Work Text:
All The Pretty Colours
A Good Omens fanfiction
When was it, exactly?
Crowley doesn't quite recall. He was already Crowley by then, not Crawley – that much he remembers – but it was before the Arrangement, he thinks. Must have been, because the kind of hopelessness he felt that day was something the demon never experienced to that intensity after he had the Arrangement to lean on as a sort of emotional crutch.
When you got right down to it, it was only a bad day – nothing particularly earth-shattering had happened. Crowley wasn't physically hurt, he wasn't under punishment or any reprimand from Hell stronger than the demonic equivalent of a wrist-slap, nothing so very ugly in the grand scheme of things...
And yet...
He'd been unhappy.
Simple as that.
Hastur had publicly mocked his last presentation in Hell, and one of his plants (this was a long time before the 1970s, when he came up with the idea of putting the fear of him into their little green hearts for their own good) had died despite his best efforts, and he hadn't seen Aziraphale (even in passing) for almost twenty years.
Also, it rained for two weeks straight. A grey, gloomy sort of pelting hard rain that stung your skin and chilled your bones.
Then, almost miraculously, the clouds parted.
Colours poured out from the gap, smearing their rainbow across the murky sky.
Crowley looked both ways – no one was watching. He lifted a glass jar and filled it with red. A brilliant, passionately dark red that was so gloriously far removed from the grey he'd been engulfed in for the last fortnight. He kept the jar in his dwelling on a shelf for a few months after that. There was the vague notion in his mind that he might drink it, after the next bad visit to Hell or poorly executed meet-up with one of its representatives. Back in Heaven, in the very old days, when he was an angel, they used to serve drinkable light at important social functions. Only, he tasted it and gagged. It was bloody awful. He wasn't sure if it was because rainbow light is just foul-tasting naturally or if it was because becoming a demon had changed his taste buds since the olden days – there were a lot of strange things that burned away, very unexpected things, when you fell (er, sauntered downwards) from heavenly grace.
So he kept it, minus the sip that he'd spat out in disgust and watched dissipate into the air above his water basin (his lips had been stained a vivid cherry-red for a week afterwards, which was rather embarrassing). And he waited for another chance to do something with it.
Another bad day, another rainbow, and this time he caught the other colours up, too – blue, purple, yellow, green, orange, all of them.
The purple had a different constancy from the others, it was more like jam than light or liquid – but Crowley scooped a bit onto his thumb and licked it off and discovered it tasted just as awful as the red had. He also lost all feeling in his thumb for over an hour.
There was something he wouldn't be trying twice.
His eyes landed, after a while, on a row of clear crystals he'd kept on the windowsill. All crystals were clear in those days, though some human textbooks will tell you otherwise.
Crowley opened the red jar and poured.
He was now looking at the very first ruby, roughly the size of his clenched fist. He had a little leftover, the very dark bits at the bottom of the jar, and from this he made garnets.
Then he opened the blue and, breaking a crystal into several pieces, started dumping them in. He closed the jar and shook, shook, shook. When he opened it again and dumped the contents on the floor of his dwelling, there spilled out perfect sapphires, blue topazes, and aquamarine stones.
Orange made orange sapphires.
The green started as a light olive shade as he eased it into the crystals, leaving him with peridot, but as the work progressed it spread out like an ink spill, darkening until he had created the most striking of emeralds.
It took a while to work the rich constancy of purple into the crystal, but in the end he did it, managed it rather successfully; from this he got vivid amethysts.
Yellow didn't come out as good. The stones were pale, a weak lemony wisp of a colour that didn't show up well against the crystal; it still appeared nearly clear in most lights.
And, unlike green, it didn't change as it spread.
His gingery brow furrowed, Crowley held it up to his eyes, perhaps to inspect it more closely and see what was to be done. Only, somehow, it took on a reflective quality, picking up the amber-like golden hue of the demon's snaky eye colour and growing darker until it was a very rich, fine-looking stone indeed.
This would be called citrine in the future.
"You'll like this," said Crowley, smiling as if he'd singlehandedly accomplished the most evil of deeds.
Beelzebub waited. "Yezz?"
"I turned all of the crystals into coloured gemstones."
Her fuzzy black brows met in deep confusion under her fly-shaped hat. There must be something she was missing here. He sounded so proud of it – like he half expected Satan to give him a commendation and a week off work for this... But why?
"And what doezzz that do to zzecure zzoulzz for our mazzter?
His smile was serpentine – he couldn't let her see, couldn't allow her to guess, he'd really only done it because he was bored and a little sad.
"Think about it, Lord Beelzebub," he beamed, selling it to the cheap seats. "People will get all kinds of greedy over a handful of stones, over a little change in colour. They'll trick each other, cheat each other, be vain as anything – just imagine the layers of tarnish, all because of a little borrowed colour."
Beelzebub's imagination was not up to the task. "Humanzz zzzurely are not that zzztupid."
"Oh," sighed Crowley, relaxing his shoulders, knowing now that he'd gotten away with it. "You would be surprised."