What Isn't And Came To Be

Chapter 18: The Taming of Foxes

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Crowley pushed the laptop away from him, and shifted fitfully in his seat. Tugged a harried hand through his hair and down his jaw.

His eyes found their enevitable way back to the white office door, and the small red smear there. No bigger than his pinky finger the mark trailed downwards, leading his gaze to the deflated, empty blood bag on the floor below.

From where he sat, he could see a few pinpricks of red, beaded tantalisingly inside the clear, thick plastic; and for a moment he considered if it might be worth it, to go over there, pick the piece of trash up off the floor, and cut it open for those dregs.

Lingeringly, he imagined the feel of his tongue dragging over the inside of that slick plastic to collect those tiny sanguine drops. Speculated whether there was enough in there to give him what he so craved.
But alas, bagged blood tasted sour and off. What ever they put in it made it far less palatable on the tongue than blood fresh from the source.

The fact there wasn't enough left to shoot up, was what had triggered him to toss the empty bag across the room to begin with.

Crowley ground his teeth and dragged his eyes away.
He didn't need to start rooting through the trash for a hit. He could be at a blood bank with a snap of his fingers.
Better yet, he could go to a seedy bar or street corner, pick up a bar fly, street walker or junky. Make a whole day of it, in a hotel suite.
Give himself space and privacy to indulge completely; far away from nephilim and over dramatic little prophets.

But, the odds were bad, if he started draining humans he didn't need to get his fix; he'd end up in another spiral of overindulgence. Like that bitch Lola had goaded him into three years ago; after the Winchesters got him hooked on the stuff, attempting (and failing) to close the gates of Hell.

The Winchesters hadn't aimed to get him addicted to human blood, they'd simply done what they always did. Rushed in where angels feared to tread, without thinking of the consequences. Afterwards, they always tried to fix their mistakes (with somewhat variable results.)

While he didn't have Lola to lead him down the garden path and enable his addiction now; Moose and Squirrel weren't around either, to stage an intervention if he let things get out of control.

Fist clenched, Crowley forced himself to remember the contempt in that whore, Lola's, beetle black eyes. The way her pretty, oh so talented lips had curled in uncamoflaged disgust, after he'd confronted her, over informing on him to Abbadon.

"You're joking right?" Lola had spat, eyes narrowed cat-like, with all her previous fawning subservience melted away. "You, help me?" She'd scoffed, laughing at him in pure derision. "Look at yourself, you couldn't help anyone."

He'd thought she knew that hitching her star to his, was the only chance a whore like her would ever get; and the knowledge would keep her loyal.
He'd been wrong. Underestimated how utterly moronic your average black eyed demon was.

All he could blame such a startling lapse of judgement on now, was the blood. Feeling so much, after all those years filled with nothing but a blackened slurry of self loathing, fury and hatred.
Tasting the shadows of humanity's former glory was enough to go to even the strongest man's head.

Thinking of his folly was still like a kick in the guts.
It made him nauseous. But he pressed into the feeling, and used it as a tool.

He'd run the black eyed Trollope through…

But then, he'd turned and seen that bag of blood, still sitting there.

Moments later he'd been shooting up again.

Thinking of how low he'd sunk; he told himself he didn't need a fix, that he simply wanted one.
But that distinction seemed like splitting hairs.
Demons weren't exactly known for their ability to withstand vice or temptation.

He'd called the Winchesters that day. After he'd given Lola her traitors reward, emptied the bag of its contents, and looked around. Known he couldn't stop himself, sitting there, after shooting up in that room full of exsangunated corpses and empty blood bags.

So, he'd called Dean.

And the Winchesters had come, slapped warded cuffs on him and left him chained to a chair in their dungeon detoxing, cold turkey.
Not because they cared, of course, but because they needed him, to track down the first blade.

Now the Winchesters were gone, (admittedly through his own actions) he was on his own.
No, not on his own, he had the woman, his little pet prophet. But she was part of the problem. The source of this relapse.

Blood of the prophet was a rare vintage, a pricey drop he'd developed a taste for.

Ma Cherie might be one of the good guys; but she wasn't a hunter like the Winchesters. Neither was she a force to be reckoned with. The woman was something of a born victim. A Bible thumper who'd been raised light on Old Testament fire and brimstone, and heavy on submission, forgiveness and turning the other cheek. (It made sense, really, her Daddy struck him, from the little experience he'd had of the man, as the type to use the 'good book', as a justification, rather than standards to live by, for himself.)

The nephilim's little prophetic au pair couldn't be relied on to provide the kind of enforced bondage he'd need if he took a deep dive into his addiction.
Fact was, she was more likely to end up a slightly regrettable, drained corpse; now her previous divine protective order, looked to have lapsed on that bloody lounge room carpet.
Appeared that, now her part had been played, (Housing the grace needed to seal the rip between realities and lock Lucifer away.) her creator no longer cared enough to provide protection against untimely death.

Which left only Crowley's good nature, as a buffer between her and his more violent, hell-born proclivities.

Ma Cherie might be the infant nephilim's chosen nurse maid, but after nuking mother Winchester, the creature hadn't seemed inclined to do more than make the lights flicker. Honestly, he was beginning to wonder if Lucifer's son's potential power might have been a tad exaggerated.

Things between he and the prophet continued to be complicated, stained by the memories she'd infected him with. So very many horrible memories, of the two of them as Lucifer's co-captive chew toys.

Lucifer had made her suffer, because Ma Cherie was a prophet, God's little chosen one. The only part of his absentee Father he could hit out at.
Then, as if that reason for jellousy wasn't enough, Lucifer's only begotten son had chosen her as his caregiver also.
The archangel could never cope with anyone or anything being the favourite but him. And one mustn't forget Samuel Winchester's oedipal attraction for her. Sam was Lucifer's perfect vessel, his ideal meatsuit; yet the lad had vemvently rejected him.
A rejection like that, from the one person designed to fit him perfectly… Well, it had really stoked the Devil's fire.

Lucifer hated Crowley for other reasons.
For co-conspiring with Winchesters to lock him away, daring to sit the throne of Hell and showing him up for the spoiled child he was. He liked to believe it was also because he'd been a far better ruler of Hell than Lucifer ever was.

But damn it all, those memories weren't actual history, they were just a shared delusion; things that surely couldn't happen, now Lucifer was gone, banished.

The disconcertingly sticky strands of those memories felt like manipulation, a puppet masters strings, and part of him strained to cut himself free.
Yet at the same time, it felt like the two of them had shared a foxhole, and were bonded after a fashion. And that connection, those memories, felt like being less alone.

When he first took over as King of Hell, he'd thought he could change the worst of it's horrors and do things better; justify his existence, and feel like someone. Something. That maybe, he could make his minions love him. After all, if two pitiful humans could choose to buck the status quo and upend the system, why couldn't he?

Sam and Dean Winchester's presence in his orbit had affected him. They'd changed him. The blood and memories the prophet had infected him with, were doing something similar.

Feelings were like fine sticky strands of spider web. They stuck to you, then bound you to things, and people.

He was Crowley, King of Hell, he played the tune and made everyone else dance… but somehow he, Sam and Dean, and then the prophet, had ended up waltzing.
That dance, those moments of human connection— they hadn't felt all bad. It'd filled a void and he was loath to let that comradary go.

Thinking of that connection, Crowley found his hand in his pocket.
He fingered the golden, Lord Of The Rings ring, to which he'd had the second golden Aureus welded, creating a crude signate ring.

Rolling the ring between his fingers, he prepared to slip it on; as he'd done regularly, since the lad had clasped the chain threaded with it's mate, around the prophet's neck. Glancing at his watch, he was disappointed to realise he'd missed the children's nightly bedtime story, distracted as he'd been.

She was reading The Little Prince to them.

In the story the previous night, the little Prince had met a fox which had asked him to tame it.

The talk of taming had hit him strangely and made him think of Dean.

("Taming, is to establish ties," the fox explained. "Right now, I am a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes, and you are a boy, like a hundred thousand other little boys, and I have no need of you, nor you of me. But if you tame me, I shall become unique in all the world, and the same of you to me…")

When the Little Prince and the fox inevitably parted ways, that taming and attachment, looked to have brought only grief.
But the story seemed to say otherwise.

That was the trigger for yesterday's binge. Him trying to understand and clarify the emotion and lesson the story was attempting to inflict.

Alone in his office. In a blood fueled blur, he'd decided he'd tamed Dean, and Dean Winchester had tamed him in return.

Just like the fox would never again look at a wheat field, (a thing for which it had never had a use for before,) without being reminded of the Little Prince's blonde hair. Crowley would never look at denim and flannel, or a karaoke bar, without being reminded of Dean.

The thought had driven him to rage, sentimental tears, and filled him with a masochistic kind of gratitude.

It was probably for the best, that he'd missed tonight's story.

But still, he craved a distraction.

Listening in on the prophet's little routines, and trying to ascertain what she was up to, felt like the kind of distraction he needed.

Slipping the ring onto his finger, he closed his eyes, and listened.

At first he heard nothing.

Was the lazy little thing asleep, already?

Resentful frustration took him.

All he wanted was a distraction, something to take his mind off the skittering, out of control, sensation of need crawling beneath his skin.

Couldn't he rely on anyone, or anything to help him out in his tribulations?

Why did he have to suffer everything alone?

What use, was she to him, if she couldn't be useful when he needed her most?

Then, he heard a gasping intake of breath, and the sound of rippling water.

Eyebrow raised he leaned forward in his chair, and listened more intently.

The children would be asleep.
Was she perhaps indulging in a bubble bath and a spot of self pleasuring?

The thought tickled him. Perhaps, his little church mouse was less prissy than he'd supposed.

Ragged breaths filled him with delight and tickled his ears.

"Can you hear me." Her sudden words made him startle, worried that she'd somehow become aware of his voyeurism.

"Do you even care! Or is he right, that you don't give a damn!" There was a splosh like an object hitting water.

"Please, just— please! Can't you see I tried? What else was I supposed to d-o…" the words broke and trailed off into something that was more obviously a bout of weeping.

Disappointingly, it looked like he'd misconstrued. Easy mistake to make, anguish often sounded like the throes of passion, for some, like himself, the two cohabited.

Seemed he was listening in on some kind of emotionally charged argument.

But with what, or whom?

On his feet now, Crowley let the ring's pull draw him blindly; Until he found himself at the door out to the rooftop swimming pool. (Which would explain the splash.)

Was the damnable woman sneaking round behind his back? Informing on him to a demon or monster that had, somehow, slipped past the warding.

Or had it slipped past? Had the two faced little wench sabotaged his warding, to facilitate this very meeting?

At first, he couldn't see anything; neither visitor nor prophet, out there on the darkened rooftop.

It was all just silvered shadows, against the distracting neon lit backdrop of Dubai's city scape.

Then his eyes made sense of the shadows.

He saw small wet footprints on the far side of the pool, leading towards the glass balistrade, that circumscribed the roof's perimeter.

There she was; alone and hunched over on her knees, with her back to the glass railing.

It was the position as much as anything, which finally clued him in.

Praying, she was praying; though the vemhence and angst she expressed had little in common with the ritualistic invocations he'd been taught to identify as prayer.

"How could you allow Johnny to sell his soul!" She burst out again.

"Is this some kind of punishment? Because you think I love him more than I love you?"

That sounded an awful lot like an accusation, and it thrilled him to the core. (Even though it was based on false assumptions; and Chuck probably wasn't even listening.)

"Or…Did you actually want the world to end?
For us all to just sit back, and let your favorite little archangel end the world?
Are you bored of us, is that it? Do you want to wash your hands of us?"

Head cocked, Crowley lay his hand on the glass door out to the balcony and wished he could see her face, past those shadows and the dark fall of her hair. He wondered how Chuck would respond, if the deity could hear her pointed accusations.

"It's not fair— how can it be fair!
Johnny's a kid, a little kid! He didn't know! How could he understand—" voice strangled with emotion, her diatribe continued. "He shouldn't have even been there. You never showed me that… if you had, I—" She stopped.
Shook her head furiously, pale hands fisted in her own hair, as if she wanted to yank it out by the roots. "—I don't know!"

She keened, sounding like an animal trapped in a snare, attempting to chew off it's own leg; and he cursed the blood, still flowing through him.

The sound seem to resonate through the glass under his palms, though it wasn't audible. It transmitted straight from the ring to his mind.
That sound lodged somewhere deep inside him. Somewhere related to the chaffing ache of his blood addiction.
It made him want to turn and flee the emotion he'd come to spy on.

Those feelings she was expressing out there, they were too sharp edged and broken to be borne, in his own fragile state. Yet, all that doubt and fury, aimed as it was, at a silent uncaring creator, was something he could identify with.

Out on the roof the prophet had released her hair and lapsed back into silent prayer once more.
She stayed there motionless, on her knees, hands clasped, shoulders slumped. When the wind whipped her dark hair back, he saw her lips moving without a sound and the wet glint of tears.

The urge to go out there and tell her the truth, bothered him. An impulse to gather her up, and reassure her. To tell her, her son's soul wasn't bound to Hell.
But he pushed it away.

He needed her, and if she knew the truth he'd lose the only real hold he had over her.

Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes. They both stayed in their positions, frozen like statues in a tableau, with the glass, swimming pool and deepening darkness between them.

Until, he noticed she was shivering.

She was barefoot out there, wearing only thin cotton pajamas. The wind temperature coming off the Persian gulf and Arabian desert dropped off sharply after dark.

Humans were fragile. They suffered from cold in ways demons (who didn't truly feel anything) didn't.
Ma Cherie seemed more susceptible than most.

…He remembered that too.

Lucifer wasn't one to bother himself over human fragilities, the cells he kept the two of them in (once the nephilim was grown enough to fend for itself) were usually made of iron and concrete and lacked any furnishings.

Lucifer, like most angels, hadn't seemed capable of comprehending startling concepts, like that clothing choices for humans needed to account for the current season and temperature. Lucifer just dressed them, (or didn't) by whim and for his own amusement.

The sound of the woman's shivering, relayed to him by the ring, set off an almost visceral flashback.

That first time he'd hauled her into his arms, and shared his warmth, it had been prompted strictly by irritation and self interest.

It'd been hard enough to dissociate from his own misery without that sound, of her chattering teeth, constantly dragging him back to awareness.

Demons couldn't sleep (unless they were high on human blood) but most of them developed an ability to reach a drifting kind of blankness.

The constant staccato, so close by, had kept his nerves strung tense; jerked him back every damn time he'd reached for that numb drifting state.

Eventually, in pure frustration, he'd climbed to his feet, and stalked over to the corner where she'd wedged herself. (Lucifer hadn't started wiping her memory of the worst of his games at that point, and she'd been extremely scatty.)

When he'd slid down onto the floor and wrapped his arms around her, and she tried to get away; he'd sympathised and understood her reticence. (Fergus MacLeod had acted similarly in the workhouse, in the beginning, before he'd toughened up.)

But by then, he'd just needed a little respite from his own misery. In his mind a bit of peace and quiet was worth any amount of distress he might force on her.

He'd have put them both out of her misery long ago, if it wasn't for how Lucifer was an irritable bastard whenever he had to raise the dead.

She'd struggled wildly against him for a while.

But she'd been weak and eventually his bodyheat, and the fact that he wasn't taking any other liberties, had gotten through.

Her teeth had finally stopped chattering and she'd fallen asleep, tucked in against his side.

Finally, he'd gotten silence and a chance to persue his own form of thin oblivion. The comradery and steady rise and fall of her breathing had been almost soothing…

Eventually he hadn't had to force her to stay there.
She'd come to trust him, and even when it wasn't freezing she'd curl up next to his side to sleep.

Thinking of that now, brought to mind the Little Prince taming the fox again, sitting closer and closer to it each day…

He shrugged off the memory; none of it had happened, he reminded himself.

It was true however, that humans were fragile, and he didn't want the hassle of the woman catching a chill during her self inflicted flagellation and one sided argument with god.

…ooo0ooo…

"Trouble sleeping?"

Michele startled and looked up to see Crowley standing on the other side of the swimming pool, staring down into the water, head cocked, brows drawn together in a frown.

The demon snapped his fingers and suddenly he was holding the coffee cup she'd tossed into the pool.

He hummed in the back of his throat, turning the cup this way and that, like it was some bizzare treasure hauled from an ancient shipwreck, who's use and purpose he had to work out.

She wished he'd go away. She felt wrung out, cold and drained.
Swiping at her eyes with her sleeve, Michele hoped it was too dark for him to tell she'd been crying.

"Did you want something Crowley?" She asked finally, forcing her chilled body up, to stand.

"Hmm?" Crowley looked away from the coffee cup as if he'd barely been aware of her; and snapped his fingers again.

The cup vanished.

What she'd just seen was magic, real magic; not sleight of hand, like the magic show she and Phil had gone to for their tenth wedding anniversary.

Thinking of Phil now, made her want to cry again.

What she wouldn't give to feel his arms around her.
To have him tell her it'd all been a nightmare, and that she was awake and safe now.

Most mornings, there were a few hazy moments; when she woke up and it all felt like a bad dream.
Where she expected Phil to wrap his arms around her and drag her against his chest in a lazy hug; or spoon against her from behind and whisper risqué comments about how he didn't have any pockets, in her ear.

Thinking of their stupid in-jokes made her want to cry again.

She turned away from Crowley, the human shaped nightmare who insisted on haunting her, and pretended to stare out at the view.

She felt Crowley circle the pool and come to stand beside her, not touching, but too close for comfort. His presence seemed to suck all the air away.

She fought the urge to retreat and made herself stand her ground out of grim stubournness.

"That's Burj Khalifa." He said, leaning against the rail and pointing out at the spike beaded with lights that stuck up, tallest on the horizon.

Crowley was expecting some response, but she had none to give.
It was another ugly skyscraper in a sea of skyscrapers.
They all made her feel vaguely sick and nervous.

In the day time when she tried to look down at the streets so far below, all she could think about was the towering inferno, and earthquakes.

People didn't just casually build things like that, even in New Zealand's major cities. Not when, 'the big one,' could come at any time; not after the Napier and Christchurch earthquakes.
Buildings like the one she stood in and all the others stretched out across the horizon, felt wrong to her small town New Zealand sensibilities; like looking at them too long was bad luck, or tempting fate.

The mental image of twisting concrete and metal, of shattered sheets of glass plummeting down into the streets so far below; (like so many clear, deadly daggers,) haunted her thoughts.

"Tallest building in the world. 162 floors, 2,717 feet." He prompted.

She frowned. "So we're in Taiwan?" That was useful information to have.

"No!" He scoffed. "Burj Khalifa, does that sound Taiwanese to you?
Dubai, we are in Dubai, you little nitwit!
That monstrosity out there, surpassed Táiběi yī líng yī; (or Tapai 101, to a monolingual idiot like you;) back in 2009.
You're eight years out of date. Sit in on your son's third grade geography classes, maybe you'll learn something."

She was sitting in on Johnny's classes.
But seriously, how many normal people knew an up to date list of the worlds tallest buildings and the places they were situated.

And languages… she'd just never needed them… never had room for them in her class schedule with all the math and science subjects.

Despite that, Crowley's comment stung.
Ever since she'd become a stay at home Mum, it'd felt like people saw her differently; every time Crowley called her stupid, part of her wondered if he was right.
Once, people might have praised her intelligence, at school, Uni and work.
But recently, things had been different. When you were constantly ill, and 'just a Mum,' people didn't expect much.

She'd always had a creeping doubt, that perhaps she'd managed to fool everyone, or strangers were just being kind. All her father's little jabs growing up had left their marks; made her doubt. After all, her father had known her, her entire life, surely he was the most qualified to judge such things.

"Never fails to amuse me, that half of the tallest buildings here aren't even hooked up to a sewer network. They have trucks, go round daily, and suck the shit out of the buildings. Quite literally." Crowley snorted at his own joke.

She caught herself looking up at him in surprise.
"Seriously?"

Tilting his head, he smirked down at her. Looked pleased to have gotten a response. "Dubai, the land of more money than sense.
Build a glittering edifice to progress, whilest at the same time plummeting the fine art of sanitation back to the gong farmers of the fifteenth century.
That's humanity at its finest, that is!"

She wanted to argue that scathing assessment of humanity, but sadly, felt he kind of had a point.

She wondered if the building they stood on was one of the ones Crowley had been talking about.

The thought of all the plumbing starting to spew raw sewerage some day when Crowley was gone, with no way out— that was a new horror to contemplate.

She looked over her shoulder towards the place she'd hidden the rope she'd begun making, of torn and plaited sheets. Several stories down the balcony of a restaurant stuck out of the building.
She didn't fully trust her handy work, doubted the rope would hold an adult. But in the event of a life threatening emergency she could lower Johnny and Jack down there and give them a chance.

The knowledge tormented her constantly, that if Johnny died he'd go to Hell.

The thought forced a shudder of dread out of her.

Crowley must have noticed the shiver.

"You're cold." He accused, reaching out bodily, to turn her around as though she weighed nothing.
"How can you care for the children, if you can't care for yourself?" He asked pushing her ahead of him, back towards the glass double doors inside.