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Warlock magicks up another ball for Dog and gives it a hard throw down the hill. The terrier tears after it like a mad thing, folded ear flapping in the wind, and Adam shades his eyes against the melting summer sun to watch him go.
“Nice one,” he says approvingly.
As far as Antichrists go, Adam is alright. He’s easier to get along with than anybody at Warlock’s school ever was, anyway.
Dog’s breakneck pace takes him past the stupid little picnic table Aziraphale miracled up for the afternoon. He closes in on the plastic ball where it rolls to a stop against a tree stump and snatches it up in victorious jaws.
Their parents are down there, too. Crowley’s lounging to one side, drinking two-hundred pound wine like it’s going out of style while Mr. Young talks his ear off about vintage cars, and Aziraphale and Mrs. Young are deep in enthusiastic conversation. It looks like they might be stuck in The Middle of Nowhere, Oxfordshire for awhile yet.
Warlock rolls his eyes and sits in the grass next to Adam.
The Them didn’t come along today. Warlock’s glad for it. He likes them well enough, and Pepper is cooler than all the rest of them put together, but he feels outnumbered around all four of them. Sometimes he feels outnumbered when it’s just him and Adam.
“What are you thinking?” asks Adam. It’s nice of him to ask, when he could probably just find out by looking a little harder than usual.
Dog is coming back, dropping the slobbery ball in Warlock’s lap and sparing him scraping together an answer for as long as it takes to send him hurtling back down the hill in pursuit once more.
He’s thinking it’s odd, that this life could have been his. He’s thinking it’s odd that he hates the idea.
If Adam hadn’t come along, if the Dowlings had been left alone, then Warlock would have been raised here, in Tadfield, as Albert or Baldwin or Oscar Young. He would have gone to school with Brian and Wensleydale and Pepper, and he would have had a mom who baked birthday cakes with his name written in crooked icing, and a dad who went over homework with him that neither of them understood and he maybe would have been a pretty happy kid. He maybe would have turned out like Adam.
But he wouldn’t have his parents. Even though Aziraphale can’t cook, and Crowley would rather climb the walls than look at homework for very long, Warlock would still pick them over the Youngs or the Dowlings. He’s pretty good at maths on his own, anyway. That's why he majored in it.
“I’m thinking it’ll be a miracle if the bookshop’s still standing when we get home,” Warlock says, leaning back on his hands. If he gets muddy, it will only take a thought to clean himself up again. “Considering who we left to look after the place.”
“Nanael’s there, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, but so’s Grem,” Warlock points out. It’s hard to say Gremory’s name without rolling his eyes and most of the time he doesn’t even try. “She’d start a fire just to have something to talk about later.”
“Bookshop’s fireproof,” Adam says matter-of-factly. “Made sure of that this time.”
Warlock looks at him sideways, weighs his options, then decides that it’s way too late to pretend he has a healthy dose of self-preservation in face of someone who could rearrange his entire existence with a blink.
“Fireproof doesn’t mean Gremory-proof. Those guys spend so much time reading weird grimoires they probably know plenty of stuff you don’t.”
The Antichrist tips his head back with a grin. “That’s pretty cool. Y’know, I could probably fix it myself. How many years have you been sneaking around behind their backs at this point?”
Warlock scowls. “None of your business.”
“I mean, I guess not.” Except Adam’s business is whatever he sticks his nose into and they both know it. “I won’t always be around, you know. A hundred years from now I won’t be able to offer again.”
“A hundred years from now we’ll have figured it out for ourselves,” Warlock snaps, sitting up straight. “Nanael’s close, I know they are.”
“I didn’t mean to fight,” Adam says peaceably. He never gets riled up. “I was just saying.”
Feathers ruffled, Warlock slumps back down again. “Well, quit.”
Dog was waylaid by a sausage that rolled under the picnic table. He’s begging for more scraps now. Adam brings his fingers to his mouth and whistles, which is something Warlock has never been able to figure out, and the Hellhound comes running right away.
He left the ball behind, so Adam just tussles with him for awhile. The terrier ends up in his favorite spot, pressed against Adam’s side in the sun-hot grass, a small and trusting thing.
“You wouldn’t have to be gone,” Warlock says after a moment, surprising himself. “You could still be here, if you wanted to be.”
“If I wanted to be,” Adam agreed. “I wouldn’t, though. Not when everyone I love is human. Not when they’d all be gone without me.”
He says it very easily, like it’s not even worth thinking about. Warlock has always envied how certain Adam is about everything, from as far back as the first time they both met, when Adam took one look at him and said in a self-satisfied way ‘you and I will be good friends.’
“You do, though,” Adam goes on. “Want to, I mean. You said ‘we’ earlier, when you were talking about the future."
A prickle of unease works its way into Warlock's stomach, the way it always does when he looks too far ahead.
He doesn’t think Aziraphale would approve of this conversation, given how much of Crowley’s existential dread (and Murmur’s general dread) that Warlock has inherited; but Aziraphale is down the hill playing human the way kids play house, and Adam probably wouldn’t let him overhear, anyway.
So Warlock says, “Of course I do. Your family may be human, but mine isn’t.”
Adam considers him, the shadow of something much older than the two of them in his eyes. “You can’t take it back once you make up your mind.”
Protective of the ones he loves, of his place in their lives, Warlock loses his temper. His words come out in a tone sharp enough it makes Dog lift his head.
“I don’t care what you say, Adam. You may have nearly ended the world or saved it or whatever, but you can’t boss me around. Crowley’s my Nanny and Aziraphale’s his angel, and the two of them, and Nanael and Grem and Murmur, are more my family than my mom and dad ever were. If I want to stay then I’m going to stay.”
The air is thin and dry, like brittle paper, heat building around them in a dangerous way. Adam’s curls are sticking up with static electricity from simple proximity to Warlock in a snit, but his expression is caught between amused and fond.
“I’m really not trying to fight,” he says. It bleaches the venom out of Warlock like a poultice, like the easiest thing in the world. Warlock resents it a little bit, at the same time he's grateful.
I’ll miss him when he’s gone, Warlock realizes. The thought settles in to stay, uncomfortably heavy, somewhere close to his heart.
He scowls anyway, and pulls up some grass just to feel the satisfying give beneath his hands, and they sit together in the silence of two almost-brothers who almost-entirely understand one another.
“You could stay if you wanted to,” Adam says after awhile, an unnecessary olive branch. “If you really wanted to, you could do it. You could stay forever. I mean, you’ve got a pretty good start.”
They were born at exactly the same time, and Adam will be thirty in another year, but Warlock is still nineteen. He rather feels as though he’ll be nineteen until he gets bored of it.
“I could make sure of it, if you’d like,” Adam offers kindly.
Warlock doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he nods.
Adam turns his hand, and reality turns with it, and they both feel a little bit better when it’s done.
“C’mon,” Adam says, standing with Dog tucked easily into the crook of his arm. “Mum made hummingbird cake.”
The heat has dissipated, typical English gray sponging across the sky and cooling all the sun-touched planes of the countryside. It won’t rain, not when it would ruin the picnic, but petrichor is thick and syrupy in the air as if it already had.
Warlock sinks into the chair next to Crowley, soaks up Aziraphale’s fond smile, and looks forward to the future.