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She’s the first one to realise that he’s gone. That the place isn’t a haven or a sanctuary anymore, just a quiet building on the side of a busy road. The bookshop, the place she loves as much as a car with some added qualities can love anything, changes as she stands on the road outside.
Waiting.
It feels like she’d waited half her life at times. Waited, not yet alive, in the workshop. On the shop floor. Waited, with strange and sudden knowledge that no vehicle should ever have, for Angel to speak to them both while the war waged around their heads. Waited outside restaurants and cinemas, in a thousand different London streets.
She’d waited for them both at a big house where they’d all lived for a while. Waited hazily through flames and things she can only just remember, and through a magic moonlit evening when the nightingales had sung in Berkeley Square.
But there’d always been an answering presence there. The shop, as inanimate and as alive as she is. As ready to reach out across London with a tentative touch, even back when the air raid sirens had been screaming, as she had been.
She reaches again. Strains nerves of metal and thoughts of glass and leather. Paintwork burning with the effort. Every scrap and cell of her, reaching-calling-striving-hoping.
It should be impossible.
She does it anyway.
Crowley had half-made her, after all. There’s more than a touch of stardust in her mind, more than an echo of space and time woven through her, whether he intended it or not. And Angel has added his love and grace, his protection, and probably never even noticed he was doing it.
She reaches again.
There’s Crowley. An empty shambling shape in the form of her demon, all anger and heartbreak and acceptance and confusion.
There’s the other angel. The strange, mostly harmless one.
And there’s… a building. Not her friend. Just empty walls pulling in on themselves and shelves full of books folding up like Tower Bridge and the clocks muttering about time passing, just as it should.
He’s gone.
Left.
The shop knows.
She can’t explain it to Crowley. He’s shut himself off to everything, all furious walls, silence and inward pointed knives. He won’t listen to anything, except perhaps the replies of conversations in his own head.
She knows he’s still expecting Aziraphale to turn up again. That’s why they go round there every day, why it dwindles along to every other day, once a week and then long enough that she can watch the slow, solemn changing of the seasons.
The shop doesn’t know her anymore.
There are flies battering against the windows and dust clouding the signs. The rain weathers the panelling. She sees it all change, for the first time in forever, and can do nothing about it.
She’s heard human words for it. Decay. Husk. Shell. Death.
And although none of them are words that a car should really know, she understands them with a shudder anyway.
Emptiness where there should be love. Crowley’s described himself like that plenty of times, although she’s never believed it of him.
But the shop does feel like that.
She visits when she can; starts up conversations in their old, strange language that go unanswered and unheard. Unnoticed even by Crowley.
She talks about memories; about the Blitz and her first visit here. About laughter and long nights and the Beatles on the radio singing ‘I wanna hold your hand,’ and an angel and a demon smiling shyly at each other. About the end of wars and protests about other ones, about coronations and riots and the Olympics. About the end of the world and then lockdown which felt like it might have been the same thing. Of love and belonging and hope for the future.
In the shop, the shelves fall down. Books scatter on the floor. Pigeons sing a dirge from the roof, and she has no answer for them or anyone else.
Bentley stands watch in silence in the end. There’s nothing else she can do.