Work Text:
Somewhere in London, 2023
Crowley glanced at the speedometer. He had lost track of how long he had been driving at that point, and for once he was doing so under the speed limit. This was unlike him, but then again, the events that had just taken place were unlike anything he had experienced before.
The Bentley was not playing Queen songs, as if trying to give Crowley some quiet to think. The demon was driving straight ahead, eyes fixated on the dirt road that stretched before him.
It was nighttime now, and he was in the middle of nowhere, literally. He had ended up so far away from Soho he could only see fields and small abandoned brick houses anywhere he looked. Crowley couldn’t shake the thought that he was supposed to be somewhere else– at the Ritz, dining with Aziraphale while a sweet piano melody played in the background.
A few metres ahead, a flock of sheep was crossing the dirt road, and the shepherd helping them to a nearby barn signalled Crowley to stop the car, so he reluctantly did just that.
“Come on…” he sighed.
Typically, he would’ve made a comment about how people had owned livestock for millenia and it was so annoying that there was no faster or less bothersome way to move the animals from one place to another. However, that night Crowley simply sat in the Bentley and waited, his saddened expression unchanged since he had left Aziraphale’s bookshop.
Once the sheep had crossed the road, the demon decided he no longer wanted to drive aimlessly anyway, so he parked the car on the side of the dirt road, took off his sunglasses, and began to walk aimlessly instead.
While he roamed around trying to push the memories of that evening so far back into his brain they could never resurface again, Crowley heard running water. It was hard to make out anything more than blurred shadows of trees and bushes in the dead of night, but he still moved forward towards the stream, guided purely by its sound. And once he got there, stopped, and stood by the water, for a moment Crowley wished it were holy. He wouldn’t dive in headfirst or anything if that were the case—that would result in too much paperwork—but he concluded he would at least dip his fingers in it, perhaps to feel something. It was already tiring, the dullness that had come when Aziraphale left. Or rather, when Crowley left Aziraphale because the latter was leaving.
The silence around Crowley and the unceasing noise inside his head were both interrupted by a ringtone. He jumped out of his skin and then looked around to make sure nobody had witnessed that before taking his phone out of his pocket to check who was calling. For a split second he hoped it was Aziraphale, but obviously, it wasn’t.
“What.” The demon didn’t even phrase it as a question. He was sure he hadn’t sounded so dry and rude in his entire eternal life.
“Was that a ‘Call me another time, I’m busy right now’ ‘what’, or a ‘You’re annoying and I hate you, please refrain from calling later, or ever for that matter’ ‘what’?”
“Both. I hope you have a good reason to ring me up at midnight, Hob.”
Crowley heard the man laugh faintly at the other end of the line. He really wasn’t in the mood for this. He put his sunglasses back on.
“Well, for starters, it’s not midnight, it’s two in the morning. What are you up to?” Hob asked, curious. Being met with complete silence, he kept talking. “Anyway, I was walking past the tavern, you know, our tavern, and well, turns out it has been vandalised. I’m talking graffiti on the walls and shattered glass on the floor. It’s clearly been broken into. And it even–”
“Not our tavern. I own it, you just drink in there with me sometimes,” Crowley corrected him.
“That’s your takeaway? Out of everything I said? Crowley, the place is a shithole now, like, you have to see it to believe it.”
“It has always been one. Anything else, or can I hang up?”
Hob sighed. “Whatever, don’t come then, but at least tell me what’s going on. You seem more pissed off than usual.”
“ You are pissing me off–”
“Man, they even took the door,” Hob continued. “I didn’t notice when I first walked in, with everything else going on, but it’s so obviously not there. They took the door! What do they even want a door for?”
Crowley turned around and started to make his way back to the Bentley. “Listen, if I go there and miracle the door back, and fix up the rest of the place, will you stop calling me every other month? And you have to promise it to me.”
The demon was talking to Hob like a mother reprimanding her son for his bad behaviour.
“I swear to God,” Hob replied. “Sorry, I mean–”
“Oh, just shut up. I don’t want to hear another word about God right now.”
Crowley hung up and got in the car. He could just appear in the tavern, but he didn’t mind keeping Hob waiting a few hours. He wanted to punish the man for interrupting him in the middle of his private and intimate ‘beating myself up and wondering if I could’ve done anything different’ session.
The still quiet Bentley crossed dirt tracks followed by cobblestone paths and finally asphalted roads full of potholes leading to central London. During this spontaneous road trip, Crowley had more than enough time to ruminate on his thoughts again. He replayed the last couple minutes he had spent with Aziraphale more times than he would like to admit—the smell of centuries-old books in the air, the hope followed by desperation, and the kiss. Crowley had been trying to figure out what he had meant by it. He wondered what Aziraphale thought Crowley meant by it. ‘ Stay ’, was what he was thinking at the moment. ‘ This is goodbye, so it is my last chance to do this ’, is how it might’ve come across. After all, Crowley realised, it didn’t matter. Both were true in a way.
Without even noticing, Crowley had started speeding again, and he ended up making it to the tavern sooner than anticipated.
The Old Tavern, London, 5:40 a.m that night
Hob was sitting on the curb under a streetlight reading one of his books when he got startled by the Bentley drifting around the corner. Crowley ‘parked’ diagonally in a way that he managed to block both the sidewalk and the road. Hob could never park a car that badly if he tried, he thought to himself.
“I suppose you can also miracle parking tickets away,” Hob murmured as he approached the demon.
Crowley did not entertain him. With a snap, the demon brought back the door of the tavern and made the graffiti, the glass shards, and all the trash disappear. Immediately afterwards, he got back in the Bentley without even looking at Hob’s general direction.
“Hey, wait. Wait!” The man started tapping the passenger side window, telling himself that Crowley couldn’t hear him, to avoid getting hurt by the fact that the demon was very clearly ignoring him.
Crowley didn’t budge, and he turned the engine on. Soon after, Hob realised that the doors weren’t locked, so he got in the Bentley with the demon.
“Get out of my car.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Hob raised his voice unwittingly “First you don’t care that the tavern has been wrecked, then you take hours to get here after hanging up on me, and now you want to drive away without even saying hi? I mean, you’re usually distant, but bloody hell.”
Right after he finished his sentence, the Bentley started playing ‘ Friends Will Be Friends ’ by Queen at full volume, and kept doing so even after Crowley tried to turn off the radio several times.
“Are you doing that, or is your car sentient?” Hob asked, perplexed.
“My car hates me, that’s what this is,” replied Crowley, visibly stressed.
“Okay… Well, why don’t we get out then, and have a pint in the tavern?”
“There are no drinks in there, Hob, they took them along with the door and the hanging picture of Shakespeare you used to throw darts at.”
“Can’t you make some appear, too?”
“They don’t taste the same,” Crowley explained.
“Let’s go in anyway,” Hob suggested as he smiled warmly. “We can just chat.”
The door of the tavern which Hob opened was not the same it used to be. Not only because of the obvious fact that it had just been miraculously replaced, but because the previous door was plain dark wood and this one had some golden details in the corners. He didn’t dare open his mouth though—it was clear as day that Crowley was going through something, and the man didn’t want to upset him.
As they sat down, Hob’s elaborate plan to get the demon to talk to him was beginning to take shape inside his head. He knew Crowley kept to himself and was usually very stubborn, thus he wasn’t about to tell Hob what was worrying him before conversing for, like, several hours. Even then, the man might get only a brief summary of whatever was going on and the demon would refuse to elaborate further. But Hob was willing to try. He was going to start chatting about something innocuous to, slowly, make Crowley more comfortable.
“Do you think they’ll ever patch up the road that–”
“It’s all over,” Crowley said under his breath.
“What… What is?” asked Hob, trying not to sound like he had been completely caught off guard.
“Aziraphale is leaving.”
“Leaving where?”
“He’s going to become the Supreme Archangel,” Crowley enunciated the last two words with a hint of mockery, “so he’s going back to Heaven. And I’m not going with him.”
“Wait, the last thing you told me was that you two were really close now and you were hanging around his bookshop all the time. What happened?” For a second Hob sounded like he was more interested in the gossip than in helping Crowley.
The demon huffed and waved a hand in front of his face as if saying ‘it’s a long story’.
“Did you two fight?” Hob tried a more specific question.
“Something like that. But in the end, after he said he was leaving.”
“Did he say why he was going back to Heaven?”
“He wants to turn the place around, make everything good and fair. I don’t know how he can be so smart and so stupid at the same time.”
“Well, you said you were kicked out of Heaven–”
“I sauntered vaguely downwards,” Crowley corrected him.
“Yeah, that. And you didn’t like the angels who were running things. So what’s wrong with Aziraphale wanting to change that?”
“What’s ‘wrong’ is his mentality. He can’t change anything. They have always treated him like trash, they even tossed him into hellfire, and he’s so optimistic and forgiving he still thinks he can win his side’s approval. It’s like he doesn’t remember how that worked out for him many times before. What I’m saying is that him being in charge won’t make the others turn good.”
“Maybe you could just wait and see how it turns out. And if it doesn’t work out for him, like you said, he can always come back to Earth with you, right?” Hob suggested.
“No, not really. We aren’t talking anymore.”
“What do you mean? God, you’re saying it like you two broke up or something.” Hob laughed, and then added “Sorry for the ‘God’, again. Force of habit.”
“I kissed him.” Crowley simply stated, then looked away.
“You what ? What are you talking about? Help me out here.” Hob was about to jump out of his chair. “So, you were actually together. You did break up.”
“It’s not like that! Why does everybody keep telling me the same thing? ‘ Are you and Aziraphale together? ’ ‘ Why don’t you have a deep talk with Aziraphale? ’ It’s always Aziraphale this and that , all the time.” Crowley looked like he was genuinely losing it.
“That’s because we are talking about Aziraphale,” Hob pointed out. “What the hell do you want me to say, then?”
Crowley frowned. Hob breathed in and out and tried to be patient—he knew he had gotten on the demon’s last nerve many times before when Dream didn’t show up for their scheduled meeting in the 80s, and it was time to pay it forward. Crowley needed a friend, and Hob was going to act like it whether the former liked it or not.
“Okay. Just tell me what happened right before he left.”
Crowley took a second to gather his thoughts before speaking. “I was about to say something to Aziraphale, but then he told me he was leaving. I was like ‘You can’t leave’, because Heaven is awful. He was dead set on it so I told him what I was gonna tell him anyway. I said ‘We should run away together’ and some other stuff. And Aziraphale was like ‘I want you to be my second in command in Heaven’, I replied ‘Absolutely not ’. And if you think that’s bad just wait, because he told me that he needed me and when I kissed him he went ‘I forgive you’. I didn’t want him to forgive me! Forgive me for what? So I told him not to bother and that’s all of it, I think.”
Hob sat there completely dumbfounded.
“I know.” Crowley huffed, as he looked away from Hob again.
“And then he left?”
“No, I left. I left the bookshop. And when I was outside I saw him going up to Heaven,” clarified Crowley.
“How was it? When you kissed him, I mean.” Now Hob was clearly just gossiping. He was totally locked in, eyes wide open as if somebody was telling him about a nasty divorce.
Just as Crowley was about to open his mouth, Hob’s phone alarm went off and he practically leapt out of his chair.
“I’m sorry, really, I have to go to work. I have class in two hours and I can’t miss it because I’m the teacher. And my car’s broken so I’m taking the bus.” He clumsily picked up his stuff as he repeatedly apologised.
“Don’t worry about it.” Crowley laid back on his chair.
“You can wait for me here. I’ll be back at…” Hob glanced at his watch and started doing maths out loud to figure out how long the demon would have to sit there while he was working.
“I’d rather not, really. I gotta get going.”
“Are you going to go talk to Aziraphale?” Hob’s face practically lit up.
“No, I told you he’s gone for good. I’m just gonna drive around.”
“That’s fun,” Hob muttered, sarcastically.
“By the way, thank you,” Crowley mumbled under his breath.
“What? Why do you thank me? We’re friends.” Hob looked like he had taken offence by this.
“Maybe we are,” agreed Crowley, and if Hob didn’t know better he’d think the demon was smiling just a little.
“Hey, you still have to tell me everything. Every detail. Don’t you forget it! I’ll be keeping in touch and I don’t care that I promised not to!”
Immediately after saying this, Hob closed the door of the tavern behind him, giving Crowley no chance to answer.
The demon sat there with his thoughts for what felt like an eternity before slowly getting up and making his way towards the Bentley. As soon as he stepped foot outside, he began to hear what early morning usually sounds like: alarm clocks, crying babies, and train whistles. Humans that might’ve also had the worst night of their lives were now getting up for the morning commune—high heels clattered on asphalt, and muttered curses followed by hurried steps could be heard as someone realised they were running late. Crowley used to find everyday sounds so trivial and repetitive that he never paid any mind to them. Now, for the first time in decades, he stopped to listen.
Sprinklers hissing, neighbours chattering, birds chirping.
He paid special attention to the latter and, for a split second, he thought he could hear a nightingale singing.