"You know, darling, there are far better ways to go about romancing a bloke." Crowley tilted his head, giving Bobby the best attempt at an innocent smirk he could muster while in the nude from the neck to the waist. Just for the sake of getting in the spirit of things, the demon pretended to struggle against the (sigil-marked, escape-that-wasn't-Bobby-permitted-proof) duct tape bounds on his wrists, with the salt-and-holy-water-coated chain that connected them to the ceiling, putting just enough room between him and the floor that, had he not been rubbing his toes against it, he'd have been dangling like some carcass in a meat locker.
(And, well, had he been able to get out of them, the fact that he'd been dumb enough to wander into a covert devil's trap meant that he'd not be going anywhere anytime soon.)
Crowley pouted, wiggling his wrists around with what little leeway the bounds gave him. "Have you even considered some chocolates? …Dinner and a film? …Flowers? I've always been fond of lilies, and they'd liven the place up a little. …Or how about some scotch? I'd like it without your usual junk in it, if you'd be so kind."
"What'd I tell you about talkin' when it ain't yer turn?" Bobby cupped Crowley's jaw, ignoring the growl of the Hell-hound he heard from the other end of the room as he leaned in to kiss its master. There wasn't anything the bitch could do; Bobby'd looked into salt, iron, and some Devil's Shoestring, just to make sure that Bruiser didn't go and get ideas. Not that it could get past the Devil's trap, or that Crowley wouldn't just tell it to back down. As though he hadn't heard his dog start voicing his distaste for the scene before him, Crowley reciprocated the kiss without any of the oily slickness that he had in making Deals, because that wasn't what he and Bobby were here for.
"I believe you didn't tell me that as much as you put a salted, silver knife to my throat and mentioned that it wasn't polite to speak without first being spoken to." From his spot in the corner of the sitting room, Bruiser whined, prompting Crowley to hiss a few commands at him in Infernal, the majority of which translated to, Sit. Stay. Daddy's getting lucky. Bad dog. "Besides, cupcake: I still have your soul... and I could just keep it, if you're going to get all moody and entitled with me."
The flat end of Bobby's knife smacked into Crowley's cheek; the little bit of holy water burned, but just enough that it didn't feel all that bad, considering. "Well, yer just jumpin' to press yer luck today, ain't ya?"
"You really should be nicer to me, kitten. We could always have this conversation Downstairs, if you like." Crowley smirked. He was bluffing, sure, but there wasn't any reason not to keep up the pretenses of the game, not when they were his favorite part, and certainly not when they got the reaction out of Bobby, which Crowley felt pressing against his thigh when the hunter leaned in to steal another kiss, a longer one and one that went deeper than its predecessors, as though Bobby needed to claim what was his. Like some puppy pissing on its favorite fire hydrant. "Or, it's always possible..." Crowley whispered, trailing off with an overly-pensive expression.
"What is?"
Crowley chuckled. He tilted his hips into Bobby's, grinding against him with an intent that didn't match what he had to say. "I could always drag you down to Hell," Crowley suggested, "and put some junior demon in your meat-suit. It's not as though we haven't got enough of them clamoring for a ticket topside, and if you think about it, it'd probably be better for me in the long run." He could have done that — not that he would have. Things like that worked with politicians and priests who got their hands all over little boys, but not for Crowley's favorite, and the kiss he gave reflected a kind of trust that was just unheard of in Hell. "Of course, Bobby... you could always give me incentive not to."
This time, Bobby smirked. He yanked off Crowley's trousers and his shorts, letting them fall around the demon's ankles. He dropped to his own knees, and a very pleasant intimate encounter might have followed, except for the interruption from two voices:
"Oh my—"
"God… DAMMIT, Bobby!"
The forty-five minute drive to Bobby's had passed in relative silence, marred only by the mix-tape of Zeppelin songs that Cas had begrudgingly agreed to listen to — but at the sight they wandered into, both Dean and the angel fell into a string of curses in a mix of English and Irate Winchester. Bobby looked up from his demon in time to see Dean's face turn a perfectly tomatoey shade of embarrassed. He looked from Dean to the angel — who, bless the idjit's heart (or whatever angels had in place of that organ), had quit speaking and taken just to tilting his head, attempting to figure out what, exactly, he was seeing — but Bobby found that words just failed him completely. Turning his eyes back down to Crowley, Bobby waited for Mister Eloquence to open up his goddamn mouth and start putting everyone at ease.
Crowley just arched his eyebrows at Bobby and shrugged. "Well, they had to find out sooner or later, love," he pointed out as though he was entirely unaware of the fact that he was naked as a newborn. "And, besides: better finding out from us than from Gigantor. You know how Sir Samuel the Tactless would have handled this."
Bobby gave Crowley a swift thwack on the back of his head. "You're not helping."
"...I thought that duct tape was an ineffective hold against demons," Castiel commented, as Dean stormed into the kitchen.
"Well, evidently, angel, you just haven't been using it properly. Have you and your Satanic sweetheart tried making agreements about rules before you spend a long, arduous night taking your Father's name in vain?" This earned Crowley another thump on the head, and a protest from Castiel that he did not engage in physical congress with demons. Over the increasingly tense air in the sitting room, Dean could be heard rummaging through the liquor cabinet, cracking open one of the many bottles of whiskey.
Bobby sighed, and looked to the hopelessly confused angel. "I don't suppose you'd like to tell me why you idjits just showed up out of nowhere?"
Castiel nodded. Getting down to business was probably the best idea. "...Your Hell-hound needs to go outside," he said. "He looks uncomfortable."
Groaning, Bobby left Crowley's side to let the mutt into the backyard; on his way back, he stole the bottle that Dean was feverishly trying to crawl into, more out of concern for the kid's liver than for the nonsense he muttered about not wanting to go and buy a whole new liquor store after salting and burning Dean's alcoholic corpse. Whatever these two needed from him, he thought, had better have been good.
"Why are you doing this?"
As much as Gabriel usually welcomed the sight of one of Sam's patented bitch-faces — not because they were endearing, of course, but because the frustration he caused the younger Winchester just warmed the spot where he should've had a heart — right now, he just didn't have the patience. From his seat on the bed, he looked up at the enormous man before him, and smirked. "Because I love the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and I've just always, always wanted to be a big, Broadway star — I'm very flexible… You wanna see my high-kicks?"
Sam gave one of his long-suffering sighs and flopped onto the mattress beside the archangel. "You've been spending too much time with Cupid," he said.
"I'm not going to agree with you until I start belting Evita." At this, Sam wrinkled his nose and tilted his head — apparently, Gabriel wasn't the only one spending too much time with one of his brothers. "Uh, how about no, Tall Boy? I'm not singing 'Don't Cry For Me, Argentina' to catch you up with what I'm talking about."
Shaking his head, Sam clarified, "It's not that. …I just never pegged you as a Madonna guy."
"I'm not," Gabriel huffed. "Besides, Webber and Tim Rice are responsible for that piece of work Cupid's been subjecting me to in between episodes of Glee and crying jags over the end of When Harry Met Sally, and Madonna's not even the best Eva—"
"Why are you doing this, Gabriel?"
"…Because you called me a Madonna guy. And you know how angels get about their honor."
"I meant with Dean and Cas."
Gabriel quirked his eyebrows, and he intended the smirk he shot Sam to cut straight to the Sasquatch's heart. The result looked more like a proposition to pop off to Rio de Janeiro for some wine and a moonlight tango — and all Sam could do in response was pull a befuddled, confused face. "I think it'd be surprisingly good for them, don't you know," Gabriel quipped. "Besides, aren't you sick of dealing with your brother's crap?" Sam had to agree that, yes, he was, but before he could qualify this statement, Gabriel continued: "And I've had it up to your eyes of Cas being such a difficult little—"
"Have you noticed that there are more important things to deal with?"
"Like this?"
Sam and Gabriel both snapped their heads up at the advent of another voice, and at the string of fucks, goddamns, I'll rip your throat out, you fucking bitch's, and other colorful turns of phrase that accompanied it. Grinning like the Serpent in Eden, Bela leaned against the doorframe — and, really, Gabriel could've sworn that the door hadn't been open like that before, a fact that made his expression jump from mischievous, if befuddled, to thundercloud-class glowering — and had with her what was apparently Stunt Demon Number 12. SDN12 was riding around in a scrawny, freckled ginger kid with angry-looking acne, who could've been the brother of Bela's meat-suit but wasn't any older than seventeen.
"Sam," she said with a self-satisfied smirk, "can I have some protection, please? I've already given him the no-smoking-out sigil, but... we can't let a stool pigeon go running now, can we?"
Nodding, Sam got to work, making sure the demon wouldn't get out — he got tied to a chair, put in the middle of a devil's trap, and surrounded by a ring of salt for good measure — after which he excused himself and took a walk. With a pensive hum, Gabriel joined Bela on the edge of the bed. "You know, you're a lot prettier than the last demon I met," he said, reaching over to stroke her hair.
This earned him Bela's hand clenching around his wrist like a vise. "Put this on my person again and I will keep you from ever growing it back.
Gabriel chuckled. "So you like it rough, do you?"
Bela rolled her eyes. "Don't you think you might make Sam jealous, carrying on like this?"
Gabriel flushed and utterly failed to make an excuse for himself.
Slumping down on the desk before him, Cupid set his chin on his forearms and looked up at Israfel with the widest eyes and the most piteous pout that he could muster. "Please, Izzy?" he asked, for what had to be the fiftieth time in the past half-hour. "We just need one little choir, and it wouldn't be for that long, and just… pretty, pretty please?" Grinning broadly, Cupid batted his eyelashes up at the Angel of Music; Israfel blinked once. Then again. His face remained impassive. "…Pretty pleeeeeeeeeeease?"
It wasn't that Israfel had no understanding of emotion, or that he didn't feel any affection for Barachiel… but he had a stack of paperwork the size of the Library of Alexandria, and looking down into his brother's eyes was not helping him get it done. Rubbing the bridge of his nose, he sighed. "You know you're my favorite of our siblings, when Gabriel isn't being a bad influence on you," he said. "But really. I cannot simply loan out a heavenly chorus because he's decided to meddle in Castiel's life."
"But it's not about that!"
On the list of Most Skeptical Looks Ever Given, the one that Israfel gave Cupid ranked somewhere between the Virgin Mary's upon her visitation from Gabriel and the one that a now-nameless male Homo habilis gave his female companion when she suggested tying together the sticks and rocks he used to kill their supper. He wrinkled his nose as though he'd inhaled a whiff of something disgusting and his left eyebrow arched so high that it risked leaving his face — and, despite this, he couldn't help the hint of a smirk that tugged up the corner of his lips. "…So what is it about, then, brother?"
Cupid sighed, beaming up at Israfel in too similar a fashion to the way he beamed at young couples holding hands and Ricky Martin music videos. In a voice with the over-sugared, sticky consistency of cotton candy, Cupid said, "True love…"
That wasn't exactly a decent explanation of the situation, not by a long-shot — and, moreover, Israfel knew this without being pulled aside by one of their superiors for a lecture on exactly what he'd done wrong in allowing Cupid to have his way on this matter. Frowning, he slid a Choral Request And Loaning Form off the top of the stack and looked it over — it required a reason for loaning out any of his angels and their musical abilities, and judging by the stars in Cupid's eyes, he wouldn't be able to help with that. His intelligence tended to fall into more specialized realms and, besides that, he couldn't lie.
Brushing his hair off of his face, Israfel muttered, "Fine, Barachiel. …Just give me some time to get the paperwork done?" Cupid said nothing in response. Israfel glanced down at his brother — he hadn't said anything that would emotionally injure the little one, had he? — and, instead of tears, he got tackled into hug. Keeping his face as neutral as possible, he patted Cupid's back. "I love you, too," he acquiesced.
Stunt Demon Number 12, for all he'd seemed so hapless and breakable, endured a full 24 hours tied to the chair while Sam, Gabriel, and Bela waited for Dean and Castiel to return with Bobby. He sat through several rounds of Go Fish, strip poker, and one epic game of Never Have I that ended with the two supernatural participants nude and dog-piled on Sam. He listened to Bela's graphic details of everything she and Lilith had done to each other sexually, Gabriel's nauseating version of the events that had led up to William Shakespeare writing his sonnets (involving a threesome with the archangel and the only female meat-suit Crowley had ever taken), and Sam's blushing, verybegrudging comparison of sex with a werewolf to sex with a demon. He even handled Sam's drunk rendition of "You Give Love A Bad Name." Nothing got him to talk.
Even when Dean, Cas, and Bobby returned the next evening, all that SDN12 threw their way came in the form of insults, snark, and disrespect. And, as Sam would not stop pointing out, the hunters, the angels, and Bela were running on a tight schedule — "And... maybe it's getting to be time for. ...You know. Desperate measures." He always suggested this tactic without explaining his intention, and each time, Bobby glared, Castiel wrinkled his nose in pensive distaste, and Dean came up with some notion of what he'd do to his dick before he let Sam run wild with what he had to be thinking. Bela and Gabriel just sat off to the side, trying not to make nuisances of themselves for once, which was easier said than done. When she filed her meat-suit's nails, he snapped his fingers and turned them into talons. When he started preening in the bathroom mirror, she made him hallucinate that his hair had turned into tentacles. And so on.
No one had ever commended them for their grasp on the concept of restraint — but, to their credit, the only beings in the room who didn't seem to get bored with these shenanigans were Dean and Castiel. Even Sam had to give up and flop on the sofa, but the blue-eyed angel and the elder Winchester kept locking gazes and snapping at each other. When SDN12 finally spoke at all, it was just to inform the two of them that they needed to find themselves a secluded place, away from everybody else, and fornicate with each other until they lost the desire to make terrible decisions. While it wasn't quite a start in that direction, Castiel did tire of arguing with the uppity thing and, rather than continue, decided to make himself at home in the corner.
"You know, just a thought," Sam piped up for the seventh time, "but maybe we should go a little crazy here? In the interests of getting anything done?"
A silence followed this, and Sam sighed, bracing himself for the inevitable repetition of what they'd already said before. Finally, though, someone had something else to add to the conversation: "You're not using your psychic crap, okay?" Dean snapped. "So just drop it already!"
"It wouldn't have to be—"
"And I'm not doing anything to make him squeal, so you can fucking—"
"Dean! He knows something—"
"Oh yeah, because now's a great time to just start believing Bela!"
(Bela furrowed her brow and looked to Gabriel. "He does remember that I'm right here, doesn't he?" she whispered.
Gabriel shrugged. "Doubt he cares, really."
"Typical Winchester behavior. Here I was hoping one of them would've grown up during the Apocalypse.")
"All I'm saying, Dean, is that it could get us to move a lot faster if you'd just... splash some holy water on his face or something. Get some salt and a silver knife. Anything—"
("Yeah," Gabriel muttered. "Because anyone who learned torture under Alastair's razor is really going to just stop at the kid stuff."
"He's pretty," Bela agreed, letting her eyes run up and down Sam's body. "But he really can be such an idiot.")
"I am not going to do anything just to—"
What happened next almost made time slow down; Dean didn't even notice it happening until he saw the angry, flashing light out of the corner of his eye and heard the thud of a chair and a corpse hitting the ground. He whipped around to face where they'd previously had a prisoner. Castiel stood over the body and looked down at it with impassive eyes and a stoic expression. He muttered something that Dean didn't really hear, about a ritual that the Luciferians were planning, one that would require sacrifices — two humans, a demon, and an angel — but the only thing that stood out to Dean was the gaping, bloody wound the angel had left on SDN12's head, the larger one that went from his navel to his throat, and the way that Sam's eyes darkened and wouldn't go anywhere else. ...Oh, he was going to fucking kill Castiel.
"Okay — everybody out!" Dean barked. He locked his eyes on Cas, and when he saw the angel heading for the door, snapped: "Not. you, angel-face."