Chapter Text
PART THREE: LAMENTATIONS
For you have forgotten the God of your salvation
And have not remembered the rock of your refuge.
Therefore you plant delightful plants
And set them with vine slips of a strange god.
In the day that you plant it you carefully fence it in,
And in the morning you bring your seed to blossom;
But the harvest will be a heap
In a day of sickliness and incurable pain.
Isaiah 17:10-11
Crowley had memorised the varying textures and imperfections scrawled across the dingy old ceiling above his bed. Stared at them for so long their afterimage burned, searing and lingering, whenever he closed his stinging eyes.
He knew where hastily thrown-on paint covered the worst of the shabbily patched and crumbling plaster, shielding it from view until someone looked too closely and the damage would become more obvious than ever. Learned by heart the coordinates of countless broken bits dressed up by lies that couldn’t stand the test of time.
Just like him.
There were parts of Crowley he’d been deluded into believing he could change, that might heal. He’d finally tricked himself into thinking he wasn’t entirely shattered or broken beyond repair. But this last year with Aziraphale turned out to have been nothing more than a coat of paint. A thin, shoddy layer hiding the fact that not only was Crowley broken— he was ruined.
The remnants of him had been held together by cheap pigment meant to conceal shortcomings, and that had worked for a while. It always worked until something caught your eye— a scuff in the finish, maybe the hairline of a crack— and suddenly all of the blemishes, all the deformities rose to the surface, glaring and ugly and irreparable, until they were all you could see.
And all it had taken to see the truth about himself was one look from Lucius Morningstar. He’d immediately found the cracks and peeled back the chipping paint to expose the rot beneath till it was all Crowley could see, too. His faults, his flaws. His defects.
He had every single one of those memorised as well.
And his only consolation was that at least now, he’d no longer infect Aziraphale with his failings.
♰
The night before he left, perched on the bedroom windowsill and nestled against the frigid panes of glass, toes going numb from a chill he’d not felt at all, Crowley had looked to the stars. He sought them out just like he’d done when he was young, before they’d been twisted into a fucked up refuge from a supernova that always burned him anyway and could never protect him from being devoured by a black hole.
But since first stargazing with Aziraphale outside of the church last November, Crowley had fallen back in love with the night sky. He’d once again found joy and wonder and comfort within its twinkling velvet, and so he’d searched for that starlit solace that last night in Aziraphale’s home. Scanned the swaths of blueish violet for any constellation of guidance, for any glimmer of hope— but he’d found nothing.
He couldn’t see them at all.
His stars were gone.
And Crowley had known that by the next night, he’d be gone, too.
The ghostly murmurs of his past had kept him company as he’d stared out into the night. Low, silken whispers reassuring him that it was the right thing to do, leaving Aziraphale. A softly soothing coo, persuasion at its gentlest, that to once again accept he was nothing was for the benefit of everyone, and though it may have been too late for Crowley— it was and would always be too late for him, he knew, had known for so long even if he’d forgotten for a little while— it didn’t have to be too late for Aziraphale.
Oddly enough, Crowley hadn’t cried. He’d been crying so much over those last few days that his eyes were constantly tender, they’d been puffy and hurt even in the dim airglow of the clouded sky, but he hadn’t cried as he stared into the dark he knew was coming for him.
It was sort of like stepping into the cool, perfectly still blackness of a lake too murky to see through to the bottom. Resignation swallowed Crowley up like inky waters, and he’d gone without a fight, knowing that he deserved whatever they might be hiding.
By the time Aziraphale had come to stand next to him by the window, his chin slotting warmly onto the dip of his shoulder as loving hands cradled the numbing angles of his body, Crowley was already drowning.
Just like he’d known he would.
And when he’d told Aziraphale that he loved him the next morning, Crowley had meant it with all of his inadequate heart, with every fragment of his splintered self.
It was because of that love that he left later that morning.
The tears had come again with a cruel and exacting vengeance when Crowley tried to write the words that left more ugly, purpling marks on his already battered mind with every mark of the pen. Resignation took a step back as utter fucking agony assaulted him with all its viciousness, and he’d stood, bent over Aziraphale’s desk, and sobbed until the first piece of paper he’d dug out from a drawer was soaked. He’d needed another, he’d destroyed it so thoroughly, and it was too fucking apt of a metaphor for Crowley to handle. There in his hands he held a tiny piece of evidence that he truly did wreck everything he touched, anything he came in contact with. Drenched it with his bullshit till it crumbled.
With trembling fingers he’d set out a fresh sheet of paper, sniffling so fiercely his swollen, stuffy nose had hurt with it. He attempted to write what would be his last goodbye to the man he loved and who had— for a little while anyway— made Crowley feel like there was something good about him, that there was something good inside him. Like he was something.
But it had been a lie, it had all been a farce, and when Crowley finally finished writing, the side of his hand he couldn’t even feel smudged with ink, he’d carefully folded the tear stained, messy note and placed it on the bed he’d made after getting up, their— no, not anymore. Aziraphale’s bed.
He’d laid the rosary (after tearfully and selfishly kissing each bead goodbye, memorising their smooth texture against his lips) on top of the paper, gathered all of his things— his clothes, shoes, the other paraphernalia he’d brought from his flat— and walked out of the house.
Once he’d locked the front door, Crowley stared down at the old key in his hand, unsure if he could bring himself to part with it.
It was a simple but pretty thing, a proper old skeleton key that worked for most of the doors in Aziraphale’s home, the priest had informed him when he’d given it to Crowley last year so that he could come and go as he pleased. Crowley didn’t know if it was made of steel or iron, but it had a good weight to it, whatever it was.
He was already missing its presence, whatever it might be wrought from, mourning the shape of its lines pressing into his thigh from within his pocket.
He’d then pressed the oval grip of the key to his mouth, closing his eyes as he let it rest there for a few moments, the tears still falling. Another icon of Aziraphale he would never hold in his hand again, another holy relic Crowley had no right to kiss or touch, let alone keep.
Pushing it through the ornate brass letterbox that closed with a clang had felt like locking the door to this season of his life, like he’d thrown away the key so that he couldn’t tempt himself with frantically shoving it back into the lock in the future.
Crowley had then carelessly shoved all his shit into the boot of his shit car, but instead of getting in, had found himself heading towards the back of Aziraphale’s house, his feet refusing to listen to reason.
He’d shuffled through the gardens he’d been tending for months into a verdant splendor that were browning and waning until he’d spotted it through a blur of tears: the Christmas tree he and Aziraphale had planted while it was still quite cold.
One of the priest’s first and most meaningful gifts to him, that had made Crowley feel so understood and so seen, so held.
It had planted a seed in Crowley’s mind that chilly December day, a seed that had cautiously sprouted into the idea that perhaps it might be okay if he never fully healed. That maybe there were people in the world who could love a broken thing even if it would always be a shadow of its former, best self.
The fir was lovely and healthy, thriving in the soil despite the heat of the past summer and benefitting from Crowley’s meticulous pruning when needed.
He’d reached a shaky hand out, the very tips of his fingers grazing the feathery ends of a branch as he’d swallowed down a fresh flood of sobs.
“I’m sorry,” he’d whispered thickly, tasting salt on his tongue as he’d turned and walked away. The death of that hope— the hope that Crowley was worth loving and that he was maybe something instead of nothing— spreading bitter over his tastebuds as it withered into ash.
The burnt, chalky aftertaste of that death, that ending, seeped into every corner of his mouth as he drove.
♰
That had been two weeks ago.
Two weeks of solitude— or isolation, more like— back in his flat and effectively shutting out the rest of the world. Two weeks of stillness in Crowley’s chest where the flock of heart birds he’d so poorly protected had either gone utterly quiet, suffocated into silence by the noxious reappearance of their long evaded poacher, or had flown far away, abandoning the caved-in cage of Crowley’s ribs in search of a safety he no longer possessed.
And though he missed them terribly, though he longed for the melody of their birdsong and silken fluttering of downy feathers, Crowley knew they were better off, too.
His newly lonely days quickly took on a repetitive, soul sucking pattern of waking and sleeping, the latter eluding him until he eventually succumbed to exhaustion that left him queasy and sore at all hours of the early morning. He avoided leaving the flat as much as he could and abused various delivery apps for the sake of that aggravating need to eat despite his complete lack of an appetite. Being back in this space also resurrected Crowley’s previously constant worry about his finances even though he was alright for now, thanks to Aziraphale and his generosity—
Aziraphale.
Mostly, Crowley thought about Aziraphale. He thought about them.
Aziraphale had only called once: just after 2 am on the second night. Crowley had let it ring, staring at the flash of his mobile and shaking so badly his bed had creaked with the force of it, and watched the call as it went to voicemail.
The priest had left none.
And Crowley had been assaulted by a freshly torn-open wave of anguish.
It made sense that he was so easy to let go of, and Crowley couldn’t fault Aziraphale for that even if it hurt more than almost anything in the world. After all, he’d begged him in his note to let him go, and Aziraphale had never, ever denied Crowley a request, not once. He had always respected his wishes to the letter, so Crowley wasn’t surprised that Aziraphale was listening to him, and it was fucked up of him to partly wish otherwise, just another example of how fucking selfish Crowley was when it came to Aziraphale. That call could’ve been accidental, even; it meant nothing.
Which was fitting.
Crowley knew Aziraphale wouldn’t come knocking, either, knew he wouldn’t crowd him. Knew he’d let him fly to where he couldn’t follow, and Crowley just fucking prayed with all that was left of him that Aziraphale would find the strength to leave the church and live a life where he could be free: free to be himself, free to heal. Free to love whoever he wanted and who would love him the way he deserved to be loved.
He spent hours rewinding the months and pressing play on each encounter stretching out over the last year and a half, obsessively recalling every moment his fatigued brain could parse out from the waking nightmares of his failure. Looking for evidence of his manipulation of Aziraphale, searching for any questionable moment. Cringing at how he threw himself at a haunted man of God as soon as he’d gotten the chance. Curling up into a shivering, nauseous ball of self hatred whenever he came across a memory where yes— Crowley had acted in a way that was self-serving and perfectly impossible for a charitable man to ignore; didn’t matter if it was unconscious or not.
He stared at his mobile for what felt like hours throughout day and night, fighting with the incessant urge to call Aziraphale and ultimately pushing it away when he realised he had no more to say. Pathetically getting off to memories he had no business having and then wallowing in tear-streaked guilt as soon as his orgasm ended and the come on his sheets and stomach cooled to a tacky mess.
Crowley would then cry himself into an uneasy sleep post spectacularly sad wank as his body ached from the absence of that warm, solid sun cradling him from behind, an ache that was joined by fear whenever he started to drift off into dreams of black holes and terrible heights and galaxies that burned.
He didn’t know how long he could keep doing it all. Didn’t know when, or if, things might change, might get a bit easier; he sort of doubted they ever would, which was so disgustingly self pitying and melodramatic it made him hate himself all the more, but he really couldn’t help but think that way. It was the most excruciating thing Crowley had ever done, leaving his priest, and he was beyond fucked up here, in the after.
Still— in his head, it was the best thing. The only right thing. And it was that knowledge that kept him some semblance of going, he supposed.
Crowley was trying to stick with it. Tried to focus on the fact that there was a reason he was alone while also trying to ignore the alluring call of rectifying that loneliness in any other way.
But even though he was physically alone, there was another voice that joined the relentless whirring of Crowley’s anxious thoughts, its intonation that much clearer now that he’d been refreshed on its intricacies so recently.
Crowley’s inner voice, the one that had been a pale imitation of Lucius more often than not for years, had been quiet for months, and he’d expected it to return with a vengeance as soon as he left the haven of Aziraphale’s arms; but it had, apparently, been forced into submission by the chattering memories of that day in the Bentley when Crowley’s facade was found out and decimated.
Lucius’ words, down to their exact intonation and pitch, had wormed their way inside his head where they’d been silkily whispering on a constant loop for days and days and days, and Crowley would be lying if he insisted he hadn’t been brooding over every single thing Lucius had said in the Bentley almost as much as he’d been thinking of Aziraphale.
He replayed it over and over again till it was a traumatising script Crowley now knew better than his own name: accusations that were horrifyingly true, Lucius’ cruelly cutting barbs and the moments where something reminiscent of fondness had eked through. That odd and fleeting shadow of regret in evergreen eyes that Crowley likely imagined, or that the sickening, pitiful and still well trained part of him so badly wanted to see.
And he thought about the very last bit, too. Thought about the carnivorous words that had burrowed and now itched everywhere that Crowley couldn’t scratch. That were spreading through his veins and eating him alive:
“— even broken things still have their uses.”
Fuck, Crowley ached to be of use.
Through the fog of his depression, he ached for that as much as he ached for everything else, or maybe even more: to be held by arms that were fulfilled by holding, to be made to forget about it all. To be fucked even if he couldn’t feel it. To not think and to be grounded by the guiding hand of a dominant energy he’d robbed himself of, but above all, to be of use.
Even his deep seated, screeching desire to be good had been shoved aside and silenced by the need to just be used.
And it was getting to the point, Crowley feared, where he was caring less and less and less where it came from. He was an addict that had been cut off from their supply, and even though he himself had done the separating, Crowley was getting fucking desperate for something, for anything else that might give him even the slightest of highs, for anyone who could be a fix even if they would get him hooked on something that might fuck him up worse than ever before.
Fuck, he needed to stop thinking.
He needed something other than what he’d been trapped in for days on end, that cycle of languishing, fixating, decaying and thinking, thinking, thinking. Always fucking thinking of how he fucked everything up and how he was fucked up and Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale. Thinking about how he’d fucked things up for him as well, how the priest was likely hurting terribly still, if he’d not yet realised the truth.
He’d always thought the best of Crowley, always had done right from the very start like the angel he was— and how did Crowley repay him? By leaving him a fucking note, a note that was barely legible and probably fucking incoherent as well; Crowley couldn’t really even remember what he’d managed to scribble down through the tide of his tears. He could’ve done the decent thing and at least, could have at least tried to say goodbye face to face. Could’ve tried to explain it again in a way that would help Aziraphale understand, that wouldn’t end with Aziraphale insisting that Crowley had done nothing wrong like he’d done in the bathroom the first time.
He could have tried harder. He could have done more. Crowley could have made more of a fucking effort for the only person— the only person since his dad— who ever made an effort for him, but instead he turned his back on Aziraphale and ran.
But was that much of a surprise? Crowley had said it before, and he proved it time and time again: he was a coward. He knew that. He knew himself more than maybe he’d ever really admitted before now—
—but Lucius had always known him. Had always seen Crowley for what he was, and even after so much time apart, he still knew him, and, Crowley thought with a stomach-heaving lurch, probably better than Aziraphale ever had. Lucius knew what defective and splintering flaws lurked beneath Crowley’s spineless surface, and yes, it made his skin crawl to be so known by him, it made him so nauseous he couldn’t stomach anything substantial for days, but it also made him ache, ache, ache.
All he ever did now was ache.
♰
Nearly three weeks after he’d left the relationship where Crowley could no longer claim sanctuary, he hit a breaking point. Reached a hard limit he’d not known he had until he could not stand to lay on his lumpy mattress anymore, couldn’t go through it all again. His body and mind frantically safewording even though Crowley didn’t know how to make it all stop.
He swung his legs over and sat on the edge of his bedframe, calves trembling and twitching, shaking. Aching knees atrophying from the lack of doing what they were meant to do. The back of his skull pounding painfully in time with his quickening heart rate.
Through the prickling panic of needing to do something, Crowley briefly considered whether or not he wanted to tackle the enormous task of procuring more alcohol, of which he’d already consumed extraordinary amounts of these last few days, but ultimately decided against it. If irresponsible quantities of liquor on a mostly empty stomach hadn’t yet proved a reliable mechanism of dulling his thoughts, Crowley doubted anything would be different now.
Instead, he grabbed and stared at his (dying) mobile, its brightness turned all the way down for the sake of his sensitive eyes. Scrolled through the last texts he’d shared with Aziraphale for the umpteenth time before settling on the snapshot of the bench in St James’s.
Fuck, had it really only been three weeks ago, when he’d walked through the park?
And what followed— was that really all it had taken for his life to fall apart? Three days of trying and failing to forget the truth Lucius had unearthed within three minutes was all it took to destroy the only real happiness Crowley had found within the last decade.
Happiness that had all started on a nearly identical bench just about a year ago.
He’d been plagued by a jagged, close to impassable mountain range of emotions since that day, but now— now anger took a step forward for maybe the first time since that awful confrontation in Aziraphale’s bathroom, and the pulsing at the nape of Crowley’s neck mounted into a deafening roar.
Crushing points of searing pain cut through the too-fast, too-loud rush of blood in his head, and Crowley glanced down to see that both hands were digging into the flesh of each thigh, his mobile no longer in his palm. Each fingertip and thumb boring into the muscles to the point where he needed to grit his teeth, but at least his knees were no longer shaking.
There was something motivating about it, the driving fury. Fuming at himself and Lucius and for a brief, unfair moment towards Aziraphale made it impossible to sit any longer. The slicing repulsion towards his cowardly weakness forced Crowley’s feet to walk away from the pathetic nest of his failures, made him put space between himself and where he’d spent days crying and coming and obsessing and wallowing.
Crowley couldn’t take one more fucking second of it.
He donned the closest warmish jumper he could find followed by his sunglasses, the bruises left behind by his wrathful hands smarting but welcome catalysts. He bent with a wince, creaky back cracking, to tug on the boots closest to him and left the building, yanked outside by some unknown force that had Crowley gulping down a biting wind that really did call for a heavier sort of coat; Aziraphale would likely fret to the point of his heart giving out at his less than adequate outerwear, let alone his walking alone this time of night.
He choked down a sob at the automatic thought he no longer (or ever) had any right to. Shook off the chill of the air that slipped through the stretched fibers and kept walking.
Of course it was far from the first time that Crowley found himself aimlessly wandering the streets of London in the middle of the night, but it had been quite awhile, not since the days of walking to meet whoever wanted him for a night or an hour or two, probably. Still, the rippling sheen of dark pavement reflecting streetlamp halos was a trail that Crowley recognised even if he had no plans for where he was headed.
With every step, Crowley waited for the unbearable, irate itch crawling in his skin to let up at least a little; surely something had to give eventually, right? But as time passed in a shuttered blur all around him, the hum of the city dialing down and the last of the loitering taxis beginning to thin out, he didn’t feel better. The fresh air his lungs had craved was seizing up in his throat with every breath, too cold to be much more than a nuisance, but Crowley kept going anyway, stubbornly refusing to turn back, unable to face the bed he’d made where he knew he would find no rest. Pulled inexplicably forward as the minutes turned into hours of some vague mission he couldn’t divine.
He hadn’t known where he was going until he was already there, rounding the corner of an immaculately kept street lined with historic terrace housing. He was completely unsure as to whether it had been an unconscious decision or merely a repressed one as he glanced up and to the left where he knew that, at least in years past, there had been a camera that made knocking superfluous.
Crowley stared through his sunglasses at what looked like the glint of a lens, and his hands, buried in the pockets of his jeans, were clenched, tingling with that awful prickling as he stood there, waiting—
—and then the door opened, pulled back on its hinges to reveal Dr Lucius Morningstar standing there, still fully dressed in slacks and a turtleneck despite the hour of 2am-ish, taking up its frame and making the whole structure of the doorway and Crowley himself feel comically small.
Neither said a word as the silence between them stretched on and on for what felt like hours. In reality, it was likely less than a minute or two, but then again, time had never made much sense around Lucius.
The expression on his face as he peered down at Crowley was strange, nearly alien. Unreadable but fixed, rapt, and with signs of what might’ve been surprise written there, but Crowley wasn’t sure; he didn’t know what surprise even looked like on those features. Lucius was never surprised or so much as caught off guard, but his eyes were a bit wider than usual, his brow raised enough that Crowley noticed. Within seconds, though, it all disappeared, and his features rearranged into something more outwardly neutral, into his characteristic calm yet piercing affect that Crowley knew well.
But that flash of something, whatever it had been, made him feel slightly braver, just enough so that he could find his voice. Bright enough to illuminate the path to his rage.
“Y’happy now, yeah?” Crowley had intended to hiss, but his hoarse words trembled despite his best efforts, wavered like his body was shivering in the unseasonably frigid brisk of the mid November air and that unblinking gaze. “Y’got what you wanted out of your whole fucked up ambush— I left the only person who ever loved me in spite of what a fuckin’ waste of space I am, and now I’ve got nothing. Fitting, right?”
Then Crowley did laugh, ripping his glasses from his face in a burst of rare and reckless nerve, bitterly chuckling as he glared, uninhibited, up into the forest of Lucius’ eyes. Spurred on by his unprecedented silence and the lack of rebuttal, that temporary courage flitting about in Crowley’s veins like it was frantically scrambling to make a difference before it evaporated.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing— tha’s all I am, thanks to you. ‘M not afraid to say it anymore,” the almost hysterical fury was back in full force, bubbling up into his throat like acid and biting at the back of his tongue as his teeth started to chatter. “I know ‘s t-true, an’ he— he’s b-better off. I know that. I wasn’t—”
His voice cracked as he looked to the left, breaking eye contact, unable to look at Lucius any longer as he already began to regret removing his glasses. Fighting to swallow the rest of that too-big, soul cleaving statement: I wasn’t worth it— wasn’t worth leaving a prison he hated. Pretty telling, that.
He blinked through welling tears, shivering as cold crept up his arms and legs and slithered down his spine. It had started misting at some point on his walk, but Crowley hadn’t known how fucking freezing he was till just now, the black jumper he’d worn damp and hanging heavy on his frame. The rain started hitting his back as he stood half-under the balcony that was right above Lucius’ door, picking up speed and intensity, and Crowley’s body began to thrum with renewed panic as its core temperature dropped. Remembering the times it had been left alone to grow cold in the sweat slicked aftermath of euphoria by the man now standing only centimeters away.
He inhaled as deeply as he could, desperately trying to keep hold of himself, the raw air catching in his throat as he licked his lips and batted at the tears falling hot and itchy over his cheeks. He hated that he was crying in front of Lucius again, hated that his feet had brought him here in some fucked up notion of— fuck, Crowley didn’t even know.
Maybe it was an unconscious attempt at reclaiming something he already knew he’d never get back. Possibly a pretty decent shot at self sabotage, self destruction— punishing himself— or some misguided idea of exposure therapy, like confronting Lucius might strip away his power and the stranglehold he had on Crowley and his psyche.
Or perhaps Crowley was simply giving in to the inevitable; maybe he was accepting that he truly was a broken thing that would only ever be useful in whatever way Lucius deemed best, and that might be better than rotting away in his bed with nothing but his yearning for Aziraphale keeping his shattered heart company.
And through his inner jumbled justifications and droning anxiety edged with terror, Crowley realised that Lucius, for once in all the years of knowing him, was still quiet.
He hadn’t said anything, not one thing since he’d opened the door, and Crowley was unnerved, was thrown off by the silence coming from a man whose voice was his greatest weapon, but Lucius continued staring down at him without so much as a word.
Unease settled in the spaces between Crowley’s weary, too-heavy bones, and his shuddering breath came faster and faster, little puffs of white swirling into the cold before disappearing. He hadn’t realised just how tense he was all over until now, so much so his limbs were aching with it. The inner push and pull between his fury and fear and the haemorrhaging, sucking chest wound of his heartbreak was as dizzying as the frightening newness of this— and as he swayed there on his feet, peripherals beginning to blur and shimmer with the threat of bleeding out, it pissed Crowley off all the more.
“Nothing to say? Christ, first time that’s ever happened,” he snapped, his voice strengthening ever so slightly even as his eyes continued leaking; he was so used to crying he barely noticed it anymore. “‘s it possible I’ve shocked you? Done something you hadn’t predicted, Doctor Morningstar? Better add that to your fucking file on me—”
Crowley trapped his trembling lower lip between his teeth as his words cut off, feeling like he was seconds away from disintegrating right outside of this fucking door. He was so fucking furious and so fucking tired, so tired of everything, so tired of thinking about everything and anything and Aziraphale and how Crowley fucked everything up and maybe it was for the best, really— maybe it truly was all for the best that he was here with someone who really knew what he was—
His waning bravado vanished as soon as Lucius moved for the first time that night, shifting in the doorframe and uncrossing his arms.
Crowley startled at it, it was so sudden despite its subtlety, and Lucius actually froze, going perfectly still again.
That was confusing, and Crowley’s brow furrowed as he tried to wrap his strung out mind around what it could mean.
It was as if Lucius thought Crowley might bolt at any second and didn’t want to frighten him off, like he was just as uncertain of what the Hell was happening as was Crowley, and wouldn’t that be something? For Lucius, of all people, to not know what to do, to question his own self?
That couldn’t be the case, Crowley thought wildly as his molars clacked together, the blustery wind at his back almost icy now, whipping faster and cutting through his wet jumper. Some vague part of him, through the building overwhelm, thought the air smelled like snow—
—he was moving again.
Crowley could hear his heartbeat ricocheting within his sore, fuzzy head again, could hear the frantically whooshing current of his roaring blood as Lucius inched out of the doorway and a hand, massive but gentle, reached up to softly cup his cheek, its huge thumb tracing the jut of his cheekbone, over the papery thin skin below Crowley’s eye that was bruised from crying for days and eventually, the tears clinging to his lower lashline.
The noise that trickled out from between Crowley’s teeth as Lucius cradled his face with an impossible tenderness, was as breathless as the rest of him.
It rattled the dilapidated halls of his memory, it shook him to his marrow, this version of Lucius, this stranger he didn’t know or maybe had known at some point years ago, bits and pieces offered to Crowley at the start that he was too blissed out and fucked up to remember they existed at all once they’d vanished without a trace.
It was beyond disorienting, but Crowley— pathetic, pitiful, weak— couldn’t stop his eyes from closing as he leaned into the touch, the desperation for anything other than the agonising cycle he’d been trapped in for weeks taking over whatever rational thought he had left. Instead of cracking from trying to contain the misery of a vacant ribcage, it felt good to have those ribs graze against something warm and solid as Lucius stepped closer— even if that something was partially responsible for the destruction of the aviary in his heart.
He braced himself for it: for the onslaught, for the surely imminent crash that would have him struggling to breathe while begging for more. Crowley’s own body froze in place while he waited for whatever would happen next, as his mind started to slowly, mercifully go blank and the verdant edges of his vision began to faintly glimmer with a brilliantly gilded shadow.
Crowley braced for it, but it didn't come.
His pounding heart pulsed with that darkly reverberating gold, and he was still crying as Lucius continued to brush tears from his cheeks, his thumb gathering the wetness as delicately as if it were something unthinkably precious to him, and it was unthinkable, it was fucking unthinkable that any part of Crowley was precious to anybody, but especially to Lucius fucking Morningstar.
The reverence was eerily familiar yet completely foreign, coming from this source in place of his angel, and it felt unreal, it was disconcerting and it was wrong—
— it was a terrifying, incomprehensible relief.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” Lucius’ murmur, blooming low over his temple and blanketing his inked serpent with warmth, was so soothing, so sure it made Crowley’s nervous system forget to panic at his dangerously close proximity to the scar of his own making, “you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.”
Crowley found himself involuntarily dipping his chin in reply, like even the most unconscious segments of himself couldn’t help but agree, like his body had long known what his mind was sluggishly catching up to. His legs followed suit and began to buckle, knees twitching out of control as a powerful forearm curled around his waist and kept him from crumpling to the ground.
Through the drumming racket of his own heart and the other now pressed up against his ear, deep and resonant, Crowley listened for the distress calls of anyone who might be left in its chambers, for any feathered stragglers that hadn’t left him crying out in warning, but there was nothing. No canaries left to scream. No one left to suffocate with his deficiencies. A chest as empty as he was.
The dizziness swooned as he shallowly inhaled rich, woodsy plumes of smoke, inviting smouldering birch and pine into his lungs now that Crowley knew it wouldn’t choke anyone who mattered. Breathing in the Earthiness of skin-warmed leather and the sweetness of spring’s last daffodil asphyxiated by ash falling from a nearby, grove of burning cypress until he was filled with it, teeth no longer chattering.
He was back where he didn’t have to do anything except be whatever Lucius wanted, didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than what he really was. And if that meant fully and unreservedly accepting that Crowley truly was nothing at all, well— in that moment, it was better than the alternative.
It was better, Crowley hazily mused to himself as fingers threaded into his hair, carefully detangling its damp and frizzing waves, than thinking himself to death on how he’d preyed on someone filled with light and love and pain.
It was better than clumsily slapping coat after coat of paint all over himself in a pointless attempt to hide the broken, damaged thing that he was.
And it was better to feel like he was getting exactly what he deserved.
One of the last things Crowley remembered thinking before he was thoroughly overcome with the vastness of that all encompassing embrace and enveloped in an inebriating darkness that was unexpectedly comforting, was why shouldn’t he accept that Lucius might be right?
Stepping past that last threshold of the doorway felt like Crowley was wading into that same starless sky he’d seen from Aziraphale’s window, but now its darkness was a familiar one, a welcoming void lined with midnight calling him home. Strong, steady arms slowly snaking around Crowley’s trembling torso in a fortified structure that seemed willing to house the nothingness that was him. Drawing him closer until he completely collapsed into the event horizon of Lucius’ chest, breaking apart against his clavicle and dissolving into fractured sobs that were muffled by his density.
Crowley’s own hands scrambled around Lucius’ back to grapple into the softness of his turtleneck, the only lifeline he could find in the velvety dark as he was pulled closer and closer. Reeled in until he was entirely flush with and by the immense, inescapable gravity of a temptation Crowley couldn’t withstand, but what did it matter, anyway?
He was already in Hell.