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Dowling Residence, 2013
“He’s been restless at night, wanting to push bedtime later and later. Would you like one of these? Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to be on the clock all the time. Here. Fresh mint from the garden, it gets everywhere. I keep having to think of creative ways to use it.”
Crowley closed his fingers around the proffered mojito, the outside of the glass already slippery with condensation, fat drops sliding down to form a ring on the granite countertop. It smelled like lime and a healthy dose of rum with a proof high enough to bar it from international flights. Crowley sipped cautiously. Harriet Dowling took an unladylike gulp of her own drink and flopped back on her bar stool, exhaling through her nose.
“I think it’s all the travel Thaddeus is doing. It’s so hard to keep Warlock on a schedule when Mr. Dowling’s only here two nights in every ten, and trying to make the most of it.” Harriet pursed her lips, as though “making the most of it” was a sin akin to slurping from one’s soup bowl during a diplomatic luncheon. “Games of catch when Warlock is supposed to be at dinner. Letting him stay up to watch those terrible comic book movies. And then he’s off again, and I have to be the one to tell Warlock he needs to eat his greens and be in bed before 10:30.”
Crowley made what he hoped was a sympathetic noise. Honestly, “marriage counseling” hadn’t been covered in the satanic nanny handbook, but he found that listening, nodding, and the occasional murmured “that sounds very frustrating” usually sufficed. He’d toyed with the idea of tempting Harriet to a bit of old-fashioned adultery so that she could give her itch a well-deserved scratch and he could have a little time to himself in the evenings, but most days he was too worn out from running after his charge to spare a thought for his usual laundry list of occult mischief. Sleep had become infinitely more precious than soul-tarnishing.
“And then he lost his grandmother, just last year- she was in Long Island, and Warlock hardly knew her, but Thaddeus was upset and there was the funeral and we had to tell him something…” Harriet tipped her glass up again. When she set it back on the countertop it was half empty and her cheeks had gone a bit pink. “Well. Now he’s having night terrors, or so it would seem. He’s been climbing into my bed at two in the morning, nearly in tears, talking about dogs with red eyes or saying the oceans are boiling and all the fish will die.” She barked a short, incredulous laugh.
“Er…” said Crowley, who had a sneaking suspicion that the boy’s nightmares had nothing to do with Nana’s open casket funeral and everything to do with certain educational stories he’d told Warlock under the old sycamore tree in the back garden.
“Anyway, I hate to ask, but do you think you could help?” She put a hand on top of his and fixed him with a look that was sincere and only a little bleary. “You’re very good at setting limits with him, honestly, he’s like a different child around you. He’ll adjust so much faster if you’re there for every bedtime, and it saves me from having to be the bad guy.” She threw back the rest of her drink, shuddered a little, and sucked on a slice of lime. “Of course we’ll adjust your pay. We’d be so grateful-”
“Put Warlock to bed?”
“Would you? I know he’s a bit old for it, but if I have to spend another night checking under his bed for seven-headed dragons I may really have to start drinking seriously.”
Crowley’s flat, 2019
Crowley jolted awake with the sinking horror that accompanies the sight of sunshine through bedroom curtains for a traveler who’d booked a pre-dawn flight. He and Aziraphale had talked across the table for hours, the little scrap of singed paper sitting between them like a life preserver that could- if they were very, very lucky- bear them out of the mess they were in. They’d gone over notes and practiced their transformations, and after a while there was simply nothing else to do but wait. Underneath the fears and hopes occupying the forefront of Crowley’s mind a single red thought had pulsed like a heartbeat- don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep. He guessed they probably had until morning, but there was no way to know for certain. He couldn’t let his guard down. He was so tired. But he couldn’t...
The last thing he remembered was trying to eat from a carton of leftover chow mein (Aziraphale was shattered, but not so shattered that he would allow them to skip dinner) with chopsticks that felt ten feet long, ferrying noodles to lips that were numb and stupid with exhaustion. He’d put down the utensils and stared straight ahead for a long moment, unable to focus his eyes. The fuzzy halos of light and smudges of color had moved and swirled and then coalesced into Aziraphale’s face, hovering in front of him, calling his name. Then… nothing.
Now he was here, in his bed, heart pounding in alarm while he lifted his head from his damp pillowcase and swiped at the drool on his cheek. Strange humped figures loomed around him in the darkness of the room. “Aziraphale!”
“I’m here.” A shuffling to his right, a click from the lamp on the bedside table. The room flooded with frozen-looking, fluorescent radiance, somehow making the hulking shape of the wardrobe even more monstrous than it had seemed in the dark, all its planes and edges as sharp as the blade of a knife. Aziraphale leaned over from the chair he’d evidently dragged from the office, the lines of his face thrown into harsh relief, pools of shadow below his eyebrows. Crowley thought briefly of Warlock’s old star projector with its warm yellow light and experienced a sinking feeling that his ancient, twisted soul had no name for. If he’d been human, he would have described it as “wanting his mother.”
He sat up, digging the heels of his hands deep into his eye sockets and trying to clear his head. “M’sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“You looked utterly done in. I know you didn’t want to, but I’m glad you got your head down.” Aziraphale had dark circles under his own eyes, and his lids were at half mast. Despite this, he twinkled at Crowley, just a quirk of his lips that lifted his cheeks and made his whole face bright and fond. Crowley pined helplessly at him. “You wouldn’t have convinced anyone you were me in the state you were in. I know I don’t have your way with words, but you could barely put a sentence together.”
“Worried I wouldn’t sound sufficiently posh?” Crowley asked, emphasizing and lengthening the “o” so it came out “poowwsh.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He seemed to be dressed in black silk pyjamas, and… fuzzy socks? He wiggled his toes, inspected the surprise additions (they were brown and woolly, with the face of a teddy bear embroidered on each instep with black thread. Two little pom poms seemed to represent ears), and looked up at Aziraphale, eyebrows raised.
“Warm socks are supposed to help you sleep better,” Aziraphale muttered, worrying at a cuticle, cheeks nearly as red as the upholstery on Crowley’s chair. He cleared his throat. “Do you want an early breakfast? I’m afraid it’s still a few hours before dawn. As much as I don’t want to face whatever is next for us, the waiting feels almost unbearable. I remember comforting some of Charles’ troops, oh back in- 778, it must have been. Roncevaux Pass. That’s what they said, the night before they marched into battle.”
“Yeah, so did the prisoners bound for the chopping block at Verden, as I recall. Your man was a bloodthirsty bastard.”
“Don’t let’s bring that up. He was a swine. Heaven’s forever backing the fellow who can swing his sword the hardest or spread his seed the furthest, and not an ounce of kindness or charity among the lot of them.” He sighed, then brightened. “On the other hand, it feels good to finally be able to say that out loud. Your clothes are folded on the bench in your bathroom, by the way. The wardrobe seems to be full of old paintings and gardening supplies, and I didn’t see a dresser…”
Crowley snapped, and his usual attire manifested around him, although he left the socks on (they crackled with divine energy and Aziraphale’s very particular brand of fluffy angel-ness, and he found he couldn’t bear to part with them yet). “No need. Easier this way.” He looked at Aziraphale, whose jaw cracked open in a huge yawn that he attempted to hide behind his hand. “All right. If we’ve still got a few hours until morning, it’s your turn.”
“My turn for…?”
Crowley climbed out of bed and drew the covers back. He discretely miracled a fresh pillowcase; demon drool could be a bit corrosive. “Go on. In you get. Have a kip, catch a few zzzs, go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.”
Aziraphale looked awkward. “I’m… not sure I can. You know I don’t as a rule, and with everything that’s gone on…”
“With everything that’s gone on, you need to rest, angel. You were going through that book for three days straight with no breaks, and I know getting discorporated takes a lot out of you. Look at you.” He gestured as Aziraphale ineffectually stifled another yawn. “Your body’s not immune to needing sleep, whatever your lot upstairs tells you about it.”
“Not my lot anymore,” Aziraphale pointed out, but he unlaced his shoes, and, after a moment of thought, snapped to clothe himself in a frilly, white, neck-to-ankle nightdress that might have been fashionable in the 1880s. Crowley supposed he should count himself lucky he hadn’t added a bobble cap. He lay back stiffly and settled his head against the pillow with utmost caution, as if he were afraid it would bite him.
“Relax,” Crowley said, daring to pull the covers up and settle them around him, the motion coming back to him easily after years of tucking Warlock in. He waved a hand at the black bedside swing-arm lamp which was radiating cold, unpleasant light with the kind of low-grade malevolence a demon’s bedroom accessory was expected to possess. It obligingly became a lavender and bergamot-scented candle in a frosted glass hurricane. “I’ll be here.”
“I think I want three stories.”
“We said two stories, Warlock.” Crowley turned back from replacing the books on the shelf and settled himself in the chair beside the bed.
“But I think I want one more. Just one more, please Nanny?” The boy was still sitting up, head tipped back, tracing the patterns of the star lamp’s projected glow with his fingers. Moons, comets, an asteroid, Saturn with its rings. Dozens of stars, circling the ceiling as the mechanism inside the lamp whirred softly from its place on the bedside table.
“We read our two stories. Two is what we agreed on. When you negotiate a compromise- which this was, Warlock, because if you recall my first offer was one story- you mustn’t attempt to change the terms of the contract once the work has been completed.” Crowley held up a finger. “It’s poor form.”
Warlock considered this, with the solemn earnestness that seemed to be the sole province of very young children. He shifted in his blankets. “Nanny?”
“Yes?”
“I’m thirsty.”
There was a glass of water at the ready; this was not Crowley’s first rodeo, as Thaddeus Dowling might have put it. He handed it to the child, who held it with both hands as he raised it to his mouth and took several deep swallows. He handed it back to Crowley, thankfully not spilling it either in his own lap or all over Crowley’s Brunello Cucinelli blouse (this time). Crowley settled it next to the lamp. “All right, just lie back under the covers and I’ll sing you our song. ‘Go to sleep and dream of pain, gloom and darkness-’”
“Oh, nanny?” Warlock rolled from his back to his side, tangled his legs in the blanket, and kicked them free. He sat up on one elbow.
Crowley sighed to himself. “Yes?”
“Um. Is flouricollar a kind of broccoli?”
“...Flouricollar?”
“Yes. Tonight, remember, we had buried flouricollar for dinner? But I had peas.”
Crowley was working out the syllables in his head and putting them together with the context. The penny dropped. “Oh, puréed cauliflower.” Shit. Was cauliflower a kind of broccoli? He’d never paid much attention to the way that humans chose to group organisms. They’d all started from the same place, after all, packed into the little pocket dimension that was Eden, blooming and budding and generally stepping on one another’s Archaeplastidaen toes. Well, a hand-wavy answer would do. “Cauliflower and broccoli are… related. Like cousins.”
“Cousins like Emily and Lucy are my cousins?”
“Aye, just so.”
Warlock twisted under the covers again. When he was restless he jackknifed like a landlocked salmon, making his way from one side of the bed to the other in a series of spastic limb rearrangements. “Oh. Nanny… do ‘couch’ and ‘sofa’ mean the same thing?”
“Yes, Warlock. ‘Couch’ and ‘sofa’ are synonyms.” Why not. He wouldn’t officially become the boy’s tutor for another few years, but it couldn’t hurt to get an early start.
“‘Cinnamons’? Mommy lets me have cinnamon on my applesauce,” Warlock said, nodding sagely.
Maybe not. Ah well. “It’s time to lie still, dear. ‘Go to sleep and dream of-’”
“Nanny?”
“Yes?”
“What’s a C moon?” Warlock had his head turned towards the window.
Crowley followed his gaze. “A see moon?- oh, you mean, a crescent moon?”
“Yes, that’s it. What are all the shapes of the moon called?”
Oh, blast. Weren’t there fourteen? He supposed as an occult being he really ought to know. He hadn’t been on the dev team for the solar system. Since he’d been down here- or up here, depending on your perspective- he’d only thought about the moon in terms of the bonus illumination it sometimes provided during graveyard meetings with his more traditional bosses. Made it slightly more tolerable to hang around in the dewy grass (which soaked your new Zanotti boots right through and gave your feet that unpleasant clammy feeling they seemed to cultivate downstairs, with their endlessly dripping pipes and damp concrete) while you recited the deeds of the day.
“Er. There’s crescent… half… full… and ah, new moon. That’s when there’s no moon at all.”
Warlock was holding his index finger and thumb out in front of him, trying to squeeze the moon between them. “Is the moon this big?”
“Bigger.”
He moved his fingers a little further apart. “This big?”
“Much bigger than you could measure with your fingers, dear. It just appears small because it’s very far away.”
“Nanny?”
“Yes?”
Aziraphale rolled over, folding his hands under his cheek like one of those twee little sleeping child sculptures you saw at gift stores that catered to bored housewives. (Harriet Dowling would leave catalogues with names like Uncommon Goods and Lladró scattered all over the house every December.)
“Which stars are yours?”
Crowley, who had put his sunglasses back on mostly out of instinct but also as a shield against the plaintive, near-tears feeling that was still hammering his breastbone and thickening his throat, looked over the tops of them. “What?”
“I saw you picking up the pages from your universe book while I was finishing with the holy water spill outside the study. And I thought… I never asked you. It seemed- oh, I don’t know- impolite?”
Crowley smiled. “Not exactly a trade secret, angel. Anyway, at this point you may as well ask me anything you like.”
Aziraphale made a little hmph-ing noise and shifted to his back again. “Well in that case, the possibilities abound. The city of Bijlmermeer-”
“Oh, mine, most definitely.”
“-loos with wall-to-wall carpet-”
Crowley grinned devilishly.
“-televangelists?”
Crowley held up his hands. “Had nothing to do with that one. Good for rounding out numbers, but the humans came up with the “divine mercy to the highest bidder” concept all on their own.”
“Camels through the needle’s eye,” Aziraphale said reflectively, and flipped over on his stomach.
“Eta Carinae nebula.”
“Hmm?”
“Oh- that’s the one I worked on. Nothing fancy. I mostly charged up plasma and gave the clouds of gas a nudge in the right direction every once in a while. It’s a little like growing a houseplant, I suppose. You start out with dirt and light, add a little electricity, and suddenly you have this… new thing.” He pressed his lips together and blinked, just once. He could feel Aziraphale’s eyes on him, and he stared at the ceiling.
“It’s so very lovely, Crowley.”
Crowley sniffed, casually. A casual sniff. It was dusty in here, that was all, and it wasn’t worth commenting on. “Always liked that stuff. New stars. Plants. Baby animals, the way they’re not just little adults.”
“Like larvae and tadpoles?”
“Not just that. Not just the ones that change form. Even little humans. They’re their own- oh, I don’t know, their own thing. You remember Warlock when he was five or six? The way his brain worked- wasn’t anything like his parents, and it wasn’t because he was the Antichrist. Just- because he was a kid, you know?”
“All I know is, his fascination with ‘Brother Slug’ was a great deal more ardent than I think was healthy. Did he ever show you the jar he filled with them and put under his bed for safekeeping?”
Crowley smiled. “That’s it exactly. Catch an adult trying to find out if slugs will form a society in an old jam jar with a couple of moss-covered rocks in.”
“Trying to find out about the world. Asking questions.” Aziraphale’s eyes were dark grey and very serious. But also very much not asleep.
“Angel, stop distracting me. Shut your eyes. You’ve got a job to be getting on with.”
There was silence for one minute, two, three. Then-
“Crowley?”
“Warlock. Lie still now.”
“But-”
“Warlock.”
Silence for one minute, two. Then-
“I want a model car. One that you put together with- with sticks and with glue, and stuff, and you get a kit. An’ it’s very complicated. You and Daddy and Mommy and me can work to put it together.” A short, reflective pause. “I really want that.”
“Well. You have a birthday coming soon.”
“Yes! In a hundred days, I’ll be this many!” Warlock held up five fingers and a thumb.
Crowley settled himself a little deeper in his chair, smoothing his skirt. “Lie still now. Close your eyes.” He tilted his own head back and demonstrated.
Warlock flipped to his belly. The blankets were in a heap at his feet, the little blue pyjamas printed with anthropomorphic steam engines rucked up around his knees. “I tried to close my eyes. But they won’t stay closed!”
“Well, when they open, just close them again.”
Warlock squinted his eyes shut dramatically to show willing, but opened them again with a loud, put-upon sigh under a minute later. “I just can’t. Nanny… why can’t I see my eyes?”
Crowley, who was understanding God’s firm no questions, “because-I-said-so” stance more clearly by the minute, said “No one can see their own eyes. Because you see with them.”
“I can see your eyes. Well, sort of. Can you see your eyes?”
“No, Warlock. Not unless I look in a mirror, just the same as you.” Crowley decided not to mention the few unfortunate discorporations that had left him staring down into his own lifeless face; the boy had night terrors as it was.
“Well. I bet I can see my eyes if I want. I bet it’s a superpower!” He kicked both legs up, excited. “An’ I can get it if I get radioactive.”
“Warlock, shhh. ‘...gloom and darkness, blood and-’”
“Nanny?”
“Yes, Warlock?”
“If I go to the dentist, will you be there?”
Crowley looked down into the worried little face. “Um… I think your mother or father would take you to the dentist, don’t you?”
“Well, Mommy has to lie down in her room a lot. And Daddy has to go to work with all his friends. So. I think you should keep an eye on me.” Warlock picked up his long-suffering teddy bear, which might have once been fluffy and brown but was now a washed out, slightly grubby beige, with bald patches where the fur had been rubbed into nonexistence, and kept his eyes on it as he spoke.
Before Crowley knew what was happening, he was smoothing the hair back from Warlock’s furrowed brow. “If your mother and father aren’t available then of course I will.”
“Will you be in the waiting room and in the room where the dentist is?”
“Warlock. You’re nearly six years old. It will become important in your life to face the things that you are afraid of.”
“Oh. Nanny?”
“Yes, angel?”
Aziraphale lifted the sides of his mouth in a thin smile that didn’t look good-humoured in the least. “Please understand that I ask this flippantly because I don’t know how else to do so. And you would be perfectly within your rights to tell me to go soak my head.”
“It can’t be that bad. What is it?”
“Did it- did it hurt when you Fell from Heaven?” Aziraphale was up on one elbow. As soon as the cheesy pickup line left his lips he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, looking like he wished he could take it back. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. That was dreadfully insensitive of me.”
Crowley, who didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath, let it out through his nose in a rush. Incredibly, he felt a laugh bubbling up from his chest, and made a sort of half-giggling, half-choking sound, then winced. He smacked his lips. He could still taste smoke and petrol. “Aziraphale. You’re not going to Fall.”
“You sound remarkably assured of that for someone with no evidence. Crowley, I rebelled. I don’t know what it was you did to get you into God’s bad books, but I was handed a uniform and told to get in line. I didn’t. And yes, maybe the whole... Armageddon... thing wasn’t Her plan, exactly, but She’s never looked very kindly on overt disobedience. Big on obedience, God.” He sighed and flopped onto his back, looking remarkably like the worried angel of sixty centuries past, contemplating the return of the equipment from his first field operation with a gaping, sword-shaped hole in the inventory.
Something sticky seemed to be coating the back of Crowley’s ribs. It was hard to take a breath. “You are not going to Fall,” he repeated.
Aziraphale rolled back to face him. “I might,” he said gravely. “And Crowley, it’s alright. If I do. I won’t lie to you and tell you I’m not…” he swallowed, “...afraid, but I can handle it.”
“No. No, you said that the prophecy-”
“Oh, bollocks to Agnes and her prophecies, anyway,” the angel snapped. Stress always made him tetchy. “I’ve had the feeling on and off through the years- and almost constantly, this past week- that Agnes just liked a bit of drama. She preferred her stories to have, ah- explosive endings. Bloody-minded witch. She knew very well where to find the boy. But she wallpapered it over in layer upon layer of opaque prolixity so that she could keep us away until the eleventh hour. And give me an absolute blinder of a headache.”
“Come on, now,” said Crowley, who was thinking very privately that Aziraphale’s annoyance at Agnes’ dramatic tendencies was a case of “the angel doth protest too much.” “You’ll wind yourself up in knots if you start to think it might have happened any differently than it did. Maybe she manufactured a climax more contrived than the one in that teenage vampire movie, but we came out the other side of it, and we’re still here. The world is still here. I don’t think she’d give us one last riddle if the answer to it is ‘the angel falls.’” He reached out without meaning to and ran his fingers under the tips of Aziraphale’s short curls, brushing them away from his forehead.
Aziraphale closed his eyes. “Crowley…”
“Shhh. Try to rest.” Crowley began to hum, just a little mindless tune that had popped into his head, the notes grating out of his hoarse throat in a way that was probably more alarming than soothing.
Aziraphale opened one eye. “That’s never that little satanic nursery rhyme you used to sing to Warlock?”
Crowley realized it was. “Suppose. I can sing it to you if you like. Bit dark.”
“I remember. Someday you’ll have to explain why your people have such a fascination with the insides of humans. ‘Blood and brains…’ really.” He wrinkled his nose and kicked the covers off of his feet.
Crowley shrugged. “All of us- angels and demons, I mean- are in the death business, when you get right down to it. Demons’re just more realistic about it. No one’s getting their sticky fingers on a soul until after it's shuffled off the mortal coil, and sometimes that involves the inside bits ending up on the outside. Or sickness… lesions… decay. It’s what happens to all of ‘em in the end, and we try to respect that.”
“Is that why Lord Beelzebub’s face is a bit…”
“Pustular? Yeah. Although…” Crowley clicked his tongue against his front teeth, thinking. “They got rid of them before their little tête-à-tête with Gabriel, earlier. Wonder what that’s about.”
Aziraphale sighed and turned over again. He was winding the duvet into a coil around one of his ankles. “I suppose I haven’t thought about it much. Death, that is. I’ve had the- the privilege, I suppose, of not having to think about it. At least, not in terms of the- ah- ‘nitty gritty’.”
Crowley snorted softly and put his elbow on the arm of the chair, resting his chin on his hand. “Death’s just as messy, and just as important, as birth, or- or sex. Angels think it all ought to be neat and sanitary. Think humans ought to manifest like we do, fully formed, no fuss, and then fade away like smoke when you blow out a candle. S’not like that. It’s… organic.”
“For humans, yes. Without the soul, the vessel gets broken down into its component molecules in short order to sustain other forms of life down here. They feed, they find each other, they reproduce… then they die. And so on.” Aziraphale, somehow managing to look pedantic in a ruffled night dress, held up a finger. He went on in a lowered voice, as if passing a state secret to a hostile foreign power, which Crowley supposed he technically was. “It was Her big breakthrough, you know. She wanted Her creations to be self-sustaining, so she could have a bit of a holiday. I suppose it takes it out of you, shaping life from the ether.”
“Took yonks for the helium atoms to fuse, I remember that much. She’d just gotten Her first batch of carbon and was playing around with it when… you know.”
Aziraphale fluffed the pillow and settled his cheek back down. He looked like a Baroque painting in the candle’s yellow light, soft curves and pink cheeks tucked into folds of white satin, the duvet twisted and draped dramatically around his waist and thighs. Crowley adored him. His throat was full of tears. Prophecy or no prophecy, Aziraphale wouldn’t burn. Crowley would smash Heaven and Hell to pieces; he would tear the golden city to the ground, reduce the jasper walls to rubble, and drain the river Styx before he would let any of their people touch a single golden hair on his head.
Not, he supposed, that it was particularly up to him, but he’d certainly try.
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley thought crazily for a second that he’d heard his thoughts. “I remember the- ‘you know.’ And then after that, death was a part of life- but not for us. Not even after the war, Crowley. We didn’t die. Some of us Fell, and some of us stayed…” Aziraphale blinked rapidly. His eyes were too bright. Crowley twisted his hands together in his lap, wanting to touch, not daring. “...but none of us died.”
Crowley sniffed again. Allergies. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go easy on that kind of talk for now, huh? You’ll be up all night- well, the rest of it, anyway.” He gently unwound the duvet from the angel’s restless limbs and resettled it. “Close your eyes. Think about… oh, nice things. Tea at Corinthia. Dido and Aeneas. Victorian chaise lounges piled with pillows …”
“Eton mess.” Aziraphale had closed his eyes, and was smiling. “Fresh watermelon…”
“Biscuits dipped in milky tea.”
“Mmm. Crowley?”
“Warlock. I’m singing now. ‘Sleep so sweet, my darling boy, you will rule’-”
“I want to count on my fingers.”
Crowley paused. “Go ahead, then.” Warlock liked to keep time with his bedtime songs by lifting a finger on each beat. When all ten fingers were raised, he’d count back down and lower them again, one by one. God Herself knew why. He cleared his throat and started again. “You will rule when Earth’s-”
“Wait, Nanny!”
“Yes?”
“I forgot to count on my toes too!”
Crowley drew in a breath, held it for a few seconds, and let it out slowly. “All right. Do you want me to start over?”
“Yes. Oh, nanny! I remembered another thing I forgot. I forgot to cut the watermelon!”
“We can cut the watermelon in the morning. It’s not ripe yet.”
“Why?”
“Because after we pick fruit, sometimes we have to wait a few days until it’s ready for us to eat it.”
“Why?”
Oh no. “Because sometimes when a fruit is picked it’s still hard and sour. You wouldn’t want to eat it like that. You have to give it time.”
“Why?”
“Warlock, I’m singing-”
Warlock giggled. “Why why why why why?”
“Hush now. ‘Sleep so swee-’”
“Does fruit last forever?”
Crowley gave up. “What was that?”
“The watermelon. When it’s ripe, can we eat it forever?”
“No dear. Fruit doesn’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever.”
“Why?” Warlock’s solemn brown eyes were on him, Crowley could feel them like a physical weight.
“Well. Eventually the fruit gets old, Warlock. It starts to rot, and then you wouldn’t want to eat it anymore.”
“Like when apples get soft and then you cook them?”
“Just so.”
“I don’t like cooked apples.”
“You don’t like applesauce?” Crowley raised an eyebrow.
Warlock gave another little shoulder-and-hip shimmy, and ended up on his back again. “Oh. I guess so. Nanny?”
“Yes?”
“When fruit gets rotten, does it die?”
Crowley had the sense that he had walked onto thin ice, and was finding this out too late from the sudden loud crack and buckling of what should have been solid ground beneath his feet. He paused before responding, considering his words carefully. “In a way. Fruit really isn’t alive anymore after it’s been picked. But it does die in the same way that everything dies, I suppose. Eventually, it goes back to the earth.”
“Does it take a hundred days?” Warlock asked.
“Usually just a week or so, for fruit.”
Warlock considered this. He sat up, wrapped both small hands around his teddy’s arms, then stretched them apart and held the bear out in a way that reminded Crowley disturbingly of a crucifixion victim’s painful spreadeagle. The stuffed animal’s head lolled to one side. Crowley looked away. Warlock addressed his next question to the bear. “Will I die in a hundred days?”
“No. No, Warlock. You won’t die for many, many years.” Crowley leaned forward. He plucked the doll, straining at its threadbare seams, gently from Warlock’s hands and placed it in his lap. He tilted Warlock’s chin so the boy was looking at him. And then he froze. What was he doing? He was a demon. A foul denizen from the very deepest pit of hell; sure, he’d been up here a long time but he could still whiff sulphur under his arms when he’d gone a few days between showers, he knew what he was. A beast cursed to crawl on his belly for the rest of his days, and incidentally, also tasked with overseeing the infernal upbringing and education of the Antichrist. This innocent-appearing child was his hugely terrifying boss’s only son, heir to the throne at the bottom of the 9th circle, and liable to tear the earth apart like he’d almost torn his bear just now, without even meaning to.
What would they say around the unholy water cooler if they could see him now? Hastur would laugh the frog right off of his head.
Warlock was looking at him. Crowley’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. “Nanny?”
“...yes?” Crowley whispered.
“I don’t want to die,” said Warlock.
“I don’t want to die,” said Aziraphale.
Just like that, Crowley was no longer frozen, as if his icy limbs had been doused with water from a teakettle. Bollocks to what was expected of him. Weren’t they trying to rewrite the script in any case? “Warlock,” he said, “push over.”
Warlock looked at him curiously, then scooted on his bottom over to the side of the bed nearest the wall. Crowley lifted the coverlet, toed off his kitten heels, and settled his long limbs onto the twin mattress, feeling heavy and awkward as it shifted under him. One of his elbows knocked an overhanging shelf, crammed to the point of overflowing with rockets, dinosaurs, playing cards, miniature cars (and if there was a tiny replica of the Bentley tucked in among the rest of them, so what?), and the kind of plastic toy that makes a high pitched buzzing noise, has a blinding, laser-like red light, and transforms from a truck to a robot. The shelf shuddered ominously and the toys shook, then settled. Crowley lay back on the pillow and extended an arm toward the boy.
Warlock hesitated, then clutched his teddy and melted into Crowley’s side. He settled his cheek in the hollow of Crowley’s shoulder and tucked his feet under Crowley’s thigh, wiggling his toes in a way that might have been anxious but was more likely driven by the constant, Brownian motion intrinsic to small children.
Crowley wrapped an arm around Warlock’s shoulder. This was the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, et cetera, et cetera? He felt so small. He moved his hand absently back and forth over the boy’s arm, stroking in a soothing rhythm. “Warlock, listen. You won’t die for a long, long time. Maybe… maybe you won’t die at all, hmm?” Maybe you’ll outlive us all, he thought, and closed his eyes. “Most importantly, it’s not something you need to be worrying about right now.”
Warlock was silent for a long moment, toying with his bear and breathing quietly. Crowley felt the motion of his ribcage, in and out, in and out. He felt the rhythmic thumping of Warlock’s small heart from the place where Warlock’s chest was tucked tightly against his side. He’d never known anything quite like it.
Eventually Warlock said, “Can you sing?”
“All right, dear.” Crowley chewed the inside of his lips thoughtfully. “What song would you like to hear?”
“Can you sing Sesame Street, Nanny?”
Crowley smiled. “‘I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon’?”
“Yes please.”
“All right.”
Aziraphale had opened his eyes and was looking up at the ceiling. His lips were pressed together in a thin line, and as Crowley watched a fat tear welled up in the corner of his eye and slid down his temple, dampening the short hairs just above his ear. Crowley stared at the tiny, slightly darker spot among the roots of the wiry curls where it had disappeared and felt like crying himself. Instead he rose from his chair.
Aziraphale had migrated almost to the edge of the bed on Crowley’s side. “If ‘playing with fyre’ means I Fall, Crowley, then I’ve gotten off easy. That’s how I know they won’t do it. Unless they do something even worse to you, and I couldn’t bear that. You- you…” he gulped and gave an un-angelic, watery sniff.
Crowley pulled the duvet back and leaned over, pressing his elbow against Aziraphale’s shoulder and giving him a gentle nudge. When Aziraphale looked up, startled, Crowley laid his glasses on the nightstand and snapped again, putting the silk pyjamas back on. “Let me in, angel,” he muttered, feeling his cheeks heat as the moment stretched out and out and Aziraphale just looked at him owlishly, not moving, not blinking. He was being ridiculous, perched on the edge of the bed like a gangly bird of prey, with his slitted yellow eyes naked and his feet still encased in teddy bear socks. Aziraphale would tell him to shove off any second now, and rightfully so.
He was just shifting his weight back to return to the chair (or maybe to saunter out to the living room and find a nice pillow to scream into) when Aziraphale seemed to come to life with a start and moved over to the other side of the bed. He fluttered his hands up to the coverlet and back down again, looking like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Crowley, who had climbed into bed with a human-shaped being once before and so considered himself something of an expert, slid down next to him in one fluid, easy movement (silk pyjamas, sateen sheets, snake demon). He got an arm under Aziraphale’s shoulders and pulled him in until, after a flurry of minor re-shufflings and awkward elbow rearrangements, they were lying pressed together from chest to knee.
Aziraphale tucked his face into the crook between Crowley’s neck and shoulder, and Crowley felt the short hairs on his head tickling his nose when he breathed in. He slithered a calf between Aziraphale’s legs and hooked a foot around his ankle, wondering idly if snakes could purr. He’s never been this wrapped up in another creature in all his years, and some sort of deep longing that had sung in his bones as long as he’d had bones, so much a part of him that he’d long since stopped noticing it, was suddenly silenced. It was as if he’d been walking around his whole life with a sharp stick poking into his side, like one of those crazy torments the Greeks use to dream up with the liver-crazed vultures or the rock on the eternal uphill slope. When he put his arms around Aziraphale, the stick had been withdrawn, taking with it a pain he’d lived with for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to be free of it. For a moment he couldn’t speak. Then he realized that Aziraphale was crying in earnest.
“Humans die. They- they do it every day, aa-aand they think there’s something waiting for them, but they don’t know for certain. They’re braver than me. Crowley, I-” a sniff, a hiccup, “I never really thought about the end of, of me. Thought about you, what would happen if you had- an, an accident with the h-h-holy water,” a series of jagged sobs, then he drew in a breath and continued, “and I was so angry with you, Crowley. You can’t just give up. Not when we’ve never… when I’ve never…”
“Shhh.” Crowley stroked his back, silky circles against the fabric of the nightshirt, and breathed in his scent- rain, the strange, almost electric tang of the atmosphere at the Tadfield airbase, lavender, green tea shampoo.
Aziraphale’s hand crept to circle Crowley’s waist briefly, then further up, pressing into the scapula. The root of Crowley’s wing, tucked away from this plane of reality but alive under the touch, arched to meet it like a friendly cat.
Aziraphale was breathing roughly, but the storm seemed to be passing. “There’s only one way tomorrow can possibly go, Crowley, because anything else feels simply intolerable.” He drew back and looked at Crowley seriously, eyes red-rimmed. “If they hurt you, or kill you, they may as well kill me, because I cannot imagine wanting to go on. I would- I would be so lonely.” This last was a whisper, spoken to the hollow of Crowley’s throat. “But I don’t want- well, I don’t want to die. And it’s not just because I’m afraid. Because there’s still so much to be, and to do. And I’m not torn in two anymore.”
Crowley’s knowledge of literature couldn’t hold a candle to that of a polyglot, bookworm angel who didn’t habitually sleep, but he recognized the reference and smiled. He rested his forehead against Azirapahle’s. “You’re not going to die.”
Aziraphale wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry. You must think I’m such a coward.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re the bravest person I know. You’re scared because you never gave up, not on anything- and now you’re afraid it won’t be up to you.”
“Up to us.”
“Yeah. Up to us. But I think we’ve got it handled. God likes a dramatic climax just as much as Agnes ever did. Give Her the chance to witness a bit of poetic justice and She’ll be breaking out the metaphysical popcorn and settling down to watch the show.”
“I hope you’re right.” Aziraphale touched his cheek, hesitantly, just with the tips of his fingers. “I really hate to say this, but your track record isn’t entirely pristine when it comes to knowing what God does and does not like.”
Crowley smiled. “Point. But what is it She always said was the most important thing?”
“Love?”
“As the great sage and imminent multimedia performance artist John Lennon once said, ‘love is all you need.’” Crowley pressed a kiss to Aziraphale’s temple. “Okay?”
The hand on Crowley’s shoulder blade crept down his arm and clasped his hand in a warm, firm grip. Crowley turned his palm and laced their fingers together. He pushed gently with his other hand until Aziraphale put his head back down on his shoulder. “Sleep, angel.”
Warlock’s body grew heavier. At first he fidgeted with his bear, shifted against Crowley’s side, and kicked his legs aimlessly. As Crowley sung the words he’d learned from an orange puppet with an improbably shaped head on Warlock’s TV program, the movements slowed. The boy’s breathing became rhythmic and heavy. When Crowley realized he hadn’t felt Warlock move at all for nearly five minutes, he glanced down. The dark eyelashes were fanned against the boy’s cheeks, and his mouth was slack. His hand still clutched his teddy bear. Crowley tried to shift him back onto the pillow and extract his arm.
Aziraphale clutched at him, getting his fist around a handful of Crowley’s slippery nightshirt. “Please stay.”
Crowley relaxed by degrees, still feeling like a great, cosmic mistake had been made somewhere. Surely he couldn’t be here, in bed with the angel, being asked not to go? He’d never have the right words to soothe him, or to tell him… but. Once, when Warlock had been young and frightened of death, his arms and his body had been comfort enough.
Crowley considered, remembered. Then he touched the nightstand, lifted a finger to draw up a trickle of power, and a squat projector globe was suddenly sitting next to the candle holder. Its surface was a delicate filigree pattern of diamonds, circles and crescents, carved into a smooth white sphere. As Crowley watched, the globe lit up from within and a spray of stars was thrown onto the ceiling, twinkling and warm. The projection began to revolve, slow as the heavens. Aziraphale sighed in his sleep, nuzzled deeper into his neck, and said a word that sounded suspiciously like “love”. Crowley closed his eyes.
Dowling Residence, 2013, hours later
“Nanny?”
“Hmm? What?”
“I’m thirsty.”
