Growing Old is Getting Old
A/N: I tried not to write this but it didn't work. This is basically just my knee-jerk reaction to The Inside Man that I cobbled together in about an hour and a half. Enjoy!
Crowley sits on his throne, and he thinks.
He thinks about a lot of things.
About his mother.
About the Winchesters.
About himself, and the 'edge' he's supposedly lost.
The King of Hell sits on his throne, and he thinks about family. He thinks about blood, and family, and the difference between... and isn't there just a world of separation? Dean's words ring in his head, an echo he can't escape (or doesn't want to escape) and he thinks.
He's always thinking. It's what keeps him alive. It's what keeps him moving, moving one step ahead of the rest of his kind, ahead of every other player on the board. His mind is forever calculating every risk, every step, every breath. He is not a man (No, you're a demon, remember?) who ever makes a single move without considering every angle.
And he'd considered every angle of his darling mother, oh yes. From the moment he saw her in chains with blood dripping down her face, a part of him knew it would end like this... though he's still trying to figure out precisely what this is.
(You're alone, again. You're not really surprised, are you?)
He hates her. God, but he hates that woman. What he wouldn't give to strap her to the rack himself, to take her to task for all she's done to him, to make her truly pay with the only thing she understands: pain. She acts like he should be grateful to her for everything she's done, for bringing him into this world, for inadvertently crafting the being that would eventually rise (or fall) to take the throne of Hell.
But he's not grateful. In fact, he hates her for it.
She created him, but not through her presence, through her absence. Maybe it wasn't Hell that birthed the demon in him, no, maybe it was the day Rowena walked out with the promise that she would be back. The day she left him, eight years old, to face life alone.
His fingers tighten on his throne, blunt nails digging in. His jaw becomes a hard line. She'd made him feel worthless. Unneeded. Like trash that could be thrown away. Fergus MacLeod had never been able to escape that day, that feeling of being nothing. A loveless marriage, a son who hated him (And whom he hated in return, because how could he show love when he had no idea what love was? When no one had ever taught him how to love?) and a life of being just as low as he felt on the inside.
In a twist of cosmic irony, Hell saved him.
In the Pit, he forgot so much. As his humanity was bled out of him, so too was the pain. When the shackles of his human life and all he'd suffered were torn away, that was when he became strong. Became powerful. When he'd first crossed over, he'd barely remembered her. No, it had been decades before his mother's face had resurfaced in his mind. But even before that, that feeling had still been there... the nothingness... lurking under the surface, the only semblance of Fergus MacLeod left in Crowley, King of the Crossroads.
It drove him. It drove him to be more, be better, be stronger, and most importantly be smarter. He wanted to be important... indispensable. No one would ever walk out the door on him again.
Until the board meeting of Hell's finest, where he was informed that in the New World Order, under Lucifer, there would be no need for a Crossroads department. No need for him.
Tossed to the side again.
Fine, if they thought he was useless, he would just have to prove them wrong.
Several decades later, he steps over a veritable army of corpses and sits on this very throne, the one Satan himself had once lounged on. Lucifer is in the Cage. The leader of the rebels in Heaven is in his pocket. He's working to crack open Purgatory and become the strongest being on Heaven, Hell, or Earth.
Crawling and clawing, always struggling up the ladder one hard-won rung at a time. And each time he was knocked down - Lucifer, the Winchesters, Godstiel, the Leviathan, Abaddon - he got back up, and he pressed on, and no one could ever stop him for long. He would not be worthless. Never. Hell needed him. He had a kingdom, damn it, and no one was going to take that from him.
It was a mite uncomfortable at the top of the pyramid, but it was his. His.
That fear of being nothing has been his motivation, his driving force, his power for three centuries. All because of her. All because of what that callous, cold-hearted witch did to him as a child. She'd damned him long before the hounds ever sank their teeth into him.
She wants him to feel gratitude. Maybe before, he would have.
Back when being the King and having Hell crushed in his fist was enough.
But it hasn't been enough for almost two years.
That was why he'd let her stay, wasn't it? Pathetic, really, that even a microscopic part of him had fallen for a single word uttered by that evil bitch. It was the human in him. That stupid, sentimental, bloody idiotic human. She'd touched him, and he tried to remember the last time that had happened, if ever. And maybe that had been her weapon, the occasional caress on the cheek, the smoothing of his eyebrow, his face held in her hands.
She was ever the wise one, the manipulative one. The game player. Just like him. She read him, knew how to strike at his core, to get to him. She saw the weakness he held, that needy little void inside of him that he'd tried to fill in a hundred different ways since... since that night. The night he'd screamed out for love, for forgiveness.
Two years later, he still has neither.
(Did you really think she could love you? That she could love anyone?)
The blood helped, for awhile. Until it didn't. Until it destroyed him. He thought having the throne back would change things, would help him feel like the old Crowley - the one Dean Winchester remembers, the one with the army of loyal hounds and demon soldiers armed to the teeth, the one who's not afraid to get blood on his hands, the one who destroys and rips and tears instead of talks - but it didn't. No. He's still this new creature, this... puzzling, half-human, half-demon mishmash that doesn't make one shit bit of sense to him or anyone else.
And Hell isn't enough anymore.
(If everything isn't enough for you, then what is?)
He should've killed her, but he didn't. He let her live with him, and though he hated himself for it... would always hate himself for it... that black hole in his chest and his stomach, the thing that made him bored and needy and miserable and wrong... the pain lessened, ever-so-slightly. She'd annoyed him, and manipulated him, and pulled on his strings in ways no other human being (if you could still call her that) on the planet could do.
She'd acted like he cared. He'd never really believed it. Not even because it was her, but because he'd never experienced what it was like to be cared for... how in the hell was he supposed to be able to tell truth from lies, when he didn't know what care looked like, or love?
(He'd shut down when she'd said that she loved him. Because no one had ever said that to him before. Ever.)
Maybe in her own twisted, awful way, she did care. But everything about that woman was poisoned. Warped. Just like him, but in a different way.
He looks at her, and he sees a mirror.
He used to be her.
For the first time since the cure that almost was, he wants to thank the Winchesters for what they did. Because he's better than her. As he'd ghosted his fingertips across her face and felt her tears slip in between the gaps of his fingers, he felt something... give, deep inside of him. Maybe he hadn't been trying to be above everyone and everything, to be a god in his own right. Maybe he'd just wanted to be above her.
Crowley fumbles for the tumbler of Craig that rests on the table next to his throne. Tonight, he had done it.
He's better than her.
He knows it, now. He is better. In so many ways.
Funny how it only took a chat with an old friend to realize it.
He drinks deeply, the familiar taste of citrus and tobacco a comfort on his tongue, but he finds himself yearning for whatever that white nonsense with the umbrella Dean had whipped up for him was. Fruity, feminine drinks seem to have become a running joke between the two of them. It was a small gesture, but it was one Crowley appreciated.
He'd looked in Dean's eyes, and weren't they just that same Disney princess green as ever, and he saw a kind of recognition there that had been missing for months. A sign that, yes, Dean remembers their time together. And maybe he didn't hate every minute of it, and possibly he's even a little bit grateful, because Crowley had kept him on a tight leash. Pulled him away from his own darkness, fed him when necessary.
He'd kept the monster caged.
That's what best friends do, isn't it? You look out for each other.
Of course, the closest relationship he'd ever had to another person had been one born out of such dark and unpleasant circumstances. But he'd treasured it. Maybe everything rang a little false, and he'd known it was doomed to fail, but he'd held those few months with Dean close.
He never did delete the Flickr albums.
He doesn't even try to pretend he isn't sentimental, anymore.
He and Dean had shared a drink, and they'd talked, and Crowley believed that Dean hadn't laid a hand on his mother. He can see the battle behind Dean's eyes, which seem dimmer by the day, and he knows that the hunter's fighting the Mark with everything he has. Giving into that and beating Rowena to a bloody pulp was not something Dean the Human would do. Dean the Demon, yeah. But not Dean the Human.
Roughing herself up in an attempt to turn him against Dean? That was something his mother would do in a heartbeat.
Blood and family. They'd talked, and Crowley listened, and he wondered if maybe Dean wasn't really the dumb one of the Winchesters after all. So many years and so many battles had given him lines on his face that hadn't been there when Crowley had first met him. In the light of the bar, head ducked, lips resting against the brim of his glass, Dean's Hell years shine through.
Dean's looking older by the day. Time passes. Crowley realizes that even in the miraculous event that age takes the Winchesters instead of some supernatural catastrophe, they'll only be on this Earth with him for another fifty, maybe sixty years.
He takes that thought and tucks it away somewhere deep, along with the feeling that comes with it: grief.
Crowley sits there, and he feels old. Really feels his age for one of the first times. Forty-something meat suit aside, he's ancient, compared to humans... humans who are really just blips of fleeting light in a life that could last forever.
He sips on that ridiculous drink and wonders if it's inevitable. He and Dean. The two of them in some kind of parody of a normal friendship. Perhaps it's unavoidable that after so long as enemies, they would become friends.
They're a match made in the very pits of Hell itself. The human with a demon clinging to his back, and the demon with a human buried in his chest. All these months later, Dean still completes him, in the sickest of ways.
Neither of them know what they are, neither of them know what side to choose. They're hopeless, hapless, lost, but hey, at least they've got someone to commiserate with. He's grateful for his own personal Dr. Phil, because Dean gave him that 'Ah-ha!' moment he's needed for quite sometime.
His mother is not family. His mother is not even his mother.
He. Deserves. Better.
("I DESERVE TO BE LOVED!")
It had taken every ounce of bravery he had in him to make her leave, because even the delusion of having someone care for him, love him, is better than having nothing.
But it isn't. Deep within, he knows that. He wants something real. Not a hollow lie.
So he screamed his name at her - the name he'd chosen for himself - and he'd ordered her to leave, lest she face the consequences.
And she had. Tears streaming down her face (another lie?), she'd left.
Crowley made his choice.
(You can pretend it's not about Sam and Dean, but you know it is.)
So, here he sits. Alone. Again. But he's better off without her, and he really believes that.
Hell still isn't enough.
He still wants more, wants what he screamed for in that church. But now, there's hope. It's small, and shriveled, and broken, but it burns right there alongside that fledgling, bastardized soul he spends most of his time passionately resenting.
Hope's an important thing, really. That's all Hell is when it comes down to it: an absence of hope.
Crowley's sitting in Hell, on the throne, but tonight, he has hope. Hope for what, he doesn't know, but the future can hold anything. He'll live forever, after all.
An almost-smile curves Crowley's lips, and he toasts his Craig to the ceiling. "Long live the King," he says, ever-so softly.
He drains the rest of his drink. He sets the glass down.
And then he pulls out his phone and hits Dean's speed dial number.