Work Text:
2025AD
It was rare for there to be moments when Muriel didn’t occupy the bookshop, but when they came, against his better judgement, Crowley would always take them.
He wasn’t entirely certain if Muriel knew about his visits, but then it was only infrequently that he could actually tell what was going through the younger angel’s mind. For all they embodied innocence and naivete, stupidity was far from the accurate word to describe them and so Crowley was hesitant to presume they were unaware.
Everytime he returned, Crowley noticed something different. It was small details, like the placement of a coffee table or an armchair being moved, but it was all those small little details that betrayed the sanctity of the location. It was books being sold, albeit not many, but far more than ever would’ve been before. Slowly, the place was becoming less and less of the bookshop Crowley remembered.
He would enter just to absorb the atmosphere, and then mourn all the ways in which the atmosphere was different. Gone was the gentle, homely warmth and it was replaced with an unnatural, holy cleanliness that seemed so wrong in the bookshop.
Every object was a reminder of a memory, and even now there was comfort to be found in those. A book Aziraphale had been holding while gently chastising Crowley, the desk he’d written diary entries on. Crowley traced each one in turn, craving the intimacy they represented.
He was drunk that day, but that was unsurprising. Crowley rarely did anything sober these days, finding it far preferable to only be half-present; thoughts were much more tolerable when all emotion was buried beneath far too many layers of whisky to count.
He ran his fingers along one of the bookshelves, and he mourned the presence of dust - Muriel clearly wasn’t as rigorous about the cleaning as Aziraphale had been. That should’ve made Crowley angry, and maybe if he was a bit more sober, he would’ve been.
Parts of it were organised differently, while other parts remained untouched. Not reordered by Gabriel or Muriel or any intrusive customer, in the same order they’d been arranged in when the shop first opened. Somehow that section was more painful - the parts that were different could at least induce a dissonance. All that was unchanged was only a reminder of what was no longer the same, and that was almost worse.
The circular carpet had been relocated, no longer covering the summoning circle. It was still covered by a rug, but a rectangular one that wasn’t quite so complementary. Less thought behind the aesthetic of it, throwing away all the careful consideration Aziraphale had placed into it, as though it meant nothing.
Then again, the last 6000 years had apparently meant nothing, so maybe that was fitting.
***
Crowley sat in the coffee shop, a bottle of whisky stood on the table, 10’o’clock at night. In theory, the shop had been closed for several hours already, but Nina had no objections to Crowley staying here. He sat next to the window, staring out blankly towards the bookshop.
The lights inside it were still on, seeping through the drawn curtains to illuminate the exterior despite how it should’ve closed hours ago. The gold lettering reflected the streetlamp light, a gentle yellow glow highlighting the name. The crimson looked prettier in the moonlight, glistening like blood.
Nina loudly placed down a mug next to Crowley, drawing him out of his stupor. He stared at her with confusion as she sat down opposite him, her own glass in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.
“If we’re doing this, we’re doing it properly,” she offered as way of explanation. “No drinking straight from the bottle shit.”
Crowley smiled briefly at her, before turning to look out the window again. He went to grab the bottle, but was forced to glance back when he couldn’t find it within his grasp; the moment he did so, the mug was pushed into his hand. He would’ve glared at Nina if he’d had the energy to.
Instead he once again turned his head towards the bookshop. To allow his focus to drift felt almost like a betrayal, and despite everything, that concept stung more than anything else could.
“You never told me what happened,” Nina spoke quietly. “Or where he went.”
Crowley shrugged, which wasn’t entirely out of character except for the absence of harshness to his tone, all the rough edges smoothed over by alcohol. “Not much to say, really.” He took a sip of whisky from the mug, but it didn’t feel quite the same when it wasn’t directly from the bottle. “He found the one place he would be willing to go, even knowing I’d never follow.”
There was a beat of silence before Nina spoke. “Heaven, you mean?”
Crowley shot her an incredulous glare. “Of course I mean Heaven. What else could I be referring to?”
Nina shrugged, drinking from her glass. “Worth checking. You forget, I barely knew the pair of you.”
Crowley grunted, looking away from her and back out to the window. The lights were still on.
“Tell me about the bookshop,” Nina spoke.
“He opened it in 1809, first day of.” Immediately she could tell she’d latched onto the right thing, if only from the way Crowley’s eyes gleamed or the energy in his voice. “The opening was slightly complicated, but it wasn’t ever about the opening. Hell, he never wanted to even sell books, just have a justifiable place to store them.”
Crowley paused only to take a breath, despite the pointlessness of the action.
“At the start, every book was a first edition, d’you know that? Signed as well. Maybe not only those anymore, but so many stories arrived there as they were written. Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein; it’s impressive to me and I don’t even like reading. It got burnt down once, a few years ago, and ever since then, he’d keep fire extinguishers around every corner. There’s a reason he doesn’t allow candles in there.”
His voice quietened slightly, his brow furrowed as though remembering something buried.
“I watched it go up in flames. I thought he was in there too - then the next day, everything was fixed. Almost the same as it was before.”
“Sometimes, change isn’t always bad,” Nina noted.
Crowley smiled wryly. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”
He took another drink of whisky, and let his eyes fall back out the window over to the bookshop.
The lights were off by now.