Work Text:
“What’s he on about this time?” asked Adam.
Newt snorted and leaned against the door frame, wiping his hands on a tea towel as the kids unceremoniously dumped their bikes in the front garden. The sounds of a very cranky demon could be heard above the music and laughter in the house behind him. “Want to try and guess?”
“Umm…” Adam scrunched his nose in thought for a moment, then said, “Some kind of deep sea fish? Like, one of those weirdos that lives a hundred kilometers under—”
“Carnivorous plants!” interrupted Pepper, at the same time as Brian said, “The Bermuda Triangle!” and Warlock chimed in with, “Lou Reed!” Dog bounded over to Newt and gave a few friendly barks.
“Close, actually,” Newt said, pointing at Adam. “Nope, nope, and definitely not,” he said to Pepper, Brian, and Warlock in turn. He pulled a dog biscuit out of his pocket and knelt down to give it (and a few pats on the head) to Dog.
“Hmm. Then what about… The phase properties of water?” tried Wensleydale. “When you think about it, it’s very strange that the solid state is less dense than— wait. No. That would alter all life on the planet, they would have noticed way sooner, nevermind.”
“Uh. Yeah, no.” Newt draped the towel over one shoulder and smirked at the Them. “Tardigrades.”
There was a soft oooh from Wensleydale and a shout of laughter from Pepper. Adam and Brian exchanged confused shrugs.
“Oh my god, they would be one of yours,” said Warlock.
“Explain how something can be ‘one of mine’ when I don’t even know what it is.”
Warlock pushed his hair out of his eyes and frowned at Adam. “Well, that’s the whole catch, right? You supposedly have no memory of all the things you changed.”
“I didn’t forget all the things,” said Adam. “I remember putting Atlantis back. And not supposedly either. I truly have no idea what those two are talking about half the time.”
“Wow, half?” Newt stepped aside to let them pile into the cottage, Dog leading the charge. “You’ve got me beat by… about one half.”
“What can I say, it’s a gift,” said Adam.
“The gift of what,” scoffed Pepper, “speaking idiot?”
“I like to think of it as empathy.”
“Oh what the hell,” came Brian’s voice from the back of the line. Adam turned to see Wensleydale showing him something on his phone. “There’s no way that’s real. That’s a cartoon. Is… Is that its mouth?”
Wensleydale nodded. “It’s real, it just looks strange because it’s so small. This little guy is measured on the scale of microns,” he said, passing the phone to Pepper.
“Water bears,” she said reverently, and passed it on to Warlock.
“It looks strange because it’s an eight-legged potato with a sprocket for a face,” said Brian. “Small’s got nothing to do with it.”
Warlock just laughed and shook his head as he handed the phone to Adam.
Brian’s description wasn’t even that far off, though he’d left off the important detail of huge claws on each of its eight legs. “Wicked,” breathed Adam.
“And invincible,” said Warlock, then started counting off tardigrade superpowers on his fingers. “Can’t freeze ‘em, can’t burn ‘em, can’t crush ‘em. They can go years without eating, they can live in the vacuum of space.”
“They’re very hardy, but ‘invincible’ is an exaggeration,” said Wensleydale. “‘Extremely adaptable’ is a much more accurate—”
“Imagine if they were actually bear-sized,” said Pepper. “Like… Imagine taming one and riding it into battle. You’d have no enemies left because they’d all flee at the sight of your ferocious steed.”
“First of all, they’re extremely slow,” Wensleydale said flatly. “It would be more of a tedious waddle into battle. And second of all, they’re herbivores. They’d stop the charge at the first sight of moss.”
“Not my water bears! Vegetarians or not, they’d be exceptionally trained and impossible to distract.”
“Okay, how’s this for a nightmare scenario,” Warlock said. “The alternate universe where Pepper was the Antichrist, and Dog, tardigrades, and bananas were all made in her terrible image.”
“Also the patriarchy. I promise you the Pepper-Antichrist dismantled that outdated rubbish heap,” she said, chin held high. “Still can’t believe you left that intact, Adam.”
“Unless the patriarchy was actually an Adam invention,” Wensleydale said, taking back his phone.
Adam lifted his hands defensively. “Hey, c’mon, I would never,” he said before Pepper could tear into him. He nodded through the kitchen door to where Crowley was fuming, and added, “Besides, we would have gotten an earful about it ages ago.”
“You,” growled Crowley as Adam and his friends walked into the kitchen. He looked as though he had stopped mid-pace, and was leaning over the kitchen table, both palms flat against its surface. Anathema stood with her arms crossed and her back to the sink, wearing an expression of unbridled glee. Aziraphale sat at the table, taking in the whole display with the air of one who was unsure whether he should be concerned or amused, and had split the difference to land on capital-T Tired. “You get the keys to all creation for a night and you seed the planet with invincible microscopic space monsters?”
“Guess so,” Adam said casually. Dog beelined for the back door and sat down facing it, tail wagging expectantly. “I just found out about them myself. Cool, huh?” he said, as he opened the door. Dog galloped across the garden, ignoring every single other party-goer in his quest to reach Mrs. Dowling, who immediately put everything else on hold to stoop to his eye level and scritch his ears with both hands. Adam grinned and waved at his parents, then let the door swing shut as he sidled up next to Newt at the counter to inspect the cake.
“They prefer ‘adaptable vegetarians’ to ‘invincible monsters’,” Warlock said, crossing the kitchen and throwing an arm around Anathema in a friendly side hug. Then he crossed his arms and joined her in leaning against the sink. Pepper hopped up to sit on the counter on her other side, and Brian balanced cross-legged on the edge of a kitchen chair.
“Incredible,” Anathema laughed. “The tiniest role models.”
Wensleydale perched on the edge of the table and gave his legs a few swings. “I’m not actually so sure this one was Adam,” he said, holding his phone up to Aziraphale. “It says here they were discovered in 1773. That’s a huge stretch of time to alter for you to just now be noticing. Two hundred and fifty years of consequences.”
“The Consequences of Tardigrades,” Warlock said dreamily. “Brian, that’s our new band name.”
“Sorry mate, I’ve been shown a better life and I’m dropping out to eat moss and not die in space,” Brian said without missing a beat. Then, to Crowley, “Seriously though, what’s the big deal with this one? I mean, sure, they’re weird little buggers, but harmless. And invisible.”
“I believe it’s more the larger implications of the matter,” Aziraphale said, before Crowley could compose his sputtering well enough to bite back. “Adam changed so much when he put the world back that, three years later, we’re still getting a handle on the scope of it all. This tardigrade discovery shows that he altered reality on microscopic, global, and cosmic scales.”
“They're not from space,” Wensleydale said. “They can survive in space, but they’re not extraterrestrials.”
“All the same—”
“Also, that’s still assuming this was even Adam!” Wensleydale held the Wikipedia article out to Aziraphale again. “It could be you two just never noticed them before now.”
Crowley let out a loud scoff and sank into a chair beside Aziraphale, arms crossed. “Oh, we’d have noticed them alright. Pretty hard to miss.”
“They’re not,” Warlock said. Crowley winced, but kept his glare trained on Wensleydale. “They’re literally microscopic. By definition, very easy to miss.”
“Especially if you’re not keeping up to date with scientific discoveries,” added Wensleydale. “I believe you believe it, but unfortunately, this one is impossible to confirm.”
Aziraphale’s mask of Tired gained a layer of Annoyed. “Now wait just one—”
“I’m afraid he’s got a point,” interrupted Anathema. “As much as I would love this one to be Adam’s” —Warlock and Pepper nodded solemnly on either side of her— “the crux of the matter is that we only have the word of an excommunicated angel and demon to go on. Nobody else has any memory of the world ever being any other way, and no offense but— wait, no, full offense actually— I don’t buy that you two have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire world tucked away in your heads.”
“You’d actually be useful at trivia night if that were the case,” Newt said cheerfully. “Instead of—” he pointed at Crowley with an icing-covered butterknife “—crying about the existence of dodo birds, or—” he moved the knife to Aziraphale “—crying about Edwin Drood.”
Adam took advantage of Newt’s attention being elsewhere to scoop a fingerful of icing into his mouth. “Oh bleh,” he said dramatically. “Banana?”
Conversation ground to a halt for an excruciatingly long second, then all the humans burst into laughter. Aziraphale sighed and rolled his eyes, as Crowley stalked over to the cake to test the icing for himself.
“It’s raspberry,” he huffed, as he slouched back into his chair.
“Yes, very amusing, the banana incident again, a perennial favorite,” Aziraphale said tartly. Then he hid his expression in his teacup, and Adam swore he heard him mutter, “Honestly, what was the matter with yellow?”
Newt went to work smoothing over the surface of the cake and Adam let himself be shooed away. He shoved off the counter with a grin and joined Warlock in his cross-armed lean against the sink.
“So what do you think?” Warlock said, as Pepper, Brian, and Anathema launched into a conversation about hexes, and Wensleydale, Aziraphale, and Crowley dissolved into another round of bickering about semantics. “Think water bears are one of yours?”
“I have no idea. You know I have no idea.”
“Okay, but what’s your gut say?”
“That they’re absolutely brilliant, and I’m glad the world includes them, and I really hope I’m imaginative enough to come up with something so cool.”
“So you want them to be yours?”
“Obviously. Wouldn’t you?”
Warlock just shrugged, and absentmindedly shook his hair out of his eyes. He somehow always managed to look several weeks overdue for a haircut. His ‘useless superpower,’ Pepper liked to tease. “‘S’not really about me, is it? I wasn’t the one who unmade the entire world and then glued it back together a little wonky.”
Adam lifted his eyebrows and turned to look at his friend. There was a lot he could have said to that. ‘No, but you tried to knock some sense into me,’ for starters. ‘You forgave me for breaking things, whether or not I deserved it,’ was another strong contender. He recalled coming into his power — the argument in Hogback Wood, losing control of his humanity, trying to force the Antichrist’s ideals on his friends. Warlock being the first to storm off and the last to come back. ‘But you came back.’
And it was a damn good thing he had too. Five Horsepersons might have been one more than they could have dealt with, if Warlock hadn’t been there to face off with Apathy.
“To be honest, I didn’t really like being the Antichrist,” Adam eventually said. “Glad it’s over. And I’m glad I don’t have to remember every little thing I changed that night. Imagine how boring it would be knowing everything your imagination is and isn’t capable of.” Then he knocked his shoulder against Warlock’s, and felt a profound surge of gratitude to his past self for not forcing his friends to forget that day. Everyone’s memories (save the occasional timeline hiccup from Aziraphale and Crowley) seemed perfectly aligned with all the apocalyptic events leading up to that day at the airbase. Everyone in this kitchen had seen him at his worst, his most monstrous, and they remembered it. They were here, with him, because they wanted to be, not because he’d tricked them.
There was a tap on the kitchen window behind him. Adam turned to see his mum’s smiling face. She nodded to a card table holding two piles of birthday gifts, set up under Anathema’s web of fairy lights. He gave her a grin and a thumbs up, his smile softening as he watched her return to her game of cribbage with Mrs. Dowling. Harriet and Deirdre had only known each other for ten years, having met not long after Harriet and Warlock moved to Tadfield, but their friendship often seemed far older. It was hard to imagine one without the other at this point. Some people were just destined to be friends, he supposed. Some were even lucky enough to find each other.
He turned back to the crowded kitchen, feeling grateful, content, happy—and found Aziraphale watching them, wearing an expression that managed to look both worried and wistful. He shook his head and pulled an awkward little smile, like a child caught eavesdropping, then turned his attention to whatever Crowley and Wensleydale were talking about.
“C’mon,” Adam said, nudging Warlock. “Let’s go see what the mums are up to.”
Warlock nodded and blew a strand of hair out of his eyes. On their way out the back door, Adam pulled a kirby grip out of his pocket and passed it to Warlock, who rolled his eyes at the old inside joke, but pinned his hair back anyway. Same as he always had.