#in case this isn't clear: caroline service is maggie's grandmother!

[zeldahime]

Highway to Pail Day 2

[Day 1] [Next] @do-it-with-style-events

February 2: You can always trust someone who works at a music shop. They give sound advice.

Aziraphale had known dear Caroline for forty-five years, and he knew she was suspicious. Humans usually were, after about twenty or twenty-five years of acquaintance, and she was no mere acquaintance. To her credit and his relief, she kept her suspicions to herself, never so much as alluding to his corporation's failure to age a day while she herself grew from a confident young woman serving on the home front to a raucous grandmother and pillar of the community.

He also knew she was suspicious for another reason. A reason with beautiful red hair currently cut in an atrocious bowl cut, trying to get his long, delicate fingers on the only thing that could actually kill him. This was suspicion that he knew Caroline felt was well within her jurisdiction, as the unofficial denmother of Whickber Street. He was not really one of her charges, but as she had told him so many times, he was something close to family. And human families, he knew from millennia of living among them and hearing their stories, meddled in each others' romantic affairs.

Caroline and Crowley hadn't often met, but they'd pass each other on occasion, if Caroline closing up The Small Back Room coincided with Crowley coming round to the bookshop to collaborate on paperwork. Aziraphale had never introduced them, but Caroline had always been sharp as a tack. He'd been mentioning Crowley offhand to her for twenty years before they were reunited during the war, and the very first time she saw a red-haired man in a sharp suit enter the locked bookshop after curfew in 1943 and not come out again until morning, she'd cheekily gifted him a small cake and ribbed him gently about his night.

She referred to him as "your Crowley," when she spoke of him. It always made him feel a little warmer, even though it wasn't true. Crowley was Hell's, just as Aziraphale was Heaven's. What Crowley might want was irrelevant and what Aziraphale wanted was even less of a possible consideration.

Caroline had been the first person to ask him about Crowley's activities in Soho, a month ago. "Your Crowley," she had told him with raised eyebrows, "asked our Jenny if she knew anyone who could lever themselves down into a secure facility on a rope. She pointed him to the BDSM hall on Duck Lane." She rapped her knuckles on the desk. "What is he up to, Mr. Fell?"

He hadn't answered, but whatever look was on her face must have told her something, because she had just tsked at him a bit and said, "Whatever he's doing, Fell, he's going to get someone hurt. If this is about that fight you had that you talk about, the one before he left, it's best time to try to fix the root." She had winked. "And maybe that will keep him from leaving before dawn like he does. Everyone knows you've a flat upstairs; nobody needs to know there's only one bedroom in it."

Meddlesome old woman, his Caroline Service. Aziraphale adored her.

Aziraphale had asked around, of course; he knew already, but what he heard confirmed it. Crowley was planning to rob a church, get holy water.

Caroline was right. He had to get to the root of that fight in 1862, one hundred and five years before. Crowley had asked for the only weapon in Creation that could really hurt him. Did Aziraphale trust him with it?

Did Aziraphale trust Crowley with his life?

Well. That question had been answered in 1941, he had thought. But—

No, it hadn't been. Aziraphale trusted Crowley with Aziraphale's life, but that hadn't been the argument. The argument had been about whether Aziraphale trusted Crowley with Crowley's life.

He took his favorite flask, solid and leak-proof and decorated with his personal tartan, and headed to St. James' Park to gather some water from the duck pond to bless. If he was going to give Crowley a suicide pill, Aziraphale would at least make sure it was his own holiness that would kill Crowley, not the impersonal, clinical holiness of a Heaven that had already cast him out.