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They saw each other again, sooner than either of them had expected. As far as cinematic framing went, it could hardly have been more perfect (“Richard Curtis, eat your heart out,” thought Crowley later).
Shax had managed to get Crowley to agree to work with Hell on a consulting basis, for Earthly matters she hadn’t thought of in her new role as Grand Duchess of Hell, and in exchange, she erased the flashy neon Traitor!! sign above his head. So what if he’d been drunk when he accepted, he was drunk more often than not these days, anyway. Didn’t even need to sober up for the reporting. Could have done it in his sleep, honestly. Easy job. Easier than haring all over Creation after some idiot who - well. They were all idiots, weren’t they?
He’d started off the morning with his typical shot - not wheatgrass or apple cider vinegar, nothing wholesome, but whiskey, or vodka, or whatever was closest at hand on his bedside table. It was functional, he’d tried to argue with himself, a couple of days before. The drinking drowned the dreams, which had been a constant loop of a certain idiot’s face, eyes, mouth - Satan, why had he kissed him? While sober as a funeral, at that, and it had been a fucking shame of a kiss, too - desperate, dry, rigid. Nothing like what he’d - anyway.
So when he stumbled through the revolving doors to access the escalator that led to Hell’s front entrance, his edges were already blurred. Not pleasantly, mind, but blurry all the same. He happened to glance up from his thoughts, and what he saw made him promise to cut back at least, because he could not possibly be seeing what he thought he was seeing. And Crowley had never hallucinated before, not even on drugs where that was the whole point of them, but he was dead sure he had to be now, because -
Aziraphale was descending Heaven’s escalator, coming back down to Earth.
Crowley had never been the kind of being to indulge in a longing gaze. His eyes tended to burn through humans, and he had long since learned to avoid prolonged eye contact. Easier to hide what needed to be hidden. But now he found he couldn’t help it. Just like with alcohol, he drank his fill of the angel, his traitorous heart burning a hole through his chest. And Aziraphale, in turn - he looked the demon up and down, taking in the the tilt of Crowley’s head, the slack of his jaw, his hand frozen halfway in its reach to Hell’s escalator handrail. And Aziraphale knew what all those tiny tells meant.
It meant that the Leviathan could have erupted from the very floor, God Herself could have descended from the ceiling, both could have happened at the very same time, and none of it would have shifted Crowley’s gaze from his angel’s face for one single instant. Aziraphale finished his descent, stepped onto the marble floor, and turned on a heel to face Crowley.
Crowley stopped the escalator and found himself worryingly, distressingly, infuriatingly speechless.
“Well.” Aziraphale’s voice held none of the warmth and kindness Crowley had come to expect. Instead the sound of it was cold like metal, harsh like battery acid. “False friend, foul fiend, dearest enemy mine.” He took a single step closer to Crowley, who still seemed capable of all the movement of an ancient bug preserved in amber. His eyes flashed violet as he said, “Mind how you go.”
He tapped the escalator and Crowley nearly lost his balance as it restarted its descent. His vocal chords finally remembered their purpose and he choked out, “Angel, please -” as Aziraphale began to disappear from view. But Aziraphale didn’t respond, and turned away, and Crowley could hear the sound of his shoes clicking against the stone, fading like the last traces of cologne on a collar, like final embers turning to ash, like a ghost of something that had never existed in the first place. Then - nothing. And maybe, Crowley thought, turning back around to face Hell, maybe nothing was all they’d ever had.