Alright. This is Lani's chapter. So it's written in third-person Crowley's POV, and I gave her free reign of what happened with Gavin. After I wrote that drabble of him being afraid of Fergus as opposed to Crowley, that ended up becoming how she ended this, so.
Crowley stood outside the door to Gavin's chamber, fingering the blades on the cart beside him before opening the door with a sigh. He found Gavin sitting on the floor, ankle chained down.
"Haven't changed your mind, have you?" Crowley asked, half hoping that Gavin had, so he wouldn't have to go through with this.
Gavin shook his head, sneering up at the vessel that held his father's demonic spirit. "'M never goin' ta change me mind. Yer not goin' make me into ye." He bared his chin in defiance, staring into the dark green eyes that held a careful blankness. "Just get yer little show over with. 'M already bored."
Crowley sighed, snapped his fingers, and Gavin was strung up in front of him. "Alright, then I'll have to begin. Don't listen to me. Not a word I say." He walked back over to the cart, picking up a butterfly knife and running his thumb over the razor sharp blade, leaving a thin slice which he quickly healed.
He took the knife and sliced open the shirt Gavin had been wearing, cutting it to pieces until it fell to the floor. Crowley then began running the butterfly knife across his ribs with slight pressure behind it, splitting the skin and watching as the blood ran in between the horizontal cuts. Once he had cut across all of the ribs deep enough to have reached muscle membranes rather than skin, he made a cut of matching depth vertically down either side of Gavin's torso.
He swiftly replaced the butterfly knife, picking up a thin pair of tongs, filed to dangerous points, and a beaker of salt, careful not to touch the rim. He gripped the tongs tightly, pulling up at the corner of the lowest rectangle of flesh outlined on Gavin's chest. Crowley swiftly yanked the skin away from muscle and bone, then dusted a light coat of salt over the open wound.
He repeated this up each rib, trying his hardest to ignore the gasps and screams his actions were forcing out of Gavin. When Gavin's torso could no longer be recognized, Crowley gathered up his tools and walked out the door without a word.
The cycle of harsh actions repeated for weeks on end. Sometimes Crowley would take up the cat o' nine tails and flay the skin from the bone, other days it was knives with blessed blades and demonic hilts. But, at the start of every new day, Crowley would offer Gavin the blade, and get a curse in return.
Twenty years into Gavin's torment, and Crowley's starting to believe he's lost himself more than Gavin has. Taking up a blade again both pained and completed him. He was a demon in sales for a reason. Most of him had no desire to hear the screams, the dark curses and secrets spilling from tortured deep down, there was a piece of his shredded, hell-blackened, sorry excuse for a soul that took savage glee in the shrieks of pain.
But still Gavin refuses the knife, sneers and spits in the face of the vessel who held his father's spirit. His screams and blasphemies echo through the halls just as every other soul's, but his hold more strength of spirit. Crowley begins to think that Gavin would never break, that somehow his son had grown up to be even more righteous and moral than Heaven's Righteous Man.
That assumption changes when Crowley enters the room an hour earlier than usual, intending to leave early to pick up a contract in the evening. He had expected that Gavin would be awake, his son always was when he came in. But, it seemed that Gavin's internal clock was set an hour later, and the boy was still asleep in his cell.
It was not a peaceful sleep, by any means. Gavin was thrashing and writhing, as much as he could with a leg chained to the wall. Crowley stood in the doorway, watching, wondering what could possibly be causing these night terrors. From the lack of anguished screams, it couldn't possibly be his torture sessions tormenting him in his dreams.
Crowley leaned forward, attempting to hear the soft words being mumbled. He heard a spattering of Gaelic that made very little sense to him. He had lost command of the language along with most of his memories of being human. What few words he knew were from the bleary memories of cursing Gavin out whilst drunk. Though, when he listened closely…
The phrases were ones he recognized. Soft spoken curses and exclamations of pain. Snippets of a language that sounded mostly foreign. But these words, they were well known. Then realization struck.
Gavin would never give into him like this. In this vessel, speaking with this voice, he wasn't Gavin's father. He was Crowley, the demon who wanted another servant in his house. Crowley couldn't break Gavin, Fergus would have to. With a deep breath, he shed his vessel's form, stretching out and adjusting to be in the physical manifestation of his past self.
"Oy, getcher arse up. 'S'time fer a new day, boy," Crowley called out in a voice he hadn't heard come from his own mouth in almost 300 years. He watched as Gavin leapt awake, crouching in the farthest corner from him possible with wide-eyed fear.
"How..how'd ye get here?" Gavin watched his father's form saunter over to the table and pick up a knife that was familiar by now, testing the blade for sharpness the same way as always, lightly slicing his own hand.
Crowley chuckled, the rumble coming out lower than usual in his old body, "Well, boy, s'always been me. Mayhaps I's lookin' a bit different, but s'still me in here. Me. I's the one hurtin' ye, Gavin." He takes a brief pause, flipping the knife in his hands. "Me. Not 'Crowley', the demon ye dun know. S'yer Father doin' it. Yer Father holdin' the knife out to ye ev'ry mornin', then cuttin' ye up afterwards."
Gavin twitched, curling in on himself, attempting to cover his ears and block out Crowley's words. As his father's monologue continued, he felt the sliver of hope he had held onto for decades crack. His own father had truly become a demon who tortured without mercy.
Crowley stopped talking and flipped the knife one last time, catching it by its blade and offering Gavin the handle. "So, whadye say, boy? Ye gun man up and pay me back fer wha' I did to ye?"
What he wasn't expecting was Gavin's scream of anguish and the shadowed resignation on his face. Nor did he expect his son to stagger up of the floor of his cell and swipe the knife from his hand with a horridly blank expression.
So, there's another part of this. I guess I'm writing it unless I can convince Lani to write it with me. And it's just as important as this because it's kind of the aftermath...kind of. Anyway. Meanwhile I get to listen to Lani go, "MK, how do write Scottish" "I dunno, Lani, how do write Scottish and not sound Irish in my head?"
I hear Irish in my head when I write Gavin's accent, for anyone wondering. And I know that's wrong. But I can't think in Scottish. Lani, on the other hand, has been to Scotland before and she can do a pretty decent spoken accent. So her grammar is probably close to phonetic than mine here, just saying. But Crowley doesn't go Scottish all that often, lucky for her.