The end of the Apocalypse finds Crowley and Bela in his ramshackle hideaway, watching the skies and waiting for any sign of improvement, a hint that they can stop cowering behind his hex-bags and protective sigils, letting Bruiser, Crowley's favorite hound, pace outside to make sure that. When the realization comes, they feel it — all the demons do. First, Bela needs to sit down. The nausea overwhelms her in a way it hasn't since she was human, or possibly since suffering Alastair's razor and still knowing that he preferred Dean, his special project. Then, pain shocks through her entire body, her head hits the kitchen table and feels like it might split in two...
"That'd be what we were looking for." She trembles as she forces herself to look up into Crowley's eyes. They've reverted to their natural red — she assumes, correctly, that hers have done the same — and for all he wants to look composed, his skin has an unnatural pallor and his smile, a quivering that just looks wrong on him.
"What was it?" She sighs and jams her thumbs into the bridge of her nose; it does nothing to help the pain.
Crowley's hand on her shoulder feels frigid, but firm. Comforting. "Well, Lucifer did create us, poppet. All of us have a link back to him, wouldn't exist without his power and all. Rather makes sense for his pain to manifest in our pain."
Bela nods, but says nothing of the pit in her stomach.
Something that everyone but the Winchesters knows about Bela Talbot is this: she was all too ready to become a demon. She keeps her reasons for this on a need-to-know basis only, but the fact remains that, after all the hardship she suffered on Earth — the sexual assault from her father and his brother, her alcoholic mother's silent acceptance of this fact and enablement of it, her relationship with Lilith, in all its ups and downs, and the final choice she had to make between shooting herself and letting a Hell-hound take her — she only lasted three years, by Hell reckoning, underneath Alastair's careful ministrations, the craftsmanship that he put into torturing her.
Something that very few beings know goes thus: Bela chose to shoot herself. Considering that she was going to Hell either way, then she wanted to go down there on her own terms.
Something that she's only shared with a handful of her closest, most trusted friends: she cried when Sam Winchester annihilated Lilith. For everything they did to each other, Lilith had been the one to save her from her father's house, if indirectly, through one of her Crossroads Demons, and for years, Lilith was the only one she trusted. Bela didn't know, at the time, about the plot to break the Sixty-Six Seals and set Lucifer free — she just knew that Lilith's icy fingers felt right around her waist, and that Lilith's was the kiss she preferred above all others. When Lilith blindfolded her, or smacked her around, or threw her to the bed and took her without asking first, Bela always gave her consent. She loved Lucifer's First, even when it was clear that Lilith only loved the Morningstar.
And something that Bela Talbot has never told anyone but Crowley is: there's a reason why she tries to treat her meat-suits nicely. She picks up a new one after Dean defuses the Apocalypse — a spritely ginger girl with a mess of gorgeous ringlets — and lets her other one go back to college in New York. She doesn't need to sleep, but she does for the sakes of the girls she possesses. All too clearly, she remembers Lilith smoking into her, riding her around for days, weeks, and only letting Bela see the things she'd later wish she could forget — the people they'd killed, the contorted faces of their torture victims, the scars all up and down Bela's body that Lilith made her put there, "Just to make sure you understand who you belong to, sweetie" — then leaving her alone, exhausted, hopeless. So Bela lets her girls get some rest.
The problem with sleeping is that Bela dreams.
Hell comes back to her in full Technicolor when she lets her eyes slip closed, and when she jerks awake again, she always needs to find some way to make the memories return to their repressed state. This morning finds her in a scalding shower, going up and down her body with a washcloth as though scrubbing hard enough will take away whatever it is she's feeling, the dark stain in her spirit that refuses to let her live. Water hisses as it hits her freeing skin, rolls down her neck and shoulders, burns. She gasps, but not too secretly, she loves that pain.
She lets the shower run until the water turns as cold as she is, and then for a few minutes afterward. When she slinks out, she finds herself embraced, without a warning; she glances up at Crowley's face. "You ought to stop roughing yourself up over this, you know?" he offers.
"What are we supposed to do, now?" she whispers. "Is there still a place for our kind in a world like this one?"
He chuckles. "If there isn't, then I say we make one ourselves. We've got one leg up on the Devil, anyway. Neither of us are psychotically obsessed with old betrayals."
Bela sighs, and relaxes into his hold. He might be far from perfect, but at least Crowley understands her.