Hellfire and Holy Water (A Good Omens Fanfiction)

Chapter Five

 "Why, he'll be wanting a tricycle soon," Nanny Ashteroth cooed with an unpleasant smile on her face.

The young master Warlock was just about sixteen months old at this point and Crowley was pleased to see that he was already getting to be quite the troublemaker. The boy loved to toddle his way over to his father's desk, having found the door to his study mysteriously unlocked, and when his nanny wasn't looking would find tons of fun-looking official documents and tear them up into bits. Or there was one time on one of Nanny Ashtoreth's days off that he found a pair of scissors and decided it would be delightfully entertaining to use on one of mommy's favorite dresses.

And then there were times that he would wander outside into the garden, to a whole new world filled with life and light and excitement just waiting to be explored by a rambunctious little toddler who was sick of being cooped up inside. Then there would be Brother Francis. The gardener showed him how to throw out feed for the birds, or told him to be mindful of little slugs and snakes sunbathing on rocks throughout the yard, and one day they looked together at a nest full of adorable newly hatched birds buried in the brush, little hatchlings that chirped and squeaked for food. Francis also told him to be nice to insects, but they had always looked really icky and Warlock wanted nothing to do with them.

Then most every night Nanny Ashtoreth would tuck him into bed and sing sweet and soft lullabies about the wails of the damned, eternal agony, world domination, or violating virgins. Warlock wasn't sure what all that meant exactly, but he didn't think Brother Francis would have agreed with any of it.

Over this time Crowley and Aziraphale continued to have their weekly meetings in private. Dinner was a popular choice for them, but eventually they decided that they could only resort to it every once in a while if they wanted to avoid suspicion. Not that they were up to anything bad, of course, or good in Crowley's case, but they agreed that it was better if their superiors didn't catch on and think there was more to these meetings than there really was.

After they had run out of different restaurants in the area, they resorted to occasional alternatives. The park was an option, though they preferred more secluded meetings. They came up with similar concerns regarding bus and train stations. Art galleries and concerts were possible options at times. But they had found that sharing a drink in Aziraphale's bookshop every now and again was private enough to talk about anything they liked, and they were both rather comfortable together in that setting. It was the perfect place to scheme and plan their plot to save the world. Though that sort of talk, in truth, dominated their conversations only a fraction of the time before segueing to another topic entirely.

This was the first time that they had agreed to meet on an official and regular basis in six thousand years, and they both found it an uncomfortably welcome change. Both of them even began to look forward to these meetings, possibly with a sense of urgency as they began to hope rather separately that they would be successful and the apocalypse would be averted. If it did happen, they were painfully aware that they would be fighting on opposite sides of a long and bloody war. Best not to think of it.

It was far more pleasant, they found, to celebrate their differences, not that they really had all that many differences in the grand scheme of things. Years passed in this rhythm. Warlock was nearly five years old already, and their officially unofficial dates had been consuming much more of their conscious–and unconscious–minds than was probably good for them of late.

Aziraphale refused to label their meetings in any way and further refused to acknowledge that he was "consorting with the enemy,'' as his superiors would have liked to put it. Crowley knew damn well what they were doing, and what's worse was that he knew he liked it. It was just another thing to add to the pile of reasons to hate himself. Not that he was willing to put a stop to their meetings, of course.