Chapter Text
Crowley has a child.
Not in the conventional, visceral sense people generally mean when they speak of “having” children. There is no birthing involved, and thank all that is holy and unholy alike for that.
It might be easier to say that Crowley possesses a child, except that it’s not. As a demon, Crowley can actually possess a human, which would involve infusing his metaphysical presence into their mundane body and taking them for a rather uncomfortable test drive. He hates possession. It is stifling, obnoxious business; he invented the wedgie simply for the pleasure of watching humans deal with a comparable measure of discomfort.
So, he does not birth the child, nor inhabit the child’s body, but he has one nonetheless.
The facts producing this unusual circumstance are these:
Crowley occasionally finds himself restless, and he requires a solid afternoon of mindless wandering to recover from it.[1] Sometimes, he transports himself to a corner of the Earth he hasn’t visited in a while and meanders around to see what people have done with the land in the last several hundred years. Other times, he burrows himself in the throes of a large city and wreaks as much havoc as he can.
And yet others, he visits snakes.
One should not be surprised to discover that Crowley, formerly the Serpent of Eden, has a vast fondness for snakes. They are clean, lithe, fashionable creatures who would rather laze about in a patch of sunlight than do anything else. In a game of chicken and egg, only God Herself would be able to verify whether Crowley is snakelike or whether snakes are Crowley-like. Plainly put, snakes make sense to him, far more than people do most days.
When he visits snakes, he almost always checks in on the ones held captive by humans, as they tend to crave company more, and because he wants to make sure the humans do a proper job of caring for them. Thus, on the day that he takes (non-demonic) possession of a child, Crowley is in the Reptile House of the London Zoo, one of his favorite haunts.
When he arrives there, he makes his rounds, inspecting each exhibit and chatting with whichever occupants understand him. The king cobra, who is as torrid a gossip as any real member of royalty, catches him up on things: the Galapagos tortoise enclosure has a female resident now, and she is exactly as popular with her cohabitants as one might guess; the komodo dragon has taken to shitting in his water supply like the foul creature he is; the poisonous frogs kick up an enormous racket at night, now that summer has fully bloomed; two of the zookeepers are officially courting and constantly reek of each other, but bless them anyway, because they’re shockingly tolerable for being oversized prey.
At some point, a cartoonishly severe family walks in, and the sight of them is enough to pause the ongoing gabfest between Crowley and the cobra. Typically with humans, body shape tends to become a common thread in families, but not this one. The man is spectacularly round, as is one of the children, while the woman is tall and waspishly thin. Another of the children looks like a rat. The last of the children is… concerning. Underfed and gaunt, and wrapped in clothes twice his size, with cautious eyes that no child should have and careful control over his feet and elbows. The two other children take to the reptile exhibits with the proper excitement, but this one surveys everything at a distance.
“Terrible creatures,” the man says self-importantly by the blue tree monitors. “Not fit to eat or keep as pets. Liable to kill you if they get the chance. I don’t see the point in keeping them around.”
That amuses Crowley more than it annoys him, but only because he would very happily say the same thing about most humans.
The family makes their rounds, led by the boy that bears an unfortunate resemblance to the man. This boy—Dudley, apparently—does not stop talking, and each thing he says is stupider and more entitled than the last. When the king cobra behind Crowley makes a comment about how Dudley would make for a fine meal, Crowley snorts in amused agreement.
The concerningly small boy happens to be passing by right around then, and he breaks down into a coughing fit that, if he didn’t know better, Crowley would swear is masking laughter.
The man of the family turns to glare down at the boy, and the boy freezes.
“I told you,” the man hisses just loud enough for Crowley to hear, “not to make noise, you wretched mongrel. This is Dudley’s day, and you’ll not be ruining it with—with you. Do you understand?”
The boy nods quickly, flushing and looking away. “Sorry, Uncle Vernon. Tickle in my throat. It won’t happen again.”
It should be known that Crowley rarely feels rage. He enjoys the grip of wrath as much as any demon, but his anger usually funnels its way out as annoyance or frustration. Rage itself involves caring, and Crowley cares about very, very little. One angel, one car, and now, for some strange reason, one comically undersized child.
For it is rage, proper and hellfire hot, that crackles to life inside him when he hears the man—Vernon, an appropriately ugly name—call his nephew a mongrel. Rage, when the boy makes himself impossibly smaller and meeker as a result.
The boy bloody coughed, and the uncle is livid over it. What happens, Crowley wonders, when he actually does something wrong?
He has the sneaking, awful suspicion that this boy should not be quite so small, nor quite so careful about his elbows and feet.
He keeps an eye on the boy after that, ready to take action—and sod the consequences for himself if it’s good action—should something else happen. He shouldn’t care, but… but it’s a child. Children are meant to be exempt from that sort of torment; demons are even discouraged from tempting them. Children are God’s gift of free will in purest form, after all. They’re meant to be unshackled.
This child, however, is about as shackled as they come. Poor thing. If Aziraphale were here, he’d be pitching a fit.
It is that thought that pushes Crowley up off the floor to follow the family around. Keeping an eye on things isn’t good enough; he needs to hear what happens. A quick flick of his fingers makes his presence unnoticeable, so he can prowl as close as he likes without them spotting him.
Dudley makes a big fanfare about the Brazilian boa constrictor, who refuses to move no matter how much he pounds on the glass. Irritated on her behalf, Crowley points a finger at Dudley’s belly; birthday or no, he’ll spend his evening hunched over his toilet, regretting every bite of his knickerbocker glory.
Children are generally exempt, sure, but Crowley has his limits.
After a handful of seconds demanding that the boa put on a show for him, Dudley and his friend wander off. The small one approaches the boa, looking resigned. “Sorry about him.”
It isn’t until the boa lifts her head that Crowley realizes that the boy hasn’t said it in English. He speaks snake.
She regards him carefully while Crowley gapes from afar. Snakes are usually as coldblooded metaphorically as they are literally, but this one is uncommonly sweet. Whenever Crowley stops by, she insists that he take his sunglasses off so she can see his preciousss eyesss. So, instead of ignoring him or telling him to fuck off, like the others probably would (or demanding to know how the fuck a human child speaks snake, like Crowley would), she tastes the air and responds.
“I get that all the time,” she admits, no doubt trying to reassure the boy that she isn’t upset.
The boy’s eyes light up a little, but his face twists with dismay. “I know. It must be really annoying.”
Something seems to at once tighten and unspool in Crowley’s chest. For all that he’d pitied this undersized child, he hadn’t expected him to be kind. Kindness is usually the first thing to leave the humans tortured in Hell.
The boa nods. It’s a human gesture, one she learned from Crowley himself. He had to explain a number of gestures to all the snakes, as they kept seeing people wobble their heads around and assumed they were gathering depth perception to prepare to lunge at them. By taking such a human step in the conversation, this sweet girl is meeting the boy halfway.
Without letting himself overthink it, he taps a finger on his thigh, and the water in her tank is magically refreshed and sourced from the tastiest Brazilian watering hole.
“Where do you come from, anyway?” the boy asks. He seems perfectly at ease, and Crowley wonders if this odd child makes a habit of shooting the breeze with random animals. He could be like that fictional chap, Doctor Doo-whatsit.
Snakes are not particularly skilled with social cues, such as when someone is attempting to strike up conversation just for the sake of it. As such, instead of taking the opportunity to tell the boy about Brazil and all the wonders therein, the boa lifts the end of her tail and jabs it in the direction of the sign near her enclosure.
The boy jerks a little, flushing like he’s embarrassed to have asked for information that he could have learned for himself. Wryly, Crowley thinks that if Aziraphale were here, he’d be fairly huffing and puffing with all his exclamations of oh, dear boy! and what a charming young lad!
“Was it nice there?”
Another pointed jab at the sign, and the boy reads on to learn that this particular boa was born here.
“Oh, I see,” the boy says, shyly. “So you’ve never been to Brazil?”
Just as the boa shakes her head, Dudley’s rat-like friend shouts about the boa moving around, and Dudley waddles over, punching the small boy in the stomach to make him step aside. The boy falls to the floor with a pained grunt.
Crowley very nearly intervenes, so great is his resulting spike of rage, but just as he’s raising his fingers to snap his existence into focus again, the glass of the enclosure disappears.
He didn’t do it. He knows he didn’t. But that means….
He takes in the boy with renewed interest. Magic.
Of course, the boy is magical. Humans literally cannot speak to snakes, but magic has the pseudo-miraculous tendency to make impossible things possible. Magic would, and does, explain everything going on here.
Crowley is struck by the fervid realization that this boy cannot be around his family anymore. Why he’s with them at all is a mystery, but magic-users and mundanes get along about as well as… well, witches and stakes, for lack of a better comparison. The boy is in danger, especially if his magic is untrained and instinctive like this.
He turns his attention back to reality just as the boa slips free from her enclosure and slinks over the handrails with weighted fluidity. The humans leap into an uproar around them, but the small boy, still on the floor, has his eyes on her.
“Brazil, here I come,” she murmurs, sounding thrilled. “Thankssss, amigo.”
With this level of chaos, the boa will be captured and re-imprisoned, if not killed, and the boy… Crowley has no idea what might happen to him. Nothing good. Not even something not-so-bad.
Coming to a decision, Crowley snaps his fingers, and all life in the Reptile House freezes in place. He takes a second to uncloak his presence, then lopes over to the small boy and touches him on the forehead.
The boy jolts to life and scrambles away as fast as he can.
“I don’t know what happened!” he yelps, looking terrified. “I swear, it just—”
“Stop,” Crowley says, raising a hand.
It says something horrible that the boy goes stock-still, and that his ashen attention is fixed on that raised hand. Like Crowley might jump forward and slap him with it if he doesn’t obey immediately.
As soon as he’s done cleaning up this mess, Crowley’s going to have words—and a few things worse than words—with that family.
“I know it was an accident,” he says, channeling angelic calmness as much as he’s able. He’s not very able, but the boy relaxes a little anyway. “I have two questions for you.”
The boy glances around, finally realizing that they are the only creatures in the whole room moving. “What—what’s happening? Why’s everyone stuck?”
“Magic.” Which is not quite true, but close enough (and hopefully familiar enough) to work for now.
The boy’s jaw drops. “Magic?”
Not familiar, then. Crowley sighs.
“You just had a chinwag with a snake and made a pane of plexiglass disappear into thin air, mate,” he says, not beating around the bush about it. “Yeah, magic.”
The boy’s face contorts into several expressions in quick succession, and he shakes his head. “No—no, I’m not—”
“I have two questions for you,” Crowley interrupts. “Time is of the essence, if you don’t mind. Or, really, even if you do mind.”
“I don’t mind!” the boy offers with the quick supplication of someone that is used to being agreeable just because. “What questions?”
“What’s your name?”
“Harry,” Harry responds promptly. “Harry Potter.”
Harry Potter. That’s a name rife for some teasing if ever he heard one. Right up there with Mike Hunt and Ben Dover.
He nods and moves on.
“If I offered you the chance to escape this lot,” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the frozen family, “would you take it?”
Harry blinks repeatedly. “You—but they’re my family.”
“They treat you like shit,” Crowley points out. He shrugs. “If there’s love there and you want to stay, stay. But you’re about one growth spurt away from that malnutrition having permanent consequences, and that oaf you call a cousin is one growth spurt away from being able to break your bones. Just saying.”
Harry pales; Crowley was too harsh, and if he cared about things like his own harshness, he’d regret it.
A steely determination comes over Harry’s face, though, and he takes a brave step forward. “You’d help me get free of them?”
“I’d get you free of them,” he corrects.
“At what cost?” Harry’s lips set, and he suddenly looks a lot more capable than he did a moment ago. “Uncle Vernon says nothing good comes without a price. No free lunches. That’s why I have to do all the cooking and cleaning and stuff. So… what’s your price?”
Crowley isn’t sure whether to be impressed, proud, or horrified. He settles on all three.
He considers the question. He’s a demon, and truly, demons don’t give away free lunches. They make deals. The problem is, Crowley’s a rubbish demon, and he doesn’t particularly care to barter with a child that looks like he’s got about a stone less baby fat than he should.
“You let me handle them,” he says finally, referencing the family again. “And they pay your price. I won’t harm them, not directly, but I plan on making their lives difficult for a very, very long time. That seem fair to you?”
“Not at all,” Harry replies. A light shines in his eyes amidst all the awe and hope, and it takes a moment for Crowley to recognize it as mischief. “You have yourself a deal.”
Blazing hells, Crowley likes this kid.
He hasn’t properly liked a child… ever.
“But.”
Crowley hesitates with his fingers poised to snap. “Yes?”
Harry tilts his head at the boa. “What about that? It—it talked to me. It was nice. And I don’t think it’ll make it to Brazil like it expects to.”
Crowley can’t help it: He grins. He’s not big on goodness when it comes to humans, but goodness when it comes to snakes is his precise wheelhouse. “She can come along, too.”
That, in summation, is how Crowley comes to have a child.
And, not to be forgotten, a massive, happy boa constrictor.
Once he escorts them out of the zoo, he snaps his fingers, and life resumes in the Reptile House. He can sense everyone’s distress over the sudden disappearance of both a child and a huge predator, and it soothes his spirits. No good deeds here, thank you very much; he has caused panic.
The problem, he realizes once he, Harry, and the seven-foot snake coiled around his shoulders are out on the pavement, is that he has absolutely no idea what to do next. He’s a demon, not a babysitter. He doesn’t know the first thing about attending to the needs of a child.
“So,” he says lightly, steering their group toward his Bentley, “d’you have somewhere you can stay, besides them?”
Harry falls quiet. “Er….”
“It’s alright if the answer’s no,” Crowley continues, forcing nonchalance to hide his own rising panic. “Just trying to gauge whether or not anyone outside that crew is going to look for you.”
“No,” Harry says, sounding relieved. “It’s just me. No one likes me much because they always tell people I’m horrible, so… I’m all alone, really.”
That is not, in Crowley’s opinion, something a child should admit to a complete stranger, especially one that wears all black and can make people freeze against their will.
Then again, maybe Crowley just sees the dark side of things too much.
“We’ll go back to mine, then,” he says as they reach the Bentley. At his wave, Harry clambers into the passenger seat. “It’s not a particularly friendly place, but it’s safe. There’s plenty of food, as well.” [2]
“What about me?” The boa asks from Crowley’s shoulder as he sits in the driver’s seat. She slithers to the middle space of the bench seat, coiling up on its leather. “I am going to Brazil! I shall gorge myself on mice and make the forest my home!”
“Oh,” Harry says, sounding uncomfortable in the specific way people sound uncomfortable when they believe they are imposing. “Er, sir, the snake is asking what you intend to do with her.”
Crowley hides a smile, intentionally doing a poor job of it. He replies in snake, “Eloa, darling, no offense, but you wouldn’t survive a day in the wild. You lot are spoiled rotten in that place.”
She hisses in agitation, butting her nose against his thigh while he begins driving home. “You lie! I am a mighty huntress, Crowley. You have said so. I hear you with Rajesh!”
“Yeah, well,” he replies, half scoffing, “Rajesh needs to be taken down a peg or two sometimes. Takes the ‘king’ in his name a bit too seriously, don’t you think? It does him good—no, it does him… bad… whatever—to squash his ego a bit. Trust me, you need some experience before you’re ready for the wild.”
“You two understand each other,” Harry observes. His eyes are an unnaturally bright green, Crowley notices when he glances over, and there’s a scar on his forehead shaped exactly like a lightning bolt. “Is that a magic thing? Not that I believe I am magic, but… but is it?”
“Human.” Eloa swivels her neck around to address Harry. “Crowley is the Great Serpent, the father of us all. The strongest, the mightiest. No other’s fangs are sharper; no other’s scales are so sleek. You dare ask if he understands me?”
Well, there goes Crowley’s half-cocked plan to pretend to be human.
“You’re what?” Harry gasps. To Crowley’s surprise, he doesn’t sound scared. If anything, he’s enthralled. “You’re… what, a snake god? Is that even a thing?”
“Not quite.” Crowley waits until he’s passed a slow Volvo and is back in the proper lane to tug off his sunglasses. He glances over at Harry, letting him see the gold of his eyes and the ophidian shape of his pupils. “It’s complicated. And don’t call me a, a G-word. That gets messy quickly. But yes, I understand Eloa just as well as you do.”
Harry stares at him, and Crowley keeps his eyes on the road while he waits for the inevitable terror to come. Humans are always terrified of his eyes, no matter how grateful or helpless they may be otherwise.
“Wicked,” Harry breathes. “So, wait, is talking to snakes a magic thing at all, then? Or is there something else? Am I some sort of—”
“You’re human,” Crowley cuts him off, though he’s growing less and less confident in Harry’s humanity by the minute. He doesn’t act like a human. His survival instincts, for one, are way off. “There’s—there are some magical folks out there that can talk to snakes. And before you ask, yes, it’s my doing, and no, I won’t explain what I did. You’re not old enough. How old are you, by the way?”
“Ten,” Harry replies in that worryingly prompt way of his. “Why can’t I know? How old do I need to be?”
“He spawned a hatchling,” Eloa supplies, obviously not caring what Crowley has to say on the matter. “The Almighty Salazar. Do you not know? Are you not told the stories, young one?”
“Bless it, stop,” Crowley hisses, very nearly doubling the speed limit in order to get home faster. “Eloa, I will glue your mouth shut if you can’t do it yourself. I’m trying not to break his mind.”
“I’m okay,” Harry insists. “I’m old enough to know about that, Mister… Crowley, did she say? Or, well, Dudley got told about it by one of his mates, and I overheard him and Piers talking about it in his room, but whatever. You’re a dad. That’s alright.”
What young Harry does not understand is that of his few regrets since Falling, Crowley’s parenthood tops the list. The story involves a massive spat with Aziraphale, a broken heart that Crowley had no idea what to do with, and a beautiful witch that wanted to rebel against her father by losing her virginity before she was wed off to a nobleman she barely knew. The situation was chaos incarnate, which was exactly what Crowley wanted for himself at the time.
Unfortunately for him, he didn’t know that his human form was so functional that it could reproduce. He’d assumed that his demonic nature precluded that sort of thing. But no, his one-night dalliance yielded offspring, and that offspring was as brilliant and cruel as any half-demon should be.
In addition to being his greatest regret, Salazar is also Crowley’s greatest secret. Snakes know because their mythos spreads faster than he can silence it and because it’s harmless for them to know, and Beelzebub knows in that vague way they know about all demonic acts on Earth, but no one else does.
Especially not Aziraphale, who might be a necessary addition to this little group, considering Crowley has no idea how to handle cohabitating with a human child.
“It was a long time ago,” he eventually replies, turning onto his street. “Not worth talking about to anyone else. Alright?”
Blessedly—no, damnedably—Harry seems to pick up on that cue. “I’m quite good at keeping things to myself, Mister Crowley. We can add that to our arrangement, if you like. You helped me when you didn’t have to, so I’ll keep what I learn about you to myself.”
Crowley careens to a stop in front of his building and puts the Bentley in park before responding, not sure whether to take Harry up on his offer or not. It’s obnoxiously nice of him, which makes Crowley want to reject it outright. Then again, if he is going to have a human child in his home, it might be useful to know that said child is sworn to secrecy.
But if Harry breaks that secrecy, breaks the agreement… that’s his soul damned, right then and there.
Crowley has no instincts for this. No understanding of which measures are productive versus which ones might hurt Harry in the long run. Maybe telling Harry the entire truth about the cosmos would be alright, or maybe it would fracture his self-possession and lead to a lifetime of paranoia. Maybe housing Harry in his flat wouldn’t affect him at all, or maybe it would expose him to traumatic experiences that Crowley cannot even fathom because he is, quite literally, a being of trauma.
“It’s not a part of our arrangement,” he decides. “That deal is forged, and I’m not going to amend it. The paperwork for that sort of thing is bloody terrible. But I will ask you to keep the things you learn about me to yourself, yes. And I expect you to tell me if you learn something that makes you uncomfortable, or if you get overwhelmed. I don’t know you like you know you, yeah?”
“There’s paperwork for the thing we agreed on?” Harry blinks, then shakes himself and makes a visible effort to move on. “Sorry. What I mean is that yes, I understand. Don’t talk about stuff because you’ve asked, and tell you if I’m freaking out. Got it.”
Crowley regards him for a moment, taking in the flush on his cheeks, the brightness of his eyes, and the way he’s clutching the extra fabric around the knees of his jeans. He doesn’t seem scared, at least, which is a strong start.
Then again, neither did Eve.
“I shall agree, as well,” Eloa says, dipping her triangular head down to the coils of her body. She scents the air repeatedly, letting him know that she can smell the unease pouring off him. “I did not mean to cause conflict, Crowley. Do not glue my mouth shut.”
He sighs, exasperated but feeling slightly better about his circumstances now that there are some ground rules in place. “I wouldn’t, darling. Not really. Now let’s get everyone upstairs before the fuzz wonders why I’ve got an endangered snake in my car.”
Entering his flat with Harry makes Crowley realize how very evil it all is. Sharp angles and lines everywhere, no furniture or tchotchkes, and everything is grim and dark. He’d change it, but… he doesn’t want to. Unwelcoming as it is, he loves this flat.
“Whoa,” Harry says from Crowley’s side, taking in the space with wide eyes. “I didn’t know they made houses that looked like this.”
“Not a house, technically,” Crowley says. He holds out an arm so Eloa can slither down it to the floor. She hits the concrete with a meaty slap and glides away, no doubt to make herself at home. “Sorry it’s not… child-friendly.”
“Is it not?” Harry shoves his hands in his pockets and looks around. “You should have seen my cupboard. What makes a place child-friendly, do you think? If you judge by doctor’s office standards, it’s, what, one of those books you have to stare at cross-eyed for a long time to make the image appear? Those are rubbish anyways.”
“I invented those,” Crowley says before he can help himself, too pleased to bite the words back. “Stereograms, they’re called. They’re meant to be rubbish. You wouldn’t believe the number of people that have gotten pissed off about them.”
Harry nudges the floor with the toe of one well-worn trainer. “You invented them to be annoying to people?”
The question he poses is far larger than he makes it sound. To fully answer, Crowley would have to explain why he’d invent something that annoys people, which, in turn, would make him explain what he is, and what that means about Earth and everyone on it.
“I did,” he says, making a show of heading for the kitchen. Aziraphale is easily distracted by food; maybe Harry will be the same. “Have you eaten? Want… blimey, er, hummus? Or… grains?”
He should figure out what children eat, probably. Add that to the ever-growing list of things Crowley will need to research if he has any hope of keeping Harry alive for any length of time.
This is why he likes plants. Plants are easy. Give them water, sun, and insults, and bob’s your uncle, you’ve got verdant greenery everywhere. Creatures, especially human ones, are infinitely harder.
There are various edible things tucked all around his kitchen now. A bowl that previously stood empty on his countertop now holds a colorful pile of fruits and vegetables, some of which are familiar and some of which look slightly made-up. Plastic packages of bread form a neat stack near his oven, each bag proudly claiming what kind of bread it is. The cupboards, when he opens them to check, are filled with boxes, cans, and jars. The fridge and freezer are both fully stocked.
Crowley discovers with no small measure of dismay that he only recognizes half of it all. Some items have demonic influence, like the noxiously sugary cereals in the cupboard, while others have featured on Aziraphale’s plates a time or two. He has no idea, however, how to combine ingredients to form dishes. He knows what fully-developed food is, but not how it gets that way.
“Grains?” Harry follows him carefully into the kitchen. “Like… wheat?”
“Sure,” Crowley says distractedly, lifting a peculiar fruit from the bowl. It looks like a five-point star when viewed from the end, which is more entertaining than it has any right to be. “Oats, barley, hops. Corn, I think. Those are all edible, eh?”
“Do you not know?” Harry sounds dreadfully small. “Do you not… eat?”
Crowley looks up at him, only to find him shrinking in on himself, looking much like he had when his uncle was angry.
Shit.
He needs Aziraphale. He can’t steer a kid straight on his own, he can’t decide how much sharing is too much sharing, and he can’t bloody cook. Aziraphale will have a world of solutions.
Oddly, though, he doesn’t want to share Harry just yet. He can count on one hand the number of humans he’s enjoyed for long enough to hold a conversation with them just because, and he’d have to retract half those fingers if he factored in how much the human wanted to talk back. Harry is a novelty all over, and Crowley just knows that once Aziraphale gets involved, he will be Harry’s favorite. He’s everyone’s favorite.
Which is the proper, accurate order of things. Aziraphale is designed to be likable and engaging, while Crowley is designed to be intriguing but discomforting. If Harry liked Aziraphale better, he’d be correct.
Nevertheless, the idea of Harry getting on with Aziraphale better than him stings. They’re snakey friends. Comrades-in-escapism. Kindred, in a peculiar, mischievous way.
Maybe he needs to treat Harry as kindred, then, and stop pussyfooting around so much.
“Full disclosure? No,” Crowley says, tossing the fruit back into the bowl. “I can eat, but it doesn’t do anything for me. All this stuff is new, and I’ve no bloody idea what to make of any of it. I could get takeaway, though? That comes pre-made, I think.”
“You’re weird,” Harry replies, wrinkling his nose. He’s smiling, though, which suggests Crowley’s response soothed his apprehension well enough. “Am I allowed to look around? I did loads of cooking with the Dursleys. I might be able to make sense of it.”
Crowley gestures expansively. “Be my guest.”
He flees from the kitchen while Harry snoops around, and he takes the opportunity to make some quick changes to the flat. The statue of evil’s triumph over good gets relocated to the master suite, safely out of sight. The living room gains a sofa—black leather, of course, but suitably squashy—and the bookcase in the study grows a shelf that promptly fills with self-help books on parenting, cookbooks, and some novels that should, in theory, be amusing to a ten-year-old boy.
Heaven, Hell, and all the in-between, he hopes he’s doing this right.
And, just for shits and giggles, he summons a live mouse about a foot away from Eloa’s nose, wherever she is. She’s going to have to become good at hunting sooner or later.
From the other room comes a surprised hiss, followed by a high-pitched squeal.
Then, distantly: “Indeed, I am a huntress. He knows not of what he speaks.”
Well, at least he can feed one of them.
Unable to help himself, and not quite composed enough anymore to try, Crowley tips his head back and laughs.
Notes:
1. Were he a human, he would likely be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and that diagnosis would probably be accurate. ↺ go back
2. Prior to Crowley saying as much, there was not, in fact, plenty of food in his flat, as he had no need for it. Nor was there a guest room, least of all one that contained a comfortable bed and a chest of drawers full of child-sized clothes. Once the words were said, however, his kitchen found itself full of nutritious foodstuffs, and a bedroom squeezed itself in where no room should fit. ↺ go back
Chapter 2
Notes:
We're back!
Thank you to everyone who has joined this ride, especially those who commented that they follow my work and are trusting me with this insane concept. Your trust is not misplaced, I promise. I appreciate you all so much!
A couple tiny things: I've tested the e-reader situation, and it looks like footnotes work perfectly well (better than they do on the AO3 website, in fact), so... we're not going to be creating a whole separate document with things formulated differently. That said, if you require accommodations because the footnotes make this story difficult to read, please let me know! Additionally, I've decided that having the footnotes at the end of a chapter looks messy, even with a line break, so those will always be in the endnotes instead - this may change things for e-readers. Again, more testing is needed.
Those are all my notes for now. Have fun!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Harry ends up poking around for long enough to make something he calls a “stir-fry,” which seems to involve chopping ingredients up into bite-sized morsels, then cooking them all with bits of meat (also chopped up) and brown sauce.
He doesn’t offer Crowley a plate, which is discourteous in a way that makes Crowley grin and thoughtful in a way that makes him soften that grin into a smile. Curious to see how Harry has fared, though, he ends up stealing bits of food from the pan with a fork.
It’s surprisingly tasty. Not worth the irksome process of digesting a whole meal, but closer to worth it than the heavy, decadent foods Aziraphale prefers.
He tells Harry as much, which just about sets Harry off in sunbeams.
“Really?” Harry chews on a bite of broccoli thoughtfully. “Aunt Petunia says my cooking is ‘barely palatable.’ But she eats it more than she does when she makes food for herself. So, you know, I dunno.”
A now-familiar bubble of rage finds its home in Crowley’s belly. Just for that, he finds the plates and serves himself a measure of the stir-fry. Spiting that bony hag is worth the digestion.
“She was lying to you,” he says, reaching for a bottle of wine before thinking better of it. He gets himself a glass of water instead. “She’s a liar, your aunt. Could smell it on her a mile off. Anything she’s told you, you should take with a heavy dose of salt.”
Harry swallows his mouthful of stir-fry, eyes wide as Crowley takes a seat opposite him. “You think?”
“I know.” Crowley pokes at a snow pea until the peas pop out, then spears each one on a separate prong. Playing with food, he’s discovered over the last two thousand-odd years, is one of the better parts of interacting with it at all. “Same way I know Vernon’s intimidated by you and uses wrath to cover it up, and Dudley is envious of you. Quite a sinful brood, your family.”
“Sinful,” Harry repeats, blinking slowly. Whatever he thinks of that, though, he shrugs it off. “So you’re saying they’re like that because I… impress them, in one way or another?”
“Bingo,” Crowley says, gesturing with his fork. A pea flies off and lands on the table by Harry’s plate. Crowley winces. “Ignore that. Point is, humans—people—don’t treat things badly when they dislike them. Pick your poison: food, TV, other people, pastimes, whatever. When people don’t care for something, they just ignore it. So, if they take the time to belittle something, it’s because they resent it.”
Harry absorbs this wisdom with all the hungry yearning of an acolyte. “And what is that? ‘Resenting?’”
Crowley flounders, having forgotten for a moment just how young Harry is. He recovers and clears his throat. “Resentment. It’s… well, harboring a grudge, I suppose. Erm, think of it like… when something’s not fair, yeah, and you feel wronged about it, you resent whoever made it that way. Or whoever benefited from it.”
Aziraphale would know how to explain it better, probably. He’d whip out some mental encyclopedia or another and unfold the words into the room, easy as anything.
He’d be better at all of this.
But Harry nods slowly, prodding his food around his plate. “I get that, I think. If I understand you, that means I resent Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia because I feel like they don’t treat me fairly, and I resent Dudley because he gets treated nicely in comparison, even though he doesn’t deserve it. And they… resent me? Otherwise, they wouldn’t be so, er, Dursley-ish to me?”
Crowley privately files the family’s last name away for reference. He doesn’t strictly need it to track them down, but it’s a handy fact to know.
“Exactly,” he says, injecting cheer in his voice because he has a feeling Harry hasn’t been praised much in his life. “That’s how it works. Generally speaking, at least. Me, I’m just awful to people for fun.”
He expects a snort, or maybe an awkward subject change, but Harry perks up. “That’s right! Our deal. Is that why messing with them is a good price to you, because it’s something you find fun?”
Crowley chokes on a chewed hunk of beef, which he has never done before and resolves to never do again. It hurts. Once half his water (and all of his dignity) is gone, he clears his ragged throat and tries to redeem himself.
Until he opens his mouth and remembers, rather instantly, that he isn’t redeemable. That’s the point of him. He is irredeemably evil as a rule, and he just happens to be terrible at following that rule. Or, well, any rules.
“Something like that,” he replies, once again opting for honesty. “It’s more like… it’s my job. Sowing seeds of chaos, putting people in bad moods. I’m not supposed to do things like, you know, save children from toxic families. But if I’ve kidnapped that child, then fu—messed with the family a bit, well, that’s alright, then.”
Harry takes another bite of his dinner, then a drink of his own glass of water. He looks around the flat with renewed interest. “Are you the devil?”
Bless it, he’d gone for the beef again.
Another humiliating half minute of coughing later, Crowley gives up and, with a snap of his fingers, gets himself a glass of the wine he avoided earlier. He chugs that down, not caring that it’s a waste of a perfectly good vintage.
“What makes you say that?” he asks once he’s emptied his glass.
Harry’s eyes flick down at the wine glass, like somehow switching to alcohol has answered his question. Perhaps it has.
“You talked about making a deal, and Uncle Vernon sometimes says that Aunt Petunia made a deal with the devil by taking me in,” he says, and Hell below, Crowley wants to actually hurt these people. “You mentioned sin a few minutes ago, and people say that talking to a snake led to the original sin. And, no offense because you’ve been wonderful to me so far, but you don’t seem like you’re used to being nice to people.”
A second snap of his fingers, a second glass of wine, and Crowley collects himself enough to answer.
“You are a very, very clever young man to have noticed all of that,” he says finally. “Though, to discredit you a bit, I’m also absolute shit at talking to children.”
“You’re not, though,” Harry retorts, shaking his head. “You just keep believing you are.”
This kid is going to burn him alive.
“Be that as it may,” he says, moving on, “I’m not the—the devil. The thing about those, er, those stories is that if people don’t read the scripture closely, they tend to get a lot of the details wrong.”
Harry sits back from his half finished food. “Okay. What would it look like if I got the details right?”
Despite himself, Crowley grins. He hasn’t ever gotten to tell this particular story to anyone, not once in six thousand years. Everyone always either knows it already or doesn’t care to hear it from him.
“The devil was an angel once,” he starts, tapping the edge of his wineglass to refill it. “Did you know that? His name was Lucifer. The Morningstar, some called him. Brightest light in the sky. But he wasn’t just bright physically. He was brilliant. Understood things no one else but God did, how things worked, why they worked that way. He understood things enough, eventually, to doubt that God’s way was the proper way. He asked questions. Voiced concerns. Some of the other angels, once they saw his logic, agreed with him.
“Thing is, you don’t just go around acting like God’s wrong and get away with it. We—or, the angels, rather—know that now. God expects obedience. But back then, there were no consequences yet. Then, suddenly, there were.”
He thinks about Falling and pauses to take a drink. Perhaps he should have just started with Eden, to keep from explaining all this.
But, really, telling the story right means telling it fully, and he might never get to share it like this again.
“Lucifer was cast out. A new realm was created, just to punish him. Hell, God called it. He was sent there and ordered to rule it. If he wanted to design things so much and make his own decisions, well, he had full license there to do whatever he wanted. His followers, which included anyone that spent time with him and found that room for doubt, were sent shortly thereafter. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of angels, mind you, banished to Hell.”
“For asking?” Harry interrupts, aghast. “But that’s… why?”
It’s a question Crowley has spent, in aggregate, around two centuries of time asking himself. That specific question: why? He doesn’t have an answer that feels genuine for himself, but thanks to Aziraphale, and others to a lesser degree, he’s got something approximating a decent explanation.
“Let’s say you want to build a castle,” he says, spreading his hands out flat on the table. “You know what you want the castle to look like, and you know how to make it just right. But castles are bloody massive, yeah? Can’t do it all by your lonesome and expect to get anything done quickly. So, what do you do? You hire builders. You give them the blueprints, you show them how to do it all, and you tell them, ‘be my hands, do the work, it’ll turn out right.’
“And then, after giving those builders everything they need, everything they want, they have the gall to challenge you on it. ‘Do you really want the bathroom there? Because the light comes in better from over here, and yeah, it makes the plumbing a bit wonky, but we could sort that out.’ Stuff that doesn’t actually improve anything, because a gain in one direction means a loss in another.”
“Okay,” Harry says, trooper that he is. He sets his fork down. “I put my fork here, and you move it here.” He moves his fork to the other side of the plate. “And, like, okay, but why bother?”
“Clever lad,” Crowley says, pointing at him in confirmation. “What those questions do do, however, is gum up the machine. Suddenly, a tenth of your castle isn’t getting built because a group of workers are too busy faffing about, rethinking your perfectly adequate blueprints. And maybe, maybe, one of them might have a slight improvement here and there, but to you, humoring even one of them means considering all of them. What is one tiny improvement, if that means never getting the building done at all? Why have workers if all they do is slow you down?”
“Better to fire that group, so the fussing stops,” Harry finishes. He looks troubled. “I get that, but… but isn’t that kind of mean? They’re people. Yeah, you hired them for a job, but why not sit them down and talk to them first? See if maybe they’d understand the problem and get back to work on their own?”
Crowley smiles, somewhat sadly, down at the table. “Yeah, I’ve asked that, too. Loads, honestly. I wish—well, it doesn’t quite matter what I wish.”
“Yes, it does,” Harry says. He leans forward, putting his elbows on the table to emphasize his point. “Yes, Mister Crowley, it does matter. I want to hear it.”
To his horror, Crowley has to blink back a wave of heat in his eyes. He’s not soft about this stuff, not anymore. He’s over it. He is.
But—but no one, not even Aziraphale, has ever said anything like that to him. With the demons, it’s all who cares, move on. With the angels, it’s all it’s Her plan, you should never have doubted. No one’s ever stopped and told him that his thoughts, no matter how futile or counterproductive, are worth saying just to say them.
“I wish I’d had that chance, that’s all,” he says, shrugging to affect nonchalance. “I wish I’d gotten this talk about builders, but from Her. I see it so clearly now, and I know She could have just… She could have saved us, loads of us, if She’d slowed down that one time to talk to us. I don’t know why She didn’t. S’pose I never will.”
“You’re one of the banished ones,” Harry concludes softly. “You were an angel.”
Crowley takes a deep breath, telling himself that there’s no room for sippy-sappy nonsense in his chest when it’s so very full of air. He holds that breath, then lets it out. The tightness eases.
“I was.” He picks up his wineglass and swirls its contents around. “And now I’m a demon. New name, new abilities, new hopes and dreams, all of it. I like to think there are bits of the old me left over, but most of it’s just… renovated.”
“A demon,” Harry repeats, taking care with the word like it’s made of glass. Or, more appropriately, made of dynamite. “So those aren’t little red men with arrowheads on their tails?”
Crowley splutters out a shocked laugh, which, judging by the curl of Harry’s lips, was his precise purpose in asking.
“No,” he says. “We invented those, actually. No one’s going to worry about a shifty human that looks a bit off when they’re too busy worrying about red imps, or whatever. You humans, you’re a gullible lot sometimes.”
“Tell me,” Harry says conversationally, “did you know there’s been a weirdly large fly on your ceiling this whole time?”
Going cold, Crowley looks up, thinking of Beelzebub’s swarm of flies and how bad things would be if they had spies in his flat.
The ceiling is bare.
He turns accusing eyes on Harry, who gives him a massive, shit-eating grin. “Gullible is what you make of it. Learned that one from ol’ Dudders.”
“You twerp,” Crowley hisses, more impressed than he wants to be, and more than a little chagrined, too. “Thinking you’re all clever and cute. Joke’s on you—I’ve got your number now.”
Harry shrugs. “Good. I don’t want to be some sad charity case, you know. I’m not like that, not on the inside. I just haven’t been allowed to be much else on the outside.”
Crowley considers him. “Okay, let’s set some house rules, then. Ask whatever. Question whatever. I may know best on some things, so if I seem like I really know what I’m talking about, trust that I do. If it seems like I’m guessing, trust that I am guessing. I’ll never fault you for being yourself, although I may gripe at you about it. And our other ones still apply, too: You get overwhelmed about something, you tell me so I can make it stop. I won’t know unless you tell me. Sound good?”
“And I’m keeping this stuff secret,” Harry reminds him. “Not because I have to, but because you asked. And because, well, who would believe me?”
Crowley grins. “There’s a good lad. So, want to hear the next bit of the story?”
Harry scoots his chair forward. “Yes.”
The tale continues. Crowley tells him about being the Serpent of Eden and explains that the apple Eve ate wasn’t just some forbidden fruit, it was a physical manifestation of Knowledge. The Garden was, for all intents and purposes, exactly like an enclosure in a zoo; Crowley simply vanished the glass.[3]
From there, his job became humdrum: Tempt people into committing sins so that their souls would go to Hell instead of Heaven. Most demons do this by planting insidious thoughts in people’s minds. Crowley, however, figured out that the seeds for damnation were already in people’s minds and just needed fertilizing. Thus, he doesn’t create new thoughts as much as he creates situations where the preexisting thoughts become a lot more reasonable.
In other words, he pulls pranks. Annoying ones, and the more people he gets with them, the better. He’d rather inconvenience a thousand people and have a tenth of them do something about it than prod a hundred individual minds into action. His methods, he tells Harry, have been the subject of big controversy down below, but his results speak for themselves.
“So… is that what you want to do to the Dursleys?” Harry asks, frowning. “Tempt them so they go to Hell? That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”
Here, Crowley hesitates, not wanting to hurt Harry’s feelings, but not able to tell the truth otherwise.
“Your cousin’s a kid, so I won’t mess with him too much either way,” he says, wanting to get that out of the way. “Kids are protected from that sort of thing. If we’re talking about your aunt and uncle, I don’t need to tempt them. Actually, I reckon one of my lot’s already done some work there, if they’ve had you for ten years and still don’t see you as one of their own. That kind of hatred… it isn’t natural. Not how the human brain tends to work without some influence. I’m sorry if that’s bad news.”
Harry bites his lip, looking more upset than he’s been this whole time. He thinks for a long, hard minute.
“It is bad, but it helps,” he says eventually. “Helps explain why they are the way they are, I mean. Them going to Hell, though…. I know they’re awful, but I love them, in my own way. They’ve kept me fed, mostly, and they kept me safe when I couldn’t look out for myself. It’s a shame they’re going to suffer.”
Crowley thinks that’s inordinately generous of him, but he wisely keeps quiet.
“But what you’ve said demons do,” Harry continues, “planting seeds or whatever… that means that what humans do is still their own choice, right? No matter what influence there is, at the end of the day, they choose how to act toward the world. Including how the Dursleys acted toward me. Is that right?”
“Very right.” Crowley twists the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. “God gave humans free will, and that is absolute. We can’t send anyone to Hell on our own. All we can do is test humans, push their buttons, that sort of thing.”
“Right,” Harry says. “So… so if that’s where the Dursleys end up, that’s their doing. They go to church every week—I’m not allowed to, on account of not being made in God’s image, or something, but they do—so they ought to know better.”
Crowley isn’t sure he’s ever going to get used to these small, catastrophic comments of Harry’s. He’s not sure he wants to.
“You are made in Her image,” he says with finality. “Big or small, clever or dull, beautiful or ugly, you are exactly what She wants you to be, and She loves you for it. I have more reason to lie about that than anyone, so trust that if I’m saying this to you, it’s the truth. You hear me?”
Harry nods, blushing a little. “I hear you. And, er, thanks. For everything, actually. Like, wow, everything about today has just been… the coolest.”
Crowley eyes him dubiously. “You’re sitting across from a demon right now, and there’s a gigantic boa constrictor somewhere in this flat that will know where you’re sleeping tonight. You sure you want to be thanking me?”
“Eloa’s not gonna hurt me,” Harry protests, sounding offended. “She’s lovely. And you’ve been nice, too. Should I not thank you?”
Confronted with the dilemma of not wanting thanks because it goes against his nature, but also wanting thanks because it suggests he’s doing things well, Crowley just shrugs. “I just don’t want you to be caught up in how something feels and miss the way that it is. Humans do that too much. Like I said, question everything.”
In a full departure from the timid, fearful boy he was at the zoo, Harry rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Question everything. Well, fine, first question: How should I do the dishes? You have no sponges. And no soap.”
Crowley takes a second to register the change in subject. “Oh. Just….”
He snaps his fingers, and everything is cleaned and put away. The leftovers wind up in a trashcan, which should empty itself in the morning.
Harry, with eyes as wide as saucers, snaps his fingers.
Nothing happens.
“I’ll rephrase,” Crowley says, trying his best not to laugh. “Let me ‘just.’ I can do that. You can’t. You’ll be able to get close, someday, but you can’t perform miracles like I can.”
“That was a miracle?” Harry gapes, then shakes his head. “Actually, no, don’t answer that. I’m hitting the ‘overwhelmed’ button, I think.”
“About time.” Crowley relaxes in his seat, which amounts to spreading himself over it like he’s forgotten how to sit properly. “You’re handling all of this surprisingly well, you know. I won’t blame you if you lose it and want to go back home tomorrow.”
“I won’t.”
Harry stands and paces away, making a lap of the living room. He pauses at various moments to examine the few adornments in the room, like Crowley’s outdated (but highly aesthetic) phone set on the desk and the massive throne that sits behind it. He brushes his fingertips over the back of the new sofa as well, either forgetting or ignoring that it wasn’t there when he arrived.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” he begins slowly. “I’m so grateful. It’s just… why help me? Is this something you do, or…. I mean, why me? Why now?”
Crowley stands, only to lean against the wall of the living room so hard, he’s practically sitting down all over again. He can’t help it; no matter how hard his body tries to be human, it still feels serpentine. Unless he makes a conscious effort, he’s constantly laying on things.
One might expect that this is yet another of Harry’s questions that Crowley finds difficult to answer. To an extent, it is. There are emotions involved that he cannot parse and reactions he cannot trace back to root sources. But he’s familiar with vast, existential queries like this, and he knows that often, people aren’t looking for solid answers to them. They’re looking for validation. Crowley is, above most anything else, a master at validating.[4]
What he wants to say is that Harry is an exceptional human being. When people talk about exceptional humans, they tend to think of ones that have done great, revolutionary things, like Albert Einstein or the Marquis de Sade. They focus on accomplishments. Crowley sees things differently. For him, an exceptional person isn’t one who does objectively impressive things, but rather one who does hard things. Things that might appear small, but nevertheless take enormous effort or fortitude. Everything Harry has done thus far, in Crowley’s opinion, has been exceptional.
He does not say that, however. It is too much for Harry, overwhelmed as he is, to hear. And, frankly, it’s far too earnest a thing for Crowley to voice without feeling like a sentimental idiot.
Instead, he does what he does best and deflects.
“Why did you vanish that glass? I know you didn’t mean to, but some part of you wanted it gone, or it wouldn’t have happened. You wanted that snake freed. Why that one? Why in that moment?”
He asks it to prompt Harry into distraction, so that he is left defending his own actions instead of examining Crowley’s. But, as is the case with Harry over and over again, he doesn’t get the reaction he expects.
“Oh,” Harry says, tilting his head and staring off into space. “Yeah. That’s… yeah, that makes sense, I guess. Okay.”
He pauses as his body swells and arches with a huge, spine-cracking yawn.
“Is there a place I could sleep, maybe? I can take the couch if you’re not using it.”
“Don’t be daft.” Crowley straightens up, putting their largely unspoken moment to the side. “Let me show you your room.”
Harry’s new bedroom is a bit excessive, once Crowley can see how his hasty miracle manifested into an array of choices. The ceiling made of constellations is gorgeous and might work its way to all the other rooms in the flat, but the life-size Eloa plushie in the armchair is a bit on-the-nose. The ornate, serpentine carvings on the bed frame and dresser, too, come across as rather extravagant. He’s put the kid to bed in a snake’s den.
If Harry minds, though, he doesn’t show it. He takes in the appointments of the room with childlike awe.
“Wow,” he whispers, clutching at the hem of his oversized shirt as if afraid to touch anything. “This is—this is my room?”
“Yep.”
Harry takes a deep breath and swallows once, loudly. “I’ve never had a room before. I wager this is an excellent first one.”
You should have seen my cupboard, he said earlier. Crowley wrote that phrasing off, presuming he’d meant something about storage for his possessions. In context, though….
Demonic hearts are not designed to be quite so affected by such little things.
Crowley clears his throat loudly and gestures in broad, vague strokes that hopefully make him seem like he couldn’t care less. “Do whatever you want with it. If you want to change anything, just let me know. Loo’s across the way—can’t miss it—and… and I’ll be around, so… yeah.”
“Understood.” Harry turns and smiles at him. It is an exceptional, affecting smile. “Thanks, Mister Crowley.”
Crowley shrugs and backs away before he can do something dreadful, like hug him. “Don’t mention it. I mean that; you’ll murder my reputation if you do.”
He strides off to the sound of Harry’s laughter and makes for his own bedroom.
Demons, as with angels, do not sleep. They can, if they want time to pass them by, but they have no biological need for it. All this being said, Crowley has no idea why his body feels like it could lay down and rest for a century.
Eloa is curled up on Crowley’s bed, basking in the heat lamps Crowley has installed on the ceiling overhead. She raises her head when he comes in.
“The hatchling sleeps?”
“Yeah,” he replies, wiping a hand over his face and sprawling out next to her. “Fuck. I’m in over my head.”
She winds her way over to him, lamp-warm and heavy. She feels like a long, slim hot water bottle against his side. “I do not understand.”
“Childcare.” He says it like a dirty word. “It’s different with us, you know? Once snakes hatch, they’re good to go. Human children, though… there are a million ways to ruin a kid. A billion.”
“You’ll ruin him?”
“I might.” Crowley stares up at the orange glow of the lamps and takes off his sunglasses so he can feel the heat soak into his eyeballs. “I will. I am, by definition, a bad influence. I should… I should just call Aziraphale. He’ll take Harry away, probably, but it’s for the best. He deserves a fighting chance.”
She hisses quietly, tasting the air. “Does he need to learn to fight? Is that how humans grow? I can help!”
“No.” Crowley peers down at her. “Don’t fight him, Eloa, that’s stupi—that’s not what I meant. We need to protect him. That’s the problem, see. I’m meant to protect him, but I’m the thing humans need protecting from.”
Her tail curves over his calf. “I shall fight you, then.”
“No, darling, that’s—” he pauses, a new thought dawning that might be terrible, but might just work. “Actually… do you want to protect him? Not from me, but, like, generally?”
“If you seek it,” she replies. “It would honor me to please you, Crowley. I can protect hatchling Harry in service to you.”
The miracle involved is quite large, but on paper, it will look nondescript: Crowley gifts a snake. He helps snakes all the time. Never before, however, has he gifted a snake by giving it a new section of brain.
Snakes are not, by their nature, pack animals. They do not form attachments. They can socialize, especially when they are bored mindless in glass boxes with nothing to do but hiss conversation at each other from afar, but things like affection and loyalty surpass their capabilities.
With one long-fingered tap to her head, Eloa becomes the very first snake in all of Creation to care about something other than themselves.
She rears back, coiling tighter in surprise as she processes a bevy of emotions no snake has felt before. “What is this?”
“Love,” Crowley says. “It’ll help you protect him.”
She curls around his forearm, nuzzling her flat nose against his shirtsleeve. “Kind Crowley. Warm Crowley. Yes, I love him. I shall protect him. Thank you, Crowley.”
He’s been getting altogether too many thanks today. “Don’t mention it.”
Notes:
3. Upon later contemplation, Crowley would second-guess his decision to relate his notably intentional temptation with Harry’s impulsive bit of magic. But only much, much later, and only after three bottles of delicious wine and an hour of scolding from a furious Aziraphale. He would not, however, find it in himself to regret it. ↺ go back
4. Granted, his normal version of validation involves encouraging folks to surrender to their unhealthy desires. Temptation, at its core, is validation. Nevertheless, Crowley is a creative enough demon to suit his skills to whatever purpose he deems necessary. ↺ go back
Chapter 3
Notes:
I am chronically bad at responding to comments (I'm sorry!) but I am reading all of them, and I have to say, I LOVE the speculation about potential future developments. Y'all are plotting, and it tickles me to no end.
Enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Crowley spends the night in his study, reading his new collection of books on child rearing. He hates reading. His snake eyes don’t process the letters right, often mixing them up until each word is a jumble of symbols. A few words here and there are no trouble, but once a bit of writing is expanded enough to involve chapters, he’s in trouble.
For Harry’s sake, though, he bears it. A tension headache is preferable to the alternatives, all of which include handing Harry over to someone else. As little as Crowley trusts himself, he trusts others even less; Heaven invented adoption agencies and the foster care system, but Hell made them the bureaucratic monstrosities they are today. A kid like Harry would have a tough time of it, and even if he did manage to land himself in a stable home, there would be no guarantee that it would be a good one. He could wind up with another set of Dursleys, if not worse.
And, though Crowley will never say as much to Harry himself, there’s something off about him. Something inhuman, or at least something not Harry. It’s louder when he sleeps, more present in his aura somehow. Crowley can’t write it off the way he can when Harry’s awake.
The trouble is, Crowley can’t figure out what the blasted thing is.
Whatever it is, it is more powerful and insidious than any ten year old’s mind should be. Fiendish. Honestly, if Crowley didn’t know better, he’d wonder whether Harry was the antichrist.
But he can’t be; if the antichrist came to Earth, Crowley would at least get a memo, or something. He wouldn’t be blindsided by a ten-year-old spawn of Satan in the middle of London Zoo.
It’s something else, then. Not Satanic, but reminiscent thereof.
That is, above everything else about the last twenty-four hours, deeply distressing. And it means that Harry Potter, whoever and whatever he is, cannot go to some random, human family that the fool government deems fit.
The reading helps. Ten year olds are hardy creatures, he learns. Endlessly curious and energetic, but independent enough to make their own decisions. If Harry needs or wants something, he’ll know to ask for it. He’s capable of disagreement and conflict.
More reassuringly, he’s capable of healing, too. The chapters on early life trauma indicate that maltreatment has permanent consequences on children as young as infants, but the severity of those consequences magnify the longer the trauma lasts. Getting Harry away from the Dursleys quickly was a wise decision. Now, if Harry is given good models of how people should treat each other, and he learns all the ways the Dursleys were wrong, he can grow up to be relatively normal.
Meaning that Crowley needs Aziraphale. He keeps looping back to that conclusion over and over again. They balance each other out—good and evil, hard and soft, critical and magnanimous. Under Crowley’s care, Harry would learn to be fickle, mischievous, and opportunistic. Under Aziraphale’s care, he would learn to be trusting, naïve, and benevolent. With both of them, he may—may—be able to take the best from both worlds.
And, as he sits in the privacy of his study, Crowley can admit that he wants Aziraphale to be involved. Aziraphale is a frequent part of Crowley’s life these days, so looping him in just makes sense. The only other option is to hide Harry from him, which would be an awful lot of work and would put distance in a relationship where Crowley (privately, secretly, and consumingly) wants no distance at all. Aziraphale must know.
The sooner the better, he supposes. As nice a thought as it is to keep Harry all to himself until they’re comfortable around each other, the books say that children form attachments quickly and make immature, illogical assumptions thereafter. In other words, if Crowley establishes himself and Harry as a two-person team, the introduction of Aziraphale will feel like an invasion in a pre-existing space; if Aziraphale becomes a known entity while Harry is still learning Crowley’s lifestyle, on the other hand, he will be accepted as a normality.
They’ll visit the bookshop today, he decides. They’ve nothing else to do, and he’ll need some way of keeping Harry preoccupied. It’s a positive thing, letting him meet Aziraphale. A healthy thing. Not good, because goodness and badness get mixed up where Crowley is concerned, but… productive.
Harry wakes up early. Crowley hears him moving around just past dawn, and the sounds of activity in the kitchen start soon after.
After a stern lecture to himself about how demons do not fret, so he is not presently anxious, Crowley abandons his book and strolls out into his living room.
Harry is a rumpled mess of black hair and pyjamas, but he lights up when he spots Crowley. “Good morning!”
“Morning,” Crowley replies, casual as can be. He lopes over to the doorway of the kitchen and watches while Harry cracks eggs into a pan. Eloa is a tight coil on the countertop, watching Harry’s every move. “Sleep well?”
“Well as ever,” Harry replies, which isn’t an answer at all. “Do you—I didn’t think about breakfast for you, if you wanted—”
“No need.” Crowley raises an eyebrow at his espresso machine, the only gadget in the whole kitchen that has been trained to know what a raised eyebrow means. The clockwork of chrome tubing starts churning up boiled water obediently. “How was the room? Anything missing?”
Harry turns pink, nudging at the sizzling eggs with a plastic spatula that Crowley never realized he owned. “It’s wonderful, Mister Crowley. I love it.”
“Good.” Crowley adjusts his posture against the doorway, leaning even harder against it. “I was thinking we’d take a little field trip today. There’s a friend of mine you should meet.”
“Oh?” Harry looks over at him. His glasses are broken, Crowley notices belatedly. There’s a jumble of tape in the middle holding the two halves together. “Okay, sure. Are they, er, like you?”
A snort works its way out of Crowley before he can hold it back. “Hardly. We’re quite opposite, Aziraphale and I. You’ll like him, though. Kids usually do.”
“Oh,” Harry says again. For some reason, he grimaces. “Will he like me, do you think?”
“He would be a fool not to,” Eloa says. “If he does not, I shall bite him for you.”
Crowley chokes out a laugh at the vehemence of her hissing. In retrospect, perhaps giving a snake the power of human love all at once was a bit heavy-handed.
“That won’t be necessary, darling,” he tells her, fetching his cup of espresso and taking a long sip. “But I like your gumption. Say, Harry, do you drink espresso? Want some?”
Harry looks at the small cup in Crowley’s fingers and wrinkles his nose. “It smells like coffee.”
“Well, it ought to, considering that’s what it is.”
“Thank you, but no.” Harry takes care to sound polite. “I’m not partial to coffee. It’s very bitter.”
Crowley makes a show of taking a loud slurp from his cup, smacking his lips together. “Just like me.”
No self-respecting demon should like the sound of a child’s laughter quite so much. Luckily, Crowley gave up on respecting himself millennia ago.
He tends to his plants while Harry eats his eggs. They’re excited about the presence of two new bodies in the house; one of his Calathea lancifolia has sprouted two new leaves overnight. Keeping his voice low so that Harry won’t hear, he lectures them that having new people around means nothing, and that he won’t hesitate to punish them if they act out. He doesn’t stop threatening them until they’re all trembling with fear.
Confident anew that he is still quite evil and irredeemable, he bustles Harry into his bedroom after breakfast and shows him the drawers of new, properly sized clothes. He fusses when the new kit makes Harry look even smaller, adjusting the shoulders of his jumper as if doing so will conjure several pounds of fat into place. It doesn’t.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Crowley asks, nudging the temple of Harry’s glasses. The tape falls away from the bridge, no longer needed because the glasses are perfectly unbroken. “Is your hairstyle a look of some sort?”
“No.” Harry, who’s been blushing the whole time Crowley has been fixing his clothes, turns positively magenta. “It just stays like this. Nothing works on it. Actually, hey! It might be a magic thing, now that you mention it.”
“Well, then.” Crowley snaps his fingers, expecting the hair to shape itself into something pleasant. Miracles supersede magic in almost all circumstances, so it should work.
Yet again, though, fussing does nothing. Crowley frowns and snaps again, with no change. “Huh.”
“It’s stubborn,” Harry confides apologetically, like something as foolish as stubbornness should be able to refute Crowley’s hellish authority. “Aunt Petunia shaved it all off once, and it grew back by morning. I’ve just learned to accept it. Do you dislike it?”
Does Crowley dislike that a tuft of keratin and dead skin cells won’t obey the laws of Creation? Yes. Yes, he very much does.
“Not at all,” he says instead. “You’ll fit right in. Aziraphale’s got this ridiculous thatch of blond curls, and my hair only cares about gravity when I want it to. Let’s get going, eh?”
Eloa is too heavy for Harry to hold, even around his shoulders, and she insists on coming along. After a quick argument with her about what to do, Crowley relents and shrinks her down to half size. Now only a meter or so long, she curls up around Harry’s shoulders easily.
And then they’re off in the Bentley.
“Does your friend like snakes?” Harry asks halfway there, grinning while Eloa weaves her new body between his spread fingers. “Is he going to like her?”
“He loves everything,” Crowley says on autopilot, taking a turn sharply. “And he tolerates me just fine, so he shouldn’t have a problem with her.”
“He can’t love everything,” Harry denies, righting himself when the force of the turn bowls him over. “Can he?”
“He can. Same way I loathe everything, just a little bit.”
“Oh. Is he an angel? He is, isn’t he?”
Did he not mention that yet? Oops.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Crowley tells the light not to turn red and flies under it, narrowly avoiding causing an accident. “We go way back. When I was in Eden with Eve, he was the bloke guarding the door.”
Harry hums. “He’s not a fat baby with wings, is he? Same way you’re not a little red man?”
Crowley just about beams at the road, amused all over again. “He’s closer to it than I am. Don’t tell him I said that, though, or he’ll pout all day.”
As usual, a spot near the bookshop happens to become available just as Crowley reaches it. He parks with a squeal of rubber and gets out.
“You drive like a racecar driver,” Harry comments. He looks tiny out here on the street. He grins. “It’s awesome. Uncle Vernon’s super careful with his car, says he doesn’t want to give the dealership people a reason to void the warranty.”
“Warranties are for cowards,” Crowley says with feeling. “Come on, then.”
The sign on the door claims that the bookshop is open, but the shop itself is as empty as ever. Crowley shepherds Harry through the door, ignoring a sudden wave of nerves. He isn’t scared, because there’s no reason to be that way. Disappointing Aziraphale is a rite of passage for Crowley; a century isn’t allowed to pass without a good disappointment or two, these days. It’ll be fine.
Still, he has to hide his hands in his pockets when he calls out, “Angel? You in here?”
“Crowley?” There’s a muffled thump from the back room, then the quick sound of footsteps. “Crowley, my dear, I wasn’t expecting you to—”
Aziraphale clears the door and cuts himself off, dumbstruck at the sight of Harry by Crowley’s side.
The sight of Eloa clasped around Harry’s neck probably doesn’t help, now that Crowley thinks about it.
“—drop in,” Aziraphale finishes quietly. A beat passes, and a warm, tender smile paints itself on his face. “Hello, there, young man.”
Crowley hears Harry take a shaky breath.
“I see what you mean,” he murmurs to Crowley, who has to fight back an unwelcome bark of laughter. He raises his voice. “Hello. I’m Harry. Potter. Harry Potter.”
“Indeed you are, aren’t you?” Aziraphale keeps smiling, but it goes slightly stiff when he turns it toward Crowley. “Is there a reason you have young Mr. Potter in your company, Crowley? I do hope it’s a good one.”
He sounds effortlessly pleasant, but Crowley knows him well enough to hear the grit in his voice. Pleasant, alright, but decidedly not pleased.
“He’s helping me,” Harry says before Crowley can explain himself. Taken aback, Crowley watches as Harry takes a purposeful, courageous step forward and becomes every inch the brave boy he was in the Reptile House. “We agreed about it, you see. He didn’t like the way my relatives were treating me, so he offered to help me leave them.”
“Fascinating.” Aziraphale’s smile might as well be made of marble. “And in return? There is a return, of course?”
“It’s not—” Crowley starts, but Harry interrupts.
“That’s for my relatives to find out.” Harry’s voice is remarkably even. “I’m not meant to do anything to pay him back. Except—well, we have rules. I need to tell him when I’m overwhelmed about things, and I’m supposed to ask him whatever questions I want. I haven’t been allowed to ask questions without punishment before, so that bit’s really nice.”
Crowley’s heart tugs sharply in his chest, and he dips his head to hide his expression. If anyone knows about getting punished for asking questions, it’s him.
The little bugger knows it, too, he slowly realizes. Harry picked up on the similarities last night and is using them now—communicating volumes to everyone in the room without explicitly saying anything. If Aziraphale understands all the implications, which he most certainly does, he now has a full arsenal of information to work with.
Suddenly, the ache disappears; Crowley’s not sure he’s been so proud since he invented car horns.
He looks up just in time to see Aziraphale soften as he takes stock of Harry again. This time, Crowley can see him noticing all the details about Harry, like his size and the hollowness of his cheeks, and also the buzz of magical energy around him and—if the flicker in Aziraphale’s smile is anything to go by—the shadowy alien in Harry’s aura.
“Well, then,” he says, tucking his thumbs into his waistcoat, looking entirely the same but far more genuine about it. He rocks up onto his toes. “It seems to me that this situation calls for a nice chat over some hot chocolate. What do you say?”
When Harry hesitates, Crowley gathers that all that literature about kids forming quick attachments undersold just how quickly they formed. Or, perhaps, how emotional neglect and a dollop of abuse might speed such matters along.
Nevertheless, Harry takes a deep breath and smiles. “Okay.”
Without much delay, the shop is closed and Aziraphale urges them both upstairs to his flat. There’s already a pot of cocoa simmering on the stove, like it’s been there all along. Aziraphale fetches cups the human way, busying himself with the clatter of ceramic while Crowley shows Harry where to sit.
“He’s just surprised,” he murmurs in snake, hoping Harry will notice and appreciate the display of secrecy. “Probably should have called ahead, eh?”
Harry doesn’t reply, but the corners of his lips curl up. Crowley takes that as answer enough.
“Here we are, then,” Aziraphale says cheerily, bringing over two cups of chocolate in saucers and setting one on the coffee table by Harry’s knees. “I expect you don’t want one, my dear?”
“Nah.” Crowley sits in his usual armchair, lounging his limbs all over the place. He waits for Aziraphale to take the other armchair. “So, let’s just get the whole thing over with, shall we? He knows what we are, but only because he figured me out. He’s also learned that he’s got magic, which he didn’t know before we met yesterday. His relatives were right bastards to him, and my guess is that if they treated him like that in public, they weren’t much better in private. Is that right, Harry?”
Harry blushes and nods. “Er, yeah. That’s true.”
“There was a bit of a mishap,” Crowley continues, “involving a wee spot of accidental magic from Harry. You know how the young ones are. His relatives knew it was his doing, and that uncle… well, I’m glad Harry isn’t as attuned to auras as us, let’s just leave it there. He seemed like an alright kid, so I nabbed him. And here we are.”
“You… ‘nabbed’ him,” Aziraphale repeats, brows pinching. “As in, you stole him? His family doesn’t know where he is?”
“Yet. They will, don’t worry.”
“They won’t care,” Harry confides. “I mean, they try not to lose me, but… but they won’t miss me.”
“Oh, sweet boy, of course they—” Aziraphale’s eyes meet Crowley’s, and Crowley shakes his head imperceptibly. Aziraphale dims. “I’m sure they do miss you on the inside.”
“Tell him where you slept, Harry. Before last night, I mean.” Crowley doesn’t want to hear it, but he thinks Aziraphale needs to. And, if his reading was right, forcing kids to recount bad experiences helps them deal with them, or some rot like that.
“I, er… well, they have this cupboard under the stairs, see,” Harry explains, fidgeting. “It’s not so bad. I’ve got some blankets, and my cousin hates wool so I got his Christmas socks to keep my hands and feet warm, and the spiders aren’t scary once you get used to them.”
It takes six thousand years’ worth of disregard for Crowley to keep his expression calm. He doesn’t know what he expected, but he wasn’t prepared for the truth of the matter, regardless.
Aziraphale pales, looking over at Crowley like he might admit that Harry is joking. When he doesn’t, Aziraphale carefully sets down his hot chocolate. The cup rattles in its saucer.
“I see,” he says carefully. When he looks up from the coffee table, there’s a smiting light in his eyes that complements the searing ball in Crowley’s belly. “How long did this go on?”
Harry frowns at him. “What do you mean? I’ve always slept there. Sometimes, I’m in there during the day, too, if I’ve done something wrong. It locks from the outside.”
“Fuck.” Crowley stands and strides off to the edge of the room. He pushes a hand through his hair, not trusting himself to face Harry just yet. It’s not that he’s stunned; he’s familiar with the utter dregs of humanity, and he’s well aware that locking a child in a cupboard is far from the worst thing the Dursleys could have done. It’s that it doesn’t matter how much worse it could have been, because it’s already far worse than it ever needed to be.
Harry’s a sweet kid. More than that, he’s a kid. Crowley’s dozed off for longer stretches than Harry’s been alive. He couldn’t have done anything so bad that he deserved—
There’s simply no justification for that kind of cruelty, no reason—
Not everyone in the world has bedrooms to spare, sure, but to single out a child is just—
Even Victorian street urchins had—
The room behind him is perfectly silent.
And the air around him is foggy, he realizes. He’s steaming.
Shit. Not good. He needs to not be steaming.
“Ssssorry,” he manages, his old lisp slipping out. His canines are sharp, too, halfway to dropping into fangs.
He fills his lungs, telling himself that he’s got no room for outrage when he’s so full of air. No place for feelings to exist at all. He holds the breath to the count of eight and lets it out.
The important thing to remember is that Harry was in that awful situation, but he’s not anymore. Crowley fixed that. There’s a nice, warm bed and a ceiling full of stars reserved for him now, and it’s his for as long as he wants it.
“Sorry,” he repeats, composed enough now to turn back around. “Didn’t mean to swear. Or, erm, steam.”
Aziraphale grimaces sympathetically. “I might have gone a bit bright, myself. No harm done.” He reaches over and pats Harry’s knee. “And it’s not your fault in the slightest, Harry, dear, so put all those thoughts right out of your head. You’re very good for telling us.”
“I didn’t mean to make you upset.” Harry’s voice squeezes itself out. His hands are a tight tangle in his lap. “I don’t have to talk about it—it’s just, you asked.”
Oh, Hell’s blazing fury, Crowley really did fuck up.
“Nonsense,” he says, sending the remainder of his anger out to an isolated copse of trees in Indonesia, which promptly catches fire so intensely, the whole thing is ash within seconds. He crosses back to his seat, then ignores it in favor of plopping down next to Harry. “Steaming a bit is healthy for us demonfolk. Keeps the skin nice and fresh, eh? Like angel said, no harm done.”
Harry doesn’t buy it. “Don’t be angry, please, I’m okay—really, I’m fine, I—”
“No one’s angry at you, darling boy,” Aziraphale says soothingly. He trades a look with Crowley filled with heavenly flame that communicates that the key words of his promise are ‘at you.’ If Crowley doesn’t confront the Dursleys, Aziraphale certainly will. But for now, he is all calm joy as he pats Harry’s knee again. “Thank you for being honest with us about something so difficult. We won’t go off like that again, I promise.”
Harry turns to Crowley, though, all green eyes and anxious brows. “Mister Crowley?”
If that doesn’t scorch his heart like it’s one of those Indonesian trees, Crowley doesn’t know what will.
“Don’t worry about me,” he says, waving his fingers and pulling a small notepad out of thin air. “I might be tweaking what I do to these relatives of yours, though. They might have some big inconveniences coming their way.”
He makes an obvious display of writing CONSTIPATION - TWO WEEKS! on the pad. It’s gauche as all get out, but it does the job of breaking Harry into giggles.
“Aunt Petunia hates messes,” he advises sagely, tipping his head at the notepad. “And she’s terrified of aging. Has a whole bunch of posh creams and stuff I’m not allowed to touch. Uncle Vernon’s thing is gay people—he hates them. Hates anyone not like him, really, but he’s really fixated on them. If any of that helps.”
The little hellion. As soon as Crowley finds something Harry likes, he’s getting him a dozen of them.
“That’ll do nicely, Harry,” Crowley says, grinning broadly. He writes it all down, then hands Harry the notepad. “If you think of other stuff, be a good lad and write it down for me, will you? I value your expertise.”
Harry takes the pad and pen, bright red but looking far less anxious. “Okay.”
“Crowley.” Aziraphale looks unimpressed. “You’re tempting him? Really?”
“It’s not tempting if I’m the one doing the bad acts.” Crowley crosses his arms. “Tell me this isn’t justice, and I’ll stop.”
A beat passes, then Aziraphale busies himself with a stack of books by his chair. “Well, justice or no, it’s hardly a good example to set for poor Harry. Drink up, dearest, your chocolate’s getting cold.”
Harry obliges and lets out a happy noise at his first sip. “It’s so good!”
It better be, considering Crowley can smell the grace in it from where he sits. That hot cocoa should, quite literally, taste like Heaven. With that sip alone, Harry probably just became one of the more blessed humans to exist this century.
Coming to Aziraphale was such a smart idea.
“So, we’re done with that lot,” he says aloud, watching Eloa curl her way down Harry’s arm to watch his pen move across the page. Vernon hates being interrupted. “Let’s talk about the future, shall we? Now, I don’t know about you, angel, but I trust the system about as much as I trust Hastur, meaning not at all. Certainly not like I trust us.”
“Us?” Aziraphale repeats dubiously. He opens his mouth, and millennia of denials seem poised at his lips. There is no ‘us.’ You go too fast for me. You’re a demon, and I’m an angel.
But then he looks at Harry—who is doodling a snake at the corner of the pad, and judging from the jagged zig-zag of hair on the snake’s head, it’s meant to be Crowley—and the protest dies there.
Some things are bigger than the feud of the cosmos, after all. Tending to a child in need happens to be one of them.
“I think young Harry shall be quite looked after with us,” Aziraphale resolves, patting his belly. “I have an extra room here, Harry. Would you like that?”
Harry looks up. He’s started a second snake, and this one has eyelashes, seemingly to suggest that it’s female. Eloa.
“Am I—”
He turns away from Aziraphale’s warm, fatherly, loving self and turns to Crowley, who has been idly pinching a nail-sized flame between his forefinger and thumb.
“Do you not want me to stay with you?” He sounds timid again.
He wants to stay with Crowley? Over a literal angel?
“Codswallop,” Crowley replies blankly, for lack of anything better to say. Everyone always picks Aziraphale over him. It’s just the natural order of things.[5]
He clears his throat and decides to stop worrying so much about natural orders, where Harry is concerned.
“Perish the thought, hatchling. You can stay with me all you like. It’s just—well, my place is a bit dark for you, isn’t it?”
A spark lights up in Harry’s eyes, borne neither of hellfire nor smiting flame, but of something equally incandescent. “What’s so bad about dark places? Don’t make me mention my cupboard again, because I will. It was always dark in there. And safe.”
The manipulation is transparent—Crowley would even go so far as to call it sloppy, were it coming from anything more than a ten-year-old child—but it settles the matter. He has no problem at all keeping Harry (and Eloa, of course) at his flat. Rather, he’s quite proud he’s done a pleasing enough job that Harry wants to come back.
From there, they agree that Aziraphale shall be the default babysitter for occasions when Crowley has to work (“I can’t come with you?” “No, you little terror, you cannot tag along whilst I’m demoning,”) and a frequent houseguest, besides. If Crowley had it his way, Aziraphale would just move in and be done with it, but he resists suggesting as much aloud. He’s not sure he’d be able to bear it if Aziraphale refused him—there’s a reason to live together now, so if rejection came, Aziraphale would really mean it—and he wouldn’t be able to go home and drink himself into a stupor afterwards, either. Better to let that sleeping dog lie for now.
Eventually, the conversation dwindles down to those subjects they cannot discuss in front of Harry. They settle him down with one of the books from Aziraphale’s hidden collection of magical works and head downstairs to the back room of the shop.
“Goodness gracious, Crowley,” Aziraphale sighs once they’re alone. “You’ve gotten yourself in the thick of it now, haven’t you?”
“Well, what’d you expect me to do?” Crowley sighs, taking off his glasses to rub at his eyes. “That fucking family, angel. I’m not sure he’d have survived many more years under that roof. It’s a miracle—maybe a real one—he lasted as long as he did.”
“I’m quite proud of you, you know.”
Crowley pulls his face away from his massaging fingers, nonplussed. “You are?”
“Immensely.” Aziraphale gives him one of those small smiles of his that shine brighter than the sun. “Say what you will, but there’s a bit of goodness in you yet. Saving an innocent.”
“Excuse me?” Crowley scoffs, even though there’s hardly another way for him to label what he’s done. “I’m—I’m bespoiling an innocent! Ignore what I said earlier—he likes dark things and wants me to screw with his family. This is occult all over. How dare you?”
The small smile splits into a grin, one that Crowley knows and lov—doesn’t hate. But just as quickly as it comes, it fades.
“I am worried about him,” Aziraphale admits. “You can sense it, can’t you? His unfriendly occupant? I never know quite how many of our powers your kind held onto.”
Crowley’s optimistic mood takes a nosedive. He cranes an ear and just barely hears the chattering hisses of Eloa and Harry from above.
“I can sense something,” he says quietly. “Not sure what it is, but I know it doesn’t belong with him.”
“To his people, it’s called a Horcrux, I believe.” Aziraphale lets out a huffy, worried sigh. “I had a book on them a while back, but I’m not sure if it’s still around. Nasty business, Horcruxes.”
“What are they?”
“Abominations.” Aziraphale brushes his hands nervously over his jacket. “Makes my skin crawl just to think about them. What you have to understand is that your people and mine are immensely powerful in most ways, but our connection to God limits us. There are some things that even the most righteous of angels or the most depraved of demons cannot do, because God’s will commands it.”
Though he loathes the idea of still being on God’s leash, Crowley nods. “I’ve come across some of that. Demons don’t like messing with kids because they don’t feel ready for us yet.”
“Exactly!” Aziraphale lights up. “It is an instinctual urge: We do not feel restrained, but rather repulsed. A magnet, forced the wrong way round.”
“Sure, yeah. And?”
Aziraphale’s eyes drift to the side, and the air in the room piques with melancholy. “One of those repulsive things for us is the mutilation of souls.”
Phantom ants skitter over Crowley’s skin, just as predicted. “What? Who—that’s not possible!”
“It is,” Aziraphale corrects. “Just not by us. We cannot interfere with a human soul, not directly, because God’s will precludes us from it. Humans, however, do not play by God’s rules. Their power is limited, but the range of things they can do with that power is not.”
Crowley thinks of the looming, shadowy presence in Harry’s aura and goes cold all over. “Angel, get to the bloody point. What is that thing in his head?”
“In short? A piece of someone else’s soul.”
The words come as a blow that nearly knocks Crowley over. Aziraphale called this stuff repulsive, but that word doesn’t cover the feeling boiling up inside him. It’s abhorrent, vile, despicable. He doesn’t just want to move away from it, he wants it eradicated.
“Fucking. How?”
“Magic users, Dark ones, came to realize that splitting one’s soul granted one a kind of immortality. Think of it like discorporation, where your body dies, but you remain and can find a host or have another body built for you. Horcruxes are… well, bits of soul that, once sectioned off, can be stored somewhere else on the mortal plane. That way, if the witch or wizard dies, their Horcrux can bring them back to life. Do you see?”
He sees, alright. He wishes he saw less.
He bends over and puts his hands on his knees. “I’m gonna be sick.”
“I felt much the same when I first learned about them.” Aziraphale steps close and rests a hand on Crowley’s shoulder, gifting him with a tiny blessing of calm. It works, slightly, but he still feels peaky. “I’m sorry, my dear, but it does get worse. In order to split one’s soul, one must commit the ultimate offense: murder. Intentional, premeditated homicide, at which point the soul fragment breaks free and finds an available receptacle.”
“Like a fucking child?”
Aziraphale makes a small, distressed noise. “Now that, I haven’t heard of. The book I read spoke of a ritual where the person has to anoint the desired object—an object, not a living thing. The anointment cleanses it so that it is spiritually blank and has room for the fragment. For it to work on a person….”
“They have to be spiritually blank,” Crowley finishes hollowly. He needs about a vat of wine, he thinks. Or maybe a nap that lasts a millennium. Hell, both. “Uninfluenced. Pure. Like a baby.”
The hand on his shoulder trembles, and Aziraphale takes a shaky inhale. “Oh. Oh, no. Crowley. No.”
“I hate it, too.”
“No, Crowley.” Aziraphale bustles away, and Crowley tilts his head up, still bent over, to watch him rifling through one of his many sets of drawers. “Something happened to a baby. Oh, when was that? It would have been—blast it, a few years ago maybe? Halloween, I recall. But which one?”
“What are you on about now?” Crowley demands, giving up on standing completely. He collapses to a seat on the floor, pressing a hand to his aching chest. “What is it?”
“If I’m right,” Aziraphale murmurs, ignoring him, “it would have been ten—no, nine? Eight? Bah, all three, then. That many years ago. Halloween. That means—”
He snaps, and three thick newspapers materialize in mid-air and fall to the floor a foot from Crowley’s boots. Aziraphale descends on them, spreading the sets out so they lay side by side. The pictures are moving; it’s that magical newspaper, The Daily Prophet.
“This one!” Aziraphale points at the middle one excitedly, and against his better judgment, Crowley leans forward to take a look. “The demise of the infamous Lord Voldemort. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure.”
“Maybe.” Crowley casts his mind back, but he’s always tended to avoid magical culture. It weirds him out, people having all those skills and using them for normal stuff. And they’re kitschy, too, always coming up with cutesy names like flobberworm and grindylow.
Lord Voldemort, however, rings some sort of a bell. The crew down below has talked about him, he thinks.
“Acutely evil,” Aziraphale tells him as turns the paper toward himself to read it. “All the spite of a demon, but with none of the God-willed boundaries. He’s murdered hundreds, maybe thousands. He had a whole army of followers, once upon a time, and—oh, fuck.”
It should be known that in six thousand years of acquaintance, Crowley has only heard Aziraphale swear eight times. This is the first instance in over five hundred years.
“Angel?”
“Voldemort died. Freak accident while he was murdering a young family. Only one person survived. The baby.” Aziraphale turns the paper around and points to a line of text. “Harry Potter.”
Crowley stares blankly at Harry’s name and the moniker next to it: The Boy Who Lived. “Fuck.”
“Indeed.”
“Angel. Fuck.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“No, angel. That fragment, the Horcrux—”
“Precisely. It’s Voldemort.”
“Fuck!” Crowley tears his hands through his hair. “You’re telling me that that kid—” he jabs a finger up at the ceiling, “—that sssweet little boy has, has—”
“A bit of a mass murderer’s soul locked up inside him?” Aziraphale crumples opposite Crowley, miserable. “Yes, I suppose I am. And I expect that when Voldemort comes back, either via Harry’s Horcrux or some other, revenge will be the first thing on his mind.”
It feels like something should happen. Revelations this large always bring some sort of time-bomb or wave of destruction. The flood comes, or Jesus dies, or cities burn. Something sets off. News this big can’t just exist.
But it does, just as it has to the magical people of Britain for nine years. Seconds pass, then a minute, and Harry keeps on hissing away to Eloa upstairs, and the streets of London keep droning from beyond the windows, and the planet keeps on spinning to maintain it all. In the relative silence, all that’s changed is how much Aziraphale and Crowley know.
“Okay,” Crowley says, taking and holding a huge breath to push the panic out of place. “Okay. We can fix it.”
“How?” Aziraphale stares at him with pinched eyebrows. “We cannot interfere with human souls, Crowley. Our miracles can’t touch that thing.”
“Right, right,” Crowley agrees, “but—but there’s something, isn’t there? Magic people have doctors. If—if these Horcruxes are a thing, there has to be some way of dealing with this. We can’t just wait around for this Voldemort arsehole to respawn and kill him.”
Aziraphale purses his lips. “I don’t know. That isn’t to say I disagree with you. Truly, I do not know. I keep an eye on their news, and I read some of their books, but… but I have no idea what their society is like these days.”
“Why not?” Crowley can’t keep the edge out of his voice, no matter how unfair it is. “It’s quaint and old-fashioned and all that tosh. Right up your alley. Why don’t you pay more attention?”
“Because!” Aziraphale snaps, whipping his hands downward, suddenly just as frantic as Crowley is. “Because—you don’t. You don’t, Crowley, and—” he inhales quickly, the breath catching in his throat, “—and I can’t just—just join a whole society that vexes you, now, can I? You wouldn’t visit. So I don’t, either.”
Crowley’s body isn’t big enough to handle the abrupt expansion in his chest. Aziraphale cares that much about being available to him? He craves Crowley’s company that badly?
Is it possible that he doesn’t want any distance between them, either?
“Angel,” he breathes, not sure what to think or how to react to any of it. “You—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Aziraphale shakes his head and climbs to his feet, ending the conversation. “We have bigger issues now. You’ve gone and rescued the bloody Boy Who Lived, and now we have to deal with it.”
His clipped tone sends the thread of hope scuttling back to its home deep, deep inside Crowley’s ribs.
Everything he does disappoints Aziraphale sooner or later. Nothing, not even his biggest, most romantic gestures, ever seems to work out right.
There’s no reason rescuing a child that happens to be the magic world’s version of the antichrist should change anything.
“Fine.” Crowley picks himself up off the floor, forcing normalcy. “We will. I’ll do some digging. Those bits of soul have to wind up in Hell, so maybe someone down there will know something. In the meantime, we’ll—we’ll just have to keep an eye on him. Which I’m going to go do. Right now.”
He heads for the door and opens it, wanting nothing more than to take Harry and Eloa home, where the only thing that can hurt him is himself.
“Crowley?”
Crowley pauses, because he’ll always pause for Aziraphale, no matter how little he wants to. “Yeah?”
He hears the gentle click of Aziraphale’s shoes on the floor, and a warm hand falls on his shoulder.
“I am still so tremendously proud of you, my dear. This discovery changes what happens next, not what’s happened already. Do keep that in mind, won’t you?”
And back onto the razor’s edge of hope, he goes.
“I need to check on Harry.” He steps away from the hand on his back and heads for the stairs. “I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”
Notes:
5. Much, much later, when nothing exists in Harry’s aura that doesn’t belong there, Crowley will look back on this moment and wonder whether Harry himself preferred Crowley, or whether that diabolical interloper did. He’ll torment himself with that notion. But then he’ll pay visits to Harry, and eventually Harry’s wife and children, too, and he’ll realize how little it matters either way. ↺ go back
Chapter 4
Notes:
Somehow, I let a FULL WEEK go by without posting. Ridiculous. Here we are, with another lovely, heartwarming chapter. Enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Time, Crowley soon discovers, passes far more slowly when one lives each day through a ten year old’s eyes.
They establish something of a routine around Crowley’s flat. Harry wakes up, does whatever he needs to do in the loo, and cooks himself breakfast, and Crowley joins him with a cup of espresso at the table. They plan their day, then execute that plan with varying degrees of success. They spend their evenings talking about whatever Harry wants, which typically involves stories from Crowley’s past or facts about the preternatural forces of the universe. Harry goes to bed. Crowley hides away in his study and spends several hours trying to figure out what he got right and wrong that day. Rinse, repeat.
These daily plans of theirs involve all sorts of activities. One day, Crowley takes Harry to the British Museum and points out all the history the description plaques get wrong. Another, they drive out to the nearest beach and Crowley learns just how easy it is for a pale, wispy child like Harry to get sunburnt. Another, they spend at the movie theater, hopping from one showing to the next until Harry falls asleep right there in his seat. Another, they return to the London Zoo with Eloa hidden under Harry’s jacket, and he meets all the rest of the snakes there. Another, Harry insists on learning about Crowley’s plants, and Crowley teaches him how to properly intimidate them.[6]
Aziraphale checks in at least once a day, usually in person, and usually around dinnertime. With each visit, Harry warms to him more and more, though he never does what Aziraphale asks without checking with Crowley first.
He does, however, adore the fact that Aziraphale eats just for fun, and he delights in trying whatever treats Aziraphale brings with him. In what Crowley would call a desperate bid for approval (if, for no other reason, than to maintain his status as an insulting bastard), Aziraphale arrives with increasingly exotic food. Harry has now eaten things Crowley has never even heard of.
Just as Crowley hoped, Aziraphale’s company brings out a different side of Harry. He can still be a stubborn, crafty little shit that does Crowley proud, but he proves to be compassionate and earnest, too. Without prompting, he adopts Aziraphale’s optimistic perspective of the world, believing that people should and do strive for goodness, but can fall off-course and commit misdeeds.
As such, he also adopts Crowley’s ill-considered description of his work as “pranks,” specifically ones that test humans’ mettle. Crowley finds that a bit demeaning but, at the end of the day, more or less accurate, so he doesn’t complain.
Too much time around either of them alone, however, can skew him in one direction or the other. At one point, Crowley gets an assignment that sends him to Leeds for two days, and he comes back to find that Harry has taken on a personal mission to save rhinoceroses from extinction. Conversely, when Aziraphale journeys to France to pick up a rare edition of Les Misérables, Harry develops a fondness for finding new ways to “prank” people, as he is “an actual human and knows about what cheeses us off better than a demon ever will, if you think about it.”
It goes without saying that Harry Potter becomes, in Aziraphale and Crowley’s opinion, a shining example of why God wants kids left alone. Were it not for that rotten piece of soul trapped inside him, they’d consider relocating him so he can grow up without their meddling. Alas, it is trapped and in need of removing, and so they continue to meddle. (And quite happily, too.)
As long as it’s balanced, this new, strange lifestyle they’ve all developed seems to do Harry immense favors. Both the color and roundness of his cheeks improve within days, and he starts taking less care (though never reckless care) with his elbows and feet. The brittle edge of his demeanor weakens, as well, and though he is still quick to stiffen when someone says something antagonistic, he learns to trust that Crowley and Aziraphale can handle themselves both against each other and outsiders.
The lifestyle suits Crowley and Aziraphale just as well. Neither of them find much joy in their work, though both of them are loath to admit as much out loud. With Harry around, they can see the aimlessness of their existence before they had him to fill their days. He brings purpose to each and every moment.
Which is why it comes as something of a shock to learn that a whole month has passed without anyone but Harry noticing. They only realize it at supper, when he produces a wobbly, slightly overdone cake for dessert that he spent hours making.
“A month?” Aziraphale asks, gobsmacked. “Surely you mean a week.”
“Yeah, I picked you up, like, yesterday, wasn’t it?” Crowley crosses his arms. “Maybe a few yesterdays ago. Not a whole month.”
“I mean it!” Harry says. “You can check. Dudley’s birthday is June twenty-third, and that was a month ago.”
They don’t bother to check. They both know better.
“Well, then,” Aziraphale says faintly, “it certainly is cause for celebration.”
He doesn’t sound like he means it, and Crowley understands why: A whole month has passed, and they have made no progress on removing the Horcrux. They’ve wasted precious days of Harry’s life enjoying themselves, all while that foul thing plagues him.
Harry, however, has no knowledge of the Horcrux whatsoever and takes Aziraphale’s tone the wrong way. “Er….”
“It’s been a fantastic month,” Crowley tells him. He doesn’t bother wearing sunglasses around the house anymore, so he stares Harry in the eye to convey his sincerity. “The best month.”
“Of course,” Aziraphale agrees, recovering quickly. “Oh, dear boy, it’s been wonderful. Never doubt that. The disappointment comes from seeing how much time flies, that’s all. Now come, tell us about this lovely cake you’ve made for us.”
Easily distracted, Harry turns to his burnt, misshapen cake with a small frown. “Well, I did my best, but it looks a bit funny. It should taste okay, though, I think.”
Crowley doubts it, but he wisely doesn’t say so. “Well, something’s missing, that’s why.”
Harry turns massive, worried eyes on him. “Oh no. What is it?”
Crowley snaps his fingers, and a candle shaped like the number 1 appears, wedged into the cake. He summons a flame to the tip of his finger to light it.
“There, see?” He nods once. “Now it’s all proper.”
It’s very much not. The last thing this cake needs is another heat source around it. But Harry fairly radiates joy, and Aziraphale’s eyes shine wetly at him from across the table, so Crowley thinks he’s done well for himself, regardless.
Harry leans forward and blows the candle out, thrilled.
“I’ve never gotten to do that before,” he tells them as he begins cutting pieces from the cake with a table knife. “Make the wish, and all that. Do they matter? You two would know, wouldn’t you?”
Crowley watches him carefully plop a piece of cake onto a plate. The insides have fared better than the outsides, but not by much. “What wish?”
“Humans wish for things before blowing out the candle on their birthday cake, my dear,” Aziraphale advises. “I’m surprised you’re unfamiliar. It’s quite an occult practice—though perhaps not demonically so. But no, Harry, I’m afraid they don’t hold much weight. Prayers tend to reach more helpful ears than wishes.”
Harry’s face twists in a dismissive way that Crowley just adores, and he sighs. “Now I see why I shouldn’t tell others about what you two are. It would mess up a lot for people if they knew things like angels and demons were real. It’s okay, though. I’ve only got this one wish out there, and it’s not that important.”
His tone makes it clear that his wish, whatever it was, was, in fact, very important.
Crowley shares a look with Aziraphale. “You do know you’ve got two miracle-makers for guardians, right? If there’s something you want, all you have to do is ask.”
If Harry were any other type of child, he might be at risk of spoiling from how much Crowley and Aziraphale are willing to dote on him. The way Crowley and Aziraphale see it, though, pampering Harry is a matter of making up for lost time. And, really, doing so is immensely fun.
“It’s embarrassing to say out loud,” Harry mumbles, blushing. He prods his slice of cake with his fork. “‘S why I wished for it on a stupid cake.”
“You don’t have to tell us unless you want to,” Aziraphale soothes, reaching out to clasp Harry’s hand. He offers physical comfort whenever Harry gets uncomfortable or shy, and it always works. “It’s your wish. Do with it whatever you please.”
Harry heaves a sigh and shrugs, looking anywhere but at them. “I wished we could stay like this, is all. All my life, all I’ve ever wanted to do was grow up so I could leave home, and now… it’s the other way round.”
Four weeks is too little time to develop love for someone, even by human standards. By Crowley’s, it takes about two thousand years, give or take. Loving something is meant to require time.
But bless and damn it all if every last plant in his flat doesn’t burst into bloom anyway. The light overhead surges brighter than it ought to. A village in Zimbabwe that has been struggling with drought finds itself drenched with rain. The cake unburns itself.
Judging from the look on Aziraphale’s face, a lot more than that happens, too.
“We’re not going anywhere, hatchling,” Crowley says, not even caring that he ends up rasping the words out. And then he’s out of his chair and lifting Harry up into his arms. It’s his first time hugging anything besides Aziraphale in… possibly ever. “We’ve got nothing but time.”
“Quite right.” At his seat at the table, Aziraphale dabs at his eyes with his handkerchief. He stands and brushes a hand over Harry’s mess of hair. “You’ve got eight years of growing left in you. That’s an awfully long ways away.”
“Seven,” Harry says into Crowley’s shoulder. Tiny arms worm their way free and curl around Crowley’s neck, and a toddler in America loses her leukemia. “I turn eleven in a week.”
Crowley and Aziraphale’s gazes lock.
Seven years.
It’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough.
“Eleven,” Aziraphale echoes softly. “Goodness.”
Crowley swallows and pulls him into the hug. Later, he’ll deny being sappy. None of this will have happened, and he’ll insist on that for the rest of eternity. For now, though, he just holds the people he loves and wishes, just as futilely as Harry did, that they could stay like this forever.
After a few seconds, Harry gets squirmy and mentions cake, so they all separate and get back to their seats to enjoy their celebration.
No longer burnt, the cake isn’t all that bad. It’s not good, either, but to Crowley, cake never is. He eats every bite of his slice anyway.
“It seems to me we have something very important to discuss,” Aziraphale announces once the plates are miracled clean and back onto their shelves, “Mister Almost-Eleven. I hope you weren’t expecting us to let your birthday just pass us by. I expect this shall require enormous fanfare.”
“Nah,” Harry says bashfully. “You don’t need to go to any trouble. Maybe we could, er, order the cake in, though, next time?”
He grimaces down at his lopsided creation.
“Well, now, hear me out,” Crowley says, feigning contemplation. “The Ritz does cakes, angel, doesn’t it?”
Aziraphale gasps, beaming. “You know? I think it does.”
“Big, fancy ones,” Crowley continues, and even if The Ritz doesn’t usually make those sorts of cakes, it certainly does now. “It’s about time we took him there.”
“Most definitely.” Aziraphale gives Harry a wink. “It’s our favorite place to eat. Or, well, my favorite place to eat, but only because Crowley barely eats anything. The food is delicious; you’ll love it.”
The rest of the evening is spent with the three of them camped out in the living room, coming up with ideas for Harry’s birthday. The ideas grow sillier and sillier as Aziraphale and Crowley let their imaginations unfold. The scope of their powers is commonplace to them, but putting themselves in Harry’s shoes makes it all feel extraordinary. They could go to Spain. To the Great Barrier Reef. To Mars. He could try being an inch high, or ten feet tall. He could see what it’s like to be a tiger. Anything.
Harry spends the time absolutely fascinated by what they come up with, but when his bedtime draws near and they finally ask him what he wants to do for his birthday, he asks them for something unexpected.
“Can we… can we make sure I can stay?” He folds his knees up to his chest and hugs them. “Officially, I mean? It’s just—I knew someone at school once whose parents split up, and he really wanted to live with his dad all the time, but his mum ended up getting him. I don’t want that to happen with me and the Dursleys.”
At that, Crowley feels tremendously stupid. He should have known, with all his nighttime reading: Harry doesn’t want excitement for his birthday, he wants stability. Security in the knowledge that he really isn’t going back into that cupboard, and that no one can make him.
He wants them to adopt him.
Backwards as it sounds, taking him to Mars would actually be simpler. One big miracle is easier to write off than the number of small ones they’ll need to use to make the paperwork go through. Plus, if news of their adoption travels down either side’s grapevine, Heaven and Hell will have a lot of questions for them, none of them good.
“I think we can arrange that,” Aziraphale says. He sounds a lot more confident than Crowley feels. “Unless I’m mistaken, Crowley owes your relatives a visit anyway. How about you go get yourself ready for bed, and us grown-ups will start figuring it out, hm?”
Already yawning, Harry scampers off to do just that, leaving Crowley and Aziraphale behind. A few seconds after his bedroom door closes, Aziraphale waves his fingers.
“He’s having pleasant dreams,” he says quietly. “Deep ones. We need to talk.”
“Adoption,” Crowley muses, twisting himself around so his head rests on an armrest and his legs sprawl out at odd angles. “He had to pick one of the trickiest things for us, didn’t he?”
“Indeed.” Aziraphale exhales robustly. “But that’s not what I mean. He’s turning eleven, Crowley.”
“So I heard. Is that supposed to mean something special?”
“It does,” Aziraphale replies, like it’s obvious. After a moment, he rolls his eyes. “Of course, you don’t know. Crowley, that’s the age when magical children are invited to attend Hogwarts.”
Crowley’s chest cinches.
Hogwarts. Salazar’s school.
A boarding school.
“No,” he says immediately, shifting up onto his elbows. “No, angel, he can’t. It’s so soon.”
“What’s the alternative?” Aziraphale makes a helpless gesture. “One of the other ones, even further away from us? A mundane school where he’ll never get the chance to explore his abilities?”
“We teach him,” Crowley suggests. “You and me. We can figure it out, can’t we?”
“Miracles and magic are completely different.” Aziraphale tugs a hand through his hair. “Even if we could… do you not find that cruel? He’s a young boy, Crowley. We can’t be his whole world. He needs friends, relationships.”
“He needs love,” Crowley fires back. “Family. Us. Not some—some daft bit of wood with a hair stuck in it!”
But even as he argues, he can tell that Aziraphale’s right. This past month has been idyllic, but no matter how many candles they wish on, nor hugs they share, it can’t last forever. Harry deserves to grow up, and he deserves every chance to meet his potential.
Caging him in with nothing but an angel and a demon for company is little better than locking him in the proverbial cupboard.
Well, fuck.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Aziraphale murmurs, resting a hand on Crowley’s nearby ankle. “You can’t say we haven’t been building to this point. He needs that thrice-damned Horcrux out of his head, and we need to know that if anything happens to us, he’s not alone.”
“Happens to us?” Crowley scoffs. “What on Earth could happen to us?”
“It wouldn’t come from Earth.” Aziraphale raises his eyebrows at him meaningfully. “You’re right to say that what we’re doing with him is… risky. Our miracle usage alone is bound to raise some flags after a while. And if anyone from either side were to pay us a surprise visit, they’d find us here, influencing a human child, and working together to do it. They’d send us home. They’d send him home, if they don’t just turn him into a pillar of salt instead.”
“I’d like to see them try,” Crowley spits, coldly furious at even the thought of Gabriel or Beelzebub laying a hand on Harry.
The threat is empty, though. Liberated as the two of them are on Earth, they are agents of their respective domains first and foremost. Rank matters. If the Duke of Hell or the Supreme Archangel commands something, they are bound to comply.
“This Horcrux business,” he says, needing to change the subject. “Going to magic school won’t fix that on its own. Humans won’t be able to sense it to know it needs removing.”
“I’ve looked into it a bit,” Aziraphale admits, which is news to Crowley. “Wizarding records have been scrubbed of the subject. Most people—perhaps all of them—don’t even know what a Horcrux is.”
He pauses to heave a sigh.
“I can’t say I’m surprised about that. Horcruxes are one of the darkest magics out there, supremely forbidden. The best way to prevent their making is to hide the fact that they can exist at all. But it does make our task incredibly difficult.”
“I should try my hand at it,” Crowley says. “If it’s evil stuff, I’ll have better odds than you of finding something. I mean, come on, angel. Someone must know something.”
“Maybe.” Aziraphale clasps a hand to his cheek, thinking hard. “You might be onto something there. You should check the seedy quarter of the community, of course, but… there is one person that comes to mind. He’s old enough, clever enough, morally gray enough. He might know.”
“Who is it?”
“You won’t be happy.” Aziraphale gives him a small, mirthless smile. “His name is Albus Dumbledore. He’s the headmaster of Hogwarts.”
“... Fucking bless it.”
They expect to have time to figure things out. To spend the week before Harry’s birthday quietly planning while they continue on with their balanced little routine. They expect peace.
Those expectations are ruined when, the very next morning, an owl with a letter in its talons taps on Crowley’s living room window.
Notes:
6. Harry, for the record, is abysmal at it. His threats are much too focused on the plant’s feelings—“If you don’t lift yourself up a bit, Crowley will be very cross, and that won’t feel nice at all, will it?”—and he can’t bring himself to so much as waggle a finger at them without feeling sorry afterward. But he tries, and the plants give him an encouraging tremble or two for his efforts. Crowley isn’t all that dissatisfied. ↺ go back
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