The King of Hell

A man who tells the truth.
A man who lies with the best of them.
Selling sin to saints and virtue to sinners.
Ambition has no weight without glory and a heart bears no substance without pride.
Crowley, King of Hell, who is never without a deal or a plan.

Break me. - Prompted by Dean.

It always comes down to Crowley, somehow. It wouldn’t really be calling a favor at the eleventh hour unless the King of Hell was involved, some insane plan that seemed so crazy that it might work. Was that not what he did best, somehow pulling through for a deus ex machina and helping save the day? Every time. Every fucking time the world went to pieces he was the one who right there putting everything on the line to make sure that the world went back to normal so that people could be petty to each other and their every day lives and kill each other without care, never once thinking that it could have all been over for them. Humans were never thankful creatures, were they?

It was inevitable, too, that there would come a day that Dean would be cradling Castiel in his arms, when breath would not come back to his body the moment it had left. The angel had been faithfully waiting in the motel room for the hunter, always waiting around for the one person that he loved more than anything else; more than his life and perhaps, even more than God. It was this blaspheme that was his greatest crime, his downfall.

There was no one left; Sam had succumbed to the tantalizing words that were whispered to him, that promised a way that all of his beloved ones would be safe and that this was the only way to save the world.

Crowley is the only one left to call, but always the first to help. He came when summoned; faithful and loyal.

“I’ll do anything, please… Bring him back.” Dean is so crumpled and broken and he’s crying, as if he expects a righteous man’s tears will bring some much needed virtue to the world.

“I can’t.” The tone is as smooth as ever, like a good scotch, running down your throat.

“Or you won’t.” The words choked out, and Dean’s entire body tensed. “You killed him. For what he did to you.” The angel’s betrayal is a dark mark on Crowley’s pride, but he looked as passive as ever at the words. Crowley had already gone over the memories a thousand times in his head, tortured himself with all of the alternate scenarios, some of them better and some worse, some ending in with a complete loss and others in victory.

“No, I didn’t.” He’s remarkably courteous and calm for the fact that there is no one left to fight, no allies left. As if they ever really were. “Lucifer did.”

“Lucifer?” Dean’s eyes widened in surprise, but then immediately darkened in suspicion.

Crowley just pointed at the wound, “There’s nothing I possess that could make a mark like that.” How daft humans could be sometimes. But it must have been the hunter’s grief that overcame his sense, at noticing it pointed to the usage of an archangel blade. “You’re all alone now.”

Dean’s world is crashing all around him. He doesn’t understand. That’s not possible. “Sam, he’s okay-”

“You’re not the first one who tried to make a deal with me.” He’s smiling now, not smug, but just a queer sort of smile that said that there was so much to all of this than he knew.

Dean can barely tear himself from Castiel, but he managed to, so he could look Crowley in the eye. It’s exactly what the King of Hell wanted. It’s no accident that pride is the sin most associated with the devil; it beat out all others when indulging in it. “I was the last thing that Castiel saw in this world. He begged me as he was trapped, with nowhere to go. The last thing he ever felt in life was helplessness.”

“Lucifer-” He tried to grasp what was being told in him, through his haze of grief. Crowley had said that it was the devil, the old devil, not him, not the new devil.

“Yes, Lucifer took that blade and gutted Castiel. He did it for me.” There’s something in his eyes, a twisted sort of softness, one that Dean look deep into and understand. The wound is too newly fresh, as Dean has his beloved’s blood on his hands. If only he knew exactly how true those words were; soon he would. “I asked him to kill Castiel, because I wouldn’t.” He dug his hand in his pocket, circling around the pair of bodies. “And I gave him Sam’s soul, the key to his vessel. I know my way around loopholes. Every trick in the book. So maybe your brother would never say yes to Lucifer, but he said yes to me, even though it would have always been the same deal.”

Dean doesn’t understand, he truly doesn’t; this is like some bad nightmare and he’s going to wake up from it. It isn’t possible that this should happen. “But Lucifer- He’s going to torch the world. He’s going to kill you. Everything-”

Crowley looked like he was considering something, some far off thought. But it was all mockery, that he hadn’t gone through it all before. Not that he needed to. “You really should have been nicer to me, Dean.” He stood right in front of him, putting a hand on his shoulder. There’s no other words he needed to convey: he wanted him to know that everything had fallen through because of such inaction. Is that not what the lesson of life was? It was all of the little things that mattered.

Then, in a blink of an eye in his hand produced a knife and he gutted him too, and he would make sure that the last thing that Dean Winchester sees in his life is him, and not Castiel, not Sam, not anyone else. “And now, I’m killing the righteous man, just as he asked me. His brother’s true vessel, because he wouldn’t.” There’s a remarkable sentimentality to his words, and it sounded so genuine that it hurt to hear, as life faded from Dean’s body.

“No one would stand by me, and no one would stand by him. So now we stand by each other.” He twisted the knife into him, the quaint smile dancing on his lips. “I’d say see you in hell, but… I’m locking you away in darkness, for eternity. No pain, no torture, no classes with Alastair, just sensory deprivation at its best. And you know how everything feels like a lifetime down there. Eventually, you’ll forget everything, bit by bit. I wonder what your last memory will be, which person you considered the most important to you.”

To what crueler end could there be, knowing that love had given him everything and now it would take everything away from him. Dean and Sam would do everything with Castiel and that had been the first of their undoing, and the second was that even a demon could possess humanity and heaven’s most scorned angel could still have faith, could even forgive.

Dean Winchester had always been destined to start the apocalypse, no matter what he did, or how much he tried to stray destiny away from God’s divine will.

In the end, it had only been a question of how it would happen.

The first way it should have happened was by brothers divided.

And now, the second time around, it would be by lovers united.