Chapter Text
Crowley drove away in the Bentley, his knuckles white at nine and five on the steering wheel. He let up on the gas once he cleared the Soho crowds, obeying the speed limit and stopping at all the traffic signs. The radio, fearing for its life, was quiet.
He wound up in Tokyo eventually. Crowley wasn’t entirely sure how he made it across the Sea of Japan. He didn’t expect to stop so perhaps the water had simply hardened itself into pavement for the Bentley’s tires and then sloughed away again. He wound to a stop in Japan however, because a drive across the Pacific was the sort of thing Downstairs was bound to take notice of.
Crowley went about the work of tucking his heart back up his sleeve as far as it would go. He felt like a magician, folding the bright handkerchiefs back up again, finding the doves hiding in the rafters and stuffing them back into their cage. Everything made him think of Aziraphale. So he did his best not to think, tried to remember how exactly he had amused himself in the stretches of intervening years when they did not see one another. He took to wearing his sunglasses at all hours. They pressed red lines into his cheeks while he slept.
He hung about the Shibuya crossing and the Skinjuku district - places with big glass towers and sleazy alleyways and flashing neon advertisements which glowed at all hours of the day. He redeveloped his taste for sake and avoided the many temples and vintage record stores because they seemed, blisteringly, like the types of places Aziraphale would coo over. Crowley haunted the convenience stores instead, which seemed to appear on every block like mushrooms multiplying in the rain, and picked over the novelty junk-food.
He started smoking again because he knew he looked very Cool doing so and could therefore lead by example. He was technically off of Hell’s payroll but he’d been fermenting low level evil for so long that he wasn’t entirely sure he knew how to stop. He allowed the flow of white-shirted business men to tug him down various streets and left sulphurous grey clouds in his wake. “You’re like a walking talking cigarette advertisement!” Aziraphale had once sniffed disapprovingly and Crowley had only smiled because he knew it was the angel’s oblique way of saying he looked handsome.
It wasn’t like an argument was unprecedented. They had exchanged dramatic, stinging words before, but things always righted themselves, like a pendulum swinging itself still. One would wander with deliberate unconcern back into the other’s life and they would more or less pick up right where they left off. The apology dance had been a good invention - it saved a lot of trouble.
But it felt different this time. Crowley’s hurt simmered on and on. It sat in his gut like a lodestone. He took a long walk because even the damn Bentley reminded him too much of Aziraphale. A warm rain began and clear portable umbrellas popped up all around him and Crowley, bless him, thought of the very first rain and the wing which had sheltered him.