AN:
Thanks to everyone who's riding on this crazy train! No warnings for this chapter, just Feels.

Crowley hated being wrong. He hated it with the fiery passion of a thousand angry suns. Normally, he bottled it up and primed it to explode on the most deserving of fools: people who talked in the cinema, idiots who insisted on feeding bread to ducks, or—worst of all—customers in Aziraphale's shop. Useful emotion, that.

He still hated it.

The insult was especially heinous when the party who was in the right was a two-tonne box that communicated almost exclusively through Queen lyrics, and wasn't technically supposed to communicate at all.

And she was right; the extra thirty minutes they'd spent circuitously roaming London had allowed his anxiety-riddled outrage to mellow to something approaching minor unease. His thoughts, frazzled and stretched to breaking as they'd been, were no longer lost in a fog of resentment that coated them in pitch and threatened to burst until the darkness consumed everything around them.

Just as he couldn't apologise, Crowley couldn't say thank you. So he trailed appreciative fingers across the dash as his girl rounded a familiar corner, poised to make the final turn onto Whickber Street. He couldn't voice it aloud, but he could make sure she knew.

His head lolled back for a brief moment, mind nearly calm, before his entire body jolted upright into something that could be considered a cousin of posture. His rabbiting heart and quicksilver breaths, having finally subsided to a rate close to that of mere mortals, jumped into a rhythm that rivalled Roger Taylor's enthusiasm in holding the beatline of Breakthru. Crowley clutched the wheel as the full horror of the situation hit: during the half hour he'd spent walking himself back from a particularly destructive edge, he hadn't spared a thought as to what he was supposed to say.

They were still headed inexorably toward the last place on Earth he'd ever wanted to see again, and his mind couldn't spin up anything that wasn't made of vitriol and nightmares.

"It's not too late to go back," he suggested. "Or we can at least go 'round another couple times, yeah?"

The only response the Bentley deigned to give was to roll sedately into their usual parking spot and, quite pointedly, turn the key in the ignition. Crowley, equally pointedly, steeled his arms and dug his heels into the floor. She snapped her door locks open, followed by a vaguely foreboding, exceedingly pregnant silence.

"Yeah, yeah, fine," he growled. He very carefully did not shut anything too firmly in his wake; Crowley wasn't sure if a car could bite, but in this mood, he was certain that his girl would figure it out.

He'd barely pulled himself to standing when that blessed insistent jerk returned, expertly positioning a burning hook behind his sternum. The metaphysical chain tightened one large, heavy link at a time, until Crowley was forced to grit his teeth against the strain. In his absence, the compulsion had become absolutely bloated with power; he could nearly look across the road with unfocused eyes and see the thread that bound him. Fire danced deep in his chest—deeper, even, than his Earthly form—in a warning, a mandate, a choice. Resisting the invocation would be akin to strolling over consecrated ground, and the longer he opposed it, the fiercer it would burn.

Like anything could scorch worse than his miserable existence over the last two years.

Crowley sneered in the direction of A.Z. Fell and Co.'s darkened storefront and dragged his feet against the threatening summons until he stumbled through the door of Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death.

When he locked eyes with Nina behind the counter, she had the audacity to look shocked as he shifted into the back of the queue.

That.

Did.

It.

He had been so careful with his humans. Considerate. He'd been trying to help this one in particular fall in love for fuck's sake. In fact, Crowley had behaved so absolutely un-Hellishly that his presence barely qualified as demonic at all. Then, the time, the one time, he'd needed assistance, no one had been there, and she still had the gall to not only summon him, but also be surprised when he answered?

The simmer of irritation boiled over.

Four people stood between the wide-eyed woman behind the counter and where he stood leaking infernal dread. A single click of his fingers could empty the store of mortals, their minds as unburdened as their hands. He could wave and slam the shop's locks shut, see the dawning horror in Nina's face. He could saunter over, hands in his pockets and casually prop a hip next to the register, stare at her over his glasses with an expression that had promised pain and fear for six millenia.

He didn't.

He did curl his mouth into something resembling a smile, catching Nina's gaze to share the cruel shape of it. She paled, but said nothing.

Crowley busied himself looking about the place as if he'd never seen it before while positively oozing fiendish energy, almost thick enough to swim in, enough malevolent intent to flood a village sent to swirl around a single, frail figure.

The next person in line didn't notice the waver in their barista's smile, the slight tremble to her hands. Nina was doing a remarkable job of maintaining her calm exterior, considering the sheer volume of power she was absorbing; Crowley had certainly brought stronger beings to their knees with much less. Definitely a fighter, this one.

Crowley sharpened the edge of his smile as he glanced back over his shoulder from where he'd been ostensibly studying the new cork board and its many announcements. No, the two people left in the café wouldn't see anything amiss, even without his intervention, but the pure, undiluted terror that wafted off of Nina in waves was a comforting, nostalgic scent that made him breathe in deep and exhale in satisfaction.

It was almost enough to make him ignore the clamp burning away his insides.

He waited until the final patron had been handed their order—quite suddenly to-go, if you please—before turning his full attention back to Nina. The moment Give Me Coffee's door swung shut, Crowley snapped the locks closed and the lights off on his way to the counter. His glasses clattered to the floor as his hands slammed down next to Nina's where they were clenched, convulsing, on the metallic surface. Crowley loomed, pressing his face close to hers until he was sure all she could see were eyes that had to be golden all the way through.

"What," he growled, hitting each ending consonant with a force that could have toppled buildings, "the fuck are you playing at?"

Nina, to her credit, swallowed thickly but otherwise didn't so much as flinch. Her dark pupils were drawn nearly to pinpoints, dull and glazed by a deep, abiding, instinctive shock, protection against where she was being driven toward madness.

The lack of lucidity in a stare that was usually so razor-sharp should have made him feel ashamed—despite his best efforts, Crowley liked Nina, and without Aziraphale, she was the closest thing he had to a friend. He could have blamed his response on this bloody cord that was hot and tearing and pulling, that the twisting emotion he'd been left on his own to defend against had become a vortex with no escape, that his temper was just too short these days and she'd been an unfortunate casualty.

But that wasn't true.

He'd wanted to, so he had.

Now that the numbness of the past months had abated, his grating fury had returned, and with it, a staggering lack of control.

I'll show you a fucking demon.

As Crowley had so vehemently denied, he wasn't good or nice or kind. Yet here he was, berating himself for his own idiocy while he waved away the remainder of his vicious influence, solely to stop the seismic tremors of apprehension that shuddered through his… friend.

A flick of his fingers sent a chair behind her; a sigh and a stern look urged her to sit. Nina, unwilling to give up her grip on the counter, rested her forehead between her fists and drew in one ragged breath after another. Blind panic was giving way—slowly, so slowly—to a clarity that would carry with it a reckoning that Crowley should scoff at. After all, what could she do to a demon?

But he found himself looking forward to the confrontation, to spitting venom and finding the chinks in the armour of a well-shielded foe, to a battle of words and wits against someone who wouldn't balk at jabbing their own knife in, who he might even be able to goad into twisting it.

Half-turned away, Crowley stared out the window and waited for the guilt to gnaw at his belly.

It didn't.

From the corner of his eye, he watched Nina's mute form go limp as the tension leached out of muscles strung tight. Her shoulders sagged, head dropping forward as if her neck simply couldn't support its weight for another second. Knuckles that were red and angry spasmed and released, elbows landing hard on her knees as she folded nearly in half. The breaths coming longer and more regularly contained the faintest hint of a sob on the exhale, overwhelmed.

She would be fine. Nina carried her own brand of teeth and claws.

Crowley's jaw tightened as flame twisted through an indefinable place that was still, somehow, very close to his wings. He'd been able to ignore the sanctity creeping through his veins while he'd unleashed his cathartic brutality, but, in his distraction, it had wormed its way into the crevices of broken divinity that had shattered in his Fall. The searing heat was so white-hot that the fissures should have been cauterised, but only seemed to shake further apart under the onslaught.

He could make it stop. The slow crawl of poison, the metaphysical assault that made his corporation tremble, the pain, blooming brilliant and bright, that had to be what it felt like to be run through with a flaming sword, it would all stop, if he only walked across the road. The truth of it soaked into him on a level deeper than flesh and blood and bone.

There was nothing he wanted less.

Folding his arms across his chest and lethargically hooking one ankle over the other, Crowley opened his infernal senses for a taste of the background turmoil that was beginning to turn almost staticky with spikes of anger. A thought, pressed too hard into the fabric of reality, brought one of Aziraphale's best reds to settle between his hip and where Nina was raising her head to stare at him with equal parts incredulity and enmity, shot through with a desire for violence so thick it could be followed like a fault line straight to her core. He idly wondered whether that was aimed at him in particular, or was just her all-too-human body's need to vent the last of the frenetic energy trapped inside a vessel never meant to contain it.

Nina's eyes burned into the back of his head; his own never left the window.

"I shouldn't have done that." It was an easy admission to make—he probably shouldn't have done any of the things he'd done since the day he'd frantically pressed his lips to Aziraphale's and filled those desperate seconds with a prayer more fervent and gasping than even the one he'd cried as his head surfaced from a lake of sulphur. Nina didn't deserve this kind of ire, and it wasn't big of him to concede that.

Silence met his statement. Crowley was in no hurry to break it.

"That isn't an apology." Her voice was steady, level, but raw, as if she'd been screaming.

His own throat had been in the same state, seven hundred and twenty days ago, as he watched the sun rise on the first day of the rest of his angel-less life.

"No," he said at last, slicing his eyes back to her. She met his gaze with steel in her own. "I suppose it isn't."

Crowley watched the complicated play of emotion across Nina's face, his own savagely neutral and yet struck with the singular sensation that she could read everything he hadn't said.

That wasn't right.

I'm not sorry.

I wish I could be.

I'm not asking for forgiveness.

Whatever Nina saw as she studied him finally made her bite her lip and nod, almost to herself. She glanced down, sucked in a deep breath, and when she looked back up, she reached for the wine.

"So, Muriel?"

"So. Muriel."