Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aziraphale likes to believe that Crowley’s range of expression lies on a completely different plane of existence than the rest of the world’s. His face is ever changing like silk stretched over unpolished marble, eyes moving with the same intention as his tongue and lips.

Crowley’s grins stretch across an endless spectrum, each rose-colored and simpering in its own way. Nervousness pulls at the muscles behind his eyebrows, and his lower lip glows from the traction of his front teeth. When Aziraphale kisses him, a red watercolor travels the bridge of his cheekbones across his nose.
Crowley uses emotion like humans use speech, nuance being a dialect in which he specializes.

Aziraphale speaks in Crowley’s expressions as a second language, understanding basic terms and themes. He knows enough to get by, and he is never entirely baffled.

The sun is out when Crowley slips into the shop, flicks his eyes around as though he is preparing for flight, and strides towards Aziraphale as though he is a guilty man walking a pirate’s plank. He presses the bones of his palms into Aziraphale’s jaw, pulling him upwards and kissing him, hard. Crowley moves forward, sending the angel back into a shelf. Crowley presses them together, as though he is trying to hold Aziraphale from asking questions. Aziraphale opens his eyes, and Crowley’s face is curled in desperation, his eyes squeezed tight behind the shades.

He slides his hands up to Crowley’s chest and gently pushes the demon away, separating them with the force of a light breeze. “Crowley, what’s going on?” Aziraphale asks.

Crowley responds with a broken expression. His mouth is a wry smile fixed with expired plaster, and his eyes are tilted wide like he’s just been slapped. They are characteristics of Crowley’s face, but they are wrong together. Crowley is a handful of plastic pieces jammed into the wrong spots. “Nothing,” he says lightly, and leans in again.

An accusatory form of his name is lost in another futile kiss, Crowley tense and wrong against Aziraphale’s hands. The angel lays a hand carefully on his chin, again pushing Crowley away. Crowley’s face falls, much to the avail of his twitching muscles attempting to rebuild. “Crowley, tell me what’s going on,” Aziraphale says, and it’s a thick statement.

“Why can’t you just let me kiss you?” Crowley exhales, and his voice nears a shout as his fist slams into the side of a bookshelf. Aziraphale extricates himself from under Crowley’s arms, gripping him by the shoulders and pulling him away from the wall.

Crowley’s face is entirely empty. His muscles have been injected with wet cement, and his countenance melts as the heavy stuff pulls at his skin.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Aziraphale demands, cradling Crowley’s face in his fingers. The demon’s eyes perk up, as though he’d only then realized he had fallen. A crazed smile takes its place, amused almost to the point of insanity, his eyes lifted and wide.

“They found out it was me,” he said simply, and his grin bubbled to the edge of giggling. Aziraphale can barely begin the motion to ask, when Crowley answers, “Hell. They know it was me who stopped the Apocalypse. And now they’re going to punish me.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale begins, but he doesn’t know where the sentence is going to end. The sounds stumble and fall off the cliff, as Crowley stares back expectantly, with more sorrow in his eyes than Aziraphale has ever seen.

“I’m going to be MIA for a while, angel,” Crowley’s mouth says around a thickened smile. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Aziraphale lifts one hand and places his fingertips along Crowley’s temples, resting his palm against his cheek. Crowley closes his eyes, and leans into it, face tightening in anguish. Aziraphale wraps his hand around the back of the demon’s neck, pulling him into an embrace.

“They won’t kill me, angel,” Crowley whispers into Aziraphale’s shoulder, clutching handfuls of the sweater. “Not yet.”

“How much time do you have?” Aziraphale murmurs in response, not moving his hands from Crowley’s back. A car zips down the street too fast, pulling a loud rush of air with it. Crowley jumps, and pushes away from Aziraphale.

“I need to go,” he says, and his face is broken. His eyes have fallen, the creases in his face drawn deep with ink pencil, his mouth slightly open as he breathes. “I don’t want you to be there,” when they take me, silently inflates the air. Crowley’s face twists, his chin pulls up, and his top row of straight teeth dig into his lip. He tears the sunglasses from his face, tucks them neatly into his jacket pocket. Crowley runs both hands against his face, scrubbing away the liquids.

Aziraphale watches the scaffolding go up with precision. First his mouth warps, smoothing the skin around it, and it stands at attention, in an ironic smile. His cheeks lift slightly, and his eyes open, like he’s awake, aware, alive. He stares Aziraphale down like they believe they will see one another again.
They both know the truth, but neither of them plan on admitting to it. “We’re doing lunch? On Tuesday?” Aziraphale asks casually, and they both decide to ignore the break in his voice. “You promised you’d pick up the tab this time.”

“Sure. Tuesday. I’ll have to cancel an appointment with a friend of mine. I’ll see you there though, alright?” Crowley is much better at keeping up a face, Aziraphale decides. He wonders why he has only realized this now.

“I look forward to it, dear boy.”

“Don’t look so sad, angel, I’ll be back before you know it,” Crowley says, and he almost makes it sound real. He turns towards the door, takes one step, two.

“Crowley?”

“Yes?” he replies, turning on his heel with the speed of a dead man.

Aziraphale steps towards him, clasps his chin between two ancient palms, and kisses Crowley. They stand, in the middle of a bookstore, millennia between them, and they kiss.

“Goodbye Crowley,” Aziraphale says.

“See you around, Aziraphale,” Crowley replies. This time, when he walks out the door, Aziraphale lets him. The angel makes himself a cup of tea in the kitchen and sits in a worn plush chair, settling.

He sits.

The tea goes cold in his hands, hours later.

Chapter Text

Crowley thought he had a plan. He was going to find the nearest place that served alcohol without too many stares, drink a bottle or four, and start driving. He’d drive without rest. He’d leave London, then England, and when he reached the coast, he’d hop out and start swimming if there weren’t any boats. He’d move until he hit another shore and then he’d keep going. Rinse and repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

He would run until he felt Hell’s clammy fingertips on his ass, and then he would start sprinting. After a millennium or two, they’d have to forget about him.

Forget about the crimes, the running, that he’d even ever existed. And maybe, maybe if he made it that far, he’d shave off the long beard and put his sunglasses back on and find Aziraphale if the angel had hung around. He’d find some dramatic way to appear and Aziraphale would say Crowley’s name in that surprised breathy voice and he’d smile the goofy smile and they would go back to how it used to be.

Crowley thought this was the plan. And - foolishly, he thinks now - he even believed that it would work. The truth is, Crowley leaves Aziraphale’s shop, and a sense of impenetrable dread latches around his torso. A leaden feeling weighs down on his chest, and he has to lean against a wall for comfort. He almost lets out a sob, but swallows hard to scare it away and falls into his car. The Bentley starts up with a concerned sound, but Crowley shushes her and starts driving.

He passes four pubs, each not good enough for his purposes, and then he stops counting. He stops looking anywhere but the clean glass of the windshield. Crowley drives. He drives away the sun, and doesn’t turn on his headlights.

He’s stopped in a field where he’s afraid to turn on the radio and hopes, hopes, hopes… For what he doesn’t know. Crowley’s hands shake and he barely feels the movement, his entire being seemed to have gone numb. He tries to imagine Aziraphale reading his aura, spinning tales of colors that humans have never seen and tweaking it as he speaks until he’s satisfied. The night is quiet, but there’s a roaring in Crowley’s ears.

In this non-silence, he climbs out of the car and screams. He yells to the sky to drown out the tsunami waves crashing in his head.

Why me why me why me why why why

The sound in his head gets louder, and he doesn’t have the lungs to compete with it. He whimpers, and tears sting at the rims of his eyelids. Crowley stares at a star-studded sky, patchy with the twinkling lights. He tries to remember skies that glowed with the lights of flaming gas lamps billions of miles away.

He wonders when he stopped being able to picture it clearly.

It could have been seconds or hours that he stood in that field, screaming, but he falls to the earth nevertheless. His eyes are clenched tightly, and he digs even fingernails into the clods of red soil. A sound goes off behind him in the stalled Bentley as the radio fizzes to life.

           CROWLEY, YOU HAVE BEEN AVOIDING US.

The demon does not respond.

            IT IS NOW TIME FOR YOUR COLLECTION. DO NOT CONTINUE THIS CHARADE, CROWLEY. YOU KNOW THAT IS YOUR TIME.

The demon lets his forehead gently touch down onto the earth, and tries not to remember the last time he was punished by Hell’s forces.

            DO NOT RESIST.

The demon does not.

Crowley used to believe if he were ever taken down South for a crime, it would be in a blaze of glory, to the death with a shit-eating grin on his face and maybe even an angel at his side. After the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t, he knew for certain it was eventually going to be far from it.

However, Crowley did not imagine a vaguely unpleasant burning light glaring through his crunched eyelids and thick arms snaked around his own.

The air around him gets warmer, and he can feel the movement in the pit of his stomach as they move downwards. He doesn’t push away, isn’t even sure of how many people are around him. His eyes don’t open, and he just moves his legs, neck prickling.

There is sound all around him, the sound of demons moving and talking, plotting and scheming, and he’s never wanted to be home more.

“This is your home, Crowley,” one of the demons next to him speaks, growling at a frequency that is only a light rumble on topsoil. He can’t figure out if he’s spoken aloud or maybe Hell has just gotten better at listening.

Crowley knows Hell is technically his home, and he should be immensely comfortable there, shoving his friends into lava pits just like the other guys, but it’s never been like that. Hell is the cousin’s cabin a half country away where the wind blows through the spaces in the walls and the heating smells like burnt toast. Heaven was the aunt’s house he visited as an infant before the family cut ties.

Home is Earth. It’s the tailored suits and smooth sheets and stacks of old pictures piled in a hidden shoebox at the bottom of a closet.

Home was books. Books stacked to the ceiling and cold tea leaves forming stained rings on the insides of cups. Home was golden curls and thick-rimmed glasses and smiles hidden behind scolding. Home was warmth under blankets but chilled toes. Home was soft skin and lips. It was smiles in half sleep but murmurs of whole truths and Home was everything that Crowley had loved.

But Home was gone, and he’d probably never see him again.

They walk Crowley to a cold, cold room, and he doesn’t open his eyes until he’s set on an icy floor and a door closes behind him. He breathes, once, and immediately regrets it. The air is rubbing alcohol and antiseptic, and it flows into his chest like he’s breathing tar.

He stands, shaking. They’ve left him intact, his suit dusty and palms starched copper. His sunglasses are gone, but that’s because he left them on the console of the Bentley. Crowley pushes forlornly at the bridge of his nose, hoping his darling auto is found by a loving human with a solid paycheck.

The room is an operation theater, compact and sterile white. It looks like any standard hospital set up, aside from the table with a spread of torture tools expansive enough to belong in a museum. The bed is covered in thin blue paper, and the perimeter is laced with leather straps. Crowley gulps. There is the one door behind him where he was brought in, in addition to another on the opposite wall.

He sits in a corner, wedged between a small sink basin cabinet and the wall. Crowley stares ahead, trying to think of nothing at all, lest his mind wander to his current situation. He wonders if he is meant to be crying, or sad at all.

He is mostly just numb. Numb to the thick wire cord that twists through his veins and holds his heart at a standstill. Numb to the kettlebell that swings from his sternum. Numb to the shrill screech that plays as background music to all activity in Hell.

He wonders how the angel is faring, without a single being to thwart his plans. Has he gone and converted the entire western hemisphere by now? Or is he enjoying the silence and reading some long lost text that Crowley had found entirely boring? Crowley imagines Aziraphale going about his daily business, perhaps a little disorientated by the lack of presence around him.

Aziraphale, far away, moves only now, as though roused by his burning ears, to dump the tea down the sink. He picks volumes and random and returns to his seat, setting the books down with no intention of actually picking them up. He leans into the upholstery, and presses his fingers into his jaw, thinking of absolutely nothing and entirely everything.

Chapter Text

// i'm a sinner, i'm a liar, i'm falling apart at the seams // 
~ruby day~

Crowley hadn’t fallen asleep. He had gotten as close as one can get to sleep in Hell – a sort of agonized stupor of non-seeing – but he was not asleep. The room had gone dark some time ago, the lights shutting off at once with no forewarning. He was left with the quiet fizzing clicks of the cooling fluorescent bulbs and the heavy sense of impending doom in his gut.

He gazes at nothing in the darkness, waiting for… something. He’s been in Hell’s hands before, but not since his initial screw up. Fruit? You were supposed to kill them you imbecile!

He remembers being dangled over a lava pit, the heat grazing his scales. He remembers being dipped in acid and set on fire and sliced apart and ripped to shreds only to be put back together and go through it all again. Crowley remembers the pain, relentless and constantly sharp.

But it was never like this. Hell was continual; a perpetually bleeding wound that refused to clot. They never left him alone. Never was he accompanied by silence and his own thoughts. This, this quiet nothingness wasn’t Hell. It was something different, and it scared Crowley even more.

There are hands clasped around his ankles, and he’s dragged forward. The lights come on quickly, and they blind him like a magnesium flare. As his vision flushes away, a man takes shape above him, and a metal rod comes slamming into his forehead. He hears his skull connect with the ground before he feels the pain; a cold spread that crackles away from the impact.

Again, the bar slams down. His collarbone, his kidney, parallel to his ribs again and again. It’s driven into his sternum like a shovel, the point driving the air from his lungs, chattering along ribs and shaking him to the core. He’s paralyzed on the floor, moving only under the force of the pole. Crowley pulses on the floor, seizing.

Against his knees, his shins, and then a foot driven into his side, just under his ribs, and he feels a creaking as his body groans.

He has yet to cry out, to make a sound, because there’s something wrong with this. There’s the pain, a low ache that resonates under the whipping rod. The bruises blossom like there’s spilled ink under his skin, bones fracturing and splintering like all the mirrors he must have shattered to get this luck.

He feels the pain, and it hurts, there’s no shame in that, but it’s… it’s wrong somehow. The foot returns, stomping down on his gut, and what little air he recovered goes out of him with a whoosh that rubs his throat raw.

And that’s it. The pain he feels, this thick soreness that grips him at every point, it is not at the hands of Hell.

This pain is Human in a way that the heavy hands of demons could never accomplish.

Clammy fingers strip away his jacket, rip the buttons out of his shirt with a pop. He misses it immediately, the chilled air rising hairs on his battered skin. His shoulders tweak as his arms are torn from the fabric. Crowley struggles to filter through the stars in his eyes, he needs to see, to see who this is.

His belt slips through the loops on his slacks so quickly that he can feel friction heat on his hipbones.

He should be moving. Why isn’t he moving? Through the fog, he reaches up one desperate hand. Maybe he’ll hit something, pull something, maybe get a handhold. The person jerks away, and he feels cold metal bash the bridge of his nose. His hand falls.

The lights have gone out again, a fluorescent sun setting into midnight. The pain fades away.

Crowley comes to at the creaking of a door. His entire body aches like his muscles were rung out, the bone marrow pressure washed from his body. The grimace pulls at the swollen, hot skin of his cheeks, and a low groan rumbles in his chest.

“Crowley,” a voice says, and a warbling chill shivers down his spine. His skin crackles against the paper of the hospital bed, his clothes gone. “I was wondering when you were going to show up,” Hastur purrs, and it is as though his vocal chords are being dragged down a chalkboard.

“Hastur,” Crowley replies, his own voice gruff from disuse.

“You know, it is such a waste.” He looks over at Crowley as he moves towards the counter. He picks up a curled, serrated knife blade, twirling it in his fingers. “All of these tools, and I am not to use any of them.” His grin falls into a frown. Hastur steps over to Crowley, where the demon is completely immobilized on the bed. The knife clatters when it hits the floor.

He lays clawed, slender fingers across Crowley’s forehead, flicking long nails against the leather strap that holds him there. “I wanted you for myself, I’ll have you know. Desperately wanted to have you on my very own rack.”

Crowley tenses under the touch, a sense of unease spreading out from the point of contact. “But I lost you. To these fools.” He makes a wide gesture to the room. “We’ve taken to outsourcing some of our work these days,” he says, disgust on his breath.  

Crowley flinches as the thick nails are dragged down his tender face, resting against his jugular. “Though it’s not as though they won’t take care of you. You’ll be delivered every punishment you deserve, Crowley, and there is plenty on the list.” A smile returns to where his face should be, the horns almost twitching with delight.

“I wish I could be there,” Hastur says longingly, pulling away from Crowley and exiting the room. “After you, gentlemen,” he utters as the door swings open again.

Crowley deflates. There is a belt tightened at every pressure point on his body, and he can already feel the red indented lines showing on his skin.

There are people moving in the room. He tries to count. Three? Four? They swarm endlessly around his bruised brain, none with any identifiable characteristics. There is just a low muted green – paper smocks, paper masks, all conglomerated into the one color.

Hospital wear, he identifies groggily. A hum of voices. Crowley struggles to separate them.

“-art with one to one hundred. That's one milliliter to one hundred.  Write that down.” The voice is calculated and female, punctuated with the scribbling of pens. “Let’s get started here, folks.”

“Wha’s goin’ on?” Crowley mutters, his voice rasping through beaten lips.

They continue to walk around him, moving about him as though he is not there. “Alright,” the same female voice continues, speaking as though her words are being recorded. “Patient six-point-one. Control test one. Ratio one to one hundred. No symptoms as of yet.”

“Wha’re you doin’?” Crowley tries again, squinting against the lights. Thin paper rips as a sterile packaging is removed. A shadow comes into the light, as the operator inspects it in the light. “Wha’s that?” Crowley demands, voice still wobbling.

He gives a mild protest as there is a pinch in his forearm, a syringe spills a chill into his skin. “Hey…” he murmurs, feeling a new kind of exhausted that he’s not familiar with.

But then the cold vanishes. It’s warm. It’s a hot, itching feeling that is radiating down through his arm. It winds through his whole body, and his digits twitch against their restraints.

Like he’s fallen into a patch of stinging nettles, it pinches at his skin, heat thickening into a fever. His skin breaks into sweat, his body lava and the perspiration ice.

A rush of molten rock, halted painfully slowly, dragging his entire body across the ground. He’s trapped, held in standstill at every point.

It burns, slow, smoking on an open fire. Sandpaper, cactus, whiskey on an open wound. 

And then

Nothing.

The pain fades, and he’s left with a hollowed out, empty shell, shivering on a hard bed.

“Control test successful. Minimal evidence of correction. Expedited process necessary.” She pauses, glancing over at Crowley’s absent countenance. “We’ll have to jump up a bit. Test two. Ratio twenty-five to one hundred.”

“Twenty five percent? Already?” a young voice questions.

“Yes. We need results, and going slowly hasn’t done us any good.” She looks at Crowley again, his eyes far away, unaware of any conversation around him. “Besides, I’m sure he can handle it.”

Chapter Text

Crowley knows, somehow, that no matter the level of hatred that Hastur felt for him, he would never be able to reach the extent to which Crowley was suffering. And knowing this, Crowley feels betrayed.

Flayed open, lying exposed to the hands of these humans, these filthy rancid apes that he had give everything for. He sobs amidst a scream, wondering and regretting every decision he had ever made.

He feels the second syringe, a little above the last incision, the open hole releasing a drop of blood into the crook of his arm.

It’s fire. It’s boiling, churning oil that rolls through his body, burning away the lining of his stomach and spilling the acid into his intestines. His body rejects it like a botched organ transplant, limbs bucking against the bed.

He groans, a thick and low moan that sounds halfway between a sob and curse. His eyes are open, never blinking, only seeing the dispassionate faces of humans in scrubs. Their eyes watch him, uncaring, unfeeling. They note his pain like it is a routine procedure – and, he thinks with nausea, it just might be. He screams what he hopes comes across as an obscenity, saliva spewing from his mouth in a foam.

His insides are being eaten away, guts thrown to the pigs and bones gnawed on by dogs. His skin is fried, smoking dark and oily.

The pain fades slowly this time, a slow burn like he’s suspended over an open fire. It roars endlessly, popping and flicking sparks at him, the flames dangling him over the coals. Slowly, slowly, the fuel dies out, logs snapping and sending heavy clouds of burning ash into his face, coating his throat, his lungs. The fire fades, and he’s left, coughing, sputtering, ears only clear enough to hear,

“Up it to thirty percent. We still haven’t seen any improvement,” followed by the quick step of rubber soles in sturdy shoes.

At forty percent, Crowley has an epiphany. A strangled gurgle, a pained scream. He hears the sound from his own throat, and a memory dislodges, tumbling into his mind. A metal bucket, sloshing with Holy Water, placed on the crux of a doorframe.

Ligur had cried out as his body fell to shreds, sound careening around the room, sending shivers down Crowley’s spine. Crowley hears his own approximation of the sound, that gut-twisting sound, and his eyes blow wide.

This is Holy Water, this is concentrated acid, liquid fire, this is agony in a syringe, and the thought makes him nauseous. This is what he inflicted on Ligur, and no one, no matter how horrible, deserves this pain. Crowley vomits, and the vile slick that hits his tongue is metallic like blood. He coughs, attempting to clear his throat, but to no avail.

Just as well, he decides grimly, I don’t need to breathe anyway.

At fifty percent, Crowley goes cold. The spasms halt, the heat leeching from his body into the icy air. He shivers against the bed; sweat seeming to freeze on his skin. He swears his breath clouds in the air, swears that his fingers have gone blue, his lips purple.

The room goes foggy, his mind losing purchase in the polished slopes. He’s stranded, high on a mountain’s peak, where air is so thin it passes through the body without ever touching a surface. He can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe, and his eyes begin to fade.

Crowley is lost. Where is he? It’s just cold and burning, a paradox that has fried his nerves beyond recognition. He’s standing in a blizzard but inside a volcano. Barefoot on hot coals while the sky pelts him with hail.

Crowley is lost. An angel? An angel in his mind. The scene comes crisp like the way summer falls into autumn, tumbling. The angel is sprawled on the ground, a halo sparking faulty and rested crooked. White robes torn, grayed and shredded. His skin is pale and broken beneath. Hot red blood.

Crowley’s foot crunches onto something; downward glance, shifting leg, broken glass. Twisted wire frames. Shattered lenses. His mind feels that this scene is wrong, knows this is not what he wants to see, but still, something is missing.

Dead angel, dead angel, dead, dead, dead. He moves towards the face, and the eyes flutter open. Recognition.

“Crowley! Crowley,” Aziraphale calls, strangled and gasping. His arm reaches up, fingers twisted and crumpled. “Help me,” he cries, voice failing as the air whistles out of him. “Crowley! Help me! Help me,” he pleads, and his chest heaves.

Crowley stares, watching the blood flow with a sort of morbid fascination. The pieces are there, but he is unable to connect them. Frayed rope, knots undone.

“Crowley, please,”  and the demon’s head is slammed with a sledgehammer. The scene is unchanged, but Crowley realizes, Aziraphaleangelbleedingdyingdyingdying. He dives forward, kneeling next to the broken form.

“Aziraphale! I’m sorry!” he attempts, but his voice fails him. The breath is knocked out of him like he’s been thrown to the ground. The angel looks up at him with nothing short of contempt, a disappointed glare that Crowley can’t shake. He tries to move his arms, to comfort, to stop bleeding, to do something.

Crowley is thumped on the back again, and blood spills from his lips, splattering on the ground.

“You didn’t save me,” Aziraphale says with perfect clarity. He watches dispassionately as blood pours from his mouth like a faucet, choking him. “You killed me, Crowley.” Crowley falters, disbelieving as Aziraphale sucks in a thin breath, a sob exhale as the light falls from his eyes.

Crowley wakes and breathes in the chaos: beeping monitors, shouting orders, pain and pain and pain. He notices dimly that he is no longer strapped to the bed. He’s on his side, blooding draining lazily from his mouth, a hand slamming into his spine, forcing air from his lungs.

He could escape now, with nothing holding him down, the thought drifts through his mind. But when he tries to move, he feels nothing. His fingers do not obey the twitching he commands.

“Patient is flatlining, ma’am.”

“Defib, stat. We cannot lose another one.” Crowley feels something in his chest detonate, a heavy feeling of pressure. Again. An electric shock that hitches his breath and shatters his organs. Two times more. His eyes open and air filters through his throat. Beeping, then a collective sigh as the monitors regulate.

“Good, good,” the voice breathes, pure relief evident. “Alright then. We’ve wasted enough time. Sixty percent. Let’s go, people.” Silence follows this demand.

“Are you serious?” a young voice spits. “The patient barely survived fifty!” Crowley listens to the exchange with a disconnected feeling. It’s all just pain, right? All just pain.

He’s instilled with a feeling of loss that he can’t quite place. Like half drowning, with the surface inches away, he feels helpless. Crowley has lost reality like a misplaced old book, and… oh. Aziraphale.

Did he die? Was Crowley really present? Is Aziraphale dead or alive or just somewhere in between? Drifting in Purgatory like Crowley, lost with no end in sight.

Tears slip from his eyes, and it takes several seconds for Crowley to recognize that his face is running deep red with blood. Crimson that drizzles down his cheeks. He’d never cried blood before.

He lets out a cackling sort of laugh that sends chills into the hearts of the people in the room. They rush to strap him back down, having nearly forgotten his presence. He laughs, and it’s high pitched and whining, like malfunctioning machinery.

Rubber fingers scrabble at his arm, searching for a proper vein. His body is riddled with holes, and Crowley sends himself back. He travels back to when the stars were punctures in the black blanket of night, circles scored by the beaks of birds searching for the sun. He wishes for a time when he could pretend it really was that simple.

A needle, pressing into him. He stares at the blank ceiling, wondering if galaxies and stardust will spill from his skin. He imagines the night sky pouring out, engulfing everything. He thinks of the peace, grips it with white knuckles, because he can feel it slipping away.

Crowley aches, and a new wave slams him into the rocky floor. He laughs again, long and loud, because, really, what does he have to lose?

Chapter Text

Sixty is floating. Sixty is disconnected. Crowley is amidst a sea of green, of rubbing alcohol and false words. Blood runs in rivers from his nose, his ears; he’s drowning in the white-water rapids that fall from his eyes. He can’t decide if he’s floating or drowning, submerged or suspended. He’s losing words in his mind, the meaning peeling away from the sound like the split ends in frizzy hair. Holes have burned through his skin, but he doesn’t feel it anymore. Not really.

They say seventy but Crowley feels thousands. Thousands upon thousands of mushroom clouds erupting below the surface of his skin, shredding capillaries and firing shards of bone into his bloodstream. His voice is gone from screaming, now all he feels is strangled gasps wheezing out of his throat, moving like a pulley in his chest. He finds that all of the sound seems to blend into nothing. The voices mean nothing anymore – they are as indistinguishable as the eternal beeps of the machines. Pitch and timbre are lost to his ears, flowing steadily in and out of him.

The pain now is only a cloud, all encompassing. It is distant and yet microscopically close, enveloping him so completely that he no longer has anything to contrast it with.

No sweet without sour, no fire without ice, no angels without demons.

He floats amongst nothingness, desensitized. He wonders if his eyes still function, if he is truly seeing anything. Sometimes, there are gray eyes in front of his own, blue flecks that float through his vision like bits of collagen.

Warm ringlets of blonde hair melt away like golden sheaves of fairy paper drowned in storm drains.

He swears that the sweat on his rough fingertips feels like the creases of leather binding, that the winding labyrinth of his fingerprints is ancient ink on thin paper. He smells peppermint, pastry dough, and oil paint on palette knives, but before he can place it, a stiff breeze whisks it away.

He’s lost here, hands forever grasping at smoke, the hot ash scorching his hands. Sand flows through the cracks in his fingers, the wrinkles of his skin. Cold air whistles through the gaps in his ribs, storm clouds in the back of his throat. Aches hammer nails deep, bone marrow brittle and cracking.

And for a moment, a fleeting moment, everything is pain. And, for that moment, that singular, ephemeral moment, because everything is pain, nothing is pain. And he floats, at peace.

The rattling of air against his ribs is music, the band picking up speed as the notes flow from his chest. The instruments swell as the blood continues to gush, chords crashing after one another in sync with the synapses in his brain. They pop, fizzle, collapse inwards like accordions.

For the moment, he is lost in the music, in the orchestra. For a moment, he is in a crimson tuxedo, tailored wool fitted against his skin. For a moment, the thin crackling paper is plush velvet, the vinyl mattress soft and supple. For a moment, the bruises are sunglasses, and the rubber band tight around his arm is a soft hand, gentle and kind. For a moment, he is high in a balcony etched with his name, looking into crinkled gray eyes. Music surges in waves to lap at their ankles, and he can’t imagine enjoying himself much more than this.

For this one, indeterminable moment, Crowley exists in a place not Hell, Heaven, nor Purgatory. For this moment, he is Home.

And as the clocks tick by on anxious moons above him, it ends. It ends as it began – with a needle sliding into a vein.

___

“Is this really necessary?” a voice asks over the trembling near-corpse before them. “We haven’t seen any change. It’s not working. We might as well put him out of his misery at this point.”

“No. No. We have to – we can’t just – “ the woman is manic, hands vibrating. “Another failure would mean ending the program all together. Every being outside of the atmosphere will be hunting me down,” she mutters, staring down at the demon.

“So? Would that be so bad?” the first voice cries. Any sense of professionalism was lost when blood started seeping from the subject’s skin. His skin wept as though he were soaking up something from inside him, the stain coloring him all the way through. “This whole thing is crazy. What are we even doing here anymore?”

The woman turns to glare at him, and in the light, she nearly looks as much of a cadaver as the demon they’ve been watering down. “Hell is the only place that wouldn’t blink at the screams. And Heaven is the only one who would pay for a possible cure for demons. What they each don’t know about the operation won’t hurt them. Like it or not, this is what we have to work with.” She worries at the cross on the thin chain around her neck. “This needs to work,” she says, and the desperation in her voice perforates the air.

“Well it’s not working!” A gloved hand pries open a swollen, stained eyelid to reveal an unmistakably inhuman eye. Though faded, the canary yellow still practically glowing in the muddled gray of the room. The pupil, blown wide, is still a deep fissure swallowing the color surrounding it. He pulls away, gesturing widely to Crowley. “I don’t understand why you won’t just give this one up. Demons can’t be cured with Holy Water! We’ve tried, and it’s failed.”

“We’re just so close,” she whispers, finger tracing down the neat lines of track marks. Maybe – maybe at Purity levels – maybe we’ll have a miracle,” and though there’s hope in her voice, they both take the minute to bask in the absurdity of the statement.

“We’re beyond any help now, much less Heaven’s,” he spits. With a careful precision, he pulls the eighty percent solution into a syringe, and watches as it oozes away into the pale, skeletal arm.

Immediately, the thin bands of muscle left in the emaciated body tense, veins standing at attention, blue and abused. He doesn’t scream, not anymore, the nurses can assume he’s too far gone for that, even if he had enough voice to rouse his vocal chords.

But the pain is visible, fists clenching, breath coming out in jagged puffs. Crowley’s thoughts are a thin, wavering wire, a singular phrase shivering down the line.

I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, I want to die.

But he’s too disorientated to remember that this is death for him. If he’s human enough to die, he’ll go to Hell. This is what lies in store for eternity to come.

He is too disorientated to notice the new flush of pain that burns when another needle pricks his arm. Ninety burns like all the last, and somewhere deep down, Crowley finds a half iota of energy to feel irritated.

So he lies, supinely, not wanting to die, but just wanting this to end. And slowly, slowly, agonizingly slowly, it does end. It all ends, doesn’t it?

He swears that it is no longer the earth spinning, but his own head, thousands of miles a second as the poison filters from his body. Millions of years pass him by as glowing planets twirl pirouettes over his eyes, backlit by the fluorescent lights. Sound returns to his ears, first only a low din, then splitting into pitches – the high, creaking beeps of endless monitors, the varying voices that speak in low tones.

Feeling returns to his body, starting with painful prickling at his toes and waning into a low hum of vibration in his upper spine. When he blinks again, a heavy and slow process, he sees more than he has in what feels like months. Hands pull at his arms, tacky fingers slick against the leather bands scoring red lines in his limbs.

The need to vomit is strong as nausea flushes through him, but he holds it down, knowing that what bile exists in his stomach will do no soothing to his ravaged throat.

After an amount of time that stretches on unendingly, Crowley sits up. It takes much longer than he’d ever like to admit, and his back muscles spasm so hard that he twice has to lie down and try again. But then he is sitting up. His body feels unreal, as though he has lost something.

And, he supposes, that ‘something’ may have be weight. He catches his reflection in the stainless steel that plasters the room, and hardly recognizes it.

The smooth contours of his cheekbones have darkened to black shadowed canyons, charcoal smears under his eyes. His body has lost any tone he once possessed, skin gone translucent and white like sleek moonstone. His clavicle stands an articulated plateau; he slides his fingers over the soft valleys between his ribs.

The image is eerie, and he raises his left hand, drops a finger, presses knuckles hard against his cheeks, if only to make sure that this skin is really his.

Even then, he’s still not sure that the blood-smeared starch under his fingers truly belongs on his body. He feels like a wooden mannequin, nailed together carelessly, old burlap stretched over the gaunt angles of his body. His skin is raw, buzzing under the peeling spades at the tips of his fingers.

Crowley is alone in the room, alone if not for this pale revenant that stares at him from sheer surfaces. He tests his feet against the sleet of the floor, the clammy warmth of his feet leaving ghostly imprints.

But standing transforms his throat into a beach and the stomach acid to tsunamis, so he sits, numb in a strange sort of way.

So once again, Crowley falls into what will never be sleep, an uneasy trance that exists only in Hell.

Chapter Text

Crowley comes to at the creaking of a door. With a sickening twist of déjà vu, he finds himself looking directly at the shape of Hastur, only this time, he is flanked by three others. Two are demons, undoubtedly so by the angry lines that make up their bodies, and a woman, undeniably human.

He stares directly at the face of the exhausted woman, and wonders why he cannot seem to place her, despite the feeling of nausea that he feels at the sight of her.

Hastur addresses him with a sound that vaguely resembles an atomic bomb being dragged down a chalk board, and Crowley looks up, breaking eye contact with the human.

“Decided by the Council of Dukes, you shall be released at once,” he spits, and the sound is like machine gun fire.

The words traverse through several filters until Crowley’s addled brain can latch onto a meaning at all. “Released?” is all he can manage in response, because people aren’t released from Hell. Especially not demons, and even more so demons who are being punished.

Sliced to slivers and spread across the planet? Sure. Sent to earth on a mission? Occasionally. Tortured until their very soul can no longer survive the discorporation and therefore ceasing to exist? It’s kind of their business model.

But to be willingly sent out of Hell, back onto Earth, Crowley is sure this was a first time event. Somehow he can’t find the energy to be happy about his making of history.

“Yes,” Hastur growls, and the sound rumbles in his chest like a storm. “We – those filthy bastard Dukes decided you had really hadn’t done enough to deserve Eternal Punishment. Plus, you’re our only agent on Earth, and ever since the Plagues, it’s been impossible to find a replacement.”

“So I can leave?” Crowley exhales, wonder in his eyes. Hastur sounds as though the words are twisting a knife in his kidney.

“…Yes,” he says, and Crowley laughs with a sort of incredulity. A grin slides onto his face, and he stands, wobbling. The nausea is overcome by the impossible sheer joy that he feels. Home, home, home, he’s going home.

And he looks back at the woman, still unsure of how he knows her. But this, this isn’t a waiter wearing street clothes in an antique shop. This is… uncomfortable. And not to mention the least bit frightening.

“This is yours,” she says, her voice like the frayed tip of an explosive’s wick. Her hands stretch out, a carelessly folded pile of familiar clothing resting on her hands. His suit. When his hands reach for it, it is with a speed that causes her to wince suddenly, and in the second that Crowley pauses, she snatches one of his wrists, almost sending the jacket to the floor.

A wavering finger traces reverently up the puzzled lines of injections on his wrist. “We were so close,” she whispers, sad eyes flicking up to meet Crowley’s. And it all comes rushing back to him, the pain, the eyes that stared down at him as he screamed for mercy. Blood rushed from him onto her hands. Her. She did this.

Suddenly, rage. Heavy, thick, choking black furious smoke. He can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t move. The words fight to the surface, dragging through pits of molasses, of sick and misery.

“Fuck you,” he bites. “Fuck you,” he screams, a finger jabbing dangerously close to her eyes. But Crowley can’t move, can’t lift himself from his position. His knees totter on themselves, anger sending him downwards. He knows she’s looking directly into his eyes – his demonic eyes. He spits the words again, probably in the wrong language.

Like an emergency alarm, the emotion flushes his body with red lights, screaming sirens, warning emergency. Chaos and confusion.

“You have the purity with you. Please use it. We were so close. So close. Please, please,” she screeches as the two demons drag her from the room. Crowley is alone with Hastur, glaring at him as though he has eaten a vat of raw sewage.

“The human speaks nonsense,” he says, addressing Crowley.

He doesn’t respond, still drowning in the vehemence of the event.

“You know the way out,” Hastur says, opening the door as he moves through the exit. “Make no mistake, Crowley,” he grinds out, the words said in a series of scraping and whining noises. “You will return here. For crimes or otherwise. And then, I will have you on my rack. And it will be worse than anything they could have done to you, let me promise you that.”

I doubt it, Crowley thinks, and Hastur grimaces, obviously having heard. He leaves, the door left open behind him. Not as a sign of invitation, Crowley knows, but as an irritating habit.

But he stands on legs that betray him, forcing the limbs that no longer react to his requests into the clothes that once fit him. The suit drags against the angled corners that make up his body, any fitting now a distant dream. It holds weight differently, and he feels obnoxiously unbalanced in his old clothes.

He moves slowly, a shifting of emaciated muscle that somehow brings him closer to the door. When Crowley passes its threshold, there is no relief, no forgiveness, no reprieve from the torture. After all, he’s still in Hell.

After he passes through the strange in-between place that sends his empty stomach whirling, the air takes on a different shape. The heat dissipates like it is peeled from his cracking skin, cool night mist settling instead. The fizzing and popping of Hell’s mourning souls is replaced by the hum of insects, crickets wheedling their sound through the night.

He’s on Earth again, in a familiar field.

Crowley barks a laugh, emotion jumping in his chest like something foreign. The Bentley is there, in front of him, shifting away from the scorched crop circle he left with his entry.

When his hand falls flat against the cool metal, the engine roars to life in greeting. He takes a moment to breathe it all in before sliding into the familiar seat.

“I’m going home,” he says quietly, and the car slides forward before his foot has pressed the gas pedal.

Crowley’s not sure how much driving he actually does, as he spends the majority of the night with the windows rolled down, thick tufts of air whipping around his face and hands, the stars above him scattered like handfuls of glitter.

The moon moves with him, guiding him home.

He start up to the beginning instrumentals of Best of Queen, the Bentley gently nudging him awake. Aziraphale’s street falls into his vision, the most familiar place he can recall. But something is off; a weight in his breast pocket.

He digs a thin hand into the space, and finds two objects. When he pulls them out, they fall into the yellow streetlight that glows above him.

A choked yelp catches in his throat, as he recognizes what lies in his hand. A syringe and a vial. He drops them in shock, air hovering in his mouth, the breath not making it either way. He leans down almost automatically, holding the syringe in his left hand, the vial in his right.

The smooth cylinder rolls in the lined palm of his hand, the Bentley’s engine clicking quietly as it cools. He remembers the woman’s words – You have the purity with you… please, please – so it was literal then. She had left him with the final dose of Holy Water. A tremor rocks his spine.

The desperation that had colored her voice pulls thickly at his memory. He didn’t owe her anything; the opposite entirely, if anything.

So why was he considering this?

Why? says a quiet voice at the back of his head. His brain is rotted, tissue inflamed and hot against the inside of his skull. It’s all arbitrary, though; Crowley doesn’t exist in that brain. He is somewhere incomprehensible, his true Self floating around in the nether in between bodies. He has not been there in a long, long time.

But why, then, he wonders, does he hear this voice in the back of his human bodied brain? Why can he feel some… something nudging questions at him. Why, why, why?

He feels the liquid in the bottle, warmed against his skin, the thin paper label adhered securely to the bottle.

“PURITY,” it reads, heavy typescript in clear black ink that rubs gray under his thumb. PATIENT 6.0 | 100 PER CENT HOLY WATER | 1 CC BY INJECTION | ONE TIME USAGE.

A familiar tendril of anger unfurls in his chest. He’s just a number. Six-point-zero. He is not the pain that they wrought upon him, the agony he was dragged through. To them, he is not the corpse body that Crowley now inhabits. He is not anything. He is only a number.

Why do it? Why?

“Why?” Crowley mutters to himself, sputtering the words into the stale leather air of the Bentley. “Because-” He draws the liquid into the syringe with shaking fingers. “Because fuck her.” The needle jams into his thigh, ripping a supernova into the worn thin fabric of his pants. It burns its way through his muscle like the Morningstar, and the syringe falls from the rigid muscle of his hand. “That’s why,” he spits, sending a burning needle through the voice in the back of his head.

The burn spreads like a wildfire in his leg, crumbling dry needles and underbrush to ash as it rages. His taut muscles search for the door handle, throwing it away from himself as he stumbles from the seat, landing firmly on the pavement. Veins stand away from his neck, as though trying to escape his skin.

He limps towards the door, dragging his uncooperative leg like a cement fence post. His windpipe is tightening like a gallows, black at the corners of his eyes. But the door is so close.

Crowley tries to lift his leg onto the first step, concrete worn down where weather had taken its toll. But it may as well be a cliff, and he totters backwards, nearly cracking his head on the pavement.

A couple giggles behind him as they pass, presuming he’s a clumsy drunk. He nearly screams out of frustration. But he can’t spare the energy, and the rushing in his head is like being tumbled in an ocean wave.

Crowley falls, hands barely catching him as his fingernails scrape on the edge of the second step. He drags himself up by the doorknob, leaning in the frame of the bookstore. So so close. He wonders if he’s bleeding – it feels like it.

He wonders if he has blood left to bleed.

His hand barely connects with the old wood when the door swings open. His lungs have collapsed, the air no longer heavy enough to fill them fully. Oxygen rushes from the fissures that form in his respiratory system.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, in that surprised breathy voice. He smiles a goofy smile, and a cataclysmic avalanche of relief falls over his face, the expression lost to Crowley. He’s never seen it before. “I thought I – I knew you were here,” he coos, and the roaring violence in Crowley’s ears dulls to a light rain.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley manages, before promptly collapsing. But arms catch him, and he doesn’t hit the ground.

“Are you –“ Aziraphale begins, but stops himself. “You’ll be okay, dear boy, I’ve got you.” He’s being moved inside, and Crowley feels a couch settle under his back. A soft hand spreads the sweaty hair away from his eyes, fingers deftly pulling the shades from his ears. Aziraphale gasps. “Crowley, your eyes,” he trails off.

“What?” Crowley barks, icy fear flushing his gut.

“They’re…”

“What?” he nearly screams, shoving at the couch, poisoned muscles sending him flat on his back. He searches for shapes of words in Aziraphale’s mouth – human, brown, blue, bleeding, gone, anything but silence – but what he hears instead is,

“Bright,” Aziraphale says simply, and an innocent sort of happiness curls into his face. He places a careful hand against the sallow curve of Crowley’s now gaunt face. “Brighter than I’ve ever seen, Crowley.”

Realization falls over the demon like a veil. Still a demon. Still alive. And not only that, but bright. He covers Aziraphale’s hand with his own.

The burn is fading, the flames dying as he stares into Aziraphale’s eyes. Silver, blue, iridescent. He reaches up and wraps his hand along the beginning of the angel’s spine, fingers resting on his neck. Crowley lets his eyes close, pulling him close, resting their foreheads together.

It smells like old books and fatigued leather; like a cloying sweetness and tinny peppermint. It smells like tea and sugar, like fine food and china. Wool and shoe polish and ancient cotton. Soft skin, smile lines. Worry lines and scolding.

It smells like home. It smells pure.

Crowle takes a deep breath, lets the feeling wash over him.

I’m Home. I’m pure. I’m a demon, and I’m pure.