Full Circle (Book 8 in Arrow/Spn Crossover)

A Meal with Death

Sam stopped short of picking on me too much while I'd been grabbing what I needed for what I was making for Death. I made sure to pick the high end shit, the extra expensive ground bison, extra sharp cheddar cheese, red potatoes and pickles that I had no idea why they were that pricey. I also picked up some of that salad mix that had every type of green thing in it out there. Coyote and I had perfected a bison burger recipe over the last year and I threw a bit of the $200 bourbon I'd bought into the sauce too. Sam almost cried when I did that. I blamed the onions for me tearing up, Sam knew better. Hey if you're cooking for Death, you go all the way.

"Go set up a table and all that in the dungeon," I told Sam while I was prepping. "Set up a table for Crowley too, just with one of those classy glasses for the bourbon. I may as well give him a shot of it, he'll get all pissy if he finds out I cooked a meal for Death and didn't get him anything."

"We're giving Crowley a shot of bourbon? Are you sure we should summon both of them at the same time?

"We're not, but in case Death doesn't have any info and we need to call Crowley may as well plan ahead. Just go with it. I'll explain when you get back."

He just rolled his eyes and wandered off. Cas had been watching us prep but he'd been staying pretty quiet. At least until Sam left, "This isn't how you usually treat Crowley."

"Yeah, I know. I have a theory. Had a lot of time to think things over. I'll go into it more when Sam gets back."

"I'm intrigued."

Sam came back a few minutes later and sat at the kitchen table while I worked. "Here's the thing," I started out, "As much as it makes my skin crawl to do I spent a decent amount of time over the last year trying to figure out why Crowley wanted to make me a Knight of Hell. He went way out of his way to do everything he could to keep me happy and sane after I went demon, not to mention the whole twisted road trip we did to get the First Blade. What I came up with is this, and it sounds stupid but here it is. In the entirety of Hell, or for all I know, his entire life, Crowley's never found someone that challenged him, kept him on his toes, like we do. He can't let anyone that clever get too high up in the ranks in Hell or they could take him out. It's obvious he sees demons, all of them, as expendable and useless. Who knows if he ever had a decent friendship with anyone over the years. Then we come along, we don't cower, don't back down and I show him a sort of grudging respect, or at least that's how he sees it, because we need him. He sees us as equals, especially me for some reason, I mean he wanted me to help him fix Hell, be a sort of right hand man to him. So I think we should use that when we talk to him. He craves attention, needs someone to talk to, needs a twisted sort of validation so we give him what he wants and see where it gets us."

"Interesting theory," Cas said.

Sam, on the other hand, wasn't too thrilled.

"Are you fucking kidding? You want to kiss ass and play nice?"

"No, what I want is to solve this without ending up having to go to Purgatory to do it ourselves or be worried about demons on our ass again. It'd be nice if once, just once, we get a solution for something without ending up hip deep in shit again. This isn't my life anymore Sam, I don't want it to be. I won't back down, you know that, but I don't think it could hurt to try a different approach. After all that's what you and Coyote have been hammering me with since we got rid of the Mark, doing things differently. Aside from being werewolves now doing things differently this time around seems to be working pretty well for us, and it's really been working well for you and Roy. I mean we wiped out a whole slew of monsters with minimal clusterfuckage, you and Roy went a year without anything major blowing up in your faces, I say let's keep going with it."