'JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.'
In which an angel, a demon, and their adoptive daughter decide to stop Armageddon. Except it's days away, they've lost the antichrist, Heaven and Hell are both breathing down their necks, and th...
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Freddie might be the child of an angel and a demon, but sometimes, she's just like anyone else, and like anyone else, she hates to see her parents fight.
***
The drive back to Crowley's apartment, the walk up the stairs, it was all a blur to Freddie. The whole world was obscured by the tears running down her face and the pain of her fathers' fight, and the next real and solid thing she could recognize was her bed, which she violently flopped on. Crowley trailed after her, guilt written all across his face as he tentatively sat down on the edge of the bed and reached out to rub Freddie's back in soothing, circular motions.
"I'm sorry," he said over and over again. "I'm sorry, Freddie."
"Why?" She sobbed. "Why did you have to-"
Her throat was tight and she found it impossible to say a single word more. So she just buried her face among the pillows and continued to bawl. Crowley looked down at her with the utmost concern, unsure of what to say. How could he comfort her now, after she had been let down so badly by her parents?
"What can I do?" The Demon asked desperately, and he wasn't sure if he was begging his daughter or God Herself for the answer.
When he received no response, he swallowed tightly. "Look, I'll... I'll try to fix this. I don't know how, yet, but I'll try. Freddie, sweetheart, I'm going to make things better. It'll be okay. Just trust me."
The teenager wished more than anything that she could. But her world had been ripped off its axis and now she didn't know what to trust and who to put her belief in. She felt as though her innards had been torn out and then rearranged all wrong, like a fucked up game of Operation. She felt as though Armageddon had just hit, even though there was still a day left.
(It wasn't that she thought her parents were perfect; she hadn't thought that since she was very small. Freddie was a rational girl, and she had long been able to see that Aziraphale and Crowley were flawed. They each carried their fears and their loneliness, and God knows they could be foolish. But even knowing all that, she had never thought they could do something like this. She had never thought there'd be a moment where she was left adrift. And now that she had been, she didn't know what to do; how was a sixteen year old to carry on in the face of such unprecedented devastation?)
Crowley sighed. It was a terribly weary sound, one that betrayed just how old he was, just how much he'd seen. "I'm going to get you some tea. Chamomile. That always makes you feel better, right?"
She tried to respond, but her words came out in a choked sort of wail.
"Right," Crowley said tentatively. "Is it alright if I leave to do that? Will you-"
"Yeah," Freddie managed to say, more forcefully than she had intended to. "Go."
Hesitantly, he did so, creeping out of her bedroom, leaving her alone. Her vision was blurry with tears when she lifted her head up and glanced around at the familiar space. Her gaze lingered on the various photos spread throughout the room; from the one tacked to the wall with her and her dads in the bookshop, beaming in front of a cake on her tenth birthday, to the small one sitting on her nightstand, of her four-year-old self sandwiched between Aziraphale, who was reading her a book, and Crowley, who had one arm stretched out to capture the picture in the first place. That was her family. That was her whole life. It was warm, and happy, and full of love. And now it was breaking apart, destined to end in less than twenty four hours.
She couldn't bear it. If she had to listen to her own thoughts for a second longer, she might go mad.
Freddie grabbed her earbuds from the nightstand. She quickly put them in and attached the jack to her phone. Music had to help, right? If she just found the right song, she could drown all her pain in the sound...
The dulcet tones of The Cranberries filled her ears. They were singing of love and longing and imagination, as though such things could last forever. As though the world wasn't on the verge of ending.
Crowley returned with a steaming mug of chamomile tea, which he placed on Freddie's bedside, along with a box of tissues. "If it gets cold, just let me know and I'll heat it back up," he told her, just loud enough that she could hear him over the music."
She nodded, grabbing one of the tissues and wiping at her face, which was sticky with tears, and her nose, which had begun to leak. Then she flopped on her side once more, her back turned to Crowley, who was sitting on the edge of the mattress yet again. He didn't protest it, didn't try to get her to talk again. He just went back rubbing her back in that steady circle pattern, as though if he created a consistent rhythm it would repair them both.
His gentleness pulled memories to the surface, and Freddie remembered how he'd do this same thing whenever she felt bad. One memory in particular lingered in her mind, the memory of being eight years old and sick with bronchitis. The sickness had her laid in bed, exhausted, nearly hacking up a lung every ten minutes. Through it all, though, her parents had been patient, even when she complained nonstop about how miserable she was. Crowley stayed over at the bookshop for a week straight, watching cartoons and helping her with the schoolwork sent home with her, while Aziraphale kept her supplied with cough drops and cold medicine, he brought her toast and tea and wrapped her in blankets. And one time, Freddie remembered, she'd woken up in the middle of the night, coughing fiercely, her chest and throat aching. Her parents had comforted her, then; Pops had read to her until she fell back asleep, while Dad traced those familiar circles on her back.
She never thought she'd miss being a little kid, suffering from a particularly nasty cold and flu season, but she did. She really did.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for getting you into this mess," Crowley said, voice faint beneath the guitar filling her ears.
It was selfish to drag you into this, instead of letting you go...
Aziraphale's words were stuck in the metaphorical cracks spiderwebbing across her young heart. They made Freddie want to scream, want to break something. She wanted to shake both her parents, to tell them how wrong they were, to tell that there was nowhere she'd rather be than living the life they'd given her. She wanted to tell them there was no one she wanted to be except for herself. She wished she knew how to make them understand that she loved their family so much, and she'd never desired anything except for that family to stay together, to be happy, to carry on for... Well, forever.
The night carried on, though it all felt quite blurry. At some point, Freddie drank the chamomile tea and Crowley carried the mug away. At another point, she changed into pajama bottoms and a tank top, only to end up back where she started, laying in her bed and feeling numb. And eventually, she ran out of tears to cry and just closed her eyes, giving in to the ache threatening to encompass her entirely. She couldn't tell if her dad had come back into the room to comfort her again, or if he'd chosen to give her space. She found she did not have the energy to lift her head and check.
The last thing Freddie remembered before drifting into an uneasy sleep and reaching for dreams of times when things were happier, when life was easier, was the music she'd had playing all night. As her namesake sang she absorbed the words, letting them sink into her broken heart.
I don't wanna die... I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all...
I don't wanna die, Freddie echoed in her head, over and over, until the oblivion of unconsciousness came for her. I don't wanna die.
