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11
When the staff packed up Warlock's room for the big move, his father told them to get rid of anything Warlock had outgrown rather than spend the time and money to ship it to the States.
Warlock lost the oldest of his clothes, the books he used to sneak out to read with Brother Francis, the board games he used to play with Nanny, and all but one of his stuffed toys.
The remaining toy was a stuffed snake Nanny had given him, black with a red belly, perhaps six inches long, with a neat mend where Brother Francis had once stitched a seam back together, bendy enough to twist into loops like Nanny's tattoo, or to coil up and hide in a pocket. It was in his pocket when his father gave the order, and there it remained until he was sure that people had stopped throwing his things away.
If it was all he had to remember them by - those who, if not called his parents, were still the ones who were there for him, who listened when he wanted to share something, who held him when he wanted comfort, who patched him up when he was sick or hurt - at least, he thought, it was something with a little of both of them in it.
No one gave you band-aids for a broken heart. The snake would have to do.
#
17
It was years before he heard from them again. The snake practically lived in his inside jacket pocket, an external weight against his heart to match the internal weight on his heart. He thought once he had someone - two someones even - who cared about him. If it was the case then, it doesn't seem to be any more. Not all the wishing or willing or weeping in the world will bring them back.
He tried.
Then, on his 17th birthday, his phone chirped with a message from a number he certainly didn't add to it, but which his phone seemed to recognise anyway. Warlock rolled over on his bed, the little snake tucked into the crook between shoulder and neck, reached out a hand to the desk beside his bed and groped through the clutter of piled textbooks and lesson notes for the phone.
The message read: Happy Birthday! NA & BF
That was all. No apologies for the six missing years, no word of missing him. Just a blithe assurance that everything would carry on as if they had never vanished in the first place.
Warlock stared at it for a long, endless, moment. They had thought of him. He had longed for some sign that they thought of him for so very long, and here it was, and all it did was hurt.
Because it meant that they could have done this every year. But they hadn't. They hadn't thought of him - or if they had it was as an afterthought, something of no value, to be brushed aside and forgotten unless they wanted something. Probably wanted something.
All that hope. All that aching need. All that - remembering. And all he was was a footnote in their lives.
The phone slipped from his fingers onto the bed. He pulled the snake from its place on his shoulder and flung it away from him as if it had bitten him. It hit the wall, and a seam split with the force of his throw even as he curled up and wept soundlessly, lips and throat convulsing around a silent WHY?
Only later, once he had washed the evidence from his face (his father still insisted that boys didn't cry, so he'd learned to keep his tears secret), did he consider that the incoming message meant that he now had a number to send an outgoing message to.
He didn't send one. Not yet, anyway. Instead, he retrieved the stuffed snake, and ran a thumb over the worn fabric. It wasn't the snake's fault that he'd been forgotten, after all. The popped seam sat opposite the one that Brother Francis had mended. Well, no-one else would fix things for Warlock now, he'd have to do it for himself. He picked his phone out of the rumpled bedding and went looking for how-to-sew videos.
#
25
Warlock wrestled the pushchair up the steps out of the rain, and rapped lightly on the bookshop door. His slow reconciliation had sped up considerably after his partner walked out over him singing Nanny's old lullaby to their daughter, turning him into a single parent on the opposite side of the ocean from the Dowling household. He'd needed help from someone. He wasn't much inclined to inflict his parents on his daughter, and he had to grudgingly admit that his carers weren't bad with kids when they were around. Operative word being 'when'.
The door opened and his daughter, Frances Ashley Dowling, crowed delightedly, "Zizi!!"
Aziraphale hustled them in, closed the door again before any customers could get the idea to follow, and scooped Frances out of the pushchair into his arms. "There we are, my dear."
Meanwhile, Warlock unloaded the bag of supplies, folded the pushchair up, and stowed it in the coat rack, out of the way. He lugged the bag into the back room, where Crowley was sprawled on the sofa and couldn't help a rueful smile. Nanny never sat like that when Warlock was little, but the change - helped - oddly enough. It let him distance the now from the then, and it didn't hurt quite so badly. The pain and the grief was still there of course, underneath, like a stain on an old coat, but he could step around it now, and shape something that looked right. Or as right as it could be, forged between three very weird people and a small child. He was weird himself, he knew it - how could he not be weird with his childhood - but it was a channelled weirdness. A weirdness that made him very much himself, and had shaped him to the point that giving it up would make him no longer himself.
He knelt down to Frances' level and held out his arms.
She came toddling over to hug him, his old stuffed snake dangling from one chubby fist.
"You be good for Nanny and Zizi, OK?" he told her, hugging her back and tipping his head so that he could see her face as he prepared to turn her care over to her almost-grandparents. "Daddy has to go be an Auditor for a bit. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
Crowley chuckled, quiet and deep. "That's a lot of things available."
"Yes, well." Warlock let Frances go and got to his feet, brushing dust off his grey suit (a shade almost exactly halfway between black and white). "We all know where I learned that from."
"And now you audit people's taxes," Aziraphale said, with the dryness of someone who has been on the other side of many audits. "Who could have seen that coming?"
Warlock just shrugged. He wasn't about to defend his choices, but really? Maths had always been his best subject (much to the despair and confusion of his carers/tutors), and there were only two certainties in the world, death and taxes. Three if you counted the way everyone kept walking out of his life and leaving him to just cope as best he could. Since it turned out that he wasn't actually the one to bring apocalyptic death to the world, he'd settled for bringing taxes instead.
Besides, Nanny had always taught him to grind his enemy beneath his heel, and there was no better way to grind the big mega-corporations under his heel than to audit them thoroughly and extract every penny of the tax that they ought to be paying.
He waved and headed back to the door, and carefully didn't flinch at the cheerful "Mind how you go!" that followed him out.
#
33
"So," Warlock asked, looking sideways along the park bench at Crowley, "are you two going to vanish out of our lives again, now that she's eleven?" He nodded to where Aziraphale and Frances were feeding the ducks.
Crowley winced. "We didn't mean to the first time, you know?" he said quietly. "We just - had a lot on our plates."
"I know." Warlock's own mouth tightened. "But that didn't make it hurt any less." He picked up the old stuffed snake that his daughter had left with them on the bench, running his fingers over the badly worn fabric, tracing the two mends (one neat and tidy, one rough and clumsy, but both holding it together, even though it was never going to be the same as when it was new). The fact that his abandonment hadn't been intentional had made it hurt more rather than less. Had shown him just how small and unimportant a part of their world he had been, even though they had been such a huge, essential, part of his own world.
"I do understand that," Crowley muttered, and his mobile mouth had tightened too. "Probably better than Aziraphale does." He shifted on the bench, long limbs twisting into a new sprawl. "I didn't mean to Fall, but it hurt all the same."
"Yeah."
They sat quietly, side by side on a park bench, the mends in their relationship invisible to a casual onlooker. Some of the mends were neat and tidy, some rough and clumsy, but they held it together all the same, even though it was never going to be the same as when it was new.
At last, Crowley asked, "Do you want us to go?" and Warlock heard the same aching note of anticipated abandonment seeping into his voice as there was in his own.
Warlock thought about it. "No," he said, "not really. I just wanted advance notice, for once."
The sound out of Crowley's mouth was half hiss, half sigh. "We'll try to stay. Sometimes - most times - it doesn't work out that way. She's getting to the age where kids start to notice that they are getting older, and we're - not. They ask questions, and the answers...."
"The answers," Warlock echoed softly, "cause just as much pain as not knowing. But at least you know why. That's something."
"Yeah." Crowley was silent for a long moment, his gaze fixed on Aziraphale. "If it gets too much for us," he said at last, "we'll let you know before we leave." He offered a hand. "Deal?"
Warlock grasped it. The future might be uncertain but, for now, they had a deal.
And for now, that was enough.