dizzy_land | It's just the power to charm

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It's just the power to charm

((Closed to Cayce, Azi, Crowley, and Ellie. Backdated to a day or two after the Bentley Babes caper.))

Cayce wasn't jealous. That much was easy enough to define; she cared for Crowley a lot, but not That Way. And notwithstanding her admission at the community Truth or Dare game, she definitely wasn't queer for Ellie either, although she certainly liked her well enough. Actually, she thought the two of them pairing up was kind of cute.

But for reasons she was still hard pressed to identify, she was a little perturbed when the two of them up and vanished from the lake party, and clearly Aziraphale was too. They'd exchanged a few half-heartedly snarky (and subtly worried) comments at the time before finally sort of shrugging it off, and Cayce had said something about coming by the tea shop later.

So now she was suiting action to the word. She sort of hoped that Crowley wouldn't be around. It'd spare everyone a touch of awkwardness.

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"Sure, come on up. There's a ladder in the back of the store." Ellie hastily kicked a few items under the bed (she had a bed now, yay. It took up most of the floor space and was pretty much the only thing available to sit on, but she'd been overruled on that count. Maybe she should have waited until Crowley's brain was fully back online to bring it up.) "Sorry about the mess," she called downstairs, quickly scanning the room to make sure nothing in sight was too...much.

Cayce made her way up and waved off Ellie's comment about the mess. "Pfft. You should see my place over at Starcade." She couldn't help feeling a little envious over the fact that Ellie actually had a bed; no points in guessing who was responsible for that.

She ended up leaning somewhat awkwardly on the window. "So, uh, here's the thing. What—what do you know about Aphrodite? And the kind of crap she's known for getting up to?"

Cayce could probably have wheedled a bed and any number of other luxuries out of Ellie's source if she'd tried, and without having to offer anything dubious in trade. Said source was utterly smitten with the lady, that much was unmistakable, even if he wasn't inclined to express it physically.

"Aphrodite?" Ellie said in surprise, perching on the edge of the mattress. "She's a narcissistic brat with more style than substance, basically. Throwing tantrums anytime she doesn't think she's getting enough compliments, sending people on impossible quests, gah." Ellie made a disgusted gesture. She and her sisters were competitive, sure, but they would never have wasted their energy bickering over who was better-looking or farting flowers all over the place; they let their job performance speak for itself. "Prety much that whole pantheon's a few onions short of a stew, apart from maybe Psyche. Why?"

"You got that right," Cayce said, as regarded the Greek pantheon. "Yeah, she's a pain in the neck, and, um, I think she may have decided to be an extra-special pain in the neck to you and Crowley. Did you notice anything wonky after she talked to us during our drive around the park?"

Ellie blinked at her, an uneasy feeling inching its way up her spine. "Wonky in what way?" she asked slowly, thinking back to the incident and what had happened immediately after. It had seemed odd that they'd gotten off more or less scot-free after snubbing the goddess, but the day hadn't gone badly after that. Just the opposite, in fact...

"Wonky like ... maybe you weren't entirely in control of--of--". Oh, fuck it. Might as well go ahead and lay it out. "Here's the thing. I was--okay, first of all, I'm totally okay with you and Crowley. Honest." She felt her ears getting hot. "I say that because I don't want you to think I'm jealous or something, because I'm not. But I had this, this hunch, and when I talked to Aziraphale about it, he found a trace of something on me. From her. A compulsion or something." She took a deep breath. "We think it might've been ... backwash, or something like that, from something she did. To you. And Crowley."

Puzzlement turned to astonishment and then knee-jerk denial. "You think she tried to make---? No. No, that's not--I would've seen it--"

Would you, though? Or did you just see what you wanted to see and not look any further? She had her pride, and it wasn't easy to accept when someone just wasn't interested. Much easier to assume he was just a slow starter, or playing hard to get. But then with the unexpected one-eighty, and what she'd come to realize later--

"Oh, shit." Ellie's face went ashen, and both hands flew to her mouth as everything clicked neatly into place. "Fucking hell. That unbelievable bitch. She'd do it, too, just out of fucking spite...Christ..." Now her whole face was covered. Not just one, but two vitally important clues she'd completely missed within a few hours of each other. It was more than embarrassing; back in the day, Triskelle would have kicked her straight into the nearest lava pit for such carelessness, and rightly so. You fucking moron, could you possibly have been any more blind? Shit, poor Crowley, all those years and then in you waltzed and...fuck, he's going to be furious...

"Cayce, I think I screwed up big time," came her tiny, muffled confession after a long moment's silence.

A little awkwardly, Cayce sat down next to Ellie and patted her on the shoulder. "It's ... it's not your fault," she said weakly. "I mean ... it's not like any of us noticed, and Aziraphale had to look long and hard to see anything."

Ellie dropped her hands, shaking her head impatiently. "Yeah, but this stuff is supposed to be my specialty, Cayce. I can't believe I just let her get the drop on us." She hugged herself defensively. "On Crowley especially. I don't care so much for my sake, I didn't really need any encouragement, but he--fuck. I can't say why, but it was a really, really shitty thing for her to do to him, and I should have caught it." She collapsed backward onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. "I must be getting senile. I'll be lucky if he ever speaks to me again..."

"Yeah, but—" Cayce began, and stopped herself suddenly as a realization hit her. This was not two of her New York friends getting a case of beer-goggles and regretting it in the morning. This was a several-thousand-year-old demon virgin losing it to a friend (and at least it was a small mercy that he and Ellie were friends) because they'd been induced to it by a goddess.

Nursing friends through post-beer-goggle regrets was nothing on that, and no matter how much Ellie and Crowley looked like ordinary people, it wouldn't do to forget that they weren't.

"I, um. Don't tell Crowley I know this, and don't ask me how, but I, I think I know what you mean about why that was an especially shitty thing for her to do," Cayce said slowly. "And, I don't know, I still think it's not your fault. Whatever she did probably blunted your judgment as much as his. And it—" Her mouth snapped shut and her eyes went wide as it dawned on her that there was at least one way in which the scenario could have been worse. Or at least, much, much more awkward. She felt a blush creeping up her neck.

"...could have been worse?" Ellie snorted, watching with dark amusement as Cayce turned into a human thermometer. "Uh-huh. And I bet I know what you're thinking right now and I bet it crossed his mind at least once." She grabbed a pillow and hugged it, thinking. "If Aphrodite was slick enough to get it past both Crowley and me without us noticing, there's no way she tagged you by accident. No fucking way. But he was the one who slighted her, as she'd see it, so he'd have been her primary target." She glanced at Cayce, eyebrows raised. "It was probably just the luck of the draw that things turned out the way they did." And wasn't that just a kick in the old ego...

"Gah." Cayce rubbed her hand over her face and sighed. She felt tremendously relieved that things hadn't gone as messy as they might have, but it seemed to be in somewhat poor taste to actually say as much, considering. "What a mess. I ... really wish I had some idea of how Crowley's going to react. But I think ... I hope he doesn't blame you."

"You and me both," Ellie muttered." She heaved a deep sigh and then sat up and looked around. "I know I must have chocolate around here somewhere..."

Cayce chuckled. "Chocolate. Good short-term solution, anyway." She was sort of amused by the idea that a succubus was as susceptible to chocolate as a human ... but then Crowley and Aziraphale seemed partial enough to the booze, so maybe it wasn't so surprising.

"So, um, I know this is kind of ridiculous-sounding, considering ... what I am and all." Which was to say: an ordinary human with an annoying allergy-cum-neurosis. "But if there's anything I can do to help you guys, you only have to ask."

Ellie smiled wryly as she dug around the miscellaneous storage boxes that served her as furniture apart from the bed, and came up with a box of gourmet truffles from some shop or other. She opened it, grabbed one and came back to plunk down on the bed again.

"What you are," she said, holding the box out to Cayce, "is a friend, and that's a pretty rare commodity where I come from. Just stick around and keep not freaking out, okay? It helps a lot." She didn't claim to speak for Crowley, but she suspected he'd say pretty much the same thing.

"Not freaking out I can do." Cayce picked a truffle at random. "Every now and then it hits me, just how much utterly bizarre and random stuff I've gotten used to around here. By all rights I should have gone totally off my head by now."

Changing the subject was good. It gave Ellie some breathing space before she had to decide what to do next. (The option that was currently winning out in her head was to go collect a pretty blonde scalp and present it to Crowley as a souvenir, but that was why she really needed some time to think.)

"It never ceases to amaze me how well you guys manage to adapt to your circumstances in so short a time," she mused. She meant humans, of course. "You should see the shit that goes on where I come from, though. Alien invaders, pan-dimensional crises, guys in tights tearing up whole cities. And that's just on Earth, never mind the rest of reality." She shook her head. "I live there and I don't even believe half of it."

"It's not quite that exciting where I come from," Cayce said wryly. "Ordinary people get up to enough horrible crap on their own, as it turns out. Still, you're right ... we can get used to almost anything. A few years ago in my ... my timeline, they were saying irony was dead, and there was even this thing in the Onion—it's a satirical newspaper—about how 'Americans desperately want to care about stupid shit again.' And then a couple years later we were right back to the stupid shit."

Ellie grimaced slightly, her eyes on the neat rows of candy in the box. "That's hardly unique to Americans. Or humans." She carefully picked out another chocolate. "It's mainly the distractions that make life bearable."

A cautious knock on the door interrupted their conversation...

Ellie shot Cayce a look full of dread, crammed the truffle into her mouth and swallowed it nearly whole, and got up to go look out the window.

"Um. Hi," she said uncertainly when she saw Crowley standing below.

"Hi," he called back, witty as ever. "...Can I come up?"

"Sure," she said, not sure to be encouraged or worried at the conspicuous absence of towering fury. "Cayce's here..."

Crowley wasn't sure what to make of all this yet himself, but he wasn't angry with the two women who'd been used just the same as he.

"Good. I need to talk to both of you."

Making his way inside, Crowley hobbled as gracefully as possible up the ladder, relying mostly on his arms and good leg. Once he'd climbed into the room, he noticed Cayce sitting on the spot where he and Ellie had... well, it was incredibly awkward and he did not like feeling awkward.

"Hi, Cayce," he nodded. "Ellie."

As was becoming her habit, Ellie quietly let out the breath she'd been holding when he made it up without breaking his neck, and smiled wanly in response.

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