Work Text:
The woman had been watching him for quite some time.
Crowley became aware of her presence the way one became aware of an itch beneath a layer of clothing: vague at first, easily dismissed, then increasingly impossible to ignore. He thought he’d noticed her perhaps an hour earlier, though time in parks could stretch and warp in odd ways.
At first, he told himself it was nothing. The park was more crowded than usual for this time of year. People were lingering as though instinctively trying to stockpile peace against something they could feel approaching but not yet label. Still, every so often, when he shifted his weight or turned just slightly, he caught her looking at him. Not glancing. Observing.
She would raise her eyes, consider him for a moment, then lower her gaze and write something in a notebook resting neatly in her lap. Leather-bound, by the look of it. Practical. Well cared for, as someone else would surely remark appreciatively.
Crowley fixed his attention on the lake instead, its surface faintly unsettled by the winter breeze. He told himself that if he didn’t react, the woman would eventually lose interest.
She did not.
After a while, long enough that irritation had time to ferment properly, Crowley turned toward her.
“Is there something I can help you with?” he asked, his voice sharper than he’d intended.
The woman paused mid-sentence, pencil hovering above the page. Instead of looking chastened, she smiled. Not apologetic, exactly—more as though she were pleased to have reached the end of a silent experiment.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said. Her accent was melodic, slightly nasal, though he could not quite place it. “I observe, and then I write down what I see. It helps, when there’s… rather a lot happening.”
Crowley scoffed, mistakenly assuming she meant the gathering unease curling through London. She hardly needed to write that down. It was everywhere. In the papers, in the radio broadcasts, in the way people laughed too loudly and argued too sharply.
Before he could offer a suitably biting reply—he had several, all excellent, thank you very much—she spoke again.
“You seem to be waiting,” she said mildly. “Or perhaps hoping is the better word. For someone, I think.”
Crowley’s jaw tightened. That someone hadn’t been seen in seventy-seven years. Not that he was counting.
“Well, with everything going on,” he said, sidestepping the remark entirely, “what is it that you actually want?”
“What I want?” She finally closed her notebook and slipped it into a brown clutch bag, taking no obvious offense by the slight hiss in his tone.
It was a look Crowley recognised, the particular expression humans wore when drifting backward through memory, touching something they had no intention of sharing. Sometimes he wondered whether anyone would recognise that look in him, if they ever caught him without his glasses.
A soft sigh drew him back. He met her gaze just in time to see a fleeting smile. The kind that belonged to someone missing something dearly, knowing with quiet certainty that it could not be reclaimed.
“At the moment? A proper Fiaker. It’s a small crime, really, what passes for coffee around here."
***
“I already told you,” he said, perched in a way that could generously be described as reclining on her chaise longue. His arms were folded behind his head, boots dangling perilously close to upholstery that was almost certainly expensive. “My last dream was in 1862. October fourth, to be precise.”
The woman, whom Crowley had to come to know as Anna, sighed somewhere behind him. Her notebook lay untouched on a table beside him.
“Very well,” she said. “Don’t tell me. But there’s no need for such exaggeration.”
She muttered something under her breath. Crowley caught fragments, words like “repression” and “defense mechanism” and smiled to himself. The date was the truth. Honest to Go—Satan. But humans always assumed metaphor when faced with anything inconveniently literal.
“Besides,” he added, shifting upright. He moved from lounging to squatting in one fluid motion, forearms resting on his knees, hands clasped together. Anna cast a pointed look at his heels digging into her furniture. He ignored it. “That wasn’t my point.”
“And what was your point?” she asked.
Talking to Anna was… easy. Too easy, sometimes. She let him wander, let him circle his thoughts, never interrupting, never hurrying him toward a conclusion. She seemed content to wait for him to arrive wherever he was going on his own. He appreciated that, but he often forgot what he’d meant to say in the first place. And there wasn’t even alcohol involved.
“Kids,” he said suddenly. “No one’s thinking about them. About how all this—” He gestured broadly, encompassing war, history, humanity’s remarkable talent for self-destruction. “—is going to land on them. Not just now. After. Years after.”
He wasn’t sure when concern had turned into confession.
Anna sighed again. Her expression softened, but there was resolve beneath it.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Maybe we can lessen their immediate fear, their Realangst. Children are surprisingly adaptable when they must be.” She paused. “But they carry what they cannot yet name. And if no one helps them make sense of it, it settles into them instead. Trauma doesn’t end when the noise stops.”
Crowley tilted his head slightly, listening.
“It matters who is there afterward,” she continued. “Who notices what has changed. Who understands that behaviour is often language—especially when words fail.”
Hidden behind his dark glasses, Crowley closed his eyes.
In all of history, kids had never been off limits—not to human cruelty, nor to “divine” retribution. And yet they endured. It was easy, in the endless churn of catastrophe, to forget that there were people like Anna. People who didn’t look away. Who stubbornly tried to understand. To help.
There were so few of them who dared raise their voices. But it was all they had.
It had to be enough.