SOME PEOPLE HAVE REAL PROBLEMS--7/10 (Supernatural: Crowley, Growly, Sam, Dean, Castiel)
Title: Some People Have Real Problems
Fandom: Supernatural
Word count (total fic): 20,245
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: None, really, maybe some Dean/Cas hints. Don't hold the lack of pairing against it, though--If you're a dog lover, you'll probably like this story...
Summary: When Crowley's meatsuit mutinies it's up to Castiel and the Winchesters to help The King Of Hell him get back into his favourite blood and guts condominium. What starts off as a seemingly easy assignment quickly turns into a drama about a dead dog and a haphazard pile of memories. Putting a leash on Crowley's body proves harder than expected.
Notes: Takes place after season five, AU afterwards--Sam was rescued from Hell in much the same manner as Dean. Otherwise it's canon.
This was written for the crowley_bigbang on livejournal. I didn't quite make it for the official track, so this is the unofficial posting :P.
Castiel tried to ignore the blinking text on his cell phone, the little flame app licking each letter. "WASHROOM. NOW." it read. Castiel turned off his cell phone and continued his conversation with Erin. Rude demons with corporeal bodies that misbehaved themselves were just going to have to wait. "So you believe the drowning of your dog was in retaliation for your involvement in taking down this drug dealer." Castiel pretended to write the information down, which of course meant he actually*was* writing the conversation down. "Do you have any idea why it was your dog, specifically, that he went after?"
"Galileo was our world." Erin cast a worried glance down the hall leading the bedroom, the scuffling of the body echoing into the sparse living room. "There's something kind of off about him, don't you think? I mean, I don't mind he hasn't said anything, but he's like that, it's part of his personality and I accept it. He has a lot of problems expressing himself, unless he's reading or writing things down. That's why he made such a good literary agent, even if it was for a tiny publishing company. It feels different this time, though. He's really kind of...off. The last time this happened he was mute for a couple of days, but this time he's just...I don't know, he doesn't seem to be as aware as before."
Dean Winchester raised a brow and his brother Sam matched it. "The last time?"
"He comes back, he leaves, it's been like this for the past five months. It's really frustrating. I mean, if he wants to break up why doesn't he just pack up his stuff and go? I caught him three weeks ago in the backyard with Galileo, playing catch with him for over two hours. Then he left, not saying one word to me. If he wants another life with someone else, I get it, but why torture me like that? It's pointlessly cruel."
Sam was confused. "I thought you said he'd been gone for five months and you didn't know where he was?"
"He *was* gone! He still is!" Erin's face flushed with worry and frustration. "I don't know how to explain it, but that person who keeps dropping in here, it looks like him, it tries to act like him, but he's...He's missing. I don't have words for it." Erin gave both Sam and Dean an imploring look. "Maybe if we can get him to a hospital or a doctor to have him checked out. Nothing has been right since that ridiculous Oscar dinner. Maybe he had a stroke?"
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Castiel took advantage of the uncomfortable opportunity and headed down the thin hallway leading to the bedroom. The bungalow was a tiny affair, consisting of a kitchen, a living room and a single bedroom with an adjoining bath. There was no basement. Closet space was at a minimum. In many ways it was like a rented apartment with a lawn, only this time of year one had to shovel one's way out. He paused and cocked his head to one side as the body came into view, and Castiel watched its circular, automatic movements as it fussed over bed covers and straightening a rather ugly painting of a clock. There was no Salvador Dali rendition of it, no surreal interpretation of time. Just a simple black and white image of a black and white clock bolted firm against a white wall, above a white lamp which was in turn on a white bedside table.
The only thing with colour on this side of the room was a photograph in a white frame of the body, Erin, and a rather goofy looking tumble of fur that Castiel understood to be Galileo, the dead dog. In the periphery of Castiel's vision, he could see the bathing room with its large mirror, the outline of Crowley frantically trying to get his attention and when he realized he was unable to do so, the demon was pantomiming all manner of lewd gestures and threats of dismemberment. Castiel continued to ignore him, for he had a far more interesting specimen to converse with.
"It is my understanding that you have been able to evict Crowley, the demon possessing you, from your physical self for quite some time. This may not have been entirely wilful on your part, and no doubt Crowley is completely unaware of these visits home. You are not a complete person, but you are enough of one to indulge in subterfuge. I imagine it's been quite a good scenario for you, being able to come home and check on things before being forced into the background again as Crowley takes over. I am sure it's been highly risky for you, keeping tabs on that balance, ensuring your actions weren't detected."
The body paused. It stared at the pillow, eyes blank, but something, that indomitable spark that Castiel know to be Human Will, was running wild within the corner of its dark brown gaze.
Castiel gestured to the highly antiseptic side of the room. "Your surroundings suggest you are a being of great restraint. It's no easy thing to have this amount of self control. Yours is a very strong personality, not one that easily bends to the will of someone else." He picked up the photograph, studying it intently. "A powerful demon such as Crowley is not easy to manipulate and I am impressed that you have been able to do so without recrimination. But this time you made a serious breach of your usual pattern and that disturbs me. What is your real purpose here? I understand you lost your dog and this upset you greatly, to the point you have taken this unnecessary risk. But you had to have known that this would result in your permanent caging beneath Crowley's overwhelming personality." He placed the picture back on the bedside table very carefully. "You know you will never be able to come back here again. Crowley will take possession of your body, I myself will ensure it. As you know, there are far too many security risks involved to leave you untethered to him."
The body slumped to the sit at the edge of the bed, wide brown eyes staring emptily into a point of space only it could fathom. Castiel had seen that look before, on Dean during one of his sweat inducing nightmares, a cold, shivering realization pouring out of him bodily, the stench of terror lingering in the motel room. But this was not entirely the case here, for while there was a residual, lingering fear, there was more a resolved sorrow, not unlike the cold breeze that crept up from the newly dead.
"How does Galileo fit into this?" Castiel asked, and the body shot him a glare filled with enough hate to fill a dozen or so hells of its own. It clenched its fists and ground its teeth, its throat gurgling with words it could no longer speak. Castiel sighed and gave Crowley's furious stomping in the mirror behind him a roll of his eyes. "Erin says that Galileo was murdered by a drug dealer. Why are you here with Erin and not going after the person responsible for your pain?"
Castiel heard Dean cough in the background, the low rumble of Sam's voice seeping in from the living room, down the slender hall and into the bedroom. "I still don't get it," Dean was saying. "The two of you never even had sex."
The body shifted where it sat and Castiel's face lit up with understanding.
"This is your family."
The body shuddered at Castiel's choice of words. It stood up and began its ritual organizing of the closet, arranging blue shirts in a scale of light to dark, with white shirts taking the lead. "Thank you," Castiel said to it. "You have been very forthcoming. This is quite possibly the easiest conversation I have ever had with a human."
His mood considerably brightened, Castiel left the bedroom and the OCD zombified version of Crowley's body behind and entered the bathing room, where Crowley's furious face lit up the long mirror with all the force of his virtual hellfire might. It was getting very hot in the small bungalow, the air charged with Crowley's trapped rage.
"Well?" Crowley demanded.
"Well, what?" Castiel asked.
"Did you get any answers you insufferable moron! Why can't I get back in my body!"
"It's not your body. From your own statement you never obtained the proper permission to take it." Castiel held up his hand to halt the torrent of curses that spilled from Crowley's virtual mouth in a suddenly fluent Scottish brogue. "There is no need to panic. I will assist you in returning to the body once its current need has been met. I suspect it is worried about the last remaining members of its family and..."
"It's all about the damned dog," Crowley sneered. "He's not getting him!"
Castiel frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"Growley, you idiot! Haven't you been paying any bloody attention?" The mirror crackled and sparked with pent up firepower. "I'd sell my own soul to the highest bidder if it suited me, but there's no contract in any universe anywhere that says I'm to give up my dog!"
Castiel's joy at finally understanding a complex human tragedy was erased at this. "How do you know he wants your dog?"
"It's obvious. That's what this whole ploy is about. Drug dealer, living here alone, impending danger...He wants my Growley! The greedy bastard isn't getting him!"
"I don't understand." Castiel glanced over his shoulder to the automaton being arranging carefully pressed shirts on hangers, this time in alphabetical order according to manufacturer labels. "How are you making this connection? I found his argument to be quite articulate. But then, he didn't say very much, and was perhaps a bit vague on the details."
"Drug dealers. For something so boring and stupid and pointless and worthless, I'm dragged away from my job, my very, very, very important job, to go slumming it with a zombie and its gender neutral platonic body pillow!" Crowley was really frothing at the mouth now, licks of fire escaping the mirror and leaving sizzling holes in the bathmat. "I'm telling you, when I get that body back I'm killing it. No more good Craig and healthy dark stouts it's all deep fried Mars bars and suicide salt lick buffalo wings, have you got that, you mindless tosser!"
"The body really doesn't care about your feelings," Castiel reminded him. "You can't reprimand it for doing what its memory has deemed natural."
"Natural," Crowley spat. "There's nothing natural about any of this! There is no dust to dust going on here, the natural order has been most seriously, my dear, thoughtful angel, fucked with--which is the closest that uptight bastard ever got to doing it!"
"You are being unnecessarily crude," Castiel said, annoyed. He stepped out of the bathing room and closed the door behind him, ignoring the horrendous cries of protest from Crowley as he gently clicked it shut. "You're getting far too noisy. There's no need to further upset Erin."
But upsetting Erin was the order of the day. The words had no sooner left Castiel's lips than a roaring crash erupted in the living room, followed by the unmistakable explosive pounding of gunfire. Castiel ran into the living room to find Dean and Sam had overturned the couch, using it as a shield, while Erin stood with gun cocked, ready to fire at will. Outside, a figure stood apart from several others, a flaming Molotov cocktail held in his grip.
"This is for you, bitch!"
The front window exploded on impact, the Molotov cocktail thrown into the living room where it erupted on the orange shag carpet, engulfing a large part of it in flames. Loud voices shouted at them from the back door. They were surrounded. The figure on the lawn approached, his gold teeth gleaming in the darkness.
"I'm going to make you pay for crossing me," he promised.
Fandom: Supernatural
Word count (total fic): 20,245
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: None, really, maybe some Dean/Cas hints. Don't hold the lack of pairing against it, though--If you're a dog lover, you'll probably like this story...
Summary: When Crowley's meatsuit mutinies it's up to Castiel and the Winchesters to help The King Of Hell him get back into his favourite blood and guts condominium. What starts off as a seemingly easy assignment quickly turns into a drama about a dead dog and a haphazard pile of memories. Putting a leash on Crowley's body proves harder than expected.
Notes: Takes place after season five, AU afterwards--Sam was rescued from Hell in much the same manner as Dean. Otherwise it's canon.
This was written for the crowley_bigbang on livejournal. I didn't quite make it for the official track, so this is the unofficial posting :P.
Castiel tried to ignore the blinking text on his cell phone, the little flame app licking each letter. "WASHROOM. NOW." it read. Castiel turned off his cell phone and continued his conversation with Erin. Rude demons with corporeal bodies that misbehaved themselves were just going to have to wait. "So you believe the drowning of your dog was in retaliation for your involvement in taking down this drug dealer." Castiel pretended to write the information down, which of course meant he actually*was* writing the conversation down. "Do you have any idea why it was your dog, specifically, that he went after?"
"Galileo was our world." Erin cast a worried glance down the hall leading the bedroom, the scuffling of the body echoing into the sparse living room. "There's something kind of off about him, don't you think? I mean, I don't mind he hasn't said anything, but he's like that, it's part of his personality and I accept it. He has a lot of problems expressing himself, unless he's reading or writing things down. That's why he made such a good literary agent, even if it was for a tiny publishing company. It feels different this time, though. He's really kind of...off. The last time this happened he was mute for a couple of days, but this time he's just...I don't know, he doesn't seem to be as aware as before."
Dean Winchester raised a brow and his brother Sam matched it. "The last time?"
"He comes back, he leaves, it's been like this for the past five months. It's really frustrating. I mean, if he wants to break up why doesn't he just pack up his stuff and go? I caught him three weeks ago in the backyard with Galileo, playing catch with him for over two hours. Then he left, not saying one word to me. If he wants another life with someone else, I get it, but why torture me like that? It's pointlessly cruel."
Sam was confused. "I thought you said he'd been gone for five months and you didn't know where he was?"
"He *was* gone! He still is!" Erin's face flushed with worry and frustration. "I don't know how to explain it, but that person who keeps dropping in here, it looks like him, it tries to act like him, but he's...He's missing. I don't have words for it." Erin gave both Sam and Dean an imploring look. "Maybe if we can get him to a hospital or a doctor to have him checked out. Nothing has been right since that ridiculous Oscar dinner. Maybe he had a stroke?"
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Castiel took advantage of the uncomfortable opportunity and headed down the thin hallway leading to the bedroom. The bungalow was a tiny affair, consisting of a kitchen, a living room and a single bedroom with an adjoining bath. There was no basement. Closet space was at a minimum. In many ways it was like a rented apartment with a lawn, only this time of year one had to shovel one's way out. He paused and cocked his head to one side as the body came into view, and Castiel watched its circular, automatic movements as it fussed over bed covers and straightening a rather ugly painting of a clock. There was no Salvador Dali rendition of it, no surreal interpretation of time. Just a simple black and white image of a black and white clock bolted firm against a white wall, above a white lamp which was in turn on a white bedside table.
The only thing with colour on this side of the room was a photograph in a white frame of the body, Erin, and a rather goofy looking tumble of fur that Castiel understood to be Galileo, the dead dog. In the periphery of Castiel's vision, he could see the bathing room with its large mirror, the outline of Crowley frantically trying to get his attention and when he realized he was unable to do so, the demon was pantomiming all manner of lewd gestures and threats of dismemberment. Castiel continued to ignore him, for he had a far more interesting specimen to converse with.
"It is my understanding that you have been able to evict Crowley, the demon possessing you, from your physical self for quite some time. This may not have been entirely wilful on your part, and no doubt Crowley is completely unaware of these visits home. You are not a complete person, but you are enough of one to indulge in subterfuge. I imagine it's been quite a good scenario for you, being able to come home and check on things before being forced into the background again as Crowley takes over. I am sure it's been highly risky for you, keeping tabs on that balance, ensuring your actions weren't detected."
The body paused. It stared at the pillow, eyes blank, but something, that indomitable spark that Castiel know to be Human Will, was running wild within the corner of its dark brown gaze.
Castiel gestured to the highly antiseptic side of the room. "Your surroundings suggest you are a being of great restraint. It's no easy thing to have this amount of self control. Yours is a very strong personality, not one that easily bends to the will of someone else." He picked up the photograph, studying it intently. "A powerful demon such as Crowley is not easy to manipulate and I am impressed that you have been able to do so without recrimination. But this time you made a serious breach of your usual pattern and that disturbs me. What is your real purpose here? I understand you lost your dog and this upset you greatly, to the point you have taken this unnecessary risk. But you had to have known that this would result in your permanent caging beneath Crowley's overwhelming personality." He placed the picture back on the bedside table very carefully. "You know you will never be able to come back here again. Crowley will take possession of your body, I myself will ensure it. As you know, there are far too many security risks involved to leave you untethered to him."
The body slumped to the sit at the edge of the bed, wide brown eyes staring emptily into a point of space only it could fathom. Castiel had seen that look before, on Dean during one of his sweat inducing nightmares, a cold, shivering realization pouring out of him bodily, the stench of terror lingering in the motel room. But this was not entirely the case here, for while there was a residual, lingering fear, there was more a resolved sorrow, not unlike the cold breeze that crept up from the newly dead.
"How does Galileo fit into this?" Castiel asked, and the body shot him a glare filled with enough hate to fill a dozen or so hells of its own. It clenched its fists and ground its teeth, its throat gurgling with words it could no longer speak. Castiel sighed and gave Crowley's furious stomping in the mirror behind him a roll of his eyes. "Erin says that Galileo was murdered by a drug dealer. Why are you here with Erin and not going after the person responsible for your pain?"
Castiel heard Dean cough in the background, the low rumble of Sam's voice seeping in from the living room, down the slender hall and into the bedroom. "I still don't get it," Dean was saying. "The two of you never even had sex."
The body shifted where it sat and Castiel's face lit up with understanding.
"This is your family."
The body shuddered at Castiel's choice of words. It stood up and began its ritual organizing of the closet, arranging blue shirts in a scale of light to dark, with white shirts taking the lead. "Thank you," Castiel said to it. "You have been very forthcoming. This is quite possibly the easiest conversation I have ever had with a human."
His mood considerably brightened, Castiel left the bedroom and the OCD zombified version of Crowley's body behind and entered the bathing room, where Crowley's furious face lit up the long mirror with all the force of his virtual hellfire might. It was getting very hot in the small bungalow, the air charged with Crowley's trapped rage.
"Well?" Crowley demanded.
"Well, what?" Castiel asked.
"Did you get any answers you insufferable moron! Why can't I get back in my body!"
"It's not your body. From your own statement you never obtained the proper permission to take it." Castiel held up his hand to halt the torrent of curses that spilled from Crowley's virtual mouth in a suddenly fluent Scottish brogue. "There is no need to panic. I will assist you in returning to the body once its current need has been met. I suspect it is worried about the last remaining members of its family and..."
"It's all about the damned dog," Crowley sneered. "He's not getting him!"
Castiel frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"Growley, you idiot! Haven't you been paying any bloody attention?" The mirror crackled and sparked with pent up firepower. "I'd sell my own soul to the highest bidder if it suited me, but there's no contract in any universe anywhere that says I'm to give up my dog!"
Castiel's joy at finally understanding a complex human tragedy was erased at this. "How do you know he wants your dog?"
"It's obvious. That's what this whole ploy is about. Drug dealer, living here alone, impending danger...He wants my Growley! The greedy bastard isn't getting him!"
"I don't understand." Castiel glanced over his shoulder to the automaton being arranging carefully pressed shirts on hangers, this time in alphabetical order according to manufacturer labels. "How are you making this connection? I found his argument to be quite articulate. But then, he didn't say very much, and was perhaps a bit vague on the details."
"Drug dealers. For something so boring and stupid and pointless and worthless, I'm dragged away from my job, my very, very, very important job, to go slumming it with a zombie and its gender neutral platonic body pillow!" Crowley was really frothing at the mouth now, licks of fire escaping the mirror and leaving sizzling holes in the bathmat. "I'm telling you, when I get that body back I'm killing it. No more good Craig and healthy dark stouts it's all deep fried Mars bars and suicide salt lick buffalo wings, have you got that, you mindless tosser!"
"The body really doesn't care about your feelings," Castiel reminded him. "You can't reprimand it for doing what its memory has deemed natural."
"Natural," Crowley spat. "There's nothing natural about any of this! There is no dust to dust going on here, the natural order has been most seriously, my dear, thoughtful angel, fucked with--which is the closest that uptight bastard ever got to doing it!"
"You are being unnecessarily crude," Castiel said, annoyed. He stepped out of the bathing room and closed the door behind him, ignoring the horrendous cries of protest from Crowley as he gently clicked it shut. "You're getting far too noisy. There's no need to further upset Erin."
But upsetting Erin was the order of the day. The words had no sooner left Castiel's lips than a roaring crash erupted in the living room, followed by the unmistakable explosive pounding of gunfire. Castiel ran into the living room to find Dean and Sam had overturned the couch, using it as a shield, while Erin stood with gun cocked, ready to fire at will. Outside, a figure stood apart from several others, a flaming Molotov cocktail held in his grip.
"This is for you, bitch!"
The front window exploded on impact, the Molotov cocktail thrown into the living room where it erupted on the orange shag carpet, engulfing a large part of it in flames. Loud voices shouted at them from the back door. They were surrounded. The figure on the lawn approached, his gold teeth gleaming in the darkness.
"I'm going to make you pay for crossing me," he promised.