SOME PEOPLE HAVE REAL PROBLEMS--1/10 (Supernatural: Crowley, Castiel/Dean hints, Sam, Growly)
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.
Crowley brooded over his glass of brandy, its heady aroma and smooth taste doing little to ease the dark mood he'd been cultivating for the past two hours. He had finished his job with the Winchesters, had saved the ridiculous world they existed in and was now free to enjoy the exploits of being the King of Hell. The trouble was, without an impending apocalypse hanging over the universe with ticking Dr. Strangelove frenzy there wasn't much else for him to do. The adrenaline rush of heading off Lucifer and dealing with the twisted logic of angels from On High had long since worn off. He was now doomed to the petty whims of humans and their make believe dramas. Adultery. Murder. Thieving and coveting. All very pedestrian and banal pursuits that on the surface looked like a vacation but were, in fact, pointless exercises in filling one's day for that relentless bitch known as Time.
They'd ruined what was once a good thing, those Winchester boys, he thought with malice. The best part of his job had been all the weaselling and conniving and backdoor backstabbing but now all these little menial contracts paled in comparison to that one Big Score. He was now demoted to sitting on comfortable couches and admiring his post-modern fireplace, his brandy warming up from the considerable heat in his palm. Bastards. They'd saved the world and turned his wonderful, fiery hell into a suburb.
The face in his fireplace had long since burned away, revealing the grinning skull beneath. It too began to crackle beneath the white hot heat he kept the fire roaring at, the bones at last turning to charcoal while the teeth stubbornly remained intact. A briefcase from Smitty's Furnace Repair lay on its side, its contents spilled across the soft lambskin carpet that adorned the floor. His contract was up, of course, all very orderly and neat and Smitty didn't put up as much of a fuss as Crowley had expected him to. Smitty had been proud of his accomplishments in creating sustainable alternatives to natural gas furnaces and the start-up for his project was well worth the price of his soul if it meant the planet could benefit from his invention. Goddamned ecological martyr. Crowley picked up the poker and gave Smitty's sizzling bones a whack for good measure. His rib cage erupted into a shower of sparks that burned holes in the lambskin carpet.
Altruistic furnace repairmen--Was there any end to humanity's useless existence? He sighed and sat back on his white leather couch, sipping at the warmed brandy in his grip. He supposed things could be worse. After all, he did manage to get another season of Big Brother on the air not to mention those mysterious extra charges on cell phones that were now stubbornly commonplace. Small successes, but they were destined to create havoc in even the calmest of places. Only last week a yoga instructor had a full on meltdown in front of her clients thanks to a two hundred dollar cell phone bill on a phone she no longer owned. He had a lot of knowledge, it was true, but he never knew it was actually possible for a human being to be flexible enough to actually pull a Linda Blair head turn of 360 degrees without snapping one's neck.
The puking in time to Yanni wasn't his fault, of course. That was the bad tempeh salad.
Furious yoga instructors and ecological furnace repairmen were not, however, what was foremost in Crowley's mind at present. As he sank further onto the couch, enjoying the warmth and luxury surrounding him, the pop of human bones crackling in the fire, he had to admit that this was the ideal job he'd been searching for when he'd first been given the post. Being Kind was supposed to be easy, especially for a man whose sole care was for how old his brandy was and did his suit fit to the perfection of his own expectations. The one he was wearing now had a slightly imperfect dart in the seam just beneath his elbow. The Korean seamstress who had made *that* mistake was going to pay dearly.
Annoyed, he picked up the local paper and perused it with idle eyes, his glance taking in the usual stories of earthquakes, hurricanes, economic collapse, terrorism and virus outbreaks before turning to his favourite column, Dear Granny. Dear Granny was not, of course, a Granny, but a two thousand year old demon in a thirty-one year old woman's body who dutifully typed out terrible advice to unsuspecting broken hearted saps and gullible morons--most of the human race, in fact. He read the first problem begging for Dear Granny's fix: "My boyfriend tries on my underwear and he says he's not cheating on me with my cross-dressing uncle, but how can I be sure?"
Crowley sighed. Maybe he should have let the apocalypse happen. It was a natural mistake, believing one's sudden promotion to King Of Hell to have more staying power than a five minute stint in Winchesters United's little universe of demon bashing. An apocalypse be damned, he wasn't giving up his cozy new promotion without a fight! Really, what did Lucifer expect, that he wouldn't fight for his new job? He'd clearly never heard of the entrepreneurial spirit, and Crowley was full to bursting with those. Those souls went down well with a good Merlot.
He read through the Dear Granny article, where she encouraged the young woman to allow her boyfriend to continue borrowing her clothes and could she perhaps be more understanding of his search for his identity. The signs of him being a possible serial killer were surely exaggerated. It wasn't like he was stripping people's flesh and wearing it...Yet.
Crowley smiled. Good old Dear Granny, she never disappoints.
His eye travelled south to a small local article about someone drowning a neighbour's dog. Crowley's interest was immediately piqued and he sat on the edge of the couch, the brandy balanced uneasily in his grip. One paragraph, and yet it sent him hot enough to make the brandy boil and bubble in its glass, the rim cracking into jagged shards:
DOG DROWNED, NEIGHBOURS WARY OF DOG KILLER
It was a shocking act of animal cruelty. Homeowner Evan Cornish went out to get his morning paper when he stumbled upon the body of his dog, Galileo, his border collie cross. Galileo had suffered obvious trauma and according to an investigation by police it is believed the dog was drowned.
"I don't know who would do such a thing," a tearful Evan Cornish told police. "It's so cruel. He was an old dog, he never hurt anyone. It's so awful."
The drowning itself is a mystery to police since there are no rivers or lakes or even swimming pools in the immediate area. "For someone to go through this kind of trouble, they want to send a message," Police Constable Alex Rickers said. "Clearly Mr. Cornish has an enemy."
Evan Cornish denies this and maintains he knows of no one who would have cause to drown his dog. Mr. Cornish says he has suffered severe depression as a result of this incident and is wary of his own safety.
Son of a bitch. A dog. Someone drowned an innocent, elderly *dog* for no particular reason? What in his own Hades was humanity coming to? Of all the bloody vile things a human being could do, some bastard had to step outside of their own goddamned pile of steaming shyte to go out of their way to hurt a *dog*?
A *dog*?
He made a motion to stand and his knee hit something invisible and solid beside him. He answered the ghostly whimper with a scratch behind Growley's massive head, somewhere in the vicinity of the hell hound's ears. "A bloody dog. Don't you worry old boy, I'll get him for that, whoever he is. Disgusting wretch!" He fought the urge to give his now nuzzling hell hound a fierce hug around his thick, monstrous neck, the small article having provoked feelings in himself he'd long forgotten. As King of Hell it was important he had no care for humanity, and he didn't, but that apathy most definitely did not extend to the tail thumping creature that sat beside him at present, its breath so bad it could make a bear pass out.
There are a lot of things one could say about Crowley. If you aren't keen on using curse words, you can mention that he is a dog lover.
"There's a good boy, don't you worry your big, slobbery head about it, we'll get who did that terrible thing to that doggie now won't we?" Crowley grinned over Growley's tasting lick that covered his face in virtual dog slop. "Some people have real problems, don't they? Don't fret, we'll get him, boy. Now, where was that address again?" He reached behind him to grab the newspaper, but something was amiss. Growley, in the way that dogs--even hell hounds--are, gave him a questioning whine that suggested he wasn't sure, but there was a serious breach of what he, in his dog-like way, understood to be reality. There was a half growl and then a rather frightened whine, and Crowley frowned, unable to find his paper, unable even to grasp the couch he'd been sitting on, or to feel the roar of the fire, or the inability to feel the pinching annoyance of an imperfect dart in the elbow of his almost, but not quite, expertly tailored suit.
There was good reason for Growley to be upset. Crowley was beginning to understand how the hell hound felt. For there, on the couch, sitting as though it had nothing at all to do, was Crowley's meatsuit, primly propped up and separated from Crowley's essence, refusing to give its most esteemed guest the time of day. It folded the newspaper in half and placed it gently on the cushion beside it before brushing off imaginary bits of dog hair and getting up.
Crowley could only watch, helpless, as the human body stepped out of the living room and into the nearby washroom, where it scrubbed at its face with a jasmine scented towel and inspected the red capillaries in the whites of its eyes before reaching into the cabinet for a bottle of shaving cream.
"Oh no you don't!" Crowley shouted at it. "It took me ages to get that beard to look right! Don't you dare ruin that trim!"
The body turned, giving Crowley a raised brow in response. Ignoring the protests of the King of Hell it began to do the impossible.
It began to shave.
Crowley went after it. It had been his five star hotel for the past few months and he wasn't about to check out just yet, especially with the body being so damned insulting in its bland assessment of Crowley's care. "You let me back in!" Crowley demanded of it, storming into the washroom and through the now closed door. "You bloody buggery bastard! I took good care of you, way better than that last one! I'm the one who owns you now!"
But the body refused to be compliant. Though the soul had long left it, there seemed to be an automatic, residual memory coursing within it, and in this memory was a strangely powerful will that refused to allow Crowley access. He slid in front of the body, only to be physically pushed against the sink and then through it, Crowley's ethereal existence reduced to a reflection in the mirror.
Ignoring Crowley's continued protests, the body finished shaving.
"Bollocks!" Crowley shouted, and in the background he noticed Growley slink silently away to slump his massive, invisible bulk against the back door in depressed confusion. "You will do what I want!"
The body turned on the shower. It seemed that this day, its goal was about Ivory soap and a shot of Head And Shoulders. The water was hot as it hit the body's skin, the steam from the shower obscuring Crowley's view.
"Bollocks!" he shouted at it from beneath the opacity of the mirror. "Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!"
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.
Crowley brooded over his glass of brandy, its heady aroma and smooth taste doing little to ease the dark mood he'd been cultivating for the past two hours. He had finished his job with the Winchesters, had saved the ridiculous world they existed in and was now free to enjoy the exploits of being the King of Hell. The trouble was, without an impending apocalypse hanging over the universe with ticking Dr. Strangelove frenzy there wasn't much else for him to do. The adrenaline rush of heading off Lucifer and dealing with the twisted logic of angels from On High had long since worn off. He was now doomed to the petty whims of humans and their make believe dramas. Adultery. Murder. Thieving and coveting. All very pedestrian and banal pursuits that on the surface looked like a vacation but were, in fact, pointless exercises in filling one's day for that relentless bitch known as Time.
They'd ruined what was once a good thing, those Winchester boys, he thought with malice. The best part of his job had been all the weaselling and conniving and backdoor backstabbing but now all these little menial contracts paled in comparison to that one Big Score. He was now demoted to sitting on comfortable couches and admiring his post-modern fireplace, his brandy warming up from the considerable heat in his palm. Bastards. They'd saved the world and turned his wonderful, fiery hell into a suburb.
The face in his fireplace had long since burned away, revealing the grinning skull beneath. It too began to crackle beneath the white hot heat he kept the fire roaring at, the bones at last turning to charcoal while the teeth stubbornly remained intact. A briefcase from Smitty's Furnace Repair lay on its side, its contents spilled across the soft lambskin carpet that adorned the floor. His contract was up, of course, all very orderly and neat and Smitty didn't put up as much of a fuss as Crowley had expected him to. Smitty had been proud of his accomplishments in creating sustainable alternatives to natural gas furnaces and the start-up for his project was well worth the price of his soul if it meant the planet could benefit from his invention. Goddamned ecological martyr. Crowley picked up the poker and gave Smitty's sizzling bones a whack for good measure. His rib cage erupted into a shower of sparks that burned holes in the lambskin carpet.
Altruistic furnace repairmen--Was there any end to humanity's useless existence? He sighed and sat back on his white leather couch, sipping at the warmed brandy in his grip. He supposed things could be worse. After all, he did manage to get another season of Big Brother on the air not to mention those mysterious extra charges on cell phones that were now stubbornly commonplace. Small successes, but they were destined to create havoc in even the calmest of places. Only last week a yoga instructor had a full on meltdown in front of her clients thanks to a two hundred dollar cell phone bill on a phone she no longer owned. He had a lot of knowledge, it was true, but he never knew it was actually possible for a human being to be flexible enough to actually pull a Linda Blair head turn of 360 degrees without snapping one's neck.
The puking in time to Yanni wasn't his fault, of course. That was the bad tempeh salad.
Furious yoga instructors and ecological furnace repairmen were not, however, what was foremost in Crowley's mind at present. As he sank further onto the couch, enjoying the warmth and luxury surrounding him, the pop of human bones crackling in the fire, he had to admit that this was the ideal job he'd been searching for when he'd first been given the post. Being Kind was supposed to be easy, especially for a man whose sole care was for how old his brandy was and did his suit fit to the perfection of his own expectations. The one he was wearing now had a slightly imperfect dart in the seam just beneath his elbow. The Korean seamstress who had made *that* mistake was going to pay dearly.
Annoyed, he picked up the local paper and perused it with idle eyes, his glance taking in the usual stories of earthquakes, hurricanes, economic collapse, terrorism and virus outbreaks before turning to his favourite column, Dear Granny. Dear Granny was not, of course, a Granny, but a two thousand year old demon in a thirty-one year old woman's body who dutifully typed out terrible advice to unsuspecting broken hearted saps and gullible morons--most of the human race, in fact. He read the first problem begging for Dear Granny's fix: "My boyfriend tries on my underwear and he says he's not cheating on me with my cross-dressing uncle, but how can I be sure?"
Crowley sighed. Maybe he should have let the apocalypse happen. It was a natural mistake, believing one's sudden promotion to King Of Hell to have more staying power than a five minute stint in Winchesters United's little universe of demon bashing. An apocalypse be damned, he wasn't giving up his cozy new promotion without a fight! Really, what did Lucifer expect, that he wouldn't fight for his new job? He'd clearly never heard of the entrepreneurial spirit, and Crowley was full to bursting with those. Those souls went down well with a good Merlot.
He read through the Dear Granny article, where she encouraged the young woman to allow her boyfriend to continue borrowing her clothes and could she perhaps be more understanding of his search for his identity. The signs of him being a possible serial killer were surely exaggerated. It wasn't like he was stripping people's flesh and wearing it...Yet.
Crowley smiled. Good old Dear Granny, she never disappoints.
His eye travelled south to a small local article about someone drowning a neighbour's dog. Crowley's interest was immediately piqued and he sat on the edge of the couch, the brandy balanced uneasily in his grip. One paragraph, and yet it sent him hot enough to make the brandy boil and bubble in its glass, the rim cracking into jagged shards:
DOG DROWNED, NEIGHBOURS WARY OF DOG KILLER
It was a shocking act of animal cruelty. Homeowner Evan Cornish went out to get his morning paper when he stumbled upon the body of his dog, Galileo, his border collie cross. Galileo had suffered obvious trauma and according to an investigation by police it is believed the dog was drowned.
"I don't know who would do such a thing," a tearful Evan Cornish told police. "It's so cruel. He was an old dog, he never hurt anyone. It's so awful."
The drowning itself is a mystery to police since there are no rivers or lakes or even swimming pools in the immediate area. "For someone to go through this kind of trouble, they want to send a message," Police Constable Alex Rickers said. "Clearly Mr. Cornish has an enemy."
Evan Cornish denies this and maintains he knows of no one who would have cause to drown his dog. Mr. Cornish says he has suffered severe depression as a result of this incident and is wary of his own safety.
Son of a bitch. A dog. Someone drowned an innocent, elderly *dog* for no particular reason? What in his own Hades was humanity coming to? Of all the bloody vile things a human being could do, some bastard had to step outside of their own goddamned pile of steaming shyte to go out of their way to hurt a *dog*?
A *dog*?
He made a motion to stand and his knee hit something invisible and solid beside him. He answered the ghostly whimper with a scratch behind Growley's massive head, somewhere in the vicinity of the hell hound's ears. "A bloody dog. Don't you worry old boy, I'll get him for that, whoever he is. Disgusting wretch!" He fought the urge to give his now nuzzling hell hound a fierce hug around his thick, monstrous neck, the small article having provoked feelings in himself he'd long forgotten. As King of Hell it was important he had no care for humanity, and he didn't, but that apathy most definitely did not extend to the tail thumping creature that sat beside him at present, its breath so bad it could make a bear pass out.
There are a lot of things one could say about Crowley. If you aren't keen on using curse words, you can mention that he is a dog lover.
"There's a good boy, don't you worry your big, slobbery head about it, we'll get who did that terrible thing to that doggie now won't we?" Crowley grinned over Growley's tasting lick that covered his face in virtual dog slop. "Some people have real problems, don't they? Don't fret, we'll get him, boy. Now, where was that address again?" He reached behind him to grab the newspaper, but something was amiss. Growley, in the way that dogs--even hell hounds--are, gave him a questioning whine that suggested he wasn't sure, but there was a serious breach of what he, in his dog-like way, understood to be reality. There was a half growl and then a rather frightened whine, and Crowley frowned, unable to find his paper, unable even to grasp the couch he'd been sitting on, or to feel the roar of the fire, or the inability to feel the pinching annoyance of an imperfect dart in the elbow of his almost, but not quite, expertly tailored suit.
There was good reason for Growley to be upset. Crowley was beginning to understand how the hell hound felt. For there, on the couch, sitting as though it had nothing at all to do, was Crowley's meatsuit, primly propped up and separated from Crowley's essence, refusing to give its most esteemed guest the time of day. It folded the newspaper in half and placed it gently on the cushion beside it before brushing off imaginary bits of dog hair and getting up.
Crowley could only watch, helpless, as the human body stepped out of the living room and into the nearby washroom, where it scrubbed at its face with a jasmine scented towel and inspected the red capillaries in the whites of its eyes before reaching into the cabinet for a bottle of shaving cream.
"Oh no you don't!" Crowley shouted at it. "It took me ages to get that beard to look right! Don't you dare ruin that trim!"
The body turned, giving Crowley a raised brow in response. Ignoring the protests of the King of Hell it began to do the impossible.
It began to shave.
Crowley went after it. It had been his five star hotel for the past few months and he wasn't about to check out just yet, especially with the body being so damned insulting in its bland assessment of Crowley's care. "You let me back in!" Crowley demanded of it, storming into the washroom and through the now closed door. "You bloody buggery bastard! I took good care of you, way better than that last one! I'm the one who owns you now!"
But the body refused to be compliant. Though the soul had long left it, there seemed to be an automatic, residual memory coursing within it, and in this memory was a strangely powerful will that refused to allow Crowley access. He slid in front of the body, only to be physically pushed against the sink and then through it, Crowley's ethereal existence reduced to a reflection in the mirror.
Ignoring Crowley's continued protests, the body finished shaving.
"Bollocks!" Crowley shouted, and in the background he noticed Growley slink silently away to slump his massive, invisible bulk against the back door in depressed confusion. "You will do what I want!"
The body turned on the shower. It seemed that this day, its goal was about Ivory soap and a shot of Head And Shoulders. The water was hot as it hit the body's skin, the steam from the shower obscuring Crowley's view.
"Bollocks!" he shouted at it from beneath the opacity of the mirror. "Bollocks! Bollocks! Bollocks!"