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Maybe… maybe, he conceded, stopping time had been a bit much.
He’d done it a few dozen times, exerting the frankly immense amount of power he had at his disposal, halting the universe in its tracks. The first time he’d done it, included it in a report, assumed the rest of Hell knew — they’d wanted a demonstration. It was easy, Crowley reasoned. It was all, really, a matter of gravity. In the infinite void of the ever-expanding universe, there were galaxies made of stars and planets careening wildly around each other, and if you stopped them all from pulling each other this way and that… It just made sense that everything else would stop, too. Everything unless he willed them free.
The guillotine stopped mid-descent and manacles clattered to the floor. Crowley’s lips curled into a smirk.
Aziraphale was radiant. He couldn’t help it — it was part of the whole angelic thing. Crowley had been radiant once, but Aziraphale wore it better.
He was chained up in the Bastille, wrapped in delicious frippery begging to be pushed aside, torn, ruined, but Crowley was a gentledemon. If Aziraphale wanted him to be something else, he’d have to ask for it. Nicely.
“Crowley,” he said in that horribly warm and holy way, and somewhere on the celestial plane, an ouroboros gagged a bit on his own tail. The gravity of the universe slipped between his slim fingers, and Crowley grabbed tightly onto it again, sweat beading on his brow even as he grinned.
It was a mistake the second time, stealing those precious minutes from God’s eyes and from the universe itself, but it was worth it. The meal after, the quick trip back to London, the companionable walk to where Aziraphale’s books waited to be shelved and possibly — horror of horrors — sold. All of it was worth it.
The fatigue hit moments after he left, wandering down a darkened street with a grin that some might have described as ‘giddy’. It weighed in every limb, settling at the core of himself until every movement, even the drag of air into his lungs, felt heavy.
He felt drunk or drugged, and it took him too long to realize it wasn’t just the heady mix of exhaustion and euphoria. He should have felt the way the paving stones fell away under his feet, should have noticed the darkness clouding at the edges of his vision.
It wouldn’t have changed anything, really.
But maybe he could have spared some scrap of his pride.
Crowley blinked once, and London fell away. The fresh air turned suffocating and stale. Sulfur and brimstone flooded his nose, his mouth, his lungs, and the open sky closed over him, caging him in the depths of Hell.
He stood alone in a dark and dingy room. Mold grew on the tattered walls which were papered in an infuriating pattern. Looking at it threatened to give him a migraine, the images sliding out of focus and shifting to another the moment he thought it might be bearable.
The heaviness coiled in his limbs, and Crowley longed to follow it, to curl up and compress into a predator’s form, all muscles, scales, and venom. He got so far as the scales on his feet creeping upwards before he forced himself to take an unpleasant breath and steadied against the inevitable.
Cowardice, however comforting it felt, wouldn’t save him if he could be saved at all.
If he wanted a fighting chance, he had to put on a show.
The walls began to shift around him, and Crowley forced a grin, his shoulders and stance loose as he refused to move. He felt a slight breeze as a door opened behind him.
“Crowley.”
“Hastur,” he greeted, deliberately reveling in the sibilance, dragging the first syllable of Hastur’s name over his tongue as he finally turned to look at the Duke of Hell. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Hastur smiled, an ugly, uneven thing that sent a sufficient chill down Crowley’s spine as it was intended to. “Did somethin’ big today?” There was a menacing glee in the pitch darkness of his eyes. He stepped forward, and the wall swallowed the door, leaving the two of them alone in a room that felt suddenly claustrophobic. The walls crept closer until one was almost at Crowley’s back.
He took the chance to lean against it, heedless of the way the mold smeared on his nice, expensive clothes. His own grin sharpened. “Saw to the execution of an innocent man at the hands of his own rebellion.” Crowley shrugged, reaching up to smooth a hand through his hair, pulling it out of the coiffed stiffness until it lay in loosely-tied waves around his shoulders. Better to look less primped and preened, more like the rest of them.
“You stopped time twice.”
“Yeah,” Crowley gave a low chuckle, stretching himself lazily out, sprawled and comfortable. “Thought I could botch it up. Get the front row nice and bloody, let him suffer a bit.” He clicked his tongue. “Marvelous little machine we gave to the likes of them. Sheared his head clean off even after I dulled the blade. Put the world on a bit of a pause to take a good look at my handiwork.” In a lower voice, something a bit secretive, he confided, “Gotta really appreciate a bad job well done, y’know? Helps the pencil-pushers down here when they have a fun report to read. Love to keep morale up, me.”
“Of course,” Hastur agreed in a way that wasn’t particularly comforting. He looked a little too eager, too excited for it to be good news for Crowley. “Do you know who he replaced?”
Crowley’s stomach dropped through the floor, and he did his best not to let it show. “Some pompous aristocrat. Gluttonous, prideful, probably has several little bastards running around France given the obvious appetite.”
“And you rescued him.”
“Wouldn’t go that far. Gave him a miraculous little escape, but I’d be surprised if he made it out of the city.”
“He did,” Hastur said. “Apparently, though. He stopped along the way. Lunch with his savior.”
A scoff. “Yeah? And where’d you hear this from?”
“Berith.” The name sent a chill through Crowley’s veins. Distantly, faintly, he finally remembered that he was not the only demon on Earth. But last he’d heard, Berith had been in Vienna—
Right. Playing nanny to the future Queen of France.
Fuck.
Hastur giggled which was altogether more unsettling than anything else he could have done. Crowley realized too late that he hadn’t shuttered off his expression, hadn’t schooled away the surprise of being caught in a rather significant lie. Especially if they knew—
“So I guess it’s your word against Marquis Berith’s. Who had it on good authority that it was an angel.”
“An angel,” Crowley repeated, aiming for disbelief and missing it by a mile. “Hastur, you really think I was eating lunch with an angel?”
“Who knows what you get up to up there,” Hastur said with no small amount of malicious delight. “Don’t really care if you saved him on accident or on purpose. Not going to change what happens next.”
A chair appeared in the center of the room. It was innocent enough. Plain. Four legs, a seat, and a back — nothing extravagant, nothing special. In a way, that made it worse. “The way I see it, Crowley, you have two options.”
Crowley’s panic reached a fever pitch. He knew the two options. He could fight. At best, he could freeze time again and run like a bat out of Hell and hope to be ignored and forgotten while he spent the rest of eternity in some secluded part of space. At worst, they would drag him back, and he’d remember this moment fondly as the one where he wasn’t in unbearable, unending pain.
He pushed himself off the wall, rolling his head in a way to indicate that he was rolling his eyes. Crowley swaggered to the chair and dropped in it with a defiant huff before Hastur could begin to threaten him. “Let’s get it over with,” he said, projecting annoyance rather than fear, holding onto some secret hope that it would be enough to make this incident disappear after he’d paid his pound of flesh.
Shackles cinched tightly around his wrists, pulling them back with a snap. His shoulders popped almost out of their sockets, and Crowley swallowed thickly around the pain.
To his left, the wall rippled, forming a hearth with hellfire glowing at the center of it. In the flicker of the flames, the far wall gleamed with the sudden appearance of countless implements of torture.
He’d thrown Hastur, but the satisfied, smug, slimy grin returned far sooner than Crowley would’ve liked.
“Think we’ll start with this.” The metal rod bore a sigil on the end, a Satan’s Cross that Hastur thrust into the fire. The flames roared higher, and Crowley watched in badly-feigned disinterest as the end turned first red, then orange, then almost white with the heat. Dismay writhed in his gut. The sole brand he wore was something he had chosen. His serpentine form had been forced on him, but he had embraced it, had added it to his corporation, burying it beneath his skin rather than wearing it like an accessory. He’d embraced being the serpent.
He wouldn’t embrace this. He wouldn’t.
Crowley tossed his head, feet flailing against the floor in a futile effort to push himself away. The chair didn’t move, and his shades clattered to the floor, exposing his frightened eyes which trained instantly on the brand as it was removed from the flame.
“Now,” Hastur said, twirling the brand too near Crowley for comfort. “Open up.”
Crowley stared up at him, and he barely had time to register what Hastur was asking for — what he was demanding — before the Duke gave an irritated twist of his wrist. Crowley gritted his teeth, fighting the power holding him, but he was exhausted from two very big miracles, and Hastur had quite literally all the time in the world. Crowley’s jaws were pried open, and he stared up in horror as his tongue was pulled out of his mouth, straining almost to the point of tearing.
“Berith told me something to say… something like… Oh, that’s right.” He grinned. “Let them eat crêpes.”
There was fire and blood, and Crowley remembered wildly that once, God had told him he would eat dust for the rest of his days.
It was one of those things. He forgot about it, honestly. Until he was reminded.
Aziraphale raised his eyebrows expectantly, the devil’s food cake that he’d offered now melting on Crowley’s useless tongue. It tasted of ash. Everything, if it tasted of anything at all, tasted like ashes and embers and pain.
“S’alright,” he said easily, lying with a smirk on his lips.
It was fine. Better than fine.
The best part, in Crowley’s opinion, was that Aziraphale would never know.