Hell's Belle (Part 5)
Pairing: Crowley x Reader (romance) Warnings/triggers: None Word count: 2,380
The Reader makes a deal with Crowley: her soul in exchange for her mother being cured of a disease. But Crowley doesn’t want her soul. He wants something else.
—————
Maybe you should have thought this all through but it’s too late now. You’re standing on the street you grew up on, staring directly at your house. You glance over at Persephone. “Are you sure Crowley is too busy to know what we’re doing?”
“Yes, Y/N. I’ve told you nearly 20 times now. Hardly any of his servants are even home right now because of how important this deal is,” Persephone says. “Now could you please just relax and take a damn step forward? Your mom is probably in the kitchen making your dad a sandwich or something.”
You fight the urge to roll your eyes at her but you listen. As soon as you lift your foot off the curb, you hear someone shouting your name.
“Y/N? Y/N? Is that you?”
You freeze. Oh no.
A tall, somewhat chubby dark-haired young man jogs up to you. “Y/N,” he pants. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you. This isn’t like you.”
It’s Joseph. Joseph as in your boyfriend, because you two technically didn’t break up before you were catapulted into Hell.
You whirl around, looking to Persephone for help explaining but she’s already disappeared, just vanished. You panic inwardly, desperately hoping your anxiety doesn’t register on your face. ‘Where could she have gone off to?!’ you scream inside your mind.
“Joseph, this really isn’t the right time for me to talk,” you say.
His irritation is evident. “What do you mean it’s not the right time to talk? You’ve been gone for WEEKS. You expect me to just walk past you and pretend like that’s completely normal? It’s not, Y/N, and you know it. Who was that girl you were hanging out with?”
Oh. So he saw her too.
“She’s my friend…Charlotte.” Persephone had confided in you that that had been her real name when she was human, before she went to Hell and became a demon.
“Charlotte?” he says exasperated. “Forget Charlotte.” He grabs your hand. “We’re going home.”
He starts pulling you towards your house. You try shaking off his hand but he’s bigger AND stronger than you. The struggle is useless. But you give your hand one last tug and you stumble away from him, nearly falling over onto the pavement. He yanks you up before you do, pulling you into an embrace. This is the first time in nearly two months that you two have been this close. His hot breath feathers your face. He’s not even looking in your eyes. He’s looking at your lips. You know what he’s going to do. It’s what any good boyfriend would want to do upon seeing his missing girlfriend: he wants to kiss you. Suddenly, you realize just how alone you truly are. Persephone isn’t here. Most importantly, Crowley isn’t here. You are twenty feet away from your mother and father, and your boyfriend is in your arms. This is the most normal you have been since you made the deal with Crowley.
“I’ve missed you,” Joseph says, a slight whine in his voice. His brown eyes, the ones that are normally brooding, are softer, almost pained.
“I’ve missed you too,” you say dishonestly. You missed your old life, but truthfully, you didn’t miss Joseph. You hadn’t thought about him once since you sealed the deal with Crowley with a kiss. But maybe if you kiss Joseph, maybe—just maybe—you can reverse it. You try not to scowl at the fairytale ‘true love’s kiss’ cliche. As silly as it sounds, you are desperate to get back your old life.
Joseph leans forward before you have to, closing the space between the two of you quickly, pressing his feverish lips against yours, pressing your body against his even harder. You are disappointed to find that it doesn’t feel as magical as it did before. Maybe Hell has tainted your perception of teenage boys who only know how to show affection with their mouths. You tangle your hands into his dark, curly hair and hope to whatever god there is that when you pull away, everything will have returned to normal.
“Y/N.”
You jump away from Joseph, as if you had accidentally touched an exposed electrical wire. You already know how guilty you look.
“Y/N,” Crowley repeats again after a sigh. “Come.”
You are confused. You were expecting him to flip, to be angry, to pulverize both Joseph and you just with the snap of his two fingers. Instead, he’s telling you to come hither. Is it a trick? Is he going to kill you if you go any closer to him?
“If I wanted to hurt you I’d have already done it by now,” Crowley answers for you. “But I would’ve killed your parents in front of you first.”
Each of his words feel like a knife to your stomach—eleven stab wounds to your most vital organs. You have no choice but to stumble forward, your eyes lowered to the ground, ashamed and terrified. When you reach his side, you look up, right into the eyes of Persephone. She is standing behind Crowley’s shoulder, a smug look spread across her attractive features. In her eyes, you’re dangling ten feet off the ground, trapped in a snare she set up just for you.
“Take her home,” Crowley barks to Persephone.
Persephone grabs you by the elbow and yanks you towards her.
“Gentle,” Crowley reprimands, much to your surprise.
Persephone loosens her grip but not by much. “You are in SO much trouble,” she mutters beneath her breath before she snaps her fingers and you’re once again in Hell, in your bedroom. She throws you onto your bed and stands over you, fists on her hips. She’s glowering at you, as if any of this wasn’t her fault. “You failed the test,” she spat out.
“I failed the test? I didn’t know I was studying for one, let alone TAKING one,” you hiss just as viciously.
She jumps towards you, inky black filling the whites of her eyes. “Don’t you dare speak to me in that tone, missy. I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to. You don’t know what I’m capable of. The second Crowley gives me the go, I’m going to rip your intestines out through your throat, and I’m going to feed them to your mother under the notion that she’s eating a rare delicacy. Then I’m going to murder her.”
Her words anger you but you are too terrified to fight back. After a few moments of silence, your bravado returns to you. “Crowley won’t let you.”
She laughs, a haughty, hate-filled laugh that doesn’t quite sound right coming out of her beautiful mouth. “After Crowley saw you kissing your little boytoy, I think he’ll let me do anything to you.”
Suddenly you’re reminded of Joseph. A hot flash of anger, guilt and pure fear surges through you and you imagine Crowley killing him, ripping his guts out and leaving them on his parents’ doorstep.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Persephone says, nodding her head. She crosses her arms and saunters towards you slowly, slowly, until she’s leaning down, her face just inches apart from yours. Her breath smells like blood. “Say goodbye to your boyfriend. I’ll bring you the obituary so you can at least read what the coroner decided his cause of death was. Crowley is creative. I’m sure he’ll do something colorful for us all. He wouldn’t want you to think he’s boring.”
There’s three light knocks on the door. Persephone zips to the other side of the room, plopping her little butt down on the plush sofa cushions and crossing her legs. She smiles tightly at me, placing her folded hands over her knees. She looks like a 1950’s housewife awaiting her working-class husband. If only Crowley could see just how full of—
“Persephone, I think it’s high time you left. I need some time alone with my pet.” Crowley has already entered the room. He doesn’t even look at Persephone. His eyes are locked on yours. This time, his eyes are a rusty red, not black. It frightens you, but you don’t let it show. You won’t give him the satisfaction. You won’t give either of them the satisfaction—especially not Persephone.
She stands, galloping over to Crowley. She actually kisses him on his cheek, letting her lips linger for a few seconds before pulling away and quietly exiting the room. You stare after her, angered by the jealousy that’s suddenly overcome you. Why are you jealous of her kissing the man who’s possibly murdered your entire family AND your boyfriend?
However, Crowley doesn’t seem fazed by Persephone’s uncharacteristic show of affection. He pulls the chair from your desk across the floor, dragging it so that he sits just two feet away from you. He settles into it, leaning back, crossing his arms. His silence is loud and it speaks louder than words. You want to fill it, to apologize, but you know he won’t accept your apology, and you’re not sorry in the least bit.
“Part of the deal we made was,” Crowley says, pausing slightly in the middle of his sentence, “that you couldn’t see your mother. In exchange for your mother being cured of her disease, you would be my plaything, my pet. You accepted the deal graciously. Or at least I thought you did. Tell me, Y/N, what made you run away? And what made you think you would get away with it?”
You put on your best brave face, squaring your shoulders. You look him directly in the eye, pretending as if red was the most common eye color in the world. You have no excuses, so you tell the truth. “Persephone told me I could see my mother because you were going to be at a UN meeting all day. So I went with her. Joseph showed up before I could see my mother, so I technically didn’t break the deal.”
Crowley nods, listening to you attentively. “Go on.”
You’re surprised by the amount of patience he is displaying. “Well, erm…I don’t LIKE Joseph, per say, but I thought that if I kissed him, things would go back to normal. I thought that it would reverse the deal. Like, I kissed you and we made the deal. But I thought that if I kissed him, it would break the…the…”
“The curse?” Crowley offers.
You frown. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“Then what else would you call it? You’re not happy.”
‘He’s right, you know…’ a voice in the back of your mind whispers. You shut it out immediately. “I’m not, but I’m trying to be. I see how lonely it gets down here. I see how disloyal all your subjects are.”
“You’ve proven to be disloyal too, though.” You ignore the slice of pain his words inflict. “No. It was just a moment of poor judgment. I am young, after all, and I miss my mother. But as soon as I kissed Joseph, I knew that my life would never be the same anyway, so what was the use in trying? I kept hoping. It’s never going to be the same. I should stay down here for the rest of my life, maybe longer.”
As you say the words, the more right they feel to you. You’re not the same person you used to be. There’s no possible way you could go to college, hang out with your friends, get a part-time job, chat with your mother normally ever again after you’ve spent this much time in Hell. You’ve seen the evil that exists in the world. You know there is something that goes bump in the night. Monsters that eat you alive and lurk in the shadows are real. But here you are with the King of all those monsters on your side. You can’t get much safer than that.
“Persephone told me you disappeared while you two were shopping.” Crowley completely ignores you, getting straight to the nitty-gritty. He is a salesman, after all.
You sigh. “I already told you. Persephone ASKED me if I wanted to see my mom. She told me she could take me to see her. Is it really that shocking? You’ve had people betray you before down here, and you know she tried to make me stop liking you by telling me that you ‘drink blood,’ even though you don’t.”
Crowley’s eyebrows shoot up. “You like me?”
You blush, much to your displeasure. “Uh, Crowley, I kissed you.”
“You kissed Joseph too.”
“I already explained that.”
“Why did you kiss me then?”
“Because you kissed me.”
“Why did you kiss BACK, Y/N? Answer me when I ask you a question.”
You suck in a breath, once again shocked by how quickly he changes from patient to impatient. “Because I think you’re cute, and I don’t want you to be lonely. Isn’t a pet supposed to keep their—“ You stop suddenly, not knowing what to call Crowley. Your master? Your owner? Your keeper? “Well, I’m not sure what to call you.”
“Just call me the King,” Crowley says, and he abruptly kisses you, lifting himself off the chair and pushing you back onto the bed. You can’t help but kiss him back, because the atmosphere in the room was filled with so much frustration, so much confusion and misunderstanding that nothing could have possibly fixed it but this kiss. You allow your hands to drape around his neck, holding his head to yours, pressing his body against yours harder, trying to get more of him.
“I didn’t kill your friend,” Crowley says between kisses.
You stop. You gently push him away from you so you can meet his eyes. They have returned to their light brown color. “What did you just say?”
“I didn’t kill your friend,” he repeats. “I just erased his memory of you and what happened today, and sent him on his way to the ice-cream truck.”
“But you’re the King of Hell.”
“And you’re Hell’s little Belle.”
He kisses you again, and you don’t protest. All thoughts of your family, your now ex-boyfriend, and Persephone, everything. All you can think about is the King of all evil and his little Belle.