Chapter Text
Crowley woke up from the weirdest dream he’d ever had yet. Part of the weirdness came from the fact that Crowley didn’t have dreams, weird or otherwise—just never saw the point of them and his conscious was obedient enough to not see the point of them either.
He looked at the cieling for a minute or two, thinking why he was having dreams now, after 6000 years before he realised that it had not been a dream after all.
That explained it, then. Not a dream.
And it probably was a lot more than 6000 years.
He’d not set any alarms. Infact he’d broken his alarm clocks. And his phone. And his doorbell. Well , not broken his doorbell, but conveniently miracled it silent forever. Whatever forever was, anyway.
Nothing lasts forever, a voice whispered in his mind, and Crowley shut his eyes again. That’s why he’d broken the alarm clocks.
He hadn’t actually meant to wake up anytime soon. Preferably another century. Or ten. Or 60.
If he slept for 60 centuries, that would probably undo all the 60 centuries worth of memories he’d spent…living (It had been as close to living as anyone of his kind could ever get, after all). 60 centuries was 6000 years right? He opened his eyes.
60 centuries = 60 x 100 years = 6000 years
Yeah. It was. He closed his eyes again.
Should probably sleep for 60 centuries, then. If he was lucky, he’d probably sleep through Armageddon 2.0. It took a few hours, and a good amount of human sleeping pills that didn’t do much but tasted very bitter (probably shouldn’t have chewed), but Crowley went to sleep again. It was almost peaceful.
When Crowley woke up, it was very loud and very inconvenient. Not his doorbell, he’d made sure of that. The noise was louder than a doorbells noise typically was, anyway. But it was not loud enough to be anything of real importance either.
Probably not Armageddon 2.0 then. Pity.
The noise was coming from directly outside the window in his room. It was like a big hole was being drilled in his wall from the outside. A few humans were shouting over each other. Blasted Humans. Always lurking around places they shouldn’t lurk. Feeling annoyed and very much not sleepy anymore, Crowley raised a hand and snapped his fingers, the human noise disappearing immediately. The drilling sound still blared on, and after a groan and another click, it went away too.
Blasted humans , Crowley thought again and after a few minutes, decided that sleep was not coming. He lay there, in his perfect bed in his perfectly dim room in his perfectly empty world for an hour or so, until new human voices came replacing the ones he’d silenced.
Ahhh, they’ll never stop coming , he thought. There were so many of them after all. What was it, 8 billion, last time he’d checked? Could’ve only increased by now. Unless the humans had managed to do something like the world war or another one of those pandemics. Never know with those humans.
‘Right!’ Crowley said to his perfectly dim and empty room. Something to find out, something to do. He could work with that. Go out. Check out the year. Any recent news. Check out if Nina and Maggie had found their way to each other, if they were alive. Check out the dates.
‘Right,’ he said again, still on the bed. The new human voices were getting louder and agitated. The date.
‘Oh! come on,’ Crowley leapt off the bed with a jerk.
He’d been through this before. It was nothing new. He’d been here before and he’d been out of this. He could get out again.
With a snap of his fingers, the drapes went sliding sideways and brilliant sunlight assaulted his eyes. He ignored it and strode to the window, sending the glass sliding too with a flick of the wrist. It really was too bright and too, damn too green.
Crowley didn’t actually know where he was. He just remembered driving. A lot. He’d driven for several days until the Bentley couldn’t ignore the odd noises coming from the engine anymore and had gradually started to slow down. Then he’d just found whatever empty house he could in whatever secluded place he would find and parked there. He’d placed a miracle or two on the house to prevent people from disturbing him and found the prettiest bed to sleep in.
Now that he looked sclosely at the room, he noted that Iftaar was a big room, with full length windows on one wall, glass running from the ceiling to the floor. In the middle of the brightness was a white spot from which the brightness seemed to come. The sun , he told himself unnecessarily and stared at it for a full minute, just in pure spite. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and since he wasn’t in the mood to find them in the mound of blankets gathered up on the bed, he went out just as he was.
There were humans there. Too many to count.
‘Oi,’ Crowley called to the mob of frantic people below, ‘You woke me up.’
When they spotted him, they became even more frantic, stepping a few steps away from him. They started whispering and shouting, somehow both at the same time, and some of them were also moving their mouths without a sound coming out. That was probably his fault, but he couldn’t care.
‘Sir,’ One middle aged woman who was dressed like an inspector shouted above the others, ‘Are you the owner of this property?’
‘Yeah yeah! Go away now.’
‘Sir, I will have to ask you open the door and let us in?’ She shouted.
‘Actaully, don’t go just yet,’ Crowley said, ‘What year is it?’
At that she looked befuddled, if that wa she word for it and repeated her previous let us in thing.
‘Not happening,’ he said, ‘Year?’
After that, it went very noisy again. People started speaking over each other and the inspector disappeared with some others and started rapping at the front door.
Crowley realised it was a lost cause—he’d never be left alone here now—and flicked his wrist with a sigh.
Below stairs, a door opened on its own, and in no time, three people in uniforms were standing in the bedroom, weapons drawn and stuff. Crowley really wasn’t in the mood, but he decided it was better than thinking about that , so he humoured them.
‘What seems to be the problem, officer?’ He asked and then pushed past them and went out of the room, downstairs, preferably towards something to drink. This would go so much better with something to drink.
The house looked very old, so it would probably have some good wine, if he was lucky. The humans followed, and Crowley assumed they were confused.
The kitchen was empty, so were the drawers and cupboards when he opened them, but when Crowley closed one and opened it again, it was miraculously full of dark red bottles of the highest quality wine. He picked two and then conjured a glass out of thin air.
‘So,’ he asked as he sat down on a chair in the kitchen that had not been there a moment ago, ‘What’s happening!’
The humans were still pointing guns at him, and they went on again about something to do with property papers.
That was annoying, Crowley thought, and he didn’t deserve it after all things considered.
He raised his hand that didn’t hold the now mostly empty cup and snapped his fingers. Three sets of hands went limp at their respective sides and the middle aged woman came forward, her expression a pleasant mask of indifference.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘First, why did you wake me up?’
‘The place is being reinvented as a bio-reserve,’ she answered in a monotone, ‘We’ve been contacted by the authorities because they couldn’t open or being down this residence. We’ve been trying to demolish this building for two weeks.’
That would be his fault, then.
Now, wasn’t that easy, Crowley thought bitterly. Didn’t know why humans couldn’t get to the easy bit from the start. He refilled his cup.
‘What year is it?’
‘2026’
‘Shit!’ Crowley ejaculated without any real intensity. Not even a century, then.
‘Right, then,’ he sat there until both the bottles were empty, the three humans looking on like statues. After he was not-uncomfortably-sober anymore, he snapped his fingers, getting rid of the statues, then made his way out, a third bottle crammed under his arm.
In front of him, the sea of humans parted to make way.
Behind him, with a twist of the wrist, the building came slowly crashing down, careful not to come down too quickly or to trap any of the humans under it.
Crowley didn’t particularly care if it did come down too quickly, but it was careful all the same.
Right ! Better find the Car. See what happened to Nina and Maggie.
Crowley walked in a random direction. He needed to have something to do. Better start with something he knew.
Besides, he needed to see how things were going with the latest change in hierarchy.
Gotta keep up.
It had been three years and five months. Crowley wished it had been longer—then atleast, he would have the comfort of pretending that it hadn’t actually happened after all. That this had always been his reality. Crowley was good at pretending; he was a demon after all, a liar. He’d been lying ever since he remembered, but most of them had been petty lies. Most of them had been comforting in the knowledge that they protected him from something exactly like this . Now those lies had vanished and he was left stranded, wishing for new ones, devising new ones. New lies.
Right! Something to do, he decided as he drove on. The Bentley was still as he’d left it, if only a bit grumpy and a bit rested. Making lies was supposed to be an interesting task. Something to distract him with.
Crowley looked in front of him, at the road, and w told himself that he knew where he was going. No! That wasn’t right.
He told himself where he wasn’t going, just yet.
Yes, that was better, he decided pathetically.
He wasn’t going to Soho. It was progress. He told himself that he was familiar with this, whatever this was. And it was more progress because he was familiar. It had just been a bloody long time since he’d actually been like this. Stranded. Grasping for lies.
Crowley was a liar, and the person he lied to most often—the person he lied to all the time—was himself. He knew it and he pretended he didn’t. He was liar after all.
You don’t really say what you actually mean.
A voice itched at the back of his mind and he hated it. He hated it because look where that got me. He hated it and he hated everything. Suddenly, Crowley slammed a foot on the brakes.
The problem was that he didn’t even know what the problem was. He’d been awake for less than a day, and he’d been drunk most of that time. So what was the problem already? Why was he spiralling downwards again, already?
‘Not spiralling,’ Crowley muttered in the darkness and the silence, his head resting on the wheels, ‘Not spiralling. Just—just sauntering vaguely downwards.’
It had been a lie the first time. It was a lie now.
Crowley didn’t go to Soho after all. Nina and Maggie could wait. He didn’t even go to his own flat, which was, most certainly, not his flat anymore. He refused to think. And he refused to drink anymore than he already had, so he went to a theme park.
He’d never been to a theme park, didn’t like how the rides made him feel even as he looked at them from afar. It seemed very uncomfortable, but he decided to try it after all. He parked the Bentley in front of the exit and entered from there. The sky and still something of the sun left, but it was fading quickly. There were humans there, hundreds of them, laughing and screaming.
For not the first time in the six millennia he’d spent among them, Crowley wondered how it would be to live as a human. To have that life. Ignorant. Unconcerned. Fleeting. If only for a burning second, laughing and screaming.
To live it knowing it would end, and live it anyway. Live it splendidly. Live it better than they would’ve lived if they had eternity.
Crowley wondered how it would be like, passing the guards as they didn’t bother stopping him to check if he had any tickets. Not even telling him to come through the entrance.
How would it be to buy tickets first and then enter the right way, and then hop on those rides, enjoying them because you’d payed for them and because you’d driven here for this hour of thrill and because…because you’ll die soon, so why not have some fun before that.
Did it feel different, he thought, if you did it the human way?
Crowley strode towards the gigantic ferris wheel and produced a piece of paper from between his long fingers. The young man standing by the gate ushered him in a small cubicle completely open on two sides.
It was empty, and he could’ve chosen to have it remain empty for his ride, but he didn’t. A trio of school kids hopped on, talking about ‘assignments’ and ‘summer’ and ‘how the physics teacher was way too weird’ but that ‘it was refreshing, atleast’. The conversation halted for just a millisecond as they passed him a single strange look, and then continued as if he didn’t exist. Crowley was used to that. Most humans saw him, tried to label him, categorise him as something they could understand. Most humans failed, and then did the next best thing: they ignored him. It had been convenient, up until now. Now it just seeemed rude, and— if he wasn’t lying to himself—lonely.
‘Did you get the book,’ one short girl asked another girl, and Crowley’s mind latche do to the word. Book. Book. Book. Book. Book.
He was going upwards, very slowly, the quickly darkening sky closing up, becoming clearer. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. No queasy feeling like people described. He’d never liked books. But he’d liked what they reminded him of.
They stopped when they reached the top, miraculously, and Crowley let it stay there for an extra minute or two as he saw the three humans fall silent and peer up at the sky, as if they wanted to stay there forever.
When they started moving downwards again, faster, Crowley thought he would’ve wanted that too, if he could.
He wanted, suddenly, to go back in time.
Back when the end of the world was the worst thing that could happen. Hell, he’d take the end of the world over whatever this was. Anyday. Everyday.
Crowley stepped down from the ride when he’d seen the same sky about a dozen times, until it grew as dark as it was going to get.
Nina and Maggie and the damned bookshop could wait.
Crowley got into his car and he drove to Tadfield.