Chapter Text
"I … have an email. From ... Warlock," Crowley says, slowly, to his mobile screen. Aziraphale looks up from the book sitting beside his breakfast eggs, then closes it and pushes it aside without bothering to insert his bookmark at the proper page. Because, oh dear, that's an unexpected and worrying statement for Crowley to make on an otherwise pedestrian Tuesday morning.
"From ... Warlock? Our Warlock?" As if it were plausible Crowley would be speaking of another Warlock. Aziraphale is shaking his head to cancel out the question even as he says it, picking up and then lowering his teacup back down to the saucer with a slight rattle. It’s jarring, to think of communication from Warlock. The first they’ve had since -- well, since the day neither of them like to talk about. The birthday party. The absence of the hound. The nauseating realization that they had failed and the knowledge that there was no way to go back and undo what had already been done.
In that soul-numbing moment of despair, the safest place for a disastrously fragile, human Warlock had seemed -- assuming any of them survived long enough for safe to matter -- as far away from Aziraphale and Crowley as possible. A clean break, Aziraphale had told himself -- and then, repeatedly, told Crowley -- would be for the best. Human children were resilient. As far as the Dowlings were concerned, Warlock had outgrown the need for a nanny-turned-governess anyway. He was to start at one of those boarding schools in the autumn (had been on the list since birth). Such schools had always reminded Aziraphale too much of Heaven to seem hospitable, but many human children did survive them. And there, Warlock might be free from the scrutiny of Heaven and Hell; free from the fairly spectacular cock-up Aziraphale and Crowley had made of his childhood. Free to become who he actually was rather than being steered so ineptly away from a fate that (it turned out) hadn't been his to begin with.
They'd failed him so much that their failure was overwhelming. Aziraphale could barely think about it. Crowley wouldn't talk about it. In the weeks and months after -- when they were moving numbly through the motions of rebuilding their former lives (as if those lives fit who they had become, were becoming) -- they had taken steps to make sure Warlock was physically safe. That he'd begun school. They'd arranged for a few postcards to be sent by Nanny from far away locations. Since then, Aziraphale has been aware of Crowley sending the child odd things he finds, every so often; always from a pillar box, and never with a return address. Aziraphale himself has selected and sent a book, per custom, on Warlock's birthday, at Christmas, and on May Day. But in the two years, one month, nineteen days, thirteen hours, and thirty-six minutes since they had driven away from Warlock's eleventh birthday party, Warlock has never once contacted them.
(They've made that all but impossible; it's safer that way.)
Crowley turns his mobile around and pushes it across the breakfast table. "Our Warlock," he confirms.
Dear Nanny,
I got your present; thanks for the ammonite. I still have the geode you helped me break open; I keep it on my desk at school. I hope it’s okay to email you. I found your address on the employment paperwork in mother’s files. She doesn’t know I’m writing. Could I visit you? I’m allowed to leave school on the weekends if I’ve permission from my parents and I’m staying with an approved adult. I think if it’s you I can get father’s assistant to take care of the paperwork. I've money for the train fare and food and everything. I don’t mind sleeping on the sofa. I'd like to see you. If it’s ok?
Sincerely,
Warlock
Aziraphale blinks.
"You see my concern," Crowley says. He scowls into his coffee mug and then slides out of his chair to pour another cup from the press on the counter.
"Why does he want to see us -- you -- do you think?" Somehow it's more unsettling to imagine that Warlock has a reason to want to see them, in the present, than it is to imagine that Francis Fell and Nanny Ashtoreth have become a half-forgotten memory.
Crowley's back and shoulders are angles of tension as he pours the coffee and sucks it down black. "I don't like any of the reasons I can think of,” he says, pouring a third cup and returning to the table. Aziraphale tries to read his expression. After so many centuries of Crowley's expressions Aziraphale has become rather an expert, but Crowley has Warlock-specific expressions that Aziraphale is out of practice reading, and this is one of those.
"The child clearly needs something," Aziraphale says, tentatively, pushing the mobile back toward Crowley. It won’t have escaped Crowley that Warlock is trying to arrange a visit behind the backs of both his parents. "And we haven't… none of the others have come to harm, through contact with us. Why should either side care about a human child now -- one who never was a part if their plans after all, just --" just someone who mattered to us very much. "What harm could it do, saying yes to a visit?" He tries the idea out, imagining he and Crowley driving up to the Dowling residence in the Bentley and … but no, of course, Warlock is at school now. Would they meet with him there, under the watchful eye of ... the school head? No. Warlock had specifically asked to visit --
“Here.” It’s not quite a question as Crowley jabs his spoon into his second soft-boiled egg.
"I --," Aziraphale’s instinct is to say yes, of course. Warlock needs them. It’s been Aziraphale's celestial obligation -- to see human needs, and meet them -- for as long as he’s been on Earth. But the idea of Warlock here is ... disconcerting. Upsetting, even, though he can't immediately say why.
He looks around. They’re sitting at the kitchen table with tea and toast between them. The late September sun slants through the window above the sink. Crowley's rosemary bonsai is on the window sill, and their wine glasses from the evening before are upturned drying on the drainboard. To his left is the sitting room -- the rug on which he and Crowley had made love countless times; the table by the front door on which Crowley’s sunglasses and keys sit, untidily, next to yesterday’s Guardian that Aziraphale has not yet made time to read. Upstairs are rumpled flannel bedsheets on a single, unmade bed. Below is the bookshop to which Sky will shortly arrive and open with her own set of keys.
They'd sold Crowley's flat six months previous, which had been several months after Crowley admitted what Aziraphale already understood: that the flat above the bookshop is no longer Aziraphale’s home but their home. The only thing left to do had been hire Newt to design and start construction on a rooftop solarium for Crowley's plants. They'd put Anathema in charge of disposing of the unwanted real estate and asked her to find them a property near enough to Tadfield that they could reasonably keep tabs on the Them without seeming to hover -- though of course precisely no one was fooled.*
*The children had most recently presented them with a list of features they thought Crowley and Aziraphale’s future property required, a tree suitable for building a treehouse had topped the list.
In short, this was their life now. The only humans who came through that front door were the very short list of people who knew the look of Crowley's eyes. Aziraphale struggles to picture Warlock in the bookshop, at the breakfast table, sitting on the sofa sipping hot chocolate from one of Crowley's mismatched charity shop mugs. Their years with the Dowlings had been separate from all of ... this. Part of a distant era that felt almost as if it had happened to different beings. He doesn't feel remotely like the Aziraphale who imagined the terms of The Arrangement might be all that tethered him to Crowley; the Aziraphale who thought that could ever be enough.
Aziraphale picks up his teacup and swallows a fortifying mouthful of tea, then helps himself to another slice of toast spread with raspberry jam.
“He’s still a child,” Aziraphale says finally, to his toast, striving to be firm. He isn’t even sure if he’s speaking to Crowley or to himself. “I think it’s fair to say our child, in that we were charged, however mistakenly, with his care. And he needs us. So we shall.”
"Right," Crowley says, clearing his throat, after a pause. “I’ll write back, then. And say he can come here. For a visit.”