Archive of Our Own

“Are you sure you don’t need any help with your bags, dear?” Aziraphale fusses, peering over his shoulder into the backseat. Warlock huffs a breath through his nose. 

“The boy can handle a couple duffel bags, I think,” Crowley drawls, and Warlock shoots him a grateful look. Crowley returns it as a smirk. “Don’t let him get out with you, he just wants to plant a wet one on your cheek right in front of the whole freshman dating pool,” he warns.

“We did hugs before we got in the car,” Warlock says patiently. “I'll see you next month.”

Aziraphale's chin wobbles dangerously, but he nods, conceding the point. 

“Don't forget your appointment with your advisor tomorrow,” he reminds as Warlock unbuckles.

“Yeah, I remember,” Warlock says. He does remember. He is, however, definitely not going.

“Knock ‘em dead, barra,” says Crowley.

“But not literally,” adds Aziraphale. “Good luck. We love you very much.”

“That too.”

“Love you too, Azzy. Love you, Nanny,” Warlock sighs, as though the admission is a great sacrifice. He gets out of the car and retrieves his bags. Aziraphale's window rolls down.

“We’ll ring you tonight!” he says, waving.

“No, we won't!” Crowley calls across him, also waving. 

The last thing Warlock hears from his godfathers is Crowley saying “Let the kid have some space, Angel,” as the window rolls back up and the Bentley rumbles away.

Warlock Dowling pulls a pair of sunglasses out of the pocket of his shirt, flicking them open and sliding them onto his face. His eyes thus hidden, he is free to watch the car drive away and turn a corner, his chin pointed down at the phone he's pulled out of his back pocket, as though it's that which has his attention and not his departing family. 

When the Bentley is gone, he looks down at the phone for real. He pulls open and scrolls through his text messages.

To: Mum
Moving in today (read: 8:04 AM)

He pockets the phone and adjusts his bags, heading toward the dorms.  

Pepper
kick collegiate ass 2day ✊

Wensleydale
Text when you're moved in and unpacked! 
Brian says we need to approve your poster placements lol

Mr. Young drops the last box in Adam’s new room while Mrs. Young busies herself taking pictures and dispensing collegiate advice.

“Keep up your grades, of course, but don’t forget to get out too, love,” she clucks. “Make some friends.” She’s always been concerned that Adam’s social circle hasn’t expanded much since he was eleven. 

Mr. Young hasn’t. He slaps a hand on Adam’s back.           

“He knows how to make friends, Dierdre,” says his father. Adam smiles at him. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking, which is that he wishes the Them were here to save him the trouble.

“Yeah, Mum. I know how to make friends,” he says longsufferingly. Mrs. Young does not look impressed.

“Then you know it’s as simple as just introducing yourself,” she says. “Talk to some people in your classes. Ask someone if they want to study. Join a club!”

“The boy just said he knows how to make friends,” Mr. Young insists, but then turns back to Adam. “Take a look at the intramurals, maybe,” he offers. Adam rolls his eyes. 

“I’ll make friends,” he says. “I might make some at the activities fair, but I’ve only got four hours to get to that, so at this rate…”

“All right, all right, we’ll leave you to it,” his mother laughs, rolling her eyes right back. She steps forward and envelops him in a hug, even though the door is wide open and any of the other students could just walk by and see. “We’re so proud of you, my darling. I know you’re going to do so well.”

“Well, let’s let him do it, then, dear,” says Mr. Young, who again undermines whatever gratitude he might have just earned by taking his turn to wrap his arms around Adam. Adam sighs and allows it. 

He’ll miss them a little bit too, anyway.

Adam is buying a coffee from the kiosk at the front of the library, when the rigid quiet of the lobby is broken by a thud and then a clatter.

Adam glances over his shoulder and sees a kid struggling to roll a heavily-laden trolley through the library doors. He takes his change and his coffee and wanders over, noticing that the guy looks familiar. He’s in Adam‘s geometry class, isn’t he?

“There’s a thing on top of the door that you can lock to prop it open,“ he offers, and sips his coffee.

The guy looks up, scowling venomously through floppy hair.

“Great,“ he snaps. “Is there a lock on your big fat mouth too, or does it just flap as a default?“

Adam blinks.

“Just trying to help,” he says.

“Actually, you’re just standing there,” the kid says. 

He puts his back to the library door and grips the edge of the cart, giving it a savage jog. Adam can see that one of the wheels seems to be stuck on the floor mat. He sets his coffee down on a nearby table, and comes over to grab the other side of the cart. 

Without speaking, they give it one more good jerk in unison, Adam holding his toe down on the problematic mat corner, and the cart comes free.

“That’s helping,” the other guy says, and pushes the cart through the door, heading towards the stacks.

“You’re welcome,” Adam calls after him, and the kid grunts back over his shoulder.

“And your classes are all going well?” 

“For the first week of a bunch of intro level courses, yeah, great,” Warlock says. He twists shut his loaf of bread and starts hunting for a knife to spread peanut butter with. “Syllabus for World Lit One is pretty basic, but I already asked the professor and she said I could use outside sources for the midterm essay.” 

The cord of his earbuds sways as he reaches for the peanut butter.

“What fun!” comes Aziraphale’s voice. “Oh, they did have a very nice library.” He sounds wistful. Warlock smirks down at the slice of white bread he’s smearing.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Met one of the librarians actually, when I was taking some materials back for Dr. Baumlin. He teaches English Renaissance Literature.” He screws the lid back on the peanut butter and folds the piece of bread over. “He has a thing next Thursday I might go to.”

There’s a muffled sound of someone else talking, and Aziraphale pauses, so Warlock takes a sticky bite of his lunch and flops down on the sofa of the suite’s common room. 

“Nanny says have you met any — Oh, I’m not asking him that. Hold on.” A beep sounds loudly over the connection, and Warlock winces. “How do I…? Oh, thank you, dear.”

The rustle of a phone changing hands. Warlock chews and waits. There’s a click, and the change of background buzz that indicates the speakerphone has been turned on for the old touch tone landline in the cottage.

“Met any hotties?” says Crowley’s voice. Warlock grins at the sound of Aziraphale’s tutting.

“Girl repping the Student Pride Alliance on the quad today was a stone fox,” he says, mostly to help Nanny antagonize Azzy. “And the TA for my poli sci class is cool in a sort of sleep-deprived, anxiety-ridden way.” 

He doesn’t know what makes him think of the kid that offered his dubious expertise with doors the other day, but he groans as soon as he does.

“Ugh, and there was this one blond prettyboy who got on my nerves the other day,” he says. 

“Promising,” says Crowley.

“Not all of us are turned on by being corrected,” Warlock snorts.

“Ah, one of those types,” Crowley says. “Still, there is something undeniably sexy about a know-it-all…”

“Gross,” says Warlock flatly around another bite of sandwich. “I’m going to hang up.”

“He started it,” he hears in the background, behind Aziraphale saying “Oh, before you do — Lawrence and Samantha, from down the street? They just came back into town to stay with their mother, and they said good luck at uni. Everyone at the shops keeps asking how you’re doing, too.”

“Breaking hearts and breaking rules,” Warlock says blithely, and sucks some peanut butter off his thumb.

“Not too many, I hope,” says Aziraphale with faint disapproval. “We’ll let you go though. Don’t go to any wild parties.”

“Now, why would you tell him a thing like that?” Crowley pipes up. “Go to as many wild parties as you can, dearheart. Don’t listen to him,” he adds, and Warlock can hear the sneaky grin. “Listen to me.”

“Oh, really,” says Aziraphale, and Warlock laughs to himself. Even when he was little, the antagonism of the ‘listen to me’ game seemed affected, and he was vindicated to find out at age eleven that they’d loved each other all along. References to ending the world and ruling hell dropped off after that, but Nanny’s sense of humor had never gotten less wicked. Now his godparents’ gentle bickering makes the South Downs not seem quite so far away. He’s grateful for it, even if he’ll never say so.

“Love you,” he says over them, and they both reply nearly in unison. 

“Love you.” 

Warlock is sitting under a tree outside the science building, reading on his phone. The weather is beautiful, his hazelnut iced coffee is delicious, and he’s well into his ebook of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He wants for nothing, particularly company (he thinks as he swipes away a text from his godfather).

“Hi,” says a voice, as a shadow falls across his lap.

He looks up slowly and squints through his sunglasses at the kid from the library a few days ago standing over him, silhouetted against the afternoon sun. 

“Hi,” says the kid again. “It’s me, from the other day.” He fidgets charmingly, all sun-browned skin and curly golden hair. Warlock is extremely unimpressed.

“God’s gift to Earth,” Warlock drawls. “I remember.”

The boy laughs, a short, sudden noise at odds with his grave demeanor. Warlock raises his eyebrows.

“Not exactly,” he says, like it’s some private joke. “Kind of the opposite.” 

Warlock has no idea what he’s supposed to say to that. He stares at the kid. The boy fidgets some more, and then leans down and sticks out a hand. 

“My name’s Adam,” he says. 

Warlock seriously considers if there’s any good way for him to get out of this interaction without being the asshole, but determines it’s impossible. He puts down his iced coffee and accepts the hand.

“Warlock,” he says, giving Adam two firm shakes.

He’s seen the full spectrum of possible reactions to his name. If this Adam laughs at it, or tells Warlock he’s lying, then Adam’s the asshole, and Warlock can tell him to fuck off with a clear conscience. He watches as a crease appears between Adam’s eyebrows, and then watches as it vanishes.

“Pleased to meet you, Warlock,” Adam says. He’s ridiculously earnest, a big grown up boy scout radiating solemn sincerity.

Warlock doesn’t want to smile, but he does, just a little.

“Wish I could say the same,” he says, but Adam looks pleased anyway.

“So long story short, I’m making a formal complaint to the head of the department,” Pepper is saying. “If he thinks he can get away with that kind of casual misogyny just because it’s an intro level course, he hasn’t met me.”

“For which I bet he thanks his stars,“ Brian grins. “How about you, college boy? Made any professors cry?”

Adam’s friends stare at him expectantly from his laptop screen. Adam smiles.

“Think I’ll leave that to Pepper,“ he says.

“Not too lonely without us, are you?“ Wensleydale puts in.

Trust Them to get straight to the question he doesn’t want to answer. He shrugs what he hopes is casually.

“I mean, I wish you were here, obviously,” he says. “But I’m making friends. Met some guy just the other day,” he adds. “Warlock.”

There is a confused beat on the video chat.

“That’s his name?” grimaces Wensleydale.

“No way!” Brian laughs. Adam thinks of Warlock’s stuck out chin, and frowns.

“I mean, there are lots of weird names in the world,” he says. “I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth.”

“Anyone we’re gonna be introduced to?” Pepper says.

“Maybe,” Adam says, shrugging again, before he notices the careful way she said it. “Not like that,” he adds hurriedly. Brian and Wensleydale both frown, not having picked up her meaning. Adam coughs.

“I think he's lovingly committed to his phone anyway,” Adam jokes. 

The wrong tack. Too far, not dismissive enough. Brian and Wensleydale are looking like they’re starting to figure out Pepper’s implication, and Pepper looks like she’s dangerously close to affirming and supporting him.

“How about the two of you?” Adam says with slightly desperate joviality. “Tadfield holding up without us?”

“Dog misses you,“ Brian says. “I popped by to see him yesterday and he ran out thinking I was you at first.”

And the conversation moves on, to Adams great relief. It would be such a nuisance if they got the wrong idea, was all. Adam hardly even knows this Warlock kid.

Geometry was supposed to be an easy class. Adam has never liked math very much, but the shapes and diagrams were comforting in geometry, something at least close to tangible, something that all the numbers and letters could actually mean. Now that he was staring up at the whiteboard in his college geometry class, he was getting the sinking feeling that study group with Wensleydale had been the only thing that had gotten him such good A level scores. 

Warlock, halfway to the back in a row of chairs against the wall, does not look in the least bit bewildered.

Adam walks up to him after class.

“Hey Warlock,” hesays, as casually as it’s possible to say a name like that. He waits until Warlock looks up from his phone as he stuffs things in his backpack with one hand. The other boy is already frowning as he does.

“Do you have a study group or anything?” Adam asks, and the frown deepens.

“Are you inviting me to a study group?” Warlock says.

“I haven’t got one,” Adam said. “I was hoping you did. Or wanted to start one. Or could just help me with the planes chapter. Are you any good at this stuff?”

The frowning has taken on a faintly skeptical tint now.

“This is a gen ed,” Warlock points out. “So. Yes?”

Adam frowns back as he hoists his book bag onto his shoulder. 

“I’m good at other things,” he says, hating immediately how defensive it sounds. Warlock rolls his eyes. 

“I’m sure,” he says, standing up from his chair. “Like bothering people and running your fingers backward through your sandy golden hair.”

Adam blinks.

“What?” he says.

“You heard me.” He pulls his bag onto his shoulder too. “I’m going to the student union for lunch. If you keep up, you can tell me what’s giving you trouble.”

He heads for the door with the remainder of their departing class without another word. Adam takes a second, and then hurries after him. 

He does need the help with planar geometry.

Warlock runs a finger along the spines of the books on the library shelf, reading numbers under his breath. 509, 510, 510.1…

“Do you, uh… do you watch Doctor Who?”

Warlock doesn’t look over at Adam, who is following behind carrying a stack of Warlock’s library books. 

“Sometimes,” he says.

Silence returns. Adam clears his throat.

“Uh, who’s your favorite Doctor?” he tries. 

Warlock double checks his list, and looks back up at the shelf.

“I dunno,” he says. “I don’t really keep up with it." He glances back at Adam. “Do you watch it a lot?”

Adam looks a little defeated. 

“Not, uh, really.” He shifts the books in his arms. “My friend Brian likes it.”

Warlock looks back at the shelf and moves down one. There. He takes down the book he was hunting for and hands it to Adam.

“Hold this,” he says. Adam accepts it automatically but, after a moment, frowns down at it. 

“Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving?” he reads from the cover. “Is this for a class?”

“No,” says Warlock, and heads for the European history section. Adam follows.

“What’re you studying, anyway?” Adam says, flipping through the book. 

“I’m undeclared,” Warlock says. “I’m trying the tasting menu.” 

He isn’t sure if it’s the turn of phrase or the concept that paints bafflement across Adam’s face. Warlock smothers a smirk and heads down the aisle. 

He’s not sure how to read the kid, honestly. The last two classes, he’d followed Warlock by invitation to ask homework questions. This time, he’d just followed him. He had neither asked Warlock out, in any identifiable way, nor responded either positively or negatively to any of Warlock’s less than heterosexual implications. He might be trying to befriend Warlock for Warlock’s sake; he seems like the type, all warm, small-town-hero good intentions. It’s missing any condescension, though. Warlock’s not sure Adam even knew he was following him out of class today, but as long as he’s going to, he can carry Warlock’s library books. 

“What’re you studying?” Warlock asks, because Adam also seems like the type who’s waiting to be asked.

“Religious studies,” he says without hesitation. 

Warlock doesn’t freeze, but he comes close. Shit, he hopes this kid isn’t some kind of evangelist —

“It makes my dad nervous,” Adam is saying. “Not that he’d admit it. Both him and Mum think I want to be a priest or something, no matter what I say.” 

That’s reassuring, at least. 

“What do you want to do with it, then?” Warlock asks, glancing over from the shelves. “Just academics?” 

Adam shrugs, seeming uncomfortable with the question. 

“Personal interest, I guess,” he says. 

Warlock eyes him. That seems harmless enough, but it’s odd how unhappy even bringing up Adam’s field of study seems to make him. Warlock doesn’t really feel like cracking open this kid’s religious baggage in the middle of the stacks, and only one third of the way down his book list. He turns back to the shelf and pulls off a book on the Dancing Plague of 1518. 

“Fair enough,” he says, and sets it on top of the one Adam’s already holding. 

“Hey,” says Adam abruptly. “Are you going to the thing on Tuesday? The freshman board game night?”

Warlock stops and peers at Adam over his book list. 

“Sure wasn’t planning on it,” he says, wary. No, this is Adam asking Warlock out, surely. He’s been working around to it all this time, and he’s picked a university sanctioned social activity as the venue. No matter how handsome he might be, Warlock will probably have to turn him down on principle.

“My mum found it on the university calendar,” Adam sighs, sounding like he doesn’t blame Warlock for his skepticism. “She’s trying to get me to go.”

He’s not asking Warlock out. He actually isn’t! Is he meaning it to sound like he is? 

“Y’know, you could always just lie and tell her you went,” Warlock points out. Adam frowns. It’s definitely not cute.

“That seems like a stupid thing to lie about,” Adam says. 

“Yeah, well, it seems like a stupid thing to go to,” Warlock counters reasonably.

Adam gives a serious nod. “Fair enough.” 

Warlock looks down at his book list and starts in the direction of biographies. 

“When is it?” he asks.

Right about the time the student activities council volunteer sets the bingo cards in front of them, Adam realizes this was a mistake. 

He tries not to look over at Warlock, who’s probably laughing at Adam from behind his dumb sunglasses. Adam should’ve just told his mum that he didn’t have time to go. But then she would’ve tried to get him to join a club or something…

“You want orange or purple?” Warlock asks.

“What?” says Adam blankly, looking up from his morose contemplation of his bingo card.

Warlock is looking impatiently at Adam, his sunglasses pushed up into his hair, and holding up two dry erase markers. 

“I thought you thought this was stupid,” Adam says.

“Oh it’s definitely stupid, just to be clear,” Warlock replies. “But like, if we’re going to do this, I’m going to win the giant toblerone.”

“You don’t need to stay,” Adam offers. 

“No shit,” Warlock replies. “I didn’t need to come. Purple or orange? Last chance or I’m picking myself.”

Adam regards Warlock for a moment. 

“Everyone got a card?” bellows a student volunteer from the front of the room.

“Orange,” says Adam.

Warlock passes him the requested marker.

“G55!” shouts the caller. As Adam checks his card for the number, Warlock’s hand enters his field of vision and marks a purple X over Adam’s free space.

“Don’t play a lot of bingo in that small town of yours, huh?” he smirks when Adam looks up. 

“Not a lot, no,” Adam frowns. “We did other stuff.”

“B9!” the caller yells.

“Who’s we?” asks Warlock.

“My friends,” Adam says. “Pepper, Wensleydale, and Brian. We were… we’ve been together since we were kids.” He almost says about them being the Them, but it occurs to him at the last moment that maybe that’s weird or stupid. 

If the Them were here, Wensleydale would be keeping careful track of everyone’s neglected bingo cards. Brian would be gunning for the Toblerone too. And Pepper…

Pepper would be making friends with Warlock. He wishes she were here, to show him how to do it.

“Like, little kids?” says Warlock. “That’s wild. I haven’t known anyone that long. Well, except—"

“N34!”

Warlock marks his card, but doesn’t finish his sentence.

“Except?” asks Adam.

“Oh. Except my godparents,” Warlock says offhand, like he doesn’t want Adam to ask. Adam doesn’t.  “Is this, what, the first time you’ve been apart from them?”

Did Adam imply that? He guesses he kind of did. God, he’s probably coming off sad and needy, which isn’t true at all, he’s fine. He can’t say he’s fine or it’s gonna sound like he’s not fine, but he is, he’s fine — 

“I27!”

“Well?” Warlock says, and Adam looks up from his card, his brow scrunching in confusion.

“Well what?”

Warlock reaches over and marks Adam’s card, rolling his eyes.

“You were telling me about your friends,” he says, his tone suggesting he thinks Adam is a little dense for forgetting. Adam is… not sure that’s what he was doing, but if Warlock wants him to, he guesses he can.

“Uh, well, Wensleydale is good at — you know, keeping us all on track. Him and Pepper are the only reason I did any good on my A levels. Brian mostly specializes in getting us off track, which is something you need sometimes.” A faint smile curls a corner of his mouth as he thinks of them. “Pepper’s the tough one. And the smart one, these days... sometimes. Not just in the A levels way, although she’s the only other one that’s going to uni." He shuts his mouth, frowning to himself. He didn’t really mean to say that much.

“And what are you?” Warlock asks. Adam shoots him a questioning look.

“Huh?”

“G48!”

“In this little circle,” Warlock says. “What do you do?”

Adam doesn’t really want to say he’s the leader, even if it’s true.

“I’m… the ideas guy,” he says. 

Warlock’s face cracks in a grin, and he turns and props his forearm on the back of his folding chair.

“That so?” he says. “I assume your ideas are usually better than this one?”

Adam thinks about saying that this was his mum’s idea and not his, but thinks better of it.

“O64!” 

“Yes,” Adam says. 

Warlock flips his marker over his knuckles and doesn’t look away from Adam.

“You’ll have to prove it sometime,” he smirks.

Adam’s throat is strangely dry.

“Okay,” he says.  

Warlock
what are you doing tonight

Adam
Starting my world religions essay I guess

Warlock
wrong, you’re coming to this stupid party i’ll text you the address

Adam
If it’s stupid why are you going??

Warlock
bc i went to your stupid thing and you owe me    

Warlock
also we both know you’re not gonna start your fuckin essay tonight don’t lie to me young

Warlock tugs on a grey beanie and arranges his hair carefully under it in the little mirror he’d stuck to the dorm wall. He darts an annoyed glance at his phone. He sent the last message three hours ago, and had gotten a read receipt twenty minutes later. An actual reply is yet to arrive.

“If that asshole stands me up for his religion essay, I swear to Someone,” Warlock mutters at his reflection. He stares at himself for a few more moments of silent consideration, idly adjusting his hair with his fingers, before picking an eyeliner pencil out of a jumble of them on the table.

The phone rings and Warlock startles badly, the cap of the pencil clattering to the floor.

It isn’t Adam. Warlock taps the screen and bends down to get the cap.

“Hey kid,” comes Crowley’s voice over the speakerphone.

Warlock leans in close to the mirror and pulls his eyelid taut.

“Hey Nanny,” he says. “What’s up?”

“Oh, the usual,” comes the languid reply. “Persons unnamed seem to think that if we don’t check up on you regularly you might do something reckless like join a cult or declare a film studies degree.” 

Warlock lines his eyes carefully and smiles a little in the mirror. Despite all Crowley’s nonchalance, Warlock knows perfectly well which of his godparents was mostly likely to fret when wee Warlock wandered out of sight.

“Nothing like that,” he replies. “Just going to a party.”

“A cool party?” Crowley says, and Warlock can’t help another glance at his phone screen where no notification has appeared from Mister Religion Essay.

“Cool enough for some people,” he grouses. “Not everyone.”

The pause that follows is space to elaborate, if he wants it. He doesn’t — he’s just nervous and a bit sore about it. After a moment, Crowley speaks again.

“Cool enough for anyone worth bothering with, I’m sure,” he says, and isn’t talking about the party.

“Is that Warlock?” Warlock hears just barely in the distance. There’s the click of speakerphone going on, and then the muffled clunk of the cottage’s wooden front door being persuaded closed.

“Warlock, dear boy, I’m sending you a ‘care package’! I read about it in a magazine, it’s to alleviate homesickness as you move toward independence. I just got back from the post office! Mrs. Bradley says hello, by the way.”

Warlock tries not to groan, because Azzy would take it the wrong way.

“I’m not that homesick,” he tries to say, but then has an interesting thought that leaves him paused in front of the mirror. “Wait. Did you put, like, biscuits or something in it?” 

Nanny is the better cook, but Aziraphale is a strong baker, and even though Warlock definitely meant it about not being homesick, the thought of sitting down to a plate of his godfather’s biscuits is enough to give him a dull pang. 

There is a pregnant pause on the other end of the phone. 

“Yes, of course!” Aziraphale declares. “Wouldn’t be a care package without biscuits! Probably!”

Warlock figures there probably weren’t biscuits in the package until he said something. 

They’ve never talked about who or what exactly Warlock’s godparents are. They’re magic, obviously — Warlock isn’t stupid. But what kind of magic they are (if there are kinds) seems unimportant. There’d been a brief period between the ages of eight and ten when he’d seriously entertained the possibility that the two of them were, in order, Harry Potter wizards, superheroes, or aliens. 

Ultimately, though, he figured if Cinderella could have a magic godparent and not make a big deal of it, so could he. He knows godparents are usually appointed by the regular parents too, and he certainly isn’t going to bring up any theories he’s got about that.

“They wouldn’t happen to be peanut butter biscuits, would they?”

Another pause.

“Certainly!” Aziraphale declares with very slightly strained cheerfulness.

“Warlock’s got a party,” Crowley puts in, smugness tinting his voice. “A cool party.”

“Oh!” says Aziraphale, and Warlock snorts a silent laugh.

“My coursework is all on schedule, Azzy,” he promises as he finishes up his eyeliner. 

“And more importantly, he’s got a cool party to go to,” Crowley says.

Warlock can practically hear Aziraphale struggling. He caps the eyeliner and straightens up again, finger combing his hair in the mirror while he waits for his godfather to warm to the idea.

“Just make sure you don’t, ah… don’t leave your drink unattended,” Aziraphale says finally. “And don’t, um, operate any… motor vehicles!”

“I don’t have a motor vehicle,” Warlock says patiently. He scrunches a section of rebelliously waved hair in his hand, to no effect, and then reaches for a bottle of product. 

“Right,” says Aziraphale. “But don’t, you know. Operate anyone else’s.”

“If you’re going to mix alcohols, start with liquor, end with beer,” says Crowley. “And don’t let anyone go to sleep on their back.”

“Cabbage broth the next day,” Aziraphale contributes, sounding pleased to have thought of it. “Or an owl’s egg.” There is an incredulous silence. “What?” he adds, apparently to Nanny. “You’ve never been so far gone you forgot how to —”

“And have fun,” Nanny directs, speaking over whatever Azzy was going to say. “Don’t do anything for the sake of someone else’s fun that isn’t fun for you.”

“Oh yes, do have fun, dear boy,” Aziraphale agrees. “We really are so proud of you. You deserve to have a good time with your friends.”

It’s not friends that are throwing this party, he almost says. It isn’t for anyone else’s fun that Warlock’s going, so it doesn’t directly counteract Nanny’s advice, but he thinks of watching his drink and taking a rideshare and cabbage broth, and he looks at his hair which refuses to lay straight and he almost tells them he was just kidding, he’s not going to a party at all — 

His phone screen lights up with a notification.

Adam
Were you going to text me that address or??????

Warlock’s lips twitch upward. He wipes his gel-sticky hands on the towel and picks up his phone. 

Warlock
right, sorry. it’s in like two hours, you’ve got time, don’t freak

“I think I will,” he says.

“Okay, Mum. I gotta go.” Adam pauses on the pavement, his phone to his ear. “Yeah, Mum. Yeah, all right.” He stuffs a hand in his trouser pocket, and looks up at the sun dropping behind the tops of the trees. “Got it, Mum. Love you too. Bye.”

The address for the party is on a block just off-campus mostly rented to students. Adam can spot which one it is from the string of lights over the open front door and the kids standing on the stoop with drinks in their hands. It’s not crowded or noisy — at least, not yet — but Adam still lingers out by the kerb.

He’d felt pretty good about his band t-shirt and jeans when he left his room this morning, but he rethinks it when he sees Warlock approaching down the pavement. The other boy is wearing slashed jeans and a jacket that looks older than the two of them put together, but in a cool way. Without even going into the party, Adam already feels instantly out of his element. It’s a strange feeling to have; he’s spent his life at the head of the Them, utterly at home among his friends and in his town. He knew where he stood there, and even if not everyone in Tadfield was his biggest fan, it was never more than comfortable antagonism. Even Greasy Johnson had signed Adam’s yearbook, with a frowning grunt, before they’d parted ways.

Here, it turns out that Tadfield tastes are a few years behind the rest of the world, and Tadfield clout means less than nothing. And Tadfield boys…

Well, he doesn’t know where he’s going with that one. But he’s pretty sure none of them were like Warlock Dowling.

“You ready to go in, or you gonna kick rocks out here for a little longer?” Warlock says when he’s finally reached Adam’s square of pavement, pushing his sunglasses up into his hair. 

“No, I’m…” he cuts off his own explanation of how much he isn’t nervous, figuring it’s probably only going to make him sound more nervous. “Yeah,” he says instead. “Let’s go.”

Inside, the party is only just getting going, the students milling around the house with plastic cups in their hands, scoping out the rooms and the guests. But the music is already just a little louder than is comfortable, the bass line thumping through Adam like shoes in a washing machine. 

“I’m getting a drink,” Warlock declares, and marches to the kitchen. Adam follows, feeling a little foolish trailing after him. But what is he meant to do if he stays behind? Would Warlock meet back up with him? Should he try to insert himself in one of the couple little knots of people talking in different parts of the room? Adam’s never thought of himself as bad at making friends, but trying to strike up a new acquaintance here, now, seems impossibly hard.

Anyway, Adam wants a drink too, probably.

A girl in the kitchen ladles a red drink out of a giant plastic tub into cups of their own. 

“We won’t tap the keg until later,” she informs them, and Adam nods like he’s been to plenty of keg parties. The red drink looks and mostly smells like something that might have come out of a lunchtime juice box in primary school, but there’s an edge to its sweet aroma that promises danger. 

Adam has drank before, of course — not even the best after school efforts of the adults could keep a bunch of small town teenagers from spending a Friday night on someone’s car hood on a back road with a pack of pilfered beers at least once. But that was Tadfield, and Them, and watching Pepper frown at the stars while Brian and Wensleydale poked each other in the ribs and giggled. He feels their absence sharply all at once, and stumbles internally as he blinks down at his cup of red drink.

Warlock slurps his casually, one hand stuffed halfway into one of the front pockets of his tight trousers. He peers around the kitchen without curiosity, looking cool and unaffected and not nervous at all. Adam isn’t sure if he’s irritated or impressed. Warlock probably went to a hundred parties like this back home.

One pounding song ends, and another indistinguishable song begins. Adam slowly drains his red drink.

“You having fun?” Warlock asks finally.

Adam swirls the remainder of his red drink in the bottom of the plastic cup.

“Yeah, sure,” he says.

“Well, I’m not,” says Warlock. “This shit is worse than bingo night.”

The admission surprises Adam into a laugh. He looks at Warlock and sees the other boy’s mouth curl up into a lopsided smile. 

“Well, what else should we do?” he says.

“You said you’re the ideas guy,” Warlock fires back, and Adam doesn’t know why Warlock remembers that. “You come up with something.”

Adam thinks about the ways he used to occupy his evenings with the Them, and the advantages in entertainment afforded by the city. He tips back his cup and drains the last of the too-sweet punch.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, and tosses his cup at an overflowing bin. It hits the side of the heap and bounces to the floor. He jerks his head toward the door and strides outside.

He hears, just barely over the music and the noise, the clack of a second cup hitting the bin, and feels Warlock just behind him. He knows exactly where to go.

They reach Adam’s new idea, and Warlock halts at the property line. Adam pauses and looks over his shoulder at the other boy hesitating a few meters behind him. 

Adam looks at him questioningly, but for a moment Warlock simply lingers by the dilapidated fence, communicating something with his eyes that Adam isn’t quite getting.

“What?” says Adam.

Warlock gestures a little weakly to something on the other side of the fence. 

“There’s a sign,” he says.

Adam saw the sign, he’s pretty sure. If he were to guess, it’s probably about trespassing, or private property, or something like that.

“Yeah,” he says, trying not to smile.

Warlock takes a second to clearly war in silence with himself about voicing his objection — something like “But won’t we get in trouble,” if a friendship with Wensleydale has taught Adam anything. But it seems in the end that Warlock Dowling is simply too cool to say anything like that out loud. He sets his jaw, in a steeling of his nerves that he likely hopes is subtle.

“Yeah, all right,” he says, and steps past the busted fence.

It is unexpectedly cheering to see Warlock’s hesitation, if Adam’s being honest. He’s had enough of feeling like the weird, uncool rube for the evening. He walks up to the front door of the shuttered building with just a touch more swagger than normal, very conscious of the presence of Warlock a few steps behind him.

Adam knows he won’t be able to see much, if anything, through the dusty, barred windows, but he peers in one anyway as he jiggles the doorknob.

“Won’t there be an alarm or whatever?” suggests Warlock, in a voice as though it’s only idle curiosity that causes him to ask.

Alarms? Nothing in Tadfield was alarmed. Was that something they did a lot of in the city? But Adam shrugs as though he had already considered and discarded the possibility before Warlock even mentioned it.

“Look at the state of this place. All the dead flies in the windowsill.” He points to the tiny corpses only just visible in the shine of the streetlight. “Whoever owns this place stopped caring about it a while ago. There’s no way there’s anything in here worth protecting.” He pulls his student ID on its lanyard out of his pocket. “And if there is an alarm, we’ll just run.”

This last sentiment does nothing to reassure Warlock, who glances nervously over one shoulder as Adam drops to a knee and starts to work his ID into the catch on the door.

“So is this the kind of thing you and your friends did a lot, back home?” he asks after a moment. The forced casualness has started giving way to a tone of incredulity. “Breaking into places?”

Adam shrugs one shoulder, eyes on his work. “Sometimes, when there was nothing else to do.” 

Warlock considers this. 

“Young, answer me honestly,” he says. “Were you a hooligan?” 

Adam snorts. “Are you nineteen or are you ninety?” he shoots back. “Who says ‘hooligan’?” He wiggles the plastic card at a slightly different angle, and sticks his tongue out in concentration. “We make our own fun. Nobody gets hurt.”

“That’s exactly what a hooligan would say!” Warlock half-screeches in a breathy stage whisper. “Oh my god, I thought you were just some nerd but you’ve secretly been a badass this whole time!”

“I’ve seen your library hold list,” Adam observes. “I’m absolutely sure that of the two of us, you’re the nerd.”

“A very palpable hit,” says Warlock, and the door pops open. 

Both boys pull their phones from their pockets as they step into the dark room, and in a moment two flashlights illuminate the scene in front of them. The building was some sort of office once, judging from the receptionist’s counter in front of them. Warlock hangs back in the doorway while Adam goes around to the other side of the counter to investigate.

“There’s still a desk back here,” he reports, and starts opening drawers. The motion kicks dust into the air, and he coughs. A flashlight beam flicks across his vision, blinding him for a second, and he hisses. “Hey, keep that pointed down or keep your hand in front of it.” The light is quickly directed at the floor.

“Sorry,” says Warlock.

“Also come in out of the doorway,” says Adam. “We don’t have a car out front, so if they can’t see us from the street and we don’t flash our lights around, they don’t have any reason to suspect anyone’s in here.”

Warlock’s silhouette disappears from the entry, and the door is gently set ajar. 

Adam pulls out a find from the back of a drawer.

“Here, catch.” He tosses a little box of paperclips toward the sound of Warlock’s scuffling footsteps. 

There’s a small thud and an “Ow, what the fuck?” and Adam snickers.

“So those friends you told me about,” Warlock says, as he picks up the box of paper clips. “You’re totally in a gang, aren’t you? Like, a hick gang.”

“What does that even mean?” says Adam. He shines his phone light through his fingers onto a pale square on the wall where a picture must have once hung. “How are you defining ‘gang’? We weren’t involved in organized crime or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Warlock crunches over what sounds like broken glass, his flashlight low on the wall as he makes his way carefully into the next room.

“Judging by the state of your backpack it was probably pretty disorganized crime,” he quips. Then his light flicks back toward Adam’s feet as Warlock spins around to face him again. “Holy shit. ‘The ideas guy’? You’re the goddamn gang boss, aren’t you?” He laughs a little too loud, and Adam shushes him. “You are! I bet you were the grimmest little baby mafia don when you were a kid.”

Adam rolls his eyes, unseen in the dark, and steps past Warlock into what’s probably the rest of the offices.

“I’m glad you’re entertained, at least,” Adam says.

“Honestly, yeah,” says Warlock, and Adam can hear the grin in his voice. “I’m entertained as all hell.”

Adam finds he isn’t annoyed the way he might think he’d be. He isn’t sure how to refute Warlock — really, he isn’t sure if he has the room to. But for all Warlock’s prickly, sarcastic demeanor, his teasing comes from the same side of the table as Adam, sharing his sharp smiles like a bag of chocolates.

“Grim?” Adam says.

“What?” 

Adam’s eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and he can make out the outline of Warlock poking through a pile of junk in the corner with his foot.

“The grimmest baby mafia don,” Adam quotes. 

Warlock raises his head from his investigation of the debris and looks over at Adam.

“Oh, nothing bad,” he says. “You just don’t smile a lot, dude.”

People have mentioned this to Adam, now and then. But it’s usually framed as at least a little bit of a failing. “You were such a serious baby,” his mother said sometimes. “When we first met, I thought you might be mean, or sad maybe,” Wensleydale told him in confidence once when they were kids. His parents and the Them know him now, of course, that he isn’t mean or sad or anything. But Warlock just mentions it in passing, “nothing bad,” like “grim” is just a thing a person is allowed to be. 

Warlock pulls open a door that’s been left ajar and shines his phone into the dark space behind it.

“I think I found the stairs,” he says.  

Their footsteps in the stairwell stir up thick dust that swirls in the beams of their phones. Adam pulls his shirt over his face as he follows Warlock up the narrow corridor. Surprisingly, there’s still a lot of office furniture up here. Maybe it’s all old and whatever company moved out of here knew they were going to have to replace it anyway.

He hopes it isn’t because of asbestos or anything like that. Maybe he should have actually stopped and read the sign.

They won’t be in here that long. It’s probably fine. 

Warlock is poking around in one of the desks. “Found more paper clips,” he reports. 

“You party animal,” says Adam blandly. Warlock giggles a little nervously. It might be cute.

“Did you really do shit like this a lot as a kid?” he asks, climbing up on top of the desk to sit.

“Yeah,” Adam says, coming over to crawl onto the desk too. “Didn’t you? You aren’t from a big city either, right?”

“I grew up in London,” Warlock sniffs, and then pauses. “Well, the edge of London. And then a seaside village in Sussex, but that’s not the point. Not all of us are driven to petty crime by village life,” Warlock fires. He sits cross-legged on the desktop and opens the little box of paper clips. 

“It wasn’t all petty crime,” Adam says. He sits facing Warlock and folds one leg under him, and lets the other dangle off the desk. “When we got older, sometimes. Mostly it was loitering. When we were little we mostly played in the woods.”

“Played like what?” says Warlock, pulling out a handful of paperclips and fiddling with them intently. “Like football?”

“Like detectives,” Adam corrects. “Or pirates.”

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” Warlock replies approvingly. Adam snorts a little laugh.

“Yeah, I read Treasure Island when I was nine and convinced Them we needed to bury treasure out in the neighbor’s field and make a map. We never needed much prompting to make anything into a game, but the pirates era lasted a while.” 

“Did you make Them let you be Jim?” Warlock grins, looking up from his paperclips. “God, I can picture it. Towheaded and heroically sun-browned.”

Adam’s glad it’s so dark so Warlock can’t see him blushing. 

“Yeah,” he admits. “We did the fight with Israel Hands a couple of times. Brian liked to do death scenes.”

“My godfather had a really old leather bound copy in his library,” Warlock says, smiling down at his paper clips. “A kid probably shouldn’t have been touching it, but I read it four times one summer.” He shoots another smirk up at Adam. “I might not have had a gang to do scenes with, but I practiced my Long John Silver to perfection in the mirror.”

Adam wishes, with surprising suddenness and intensity, that Warlock had lived nearby and could have spent long, hazy summers playing with the Them. Normally he’d keep such a thought to himself, but he’s already admitted more than he would, and something about the dark, silent isolation of this musty building and the way their knees are almost touching changes his mind.

“We could have used a Long John,” he says quietly. “Pepper always wanted to be Captain Smollett. She said he was the only competent one. And Wensleydale was hopeless as a pirate.”

He’s rewarded with a warm grin, aimed at him over Warlock’s busy hands.

“Did you ever go back and dig it up?” Warlock asks. “The treasure?”

“I don’t think so,” Adam says. “It’s likely been plowed up by now.”

“You should check over the next holiday,” says Warlock. “Just in case.”

He lifts up his handiwork and drapes it over Adam’s head — a paper clip chain that snags in the back of his hair. Warlock leans in and reaches back to disentangle it with careful fingers, and the chain settles cool on the back of Adam’s neck.

Adam’s chest goes strange and tight all at once. He runs his fingers over the chain and pulls his mouth into a crooked smile of acknowledgement. His eyes slide off of Warlock, and land on a row of standing file cabinets near the center of the room. 

“You know what we should do?” he says, nodding to the cabinets. “We should push those over.”

Warlock looks over his shoulder to the cabinets, and laughs.

“You think they’d go over like dominos?” he asks, eyes sparkling. The feeling in Adam’s chest doesn’t get any less, but he shrugs.

“One way to find out,” he says.

They both slide off the desk, and take position behind the nearest cabinet. They plant their hands against the side of it, side by side, nearly touching. 

“One, two, three,” counts Adam, and they shove.

The file cabinets do go over like dominoes, with a fabulous crash that rings in Adam’s ears and shakes in the floorboards under their feet. It’s loud and magnificent and absolutely perfect for about two and a half seconds.

Then the floor collapses.

Adam leaps away, throwing an arm over to shove Warlock back too. It’s unnecessary, since Warlock’s already scrambling backward, back hitting the desk as they watch the cabinets tumble through the floorboards, the clang and clatter of metal eclipsed by the thunderous crack of breaking wood, and another crash of the cabinets hitting the floor below. A cloud of dust erupts into the air, and the two of them huddle against the desk, coughing, as the sound and the tremors finally settle.

“Asshole, I knew this place was condemned for a reason,” Warlock says, and Adam almost thinks he’s in trouble before he sees that Warlock is laughing.  He looks at the enormous hole in the middle of the floor, and then back at Warlock’s face, laughing and coughing in turn and brushing dust from his cool clothes. 

“You didn’t say it was condemned,” says Adam, but he can feel a laugh starting to bubble in his chest too. 

“The sign!”

“I thought it was just for private property, or whatever.”

“Or whatever. You said you couldn’t do geometry, you never said you couldn’t read.”

Adam is truly laughing now, deep and helplessly, leaning over with his hands flat on the desk, the paper clip chain swaying under his face. He looks up after a minute to see Warlock is watching him, grinning like Adam’s laughter is the best thing Warlock’s seen all night.  

“We should go,” Adam coughs, flushing, but then bites down on another giggle. He feels fizzy from his stomach to his head all the way out to his fingers and toes, like a shaken soda. “Somebody had to hear that.”

“No fucking kidding,” says Warlock, and hops over the desk, heading toward the stairs. “You maniac.” He glances over his shoulder, eyes still laughing. 

“But definitely better than the party,” Warlock adds.

Adam grins back at him, and follows, fingers looped around the paper clip necklace. 

 
Warlock is sitting at one of the second floor study tables in the stacks, his feet propped up on a chair, his attention on the book in his lap, and a bottle of soda and an open package of jaffa cakes in front of him. 

He’s not eating the jaffa cakes over the book, obviously, he’s not a monster. He’s eating them over the table, and wiping his fingers before he turns a page. The book is a huge doorstop about the history of Buddhist art in India, with color pages in every chapter, each shiny print sandwiched between two sheets of tissue paper. It was only printed in the 1960s, but he knows Azzy would love it anyway.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be eating those in the library.”

He’s so deep into this chapter about the beginning of the Iconic phase in the first century that at first he doesn’t comprehend that he’s heard words, much less that it’s him being spoken to. But something about the particular voice that’s speaking rouses him, and he raises his head to see Adam Young standing on the other side of his table, looking skeptically at his biscuits.

Warlock hates himself a little bit for breaking irresistibly into a grin, but he does anyway. 

“What?” he says. Adam nods at the jaffa cakes. 

“I don’t think you’re supposed to eat those in the library,” he says again. Warlock rolls his eyes, though doesn’t manage to smother his smile.

“You know, I really hoped the book trolley was just a bad day,” Warlock says, propping one elbow on the table and putting his chin in his hand. “But you really are a bossy bastard, huh?” Adam frowns like he’s trying to decide whether or not to be offended. Warlock just laughs and jerks his head at the chair opposite. “If you sit down,” says Warlock, “I’ll share.”

“Sure, and get me in trouble too,” Adam says, but he sits down anyway.

Warlock gestures widely around at the library. 

“Have you seen signs prohibiting eating in the stacks?” Warlock demands. Adam opens his mouth, but Warlock doesn’t let him argue. “No,” he answers himself. “You haven’t, because there aren’t any. I checked, it’s not against library policy. Everybody just assumes it is.” 

Adam frowns again, more emphatically, but after holding the expression thoughtfully for a moment, reaches out and takes a biscuit.

Warlock slides the book carefully onto the table, leaving its heavy covers laying open, weighing down the page lightly with a pencil. 

“What brings you into the temple of knowledge, Young?” he asks, joining his hands together and stretching his arms above his head. He winces as his shoulder cracks, betraying how long he’s been sitting here.

“The paper you told me to put off writing last week, actually,” says Adam dryly. “The one for my world religions class.”

“I didn’t tell you to put it off,” Warlock corrects. “I told you that you would not be working on it whether you went to the party or not. The difference between peer pressure and prophecy.”

Adam folds his arms on the table and perches his chin on top. 

“I don’t even know what I’m writing it about,” he admits. “It’s open topic and I just need one secondary source, so I’m really just browsing for information.”

Warlock removes his pencil from the book he was reading, shuts it and pushes it across the table to Adam, carefully avoiding any biscuit crumbs. 

“Try this one,” he says. “It’s great.” 

Adam looks unconvinced. 

“It’s pretty big,” he says.

“You’re in uni now, some of the books are big,” Warlock fires back. “You’ll like it, it’s full of pictures.”

Adam rolls his eyes again, but he pulls the book the rest of the way across the table and reads the cover.

“Oh hey, the professor mentioned this stuff last week,” he says, and, Warlock is pleased to see, swings the clothbound cover open and starts to leaf through the book. Warlock watches him. His fingertips turning the heavy pages are callused and there are a couple mysterious scars on his hands, old and faded to white. He thinks about their escapade three days ago, and is quite sure that Adam got those scars doing something wildly unwise in a tree or on a rooftop or with some kind of rusty farm equipment.

“What are you smiling about?” says Adam, and Warlock looks up from his hands.

“If you don’t want to be a priest or a rabbi or anything, why religious studies?” asks Warlock, instead of answering.

Adam shrugs one shoulder.

“It just sort of seemed like... I dunno, what I was supposed to do.” He runs fingertips along the margin of the color picture of Miracle at Kapilavastu. Warlock double checks that it’s not the hand he used to eat the jaffa cake.

“What, like a calling?" Warlock says, digging another one out for himself.

Adam makes a face. “More like… An obligation?"

“Not to your parents,” Warlock muses. “You said it made them nervous.”

Adam shakes his head, his eyes still on the picture. 

“Not my parents. It’s… it’s hard to explain.”

“Well, it’s stupid,” Warlock says abruptly. 

Adam looks up at that, faintly scowling.

“What? Why?“ he demands.

Warlock pulls his feet back out of the chair and sits up. He slides another book out of the stack next to him and opens it on the table. 

“Nobody’s obligated to anybody,” he declares, and punctuates it with a bite of his biscuit.

He glances up to see that the scowl has been rapidly replaced with something else — maybe an air of amused disbelief. The kid is definitely hard to read sometimes.

“Nobody?” says Adam. Warlock nods firmly, but Adam doesn’t look convinced. He takes another biscuit and nibbles it thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he says. “I owe a lot to my friends. And my mum and dad.” His gaze is in the middle distance, remembering something, maybe. “It’s more to do with like… a legacy that I ought to know something about.”

“Well, the last person you’re obligated to is the Almighty,” Warlock snorts. “If that was the next thing you were going to say.” Adam’s eyebrows go up. 

“The Almighty?” he repeats. 

“Yeah,” says Warlock. “You know, God?” 

Adam’s definitely amused now, although Warlock’s got no guess as to what the joke is. Warlock picks up his soda and unscrews the cap, taking a long sip. 

“It’s in the name, isn’t it?” he says, when it becomes clear Adam is going to wait for elaboration. He screws the cap back on. “The Almighty. If God needs something done, She’s plenty well capable of doing it Herself. Meanwhile, She put us in charge of our lives and it’s our responsibility to run them. Don’t like how we do it, should’ve gotten someone else for the job.”

Adam’s definitely amused now. Still not really smiling, but Warlock can spot it in the corners of his eyes.

“Do you say that just to make your parents mad?” Adam says. Warlock snorts.

“My parents couldn’t care less,” he says, and smirks. “But yeah, it does stress my godfather out some. Just the one, though.”

“The one what?” says Adam distractedly as he turns a page in the book.

“The one godfather,” says Warlock. “The other one gave me a high five the first time I said it.”

Adam looks up quickly from the book. 

“Oh,” he says. Warlock doesn’t know what he’s so surprised about until he blinks and adds “Sorry, you’ve just always said ‘godparents’ before.”

“Well, you know, gender is fake,” Warlock shrugs. Adam is still quiet, and Warlock can feel his stomach clenching up. “I’m not very straight either, for that matter,” he says. “Is that a problem?”

Adam shakes his head too emphatically.

“No, no way,” he says. “Uh, my friend Pepper is gay.”

The other boy’s eyes are lake blue and over-wide with the sincerity of whatever unspoken sentiment goes with “Pepper is gay.” Warlock lets himself relax. 

“The more I hear about Pepper, the more I think I’d like her,” he says, and he sees Adam relax as well.

“She’d like you too,” Adam says. 

Adam
Hey you free to talk?

Pepper
yah sure. i was just texting brian so i kno hes free if u wanna group call

Adam
Nah I need like. advice??? 

Pepper
1 sec

Adam sits in the “Class of 2003 native flora garden,” and watches the moths wheel around the orange glow of a lamppost. Autumn is taking a while to settle in, and the flowers are still blooming confidently, although a breeze with a hint of chill is moving in with the falling dusk. Someone has written “FUCK COPS” on the molded concrete bench he’s sitting on, in something that seems too thick and dark to be sharpie. He rubs a corner of the f with his finger, and it smudges. An anarchist ceramics student with a china marker? 

His phone rings. Adam breathes in, his chest expanding slowly, and then breathes out. He presses the answer button.

“You can’t just charm your way out of a criminal record anymore, you know,” is the first thing Pepper says. “That only worked in Tadfield.”

Adam looks at the graffiti and almost laughs. It unties his stomach just a little bit.

“I’m not in trouble,” he says.

“Well, good,” says Pepper, and then pauses. “What’s the matter, then?”

Adam inhales, exhales. 

“I want to ask somebody out,” he says.

“Good thing we left Brian out of this,” Pepper snorts. “You’ve asked people out before. What’s the struggle? Just nervous? Or don’t they like you?”

Trust Pepper to get to the heart of the matter quickly. Adam pulls a foot up onto the bench and wraps an arm around his knee, leaning back further into the dark shadows of the overhanging tree.

He notices the use of ‘they.’ Pepper says ‘they’ a lot, and this one is off the cuff, no emphasis. She might have used the same ‘they’ when talking about someone Brian or Wensleydale wanted to ask out. But he still feels in her brusque words a gentle permission, the room to say whatever he needs to say next.

“I think he likes me,” Adam says.

There’s only a moment’s pause. It doesn’t feel like dismay or surprise — well, of course it doesn’t, Pepper hasn’t been as subtle in her suspicions as she probably thinks she has — but more like the time it takes for Pepper to shift all her attention to this conversation. Adam can almost hear the well-known determined expression settle onto her forehead in that pause. He loves her deeply for it. 

“If you think so,” Pepper says, “I’m sure he does.”

She would leave it at that if that’s what Adam wanted to do. It isn’t.

“You can say you knew it, if you want,” he offers.

“I might be a bitch, Adam Young,” Pepper scolds, “but I’m not that kind of bitch.”

“But you did know.”

“Yeah,” she admits. “I totally did.”

Adam huffs a little laugh and props his chin onto his denim-clad knee. 

“Is it that wizard kid?” she asks. At that, Adam really does laugh.

“Warlock,” he corrects. “Yeah. He’s… bi, or something? He likes guys.” It’s weird to say it out loud, even though he’s talking about someone else. Because it’s relevant to Adam, so it’s kind of like he’s talking about himself. Adam’s pretty sure he’s not bi, but saying that feels like a little much for right now.

“Is he the one you’ve been spending so much time with lately?” Pepper demands. “All this ‘oh, I’ve been doing stuff,’ and ‘just hanging out with a friend’?”

Adam sighs, caught out.

“Yeah,” he says. 

“He definitely likes you,” she pronounces. “Bet you my whole ramen stash.” Adam wrinkles his nose, skeptical. A beetle alights on his jacket sleeve and he brushes it off. 

“Why hasn’t he asked me out first, then?” he says. Pepper scoffs.

“He probably thinks you’re straight, idiot,” she says. “Even if he suspects, asking someone out through the closet door is very drama heavy and only to be attempted as a last resort.”

That sounds true, although he knows Pepper doesn’t have a lot more personal experience in this area than he has. She and the one other young lesbian in Tadfield had dated for six months in year eleven, and their breakup had been deeply fraught and occupied most of the Them’s time and conversation for the month of February. Unless she’s been making far more of the last couple of months than Adam, she’s probably talking from either theory or hearsay. 

It’s better than he’s got, though. He thinks of Warlock teasing about Adam’s golden hair and ocean eyes, and figures Pepper’s probably right. It would just be so much easier if Warlock would ask Adam out first. 

“I don’t know what my dad is gonna say,” Adam says.

“He’s always been nice to me,” Pepper points out. Adam shakes his head invisibly in the darkness.

“It’s not exactly the same,” he says. He hears Pepper sigh. 

“I know,” she says. 

They sit in silence for a long moment with the thought, with each other. A gust of wind rustles the weedy beds of native flora.

“Thanks, Pep,” Adam says. 

“You got it,” she says. “Tell me how it goes. On for the Thursday group call?”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “Talk to you then.”

“Night, moron,” she says lovingly, and the line goes silent.

Adam tucks his phone and his hands into his jacket pockets and resumes watching the moths.

He breathes in, and then out.

Adam looks over at Warlock no less than seven times during the course of a fifty minute class. It might be more, Warlock couldn’t say because he’s busy paying attention to the lesson. Well, okay, no he’s not, but he’s busy pretending he is, anyway. About fifteen minutes in Warlock feels Adam’s eyes on him once again, and turns to meet them with a pointed stare. Adam looks quickly away, but he’s back at it just a few minutes later. Warlock doesn’t return the look again. A lesser man might suspect his hair was doing something really unfortunate, but that lesser man is not Warlock. His hair is good, it’s great, he made sure of that this morning. Adam, Warlock thinks with gritted teeth, his eyes on the whiteboard, is just being weird.

Warlock spends the last twenty minutes of class resisting the urge to reach up and pat his hair down.

When the professor dismisses them, Adam strides purposefully over to Warlock’s seat. Which isn’t surprising, given his behavior all period, but is still a departure from his usual modus of strolling everywhere as though he’s kindly saving you the trouble of coming to him.

His gaze is… intense. Warlock does not recoil at his rapid approach.

Once Adam has closed the distance between them, though, he seems to leak all that purpose like a pricked balloon. He pauses in front of Warlock’s desk, both hands wrapped around the strap of his messenger style book bag. The classroom slowly empties around them, and Warlock, paused in the act of hoisting his book bag onto his shoulder, raises an eyebrow at Adam standing in front of him.

“Hi,” says Adam. 

“Hi,” says Warlock, skeptically.

Adam frowns as though Warlock has stumped him with an impenetrable riddle. Warlock sighs to himself. This kid gets weirder every day.

“I’m going to go get some coffee,” Warlock says patiently, pulling his shades out of his hair and putting them on. “Think you can work out whatever it is you wanted to say on the way?”

Adam frowns harder, but after a second he nods. 

“Yeah,” he says. 

They walk in silence from the classroom, through the building, and out into the sunshine, and they’re halfway to the coffee place on the edge of campus before Adam speaks. 

“Do you wanna come with me to see a movie Saturday?” he asks. 

He’s so serious about it, but he’s that way about most things, so at first Warlock doesn’t even manage to connect the question to Adam’s odd behavior.

“There something you wanted to see?” Warlock asks, and Adam shrugs. 

“There’s a few things out right now that sound kind of good,” he says, but then backs down from his own suggestion surprisingly quickly. “Or we could do something else, I don’t mind.”

It still takes Warlock half a second. To be fair, he’d stopped waiting for it weeks ago. Now he stops walking suddenly, and his face splits into a grin.

“Hold on,” he says. “Are you asking me out on a gay date?”

Adam stops too. His mouth and forehead bunch up defensively, and his hands tighten on his book bag strap. He hesitates for only the barest moment.

“Yes,” he says, decisive.

Warlock’s smile gets wider. He flips his shades up onto his head.

“A gay homo date. Like a regular date, but in a gay way.”

“Aren’t you bi or something?” Adam says, looking less nervous and more annoyed now. “Why are you saying it like that?”

“I’m pan,” Warlock smirks, “but same difference. It’s just that I’ve thought you were asking me to go out with you like six times before this, so I wanted to make sure there was no mistake this time.”

He’s teasing, of course, but Adam’s mouth twists a little to the side.

“Maybe you were right before too,” he says, a little quieter than Warlock is expecting.

If Warlock hadn’t already guessed that he was walking into some coming-out drama, this is a dead giveaway. And in theory he’s not a fan — it sounds messy, being some small town Adonis’s first boyfriend. After all, Somebody knows Warlock has enough issues all on his own.

Warlock wants to anyway.

“Okay, but they weren’t actually dates before now, right? Because that would be embarrassing if I didn’t know we’d been on like, three dates already.”

“No,” says Adam. “This would be the first.” He’s still not smiling, but his shoulders are less rigid, and he’s let go of his bag strap with one hand. His eyes are softer, too, and Warlock’s coming to think that’s one of the ways Adam smiles. 

“Then I accept,” Warlock says. “But you’re going to have to do better than a movie, ideas guy.”

For that, he is rewarded with a genuine smile: eyes, mouth, cheeks. They must look like idiots, standing there on the pavement, smiling at each other.

“I’ll work on it,” Adam promises. “We still getting coffee?”

“Obviously,” Warlock says, flipping his sunglasses back down, and then points at Adam mock-sternly. “But it’s not a date.”

“Nah,” says Adam. “I’ll do a lot better than coffee.”

They resume walking, and Adam keeps stride beside him the whole way.

Adam
u have any allergies

Warlock looks down at the text, bemused. 

Warlock
penicillin?

He returns to the activity that has superseded studying for his world history exam, which is creating his artistic masterpiece on the dorm wall above his bed in sharpie. It started two hours ago as a palm-sized doodle, but has since expanded to a fractal swirl of abstract bubbles and zig zags as big as his head.  

His phone pings again. 

Adam
Too bad I already made the penicillin sandwiches

Warlock flops back on his bed and smiles up at his phone as he texts back.

Warlock
you bringing me a sandwich young? dont forget the pickle

The text blinks “read” right away, but it feels like a long minute before the dots of a text in progress start. 

Adam
Its for our date. Whens the next night youre free??
I mean no rush I just don't have a fridge for this stuff

He’s making them food? Warlock sits up and looks around, assessing exactly what state his laundry is existing in right now. 

Warlock
can’t have my penicillin sandwich going bad. i’m free tonight

He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until the next text comes through and he lets it out in a gust.

Adam
You don’t have class early??? well be out late

Warlock
forward, i like it. yeah all i got tomorrow is an evening class, do ur worst

Adam
meet you outside ur building at 10

Ten o’clock. That’s plenty of time. That’s even time for Warlock to wash his hair first, and maybe throw his favorite shirt into the washing machine downstairs…

Ping.

Adam
:)

Warlock shoves his phone in the back pocket of his jeans, and goes digging in the pile of clothes at the end of his bed, smiling like an idiot.

Warlock is waiting on the pavement outside his residential building twenty minutes before ten, so by the appointed time the autumn wind is chilling his fingers and insinuating itself into his open jacket. Adam comes around the corner right on the dot, carrying a stuffed-looking backpack and two paper cups from the coffee shop on the north edge of campus.

A rare smile curls his mouth when he sees Warlock. He approaches and holds out one of the cups. Warlock accepts it gratefully, wrapping cold hands around it and breathing in the fragrant steam coming out of the hole in the lid.

“You usually get a hazelnut latte, right?” Adam says. “I couldn’t remember.”

“A hazelnut cappuccino,” Warlock says. “But a latte is better on a night like this,” he adds quickly before a frown can settle in on Adam’s honey colored eyebrows and chase away the smile. “Retains heat better.” He sips his latte, which is wonderfully, scaldingly hot.

“How’s it even this warm anyway?” Warlock says. “Even if you got it right when they closed, that’d be a whole hour ago.”

Adam shrugs. 

“You ready to go?” he says. Warlock takes another sip of coffee, and nods. 

“You going to tell me where we’re going?” he asks. Even by the dim streetlights, he can see Adam’s eyes crinkle.

“Nope,” Adam says, and sips his own coffee. 

They walk in silence for a couple minutes through the dark pathways of campus. The evening classes have long let out by now, and the property is all but deserted, the students having found more entertaining places to spend their night.

For Warlock’s part, there isn’t a single wild party or exclusive club he’d rather find himself in right now. 

“So do I get to ask about the name yet?” Adam asks. Warlock snickers into his latte.

“My dad wasn’t there for my birth. I always got the impression Mum named me to get back at him. I think I was supposed to be Thaddeus Junior.”

“I can’t even imagine you as a Junior anything,” Adam says, wrinkling his nose. “Much less Thaddeus.”

“Me neither,” Warlock laughs. “And you can either change a name like Warlock or lean into it.” 

“I think you made the right choice of the two,” says Adam. “It suits you.”

“Thanks,” grins Warlock. “I think.”

Their path across the campus is meandering and leisurely, and they talk about their classes and professors and suitemates. Adam is easy to talk to, which is not true of most people Warlock meets. He had friends as a child in his parents’ house, and friends at his public school, and friends in Sussex. He’s never looked up a single one since any of them left his life, exchanged a letter or a phone call. 

He doesn’t really know why. Maybe it’s a personal failing. But when Adam Young talks, Warlock wants to listen, and when Adam Young asks him questions, he wants to answer. When Adam Young walks next to him, he isn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

Which is to say, he doesn’t even question when they linger around the back of the science building, drifting from shadow to shadow and speaking in low voices. He’s thinking less, really, about where they are, and more about how soon into this date is too soon to try holding Adam’s hand, when Adam directs them into a darkened doorway and starts fiddling with the doorknob. Even then, it takes Warlock a second. 

“More breaking and entering? Seriously?”

“Once you’ve broken into one building you’ve broken into them all, I guess?” Adam says, unruffled, as he wiggles a paperclip into the keyhole above the door handle. Apparently a campus building requires something more than a plastic card for unauthorized access. “Anyway, the last one was spur of the moment, just for fun.”

“Whereas I suppose this is romantic crime,” says Warlock. At that, Adam glances up from his work.

“I mean, hopefully,” he says. 

The tone is so subdued for Adam that it takes Warlock aback for a moment. As soon as he thinks about it for a second though, he feels a little shitty. The last thing he wants to do is make Adam self conscious about his first steps out of the closet. Warlock sways over and bumps Adam lightly in the shoulder with his hip.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he says, and is rewarded with another glance up and one of Adam’s tiny smiles. 

Warlock lets the pleasant silence rest for a few seconds.

“This is a campus building though,” he points out. “I’m just saying. It’s definitely got an alarm.”

“We’ll be fine,” Adam says. He jiggles the doorknob, gives the paperclip another precise poke, and the door clicks and silently swings open. Warlock waits in suspense, but no alarm sounds.

“You’re about a million times luckier than anyone has a right to be,” Warlock mutters. 

They slip inside and Adam closes the door gently behind them.

“So you got us into the sciences building after hours,” Warlock says, because he can’t not take the piss out of Adam. “Congratulations.” Adam shushes him with a finger to his lips, and cocks a listening ear. There aren’t guards inside the campus buildings at night, are there? They’re not art galleries. Warlock shuffles nervously for a moment before he notices Adam smirking at him.

“Fuck you,” Warlock groans. “All right, what’s your plan, then? Impress me, Ideas Guy.”

Adam hesitates for a strained moment, before turning and leading Warlock down a hallway. Warlock follows. He hasn’t had any science classes so far, so he doesn’t know this building. He thinks they walked through it once on the campus tour, but he has no idea where exactly Adam is taking them with such purpose. 

They turn a corner and Adam stops in front of a door. He turns the doorknob, but it seems to stick. Warlock thinks for a second that Adam is about to drop to a knee again and start picking this lock too, but Adam frowns and gives it another turn, and this time it opens smoothly. 

Before Warlock even sees what’s behind the door, he sees that there’s a different quality of light inside — not emergency lighting or the darkness of a classroom. When he steps in after Adam, he sees why.

Apparently, their university’s life sciences department has a conservatory.

It’s still dark inside, but it’s the dark of their walk from the dorm, not the dark of indoors. The street lights shining through the glass walls cast soft-edged shadows, and despite the lateness of the autumn, the aisles are infringed by spreading leaves and the bobbing heads of flowers swaying in the warm, gently circulating air. This place is probably lovely even during the day; at night, the atmosphere is dreamy and blue-tinged, like the inside of a painting.

Warlock follows Adam in awed silence to the end of the long greenhouse, and simply stands looking around as Adam takes off his backpack and retrieves from it a large flannel blanket. He returns his attention properly to the proceedings as Adam starts to pull out a series of packages.

“Did you pack us an illicit after dark greenhouse picnic?” Warlock blurts. Adam looks up.

“Yeah,” he says.

Warlock stares, and then drops down on the empty space on the blanket Adam has left for him. 

“Okay,” says Warlock. “That’s romantic as fuck. You win.”

Adam’s eyes sparkle—how does he do that?—and he hands Warlock a baggie of custard creams. 

The picnic is not a culinary masterpiece. Adam produces another baggie of almonds, and one of apple slices. 

“This is pretty wholesome,” Warlock teases. “Somewhere I imagine there’s a primary school teacher in your past that’s very proud of you.”

Adam mutters something that sounds like “healthy lunch,” and shoves a bagged sandwich at Warlock. 

The sandwich is chicken salad, made rather than bought. Warlock can picture, very clearly, Adam heading back from the shops laden down with produce and tins. The thought is warming somehow, and he finds himself smiling foolishly as Adam finishes unpacking his backpack. There are two lidded plastic containers, and a bottle. Warlock picks it up and sloshes it at Adam.

“Orange juice?” he smirks. 

“There’s getting caught breaking into a campus building,” says Adam, “and then there’s getting caught breaking into a campus building with alcohol.” He raises his eyebrows challengingly. “And I know this kind of thing makes you nervous already.”

Warlock laughs.

“Right,” he says. “I see how it is. That was cute enough that I won’t point out that last time, the thing that made me nervous almost got us killed.”

“Nothing’s killed me yet,” Adam shrugs, fishing an apple slice out of its bag. “I won’t let anything get you either.”

From anyone else it would be glib. But there’s something about the confidence with which Adam says it that makes Warlock think, absurdly, that if the universe was going to listen to anyone about something like that, it’d probably listen to the golden boy munching apple slices in front of him.

“How about the accent?” says Adam. “Can I ask about that?”

Warlock wrinkles his nose. 

“My parents are American,” he says, and then grimaces harder as he pushes past the instinct to leave it at that. “Uh, my dad used to be the American ambassador, actually.” Adam blinks in surprise, and Warlock shakes his head emphatically. “It’s really not a big deal, I promise. They almost always left me home for official functions. Once when I was eleven they flew me out to Israel for a photo op and then we went right back home. It was pretty much bullshit.” He shrugs. “Also my nanny was Scottish when I was little, so that was kind of the killing blow to my queen’s english.”

Adam chews his sandwich, looking like he’s thinking about that. Warlock bumps him with a shoulder, picking up the juice and unscrewing the cap. 

“Done with the third degree already?” he teases. “Does that mean it’s time for me to ask you about your tragic backstory?” Warlock can’t be sure, but he almost thinks Adam stiffens up at that. Huh. He takes a swig of the juice and changes tactics. "For instance, as the poets say, where'd you get those blue eyes?"

Adam's mouth twists in amusement, and he relaxes again.

"Good genes," he answers. Warlock offers him the juice bottle, and Adam accepts it, but doesn't take a drink right away. "You're always saying things like that," he observes. "About my eyes and stuff." Warlock rolls his.

"Yeah, genius. It's called flirting," Warlock fires back. It's hard to tell in the dim light, but he thinks Adam actually blushes.

"I know," he says, a little more forcefully than he needs to. "But what I mean is... you've been saying it the whole time. Like, not the first time we talked, but in geometry class. You said something about me having golden hair."

"In my defense," Warlock points out, "You do have lustrous golden hair."

Adam exhales gustily, and levels a look at Warlock.

"Saying it again doesn't count as explaining," he says.

"I didn't realize I needed to explain myself," Warlock laughs. He folds one leg under him and reaches for the custard creams. "Where did I lose you?"

Adam takes a long sip from the orange juice — Warlock suspects it's to buy time.

"You were... flirting," he says. "Even back then. But you didn't even like me at that point."

Shit. Now it’s Warlock who feels put on the spot. He takes a bite of his sandwich.

“Yeah I did,” he admits.

Adam raises one eloquent eyebrow.

“You thought I was annoying,” he says. “And bossy.”

“You are annoying,” Warlock snipes. “It is as objective a fact as your cherubic and symmetrical facial features.” He’s not sure how he became the one blushing. He sighs. “You’re a hard guy not to like, Adam Young.”

It’s the wrong answer, somehow. Adam closes off immediately, turning his head away to stare at someone’s potted tree and pulling a knee up in front of his chest. Warlock frowns.

“Hey,” he says. He waits until the other boy looks back at him before he continues. Adam’s eyes are pale and troubled. “You wanna let me know what’s bothering you so much about the big embarrassing crush on you I just admitted to?”

He watches until he can see the traces of a smile touch the corners of Adam’s eyes. Warlock tries to smile back, which is harder than it ought to be with his heart suddenly thudding in his throat. 

“I won’t tell you you’re incredibly good looking anymore, if you don’t want me to,” Warlock says. He won’t, even if it’s true; the blue swaying shadows of the greenhouse falling across Adam’s face might be the prettiest thing Warlock’s ever seen in his life. His mouth is a little dry, but he swallows and continues.

“If you prefer, I can just stick to calling you annoying and bossy,” Warlock says. “Because I like that about you, too.” In a surge of daring that he told himself earlier he was going to leave to Adam, he reaches out and lays his hand on Adam’s on the blanket.

Adam looks down at their hands, and seems to hesitate.

“If I messed up,” says Adam, “you’d tell me, right?” 

The thought seems out of nowhere to Warlock, but it’s clearly important to Adam. His forehead is furrowed, and he watches Warlock like there’s exactly one right answer to his question, and it’s vital that he hears it. Warlock takes a breath.

“I don’t exactly know what you mean here,” Warlock replies. “But I can tell you that the answer is yes. One hundred percent. If you do some dumb shit, I will absolutely call you on it. Loudly, and without hesitation.”

For some reason, that’s what breaks Adam’s strange mood. He gives Warlock a smile, a real smile, which spreads across his face like the sun rising, and Warlock’s heart stops. 

“You’re not going to make me stop telling you you’re pretty though, right?” he breathes. 

Adam leans forward over their picnic, cups Warlock’s face in his hands, and kisses him.

His smile tastes even better than it looks.

“So yeah, he sacked me,” says Brian, wrapping up his story. Wensleydale giggles. Pepper sighs. 

“Oh, Brian,” she says.

“It’s fine,” Brian says cheerfully. “Mr. Connor is a tosser. And I’m meant for better things than the ice cream shop anyway.”

“They’re hiring at the post office, I think,” says Wensleydale.

“And you’re unlikely to get caught eating the stock there,” Pepper reasons. “Adam, can you top that? Haven’t gotten expelled, have you?”

Adam wonders if somehow Pepper has intuited about the date, is giving him an opening if he wants it. But as far as he can tell, she’s just needling Brian. He looks over at his bulletin board, where the paper clip chain is hanging from a thumbtack. 

“Not expelled, no,” he says. “Not this week anyway. But I did, er. I did have a date.”

He feels Pepper’s attention snap to him, her tense expression much different from the whooping that the boys are doing.

“A date!” Brian crows. “All right! Can’t believe you let me talk about old Connor. Tell us about her, then!”

Adam’s stomach is fluttering, his chest quickly going tight and scared. He breathes once slowly, in and out.

“Do you remember me mentioning Warlock?” he says. “Back in September?”

He can see Pepper holding her breath.

Wensleydale and Brian pause for a moment, recalling the conversation. He sees it dawn on Wensleydale’s face first.

“Oh, shit, this whole time I thought Warlock was a guy,” Brian laughs.

Adam rubs a hand through his hair.

“Brian, you idiot,” snaps Pepper.

Brian stops laughing. Four microphones buzz with silence. 

“So how’d it go?” says Wensleydale valiantly. “What’d you do?”

Adam blows out a lungful of air.

“We went on a picnic,” he says. “I made chicken salad sandwiches.” Wensleydale nods in solemn approval.

“Oh no, now I want a chicken salad sandwich,” Brian groans.

Adam smiles.

It’s a Tuesday, so Warlock has one class in the morning, and then another right after in the same building. He’s used to having a lot of notifications when he gets out for the afternoon. He almost scrolls past the text as he walks out into the sunshine.

Mum (8:24 am)
We’re in town today! Let us know when you’re free, we’d love to see your campus :)

Mum (9:03 am)
Are you in class? Your father is here with me.

Nanny (9:16 am)
Azzy says he found that book you guys were talking about. He’ll post it if you want

Mum (9:32 am)
The student services desk won’t tell us what dorm you’re in. We told them we’re your parents

3 missed calls

Mum (10:11 am)
Please call us when you get out of class honey :)

Warlock realizes he has stopped walking in the middle of the pavement. 

Is he getting the flu? He feels a little weird. If he’s getting the flu he should probably go back to his dorm room. He should text his mother and tell her he has the flu and they should reschedule the visit.

Why are they even in town? Why is his father here? Really, why is his mother here?

He thinks immediately of calling Nanny and Azzy but just as quickly dismisses it. It’s just his parents. Why would they need to know his parents were visiting? What would they do with that information? Warlock doesn’t even know what to do with that information.

He probably has the flu. He feels lightheaded, like maybe he should sit down. He’s even got a little bit of a stomach upset. Maybe it was the salad from the dining hall last night...

He doesn’t have the flu. Warlock knows he doesn’t have the flu. He sees his parents maybe twice a year anymore; just because this visit was unannounced doesn’t mean it was unexpected. They’ll be here for a few hours, it’ll suck, and then they’ll leave. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.

(He ignores the way his heart is hammering sickly in his chest, the cold feeling creeping over his brain, because it’s nothing out of the ordinary when his parents suddenly come over all parental. It’s just something to grit his teeth around until they’re gone, and they will go, they never stay and that’s good, who wants people like them hanging around—)

The urge to run isn’t new. The urge to go find Adam Young is.

When he realizes that’s what he wants to do, it gives him pause for a moment. Then he squashes that instinct too, because it’s just another kind of running anyway, and it won’t shorten this visit. He pulls his sunglasses out of his coat pocket and slides them onto his face.

Warlock
Just got out of class. We could have lunch?

It’s a little early for lunch, but it’s a nice limited time frame. When they’ve all finished their food, Warlock will say that he has a class to get to and it’ll be over.

His stomach lurches when his phone rings immediately.

"Hey Mum," he answers as evenly as he can. "Where are you?"

"We were just on our way to the Dean of Students' office to try to get your class schedule," his mother chirps. Warlock winces.

"Right, I'll start heading toward there. I thought we could get lunch — if you haven't had a chance to look around the area, I know a sandwich shop we could go to."

"That sounds wonderful, darling. We'll meet you outside. Ta!"

His mother is wearing some sort of cobalt blue luncheon ensemble that probably cost five hundred pounds if it cost a penny, but it's his father that Warlock spots first. He's wearing a suit with no tie, the only concession Warlock has ever known him to make to his time off the clock. He is not smiling before he sees Warlock. He does not smile after he sees him, either.

"Hello dear," says his mother, click clacking over the pavement to him, a vague smile pinned to her face as securely as the antique brooch is pinned to her coat. She hugs him in a delicate, deliberate way, and touches a dry kiss to his cheek. When she's released Warlock his father, still frowning, offers his hand. Warlock shakes it.

"Shall we get going? I know it's a little early to eat, but I've got classes all the rest of the day."

"Not at all, honey," smiles his mother. "I could do with a spot of brunch."

His mother has lived in Great Britain for twenty years now, and her American accent has proven mostly resistant to any of the dialects she's encountered since then. But sometimes it takes a posh curl on the edges that seems more affected than absorbed, and she says things like "I could do with a spot of brunch," which Warlock isn't sure he's heard unironically from anyone else in his life besides Azzy.

"I guess a burger is too much to expect," his father snorts, which his mother answers by pointing another bland smile at Warlock.

"Why don't you show me where your car is," Warlock says, and they go.

The restaurant is nominally casual, but is fancier than anything Warlock would choose to eat at alone. All the same, his mother seems reluctant to order anything. She pores through the menu clucking at lists of ingredients, as Warlock gets a bowl of soup and his father grumblingly orders a steak sandwich on crusty bread. Warlock eventually manages to point his mother to a garden side salad, which she pairs with a glass of white wine that probably has more calories than the meal itself.

For all the veiled urgency of his mother's texts, neither of his parents seem inclined to say much at all. There is nevertheless a tension hovering over the table that keeps Warlock's shoulders tight and his stomach roiling.

His mother's wine arrives first. It's nearly gone by the time the food follows. His father gripes loudly about the sandwich (which looks delicious) but picks it up. His mother does not touch her silverware, and looks at his father rather than her salad. Her smile falters just slightly, and then reasserts itself.

"As you know, dear, your father left the public sphere recently," she says. The words have the flavor of an announcement, but Warlock isn't worried until his father sighs aggrievedly and puts his sandwich back down.

"Yeah, I know," says Warlock. He tries to sound casual. He's not sure if he's succeeded.

His father leaving his position earlier this year did not come in the wake of any great scandal. A scandal, as Thaddeus Dowling would say, is something people talk about. A scandal is the mark of someone who didn't know when to leave the table with his winnings. Nobody talked about his father's early retirement from his position; Warlock knows, because he googled the situation thoroughly when he got the email from his mother. All that happened was that Mr. Dowling left politics, and his wife sent her son pictures of their new car and her designer tennis bracelet.

She's wearing the bracelet now, and it twinkles as she fiddles with her cutlery.

"Was time to make the move," his father says, the first words he's spoken since ordering. "No more opportunity for advancement."

If they're just going to talk about his father, this visit might go more smoothly than Warlock guessed it would. He hasn't fielded a single question thus far about his lack of degree plans, or a homophobic insult about his hair or his clothes. He begins to relax, and dips up a spoonful of his soup. It's five-bean, warm and hearty against the chill that's seeping through the restaurant windows.

"Yes," says his mother, smiling more firmly. "Precisely. Opportunity."

Whatever that means. The soup and the sensation of not being the subject of conversation come together to cheer Warlock considerably.

"Don't worry Dad," he says. "I'm sure something will open up. I think the Debenham's downtown has an open position."

His father scowls, sandwich crumbs clinging to his upper lip. His mother's hands twitch over the tabletop, and light glitters nervously off the bracelet.

"Well, something has opened up, actually," smiles his mother. Smile, smile. Glitter, glitter. She rearranges her spoons on the tablecloth.

"New York," says his father, scrubbing a dot of sauce off the corner of his mouth with a napkin. "Law firm. Haven't taken a new partner in fifteen years, but they opened up an office for me."

Warlock sees now why his mother seems so distressed.

"Bit hard on Mum," he says carefully. He's heard more times than he cares to remember the story of his birth, his mother screaming at a disconnected video call in some backwoods convent hospital. He doesn't know why they haven't gotten divorced by now, but he suspects cars and tennis bracelets have had something to do with it. Maybe they're even here to tell him they're getting divorced. It's all right with Warlock. If they do get divorced, he'll probably hear even less from them.

"Not at all," says his mother. She picks up her fork and stabs a few leaves of lettuce, but doesn't eat them, just sits twirling them on the edge of her plate. "You see, we've found a house — it's in the countryside just outside the city, it’s really darling."

"Darling" probably means no less than nine thousand square feet, Warlock guesses. It takes him a second to place this newest thought into context, though.

"A house," he says. "You're moving? To New York?"

His mother's smile cracks and crumbles, and she peers at Warlock from under a forehead more creased than the botox injections ought to allow. Warlock takes a sip of water while he organizes his thoughts. An unhappy silence hums over the table, conducted expertly by his mother's eyebrows while his father munches steak sandwich.

"I'd prefer to stay in my university, if it's alright with you," he says, trying to make it sound like he gives half a shit what's alright with them. They can't make him move. He’s an adult, he doesn’t have to go with them, and even if they cut him off — 

The distress rises from his mother’s face like a curtain.

“Oh of course we’d never ask you to leave college,” she gushes. “You seem like you’re thriving here, dearest. And of course you can always come visit us whenever you like! Just say the word and we’ll pop you on a plane.”

Oh.

The crisis, apparently, is not that Warlock might fight the move. The crisis is simply that their only son might put up a fuss about his parents moving an ocean away.

If it's not going to bother Warlock, it's clearly not going to bother anyone else.

The five-bean soup revolts in his stomach. He wraps his hand tighter around the spoon and smiles back at his mother.

He doesn't even blame her, really. Maybe he should. But he's filled all at once with pity instead, for her ridiculous, empty little life. If she's ever had anything or anyone that mattered to her, really mattered, Warlock's never seen it.

Hell, maybe she's perfectly happy, and it just doesn't have anything to do with Warlock. Maybe she'll be perfectly happy in New York.

His father chews his sandwich, impassive. Warlock feels his eyes start to sting.

"No," says Warlock crisply, still smiling, every inch the ambassador's son. "I think it would be better if I didn't." He picks up his napkin out of his lap and sets it on the table. "I'm focusing really hard on my studies, you know, and you guys are going to have a whole new start to occupy your time." He stands up from the table, trying not to blink. "Good luck in the new job though, Dad. Mum, the bracelet's really pretty." Mrs. Dowling smiles, but looks faintly confused.

"Where are you going, honey? You've hardly touched your soup."

"Sorry," Warlock says, but he's not looking at her. His eyes are on his father as he says "I just remembered I double booked brunch with my boyfriend."

His father's bushy eyebrows twitch, but he doesn't choke or roar or anything like that. A sourness settles onto his face like a soap film, and that's all. It isn't satisfying.

Warlock turns and strides out of the restaurant, and feels like an idiot for crying.

Warlock
are you free

Warlock
can i see you. something happened

Adam
Im at the library rn. Tell me where you want to meet

Warlock
my dorms the closest to you if thats fine

Adam
Omw

Warlock walks back to campus. It’s not that far. He’s rubbed the tears out of his eyes before he’s even a block away from the restaurant, and the brisk walk works with the cold to push the hurt and the absurdity of the conversation off to a distance. By the time Warlock reaches his dormitory, he’s almost feeling like he overreacted.

Who cares if his parents don’t want him? It’s not like it’s news. It’s not like he wants them to want him. Hadn’t he been afraid they’d insist he follow them to the States just a second before? 

He climbs the stairs to his room, making up his mind as he goes that he’ll just tell Adam he had a shitty class. It’s not important, about his parents. It barely affects him.

But when he reaches his suite door, Adam is standing outside it, watching down the hall for Warlock’s arrival. When he sees Warlock, he drops his backpack and half runs toward him, meeting him halfway down the hall.

“What happened?” he asks immediately. “What can I do?”

Warlock, to his own humiliation, feels his eyes get hot and prickly again.

He takes a second to put his words together, trying to figure out what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. It’s harder than it should be, with his mind full of that last look on his father’s face and his stomach grinding away on three spoonfuls of bean soup.

It takes him, it turns out, a second too long. Adam steps forward and wraps his arms around Warlock—all the way around, tight and crossing over his back. He feels Adam exhale a long breath into Warlock’s hair.

“What are you doing, Young,” Warlock says with poor gruffness into Adam’s shoulder.

“If I don’t get to hug you when you’re crying,” says Adam, “I don’t see what the point is in being your boyfriend.” 

Warlock prickles with surprise at the b word, but the warmth it spreads through his chest eases his heart a little.

“I’m not crying,” Warlock says. He wraps his arms around Adam’s middle and hangs on.

It must be only a few minutes that they stand there, or else someone on the floor would have come along to hoot at them. But the hallway remains blessedly empty, and after a while Warlock feels stable enough to loosen his hold on Adam. 

Adam lets him go too, and steps back, but not far. He ends up somehow with Warlock’s hands in his, and he stands there looking into Warlock’s sunglasses with ridiculous sincerity.

“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” Adam says. Warlock sighs.

“In the room,” he says. 

Warlock disentangles his hands from Adam’s to unlock the doors, but by the time they’ve climbed onto Warlock’s bed, Adam’s fingers are tangled in his again. He doesn’t mind.

“My parents are moving back to the States,” he says. “That’s all.” 

Adam blinks at him. His hands tighten on Warlock’s.

“They’re doing what?” he says.

“It’s okay,” says Warlock hurriedly. “I barely see them. I haven’t lived with them since I was eleven, which is… fucked up, I guess, but that’s why it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have even wanted to go with them.”

“But they should want you to come with them,” Adam says, right to the heart of the matter as always. “They shouldn’t go in the first place, I don’t…” He squeezes Warlock’s hands and frowns as though this is something he ought to be able to fix. “You said you lived with your godparents, right? This isn’t them? I just figured —”

“I transferred to a boarding school when I was eleven,” Warlock says, letting his head fall back against the wall as he recites his sad little history. “My godparents came to visit me on the weekends, and I stayed with them on holidays. I liked it better with them than at home.” He remembers that first break spent wandering in the strange, cluttered bookshop, getting to know his favorite grownups in a new way, and working slowly through the small stock of adventure books shelved near the dusty window. He remembers the peace of it.

“My parents sent me… gifts on my birthday and things,” Warlock continues. “But they didn’t come see me, and before I started year nine I asked my godparents if I could live with them instead of at school. So we all moved to Sussex and I just… haven’t seen much of my parents since. They think I transferred to some elite institution with off-site housing, I guess. I don’t know.” He scrubs one of his hands through his hair, but leaves his other clasped firmly in Adam’s. He bites down on the infuriating urge to start crying again.  “I don’t think my mum really wanted a kid, and my dad certainly didn’t want a kid like me.”

“Okay, so your parents suck,” Adam says firmly, sitting back against the wall next to Warlock, his face painted with baffled anger on Warlock’s behalf. It’s endearing, or whatever. “But your godparents,” he adds. “They’re… cool? Were they your parents' friends, or —”

“They were staff,” Warlock sniffles. At Adam’s bemused expression, he laughs a little. “Household staff, you know. The nanny and the gardener. They aren’t… actually my godparents. They just loved me better than my parents did.” He shrugs one shoulder. “We don’t really talk about it.”
Adam’s forehead wrinkles. “I think probably you should,” he says. 

Warlock is suddenly angry, bitterly, vitriolically angry. He almost pulls his hand back out of Adam’s, almost says something, something mean and hard that would slam a door between them, as firmly and satisfyingly as he couldn’t do with his father. Adam’s face would close and he’d learn a lesson, wouldn’t he, about offering his fucking advice about library carts and distant parents and anything else like he knew what the Hell he was talking about.

But Warlock doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t want to. Instead he leans over and lays his head on Adam’s shoulder.

It’s the best choice he could have made, because the pleased surprise radiating from Adam is a thousand times better than any look Warlock could have put on his father’s face. Warlock squeezes Adam’s fingers and swallows hard. 

“Yeah, maybe,” he says.

“But by the time I got there, it turned out that they cancelled the whole exam,” Adam says. 

“Yeah, well, you're an anomaly,” snorts Warlock, from where he is nestled under Adam’s arm on the suite sofa. “Nobody has your luck.”

He lays his head back down on Adam’s shoulder and reaches into the bag of crisps, and Adam feels warm all over again. He has a boyfriend, he thinks for the thousandth time, a boyfriend who’s handsome and cranky and smart and likes to make Adam laugh and tells Adam his secrets. He thinks of Warlock last week after his parents left, his cheeks pale and his jaw tight, letting Adam see the wetness standing in his eyes. 

Adam surprises himself with his next thought: he wants to tell Warlock the truth.

Not all of it, but the important part. Very few of the others know — not Anathema and Newt, certainly not his parents. The Them sort of, almost know, because Adam realized even at age eleven that knowing alone would sooner or later be horrible and lonely. He made sure they don’t think about it very often. Anyway, neither does he.

“Actually, It’s… It’s not exactly luck.”

Warlock must hear in his voice that it’s not a joke, because he stops poking at his phone with one hand and lifts his head to turn it fully toward Adam.

“Yeah?” he says, and the tone is needling and skeptical because this is Warlock, but his eyes are fixed and listening because this is Warlock.

It’s the sincerity, somehow, that hits him with sudden doubt. It’ll scare Warlock, or he’ll think Adam’s crazy, or…

“Just kidding. Never mind,” he says, and reaches for the crisps. 

Warlock snatches them away.

“No you weren’t,” he says. He inspects Adam with an attention that makes him suddenly uncomfortable. “I know you’re from Nowheresville, so I know it’s not that your parents are secretly bribing your way into popularity or success,” he muses. “Anyway, you’re not that popular.”

“Thanks,” cuts in Adam sarcastically. 

“Or that successful,” Warlock continues.

“Thanks!”

Warlock points at Adam, silencing him.

“But you are lucky,” Warlock accuses, and holds the crisp bag away from Adam at arm’s length. “So tell me the secret, or no more crisps.”

“It’s nothing,” Adam insists. Feeling daring (and hopefully distracting), he tries to roll over Warlock, wrestling him down as he grabs at the bag. Warlock flings the bag away, scattering crisps as it arcs through the air. Adam stops and groans, surveying the damage with his hands still pinning down Warlock’s shoulders.

“Thanks, my suitemates will love that,” he admonishes. 

“No crisps for you,” Warlock sniffs. 

Adam finds himself looking down at Warlock, and he feels his face heat. He loses his nerve and sits abruptly back on his heels, but Warlock doesn’t seem fazed. 

“Is it magic?” he says, propping himself up on his elbows.

Adam blinks, startled from his discomfiture. 

“What?”

“The reason you’re lucky,” Warlock presses. “Are you magic?”

He… doesn’t seem like he’s teasing. Neither does he seem freaked out. Adam eyes him suspiciously.

“It’s not a big deal if you are,” Warlock informs him. “Some people are magic. It happens.”

“Does it?” Adam says, thoroughly bewildered now. He hasn’t retained limitless supernatural knowledge any more than he’s retained limitless supernatural anything since the incident when he was eleven. Mostly it’s like Warlock says — things go right for him in little ways he stopped thinking about long ago, and there’s a little crackling fire deep inside of him that he doesn’t often siphon out to his fingertips or really pay much attention to. Still, if there were a lot of magical people wandering around, Adam’s pretty sure he’d know. 

“Are you magic?” he asks, struck by the thought suddenly. Warlock stiffens, and scoots upright, to the other end of the sofa.

“No,” he says, and sounds almost defensive. “But some people are. My godparents are.” He shrugs jerkily. “So it’s not a big deal.”

“You gave me a harder time about coming out,” Adam observes, and then finishes processing what Warlock’s just said.

“Your godparents are magic?”

It doesn’t seem likely, to say the least. But then, Adam being the one to react to this conversation with skepticism is, admittedly, a little unfair. And there’s something, something he can’t quite place…

“We don’t talk about it,” says Warlock. He’s said it before.

“Maybe you should,” says Adam, for the second time.

Warlock moves suddenly to get up from the sofa, and Adam wraps a hand quickly around his wrist.

“Hey, wait,” he pleads. Warlock levels a terrifying glare at Adam’s hand on his, and Adam, ears burning with an old shame, drops his hold at once.

“Come on, we can’t start a conversation like this and not finish it,” Adam says. “Please just sit down and tell me about your godparents.”

Warlock glances toward the door of the common area, and flicks his sunglasses back down over his eyes. He heads for Adam’s room without another word, and Adam hastily gets up and follows him. 

“It’s just that I didn’t know there were supposed to be… many others,” he hedges apologetically, closing the bedroom door behind him. “So the coincidence is… it’s…” He presses his lips together, and runs a restless hand backward through his hair. “You said they worked for your parents?”

Warlock flops onto Adam’s bed, his sunglasses still firmly in place.

“I said they loved me better than my parents,” Warlock says, his jaw set and his tone cold. Then he sighs and seems to relent. “They were just staff until I was eleven. I always knew there was something up about them, but who’s going to believe a kid who says his nanny’s magic? They’ll just take away the Mary Poppins DVD.” He shrugs again. “Look, how’d this start as a conversation about you and turn into one about me? Isn’t it usually the other way around?”

“No,” says Adam. He can’t shake that thought that there’s something he’s missing.

“You shouldn’t even believe me now,” Warlock points out. “I shouldn’t believe you. Do something magic, or I’ll assume you’re a government plant sent here to trick me into giving up my fairy godparents for dissection.”

“There’s no such thing as fairies,” Adam says automatically. Warlock’s eyebrows go up skeptically behind his sunglasses.

Adam frowns and looks around the room for inspiration. The day outside is grey and dismal, with a low ceiling of murky clouds and a chill that leaks through the underinsulated dorm room window. 

He stands in the middle of the little room, and stares out at the clouds, and he thinks about Warlock. 

After a moment, the clouds part, a hole just over the late afternoon winter sun. A sunbeam shines in through the window, filling the small space with golden light and the scent of spring.

Then it passes.

He looks back over at Warlock, who is sitting up now, his sunglasses slipped almost all the way down his nose and his mouth slightly agape.

Adam rubs his upper arm with one hand, feeling unexpectedly awkward.

“That work?” he asks.

Warlock closes his mouth and pushes up his sunglasses, but he pats the bed.

“Stop showing off, and sit down, Young,” he says. Adam does, settling himself gingerly on the edge of the bed. Warlock blows a long breath out of his pursed lips. “What do you wanna know?” Adam thinks about it.

“What kind of things can they do?” he ventures. 

“I mean, I’ve known the weather to go very nice very suddenly for a day at the shore,” Warlock says, “though never as flashy as yours, thanks.”

“You asked!” Adam objects, but Warlock shushes him with a dismissive wave of the hand. 

“Mostly it was just little things around the house, though,” Warlock continues. “Nanny’s always more subtle. He shouldn’t have as many clothes as he does for how small their closet is, and he never seems to do laundry. But Azzy’s always doing something or other with a finger snap when he thinks I’m not looking.”

The feeling of missing something intensifies. “Azzy?” Adam says. The moniker niggles something at the back of his head, and gives him a strange uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Oh, it’s just something I call him to go with ‘Nanny,’” says Warlock. “He was the gardener when I was a kid, but when they quit, his name… it just, it turned out to be something different. It’s not as weird as it sounds,” he explains, sounding unconvinced himself. “So, you know, Azzy. It’s short.”

“For what?” he asks, a little more impatiently than he means to.

Warlock frowns. “Aziraphale. It’s weird, I know.” 

Adam stares at his boyfriend. After a moment, Warlock shifts uncomfortably.

“What?”

“Uh, nothing,” Adam says. “I mean… It’s just that... I think I know your dads.”

Warlock looks at him for a second.

“You know how unlikely that is, right?” Warlock says, but Adam’s already shaking his head. 

“More unlikely than there being two Aziraphales?” he says. “And the other one, your Nanny, he’s something like… Crow?” 

Warlock’s frowning now, the frown of “my confusion is turning into pointed frustration very quickly” and “explain immediately or face consequences.” Adam’s familiar with the look from seeing it on Pepper. He holds up his hands in a gesture meant to be pacifying.

“Look, I only met them once,” he explains. “A long time ago. But it was… memorable.” Warlock has pulled his phone out from the pocket of his hoodie and is flicking through what looks like his contacts list. “What are you —”

“Taking your advice,” Warlock says, as he punches the video call button on one of the contacts. “Talking to them about it.”

Adam has a feeling in the pit of his stomach that this conversation is, for some reason, not going to go smoothly. He glances toward the door.

“Do you want me to — ?”

“Come on, you don’t want to know?” Warlock says over the trill of the ringing call. “I don’t know about you, but this is one too many mysteries for me. And you’re a better excuse to bring it up than just dropping my bags on the floor when I come home for winter break and going ‘Hey, so you know how you’re magic?’” 

There’s a bloop from Warlock’s phone, and Adam sits down on the bed, hanging awkwardly back out of frame while the call connects.

“Hey barra! What warrants a video call in the middle of the day?” comes a voice Adam hasn’t heard in eight years. “Aren’t you having any fun out there?” 

Adam leans over just enough to peek at the screen. The hair is longer than the day Adam met him, but the sunglasses and the long, peaked face are the same, though the grin is gentler, the demeanor of angular tension missing.

“Where’s Azzy?” says Warlock. “In his library?”

“Where else?” the demon Crowley snorts. “Should I get him?”

“Yeah, please,” Warlock says brightly. “I just wanted to introduce you to my boyfriend.”

The feeling in Adam’s stomach gets stronger.

There’s a sort of tightness around the corners of Warlock’s eyes that suggest he’s trying to force this to be not a big deal. Adam wishes he could ask him if he’s okay, but on the phone screen Crowley is calling out “Angel!” and squeezing another familiar face into frame.

“Hello dear boy!” Aziraphale greets, dimpling, his face just as unchanged by age. “It’s always so good to see your face.”

“He’s got a boyfriend!” Crowley declares, and Aziraphale’s blond eyebrows raise. 

“Has he!” he exclaims. “Oh, are we going to meet him?”

Warlock shifts on the bed to put Adam into the picture. They’re an uncomfortable portrait, his own posture tight and awkward and Warlock’s smile just a smidge too wide and almost imperceptibly brittle. Adam waves at the camera.

He thinks he sees a wrinkle appear on Crowley’s forehead in the moment before Warlock speaks.

“Nanny, Azzy, this is my boyfriend, Adam Young,” Warlock announces.

Aziraphale’s smile goes stiff. Adam sees Warlock notice it too. 

“He mentioned you guys might have met,” says Warlock brightly.

Crowley leans a little closer to the phone and touches his sunglasses, like he wants to slide them down for a better look the way Warlock does sometimes, but doesn’t. His face screws up in disbelief; Aziraphale just looks pale, his smile getting feebler by the second. 

“You just know She thinks this is very funny,” Crowley mutters.

Warlock says nothing. He just keeps that wide, empty smile in place as silence crystallizes along the phone connection.

“It’s… rather a long story,” tries Aziraphale. “I’d rather hear how you two met.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” says Warlock, (and Adam almost winces at the tone of his voice) “let’s save that. I mean, I know I’ve apparently never earned an explanation of… the magic, the names, the secrets, the… anything, really, but I figured there might be a chance Adam has.”

Shit.

Aziraphale and Crowley look like they’re having similar thoughts. 

“Magic,” says Aziraphale carefully.

“You two are... Ngh,” grimaces Crowley. “How much has he—? I think it’s more his story to…”

“It’s Warlock’s story too, really,” Aziraphale argues, a little despairing. 

There’d been an hour or so, back when he was eleven, that Adam Young had the ability to know everything he’d cared to know. He’d looked at the angel and the demon that had shown up to his Apocalypse, and known their investment in the fight, in the world, in each other. He knew without asking that they’d been pushing back against the end for years, the only ways they knew how, but they’d made some sort of mistake. The whys and hows and whos hadn’t been material then, and that endless reaching knowledge was one of the things he’d voluntarily laid down when he’d renounced his father. Now he almost wishes he could glimpse it again, just for a second.

“I don’t know how Warlock fits in,” Adam says. “But you can… you know, tell him. My part.”

It doesn’t placate Warlock the way Adam hopes it will — he doesn’t smile at Adam or relax his shoulders. If anything, he goes a little more closed off.

Crowley blows out a long breath and rubs his hand over his face. 

“Adam is… well…”

“He’s who you were supposed to be,” Aziraphale blurts. 

Crowley whips his head around to stare at Aziraphale, his lip curled reproachfully.

“Don’t say it like that,” he says, but it’s too late. Warlock is suddenly standing up, pulling away from Adam’s reaching hand.

“Yeah, never mind,” he says a little too loud. “This was a bad idea.” He’s hanging up even as he walks out the door, throwing it open so it slams against the wall.

“Hold on,” Adam pleads. Warlock holds up a hand behind him, but doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stop walking.

“Don’t,” he calls behind him, and the suite door bangs shut. 

He’s gone.

Adam finds himself standing in the middle of the common room, having half-followed Warlock without meaning to. Would a good boyfriend leave Warlock alone? Would a good boyfriend follow him anyway? Adam’s never been a boyfriend before, he doesn’t know — 

There is a crashing commotion from one of the bedrooms and Adam startles badly. He didn’t even know any of his suitemates had been in today. He’s trying to remember which kid lives in room B, when there’s a second bang and clatter, like someone’s shitty flatpack furniture meeting an unfortunate end.

A moment later, the door to the room swings open. It’s not his suitemate.

“Worse than your car,” Aziraphale huffs, staggering out and straightening his bow tie.

“Why do you think I got the car?” says Crowley, cracking his neck. He looks around the room and then toward Adam, face serious behind his shades. 

“Where is he?” he asks. 

Adam raises a hand and points to the door wordlessly. Crowley strides through it and it swings shut after him, leaving Adam alone with a clucking Aziraphale.

“Well,” says Aziraphale, wringing his hands. He smiles weakly at Adam. “Well. Nice to see you again, dear boy.” The smile fades. “Maybe we should talk.”

Warlock stalks down the dorm hallway, no plan in his head. 

He’s angry. He’s angry at... He’s angry because… 

Look, he’s pissed, is the point. He’s pissed because he ought to know better, right? He ought to have taken the lesson from his fucking parents and he didn’t, he ought to have taken the lesson from his godparents’ silence and the Bs in his classes. He’s just a whiny rich kid, and nothing’s enough for him —

“Where are we going?” says a voice beside him. 

Okay, objectively Warlock knows that his godparents are magic. They just had a whole confrontation about it. But still.

“You were just in Sussex,” he says accusingly, halting in the middle of the hallway.

Nanny raises his eyebrows, face placid.

Warlock frowns.

“Azzy didn’t put that right,” says Nanny. “Can we talk?”

He almost says no. But what good would that do him? Warlock sighs and directs them to a door at the end of the hall, and into the infrequently used stairwell. He sits down on one of the steps, and Crowley sits next to him.

“Always told your godfather we weren’t as subtle as he thought,” he says. “But you’re a smart kid, you were bound to…” He sighs, and quirks a smile. “I mean, not a kid so much anymore, huh? We really should have talked about this before now, I guess. Okay, where should I start?”

Warlock says nothing. He folds his arms and leans his forehead against the cool metal handrail.

“Right,” says Nanny. “Okay. So… Aziraphale,” he says slowly. “He’s an angel.”

That makes Warlock raise his head. An angel?

He thinks of Azzy in his library, at the seashore when Warlock was small, in the garden at his parents’ estate. Of Brother Snail and Sister Slug. In the kitchen with Nanny, laughing, the light from the window catching gold in his hair. He thinks of Azzy’s collection of Bibles, as well as the collection of antique racy poetry and engravings on the top shelf that Warlock had reached with a ladder once when he was home alone. 

An angel. Okay.

“What does that make you?” says Warlock, without unfolding his arms.

Nanny takes off his sunglasses, and blinks once his familiar yellow eyes with their narrow slitted pupils.

“What do you think that makes me?” he says quietly.

Warlock thinks of his beloved Nanny’s silly songs about doom and darkness, blood and brains. He thinks of the sleek black car, snakeskin shoes, long sibilant hisses to his speech when he’s had an extra glass of wine. He thinks of bad ideas whispered in the ears of Warlock and Aziraphale alike, with a creeping sly smile. He thinks, too, of Nanny stretched out on the rug in front of the crackling fire in the Sussex cottage, listening to Aziraphale read, a very different smile on his face. 

“I guess that makes you a demon,” says Warlock evenly, meeting his eyes. 

They look at each other for a long moment, and then a grin curls slowly onto Crowley’s face.

“Not just any demon,” he says, buffing his fingernails on the front of his shirt. “I’m the Serpent, actually. From the Garden. The original troublemaker.”

Warlock will never admit that he is, in fact, a little bit impressed at that. He thinks about it for a second. 

“Huh,” he says. 

He could pursue that, but it would just be him distracting himself. He steels and asks the question he least wants answered.

“So what does that make me?” Warlock asks.

“Our darling godchild,” Nanny says without missing a beat. Warlock raises an eyebrow, unimpressed, and he sighs. “Yeah, all right.” 

They sit together in silence in the dim stairwell, while Crowley arranges his thoughts.

“You remember when we quit our jobs for your parents just before you turned eleven?” he asks, and Warlock nods. He’d been hurt, though he’d never have admitted it. It hadn’t felt like them leaving his parents; it had felt like them leaving him, at least until they picked him up from school a couple weeks later. 

“We were actually taking some time off,” says Crowley, “for, uh. The End of Days.” He coughs and rubs his neck, but Warlock is quiet, listening, and Crowley, glancing at him, continues. “I’d been put in charge of the newborn Antichrist, you see. He was supposed to be planted in a place of influence, and he’d grow up to end the world. And your godfather and I, we thought, well, if we made sure the Antichrist grew up with both Heavenly and Infernal influences, he’d turn out… normal. And he wouldn’t want to do it.”

Warlock suddenly remembers Azzy, telling him when he was very small that he must never destroy the Earth. It had seemed, at the time, like something between a funny game and very good advice. After Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis had come back and explained that they had other names, secret ones Warlock’s parents didn’t know about, the game had never come up again. Warlock had almost forgotten about it.

“The thing is,” says Nanny, sucking awkwardly on his teeth, “I messed up.” Warlock regards him skeptically. Nanny rolls his eyes and starts to polish his sunglasses on the hem of his shirt.

“We sort of misplaced him,” he says. “The antichrist. The baby. Whatever, could have happened to anyone. So we set about raising the son of Satan the best we knew how… while the real son of Satan grew up playing in the woods in a little town called Tadfield.”

Warlock lets the story settle on him, on his shoulders and in his chest. 

He’s who you were supposed to be.

The people who loved him best in the world were an angel and a demon, and had thought Warlock was the antichrist, was a great and powerful being that they came to watch over so that he could avert the apocalypse. 

But he wasn’t. And he didn’t. And they had simply let it go quietly, and presumably hoped he wouldn’t ever ask.

It’s a strange, stupid, difficult thing to feel small and inadequate about, but Warlock’s always been up to a challenge.

“And… he didn’t end the world, I guess,” Warlock says. “Adam. Even without you guys helping.”

“It was a near thing,” says Crowley. “But no. By the time we found him, he’d made up his mind not to do it. I gather his friends were the real help—we might have just made things worse if we’d gotten the chance.”

Warlock picks at some flaking paint on the stair railing.

“What about me?” he says, and hates how it sounds coming out of his mouth, all the more so, when he glances over to Nanny to see him looking faintly confused. Warlock gnaws on his lip. “I mean, do you think I would have? Ended the world?”

Nanny opens his mouth, and then shuts it. He thinks about it. He looks at Warlock.

After almost too long to stand, he speaks.

“It wasn’t your job to end the world or not,” Crowley says. “It wasn’t your mistake, lovey.” The endearment comes out just a bit Scottish, like Warlock is in his nursery again, a small boy being spoken to more gently from a demon in a rocking chair than he’s been spoken to by any of the humans in his life. “It was our mistake. Your job wasn’t to be the antichrist. It’s only ever been your job to be Warlock.” Nanny smiles. “And we love you for being Warlock. Why do you think we came back? Got that whole nasty apocalypse business out of the way so we could get back to being your godparents. Sorry we haven’t done a better job.”

Warlock blinks hard, and after a moment’s hesitation, scoots over to press himself up against Nanny’s side.

“Adam called you my dads,” he said. Crowley laughs a little. 

“Might as well be,” he says. And then, quieter: “Could be if you wanted.”

Warlock nods minutely. Crowley wraps an arm around his shoulders. 

They sit like that for a while, and don’t say anything more.

“Dad says he’ll be by to pick us up shortly,” Adam says, tucking his phone back into his coat pocket. “Who knows when ‘shortly’ will be, especially if he’s forgotten where the bus station is.”

Warlock hefts his duffel bag onto his shoulder and follows Adam over to the bench near the entrance of the station. He looks, despite all Adam’s reassurances on the trip, very nervous.

“And it’s still cool for us to go stay with Pepper?” he says. “Just in case.”

“Yeah, which Pepper has reassured me of almost as often as you’ve asked,” Adam sighs. “I don’t think we’re going to have to, honestly.” Mum and Dad were surprised, sure, when Adam announced (via e-mail; even a former antichrist wasn’t that brave) that he’d like to bring his boyfriend home for the winter holiday. But on the next call home, they went to great, excruciating lengths to communicate their enthusiasm for the idea. 

Adam didn’t think he could stand another conversation like that in his lifetime, but it was warming to think of anyway.

“They’re having us over for Solstice on Tuesday, regardless,” he adds as Warlock sits down next to him. “Pepper and her mum. We can’t get out of it.”

Warlock’s eyebrows go up. Adam can see the station attendant at his desk forming opinions about Warlock’s sunglasses, indoors and with only the very edge of the sun still orangeing the sky, but Adam knows there’s little chance of Warlock taking them off, as wound up as he is. Adam isn’t going to ask him to.

“Do we want to get out of it?” Warlock asks.

“Yeah,” says Adam. “But we can’t.” Outside the glass front of the depot, it’s the same Tadfield as ever. Just as it should be; Adam doesn’t know how long he’ll keep having a say, but as long as he does, everything else changes. Tadfield doesn’t. “Pepper doesn’t get back from uni until tomorrow though, so you’ll meet her then.”

“And Brian and Wensleydale?” Warlock asks. Adam chuckles.

“They’ll show up as soon as they hear I’m officially in town,” he says. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam sees him take what he probably thinks is a surreptitious breath.

“I’m looking forward to meeting them,” Warlock says.

Now that Adam knows to listen for it, he can hear Aziraphale in Warlock’s voice when he gets nervous, as clearly as he can see Crowley in his clothes. He wonders if soon Warlock will recognize Adam’s parents and friends in Adam. 

He hopes so. The best parts of them are the best things he can hope to be.

“They’ll love you,” Adam says.

“They love you, oh golden one,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily translate.” He laughs a little as he says it, like it’s a joke. It isn’t.

“Why?” says Adam. 

There’s an uncomfortable beat between the two of them, before Warlock scoffs. 

“You know what I mean, dark harbinger, beloved of the nations,” he says, like he’s teasing. He isn’t.

They’ve still not… really talked about this. Maybe they should have before now. But after Adam and Aziraphale chatted (about how Adam’s been doing, about how Warlock’s been doing more recently, and an awkward apology for trying to kill Adam when he was eleven), Aziraphale and Crowley whisked Warlock away to a long lunch. Warlock came back alone, but he came back smiling, and started a conversation about his finals essay in World Literature. 

Once in the last couple of weeks, Warlock had interrupted a silent study session with “So. The Antichrist, huh?” 

“Yeah,” said Adam. And Warlock nodded and went back to putting arrow tabs in his library book.

Adam is learning that sometimes Warlock needs time to bring things up on his own. Apparently that time is now. 

“I’m not that anymore,” Adam says. “I was that for about forty five minutes eight years ago.”

“Yeah,” says Warlock. “But you’re still…” He gestures vaguely at Adam. “You know. The aftermath.” He pushes his sunglasses up his nose impatiently. “Handsome, magnetic, with devoted friends and a charmed life. I mean, I’m not still hung up on being literally the poor substitute. But it’s not like you’ve got anything to worry about. We’re not the same.”

Adam is surprised by how… angry that makes him.

“You’re the only friend I made all semester,” he snaps. “I lived with three suitemates for over three months and I barely learned their names. And you’re the first friend I’ve made since I was a kid. I kind of hate my degree, and if I passed my English final, I’ll be shocked. My greatest accomplishment was deciding not to end the world when I was eleven, and that only happened because my friends practically beat me with shovels until I came to my senses.” He stands up abruptly, and pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“You know being the antichrist isn’t good, right?” he says, turning to face the bench. The station attendant won’t overhear this, but Adam still speaks in a harsh whisper anyway. “Like, you know I was the son of the Devil or whatever, right? I changed that, it’s not what I am, but it’s… it’s still why I’m here.” He rakes his hand through his hair. “And I’ve been trying to decide if I owe anything to that. But of course I don’t, right, it’s over. It was over eight years ago. I peaked before puberty, when I decided not to do the only thing I was born to do, and I can’t ever tell anyone, so where does that leave me now?”

Adam blows out a long breath, his hands clutched together at the back of his neck. Warlock has pulled his sunglasses down his nose and is staring at Adam over the top of them. 

“If I seem like I’ve got it all together,” Adam says, “it’s definitely not on purpose.”

There’s a heavy pause. Warlock takes his glasses off, folds them, and tucks them in his jacket pocket.

“I think you need to be in therapy, dude,” Warlock says. 

“My parents barely know what therapy is!” Adam bursts. “You see my problem?”

Warlock silently reaches out a hand, and Adam takes it. Warlock tugs him back down to the bench. 

“I think I’m going to change my religious studies degree,” Adam says. 

“Fair enough,” says Warlock, dropping his head onto Adam’s shoulder. “What do you want to switch it to?”

“I dunno,” says Adam. “Maybe environmental science. I bought us time on the climate thing back in the day, but my friend Anathema is always e-mailing me articles about, like, the rainforest.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” says Warlock. “I mean, environmental science doesn’t have any geometry, so you should be okay.”

Adam turns his head and giggles into Warlock’s hair.

In front of the bus depot, a car honks. 

Adam’s dad is parked at the kerb, waving at them through his open window. He is smiling, and Adam is smiling too.

Adam looks at Warlock, whose head has jerked upright, and is looking out the window at Adam’s father. Warlock gulps visibly.

“Okay,” says Warlock, and they stand, gather their bags, and step out the door.

“Happy Christmas!” declares his dad immediately, jumping out to help with their bags. “How was uni?”

Adam looks over at Warlock. “It was good,” he says. “Only going to get better.” Mr. Young opens the boot, and Warlock and Adam load their bags. As soon as the boot is shut, Adam’s dad wraps him in a hug. Adam allows it. “Dad,” he says once he’s been released. “This is Warlock Dowling.”

“It’s an honor to meet my son’s boyfriend,” his dad says, with just a little too much well-meaning emphasis, and offers his hand. Adam watches Warlock valiantly attempt not to cringe or bolt. The two shake hands. 

“It’s an honor to meet you too, sir,” Warlock says. Mr. Young beams. Adam knows his mum is going to love him — he can practically hear the “your young man is so polite” already.

“Adam, your mum’s at home practically trying to make Christmas dinner early,” says Mr. Young. “So I hope you boys are hungry.”

Adam and Warlock slide into the back seat. 

“What are you studying, Warlock?” asks Dad as they pull away. 

“Life, sir,” says Warlock promptly. Adam laughs.

Outside the windows, snow starts to fall silently over Tadfield.