Chapter Text
They arrive at Euston on Saturday morning comfortably punctual to meet Warlock's train only to find out it's running late and they have more than an hour's wait ahead of them.
"I know transit delays were my own handiwork," Crowley growls, drumming his fingers in an irritated staccato on the Bentley's steering wheel. "But did I have to be quite this good?"
Aziraphale smooths a comforting hand down Crowley's tense thigh, giving his knee a squeeze. "Let's go for a walk."
They leave the Bentley illegally parked directly in front of the station and Aziraphale takes Crowley's hand as they stroll in the direction of the British Library. Crowley's is tightly wound this morning, and with a point of physical contact Aziraphale can siphon off some of the accumulation of electric energy that's starting to make Crowley's hair dance in agitation. Crowley had allowed Aziraphale to fuss over his hair this morning, and Aziraphale had tried to ease his grace into the braid as he wove it -- a method he's employed in the past, a way to help Crowley find calm at the eye of a storm without having to ask for assistance in so many words. He thinks the gracework in Crowley’s hair has helped ... but the number of fender benders, just-missed buses, and spilled lattes they passed between Soho and Euston tell Aziraphale that Crowley is still struggling for equilibrium.
"Warlock will be hungry when he arrives, don't you think?" Aziraphale asks, mostly for something to say. It often helps Crowley just to listen to Aziraphale talk at length about nothing in particular. "There's that lovely creperie just down from the British Library, do you remember? The last time we were there was that day I had to stop in at the library to have a look at that Belgian grimoire for Anathema. I ordered that crepe with the brie and pears. And their French hot chocolate was divine." Warlock, like Aziraphale, has a bit of a sweet tooth and had always enjoyed the crepes Aziraphale made for the three of them on special days.
From the start, Warlock's parents had turned Warlock's birthday into a society affair. The poor child would reach the end of the day exhausted and, more often than not, have a full-body meltdown. On the afternoon of Warlock's fourth birthday Crowley had brought a weeping, thrashing Warlock to Aziraphale's cottage and set the child carefully down on the kitchen floor. "You deal with him for a bit," he'd said, enunciating every word. "Before I do something you'll consider unforgivable." And then he'd stalked back out again.
Aziraphale had set aside his book and gone over to the sobbing, red-faced child. He'd crouched down until he was at eye level and they regarded one another. "Oh my," he'd said in as calm a voice as he could manage -- putting a bit of soothing grace into the words as he usually did when Warlock was in a state. "It's been a bit of a day, hasn't it."
Warlock hiccuped.
"Why don't you and I make a surprise for when Nan comes back?"
Warlock hiccuped again.
There was a series of picture books about a man and his cat that Warlock absolutely adored. Aziraphale had found one of the titles, incongruously, in the bottom of a box that contained a full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary while unpacking from a Shropshire estate sale. Rather than add it to the shop inventory he had set it aside to bring back to the Dowlings'. Warlock had liked the book so much that Aziraphale had subsequently set about finding the others, and one of them featured the man making a birthday pie of Swedish pancakes and strawberry jam.
"What do you think about making a pancake pie?" Aziraphale had asked, putting out a hand. Warlock's fingers were grubby with dirt and tears and what looked like the remains of chocolate cake, but he had uncurled a fist and let Aziraphale pull him to his feet. "Now," Aziraphale said. "Where did I put my apron?"
After that year, it became an annual ritual for Crowley and Aziraphale to spirit Warlock away from the official birthday celebrations, as soon as (if not before) he started showing signs of exhaustion, so that the three of them could finish the day with a quiet evening at the cottage. Aziraphale hasn't made a pancake pie for three birthdays now and feels a sudden, unanticipated wave of grief at the thought. He stumbles on a bit of rough pavement and Crowley grips his hand to steady him.
"Hey," Crowley says, soft. "Need you on your feet for this, my angel."
"I -- yes," Aziraphale wipes a hand across his face and steadies himself. "I was just thinking --" for the hundredth time since Warlock's email, why it had once felt so imperative, to cut themselves off so entirely from a child.
"I know," Crowley says, and Aziraphale thinks yes, he most probably does, and likely got there before Aziraphale did.
"I think I could use a fortifying cup of tea," he admits.
"Well," Crowley says. "We are in London. Let's see what we can do."
By the time Warlock's train pulls up to the platform, Aziraphale and Crowley have fortified themselves with tea and Crowley isn't causing passersby to trip over invisible shoelaces at quite the same rate as he had before their walk. He's poking at his mobile as Aziraphale stands next to him, against a wall away from the flow of pedestrian traffic to and from the platform, leaning just enough to maintain shoulder-to-shoulder contact and stave off the worst of Crowley's nerves.
"He's just texted to say they're arriving," Crowley mutters. "I've told him to look for us at the end of the platform."
"I suppose the last time he saw me I had a beard, didn't I?" Aziraphale asks, surprised he hasn't thought of this before. He touches fingers to he clean-shaven cheek. Crowley raises an eyebrow that Aziraphale can feel. "Well, yes," he admits in response to the nonverbal observation. "But you with the black, and the hair, it's -- you always look like you." He flaps a hand in illustration. It seems self-evident that Crowley is always unmistakeably Crowley.
"And it's never occurred to you that you always look like you?" Crowley seems honestly curious.
Aziraphale blinks. "I -- well."
"There he is," Crowley says before Aziraphale can finish forming a response. He straightens from his slouch against the wall and turns his entire focus down the platform. Aziraphale grabs his arm just in case, but the energy radiating off Crowley is transmuting even as he takes a step forward -- with Aziraphale stumbling half a step behind -- from the foggy despair of the previous afternoon and staticky nerves of the morning into something calm and focused and purposeful. And there, suddenly, in front of them on the platform amidst the stream of other disembarking passengers, is Warlock.
Warlock has grown in the past two years. No surprise; Aziraphale has seen Adam, Wensleydale, and Brian all gain more height than seems necessary among three human boys. Warlock is nearly as tall as Aziraphale now. His features and proportions having settled into that indeterminate adolescent state he shares with the Them: no longer children, exactly, but not yet full adults. Aziraphale can see the clear traces of the child he had been overlaid with the sketched out features of the grown human he will someday become.
He's pale, thinks Aziraphale, sadly, as Warlock sees them and hesitates, hand white-knuckled on the strap of the knapsack slung over his shoulder. Warlock had always had a light complexion, with a shock of dark hair and the mismatched eyes -- one blue, one green -- that left humans so discomfited. But this isn’t just fair, it’s outright wan. The pallor of someone who has too much on their mind and no one to share their troubles with.
He’s a bit gangly but not underfed -- there's that, at least-- and yet he manages to feel undersized all the same, as if apologizing for taking up space. Aziraphale is familiar with that look -- both he, himself, and Newt are champions at the posture of apology under the right (unwelcoming) circumstances. He wonders what in Warlock’s life has made him feel so persistently unwelcome -- and feels a ripple of guilt that it could, possibly -- at least in part -- have been them.
"Warlock," Crowley says first. It comes out as both a statement of fact and a greeting. And he puts out a hand, the one unencumbered by Aziraphale still clinging to his elbow. There's something about the way Crowley reaches out -- an invitation to catch hold -- that brings back a memory of Crowley doing just this, so many times, with a much younger child: Putting a hand out to help Warlock over a stile, climb a flight of stairs, get into and out of a bus, walk down a country lane, wade out into the ocean surf.
Warlock must remember it too, because after a breathless in which he seems frozen in place the hunched tension in his body drains away, his shoulders ease, and his face lights up in a smile.
"Hi Nan," he says, and reaches out to put his hand in Crowley's.