mean, causing mischief!”
The angel smiled.
“Have a good day. Sorry. A bad one.”
He glanced to his right again.
“Is it off? Good. Did I forget to mention any- No? Jolly good.”
Aziraphale flickered and faded away into nothing.
Crowley stood frozen still, as he had for the entire duration of the message. A single tear slid down from underneath his sunglasses.
On the wall behind where Aziraphale had stood where now the words “This Message Was Approved By Heaven And Hell” projected.
This was, he felt, his most pathetic moment of all.
“That’s it,” he said, with almost no tremor. “That does it. I’m leaving.”
He snatched his car keys from the table, clipped an extra pair of sunglasses to the neckline of his shirt, and hoisted two of the nearest plants into his arms. They trembled with fear.
He walked through the door.
After some seconds he walked back into the room.
“Fine,” he gritted, and with some difficulty picked up the little Fiddle-leaf in the corner, too.
Then he left.
The Bently was parked out front. Crowley got in, dumped (and carefully arranged) the plants in the back seat, and started the car. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, and hissed. He would go off on his bloody own. He didn’t even care where. Alpha Centauri came first to mind, and even though it only brought him sour memories now, he held on to the thought. It was far away from earth, far away from any place where automated messages of goddamn Archangel Aziraphale could pop up when you’d least expect them.
But what, he thought, frowning, was he going to do there? Stare at the stars forever? That seemed even more depressing than his current situation. He decided to just drive, with no particular direction in mind, and see where that got him.
Not very far, as it turned out. After a good two hours driving around London, without seemingly being able to leave it, he saw at last the familiar shape of the bookshop looming in the distance.
Cursing, he parked up front and banged his head repeatedly against the steering wheel.
Not very far at all.
He beheld the building through the car window. Behind the window of the bookshop Muriel stood still, spotted him, and gave him a flappy little wave. Crowley awkwardly waved back.
He then took up his plants, got out of the car, took a deep breath, realised that was stupid halfway through, and, growling through gritted teeth, walked into the bookshop for the first time in a year.