Chapter Text
Now
After he paid his bar bill, almost miracling the money straight from Aziraphale’s account in a fit of pique before he thought better of it, Crowley spent a night sobering up slowly in the back seat of the Bentley before heading back to Soho.
Four months had passed since Shax’s little raid and the subsequent tearing down of Crowley’s world.
He had tried to be permanently drunk at first, but his body had quickly developed a resistance to alcohol that just left him hungover and annoyed. That was infinitely worse than stone cold sober and annoyed. At least that came with less headaches.
{Annoyed was perhaps not the definition the Oxford English Dictionary would give for what Crowley was feeling. Thankfully, Crowley did not own a dictionary and could therefore be annoyed and not any other word that conjured up images of broken hearts, torrents of tears and pathetic whimpering from beneath piles of blankets.}
With an eternity spent in an alcoholic stupor no longer an option, he had gone and regained possession of his flat. It hadn’t taken much really, just a promise to Shax that he had no intention of fighting her for position in Hell and she’d handed the keys right back over to him.
He’d resituated his plants, giving them a little less of a rant than he usually would because they had held up well despite months spent in the back of the car, and then cleansed the place of any demonic residue other than his own.
That done, he’d headed out for a coffee.
He would like to say he hadn’t expected the sympathetic looks that came with his six shots of espresso, but there wasn’t much point in lying now.
He had sprawled out in a chair by the window, not the chair, not the same chair. Because that would have been pathetic. {Avoiding that chair wasn’t pathetic, avoiding it was smart. He wasn’t drinking nearly enough water to keep fighting back tears over a chair he had only sat in once opposite his…friend.}
Maggie had joined him before he had finished draining his cup. Crowley had glared at Nina who had glared back unrepentantly.
It should have been easy to scare Maggie away, she was too nice to have much of a thick skin.
Crowley had let her sip her way through a mug of mint tea without saying a word.
When he left, Nina had said she would see him the next day. Crowley had sneered and promised himself he would never return.
The same table had been empty when he arrived the next day. It remained empty no matter what time of day he arrived.
He liked that table, it put his back to that chair. It also gave him a good view of the bookshop. {Looking at the bookshop didn’t hurt, he just felt numb. He wasn’t going to dig any deeper into that.}
Three days and five, six shot espressos later, that view had led him back into the bookshop.
And that had led him to where he was now, parking the Bentley neatly into a space that didn’t - strictly speaking - exist and unlocking the bookshop doors.
He turned the sign in the door’s window from ‘Closed Until Tomorrow’ to ‘Closed For Lunch’ and headed for the back room to flick the kettle on.
Muriel turned up just as the kettle clicked off; they were getting good at timing that, they liked to pour the water over the teabags in the pot.
“Good morning Mr Crowley.” They were working on dropping the mister. Crowley had given them a limit of only three ‘misters’ a day in exchange for letting him call them Muriel instead of Inspector Constable.
{He was working up to Mur but he didn’t think it would take.}
“Muriel.” He nodded at them, leaning back against the counter and watching carefully as Muriel poured out the water. He had already healed more than enough burns the first few times they tried this.
Muriel beamed when the water was poured into the teapot without incident, almost fumbling the lid in their excitement.
Crowley fought a smile, pushing his glasses further up his nose.
“What are we doing today, m- Crowley?” Muriel bounced a little on their toes as they turned to him.
They were so eager. Crowley couldn’t remember ever being like that, not even in the early days.
{Of course, just because Crowley didn’t remember didn’t mean he hadn’t been. If he’d asked a certain angel…but well, he couldn’t could he? He was busy leading the heavenly chorus in the next round of ‘how can we best screw up the Earth and all the kingdoms thereof’, while Crowley was down here, on his own side, teaching a different angel how to be human. His life was a joke and he knew exactly who was telling it.}
“Where did we get up to with music?” He asked, falling even further back against the counter until only his elbows {and a bit of demonic miracling} kept him upright.
Muriel pulled a notebook from their pocket, flicking through until they evidently reached the right entry. “We used Supreme Archangel Aziraphale’s gramophone to listen to Bach who wasn’t evil but made a few deals with the wrong sorts of people. Then we tried the ray-dee-oh and you said pop music was definitely evil. Then something by Taylor Swift came on, which I liked but you started crying and said that was enough for the day.”
Crowley didn’t blush, because he was an ex-demon, but if he did blush he would be red as a tomato right now. At least the embarrassment kept him from reacting too obviously to the reminder of Aziraphale’s new title.
{When he could say the angel’s name out loud without wanting to rip his throat out, they would be working on that too.}
“Right, well, I think you’re ready for the exciting world of rock music.”
Muriel poured them both a cup of tea, head bobbing up and down like one of those nodding dogs that had been so popular a decade ago. Crowley miracled away the splashes of milk that splattered Muriel’s clothes before they could notice. They had obviously thought today’s outfit through very thoroughly. Crowley didn’t even remember buying them a jumper in that shade of lime. It was very…vibrant.
He sipped at his tea while Muriel retold him the plot of the book they had finished last night, hardly pausing to take a deep sniff of their own tea.
Crowley had no intention of convincing them to consume it, or anything else for that matter. One angel discovering the delights of human food and drink at his insistence was more than enough for one existence, he thought.
“Do they make this music with rocks?” Muriel asked when they had run out of story to tell and the tea was either cold in their cup or long gone from Crowley’s. Aziraphale’s record player was whirring away in the corner of the bookshop. It wasn’t playing The Best of Queen, but Crowley had practically lived in the Bentley for nearly three months, so he heard Freddie Mercury’s voice even when it wasn’t there now.
Crowley grinned, tipping his head back against the couch to hide it, fond despite himself. “Do you know, I think they might.”
2500 BC
She had - rather predictably Crawly thought later - shown up again after everything with Job.
He now knew that while Aziraphale was having an existential crisis {although not one of faith, Crowley still didn’t understand that}, Crawly had been visited by Her.
“I know what you did.”
Crawly, who had been in the process of turning Job’s original geese from pigeons back into geese, had snorted. “Of course you do, you’re omniscient.” He had been sure to put a little extra bite into the ‘t’.
“I know, because I know you.”
“I do wish everyone would stop saying that! I could get into a lot of trouble if people keep saying that.” Final goose re-goosed, Crawly had flopped down on a convenient boulder. “Was this really all over a bet?” He’d asked eventually, still unable to not ask a question.
“You know how he is, so sure of himself.”
Crawly had scoffed. “I know how you are.”
Thunder had rumbled in the sky. If Crawly were someone else, it might have frightened him. Of course, if Crawly were someone else he wouldn’t have been there at all. It was a lovely thought.
“If you’re starting another Flood I’d appreciate a little warning. I’ll need a bigger boat this time; the last one was much too cramped by the end there.”
The thunder had stopped, the sun coming back out. Crawly was glad, he hadn’t thought he could handle one hundred and fifty days shut up with Ennon.
“It was necessary to test Job’s faith.”
Crawly had rolled his eyes behind his glasses. The same old story to a different beat. “You could stand to have a little faith yourself, you know. Just believe in the good in people.” He was starting to sound like Aziraphale, which was worrying. He really would start getting into trouble if he kept that up.
“You know why I created the world, all the living things, humans.”
Oh yes, he had known. She had made that very clear right before She swapped his halo for a pitchfork and tossed him off Heaven’s clouds.
{It was Hell’s greatest secret that they all did in fact have pitchforks. It was one of the only things he would ever lie to Aziraphale about. It was just a bit too embarrassing. Especially as Angels didn’t have harps. Lucky bastards.}
A long fall and a hard landing had still not brought him around to Her way of thinking, however. Perhaps there had already been something broken in him. He blamed Her, She’d made him this way.
“Why are you here?” He’d felt tired suddenly and he still had the camels to change back. He was getting a bit fed up with them wiggling about in his pocket.
“Your brother had a rather extreme reaction to the result of our bet. I felt my presence on Earth might restrain his impulse to punish Job for it.”
Crawly had snorted again; “Satan reacting badly to losing, who could have guessed?” He’d sneered and then added quickly; “and he’s not my brother. He’s my boss.” For a limited definition of the word. Supposedly Satan gave the orders, but Crawly knew the ex-Morningstar, he suspected Beelzebub was doing most of the leg work. “Besides, what’s he going to do? Murder Job’s children again?”
There had been a part of him that was glad She had turned up. By the time Satan stopped huffing about having his revenge plans thwarted, he would have moved onto the next bit of moping. If she hadn’t…Crawly wondered if Aziraphale would have had to do the saving this time, wherever he had disappeared off to after Heaven’s lot left.
{Crawly would never admit it, not even millennia later with a different name and a friend to admit it to, but it had hurt to not be recognised by Gabriel and Michael. He hadn’t been gone that long. Something else She had done, no doubt. It made him think though…Aziraphale seemed to have recognised him well enough.}
“But they weren’t murdered.”
And that had been it, limit reached, time to pack up the party and everyone go home because Crawly was done.
“Nope. You don’t get to do that. My actions are my own and you don’t get to go making them all part of your plan after the fact.” Pulling himself to his feet, he had walked away without another word. She would be back; he had been starting to get very sure of that.
Time to find the angel who lied.
{Listening to Aziraphale near tears, asking Crawly to be the one to drag him to Hell if only to have a familiar face do it, had reminded Crawly of why he had burst into Her rooms in the first place. Couldn’t She see what was happening around Her?}