Work Text:
The night will never stay
The night will still go by
Though with a million stars
You pin it to the sky...
In all of his years on Earth, Crowley was never more fervently grateful for his demonic ability to go without sleep than he was during Warlock’s infancy. If he hadn't already Fallen, long ago, Heaven surely would have exiled him for blasphemy several times over in his first six months at the Dowlings. Because Warlock refused to sleep through the night. God must have been drunk, or high -- probably drunk and high -- Crowley concluded, in a foul temper, on a Tuesday night at 3 a.m. No sober entity, not even God, would have designed such a terrible method of species propagation. No sooner would Crowley find a reliable method of getting Warlock to sleep -- changing his nappie, feeding him, walking him up and down the hallway, reading passages of Leibniz's Monodologie aloud with Warlock in his lap, driving Warlock at high speed around the countryside in the Bentley -- than the antichrist would change his bloody mind and scream like the activity in question were a form of torture devised by Lucifer himself.
"Do you think murdering the antichrist in infancy would be an effective spanner in the works?" Crowley asks, slamming open Aziraphale's kitchen door with a squalling, red-faced Warlock hoisted to his shoulder. It’s nearing one o'clock in the morning and he and Warlock are at a stalemate that’s entering its third hour. For the third night this week.
Aziraphale, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up from his book. He slips a bookmark from the back pages and marks his place before setting it down beside the teapot at his elbow. "Oh dear. What an extraordinary sound."
"Only 'extraordinary' if you haven't been intimately acquainted with it, angel," Crowley growls, joggling the howling bundle in hopes of surprising Warlock into a few seconds' silence. It doesn't work. "After the first ten minutes it stops being extraordinary and just makes you want to rip your ears off."
Aziraphale pushes back his chair and rises to his feet. He picks up the teapot and goes to the sink to rinse it and set the kettle on. Warlock continues to wail. Crowley considers (not for the first time that night) cursing himself hard of hearing before he accidentally calls down a lightning bolt and sets something unfortunate on fire. He shifts Warlock to the other shoulder and rolls his head to try and get his vertebrae back into alignment. Without a word, Aziraphale passes him a fresh tea towel and Crowley fumbles at the damp patch on the vacated shoulder of his black hoodie. He manages to get the worst of the fluids off, at least.
"Why do you think She made them like this?" Aziraphale asks, moving closer and peering down at Warlock's blotchy red face.
"I haven’t a sodding clue," Crowley grunts, finishing with the towel and dropping it on the kitchen table. He can already feel Warlock's various fluids seeping through the fabric on his other shoulder. "Aren't you the one who's supposed to understand this Great Plan of Hers? I suggest you inquire what part of the Plan screaming turnips are supposed to fulfill. Exactly. I want details. You can take Warlock to the meeting. As an illustrative example."
"My dear," Aziraphale begins, lifting his hands in a gesture he arrests before completion. Something in Crowley's face, or stance, must give him pause because he stops and tips his head just a fraction in a silent query. Crowley frowns. He knows he ought to understand what Aziraphale's expression means but he’s too strung out to parse faces at the moment.
"Your kettle's boiling, angel," is what he says, knowing how defeated it sounds and hating himself for that, too. Who were they to think any of this absolutely madcap idea would work, anyway?
"Let me," Aziraphale says, ignoring the kettle. "For a bit." He holds out his hands again and it takes Crowley a full fifteen seconds to realize he's meant to hand over Warlock. Crowley's hand is protectively cupping the back of Warlock's head before his brain catches up and he reminds himself Aziraphale is one of the fiercest, gentlest people he knows. He reminds himself that Aziraphale has held Warlock before and -- despite Warlock being the antichrist -- no harm had come to Warlock because of it. It's just ...
Crowley doesn't remember being this small and helpless. He isn't sure angels, or demons, have an infancy. But to be so new, barely able to keep your form functioning, and to be at the complete mercy of all the beings who are bigger and stronger than you. It's terrifying to imagine. He wants to murder the little bugger frequently, sure, but what he'd failed to sufficiently guard against in securing his post at the Dowlings is the fact he's never, ever been successful in ordering himself not to care. Especially when the fragile life in his arms was destined to be a strategically vital pawn in the chess game of Heaven and Hell. Crowley's been a pawn for over six thousand years and it horrifies him -- every time Warlock looks up at him with the absolute trust of an innocent who doesn't know any better -- to imagine Warlock at the mercy of either side.
This is Aziraphale, he reminds himself, remembering how gently Aziraphale holds injured birds and tiny snakes. Aziraphale. Not your run of the mill angelic bureaucrat, who would see Warlock as the spoils of an everlasting, miserable war. His pulse is racing from adrenaline by the time Aziraphale lays a hand ever-so-briefly to the side of his throat -- a soothing caress with the slightest fizz of grace, one might call it, if Crowley ever allowed himself to think words like caress in the context of Aziraphale. He really must be exhausted, he realizes, to have let such a word even take shape in his mind.
He closes his eyes and sways into the touch.
"Crowley," Aziraphale says, softly, and Crowley allows Aziraphale to ease Warlock out of his arms. Aziraphale's hands are warm, and broad, and firm. He steadies Warlock's head and gets a hand beneath Warlock's tiny bum.
"There, there," Aziraphale murmurs, underneath the ragged sounds Warlock is making, as he eases the baby away from Crowley's chest and turns him in toward his own -- no thought or hesitation, Crowley thinks faintly, at the damage an infant might do to his cashmere cardigan and fine dress shirt. "There, there." Aziraphale tucks Warlock in against his chest and bows his head to press soft kisses against the downy black of Warlock's hair. "Shhhh it's okay. It's okay."
Crowley's swallows against the sudden ache in his throat. None of this is okay. But Aziraphale has a way of making him believe somehow it could be.
"Why don't you make the tea," Aziraphale nods at the kettle. "Warlock and I will just take a turn around the herb garden so you can have a few minutes' peace."
Crowley steps sideways so as to allow Aziraphale access to the kitchen door, twisting to watch him step out into the early spring night with Warlock securely in his arms. Warlock's screaming diminishes as they move away from the cottage and Crowley feels like he can finally breathe again.
He pulls off his glasses and drops them on the table next to Aziraphale's book, pressing finger and thumb to the aching inside corners of his eye sockets. Then he goes over to the stove where the kettle is steaming merrily. Aziraphale's cupboards have an alarmingly large stock of tea and Crowley pokes around until he finds the herbal blend with nettles and elderflowers that he particularly likes. Over his shoulder, he can hear Warlock's grizzling moving back and forth in the garden outside, aware of Aziraphale, as he always is, moving with the child. It's ridiculous that after three bloody hours of wanting nothing more than for the crying to stop he's now moving toward the kitchen door as the sound fades in order to keep them in range.
While he waits for the tea to steep Crowley yanks out the hair elastic hastily used when Warlock first woke to keep his hair out of his face and runs his fingers roughly through the tangles in a vain attempt to tidy it. He wishes, with a sudden desire so strong it's a physical pain, that Aziraphale were free to untangle it and braid it for him. He hasn't had Aziraphale's hands in his hair since they moved to the Dowlings. The skin on his throat, where Aziraphale's fingers so recently skimmed, burns from the contact. If only … He looks blearily around the kitchen, too tired to stand any longer but too tired to decide where to sit. Oh, but there's tea. He can't remember where Aziraphale keeps the mugs in this kitchen and he opens three cupboard doors before finding them. Maybe if he just keeps moving ... he rotates on his heel, tuning back into the sound of Warlock and Aziraphale -- one whimpering, one murmuring -- outside the cottage and to the left. He can take tea out to Aziraphale, in thanks for being here. For not abandoning Crowley out on this mad and precarious limb of stopping the antichrist from ending the world.
Aziraphale is standing with his back to the cottage and Crowley almost stumbles, sloshing the tea on the gravel path, because there's the faintest of faint starlit outline of wings stretching out from Aziraphale's back. The rare sight makes Crowley ache with a familiar longing. He hasn't seen Aziraphale's wings since Warlock was born and their lives were thrown topsy turvy. Even barely manifest, Aziraphale's wings are the most beautiful Crowley has ever known: a misty aurora borealis of light moving gently in response to invisible currents of not-exactly-air. They feel of strength and safety, and the night eddying around them is warmer than the damp chill of the South Downs in early March. Crowley sways once again toward Aziraphale's warmth as he always has, and always will, spilling another slosh of tea over his hand and biting back a bollocks at the burn.
It's because of the wings that the absence of Warlock's ragged sounds is the second thing Crowley notices. He can hear thick breathing, around the disgusting human snot Warlock insists on producing, and a sound that he identifies -- with a shiver of disorientation -- as Aziraphale singing. It isn't that he's never heard Aziraphale sing. Angels have perfect pitch, every single one of them, and Aziraphale's singing voice is a resonant tenor that has, in fact, made more than one grown man (not to mention at least one demon) weep. It's just that Aziraphale's taste tends toward composers like Monteverdi and Mendelssohn. He dragged Crowley, under protest, to the Messiah at least once a year and had giggled delightedly through the opening night of The Pirates of Penzance. What he's singing now is a much simpler melody that Crowley has never heard before.
"...first, in the West, where the old hills are
He touches his wand to the Evening Star ..."
Crowley licks his lips, tasting the spring thaw, the nettle and elderflower tea, Aziraphale (always Aziraphale), and Warlock's blend of sea salt and violets. "...Then swiftly he runs..." He inhales, and exhales, nearly afraid to breathe for fear of disturbing the balance of silence and song. "...on his rounds on high..." Crowley takes a step closer. Then another. His trainers crunch on the gravel path. Softly, but Aziraphale will know he is there. "...Til he's lit every lamp in the dark blue sky."
Somewhere off to the right an owl calls in the forest. Crowley waits for Warlock's wail to begin again but it doesn't. Instead, although he's finished singing, Aziraphale adjusts the weight in his arms and bends his head down, as if he's whispering in Warlock's tiny crumpled shell of an ear. "That's your nanny, you know, little one," Aziraphale murmurs. It's soft, but Aziraphale must know Crowley can hear. "He lit all the stars, every one. He's very clever like that." Crowley feels the flush of exposure roll over him, from scalp to toes, a burning rush of fear and pleasure that seizes him whenever Aziraphale almost says aloud the many things they never say.
"He lit the stars, and then he named them. Every star, in every language that has been, is, or will be. I've spent six thousand years trying and I still haven't learnt them all."
Crowley's rooted to the spot, now, caught between the desperate need to hear Aziraphale say it and the terror that God Herself will come down and discorporate his angel for uttering such things about a demon. About Crawly.
"So clever. And so brave," Aziraphale is still talking. As if he's unaware that another few sentences and Crowley might have to snake just so he can slither into the safety of the nearest stone wall. "He brought you into this world, you know. In that beautiful, terrifying car of his. Carried you here and I don't think --" Aziraphale's voice wavers and for one crystalline moment Crowley thinks he's starting to weep. "-- I don't think he's ever stopped, really. It's why he's so tired. So we really must do everything we can to make sure he gets some rest. You and I."
There's a rustle under the nearby hedge; a rodent that can count its lucky stars Crowley's managed to stay bipedal. He counts backward from fifty and Aziraphale remains silent. So Crowley sucks in a deep breath of night air and closes the final few steps between them.
"Angel," he says, on the second try, and passes Aziraphale his tea. He knows without looking down that his shaking hands betray him -- though of course Aziraphale had been aware, already, that Crowley was standing there to hear. He hadn't spoken the words for the sleeping infant in his arms, who doesn't yet comprehend their meaning.
"Ah, thank you, my dear," Aziraphale says, outwardly serene, though Crowley feels the shudder of his wings as Aziraphale folds them away. He accepts the tea with the hand not cradling Warlock to his chest, then tips his head away away from the glow of the warm kitchen lights. "There's a bench," he says, and Crowley remembers it along the garden path. Next to a trellis of climbing roses that, in summer, will bloom for Warlock's first birthday. "Come sit with me while he sleeps and tell me again what you named the stars."