Work Text:
Crowley glanced around again, to make sure no one would observe him doing this, then picked the lock on the door—demonic miracles were less effective on consecrated ground and could draw attention he didn’t want—and slipped into the nave of the cathedral, closing the door behind him. The click of the latch was masked by his hiss of pain as the hallowed ground started burning against his feet, and his hands felt a bit tender from the door handle.
Good. Everything was going according to plan. He continued through the nave and into the sanctuary proper, the burning in his feet spiking up a level as he stepped through the door. His skin tingled with malign (or, well, benign) promise in the air as well, and when he dragged in a breath, his lungs ached warningly.
Not warningly enough. Relishing the increasing burn in his feet with every step, as each exposure layered onto the last, he headed for the side of the altar where they kept the censer with the holy incense. He’d need to actually put gloves on to keep his hands functional long enough to light it, but once it was lit and the air itself smoked with holiness, he wouldn’t have to worry about his hands working for anything more complex than a doorknob afterwards.
His breath came harsh in his throat, which stung already, and he couldn’t help hissing in pain on each step, especially as he got closer to the altar. This cathedral had been in use for a very long time, and it was very holy indeed. It was wiser to do this sort of thing in newer churches, if he insisted on doing it, but, well.
Crowley had never claimed to be wise.
When he got to the altar, he had to stop and recover himself for a bit before he could reach into his pocket and pull out the kid gloves that should insulate him from the holiness long enough to get the censer out and lit. It would be wiser if he stopped breathing while doing this, it wasn’t like he needed to in the first place, but he relished the building burn in his lungs as the holiness scoured his profanity too much to stop.
Really, every part of this exercise would have been better left undone. It was far too late for good judgment now.
He got the censer lit with a minimum of fumbling and the incense in place over the charcoal, and hung it off of a convenient candelabra where he’d be able to reach it and knock it swinging.
Then, with everything fully prepared, he braced himself and laid down on his back on the floor under the censer. His hiss of pain was considerably louder this time, and snagged in his throat. It was agonizing. He laid there motionless for a few minutes adjusting and feeling the burn set in, going from a surface scald to something that felt like it ate into his flesh, grasping for his bones. He was still breathing, half gasping, and the sacred air kept scouring out the inside of his chest, especially with the addition of the incense that was starting to catch properly and drift down over him in little waterfalls of consecrated air. It felt like it was eating off his skin, bitterly caustic or burning acid, but he knew the signs weren’t so outward as that. Holy water could eat his flesh and damnation away, but holy ground and holy smoke would only burn through the things his corporation hid, scalding his infernal inhumanity into agony without an outward sign.
It was much, much more painful than just pouring acid on his corporation. No matter how long he’d lived in it, the body wasn’t him, and there was a disconnect from its suffering.
Holy ground burned his real self. It saw him for what he was, unforgivable, damned, Fallen, and it punished him appropriately.
He knocked the censer with the side of his arm and an almost perfunctory hiss of pain at the contact, setting it swinging, and the rush of air across the charcoal produced a fresh fall of smoke over him. He sucked in a lungful and choked on it before he could help himself, coughing as it seared his throat and lungs. Almost every particle of his being hurt now. His wings weren’t corporeally present, but they hurt too, a mounting and merciless burning.
It hurt almost as much as when he landed after he Fell. And that was what he needed. To be reminded, on every layer of his being, what he was and what he could never escape.
He was damned, and anything of Heaven or the Almighty could only torture him, destroy him, remind him forever that he was unworthy. It was not for him.
He felt his corporation start to shut down from the pain and reluctantly squirmed backwards out of the way of the censer and sat up. If he passed out in a church there would be very inconvenient questions, and the extended exposure would render him unable to do his job, and then there’d be questions from management about what he was doing passing out on the floors of cathedrals.
He was so tempted, every time, to let consciousness slip away and hope maybe this time the consecrated air would burn the profanity out of him, or burn him out of the world, but he knew it wouldn’t. He was already going to be impaired for long enough from being reckless enough to go this far. This was the absolute most he could afford to do. (All right, honestly, it was more than he could afford to do. It was the least he could manage to confine himself to, no matter how valid the arguments against what he was doing.)
He sucked in another lungful of the incense smoke, savoring the agony, then used the altar to haul himself upright. It burned his arms horribly, but he was in so much pain by now it didn’t really register as a separate shock against the background. He shook himself, focused on the goal, and started staggering towards the door, lurching into the pews unsteadily as he went. They were old, old wood, with centuries of faith baked into them, and they scalded him when he clutched at them, not to mention he was pretty sure they were leaving more mundane bruises on his corporation from the force he was knocking into them with, but that was all right. Every other injury on his way out was a bonus.
When he made it back out to the nave, some of the tension unwillingly went out of his shoulders at the reduction in holiness. The pain wasn’t perceptibly mounting anymore. The door handle burned his fingers, but not so much that he couldn’t get it open and get back outside.
He closed the door behind him and didn’t lock it. If pressed, he would say this was because he should encourage stealing from churches, because he was a demon, but in reality it was because he didn’t have the energy for a miracle and his hands weren’t functional enough to do anything about it via a more mundane mechanism.
He staggered off of the church’s grounds, and the return to entirely unconsecrated soil and air was a blast of relief something like stepping into a cold shower after spending too long in a sauna. He resented it.
After standing and breathing for a few minutes, letting his corporation adjust to what they were dealing with, he trusted himself to keep walking down the street stably enough that he didn’t look too drunk for a cab to be willing to stop for him. It took another two blocks before he judged himself far enough away from the cathedral to not look suspicious and started trying to flag one down, and another block after that before one stopped. His infernality was too scalded to manage even a tiny miracle, which was why he planned and prepared to take a cab both ways from this in the first place. His reflexes and powers weren’t reliable enough to trust with the Bentley, not right now.
After he’d gotten in the cab and directed it to his building, he let his eyes fall closed and drifted in the backseat until he felt it lurch to a final-feeling stop. He opened his eyes to confirm that they were in Mayfair and not just at a particularly long traffic light, then paid the cabbie and hauled himself out of the car. He was staggering significantly more on his way into the building, the rest from having to manage his corporation leaving him having to figure out how to corral it all over again, but it didn’t matter what he looked like anymore. It wasn’t like the cabbie could retroactively refuse to have picked him up.
He took a moment to silently thank Somebody that his building had elevators as he collapsed against the wall of one and jabbed at the button for his floor. He didn’t think he could manage stairs right now. His legs felt like a particularly wobbly Eton mess that had somehow incorporated boiling lead instead of meringue.
His eyes drifted closed again, until the elevator stopped with a jerk he felt much more than usual. He hauled himself upright again, his eyelids up, and lurched out of the elevator and immediately into the wall opposite its door. He hung onto the wall for a minute, breathing. He’d be tempted to give up and crawl the rest of the way to his flat, if he wasn’t concerned about being able to reach and operate the doorknob if he did. It would just be embarrassing to pass out on his own doorstep, after making it back this far.
He steeled himself and started staggering down the corridor, staying close to the wall, ricocheting off of it with another bruise to his shoulder or hip every few steps.
Finally, he made it to his door, and fumbled his keys out of his pocket. Usually he just miracled his door locked and unlocked, but he was definitely not up to that right now. After nearly dropping the keys several times, swearing constantly under his breath—he was really going to be in a bad way if he had to get them off of the floor—he managed to get the door open and himself through it.
He slid the deadbolt home, tossed his keys vaguely at the coatrack, and passed out on the floor.