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Aziraphale tried to tamper down his frustration with the young girl wandering aimlessly through the shelves. Forbearance was a heavenly trait, and Lord knew he'd watched Crowley weaponize boredom in the bookshop to the angel's own benefit. Aziraphale should be immune. He had chosen to stay at the papal library in Rome because it was not the sort to amass fidgeting dilettante schoolchildren even before angelic miracles persuaded them to pursue knowledge elsewhere, but no matter. Centuries of thwarting Crowley's dramatics behind a good book should prepare him to handle a smaller, mortal version of his demon.
She'd been here every day for hours at a time, making it very hard to get lost in his own research when the past week had been regularly interrupted by complaints of "Mom, it's time to go eat." "Mom, can I go rollerblading if you're gonna read that same book again?" "Mom, when are we going home?" To the girl's credit, she'd mostly kept her voice down, the loudest noise a frustrated sigh when her mother once again refused to let her out of the library, but it felt like Aziraphale's own Crowley-shaped guilt had manifested in the voice of an American preteen. Unlike the girl's mother, he hadn't been able to bundle up his most cherished person and hide them in a consecrated research center. Crowley would have been equally insufferable about it, but he would approve of the girl's reminders for regular mealtimes and exercise.
Crowley, at least, was a grown demon. While Aziraphale was busy researching root causes of the number of angel wing sightings 1 and ways to prevent increased incidents of resulting human mania, Crowley was out there putting out the individual fires. His demon still believed in the power of one event to affect the lives of many, but until Aziraphale could find a way to ease humanity as a whole back into being comfortable with raw ethereal power, Hastur and Ligur would have been impressed with Crowley's dedication to tracking down individual humans and altering their memories. Aziraphale didn't like leaving Crowley to sneak through Los Angeles alone, but Crowley himself would have admitted that bringing him along to Rome would have resulted in another sunburnt, petulant distraction from the angel's research.
How fortunate that the Almighty had seen fit to provide him with such a distraction anyway. Aziraphale didn't remember Warlock being this antsy and restless at that age.
Of course, Harriet had never sounded as fearful about a simple request to visit a "Maze", who appeared to be a Nanny-like provider of ice cream, chocolate cake, and knife-throwing lessons. Harriet wasn't desperate to keep her child within sight at all times, and Harriet didn't startle and reach for a pistol she wasn't wearing every time Aziraphale set down a particularly heavy tome.
"Psst. Mom," the girl whispered. "That guy has cookies. I didn't think we were allowed to have food in the library."
Aziraphale had thought that his concealment spell had been foolproof. All the more reason why he should be allowed stress-relieving snacks, if a small child was able to see through his magic.
"Let him alone, monkey," her mother replied with weary affection. She hadn't really looked at him, just registered that his angelic aura didn't feel like an immediate threat after a week of coming to the same library wing. A wing that should have been free of adult humans, as well, though Aziraphale rather felt more sorry for the clearly troubled blonde woman than the failed miracle.
"But there's rules. You're a cop," the girl insisted, as if that airtight logic ought to explain everything.
Her mother ruffled her daughter's dark hair. The blonde still had worse tangles from clutching her own scalp during her reading. "Not my precinct and not my kid. If he gets crumbs where he's not supposed to, that's his problem. The rules may apply only for visitors, not for the people who work here."
The girl continued to eye Aziraphale's plate covetously as she pouted. "That's not fair." He ate a biscuit while staring her down.
"Is it not fair when you did well in your classes all week and earned a later bedtime than usual?"
"I liked it better when I could earn a ride in Lucifer's corvette." Aziraphale, despite being an angel with no real need to breathe, promptly choked on his biscuit. The girl's mother looked similarly poleaxed. "Besides, it's summer and I finished my book report ages ago. We're not supposed to have to worry about school," the girl continued guilelessly.
"Even outside of school, there are things that people do to earn rewards and avoid punishment. You know that. It's just that there are some rules that I'm still figuring out." The mother's voice was shaky, softer than the library required. "Somebody that I didn't think existed made these rules, so I haven't been able to ask about them before."
"Mom," the girl huffed. "We have got to work on your Latin. You've lived through like three popes; of course Pope Francis is real."
Aziraphale didn't keep up with the latest human ecclesiastical hierarchy. He hadn't been consulted on organizational decisions since one of Adam and Eve's grandchildren had found a strange buckle of metal and idly wondered what had happened to the rest of the sword. Crowley had pulled him away, then, before he did something rash about God's new favorite, and for the sake of the angel's Cain-marked heart, they decided that it was better not to get involved with any more sibling rivalries between the mortals. God loved all of them, and that would have to be enough for Aziraphale. The angel couldn't know which ones were the closest to Him.
Still, Aziraphale was used to the name Francis in a child's voice. For the better part of the last fourteen years, it made him subconsciously check his teeth and affect an (admittedly exaggerated) Welsh accent without thinking. Especially with the devil preying upon his mind from multiple sources, it was all too instinctive to fall back into the role of gardener and guardian.
"Here now, little miss, don't trouble your mother." Aziraphale brought a chair with a schoolroom arm-desk and the biscuit plate to the middle of the aisle, as far from the books as possible. "If it's all right with you, ma'am, we might bend the rules a bit," he said to the mother as he offered the chair to the girl.
"Who are you and why do you get to decide them?" The girl cut straight to the point, still eyeing his biscuits, though she didn't sit down. Crowley would love her.
"You can call me Brother Francis. Not… that one," he inclined his chin upwards in a quick, nervous movement, "but I mind the holy books, so I can get away without asking for permission as long as I clean up after myself, y'see." The papacy might claim to own this library, but to an immortal, five hundred years was a short term loan.
"Beatrice Morningstar," the girl introduced herself. She was about ten. This time, Aziraphale choked on air.
"Trixie," her mother admonished her. "You never did this with Lieutenant Pierce. For better or for worse," she added as an afterthought.
"He's hiding something, like Maze and Lucifer and Amenadiel do. Why're you snapping your fingers? I've known about angels and demons for years; Mom's just freaking out because she never believed it. The magic never really worked around us, so she wasn't expecting the disguise to fail. Are you hiding scars, too?"
Aziraphale had to blink. He should have known something was strange when Trixie and her mother kept coming back. He had placed the same deterring miracles upon this wing of the library that he used on the bookshop, and not even the human caretakers had come sniffing around.
I never fell, he didn't say.
Just sauntered vaguely downwards, he could hear Crowley add.
But it didn't take a fall to get a scar.
"So… you aren't related? To, er, Lucifer Morningstar?" he asked instead, fumbling desperately for any crumb of hope that the mother's exasperation might offer.
"He's my partner. Ex-partner. At work. We weren't like that," the mother explained, in sentence fragments that sounded very familiar to one who had been denying "that" to himself for four millenia. "You probably hear all sorts of people say that they worked with the devil. I didn't believe him. Not until…" she trailed off, and her daughter hooked her thumbs together and made a fluttering motion that coincidentally moved her hands toward the biscuits. "I still feel like I'm going crazy."
Oh. Well, Aziraphale might save Crowley two individuals' worth of work. "Are you fearful that he might come after you, ma'am?"
"No. I wasn't, at least." Aziraphale hoped he hadn't made things worse. The woman appeared to be sweeping the library for threats again as she spoke. "Holiest place on the planet, isn't it? But he went to service with Ella, and that's a Catholic church, too, if denomination makes any difference…"
"In my experience, that tends to be more a matter of feeling guilty than which church you go to." It wasn't that Aziraphale had ever felt particularly guilty about what he had done in the name of God, but he did prefer to lick his wounds in his bookshop instead of a temple after a dressing down from his superiors, back when he had served under Gabriel.
Crowley would deny any guilt, as he jolly well should after saving the planet, in Aziraphale's opinion. But Crowley had been the one who helped Samael pick holes in what Michael told his twin versus what their parents actually said. Lucifer had never once felt guilt for defying his Father, but the price lingered in the aisles of old churches, hot as Moroccan dunes under snakeskin feet.
The woman reached again for her daughter. Letting Trixie out of arm's length was often a sign of a good day for her. Today was becoming less and less good.
"Is it wrong that I don't feel guilty? I haven't been to my dad's church since I was thirteen, not for anything but the funeral. I stopped believing long before that." She laughed at herself, still desperately trying to bury the edge of despair. "The evidence came twenty years too late, and while I keep hearing Dad telling me to work with the clues we've got; don't dismiss a theory just because it's inconvenient… part of me wants to pretend that I never saw a thing."
"So… no lingering desire to spend time in the company of angel wings with this new religious revelation?" Aziraphale asked, just to be sure.
"If I never saw another fffeather, hide, or hair from that man, it would be too soon." The mention of plumage had clearly been a last second word swap, but the emotion came through without the adjective. "Is this the part where you reassure me and tell me that I'm crazy, Brother Francis?" He wished that he could.
"I never saw his wings, but I think it'd be cool. Mazikeen let me see her scar that Halloween when I went as President of Mars." This was no stranger enthusiasm than the Them had shown for Sargent Shadwell's old collection of thumbscrews and Tracey's medium paraphernalia, but Aziraphale was fighting the urge to let his expression drop as thoroughly as the girl's mother. So Maze really was a Nanny-like figure.
"Oh, baby, I am the worst mom," the woman murmured. "I am so sorry. Was that when you started having nightmares?"
"Nah, those started before that. Don't know why you're apologizing to me, unless it's why Maze wouldn't tell me how she got her scar." Humans, especially children, could be so incredibly resilient and adaptable that it made Aziraphale's head spin. But one might spend only one of their fragile, fleeting lifetimes of knowing Crowley and recognize a brave face and a distraction of a coping mechanism.
"I heard that it had something to do with a snake," Aziraphale volunteered before he could think better of it. Crowley hadn't shared much about the early days of hell, and from the little he had, the story wasn't appropriate for tender young ears in a holy place.
Those were just the ears that most wanted to hear about it. "Er, or so I've heard," he repeated himself to forestall further questions.
"Okay, now I've gotta see Maze." Trixie finally helped herself to a biscuit. Aziraphale wished that she would sit down and wear gloves while eating, but at least she was over the desk. "Really, Mom, there's so much I wanna ask and we know people who could probably explain things better than these old books."
"We can't tamper with the witnesses." Her mother slipped into law enforcement lingo with the same panicked mask of professionalism that Aziraphale used to invoke ineffability. "I have to know what the questions even are before I can interview."
And that was the problem, wasn't it? Knowing that no one was out there could be as reassuring for some as knowing that He had a plan. Not being sure if there was a plan, let alone what it might be, tended to cut into everyone's confidence, whether one preferred to trust in faith or one's ability to research the universe into submission. Asking questions without knowing what the consequences would be took a dear amount of bravery.
"Perhaps there might be a compromise, an objective expert who isn't of either other party." Aziraphale could suggest himself, but he doubted that the woman would be open to his testimony now, not while she and her daughter could somehow sense what he was. Still, when in Rome… there was the Order. Aziraphale hadn't kept up with them, not since finding a Witchfinder Army conveniently in London, but the Catholic church had never lacked adversaries for Satan.
"Are they really objective if you're recommending them?"
Butter wouldn't melt in Aziraphale's mouth, no matter how little he liked having his knowledge questioned. He had put up with second guessing for six thousand years too many to enjoy being grilled by a struggling officer, even if he understood her urge all too well. "They are human, dedicated to protecting other humans from hell, so perhaps indeed, they have a certain bias. You might compare it against what the devils you know have said."
"Yeah, but are they any good?" Trixie asked, still awfully skeptical for a child who took the denizens of heaven and hell for granted. "I know the difference between what Grandma did in movies and what Maze and Lucifer do, but not everybody does."
"Your grandma's movies had a standard special effects budget of twenty dollars Canadian and a bag of tic-tacs. I wish this was just one of her sci fi films, but this is real. It affects everyone, Trix." As long as Aziraphale had lived, individual human facial features often blended into a muddle, but now that cinematography came up, the officer did remind him of one of Crowley's films. He would have guessed her as related to the star of one of the racier romantic comedies rather than speculative fiction, but perhaps he had them mixed up again. "If we have any sort of protection from… from magic, I want to know why and what we do with it."
"Lucifer and Maze aren't gonna hurt anyone who isn't looking for trouble, not really, I swear, Mom." The girl was protective of her mother in ways she might not protect herself. "They can hurt people, I know. But Maze taught me how to fight people who are bigger than me if I gotta." Still bluster, but sweetly intended. Aziraphale had not gotten into much direct conflict with the Lilium, but he had trouble picturing Mazikeen being patient enough to encourage a young human. Perhaps this girl was as motivated by getting knocked off her feet as Pepper had always been during sword lessons.
"They might be more into theory than practice by this point," the angel admitted. It had been generations since Aziraphale's last visit to Rome. "But their foundations are the same as what you've experienced."
"You?" The girl had been taught to throw daggers by a creature of hell that scared Crowley.
Aziraphale, a swordsman himself, however reluctantly, parried as best he could. "I have had some experiences in my years of things outside the normal bounds of sanity. A writer friend named Oscar, for example, based a character named Lord Henry off an associate from his early career."
Aziraphale wasn't sure exactly what Lucifer had told this officer, but she was indeed enough of a child of the stage to recognize Wilde's novel. "He spent a lot of time with this associate, then? And what did you inspire? Dorian Grey?"
That was questionable. And most of the adaptions had strayed from Oscar's original description, further distancing Aziraphale from the character, not entirely to his displeasure. It was one thing if Crowley saw something of his former boss in a character whose cynical, hedonistic advice caused more trouble than intended, but Aziraphale had enough people jokingly ask where he stored the painting merely from living in Soho for the last two hundred years. He would admit that his Francis persona might have taken some inspiration from Mrs Umney in the Canterville Ghost, what with Americans having not changed all that much in that timeframe (and certainly not much in the last decade since he had acquired a godson or two).
"Bunbury, rather," he was compelled to answer honestly. Oscar had never believed that Aziraphale had so often been off to visit the same "indisposed" sleeping colleague for the entirety of their acquaintance. "There are times when truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes, Bunbury recovers. Sometimes, the old acquaintance does not determine the author's final fate. Sometimes, what hell first claimed ends up in a library, controlled by neither heaven nor hell." And Aziraphale wasn't merely speaking of the Wicked Bible he had liberated from a certain group of Satanists some centuries ago.
The policewoman tilted her head. "I'll see your expert, Brother Francis." Her expression was still closed off, his alias suspicious on her tongue, but Aziraphale brightened at the chance she'd given him.
"Wonderful! I, ah, must admit that I'll have to find out who is available at the moment-" the downside of falling out of touch with the Vatican for so long was that he had barely gotten Father Kinley's name before shooing the last of the papal researchers out of the library and certainly didn't know anyone else around here "- but I'll be sure to send someone your way tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm sure you could use some sleep." Blessing the two of them was instinct. Unfortunately, it didn't help in the least. Whatever was happening with Trixie and her harried mother, a flick of ethereal energy was more likely to put the woman on edge than soothe her to sleep. Aziraphale didn't linger.
All he would have to do was relax the repellant charms down to the level of his bookshop when it was open; Kinley in particular had been very keen on supernatural research, and Aziraphale didn't want to overwhelm the poor officer with too many people in the library at once… And maybe, once her mother was calmed and researching as thoroughly as Aziraphale himself might have wished to, he would try a more active source on human adaptability. There was a young President of Mars who might be willing to update the angel on certain demons over cake and gelato, if someone were willing to take her rollerblading first.
Crowley really would love this child.