AN:
Thanks to everyone who's still with me! I know that your fluff/kink/whump-tober offerings are piled high, and I deeply appreciate everyone reading and reviewing!

This chapter contains references to self-harm—nothing graphic, but please skip to either the second part (beginning with "The speed limit) or all the way to the summary at the bottom if that is a trigger for you.

One would think that time would pass differently for an eternal being; years, decades, centuries blurring at the seams to drift in a hazy chronology. One would think that millenia-old memories, already nebulous, would be further distorted when peered at through the misshapen mirror of drunkenness or slumber, or indiscernible ages spent Below. One would think that a fistful of weeks would be entirely unremarkable to a creature who had existed since before Time began, and who would likely be there at its end.

A demon—laying half-curled in his bed, staring unblinkingly at the wall with an empty gaze—would refute each and every one of those accusations. He was unfortunately, acutely, agonisingly, aware of every. Single. Moment.

Crowley didn't own a clock that ticked, but he felt the steady beat of one all the same. Each internal snick added another minute to the daunting number that he'd already been forced to endure; fifty-nine days, seventeen hours, and four minutes ago, he'd looked into Aziraphale's flask for the last time. His comfort, his solace, his final attachment to his angel, was gone.

Dripping with dejection, Crowley had crawled between his sheets with the intention of never leaving them again. The inevitable march of time could be tracked on his arms if he deigned to look; according to the scabbed-over wounds, his plants were as dry and lifeless as he was himself, his beloved car either littered with tickets or missing completely, and as the sun lowered each day, he half-expected Shax to reappear with fresh orders from Hell.

The promise he'd made to himself—that he wouldn't drink or drug or sleep his pain away—had become ludicrously easy to keep. The rage, the anguish, the desolation and despair, it was all still there, roiling inside him, but the calm acceptance that came with this nothingness was its own kind of peace. He couldn't believe how simple it had been, giving into the numbness. It was a wonder he hadn't thought of it before. Nothing had moved in his flat for months, not even dust motes lingering in the air, and the only sound was Crowley's irregular breathing.

Therefore, it came as quite a shock when his mobile rang.

With an undignified noise that he would never admit to having made, even under torture, Crowley jolted upright. The bloody ringer had gotten turned all the way up, and the entire device buzzed hard enough that it almost vibrated off the bedside table.

He slapped the phone to silence the first call.

And the second.

And the fifth.

On the sixth, he seized the sodding thing and stabbed the little green icon with more force than strictly necessary.

"Whatever it is you want, I. Don't. Care." Months without speaking turned his words scratchy and raw, lacking any of his usual imposing hiss. Crowley rolled onto his back and dropped the phone on his chest, coughing once to clear away the worst of the rasp.

"Well, hello to you too, love." Nina's voice, brisk and clipped, with an edge he couldn't identify, came through the line. "Heard you were feeling awful."

"Don't know where you heard that. I don't feel awful, I feel annoyed." Well. That wasn't entirely true, but Nina didn't have the ability to force Aziraphale to materialise at his bedside, already on his knees and grovelling for forgiveness, which further fed into his cycle of annoyance. "How did you even get this number?"

"The same way I got your address, and I will come drag you out of your flat myself if that's what it takes to take care of whatever… insanity is happening to Muriel." The edge in Nina's voice got sharper.

"Insanity? What insanity? I've barely even talked to them, so why the Heaven are you blaming me?" If there had been any angel on Crowley's mind during his self-imposed isolation, it definitely hadn't been Muriel.

"Whatever happened the last time you were here. They still haven't recovered from it. Some energy or another got entwined or something" —pure liquid dread shot down Crowley's spine— "really they're not being very clear, but this all has something to do with you, and you need to fix it."

Despite having a terrible inkling what the some energy or another might be, and how absolute shit it would make his existence if that inkling proved to be true, Crowley wasn't feeling particularly magnanimous. "The last time I was there? You mean the time I was dumped in the street and left for dead?" he sneered. Nina stammered, but he refused to allow it, raising his voice to drown out hers. "And then you wait all this time to track me down?"

Not that he would have done anything if they'd found him earlier, but she could certainly stop berating him over an issue he hadn't known about.

When Nina spoke again, her voice was much more subdued. "We tried phoning your other line, but it never went to message."

Right. Because he'd turned it into a puddle of plastic. Things were coming 'round to bite him already, it seemed.

Crowley threw an arm over his eyes and breathed out slowly, something sticky and acidic loosening in his chest.

Okay, facts. He could work with facts.

Fact: He, Crowley, in a moment of terrible weakness, had approached Aziraphale's bookshop and had immediately gotten what felt like the smiting of a lifetime—even a lifetime as long as his. Also present at said bookshop was Muriel, who had, presumably, done… something to stop his total discorporation.

Conjecture: He and Muriel were now enmeshed in some kind of angel-demon… quantum entanglement? Crowley hadn't noticed anything off-kilter, but he also hadn't performed so much as a minor miracle in ages. There was a decent chance that his presence really was necessary to unknot a holy, tangled mess.

Irony: The call that had shocked him into spilling his precious sacrament in the first place had apparently been from Muriel, likely in an effort to tell him about this exact dilemma.

Bleeding angels: the cause of, and solution to, all of Crowley's little problems.

"Ah, yeah," he belatedly remembered to reply. "That's been down for a bit now."

There was another long pause before Nina cleared her throat. "Can– Will you come? Please. Just to– to talk. You don't–"

"Nah, don't think so." Curt. Dismissive.

Clearly taken aback, the voice on the other end faltered. "Why not?"

Indignation, heavy and scalding, laced his question with a dangerous undercurrent. "Are you seriously asking me that?"

"Yes!" Nina's cry was so helpless, something he had never known her to be, and it put his hackles up. "I don't know how, but we were there with you, and then you were gone. It would be nice–"

Crowley's mouth moved savagely, without his input or permission. "I've told everyone, for years, that I'm not nice," he spat, "and yet nobody ever believes me. I'm not good, I'm not kind, I'm not… altruistic. And I'm not doing a bloody thing for any of you!"

Silence stretched on, interminably long.

"Yeah, alright," she finally said, faint enough that Crowley had to strain to hear. "Won't bother you again."

The call disconnected while he gaped at the screen.

What… just happened? How did it happen?

People like Nina weren't easily cowed. People like Nina didn't just… give up, unless it was a strategic retreat, unless they were already planning a different angle of attack. Never once, not even at his most threatening, had she been anything but unimpressed and unwavering, and for her to cave after just a few snarled words made the small hairs on the back of his neck prickle in a very human-like manner.

Something wasn't as it seemed. Crowley knew a trap had been sprung, but, replaying the conversation, he couldn't parse the shape of it. The same instincts that had kept him below Hell's radar for so long jangled like the bell inside A,Z. Fell and Co.; he'd stumbled over a tripwire, or doors had slammed shut behind him, or he'd zigged when he should have zagged. He was caught, irrevocably, and now the only way over was through.

He'd almost be impressed if he wasn't so bloody irked about it.

"Fuck." Levering himself out of bed, Crowley stared at his darkened mobile, then flung it with enough force that only a miracle would allow it to function again. "Fuck."

As a demon, he spoke every language, from every era, from every part of the world, and yet fuck was the only word he could find to truly describe the matter.

Shoving a hand through hair a few inches too long, Crowley took a deep, shuddering breath. He'd been studiously avoiding everything that wasn't his own internal monologue for a reason. Apparently, for an infernal being, sinking into a despondency so deep that he lost the ability to feel had been too much to ask for.

That was the real problem, wasn't it? He felt too much, all the time, and couldn't do a blessed thing to show it. Humans were allowed to cry, and they did, constantly, about everything—happiness, sadness, pain and anger, love and separation. Crowley hadn't permitted himself to shed so much as a single tear over a loss that had ripped through his past like a knife, tainted the present with a slow drip of poison, and shattered his future anew with every passing hour.

He had no one. Nothing. He was just an afterthought, only called when someone needed a little supernatural intervention. The few beings he'd nearly considered friends had tried to contact him exactly twice in two years—both times recently, and for the same, stupid favour.

Seven billion souls on this blasted blue rock, and not one entity could understand his grief, what had been taken from him. And the most damage had been done by the one person he'd trusted, who Crowley had thought would never abuse the heart he'd offered so freely. The meddling humans especially couldn't imagine what he had lost, forever—not their idea of forever, but the forever and ever, amen kind of forever—because if they could, maybe they wouldn't have descended on him, birds to carrion, and gotten him so worked up about confessing his feelings in the first place.

While the wild desire to scream or sob was overwhelming—liquid pooled against his lashes, clothes were summoned by shaking hands, lower lip bitten raw to make it stop quivering—he couldn't. He didn't have the luxury of falling apart, not with yet another crisis on the horizon. Crowley angrily yanked into place the one piece of his wardrobe he hadn't pulled from the ether: a pair of black leather fingerless gloves.

Glancing in the mirror, he decided that he'd made himself as presentable as he was going to get; hair shortened and styled, outfit just the right amount of almost-too-tight, dead eyes hidden behind their darkened glass armour. He didn't alter the grave pallor of his face or hide the heavy blotches below the rims of his glasses. He didn't even bother to disguise the patchwork of red marks that crept out from beneath his shirt collar. A small, furious, petty part of him wanted them to see, wanted to watch their faces flush with self-conscious guilt, wanted to make them feel exactly as abominable he did. He wanted them to suffer, for just one minute, the way he had for every second of the last seven hundred and twenty-one days.

It was gearing up to be a clusterfuck of a morning, and it wasn't even nine yet.

The speed limit had always been little more than a suggestion, there for Crowley to scoff at as he watched the little needle inside the car waver between the topmost number and that nebulous space above it, where the Bentley left the speedometer behind in a place it could never follow. The minute he'd closed the door behind him, however, Crowley realised his girl was in a mood, refusing to accelerate over forty and steadfastly ignoring any attempts to silence, or even change, the radio.

Every time he stomped on the gas, the Bentley forced him into extra, longer, slower traffic, while Freddie expressed the car's displeasure at a volume that made even Crowley flinch.

Killjoy, bad guy, big-talking, small fry / You're just an old barrow boy
Have you found a new toy to replace me? / Can you face me?
But now you can kiss my ass goodbye / Feel good, are you satisfied?

A drive that he typically managed in less than five minutes was creeping up toward thirty, and while he wasn't exactly looking forward to what was awaiting him, it had to be better than this. Hell could absolutely take notes on psychological torture as the Bentley, despite Crowley's best attempts to wrest back control, found the slowest-moving vehicle on the road and resolutely stayed behind it.

"Look," he started, sounding like he was trying desperately not to let the car smell fear. "I can't say I'm sorry. I'm a demon. We don't do that. But I'll make it up to you after this, yeah?"

You're just a hot-air balloon / So no one gives you a damn
You're just an overgrown schoolboy / Let me tan your hide
A dog with disease, you're the king of the sleaze

Crowley breathed in through his nose, his hands clenched hard enough that his knuckles went white. He bowed his head, eyes screwed shut. "Look," he tried again. "I know you're angry. You're allowed to be angry. But." He paused to swallow, grip tightening until his nails threatened to shred leather. "You are literally the only thing I have left. Can we just–" He cut off, unsure and strangely, deeply vulnerable, nearly in tears in the blasted car. Crowley slumped until his forehead rested on the wheel. "Can we just?"

He wasn't expecting a response, but, a moment later, the Bentley swung into a different lane, her speedometer ticking up toward fifty. Almost consideringly, Queen came through the speakers again, shorter, and with far fewer decibels.

Make me feel good (I feel good)

Pulling himself upright, Crowley ran one grateful hand over the passenger seat in silent acknowledgement; an olive branch offered and accepted.

Maybe that would be enough to get him through what came next.

Summary:
Crowley, having run out of holy water, gives into his depression and has become one with the bed. Nina has somehow gotten his mobile number, and proceeds to have a conversation strange enough to pull him out of the flat. The Bentley, in her glorious anger, is taking him the scenic route to get there.

All lyrics from Queen's Death on Two Legs.