Work Text:
The world had ended. It had ended and the last time he had seen his best friend was his leaving him for heaven. I forgive you still lingering in the air between them, stretching across the distance that grew unfathomably while he sped away from all that could hurt him.
The world had ended and he was left in the ruins of a bookshop that had burned yet again, except this time there was no convenient antichrist to bandage it back to something comforting and familiar. This time ash fell like snow onto the memory of pages and solid beams decorated with relics of time long past. This time the rubble was battered by winds far too hot for humanity to survive, which is likely why the last of them had died mere hours before.
Hell on Earth, a demon had joyfully exclaimed while tearing at the bricks of what used to be the coffee shop. Crowley had been to despondent to do anything about it then, letting the disposable freely continue their spree of destruction in what remained of life.
Humanity was gone and their liquor with it. He tried miracling up something strong enough to ease the hurt of what had happened but nothing could truly distract from the clashing of celestial and infernal forces in the skies, on the horizon, just down the street. The battle cry of Michael’s was intensely recognisable to him, as well as the scream of pain they let out shortly after no doubt charging headfirst at Lucifer, unaware of the nature of hell and how the eldest had truly ascended to the throne.
None of that mattered to him, really. He wasn’t a part of any side. Not even his hopefully imagined and grasped for Our Side held a place for him.
He had lost his best friend. He hadn’t been able to stop the end, and now, in the ruins of a place full of admittedly mixed memories, a shade of the angel stood before him. His expression was so full of grief, anguish, that Crowley couldn’t bring himself to speak. Words weren’t needed, though, the fact that they had failed was clearly written in the dust between them.
Aziraphale was holding a book. The glimmering edges of him meant he was certainly not aware of Crowley’s reactions, but he held the very solid book out to the demon like following a script, a ghostly tear sliding down his cheek as his phantom began to fade. Crowley silently reached for the hands holding the book only for them to disappear as the object landed in his hand.
He opened it to Aziraphale’s familiar looping scrawl across pages, holding not only instructions for maybe, impossibly, hopefully righting this wrong, but a journal of his time in heaven, of his attempts to make things better, a journal of his regrets in the months leading to the Armageddid-it-anyway.
A large snowflake, a delicate pattern of wings holding halos between tips circled neatly around an ouroboros lingers where he had stood. Crowley tried to catch it with too-hot hands and cried out as it melted in his grasp, the final pair of wings shattering in his fingertips like too-brittle glass.
Crowley’s eyes widened, the angel was gone. There was nothing left of him in any realm. He couldn’t feel him. The loss rushed through him and he found his corporation incapable of handling the pain as the alcohol filled stomach was emptied of even lingering acids onto the barren earth beneath him.
He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t accept this. He couldn’t hold back the scream that escaped him, alerting every entity within miles of the serpent’s rage. Time stilled for all but him and storm clouds gathered in an already bleak sky. Crowley had lost his angel, left with a book with wonderfully vague instructions on how to fix things like he could ever hope to fix this.
He was about to be a very good, well, bad demon indeed.