Chapter Text
You are trekking through heather-covered cliffs on the cornish coast, the night quickly darkening around you, the ocean a dull roar in your ears. You are holding a child in your arms – your child, you think, distantly, at least she’d once been that, wrapped in a thin woolen scarf, far too thin for the cold January air. She is crying.
You stop. Frozen fern crunches under your boots as you do. Your child is crying in your arms. You hold her like it’s the first time you ever have, like she is something so wondrous and fragile, like the reason you’ve come here, to the small abandoned chapel disappearing into the dark cliffs behind you isn’t something else entirely.
Like you aren’t both covered in her mother’s blood.
A little under a year ago, you actually held her for the first time. She had her mother’s fine, sand-colored hair and your freckles and two bumps on the side of her forehead where you knew antlers would break through her skin, like they had for her mother, like they had for you, marking you both as heralds of- what, exactly, you aren’t sure you can quite conceive of, even now that you’ve played your own part of it to the end.
(Occult Procedure Clockwork Blackchild Havilah.
The end of the world, Francis, though is that really such a bad thing? )
Your own horns were curled in on themselves, like a ram’s. You took to them with a bone saw, and covered the stumps with a hat.
You held her, then, and she cried for the first time, and every light bulb in the room had burst, leaving just the street lamp outside to feebly shine into shabby little bedroom of a shabby little English row house, and the roof had creaked and groaned above you in a way that had made you fear it would collapse and bury you all beneath it. Something grew out of the cracks in the floorboards – grass, flowers? You couldn’t quite tell in the dark – and curled its way up your legs.
Oh, Francis, she’s magnificent.
And Agent Ukulele had found himself thinking just how easy it would be to smash her little head open on the floor, right then and there.
Eden isn’t a place, it’s a state of being.
The Agent Ukulele of the present tucks the small body into the front of his trench coat, and she is warm against him. He had been sent out here to dispose of Threat Entity 9927-Black “The Goddess”. He had done so.
(Not that The Goddess had ever posed a threat to reality in the first place. Agent Ukulele had known this the moment he pointed his standard-issue Winchester repeating rifle at the mother of his child, and in the few seconds of hesitation it took for him to pull the trigger the chamber had rusted in place in his hands, he had known it when he’d reached for his backup knife, not having found use in all of his seven years of employment and he had known it when it did, for the first time.
If he was entirely honest with himself, he’d even known it days earlier when he had returned to that small town English row house, not Francis this time but Agent Ukulele, and it was overgrown with vines and wildflowers and looked to have been abandoned for years.
The Global Occult Coalition however, didn’t.)
The looming end of the world, the small child in your arms, cries. You shush her, clumsily rocking her in your arms, unused to being a father because you haven’t been one for a year. She is bigger now, your arms already tiring from holding her, but still impossibly small in the dark fabric of your coat, impossibly small in the vastness between the night and cliffs and ocean.
You could leave her here, in one of the crevices between the rocks. The January cold would do your job for you.
(It wasn’t like Ukulele hadn’t killed children before, either.)
She’s stopped crying. You look at her. She looks at you, still cold and afraid but tired out. She is covered in her mother’s blood, like the night you first held her. You wrap the sleeve of your coat around your hand and drag it across her face, trying to clean it, to get the blood out of her eyes at least, and her nose scrunches up and eyebrows draw together and another quiet whine begins in her throat, and right then, in a patch of frozen heather on the cornish coast, your heart breaks.
You curl in on yourself, around the baby in your arms, and her little head slots in place in the space between your chin and collarbone, and your whole body shakes as the overwhelming impossibility of you killing this child dawns on you.
You think. Your strike team’s squad van is parked half a mile away, Agent Cembalo in it; He is to call for backup if neither of you report back to him in what can’t be more than half an hour from now. Agents’ Saxophone lays in the dilapidated church, his blood coalescing with that of many others on the stone floor, and Agent Harmonica had been run off the cliff side in a scuffle with a cultist and fallen into the sharp rocks below. If you were clever about it, they would never find either of your bodies.
There’s a town some four miles off to the west, you can see the sphere of light above it in the distance. If you made it there before GOC agents started combing the area, you could steal a car and go- somewhere. Somewhere.
It isn’t until you have taken up your trek again, towards that blessed patch of slightly lighter night sky, still shaking all over and considering the logistics of going on the run with a one-year-old and only the remainder of your last paycheck to tide you over, that you realize that this means that you are deserting. God damn.
Meri is quiet now. The warmth of your own body under the thick coat must have finally seeped into hers and made her sleepy. You are too cautious, still, to let yourself think that you love her just yet, but it does make you feel, her falling asleep in your arms like that.
You walk through heather and fern and cliffs and winter, collar turned up against the wind and useless shotgun still slung over your shoulder. You are deserting. Hidden in the folds of your trench coat, your daughter sleeps.