Work Text:
Crowley sits slumped over at a bar. Beer cans, whiskey glasses, and even a couple of empty wine glasses forming a barrier around him.
The barkeep had started shooting him worried looks when he finishes a second handle’s worth of whiskey after about three beers and two glasses of wine, and was still (mostly) upright.
It takes a lot of alcohol to get someone of angel stock properly sloshed. But when Crowley has spent more of the last eleven months with some form of alcohol in him than sober, that doesn’t really mean anything.
A glass of red wine rests in his hand, still filled a quarter of the way. He didn’t care enough to know which one when he’d gotten the barkeeper to pour him another glass.
Crowley raises the glass to his lips and takes a swig. A drop of wine traces its way down his chin. He wipes it away with a hand. He nearly knocks an abandoned whiskey glass clean off the table when he sets it down.
“Alright, I think that’s enough for you,” the barkeep speaks up, stepping towards the demon. Her hand is outstretched as if she plans to take the wine glass out of his hands.
“Nuh — not yet, not even drunk yet,” he slurs. He waves a hand in her direction to make her forget about what she had just been about to do and the events of the last two hours too. Whoops.
He drinks some more wine and manages not to spill any of it this time.
By the time the bar closes half an hour later — or is it fifteen minutes? He hats that particular stretch of time: fifteen minutes — Crowley is still upright and on his feet, by the sheer force of a demonic miracle.
‘On his feet’ does not automatically mean ‘able to walk in a straight line’.
The demon makes his way down the street, the path in front of him swimming.
He believes that he is going to make it back to his flat without becoming a serpent-shaped pancake on the pavement, so he would. More or less.
Logically, the smart thing would have been to miracle all of the alcohol out of his bloodstream before he left the bar. But the thought had occurred to him when he first started doing this, and it had been quickly dismissed. He isn’t going to change his mind now, eight months later.
Existence is so much easier to deal with like this; being too drunk to be able to think straight means that he doesn’t have to think. Thinking is overrated anyway.
Surprisingly, this much alcohol in him keeps him from doing something stupid like yelling in the vague direction of the sky. Would he be yelling at Aziraphale or God, he isn’t sure. Or go charging into the elevator to do something phenomenally stupider.
Alcohol certainly makes passing the time easier. Makes it pass quicker. Makes waiting less boring.
That’s what he has been doing for the last eleven months, waiting. Because, after the initial shock and heartbreak wore off, Crowley choose to believe that Aziraphale hasn’t truly abandoned him for Heaven. That he took the Supreme Archangel position because he has a plan, whatever it could be.
He isn’t quite sure what he would do if the opposite turned out to be true.
Die, probably.
So Crowley holds onto that flicker of hope (You’re a demon, demons don’t get to hope. Stop that.) and resigns himself to waiting.
But it is in times like this, the very very early hours of the morning when he is staggering off back to his flat or over to his bed, that hope starts to wane. When the ‘what ifs’ begin to creep in.
What if Aziraphale doesn’t have a plan or isn’t going to come back to Earth (and Crowley) again? What if he stays up there forever? What if the angel has forgotten about him?
He will either find out or spend eternity waiting. Some days he isn’t sure which is worse.
Crowley has just climbed into the Bentley when a flicker of light catches his eye. And there is a see-through version of Aziraphale sitting in the passenger’s seat beside him. Turned towards him slightly with his mouth open as if he’s about to say something.
Not this again.
“Know you’re not really here, so fuck off,” he tells the hallucination.
“Crowley…“ Whatever the hallucination is about to say gets cut off.
“No. Don’t care. You aren’t real, anyway,”
The Bentley pulls out of the parking space and onto the road. It takes off in the direction of Crowley’s flat faster than an eighty-year-old car should have been able to. Crowley doesn’t see the sad expression that ghosted over the hallucination’s face before it vanishes from the passenger’s seat.
This is something that has started happening whenever the demon thinks too hard about what ifs and Aziraphale, a hallucination of the angel would appear.
When it had first appeared, it scared the wits out of Crowley (not that he would ever admit that to anyone) who had been in the middle of a Golden Girls marathon. He yelled at the hallucination for nearly fifteen whole minutes before he realised he wasn’t yelling at the real Aziraphale. That had made him yell some more, just in the direction of Heaven instead.
The next day plays out much like every day before it had. Crowley wakes to find himself very much, disappointingly sober but with a ridiculous headache. The cure, which he decided upon months ago, was to get up and go drink some more.
It wasn’t like he has much else to do. Hell stopped giving him any assignments after Armageddon’t and stopped communicating with him at all as of eleven months ago.
So all he has left is an indeterminate amount of waiting.