Chapter Text
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‘408, 412, 425b, 425c – sonovabich!’
The cluttered shelf blocking the entrance to the least hospitable corner of the bunker moved aside with a hellish screech. Crowley reluctantly uncurled from his cozy nook within his meatsuit’s chest cavity and started to painfully reconnect with the body stiff from sitting still for days on end: leave it to Dim and Dimmer to forget about the (by now probably former) King of Hell stashed amongst their extensive dump of questionably magical junk.
‘432, 440, 450,’ Dean kept reading aloud with unnecessarily diligence, to show anyone listening (therefore, mostly himself) he didn’t understand or care about anything remotely resembling written word. Crowley kept his eyes firmly shut against the harsh industrial light now flooding the storage room, but he could just imagine the older Winchester standing precariously on the tip of his toes, fingers barely brushing the dented aluminium container at the very top shelf.
‘Looking for something, Squirrel?’ the demon barked in his loudest, most obnoxious voice; and, apparently, Dean had forgotten about their unwilling lodger, because the hunter jumped like all his past mistakes came to bite him in the arse, upset the rickety shelving, and stumbled backwards all the way to the edge of the Devil’s Trap when some smaller items started falling on his head.
‘Squawk!’
The sound reverberated through the room, nearly popping the meatsuit’s eardrums and filling his own demonic essence with visceral sense of existential dread. Something small, but heavy and warm slipped out of Squirrel’s arms and landed in the dead center of the Trap – right on top of the chained demon. Crowley’s eyes flew open as his bounded body uselessly tried to get away, but there was no immediate danger: just Squirrel scrambling to his feet – and a large tawny goose sitting prissily on Crowley’s lap.
The demon’s thumb reached on its own accord to stroke the soft cocoa-brown plumage on the bird’s chest: Crowley might have been a crappy father and a pathetic human altogether, but he had always been fond of animals. The goose twisted its elegant neck to stare back in surprise, bringing its mighty orange beak in dangerously close proximity to Crowley's nose. Its eyes were sharp, intelligent and of a peculiar shade of blue that was most certainly never found in birds, let alone of this particular coloring.
‘Quit petting Cas,’ Squirrel bristled, carelessly reaching inside the Trap to pick the goose up. It nipped at Dean’s fingers irritably and spread its powerful wings to move off Crowley’s lap and outside the magical circle on its own in one graceful leap.
‘Cas?’ Crowley repeated incredulously, letting his true form bleed into his irises: there was, indeed, familiar spark of celestial light stubbornly shining out of the tight confinement of an unsophisticated magical cage. ‘My, my, Feathers, how did you end up all – feathery?’
‘Like always – by doing something stupid,’ Squirrel grumbled, shaking his sore fingers; the goose let out an alarmed screech. ‘What, Cas? The witch was throwing her mumbo-jumbo in the general direction of all three of us. It wouldn’t even have connected if you hadn’t stepped in front of it. What were you thinking?’ he bent down to grab the goose again, but it sidestepped him with a condescending huff.
‘Probably, that the spell is broad-spectrum,’ Crowley translated, tutting at the goose in fake sympathy, ‘and unless allowed to connect directly, would have affected everyone within certain radius. And, unlike Mr. Birdbrain here, who is still the same wave of celestial intent, no matter what mortal body he occupies, you two would have ended up with actual bird brains.’
‘Is that it? You thought you grace would protect you from the curse?’ Squirrels asked, missing the point entirely; the goose slumped in defeat. ‘Don’t worry, Cas, we’ll find a way to fix your feathery ass in no time.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Crowley retorted with a nasty smile. ‘You see, it’s not so much a curse as a failsafe. It fades on its own once the caster is far enough to feel unthreatened.’
‘But?’ Dean prompted, voice thick with sense of foreboding.
‘But it wouldn’t be much of a failsafe if it could just be undone – afterwards.’
‘You are lying,’ the hunter protested shakily, reaching for his ever-present gun. ‘You are lying, your slimy son of bitch, and – ‘
‘Dean! What’s taking you so long?’
‘Sammy!’ Squirrel called back in relief, his gun trained at Crowley unwaveringly. ‘Please, tell me you’ve got something!’
‘Not really,’ Moose admitted sheepishly, squeezing his giant frame through the passage between the shelves. ‘The overall conclusion is that animal transformations come in many flavours, so nothing certain can be determined on the phone. We’ll have to take Cas’s word – well, hiss – that we should be looking into that ATU 451 curse. Is there a reason why we are killing Crowley instead?’
‘He says the curse can’t be broken once the witch is dead.’
‘Or once you go blabbering about what happened,’ Crowley supplied, with a meaningful look at the phone in Sam’s hand.
‘You bastard!’
Dean’s finger twitched on the trigger impatiently. Crowley couldn’t help smirking: a bullet wouldn’t kill him; and, while in his current weakened state it would, admittedly, hurt like hell, the look of helpless rage on Squirrel’s face, as the profundity of his fuck-up set in, was totally worth it.
And then, of course, Moose had to ruin all the fun:
‘He’s just taunting you, Dean,’ he pointed out reasonably. ‘We can’t be the first hunters to kill the witch first and ask questions later. And there clearly was some kind of contingency. Did you find the box?’
‘It’s up there,’ Dean nodded at the top shelf, pocketing the gun reluctantly. Sam stretched out his impossibly long arm and pulled the crate down. Dean eagerly reached inside, – and his fleeting enthusiasm immediately dimmed.
‘That’s it?’ he sneered, taking out a single roll of coarse greenish-brown fabric. ‘What the hell is that for? Are we supposed to, what, whap it around Cas?’
The goose gave him a disdainful look, flew up the table and stuck its own head into the crate.
‘What do you have there, Cas?’ Sam asked helpfully, taking a folded piece of a yellowing paper from the bird’s beak. ‘Oh, I see they left instructions – just not very helpful ones.’
He turned the page around for Dean to see.
‘Nettlecloth,’ the older hunter read aloud, squinting at the barely legible handwriting. ‘Well, I guess this,’ he poked the bundle of cloth suspiciously, ‘is nettlecloth. What else? Silence and Sacrifice; Pain and Grief; Blood and Tears; Salt and – the hell is calendula?’
‘Marigold. An orange flower,’ Moose amended at his brother’s unimpressed glare. ‘And hyacinth is – ‘
‘ – a purple flower, I know.’
‘Actually, they come in at least three colours,’ Sam corrected pensively.
‘White,’ Crowley suggested, fascinated in spite of himself, ‘for pure love and care. That’s quite clever, actually. I could swear the only remedy for de vilde svaner was sincere devotion – or, you know, enough human decency to pause your killing spree and check on your ally suddenly turned into poultry; but leave it to Men of Letters to concoct a substitute in a beaker.’
‘Shut up,’ Squirrel snapped predictably. Moose, however, perked up and started googling:
‘Did you say de vilde svaner? As in, The Wild Swans? It all makes sense now!’
‘Does it?’
‘ATU 451! The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers!’ Squirrel’s glare didn’t get any friendlier. ‘It’s a fairy tale, Dean. Well, it’s a whole bunch of fairy tales that vary across cultures, but they are all about a girl, whose brothers get turned into birds, and, in order to save them, she needs to complete a quest and keep to a wow of silence all the way through. Don’t you see, it fits!’
‘Yes, leave the witch alone and don’t tell anyone: that’s what he said,’ Dean jerked his head in Crowley’s direction tersely. ‘Keep up, Sammy, that ship has sailed.’
‘He also said Men of Letters had figured out an alternative,’ Sam argued. ‘These runes,’ he took a picture to run through a translation app, ‘spell something like My heart yearns for your return.’
‘And,’ Dean agreed reluctantly, ‘drawing them in your own blood probably counts as pain and sacrifice; but where do the rest of the ingredients go?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Sam turned the paper back and forth aimlessly. ‘There is no formula, no measurements, or even proportions listed – ‘
‘Maybe that’s a spoon?’ Dean suggested uncertainly, pointing at a faded smudge that might just as well have been an accidental pen stroke.
‘No,’ Sam mused, ‘but it may be a shorthand symbol for tea. Which, in reference books, usually means the simplest potion; like, mix in equal parts, add water and drink. Yet,’ he deflated, ‘it can’t be right. Hyacinth is poisonous even to touch, and ingesting it, no matter how small quantities, would result in severe digestive issues.’
‘Tears and sorrow,’ Crowley reminded mock-modestly.
“Why are you being so helpful?’ Dean demanded in suspicion.
‘Let’s say, I’m really looking forward to seeing you attempt this particular counter-spell.’
‘I’ll be puking my guts out while scratching some bloody runes onto a piece of freakin’ nettlecloth,’ Squirrel summarised grimly. ‘Unless you’ve lied, there isn’t much to look at. So, what’s the catch?’
‘This,’ Sam sighed under Crowley expectant gaze. ‘Obviously, the runes must be applied in a specific pattern,’ he pointed at three crudely drawn rectangles at the right side of the page, ‘but there is no indication if these are scaled, and I just don’t see how they fit together. This small one doesn’t even have any runes on it.’
‘It’s a gusset,’ Crowley magnanimously demonstrated by moving his elbow up and down, as far as his bound wrists allowed it. Sam once again reached out for his phone in exasperation.
‘Gusset,’ he read aloud, ‘a piece of material sewn into a garment to strengthen or enlarge a part of it.’
‘Sewn?’ Squirrel repeated gloomily, ‘as in –?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Crowley confirmed with a shark-like grin. ‘You might be able to magically substitute for suffering in silence, – but first, you still need to make a shirt.’
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