Chapter Text
Arizona, 1939
Crowley does not actually have thumbs at the moment when the pricking starts. But some things overwrite anatomy. Some things are more about the meta than the physics.
The pricking feeling is an insistent and increasing ‘click click click’, like a Geiger counter deep inside him is reacting to a bloom of deathly radiation in the world about him. The change makes his sluggish tongue emerge to taste the air as the tip of his tail shivers to the beat of the pricking. Then his coils slide over each other as his long sleep finally sheds from him like older skin.
Its as hot as humans think hell is under the flat rock, but it’s when he’s out of its shadows that he’s really glared upon by the relentless sun, watching him uncurl onto the desert floor. A reluctant glance back to his sleeping hole and then he’s off, a black line racing across the sand and rocks.
Two hours later, during which time a buzzard – wanting its biggest ever meal - has found its each and every swooping strike ending in a beak flattening smash against nearby boulders, Crowley reaches a scattering of buildings around a dusty road. Drivers are steering a train of covered wagons through the dust clouds, refusing to give the oxen their heads. Men on horseback are glaring silently with sun-dried skin at women in plain spun dresses and bonnets. Above them, on a building, a sign in white paint calls this the ‘Stage Depot, Tucson’. And Crowley is confused.
Back in 1862 when he’d first come west for the heat and a quiet place to sleep there had depots just like this. But not here. Places where so-called ‘cowboys’ lived and died hard in the desert. But not here. And if his internal clock (not the thing still ticking inside him with the growth of something…wicked… in the world) was right, then he’s slept about seventy-five years. Give or take.
And one thing he knows about humans is that they are almost as changeable as he is; slipping on new skins and showing off new tricks. He slithers closer to get a better sense of what’s going on and is nearly run over by a bunch of men perched on a trolley-like thing being pushed on rails by other men, red-faced and sweating heavily. The sitting men are pointing some great dark eye at the crowds and paying particular attention to a couple talking on the other side of the barely there street. Ahhh, thinks Crowley, new technology! His tongue flicks out to taste it, and he gets a bouquet of celluloid, pretence, and desperation for fame. He’s taken back to a zoetrope he’d once walked past in Soho being demonstrated. It had been showing a cute little film about ‘What the Butler Saw’ that had made red flourishes appear on Azir- on his cheeks.
His mood darkens with the memory, which comes skipping into his mind hand in hand with a bunch of other memories from before his long sleep. The urge to bite someone’s ankle grows, but he forces it down. He’s been in his serpent form for too damn long!
Two legs later, and he’s exploring what he now knows from overhearing conversations is something called a ‘set’. They’re making a thing called a ‘film’ for the modern zoetrope that’s called ‘Arizona’. This film is set just before he’d given up consciousness and found a nice rock to sleep under just a few miles off into the desert from the set, which explains the strange sense that no time at all has passed. But doesn’t go anywhere to explaining why the ambient evil in the world is setting off his inner alarms. ‘Film’ tastes like one of his lot’s projects, so maybe he can take credit for it later, but that's not what’s woken him up now.
He emerges from shadows to hypnoptise a passing actor as they walk down an alleyway away from the others. Crowley uses them as a quick mirror to judge how his appearance fits or doesn’t, this new time. At first, they think he’s an accurately dressed extra, but then he makes them see him as someone important - someone stylish. Mutton chops? Their confused mind asks in their daze, who wears mutton chops now? The hair vanishes immediately, along with the black top hat that had last worked for him in the 1860s. Clothes wise he goes for a black suit, pulling the image of it from the actor’s - William something - memory of a meeting with someone called a ‘studio boss’. Anyone else would be near fainting in a black get-up like this, complete with a black trilby, under the height of the Arizona sun, but Crowley feels as though he’s recharged and ready for action! A quick seventy-five year nap will do that for you!
It's only when he’s on a train heading east – these things have really taken off in the last century and a bit – that he thinks to summon up a copy of The Infernal Times to catch up with what his lot have been up to. The headline sets off that click click click again, and now he knows that’s woken him, what fresh hell Hell has been up to.
‘War!!!!!!’ it proclaims with six jubilant exclamation points, and for a sickening moment, he thinks that up top and down below have finally gotten into it, and he almost uses a demonic miracle to get him to a corner book shop near Greek Street in Soho much much quicker. But scanning the lines below, he’s pretty sure – apart from the odd nudge by downstairs (and he hasn’t been around to help with that!) – that this is all the work of the tangled minds of the humans. Horrible facts filter into his mind from the paper and fill in the last decades. There had been another time like this, and somehow he’d managed to sleep through that first World War. Something was very different about this one… and Crowley was going to find out what.
He arrives in a London full of the hum and roar of war. The militant patriotism is thick in the air, but Crowley slouches along his favourite streets suspecting that by the end of it all things will be very different. There are multi-coloured posters in Mayfair calling on young men to sign up for duty, and when he gets to his flat he finds the charlady – an elderly descendent of the woman he’d hired back in the 1850s when he bought the place – talking animatedly about her grandson’s smart new uniform to a disinterested messenger. A few tweaks of her memories later and she’s happily hoovering the hallway outside the flat of the Mr Crowley who’s been living there for a while. A nice bachelor that Mr Crowley. Odd that she’s never asked about his first name before, but he did promise he’d think about one and get back to her soon.
Crowley feels drawn to Soho like it’s his magnetic pole, but he manages to hold off for a week or so more. In that time, he’s visited by a few demons. They come in over the airwaves of his radio or insert themselves into the posters. They pop by to congratulate him for this or that thing that’s going on over in continental Europe. Not a single one seems to have noticed his absence, and he doesn’t know whether to be cheered by that or glum.
Finally though, one of them mentions that there are actually Nazis in London while cheering him on for his temptation of ordinary Brits into their service, and that click click click of the Geiger counter goes off again. Something Wicked this Way Comes, he hums to himself as he finds himself in front of a mirror and working out what to say to his old adversary while a nervous knot grows in his stomach. Because why else would he have woken up? The angel is in trouble.