Happy Holidays, ngk_is_cool!

[goe_mod]

Title: Warlock in America

Recipient Name: ngk_is_cool

Rating: G

Pairings: Mostly Gen, but light Crowley/Aziraphale (as Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis, sort of)

Warnings: Guns, but no one gets hurt

Summary: After the Apocawasn’t, Adam gives his powers to someone who missed out on them the first time. Warlock explores his new Power in his new home, America, but finds that both Power and the US aren’t as perfect as they seem. He reaches out for help from the two people who once acted like he was meant to be this way—Nanny and the gardener.

This was written as a mix of the book and the TV show, season 1 (Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis are Crowley and Aziraphale).

Thank you so much for this prompt, ngk_is_cool! I had a lot of fun writing about characters (and iterations of A/C) that I haven’t explored as much in the past. And thanks to my beta reader, saurusk! Happy Holidays!

  At the end of the End, Adam pretty much wrapped up everything. Memories were altered. The world was set back in motion. He—and he was standing firm on this one—was now one-hundred percent, make no mistake about it, a normal kid.

  Except there was all this Power.

  Well, he’d learned about it in one of Ms. Device’s magazines. Nothing comes from nothing, and something can’t simply become nothing, so it has to go somewhere. He’d thought about dividing it up among the rest of the Them, but that seemed too risky. He’d removed the memories from the front of their minds, but they still lingered deep within. Best not to have a Power like this when you knew what it was meant for. They’d all turned that down, so there was no risk of an Apocalypse rerun, but he figured none of them wanted those memories to resurface.

  Still, he didn’t want it going to just anybody who had no idea what to do with it. The other kids at his school would probably just waste it on unknowingly making their homework easier, and then no one would really learn anything, and this was all too much for an eleven-year-old boy to be taking credit for. He was, after all, normal now.

  There was one other person who’d been s’posed to have this sort of power. He’d even, apparently, been raised for it. Maybe even taught to control it, and then he’d ended up with nothing.

  Adam shrugged. He’d sent the boy on a plane to America already, and what harm could he do, there, really? America was full of people wielding extraordinary amounts of power. Superheroes and stuff all came from there, after all.

  He waved his hand, and felt the Power slip away from him, to be carried by someone else—and it was such a relief.

  He grinned, sank back in his seat, threw some popcorn into his mouth, and enjoyed the circus.

  Warlock was miles in the air.

  The flight had been so long. He knew America was far from England, but weren’t planes supposed to make travel faster? He felt like he could’ve swum across the ocean by now.

  He could have, said a quiet voice in his head.

  He shivered. The plane was also bloody cold. He kept getting shivers running down his spine. It had been hours, and he felt absolutely weird. He’d been sitting still for longer than he ever had in his eleven years of life, and he felt as though at any moment, he’d lift up and float away from his body. He felt too big for all of it. Like he’d just explode.

  He looked out the window, and all he saw were clouds.

  Then, suddenly, the plane broke through—beginning its descent, approaching the special airport near DC where his father’s private plane was heading—and he saw the Earth below.

  At the same time, he felt something shift in him, all of that coldness turned to warmth, and it was like a whole new Warlock looking down on that green Earth below.

  America was in technicolor.

  The feeling persisted. He even felt like the inside of the plane was brighter, and everything seemed more amazing as they finished landing. All of the people, the pilots and flight attendants and his father’s assistants, all beamed as they deboarded, and they all seemed to be smiling directly at him. He smiled back, just happy to be able to move his legs again. He stepped off the plane, his mother behind him, and America was warm, and bright, and sunny, and the air smelled like cotton candy, just like he’d always dreamed it would—or, no. He’d never dreamed of leaving England. But some of the kids at his school had told him he’d been unlucky, having parents from such an amazing place, but having to grow up in boring old England, instead.

  He’d rather liked boring old England.

  But the sky was raspberry-ice blue, and the ground felt like it was rolling the whole Earth out for him under his feet, like it was a red carpet and he was the star.

  He touched down on American soil and felt it all greet him.

  He yawned.

  It had been a long day. The sun was beginning to set on the horizon, and his father’s assistants had just informed him that the chauffeur was ready, and they’d found a hotel that was even closer than the one they’d originally planned for them. Warlock would have his own room at this one, with his parents staying next door. There would be a TV with video game controllers attached. They made sure to tell him this.

  He smiled. But he didn’t think he’d be playing anything tonight. It was like the whole world had fallen into his head, all at once, opened up to him with this new move to America, and he’d have to wait until tomorrow to play with it…to…to explore it….

  He fell asleep in the car on the way to the hotel, and didn’t wake up until morning.

  Warlock opened his eyes the next day, having had some very strange dreams that he almost immediately forgot.

  He brushed his teeth and changed his clothes.

  He went outside—normally eleven-year-old boys would have to let their parents know they were about to walk around in a brand new city, not to mention the sons of important political figures, but Warlock knew, somehow, that today he did not—and he stepped out into the streets of Washington, DC.

  It was like walking into a Broadway musical. It was the end of August, yet the temperature was a bright, breezy seventy degrees. The sky was robin egg blue and the trees were shamrock green. The streets and buildings were shiny clean and birds were singing. Everyone who saw him, even though they were adults, smiled and greeted him with ‘Good morning!’s and ‘How do you do?’s. There was a rhythm to it all that felt like things would be just fine.

  Warlock strolled with his hands in his pockets, grinning at it all, taking in all of the world.

  He didn’t realize just how true that sentiment really was.

  In the afternoon, Warlock made it back to the hotel in time for lunch, then decided to investigate the pool. It was the color of a Caribbean cruise advert beach, and, though it had been rather small seconds ago, it now stretched far enough that any child could readily pretend they were at sea in it. And, coincidentally, all of the grown-ups who had been lounging by its side or swimming laps suddenly decided that their time would be better spent elsewhere. The pool, which had once been four and a half feet deep at its deepest, now sank low enough for there to be a diving board, and a slide at one end that was still aghast at having come so suddenly into existence.

  Warlock walked to the steps.

  The other kids in the pool stopped whatever they had been doing. They looked at him, their new playground king, though they had never seen him before. They knew.

  They drifted, forming a semi-circle around where he stepped into the perfect, not-too-warm, not-too-cold water.

  “Hi,” Warlock said. “I’m Warlock. I’m from England.”

  And the king was crowned.

  “And there are thirty-nine flavors of ice cream,” Warlock announced.

  The rest of the kids nodded and beamed at him. The littlest one actually gave a theatrical gasp.

  “You know how many there are in England? Like, three.”

  “No, way,” one girl said. “What about chocolate?”

  “Well, yeah,” Warlock said, disgruntled. “They have chocolate.”

  “Oh.”

  “But what about chocolate chip cookie dough?” piped up someone else.

  “Yeah,” Warlock said, nodding. The pool float he was resting his arms on bobbed up and down from the motion. “Yeah, they don’t have that!” We don’t, his brain corrected, but he ignored it. This was where he lived, now.

  “Or Superman?”

  The kids gave a collective sigh over Superman. It was everyone’s favorite.

  “Not only did they not have Superman ice cream,” Warlock said, “but they don’t even have free-ice-cream Mondays.”

  “What are free ith cream Mondayth?” asked a small missing-toothed child.

  “You know, when all ice cream is free on Mondays?” That was certainly what the man had said to Warlock when he’d gone into the shop.

  “Wow. I didn’t even know we had that.”

  “And they fit, like, seven cherries on top.” He didn’t even like cherries, but seeing them balanced all one on top of the other had made it seem more special. It was something he’d imagined a long time ago. He thought he’d even drawn a picture of it, once.

  “England sounds stupid.”

  Warlock frowned. His hand clenched on the floaty, making a rubbery squeaking noise. “England wasn’t stupid,” he said quietly. But it hadn’t been—like this. Everything hadn’t lived up to his expectations. The world hadn’t welcomed him like it was glad he was in it, not always. “It’s just,” he said. “America’s awesome.”

  He leaned back, floating in the water, letting his hair get wet. “Yeah,” he said, confidence returning to his voice. “America’s awesome. Everyone is happy, and cheerful all the time. Everyone wants to talk to you and show you cool stuff. It’s the best.”

  “Yes!” said a chorus of kid voices.

  It was a little creepy.

  Warlock, still lying back in the water, frowned. He sat up, slowly, hair dragged down by the added weight of the water, then stood upright and looked at them.

  The kids were staring at him, all grinning. Expectant. Waiting. Waiting for orders, said a voice in his mind.

  He shook his head, water droplets flying from his mane of hair.

  “Course,” he said, “America’s all about the freedom, right? The—the brave and the free, yeah? That’s what Dad says.” He reached for the floaty, which had been drifting away from him, making its escape, and dragged it back to himself, to hug against his chest. “That’s the best thing about it, right?”

  He felt something in him that was wound up very tight. Tense, like all of the kids in the semi-circle around him, staring at him eagerly for his next pronouncement. Warlock frowned and focused on the feeling.

  He blinked. He felt the something go, ping, and he relaxed.

  The kids looked more relaxed, too. Or rather, they weren’t standing so rigid, in that tight semi-circle around him. Some looked confused. Others looked fine. A few drifted away, going back to the games they’d been playing before he’d joined them.

  It was a relief.

  Warlock was equal parts relieved, and lonely.

  One person remained, a boy who was now staring at him peculiarly. He had his arms crossed. He said, “America’s not that great.”

  “What’d’you mean?”

  The boy huffed. “It’s not all the ‘American dream’ and ‘home of the free’, you know.”

  Warlock crossed his arms, mirroring the boy. “What’s so bad about it, then?”

  The boy got a look in his eye. It was one Warlock did not know to be a warning, because he’d rarely seen it before. So far, most of the time when he asked people questions, they shrugged him off, saying he was too young to understand.

  This boy looked to be the same age as him. He opened his mouth to explain.

  And he did not stop talking for a long time.

  Warlock’s fingers were pruny by the time he and the boy, Billy, left the pool. Even his toes were pruny. Billy, he thought, seems like the kind of name I’d have given one of them just because I expected it. Such a normal boy name.

  He stopped in his tracks. It wasn’t like he had the magical ability to give the kids he met their names, anyway. Billy was just named Billy because his parents hadn’t wanted to say William all the time, probably. And Warlock had nothing to do with it, because he couldn’t possibly.

  “C’mon, Warlock,” said Billy. He always said his name with a bit of a sneer. But he’d smiled at him, too, and had told him the truth about America. So Warlock followed.

  “So if there’s all this racism and sexism and classism and injustice and stuff,” Warlock said, walking with him down the hotel halls, wet feet leaving marks on the carpet, “why doesn’t anybody do anything?”

  “Who could? The government’s all corrupt anyway.”

  I could, Warlock thought. He shook his head as though to get water out of his ears. Yes, his dad was powerful. Yes, he’d just wrangled a dozen kids to stand around him and listen to him in awe for an hour, just by willing it.

  Yes, sometimes over this past day, he’d felt like he’d manipulated the world, shaped it in his hands like silly putty, and surely he could do that to America, too? Couldn’t he?

  He remembered something from his past. From when he’d been very, very little, and his parents had hardly been around, no adults had paid much attention to him, except for a few, two, to be exact, and he remembered vague clippings of what they had said to him, and about his place in the world—

  “Why doesn’t the president just make them stop being corrupt?” he asked, instead, trying to quiet the voices in his head.

  The voices are telling me—

  Billy snorted. “He’s not the king. You British people don’t get anything about America.”

  “I’m not British,” Warlock said. He hated how petulant he sounded, but he had spent his entire life being told just how American he was.

  “Uh, yes, you are. You even have the accent.”

  Warlock gaped at Billy, who smirked back at him. “I have an American accent.” The other kids had always said so. They’d—not exactly made fun of him for it, because kids did not make fun of the kid who had the best toys and threw the best birthday parties—but they’d commented on it.

  “Well, it’s kind of British,” Billy said, shrugging. “Maybe not as much as, like, that guy from Mary Poppins. But you definitely have some of it. And you say ‘rather’ a lot.”

  “I say what rather a lot?”

  Billy just laughed.

  “I’m not British,” Warlock said. “I’m American. I’m American now, anyway. And I don’t like the country doing stupid things that hurt people. So—so someone should change it.” That someone should be me.

  Billy shrugged. His voice had lost some of its edge when he said, “Yeah. But it’s hard, man.”

  Warlock shrugged. “Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done anyway.”

  “Well, unless Superman flies in and starts yelling at people to be better, soon, I don’t think it’s going to change.”

  “That’s bloody stupid.”

  “That’s ‘bloody’ British.”

  Warlock blinked. Maybe he didn’t realize how much England had rubbed off on him over the years. People had always said he wasn’t like the rest of them. His mother had always said they’d go back ‘home’ to America one day. His father had always said he was proud to be American.

  His father, who worked with the president. Directly.

  “Someone should do something,” he said.

  “All right, Superman,” Billy said, smiling at him out of the corner of his eye.

  Warlock rolled his eyes. Then grinned.

  Warlock had a theory.

  He’d been in the United States for a full week, now, and he was beginning to really believe this theory. There seemed no other explanation. Billy had made it clear to him that America was not normally the dreamland it seemed on TV, and even if it was for some people, it wasn’t for everybody. But Warlock had been living in a dream. He kept dreaming things, while actually asleep, that he couldn’t drag back into memory when he woke up, but he knew they disturbed him. He felt like there was too much in his head for one person. And he kept making things happen.

  It sounded crazy, but he knew.

  The first day had been the streets of DC, the kids in the pool. The free-ice-cream Mondays.

  On the second day, Billy’s parents had been surprisingly busy and carefree about what their son got up to. He’d been able to slip away and show Warlock all around DC, looking at all the monuments of US history. People would be kind, proud, showing off displays of their country’s past while graciously ushering the boys to the front of every queue—every line—letting them pet their dogs, giving them free candies. Billy would frown and say that it wasn’t usually like this. Usually, people would be grouchy and rude and shove you in their attempts to get to the front of the ‘line’. Warlock would blink. Suddenly, every adult wore a scowl. They had no time for two boys anymore. And the exhibits in the museums didn’t seem to make quite as much sense. There seemed gaps in everything, whole groups of people who were suspiciously absent.

  On the third day, it had been the video games. Warlock won every single one. It had been boring. Only when he’d played multiplayer with Billy had it finally been fun, and he had to keep blinking, or else the games would give him all the easy levels, and Billy the hard ones. When the racing games had changed from maps of the US to maps of London, which was not where the game was supposed to be set, Warlock had sheepishly put away the controllers and said he’d see Billy later.

  The fourth day had been the movie stars. Warlock had always loved the American movies. When the fifth one of his favorite lead characters walked down the street, wearing his clothes from the cowboy movie he’d starred in, and tipped his hat at the boys, shining his dazzling white smile at them, Billy had sworn that this didn’t usually happen. That the United States was a huge country, and most movie stars were out in Hollywood, not Washington DC, and they were never that nice in person, anyway. Warlock had added to his list of supporting arguments for his theory.

  By the fifth day, he’d gotten tired of sunny days with little white fluffy clouds. He wanted to slosh through puddles in Wellies and complain about his damp hair. He’d gone outside, and the sky had been just as blue, the world had been just as sunny, but there’d been puddles in the streets for him and the other kids to splash in. The rain had never even come. He’d scowled, kicked the puddles, and directed his angry look at the sky itself. It had been cloudy and damp ever since.

  The sixth day had been the dogs. There were dogs, free roaming, everywhere. Running at them and licking their faces and wagging their tails. Asking to play fetch and be petted and be a boy’s best friend forever. When they barked together, it formed a harmonious chorus. That was when Warlock knew.

  On the seventh day, Warlock had been so tired. He was, by then, quite certain that he was shaping the world around him. That was the theory. What he expected, happened, and it was almost harder to stop it than to manipulate it all. Still, though, it took energy making America be what he expected. What he wanted. He was pretty sure he could only control a small part of it, for now. Just the area around him, or maybe all of DC. But he wanted to fix it. America was broken, Billy said. He said it, not just with the confidence of an eleven-year-old who paid more attention to his parents talking politics than most, but also with a sadness. It affected him, Warlock could tell. In some ways, it affected all of them. It needed saving.

  The thought of it all made him actually want to take a nice, long nap. But he hadn’t taken naps since he’d been little, and had been made to by the only adult who had ever stood up to his stubborn complaints. Besides, one did not sleep when the world needed saving.

  His Dad was at work that day, as he was every day. Warlock knew, because the night before he had listened, for once, to the rushed conversation between him and his mom during their ten-minute dinner together, that today was a big day for the White House. Quite a few important people were meeting together, along with the president. Warlock didn’t quite understand what they were meeting to discuss.

  He knew what they were going to discuss, in the end.

  Warlock decided to let Billy in on his plan.

  “You’re going to be a superhero?” Billy said, looking considerably dubious.

  “Yeah. It’s the one American thing I haven’t run across yet in America, and, well, if someone’s gotta do it, why not me?”

  Billy slapped his hand to his forehead. “There are so many reasons! First of all, you don’t have super powers.”

  Warlock opened his mouth to respond, but Billy had started pacing and yammered on.

  “Second, superheroes don’t exist. You know that, right? Like, I get that they show up in American comics, but they’re not really real. Third, you don’t know the politics, you don’t actually know how things work here, and even if you could fly into the White House and—”

  Warlock started hovering in the air.

  Billy’s jaw dropped. He stared at him. “W-ow.”

  “So,” Warlock said, “something weird is going on with me.”

  Billy, to do him credit, did not run or scream. He started to nod slowly. He put a hand to his chin.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe we can work with this.”

  They spent the day practicing superheroisms. Warlock saved a baby whose carriage had rolled out into the street—the mother had been certain her pram had not been of the 1950s variety, beforehand, but her baby was safe, so that was what mattered most to her. They stopped an old lady from being mugged. The muggers, who were of course wearing black and white stripes and masks, vanished as soon as the crime had been thwarted. Warlock proved he had super strength by lifting a bus. There had been nobody under it, but traffic was horrible, and the passengers had all been very grateful for the extra ten minutes of their day when he’d dropped them off early at their next stop.

  Billy had given Warlock his last year’s Halloween costume Batman mask, to protect his identity, and Warlock paired it with a yellow T-shirt and some red shoes and blue jeans, to have the Superman colors. They’d made a cape out of the hotel towels. It wasn’t much, but every great superhero, Warlock supposed, had to start somewhere.

  “Dad’s important meeting starts in thirty minutes,” Warlock said, dangling his feet from the top of the hotel roof near the pool, which he had hovered up to. Billy squinted up at him from below.

  “Wait. You’re not really going through with this, are you?”

  Warlock blinked. “Um. Yeah? That was the whole point!”

  “Are you serious? Warlock, you can’t do it!”

  Make it happen, said the voices inside his head. They seemed to get louder whenever he used his Power. They’d been getting stronger all day. Make it real.

  “’Course I can,” Warlock said. “I’ve been flyin’ around all day.”

  “That’s not the same as saving the country.” Billy crossed his arms again. “These are real people, Warlock.”

  “Everyone today was real. The old lady was real. So were the people on the bus.”

  “Yeah, but—” Billy frowned. “I dunno. They just—didn’t seem as real as a whole country, you know?”

  Warlock did know. But he also knew that he could put a whole country under his Power, just as he did with the muggers, and the bus. He could do it. And it was all right, too, ‘cause he wasn’t like a king, like Billy made fun of England for having, or even a corrupt government. He was Warlock. He was helping.

  He was, maybe, even meant to do it.

  Humans are messy things, whispered voices to him, but these were different. They weren’t the voices that had just started showing up in his head seven days ago. They were real voices he’d heard, many times, from the past. Ones who’d raised him. Ones he hadn’t heard in a long time, though they lived in his memory, and as he’d gotten older they’d started to seem more and more strange, until now. They had always said he was special, and now they made sense. They talked about normal people, normal humans, like they were something apart from him. They make a mess of the world. But you, Warlock, you’re different from the rest. You can rule them all. You can steer the world right.

  “I mean, you can’t just fix the world in a day, Warlock! That’s crazy.”

  The world is full of creatures fit to be crushed under your feet. You alone have the right to rule. You alone have the Power.

  Billy turned his face away and murmured, “You’re being stupid.”

  “No, I’m not!” Warlock jumped down from the roof, cape billowing, and landed in front of his new friend. “Billy, I’m not. I can do it. I—” He shook his head. You alone can make a difference, Warlock, said the old voice from his memory. You just have to believe in yourself. He faced Billy and frowned. “I have to.”

  Billy opened his mouth—he was going to argue, again—Warlock just knew it—

  Warlock glared.

  Billy’s expression changed. His doubtful look morphed slowly into a grin. The worry was gone form his eyes. He laughed and nodded. “You can do it, Warlock! If anyone can, you can!”

  “Uh.” Warlock nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.” Now was not the time to lose confidence. He gave a weak smile in return. “I can do it, right, Billy?”

  Billy gave him a big thumbs up. “Of course you can!”

  Warlock took a deep breath.

  Billy was still grinning at him. Warlock couldn’t look at him straight-on. He felt that tightness within him, and he ignored it.

  He nodded, one last time, to himself. “Okay,” he said. “Time to be a hero.”

  He didn’t look behind him, where Billy was still sitting, unmoving, without saying a word.

  The meeting in the White House was going—about as well as usual. It would have seemed a lot more boring than expected, to most eleven-year-olds. The ‘battles’ were all being done via tone inflections and raised eyebrows. The tension was expressed, not in people jumping valiantly to their feet to give an impassioned speech, but in shaking heads and sweaty brows. The stakes were high, yes. So was the chance that not much was going to get done. Still, the men (for it was that kind of government, currently, and that kind of meeting) talked, and paced, and talked.

  The window burst inward with a shatter of glass, and in flew a medium-sized Batman knock-off.

  “Fear not!” cried Warlock, face hidden behind the mask. “I’m here to help!”

  What happened as a result was the inevitable, in such a situation, under such circumstances. It just took Warlock a few moments to notice. He was looking for his dad.

  “It has come to my attention,” he said, scouting the room, feet still a yard above the floor, “that America is not all it seems. It’s s‘posed to be the ‘land of the free, home of the brave.’” That’s what my dad always told me, he almost said, but stopped himself in time. Superheroes didn’t talk about their dads when conversing with government officials. “But apparently, you lot have been making it harder for everyone to be free, actually. Like, really hard.”

  He noticed that the men were all standing, now. They were all facing him. Some of them had their hands in the air.

  “So,” he said, trailing off awkwardly. “Uh. Can we all just—talk?”

  That’s when he saw the guns.

  “Oh.”

  “Stand down!” Someone shouted. “Hands in the air! Feet—uh—feet on the ground!”

  “Wait,” Warlock said, holding his hands out. “Where is, uh—Mr. D—”

  He saw his dad, right when he saw the man next to him, holding the gun.

  He revolved in the air. He saw that there were many men, all around the room. All holding guns, and pointing them at him.

  “Stand down, and get down—” said one of them, nervously but loudly. “Uh, from there, and—uh—and stop spinning!”

  “Please,” Warlock said. His voice cracked. “I’m just trying to help—”

  “Sir,” shouted someone else. Warlock turned to face him, and saw his hand trembling with the gun in it. “This is your last warning—”

  “It’s not supposed to be this way,” Warlock whispered.

  He looked at his dad.

  His dad was looking at him, fear in his eyes. Warlock was wearing a mask. He still, somehow, would have done anything for his dad to recognize him.

  His father looked at the man to his left—the president—while the man on his other side squeezed his hand on the gun.

  Warlock blinked—hard.

  He remembered, while his eyes were still closed, something that felt like ages ago—but, really, somehow, had only happened recently. On his birthday, in fact. It seemed strange, to think of it now, but he’d almost forgotten. A birthday party, with a horrible magician. Secret service agents everywhere, like there always were when his parents finally let him have other people at their house. A magic trick gone wrong, and—

  Warlock was doused from all sides with water. His back, fortunately, was protected by the hotel towel.

  The room, meanwhile, was full of shouting. Water was being shot everywhere. The president had jumped onto his desk in an attempt to keep his hair dry, and Mr. Dowling was shielding him with his own suit jacket. The rest of the men in the room were scattering.

  Warlock flew back out the window he had come through, and did not look back.

  Back at the hotel, Billy was right where Warlock had left him. Warlock wasn’t surprised by this. He flew down to the poolside, and blinked at his friend. It wasn’t hard. He was finding it difficult to keep his eyes open without blinking an awful lot, anyway.

  Billy unfroze, then looked at him, startled.

  “I’m so, so, so sorry,” Warlock said.

  Billy shivered. “Ick. That was—really weird. And really messed up.”

  “I know. I promise I’ll never do it again. Not to anyone.”

  “Not to anyone?” Billy looked at Warlock’s soaked clothes. “But how are you going to be a superhero—if—if—wait, how long was I frozen? What happened?”

  Warlock told him and Billy grew wide-eyed. He didn’t say anything mean. Warlock hadn’t known people could say you weren’t perfect, like Billy did, and still not be mean, like Billy wasn’t.

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  Warlock looked down at his feet. They were on the ground. They didn’t have to be. He could feel tingling in them, like they just wanted to float away. All of him wanted to float away. He still felt it inside him, all that Power. He was trying not to use it, but somehow it was hard. Hard to make it stop. Hard to ignore the voices, saying, Make it happen. Make it real.

  He’d heard from other voices before. Ones that said similar things, things like You have Power and You can do anything. But they’d come from more Earthly forms.

  He needed to speak to her again. The one person who’d ever acted like he was this special, powerful thing. But also the one person who’d acted like he needed to be taught what to do with it.

  He was so scared.

  He needed to speak to the scariest person he’d ever known.

  She’d always been there for him, before.

  “I need to talk to my Nanny,” Warlock said.

  “That,” said Billy, “is the most British thing I have ever heard.”

  Warlock didn’t have Nanny Ashtoreth’s phone number. He didn’t feel like asking his mom for it, either, because she was in the middle of trying to calm down her husband over the phone, and Warlock thought it best not to demand their attention for a while. Still, that Power bubbling up within him could be put to some good use, right?

  He picked up the hotel pay phone, and it started ringing on the other end immediately, no numbers required.

  It reached an answering machine. Warlock garbled out some message of what he’d meant to say. He hung up.

  He needed to go.

  He needed to go home.

  He flew.

  Warlock was high above the clouds. It was cold up here, and damp. He’d passed birds, earlier, and nearly ran into some, and kept going higher and higher, to where he could be alone. He flew so fast his hair was plastered to his head and his cheeks were frozen. He didn’t really know which way England was. He couldn’t have steered well anyway. His eyes were blurry, water leaking from them no matter how hard he tried to stop it.

  There was something up ahead. He wiped an arm across his face and peered at it, frowning. He’d thought for sure he was above the birds, now, but as it got closer, he saw it was too big to be a bird. It was too big to be any flying creature, in fact. He realized it was a plane.

  It got closer.

  Warlock veered to give it room, to hide.

  It turned, and came towards him again.

  Suddenly, not knowing how, Warlock realized why the plane was here. And he realized who was on it.

  He pushed one fist in front of himself, just like Superman. He tried not to let his eyes leak any more. He directed his Power, raging within him, to push himself forward until he was right at the plane’s windows.

  He blinked—but it wasn’t him doing anything, this time, as far as he could tell. It was someone else’s Power pulling him—and he was sitting inside, on one of the fancier private planes he’d been in. He looked across the aisle.

  “Hello, dear.”

  “Nanny Ashtoreth,” Warlock said, and then his throat tightened, and he couldn’t say any more.

  “You’ve got some cloud on your face,” Nanny said, with utmost tact. She produced a blacker-than-midnight handkerchief from her handbag and handed it to him, said, “Tidy up, dear,” then pretended to be studying her nails while he did so.

  After a moment, Warlock’s eyes were dry. He felt himself warming up, the towel-cape he still wore completely cloud-free and toasty wrapped around him. He looked up, at first giving only a quick glance at the person across from him, then giving her a more proper look.

  He had always thought that Nanny was the most beautiful woman in the world. Some of his first school teachers had come close, in his early childhood mind, but none of them ever had that edge to them that Nanny carried so gracefully. It was something extra in her that made her stand out. Now, finally, he recognized it.

  It was power. But not just Power, with a capital ‘P’, as in something more to her than could be seen by the human eye, although he highly suspected that she had some of that, too.

  Nanny Ashtoreth would take no nonsense from anybody, and that made her the scariest, and the most comforting, person he’d ever known.

  There she sat, all in black except for that red neck scarf and flame-red hair. Her posture perfect, accentuated by sharp shoulders, and not a crease out of place on her darkly shining dress. Her expression was neutral, between those dark glasses and the thin line of her purple lipsticked mouth, yet there was a solidness to it all that made her look softer than she should have.

  “Warlock, dear,” she said to him. “You called?”

  “Th-thank you for coming,” Warlock said. For coming to get me, he thought. “I—I know it’s been a long time.” His parents had gotten rid of her years ago, swapped out for tutors and a fancy private school.

  Nanny smiled that enigmatic smile she sometimes wore, head tilted to the side. “Not as long as you think, dear. But then, you’re young.”

  Warlock fiddled with the plane seatbelt. He swallowed. “I—uh—I needed help.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s happened?”

  Warlock nodded, but couldn’t speak.

  Nanny added, “Over a pot of tea?”

  Warlock realized he hadn’t drunk a drop of tea in the past week. He’d never even liked it, much, living in England. But the scent suddenly filled his nostrils, and he felt it strengthening him. He looked up, and, not as much to his surprise as it should have been, he saw that between them in the plane aisle there was now a table set with teacups and dishes, a teapot, sandwiches, and scones.

  “Wow,” Warlock said. “You do have cool powers.”

  “It’s more of Brother Francis’s move, normally. And he’ll be really cranky if he gets here and all there is to drink is Ginger Ale.”

  “Brother Francis? Is he coming, too?”

  “When Warlock Dowling calls for help?” Nanny poured him some tea and smiled at him. “Please. Neither of us would ignore a call like that. Now. About my powers.” She handed him a scone. “I worked to keep them hidden—or at least plausibly deniable—from you for years, when you were small. Now, there hardly seems to be any point, given that I found you quite a few miles above the surface of the Earth, and overall no worse for wear.” She directed her gaze at him, and though it was obscured by the glasses, Warlock felt the Look she was giving him. “Do you happen to have any idea how that happened?”

  Warlock shifted in his seat. He crushed some of the scone crumbs between his fingers. He’d felt this conclusion building up within him for the whole past week. Still, he felt uncertain saying it out loud. “Because I’m—special?”

  Nanny Ashtoreth kept her level gaze on him, fingers frozen on the teacup they had half lifted to her mouth.

  “I—I was born different,” Warlock said. “Right? And that’s why you always used to tell me those things. I was meant to—to come into this Power—and to do something with it. To save the world. Right?”

  Nanny lowered the teacup, and her gaze. She took in a slow breath. Her voice was low when she said, “No, dear—you weren’t.”

  Warlock tapped his feet on the ground. The voices in his head had quieted since he’d entered the plane, but he still felt that ants-crawling-on-your-skin feeling of the Power. “What d’you mean?”

  “You were not born different. But—you are special.”

  “Everyone is,” said a new voice. It was soft and gentle, cheerful, with a hint of melancholy behind it. It sounded familiar, though the accent had changed. Warlock looked up, and saw Brother Francis walking down the aisle towards them. Except—

  Surely that was Brother Francis? The facial features were there. He’d recognize those eyes glowing with kindness anywhere. But his eyebrows seemed to have been pruned. His teeth had somehow shrunk three sizes. His clothing had gotten a major upgrade, and he could have sold whatever face cream he’d been using as a miracle worker.

  “B-brother Francis,” Warlock squeaked, as the man sat down in the seat behind Nanny, his legs still out in the aisle so he could face them.

  Nanny Ashtoreth half-turned, then scowled at him. “He’s looking for Brother Francis,” Nanny hissed between gritted teeth.

  The man’s face—considerably more pretty, but still familiar—fell. “Oh.”

  “You look—better,” Warlock said. Nanny and the gardener had both taught him manners, though he rarely used them, but he was genuinely attempting to use them, now. His tone had been one of politeness. He just hadn’t been prepared for—this.

  “Clean living,” Brother Francis said. Nanny shot him another look with raised eyebrows. “Erm. But, you are special to us, dear boy. Is what Nanny here was trying to say. Only—”

  “Only not in the way we thought, originally.”

  The two adults—for they certainly seemed to be adults, though in a way most that Warlock had ever encountered could not hope to compare with—looked at each other. They seemed to be communicating silently with one another. Warlock, in his early youth, had seen them do this many a time, pretending they hardly knew one another, but always holding these silent conversations, in hallways or in passing in the garden. He’d never been fooled.

  “Perhaps it’s time we told you a story,” Brother Francis said gently. “A true one.”

  Nanny Ashtoreth raised her eyebrows at him. The new, impeccably dressed, far more refined Brother Francis smoothed out his trousers and shrugged, his own eyebrows raised and lips pursed. Nanny Ashtoreth sighed.

  “Fine.”

  “But,” Brother Francis said, “perhaps the version best suited for young children.”

  “As though he hasn’t seen worse,” Nanny said with a smirk.

  After Nanny and Brother Francis told Warlock the story of how they came to be employed for the Dowling family—they hadn’t said much, just that they knew a child would be born with great power, and that he would need looking after, but it turned out they’d chosen the wrong child after all—Warlock told them his own tale.

  “So it doesn’t make sense,” he said, frustrated. “If I’m not the one the powers were s’posed to go to, after all, then why do I have them now?”

  “I have a suspicion,” Nanny said, “that the boy they did go to, once he decided he didn’t want them, was looking for a convenient replacement. Since you’d been raised to have them, he chose you.”

  “But then why can’t I control them? I was supposed to—”

  “Nobody was really supposed to be able to control them,” Brother Francis said sadly. “It was all rather a bad idea, I’m afraid. Cr—Nanny and I, we weren’t thinking of your best interest when we allowed this to happen, eleven years ago. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “We are now,” Nanny said. She had a snap to her voice, like she meant business. “No human should have powers like yours. It won’t lead to a fixed world, and it certainly won’t lead to a better life for you.”

  Warlock wanted to argue. He could feel the Power in him trying to make him resist her words. But Nanny had always gotten her way. Even when he’d been a little tyrant, and nobody else had been able to get him to take a nap, or to quiet down, or to clean his room, Nanny had done so.

  It was perhaps because, even then, he’d always known—she was right.

  It used to infuriate him. Now, with the memory of guns still in his mind, he was almost grateful.

  Then it hit him. Guns, turned to water pistols.

  “You’re not Brother Francis! You’re that rotten magician!” Warlock’s eyes flew wide open. “Er. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Francis said placidly. “I was never any good at magic.” And he reached for the tray, which had moments ago been full of rather disappointing raspberry scones, and produced from it a chocolate chip cookie. “Cookie?” he asked with a serene smile.

  They’d had those in the lobby at the hotel in America. England had biscuits, but, he had to admit, they did not have American chocolate chip cookies. This one looked like it would be the chewiest he’d ever eaten.

  Warlock’s mouth watered. “Thanks,” he said, taking it, and never mind that it had come from a beautified gardener-turned-magician on a plane that had appeared from thin air, and that it had used to be a scone. Never mind that he’d caused quite a lot of trouble, and made a lot of grown ups very angry, and that before then he’d spent the past days thinking he was king of the world, even though he’d been taught by Brother Francis that he should treat everyone as equals. Nanny had taught him different, and she smiled at him so gently now, that he thought he might get clouds on his face if he didn’t take the cookie and eat it at once.

  “It’ll be all right,” Brother Francis, or the magician, or whoever he was, said. His voice was still so gentle that Warlock, though he should have had no reason to, trusted him. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  “We’re going to talk to the person who’s behind this transfer to you,” Nanny said. “We’re going back to England.”

  Warlock smiled around his cookie.

  They were not, it turned out, going to his England. This was not his large childhood home, guarded by secret service agents, flashy like new money in an old country.

  The plane landed at an abandoned air base in what proved to be a very tiny village.

  They transitioned to a car, which they drove down the tranquil streets, and stopped in front of a cottage.

  The two adults—Nanny had driven, and she drove cars about exactly how Warlock would have imagined it—had a brief squabble in the front seats. They hissed and murmured various undecipherable things to each other. Nanny Ashtoreth growled, “He said we were fine,” and the magician-gardener took a steeling breath, then nodded. He opened the car door. As he was getting out, Nanny suddenly grabbed his arm, looking more tense than Warlock had seen her.

  “Be careful,” she said, voice low.

  “He’s just a boy,” the magician-gardener said. His voice, and the look he was giving her, was soft. “Just like our Warlock.”

  They both glanced back at him, then looked sheepish when they saw he’d been staring. He had always heard the conversations adults had around him, even when he’d been little enough to need a nanny, but these days he hid it less. They both, nevertheless, looked considerably more relaxed. They met each other’s eye again.

  “I know,” Ashtoreth said. “It’s just—it’s been a week, but it all still feels so—so precarious—and I just—”

  “I know,” Brother Francis said, and the look he gave her now was so tender that Warlock had to look away, but not before noticing that Nanny looked away from him and down at her lap, too.

  After a moment, Brother Francis said, “Warlock. I’m going to go and get—er, our friend. Who, we believe, knows what’s going on, and may be able to help. Nanny will stay here with you. We don’t want to alarm the poor boy’s family by having too many of us at the door at once.”

  Warlock nodded, and the magician-gardener left. The car was silent for a moment.

  “He always liked you, you know,” Warlock said slyly.

  “Hrn?” Nanny said, looking distractedly out the window.

  “He pretended not to approve of you, but he talked about you lots in that way grown-ups do when they’re trying not to talk about something. He pretended he didn’t approve of you. But I caught him staring. I think he thought you were pretty.”

  Nanny Ashtoreth spluttered something about ‘absurdity’, and that was most certainly the most undignified Warlock had ever seen her.

  “I wouldn’t have said anything when he looked the way he used to,” Warlock said. “But now he’s okay, I guess, so you should, I dunno, go for it.”

  “You oughtn’t judge people on their appearances,” Nanny said, looking properly pestered. Warlock grinned.

  “But his eyebrows, Nanny.”

  At that, Nanny’s already reddening face turned darker as she tossed her head back and let out a raucous laugh. It wasn’t just an admission—it was fond. He’d noticed her looking like that at Brother Francis several times over the last few hours. His parents never looked at each other like that, never sounded that way when they laughed at each other. If his mom ever laughed at someone like this, he thought, things might be better.

  “All right,” Nanny said, wiping a tear from under her glasses. “You got me, there. His eyebrows do look better.”

  “And he dresses better, too.”

  “I taught you to value clothes too much, didn’t I?”

  “Nah. Just to like what you like, and take what you want. S’long as it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  Nanny smiled peacefully out the window in the direction Brother Francis had walked. Then she did a double-take at Warlock. “Wait. ‘As long as it doesn’t hurt anybody’? Did I teach you that?”

  Warlock shrugged. Nanny let out a quiet curse.

  “Bloody useless at raising you to be—” she mumbled, voice becoming incomprehensible at the end. But then she cast him a stern look. “And quite right, I was, too.”

  Warlock nodded. “So I don’t want to control the world anymore. Not really.”

  “Good boy.”

  At that moment, someone knocked on the car window. Warlock and Nanny Ashtoreth both jumped, Nanny giving out a little, muffled shriek. She adjusted her hat, smoothing out her expression, then nodded and gestured at Warlock to open the door.

  The both of them got out, and met the person who had knocked on the door, scaring them both.

  He was a boy.

  A boy, no older than him.

  He looked strangely familiar.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “You’re the one who was s’posed to get the Power,” Warlock said.

  “Er. Actually, I did get the Power. At first.”

  “And then you gave it to me.”

  The boy nodded sheepishly.

  Warlock sized him up. He didn’t look rich. His trainers had holes in them, and his shirt was dirty, although Warlock would’ve had dirty shirts his whole life if his mom had let him, so that didn’t say much. He had wavy golden hair and a stubborn but friendly expression, that right now looked just like Warlock’s when he knew he was in trouble, but also knew he was going to get off easy.

  Warlock thought, Maybe, in another life, we would’ve been friends.

  “I’m Adam,” the boy said. He held out his hand, and Warlock shook it. “I was supposed to be you. Or, you were s’posed to be me? Anyway, we’re both just us now, which is better.”

  Warlock nodded and shrugged at the same time, bemused.

  “I didn’t mean to make a problem for you, giving you all that Power. It’s just, you were there, in the hospital. We’ve met before, you know. The only time I had memory of being—what I really was. Or what I used to be. And I remember seeing you there, thinking, Am I like him, too?”

  “Wait—what hospital? When did we meet?”

  “When we were born.”

  “You can’t have remembered that.”

  Adam shrugged, and suddenly, Warlock remembered, too. The Power let him.

  “Oh, wow.”

  “I wanted to be like you,” Adam said, “with your family, parents there and everythin’. So, years later, when it was now, and I realized I didn’t need the Power anymore—” He shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d like it? Since you sort of—had a weird time growing up, and I didn’t, and you didn’t even get powers for it.”

  Warlock had no idea what he meant by that. Sure, his family had been a bit wealthier than some of the other kids’. But he was normal enough, right? “So you just—gave your Power away?”

  “It’s not as much fun as it seems like. Trust me.”

  “Yeah.” Warlock grimaced, thinking of the White House, and the kids at the swimming pool, and Billy, frozen, waiting for his return. “I know what you mean.”

  Adam matched his expression. “I’m really sorry. I guess I thought someone else might do it better? But, really, it’s not good for anyone to be able to control everythin’, is it?”

  “Guess not,” Warlock mumbled, thinking of kings, and presidents, and dads who weren’t at home very often. “No one really can, can they?”

  “Adam,” Brother Francis said, “can you take the Power back again?”

  Adam nodded, but Warlock turned to Nanny Ashtoreth. She had, of course, been looking at him the whole time.

  Warlock bit his lip.

  Nanny raised one eyebrow above her dark sunglasses, waiting.

  Warlock looked back at Adam, then nodded. “Go ahead. I don’t want it. Not really.”

  Adam sighed. “I s’pose I could sort of—spread it round a bit. Maybe, if I try really hard, I can spread powers to every single person in the world. That wouldn’t be too bad, would it? If everyone was just a tiny bit more powerful?” He’d addressed this to the two grown-ups.

  “Considering the number of people currently living,” Brother Francis said, calculating, “that would hardly be enough for it to be even noticeable. In fact, it’s hardly worth doing—”

  “That’d be just fine,” Nanny Ashtoreth said to Adam, taking Brother Francis’s arm in her hands, effectively silencing him.

  Adam looked pensive. “If Mum and Dad find out I’ve broken my grounding again, they’re gonna be really mad. I might never be ungrounded. And it’ll be really hard to hide it if I don’t have any Power left—”

  “Perhaps you can keep just a tiny fraction more, for yourself, Adam.”

  Brother Francis gave Ashtoreth an appalled look, but she, smiling wickedly, just patted his arm, then moved her hand down to take his. He stared at their linked hands in shock.

  Then, both of them more red in the face than before, they smiled at Adam, and bade him farewell.

  “Wait,” Warlock said. “Aren’t you going to—”

  The grown-ups stopped. Adam tilted his head at him.

  “To do what?” the golden-haired boy asked. “Is there more to wrap up? I want to do it properly, this time. Since I messed up before. ‘M sorry, I really am.”

  Warlock gaped at him. He looked at Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis, still holding hands. He looked down at himself, still wearing Superman colors, but just a normal T-shirt, blue jeans, and red shoes. A towel as a cape, but only make-believe. Just like any normal kid.

  “I guess—” he said slowly, “—that’s it? I mean, I guess that’s—back to normal?”

  Adam’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh! I can keep you in America, though. If you like. I heard there’s—”

  “Thirty-nine flavors of ice cream,” Warlock laughed. Somehow, he just knew that was where the thought had come from. “Yeah, there are. But, uh. D’you mind, actually, if we come back here? I mean, if my parents don’t mind. Uh. I think my mom had finally started to make friends, and Dad’s always busy anywhere, but he gets to feel special as the only American here, and, uh—”

  Adam was nodding, and grinned. “It’s home. I get that. Hey, maybe we can even hang out sometime?” He looked conspiratorial. “When you wake up tomorrow it’ll be like you all never left. No one will even remember. Last bit of Power, I promise!” he added to the grown-ups, who were watching him in amusement.

  “Wait!” Warlock winced. “It’s just—Billy. Could he remember? And could I get his phone number?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  The two boys looked at Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis. They tried to look as innocent as possible. The grown-ups looked down at them, Brother Francis looking pestered but fond, Nanny Ashtoreth with that snake-like smile she sometimes wore. How many times had Warlock seen that expression, and been just a little frightened by it? Versus the number of times he’d seen it directed at someone else, some interfering grown-up trying to tell him who to be, and had been made to feel so safe because it was protecting him? And how many boys got to grow up with a nanny like that?

  “Last last bit of Power? I swear,” Adam said.

  “Oh, all right,” Nanny Ashtoreth said.

  And she turned, hand-in-hand with Brother Francis, and the two started walking back to the car, and Warlock went to go with them. Adam called goodbye after them. And Warlock did what he had done many, many times in his life—being escorted back home by his nanny, after having done something that could have gotten him into quite a lot of trouble, really—but knowing, deep down, that it had been worth it, and he’d get away with it.

  And trying, because of all that, to hide a very big grin.

Comments

Re: pure delight

[secret_kraken]

Thank you!