Chapter Text
What Isn't and Came To Be
Chapter 2:No fate but what we make
"If you die here and now, in front of him, it will scar him for life," Crowley warned her. "Ma Cherie, you can't claim to love him if you do this to him.
If you leave him alone!"
For the first time since he found her on the floor bleeding, his little prophet looked truly wounded. Uncertain.
Her face crumpled, and her pale lips trembling with regret, while tears welled to spill down her blood drained cheeks.
"Make a deal. I can fix this! We can fix this… You don't have to do this to him.
We can use your visions. Dodge fate, save the world and lock Lucifer away." He waved a hand at the boy.
"He can grow up never wanting for anything… They all can.
Just make a deal!"
She winced, wavering.
"I saw Crowley… I saw it all."
"Not this, you said you didn't see this, what other possibilities did you miss?" He argued desperately.
The child turned his head, looking between them with wide terrified eyes. He lifted his chin, echoing his mother's favourite gesture of stubborn defiance.
"Mum does love me, don't lie… She'll love me til there are no more stars, I know that, like I know John 15: 12 and 13…" the boy asserted even as he cringed further against his dying mother's chest.
"Make a deal." Crowley insisted again, pointedly ignoring the boy. The child didn't matter to him, only the mother. But the boy did have his use.
"Live. For him, he needs you, Pet. The world needs you."
The little brunette's hands soothed through her son's hair, pulling the boy closer to leave a bloody benediction on his forehead.
"Weren't supposed to be here… Smartest kid in the world, … love you more than anything …" the prophet whispered weakly looking at her son like he was everything, ignoring Crowley. "Would fight Heaven and Hell for you…. y're my whole world, like 'm yours…Never… doubt it."
Crowley knew the mother, prophet or not, God's patsy or not, the child had always been her weak point, the place he could exert pressure to make her fold.
He clenched his teeth, sensing bitter victory.
She was going to make a deal.
He had her.
And yet something inside him struggled against the wrongness of his own manipulation. A dirge like note of sour regret buried in his triumph.
She didn't deserve Hell.
Michele pushed her son aside slightly, blood stained hands reaching instead for Crowley.
"Choose this day…" she breathed the words softly and struggled to raise her face towards his...
But instead of kissing his mouth to seal the deal as he anticipated, her lips brushed his cheek and a flare of golden fire surged into him through the connection.
A torrent of flame edged images slammed into his brain.
A tumble of phrases in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
Crowley saw himself die, again and again and again. He saw the world burn and the prophet's role in the end of all things.
A dizzying array of death and fate. A million futures laid out.
"Now… now you see." She murmured, hushed and bloody in the dead air between them.
"Please Crowley …choose right." She begged.
"I, believe, in, you."
As she spoke, her hand found the Grace extraction device, still sunk in her neck and forced the plunger higher. Drawing the last drops of Grace from her body.
She slumped back bonelessly.
He watched it all happen in shock. Stunned by the torrent of futures the prophet had imparted.
She died moments after, slipping away out of life without any fanfare.
Her chest just faltered into stillness, then, her green eyes slowly grew flat and lifeless.
Crowley knew she was truly gone when her sheltering arms fell away from the boy's quivering form.
Trembling and traumatised, the child continued to cling to his mother's lifeless corpse, weeping mutely.
Kneeling there in the scarlet wash of the prophet's shed blood, he looked down at the boy's tear washed face and those green eyes. Eyes which were a taunting facsimile of the mother's; and felt a sucking inescapable weariness, birthed by the visions still reverberating through his mind.
Finally, he slid the needle out of the corpse's neck and dropped the apparatus back into the box. Shoved it blindly into his coat pocket. Found and confiscated her iPhone; then climbed to his feet and collected the valise of spell ingredients from the kitchen counter.
He should leave, he told himself, he had a job to do.
He'd been Winchestered and the story had played out just as it always did. Another of the Winchesters allies dead.
If the visions were correct the Winchesters would be the death of him too, in the end.
But he paused, still gazing down at the boy and his dead mother; mentally running through the contents of the valise and the spell to seal the rift between dimensions.
Took stock.
Bowl, birch wood tool, Tablet of Destinies, holy oil, lamb's blood, Dead Sea brine, brimstone, Myhhr, Solomon's seal, High John tuber and Hypericum stems. Mercury, the messenger of intent. Like all spells of it's type, the spell to close the tear between universes required a set of specific sacrifices, poured out into each point of the pentical, each dedicated to one of the five magical elements.
For air, Silphium. Once the most valuable spice in the ancient world. The plant had grown wild only in Cyrene and resisted all attempts at cultivation, and so it had been harvested into extinction. He'd been forced to tap out a contract to locate one of the last examples of the spice, squirrelled away, buried as grave goods, in an as yet undiscovered Egyptian tomb, beneath the Sahara desert.
Just call him Laura Croft, tomb raider.
To appease earth, Goofer dust was required. The hoodoo staple needed to be concocted by his own hands, using his own gravedirt as a base to which he added a noxious mix of other, more harmful substances.
That one was time consuming, but a fairly easy ask… as long as you were already dead and had a grave to plunder.
For fire, the spell required Phoenix ash, unfortunately the Winchester's had used all of the ash they retrieved from 1861 to kill Eve, mother of Monsters. Phoenixes were rare, now rarer still, after he was done.
He'd been forced to tap out another contract to locate the nasty beastie. A Luger round forged made of repurposed Angel blade had been as good as a bullet from Samuel Colt's mythical gun to off it.
Water, called for water from the fountain of youth. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León hadn't been crazy, the place was real, and still existed after a fashion. He'd been forced to tap out another contract, his last, to obtain the location.
Turned out the fount was sunk in an underwater cavern, when the island housing it plunged into the ocean off the eastern coast of Miami during tectonic activity, long before Fergus Macleod had walked the earth.
And… now the secondhand grace of an angel laid heavy in the pocket of his overcoat, the sacrifice to appease aether.
There was one other item the tablet called for to close the rift; but it appeared that would take care of itself.
He should go, he told himself again; the world needed saving and he'd been Winchestered.
But instead he looked down at the boy again. Eight years old she said, the same age he had been when his mother abandoned him in the market square.
Something was nagging at him, and it had to do with the child.
Then, finally, it hit him. His little prophet hadn't seen everything. The child's presence was proof of that. That meant the versions of the future he'd viewed weren't the only ones possible, nor were they set in stone.
He'd been fooled by the prophets blind faith in her God and her visions of the future. Tricked into believing he couldn't save her by her own insistence. Now, he'd fumbled it, allowing her to slip from his grasp.
Furious at the swindle, Crowley clenched his fist around the handle of his valise, it creaked under the strain, causing him to look down at it and realise, belatedly, what it held.
Water from the bloody fountain of youth! Enough to heal and cleanse his stupid little prophets wounds, leaving more than enough to perform the spell and close the effing rift.
He'd let himself get overwhelmed by the narrative of martyrdom, been blindsided by the creep of unfamiliar emotion, and moronically let his trump card slide through his fingers.
"Bollocks!"
He'd been offered option A or B, and made the Mark's mistake. The mistake of thinking there were only two options, two bad choices, neither of which allowed him to win the game.
But he wasn't a mark… there was always a third option. The 'or.'
The option you had to find for yourself.
Allowing his eyes to flick to demonic red, he surveyed the living room with his metaphysical sight.
The prophet's spirit still lingered, as did her reaper, come to wing her off to heaven.
In the pocket of his overcoat, opposite the grace extraction syringe, Crowley felt the weight of the small Luger pistol his R&D team had created to shoot bullets smelted from repurposed angel blades.
He hadn't lost yet, and he didn't intend to; not now that he saw a way to win.
Disorientated by death, Michele's spirit lingered by the boy, her reaper intent on convincing her to leave the child and pass on with it to heaven.
It was the easiest thing in the world to raise his Luger and put a bullet between the distracted reapers eyes.
Then, moving quickly, he shoved the traumatised child to one side and busied himself strip searching the prophet's rapidly cooling corpse; ignoring the child's escalating cries of objection over the invasion and indignity done to his nearest and dearest.
Finally Crowley found what he was looking for.
Hidden on the prophet's left foot, concealed beneath her ridiculous, fluffy cat sock. Symbols inked onto the bloodless skin atop her small foot with an everyday marker pen.
Symbols that prohibited demonic possession and any form of infernal transport.
He stared at them with gritted teeth, stoking his irritation into a simmering rage.
He was heartily sick of his damnable little prophets unwelcome art projects and scheming.
Once found, the symbols were easy enough to obliterate. The smell of her charred skin filled him with pleasant anticipation, once this was all over with, he was going to punish her for all of this, and he was going to enjoy every damn minute of it.
Gripping a hand around the dead prophets jaw, he popped her mouth open wide, and loosened his hold on the meat of the moderately successful literary agent. Poured himself out in a cloud of red smoke and down, into that invitingly open throat. Seated himself deep inside the prophet's vacated corpse, now pinned beneath the slumped, empty body of the literary agent wearing bloody black Armani.
….
Crowley sat up, pushing his usual meatsuit away from where it had fallen slumped across his new bloody, naked, femininely endowed, chest.
He took a breath in, and forced the injured heart beneath those breasts into a ragged, lagging rhythm.
Sweeping blood clotted hair away from his face, he adjusted the glasses perched on his nose and reached out a bloody, diminutive hand to fumbled inside the valise. Extracted the vial of water from the fountain of youth, and downed half of it.
Crowley concentrated for long moments on forcing the dead body he inhabited to mimick the actions of life, until the waters dispersed within it and their curative effects took hold. Healing the stab wounds littering his torso and cleansing away whatever poison the British Man of Letters had used to double ensure the assassination of the Winchesters little friend.
Quite literally forcing the body he inhabited back to life.
Around him the prophet's body began to tick over automatically with the mundane functions of life, no longer requiring the exerted force of his will to make it function.
During the swap meat his hold on the prophet's child had slipped, evidenced by the warm cannonball of human angst that impacted and clung to the newly healed and resurrected body he now wore.
Good, he had the bait.
Crowley sat up still further and ruffled the boy's hair.
Now came the tricky bit, something he'd never actually attempted before, especially like this, why would he, he was a demon, metaphysical CPR wasn't usually in Hell's wheel house.
He had a functioning body, he just needed to recapture the prophet's soul and spirit, and reinsert them where they belonged. Get it done before another reaper appeared, to finish it's dead brethren's task.
Hooking most of himself firmly within the prophet's meat suit, Crowley allowed a few strands of his red smoke essence to extrude outwards.
"I need you to call your mother, MacGuffin."
His normal voice issuing from the prophet's throat made the child cringe and gasp, looking up at him in horror. The boy struggled to reel away and escape from the smoking, hideously wrong, red eyed thing inhabiting his mother's body. But, even in the diminutive body Crowley had demonic strength.
"Call her, boy!" He insisted digging his fingers deeper into the meat of the child's thin arms.
The child screamed.
As expected, the mother's soul and spirit were drawn in by the child's anguish and horror.
Quick as a flash, he reached out the ropes of his extruded smoke and captured her. Twined his essence tightly around Michele and drew her back into her own healed body, like a fisherman landing a fish into a boat.
Headily, he experienced the friction of her squirming and fighting against him in the shared confines of flesh. It sent delicious shivers into his core as she tried, fruitlessly, to reject his hold over her and the utter unholy invasion of her body and soul.
A marvellous taste of revenge, for every unwanted feeling she had inflicted upon him, forcing him to stand by helpless and watch her die. Making him watch his carefully laid plans crumble.
Still, she flailed about uselessly, like that proverbial fish out of water within her own body. Attempted to escape once more into the freedom of death.
But he held her tight, pinned her, tiny and helpless beneath the weight of his superior will and experience.
"I told you before, You can't get away from me that easily, Darling.
I'm the King of Hell. I know all sorts of swell tricks." He breathed the words into the non-exsistant space between their spirits, revelling still in the forced intimacy of their shared meatsuit.
"You're mine now pet, and I'm nowhere near done with you."
Then, her soul registered the child held in their shared arms.
Chuckling with amusement he tightened his grasp on the child, drawing another shriek of protest from the boy.
"I go where I want, I do what I want. And when I say jump, they all ask how high, on the way up. You don't say 'no' to me, are we clear?!
Take the wheel or I'll break his arm." It was a threat and a promise. He could ride her body any way or how he desired, and her God would do nothing.
He could use her hands to inflict any damage he wanted and she knew it. He had her beat, knew her weakness, and wouldn't shy away from exploiting it to it's fullest.
The fight went out of her.
He knew it would. She would submit to anything in the name of protecting her child. He felt the moment when spirit and soul meshed with flesh.
Dominance asserted, he withdrew himself from inside her body and back into his favoured meatsuit, climbed off her naked body and straightened his clothing fastidiously.
Left her shuddering and gagging in his wake.