Angel-Centered Therapy Through A Multicultural Lens: An Integrative Approach - Nnm (2024)

Chapter 1: Piña Coladas

Chapter Text

If you wanted to understand Dr. David Hampson, Ph.D., psychologist and amateur musician, then you should know that he always referred to himself in his thoughts as Davey. None of his friends called him this, but he used to have a wife who did. It reminded him of his youth, and he liked how the sound of it fit into a rhythm. You should also know that Davey often had a Jimmy Buffett song stuck in his head, no matter how long it had been since he’d last heard one. Today was unusual in this regard, because what he had stuck in his head was The Piña Colada Song by Rupert Holmes. Davey liked piña coladas and getting stuck in the rain, under the right circ*mstances. He also liked yoga, although he wasn’t dextrous enough for it these days.

You might also want to know that, this morning, Davey had pulled out a particularly worn pair of socks while getting dressed, which he only realized once he felt a hole forming right over his big toe. But Davey wasn’t the sort to let something like that put a damper on his day.

Davey liked to get to work early, even when he didn’t have any appointments until later on. He would spend the early hours reading emails, writing up his case notes, and browsing through musical instruments listed on Craigslist in case anything good showed up, although it rarely did. He never had too many clients these days, because he didn’t need the money and he enjoyed getting to maintain a relaxed schedule. It made it easy for him to make time for his band’s regular practices and irregular gigs, which was a priority for him.

Today wasn’t going to be too busy, but it was going to be a busier day than usual. This was because he had an in-take assessment scheduled, and those took longer and required more preparation. This in-take happened to be a last minute upset to his schedule, and it had come as a surprise to him that it could even be booked in the first place.

“I’d love to meet with you,” Davey had said, apologetically, when he had been called up by a fellow looking to initiate therapy, “but I’m all booked up for months.”

“Are you sure?” The fellow had said, through a poor connection that crackled.

Davey had been sure. And yet. Right there in his calendar was a blank spot, just a few days away, which he had somehow completely overlooked before. “How about that…I’ve got Wednesday at eleven, if you can make that work.”

“What a miracle,” the fellow had said, “that would be just the perfect time.”

***

When Davey met the fellow, he quickly sized him up as kind-hearted and complicated.

With this fellow, there were a certain number of immediate impressions that formed when you met him. First, Davey could tell, this fellow was English. The accent was a dead giveaway, and Davey looked forward to learning all about how an English fellow had ended up here, in Rochester, New York. Second, he was intelligent. When Davey had looked into the fellow’s gorgeous blue eyes, he’d seen how they sparkled with intent and curiosity. He wasn’t the sort of person who put much truck in the concept of intelligence as a global and consistent personality trait, to be honest, but he liked getting to work with folk who were inclined to wax philosophical now and again. Davey’s third immediate impression about this fellow was perhaps the most notable, the most undeniable, and the most telling: he didn’t fit in.

He just didn’t. He didn’t look like he could fit in, even if he tried. It was clear from how he dressed, how he styled himself, his whole general demeanor as he walked into Davey’s office. You didn’t look the way that this fellow looked, especially not when meeting with a psychologist for the first time, if you found it easy to manage your expectations of others and their expectations of you. You looked the way this fellow looked, if there was some aspect of your identity that you were desperate to hold on to, even when it came at a staggering interpersonal price.

Now, not fitting in could be a good thing. It could be a very good thing, in fact, as Davey well knew. The problem was just how often it became the seed of heartbreak and sorrow. Which was something that anyone with a disposition not to fit in certainly knew.

Davey may not have had this at the forefront of his thoughts as he made these first few assumptions about his newest client, but in a deep and warm center of his mind, he set for himself a keen goal: he was going to work and work hard so that, someday, this fellow could come into Davey’s office and know this was a place where he did fit in, exactly as he was.

Once the fellow had taken two steps into Davey’s office, he surprised Davey by making a beeline straight to the magnet collection.

“Ah!” The fellow said, raising a remarkably well-manicured finger to tap at a miniature Big Ben. “You’ve been to London, have you?”

There were a lot of things that Davey liked about his office, but something he didn’t like about it was the whiteboard it had running along one of the walls. It made the space look clinical, which wasn’t the right sort of vibe for Davey. So, a while ago, he’d covered that whiteboard up with his collection of souvenir magnets from around the world. It was a sizable collection, and not even the stuffiest clinician with the stuffiest-something stuffed up his stuffiest-somewhere could make a wall full of little colorful magnets feel clinical.

“Afraid not.” Davey chuckled the way a companionable person chuckles when they have to correct you. “That was a gift from a friend, actually, after I did a favor for her.”

“Ah.” The fellow took a half-step back from the whiteboard, now taking in the rest of the collection. “And–all of these. Are they all from places you have not been?”

“Oh, no, no.” There was something a little tragic about that idea, wasn’t there? Davey waved it away. “Not at all. Some are my own, others are from friends. I just like to keep them all in one big hodgepodge, so I’ve got memories and dreams all mixed up together.”

The thing that Davey had just said was actually true. He was in fact the sort of person who would not only think something like that but actually say it out loud to someone else. On purpose, even.

… If you like piña coladas …

Davey smiled.

The fellow ran his eyes over Davey’s magnet collection for another moment. Then, when the fellow gave Davey the chance, he motioned in the direction of his comfy chairs. There was nothing wrong at all with the fellow taking as much time as he wanted to get to know Davey by all the things on display in his office, but this fellow seemed like the sort who would appreciate being given some direction.

Davey talked as they both sat down. “When we spoke on the phone, I don’t think our connection was too good. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

The fellow flashed an understanding smile, as he got comfortable in his chair. “Yes. It’s Aziraphale.”

The moment had yet to be realized when Davey would be able to refer to this fellow by anything other than this fellow.

“Come again?”

“Aziraphale.”

“One more time?”

“Aziraphale.”

At least the fellow was being patient about it. Davey prodded a tooth with his tongue. “How about I get you to spell that out for me.”

The fellow was amenable, but Davey had to stop him until he could get something to write with. His chair was getting old, and it squeaked whenever he got in or out of it, but he had to get up in order to find a notepad and pen. Davey didn’t have anything to write with close to his chair to begin with, because he didn’t like to take notes while meeting with clients. It could clam a person right up, if they felt like you were observing and assessing them right from the start, and there was nothing Davey valued more in his work than giving the people who came to him a chance to feel like their authentic selves. Also, there was the fact that over the years Davey had developed an absolutely fantastic grandfather-shaped belly, and that made writing on a notepad while sitting in his chair less than ideal.

The first pen he tried didn’t work, but the second one did.

“Alright,” Davey said once he was back in his chair and all situated.

The fellow was very polite in how he had waited this long, and in how he additionally waited until Davey had readied his pen. Then he said, “A.”

“Mmhmm.” Davey wrote down an A.

The fellow said, “Zed.”

After a quick rush of mental arithmetic, Davey wrote down a Z. “Got it.”

“I.”

Davey wondered if the fellow would continue without being prompted. The answer turned out to be no. So, Davey repeated, “I.”

“R.”

“R.”

“A.”

“A.”

“P.”

“P.”

“H.”

“H.”

“A.”

“Another A.”

“L.”

“L.”

“E.”

“E.”

“Aziraphale.” The fellow smiled.

What in this great big beautiful world kind of name was that? Davey had to give his mind a chance to work its way around it.

“Now that’s unique,” Davey said. “I gotta wonder what it’s like, going through life with a unique name like that.”

“Hm.” The fellow wasn’t perturbed. “I do often go by Ezra. Mr. Ezra Fell. It’s easier.”

“Aziraphale Fell…” Davey sounded it out, tried to get the hang of it. He wasn’t a judgmental sort of person, or at least he didn’t think of himself that way, but there were some circ*mstances where just about anyone would have to really work at it to see the world from a different point of view. The name was a weird one, and Davey at first thought he couldn’t imagine ever coming across a name like that at any other point in his life. But then something clicked, and realization dawned in an exciting and rewarding way. “Oh! Like Israfel! The angel!”

The fellow Aziraphale’s whole face lit up with all the light in the world. “Yes! Exactly!”

“Well, I’ll be.”

“I haven’t heard that pronunciation in quite a while,” the fellow said with pleasure. “That does take me back.”

“Huh!” Davey felt how the fellow was practically glowing from the recognition, and he liked it. He chuckled. “I’m guessing, you must have some pretty religious parents.”

All that light in the fellow’s face faltered, and then it drained away. Davey didn’t understand it.

“Yes.” Aziraphale’s voice was much quieter all the sudden. “I suppose so.”

Well, Davey sure had just stepped in it. Now the two of them would have to start all over again. “So. Tell me what brings you here.”

“Yes. You see, I received a referral. To you.”

“Is that so?” Davey got an occasional referral, but not that many.

The fellow nodded. “From Miss Thyme.”

The name didn’t ring any immediate bells for Davey, and it showed on his face.

“Miss Thyme?” Aziraphale tried again. “From–down the hall? She has an office just down that way. Miss Aubrey Thyme?”

“Oh! Aubrey! Of course.” Davey knew who he meant now, and he was happy to realize that they had encountered a small bit of kismet. “Wouldn’t you know, she’s the one who gave me that Big Ben.”

“Huh!” Aziraphale said, because he too enjoyed the chance to recognize small coincidences.

“Yeah, I looked after her office for her, not too long ago, when she was on vacation.”

“Vacation,” Aziraphale repeated for some reason or another. “To London, was it?”

“Something like that. I actually have another one from her…” Davey peered over at his collection, which wasn’t very close to where they were seated. He was looking for the other magnet he knew he’d gotten from Aubrey previously, but he gave up quickly. After all, Davey had a lot of magnets, and this was just small-talk. “Anyway. She really is a hoot, isn’t she.”

Davey enjoyed the chance to learn new things. Just now, he had learned that, when attempting to form a compliment for a woman he didn’t know very well, he called her a hoot.

Aziraphale maintained a pleasant expression, but his eyes had taken on an inscrutable gleam. “Indeed.”

Back to business. “So, you were referred here.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said.

This would be a good chance for the fellow to continue on, explaining his circ*mstances. He didn’t. He stayed quiet. His mind was all blocked up, and he didn’t know how to let any of it out.

Davey would give him all the time he needed. He asked, “How long have you been in the States?”

“Oh, not very long at all.” The answer came quickly, because Aziraphale was glad to know what to say. “Just a quick pop over for this.”

Davey was confused. “What do you mean?”

“For this appointment?” Aziraphale tried to explain, but he was confused in turn by Davey’s confusion. “I’ll be heading back, once we’re done.”

“Huh,” Davey said.

He did like this fellow, he really did. He still had the strong sense that they’d have a good time, working together. It was the darndest thing, though, how much they kept falling into miscommunication.

The fellow smiled, and he waited for the chance to answer another question.

“Well…” Davey stretched out a shoulder. He was done with the notepad and pen, so he let them fall from his hand onto the floor beside his chair. “One thing I think it’s important for us to do, right out the gate, is figure out what we’re hoping to get accomplished with our time together.”

“Oh yes.” Aziraphale nodded. Without a direct question, though, he didn’t give a direct answer.

“So…What do you think?” Davey had eyes that could go wide with joy and ecstasy but could also narrow and peer at the person sitting across from him. Davey liked how it felt when he gave all the attention and care that someone needed for them to reason through a puzzle.

… and gettin’ caught in the rain …

Davey prompted again, “What would be some good goals for you and me?”

This fellow was earnest, and he was feeling deficient. “I’m afraid I really don’t know.”

“Huh.” Davey nodded intentionally. That answer wasn’t deficient at all. Davey was perfectly content to sit here with this fellow and his uncertainty.

Aziraphale smiled apologetically.

But Davey chuckled in that companionable way of his. No apology was needed. “You’d be surprised just how many people walk through that door and sit in that chair, without any idea why they’ve come here.”

“Is that so?” Even the hint of commonality provided an opportunity for hope.

“Mmhmm.” …If you’re not into yoga, If you have half a brain … “Happens all the time.”

Just that little bit, sometimes, was all it took to make someone feel right as rain. What everyone needed, in some way or another, was to know that they weren’t out of place.

… Write to me and escape…

“And I’ll be clear about something.” Davey leaned himself forward in his chair, toward this sweet earnest fellow who couldn’t even say what had gotten him to pay all the money it cost for an in-take assessment with a psychologist, “I ain’t never going to kick you out, just because you don’t know how to answer some silly question I’m fool enough to ask.”

The fellow responded to that. He laughed, quick and small, from some frisson of relief. Davey smiled in return, to help stretch out this moment of camaraderie, to make it count. He liked this fellow, Aziraphale, and he knew for sure that, together, they had the opportunity to do real good work.

Chapter 2: Hurricane Season

Chapter Text

Who would ever be cruel enough to kick a pigeon? What a senseless bit of violence that would be, and against such innocent little creatures. All pigeons ever wanted was to make their way through this big scary world. Davey didn’t like to imagine what a person would have to be like, to want to kick a pigeon, especially if you knew anything about their little pigeony lives. Did you know, they mate for life? If you see two pigeons keeping close to each other, walking and scavenging and cooing together, chances were good you were looking at two little winged soulmates who’d never leave each others’ sides. So, no, Davey didn’t approve of kicking pigeons in a park.

All the same, Kicking Pigeons by Spunge was a great song.

Davey was really happy with how his band had handled it during their most recent rehearsal. Even if it hadn’t been great, he still would have stayed up late afterwards, taking the audio from that rehearsal and burning it to a CD. That’s what he did every week. The soundtrack to his daily commute was always his band’s set, and he got a lot out of listening to it every day. If he arrived to work in the middle of a really good song, when he and his bandmates had been killing it, like they had been with Kicking Pigeons yesterday, then maybe he’d sit in his parked car for a few extra minutes, until he got to the end of the track. There was a joke Davey liked to tell: what may look like a simple steering wheel in his car was, in fact, a disguised bongo.

The song came to an end, so Davey gave in and turned the car off. He undid his seatbelt, opened the door, stepped out onto the ground–

…Squalls out on the gulf stream…

–and said good morning to Jimmy Buffett.

***

“You’re a musician?” Aziraphale asked.

It could have been politeness that led him to asking. There wasn’t any room for doubt about the answer if you took even a quick glance around Davey’s office. He had all his drums over in the corner, along with a cheap Casio keyboard that he hardly ever used, and he had posters from his bands–his current one, and some of his past ones–up on the walls. It had taken him a lot of work to make those posters, what with how he had to teach himself Photoshop, so he liked to have them up on display.

It wasn’t just politeness, though, if Davey had anything close to the right read on things. Aziraphale was experimenting with asking Davey personal questions. This was a good first step. By getting more comfortable asking about Davey, Aziraphale might just become a bit more comfortable with questions asked about himself.

“Mmhmm.” Davey smiled. “At least, I try to be.”

Back when psychotherapy was first getting invented by everyone’s favorite perverted uncle, Sigmund Freud, it was taken as given that the therapist should keep himself as hidden as possible as part of his work. You didn’t give your clients even a smidgen of information about yourself. You kept yourself from reacting–didn’t smile, didn’t crack jokes, didn’t cry–and you also stayed silent as much as possible. The idea was, you wanted the client to be able to confront you like a blank slate. Your emptiness was a tool, and you used it to see what sorts of assumptions your client made about you. It’s called transference: the client takes his own feelings and projects them onto the therapist. If you’re doing some old-school psychoanalysis, you were going to pay special attention to transference as a way to get to the client’s own sublimated, subconscious feelings. Someone who can’t access his own anger, for instance, might instead see you as angry. Someone who secretly wants to have sex with his mother might interpret a male therapist like Davey as his jealous and frightening father. So, if you’re coming into the therapeutic space laughing and smiling and talking freely about your ska cover band, all you’re doing is making it harder for your clients to explore their own internal states.

When Davey had been in school, there were still plenty of old-school psychoanalysts around. He’d gotten some training in that style of things, but it just never clicked with him. See, the thing that psychoanalysis gets wrong, in Davey’s opinion, is that it’s never actually possible to remove yourself from the equation. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try to make yourself a professional blank slate, you’re always still underneath it a person. You’re just fooling yourself, if you think you can check your personhood at the door. Your uniqueness, your distinct personality, your very essence was going to leak out anyway, so why not embrace it? If you can’t see your own self as worthy enough to take up space in the therapeutic setting, then how could you expect your clients to believe otherwise about themselves?

Davey was a lot more fond of the Rogerian approach to things, which is also known as person-centered therapy. This is where the term, unconditional positive regard, originates. If you take on a Rogerian therapeutic stance, you’re still going to be extremely careful with how you present yourself to your clients, because it is your primary duty to embrace your client without judgment. The core to person-centered therapy is the assumption that everyone has, within themselves like a seed, the capacity for healing. The only thing that keeps people from healing themselves, without the assistance of a therapist, are external conditions that get in the way. You remove those stifling external conditions by offering unlimited empathy and acceptance. Treat someone as if they’re good enough precisely as they are and, it turns out, they will be good enough, precisely as they are.

For a long time, Davey saw himself working primarily from a person-centered stance. He thought he was happy with it. He didn’t even realize there was anything that felt off about the approach. But then, on a lark, he’d taken a seminar on reality therapy, and that’s when the world really started to open itself up to him.

“And you have children?” Aziraphale asked.

“I do.” Davey liked children, and he would happily admit that he was biased towards his own. “I’ve got three grown boys.”

In reality therapy, you understand the key to human happiness as the relationships you have with others. So, the therapist’s job is to help you get control over how you approach the world and manage to form relationships. The reality therapist is going to be his whole self, when he works with you, so you get some practice in that precious thing called interpersonal connection. Reality therapy rejects the idea that anything is wrong with a person who needs therapy. You don’t have some deep internal flaw that needs to be healed; it’s instead the situation surrounding you that’s flawed. You don’t talk about symptoms and diagnoses, which do nothing but stigmatize someone’s perfectly reasonable challenges while navigating the world. You focus on the reality of the client’s current situation and look for what real choices are available to him, where he is right now.

Davey had been intrigued by reality therapy. He had been invigorated by it. But he didn’t know what it meant to truly be at home in a psychotherapeutic modality, until he’d met reality therapy’s close cousin, multicultural counseling.

“Grown?” Aziraphale was curious. He shifted, pointed over towards Davey’s desk. “Then I suppose those are…?”

Davey knew what Aziraphale was referring to: the crayon drawings taped up, near his computer monitor. “My grandbabies. Matthew’s six, and Aiden’s almost four.”

Aziraphale, at the mention of babies, melted. “Aw.”

Multicultural counseling is all about the role of culture in our well-being, where culture is just a fancy term for all the social, political, and interpersonal forces that determine how we relate to others and fit into the world. In a sense, we’re all the same, because we’re all universally people: we all are born, we all need to eat, we all die, and so on. But, what a multicultural perspective asks us to really take seriously is how, along with that universal aspect of ourselves, we are all entirely unique, given the very particular position we inhabit in the world. Davey wasn’t just some nondescript person: he was a white, cisgender, well-educated, Southern transplant to upper New York. You sit across from Davey, and you are sitting across from his whiteness, his cisgenderness, his well-educatedness, his Southernness, his transplantness, and all the other -nesses that make him up. Davey had to unlearn a whole lot, in order to wrap his mind around the idea of multicultural counseling. And by the love of God: it’d been worth it.

Did you know, that two men–one white, one black–could show up in an emergency room with the exact same set of symptoms, and leave with different diagnoses? The exact same symptoms, and the white man will probably leave with the less-stigmatized diagnosis of bipolar disorder, whereas the black man is more likely to leave with the label of schizophrenic. And a label like that is the sort of thing that can ruin your life. Did you know, that back in slavery times, there had been this fellow–a white fellow, of course–who’d come up with a diagnosis for a mental disease that was particular to black people? The disease was: wanting to escape from slavery. And you know what the suggested treatment was? Whipping. That’s true. And this isn’t even getting into the long life of hysteria as a diagnosis, or the brutal history of ‘treatment’ for same-sex attraction. No, not at all. You look closely at each and every diagnosis in that overworked officious screed, the DSM-5, and if you really pay attention, what you’ll find are all the flaws and injustices inherent to society turned back around as prisons for the most vulnerable.

That’s what Davey cared about. We live in a fallen, corrupting world of racism, sexism, and all those other -isms. We are marked by the original sin that is implicit bias, chiseled into us by society’s unrelenting and cruel influence. And yet, despite it all, by the grace of God, we are capable of love. We are capable of music. We are capable of kindness and compassion and the capacity to see one another through a lens of not just unconditional but truly unyielding positive regard. And if Davey could offer just a hint of that to his clients–just the smallest sample, even just the briefest melody in the otherwise discordant universe–then he’d someday be able to die, knowing he’d done some good for this world. The most good, at least, that he knew how to do.

Davey had some strong convictions.

All of this, just to say: Davey knew it was an important thing, that he had the chance to let someone like this Aziraphale fellow feel comfortable, looking over all of Davey’s drums and amateurish band posters. It was a good thing that he got the opportunity to feel how it was all okay.

…Strollin’ down the avenue that’s known as A1A…

Davey decided to take an easy turn: “How about yourself? Any kids?”

“Oh–Oh no.” The suggestion was apparently absurd, with Aziraphale scoffing at it. “Certainly no.”

“No?” Davey thought this response sat as an interesting contradiction to reacting so positively just to the reference of babies. He was going to invite the fellow to explore that with him. “You’ve never wanted kids of your own?”

“Well…” Aziraphale was thoughtful. “I was something of a godfather for a while, and I did enjoy that quite a bit.”

“I bet,” Davey said.

Most people would have acknowledged that being a godfather for a while wasn’t a normal thing. That’s not how godfatherhood was supposed to work. Either Aziraphale didn’t know that, or it didn’t occur to him that this was something others would expect to get explained. Davey wondered if maybe godfather might be code for stepfather. That didn’t feel right, though.

Aziraphale smiled.

…But then it cleans me out and I can go on…

One of the greatest freedoms Davey had ever secured for himself came from extricating his practice from the horrorshow that is the American healthcare system. He stopped taking insurance. This made such a difference for him, because it meant he got to focus his attentions on actually doing therapy rather than working for the insurance money.

Take how Davey’s work with Aziraphale was going, for example. If he were relying on insurance for payment, then, by the end of their first session, he would have needed a full treatment plan completed, and he would have to give an official diagnosis. After just fifty brief minutes, and he would need to have settled on a potentially life-altering label and written it for all time into the poor fellow’s medical files. He wouldn’t have been able to take things as slowly as he was. He wouldn’t have been able to, both during that first session and now in this second one, give Aziraphale the type of experience that, it was pretty clear, he actually needed.

Who cares, what diagnosis might fit this fellow? Who benefits, from having all the infinite complexity of an amazing, living and breathing person wedged down into a concise bullet point list of observable and problematized behaviors? What good would that do?

…Sat on my beach…

“Well…” Davey roused them both up from the air of chit-chat. “How’d you like to spend our time today?”

“Oh, no, I…” No surprises here. Aziraphale demurred. “I certainly wouldn’t assume to know better than an expert such as yourself, how best to devote our energies.”

“Pshaw.” Davey waved that off. Offering a suggestion, though, would keep the fellow from feeling so much like he was on the spot. “But, if you want, maybe you could fill me in a bit about your background.”

Aziraphale considered, and it turned out he was amenable. “Alright, let’s see what I can come up with.”

Davey smiled. …and then I made up this song… “So. What was your family like, growing up?”

“Hm.” Aziraphale scowled. A whole lot of people who find themselves sitting across from a psychologist scowl just like that, when they’re asked about their childhood. “Well. I would say. That’s a bit complicated.”

“Sure is.” Davey chuckled. … and then I can go on… “What’s your mother like?”

“Um…” There sure was a whole lot of work going on behind this fellow’s eyes. “Big? Yes, let’s say, big. Loving–the most loving. And… Distant. That seems right: distant. Omniscient.”

Big, loving, distant, omniscient: what a piece of work. Davey nodded. “I can see how you could’ve had a complicated childhood.”

Aziraphale laughed, quick and curt, and my how he was getting nervous.

…I passed out in my hammock…

“Is she still alive?”

“Oh, yes, indubitably.”

“You see her much?”

“Not at all.”

“What’s her name?”

“Oh. Well…” Aziraphale’s face scrunched up, conflicted. And then he blurted out, “Pass.”

Davey tried to follow. “Pass?”

“Pass.” Aziraphale nodded with increasing certainty. “I’ll have to pass on that one.”

“Okay.” Who was Davey to push? Mothers were often a difficult topic.

… Stood up and tried to focus …

“What about your dad?”

“Pass.”

… But it cleans me out and then I can go on …

“Any siblings?”

Aziraphale's expression built itself up into an uncomfortable wince, and he shook his head. “I’ll be passing on that one too, I’m afraid.”

“Hey.” Davey held out a hand to show that everything was okay. He recentered things. “Seems like this isn’t such a good use of our time right now.”

“You’re right.” Written all over Aziraphale’s face, with that deep wince, was how he was flogging himself internally. “I’m doing such a rubbish job at this.”

“Nope, not at all.” Davey wanted to be very clear about this, since he was going to be here for the whole ride. “You’re doing exactly what you should be doing. You’re saying what you want to say, and not saying what you don’t want to. You’re feeling uncomfortable, because that’s how you’re feeling. That’s fantastic. That’s real.”

Aziraphale listened, but he was working through something. “No, I’m afraid not. It’s not that simple.”

“Sure,” Davey said, just to help the fellow with his flow of thoughts. Davey wasn’t going to rush things.

. … I knew that it wouldn’t last long…

Aziraphale sighed.

… and then I can go on…

He was inhabited by so many internal conflicts. You could see the shape of them, under the surface, even as his mind settled down into a decision. “I didn’t want to bring this up, but I suppose that I really should.”

“Okay.” Davey was game.

“You see,” Aziraphale said, looking Davey right in the face, “I’m actually an angel.”

“Huh,” Davey said. He didn’t know how just yet, but this was certainly going to change things.

…at this pace very long…

Davey asked, “What do you mean?”

“An angel. An ethereal being?” He was very straightforward with how he was saying all of this. “A Principality, specifically.”

“You mean, like… An angel of the Lord?”

“Exactly.” Aziraphale was relieved, and maybe a little happy around the edges. It was reminiscent how he’d been in their previous session, for that brief moment before Davey had stepped in it. “Although, I’m actually a retired angel now.”

“Retired?” Davey had come across a Jesus, a couple of antichrists, and a handful of Lucifers, back when he had worked in a different kind of setting. He’d never encountered a plain ol’ angel, though, let alone a retired one.“What does that mean?”

That relieved look was still on Aziraphale’s face, although his smile tightened. He shook his head. “I don’t actually know.”

“Well…” Davy was going to have to think about that. …Yes it’s quite– Now was not a good time, Jimmy. Davey had to stamp down his background music right this instant. “Huh.”

“A friend of mine–He’s a demon, but don’t worry, he’s also retired–I believe you have met him, in fact. He warned me about this, but I did at least want to try at the facade.”

“Right. Right.” Davey wasn’t focusing too closely on the details just yet. He had other priorities.

Davey’s most immediate priority was keeping that all-important attitude of unconditional positive regard. It was second nature for him after so many years of practice, but he couldn’t risk losing it for even a second. He especially didn’t want this fellow–was his name actually Aziraphale? In retrospect, that was a warning sign–to feel any anxiety or pressure. Whatever it was that motivated this fellow to say what he was saying, it wouldn’t do anyone any good if Davey stepped in it again and ruptured their nascent therapeutic alliance.

So: Davey kept on being his regular groovy self. He was comfortable, he was present, and he was relaxed. He could be all that, while he also sent off a little piece of his working memory with a backpack and a lunchsack, so it could do its thing and figure out what in a blooming onion his next steps should be.

“I’m really glad you you shared that with me,” and boy was that true. “That sounds like a really important piece of your identity.”

The fellow agreed. “It usually doesn’t go well, when I reveal myself.”

“I can imagine,” Davey said.

Davey’s second –and, in order of importance, highest –priority was ensuring this fellow’s safety. There were two key components to safety: danger to self, and danger to others. This fellow wasn’t a danger to others, no more than anyone else. Society has this grotesque bias against delusional folk, assuming that they were violent and would hurt you. How many serial killer movies were there, after all, where psychotic was used interchangeably with psychopathic or, even worse, murderer? Reality was a stark contrast: a person whose mind was burning itself up with psychosis was many times more likely to be the victim of violence rather than the perpetrator. Davey’d judged this fellow yesterday to be low risk for harm-to-others, and nothing about what had just happened changed his assessment, not one bit.

Not to say that this fellow’s mind was burning itself up with psychosis. What this fellow’s mind was doing remained to be seen.

Danger to self was a bigger concern. Davey had no reason to judge this fellow to be at anything higher than low risk of intentional danger to self: again, delusion is a different word than danger . Unintentional danger was the concern. In order to keep yourself safe, you had to be what some people like Davey referred to in their notes by the shorthand of “oriented x4”: oriented to time, place, self, and situation. This fellow displayed all the behavioral signs of being oriented to time and situation. Self was the big question, although just believing you’re one type of being rather than another doesn’t mean you can’t take care of yourself.

“Hey, I’m curious,” Davey said. “Does being an angel mean you’re, you know, impervious to bodily harm?”

“Not at all.” The fellow gave a look. “And I certainly don’t want to be discorporated, what with the way things stand now.”

“Discorporated,” Davey said. “Huh.”

Orientation to place was another issue. Davey’s mind went back to that weird little miscommunication they had had the previous session, about when this fellow had emigrated from England. The answer he had received could indicate a lack of clear understanding of current location. That could be a problem, because you can get in a lot of trouble if you don’t know where you are or how to get to where you need to go. But it’s not like the fellow had any difficulty arriving to Davey’s office today. His appearance was odd, sure, but not in any way that indicated he was rough-sleeping or had difficulty accessing basic facilities. Just look at the fellow’s teeth, for heaven’s sake! There was some additional work Davey was going to do at the end of the session to ensure that this fellow was okay with regard to place–just some pleasantries, some lowkey chit-chat, a promise of a phone call later in the evening–just to be careful. An abundance of caution was the right amount. But nothing Davey saw was evidence that it would be unsafe for Davey to let him leave this office at the end of the session.

The mere fact that you believe something that, from Davey’s perspective at least, was a little funky did not mean you had to be locked up. Far from it.

“You been an angel long?” Davey asked.

“Well, yes, of course.” The question was a silly one, which the fellow made clear. “What else would I be?”

Davey chuckled. “You got me there.”

Davey’s third priority was ensuring that he set this fellow up with proper care. It wasn’t Davey’s place to say what would count, all things considered, as proper care, because that wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a medical doctor. Sometimes, when people present in funny ways and start assenting to funky beliefs, that was a sign that something was going wrong with them neurologically or purely physiologically, rather than psychologically. Working with someone on the psychological plane without ensuring there wasn’t anything wrong on the lower levels was malpractice.

“You mentioning discorporation reminded me of something,” Davey said. “I should’ve asked this last time, but I guess I plum forgot. Have you been to see a doctor recently?”

“As a patient?” The fellow considered it a polite amount of time. “That’s really not necessary for me.”

“Well, I think it can be a real useful thing to do.” Davey nodded. “I like to recommend to everyone I see, right out the gate, that they get a medical check-up before we get going too far. Just in case there’s something to find out that could change what directions we might go.”

“I’ll look into it.” No, he was just being pleasant.

“Great!” Davey needed to back off.

His fourth priority was strengthening his therapeutic alliance with this fellow, same as it would be with anyone else. The stakes may be higher here, depending on just what was going on in this fellow’s head, but the task was the same. This fellow needed a therapist. He needed a chance to talk and sit with another in the absence of judgment. Even more so, though, what he needed was to be able to do that with someone he could trust.

Davey had to earn his trust. That wasn’t something you could fake.

“Something else I probably should mention at this point, and I hope it won’t end up being a problem for you…” Davey was working them towards a serious issue. He waited until the fellow was fully attentive before he went on. “I just have to be true to myself right now, and I think I’d be doing you a disservice if I weren’t.”

The fellow was an attentive listener. He nodded when he saw how Davey was waiting for his input before going on.

“I gotta tell ya…I don’t happen to ascribe to a worldview that involves angels and demons walkin’ around the world with humans like me–” Quick transition. “That’s just me! My personal beliefs! And I really hope that doesn’t offend ya.”

Davey was making a confession, and he had hope for absolution.

“I could prove it, if you like?”

“Well, let’s hold off on that.” Davey held up his hands in a gesture that could mean either stop or I forfeit. “I’m just hoping it’ll be okay, if you and I don’t happen to always see things eye-to-eye.”

Nowhere on Davey’s list of priorities, whichever way you may rank them, was disputing the possible delusion. There was nothing Davey wanted to avoid more than the suggestion of proof. That would be just kicking the can down the street for another block, risking a greater upset later on. Whatever attempted proof the fellow might provide would be something that he cared about, and he could very well take it as an insult when Davey rejected it. After all, Davey had an extremely well-reasoned and long-held belief that, under no circ*mstances, could there be an angel sitting in the chair across from him. Davey didn’t know everything, but there were limits to where he could imagine his mind going.

“Yes, of course–”

“I’m real glad to hear it.” Davey smiled out his relief. Sure, he’d seen very clearly how the fellow was right at the point of letting out the word but, and sure, all things considered, Davey thought it was bad form to interrupt like that. He could feel a little bad about that. But this was just what it meant to have priorities. He could make up for the interruption far more easily, he was sure, than he could make up for whatever the fellow had been about to say.

You can’t reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into. You might as well–actually–try to reason with hurricane season. The source of a delusion wasn’t the same as the source of a belief that, say, the Five Star Bank was on the north side of the street rather than the south. You try to debate someone out of a delusion, in anything but the most careful and therapeutically-structured way, and all you’ll do is reinforce it. Conflict strengthens irrational beliefs, always and only. It’s safety, empathy, and acceptance that weakens them. So, no, Davey didn’t want to try to convince this fellow he wasn’t an angel. He didn’t want this fellow to try to convince him he was an angel. What he wanted was to make sure that this fellow kept coming back, and make sure he saw a doctor, and make sure that whatever sorrows may lie underneath that ‘angelic’ veneer, he and Davey had a chance to work through them together.

“Now that we’ve got all that out of the way…” Davey leaned back to get even more settled in his seat. He smiled the way you do when there’s nothing you want to do more than give your full, undivided attention to another.

… and then I can go on …

Let’s go.

“I want to know all about it.”

Chapter 3: Same Boat

Chapter Text

There was a space that followed Davey around. He couldn’t shake it, and he had long since accepted that it would be there, with him, wherever he went. It wasn’t a void, per se, but more like a staticky sort of emptiness that cleaved to surfaces and, especially, people. It could warp reality, shifting and stretching or shrinking as necessary to keep itself relevant to Davey’s environment. He never got used to it, and, by this point, he was resigned to the fact that he never would.

Thirty-three years ago, that empty space had been incredibly small. It had been small enough to fit in his hand, to be cradled that way. He had imagined being able to do that, many times. The space had grown, though, the way that all things do: incrementally. It had never toddled, it had never run afar and then come back, it had never grown up, but it had grown.

Thirty-three years and four months, that’s how long Davey had lived in the world with a staticky empty spot. Thirty-three years and four months and—Well, Davey didn’t remember the current date off the top of his head, or else he could work it out more exactly.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, if he had been able to cradle her, before they had taken her away. Or maybe if there hadn’t been that awful nurse who’d sneered, Don’t get so upset, this happens all the time, you’ll have another. Or maybe if they had named her.

They should have named her.

Well, joke’s on that nurse, isn’t it? He and Sadie never did have another. Three wonderful, beautiful boys, who were Davey’s very life and love--but not a daughter. Not a second one.

It’s called Disenfranchised Grief, grief that is unsanctioned by society. It’s the sort of grief that you keep private, because you can’t expect it to be understood. We get by in our grief by following scripts, by going through the motions, by fulfilling the role that society holds for grievers. We rely on others to support us and walk us through the process, when we grieve. Without that script, without that support, what are you supposed to do with all the hurt that piles up?

Women, even, weren’t often given the opportunity to grieve for a miscarriage. So what was a man like Davey--who had held his wife and comforted her and sobbed with her those thirty-three years ago— supposed to do? Society doesn’t like a man who holds onto a miscarriage like that. It made people uncomfortable. Davey knew what people would think of him, if they knew he had carried this grief for so long.

So, he just lived with it. He accepted the empty spot when it came with him to work, when it sat in the chair he kept off to the side in his office. He could always find it out in the crowd, when he was performing at a gig. He knew where that empty spot was, as he walked through hallways and doorways. It followed him, and he was accustomed to finding the space for it wherever he went.

It wasn’t Aubrey’s fault that the space could fit over her so easily.

She just happened to be a thirty-something woman, and Davey just happened to carry with him an empty space that settled onto thirty-something women most easily. It wasn’t fair to Aubrey, because it meant that Davey could never really see her as she truly was. He couldn’t look at her without having to look through that staticky loss of possibilities, the form of the woman who wasn’t there in the space where Aubrey was.

He didn’t even know Aubrey in any meaningful way. They just worked near each other. Sometimes they ran into each other in the hallways. Davey would come into the kitchenette occasionally, like he did today, and she would be there, like she was today, and that empty space would somehow find its way over to her before Davey could try to stop it.

She was eating yogurt, sitting at the one lonely table in the room. She didn’t look up when Davey came in, but Davey wasn’t going to take it personally.

“You sure do manage to attract ‘em, don’t ya?” Davey brought up a chuckle as he moved over to the fridge. He kept his co*ke Zeroes in there, and this was co*ke Zero Time.

“What do you mean?”

See, Davey had done a favor for Aubrey a while ago, being available for her clients in case of an emergency while she was out of town. It was no big deal, and only two of her clients had requested to meet with him during that time. One of them, though—‘Sunglasses,’ as Davey still thought of him—had been a real piece of work. And now he had this new client, saying he was an angel, and that was apparently thanks to Aubrey too.

Davey leaned against the counter by the fridge, and he cracked open his co*ke Zero. “I found out, you’re going around, recommending me to people.”

She looked over. “Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” Davey said.

She knew better than to ask for a name. He knew better than to give one.

“Huh,” she guessed.

“Phew,” he agreed.

Aubrey smirked—or maybe she smiled, and Davey was misreading. It was easy to misread her.

She returned to her yogurt.

Davey sipped his co*ke Zero. He didn’t like himself for how he objectified her—because that’s what it was, objectification, even if it wasn’t the kind of objectification women usually confronted. He didn’t know if he could ever see her differently, the way she deserved, as a person in her own right. He wondered what kind of yogurt his daughter would have liked.

“Anyway.” Davey smiled with his most companionable smile. “A few weeks from now, my band and me are gonna be performing over at Pistol Pete’s. That’s real nearby, easy to get to from here.”

Aubrey didn’t pretend to take his invitations to his gigs seriously. He didn’t pretend he expected her to, and, honestly, he’d be pretty confused if she ever showed up. That wasn’t the point. Maybe he had a sense about things—call it, maybe, a fatherly intuition—that she could benefit from an invitation now and then, just for its own sake. Or maybe he was just pestering a younger colleague in a way she didn’t appreciate.

“I hope you have a good time,” she said, polite enough. She stood from the table, collecting up her yogurt cup and her spoon, a napkin or two. She wasn’t as subtle as she thought she was: she still had plenty of yogurt left, so obviously she was leaving for a different reason.

No harm done. He offered as she was leaving, “See you around.”

Except, she didn’t walk out. She walked most of the way out, but then she paused in the doorway. Davey watched her, waiting, because you don’t pause in a doorway like that unless you mean to.

She was working herself up to something. Or maybe she was second guessing herself.

“Let me know if you need to talk,” she said, with a depth of sincerity that Davey hadn’t expected and didn’t understand.

“Why, what do you—”

She didn’t stick around for questioning.

“Huh.”

Davey drank his co*ke Zero. He took his time, wondering what that had been about, as his staticky empty space hovered over by the doorway.

***

The fellow was in the middle of a false apology. Bashful, he said, “I’m afraid it hasn’t been possible this past week.”

“That’s a shame,” Davey said.

“Extremely busy, you see.”

“I bet.”

“But I assure you, this week, I will certainty—”

“Mmhmm.”

“—certainly make that appointment.”

Davey wasn’t a fool, but he knew when not to call someone out on their doo-hockey. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“Hm,” the fellow said, agreeable, although he wasn’t a fool either.

They both knew what the other was doing: the fellow was lying, and Davey was pretending to believe it. They didn’t have strong enough an alliance, though, for either to call the other out.

The doctor’s appointment had to happen. Davey had to ensure it happened, not just for the sake of doing good practice, but also for the sake of C-Y-B (that is, Cover Your Back-end). If anything happened to this fellow, and Davey couldn’t prove he’d done his due diligence to get him to a doctor, then that would be bad for Davey. A medical check-up was non-negotiable.

He understood, though, that doctors could be scary, and something like a phone call could be a major impediment. So, he’d give the fellow some time. About a month, that’s usually the amount of time that Davey gave someone to call up a doctor on their own. By that point, hopefully, their alliance would be strong enough for them to have an earnest conversation about it.

“You let me know, if I can do anything to help,” Davey said.

“Oh, thank you, I do appreciate it. I really do.”

Davey smiled at the fellow. The fellow smiled back.

“Well, with that out of the way…” Davey clapped his hands, rubbed them together, to mark a shift. “How should we spend our time today?”

“Hm…” The fellow thought about it, which was pretty good, considering how he’d done previously when given full reign.

“Whatever feels right to you. Whatever you've got on your mind.”

Turned out, what he had on his mind was books. No, more accurately: it turned out that what he always had on his mind was books.

Davey had not been prepared for just how much being an angel involved rare book collecting.

***

“There is also, of course…” The fellow’s eyes were bright with gusto, and he drew out the anticipation before revealing what had turned out to be an extensive litany. “The Wicked Bible.”

“Oh, now, that I have heard of,” Davey said. “That’s a good one, isn’t it?”

The fellow relished Davey’s interest. He was bursting from it. “Only fifteen known copies, worldwide.”

“And you’re telling me you have one?”

“I do!”

Get this fellow on a topic he enjoyed, and he would fill the whole room up with his bright-eyed devotion. Honest to God, it was magnetic. Even when the tales he told beggared belief.

The fellow was gleeful. “There are some real advantages to keeping to the same location for several centuries, you see.”

“Huh,” Davey said, neither accepting nor rejecting that.

Davey had thought it through. From where he sat, there were three potential explanations for what was going on with the whole angel business. Theory the First: All of this was some cultural miscommunication. After all, sanity is nothing but a society-constructed concept. A perfectly normal, perfectly healthy form of religious display in one culture could look like a break from reality in another. If you’re a psychologist, and you use your own cultural precepts to evaluate the rationality of someone from a different culture, then what you’re participating in is cultural imperialism at a very personal and harmful level. Assuming this fellow actually was from England, rather than just affecting the accent, then Davey had to be especially careful that this wasn’t some subtle, heretofore unknown-to-Davey but perfectly-normal form of British religious experience.

Yeah, except: no.

He’d done his due diligence, just to be especially sure. He’d searched Google every which way, with search terms like England angel identification and British religion angel and, at one point of deep algorithm-directed frustration, would an English man ever say he’s an angel not like he’s flirting but like he actually believes it. He had poured through all the academic databases he could access, looking for anything even remotely relevant. The results were thoroughly unsurprising: while England’s religious habits did have some pretty interesting differences from America’s, none of these differences accounted for this fellow’s behavior, not by a long-shot. Theory the First was thereby ruled out.

The fellow’s litany of books was winding down.

“You really do love books,” Davey said.

“I really, really do.” His gusto was calming. He turned peaceful. He slipped, easily, into introspection. “I’ve put so much into my bookshop. Every aspect of it.”

“It’s your happy place.”

That wasn’t how the fellow would have worded it, but all the same, “It really is.”

Theory the Second: The fellow believed what he was saying. In other words, he was actually delusional. As much as Davey didn’t like it, evaluating this theory required giving credence to the DSM.

Now, the DSM-5 actually provided a better definition of delusion than what they’d had back when Davey was in school. According to the DSM-5, a delusion is a fixed, false belief. It’s not just something you believe, it’s something you believe that is false (more accurately: broadly held to be false by one’s surrounding knowledge-constructing community) and fixed (that is: not open to revision in response to substantial contradictory evidence).

Was this fellow’s belief false? Davey’s background knowledge along with his research into England was more than sufficient for him to conclude that, yes, it was. Was it fixed? This remained to be seen, since Davey was not open to testing it just yet, but that seemed a reasonable possibility. So, given the definitions provided by the DSM-5, it was possible that the fellow was delusional. Davey couldn’t rule it out.

Theory the Second therefore could not be definitively rejected, but there was a pretty good reason to approach it with skepticism all the same. There’s a thing people say: you don’t anticipate zebras when there’s a horse right in front of you. Compared to Theory the Second, Theory the Third was a nice, docile filly happily munching on some oats.

“I love my bookshop.” The fellow’s introspection was deepening. It was turning into something with shadows. “I love getting to be there, with all my books. And… And, getting to have my tea, or a nice cup of cocoa. With my chair, just so. It’s so warm. Cozy. In every way I have always wanted.”

“I bet.”

“I have… I have, overall… Everything.” There was something he was trying not to feel as he said these words. But, of course, he felt it anyway. “Everything I ever wanted.”

The third possibility was: he was just making it up. This was all a story he was telling, as much to himself as to anyone else. He was pretending to be an angel, because doing so provided him something he needed, desperately so. Living a fiction, sometimes, is what keeps you alive.

The fellow said, “I have everything that I ever could have hoped for. I do, I really do. More than, in fact.”

The words sat comfortably with all the things he wanted to be true, and so they were easy to say. There were deeper things, though, painful and restless things deep down underneath, in contrast to the words–those were the things that chafed.

This fellow was so used to pushing down the chafing things, hiding them as far in the shadows as he knew how. It could be hard, unlearning a habit like that.

Soft and kind, Davey offered: “But…?”

“But.” The fellow agreed. The word was an awkward buoy, keeping at the surface that which was so predisposed to sink. That he, himself, would otherwise drown. His gaze was distant, for the moment.

Davey gave him his peace.

“But I am not happy,” Aziraphale said.

These words weren’t easy. There wasn’t space in his fiction for them. It’s a hard thing, acknowledging that the story you need to survive isn’t, as you need it to be, sufficient.

His eyes turned sharp, found Davey’s. “Am I?”

Davey didn’t think so, no. But it wasn’t his call to make. “Are you?”

“I should be happy,” he reasoned.

“Should’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Hm.”

In all honesty, Davey doubted there was so sharp division to be made between delusion and story. We all of us need our fabrications. It was how we willed ourselves into being. What did it mean, after all, for Davey to be who he was–a father, a husband, a psychologist, a drummer–if not that these were stories he told about himself so many times that everyone had to accept that they were true?

No, wait–not husband. That wasn’t one of the stories Davey got to tell about himself anymore. Funny how hard it was to remember something like that. Just goes to show: how unstable that line between delusion and story.

“It’s a hard thing to sit with,” Davey said.

“Yes.”

They sat with it anyway.

***

Did you know, there actually was an A.Z. Fell and Co. rare bookstore in London? Davey could see it, right there on Google Street View.

Strange, is what it was.

***

Another thing Davey wouldn’t have imagined: how much stage magic was involved in being an angel.

“And, just like that…” The fellow did complicated things with his face and his hands, until his hands were empty and his face was delighted. “It’s gone!”

“Wow!”

The fellow preened.

“Well done!”

The fellow ate up praise like the starving.

“Hey–” Davey thought up something. “How about it, would you be willing to teach me a trick or two?”

“Oh!” It was a tantalizing idea, exciting the fellow, but then he quickly backed off from it. He winced, apologetic. “You see, there is this code…”

“The magician’s code. Right.” Magicians weren’t supposed to share their secrets with outsiders. Davey had known that. “I shouldn’t’ve asked.”

They got to feel at the edges of that disappointment. This gave Jimmy Buffett a chance to do his thing (... wondering where the same time goes… ), and it let Davey think about how rarely, he supposed, this fellow had a chance to share the things he cared about with others. Delight came so easy to him, like he had joy for all the wonders of the world deep in his marrow. But who did he have to share it with? He’d mentioned one friend–and Davey kept meaning to ask about that, just hadn’t had a good chance yet–but it was hard for Davey to imagine that a person cast as a demon in this fellow’s narrative could provide the sort of emotional sustenance he needed. None of us are meant to live in the absence of fellowship.

The fellow’s thoughts had gone a different direction than Davey’s, and he got this gleam in his eye. He perked up, and he invited Davey into a scheme. “We are currently speaking within the bounds of doctor-patient confidentiality, are we not?”

Who didn’t enjoy a little conspiracy now and then? “Indeed we are.”

“And you can give me your word, you shall never share what secrets of prestidigitation I might divulge?”

“Not to a single living soul.”

“Or otherwise?”

Right, sure. “Not a soul living, dead, or otherwise.”

“Excellent!”

So there it was: Davey got a private lesson in the art of fanciful deception.

This wasn’t just a lark; Davey could see the good in it. The fellow got the chance to be an authority, teach Davey a thing or two. That can be important as a kind of practice, getting to direct how things go, offer explanation, correct and applaud as appropriate. It could also help break down the ‘expertise barrier’ between them, continuing the shift in their dynamic into something more easy-going and authentic. There was also the fact that it was fun , and there are few things more therapeutic to the human soul than the chance to have a little fun.

There was something else, too, that Davey really appreciated about getting to learn some stage magic from this fellow: it was real . For the whole of the lesson, it didn’t matter whether this fellow was named Aziraphale or Ezra Fell, it didn’t matter whether his English accent was affected or not, and the two of them got to spend time together without any attention on the whole angel business. It could be enough to lead one to wonder: might this be the opportunity that let the fellow see that he didn’t need to hide behind some fancy? Would this experience grant him the revelation that his humanhood was sufficient all on its own, that he didn’t need presumed divinity to have worth?

Naw. You’d burn yourself out, doing therapy, if you tripped into romanticism. All they did was spend a half hour talking through some silly magic tricks. Try not to build it up too much in your imagination. But, as Davey knew, there is room for hope even without untoward sentimentality. It didn’t have to be much for this to offer the fellow a glimpse, however so fleeting, of an alternative way of being.

“You really do like magic,” he said, when they reached a good stopping point.

“I do,” the fellow agreed, with pleasure.

They still had time on the clock. So, Davey mused. “I wonder why that is.”

“It’s good fun.”

“It sure is.” Davey agreed, but he was going to keep on musing. “And there’s something about it, isn’t there? The whole appearance versus reality aspect to it.”

Curiosity piqued. “How do you mean?”

“Well, I just mean…” Davey shrugged for the duration of a Jimmy Buffett verse. “When you’re performing, you’re putting on a show for your audience, right? And you make it so the audience doesn’t see what you’re actually doing.”

“Hm,” the fellow considered.

“So, in this way of thinking about it,” Davey was spitballing, “you keep back something from your audience. You control the situation.”

“For their entertainment.”

“Yeah, it’s for their benefit.” Davey nodded, because the fellow had made a good point. “You show the audience one thing, and you hide the reality behind it, because that’s what’ll make for a good show. You want to make sure what they see is something special.”

“True…” The fellow was the thoughtful kind, and he liked picking apart a theory. It drew him in. “But they are in on it, too.”

That sounded like a real good point, right there. Davey mulled it over, so the fellow might too.

“It wouldn’t be the same,” the fellow considered, “if the audience didn’t know it was all a show.”

“That’s interesting,” Davey agreed. “And why do think that is?”

The fellow thought about it, but no ready answer was forthcoming.

Davey could help him out. “You’re performing, and the audience is watching. You give them an illusion because that’s how you keep things entertaining. But, like you said, everyone knows what’s really going on. It wouldn’t be the same if the person watching you didn’t know it was all an act.”

“Hm.” The fellow listened, and he had his own thoughts.

…Wishing on the same stars…

Davey offered, “Kind of interesting, huh.”

…We're all hoping hope floats…

The fellow smiled, softly, without pretense. “It’s very nice, having an audience.”

“An audience that understands.”

“Yes, that is important,” the fellow agreed.

That was the heart of it, Davey supposed. It was the artifice of the magic show that allowed the magician to be seen.

The fellow’s smile was easy, until it wasn’t. It tightened. It grew heavy.

“You would be surprised how lonely a miracle can be,” the fellow said, “when you’re the only one who knows about it.”

Davey could believe that–not the artifice, no, but the weight behind it. Those layers of artifice didn’t diminish it, not one bit. It resonated, needfully. Davey saw it for what it was: a deep, deeply human kind of truth.

He breathed in deeply, intentionally. It was time for them to go their separate ways, but Davey wanted to hold on, even if just a little bit longer, to what they had managed together. He smiled at the fellow, and, truly hoping the fellow would hear it, he said, “I’m real glad I got to see you today.”

***

Davey got another excuse about the doctor’s appointment. But that was fine, all fine. Davey usually gave someone around a month, after all. He wasn’t giving up on this fellow just yet.

Chapter 4: Only Time

Chapter Text

In retrospect, Davey had plenty of warning and should’ve seen it coming. Retrospect is far too smug, sometimes.

In the previous session with this fellow--the one with the angel business--Davey had seen just how passionate he was about stage magic. In the session before that, Davey had seen just how passionate this fellow was about his book collecting. The inference that Davey could have made, and which Retrospect was all too satisfied to spell out for him, looked something like this:

This fellow gets passionate about the things he spends his time on.

This fellow is spending his time on therapy.

Therefore, Davey was in for it.

The fellow showed up for today’s session with a knapsack.

“I had an idea for what we could do,” the fellow said as they both got comfortable and ready to start. He kept the knapsack in his lap, where he could ensure its safety. “If you are amenable.”

Retrospect hadn’t shown up yet with its insufferable logic, so Davey was happy to hear it. Only a few weeks back, Davey wouldn’t have imagined this fellow being able to take the initiative for his own healing like this, so this was a pleasant sign for how things were progressing. It was also fetching, just how bright-eyed and eager the fellow was about it.

Davey said, “Great! Lay it on me.”

“How would you feel…” Talk about bright-eyed, talk about eagerness—the fellow pulled to get Davey swept into his excitement, like always. “About a bit of Jungian psychoanalysis?”

That was when Retrospect started knocking, but Davey wasn’t answering.

“Jung?” Davey said.

“Carl Gustav Jung, yes!”

“Well—huh!" Davey wrapped his mind around it. Usually, when people were excited to try out something new, they pointed over to his drums. “You want Jungian analytics?”

“It is such an invigorating approach to exploring the human psyche, isn’t it?” The fellow’s fingers were curled tightly around the edges of that knapsack in his lap, even as he sounded so assured—Davey suspected he was nervous. “Of course, I have never before thought to partake, myself, given the obvious limitations of such an account. But then, I thought, well, why not? Surely, through its application, we could formulate some rousing hypotheses!”

“Rousing, or something,” Davey allowed. Sure, he and the fellow could have a good time with this. “You bet.”

“Also…” The fellow hesitated, gave himself a chance to bolster himself up. “I brought something.”

That comment wasn’t meant to get Davey up to speed; Davey obviously had seen how the fellow was holding that knapsack. It was, instead, the fellow giving himself a chance to get Davey’s reaction before committing fully.

Davey showed it was all good. “You got me curious.”

A warning: “You’ll have to be very careful.”

Davey assented. “I will be.”

“And, you’ll have to…” The fellow looked around quickly, then he released the knapsack with just one of his hands in order to pull some tissues–they were on the table beside his chair. “Use this, to hold it.”

Davey accepted the tissues, with care. He had a pretty good idea, at this point, what was inside the bag, and he knew to take all the fellow’s concerns seriously.

The knapsack still hadn’t opened. “My thought was, only, you might find it interesting. To see. For a moment.”

This was the fellow doing more to build up his protections ahead of time. He hadn’t brought a gift, and Davey wouldn’t be allowed to keep his hands on it for very long. Davey hadn’t expected otherwise.

“This is very special, you see,” the fellow added.

“I understand.” Davey cared about whatever was in that knapsack. How could he not, when the fellow was so invested in it? “I will be very careful. I’ll handle it with honor.”

The fellow still had jittery nerves, probably for the sake of his book—because it had to be a book, obviously, what else would it be? He smiled, though. He wasn’t sure about this, and Davey couldn’t blame him for that, but it’s a lot easier to continue on with a scheme once it’s in motion.

Jimmy Buffett got through a couple of verses, in the time it took for that knapsack to get opened. The fellow wasn’t in a rush, and he was taking great care. He waited for a moment, too, once the bag was open, before he reached in—with a bare hand, Davey both noted and accepted—and pulled out, as expected, a book.

See, this fellow had already told Davey all about his interest in prophesies. And, while Davey wasn’t a Jungian or anything, he knew the amount he assumed just about everyone did about Carl Jung. He knew that Jung had experienced lucid dreams which he worried were prophetic—he had one dream, in particular, that he took to foretell World War I. Jung was the author of some extremely noteworthy books on psychodynamics, some of which also contained descriptions of his dreams. It only made sense that a rare book collector with a particular interest in prophetic works–who also happened to present himself as a backwards angel who had befriended a demon, of all things–would want to have something of Jung’s.

Davey was trying not to think, right this moment, about how big a deal it might be for this fellow to have brought a piece of his collection so that they could share it. If Davey focused on that too much, he’d be liable to get all verklempt.

The fellow held the book out, so carefully. He smiled, so anxiously. He glanced, so meaningfully, down at the tissues in Davey’s hands.

“Here,” he said, “go ahead, take it.”

Davey looked at the book, before he took it.

It had red binding, with golden embossed letters on the front. The listed title was: Liber Novus. There wasn’t an author listed—not on the front and not on the side of the binding, either. That alone, to Davey, was strange.

This was the point at which Retrospect gave up on knocking and switched over to a battering ram.

Davey reached forward, the tissues at the ready, and he was grateful when the fellow let him take hold of it. It was heavy, but not as heavy as he had anticipated. He had been under the impression that Liber Novus was bigger than this.

He held it with one tissued hand, hovering the other above it. “May I…?”

“Yes, certainly, please do,” the fellow said, understanding the request, but then he tacked on: “Just do be careful.”

Davey looked up, earnestly, to show that he understood. Then he returned his attention to the book, making sure he gave it all the reverence the fellow wanted it to have. He opened the cover.

There wasn’t any information listed where there should be: no publisher, no city, none of the stuff you need for a citation. That, too, was strange.

Where there should have been a cover page, there was a handwritten note:

Aziraphale,

Ohne Ihre Unterstützung wäre es mir nicht möglich gewesen, „Antwort auf Hiob" ins Leben zu rufen. Bitte nehmen Sie dies als Zeichen meiner Dankbarkeit an. Ich vertraue darauf, dass Sie es gut aufbewahren werden.

Carl
1951

Davey spent a good long moment not reading that inscription.

He didn’t know German, so he couldn’t do much more than that. This was likely to his benefit because, if he could read it, things would have been even worse for him.

Inside Davey, something dropped.

Without thinking, he asked, “What is this?”

“Liber Novus.” The fellow liked getting to explain things. “It’s an abridged version, true, but you can’t blame Carl for choosing not to copy out the whole thing.”

“No,” Davey said. “This isn’t Liber Novus.”

That was a weird thing for Davey to say. Davey wasn’t the sort to contradict people like that. He liked to keep an open mind, after all, and he was a friendly sort of guy. Also, there was again the fact that he wasn’t an expert of Jung, so there was plenty of room for him to presume that he was ignorant or confused about what he was holding in his hands.

Except: he wasn’t.

Davey knew what Liber Novus was. He’d been meaning to read it for a while now—for about ten years, specifically. He hadn’t thought of reading it before that time, and there was a reason for this. Back when he had been in school, back when Jung had a few more proponents than he did now, none of them ever talked about the contents of Liber Novus, and this was for the same reason. Not even the fiercest, most dedicated, most open-minded Jungian scholar had read Liber Novus until about ten years ago. The reason was: no one had access to it.

Liber Novus, which is more commonly known as The Red Book, is literally a red book. The singular is significant: it is a red book, just one. Jung had personally calligraphed it, painstakingly, by hand. It was a private journal. During his life, only the rarest and most trusted friends were allowed a glimpse of it. After his death, his descendants had kept it secret. It was only ten years ago, or thereabouts, when they had finally agreed to let it be copied and published.

There absolutely, absolutely was no abridged copy of Liber Novus made in 1951. It was completely impossible that Davey was holding a copy signed by Jung himself. And it was ridiculous to suggest that Jung had made out an inscription to someone named Aziraphale. That could not have happened.

It was a forgery. It was a joke. It was an intentionally aged copy.

Davey was capable of thinking many things, just like that.

He pressed the tip of a finger, gingerly, through tissue, against the very edge of the front page, in order to turn it. What he saw then looked for all the world like hand-calligraphed illuminations.

No.

The fellow across from Davey was growing concerned. Davey could feel how his mood had fallen. He would feel bad about this, if he were able to focus on it more clearly.

Aziraphale asked, “Are you alright?”

No, Davey wasn’t alright. “This wasn’t published in 1951.”

Aziraphale was catching on. “That’s correct. You see, this is a private copy. I had it bound, myself.”

“Jung didn’t make any copies.”

What Davey should have said is not what he just said. What he should have done is look up from the book in his hands, and chuckle, and ask the fellow what he liked about Jung’s psychoanalytics. Funny how you can know that, and feel it like an awful tickle in the back of your skull, and keep on doing what you know you shouldn’t all the same.

He didn’t feel safe holding this book in his hands. The tissues didn’t feel thick enough. There was an image he couldn’t put away: poison was leeching into him through his fingers.

“This doesn’t exist,” Davey said.

“Well…” Aziraphale spoke with caution. “Seeing as how you are presently holding it… It would seem, it must?”

Davey wasn’t feeling much like his authentic self right now.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said.

“Oh dear.” Aziraphale’s tone went sideways enough, it dragged Davey’s attention back to him. He was scowling, self-incriminated. “I have made a mistake, haven’t I?”

“No, no, no, there ain’t any mistakes in this room.”

That was autopilot kicking in.

Aziraphale’s expression didn’t change, but he held his hands out. “If you will give it back, we can forget all about this.”

Davey didn’t feel like giving it back.

If it was leeching poison into him, he figured, it was best to let it all in now, rather than suffer whatever damage a half-dose might do. Davey didn’t understand, and he knew he wasn’t thinking so straight all the sudden, and he wasn’t looking forward to whatever Retrospect might have to say about it later on, but he was stuck with a thought ringing through his head: If I give this up, then I am lost.

Davey didn’t want to be lost. If he went lost, he didn’t know how he could be found.

His reluctance, though, was at best hazy. And the fellow was waiting so very patiently for his property to be returned to him.

Davey gave it back.

It got hidden back up in that knapsack before Davey could process it. The fellow’s hands kept tight grip on the bag, keeping it safely closed. Guilt was steaming out of him. “I should have put a bit more thought into that.”

Davey’s mouth was dry. His brain wasn’t being too helpful.

Aziraphale could tell. He was fidgety. “I really am very sorry.”

Davey attempted the mental gymnastics of figuring out what to do. Think presented itself as a worthwhile goal, albeit unobtainable. Say something, alternatively, had the shape of reasonable advice but the substance of pudding.

Not even Jimmy Buffett sounded right. The tempo was all wrong, and it repeated over itself like a round.

“Do you…” The fellow started, rethought, stopped. He shifted uncomfortably, clutching his knapsack dearly. He started again. “Would you like to ask if I’ve set up a doctor’s appointment?”

Davey considered that.

Sure.

That made sense.

“Did you?”

“Terribly sorry, but it seems to have slipped my mind again this week.”

“Huh. Okay.”

Right now, Davey figured, being patronized wasn’t so bad.

***

A few points regarding social epistemology and the inherent limitations of the empirical sciences may be useful at present, and they can be enumerated through a simple example.

There once was a man, or so they say, named Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei who, one day, went to the top of a tower with some weights and then threw them out the window. By the time the 20th century came around, a lot of people believed that this was a very clever thing for him to have done. Many of his contemporaries, however, found it all incredibly embarrassing for him.

You see, Galileo had been attempting to disprove a claim made by Aristotle. More than a millennia before Galileo was born, this man, Aristotle, had stood up and said, If you’ve got two objects, and one of them is heavier than the other, and you drop them both from the same height, the heaver object will land first. Everyone agreed that Aristotle must be right about this, given how heavier objects, by their nature, are better at falling. And, furthermore, questioning Aristotle just wasn’t The Done Thing back then. If you wanted to figure out what was true, all you had to do was ask God or Aristotle for insight. Neither was all too great at providing direct answers, what with one being dead and the other being Committed To The Bit, but both had very helpfully allowed their followers to write down the things They had said in the past. All a scholar had to do was look at those received writings, and truth would be revealed.

Every once in a while, granted, a young scholar who hadn’t yet earned an impressive hat or tenure would pipe up and say, Now, wait a minute. I can understand God being The Source Of All Truth, sure, but Aristotle wasn’t even Christian, what with the whole linearity of time. So why are we listening to him? In response to this, an assortment of other scholars who had earned their impressive hats and tenure would groan in annoyance, because they’d already gone over this a few thousand times and just wanted a chance to enjoy their ale. Sometimes, a helpful passer-by, who might’ve had pure white hair peeking out beneath his own impressive hat, would say, That’s just ineffability, you see, to which all the other learned men would huff, Good luck getting tenure with that, before quickly tacking on, That’s not to say it isn’t true. Obviously it is. No point even saying so, given how vociferously we all believe it, no doubt about it. They would, while saying this, be very satisfied in particular about how they didn’t even once glance over their shoulders to see whether they were being listened to by a different assortment of men, who not only were always right there but also had their own style of impressive hat and, in place of tenure, more than enough thumbscrews to go around. So then the original young scholar would have to work really hard to find enough synonyms for ineffable to fill up a whole dissertation, after which the impressive hat and tenure would be his.

This brings us to the first point, about social epistemology: when you’re pursuing the truth, always keep in mind how many steps there are between you and the men with thumbscrews.

Galileo, unfortunately, had missed the memo. He really liked all the men in impressive hats, actually, and he also happened to be well-liked by the man with the most impressive hat. So, he thought, Well, why not? Maybe we should actually put Aristotle to the test. All he needed was something that counted as ‘a test’, and there just happened to be this newfangled idea going around called empirical science, whose proponents suggested, radically, How about we try looking at stuff with, you know, our eyes and suchlike and use that to figure out what’s true. Galileo thought that was an interesting suggestion, and so he got down to it: he dropped two weights, one lighter than the other, from a great height so that everyone would be able to determine, through the evidence provided by their own eyes, whether the heavier weight landed first.

This wasn’t just a test of Aristotle’s physics, but also a test of the whole idea of Trusting Things Because Aristotle Said Them Rather Than Going Along With That Ridiculous Idea Of Testing Hypotheses Via Rigorous Empirical Observation.

The experiment had embarrassing results. Even though the Aristotelians at the base of the tower were in fact relying on their eyes in order to see the results–an irony which they at least could have acknowledged out of politeness–what they saw satisfied their assumptions about Trusting Aristotle: the heavier weight landed first, even if by just a little. Poor sad little Galileo had embarrassed himself with this tomfoolery and surely hadn’t earned his hat.

Now, if you go by the details of the particular interpretation of Aristotle’s theory that Galileo was testing, then the heavier weight should have landed first not by just a little but by a lot. So, while the Aristotelians were unimpressed, Galileo and the Lets Test Things Empirically proponents interpreted the results in a way more favorable to their position. Galileo, himself, took the experiment as proof that Aristotle was wrong, and he embraced the whole Science thing with aplomb.

This brings us to our second point, regarding the inherent limitations of the empirical sciences: any empirical datum—any observation, any bit of sensory evidence—is meaningful only through reference to the whole tapestry of concepts, assumptions, and beliefs that you bring with you to that datum.

It should be noted that at least some of the above illustration is best understood as apocrypha. Depending on who you ask, some or none of the above actually happened. The People Who Know Things say that Galileo wasn’t the first person to run the Weights From A Tower test. He may not have run the experiment at all, depending on how you interpret the historical records. Whether there actually were any Aristotelians at the base of the tower, at the time of the experiment, is unknown and perhaps unknowable. The existence of tenure becomes more dubious by the day. But, unless you are currently using the history of science as a means to earning your own fancy hat, you can get by in the modern world just fine by accepting that all of the above is true.

This brings us to our final point about social epistemology and scientific methodologies: truth isn’t so much determined by the metaphysically-prior facts, such as they are, but instead by what you happen to need in order to get by in the world as it confronts you.

Humans aren’t wrong to rely on their social environments and background assumptions to make sense of the world like this. This is just what it means to know, to prove, and to believe when one happens to be a social animal.

Davey, of course, was such a social animal. He had a pretty good sense of his social world, and so he felt comfortable with his understanding of who had the proverbial thumbscrews and where they stood relative to him. He had a whole host of background assumptions, reinforced regularly throughout his long life, that affected which conclusions were the reasonable ones for him to accept when confronted with confusing observational data. The wavering variable, in his present situation, was: what exactly he could tolerate as getting by?

None of this was at the forefront of Davey’s thoughts, certainly not. But that didn’t limit its applicability to his current epistemological conundrum.

***

“Did that help?” Aziraphale asked, just moments later.

Davey felt distracted. “What?”

“The—Just now. Checking in, about the doctor.”

“Help with what?”

The fellow got that tight smile of his, the one with muted nerves and sorrow. This time was different, though, because all of that was aimed right at Davey. It was a lot.

It didn’t make sense to be this discombobulated, just because of a book. Retrospect would’ve been able to say something about that, maybe, but it was never around right when you needed it.

Jimmy Buffett was also missing, and that was a problem. Davey had to put real thought into bringing him back, and it didn’t come easy to find the tune.

He forced it.

…Only time will tell…

…is there a message in this song?

That wasn’t helpful the way he had hoped it would be.

“You know German?” Davey shouldn’t have asked.

The fellow folded his hands up in his lap, as he took in the question. “I do, yes.”

Davey shouldn’t have gone on to say, “You sure are well-educated.”

“I’m well-read,” the fellow equivocated.

Davey could sniff out highly educated folk pretty easily. Like knows like, after all. He never made a point to bring it up himself, because he didn’t like to think it mattered, and it could be useful for the ones he sniffed out to have to confront the possibility that their educational pedigree was just a tad bit pointless. Also, it almost always led to them trying to start a diploma-measuring contest, and Davey had no tolerance for that. He didn’t like any game he couldn’t lose.

Davey’s mind wasn’t giving him a chance to figure out why, with this fellow right now, things were different.

He recited: “Arma virumque cano…”

And he absolutely saw the flicker of recognition in the fellow’s eyes.

Not too many people knew Latin these days. Davey’s mind still wasn’t letting him in on why this mattered. Or why that flicker of recognition looked so perilous.

“…Troiae qui primus ab oris.” The fellow finished the line from Virgil with a horrific fluency. His pronunciation was strange, though. And that sad smile of his veered fully into pity. “Et hoc non vis.”

Davey might still remember some of the lines of the poetry he had been forced to memorize back in prep school, but otherwise, his Latin was rustier than rust. The fellow’s pronunciation, also, slowed down his ability to translate. What Aziraphale had told him was, you don’t want this.

Probably not. That was true. He didn’t want to be doing this. What was he even doing—was this his practice, or impromptu Jeopardy?

Davey’s mouth was still dry. He was thirsty. He thought about taking a moment to go get a drink of water, to clear his head, but he had a disconcerting certainty that would only make things worse.

He cleared his throat. “Right. So… Jung.”

The fellow showed relief in a way that was hard to think about. He released his hands from each other, setting them on the tops of his legs, and he waited for Davey to lead them into something that felt like normal therapy. Davey sure would like that, himself.

So. Jung.

Jungian analytics.

Jung Jung Jungity Jung.

Davey knew about Jung, sure. Sometimes it was useful to use ‘Shadow Work’ techniques, which were all about—

What happened to the knapsack?

There had been a knapsack. Davey had seen it. The fellow had brought it in with him, and Davey had very clear and distinct memories: the way the fellow had carried it; the way he had held it in his lap; how the book had come out of it, and then gone back inside. But there wasn’t any knapsack now, not on the fellow’s lap, and nowhere Davey could see around the room. He would have noticed the fellow putting the bag somewhere, wouldn’t he? How had he somehow missed that? Maybe he should crouch down and check if it had rolled under one of their chairs—and what an absurd idea that was.

Maybe there hadn’t been a knapsack. There wasn’t one now, after all. Maybe there hadn’t been a book.

It certainly was better, for there not to have been a book.

Is that what Davey needed in order to get by?

“I must be coming down with something,” Davey said. That would explain why he felt so thirsty, and why he was battling some truly horrendous vertigo all the sudden. “I’m real sorry, but I think we have to stop for the day.”

“Are you sure?” The fellow asked.

Davey shouldn’t pretend he knew anything at all about this fellow, and, as recently proven, Davey wasn’t observant enough even to know whether there had been a knapsack in the fellow’s lap or not. All the same, he was struck with a deep jolt of certainty: If I really were sick, Aziraphale would’ve shown more sympathy than that.

Except Davey was sick. He had to be. And why in a green gravy would Davey expect this fellow to know his level of well-being better than he did himself?

He could feel a little bad about ending the session early, but it wasn’t that big a deal. They were just people, after all, and shtuff happens. He pulled himself out of his chair to start corralling the fellow out the door. “No charge for today. Of course. I know I got us a little off topic.”

“But are you sure?” The fellow hadn’t taken the cue, still hadn’t stood up.

Davey chuckled. Then he smiled. Then he chuckled again. He was going to get this fellow out, now. “C’mon. I’ll see you next week.”

The fellow wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t the type to be disruptive. He stood, like he should, and he headed for the exit, the way Davey really needed him to. He was taking his time, though.

He said, “Next week. I suppose—you’ll be alright?”

“Mmhmm.”

“And you’ll ask again about a doctor. You’ll still be able to do that, won’t you?”

There was a poorly-hidden emphasis in the question that was making things harder for Davey. “No, actually, more than that, I’m going to have to confront you head-on about it.”

He hadn’t meant to say that.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” the fellow said.

“Well…”

Davey figured he’d stop his response at that. He wasn’t trusting himself right now not to blurt out something like, It’s always up to you if you show up or not.

Finally, the fellow walked on and out.

Davey’s hands were shaky. That didn’t seem good. His memory was somersaulting around the book-that-couldn’t-be and the knapsack-that-wasn’t. It was making him feel sick. Maybe he should see a neurologist, himself, and that idea was far from comforting.

No, right now, Davey wasn’t getting by.

At least, he was in his office. He had made this space homey in every way he knew how, and he could feel safe here. He had all his drums. He didn’t feel good, and his mind wasn’t cooperative, and Retrospect was a menace, but at least he had his bongos, and he could always seek solace in a rhythm.

Chapter 5: Volcano

Chapter Text

There are many practical questions that can be answered through the application of social epistemology.

For instance, suppose your band has a gig at Pistol Pete’s, where you will be performing on an outdoor stage. Suppose, further, that your band’s lead guitarist, who had secured this gig in the first place, asserted with great confidence that the stage was covered and would be well shaded for the duration of your afternoon performance. In this sort of situation, there would be many social factors influencing the level of credence you should give to your lead guitarist’s claims, and there would be little justification for you, the morning of, to make a special point of remembering to bring your sunscreen.

Under these sorts of circ*mstances, just how bad a sunburn would you get?

***

Davey took in a deep breath before he opened the door to his office. He was prepared for two different things that were about to happen.

“Oh my.” The fellow winced, empathetically, soon as they laid eyes on each other. That was the first thing Davey had been prepared for: the reaction to his shiny red cheeks, nose, and forehead.

Davey was red enough, he had even thought about calling up Sadie and seeing if he could borrow some of her make-up. That, however, would have been like hitting two birds with one stone, except instead of birds he’d be aiming at two bad ideas with the names of Borrowing Your Ex-Wife’s Make-Up and Putting Foundation On A Sunburn. Besides, there’s no way the end result would’ve been less conspicuous than his current appearance. So, more accurately, it would’ve been like getting attacked by two birds while also dropping a stone on his own foot.

“Always wear your sunscreen.” Davey chuckled as he could without moving his face around all too much. “Learned that the hard way, this weekend.”

“It certainly appears that way. I do hope it isn’t too painful.”

“Getting better by the day.” Davey was happy to give assurance, as he and the fellow came inside. The burn had been pretty bad on Monday, and it had been more tolerable yesterday. The worst was yet to come, though: Davey was dreading the flaky skin. It was going to be a nightmare, picking it all out of his beard.

It’s not that Davey was a vain man. He just knew, no one wants to sit across from someone whose face is slowly coming off.

The fellow reflexively lifted his hand up to his own face. “Oh. Hm. Well, I suppose… Hm.”

Some people get weird about their therapist having a visual ailment. Davey had called up and talked with the clients he thought might need some forewarning, but he hadn’t expected this fellow to be bothered by it. After all, you couldn’t sit across from him, even with all his intense empathy and interest, and not sense how you were kept at arm’s length.

“It’s upsetting, seeing my face like this,” Davey offered, as he got settled in their seats.

“Oh no, not at all.” If the fellow didn’t still have his fingers pressed up against his own cheek, that might have been convincing.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“Would you?”

Davey gave some silence, so the fellow had a chance to sit with that question. He couldn’t give his normal big smile, what with how tight his face felt, but he managed as well he could.

…Now I don’t know, I don’t know…

…I don’t know, where I’m going to go…

The fellow’s raised hand, finally conspicuous to him, dropped down into his lap. He clasped his other hand around it, holding it like a skittish bird he wanted to subdue.

“Well,” Davey said. “Just thought I’d ask.”

Now it was time for the other thing Davey had prepared for: an inevitable, and uncomfortable, and inevitably uncomfortable conversation.

“How’re we doing today?” Davey asked.

“Oh, fine. Perfectly fine. As per usual.”

The fellow smiled, and Davey smiled, and the fellow smiled a little deeper in response to Davey’s smile, and Davey would’ve deepened his smile in response, too, if that had been an option, but at least he was still smiling—just a bunch of wonderful smiling smiles, all around.

Davey didn’t enjoy confrontation. He figured, the fellow didn’t either.

All of this would’ve been easier, if he hadn’t warned the fellow about it in the previous session. It also would’ve been easier, if he hadn’t ended the last session early due to that strange, sudden disorientation he had experienced. It’d been some sort of strange migraine—it must have been. Migraines didn’t always hurt, Davey knew.

It’d just been a migraine.

“Well.” Davey spoke with a tone like he was setting a table. “I guess, to start out, I’m wonderin’ if you happened ta make that doctor’s appointment.”

“Well,” the fellow said, like he saw how Davey was setting the table but thought he knew better where the spoons should go. “No, I haven’t.”

At least they both agreed that the table needed to be set. “Like I said last time, I think we better have a bit of a talk about that.”

The fellow wasn’t about to accept a table with misplaced spoons. “Yes, and I have put a lot of thought into what I would like to say.”

It wasn’t normal for the fellow to show resolve like this, and Davey wasn’t the sort to throw a fuss about the placement of spoons. He could be glad the fellow had brought spoons along with him, even, so they could get on with digging in.

“Glad to hear it,” he said.

Seeing his specifications for the table were met, Aziraphale straightened up his spine.

“You see,” he said, “it is very important to me that I continue coming here every Wednesday at eleven. I don’t want to jeopardize this.”

“That’s great,” Davey said, while his thoughts settled down around some of the fellow’s wording.

“Furthermore,” the fellow continued—and Davey’s thoughts picked up on how this was a point of transition, “I have come to realize that, well, I rather like getting to talk to a human—you—about… Certain aspects of my life. It’s quite nice, you know.”

The fellow still had his resolve, but it was under tension. Straightforward communication wasn’t exactly his strong suit.

Aziraphale frowned. “I have also started to think that, perhaps, there might be some things that I would like to be able to talk to you about that I can’t talk about with—well, with anyone else I might talk to.”

This was what counted as straightforward communication, for the fellow.

Davey was supportive. “I can understand that.”

That helped bring some steel back to that resolve. “But I cannot do that, unless you permit me to be honest about myself.”

“Huh.”

“We both know why you keep insisting on a doctor’s report.”

Honestly, Davey wasn’t sure that they did.

Aziraphale looked at him levelly. “It’s because you don’t believe me.”

“Now, like I’ve said—”

The fellow raised a hand in a gesture for silence, so Davey cut himself off. “You’ve told me about your worldview, and I respect that it is important to you. I do. I’m not going to make you change your mind—it can be very messy business. So, you see, it’s alright, that you don’t believe me.”

The fellow sounded like he was offering clemency. Also, his hand again had sneaked back up to his cheek to mirror Davey’s sunburn, although he again caught it and brought it back down. Davey was chewing on his thoughts.

The fellow continued. “I will bring you a physician’s report, next week, if that is what is required for us to continue. It will show that I am in perfect health and there is no reason for concern. I’ll even include a telephone number that you can call, if you would like to speak to someone who will verify it. However. I will have you know, if you insist on this, it will be to the detriment of the—the honesty that I really would like to establish, with you.”

It was interesting how he was comfortable talking about honesty, Davey thought.

The fellow shifted in his seat. It’s when your speech is almost at its end that you start to feel the most awkward about it. “I suppose it is your choice, Dr. Hampson. If you insist on the matter, I will bring a report for you, and we will continue on as we have done. It would, however, be a great benefit to me, if you would not.”

Aziraphale closed his mouth. An offer had been made, and now he was waiting, expectantly, to see if it would be accepted.

The discomfort from the sunburn limited how Davey could express what he was feeling or thinking, but he made a point to raise up his eyebrows and nod his head. He took seriously what he’d heard the fellow say. He’d been chewing on his thoughts the whole time, after all.

… I don't know where I'm a gonna go…

The fellow was waiting for a response.

…when the volcano blow…

Davey sucked on his teeth within his closed mouth.

“Tell me somethin’, Aziraphale…” He wasn’t peering at the fellow; he was just looking real thoughtful-like. “Why’s it so important for you to come here?”

That was a flustering question. “Well, I just told you—”

Now it was Davey’s turn to give the gesture for silence, which the fellow respected. “Naw, hold on, lemme clarify. My mistake, I didn’t speak so clear there. What I meant was, why’d you say it’s important for you to be here, specifically, on Wednesdays at eleven?”

Now that the fellow understood Davey’s point, his attention went inward.

“That’s what you said.” Davey kept talking, not because there really was more for him to say, but just to help the fellow’s internal processes along. “Makes me wonder why you’d specify a thing like that.”

…I don’t know…

It’s not that Davey wanted the fellow to feel put on the spot. But, for all the time the fellow had been speaking, this was what Davey’s mind kept coming back to, and he was pretty certain that was the specific thing, out of everything the fellow had said, that he most wanted clarified. What–would the fellow’s speech gone a different way, for some reason, if they met Tuesdays at ten or Thursdays at two?

The fellow was at odds with himself, internally. That was okay; Davey was fine with waiting.

…where I’m going to go…

“Jus’ seems curious, s’all,” Davey said.

“You see…” The fellow scowled. When you war with yourself, you’re always the one who ends up losing. He relented. “This is when my friend meets with Miss Thyme.”

“Huh,” Davey said.

“It’s hard to find a good excuse to get out of London, these days.” The fellow’s scowl was apologetic, and he was talking faster now. Once a dam breaks, whatever’s behind it is liable to spill out. “We have managed to find a few nice spots here, in Rochester—and Niagara isn’t far away at all, by American standards, is it?”

“Hm.”

“I would love to visit Niagara Falls.”

“Sure.”

“And there’s also New York City. I thought, perhaps, one of these times, my friend might…”

The fellow trailed off.

Now, Davey was an amiable sort of guy. And, right now, that must have been a good thing. A different sort of guy, maybe a guy who was prone to anger, might have a pretty strong response to what this fellow was saying. That sort of guy might take it personally, that someone would come to his office and waste his time with nonsense just for an excuse to go around town with his friend. You’d be liable to get a strong reaction, if you said the sort of thing this fellow was saying, to someone who might be angry like that.

But not Davey. Maybe his mood wasn’t so great, after two days with a painful sunburn, but Davey was still his amiable, accepting self.

He chuckled, and he ignored the painful stretch from it in his cheeks. “It almost sounds like, what you’re telling me is, you don’t take this seriously.”

“No!” The fellow didn’t want to be maligned. “That’s not at all true.”

Davey had trouble believing that. Literally. He was having trouble with believing.

It would be so much easier to be angry.

He couldn’t stop all of his thoughts from arranging themselves into questions, and they weren’t the sorts of questions that Davey found amenable. There was so much of what the fellow had said that just didn’t make sense, if you spent more than a few seconds thinking about it, and Davey didn’t like how hard it was not to do that. He was tired of it all, especially how it all stacked up into a pounding in his head. He wasn’t used to trying to think with so many unsustainable questions crowding up on each other in his mind. He didn’t appreciate this feeling, like there was a deepening pit beneath the surface of his thoughts.

There was no way weekly therapy appointments in Rochester could function as an excuse to go to New York City. In what kind of world did that make even the slightest bit of sense? No matter which way he thought through it, he couldn’t find his feet with the idea.

Maybe Davey was getting another migraine, after all.

The fellow wanted to redeem himself. “I told you, Miss Thyme referred me to you. She really did!”

“You’ve been coming here,” Davey worked to find something that could make sense, “and you’ve been telling me stories—”

“She must have had her reasons.”

“—And no matter what, you want to keep coming—”

“I do!”

“—so you can visit Niagara Falls.”

“Well—not only!”

Davey wanted to rub his eyes with his palms, and he almost did, only snapping his hands away from his face once he felt the stinging. “This doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“If you would just listen to me!”

There was a real anguish in how the fellow was pleading. Davey wasn’t so lost that he couldn’t hear it. He could tell it deserved his true attention. Everything was broken and confused, and Davey probably was going to have to relent and accept that he was having another strange migraine, and he felt the grotesque wish that he had it in him to be angry about how weird this fellow was. But, that was all just thoughts. That was all just his brain working itself up when it didn’t need to. It didn’t have to matter.

What was the phrase? The one for when you suffer too many questions and feel certainty in nothing but doubt? Sentio ergo sum . Well—that’s what it should’ve been.

For the first time in too long, Davey looked so that he could see the fellow across from him.

He was sat in his chair, rigid with nerves and taking less space than by any rights he deserved. His hands were pressed as fists against the sides of his legs: they were shaped by distress, positioned to be contained. This fellow was holding himself within a sea of desperation.

He hadn’t noticed Davey’s attention, though. He was too busy with other things, internally, and his neck was bent so his gaze could fall elsewhere, across the room, where there wasn’t anything to see except the door.

“Just once, if someone would actually listen to me.”

Davey heard the emphasis in that sentence. It occurred to him, he had been so caught up on other things, he hadn’t been attentive to the possibility of subtext.

He checked in on himself, too. His jaw was tight, and he wasn’t sure when that had happened. His shoulders were tense. His face was too stiff for his own good. He made himself loosen up. He thought, his head didn’t actually hurt.

“You don’t feel heard very often,” Davey said.

Relief often comes from recognition. The fellow glanced Davey’s way.

“No,” he said, “I suppose I don’t.”

There’s this thing to remember, in situations like this. Maybe Davey had forgotten it for a while, but he pushed himself to remember it now. It’s this: the problem is the problem. People aren’t problems. Davey’s work was the most fulfilling, when he and the person sitting across from him were on the same side. It meant they could be a united front, and they could work together to confront the real antagonist in the room, the problem with which the person needed help.

Aziraphale wasn’t the problem. Davey wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the problem.

“I hope you’re not thinking of giving up on me,” Davey said. “You want to be understood, and I want to understand.”

The fellow softened, clearly, from pity. “A doctor’s report will not help with that.”

That was the problem. It was chilling to hear it said aloud so plainly. He didn’t want to acknowledge it. “I can’t in good conscience keep meeting with you, without one. It’s a professional obligation, same as it would be with anyone else.”

“But, you see, I don’t think that’s true.” The fellow scooted forward in his seat a bit, open to problem-solving, open even more to making his point. “I’ve checked—and, furthermore, did you know, Miss Thyme has never asked my friend to see a doctor?”

Davey shook his head. “I won’t comment on someone else’s practice.”

“But it’s relevant, you see, because—” The fellow stopped mid sentence. He paused the way you do when a thought is working its way through your consciousness. His eyes darted off, then they came back. They had a gleam to them now. “You should ask her.”

Davey didn’t see why. “Hm?”

“You should.” The fellow nodded, having convinced himself on this. He straightened his spine back up to where it had been earlier; apparently, he felt in control over the situation again. “Talk to her, she’ll tell you.”

“She’s not a doctor—”

“Tut-tut!” The fellow was beaming. “Think of it like a bargain. You talk to Miss Thyme, and, if you still want it after hearing what she has to say, I will bring you that doctor’s report. You have my word. How does that sound?”

It sounded like a non sequitur, at least from where Davey sat. He mulled it over, though, because he knew the fellow was pleased with the idea, and he also couldn’t see any downside to it. After all, Davey had come into this session wanting to leave with assurance the fellow would see a doctor—and he had to keep up with his certainty that this was what mattered, or else who knows what anxious things might overrun his mind—and this was a way to get it. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to hear what she had to say, given how she was the referring agent to begin with.

So, why not?

“I’ll need to get you to sign some paperwork…”

“Oh yes.” The fellow was deeply pleased with where they had ended up. “A release of information, I believe it’s called? I’m quite familiar with those.”

***

There was a knock at the door.

Davey’s session with the fellow had barely just ended, and Davey hadn’t even had enough time to sort out his thoughts. His plan was to text Aubrey, see if she had some free time this afternoon, and then go apply some lotion to his face while he waited for a response. He hadn’t expected someone at his door.

It was the fellow, back again. He had a broad smile on his face, and Davey would’ve sworn it was mischievous.

“I’ve changed my mind,” the fellow said.

“Huh?”

“Oh—not about our bargain.” The fellow tittered, dismissed the potential misunderstanding. “No, no, that all still stands. I meant this.”

The fellow waved his hand about in front of Davey’s face.

“There!” Aziraphale let out a deep sigh of relief, and he was satisfied with himself. “That would have bothered me all week.”

Whatever had just happened was weird, and it felt weirder. “What?”

The fellow was already heading away, and he called out, “Til next time!”

“Wait, hold up—wait—” You don’t get to come back right after therapy, do some weird thing with your hand, then walk away like nothing had happened. Davey had to call after the fellow and make sure they talked through this. “Hold on, we have to—”

Davey stopped short.

He’d looked down the hallway, you see.

There, down the direction the fellow was headed, leaned a figure: dark like the shadow that haunts shadows, venomously insouciant in stance and posture, sharp-jointed, wearing flash, and, of course, hiding behind those impudent sunglasses.

He wasn’t just over there. He was watching them. He was waiting.

Sunglasses spoke. “Can we go now, angel?”

Davey shut that door of his, got it closed right up, quick as he was able.

***

Retrospect had a fun little hypothetical on offer.

Suppose you went up to Davey, and you said, Hey, Dave, out of all the people you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever met in the whole of your good, long, God-fearing life: suppose you found out one of them actually was a demon! Who would you think it was?

Well, Davey’s first guess would be Alfie Stevens Crusp, whom Davey had had the misfortune of knowing back when he was in Massachusetts. But his second guess? The second person Davey would guess?

Davey didn’t like this hypothetical.

He didn’t like that it had come to him, unbidden, as he stood over the sink in the bathroom down the hall from his office. He had much more important things to think about, so it didn’t make sense that this was where his mind kept going. But he just couldn’t help it. He didn’t know how to stop toying at this pointless, silly hypothetical, even when he knew he should be focused, instead, on other things. Like the fact that he didn’t need to apply any lotion to his face after all. Like the fact that, so far as he could tell, his sunburn was so completely gone it may never have been there to begin with. Like the fact that, if he tried, he could almost pinpoint the exact last time he could remember feeling the awkward stiffness and pain of it. He could just—almost—just almost barely—if he’d only just focus on it right—just if he could–if he could understand it…

He didn’t send that text to Aubrey. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Chapter 6: 4'33''

Chapter Text

Davey was headed one direction, while Aubrey was headed the other. They crossed paths in the hallway.

“Hey, how are ya.”

“Hi.”

That could’ve been the end of it.

“Hey, uh—” Davey caught her attention. She stopped and turned his way without fuss, sticking her hands in her pockets. He figured he would regret this. “When you start working with someone, you recommend they get a medical check-up, right?”

She frowned—maybe scowled—maybe just sorted her thoughts out. “Well, yes. Generally.”

Davey had figured as much.

“I mean, it’s good practice.”

“Sure…” Davey considered. Then he considered other things. “That was a weird question.”

“I’ve heard weirder.”

She grinned at him.

Davey felt out of sorts. “I’ll see ya around.”

“You need to talk?”

That grin of hers was unsettling, even as it softened into something less intentional, which he could almost interpret as containing warmth. Very little about Aubrey was warm. She was so unnervingly inscrutable.

No—it wasn’t her. Davey reminded himself. He was unnerved. He found her inscrutable. She was just a colleague, friendly enough. He was the one being weird.

He perked his attention up, offered up that smile of his. “Naw, why you ask?”

She shrugged, hands still in her pockets. She swiveled around on a heel, back to her original direction. “No reason.”

She continued on her way. Davey, then, too, continued on his own.

***

You are at a fork in the road, and you can turn either left or right. This is not an uncommon occurrence; you have been here many times before. You have always turned left. Today, however, you turn right. Why?

There are stories you tell yourself, to make sense of this choice. I felt like something new, or I’m impulsive like that, or I don’t want uneven wear in my tires from always turning one direction rather than the other. These are all reasonable stories, and the one you settle on will feel true. It will feel like the decision you made was an expression of your self. It will be sufficient, for you to get by and get on with your day.

The best we can tell from neuroscience, unfortunately, is that those stories are post hoc rationalizations. The neurological underpinnings to the decision—turn right, not left—precede the production of the explanation. You did decide to turn right, and that is why you then constructed the story to make sense of it. We are brains, complex and active, before we are selves.

So, the question remains: why? Just—why? What makes one day different from another? What actually happened to you--within you, beneath you--resulting in that unprecedented choice?

How does one’s self become what it is, given that it is the product of processes beyond the ken of conscious thought?

***

Davey didn’t usually play on his drums before a session, but today was different.

He felt like he could use some rhythm before things got started, today.

***

There are certain things that you believe to be true. You don’t just believe them, you are committed to them. These are convictions like A loving God exists or All humans are inherently good or The world as we perceive it is real. There are people out there who hold different convictions, but that doesn’t make a difference to yours. The beliefs that you hold are the beliefs that you hold.

Why?

If called upon to do so, you might offer argumentation to support your conviction. Study logic long enough, and you can fold up so many careful reasons into awe-some, intricate theory. We can all be Spinozas, dreaming up our own Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order. It’s easy enough, if you try. The results can be stunning.

Unfortunately.

The best we can tell from neuroscience is that, the more intricate the reasoning provided for some belief, the less likely it is to reflect the actual motivation for that belief. It is post hoc rationalization, not the true reasons. How unlikely it is, after all, that anyone has ever been moved to believe in Spinoza’s God by his proof. Trust instead explanations provided for deep conviction that sound like: I just feel it or I heard music and I came to know or I can’t explain it, I just do.

The questions remain. Why? Why? What hidden processes are there, determining the trajectories of our minds? What are the secret mechanisms to belief?

Why are we susceptible to epiphany?

***

Why allow us to ask questions whose answers are beyond us?

***

“We need to talk about what happened last week,” Davey said.

“Yes, of course,” the fellow said. His mood was higher than Davey’s right now; they were out of sync. “Did you speak with Miss Thyme?”

Davey hadn’t even been thinking of that. “No, I didn’t have a chance—”

“Oh, well, then, I suppose—”

“Now, hold on.” Davey had a strong need for things to be orderly right now. He needed the world to come to him at a manageable pace. “What I meant was, we need to talk about what happened when you came back.”

“Oh.”

They were closer to being in sync.

Davey felt like he had to piece it together. He had tried already, multiple times over the past week, but now he had the fellow sitting across from him again. “We got up, walked to the door. I said g’bye, you said g’bye, I shut the door behind you. Then you came back, and I opened the door…”

“I had rather hoped you would speak to Miss Thyme.”

“But what happened, after that?”

The fellow sighed and looked off elsewhere. He may have noticed how some of Davey’s drums were out of their usual spots. It was hard to believe that this fellow was so observant; it was harder to believe that he wasn’t. He said, “Look. I am sorry. I do get carried away sometimes, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

It had been decades since Davey had last tried to pray; he felt the weight of the years dearly. “Done what?”

“Oh, Dr. Hampson.” This wasn’t the first time the fellow had regarded Davey with pity. It may as well have been, though. “I am doing just terrible at this, aren’t I?”

“No, uh-uh.” That was easy. Shaking his head to emphasize the point was easy. Looking at the fellow was easy. Davey’s hand stretched outward, to receive something he couldn’t see. “We can talk about that, if you want, but first…”

The fellow’s eyes flicked down to Davey’s outstretched hand then came back up. He smiled, soft, like you’d expect for a being composed of grace. “Yes?”

It was so quiet. The room was so still, so insulated. Whatever existed beyond these walls was muffled down by all the life and tchotchkes Davey had collected for himself in here.

His throat was dry.

“Please,” he said. “Please help me understand what happened.”

“I’m afraid I can’t.” The fellow’s eyes returned to Davey’s outstretched hand. His attention stayed there until Davey curled his fingers over his empty palm, brought his arm back to himself. “You see, it’s because I think you already do.”

***

Might as well call it all chaos—the human mind, thought and cognition, choice and determination, all of it. Some psychologists, at least, do.

Chaos theory has an unearned reputation. It cannot help you predict the arrival of a tyrannosaurus rex. Any other form of applied mathematics would be just as sexy if explained by Jeff Goldblum. Chaos isn’t anything special, really. In fact, it may be the most commonplace stuff of the universe.

All that the term ‘chaos’ refers to is a complex, dynamic system, where the features of the system as a whole cannot be determined merely by reference to the discrete components within it. A butterfly flaps its wings, and a hurricane forms: there is a causal story to be told here, but it isn’t anything as straightforward as The butterfly flapping its wings caused the hurricane. In chaos, you cannot turn to immediate antecedents for an account of some consequent. The behavior of the whole is a product of its parts as a whole. All of the system’s features are determined by its components, but the results of any change are explicable only through an appreciation of the full arrangement of those components, as they hang together.

What is the human mind, but a complex, dynamic system? What system, excepting perhaps the totality of Creation itself, is more complex and dynamic than a soul?

Take all the neurons, the hundred billion of them. Take all the synapses, the thousand trillion of them. Take every perceptual processing subsystem, every point of perceptual data that has been analyzed, contextualized, and stored as memory. Take every feeling and every impulse and every cranky morning and every rapturous joy and every warm hug and shared joke and skinned knee and found penny and every smile and scream and sob and sigh, and every love and every loss, and all the profane and all the profound and all the precious—take it all, all of it, take it as memory and sub-memory, take it embodied and abstracted, take it propositionally, and take it, by necessity, as ineffable.

Look at the whole of it. Perceive it, as greater than the sum of its parts. Do so and perhaps you can see, if you are lucky, how a human might just turn right after spending so much time going left.

***

Maybe Davey was just no good at pleading. Maybe he hadn’t asked clearly enough for what he needed. Maybe the fellow was denying him purposefully, or maybe he wasn’t.

Davey didn’t usually offer direction for how a session should go, but today was different. He cleared his throat. “There’s something I thought it might be good to do today, if you’re down to try it out.”

Besides, the fellow liked novelties, and he liked the unexpected. “Oh?”

Davey didn’t usually bring up his drums in his work, unless the other person did it first. But today was different.

“You know—sometimes—it can be real good to give yourself a chance to play some music.”

“I do like music…” There was an unmistakable but left unstated. The fellow was worried he had no right to make joyous noise.

“Now, I do warn ya…” The patter came easy. More easily. Davey knew this, he had lived through this countless times before. He smiled the way you do, when you get a glimpse of home. “It may be that all I can manage is a loud ruckus, but I’d be happy to give it my best if you’re willing to join in with me.”

He had made that offer so many times to so many people, each and every one of whom deserved it and more. And each time, distinct and distinctly individual, he enjoyed getting to see how the other person mustered up the druthers to accept it.

This fellow had the constitution for indulgence; he reached for joie de vivre the way a babe reaches for its mother. His face cracked open with a smile.

“Pick out whichever one feels right to you.” Davey gave the invitation, without getting up himself. It worked better if the other person didn’t feel like Davey was hovering over their shoulder. “Take your time, whatever you want.”

The fellow hesitated before standing up. After all, he had to get used to the idea that this was acceptable, that now was the time for something to happen that never had before.

Also, it was good, right now, for the fellow to go over and select a drum without Davey following, because it gave Davey a chance to sit on his own. He needed the chance to collect himself without being perceived.

***

Within chaos, change is constant. Everything is liable to shift; everything is in flux. The discrete components are always bumping into each other, diverting each other, shifting places, changing the structure of things. These changes are what determine the features of the system, as a whole. Change enough details within a mind, and you change the mind itself.

Not all systems undergo change the same way.

Some systems have a composition that allows for subtle growth. You change out the components, bit by bit, slow and steady, and no single alteration affects the overall functioning of the whole too noticeably. But then you look back, years later, and you see how very different you are from when you started. You make different choices now than you would have then, and you believe different things now than you did back then. You are made different, through slow and steady processes.

Some systems swing consistently between one pattern and another. Shifting the system’s components catapults it one way, and then shifting them again catapults it back. Each is equally comfortable; there is room for all the components to hang together in both shapes, and it is the very process of shifting that makes this possible. You change and you revert, and you change and you revert, and you keep at it, and the result of this pendulous process is growth.

Systems with rigid structures behave differently. There is a specific pattern in place, and no shifting of that pattern can occur. The shape is set, and it is up to the components to manage themselves however they can, however they must, however is necessary so that they fit in. As long as everything can fit the pattern, the system functions well. It can survive massive stress. The pattern is so secure that any number of incongruent minor changes can be swallowed up and subsumed. But the tension grows, and the tension grows, and it grows.

What does change look like, do you think, for this sort of system? What happens, ultimately, inevitably, when the center cannot hold?

***

The fellow made his selection carefully. He was cautious about doing wrong, and yet he was also ready to savor the opportunity. He wasn’t yet willing to risk being excited, from fear that this experiment would ultimately prove disappointing. But tentative steps are still steps.

He raised up a gentle hand, and he brushed one fingertip against the surface of a frame drum. He felt the smoothed rawhide. No sound came from contact this soft. He angled this fingertip just slightly, to test its resistance with the edge of his nail. He spread out his hand, setting his palm against the surface, and he traced the circle of the drumhead as he thought. He curled his fingers around the edge, without committing to it, and then he moved on to another.

He treated these drums like people: delightful, fragile, and foreign.

What he selected, ultimately, was a goblet drum. It was one of the largest, and it was cumbersome for him to carry and hold. When he came back to his seat with it, sheepish in his way, he sat with the thing sideways across his lap. That’s not how it was supposed to be held.

Davey smiled. He made sure he was here, wholly present again, with this fellow and the drum. “That’s a great choice. What you’ve got there is a djembe, from West Africa.”

“Hmm.” The fellow considered the information, without having much to do with it. He was occupied with keeping the drum where it didn’t belong. “It is quite cumbersome, though, isn’t it?”

There were good questions to ask about why the fellow had chosen this drum, out of all of them. He’d looked at all the options on display, and he had been so tentative and careful with each and every one, and then he’d chosen something massive, something that worked as a solo instrument because it could be so distinctly loud. Davey would ask those questions, sometime, but not now. For now, this was only an introduction.

“Well, lemme show ya how to hold it,” Davey offered. He loved this. “And we’ll see if we can get some noise out of it.”

***

If you’re going to teach someone to play the djembe, you’re probably going to start with the passport rhythm. It’s a pattern with three slap sounds and two open tones. Passport rhythm, of course, isn’t what it is called within the Malinka languages, spoken by the peoples in West Africa who created the djembe. Passport rhythm, instead, is the name that’s used for people like Davey, white Western folk who’ve never learned a single African word.

It's called the passport rhythm because it allows you entrance into a completely new terrain of music. Once you’ve learned the passport rhythm, you’re transported somewhere completely new. The idea is, once you learn it, you’re not the same as you were before.

***

At no point did the fellow slap his hand against the drumhead the way he would need to, to get real sound from it. That didn’t matter. It wasn’t the distinct sounds that mattered, it was the rhythm.

They had to go slowly. The passport rhythm might be simple, but maintaining any sort of pattern can be challenging. The fellow clearly knew his music theory, but European music theory can only take you so far with an African beat. Within many African musical traditions, you don’t separate the making of music from dancing. And here, sitting across from Davey, was a fellow for whom dancing did not come easily.

They got started. They did their best. It could take time.

They went slow.

In tandem.

Kept the beat.

Used their hands.

Felt the sound.

Worked it out.

Worked it through.

Didn’t speak. Not too much.

Had no need.

Got in sync.

Shared a smile. Shared the beat. Shared the sound. Shared it whole. Felt it whole. Knew it—

***

It undergoes a rapid, irrevocable re-organization.

That’s what happens, to a rigid system whose center cannot hold.

***

Davey registered first the moisture on his drum. There had been a droplet, and then it had spread as he played.

He couldn’t see clearly. His eyes were blurry, welled up with tears that were spilling. Some had fallen down his cheeks, some got caught in his beard, some landed further down, on his drum. He was crying, and he didn’t know when it had started. He didn’t know when it would stop.

Aziraphale noticed. Neither of them could keep going. The rhythm faded off.

The room was silent, and Davey’s tears kept falling.

“Dr. Hampson?” Aziraphale was concerned.

“Oh my God.” Davey did not blaspheme.

“David?”

“Sanctificetur nomen tuum.”

“Oh dear.”

Aziraphale scooted forward in his chair so he could move the djembe off to the side. He kept his caring eyes on Davey, and Davey did not feel self-conscious.

“Dave?” Aziraphale’s voice rose like a question.

“Aziraphale,” Davey said. His drum was secure on his knees, and so he could raise the palms of his hands to wipe at his cheeks, to rub at his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale had the patience of—“What for?”

“For…” Davey coughed, sniffed. He shook his head. “I’m sorry for everything.”

Aziraphale smiled. He was transparently bright and kind. “I hardly believe you are guilty of everything.”

Davey laughed.

“No, no,” Aziraphale could speak with gentle authority. “It’s alright. Hm? Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Davey said. “Thank you.”

“Yes, well, of course. Alright.” Aziraphale’s smile turned subtly more brittle. He tapped his fingers against his legs. He waited long enough, and then he looked back to the djembe. “Now, um. Well. So. That’s the djembe, hm.”

Aziraphale didn’t know why he had been thanked. He didn’t know why Davey had apologized. Or, at least, he wasn’t comfortable with how it had happened. Davey continued crying, but it didn’t upset his ability to tend to his conversation with Aziraphale. They talked about drums and drumbeats and the passport rhythm. They chatted, simply.

***

…

***

Davey stood, alone. His office was quiet.

… …

There wasn’t any music.

… …

There was the sound of his breath. His heartbeat. He could hear it, in his ears. There was the hum of the automatic air. There was the soft tick of a wall clock, keeping time for him. He needed that, because otherwise it would feel like nothing, absolutely nothing, was capable of movement.

There was also a sound, muted already and growing even more distant. It was a tapping sound coming at steady intervals. Davey picked up on it especially, he realized, because it was familiar. It was the sound of the heel-strikes as someone walked down the hall.

What were the chances that it would be Aubrey? What were the chances, really, that it wasn’t?

He checked the clock. She must be headed out, either done for the day or leaving for a late lunch. He would have to hurry, he knew, but if he were quick enough, he might just manage to catch up to her.

Chapter 7: Chrysostom

Chapter Text

Davey hurried, trying to catch up to Aubrey. He rushed through the hallway, out the door, into the parking lot. That’s where he stopped. It was a clear day, very quiet. There was no one out here. Plenty of cars, but no Aubrey.

He’d winded himself. He could feel it, as he stood in place. He was out of place. He had to catch his breath.

Davey didn’t get enough exercise.

One car, at the back of the lot, started up. The brake lights got his attention, as it backed out of its spot. Davey watched it. It turned, to head out onto the road, but then it stopped. It was like the car changed its mind. It backed up, turned a different way, and came up to where Davey was standing.

It rolled to a stop right in front of him. Davey swallowed, against his hard breaths, as the window rolled down.

“Hey, Dave,” she said.

“Aubrey,” he said.

“You need to talk?”

“You sent a demon to my office.”

There was a twitch to her face. She really was inscrutable.

“You need to talk?” she said, again.

“I need a drink.”

“Ha. I know the feeling.” She leaned over, into the interior of her car. She pushed off a pile of paper and rubbish from the passenger seat, onto the floor. Davey had to blink hard to keep that empty space of his from settling down around her, as he watched that. Then she came back.

“Get in,” she said. “We’ll talk.”

***

You’re sitting across from an angel, an actual Angel of the Lord. He’s fussy and particular, erudite, self-defacing in his way. You know he has a kind heart—how could he not?—and you know how much he enjoys the chance to see others happy.

Where do your thoughts go? Where else could they go?

Bless my boys. Bless my grandsons. Bless my wife. Bless my band. Why did You take my baby girl?

You wouldn’t feel an end to those thoughts, ever. Would you?

But, no, Davey thought. It wasn’t fair to think about this in general terms. Most people, he suspected, wouldn’t be so selfish. Most people, confronted with an Angel of the Lord in the seat across from them, would see beyond their own petty perspective. They wouldn’t deign to imagine that they were worth the employment of the Great Power of the Lord, imbued within this Being of Light. They wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to want. Unlike Davey.

Aubrey’s advice had been: All you need to do is remember that he’s a person, that’s it. But Davey wasn’t sure she was right.

“I still don’t understand how you ended up here in Rochester,” Davey said.

“Well, I told you—”

“Right, I know.” Davey and Aziraphale had a habit of interrupting each other. It happened. “Aubrey referred you. But what I don’t get is, how did you and the—your friend end up knowing her in the first place? I mean, there’s plenty of psychologists in London.”

“Ah, yes.” Aziraphale understood now, and he prepared to explain. “You see, a while ago, there was a fire in my bookshop...”

“Is that so?” That must have been really upsetting. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

Aziraphale appreciated the sympathy. “Oh yes. It was quite terrible. I wasn’t there to see it, fortunately.”

“How bad was the damage?”

“From what I’ve heard, it was devastating—but, you see—” Aziraphale anticipated Davey, and so he was quick to tack on, with a smile, “Everything was alright! The Antichrist restored it.”

“The—what.”

“Hm.” Aziraphale dropped the smile, while Davey was busy short-circuiting. “We’ll circle back around to that, shall we. Yes, well. As I was saying, while I did not witness this fire, Crowley did.”

Davey’s mind was still clogged up. “Uh-huh.”

“He might like to pretend otherwise, but he really does care for my bookshop far more than he lets on.” Aziraphale, a being of compassion, sighed. “It was very hard for him, to see it destroyed like that.”

“Sure.”

“He got a bit tetchy. He started to—well, I was about to say he started behaving strangely, but that’s not right. He didn’t change much at all, to be honest. And, I suppose, that’s the point.”

It’s an odd feeling, to know that there are details you should be picking up on, that you’re hearing words in grammatical order and yet still feel like you’re swimming against a tide. Maybe it would be easier, somehow, if they switched to working in Latin. “Is it?”

“Yes, because, you see…” Aziraphale frowned, because he encountered trouble expressing himself. “Everything was supposed to be different.”

No song was stuck in Davey’s head today, helping him bide his time while Aziraphale processed his feelings. Without that, Davey had to manage on his own.

He struggled with it.

…Bless my boys, Bless my…

Aziraphale had turned introspective, and his frown developed a hint of some sorrow.

Davey offered, to help it along, “You sound sad about that.”

“Oh, no, not at all,” said Aziraphale, with bright eyes and firm smile.

That was a blink-and-you-miss it shift. Davey must’ve blinked, because he had missed it. “Ah.”

“This is precisely what we had hoped for, after all.”

“Sure.” Davey accepted it. ‘Everything was supposed to be different,’ and also ‘this’ was precisely what ‘we’ had hoped for. The story had some massive holes in it, and they corresponded to the lightening-fast shifts in affect. None of that was all too hard to understand, no. That was how a mind worked, when it wasn’t comfortable with its own contents. What Davey had to wonder about, instead, was whether Aziraphale realized he was doing it or not.

At least, that was one thing to wonder about. It was the one thing he should wonder about, unlike all the other things that were refusing to leave Davey alone.

…Bless my grandsons…

Davey redirected. “I guess I’m confused how this got you to Rochester.”

“Right, that.” Aziraphale was happy to return to his explanation. “So, after all of that terrible business, Crowley thought to get a human to talk to. A therapist, I mean. Miss Thyme. Psychotherapy is such a very human activity, isn’t it?”

That certainly made Davey feel like an ant under a microscope. It wasn’t comfortable, but—Why did You—he had to accept it was deserved. Therapy, as the activity he and this Angel of the Lord were engaged in, may have been barely a century old, but every group of humans through all of history, surely, must have had some means of healing through ritualized compassion. Davey said, “I’d have to agree.”

It’s just—so many of those rituals were structured around begging the supernatural for relief.

Aziraphale paused long enough to sour. “And, as I have come to learn, he and I still Keep Secrets from one another. Crossing an ocean was his strategy to avoid detection.”

The emphasis was clear. Bitterness wasn’t a good sign for a friendship, at least not for humans. Davey couldn’t imagine it was any different for an angel. But, then again, Davey also couldn’t imagine trying to befriend a demon in the first place.

It had been too much, earlier, when Davey had put a name to Aziraphale’s affect. This time, he’d go broader. “You’ve got feelings about that.”

“Oh, no, truly, it doesn’t matter.” Shifting eyes, rigid smile. “After all, it’s not as though he owes me anything. Not anymore.”

What a shame that Aziraphale’s capacity for dissemblance had its limits: despite all his hard work, that bitterness still came through at the end.

“Huh.”

It was uncomfortable for Aziraphale, that Davey gave such a limited response. Sometimes, though, it’s important to lean into discomfort.

Throughout all the time they had spent together, Davey acknowledged, he had been shying away from anything too uncomfortable. He had directed their conversations away from Aziraphale’s friend, no matter how often and significantly Aziraphale brought him up, because Davey hadn’t wanted any conversations about demons. Davey hadn’t pressed on what it meant to be a ‘retired angel,’ despite how clearly that was worth exploring, because he couldn’t tolerate the subject. They’d enjoyed stage magic together, and Davey had purposefully skipped over every reference made to miracles.

Aziraphale, bless him—no, Bless—no, bless him, had brought in Jungian psychoanalysis, even, and what had Davey done with that?

There was so much ground to make up.

It would be a long while, Davey supposed, until he’d be able to tell just how much awareness Aziraphale had over his propensity to misrepresent his feelings, but clearly there was a limit to how much he could handle being confronted with it. Aziraphale couldn’t take sitting with his own obfuscation for too long, and you couldn’t rush things like this. Expect too much from him too soon, and all you’d do is push him away.

Davey eased them both up softly, away from Aziraphale’s inner tension. “Maybe now’d be a good time to circle back to the—uh—the Antichrist…”

That turned out to be a whole long conversation.

***

It was easy to get co*ke Zero Time to line up with Aubrey’s Mid-Morning Snack Time. It must’ve always been like that, but there hadn’t been a reason to pay attention before. Lots of things had changed recently, for Davey.

She was sitting at that lonely circular table, again, this time eating almonds from a bag. Davey opened his co*ke Zero, and he leaned against the counter.

“So, uh…” Davey cleared his throat. He looked down to inspect the top of his soda can. “Apparently, a while ago, the world… The, uh… There was—”

“You talking about the Antichrist?” Aubrey made it sound like nothing more than a recent change to the local bus routes. “Yeah, I heard all about that.”

Davey glanced to the kitchen doorway from reflex, to check if someone might be listening, but of course no one was around. Maybe he should trust her a bit more. “Do you remember any of it?”

She was holding an almond, and she rotated it absentmindedly between her fingers. “No.”

“Me neither.”

It was easy to imagine she felt just as lost in all of this as he did. There were some pretty big differences, though, between their situations.

She said, “All I know is what I’ve been told.”

This was one of those differences. They both only knew what they had been told, but they were hearing it from different sources—and what a source, terribly, she was relying on.

“We could cross-check, see if their stories line up…” Davey was just working through his thoughts, and so he only realized his mistake after he saw how she tensed up. He winced, to show he cared. “Aw, geez, I’m sorry, I was talkin’ without thinkin’.”

She waved off his apology, although she didn’t release that tension. She lifted that almond up, and then she ate it.

This was another difference between them. Davey had an ROI—a Release Of Information—allowing him to talk with Aubrey about Aziraphale’s treatment. There had been a time in the past when Davey had a similar ROI, allowing them to talk about the demon’s treatment, since the demon had come to him that one time. That ROI had since expired, though, and Aubrey insisted she wouldn’t be getting another. When they had spoken, she was completely adamant: under no conditions, in no way, would she be asking for another ROI from He Who Might Still Be Her Client But Who Knows Because She Can’t Say Even Thought Obviously, Yes, Davey Could See Him Sitting In Her Waiting Area Every Wednesday Right Before Eleven. Generalities were okay, but anything specific was entirely off the table.

He hadn’t pushed, even if he thought her approach to ethics was a bit immature. Her practice was her practice, and she was entitled to set her boundaries. And, anyway, given how much Aziraphale talked about the demon to begin with, it probably was best for both of them to avoid telling each other too much. Generally, if Davey was working with someone, the last thing he wanted to hear was what that someone’s friend’s own therapist thought of him.

Although, generally, when Davey was working with someone, that someone’s friend wasn’t a demon who had once signed an ROI with Davey’s name on it while sitting in his office, and that someone’s friend’s own therapist wasn’t the very person who sent him there.

Aubrey had said, it didn’t matter. She’d rolled her eyes at his concerns. She had said, Demon is just a label, it doesn’t mean anything. And she clearly believed it, so Davey accepted it. Well, he had intended to. He could at least assume she had good reasons for what she believed.

He’d hate to think what it meant, if she were wrong.

***

In 1955, Albert Einstein passed away while resting in bed with a nurse nearby to watch over him. With the last of his earthly strength, he gave his final words. This genius, this best of the best among human minds, had spoken, with finality, as he was dying.

We don’t know what he said, though, because his nurse didn’t speak German.

Davey couldn’t get that inscription from Jung out of his head. He wracked his mind, trying to glimpse in his memory the shapes of the words, anything that would be enough for him to puzzle out what he had seen. Did Jung know, truly, to whom he had written that inscription? Jung’s works were infused with religious imagery, angels and demons and even the Serpent of Eden. Did he know? He wrote a book once, where he deigned to give answer to Job in God’s place. And Aziraphale had been on first-name basis with him?

What even was this world, what Davey had been born into?

***

“I have to be honest with you,” Davey said, to start off this session. “It’s real hard for me to know what to do.”

“Is that so?” Aziraphale’s expression was open and kind, despite a hesitancy hiding beneath. “I suppose that makes two of us.”

Davey decided to take that as a joke. He chuckled, to show it had worked. “Maybe we should revisit if there’s some goals we could set for our time together.”

“Yes, excellent idea.” Aziraphale was keen. He scooted forward in his seat, more engaged than Davey would have expected. “I have put some thought into that, in fact.”

“That’s great."

“I thought, perhaps…” That keen engagement couldn’t sustain itself for very long. Aziraphale’s eyes flickered around and upward, like it had just occurred to him the walls of Davey’s office might be about to crumble down. They weren’t, though. So, Aziraphale smiled self-consciously, and he changed his mind about how to proceed. “Well. I suppose. There are three questions I would like to consider.”

“Let’s hear ‘em.”

Aziraphale set his teeth in an unhappy grimace, and he turned his gaze away, but then he relented and let out in a single breath: “What do I want, how do I get it, and what shall I do when I cannot?”

That was a lot to sort through. Davey wondered what Aziraphale had originally planned on saying, before he’d changed his mind. “Those’re some good questions. Although—I gotta ask, are we sure we wanna start from go assuming that third question’s necessary?”

“Best to be prepared,” Aziraphale said, with a false simplicity.

Davey chewed on that falseness. You couldn’t take what someone like Aziraphale said at face value. You had to peel off layer after layer of half-truths and nervous uncertainties to get to something honest. Although, once you’d done so, you might be amazed by what you found underneath. Davey wasn’t a betting man, but he’d wager: Aziraphale absolutely knew what he wanted, and his real goal was to learn how to settle without it.

What did it mean to want, actually, for an angel? What type of want, for an angel, would be unmentionable?

“You make a good point.” Davey smiled. He could remind himself of the lyrics to Margaritaville, but he kept stumbling over the tune. No matter: having stated goals at least offered a sense of direction. “Okay. I’m in. So, how do you want to get started?”

If it were Davey in the hot seat, having to decide how to move forward, he would suggest that they compose a drumbeat that they could entitle something like, What Aziraphale Wants. But, right now, Davey wasn’t in the hot seat, because he wasn’t the one who needed practice with putting words to wants.

And from the look on his face, Aziraphale wasn’t having a good time of it.

“Erm,” he said.

At some point in Aziraphale’s past, he had stamped down on his capacity to want. He had taught himself how to avoid directing his behavior towards satisfying his wants in any straightforward way. He had learned, somehow, that staying safe required pretending he didn’t have any wants at all. How that could happen to an Angel of the Lord, honestly, Davey wasn’t able to conceive. But clearly it had—the evidence was right before him, as Aziraphale struggled even with suggesting a way towards approaching his rushed-out goals.

The struggle mattered. It was how Aziraphale—if he were anything like a human—could restore his inherent capacity to flourish.

His brow furrowed; he winced. He regarded Davey and he let his shoulders slump apologetically. “I am terrible at this, aren’t I?”

“Hey—” Davey said, to stop that line of thought in its tracks. That wasn’t Aziraphale struggling the way he needed; that was, instead, him backing away from the unfamiliar because it was uncomfortable. It was something they’d encountered before. And, finally, Davey was willing to work with it.

People use scripts to navigate social interactions, especially when those interactions might be painful and frightening. And, right now, Aziraphale was waiting for Davey to say his lines in a script that the two of them had developed over their time talking with each other. This was how the script went:

Aziraphale faced a challenge

→

He self-recriminated

→

Davey assuaged

→

The original challenge was swept away

See how it functioned? See how this layer of Aziraphale’s self-presentation kept safe the layers underneath? The anxiety and self-doubt cocooned him from anything that threatened to get too close. A human brought up with insufficient unconditional positive regard adapted to keep itself protected from harm; instead of growing into something full, it learned to safeguard its tender spots.

Maybe Aziraphale was the angel of defense mechanisms, or something.

They had to disrupt the system, if they were going to get anywhere. And, conveniently, Davey had Jung on his mind.

He made sure he got nice and comfortable in his chair before he continued. He smacked his lips together, and then he said, “Would you be willing to try something out with me?”

Aziraphale wasn’t distressed by the fact that Davey hadn’t followed the script, because that would require him to acknowledge that there was a script in the first place. He was wary, though, naturally. “What did you have in mind?”

“It might be a bit silly.” Davey took silly things seriously, and he liked it when other people did too. “Just like a game, see where it takes us.”

Aziraphale was listening.

Davey made his offer. “Let’s pretend you actually are terrible at this.”

“What, this?”

“Mmhmm, this. Talkin’ together here. Therapy.” Davey was down for a bit of fun. “What would it be like, do ya think, if you were jus’ downright bad at therapy?”

Aziraphale thought about it, in an arched-eyebrow sort of way. “Bad, you say.”

Jungian psychoanalysis is built all around the idea of internal potentialities. Jung’s view was that everyone had the potential to be both one way and the opposite. Being a kind person, for instance, meant also having the potential to be unkind. Ignore that capacity for unkindness because you’re desperate to always be kind, and what you end up with is psychological dysfunction. On a view like this, the mechanism for change is acknowledging the polar opposite of what a person believes themselves to be, especially when it’s the polar opposite of what they believe they must be without alternative.

Not that Davey was a Jungian, oh no. But there was one thing he knew: a good way to get at something smothered under a bunch of layers is to flip the whole mess upside down.

“Well, for starters,” Aziraphale said, “I could start attending for the sake of an external scheme…”

That could either be a joke, or it could be an attempt to get them back on script. Davey decided to go with the former, so he laughed. “Naw, I gotta disagree—it got ya in the door, after all, didn’t it?”

Aziraphale allowed the point. He took to thinking with more caution than Davey really wanted.

“Just imagine it, being truly bad at therapy,” Davey said. “Whatever comes to mind.”

“I could…” Aziraphale sounded out an idea. “I could arrive late.”

“Ooh, yeah.” It wasn’t much, but it was a start. “That’d be pretty bad, cutting down the amount of time we got to talk. Of course, we’d still do what we could to make it work, huh? So, what else?”

“I could lie?” Aziraphale still wasn’t putting his all into it.

“That’d make things hard,” Davey allowed. This touched a bit close to home, given their history together, but Davey could skim past that. “But, ya know, even a liar’s got reasons for their lies, don’t they? So, even then, I’d hold out some hope. C’mon—we gotta try harder, here.”

Was Aziraphale struggling to come up with ideas, or was he just waiting until he felt invited to let out the really bad possibilities he’d long since puzzled out? He didn’t look uncertain. “Well, I suppose, it would be terrible if I were to insult you.”

Davey liked that. “Yes! Right on! That’s the spirit. Let’s dig into it. Give it to me—how would you do it?”

Maybe Aziraphale was starting to accept that this could be fun. “I could… insult your intelligence.”

“Pshaw.” Davey waved that off. “Nope, sorry, but I’m afraid that dog don’t hunt. Try again.”

“Belittle the variety of drums in your collection?”

It was closer, but not quite. “I think I’d take that as a challenge before I’d be insulted. Afraid we’re still not there yet.”

A gleam set into Aziraphale’s eyes, like he had just become willing to admit that, if he wanted to, he absolutely could destroy Davey with a word. Davey survived that look only, he thought, because it was mischievous rather than hungry.

Aziraphale said, “I could tell you that you are an unwelcoming presence.”

“Oof!” Davey played it up, slapping his hands up against his heart, grinning to show he appreciated it. Also, internally, he decided to stop playing with fire. “Yep, I tell you what, that would do it. Now, of course, if you really did feel unwelcome in here, then I hope you’d let me know, and we could talk about it. But that’d be different, wouldn’t it, from making it an insult?”

Aziraphale smiled, simply. “Indeed.”

A fair amount of his nervous and finicky energy had left him. He sat calm and assured in his seat, allowing himself to be amused even if he wasn’t thoroughly rolling around with Davey in the silly-mud. Davey thought maybe a little bit more would be useful. “What else, you think? More ways to be bad at therapy.”

It wasn’t a challenge anymore. “I could refuse to leave. Or I could, hm, throw around the furniture? Damage things.”

“Yep, absolutely. Physical violence would be pretty terrible.”

“Steal your magnets.”

Davey laughed.

“Invite others to attend without warning.”

“Sure enough.” Davey had an idea who Aziraphale might have in mind with that, and, yes, that would be an excellent way to ruin Davey’s entire day, or week, or maybe life. It was starting to feel like this game had served its purpose, so Davey let his laughing grin settle itself down into something less assertive. “There we have it, then. That’s what you’d be doing, if you actually were terrible at this.”

Aziraphale agreed.

Davey leaned as much as he could into the simplicity of this moment. He focused on the ease of sitting across from someone who would humor you and all your silliness. He grounded himself, thoroughly, in the pleasing insignificance they had constructed together. Either Aziraphale picked up on Davey’s shift in tone and was prepared for it, or he mirrored it reflexively.

“I guess I’m just curious,” Davey said. “What is it, do ya think, that you really want?”

You turn things upside down, and what ends up on top?

Aziraphale’s eyes were sharp. He spoke with no uncertainty. “I want to tell my friend I love him.”

***

Who was it, originally, who had brought up Jung? Who was it, in that room, who had the greatest familiarity with Jungian psychoanalytics, who could have foreseen the results of implementing a Jungian approach before the other? And how long ago had he figured it out?

Davey sat back, later, in wonder at it.

Had he disrupted the script that Aziraphale had expected them to follow, thereby allowing them to move to unknown territory? Or had he, instead, acted out perfectly a role he had been slotted into, in a different script, with Aziraphale not just acting along side but also directing? For how long, in total, had Aziraphale been moving them both to where he wanted them to be? Did he know what he was doing? Was Aziraphale, like him, a pawn in some supraconscious game of chess—or was he both queen and king? Or what would it mean, if he were the chessboard, itself, underneath it all?

Is this what it felt like, to be outsmarted?

If it was manipulation that had gotten them to this point where Aziraphale felt comfortable saying what he wanted to say, then it meant he’d been playing Davey like a fiddle for weeks. Could that actually be possible? The planning and execution it must have taken, let alone the patience, was impressive. No, it was more than impressive: Davey was thrilled by it.

This, Davey tried to convince himself, is why you don’t ask angels for blessings.

Chapter 8: Gerontius

Chapter Text

Sadie’s arthritis was acting up. She mentioned it last night, while they talked over the phone. Their youngest and his wife were trying for a child, but it kept not happening. Their old neighbor—the one who always had a scarecrow up at Halloween, a sled with reindeer at Christmas, and the most terrifying Easter bunny you’ve ever seen during lent—was undergoing chemo. A memorial had shown up on the side of the road Davey drove down each day, and the graduation photo taped to the little wooden cross was so achingly youthful. He had to force himself not to look at it.

Forty-four years was a long time to go between panic attacks. It was such a long time, you’d be liable to start thinking you’d never have another one. A stretch of time like that was enough to forget what it was like. Not the panic itself, no—that was the sort of thing you never forget—but what it was like, all the rest of the time surrounding the attacks. The waiting. The wondering when the next one would come.

***

Resistance was such an ugly word, from Davey’s point of view. The term originated in old psychoanalytic approaches, where the therapist was assumed to be some sort of objective observer who could be trusted to know better than the client what they needed. The idea was that clients resist against therapy, that they act out or shut down in order to stop the therapist from doing his all-important work. Now, it certainly was true that clients could do things that looked like acting out when they got to a point in the process that was uncomfortable: they got angry, they showed up late, they forgot to do what they had promised to try, they returned to bad habits from long ago, or they came up with any number of other creative ways to avoid something scary or unfamiliar. But calling that sort of thing resistance, Davey thought, made it sound antagonistic. Saying a client was resistant put emphasis on the therapist’s experience of the encounter, at the expense of the client’s own.

What Davey preferred, personally, was thinking of it as strength.

It took some real deep strength, to stand against what your therapist suggested for you. Most therapists are friendly and convincing, after all, and resisting against that sort of supportive presence isn’t easy. You had to be up for some seriously hard work, to disrupt the process once it had begun. And think about what led to a client having strength like that in the first place: that strength had, at some point in their past, been precisely what kept them alive. Whenever a client was resistant, what you were seeing was a steel spine that had been forged from an act of perseverance. And that, Davey thought, was worth honoring.

Heavens above, but Aziraphale was strong.

The next time they met, the clear-eyed certainty was completely gone, replaced with nervous glances. Aziraphale was all finicky gestures and sublimated energy. He smiled, and he demurred, and he self-effaced, and he did all the other things Davey was used to Aziraphale doing to avoid being honest. None of that was a surprise. The surprise, as it so regularly was with Aziraphale, was just how successful he was at doing it.

Davey wasn’t some sort of objective observer who had the right to sit in any kind of judgment of Aziraphale or his needs. But Davey was here in order to bring attention to alternative ways that Aziraphale could use all that great strength of his, and the opportunities that strength could afford him if only he could devote less of it to protecting himself—opportunities that Aziraphale, himself, had identified.

Davey sat across from Aziraphale, and he looked at him plainly. He smiled against the discomfort that Aziraphale radiated, and then he took in a deep breath. He said, “You know, I think we got somewhere real important last week.”

Aziraphale exuded an ill-attempted ease. “Is that so?”

“Mmhmm.” Davey took it slow. He sucked on his teeth before responding, hopefully giving Aziraphale a chance to register how Davey was actually at ease. “That is, when you told me what your goal was. What it is you want.”

“Oh, that.” Aziraphale gave a dismissive little wave of a hand. His smile was so tight, Davey’s face hurt vicariously. “No, no, that was nothing.”

Davey showed he wasn’t sure about that. “It seemed like something to me.”

“Hm, well—Hm.”

Aziraphale really needed it not to be something. Or, at least, that’s what he thought he needed.

This was the tricky part when a client got ‘resistant’: managing between discomfort and safety. You need both, if you’re going to grow. Without the discomfort that comes from confronting something new, Aziraphale would stay within his small, painful shell forever. Without the safety of his old habits, however, the discomfort could be damaging rather than freeing. You needed to keep these encounters uncomfortable-but-safe, and that was especially challenging with someone as strong as Aziraphale. He wasn’t adept at recognizing the difference between discomfort and danger.

Aziraphale felt it wasn’t safe, right now, for him to acknowledge the significance of what he had accomplished last time, when he gave voice to what he wanted. Davey would honor this, no matter what, but there were two different ways he could do so. He could honor it by helping Aziraphale build up again the sense of safety he needed in order to try again at uncomfortable work. Or, alternatively, he could honor it by inviting Aziraphale to continue with the discomfort because he was, in fact, already safe.

This usually wasn’t so tricky. Usually, Davey didn’t feel like he had to play chess when he was working with someone. And, also, usually, Davey wasn’t looking straight at the visage of an actual Angel of the Lord when he tried to make these sorts of choices.

“Well,” Davey said, gathering for himself a bit more data, “what do you think it’d be good for us to spend our time on today?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Aziraphale responded, so desperately quick. “I’m sure you’d have a better idea than I do.”

Davey kept his gaze steady. He nodded, to show he heard. He accepted it.

Aziraphale was, right now, putting all of his inimitable strength into appearing weak. He was trying, so fervently, to avoid even the suggestion of his own agency. Either he couldn’t or he wouldn’t allow himself to appear as someone who had his own thoughts. If he couldn’t, it meant he really did feel unsafe. If he wouldn’t, it meant he thought appearing scared was the best option he had for maneuvering Davey the way he wanted.

Both options, equally, left Davey feeling sad.

“Alright, then,” Davey said. He watched as Aziraphale’s eyes sharpened from either surprise or frustration before softening themselves into the expression of relief. “I guess my best idea is, how about we go pick out some drums and see what we can come up with.”

Aziraphale wouldn’t say no.

He picked out a tambourine this time, one with small plastic zills that rattled when it was moved. He held it in his lap, gripped steady by one hand, while the fingertips of his other hand tapped against its surface. He demurred from choosing a drum for Davey; he demurred from establishing a beat; he demurred from selecting a title or a theme. He went through the motions, as he thought expected of him, and Davey accepted there wasn’t an alternative for today.

None of it was what Aziraphale wanted, Davey was fairly certain. It was, solely, what was safe.

***

Davey wasn’t sure how Aubrey was always already present, when he came into the kitchen before him. Granted, co*ke Zero Time now had a pretty firm, if de facto, schedule, but it was still surprising how she always beat him here. It’s not like she spent much time hanging out in the kitchen otherwise.

She didn’t have a snack today. Instead, she was sitting at that lonely kitchen and reading a book.

“Hey,” Davey said, on his way to the fridge. “What’re you reading?”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

A long-dormant part of Davey’s brain revved up to life, thanks to that dismissive reply. It was the part of his brain that had adapted into its present form back when he was living in a house with three teenaged offspring, and it encouraged him to respond with, Well, from over here, it looks like a book.

Of course he didn’t say it.

He got his co*ke Zero. It was the last one in the case, so he sat it on the counter in order to take out the empty box, flatten it, and deposit it in the recycling. By the time that was sorted and he was opening up his co*ke, he saw that Aubrey was looking up at him.

“You doing okay?” she asked.

He took a sip from the can, and he smiled. “How about you?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Neither was that.”

This was such a stupid standoff.

It’s a mistake to think that, just because someone works as a therapist, they’ve got top-tier social skills. Some people become therapists precisely because they have trouble navigating social situations, and they find the structure and explicit rules of therapeutic encounters to be comforting. Some of the most broken people you’d ever meet become therapists, in fact. Davey wasn’t like that, no, but some people were.

There must be some way he and Aubrey could rescue themselves from this standoff on their own, but they didn’t get a chance to find it. They both heard the humming from down the hall, indicating that someone was about to join them. Aubrey looked down at her book, and Davey smiled towards the doorway in preparation of greeting the new arrival.

It was Nicole. She had an office down past Aubrey’s, and she did some sort of insurance work. Sometimes, she brought her dog in, who was an extremely sweet, elderly bulldog named Toby. Dogs technically weren’t allowed in the building, but Davey certainly wasn’t going to tell on her, especially not so long as he got to stop and greet Toby whenever they passed in the halls.

“Hey, Dave.” Nicole smiled at Davey, and then she smiled over to Aubrey. “And, hey—you.”

“Morning, Nicole,” Davey said, because he had manners, unlike someone else currently in this room whose response to the greeting was hardly more than a tight nod. He shuffled to the side, so Nicole could access the coffee supplies.

“How’s the music going?” Nicole asked, sweet enough to catch flies, as she tinkered with the coffee maker. She was somewhere in her mid-forties, early-fifties at the latest, and she’d told him previously that she liked ska.

“Ah, it’s goin’.” Davey enjoyed his co*ke Zero. “In fact, we got a gig comin’ on up not too long from now.”

“Oh, is that so!” The coffee maker was one of those kinds that uses up a little cup, so Nicole didn’t need to tinker with it as much as she did.

“Private party, so ‘fraid I can’t extend a invite.”

Aubrey’s head lifted up slowly from her book. Her face was set, as she watched, like she had something stuck in her teeth.

“Aw, well, that’s too bad.” Nicole, paying Aubrey no mind, played up a pout.

“I’ll make sure ta keep ya informed, don’ you worry.” Davey chuckled, the way he was inclined to do.

Davey liked small-talk, all on its own. And he especially liked small-talk a lot more than he liked awkward silences. It wasn’t the easiest thing to keep up the patter, though, while Aubrey was lurking over there with that look on her face. Besides, without any chit-chat to take up her energy, Nicole was able to get her coffee figured out all the sooner.

“See ya around!” Davey was sure to offer, friendly as ever, once Nicole was leaving.

And then she was gone.

Aubrey’s expression didn’t shift even one iota. Davey pretended he didn’t notice.

He returned to his normal spot at the counter with a sigh. He took a sip from his can, and he figured either the two of them were back in their standoff or Aubrey was waiting long enough to be sure that Nicole was out of earshot before she let loose with whatever she was holding in.

It was the latter, apparently.

“Now…” Aubrey pronounced the word so it was drawn out. And then she full-on drawled, “Ah maght be jus’ a simp-uhl cont-tree law-yerrr...”

Davey gave a look, and he used his free hand to point at her. “Don’t you make fun of people’s accents.”

“Oh, it’s not the accent I’m making fun of.” She grinned.

Davey recognized, too late, that the way he was pointing at her was a lot like how he sometimes pointed at his sons, when they were teasing each other. She wouldn’t have any way to know that, but, all the same, he quickly dropped the hand down.

She was waiting for some kind of reaction, and so he satisfied her. He rolled his eyes with a big shake of his head.

“I think she likes you,” Aubrey said.

“You might be surprised, most people do.”

Aubrey didn’t buy it. “You know what I mean.”

The idea of anyone in this green beautiful planet other than Sadie liking Davey the way Aubrey meant left him with a feeling somewhere between disgust and searing heartache. He didn’t want Aubrey to see how it hit him, though. It wasn’t fair that she got to poke at something that hurt.

“Well, shucks,” Davey said, into his soda can. A long time ago, when he had moved from home for college, he learned the hard way what outsiders did and didn’t think about his accent. They almost never paid attention to when or why it shifted. “Guess I jus’ didn’ pick up on none a that.”

Aubrey snorted a laugh, and Davey was pretty sure it was performative. She wanted him to see that she understood. At least, that’s what he thought she was doing. He hoped that was it.

She let the subject change. “You know anything about relational frame theory?”

Davey shrugged. “Not really—just enough to doubt I know any less than Steven Hayes.”

Aubrey laughed then, for real. It was a sharp sound, not loud but quick. She flipped over her book, angled it over his way so he could see what it was: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, written by Hayes and some co-writers. “I’ve been relying more on techniques from ACT lately, so I thought I should try to understand it.”

Davey smiled at that. He worked hard not to think about why she wouldn’t tell him, when he came in, that this was what she was reading. He worked even harder not to think about why, at this point, she had decided to share. There was so much on his mind already, so many opportunities to be drowned down, and he didn’t need anything else to make it harder to get through the day.

“Well, huh,” Davey said, and he eased into the prospect of chewing the fat about psychotherapeutic theory.

***

Davey didn’t like going into a session with any sort of plan. It made him feel disingenuous, and, besides, plans almost never survived much longer than a few minutes of conversation. What he liked to do, ahead of time, was map out his thoughts. He’d identify a few places he thought it would be interesting for him and the other person to go, if they got headed down a path that allowed it. Beyond that, though, he tried to stay out of the other person’s way. After all, it was that act of leading the way in here that could help someone learn how to flourish on their own, outside of therapy.

An undirected approach wasn’t an inactive approach, though. Davey had his work cut out for him, no matter what. His job was to provide the interpersonal scaffolding that helped along the process. He might ask a question, or raise a suggestion. He would comment on what he saw and felt, in the moment. He offered atmosphere and presence.

Still, there were times when you needed to have a plan. Like today. In absolutely no universe was Davey going to spend another session watching Aziraphale tap miserably at a tambourine.

He welcomed Aziraphale into his office with his standard smile and greeting. He walked with Aziraphale over the chairs, and he gestured the way that he usually did to invite them both to sit. He settled into his own chair, and he watched Aziraphale do the same. He got comfortable. He smiled. And he started in on his plan of providing absolutely no direction whatsoever.

He was expecting it to be just shy of unbearable—for Davey, at least—but he was going to give it his all.

Aziraphale expected Davey to say something. Davey didn’t. He knew exactly what he would say, what he wanted to say. It would be so easy for him to offer up a friendly, Well, how’re we doing today? But even that would give Aziraphale the opportunity to deflect and demure. So, Davey didn’t ask.

Aziraphale fidgeted. He became aware of a speck on his coat, and he distracted himself by removing it. Once it was gone, he glanced up.

Davey was smiling.

Aziraphale glanced away. He stirred up some curiosity about the posters on the wall behind Davey’s head, and he perused them from where he was seated. He’d seen them plenty of times before, but there was nothing stopping him from looking over them yet again.

That ate up some time, but not a whole lot.

Aziraphale took in a shallow breath. He curled up his fingers against the tops of his legs. He wet his lip, preparing to say something.

Davey waited.

Aziraphale hummed a single note, and he looked like he wanted to appear as though he wasn’t expecting a reaction.

Davey employed the full extent of his willpower, so that he could ignore the drive to react the way Aziraphale expected. He was attentive, that’s all.

Aziraphale didn’t wince. He didn’t scowl. He didn’t bite down on his lip, or narrow his eyes, or shift around in his seat with dissatisfaction. He was just as pleasant as always, while he grew more and more painfully aware of how Davey wasn’t saying anything.

If Davey had mind waves or something, he would be directing each and every one of them as intently as he could on Aziraphale with the message: End this already, for both our sakes, just say something, just do it. Of course, that would be counterproductive. So, Davey consoled himself, it was probably for the best he didn’t have mind waves after all.

Aziraphale looked down at his knees.

Davey used his breath to keep his smile unforced.

Aziraphale looked back up at him.

Davey continued to be as receptive as ever to whatever Aziraphale might want to say.

Aziraphale looked away again.

Honestly, this couldn’t have been going on for anywhere near as long as it felt like. Davey hadn’t been paying attention to the clock, and he didn’t have any music in the background to help him keep time, but a realistic estimate would likely put them at less than a minute sitting here in silence. It sure felt like more, though. It’s deceptive, how excruciatingly long a minute can be.

Or maybe Davey’s sense of time wasn’t off, and the two of them really had fallen into some sort of eternal hell of their own devising.

“You’re very quiet today.”

Praise the Lord Almighty, Aziraphale cracked. Davey didn’t know how much more of that he could’ve taken.

“I’d say I am, yeah,” Davey said. “See, last time, I got the sense that maybe I had cajoled you into doing something you weren’t actually interested in, and that’s not right. I don’t want you feeling constrained, and I wanna make sure I get to follow your unimpeded lead.”

Aziraphale didn’t like that. It would’ve been a lot easier for him, if Davey had said something roundabout or dissembling. Coming straight out and expressing his motivations left Aziraphale disarmed.

“It’s… Quite uncomfortable,” Aziraphale said.

Davey was happy to hear it, because it was one hundred percent true. “Yeah, it really, really is.”

“Perhaps we could try something else,” Aziraphale offered.

“I’d love that.” Very little could be a greater relief to Davey right about now. “Like what?”

“Would you…” Aziraphale was in a bind. He was as desperate as Davey to get them out of this awkward dynamic. But he also couldn’t offer up anything that actually mattered to him, because that would be too close to direct communication. What put him in a pickle more than anything else, though, was this: he couldn’t use the I’m terrible at this card again. He’d already extinguished that option, because now Davey knew how to move from it to the direct communication Aziraphale was trying to avoid. “…Like to play the drums?”

“Would you?”

No, Aziraphale wouldn’t. He had made the suggestion from the desperate hope that Davey would latch onto it and take over. But Davey wasn’t going to do that, and this meant that Aziraphale was again stuck. Either he had to explicitly ask Davey to take charge, or he had to express a preference on his own. It almost certainly hurt, inside Aziraphale, in a harsher and more punishing way than it ought.

Aziraphale fidgeted, and he dithered, and then he did something extraordinarily hard.

He said, “Could we, perhaps… That is some sort of electronic piano you have over there, is it not?”

“Yeah, it is,” Davey said. “Would you like play to around with it?”

“I think so, yes.”

It was such relief, Davey could cry. He really could. He had to tamp down on that feeling to keep his eyes from welling up, because his tears wouldn’t be any good right now. But it was a deep feeling, hearty and rich. He was so gosh dang proud of Aziraphale, head to toes.

“Okay,” Davey said. He was brimming with all that pride, and he hoped that, in some way, it showed. He hoped, someday, Aziraphale might be in a position to understand how thoroughly it was warranted. “Let’s go get it plugged in.”

***

Davey had to stop paying any attention to the news. Tolerating his own ignorance was a form of complicity, he understood that, but he had to keep himself safe. It was hardest, always, when he was alone.

***

The next time Davey saw Aubrey in the kitchen, the table where she sat looked a little less lonely. It had, sitting on top of it, an unopened can of co*ke Zero.

This was meant as a gesture, clearly. Davey was touched by it.

He sat down in one of the rickety chairs that were provided. It gave out a plastic groan in complaint of his heft, but it held. The can had been out of the fridge for at least a few minutes, judging from the amount of condensation that had formed, but it was cold enough. He could be comfortable.

“Hey, Dave.”

“Hey, Aubrey.”

Davey opened up the can, let the fizz die down. He then he took a sip.

“I wasn’t trying to mock your accent,” Aubrey said. “I’m sorry.”

So. It had been a gesture of apology. Davey admitted to himself, he felt a twinge of disappointment.

If his baby girl had lived, she wouldn’t have Davey’s accent. She, like her brothers, would have spent most of her life here, in New York. Instead of a Southern drawl, she would have sounded a lot like—

“Don’t worry about it, Aubrey." He smiled, to reassure. “I understood.”

Chapter 9: Thy Goods

Chapter Text

When you’re working with panic disorder, there are two key enemies for you to confront: the fear and the powerlessness. Panic attacks are terrifying, so it is perfectly reasonable for someone to fear them. They also come about unbidden, like a completely uncontrollable force, so, again, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to feel powerless against them. Fear and powerlessness: when you give in to them, that’s you letting the panic win.

Dismantle the fear. A panic attack is a neurological process, so teach yourself everything you can about how that neurological process occurs. It feels like you’re dying, during a panic attack, but you know that’s not true. Acknowledge reality: you’ve survived them just fine plenty of times before, and this one is not going to be any different. As much as you can, try to imagine yourself as separate from all the sensations of panic. Do what you can to map the phenomenology of the attack to what you know of the background neurology. You are stronger than you think; believe it.

Earn control. Start by keeping a careful log. Every time you feel the panic rising, make note of it. Record what it felt like. Rate the severity. Jot down as much as you can about where you were, what you were thinking, what you were doing, and anything else that stands out in your memory. Turn your panic into a science project. Look for patterns. Identify triggers. Come up with a plan to avoid those triggers, at least for now. Practice relaxation techniques, and plan out ahead of time how you’ll use those relaxation techniques when you notice the panic rising. Be specific, as much as possible. You know what self-care looks like; practice it.

It's all rote. Easy to spell out, hard to implement. No matter how well you understand it, no matter how many times you’ve helped someone else combat their own panic disorder, you shouldn’t try to go through it alone. Therapy isn’t some sort of college seminar, where all you’re trying to do is gather up knowledge. If you’ve got panic disorder, you deserve to have a therapist by your side, coming along with you through the battle.

Anyway.

Another thing you shouldn’t do is self-diagnose. Sure. But Davey didn’t actually have panic disorder. He might be having some panic attacks, but there’s more to panic disorder than that. And, also, he was going to manage just fine on his own.

***

“I was hoping, perhaps, we might discuss The Symposium?”

And there you go: with that, Davey won a bet he’d made with himself.

“Well, sure.” Davey said. The details of the bet were simple: a bag of M&Ms on Aziraphale at some point bringing up The Symposium. So here was Davey, now looking forward to getting a sweet treat later this afternoon. “I’m familiar, but I’m afraid I don’t recollect too many of the details.”

That was intentional, actually. He figured, the more he could comment on the contents of The Symposium, the easier it would be for Aziraphale to drag him into some sort of philosophical tangent. Keeping his recollections as limited as possible, he thought, might make it easier for them to stay on topic.

Davey got things started. “What brings it to mind?”

“It’s a remarkable achievement, is it not?” Aziraphale spoke with the simple enthusiasm that came so easily to him. “In terms of theory, rhetoric—even drama. Astounding.”

“I’d have to agree.” More or less. When Davey had read The Symposium way back when, he’d been too distracted by the references to gay sex—the first non-stigmatized ones he’d ever encountered—to pick up on any of Plato’s theorizing. That didn’t matter, though, because the Platonic dialogue’s cultural merit was actually irrelevant to their current purposes, and they both knew it. Davey gave Aziraphale a look. “But that’s not what brings it to mind.”

Another thing they both knew was that Aziraphale didn’t feel trapped by being called out like that. He played at it, of course, putting on a scowl and dropping his voice, but he wasn’t actually distressed. It was exactly what he had been expecting. “It’s the subject matter, as you well know.”

Yes, they both knew. Davey thought they could go a bit further, though, so he kept quiet and nodded to show he was waiting.

Aziraphale relented. “Agape, philia, storge. Human love, in all its forms.”

If you wanted to interpret Aziraphale, you had to focus less on what he said and more on what he expected you to recognize had been left unsaid. Davey registered the emphasis on human love, and he wondered if he was supposed to notice the omission of the angelic counterpart.

Davey was familiar with the concept of agape, at least in a Christian context, but he didn’t know what storge meant, and he had to rely on inference for philia. His understanding of Greek was extremely limited. Regardless, he could acknowledge the significance of Aziraphale putting name to the topic, even if he was unsure about how best to read into the names he had listed for it.

Davey was satisfied. “Why don’t you tell me about it.”

“Actually…” The play-act was over; now there was a small frisson to how Aziraphale spoke. He was getting near to nervous. “I was hoping you would. Could you?”

An actual, stated request from Aziraphale was an important thing to honor, but Davey didn’t actually understand. “Hm?”

“Human love.” This wasn’t a passing attempt at steering the conversation. Aziraphale was serious about this. “Could you tell me about it?”

“Well, sure,” Davey said, as he reckoned with the request. They had established that, out of the two of them, Aziraphale was the one who knew The Symposium, which was perhaps the most central exploration of the nature of love within European history. And, furthermore, there was no way that an angel with thousands of years of experience among humans would need the half-baked ramblings of an old fart like Davey to make sense of things. Again, interpretation required focus: out of everything Aziraphale wasn’t saying, what had been left out intentionally? “What do you want to know?”

“Well…” Aziraphale faltered, because whatever it was he needed, it wasn’t answers to specific questions. “We don’t… have. Human love. In Heaven, I mean.”

It was challenging, every time that place got brought up. It rarely happened, though, and Davey pushed past the feeling. “You’ve got a different kind of love, up there.”

“Oh, certainly, yes, that’s Heaven for you, alright.” Aziraphale blinked from dispelling tension. “Just—bursting with all that infinite, divine love.”

Along with what Aziraphale didn’t say, it was also a good idea to focus on what he said just a bit too much.

“Huh,” Davey said.

As much as it would be nice to get some straightforward answers to some simple questions, Davey wasn’t going to try prying out more direct communication from Aziraphale just now. It wouldn’t be the right move, given how Aziraphale had been directing the discussion. Also, it would be miserable, and Davey had his limits.

He took to musing. “Well, that’s one pretty big difference, between the divine and the human, I suppose? Human love’s got to be finite.”

Aziraphale absolutely did not like that; he as good as recoiled. “No, that can’t be right.”

“No?” Davey wasn’t here to debate. He acknowledged Aziraphale’s reaction, and then he risked the observation, “That’s upsetting for you.”

Denying it would be the easy response. Brave, infinitely strong Aziraphale sat with the chance to impulsively reject his feelings, and then he broke against it. He held, gingerly, at the potential to be true to himself.

He glanced off to the side, and he took the time to swallow before responding. “The certainty of death, surely, is always upsetting.”

Was it, for him? The fact that Aziraphale was lying didn’t change that he was also, tremendously, attempting at the truth.

“Yeah. I suppose it is.” Davey spoke, low and chill, to provide grist for whatever mill was working away in Aziraphale’s head. “But that’s what makes human lives meaningful—well, so I’ve heard said. It’s the fact that we’ve got a beginning and an end that lets the middle parts matter.”

“How very existentialist of you.”

That sounded dismissive, but it wasn’t. And, even if it had been dismissive, Davey couldn’t say it wouldn’t be earned. What mortal didn’t deserve to be dismissed for spitting out nonsense about the meaning of life to an Angel of the Lord? But the tone wasn’t intentional; it was mere byproduct. Aziraphale was working hard to feel at something important.

Davey wasn’t going to interfere. “It’s just what ya hear, sometimes.”

“I have to insist that cannot be the totality of it.” Aziraphale wasn’t one to insist often, was he? He was still thoughtful, focused far more on his own internality than anything exterior. “There must be more to—to human love—than merely that it doesn’t last.”

It wasn’t fair, that Aziraphale could say something so heart wrenching, as if it were mere abstract theory.

“I suppose you’re right,” Davey said, and he felt heavy.

It wasn’t hard for Davey to see how his love for his family—for Sadie, no matter what, and for their children—was finite. He’d been raised to understand that the love God had for humans outstripped whatever it was a creature like Davey could possibly instantiate. He was as comfortable with the inevitability of death as anyone nearing the age of retirement could be, he supposed. But there was a difference between saying love was finite and saying that it didn’t last. There was something awful about that idea, or there was something internal to Davey that cried out to reject it.

If there was an afterlife, as surely there must be, and if Davey someday would be part of that afterlife, then something of Davey must be everlasting. And if all that was true, and surely it was, then this meant that Davey’s love for Sadie and his babies must be everlasting, as well. Because what could there possibly be to Davey, except for that?

He couldn’t sit here the way he needed to, with Aziraphale’s experience centralized, if his mind kept circling around this kind of thought.

He cleared his throat.

Besides, for Aziraphale’s sake, they really should dedicate some time to processing through the fact that Aziraphale had made an explicit request.

“I’m wondering about something,” Davey said, pulling Aziraphale from his inscrutable thoughts, recentering their attention. “What was it like for you, just then, when you asked to talk about The Symposium?”

That was fine. Serviceable, for how they could move forward. Probably even the right therapeutic move to make, even if for the wrong reasons.

***

The precocious mathematician may find himself in want of the occasional word problem.

Suppose that you currently have twenty dollars in your pocket: two fives and a ten. Suppose, further, that during your drive to work, there are three corners where you are almost certain to pass a hungry, unhoused, desperate beggar. What do you do?

Do you stop for the first one, and open your wallet, and pull out a five for him, or the ten? Do you try to hide your wallet from his view, so he can’t see which choice you make? Do you honestly think you’re worthy of deciding he gets only five? What makes you think you’re better than him? Do you look him in the eye, the way he deserves, or are you going to be self-indulgent and shameful, and keep your eyes down? His feet are covered in rags while your shoes are sturdy--do you take them off? Do you? You didn’t, did you? A camel through the eye of a needle —it’s a mistranslation, and you know that, and is that the excuse you’ll bring with you when you meet your maker? Is it? Are you satisfied? Are you proud? Are you pleased with how special and worthy you are, because you asked at the bank for two fives and a ten rather than a single twenty, nevermind that you could have gotten three twenties, nevermind that you actually have far more than even that, and there was nothing stopping you, was there? Huh? Was anything stopping you? Anything, anything at all? Do you have any excuse, or are you really such a cheap selfish greedy vicious petty mean bilious piece of—

It is a simple matter of mathematics.

Under the specified conditions, what is the total amount of time that you sit, with the engine running, in the parking lot outside your office building, before you can manage to move again?

For full credit, do make sure to show all your work.

***

Davey’s co*ke Zero fizzed. Otherwise the kitchen was quiet.

“Say, what kind of music do ya like?” Davey asked.

“Not ska.” Aubrey smiled. She was friendly.

“Sure.” Davey chuckled, because he was okay. “That’s what everyone says, before they know better.”

“I guess I don’t listen to much music.”

“Really.”

Aubrey shrugged.

Davey couldn’t say why that made him want to cry.

He finished off the co*ke Zero in his office.

***

An Angel of the Lord sat across from Davey, and Davey was a fraying end.

“Hey, uh—if you’re amenable…” Davey wasn’t thinking this through; his thoughts just clicked into place. He rubbed the back of one hand with the other. “Would you be up for going on something of a field trip today?”

“A field trip?” Of course Aziraphale would be amenable. He loved getting to try out new things.

“I thought, or I’m thinking, there’s something I’d like to talk with you about,” Davey half-explained. “And I thought it’d be easier if I could show you.”

Aziraphale, of course, was intrigued. “Well, certainly!”

Davey really checked. “You don’t mind?”

Aziraphale smiled—kind, compassionate, simple and easy. “Why would I?”

That was a good point. Davey accepted it. He and this Angel of the Lord were going to go on a field trip, just as he had requested. He pulled himself out of his seat, and he led the way.

***

They had to drive, to get to where Davey wanted to go. He made sure to turn off the stereo, before the CD of his band’s practice could start playing. But he hadn’t thought, ahead of time, about what it would feel like to have an Angel of the Lord in the passenger seat of his Subaru Forester.

Aziraphale really liked the seatbelts.

***

Davey parked so they were catty corner to what he actually cared about.

This was the sort of semi-industrial intersection that never got paid any mind. They could likely stay parked here all day, and no one would notice or care. Maybe not even the man they had come to see, whose screaming they could hear even with the windows rolled up.

He was dirty. Just so incredibly dirty. His hair was matted to his scalp. His feet, visible through his worn shoes, were caked with all things unhealthy. His posture was unsteady. He jerked and twitched. His face, broken in many different ways, was contorted. He was enraged. He was raging, deeply and loudly, screaming profanities and insults and curses, running ragged his own vocal chords, indiscriminately.

Davey had brought them here so they could gawk at him, this human soul suffering to the point of his own annihilation. Add that to Davey’s list of sins.

“I’ve been wracking my brain,” Davey said, “trying to figure out if I should ask you to heal this fellow.”

Aziraphale was smart. He knew well enough to hear what Davey wasn’t saying. Davey had made no request of him.

“He’s sick.” Davey continued when he thought he knew how. “We can both see that. I mean, I’ve also been thinking about the Gadarene Demoniac—with the pigs, you know—I don’t know. But I see this fellow, and I know he’s sick.”

“Yes. He is.”

It was harder than Davey had expected, hearing an Angel of the Lord’s voice go so soft from sympathy. There was a release, of sorts, that came from knowing Aziraphale was offering him the grace to give voice to his thoughts, but release wasn’t what he was searching for. Davey felt raw in all the places where he wanted achingly to be at peace.

“And, it’s wrong. Just wrong,” Davey said, “to ask a favor like that, from you. I can’t wrap my head around it, what it must feel like, and I’m sorry, I really am, but here we are. I’ve brought us here. Because of him. But I also think—well, what if I did ask? And you did it? What then? He’s still out here. He’s still hungry and cold. These conditions, themselves—being unhoused, you know—that’s enough to bring on psychosis. It can be. What he needs is—more. So much more. He needs housing, first and foremost. And then there’s also—how many others are there? This is just one person, and you must--”

He was rambling. He was unsorted. His eyes were stinging.

He couldn’t sum it all up to a clear point, and he had to accept that’s how it was going to be. “I guess, I wish I knew what would be the right thing to do.”

Aziraphale watched the man, through the window. And then he said, “There must be authorities who can help.”

There were, yes. Davey knew all about them.

“I could call the police,” he said. “And that could end with him shot and killed, you know. If not that, he might attack them—and why wouldn’t he? He’d be scared—and if that happened, he’d end up arrested and in jail. Naw. If he’s real lucky, he’d end up hospitalized. I don’t know if you know anything about that, but a 72-hour hold in a psych unit ain’t a kindness. Especially not when you end up right back on the street afterwards. The way that he would.”

“I see.”

It was relieving, how Aziraphale invited quietude.

“Who knows, though.” Davey certainly didn’t. “Maybe it’d actually work out. Maybe. But you can’t know, can you? And who’m I to decide for him what risks are acceptable? It’s not my life I’d be gambling with, now, is it?”

They both watched, as the sick man screamed at a passing car.

“You’re a very kind man, Dr. Hampson,” Aziraphale said, at length. He was apologetic. “However, I am afraid your perspective is a bit narrow.”

When an angel speaks, you listen.

“That man is ill, just as you say, but the nature of his affliction is significant. You see, in this state, he cannot be held accountable for his actions. His soul remains untarnished, no matter what he might do. And so, as long as he stays as he is, he is firmly secured for Heaven’s side. Were he to be healed, on the other hand, his capacity for choice would be restored, and thus he might stray. So, you see? From a, shall we say, more cosmic perspective, healing him would be, at best, a waste of a miracle for a triviality. At worst, it would be counterproductive.”

What a cool, easy logic. It was like a brick.

“You’re telling me his suffering doesn’t matter?”

“No, Dr. Hampson, that is not what I’m telling you.”

Because, Davey almost forgot: when this angel spoke, you listened to what he didn’t say.

“I’m sorry, Aziraphale.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be.” Aziraphale turned and gave him a smile, small and forgiving. Then he turned his attention back, out the window. “It is a shame, isn’t it? That there is not a single bit that you could do, to help him.”

No, that wasn’t true. Davey would turn into acid, if he didn’t acknowledge it: no matter how great the need, no matter how dire the circ*mstances, there was always something that could be done to help. Maybe not heal, but always, at least, to help.

He felt awkward. He couldn’t not. “Erm… Give me a minute.”

Aziraphale was patient. He was content, to wait in the car, while Davey got out.

Davey had twenty-four dollars in his wallet today. He had granola bars and bottled water stored behind the driver’s seat. It was meager, almost embarrassing, but it was what Davey had to give. Once the man saw Davey approaching, he looked confused, but he also calmed. It always made a difference, to a person, to be treated as such. If anything mattered, maybe, then that did.

Aziraphale watched. Davey tried not to pay attention to that.

Once Davey was back, putting on his seatbelt again, Aziraphale looked at him. He spoke, so full of satisfaction and pride. “That was a very good thing you just did.”

Davey couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

***

Aziraphale watched the world go by, as Davey drove.

“I like getting to heal people,” Aziraphale said. “I wish I could, more often.”

“You can’t?”

Aziraphale sighed. They drove in silence for a while.

“Quite a bit is precarious, you know,” Aziraphale said.

No, Davey didn’t know.

“If only…” Aziraphale started, but then he didn’t finish the thought. “Well. Best not dwell on what cannot be changed.”

Davey risked a glance over, before he returned his attention to the road.

“And let’s not forget all those poor pigs, drowning like that,” Aziraphale said, transported sadly. “Such a terrible waste that was.”

***

Davey parked, and he turned off the engine. He was ready to get out, but he felt first he had to say something. He was guilty, dragging Aziraphale around like this. He was about to apologize, but he didn’t get the chance.

“Well, hats off to you, Dr. Hampson!” Aziraphale’s eyes gleamed, bright and contented. “That was quite the rousing demonstration of human love, and I thank you for it!”

Well. That wasn’t expected.

Davey put on a smile, though he struggled to respond.

Chapter 10: Down to Georgia

Chapter Text

It shouldn’t have mattered, that Davey and Aziraphale were a bit late getting back from their field trip. Davey intentionally kept his schedule light, and he liked knowing that, occasionally, a session could go a bit long. Flexibility is a good thing.

So, it didn’t seem like an issue to Davey that it was already 11:53 when he turned off the Forester, or that it was 11:55 by the time the two of them got back inside the building. His plan had been to spend a couple of minutes wrapping things up, once they were in his office. But then it became very clear very quickly that this wasn’t going to happen.

There was a demon leaning against the door to Davey’s office.

“Where have you been?” Sunglasses demanded of Aziraphale.

“We were on a field trip,” Aziraphale said brightly. He walked straight on up to him, like it was no big deal. Davey held back.

“A field trip?” Could a demon speak without it coming out as a snarl? “Therapy doesn’t have field trips.”

“Perhaps not yours, but mine does.”

Davey really wanted Sunglasses not to be physically touching his office door.

There were a couple of chairs, in the hallway, right across from his office. The demon could have sat in any of them, as he was lying in wait, but he didn’t. He would have been sitting in one of those chairs, it was only reasonable to think, if he believed Davey and Aziraphale had been in Davey’s office. No one, not even a demon, would actually lean against the very door to the room that he thought his friend was currently in. You’d be leaning against the door like that—only—if you knew the room on the other side of it was empty.

How had he known?

The demon shifted, finally, away from the door, but only so he could loom more thoroughly over Aziraphale. “Where’d you go?”

“That, I should say, is between Dr. Hampson and me.” Aziraphale made a point of turning an officious, conspiratorial smile over to Davey, and Sunglasses did not like that.

He said, “You didn’t get lunch, did you?”

“Of course not!” Aziraphale huffed. “I can’t believe you’re jealous.”

“Jealous?” The demon was all mockery, all sputtering cruelty, and Davey didn’t want any part of this. “Jealous? I’m not—”

Aziraphale patted his hand against the demon’s shoulder. “I am sure, if you would like to go on a field trip of your own, Miss Thyme would be happy to oblige.”

Sunglasses really didn’t seem to like being touched, seeing how he turned thoroughly all his attention to the gesture. He glared at Aziraphale’s hand until it was removed. And then he turned that hidden glare, and he settled it on Davey.

He was hard-edged and bitter, and he wanted Davey to be frightened of him. Well, good for him. He got what he wanted.

“Come on,” Sunglasses said, very certainly not to Davey. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t move, though. He wanted to leave, but he wasn’t leaving. Not while Aziraphale was still standing in place. He stalked just behind Aziraphale, as if it were not an Angel of the Lord he was trying to intimidate but a sheep to be herded.

Aziraphale paid no mind. He, too, turned his attention to Davey, but he smiled. It was vertiginous, just how pleasant he could be even while that boiled-over sneering face was so close beside him. “It was a lovely field trip, Dr. Hampson.”

The demon rolled his eyes, or maybe he did something even worse, behind those sunglasses of his.

“Til next week,” Aziraphale said, a farewell. And then, finally, they left.

***

It wasn’t fair. It was not fair.

The hallway was quiet, now that the two of them were gone. Davey was alone, and he had to force his breath to move the way it should. His tongue hurt; he was biting it. He had to stop that.

He wasn’t safe. He wanted to feel safe. If a demon could tell when his office was empty, could anywhere actually be safe?

His keys were in his pocket. He pulled at them, but his fingers were fumbly. He was shaky. His hands were shaking. He had to concentrate to get the right key. He had to get it separated from the others, so he could fit it in the lock. His eyes kept wincing closed, and that didn’t help. His heartbeat shouldn’t be so loud. He didn’t like this.

It wasn’t this hard, just getting a door unlocked. This wasn’t right.

But he got it, and the lock turned, and the door unlatched, and— no, oh no.

Davey had touched the door handle. He felt the metal of it, on his fingertips, before he could think better, before he could recoil and stop himself. And the feeling lingered.

The demon had touched this door, and now Davey had touched this door, and what was evil if not a contagion?

It really wasn’t fair at all. As Davey wavered there, in the hallway, watching as the door drifted slowly open, revealing to him all the safety and comfort of his office, he couldn’t stop thinking about how unfair it was.

The demon had been in his office before. He knew this. He didn’t like it, but he knew it was true. He remembered it. And never had that knowledge left him feeling as unsafe as he felt right now. Never had that memory left his private space so contaminated, turned his office so viscerally enforeigned as it was right now.

It wasn’t reasonable. It wasn’t reasoned. But it’s where Davey found himself, unmoving. And it certainly wasn’t fair.

If I go inside, I will have a panic attack.

There was no reason why that would be true. He’d never had a panic attack in his office before, and it didn’t fit his regular pattern. His office was his safe, cozy, loving, private space. The idea of succumbing to panic in there was ridiculous, it really was. But it was a risk. If he walked through the doorway, if he did in fact feel panic while in his office, would he ever be able to return to it again? Or would it, through his misery, be defiled and debased and thus forever lost?

Davey was playing with self-fulfilling prophesies. He knew it. He couldn’t help it. The certainty was irrational and thereby powerful. He could not pass through that threshold.

Where else could he go?

His feet started him moving. No: he was walking. The derealization of active choice was a mirage. He could make himself know that.

He stopped outside Aubrey’s door.

Outside his office were just the chairs in the hallway, but her office was off of an enclave, a veritable waiting area. There was a coffee table and magazines. Occasionally, when he met with someone for the first time, they thought they were supposed to wait here, and Davey would have to come to collect them. It wasn’t that far.

Her door was closed.

Had Sunglasses knocked at Davey’s door? Within the mere five minutes after the session’s official end time, had he gone up to it and knocked? Had he kept knocking until satisfied there would be no answer? Or had he just known?

You don’t go knocking on a therapist’s closed door. In emergencies, sure—if the building is on fire, if someone is dying. But you don’t, otherwise. Davey obviously didn’t.

***

He was sitting in the little kitchen, at the table. He’d walked from outside Aubrey’s door to here. He was here now. Time was passing, but unsteadily. He wanted to go home. And, technically, he could: he had no appointments in the afternoon. His schedule was free.

Why didn’t he just go?

Because, if he was going to go home, he would have to walk past his office again. And that would mean confronting the open door. And that would mean either just walking on past, without closing it—which would be capitulation, which would be unreasonable and a very worrying development—or he would have to reach out, and touch it, and be touched by it, and that would be—

It wouldn’t be anything. It would be fine. He wasn’t stupid. Evil couldn’t really be contagion, because, if it were, that would mean—

“Hey, your door’s wide open.”

Davey startled, jumped. He caught himself, just barely, and then he registered it was Aubrey. She was leaning her head in, from the hallway, and she hadn’t meant to take him by surprise like that.

“Scared the life out of me,” Davey said, putting a hand to his chest. Then he laughed, the way you do when someone has tripped your startle response.

Aubrey winced, showed she felt bad about it. “Your office. Door’s open.”

“Oh, is it?” What a surprise.

“Figured you’d want to know.”

“Thanks.”

If he didn’t say anything more, she’d leave. That would be for the best. He wanted to be alone right now.

“Hey, Aubrey—”

Davey was struggling with being well-constituted person at the moment.

She waited for him to finish what he was saying, but there wasn’t anything more coming. When she realized it, something shifted in her. He could see the moment she decided to come over and sit with him at the table. It was such an intentional thing, how she softened, just enough. She wanted him to see that she was available to listen.

She was the age of his baby girl, and here she sat, exuding a therapeutic stance.

He didn’t need that from her. He didn’t want it.

“What’s up?” she said.

He might as well take a stab at coherency, given how it was his own fault that she was in here working compassionately at him. He wet his lips, and then he tried, “How are you not affected?”

Her first impulse was to say, by what? He could see it. But that would be patronizing, and so she pursued a different path. “Did something happen?”

He shook his head.

“You sure?”

“What I mean is…” He tried again. “How do you make sure you’re safe?”

“Safe from what?”

He had to really look straight at her to tell if she was joking. She wasn’t. “You spend an hour, every week, sitting across from a—”

“Hypothetically.”

His jaw tightened at the correction. But it was fine. It was okay. He had to recenter his mind, but he would manage. “Fine. Hypothetically. If you were to find yourself, once a week, sitting across from an actual demon. In your office. Under those hypothetical circ*mstances, Aubrey, how would you make sure you were safe?"

“Safe from what?”

“From the demon!”

He hadn’t meant to say it that loud. He felt bad, and he turned to look away from her, and he hoped no one was out in the hallway. He worried at his lip with his teeth. It didn’t seem possible she could be this naïve.

Aubrey shifted. She folded her hands together and rested them on the table between them—he could see it out of the corner of his eye. That shift brought her closer to his side, which is the sort of physical move you make when you’re inviting intimacy. He’d been doing this stuff since before she was born. When she spoke next, her voice was low with care. “Aziraphale didn’t do something to scare you, did he?”

“Why—He—No.” There was a miscommunication something awful going on between them, and Davey had had his fill of feeling crazy. “I guess I’m just tired, s’all.”

Well done her: she didn’t buy it. Too bad.

This was stupid. He was being just so stupid, having wasted so much of his day already on weak-willed irrationality.

“Welp.” He hoisted himself up to standing. He would have given her his big smile, but that would require him to look her in the face, and then he’d feel exposed. So he just smiled enough to make sure she could hear it in his voice. “See ya around.”

She didn’t call out after him, try to stop him. She was perceptive.

***

It was just a door, and he just had to close it.

There. Done. No big deal. Everything was fine. He could go home now.

***

He only made the connection once it was the middle of the night.

Aziraphale hadn’t healed the unhoused man, because the miracle wouldn’t serve to save his soul. Healings, apparently, were for people whose souls could be saved. And who was it that Aziraphale had healed?

Davey was awake the whole rest of the night with the potential implications.

***

“Aubrey.”

It was co*ke Zero Time, but Davey didn’t bother pulling a can from the fridge. Instead, he went straight over to sit across from her. He leaned his arms on the table, felt the surface of it under his palms.

“Hey,” she said. “I was worried about you.”

That was sweet, and also unnecessary. He turned to what mattered. “What if they’re playing us?”

Sometimes, when Aubrey didn’t understand something, she would just sit unresponsive until clarification was provided. At least she lifted up an eyebrow.

He explained. “They set themselves up with two humans. Two souls. How do you—how do we know, they’re not doing it on purpose? Competing or something. That’s what they do.”

“Is it?” Aubrey played the fool.

“It’s not ridiculous, Aubrey. Come on.” He shifted in his chair, and it creaked plasticly underneath him. “Why wouldn’t a demon be trying to secure your soul for hell?”

Her face twitched, like she was fighting against a smirk. “Why would he?”

There was no way she was actually this obtuse. He tapped his fingers against the tabletop, and he shook his head. “Don’t tell me you buy that ‘retirement’ business.”

“I’m just saying…” No, she was playing around. She wasn’t taking this anywhere near as seriously as she ought. “Maybe it’s the other way around. I mean, hypothetically. Maybe there’s a demon trying to win my soul for heaven…”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“Maybe your guy’s the one angling for hell. I mean, who knows?”

She was being irreverent, acting like none of this was real. It was whistling past a graveyard, but actually so much worse: she was whistling past her own pre-dug grave. Davey felt such a massive crash of something—frustration, anguish, loneliness of a sort, all at once. He was stabilized only by the urgency of his concern that he was so fervently—yet ineffectively—trying to get her to acknowledge.

She noticed. Or, at least, there was something about his countenance that she noticed. Finally, she sobered, but so clearly only for his benefit. She was hesitant. She said, low, “You know about the Book of Job, right?”

Davey didn’t spend three years as the only Gentile at the Eisen-Cantor Day School just to have his knowledge of the Book of Job questioned some fifty years later. She was right to bring it up. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

She frowned. “Is it?”

“Aubrey…” How could he get her to understand? “What I’m trying to say is, I’m worried you’re in danger.”

She acknowledged what he said, and yet somehow she responded by shifting her face into a gentle smile. “I get it, but it’s okay. You don’t have to worry.”

“You work with a demon.”

“Hypothetically.”

“Oh, drop it, Aubrey, HIPAA doesn’t matter more than your immortal soul.”

There was something she started to say, but then she stopped herself. She put the work into reinforcing that gentle smile of hers but also adding to it: she presented herself as concerned. After breathing out through her nose, she spoke at a steady, slow pace. “It was hard for me, too. At first. It just took some time.”

She was trying to turn this around, make it about him, deflect from herself. It was obstinacy, or it was misdirection. Or it could be something else. Could demons enthrall?

“I get it, Aubrey.” He was concerned for her, and he tried to make sure she knew it. “You’ve… You really care. You’re a kind person. It’s really important to you that you get to help people.”

She tilted her head. There was a stillness growing to her expression. “I thought the same was true about you.”

“It is,” he said, even while grappling with her strange use of past tense, there. He wouldn’t get caught up on it, though, wasn’t going to chew at it enough to find the sting in it. “But that’s why we gotta be extra careful, isn’t it?”

“What do you need, Dave?”

Her needed her to listen. “Don’t you see? He’s a demon, he would know how to manipulate you. How to use, you know, all you own goodness against you.”

“Is that how you feel about your clients? Always on the look out for how they’re manipulating you?” She scoffed, purposefully. “Hope you don’t work with too many substance use issues.”

Davey would have guessed she had a strong protective streak, but he’d never seen it activated before. This was some exceptional deflection she had on offer, but he was going to let her attempts to rile him up slide on by. “All I’m saying is, there’s a reason why sympathy for the devil ain’t a good thing.”

Her posture had grown so very tense. It was upsetting to her that he wouldn’t drop the subject. He saw it with such horrible clarity: a demon would find such easy prey in someone like her, someone who cared yet had limited experience with being cared for.

“This is our job,” she said. “It’s my profession–”

"So quit!"

Aubrey Thyme did not appreciate him talking to her like that. She reacted sorely. Her head pulled backwards, her lip curled, and she looked at him with disgust. But he could tolerate it; he would.

She said, “You’re not doing okay, Dave.”

He wasn’t going to deny it. He was an old fool who had been healed by an angel, and he was sitting across from a young lady who was risking everything without acknowledging the possible cost. “You’re not safe, Aubrey.”

She heard him, but she wasn’t listening. Her nostrils were flared, and her mouth set in a grimace. And then her expression cleared, as though she had just settled on a decision. She said, so purposefully kindly, “You need some rest. Just go home. Take some time off—”

He was shaking his head, and he cut her off. “This isn’t about me. Aubrey—”

“I can take care of myself, thanks.” She stood up from the table.

No, she couldn’t. She was small and helpless—just a human. She was playing with fire—with actual hellfire—and she was too young or too obstinate or too something to recognize it. And Davey would be damned if he let a child like her destroy herself so recklessly, so needlessly. Wits come to ends.

“It’s like you want to go to hell!”

Davey regretted saying it.

Her eyes went so cold so fast, he flinched from the thought she was about to spit.

“What I want,” she said, finally, “is not to be in this conversation anymore.”

He’d made a mistake. He had hurt her. He winced, feeling the shame and guilt of it, as she turned away, as she started to leave. He pulled himself up to standing, his foot catching on the chair’s leg and causing it to clatter, as he tried to make amends. “Aubrey, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—I’m not saying– You are not a bad person, Aubrey. You're not.”

She stopped. She paused, her back to him, halfway to the doorway, but then she turned. Her face was hardened. “You don’t know me.”

“I know—”

“No.” She cut him off. She stood her ground. “We’re not friends. And, you know what, Dave? If you actually thought about it, you’d realize you don’t even like me.”

That was a cruel thing to say. “Of course I do.”

She laughed, once, spiteful. “You know nothing about me—and, actually? That’s intentional.”

She was trying, actively, to hurt him. He could see it, even if he couldn’t understand it. She was using all the venom she had, striking where she thought it’d do the most damage, but so far she’d missed. She wasn’t frustrated by it, though, because she knew how to be patient. She knew, sooner or later, she’d aim her strike true.

She knew it. With a satisfaction, she said, “So stop projecting.”

And then she walked out.

Chapter 11: Lioness On

Chapter Text

Nowhere in The American Psychological Association’s Code of Ethics can you find a rule saying don’t give unwanted interpretations of your colleagues. Go and take any professional ethics class, and there won’t be a single lesson or textbook chapter about why you shouldn’t do so. The reason’s simple: it’s just so obvious a faux pas it doesn’t need to be covered.

So stop projecting.

How unspeakably rude you’d have to be, to say something like that to another mental health practitioner. What gall. What audacity.

So stop projecting.

You keep that sort of commentary to yourself, that’s what you do.

So stop projecting.

Worst part is, she didn’t even have the decency to say something that wasn’t true.

***

A bit of advice: If you’re the sort of person who grows out your facial hair, there will come a day when you look in a mirror and have the bright idea, I should shave it all off. Don’t do it; that’s the devil talking.

Instead, what you should do is hold off on the impulse and really think about it. There’s a good chance there’s something else in your life you’re desperate to change, and you just don’t know what it is yet. That’s what you have to figure out. The sight of your naked, tender chin won’t do anything to help.

So, no, Davey didn’t reach for his razor. He did something else instead.

***

Aziraphale wasn’t sure what to do when he arrived and found Davey’s door open. He stood in the doorway. He shifted to look at the chairs in the hallway, and he adjudicated between his options for how to manage himself.

“Hey! Come on in.” Davey was sitting at his computer.

“Is everything alright?” Aziraphale didn’t enter.

“Sure is.” Davey smiled. If his door had been closed like it usually was, then he probably would’ve waited a few more minutes before he went out to collect Aziraphale. It wasn’t a problem, though; he was ready. He stood up from his desk and beckoned.

If your door is closed, then you might open it to find that a demon is on the other side. But if it’s open, then that can’t happen. That’s some pretty irrefutable logic.

“Just go ahead and close the door behind you, if you don’t mind,” Davey added as he moved over to his regular chair. It might seem like having the door closed while meeting with someone would be equally worrisome, vis-à-vis demons, but it wasn’t. That logic fell pretty far from irrefutable, so Davey was careful not to focus too closely on it. He couldn’t exactly do his job, if he couldn’t feel comfortable with his door closed while he worked.

Once they were both seated, Davey ran the ball of his palm against his chair’s armrest. He accepted he had hard work to do today.

“Before we get started,” Davey said, “I wanted to check in with you about how things ended last time.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale was unconcerned.

“Your friend,” Davey said as a reminder. “He seemed pretty angry.”

Aziraphale didn’t reject Davey’s perspective, but he didn’t share it. “Did he?”

“Well…” All Davey had was his own point of view. “Seemed that way to me.”

Aziraphale allowed the point. “He does keep up appearances.”

Davey nodded, because he was listening, and then he went on. “I gotta be honest with you. He frightened me.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale considered, and Davey paid very close attention to how he did so. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Of course, as always, you had to listen for what Aziraphale didn’t say. And right now, Davey was straining to hear.

***

If you wanted to understand Dr. David Hampson, Ph.D.—and really understand him, the way he was committed to understanding himself, the way he truly was down below what he often wanted people see—then you needed to know that he was a man of faith. And that meant you needed to know about Meghan.

Meghan had always been very insistent about the spelling of her name. The ‘H’ mattered for her, although she never explained why. Davey made sure he would always remember it, no matter how much time had passed.

He’d been 29 when he met her, with so newly minted a Ph.D. that the ink on the diploma hadn’t yet dried. She’d been 17. It hadn’t been her decision to seek out a psychologist; she ended up in his office because her parents forced the issue.

Meghan was amazing. She was bright and energetic. Her biggest passion had to be saurology, or the study of lizards. She rejected the term herpetology, preferring instead saurology, in part because she liked to imagine it was a reference to Lord of the Rings. But, honestly, that was just her sense of humor. What she really liked were the actual lizards themselves, as the living breathing creatures they were. She had some bearded dragons, but she found new homes for them once she realized she might not be able to take care of them for much longer. In a perfect world, she knew, she’d go into zoology and become a zookeeper. She also had a real knack for computers—she’d built two of them, by herself, and this was back at a time when home computers were a rarity—and she figured that a career in technology could be more lucrative. By the first time Davey met her, she’d already been accepted to SUNY Oswego and Stony Brook College, and she had high hopes for Cornell. She had everything in the world to look forward to.

She didn’t have many friends, though. She got picked on in school. Also, her parents wanted her dead.

That’s not how they thought about it, oh no. They thought they were exceptional parents, because they had brought her to a psychologist rather than just kick her out on the street. Their problem was, they didn’t believe they had a daughter. They thought they had a son, and they hired Davey to bring him into existence the way they expected him to be.

Davey—Lord forgive him—had agreed to help.

***

He offered Aziraphale an invitation: “Your friend doesn’t scare you?”

“Oh, of course he does, constantly,” Aziraphale said, straightforward, transported immediately in his thoughts to somewhere else. But then he caught Davey’s eye, and he shook his head with a kind smile. “But no, not like that.”

The invitation, redoubled: “Never?”

That kind smile, redoubled: “He won’t hurt you, Dr. Hampson. I promise.”

Davey shifted forward, leaned in close. “Would he ever hurt you, Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale laughed—a light, easy sound. His smile widened, became something private. And, if such a thing could be imagined, he got a little color in his cheeks. “Oh, no, certainly not.”

If there was anything at all Aziraphale wasn’t saying, Davey was poised to the limits of his ability to hear it. And the funny thing was, he was as certain as he could be about something like this: there wasn’t anything he could hear that Aziraphale hadn’t said. In fact, as Davey inspected this moment, he could acknowledge just how incredibly free from subtext it felt.

Davey was going to have to chew on that.

***

There were excuses he could offer for how he had originally approached working with Meghan. She was the first transgender person he’d ever met—or, more accurately, that he knew he’d met. He’d been taught in school about the psychosexual disorder referred to as transsexualism in the DSM-III, and that education had been at best perfunctory and at worst deeply offensive. When he met Meghan, the Q-word was a horrible slur, not a field of academic study. The internet wasn’t around back then, either, so he couldn’t just run a quick Google search and get a real education. But those were just excuses, and Davey had little interest in them. Davey wouldn’t know how to be himself, if he couldn’t look straight in the eye at his own moral failings.

Because fail Meghan he did. At first. He put her in the grotesque position of having to convince her own therapist that she deserved to exist. No one should have to go through that, especially not when her own parents have already rejected her. The only reason Davey was able to learn from her was because she was forced to teach.

Lord forgive him.

***

Davey leaned back in his seat. He nodded. “I guess it’s just something new for me. The idea of an angel being friends with a demon.”

“I’m not friends with a demon,” Aziraphale said, smile dropping, back straightening. “I’m friends with Crowley. Who is a demon.”

Crowley. That was the demon’s name. Davey was probably going to forget again, but he would try not to.

“You’re drawing a distinction,” Davey noted.

“I certainly am.”

“Can you explain it to me?”

“Hm.” Aziraphale thought.

Now it felt like there was something Aziraphale wasn’t saying. But Davey didn’t know what.

***

All that saved Davey from doing a truly grave wrong to Meghan was that he could learn. By the grace of God, he was able to take in the truth of her, of the amazing young woman she truly was. He unraveled at the seams of his prejudices and let himself be stitched back together into a better person, a better therapist, a more whole being. He started fighting inwards against his own transphobia and hom*ophobia, his internalized biphobia. He taught himself how to recognize his implicit biases and fight against them—and this was before the language of ‘implicit bias’ was available to help with the process. He leaned into it, much as he could. He couldn’t say whether he made himself into the psychologist that Meghan truly deserved, but he tried.

Respecting Meghan as she was, as Meghan-always-with-an-H, as a teenage girl with a bright future, took more than being an affirming therapist. It took learning how to live with the differences between what’s right, what’s good, and what’s allowed. He had to keep session notes that said what they needed to say, for when the lawyers came demanding to see his records. He had to reassure two worried, loving parents about the progress with their ‘son,’ even when there were curses to their names lodged in his throat. He learned the power of a good chuckle and the work that an easy-going song in the back of his mind could do to keep his smile where he needed it. He learned why boundaries sometimes had to bend beyond what any codified professional ethics could tolerate. He kept a dress and some jewelry at his office for Meghan, completely eschewing the question of parental consent. He gave a minor his home phone number and the reassurance that, if she needed it, she had access to a safe place to stay.

In working with Meghan, Davey learned how to be himself in such a way that, years later, when he discovered that multicultural counseling rejects the model of the psychologist as a scientist-practitioner in favor of the scientist-practitioner-advocate, he felt at home with a psychotherapeutic theory as he never had before.

He learned what it meant, to do good work.

***

“You know…” Aziraphale was reaching for an explanation, although he wasn’t sure he’d found it. “He is a traitor to Hell.”

“Right.” Amazing what you could let make sense to you, if you just put in the effort to go along with it. A duck could swim in vodka well enough as water. Actually, that probably wasn’t true, but then again neither was the aphorism about a frog in a pot brought to boil. Davey was doing his best. “The whole—the Antichrist thing.”

“Exactly.” Aziraphale looked relieved, quickly, but it didn’t last. “And… Well. There’s plenty else, beyond that.”

That was the sort of thing someone would say when they’re about to launch into a much longer explanation, and so Davey waited.

The longer explanation, however, didn’t come.

“It is quite hard,” Aziraphale said, like an apology. He was distant, his thoughts somewhere with thorns. “I am always so worried.”

“Worried…” Davey repeated it, slowly. “About…”

“Repercussions.”

That word had been too heavy to hold in, yet Aziraphale sagged from the weight of letting it out. The room became a darker space, with this leaden word loose within it. Sometimes, we have to welcome in that which brings with it shadows.

Davey, despite so often being wrong, thought perhaps his timing might be right just this once. He offered: “You’re scared.”

“Oh yes.” Aziraphale was relieved to hear it said, to be freed from the superficial gloss of being worried so that he could acknowledge the depths beneath it, the reason why repercussions was so heavy a word. He was scared. He glanced to the door, then to Davey, then downwards towards the floor. He bit his lip, before he continued. “They tried to destroy him. They would have, in fact, except that… Well, they didn't.”

Aziraphale’s brow was stitched up high. He brought his eyes back up to catch Davey’s gaze. Davey understood the look he saw in them.

“If they knew even a quarter of it… How good he is… How much he has…”

Aziraphale’s sentences kept dropping unfinished. He shook his head. He was trying to dispel from his imagination something unpleasant.

Davey, in order to sum up, to push himself, to make himself understand it, said it plainly, “You're worried for his safety.”

Aziraphale nodded. It was a vociferous movement: slight but forceful, repeated with emphasis.

“And…” Davey continued to go slow. He noticed his eyes had narrowed, from his thinking, and he let them stay that way. “Even after all that. With the Antichrist. And being, uh, good… You don’t think Heaven might be willing to protect him from Hell’s wrath?”

A sharp bark of a laugh, but Aziraphale was no angel of mirth.

“Dr. Hampson,” he said, and now his eyes could stay straightly level. Now, it wasn’t fear that he felt, but something that went even deeper than that, something that could only be found in the pits of absolute certainty. “If Heaven had their way, I would be dead right along beside him.”

Davey heard that. He pushed himself to understand it, truly. Fully. He pushed himself to feel what Aziraphale felt. And he took in what came with Aziraphale’s certainty, that straight-leveled feeling deeper than fear, and he let it wash over him like water raining down.

***

Meghan ran away from home three days after her 18th birthday.

That’s not what she and Davey had planned out for her. Her plan had been to tell her parents she was ‘healed’ and stay closeted while they paid for her college. She wanted that degree; she wanted the future it would allow for her in zoology. So, it was a surprise to Davey when she just up and disappeared like that. He figured she had her reasons.

Her parents were outraged. They did everything in their power to ruin Davey, blaming him for her disappearance. But, well: all of Davey’s records said exactly what they needed to say. There was no way to prove he hadn’t done exactly what he was supposed to, down to all the crossed T’s and dotted I’s. Despite their best efforts, he was in good professional standing when the next transgender kid found their way to his office.

So, really: Meghan’s parents could go f*ck themselves.

Yes, indeed.

And, also, while Davey was on it: f*ck the police.

Davey could be a man of strong convictions.

***

“Is that what it means—being a retired angel?” Davey asked.

“I suppose so. Yes.”

Davey gave Aziraphale the chance to feel the hollowed-out sorrow that came with his words.

“I’m sorry, Aziraphale.”

“Hm.”

“You’re really hurting.”

“Perhaps.”

As always, there was a limit on how long Aziraphale could acknowledge the things that hurt. He put the work into providing a smile.

Davey didn’t return it. He was going to stay here, where things hurt, for a bit longer. He thought, that might be in Aziraphale’s best interest, to see that it could be done.

“Your friend. Crowley. Do you think he’s as worried about being, uh, retired as you are?”

Aziraphale’s smile soured, as well it should. It took on frustrated edges. “He’s reckless.”

“Reckless, huh.”

“If I—If he. If I didn’t—” Aziraphale’s frustration turned itself into agitation. He gestured, in correspondence with his cut-off non-statements, although they did nothing to help clarify his point. He let out a huff, and he shook his head to a point of finality. “Reckless.”

Davey was piecing together what bits he had, trying to fit together a picture. It was especially hard, given how he had refused until now to see it any way but upside down. But he was trying.

“Do ya think…” Davey could have raised this question in less of a half-glanced, half-hesitant way, but he thought this might be how Aziraphale would be most comfortable hearing it. “Does he, maybe, feel the same way about you… That you feel about him?”

Not half-glanced, not half-hesitant, but very clear. “He would never say it.”

“No?”

“Never.”

“But you think he does, all the same?”

Aziraphale gave a look, which was enough for Davey to call the matter resolved.

“I see,” Davey said. He tried to imagine the mental gymnastics he’d have to go through, to understand that a demon could feel something like love. He couldn’t do it at the moment, just as he couldn’t quite bring himself to imagine how Heaven could want an angel dead, but he didn’t have to. All he had to do was trust Aziraphale. Trust that his word was true. Trust that his truth was in fact his. “And this is—I’m just making a guess—this is why you’re here. The goal that brought you here, I mean. Because it’s dangerous?”

Aziraphale gave a different look, like an inversion of the previous one, equally resolute. He sighed. “I want what I cannot have.”

Davey thought about that. He thought about the hopelessness in Aziraphale’s words. About how he looked and sounded. About all the very many previous times Davey had sat across from someone who looked and sounded hopeless in just that same way.

What Davey had to do was trust Aziraphale, to take in what he said and what he felt, and fit it together within his mind into a full universe that made sense. But he had to do more than that, too. He had to take that trust, and he had to build it up into something more. He had to reflect it back as something stronger, as something with depth, something that could always be leveled against a pit of hopeless certainty. Call it conviction. Better yet, call it faith.

“No,” Davey said.

Aziraphale’s eyes flashed with confusion, which Davey expected. People as clever as Aziraphale could be trusted to pay close attention when confronted with something confusing.

Davey made his point. “You want what it’s not safe to have. That’s not the same thing as what you cannot have.”

It was hard for Aziraphale to trust that there was a difference. He was skeptical, because trust requires evidence and proof to be maintained, and none of his life experiences had left him with any of that, not for something like this. That’s why Davey had on offer something different, something that could do what trust couldn’t.

He leaned forward as much as he could, held himself with his hands on his knees, because that’s what you do to increase intimacy, because he wanted Aziraphale to know that he was right here with him. “I can’t make the world safer for you. We don’t have that power, here in this room. But what we can do is figure out what it means for you, to want something that’s not safe to have. Ya hear?”

It was a hard thing for the poor fellow to hear, truly.

“You've got choice, Aziraphale.” Davey lifted one hand so he could point at Aziraphale as if pointing towards the truth. “You get to choose. That’s what it means—” to be human, Davey didn’t say— “to be here on Earth. Your options might not be the best, and they’re not the options I’d want for you, I can tell you that. But they are yours.”

Aziraphale smiled, weakly, accepting the point. He didn’t accept it because he believed it, but because it was what he felt he was expected to do.

That was okay. It could come. Faith is as much a habit as it is belief.

***

Davey liked to imagine that Meghan had run away because she found a job at a computer repair shop. She could have then used that to springboard into a career in computers. It was easy to get into technology back then without any sort of degree to your name. She would be in her fifties now, and maybe she was looking at an early retirement. She could be living in a nice house on the edges of silicon valley, with a whole room dedicated to terrariums. It was entirely possible.

He lived with the memory of her, plenty of unanswered questions, and all his hopes for her that he would never relinquish. He lived in his faith for her potential to thrive.

For his own part, he hoped that his time working with Meghan proved something about him. Namely: give Davey a chance, and he’d muck it right up. He’d fail, and hard, no doubt about it. That’s who he was. But give him a second chance and, with God as his witness, he’d get it right. He would, or he’d accept a place in the depths of Hell as his rightful reward.

If you wanted to understand Dr. Davey Hampson, Ph.D., then this is what you had to know. You had to know what he thought it meant, to have a path to redemption. You had to know what he thought it took, to live up to his better angels. You had to know that Davey was a warrior of second chances.

***

“The world’s not fair, Aziraphale, and there’s plenty out there that can hurt us.”

Davey let out a breath. He shook his head. He grinned, and he felt good about it.

“But, even so, there’s always a way for you to be you,” he said.

Aziraphale didn’t know how to feel about that. He could feel, though, what it was like to share in that grin, to test it out, to take in a moment of shared conviction, of true faith, in the potential for a future of his own making.

Chapter 12: Your House

Chapter Text

Davey wouldn’t say that Aziraphale was inclined towards regression. What he would say, instead, was that Aziraphale must be great at doing the two-step: every time they made any movement forward, Aziraphale ensured they spent a proper amount of time going backwards in response.

Aziraphale inspected the fabric of his chair’s armrest, and he said, “I am having second thoughts.”

Davey, for his part, wasn’t one to mind a good jig. “Is that so?”

“Perhaps it would be best if nothing changed.”

“You mean with you and your friend.”

“Everything is quite nice as it is, after all.”

Most people, most of the time, don’t sound so resigned when they’re middle of describing things as quite nice. Davey noticed the incongruent affect, and it was why he was so comfortable going along with this backtracking dance. After all, if you have the chance to backtrack, then what that shows is how far forward you’ve actually come.

Davey opened his hands, welcoming and offering. “Tell me about it.”

“We spend time together—we can do that, without fear of reprisal. I can ring up his telephone whenever I like, just to tell him about my day.”

Davey smiled, because what Aziraphale was saying mattered to him. He kept it as a calm, small smile, though, because he could hear the undercurrent, below the words, forming a rhythm: And yet, And yet, And yet.

“You like that,” Davey said.

“I do.” And yet.

Davey wasn’t entirely sure what Aziraphale expected him to do with that And yet. It was possible he had no goal at all, that this was simple musing on his part. If Davey had to guess, though, then he’d say that Aziraphale probably wanted him to comment on it, to do the work of making the unstated salient. Aziraphale wanted to return to the comfortable pattern of being led backwards.

Davey wasn’t going to do that. It’s not a dance, if you don’t follow a movement backwards with steps to get you going forward again.

Instead, he nodded his head as he acknowledged Aziraphale’s position. He kept his mouth closed, and he ran his tongue over his back teeth. He got curious. “Hey, let me ask something, how are you feeling right about now?”

“Right now?” Aziraphale hadn’t expected the question, and it jostled against the And yets. He took in the sight of Davey’s easy curiosity, and he considered. “I don’t know.”

“Huh.”

That’s the step forward: I don’t know. That was a very unusual move for someone whose first instinct usually was I'm perfectly fine.

Aziraphale didn’t like that he didn’t know how he felt. It can be a very distressing thing, to recognize that your own mood is unavailable to you. He wasn’t either capable or willing to acknowledge the And yets.

“How about this…” Davey threw out a suggestion. “Suppose I felt what you’re feeling right now. How would you describe what I was feeling?”

Aziraphale’s face moved from curious, to wary, to knowing. He could recognize the choreography; he could identify the routine through which he was being led. He pursed his lips with resolve, and then he acknowledged the opportunity to put voice to a truth. “I might say you were disappointed.”

“How about that.” Davey chewed on that. He accepted it, and he gave both of them a chance to feel what it was like for Aziraphale to have said it. “If I felt how you were feeling, then I’d be disappointed. What do you think—are you feeling disappointed?”

It wasn’t an easy thing, being led into honesty. “I shouldn’t be.”

“No?”

“I should be happy.”

“Huh,”

“I should be thoroughly satisfied with how things are.”

Probably, he could go on like this for quite a while. Davey cut in. “You mind if I say something that sounds crass?”

Aziraphale was certainly capable of withstanding some foul language, but neither of them had much of a potty mouth. Unsure but also, as always, polite, Aziraphale acceded. “Alright.”

Davey narrowed his eyes. He leaned forward, took his time, luxuriated in the moment. “I think… You need to stop shouldin’ all over yourself.”

He let his expression break into a satisfied grin, and he waited for a reaction. Aziraphale didn’t disappoint. No, he didn’t guffaw or snicker. He didn’t roll his eyes. His reaction was just as minuscule as Davey anticipated: a quick flick of the eyes, a mote of recognition at the presence of a pun.

“I see,” Aziraphale said.

Davey wasn’t going to let Aziraphale get in his way of being tickled by his own joke. That was rule one of living a good life: you’ve got to enjoy your own jokes all the more when you know no one else will. He chuckled. “Like I said, it only sounds crass.”

“ Shoulding.” In Aziraphale’s mouth, the word was like a foreign cheese that might have passed its expiration date.

Davey relented. “It works better in my accent, but you get the point.”

“I am shoulding myself.” Aziraphale was still testing it out, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

The joke had done its work. It disrupted the internal process Aziraphale had been engaged in, and it invited him instead towards curiosity. Now, they were in a better position to talk more seriously. Davey got back to business. “What I think is, you’re holding your emotional experiences to some sort of assumed objective standard before you’re willing to let yourself feel them.”

“Hm,” Aziraphale said.

Davey wanted uptake. “Does that seem right?”

Aziraphale wasn’t willing fully to accept it, but he was toying with the idea. “Perhaps.”

Good enough. “In all my time working with people, I gotta tell ya, I’ve never once seen a person feel something because they should feel it. And I’ve never seen someone not feel something because they think they shouldn’t.”

No, not good enough. “It may be different for you humans. As an angel, however…”

Davey had the suspicion that this was a route Aziraphale would be taking a lot from now on, in order to deflect or avoid. It put Davey at a disadvantage, since he wasn’t in a position to comment on angelic psychology. It twinged uncomfortably.

Best to give the lead to Aziraphale, so he could decide where to take them. “As an angel, you always feel what you should?”

Under some circ*mstances, Aziraphale would in fact agree to the point. If he felt like that was the only safe option for him, he’d do so eagerly, with full conviction, even if unconvincingly. It was gratifying, truly, that he instead gave Davey a capitulating look.

Davey accepted the unspoken answer. He made sure he was as comfy as can be in his chair, and then he turned to musing. “So, I guess, what I’m wondering is, why do you think someone in a situation like yours would feel disappointed?”

Aziraphale didn’t want to deflect. “Despite the fact that they shouldn’t?”

Davey gestured, waving that issue away. “Put the should off to the side. It can wait over there until we want it. This disappointment—that this person in your situation would be feeling—it’s there. So let’s inspect that, figure out why.”

Even with the distance of a hypothetical, this was not easy terrain for Aziraphale. He took the time to straighten the crease in his trousers, pinching at the fabric at his knees.

He was hesitant. “I like being an angel.”

Davey acknowledged it. He nodded, and he listened.

“I like getting to—to help. Doing the right thing. Doing good. It’s not always easy, and, granted, I understand that there are those who see reasons for doubt. I always have understood that, and I do. But it is so nice being a part of something, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale let out a heavy breath, and he let his shoulders stoop. It wasn’t a big movement, and his posture certainly wasn’t slouched, but it was enough to be noticed.

“Now we’re on our own side,” he said. His voice dipped lower into something bitter. “Or so I assume.”

Davey risked a clarification. “You and your friend.”

That caught Aziraphale’s attentions from his thoughts, just enough for him to nod, to show that Davey was correct. “Yes, we…”

He frowned. He scowled. He dipped lower into that bitterness, low enough for it give way to something more sorrowful. He kept some words bottled up behind tightly sad lips, and then he relented to an internal pressure. He sighed.

“I suppose I thought everything would be different, now.”

“How?”

Aziraphale couldn’t say.

***

If you’re careful about how you approach your job as a therapist, you can end up justified in keeping a wide collection of neat little figurines. All sorts of fun things: toy cars and plastic people; Christmas tree decorations with the strings cut off; miniature trees and bushes and tiny fake foods; all the wiggly rubber creatures for a complete menagerie; dragons and wizards and gorgons; sky’s the limit. No one can give you grief about it, either, because they’re not toys. They’re tax-deductible therapeutic implements.

Davey didn’t set his whole collection of miniatures out for Aziraphale’s sake. It was for another client who usually came in Monday afternoons but needed to switch to Wednesday mornings. Davey could have packed it all back up before Aziraphale’s session, but why would he? He could see the potential for it. This type of work was influenced by Jungianism, for a start.

When Aziraphale came in, he closed the door behind him, and then he spotted it all. “Oh my.”

“Heh, yeah.” Davey looked over at it all, and he chuckled. He stood where he was, rather than move over to his chair, in order to encourage Aziraphale to keep standing as well. They couldn’t work with all the figurines, after all, if they sat down. Davey put his hands in his pockets. “Quite a lot, ain’t it?”

Aziraphale’s interest may not have been intense or ebullient, but it was substantial. He liked knickknacks and curios, and Davey suspected he felt an affinity for ornate miniatures. Plastic toys skewed a bit too juvenile for him, but there were many little details to draw his attention. Also, if Davey had any sense of these things, Aziraphale was a highly tactile person. You could just see it in the glint of Aziraphale’s eyes: confronted with novelties, he wanted to pick them up, test the weight of them, know them through feel and touch.

This sort of thing was perfect for him, now that Davey thought about it.

“What is all this?” Aziraphale asked as he stepped over to the collection. It was all currently displayed on a folding table that Davey had set up just for this purpose. Without first asking permission or testing boundaries, Aziraphale began inspecting it all. That was gratifying to watch.

“It’s for something called sand tray,” Davey said. He took a step closer, which was a good cue that Aziraphale’s interest was encouraged. There was a rolling cart with the so-named sand tray on it next to the collection. Davey gestured towards it vaguely. “It’s a therapeutic technique, and it can be a real powerful tool at times.”

Aziraphale heard him but felt no need to respond. He was close enough to the table now that he could easily touch any of the figurines, as he continued looking them over. He rested his fingertips at the very edge of the table, itself.

“We could give it a shot,” Davey offered, noncommittal. It wouldn’t do for this to feel like anything more than a lark. “If you’re interested.”

“Could we?” In what world would Aziraphale not have been interested? “How does it work?”

Davey felt good about this. “Well, how about I walk you through it.”

The name of a sand tray is literal: you take sand, and you fill a tray with it. That’s your sand tray. The one Davey had on the cart was high quality, made out of good, dark wood. There were a lot of cheaper options available out there, but he liked how sturdy and solid this one was. It was important, he thought, that it had a reliable heft. You wanted the sand tray to be as definitively corporeal as the whole of the real world.

Sitting in their normal seats while working with the sand tray just wouldn’t do. They’d have to move the cart over, away from the collection, and it would become burdensome for Aziraphale to stand up and move around whenever he wanted to pick something out. No, for this sort of work, it was better for them to stay in the corner of the room with the collection. Davey had one chair set up over here already—not the kind of comfy armchair that they usually sat in while working, but the kind that was as sufficient as it was sufficiently portable.

“You can go ahead and sit down there,” Davey offered. Then he went to collect his computer chair from his desk, and he wheeled it over to be in the same area. He wasn’t going to sit right up next to the sand tray, the way that Aziraphale was. For this sort of thing, it was good to give some distance.

They both settled down, and Davey took his time.

He began to explain. “Think of the sand tray like an open environment. It’s available for you to create whatever you’d like. Those figurines are there, for you to set up however feels right, in the sand tray. We can build up scenes that are meaningful for you, tell stories. You can be as creative as you want.”

“Hm.”

For someone like Aziraphale, being told be as creative as you want sounded less like freedom and more like a demand. It made sense that he would grow a bit hesitant.

Davey could make it more inviting. “We start by getting to know the sand. Let’s take some deep breaths how’s that sound? And, while we’re doing that, you’re welcome to run your hands through the sand, or—you see that brush there? You can use that, if you’d like. Whatever feels like a good way to connect to it, really get to feel it.”

Aziraphale doubted. “It looks to be rather smoothed out already.”

“Is that how you want to keep it? Untouched?”

Aziraphale glanced up to him in recognition of the point, and then he looked back down at the tray. “I see.”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Davey was calm, and he was quiet. He led the way by taking in a slow, deep breath, and he was gratified to see Aziraphale do the same. He held that breath in, felt the satisfaction of full lungs. Aziraphale, across the way, closed his eyes as he let his own breath out, connecting to the relaxation it brought with it.

With his next breath in, Aziraphale let his eyes open back up. When he paused with his lungs full, he dipped his hands beneath the border of the tray’s upper edges. He let his hands rest on the sand’s surface, and, when he released his breath, he curled his fingers to make dimples in the sand.

It is meditative, lending yourself to a sand tray.

Aziraphale uncurled his fingers. He spread them out wide, and he pulled one hand to the side. It left a wide valley behind it, and Aziraphale watched as each grain settled itself from the upset. He pulled his other hand to the other side, so that the same shape was mirrored. He brought both back, making them cupped so that he gathered up sand with his palms.

Davey took in his slow and steady breaths, along with him, as he did this.

Aziraphale swished his fingers, drawing soft shapes. He undid those shapes by flatting his hand against them. He lifted all but the ball of his palm up, and then he observed the divot that was left.

Aziraphale smoothed the sand back out again. His hands stilled.

Davey didn’t break the silence, but he tapped gently to crack it. “We can start thinking about what scene to make. If you’re ready.”

Aziraphale was, but he wasn’t sure.

All Davey had were soft offers, easily reneged suggestions. “How would you feel about making a scene with you and your friend?”

Aziraphale accepted it. He glanced over to the miniatures. “Do I—?”

“Take whatever you want. Set them up in the sand however you want. You can think about characters, location, scenery… You name it.”

Aziraphale, careful and thoughtful, stood. He approached the collection again, inspecting it with different eyes. It was no longer a random assortment of toys but, instead, a host of options from which he could choose.

He wasn’t satisfied. “None of these are right.”

“You might have to get creative with it.” Davey could be apologetic about his collection’s limitations. Those limitations were completely intentional, though. Between his early session and now, he had poured through the collection and picked out everything that involved religious imagery: all the angels, the little devils, a figure that probably wasn’t meant to be Jesus but looked like most representations of him, and—after a very long and careful thought—all the Disney villains, too.

“Hm,” Aziraphale said.

This was meant to be quiet work. If Aziraphale spoke, Davey would reply, but it wasn’t Davey’s place to contribute.

Aziraphale found a very small figure of a man. He picked it up, and then he transported it over so he could sit it down square in the middle of the tray. It faced Aziraphale, back to Davey, and it was so small that Davey couldn’t rightfully see it over the tray’s sides from where he sat. He knew it, though: it wore a blue vest over a white shirt, and it had a soft, boyish appearance that Davey associated with Leave It To Beaver. It was too small for the face to be thoroughly detailed.

The next miniature took longer for Aziraphale to find. He made some dissatisfied noises while he searched, picking up a few pieces and then putting them back: a centipede, a black dog, a wine goblet. It was very clear when he was satisfied with his choice, because he wrapped it up firmly in his hand. He brought it over to the tray and sat it down right beside the little man. It was a three-dimensional star, shiny and glittery. It was made out of hard plastic, but it looked fragile like blown sugar.

“There,” Aziraphale said, satisfied with his work so far.

Additional details came quicker. A car, disproportionately small, and a book, disproportionately large, were placed together in a corner. A tree, over in the corner diagonal to them. By the tree he first sat an orange. And then he added in a plate with a piece of pie attached to it, a soda bottle, a fabric rose, and an hourglass. A gun and a sword were sat in a third corner, crossed over each other. Diagonal from them, he placed the centipede and the black dog from earlier. A string of beads was curled up into a pile and placed behind the man and the star.

Once the beads had been added, Aziraphale stopped. He didn’t go back to the collection or even glance over its way. He stood, looking down at the scene, quiet and thoughtful.

He reached forward with one hand, hesitated above the sand, and then he brought it back.

Davey didn’t interrupt.

“Hm.” Aziraphale meant: the scene was finished.

“Hmmm,” Davey echoed, easing them into talking again. “What’s on your mind?”

“It looks quite empty still.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Conflicted was the apparent answer. “Should I add more?”

“Up to you.”

“I think not, then.”

Davey smiled, because that answer was perfectly fine. “Would you like to explain your scene to me?”

Aziraphale glanced up at him, quickly, as he processed the request. There would be vulnerability involved in doing as he was asked. Many secret things can reveal themselves through toys and sand.

He could have demurred, but he didn’t. “Here, in the center, are Crowley and I. We’re on Earth. This book, I put here to represent my bookshop. Next to it is Crowley’s car—he cares for it ever so much.”

He continued.

“Here is Heaven.” He pointed at the gun and the sword.

“Here is Hell.” The centipede and the black dog.

“That’s Eden.” The tree with the orange, pie, soda bottle, rose, and hourglass. “I suppose I was reminded of it because of all the sand.”

Davey had never associated Eden with sand. Also, he hadn’t been prepared for Eden, of all things, to be included; it occurred to him in such an unsettling way that Aziraphale might have actually been there, that Eden actually had been a real place. He put that thought aside for some other time.

“Oh, and here are all of you. You humans.” Aziraphale pointed to the curled up beads.

He shot a smile at Davey. His explanation was done.

Davey nodded, thought about it. He was careful about what he asked next. “I wonder what sorts of feelings might come to mind, when you look at your scene.”

The chair was right beside Aziraphale, but he kept on standing. When working with a sand tray, it was possible to analyze anything and everything, including the angle at which someone chose to look at it. If you were so inclined.

Aziraphale said, “Sand makes for an unstable foundation.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s all quite lonely.”

“Hmm.”

“No…” Aziraphale’s brow furrowed as he thought. He was engaged and sincere, and he thought carefully. “That’s not right.”

“Hm?”

Aziraphale reached out his hand again, and he brought it into contact with the sand. Using his index finger, he drew a shape. It started out as a circle, surrounding the man and the star, but it was extended up so that the beads were enclosed within it as well.

“That’s better,” Aziraphale said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s…” Aziraphale glanced up, sought out the right words. “A boundary. You see, I was wrong when I said it was lonely. Actually, it was unprotected.”

Davey, personally, still thought the scene looked lonely. It wouldn’t be useful to bring that up, though. “The whole scene was unprotected?”

“No, just—" Aziraphale had been about to identify the particular elements that had needed protection. He almost acknowledged how this related back to his own internality, but then he corrected course. “What is inside the boundary.”

Davey chose not to think too much about the placement of the beads. He didn’t want to consider what it meant, that the beads too had been unprotected before the boundary was put in place. “I’m curious. Is there anything you put down that you find kind of surprising? What you chose as a symbol, that is.”

Aziraphale thought, and he tilted his head. “Well, I couldn’t find an apple, so we have instead an orange.”

“Ah ha.” Davey was certain he had a little apple somewhere in his collection, but it was easy to miss things.

“I’m not sure about the hourglass.” Aziraphale’s head was still tilted.

“What do you think it represents?”

“Time.” That was the very obvious, simple answer, and Aziraphale worked to explore the question further. “The passage of time… Beginnings. And endings.”

A risk, hopefully worth it: “How’s that make you feel?”

An answer, uncalculated: “Wistful.”

“Hmm.” Davey took to seeing it wistfully as well.

“I suppose everything else is straightforward.” Aziraphale straightened himself, shook his head. “I’ve not much of an imagination, I’m afraid.”

Davey didn’t buy that. Also, he didn’t think they were done with being wistful just yet, even if Aziraphale wanted to pretend otherwise. “The star’s surprising. To me, at least.”

“Oh, yes.” This was straightforward, or at least Aziraphale was acting successfully as if it were. “I would have used a snake, if you had one.”

Just as he knew his collection had an apple, Davey was absolutely certain his collection contained at least a few tiny rubber snakes. Snakes show up all the time in people’s scenes, and it hadn’t occurred to him to remove them along with all the overt religious symbols. “So you chose a star instead?”

Aziraphale nodded, looking down at it, and Davey saw that he was smiling. He said, “Crowley has always loved the stars.”

There it was: it was back. There was the wistfulness, at the forefront again. That smile of Aziraphale’s was a sad one.

Davey took his time to feel the sadness that Aziraphale had contributed to his scene. He thought better, though, than to point it out. There was something else, instead, that he wanted.

“I’m wondering if we can try something…” Davey offered. “Maybe we could try this. What would this scene look like, if you were to, you know, tell your friend how you feel about him?”

“How I feel?” The suggestion turned Aziraphale anxious, as he kept his eyes down on the star and the little figure of a man. He moved his head backwards, recoiling in slow motion, pressing himself away from the possibility. He winced.

It wasn’t meant to be that distressing, and Davey was curious about what the specific contours of that distress might be. Still, he didn’t like to be pushy: “Don’t have to.”

“No, no…” Aziraphale was intent, and his attention did not move from the two central figurines. His wince hardened itself into a dissatisfied resolve. With a sand tray, you hand over pieces of yourself to little plastic toys, so that they can ache as you ache, so that you can ache on their behalf. Aziraphale accepted the challenge: he reached out as he had done before, and he again used his outstretched index finger to change the scene.

He pressed his finger against the top-most point of the star, and he applied pressure, downwards, to make it sink. The movement was controlled, smooth. It was mechanical.

The sand wasn’t deep enough to fully cover the star; the very point that Aziraphale had pressed against still peeped out. And so, after pressing it down as far as he could, Aziraphale had to finish the job by piling surrounding sand up on top it.

He was careful that nothing else was disturbed. The beads were not disturbed; the figure of a man was not at all jostled. The star, alone, was disappeared.

Davey let out a heavy breath.

Aziraphale kept staring down at the piled up sand.

“Where’re your thoughts?” Davey asked.

“In the underworld, I suppose.” Aziraphale’s voice was flat. And then, before Davey could intervene, he worked to shake it off. “Perhaps I am too literal for this.”

“You think so?” Davey didn’t.

Aziraphale wasn’t entirely sure how to explain. His thinking was slowed by how much he wasn’t feeling, by how pressingly the buried star pushed him to feeling anyway. “Take the boundary that I included, for example.”

“Sure.”

“I made it by drawing a line in the sand…”

“Yeah.”

Aziraphale’s face tensed; his eyes glistened. His expression hardened from the attempt to keep them from growing wetter.

“And so you see.” Aziraphale’s voice moved towards uncertainty. He wanted to be confused or doubtful, but he wasn’t. “I have again been entirely literal.”

Davey didn’t understand.

Recognizing it, Aziraphale offered a small, ironic laugh. “There is no real boundary around us, Dr. Hampson. All we truly have is a line drawn in the sand.”

It was the matter of safety again. Of boundaries that were meant to protect, and of boundaries that confined. Davey saw the line in the sand that Aziraphale had drawn—around himself, around his closest friend, around the whole of humanity—and he thought about how paralyzing it can be to realize an invisible wall was never actually there in the first place.

Davey understood now. At least, he assumed he did. He sighed, to express this. But he still wanted more.

He cleared his throat. “Would I be wrong, Aziraphale, if I assumed what you’ve got, here, is a representation of a worst case scenario?”

“Oh, not worst, no.”

“But pretty bad?”

Aziraphale was so focused on that small mound of sand, under which was buried a pointy plastic star. “I should say so.”

Davey gave that answer some time to be felt by both of them. He breathed through it, and then he turned his mind to an alternative. “I’m wonderin’, though… What if we tried something different? Maybe—how ‘bout it—we could approach it like daydreaming. You know, a pie-in-the-sky, happily-ever-after sort of thing. Can we set up a scene that shows the best case scenario?”

Aziraphale’s eyebrow quirked. He thought about it.

This is what Davey wanted. For this entire day, for this entire session, what he wanted most of all was for Aziraphale to imagine a future that was happy. He wanted to see what it would look like. He wanted Aziraphale to see what it looked like. He would like it if, even just through the distance of toys placed in sand, Aziraphale could articulate a future where he was true to himself and it was good.

It was not a small thing to ask of him. Davey knew this. He watched, as Aziraphale thought, and he made the mistake of getting his hopes up.

Aziraphale shifted his weight from one foot to another. He confronted his scene. His jaw set, like a grimace, and he reached for a final time into the sand. Between index and thumb, he plucked out that star. He brushed all the sand off of it, so it was pristine, and then he brought it near to himself.

Removing the star from the plane of the sand tray was significant, to Davey. He had to assume that it felt significant as well, to Aziraphale. When you work with a sand tray, you don’t remove figures without reason. But Davey couldn’t read Aziraphale’s expression.

Aziraphale did not let go of the star. He cupped it in his palm, and then he curled his fingers around it. Davey knew: it wouldn’t be comfortable to hold it like that, what with its pointed corners. Aziraphale either didn’t notice, or he didn’t mind. Or perhaps angels had skin thicker than a human’s.

Aziraphale’s grip tightened around the little star. He looked down at the disrupted sand where he had plucked it out, at the rest of the scene that he had produced. And then he sighed, and he resigned himself, finally, to sitting in the provided chair.

“I can’t say,” Aziraphale said. He sounded defeated. He looked to the side, and he sniffed, and his eyes were now fully welled. “I don’t know.”

Even as he said it, though, Davey noticed: that star was still gripped tight in his hand. It was kept dear and protected at Aziraphale’s side.

***

You don’t put away a sand tray while your client is still in the room. You wait until they leave, and then you collect the figurines, the toys, and you put them all away by yourself. For Davey, the act of cleaning up after a sand tray session felt ritualistic. It was a chance to reflect.

The last two weeks with Aziraphale, Davey acknowledged, felt good. They felt normal, the way that therapy should feel. They’d seen progress, even if not that much. There were no revelations, no cinematic breakthroughs, but that’s how therapy is. That’s how it goes. These past two sessions with Aziraphale, quite honestly, were a reminder of what Davey liked so much about this profession, about this direction he’d chosen to go down in life so long ago. This was the kind of work that he truly would miss, if he were to stop working as a therapist in private practice.

When Aziraphale had left, Davey had had to ask for the little star back. Aziraphale had been sheepish when he deposited it into Davey’s upturned hand. Davey had to wonder if he should have just let him keep it.

Chapter 13: Could You Be Loved

Chapter Text

Davey had to cancel the next appointment. Sometimes these things happen.

***

Some people get upset when they don’t see their therapist for a week. Not only is it an uncontrollable change to their schedule, but it also leaves them without an important support pillar. So, the session after a cancellation, you should be prepared to spend some time processing the absence before getting back to work.

Davey was prepared, just in case, but he wasn’t surprised to find out it was unnecessary. Aziraphale didn’t mind the break. He wasn’t the sort to rely on his therapist; underneath it all, Aziraphale contained a resolute core of independence.

Today, that resolute, independent core was irritable.

“I’m at wit’s end,” he stated as a pronouncement, and this was before Davey could even sit down fully in the seat across from him. “And I would like your help.”

Davey paused as he registered what had just been said, and then he decided to take it in stride. “How’s that?”

Aziraphale huffed. “I can’t get Crowley to go to Niagara.”

This was a real disappointment, given how long Aziraphale had been wanting to go on that trip. Davey felt it. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

The commiseration was appreciated. “I thought perhaps this past week would be a prime opportunity, but no such luck.”

Davey tutted. “And Crowley wouldn’t go.”

“Why would he?” Aziraphale threw up his hands and gave the ceiling a good look at his dissatisfied face. “I cannot for the life of me devise a good reason.”

“Hold on.” Davey frowned. What Aziraphale had just said didn’t sit right. “What do you mean?”

The question, so far as Davey was concerned, was perfectly clear, but Aziraphale’s opinion differed. He gave Davey a raised eyebrow, and then he sighed like capitulation. “Well, alright, I admit it. Not a reason but an excuse.”

That didn’t exactly get to the heart of Davey’s confusion. “You have to devise an excuse? To go to Niagara?”

“No, of course not. I can go to Niagara whenever I choose.” Aziraphale again relented on a point that Davey hadn’t meant to make. “The trick is getting Crowley to come to Niagara as well.”

“Um. Okay.” Davey frowned. He scooted forward in his seat, and he held out a hand as a physical show that what he was about to say mattered. He felt pretty bad about it. “Aziraphale, if Crowley doesn’t wanna go to Niagara, then you’ve got to respect that.”

His concern was registered, acknowledged, and met with plain incomprehension. “Why wouldn’t Crowley want to go to Niagara?”

One of the two of them was working from some confused precepts, no doubt about it. “I thought you said… He wouldn’t go.”

“Of course he would go.” Aziraphale’s tone made it pretty clear which of the two of them he thought was behind the times. “If only there were a reason to go.”

Davey wasn’t inclined to take Aziraphale’s tone as the final word on the issue. “Let’s take a step back. What exactly did he say, when you asked him to go?”

Davey may as well have just asked when the sky turned into custard.

“What do you mean?” Aziraphale asked.

“Okay, see. When you said he wouldn’t come with you, I took that to mean you had asked him to go, and he said no.”

Aziraphale’s confusion broke with a laugh. “Why would you think that?”

Surely, from some perspective of cosmic justice, it wasn’t Davey who should be cast as ridiculous in this instance, and it’d be nice if Aziraphale would acknowledge it. “You want to go to Niagara together, step one is asking him if he wants to go too.”

“Oh.”

The miscommunication was gone, sizzling itself down to mutual comprehension. Aziraphale’s mirth went with it. He swallowed, and he scowled. When he responded, his voice was softer. “We don’t do that.”

Davey scooted back fully into his seat.

There was space for Aziraphale to explain. He recognized this, given how his eyes glanced about and how he wet his lips as though he were about to talk. No explanation could come out, however, because he didn’t know what it would be.

Davey could try to help. “You seem pretty confident that he would go with you.”

“Oh yes.”

“Would he want to?”

“Well…” Aziraphale thought about it. “He would pretend otherwise, but yes.”

“And you’re sure about that?”

“I am.”

Either Davey had to accept that Aziraphale’s unwavering confidence was warranted, or he had to doubt an incredible amount about how Aziraphale understood himself and the world. Davey accepted. “Okay. So. What I’m hearing is, you want to go to Niagara. Your friend would also like to go to Niagara. So. Why not just ask him to go?”

Again, Davey had made space for an explanation. Again, Aziraphale could not find any to provide. He was growing frustrated; he was afraid of getting lost. “We… Don’t… We don’t do that.”

It wasn’t a satisfying answer for either of them, but Davey appreciated that it was an attempt. He breathed intentionally, and he nodded. “It’s upsetting to even think about it.”

It was.

“What do you think would happen?” Davey wondered. “If you did just ask him. What would happen?”

“We would…” Aziraphale answered without answering. “…go to Niagara.”

Davey didn’t buy it.

Aziraphale sagged. “I don’t know.”

“If you think about it—actually think it through, logically, I mean—is there any danger in you asking him?”

He and Aziraphale both understood why he had specified thinking through the issue carefully. Aziraphale’s immediate answer would, undeniably, be yes. He had thousands of years of experience walking a tightrope, knowing that any slight misstep could spell destruction, and that sort of constant vigilance worms its way into your natural inclinations. It makes any deviation from your most staid and true step feel perilous, whether it is or not. It undermines your capacity to measure risk.

They both understood it, and that meant they both, too, understood Aziraphale’s lack of answer.

Davey made an offer. “Wanna try it out? As an experiment.”

Aziraphale wasn’t sold, and he didn’t like feeling pressured. “Do you mean, this afternoon?”

“No, no, no.” Davey was quick assuage and switch up his wording. “I mean, try it out like play-acting. In here, right now.”

“Oh. Well…” As if there was any doubt Aziraphale would reject an offer to play-act.

Davey smiled, and he set about pulling himself up out of his chair. “Gimme a second to get things set up.”

The two of them had toyed now and again with a Jungian go of things, but Davey really wasn’t a Jungian. The major benefit Jungianism gave them was its focus on The Shadow, or the unquenchable capacity to be otherwise than how one presents oneself to be. Aziraphale benefited from that, no doubt, but Jungianism certainly isn’t the only therapeutic approach that emphasizes embracing the whole of oneself and one’s capacities. Gestalt therapy, in particular, is all about coming to reown portions of one’s self that have been stifled or denied. This is right there in the name: the goal of gestalt therapy is to acknowledge oneself as a gestalt, as a wholeness that is more than its parts.

Not that Davey would call himself a Gestalt therapist, either. It put too much emphasis on confrontation, for Davey; it was an approach often supported by pushy and abrasive personalities. All the same, he doubted you could find a single practitioner within the whole of the American Psychological Association who didn’t, at least sometimes, use techniques that were developed or popularized by it. Gestalt therapy is absolutely teeming with techniques.

What Davey did was set them up for Gestalt therapy’s most famous technique.

It wasn’t hard. All he had to do was go over, take the portable chair he kept in the corner, and bring it over beside Aziraphale. It was an empty chair; this was The Empty-Chair Technique.

“Mmkay,” Davey said, as he got settled back down. He was about to explain what they were going to do, but then anxiety piqued. “Actually—hold on. If we pretend your friend’s here, sitting in that chair, can that cause any problems?”

Aziraphale had been waiting patiently, and now he was back to being confused. “What do you mean?”

“I just mean…” This was awkward. Davey winced. “You know. I hear about summoning demons and what-all…”

Aziraphale had plenty of experience looking at Davey with abject pity, and he didn’t sugarcoat it at all this time. “Oh, tosh.”

Davey relented. “I was just checking.”

“He’s right down the hall!”

Davey set his face into an expression that wasn’t a mea culpa.

“And you haven’t even a summoning circle, come now.” Aziraphale scoffed.

“Anyway.” It was time to get things back on track. Davey cleared his throat. “So. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pretend that he’s here, sitting in this chair.”

He motioned to the empty chair. Aziraphale’s attention followed, settling on the space currently not occupied by his dear friend who happened to be a demon.

“It’s all just make-believe,” Davey emphasized, for someone’s benefit. “A technique to let us think about how it could go. We’ll pretend he’s sitting here, and you can try asking him to go to Niagara with you.”

Aziraphale was thoughtful, easing himself into the idea. “Play-acting.”

“Right. Act it out, so you can see what it feels like.”

“How do I begin?”

“Well, it’s up to you.” Davey offered, “You could say hi?”

Aziraphale considered, and then he accepted it. He got serious. He repositioned himself so that his body was angled towards the empty chair. With his shoulders back and his back straight, he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and took a deep, preparatory breath.

It occurred to Davey to wonder how much experience Aziraphale had with community theater.

Aziraphale lifted his head back up. He opened his eyes, and he settled them on the empty space above the empty seat. Speaking from his diaphragm in order to project, he said, “Oh, hello, Crowley.”

He flicked his eyes over to Davey, seeking approval. Davey gave it: he smiled.

Emboldened, Aziraphale turned his attention back to the pretend-Crowley. He raised a hand, gesturing over towards Davey. “You, of course, remember Dr. Hampson…”

When Davey had suggested say hi, he hadn’t meant go through the whole rigamarole of polite introductions.

Aziraphale scowled at the empty chair. “Come now.”

He rolled his eyes. “No, that isn’t—”

He held up a hand, as a signal for quiet, and then his scowl deepened, and he let out a huff.

“You’re being ridiculous!” Aziraphale glanced meaningfully over to Davey—who, sadly, was not up to speed on what that meaning might be—and he turned to placate the nothing. “Of course you’re welcome here. You were invited.”

“Uh—” Davey said.

“Oh, sit back down.” Aziraphale’s eyes tracked nothing as it, apparently, stood up and walked over towards Davey’s drums. “Really, I hardly think that now is the time for—”

“Hey, Aziraphale.” Davey broke into the pantomime. “Maybe we should refocus.”

“Hm?” Aziraphale blinked and kindly brought his attention back.

“We don’t want to get distracted,” Davey tried to explain. “Do you think we could imagine a more—” complacent? pliant? non-antagonistic? “—tranquil Crowley?”

“You don’t know Crowley,” Aziraphale muttered, but he accepted the request. He started again as he had before: angling himself, dropping his head, and then raising it back up again. “Oh, hello, Crowley. You, of course, remember Dr. Hampson…”

This, apparently, was how the pretense was going to go. So Davey smiled at the nothing, and he said, “Thank you for joining us today. We’re here because there’s something Aziraphale would like to ask.”

Aziraphale didn’t like that. It meant he had to get serious about attempting the hard thing he had, so far, managed to avoid. His eyes turned from Davey to the empty space, growing nervous. He steeled himself as best he could, breathing deeply into his straightened spine, balling his hands against the sides of his legs, and he forced it out: “Dr. Hampson needs us to go to Niagara.”

“Time out.”

Aziraphale collapsed inwardly on himself. He put on as if he were confused by the interruption.

Davey was kind about it, but he still gave a look. “We both know that’s not true.”

Aziraphale wasn’t happy about it.

“How about we practice saying the words?” Davey suggested. “Will you go to Niagara with me. Try it.”

There was a petulance to how Aziraphale took up the task; he didn’t like it, but he was going along with it. He said the words like a recitation, “Will you go to Niagara with me.”

Davey appreciated the attempt. “How’s that?”

“Hm.”

“Do you want to try again?”

He didn’t. “It doesn’t feel right.”

Davey’s attention caught on that. If Aziraphale had in fact managed to ask the question, allowing them to talk about how it felt to do so, that would have been a good result. But this, in itself, felt like a result in its own right: Aziraphale didn’t like it, and he said so, plainly. Davey encouraged it.

“This isn’t what we do,” Aziraphale continued. He had said the same thing before, or close enough, and he recognized it. He was searching, again, for an explanation he didn’t think he could provide. “We never have done.”

“You don’t come straight out and say what you’re thinking or feeling,” Davey attempted.

“Not at all.” Aziraphale sighed. “And for good reason.”

Davey clarified: “Until recently.”

“It feels wrong.” Aziraphale was trying, he really was. His face was bunched up in dissatisfaction.

“Unsafe?”

Aziraphale could tell now that wasn’t right. He didn’t accept it.

“Do you mean—immoral?”

It wasn’t that, either. “It is like... putting on clothing tailored for someone else.”

“It doesn’t fit.”

Getting closer. “It’s not us.”

It was starting to make sense, but Davey wanted to find where the edges to that feeling were. “Would it change things between the two of you, if you outright asked to go on a trip together?”

“Perhaps?” Aziraphale was earnest, and his eyes danced about as he worked internally on this puzzle. “But even if it didn’t…”

“It would still feel wrong.”

There is always relief in being understood. Aziraphale smiled, slightly, from it. “Exactly.”

Aziraphale had done tremendous work. Davey was proud. He was going to have to put some real effort into thinking his way through all this to make sense of it, but he wasn’t dissatisfied. He liked a challenge.

***

The printer Davey kept under his desk in his office was exactly like every other printer he had ever encountered: old, heavy, loud, and cranky. He was behind in his preparations for his upcoming meeting with Aziraphale, and the printer wasn’t doing him any favors. He was still fighting with it when Aziraphale knocked politely at the open door.

“Hey, come in!” Davey called. He was clicking through the options in his PDF reader, working on getting it to acknowledge the printer’s existence. “Don’t mind me. This’ll only take a sec.”

By the time Aziraphale had entered, closed the door behind him, and was halfway seated, the printer—perhaps miraculously, who could say—came to life with a loud chunk chunk chunk.

“I got to thinking,” Davey said over the printer’s noise. He was still over at his computer, where he would stay until it was finished. “About human love. It occurred to me, it might be worthwhile for us to consider an alternative taxonomy.”

Count on Aziraphale for his curiosity. “Oh?”

Davey leaned over in his chair, watched for the printer to finish its job. “I’m not saying it’s a contender with what the ancient Greeks gave us, but, hey, might be useful, huh?”

Human love was one way to describe what got Davey thinking about this. More accurately, though, it was their work in the previous session. Wrong like ill-fitting clothes was evocative, and it led to Davey wondering: what clothes might fit better?

The printer went chunk chunk, and then it was done. Davey bent over as far as he had to in order to reach for the printout, and then he had it, and he was ready.

He looked over at Aziraphale. “You ever heard of the five love languages?”

He was met with uncertainty. “You don’t mean the Romance languages, do you? There are quite a few more than five.”

“Naw, not that.” Davey chuckled. He came over, held out the paper for Aziraphale to take it, and he sat down where he belonged. “Take language as a metaphor. These are five different ways we can communicate love to one another.”

Aziraphale held the paper in front of himself, moving it backwards and squinting until he could read it comfortably. He was reading through it with full care and attention, although it didn’t contain all the information he needed to understand it.

The idea that there are five different love languages originates from a book that Davey had not and would not read. He’d come across more than enough reviews that left him satisfied that the book was a bunch of patriarchal and heterosexist hogwash. Even hogwash, though, sometimes contains a baby you don’t want to see thrown out, at least not too quickly. Davey also didn’t like that a lot of the resources out there presented the five love languages as if they were some universal, immutable psychological realities rather than a simple, limited heuristic. He was always careful with what handouts he used, when he wanted to talk to someone about the five love languages. What he’d given Aziraphale was a simple chart: for each of the five languages, the chart provided suggestions for ways to speak and behave in order to show your love.

Davey explained while Aziraphale kept his attention on the chart. “Here’s the basic idea. Think of love as something that can be enacted, or communicated, in different ways. Not everyone goes about communicating it in the same way. No way’s better or worse than any other, just different.”

Part of what made this stuff so useful was its simplicity. The five languages listed were: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, gift-giving, and physical touch.

Aziraphale inhaled sharply.

“Hm?” Davey asked.

Aziraphale lifted his attention. Something must’ve resonated, but he wasn’t ready to share his thoughts. He shook his head. “Go on.”

That was a remarkably straightforward request, Davey noticed. “Now, with anyone else, what I’d suggest at this point is thinking back to how their parents used these languages to communicate love during their childhood.”

“Not quite applicable,” Aziraphale acknowledged. Satisfied with the smaller details, he lowered the handout to rest it upon his knee. He was thoughtful, perhaps melancholy, not needlessly dismissive. “I suppose angels have little use for such practices.”

Davey listened. “No?”

“You see, in Heaven, everyone has a role to play. Everyone has duties, and you perform those duties because it is, well, your job. We don’t—we don’t communicate love.”

Sometimes, you start out explaining something as a matter of fact, only to realize as you go that it is in fact quite sad. The deeper resonance creeps up on you, unexpectedly. Aziraphale tapped at the paper as it crept up to him.

He continued, all the same. “If you require some tool or material object, it is assigned to you. Or you requisition it. No gifts. There is very little unnecessary engagement with other angels. Perhaps there is for others? It was never my experience, at least.”

What could a God-fearing man say in response to that? What could he feel?

Throughout the whole of his life, when Davey thought about Heaven, what he imagined was the pure glow of a warmed up oven after a too-cold day. He thought of what a moth must feel, upon reaching a golden flame that did not consume. He thought of comfort and snug blankets and rest for the weary, of a deep hum with which one’s soul fell into abiding harmony. He thought of belonging, of comfort, of warmth.

He thought of all this, and he saw before him someone far too accustomed to the cold.

“I’m curious…” Davey’s voice had gone too quiet; he had to speak up. “I’m curious, Aziraphale. What sorts of feelings does this all bring up?”

“Nothing,” Aziraphale said. It was no deflection or denial. He glanced away from the handout, stared without seeing off to the side. He was sincere. “Nothing at all. Emptiness.”

Davey would be chilled, if he tried too hard to picture Heaven as an emptiness. He couldn’t dwell on it, not for now. This was Aziraphale’s time. He asked, “Down here, at least, do you think it might be useful thinking of love in this way?”

“I suppose so,” Aziraphale said, vaguely. He brought his thoughts back down to Earth, but he wasn’t thoroughly with Davey just yet. “Acts of service.”

“Hm?”

“It’s what we do.” Aziraphale took on a tone that felt meaningful. It wasn’t embarrassed, but it hinted that this was a more private topic than he was used to discussing. “We… I find needs. Crowley meets them.”

Davey would try to honor what he took that tone to mean. “It makes you feel loved, when that happens?”

The answer was in the silence that came while Aziraphale thought how to answer. “Of course I do.”

“You don’t sound certain.”

“It depends, I suppose.” Aziraphale was uncomfortable with his own responses. “I know—I think I know… I know why Crowley does what he does.”

“Maybe we could say it like this?” Davey was just making a suggestion. “You’re fluent in his language, but it might not be your own mother tongue?”

“Hmm.” Aziraphale tested that thought out, quietly, to himself. “If we went to Niagara, that would be quality time.”

What a good point; what a completely unexpected development, that this could connect up to that previous session’s topic. Davey prompted, “But it doesn’t feel right, asking for that quality time.”

Responding to this was easier; Aziraphale was a quick thinker. “This is why I need a reason for us to go. So Crowley is, so to speak, performing an act of service. By joining me.”

Inwardly, Davey stamped down on a pang of loneliness. He doubted Aziraphale would benefit from knowing that his explanation inspired such a feeling. You have to be careful about letting someone know that their experiences of love leave you feeling so sad.

“Affirmations are nice, too.” Aziraphale spoke like he was continuing some point from earlier. “Aren’t they?”

“They can be.”

“And gifts, I’ve…” Something hard took root inside Aziraphale. He was coming to join Davey in his sadness. When he continued talking, he spoke quicker, quieter, unhappily. “I gave Crowley a gift once.”

Davey didn’t know why that would sound like such a bad thing.

Whatever that unpleasantness was, Aziraphale did not dwell on it long enough for Davey to ask. He perked himself back up into easygoing conversation. “I daresay none of these stand out particularly as a mother tongue, or not. Except, of course, for physical touch, which certainly has no relevance for beings like us.”

Aziraphale chuckled.

“Huh,” Davey said.

In other circ*mstances, if Davey didn’t have so much else on his mind at the moment, he’d want them to focus in on that. For one, he didn’t trust that chuckle from Aziraphale. But now wasn’t the time. Davey still was distracted by that great pang of loneliness, by what Aziraphale found easy to discuss and what he struggled to find words to describe. He couldn’t get past the image of a cold and empty Heaven.

The fact of the matter is, there’s a reason why Davey would start a discussion like this by focusing on childhood memories. The way our parents show their love for us is an important key to what we, in turn, find to be a meaningful expression of love. What we find to be obvious, legible and interpretable, is what we found pervasive in our earliest years. And what, apparently, was pervasive in the place of Aziraphale’s origin?

We learn a language by being immersed within it. We must hear it before we can understand it; we must babble before we can talk. Deprive a human child of language in its earliest years, and it will forever be cut off from linguistic complexity. It is the love of others, always, that yields to us our own voices. And so where did Aziraphale gain his?

Davey was caught up on that deep pang that he felt, which he had taken to be loneliness. He was caught up within a mental image of a cold and empty space that he did not want and, honestly, wasn’t sure how to handle. But he thought, also, he could interpret that deep pang a different way. He could read Aziraphale’s chuckle in a better light. Because what was Aziraphale, that he had managed to thrive when it was a wonder he had even survived?

“It’s just a heuristic,” Davey said. He shrugged. He returned Aziraphale’s chuckle. “Just a tool, and a limited one at that, to help us make sense of things.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale accepted. “I can see how it could be useful.”

“Do you think it might be? For you?”

“Perhaps.” Aziraphale considered it, weighed it. “But I think probably not.”

It was such a simple thing for Aziraphale to do, to express what he thought, to reject a suggestion, to assert himself. It was so straightforward, so easily done, and it made Davey break out in an earnest smile. “I appreciate the honesty,” he said, feeling how this smile was earned. “I really do. Thank you.”

***

Davey was focused on his computer screen, so he didn’t register immediately what he saw from the corner of his eye: a darkness, a shadow, in his office’s open doorway.

It was Aubrey.

She stood, just outside, waiting for his recognition. Her posture was inscrutable, either casual but attempting rigid as an affectation, or rigid but attempting casual. It would be easy to read her expression as grim, but Davey thought he knew better than that.

He minimized the window on his computer, and he turned to face her fully.

“Hey,” he said.

She didn’t say it back. There were a lot of things that dissatisfied her. Existing in this moment, seemingly, was one of them.

“So, what,” she said, as close to toneless as a human can get, “someone is a complete asshole to you once, and you never speak to them again?”

Davey chewed on that.

It was a joke, and it wasn’t. It was defensive, and it wasn’t. It had the whiff of an apology while bludgeoning like an accusation. He wondered if she had worked out the wording ahead of time, or if she had come here and then found herself at a loss for what to say. She threw contradictions at him, and she must have known it.

He felt those contradictions. He felt attacked, and he felt wanted. He felt sorry, and he felt glad. He felt so cold and so empty, and yet, seeing her standing there as she waited for his response, he felt the potential for something else as well.

“Last time we spoke, I received a real tongue-lashing.” He worked to ensure his next words had weight. “And I can’t say it wasn’t deserved.”

She nodded. She accepted it. He was sure she thought she was bad at this sort of thing, but Davey wondered if there was any other way she could have wanted this to go.

“You wanna come in?” he offered.

Her gut reaction was to say no. He could see it in how her mouth twitched and how she looked quickly down the hall to her side. But then she shrugged, as if rejection wasn’t her most natural inclination, and she chose to come inside.

Chapter 14: Superman

Chapter Text

Friday morning, in the middle of a session, Davey got a call. He didn’t know he’d gotten it until afterwards, when he saw he had a new voicemail.

He sat for twenty minutes, in silence. He sat with his thoughts and his drums, with his collection of travel magnets, with his open door that he rightly would prefer to have closed. He sat with his breath and with his grandbabies’ drawings taped up on the wall beside him. And then he called them back.

***

Tuesday morning, Davey found Aubrey in the kitchen.

“Hey,” he said.

“Morning,” she said.

He went over to the fridge, in his normal way, and he opened it to look for a co*ke Zero. He was out, though, which he remembered only after he was looking inside. He had to close the fridge door, empty-handed. He leaned against the counter, anyway, the way he usually did when he had a co*ke Zero he was about to open. He really wished he had one. It would make this conversation go easier, he thought.

There was something he had to tell her. It was pretty clear to him that she should be one of the first people he told. He understood why he felt this way, but he didn’t care to inspect the reason for it too closely.

“Uh… So. Just thought you should know…” He always hated the way it sounds when you try to say casually something you don’t actually feel casual about at all. He especially hated how she picked up on it immediately, and how she grew attentive for whatever was about to come. How she tensed, anticipating something bad. He wanted to tell her to take a chill pill.

He had told Sadie. Talked about it extensively with her. He’d told his kids. He’d talked to his bandmates about it, too. But Aubrey would be the first, here, at the place where he worked.

He had already made his choice. It was a done deal. All he was doing was letting her know. He said, “I’m going to be closing down my private practice.”

She didn’t know what to say. “Really?”

He inspected his hands where he wished he was holding a soda can. “The county’s revitalizing its Housing First program—the Bureau of Housing Support, you know. Working with unhoused and unsheltered folk. They’re restructuring the mental health supports they offer, so…”

So Davey had looked in a mirror, weeks ago, and he had seen his bushy Santa Claus beard, and he had thought, Shave it all off, right now, get rid of it, but he’d known better than to actually do that. He’d known well enough to inspect the feeling, to do something else instead. So he had gone online, and he had started looking. He couldn’t ignore it, when the Bureau of Housing Support’s open position was one of the very first listings he found. He couldn’t help but feel that he was called. His credentials were impressive, and he had long resume; he knew how to make a good case. And so he’d applied, and he’d interviewed, and then they offered him the job. And he’d accepted it.

Davey shrugged.

“So, I’m going to be helping them with all that.”

Aubrey was still working internally through what he was saying, what this meant. Davey thought, and he felt pretty sure about this, that she was caught between caring and not, between allowing an update about his career choices to affect her or not. It would be awkward for either of them to address why he felt like she deserved to be one of the first informed—why she, probably, felt the same.

“I haven’t talked to any of my clients about it,” he continued. “Not yet. Mum’s the word, for now.”

“Right.”

If she was anything like what Davey thought she was like, then she was working to piece together what sort of response Davey was looking for. Davey, himself, wasn’t entirely sure.

“Timeline’s not entirely worked out yet,” Davey said.

He could imagine the sorts of questions she could think to ask, if she were so inclined. Questions like, Why? and Shouldn’t you be retired, old man? and But aren’t you comfortable where you are? Those were questions, he assumed, anyone would ask. He had answers to those questions. There were the other questions, too, that he figured only Aubrey, in particular, out of the entire world, might think to ask. He had answers to those questions, too, although they were perhaps hazier, more diaphanous.

“It’s mostly going to be administrative work.” Davey wouldn’t be blathering on like this if he had a co*ke Zero to sip. “But I’m hoping I’ll still get some clinical hours, now and then.”

Any question she asked, he’d answer. He’d be as truthful and as thorough as he could manage. He wouldn’t take offense, either, no matter how pointed they were. He would tell her what she wanted to know, what she must be straining to reason out. Just ask, Davey thought. Ask, and I will tell you how much of this is your doing.

“It’s important work,” Aubrey said, although she didn’t sound sure.

Davey agreed. He shifted his weight, as he leaned against the counter by the fridge. “I’m hoping, after about maybe six months or so, I’ll have a better sense of the time constraints. Maybe I’ll be able to come back here part-time. Maintain a handful of cases on the side here. You know, to keep sharp.”

No: to keep sane. To keep familiar with who he was, when he wasn’t working under intense budget restraints, with intense scrutiny, and in collaboration with bureaucrats, fundraisers, politicians, and even—Lord save him—Republicans. To escape, when he might need to, from good work and back into work that felt good.

“It’s important work,” Aubrey said again, sounding more confident. She nodded, her thoughts coalescing in ways beyond what she was sharing.

“Yeah,” Davey said.

There was such a great gulf between how Davey was feeling, now that he had told her, and what he wanted to be feeling. There was so much he felt he could—and, in all likelihood should—tell her, if only she gave the opening, provided the opportunity. It occurred to him that he wanted, really and deeply, for her to say something that felt pointed and sharp. All he was getting was consolatory.

“I mean… It’s good,” she said like she was fumbling. “I mean, I admire it.”

Well. Call it a consolation prize. At least he had Aubrey Thyme’s admiration.

***

Live like you’re dying is awful advice. Live so you have a good death is much better. Council like each session is your last doesn’t always work out so well. Council so you have a good termination is, instead, a great approach. As a general practice, or so these things are said, you want to approach therapy always with an eye towards how it will end. After a while in this line of work, you get used to things ending, usually, before you’d ideally like them to.

Davey wasn’t ready yet to let his clients know: he was reconceptualizing each of them, as best he could, to establish short-term strategies towards their goals. He would find them referrals to other therapists who would be good for them. He’d do what he could, in the time he had, to have a good farewell and set them up for continued support.

It wasn’t a fun process. He didn’t want to go through with it. He was going to, though.

***

Wednesday morning, Davey knew how much longer he had. He wasn’t ready to admit it yet, but he knew.

Today, he thought, would be a good day for sand tray. That was where he put his energy.

***

Aziraphale created another scene with him and Crowley. He placed the same little man figurine and the same plastic star near the center of the tray. Beside the star he set down a wine bottle, a plate with a piece of pie attached to it, a little wedge of cheese, and a flower. Beside the little man, he put a book and a wine bottle. Further away, nearer to the edges, he stacked together some more books, added a car, some additional wine bottles, tiny binoculars, a feathery string that people tended to interpret as either a boa or a fuzzy worm, and a few glittery Lego bricks.

Lastly, he pressed one index finger into the sand, and he drew a circle around the most central figurines.

“There,” he said, finished. He brought his hands away from the tray, and he took a step backward in order to take in the view of his scene.

Davey also took some time to look at all the details, now that Aziraphale had deemed it complete. He was thoughtful about it, and then he said, “What have we got?”

“This is lunch. With Crowley and me.”

“Ah, I see.” Davey nodded along. Earlier, this morning, he had reminded himself of the scene Aziraphale had constructed previously, and he could identify some similarities. “I notice that flower, there…”

“Yes, for the table setting,” Aziraphale said, simply. “I like it when there are flowers.”

Davey decided now wasn’t the time to bring up: that the flower Aziraphale had chosen was red; that it was the same flower he had put in the previous scene in Eden; that he had included no table nor chairs, and yet thought to include this, a supposed table setting, in particular. Instead, he asked, “What does it bring to mind?”

“A lovely day.” Aziraphale was still gazing at his scene, and he smiled. “A good meal, good wine, and good company.”

Davey liked that. He gave himself a chance to luxuriate in the pleasantness of what Aziraphale had set up, the mood that he had brought to the sand tray for them this session.

“What’s all that, I wonder,” Davey said, when it seemed right. “All that you put around, outside the circle?”

“Oh, those are human things.” Aziraphale wasn’t dismissive. He was just clear that it all had the significance of scenery. “All the sights and sounds. The wonderful things you humans have produced.”

Davey took the time to chuckle. It was always an odd feeling, being treated like a precocious ant. “You really do like us humans, don’t ya?”

Aziraphale looked up, and he smiled at Davey with such a kind warmth. “Oh, yes, we do.”

The pronoun hit Davey. He had meant you as singular; Aziraphale had heard it as plural. It shouldn’t have been unexpected, by this point, but it was.

“Anything else stand out?” Davey asked, turning attention back to the scene. “What more do you think about, when you look at this?”

“Hmm…” Aziraphale thought.

“One thing I’m curious about,” Davey mused, when it felt like some help would be appreciated. “You’re in this scene. How’re you feeling in it, do you think? Little fake you, down there—what’s he feeling?”

“Oh, well, he—I—” The answer came easily, even if the expression of identity was tricky. “I have presented myself as quite happy.”

“Relaxed?”

“Oh yes. But also stimulated. We’re having a spirited conversation, you see.”

“And what about your friend?” Davey continued, simply, to be musing. “How’s he feeling in this scene?”

“I suspect I have just irritated him with an astute point.” Aziraphale’s eyes gleamed, mischievous and satisfied. “And he won't own up to it, but he likes it.”

The spirit of the answer was catching, and it made Davey smile. “You both are having a great time.”

“We are.” The gleam in Aziraphale’s eye left behind the hint of mischief, settled down into that feeling of satisfaction.

It was nice. It was casual and pleasant, and Davey enjoyed sitting with Aziraphale in uplifting feelings like this. It could be useful to stay with these feelings for the entire session, to let their primary focus be the simple appreciation of glad satisfaction. But that was the sort of long-term methodology that Davey knew he could no longer afford to employ.

A short-term approach to therapy requires more direction, more focus, less room for broad exploration.

“I’m wondering…” Davey still kept on that musing tone, but he let his voice go down a register. This was a shift. “Is this the sort of scene where, maybe, you’d tell your friend how you feel about him?”

It most certainly was a shift. The easy attitude that Aziraphale had brought to this scene gained tense edges. His satisfaction melted into a kind of uncertainty that was uncomfortably close to hopeless.

“I don’t know,” he said, as if he wished he did know.

Davey meet him in this feeling. He could perhaps help clarify it, too. “You’ve had lunches like these before, but they’ve never included you sharing your feelings the way you want to. So, it’s hard to imagine.”

Aziraphale furrowed his brow, displeased. “It seems there must be a better venue.”

“You’d want it to be special.”

“It should be special.”

Davey left that should unnoted. The standard of perfection that it implied Aziraphale was holding for his declaration of love functioned as a form of protection. After all, if sharing his feelings required the perfect time and place, he could spend the rest of his existence within this mortal world without ever feeling pressured to actually go through with it.

“Can we try to imagine it?” Davey asked. “Even if it’s not exactly how you’d want it to be. Just so we can think about how it affects the scene?”

“Right here?” Aziraphale asked like he needed clarification, even though he had thoroughly understood the suggestion just seconds ago. “At this lunch? In the middle of our discussion?”

“When you’ve just annoyed him by making a good point, yeah. Right then.”

Aziraphale frowned down at the little star and the little man.

It wasn’t clear whether he was imagining it or whether he was emotionally resolving himself to refuse. Davey took the risk of assuming it was the former, and he asked, very softly, “Would anything change?”

Aziraphale, mouth set, let out a long breath through his nose. He meant with it, yes. Still looking intently down at the scene, he brought one hand forward, towards it. He was determined, but it was a hesitant determination.

Index finger connected with plastic star, and he pushed. Not downwards, as he had the previous time, but sideways. He pushed the star towards the little man until there was no gap between them at all. He pushed so that the plastic star and the little man were in physical contact, and then, as a result of the meager jostling from his finger being lifted, the plastic star tipped. It toppled over the little man, so that the little man was horizontal against the sand and the plastic star partially covered it.

Aziraphale did not move to right them. He let them say like that, one figurine on top of the other.

Davey made very sure that he did not raise up his eyebrows.

He risked a glance up to see Aziraphale’s expression: thoughtful, opaque, unsure. When he looked back down, he let out, “Huh.”

Aziraphale kept looking down at the little man and the plastic star, and he didn’t respond.

Davey kept on with a close study of the scene, and he said, “That’s something.”

Aziraphale, still, didn’t respond.

“What do you make of that?” Davey asked, glancing back up.

Aziraphale looked like he was thinking the way a stick wedged between two posts fails to bend. His attention on the scene was taut, his form unwavering. His face showed a dissatisfaction that was growing with intensity, a mask that barely covered something immense and hidden below. Whatever that immense something was, it was rising more and more towards the surface, and it was so close to breaking past that mask completely, imminently pushing towards eruption—but then Aziraphale stopped it. He loosened himself up, and he tamped it down with a quick shake of the head.

“I don’t know what it means,” Aziraphale said.

That might be absolute bull-hockey, but it was bull-hockey Aziraphale clearly believed.

Davey leaned back enough in his chair to allow him to fold his arms over his belly. He made a sound to show that he was taking this seriously, that he was really chewing over this unusual conundrum in front of them. And then he made a decision.

“Well, it’s your scene, so I can’t tell you what it means,” he said, straightforward and simple. “But, ya know, I could tell ya what I’d be liable to think it meant, if it were a human in your place who’d made it.”

For the first time since the star had pushed over the little man, Aziraphale looked up at Davey. He was curious in a bland sort of way. “Oh?”

“Mmhmm.” Davey met Aziraphale’s curiosity, and then he directed attention back down to the scene. He wanted to be able to see Aziraphale’s reaction, but he also thought it would be best for Aziraphale not to feel watched. “With a human? What I'd take that to probably represent was some sort of, you know, romantic development."

“Hm.”

Just a quick glance up, just to see: Aziraphale maintained that unconcerned air.

Davey figured, taking a risk was warranted.

“And, I’ll tell ya, even more…” This was a risk, but he was careful about it. He was gentle with how he offered it. “I’d probably take it, in fact, to represent something like a sexual development.”

Davey hoped his gaze was equally gentle, as he looked at Aziraphale and waited for a response.

“Well,” Aziraphale said.

“Ha!” Aziraphale laughed.

“Oh, you humans, you are quite predictable in your ways, aren’t you?” Aziraphale teased.

“Ha, ha,” Aziraphale said.

“I assure you, Dr. Hampson…” Aziraphale did protest a bit much.

“This really has no applicability for an angel,” Aziraphale scoffed.

Davey wasn’t sure he believed that. “No?”

“Absolutely none at all.” Aziraphale insisted. He brought a level of certainty to his insistence that Davey had encountered plenty of times before with plenty of other clients who all had certain characteristics in common. Davey couldn’t count the number of times he’d gone through this exact same rigmarole, beat for beat. It would be uncanny, if it weren’t so easily explicable.

Davey wondered. “What about for a demon?”

“Come now, Dr. Hampson, this is…” Aziraphale did not like the progression of this discussion, and so he focused with renewed interest back on its source: the plastic star and the little man. He wouldn’t want to be described as scrambling for an explanation, no matter how apt that description may be. “The meaning is perfectly clear now that I think about it. Yes, actually. I was knocked over. I have mentioned, haven’t I, how reckless he can be? What this shows us is that I should know better than to upset things.”

Oh yes, this was so completely familiar. The shock at a suggestion, the laughing denial, the flustered reassertion of a safer narrative: the progression that leads unerringly to self-blame, self-control, self-rejection. Davey smiled, because he wanted Aziraphale to know that his limits were understood, that he was not alone, that Davey could sit with Aziraphale's discomfort even when he himself could not. Davey was sad, though, all the same, for all the same reasons.

There was still time left in the session. There was enough time, in fact, that Davey could have disclosed what the future held for him. He could have used this remaining time to inform Aziraphale about how soon their work together would end. It didn’t feel right, though. He wasn’t ready. And, besides, he was too distracted with trying to reason through a plan, trying to figure out what series of steps he could possibly take to get Aziraphale where he wanted to be, with the limited the time they had left. He was worried it just wouldn’t be enough.

***

If Davey’s office door were shut, would Aubrey be as inclined to stop by? It was hard to imagine her knocking on a closed door and then standing outside while waiting to be allowed in. A door being opened for you implies you should offer to explain your presence, and he couldn’t imagine she would tolerate that. With the door already open, however, she could meander on in without relying on anyone being willing to accept her.

She saw all the miniatures that Davey still had out, and she expressed vague interest. “Sandbox, huh?”

“Sand tray,” Davey said.

“Right.”

How amazing the full capacity of the human vocal apparatus, what could allow for a single syllable such as that to contain so distinctly an opinion.

Davey was sitting at his desk, so he scooted his chair around to face her, and he leaned an elbow against the desk’s surface. “Not a fan, I take it.”

She was noncommittal, in no rush to respond, and she took her time moving over towards the collection. The figurine closest to her was a soldier in camouflage. She picked it up, and she looked at it. “It takes up a lot of space.”

That was a reasonable point. “That’s why I usually keep it all packed away.”

If her goal, while inspecting the soldier, was to show that her interest was purely academic, she was successful. She sat it back down, and she rotated it so it was facing out. “Lots of clutter.”

“Sure.”

“And it’s kind of…” Rather than provide a word, she offered a full-bodied grimace. “…Isn’t it?”

Davey put on the look of being put out. “Wouldn’t you know, it just so happens to be an excellent tool for when you want to express yourself but can’t find the right words.”

She responded with a side-eye and a smirk. She didn’t pick up the next miniature she inspected but instead placed her hand around it in order to rotate it in its spot. Just like its neighbor, it too now faced out in the same direction. “But—why sand?”

Davey wasn’t obligated to this conversation. “You don’t have to use sand.”

Her attention went to a third miniature, which she shifted so that it was in line with the other two. It was a witch with a cauldron. “Some of these are pretty on-the-nose, aren’t they?”

“You don’t score them for creativity, Aubrey.” Speaking of being on-the-nose: how long would it take for her to acknowledge she was organizing his collection into orderly rows? He wasn’t annoyed, not exactly, but it felt like she was working to push buttons intentionally. “If you’re trying to get me to teach you how to use sand tray, there’s less obvious ways you could go about it.”

She went still, but her smirk strengthened. Her fingers wrapped more tightly around the witch, and something about the movement made it feel like a private action, like Davey’s presence was an intrusion. She let go of it, though, and she dropped the smirk. She was steeling herself up for something. The last few minutes, it was clear now, had been her stalling.

“Listen,” she said.

She didn’t look at him.

“I did something that affected you. And I did it flippantly. I had every reason to know it could be a terrible thing to do—believe me—and I did it anyway. I didn’t think through it at all, and I should have.”

He didn’t have time to process her words adequately. She turned, before he could react in any meaningful way, and she looked him in the eye. This didn’t feel like the same Aubrey who had teased him with a fake Southern drawl; it didn’t feel like the same Aubrey who had breezed past an apology with sour contradictions just a week ago. This felt like an Aubrey who was precise and exacting. For someone who liked so much to be guarded, this felt especially raw.

“I am sorry,” she said.

Davey felt his jaw tighten. He had to loosen it, purposefully. He fought against his first instinct, which was to smile and chuckle and go back to joshing about sand trays. He fought against some other instinct, too, which was deeper down, and which encouraged him to react with irritation. It occurred to him that she was trying, and she couldn’t know how much he did not want this.

He regarded her, he hoped, with the sincerity she thought she had earned.

“I don’t think you did anything wrong,” he said.

“I think I did,” she said.

Well, the fact of the matter was: that was her cross to bear. If she was stained with sin, it was not Davey who could wash it away. If forgiveness was what she was after, she had come to the wrong place. Davey did not feel the touch of absolution.

He shook his head.

It wasn’t what she wanted, and maybe she couldn’t handle it. That exacting rawness of hers threatened to turn sharp, and she shifted her eyes away from him, downward. She shrugged in an exaggerated show of indifference, and then she turned to leave.

He didn’t want that to happen.

If she made it out the door right now, then something would be broken. Something would be lost. Davey wasn’t sure what. He just knew that it was something not yet fully formed, something that they had blundered through too disastrously up to this point, something he didn't want to see die. He couldn’t accept her apology, no, but Davey was sure that there was something she needed and that he could in fact provide. He was sure he would regret it, if he let her slip away, if he didn’t at least try in whatever way he could.

“Hey,” he called out, to catch her.

He worried she was stubborn enough not to stop, and so he was thankful when, in fact, she did. She waited, her body aimed towards the door, her face schooled unconvincingly into a look of disinterested patience.

“I can show you the ropes with it sometime.” It didn’t matter if she was actually interested in the lesson. What mattered was that it was an offer he could make and she could accept. “Sand tray, I mean. It’s worth knowing.”

“Yeah?” she said.

“I’d be happy to.”

It didn’t feel like enough. It had to be, though, because there wasn't anything else he had to give to her.

She took it in, and then she nodded. “Sometime next week?”

“That’ll work,” he said, accepting the agreement. He was satisfied by it, despite the twinge that came from how he added on: “I’ll be here.”

Chapter 15: Knock on Wood

Chapter Text

On Wednesday, at 9am, Davey met with someone he’d been working with for years. They’d done incredible work together, and the entire session was spent processing the news of Davey’s upcoming departure. She had cried. Davey had cried. They had cried together. And then, after she left, and after Davey had given himself a chance to feel the weight of his tears, he settled down all of his personal emotions. He switched gears, and he got ready for Aziraphale.

***

Best to get it over with, right at the start. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

There’s no good way to do it. Either you rush through it and made it awkward, or you give long enough a preamble for the other person to grow apprehensive. Davey tried to navigate from a middle position, pausing just long enough for Aziraphale to have registered his meaning.

“I’m going to be switching to a different job.” Davey spoke plainly. “That means I won’t practicing here anymore, so I won’t be able to keep working with you as a client.”

“Oh.” What disappointment Aziraphale allowed to filter into that syllable was a bland, detached sort. “Is that so?”

“Mmhmm.”

The time they spent together was Aziraphale’s to define, and that meant their upcoming termination would be Aziraphale’s to define as well. Davey didn’t interfere.

“Well.” Aziraphale tapped his fingertips against the knees of his trousers, and he glanced about the room before returning to Davey with the offer of a smile. “Then I suppose this is farewell.”

Their termination was Aziraphale’s to define, yes, but that didn’t mean Davey was ready to be discarded like an apple that’s gone squishy. “Hold on,” he chuckled. “There’s five weeks until my transition to the new job’s complete, and nothing’s stopping us from meeting until then.”

“Ah.”

There was greater discomfort, now that Aziraphale recognized the end wouldn’t be so quick. Taking time for a proper goodbye meant having to acknowledge if and how it mattered.

“Or we can quit earlier, if that’s what you want,” because Davey liked to be able to give options.

Aziraphale dismissed that idea with a small scrunch of his nose, and then he turned himself over to curiosity. “Are congratulations in order?”

“Well…”

Inside, Davey jostled.

If he were honest with himself, he would acknowledge he had avoided preparing for this aspect of this conversation with this client. In his preparations, he had kept his attention focused on what termination would mean for Aziraphale’s needs and wants, nothing else. Over and again, his mind had skittered away from any consideration of what it would be like to look this angel in the eye and share how he had upended his life in order to do good work for those in need. He had avoided imagining what it might be like to receive attention in response.

Davey’s throat went dry. “It’s with the Bureau of Housing Support. They offer services to the homeless, so I’ll be helping with that.”

“Will you?” Aziraphale perked up meaningfully, and Davey was crushed by it.

He was crushed by how he was crushed by it.

Was it some inherent human impulse, to delight in approbation from the divine? Did it seep from his skin like alcohol from the inebriated? Was it written on his soul? Could he find any way to deny it? Davey wanted not to want this. He wanted his actions, his worldly deeds, his good work to be untouched by a motivation as petty as another’s opinion. He wanted not to dwell on the source of that opinion. There was no doubt that Aziraphale, just as well as Davey, could see the connection between their time together and this choice that Davey had made. If there was a moral victory in the story of Davey’s choice—and Davey would like to think that there was, because what else could there be in its place?—to whom should that victory be credited?

If Davey could make himself not want approbation, then it meant there could be no sting in the chance that it was undeserved.

“The opportunity came up,” he said. “So I took it.”

Aziraphale smiled.

Davey met that smile like a foreign thing.

Fine: he did want Aziraphale to be proud of him. Of course he did. He wanted to feel some sort of deep-down certainty that he was good, that he was good enough, that he was more than good enough just as he was. He wanted that certainty to be mirrored in the reactions of others, and especially in the smile of this miraculous being across from him. But he also knew that the sort of deep-down certainty that he yearned for was self-contradictory. By its very nature it consumed any of the goodness to which he aspired. What could there be to Davey—to this animated, flawed flesh that attempted at goodness —that could be deserving of pride? It is a fault in our grammar that good is an adjective rather than a verb. A warrior of second chances finds no moral succor but through his actions.

“You’ll be helping the homeless,” Aziraphale said, with an emphasis.

“I’ll be trying to.”

“How good,” Aziraphale said.

“I can hope so.”

Aziraphale silenced. And then his eyes welled up.

Davey reeled himself in.

Aziraphale really was sitting there, on the verge of tears. Something sat unsaid on his lips. He was still smiling, but that smile had stiffened into a perfunctory shape, and he struggled internally against whatever it was he did not say. It was active enough a struggle that it left anxious friction in the air between them, and it pulled thoroughly at Davey’s attention.

“Hey,” Davey said, as grounding.

Aziraphale twisted his head to the side, hiding his face from Davey as much as he could, and he blinked rapidly to clear up his vision. He was trying to cover, for decency’s sake, despite the futility. “It’s a very good thing you are doing.”

“I’m glad you think so.” The words were perfunctory, Davey knew, but it didn’t matter. Aziraphale was distracted by his unexpected upswell, and Davey wanted attention to stay there. He honored the depth of feeling Aziraphale must have, to react even this much. He downplayed it. “I get the sense you’re feeling something right now.”

Aziraphale was still trying to keep himself hidden. His rigid posture couldn’t be comfortable. He sniffed, and he murmured, “I suppose I will be sorry to say goodbye.”

Right. Sure.

As if Aziraphale would ever express himself so plainly and actually say something true. As if Aziraphale would be so quick to acknowledge, let alone recognize, the impetus behind an upset. As if Aziraphale didn’t have a need for false narratives the way a human has a need for air.

The timing, if nothing else, spoke against it.

“Let’s talk about it. About, uh--” Davey recognized an immediate need to frame what it was. Certainly it wasn’t saying goodbye, but giving Aziraphale the opportunity to pretend otherwise would be counterproductive. Davey thought quickly through the antecedents. “What comes to mind, when you think about this new job I’m taking up?”

Aziraphale pretended he had an itch on his cheek he needed to scratch; the façade gave him the chance to wipe at one eye. He was doing his best within his own limits. He was trapped, as it was, with his own discomfort.

“Doing good,” Aziraphale said.

That was something. That was interesting. Davey, quiet, made space for more.

“You and your team,” Aziraphale continued, still swiveled uncomfortably, letting himself speak more to the magnet collection than anything else. “You’ll have a real chance to make a difference, won’t you?”

Had Davey said anything about working with a team? He didn’t always have a precise memory for this sort of thing, but he didn’t think so. That detail was all Aziraphale’s.

Gingerly, Davey tried: “It’s good to have a chance to make a difference.”

Again, Aziraphale had to blink rapidly. He bit at his lip, like he was scared what would happen if he didn’t keep it secured.

Davey continued: “You really value getting to make a difference.”

“Yes, I will be very sorry to say goodbye.” Prim as ever, clear and to the point, as if Aziraphale had heard nothing from Davey. With the act of turning his head back to face forward, he settled himself down into the narrative he had decided was safe. Everything was compressed down, pushed low, made smothered. His eyes were still wet, but the narrative he had chosen offered a satisfactory explanation. Finally contained, safe, Aziraphale looked up, and he smiled with a true, kindly warmth.

***

They spent the rest of the session making music. The central theme was the upcoming need to say goodbye. It gave both of them a chance to think, as they let the music help them feel.

***

Aubrey took to sand tray the way a cat takes to a bubble bath. She was skeptical of the very idea and resistant to each and every step. With therapeutic techniques, you always want to try out a technique yourself before using it with a client, but, if Aubrey were his client, Davey would have ended up throwing the whole sand tray out the window. She didn’t want to touch the sand; she didn’t want to make a scene without direction; she rankled at how the miniatures weren’t more uniform. For the whole practice, she roleplayed as Bruce Wayne.

Davey was more of a Superman fan, personally. But that was neither here nor there.

They did as much as they were going to do, and then they were done. They were sat there, each on their own side of the sand tray. Aubrey had a toy bat in her hands, which had played an integral role in the scene she had created. There was something on her mind, but she wasn’t sharing what. The silence, which could have been amiable, instead felt unfinished.

Anyway, Davey too had plenty on his mind. He cleared his throat. “You know much about Heaven?”

She rotated around the toy bat in her hands. “Not really,” she said. “Not much. Enough, I guess.”

“What I hear doesn’t sound much like what I was taught back in Sunday school.”

She smirked, respecting that. Some tension in her shoulders eased up, and it occurred to Davey she had been unsure about how honest she could be with her opinion. “Honestly, it sounds toxic as hell.”

Her meaning could have been literal or figurative. She gave no indication of an intentional pun.

The toy bat got propped up on her fingertips so she could make its little rubber wings flutter. She focused on that, and then she said, “You’re going to miss all this, aren’t you?”

It may have been a change in topic, or it may not have been.

“Yeah,” he said. “I will.”

“You know, um…” Her voice lowered. She was uncomfortable, and it made her awkward. “You don’t have to be afraid of being damned.”

That wasn’t something to which Davey was sure how to respond.

She couldn’t decide whether to keep her eyes down on the bat or to look up at him. The indecision left her with a grim scowl. The bat’s wings weren’t fluttering anymore. “I know it scares you. That makes sense, I get it. But I know there’s something–it’s something that Aziraphale could do, when–”

“I’m not afraid of damnation.”

Interrupting her cut through her grim rigidity. He shook his head with certainty, and doing so captured her attention. She regarded him, and she listened.

“What I’m afraid of,” he clarified, “is being worthy of damnation.”

“I can’t imagine that anyone’s actually worthy of damnation.”

“I guess that’s the difference between us and God.”

Her face twitched. They had a difference in perspective, clearly, but he couldn’t tell whether the twitch came from annoyance or a stifled laugh.

He could wonder about that. He wondered about her, about what she would have said if he hadn’t cut her off. He was curious, but he wasn’t going to ask. Instead, they moved on from such uncomfortable topics, and then, when it was time, she helped him clean up the sand tray and put it away.

***

When Davey had reason to reach for a metaphor for the human mind, what he liked to reach towards was rhythm. Hear him out: it might not be bunkum.

Some decades ago, Davey read a book that absolutely blew his mind. It was about string theory, or this theory that attempts to make sense of physics down at the absolutely tiniest levels of existence, down below the Planck length. Physics gets wacky down there, and, so far as Davey understood it, all our attempts to make sense of particle mechanics fall apart once we’re focusing down at that scale. String theory, in order to save quantum physics from all that wackiness, suggests that the most fundamental level of existence isn’t made up of discrete particles at all, but instead strings. And what a string is, when you get down to it, is nothing but a segment of energy. In other words, it’s a vibration. Different types of stuff are made up of different patterns of vibration. In other words, stuff is through rhythm. And what was really neat about this theory, from what Davey understood at least, was the fact that there’s nothing truly separating any one small bit of vibration from any other small bit of vibration: take any two of them together, and what you have can be understood just as well as one larger, more complex vibratory pattern. So, if this theory has any merit, the whole of the universe is just one massive, complex vibration. At the most fundamental level, there is no separation between this and that , between you and me: we are part of the rhythm that is the universe. What we are, all of us, together, from the most minuscule layer to the most grand, is the universe singing itself into being.

At least, that’s what Davey had taken from this book he’d read. He knew he probably misunderstood most of it. From what he gathered, the best way to approach string theory was by misunderstanding it, especially if you’re a theoretical physicist. So, no, Davey didn’t presume to think he could speak to the actual truth of things, cosmologically. He just liked the idea this book gave him about what it meant to belong within the universe. He just thought it was a beautiful image, that’s all. Although, isn’t there always at least some drop of truth to be gleaned from beauty?

So: Imagine rhythm as the fundamental nature of existence. Imagine any one person, any one conscious being, as a portion of a rhythm, functioning as part of that rhythm, identifiable by how it fits uniquely within that broader rhythm. We’re all interconnected, mutually sustaining, complex as chaos. We are interpretable as selves insofar as we instantiate a distinctive leitmotif. You are you, because of the patterns that compose you: your patterns of thought, patterns of action, patterns of reaction and response. What Davey thought was: your soul is a drumbeat.

Therapy, if you think about things this way, is helping someone identify the drumbeat of themselves through microcosm. People came to Davey with some presenting problem, some set of symptoms or expressed concerns that they wanted to change, and it was through their patterns of interaction here in this room that broader problems could be addressed. The drumbeat of who you are in therapy reverberates outward, affecting the whole of yourself. The same is true in reverse: the presenting problem that brings you to therapy is never separate from the broader rhythms of your existence.

For example, take infidelity. Suppose your wife has been unfaithful, and you’re trying to make sense of this. It would be easy to focus on that one occurrence, while ignoring all of the— Actually, scratch that. This was a terrible example, and Davey knew better than to think about it.

A better example: say your son’s grades have started slipping in Spanish class. This might appear as a solitary issue, easy to separate out from all other aspects of your son’s life. But it isn’t, not really. It is a microcosm for how he approaches challenges, and how he copes with adversity, and—depending—what connection he feels to the Latino side of his family. A Spanish tutor might get you some distance, but the true issue at hand cannot be separated out from all the other aspects of his life.

Now, with all that said, onto the main attraction.

Aziraphale wanted to tell his demon friend that he loved him. Take that as a microcosm. After all, if it were possible to abstract this one fact away from all the rest of Aziraphale’s life, the solution was completely obvious: just do it. He could say the words adequately enough, whenever he wanted. Nothing was stopping him—except, that is, for everything. So, what was the drumbeat to the everything of Aziraphale’s existence?

Here’s what Davey knew: Aziraphale did not feel safe; Aziraphale was inexperienced with direct communication; Aziraphale expected self-expression to be met with suffering.

And here was another microcosm: the first and only time Aziraphale had come close to crying in this room was when he turned his mind to the thought of getting to work with a team to make a difference in the world.

Listen: the drumbeat’s the same. What do you hear?

***

Aziraphale sat. He was as companionable as ever, and his fingertips were rested on his knees. His smile was both compliant and patient. He hadn’t brought anything in for them to discuss this week, which honestly could’ve been expected given how the previous session had gone.

It was fine by Davey. He had fodder for a chinwag. “You know what I’ve been thinking about lately? Retirement.”

Offer light chitchat, and Aziraphale reciprocated with polite curiosity. “Is that so?”

“Well, you know how it is…” Davey was taking it easy. He leaned back in his chair, stretched out a shoulder. “I’m getting up there in years. Talk of retirement’s never too far away from me these days.”

“Is it common, to consider retiring while beginning a new venture?”

“Oh, I’m not considering it.” Davey made the correction with a chuckle. “Now, my kids, they think I should, but—naw. And, you wanna know why?”

That polite curiosity: Aziraphale was attentive.

“Because I think it’d leave me feeling empty, not having my work to do anymore.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said.

His smile shifted to show he understood. Specifically, so far as Davey could tell, what Aziraphale was indicating he understood was the meaning of Davey’s words, nothing more. If there were hidden depths to Aziraphale that were currently working at understanding more than that superficial piece, Davey couldn’t tell. However fluently Davey might be able to interpret what Aziraphale left unsaid, a language of silence was going to be prone to misinterpretation.

No problem. Davey could have an interesting thought dawn on him. “Now, you’re retired, aren’t ya? You ever experience anything like that?”

“I suspect it is a bit different for me than it would be for you.”

“Retirement is?” That absolutely made sense, and Davey could certainly believe it. He was curious how Aziraphale would explain it, though. “How so?”

“Well—” Aziraphale’s words turned clipped, and his demeanor strained from his attempt at keeping up appearances despite a strong, cutting bitterness— “I daresay yours wouldn’t result from an attempted execution.”

Oh, yes, there was bitterness in those depths. Davey registered it, and he honored it. You don’t just have a comment like that dropped on you without taking the time to acknowledge just how heavy it is.

“Whew,” Davey let out.

Aziraphale would have preferred that he hadn’t.

“No, really.” Davey kept on, because it was worth keeping on. He shook his head from the weight of it all. “That’s—that’s something, isn’t it?”

Put in those terms, it was hard to deny. Even Aziraphale couldn’t manage it, despite how closed off to it he tried to be. “I suppose so.”

“We haven’t talked much about that, have we? It must have been truly terrible.”

“Hm,” Aziraphale said.

There was suffering underneath that buttoned-up bitterness, no doubt about it, and it was settling itself now into a self-contained melancholy. But they weren’t here to process trauma, and they had somewhere else they were trying to go. “I can see how that’d affect your feelings about being retired now.”

Aziraphale’s lips pursed, and he didn’t respond. His eyes went downcast. And, all the while, the inner stuff of him coiled and sharpened, turned and tightened. What might that stuff be, if it weren’t so compressed?

It was time, probably, for them to find out.

Davey took what pieces they’d established, and they lined them up how they supposedly were meant to go. “If I retired, I’d feel empty because I missed my work. But your retirement’s not like that, because… It wasn’t your choice to retire.”

Never bet against Aziraphale’s intelligence; never doubt he wasn’t already five steps ahead, especially when there’s no indication of it. Obviously, the pieces they established didn’t fit together. He let out, “I am happy with how things are.”

People who are happy usually don’t emphasize the word like that. They don’t usually sound like their teeth might shatter. But Aziraphale’s truth was Davey’s to accept. “I bet.”

“Being… Retired , as I am… It was—never even could dare to imagine it.”

The funny thing about truth is how many layers it has. There was the truth as Aziraphale stated it. There was also the truth that led to the pauses, the mishaps of grammar and false starts. There was the emphasis on a particular word, which stuck out. And there was how Aziraphale’s eyes came up, once he said it, pleadingly wide and tensely open.

As much as he could, Davey would reflect all of those truths back with the offer of his heartful conviction. “You were in a bad situation. Absolutely.”

“I would never want to go back,” Aziraphale said.

Yet another truth: there hadn’t been any suggestion of going back, not until right now. “You’d lose so much if you did.”

“You can’t imagine…”

“I mean, why would you?” A rhetorical question, with an obvious answer, can slip so easily into an earnest consideration. “I mean, seriously here. What could possibly ever make you want to go back?”

The whole of Aziraphale froze. His pleading eyes were fixed on Davey, his expression ramrod inflexible. And then, slow enough to be the product of anguished effort, his eyelids squeezed themselves to shut.

It is too easy to think of emotion as some kind of explosive, passionate display that flings us about like the wind. That’s how it is for some people, but not everyone. For Aziraphale, it seeped like oil from stony fruit. There was a glistening to his eyelashes.

It would not be endured alone.

Davey softened himself as antidote to Aziraphale’s tension. He spoke slow and steady.

“Hey,” he said. “This too will pass. It all passes. I promise. Think of what Jung’d tell you. We can’t make our way forward if we only see half of the terrain. We get stuck like that. We gotta work to take in the whole of things. If you wanna be a good person—if you’re human, at least—then that means you gotta recognize all the ways you’re not good. How you fail. You can’t be brave if you don’t know fear. And, well…”

It would have been better if he had a prepared speech. All he had to say was what he sensed to be the needed truth.

“Aziraphale, I don’t think you can be happy with everything you’ve got if you don’t acknowledge that you’re sad about what you’ve lost.”

Davey knew, it wasn’t much. But it meant that Aziraphale was not alone. It was, maybe, just barely enough to open for vent some truth half-rotted and collapsed beneath all the others.

There was an easing. Not much, just a slight bit. Just enough. It released, in increments, some of the tension in Aziraphale’s neck and shoulders. It gave space for him to breathe in, thickly. And, with lungs expanded from that intake of air, Aziraphale opened his eyes.

They were red. They shined from the presence of tears. They were steady. Aziraphale regarded Davey plainly and without conceit.

Softly, Davey said, “It makes you sad you don’t get to work for Heaven anymore.”

Aziraphale whispered, “It shouldn’t.”

“But it does.”

“Yes.”

***

Four weeks to go.

Chapter 16: Rude Boy

Chapter Text

They didn’t actually make co*ke Zero anymore. Now what they had was co*ke Zero Sugar. Davey knew that. Honestly, he couldn’t tell the difference between the two, but he was nostalgic for the old stuff. The old name. co*ke Zero sounded like a racecar, whereas co*ke Zero Sugar sounded like a momento mori but for diabetes. It was just one more little thing that left Davey feeling his age. But darn him up some socks, he still liked the stuff.

So far, it had been an easygoing sort of day. He was satisfied to spend his mid-morning break doing nothing but sit in his office and contemplate his soda can.

That’s what he was doing when a shadow filled up his doorway.

It wasn’t Aziraphale. Davey could tell before he had turned his head to look. It was too early: Aziraphale shouldn’t be arriving for another ten minutes or so. And even from the corner of his eye, he knew the shape of the figure was all wrong. The feel of the shadow was wrong.

It was the demon, standing just outside, toeing the threshold to Davey’s private space. He loomed, like he was waiting for something he didn’t exactly care for. Granted, that’s how he always looked.

Davey must have taken too long to say something, because the demon’s eyebrows raised up behind his obnoxious sunglasses, and then he let pour out, monotonous and sardonic, “Knock. Knock.”

Those sunglasses made him eerie. They gave nothing and reflected back everything. The totality of him was so sharp and gaunt, like he was born within the hollow bones of a bird, and you got the sense that his eyes were the only part of him that had any potential to be full or soft. And that's what he chose to keep hidden.

He was so close, and yet he hadn’t entered the room. Davey noticed that. Every part of the demon stayed right outside, on the other side of the threshold. He made it look natural and unintended, but Davey wondered.

“Uh.” Davey had to say something. “Can I help you?”

Not the greeting Davey would’ve offered, no, if he’d given even half a second of thought to it. But those Southern manners run deep.

The demon–his name was Crowley, Davey knew that–could enunciate so as to waft melodrama. “Aziraphale sends his deepest regrets.”

Davey frowned.

“I see,” he said.

Crowley, this demon, did not care to elaborate. His meaning was clear enough: this was a last minute cancellation. Aziraphale was not coming today.

“You wouldn’t happen to know why?”

“Books, or something.” Crowley sniffed, indifferent. “Personally, I’d have left a voicemail.”

That was a good point. Aziraphale easily could have left a voicemail. He could have called up at any time, and he was the sort who liked a personal touch like that. Not only would he want to communicate directly, he’d feel compelled to, given the guilt he certainly would be feeling about canceling at the last minute. This wasn’t like him. It didn’t feel right.

Maybe the demon had done something to him. That was, in theory, a possibility, yet Davey recognized he gave it zero credence. Davey further recognized that, as uncomfortable as he was, in this moment, with Crowley’s presence, what he felt was not fear.

“Well…” This interaction had nowhere left to go. “Thank you for relaying the message.”

And yet, the demon lingered.

“So.” Crowley tilted his head. It was a deeply casual movement, as if to show that he was subject to an interest no more substantial than a warming frost. “You’re off to feed the homeless, are you.”

“Uh…” Davey felt disoriented. Further, he was distracted by the wheels in his head that were starting to turn about Aziraphale’s cancellation. “No, not… Not feed. Mental health support. Mostly, administrative–”

“What, you’re not going to feed them?”

“Huh?”

Crowley had a sneer for a mouth at the best of times. “You think what the hungry need is mental health support?”

“No, but–”

“Oh, of course, don’t need to give out food .” A demon was mockery incarnate. “Not when we have so many lovely breathing exercises to distract from the starvation.”

“That’s not–!”

Davey cut himself off, expecting and yet receiving no interruption. He was taken aback, surprised by the confrontational charge. It came so easily and so readily, the demon having been so quick to assume his incompetence. And Davey was surprised further by a rush of feeling, rich and full and only just lagging behind the shock and the affront. It spread, this feeling, throughout his gut and his chest, and then out through his shoulders. It took residence in the crown of his head, and it shifted the set of his jaw. This feeling left him ready to sag down, out of the chair upon which he was sat, and onto his knees. And, all through it, Davey noticed: the demon, even still, let no bit of himself past the threshold of the doorway.

What Davey felt, this sudden wave, was relief.

Of course a demon would have no interest in admiring Davey’s good motives. He wouldn’t be moved to coo any heartfelt how good of you or aren’t you so selfless. He wouldn’t be concerned about Davey’s sacrifices, about the loss of his private practice, his upcoming and self-imposed exile from the comfort of his cozy office. Of course: a demon would not be moved to praise the apparent mettle of a mortal’s soul. Of course: a demon would have no trouble sussing out vainglory.

No one else had reacted like this. No one–not Sadie, not his boys, not Aubrey, not even Aziraphale–had looked past Davey to focus on the work itself. And yet, a demon had. This demon had. It was all well and good for Davey to play at sainthood, to puff himself up and congratulate himself for his unimpeachable motivations, but what good did any of that do? All the good intentions in the world, on their own, made no lick of difference to the ailments of the afflicted. The demon sneered and he mocked, and in so doing, he let slip a concern both true and necessary: Would the hungry be left to starve?

What Davey had started to say–what he had cut himself off from saying–was: That’s not how it works. Because it wasn’t. Nutritional support was its own operation, with its own budget and mechanisms. Caring whether the unhoused were left unfed was not part of Davey’s contractual responsibilities. That’s where Davey’s mind had gone, upon receiving a demon’s critique: the banality of bureaucratic indifference. As if organizational structure took precedence over tangible, human need. As if the righteous warrior would give up on good work when confronted with the technicalities of a job description.

Davey had needed this. He hadn’t even realized until he’d gotten it how anxious and itchy he had been for someone—anyone—to give him a reaction like this. Let the work stand to be judged on its own. Let whatever may be leading Davey to it, whether probity or pride, be submerged down beneath it. Let the work be good if it is good, and let Davey be nothing if it is unavailing.

This demon had seen right through Davey. And Davey, having been found see-through, felt the relief of being seen.

“I give you my word.” Some people might say that a promise meant nothing when it was given to a demon. Davey thought it was possible, though, that maybe this one meant even more, because of it. “No one who comes to my agency will leave without a full belly.”

The demon quieted. He looked like he was disappointed, but no. It was just that he had turned introspective, and he was preparing to back away from the conversation. There was a twitch to his mouth, but the nature of it was inscrutable, given how the sunglasses served their intended purpose.

He started to turn, to make his exit, but then he offered like a parting shot, “Careful not to piss off the wrong people.”

It could have been a warning, or it could have been well-wishes. It was fine, either way.

***

Davey sat for a time, letting his mind sort itself out. His eyes rested, purposelessly, on the hallway floor right outside his doorway.

After a while, he heard the light echo of distant voices: it was Aubrey, collecting her next client. It was 11 o’clock.

Davey turned his attention back to his can of co*ke Zero–his can of co*ke Zero Sugar. It was still half full, but he’d had enough for today.

He’d made up his mind.

Pressing his hands against his armrests, he got up from his chair. He walked across the room, over to that open doorway. He stopped there, taking a moment to feel the subtle shift in the air between his office and the hall beyond. It was a quiet day.

He took hold of the door. He felt at its wood grain beneath his fingertips. And then he pushed it closed.

Davey went back to his desk, and he dialed up Aziraphale.

***

“Oh–well. Erm. Yes, hello. But… Didn’t Crowley…?”

“Stop by? Indeed he did. I’m grateful you sent the message, thank you.” Davey nodded in a deep and understanding way, because he knew, even over the phone, that sort of thing made a difference. “It’s not like you to cancel like that, though, so I wanted to check in and make sure everything’s goin’ okay for ya.”

“Oh, well… Yes. Of course, no– That is… Truly, it’s very kind of–of you…”

When kids are really young, and they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, it doesn’t even occur to them to try to lie about it. They don’t have sufficiently complex theory of mind yet to imagine lying or a need to. Then, once they’re a bit older, they’ll look you right in the eye and tell you they’ve never even seen a cookie before, even while they’re sporting a crumb mustache. They understand lying by that point, just not well enough to know when it might work and when it won’t. It takes time for a child to develop the reasoning skills necessary to know when they don’t stand a chance of devising a convincing lie. Anyway, it’s at that age that the prepubescent cookie thief starts to stammer the way that Aziraphale was right now.

“I am dreadfully sorry about today.” These words came out of his mouth smoothly, at least, because they were true.

“Aw, don’t worry about.” Davey smiled in that way of his, but even more broadly than he usually did. He wanted to make sure that Aziraphale could hear it.

“Ever so busy… These days–The bookshop. You, erm, you know…”

Davey was sure that Aziraphale really was busted up with guilt about missing today’s appointment. Feeling guilty, though, was Aziraphale’s most comfortable state, and so that wasn’t why he was having such trouble expressing himself. No, the reason Aziraphale was falling all over his words so much was that he had thought he’d finagled a way out of having to lie. He had thought, by sending Crowley rather than calling up, he wasn’t going to have to have this conversation.

They had done hard work, last week. They had managed a root canal: they had burrowed down, and they had excavated out enough decay and inflamed flesh so that ultimately, finally, the raw nerve underneath was exposed. Something like that could be painful, and it was laborious, and it’s the sort of operation that can leave you far more sore immediately afterwards than you had been before. It was entirety reasonable, after one root canal, to want to avoid getting another.

Sometimes, people drop out of therapy right when it matters the most.

A root canal isn’t usually that painful, if you’ve got a good dentist. Davey had thought, with Aziraphale, he had been doing a good job at his metaphorical dentistry. Sometimes, though, things just hurt, no matter what.

“It sure is a shame,” Davey said, understating the point, "what that we’ve only got three weeks after this one.”

“Oh, yes. Oh. Just terrible.”

Davey sighed.

He knew what this conversation was. He’d had enough like it to be able tell what was happening. He understood Aziraphale’s tone of voice, recognized the vague flightiness in Aziraphale’s words.

He knew what it sounded like, when someone wasn’t going to be coming back.

It was real hard to admit it, though.

“So, I’ll be seeing you next week, then,” Davey said.

“Erm, actually… Well, you see, I… Erm…”

Davey lost his smile, which he was sure got transmitted over the line. He shook his head.

There was a specific kind of ache Davey felt in a moment like this. It was like when the emperor is going around without any clothes on, but you know everyone will deny it if you point it out.

“It’s the bookshop, you see. It keeps me so busy, and I– well, I have so little time…”

Sometimes, things don’t end the way you want them to.

This wouldn’t be happening, he was certain, if it weren’t for his upcoming departure. Therapy often gets a lot more intense when its timeline is fixed, when you can see where you are relative to its end. Strong emotions come up, and the work can feel more desperate. Every session has, clouding over it, the necessity of the upcoming departure. You see regression. You see maladaptive coping strategies come out in full force. It didn’t matter how long it had been since they’d last been a problem.

And what did Aziraphale do, with hard emotions? How did he cope with unpleasantries?

“...And so, well… I will have to let you know. Erm… About… That is, about next week…”

This wasn’t about Davey. He understood that clearly. This was far more about Aziraphale than it was about anything else. Davey knew not to take it personally. It wasn’t in his nature to make a big stink. So, sure, he was a bit busted up about it, but that was just because he was disappointed.

Deeply, deeply disappointed.

There was plenty of cause: the disregard Aziraphale was showing for all they’d gone through, all they’d accomplished, and all they still could potentially manage to do in the time they had left. Quitting now meant that Aziraphale would pretend none of it had mattered, that he really had come all these weeks just as a ruse to spend more time with his demonic companion. He’d tell himself some nice story about how fun it had been to talk about magic and play with drums, and he’d make it very easy for himself to deny that there had been anything more to it than that. If he ended up trying at therapy again someday, he’d be doing worse than starting over from scratch. Davey doubted that would ever happen though, given how quitting right now would require him to put even more effort into convincing himself that nothing was actually wrong.

Yes, there was plenty for Davey to be disappointed about.

“I’ll–I’ll call you back. About next week. To reschedule.”

Alright, Davey could admit it: maybe he did take it a little personally.

Maybe, actually, he was feeling just a bit peeved.

Well, maybe more than a bit.

He was only human, after all, and he was being lied to about something that mattered.

Aziraphale had no intention of calling back, and they both knew it. He had avoided even leaving a voicemail. If his plan had worked–if Davey had accepted the demon-relayed cancellation–then they never would have spoken again. He’d keep on sending Crowley to do his dirty work, and he’d just wait until he knew Davey had closed up shop. Sure, every now and then, over the next three weeks, Aziraphale might look at his phone and feel a pang of guilt, but that would pass. Soon, he would be back to ignoring everything it hurt not to ignore, and avoiding everything that made him feel uncomfortable, and pretending that there wasn’t more he wanted out of his existence than what he had. It would be soft, and it would be easy, and it would be deeply painful in every way Aziraphale would never allow himself to acknowledge.

Well. Too bad for Aziraphale, but he’d made a mistake, hadn’t he? He’d answered the phone.

“Bullhockey,” Davey said.

“I’m– I’m sorry?”

“You heard me, I said bullhockey.”

If Aziraphale wanted to fire Davey, then he was going to have to do it. Actually do it, like a grown up, like someone who knows how to use his words. And until Aziraphale got up the courage to do it, that meant Davey continued to be his therapist, so Davey may as well continue to therapize. “What you’re doing right now is trying to avoid telling me that you don’t plan on ever coming back.”

There was a whole lot of shocked silence coming through the line now.

Davey made a point to glare at his can of co*ke Zero Sugar. He made fists of his hands—well, one hand, given how the other was busy holding up his phone, but one was better than none when it came to keeping up his gumption. He could feel how he was getting shpilkes. “If you don’t wanna come back, that’s your choice. I respect it. But you’ll be doing a real disservice to yourself, if you don’t express truthfully what you’re doing.”

An anxious chuckle: way over in England, Aziraphale was working hard to maintain his facade. He insisted, “That’s not at all what I was trying–”

“Bullhockey.”

“But I wasn’t!”

“Bullhockey.”

“I’m telling you–”

“Bullhockey!”

“Will you stop saying that stupid word!”

Davey stopped. Even when he was peeved off, and especially right afterwards, he didn’t like to be upsetting. Besides, he could feel his nerve starting to wane. He didn’t want to take it too far, and maybe he already had. He had to promise himself that he’d scrutinize all his flaws thoroughly later, because he would muck everything up if he got distracted. He had to stay focused.

His glare had slipped into a wince, so he fixed that. He squared up his shoulders, and he focused on what kept him committed. Bullhockey, bullhockey, bullhockey.

A distortion in the ambient sound from the phone; it was Aziraphale letting out a big huff.

“Tell me plainly, Aziraphale. Do you want to come to our session next week, or do you not?”

Bullhockey, bullhockey, bullhockey.

“No,” Aziraphale said, finally. “No, Dr. Hampson, I do not.”

There: he’d done it. He’d said it. He’d been honest.

Davey could relax.

The tension eased from his shoulders, and he let a heavy breath out from his lungs. He nodded, softly. “I can understand that. I do. Last week was really tough, but I personally think it would be a bad idea to cut off our work right now without winding things down over the next few weeks. But that’s just my opinion. It’s your choice.”

Davey was telling the truth. He really did think it was in Aziraphale’s best interest to come back. Granted, he also knew that, for his own sake, he wanted Aziraphale to return. He liked Aziraphale, and he enjoyed the time they spent together. He was going to be sad to say goodbye, no matter what. But, despite all that, as he waited for Aziraphale to answer, there rose within him a recognition of some cause for satisfaction: the confrontation had worked.

No matter what happened next, Aziraphale had expressed his true feelings. He was going to make a choice. Whether Aziraphale chose to come back or not, either way, it would be a victory. Even if Aziraphale expressed his choice by ending the call without saying another thing–well, that would be nonideal, but at least it would still be an exertion of agency, an expression of what he thought and wanted.

It could be an ending that meant something.

You can do it, Davey thought at him. He sent out courageous vibrations, as much as he could. He directed them into his phone, up through the satellite signal–or whatever it was that connected them together--and all the way out to England.

Davey could wait however long it might take. He knew he was asking Aziraphale for something that was hard to give. He’d been a bit mean about it, too, in order to get it.

When Aziraphale next spoke, he did so as if pulling the words out against his will. It was like he was fighting with himself about some weakness of will.

He said, “I’ll see you next week.” And then there was the hearty Click as Aziraphale hung up the phone.

Chapter 17: Break the Glass

Chapter Text

There was no way that Davey and Aziraphale would be alone for their meeting today, not after the cancellation and the phone call and all the bull–. No, instead, when Davey invited Aziraphale in, he was also inviting in an elephant and a chip.

The elephant in the room was expected. His name was What Happened Last Week, and he wasn’t going to go away until Davey and Aziraphale confronted him. Davey was ready for that. And, anyway, he’d always liked elephants.

The chip that Aziraphale brought in with him on his shoulder, on the other hand, was a surprise. Davey had assumed that Aziraphale would come in with some sort of embarrassed attitude, guilty and withdrawn, shrinking in his seat and avoiding eye contact. But, no. He walked into Davey’s office with his head held high, his mouth set in a regal line, and that chip firmly in place. He was so rigid and haughty in how he sat, hands clasped in his lap and eyes hardened, he may as well as had a ruler for a spine.

That was interesting.

“Well…” Davey got things going as he got sat down. “To start things off, let me say that–”

Tone clipped and curt, Aziraphale cut him off. “There simply isn’t a point to this.”

Davey stopped mid-sit.

“Huh,” he said.

You couldn’t blame him for assuming that Aziraphale, given his long habit of avoiding anything remotely elephantid, would need cajoling, an encyclopedia of large mammals, and rough contact with a tusk before he’d be willing to acknowledge what was in the room with them. But here he was, pointing right at it and acting like it had just insulted his cologne.

“You mean, you being here?” Davey asked.

Aziraphale’s eyes flashed with annoyance, which was an affirmative answer. It wasn’t real annoyance, though; it was performative. That chip on his shoulder was his armor, and he was hiding behind it.

Davey acknowledged that, and then he got back to business. He got situated in his chair, nodding along the way. He made sure he was as comfy as he could be, and he took in a deep, pleasing breath. He smiled, big and open and welcoming. And then he said, “Tell me all about it.”

That’s all it took: Aziraphale’s shoulders slacked down, and that chip fell right off and disappeared. He’d been anticipating a fight, or at least some guilt-tripping, but without any antagonism to steel himself against, he had nothing to keep himself from collapsing into consolation. “It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed our conversations, Dr. Hampson.”

That was a kind gesture, and Davey appreciated it. It also risked moving them away from the elephant, which was precisely the direction Davey didn't want to go. He gave a trail marker: “But…”

The elephant wasn’t a friendly one, at least not for Aziraphale. Now that he’d lost that harsh veneer, his eyes betrayed a desperation, and then a capitulation. “But it’s useless.”

It was almost funny, how similar that was to what Aziraphale had said just moments ago, and yet how different it sounded. This time, he couldn’t lob it like an accusation. All he could do, instead, was hold it and feel the enormity of its truth.

“Yeah." Davey commiserated. But he wanted to get up close enough to that truth to feel its heartbeat. “You mean… Talking about things. The way we’ve been doing.”

Aziraphale's gaze was soft now. He kept them angled away. “Nothing will change. Nothing can change.”

What a downtrodden mantra that was. And it had to be a mantra, unwanted or not, given how easily it had come despite not actually working a response to what Davey had just said.

Aziraphale continued. “Suppose that I— Well. Suppose that I do miss certain aspects of, shall we say, my former role. What of it?”

Davey listened.

“It’s not as though I will be invited back.”

“Is that what it is?” Davey wondered. “You’d want to go back, if you were welcome?”

“Good Heavens no!” Aziraphale’s affront with bright and immediate, like he’d been asked to store a James Patterson collection. He shivered from distaste. “Dr. Hampson, they wanted the war! Wanted it! They were going to destroy the world!”

“Right.”

They had talked about this before, about the whole Antichrist debacle, but Davey's perspective had grown since then, and he had a better recognition of how it must have affected Aziraphale. Aziraphale missed having a chance to do good work, yes, but his sense of goodness certainly seemed to be of a humanly sort. He cared for people. It deserved notice: Heaven had tried to kill Aziraphale, personally, yet that didn’t stick in his craw as much as their attempt to destroy the human world. That felt like an insight to store away for later.

“There are bad angels. Management is…” Aziraphale shook his head, letting the lack of words speak for itself. “And this is to say nothing about Crowley.”

“It was Heaven that kept you two apart for so long.”

“Well— yes, that’s true. Although—to be clear, the other side deserves its fair share of blame, as well, but—” This was a tangent, so Aziraphale rejected it. “You see, Crowley and I… He calls it our side. Ours. Don’t you see?”

Davey thought he did. “You love him.”

That was established fact, and yet for some reason it wasn’t what Aziraphale needed to hear right now. He was crushed down by the disappointment, by Davey failing to appreciate the crux of the issue. His response was a heavy, weary sound.

It was okay. Davey would just try again, in time.

Aziraphale needed some time to be despondent, with his thoughts.

Davey sucked on his teeth, and he thought. When Aziraphale was ready for him to try again, that's precisely what he did. “You feel like you’re lost, even though there’s no where else you’d want to be. So, what’s the point of dredging up a bunch of hard feelings, if all that’s going to happen is you get stuck with ‘em?”

Aziraphale’s eyes betrayed a dissatisfaction, like he wasn’t wholly trusting of that rhetorical question. All the same, the summation was successful. “Exactly.”

Davey nodded, accepting it.

It wouldn’t do, Davey knew, to note that those hard feelings had been there all along. They felt sharper for Aziraphale now than they had before, and they wouldn’t feel this way if he had never crossed Davey’s path.

It was all understandable. This was one of the most significant and painful aspects to multicultural counseling, in fact: to be a multicultural counselor is to recognize that the problems people face are not ones that can be resolved within the therapist’s office. The source of dysfunction is out there, in society, not in here, inside the person’s mind. It is the individual who sits in the psychologist’s office, but it is the environment beyond the individual where the disease lies. So what is the point of all this talk, all this analysis and feeling and experiential exploration, when it does nothing to fix what’s actually broken?

Well. Davey knew a secret: there is an answer to that conundrum. Aziraphale just wasn’t in a place to hear it.

Aziraphale wanted permission to give up. “I am sorry to have wasted so much of your time.”

“Hm, I don’t think it’s been a waste for either of us, to be honest.” That was off-hand, nothing more, while Davey’s thoughts sorted themselves out. “You’re welcome to disagree, of course. My position is, I guess, that it’s never pointless for us to feel our feelings.”

Aziraphale gave a polite level of consideration to the point, but of course he didn't internalize it.

The elephant had meandered out, and its absence left them with plenty of space. Davey felt like exploring. “I’m curious… All this we’re talking about. What’s it got you feeling? Right now.”

If the time they had spent together really was pointless, Aziraphale wouldn’t have paused as he did before responding. He wouldn’t have turned introspective, and he wouldn’t have given an answer that was aimed anywhere near the truth. He grasped for a description, honest and truly, and yet still all he could discover was a guess. “Resigned.”

“Makes sense,” Davey allowed.

Aziraphale reached down deeper and guessed again. “Sad.”

Davey let out a breath. “I bet.”

Truth be told, neither of those was a bad guess. Aziraphale really did look sad and resigned, just as he said. But the thing about emotions is, their identities are malleable. What we have inside is a great well of excitation, and it’s our beliefs that put a name to all that feeling. Here’s the kicker: the thing about our beliefs is, they too are malleable in return. And you can take a wild guess what can get them to change.

There was this thing they did to some dogs a while ago. They put the poor critters in cages with an electrified floor that occasionally gave off a shock. This was painful, and it was bad for the dogs, so it wasn’t the type of thing Davey could say he liked spending much time thinking about. The good news is, all the cages had a way for the dogs to escape. All the dogs had to do was jump over a small divide, and they’d no longer be on the electrified floor. So, the experiment: some of the cages were set up so the dog inside could anticipate and stop the shocks. The other cages, however, were set up so that there was nothing the dog inside could do to anticipate or stop the shocks. The ones given a sense of control over the shocks would jump away when they knew one was coming; they escaped and kept themselves safe. But what do you imagine the others ones did?

They did exactly what anyone would do in a painful situation over which they had no control. It’s called learned helplessness. Those dogs wouldn’t even try jumping over into the unelectrified area. All they did was lie down, right on the electrified floor, and cry at the pain of the shocks.

And do you know what it took, to get those dogs up off the floor?

Davey nodded to himself, and he stretched out his shoulders. It was a big shrug. “You know, I bet a lot of people in your situation would feel pretty angry.”

The suggestion didn’t latch. “Hm.”

Not a problem: it didn’t matter. Davey was just throwing out an idea. “That’d make sense too, wouldn’t it? Being angry. I mean, I can imagine it. Someone in your situation, feeling angry.”

Aziraphale rejected the implication with a shake of his head. “But what would be the point?”

“Now, Aziraphale, you look me right in the eye, and you tell me if I’m someone who’s ever not done somethin’ just cuz it’s pointless.”

That there was a tone of voice Davey didn't pull out too often, but he sure knew how to use it when he did. It worked just as he'd hoped: it jostled Aziraphale’s attention.

Davey grinned.

“Would you be willing to be real pointless with me?” Davey liked this. He liked where it was going. “Would you pretend, just for a little while, just with me, that you’re angry?”

What Aziraphale wanted to do was protest: But why? He couldn’t though, could he? You can’t ask for the point of something that, by presupposition, is pointless.

Instead, he asked, “And how does one go about pretending to be angry?”

“Now, I know you know what anger looks like.” Davey didn’t buy it one lick, that Aziraphale wasn’t familiar with the theatrical arts. But then again, the term divine wrath came to mind, and Davey rethought the value of providing some goal posts. “But, uh—let’s stick to humanly anger. What would it look like, right now, for you to be angry the way a human might be?”

Aziraphale thought about it

“How about we stand up.” Davey didn’t wait for a response before pulling himself out of his chair, and he beckoned for Aziraphale to follow suit. “That’ll help, don’t ya think?”

“Like a movement exercise,” Aziraphale allowed.

“That’s the spirit.” Now that he was standing, Davey beckoned again for Aziraphale to join him. “C’mon!”

This time, Aziraphale gave in. He stood up.

They had to warm up. Davey stretched out his arms, and he flexed his toes the way he’d been taught back when he tried yoga. Aziraphale followed suit, but he took to more subtle movements, focused more on posture and expression. He did, at least, stretch out his fingers and twiddle them around: of course, this was the warm up of a magician.

“Alright, now…” Davey was here to follow, not to lead. “Think: anger.”

Aziraphale thought.

He looked around the room, like he might be able to find a puddle of anger that was spilled in some corner. There were any number of reasons why he would be resistant to this silly exercise, but he had a supportive audience in Davey, and that was a hard thing to ignore.

He curled his hands up into fists.

“Oh, that’s good.” Davey did the same, bringing his own fists up to chest level so they were on display. “Yeah–real good. What about the face? Facial expression?”

The momentum would have to ramp up, if this was going to go well, but it would do no good to rush things along. Aziraphale was as thoughtful and deliberate with his actions as ever. He crumpled up his brow. He squished up his mouth, as well. The result was a passionless glare, but a glare all the same.

Davey’s beard would muffle an expression like that, so instead he opened his lips up into an exaggerated snarl. When Aziraphale saw it, there was a twinkle in his eye: he was starting to have some fun.

“Think we look angry?” Davey asked around his snarl.

“Hmm.” The sound came out pouty, what with Aziraphale’s face scrunched as it was. He scrunched it up even more, though, and then he tensed up his shoulders. He puffed out his chest.

“Yeah!” Davey liked it. “And what’s it sound like? What’s the sound of anger?”

“Grr,” Aziraphale said. It was just a first try, weak and silly.

“Grr,” Davey followed along. He put more oompf into his, bringing the sound up all the way from his diaphragm.

“Grrr.” The growl was a little more convincing now, and Aziraphale tensed up his fists with a theatrical conviction. “Grrr!”

“Yes!” Davey could laugh, so he let it out as a cheer. He pounded one fist up in the air. “Now: movement! We’re angry, so let’s move!”

Aziraphale was all-in, now, and he let the movement flow from his posture. He lurched experimentally, swinging one foot upwards and then bringing it back down: Stomp!

It was great, so Davey joined in. He made sure to lurch the other way, so they wouldn't crowd each other.

Stomp! Aziraphale brought down his other foot. Stomp! He went on. Stomp! Davey followed along. Stomp! They let their heels bang on the floor. Stomp!

Stomp!

Stomp!

They were two grown men–more than grown, actually, and one more than a man–and they were stomping around in a circle. It was great. And the more they kept at it, the more Aziraphale’s expression lost its cartoonish exaggeration, the more his movements became fluid and impassioned.

Stomp!

Stomp!

Clatter!

Aziraphale stopped in spot like a statue pretending it can’t come to life. He even held his breath until they figured out what had happened. It was one of Davey’s magnets: the one from Victoria, British Columbia. The actual magnet part was still where it should be, but the plastic facade had fallen off.

“Oh dear.” Aziraphale’s posture was still frozen, but his voice had lost any hint of ferocity.

Not a problem. It would be easy to fix just with some glue. Davey wasn’t going to stop and assure Aziraphale that everything was fine, though, because an angry person wouldn’t be upset just to see a tchotchke topple to the floor.

It gave Davey an idea.

“Wanna break something?”

Aziraphale swiveled around to look at Davey, his posture loosening up as he turned. He wasn’t sure what to think of the offer, but he didn’t say no.

Good enough. Davey hopped over to his drum collection–which he still wasn’t sure what he was going to do with, once he emptied out his office, and he was starting to run out of time to come up with a plan–and he picked up one of the tambourines. He was specific with which one he got, and he came back to Aziraphale with it held out, on offer.

Aziraphale accepted it, but gingerly. He held it more reverently than he ever had any of the drums, and this was precisely because he knew why Davey had brought it over.

Davey said, “Smash it.”

“But this is yours."

“Go on, do it.” What Davey knew that Aziraphale didn’t was that this was a cheap toy and, even more, it already had a hairline fracture in its frame. It was trash, even if it didn’t look like it yet. “Act real angry.”

Aziraphale looked down at the sacrificial tambourine. He was still so gentle and unsure with it. His grip was as soft as could be, and there was nothing about him anymore that looked angry. Davey was starting to wonder if this idea of his was a bad one, if this might be pushing Aziraphale just a tad too far out of his comfort zone, but then he saw the precise moment when Aziraphale set his mind to do it.

Aziraphale’s eyes hardened, his grip firmed, and his face flashed with a grimace that had no farce to it.

The tambourine snapped.

***

They left the broken thing on a table, right where Aziraphale had set it immediately after the fact. They sat back down, and they debriefed. They agreed: even a pointless exercise, sometimes, was worth trying.

When the hour was up, and Aziraphale stood from his chair to head out, he caught sight again of the tambourine. “Oh!” He exclaimed and changed direction to go to it. “I nearly forgot! Let me just–”

“No! No, now, hold on!” Davey rushed to intervene, when he saw how Aziraphale had his hand outstretched, how he was reaching out. “Don’t you go fixing it!”

Aziraphale, politely, stopped in his tracks. “Hm?”

“I think it should stay the way it is.”

“But I can fix it.”

“Right, you can,” Davey acknowledged. “But it’s broken, because you broke it.”

Aziraphale didn’t understand. He stayed where he was, just a step or two away from it. “But it’s your tambourine.”

"I think it should stay the way it is." Davey really didn’t want to point out that it had already been ruined. He didn’t want Aziraphale to know that his angry display had in fact been pointless in that particular way. It meant something, now, that it had been smashed up, even if Aziraphale didn’t have clear sight of that meaning. “As a testament, to… To something.”

Aziraphale worried at his lip. He was unsatisfied. “But if I fix it, then… It can be a testament to… something else.”

Davey hadn't thought about that.

They didn’t have time to unpack the identities of something and something else. And further, it didn’t matter, did it? That Aziraphale had broken something wouldn't be made less meaningful just because the state was impermanent. If anything was true, that had to be.

So, Davey gave in. He relented, with an accepting smile. “It’s your choice.”

***

He put the tambourine back with the rest of the collection. Of course there wasn’t a hairline fracture anymore. It wasn’t even the cheap toy it used to be. He had let out a whistle, in fact, when he first picked it up and felt the new weight of the thing.

Aziraphale had been right.

It meant something.

It really did.

***

Some people dismiss the central claims to multicultural counseling by appealing to the empirical data about talk therapy’s efficacy. The evidence shows clearly that therapy, especially when combined with pharmacological treatment, does in fact work to reduce distressing symptoms. Regardless the external circ*mstances surrounding the individual, there are things that happen in the therapeutic encounter that really do work.

But the multicultural counselor can accept all that empirical evidence and still have a rejoinder: what is it, exactly, that therapy works at?

What does it mean, to have one’s symptoms of distress reduced? If those symptoms are reasonable reactions to the systems of oppression and injustice that bind, then we must view that distress as a healthy response. Are you really helping someone, by making it easier for them to feel content in a world full of harm and disrespect?

Of course you are.

Of course.

Don’t doubt it for a second.

No matter what, no matter the circ*mstances, no matter the cruelties to confront or the horrors that haunt, no matter the intractability of evil within this fallen world, no matter: every person, every single one of us, deserves to feel comfort and peace, to be assured of purpose and meaning. Davey would agree his work was pointless, and certainly so, except for the pull he felt to a compelling faith: there is always a point, truly and undeniably, in restoring to a person their capacity for joy.

There is always–always–reason to help.

***

They sat across from each other.

Davey noted, “Next week will be our last time together.”

Aziraphale, as considerate as ever, looked an appropriate level of sad.

“Anything we should plan for, to make that particular goodbye a good one?”

Aziraphale demurred.

“Alright, well… We’ll come up with something.” If Davey stretched out the moment, he could force Aziraphale to think intentionally about how next week would go. There was much to do, though, in what little time they had left remaining. There was only so much they still could do. “I’ve been thinking about what you said last time. About how this is all pointless.”

Aziraphale winced. “I feel very bad about saying that.”

Davey waved the guilt away. “No, no, don’t be like that. What I’m wondering is, what if we leaned into it? What if this really is all completely pointless?”

Aziraphale’s wince eased up, but he was apprehensive. It wasn’t in him to trust a question like that.

Davey shrugged, because everything was okay. “Give it to me like a thought experiment. Let’s just suppose, just as a counterfactual, that nothing about your situation will ever change. Nothing can change. Just imagine that scenario. Exactly how things are right now–you with your bookshop, you and your friend, everything with, you know, Heaven and Hell. It’ll all be… Well. It all stays, exactly as it is right now.”

That was a heavy thing to ask Aziraphale to imagine, but of course he had no trouble doing so. He settled into a bleak feeling.

Davey wondered, “What would that be like?”

At length, Aziraphale answered. He said, quietly, “Shokuhin sampuru.”

Uh--those sure were some syllables.

“It’s Japanese.” Aziraphale explained. He was prone to communicate with his hands, and his fingers fluttered about as he worked to find his meaning. “It’s a window display, at a restaurant, with wax facsimiles for all the menu items.”

“I see. Huh.” Davey liked learning new things, but today was not going to be the day he learned Japanese. “It looks delicious, but it’s not edible.”

Aziraphale didn’t quite agree. “It has no substance.”

That was curious. Davey wondered if they both had the same referent for it. “You’ve got, right in front of you, a display of everything you’re hungry for, but you can’t eat. And if you did try to eat it…”

“You’d wind up with a mouthful of wax, yes.” Aziraphale’s meaning was understood, but there was little satisfaction gained. “Which is a choking hazard.”

“I bet.”

Aziraphale didn’t respond. His thoughts were elsewhere, in a choked up place. Davey joined him there. For a little while.

But not too long. He broke the silence with an intentional breath, and he repositioned himself in his comfy chair. He leaned more of his weight against the right arm. He got to musing.

“You know,” he said, “that’s a sort of feeling us humans struggle with all the time.”

Aziraphale was intrigued.

“See, all us humans… We’ve got this undeniable, immutable fact about our lives we’ve got to contend with. We die. No way to change it. The whole of our existence, defined by that inevitability. Leaves a lot of us humans feeling like there’s no substance to us or anything we might try to do.”

“Hm.” Aziraphale was, of course, polite, and he was also interested. But there were remarkably few subjects on which he could benefit from a lecture, and he'd been dismissive of existentialist themes in the past. “I must say, I did not find Sartre to be good company.”

“Is that so? Well, can’t say I’m surprised.” Davey chuckled. He’d never read much Sartre. He got started on No Exit once, but that had been a long time ago. It hadn’t held his interest. “He sure was wrong about some things, wasn’t he? The whole chicken or egg thing with essence and existence–now, that’s a question that looks a whole lot different when you’re sitting across from an angel, I can tell you that.”

Aziraphale allowed the point with an understanding smile. What an immeasurable amount of experience he must have, humoring precocious mortals.

Davey just wasn't the sort to be bothered by being humored. “But, well… Putting aside all questions about the life eternal after death, you know, there’s still the fact that this life ends. For us, humans. It’s funny–and I know, I’m not telling you anything I would think for a second you don’t already know–but those existentialists, they tend to present it like a choice, don’t they? They make it sound like we humans, what we've got to do is choose between life or death. Camus said something like that, anyway, didn’t he? Yeah. But that’s not actually a choice, is it? We’re going to die, no way around it. Sooner or later, death comes for us all. So, no, we humans don’t have a choice between life or death. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still have a choice.”

Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed, as Davey spoke. He was listening.

“The real choice, for us humans, so far as I can see it, is between life and despair. That’s what we’ve got to choose from. Despair, as a response to the unyielding realities that confine us. Or instead… Life.” This monologue had gone on long enough. Davey got tired of his own voice sometimes. “What do I know. I’m just an old fool. All I’m saying is, it sounds, to me, like you find yourself in the same kind of predicament as all us humans, in a way. You gotta choose.”

“You are suggesting that I have chosen despair…”

“No–nope, nu-uh. Not at all.” Dave put a quick stop to that. It was wrong, but more importantly, he could feel how Aziraphale was winding up for an intellectual debate, and that wouldn’t do any good. Davey looked level at Aziraphale, and he spoke what truth he had. “No, Aziraphale, what I think is: you’ve been avoiding making any choice at all.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth to speak, but then he caught up to his thoughts, and he closed it again. He looked off, away.

When you’ve only got one week left, you don’t play with your cards close to your chest.

Davey continued. “Avoidance like that, it’s a great tactic to keep you feeling like you’re safe. Don’t I know it. But it also eats away at ya, doesn’t it? Makes you feel stuck. Like how Buridan’s ass was stuck, starvin’ himself to death.”

One of the benefits of working with someone who is smarter and infinitely more knowledgeable than you is that you don’t have to spell out every implication. There was no wax facsimile tormenting Buridan’s ass, as Aziraphale certainly knew. That donkey starved himself to death in plain sight of all the food he could ever want to eat, just because he couldn’t make a choice about where to start. And here was Aziraphale, who was so good at rejecting his own agency. Who was desperate to avoid making the wrong choice, of trying and failing–or, perhaps even worse, of making the right choice and failing anyway.

“And what is it that you suggest I do?” Aziraphale’s voice contained the sting of too shallow an understanding. “Choose life?”

It sounded awful, when said that way. But: yes. That was exactly what Davey was suggesting. What Aziraphale needed to do was take a leap, plunge in. He needed to choose, to make a choice and make it his. Call it radical acceptance, call it commitment, call it self-construction. No matter the name, it is the productive and inherently creative act of living a life of meaning. It’s the process of becoming, of making oneself more than merely sentient. It’s the ape rising upwards… And maybe it could also be the other thing. Maybe it should be.

It absolutely isn’t the sort of thing you can be monologued into believing.

What did Davey know? Not much, that’s for sure. He gestured broadly, like easy capitulation, and he settled back in his seat. He made sure he was comfy, and then he tilted towards an easy change of subject. “You know what I think you are? I think you’re a helper.”

Aziraphale’s attention recentered, but the interpretation glanced off. “Is that so?”

Davey had thought so, at least. He was happy to be wrong. “You like helping people. You like getting to make a difference.”

“Hm.” Aziraphale didn’t buy it, but he could make a counter offer. “I was a guardian, you know.”

“How about that.” An actual guardian angel. There was a joke in there somewhere, Davey was sure of it, but now wasn’t the time for that. “And what’s that mean for you? To be a guardian?”

“I… Protect things.” It can be hard to explain something so basic. Aziraphale frowned. “Or, at least, I was supposed to.”

Davey paid that last bit no mind. “Like your books.”

Aziraphale’s thoughts apparently hadn’t been going in that direction at all, which was surprising, but he allowed the point. “Yes.”

“You find meaning in that. Keeping your books safe.”

“Well… Yes.”

The hesitation there spoke volumes. It meant, first, that there was something else that Aziraphale would find more accurate. It meant, also, that he could feel that Davey was leading him somewhere.

“What else, then?” Davey kept on leading the way. “If you’re a guardian, what is it you really care about? That you protect, I mean.”

“Well– you.” That, for Aziraphale, was the obvious answer. It sounded personal, though, so he spread out is arms to clarify the scope. “All of you.”

“The Earth,” Davey said.

Aziraphale smiled, in a way. It wasn’t the type of smile that gets likened to dawn breaking across a person’s face. It was nothing that broad. This smile, instead, offered just the slightest hint of the light that dawn can bring. “Yes.”

It made sense–the smile, everything. “You’re a guardian. And you protect all us humans, and all the Earth.”

Last but not least: “And Crowley, when I can.”

Davey chuckled. Of course, that demon had a guardian angel. “You protect him.”

Aziraphale came close to changing his mind on this one, but then he stopped himself. That subtle smile redoubled. “Yes.”

“And you like it? Being a guardian?”

“Well, I…” Aziraphale waffled. “It’s not always enjoyable. But I always did my best.”

Davey understood that, so he reframed. “You find meaning in it. In keeping the things you love safe.”

“Oh–! Oh.” Had Davey smuggled in the word love too unfairly? Too casually? Aziraphale was surprised to hear it, but then he became more centered as he felt what it was like to allow it. “Yes. Yes, I would say, I do.”

“And it’s something you would choose, isn’t it?” This was such an obvious leading question, but that was fine. Aziraphale would get to see where he was being led, and that meant he had the chance to recognize it was somewhere he was happy to go. “If given the choice. What you’d choose would be to keep your books, and all of us humans, and your friend–you’d keep all of us safe. You'd keep us all protected.”

There had been a time when Aziraphale had seen a line drawn in the sand, and he had seen that it was meaningful. And yet he had missed the most central fact about that line: he was the one who had drawn it.

“That’s what you’d choose,” Davey said.

Aziraphale had grit in him. He was indomitable. “Yes.”

“Even in a… Let’s say, how about you give me a–what's the word–a scenario of eternal return. Like what Nietzsche was on about, you know. What you would choose, again and again, ad infinitum, would be to be a protector of Earth, and your friend, and all that you hold dear.”

Aziraphale was a worrywart. He was prone to self-doubt, and he had a near omnipotence for dithering. But they were beyond all that. They had burrowed deep past the shadows and the hollows, to a place that could hold steady in bright light. “Yes.”

Davey smiled. It wasn’t that big, welcoming smile of his, but something else. It was the sort of quiet smile that’s fresh as dew, that peaks out to welcome the morning’s sunrise. He leaned himself forward, prepared to share a secret, to bind the two of them together through a truth spoken and heard. He looked Aziraphale in the eye, and he paused. He waited, kept the steady gaze, until the beat was right, until he felt their separate rhythms converge into one.

And then Davey did it. He shared the secret. He said, “So choose it.”

Chapter 18: Paradise

Chapter Text

For the final time, Davey and Aziraphale sat across from each other.

***

If you take some brine shrimp and put them in a box, you can call them sea monkeys, and you can sell them as a gimmick. They’re so tiny that they’re hardly more than specks in the water unless you’ve got a powerful microscope. For best results, you should put fanciful drawings of aquatic monkeys on the box, just to get the hopes up of any kid with a couple of bucks.

Davey could still remember the disappointment he’d felt as a young boy, when he got that lesson about truth in advertising. Still, he was fascinated by his little kit of brine shrimp, and he loved them in the way of a child. Years later, when his own boys got bright-eyed at the prospect of sea monkeys, Davey made sure they understood what they would actually be getting. They were undeterred, though, and they cared for their little living specks the same way Davey had once cared for his own.

You don’t name a sea monkey, though. Or, if you do, you do so in a childlike way, without the name actually sticking. They’re just too small to be appreciated on the individual level. If one dies, you hardly notice. When they all die, there’s a shock and a sorrow, maybe, but it passes with the first distraction. While raising his boys, Davey had held funerals for a number of hamsters and a parakeet, and of course the family’s dogs, when their time had come. But the sea monkeys? No one mourns for brine shrimp.

When Davey tried to imagine what any one human must look like to Aziraphale, the best he could do was think of a solitary little shrimpy speck.

Of course, humans differ from sea monkeys in some pretty obvious ways. Names do stick to humans, and our individuality is matched by our creativity. Imagine a sea monkey kit that invented the printing press; imagine that one of those specks was Shakespeare and another was Oscar Wilde. Imagine being witness to brine shrimp Jesus on his minuscule cross. What anguish must that yield? After watching generation upon generation of these living specks burn bright before extinguishing, what would remain of your capacity for grief?

Aziraphale loved humanity with a stunning depth, yes, but was it any wonder that his attachment to any one person was maintained as a safely diffused affection? In his place, wouldn’t you too establish your deepest bonds with the written words that were preserved, safely deathless and unsuffering?

Here was Davey, mere speck that he was, sitting across from Aziraphale, who had in his time bid adieu to millions of humans, so many of whom were so much more interesting to watch through a microscope than Davey could ever hope to be. What sort of chance did a little brine shrimp like him have, to create an ending for Aziraphale that might somehow mean something?

***

Aziraphale gestured airily, fingers fluttering. “I had expected moving boxes.”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.” Davey’s gaze followed Aziraphale’s gesture around the room, and he nodded. There was almost no evidence that he was vacating this office space in just a few days. “I can tell you, the rest of this week’s going to be real busy for me.”

Davey had actually been feeling itchy about the need to get packed up for a while now. It had been getting deeper and deeper under his skin as the weeks passed. Every time he looked around, he saw papers that had to be shredded, doodads that had to be packed, decisions he was going to have to make about what to keep and what to throw out. He couldn’t look at his magnet collection without imagining the process of taking them down one by one. It had been a conscious decision, though, not to unmake his office until he was finished with his last appointment. His reasoning was, visible signs of the impending end wouldn’t be good for anyone.

Of course, despite all of that itchiness, it wasn’t like he was all that excited to actually do it. He didn’t want to see it happen, for this cozy space of his to be dismantled into an echoing white nothing.

Enough of that. Davey could tell that he had just distracted himself from something he had meant to remember. He cleared his throat. “Well, what d’ya think? We’ve got a big task ahead of us today, don’t we?”

Intent on kindness yet unsure of the context, Aziraphale smiled translucently. “Do we?”

“Saying goodbye, I mean.”

“Ah.”

It was hubris for a sea monkey to expect attention, let alone attachment. Was it hubris for Davey to think this parting, at very least, deserved acknowledgement?

They sat, and they smiled at each other, and they both contributed equally to a blooming silence.

The time they had spent together couldn’t rightly be called productive. There had been no trip to Niagara, nothing like a straightforward request for one. The last Aziraphale had said about sharing his feelings with his demon was a noncommittal, I'm simply waiting for the perfect chance. Of course, Davey well knew, the perfect chance for something like a declaration of love never arrived unless you made it. The very silence surrounding them both in this moment spoke to how little had changed: here was Aziraphale, as polite and passive as ever, giving in to the easy pull of inertia.

That was why this goodbye had to matter. It would be all too easy for Aziraphale to let wash away whatever they had managed in their time together, once he was out the door, and Davey would be remiss to sit idly by and let that happen. It wasn’t hubris on Davey’s part, surely, to want to prod Aziraphale towards a meaningful ending. This was the last chance truly for something to stick.

Speaking of which: Davey’s memory sparked up. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “I nearly forgot!”

He had to get up from his chair, and then he had to walk over to his desk. Aziraphale watched, curious, and Davey explained himself. “I got you something.”

That was unexpected. “You did?”

“Just a parting gift.” Davey knew it was here, but anything left on his desk for longer than a blink somehow got buried under piles of paper and what-not. He had to search for it.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, with a tone.

Found it! Davey picked it up, letting his desk’s mess return itself to equilibrium, and he headed back over to his seat. “Nothing special–just a token, that’s all.”

“I hadn’t thought that…” Aziraphale trailed off, and now that Davey wasn’t distracted by the search, he could hear what that tone of his was. Aziraphale was apprehensive, stitching himself up anxiously. “I didn’t know…”

Davey slowed himself down. He returned to his chair, and he sat back down into it. He got himself situated so he was comfy, all the while holding the gift casually in one hand. It wasn’t wrapped or anything, so Aziraphale didn’t have any trouble seeing what it was. It was just a book, a cheap paperback.

“Like I said…” Davey understood what was happening, and he felt kindly about it. He extended out the hand holding the book, offering it up. “It’s nothing special.”

Aziraphale didn’t accept that. “But I didn’t get you anything.”

“Now, why would you have done that?” Davey chuckled. He kept on holding the book out to be taken. “There wasn’t any expectation that you would.”

“Yes, but…” Aziraphale’s social niceties precluded him from forcing Davey to keep his arm outstretched like that for any longer, and so finally he took the gift. He held it in his hands, his grasp gingerly and unsure. “You didn’t have to.”

“That’s true.” Davey allowed the point. “But I did. Happily so, might I add.”

“But–”

Enough. “Aziraphale, if you weren’t feeling so bad about this right now, what do you think you might be feeling instead?”

The protestations stopped short. Aziraphale was taken aback, and he closed his mouth. He lowered his eyes down to look at what he was holding. For the first time, finally, he actually acknowledged it. He allowed his anxiety to unstitch itself.

The thing about going along with inertia: even something as minuscule as a nudge from a brine shrimp can make a big difference to where you end up.

When Aziraphale looked back up, his features were steady. He was sincere. “Thank you.”

Davey, gladful, met him there. “You’re welcome.”

***

It was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl.

Who knew what Aziraphale thought of it. He may very well have read it back when it was first published. His collection might include Frankl’s own manuscript, lovingly signed by the author himself. Or maybe he had long ago dismissed it, what with its title indicating how far he was from its intended audience. He didn’t say, and Davey didn’t ask.

Maybe, though, just maybe, this cheap paperback could hold some value for him, gift as it was.

And, maybe, in the years to come, it might catch his eye and lead him to think of the time he had spent with Davey, here, in this office. Maybe, whether he read it or not, he might find some meaning in it–maybe, even, the meaning Davey hoped for his sake that he would.

***

Aziraphale wrapped his hands around the book’s spine. He held onto it like a protected thing. “I will be sorry to say goodbye.”

“Me too,” Davey said.

It wasn’t good enough.

Feeling sorry was too simple. If Aziraphale left this final session feeling just sad, what narrative would he end up crafting, to make sense of this time he had spent in Davey’s office? There would be so much lost. Gone would be the miscommunications, the struggles, all the awkward missteps along the way. Just a few weeks ago, Aziraphale had been so dissatisfied, he had tried to cancel and never come back–what good would it do to let that get buried beneath nostalgia? If this brine shrimp had earned anything, it was at least a complicated place in Aziraphale’s memory.

Davey stretched out his shoulder, and offered up a shrug. “Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if you might also be feeling a little bit relieved.”

“Oh?”

“What we’ve been doing hasn’t always been your cup of tea, now has it?”

“Well…” Aziraphale had to choose to acknowledge this reality. It required him to move away from well-oiled social niceties and risk admitting to truths that might cause friction. “I suppose not.”

Davey, mere speck that he was, felt gratified. He beckoned. “Tell me all about it. What’re you going to be glad to be free from, once you walk out that door?”

This was the trust that they had developed: Aziraphale approached the question thoughtfully. “I would have to say, I did feel put on the spot quite often…”

Davey aped a wince. “Ain’t that the truth.”

“I would feel as though you wanted something from me…”

“I bet.”

“But I didn’t know what!”

“Oof!” Davey commiserated. “That must’ve been frustrating.”

“In some ways, I believe that, since we first started, I have grown a bit more, hrm, impatient than I was before.”

Davey’s interest piqued. “Is that so?”

Aziraphale didn’t notice. “Do you remember, once, how you insisted on us sitting in complete silence?”

“Hey, now, I wouldn’t say I insisted…”

With gusto, Aziraphale gesticulated. “It was interminable!”

Davey relented, laughed. “I do agree on that.”

“And, you must forgive me, but…” Aziraphale paused, let his posture stiffen, the way you do when you realize you might be on the brink of going a step too far. “...the drums are not the instrument for me.”

“Oh, no.” Davey was having fun, and of course that never stood a chance of actually hurting his feelings. “No, don’t I know it. That got pretty clear pretty quickly.”

Aziraphale beamed. He could go on, and Davey would give him space to do so if that’s what he wanted. They’d hit the main points, though, and Davey felt how the time was shifting.

They were moving past the jocularity.

It was a bit of a surprise, for Davey, how ready he felt. Prepared. It came to him, all the sudden, that he knew exactly what he wanted it to mean, for Aziraphale, to say goodbye on this day.

Davey rubbed at his cheek through his beard.

He had to think through how to phrase it. “I’ve got a question for you. I think it’s an important one, and I think it’s something I’d like you to leave with today. I mean it–I want you to leave with it. What I’d like is if you’d let me ask this question, without you making any moves to answer it just now. Not here, not with me. It’ll be your question to keep with you, if you’ll have it, however you might like.”

Aziraphale was intrigued. He waited.

But Davey wanted to check. “You amenable to that?”

Aziraphale, still silent, nodded his assent.

Davey straightened himself up and scooted forward in his seat. He leaned in close to Aziraphale, and he looked him in the eye.

“Thinking about all this we’ve gone through–all the interminable moments, all the humdrum, and, well, everything that was uncomfortable… And thinking about what we’ve failed to accomplished, and how much hasn’t happened the way you were hoping for. All the ways I’ve disappointed or let you down… Given all of it… What I want you to ask yourself is…”

They had walked themselves backwards into this. Of course, of course: now that they were here, there was nowhere else they could have gone. This was an angel, clever and careful, with depths upon depths; this was a creature whose silences always said more than his words. What other end point could there be, than a question left unanswered?

Davey asked:

“Was it worth it?”

***

Later, Davey would satisfy himself with the thought that he saw the twitch of a smile in Aziraphale’s expression, right after he had asked. It was subtle, though, if it had been there at all. And, ultimately, even if it was there, it wasn’t Davey’s to understand.

***

The time came; the hour ended.

Aziraphale stood up from his seat, keeping Frankl’s book close to his chest. Davey followed him to the door. Aziraphale turned back, and Davey smiled.

They shook hands. Said goodbye. Parted ways.

The end.

***

For someone like Davey, needing help with moving was the sort of problem other people had. He was, after all, the father of three grown, competent sons, and he also had a breathtakingly competent ex–or, something like ex–maybe–who knows–it was complicated–wife.

All of them could be relied on in a pickle.

Tomorrow, Davey would return his keys to the building manager. Today, his people had descended upon his office with a dolly and two pick-up trucks. They had made short work of all the boxes and knickknacks and odds and ends that had defined Davey’s working life for so long. All his stuff was moved out quickly, thoroughly, and exuberantly.

They just made the one tiny little mistake: they were so exuberant that they didn’t check how much space those pick-up trucks actually had, until after they had brought everything outside.

Oops.

This was how Davey found himself, in the middle of a beautiful day, sitting in his comfy chair underneath the bright open sky, with personal effects of his scattered all around him, in a small patch of grass beside the office building’s parking lot.

His people would return soon, to pick up this second load. In the meantime, Davey got to look up at the vibrant, glorious blue of the sky, and he got to feel the cool breeze that complimented the warm sun so nicely, and he got to check in now and then with some drama brewing between two finches across the way. It was a good day, and it was a good life.

The building’s door opened, and would you believe it? Out came Aubrey Thyme.

She took a good look at him, in his chair, and with all his detritus, and she said, “Hi, Dave.”

You know how hogs feel when they get to roll around in their own muck? Well, Davey didn’t, personally, given how it’s a regionalist stereotype that everyone from the South had a history in hog farming. But he was pretty sure there was a saying about hogs that would be entirely applicable to how he felt right now, as he grinned up at Aubrey. “Good afternoon!”

She poked the edge of a box with the toe of her shoe. “So, today’s the day, huh?”

“Sure is.”

Her eyes moved over all his stuff, and then a scowl crossed her face. Davey was about to ask what was wrong, but she didn’t give him a chance. She turned right back around the way she’d come, and she headed back inside.

“Hold on,” she called out, over her shoulder.

Well, Davey hadn’t planned on anything different. “Will do.”

It had to be some sort of turf war those finches were involved in. A few more had come up, and they were all intent on getting the others to leave. So far as Davey could tell, there wasn’t anything on the ground that should inspire such theatrics. It’s not like he could see something like, say, a discarded hotdog, which would offer a motivation he could understand. Whatever reasons they had, it wasn’t Davey’s place to make sense of them.

Aubrey came back. Now, she had dangling from one hand a mostly-full carton of co*ke Zero that Davey had last seen in little kitchen’s fridge.

“Oh!” He delighted. “I’d forgotten!”

“So I figured.” She smirked in that way of hers, which wasn’t cruel or sardonic. She walked to the side of his chair and hefted up the carton, so he could take it from her without getting up. It was near freezing cold, given just how long it had spent in the very back of the fridge, but Davey set it in his lap anyway.

“Hm?” He took out a can and held it up in offer.

It was her nature to reject. You couldn’t miss it, in how she halted before responding, how her mouth tightened and how her eyes moved to squint before she stopped them. Before she reconsidered.

Like she was afraid of a bee sting, she accepted it.

“Thanks,” she said.

Davey got out another for himself. While he did so, she tested the sturdiness of a stack of boxes by pushing at the top one. He knew those boxes were heavy enough not to collapse, so he didn’t stop her when she moved to perch herself on top. She sat so that they were both angled the same direction, so that she too could look idly out at the parking lot.

He opened his can, and she opened hers. The sound of the fizz was especially crisp in the open air.

It occurred to him that Aubrey hadn’t asked why he was out here with all of his stuff like this. Either she had reasoned it out on her own, or she didn’t think an explanation was necessary. He respected that.

“I can’t believe you’re actually leaving,” she said.

“Neither can I.” Davey chuckled.

“Are you excited?”

“Yeah!” Davey nodded, and then he reconsidered his tone. “Yeah. Yeah. Well–it’s a lot to be excited about.”

“Hm,” she said. It was a plain sound, just a sign that she was listening. It meant that she was open to continuing to listen.

“A lot to be apprehensive about, too.” He took a drink, and then he watched a glint of sunlight dance across the can. “I’m gonna miss this place.”

“Yeah.” Again, she was signaling that the space was available, if he wanted to say more.

He could go on, certainly. Chitchat came easily to him, after all, and there was a lot to say about this big transition he was going through. But his idle chitchat would drown her out. He didn’t want that.

She took her time. “You’re not going to quit your band, are you?”

“Am I–?” What an idea, it deserved a double-take. “You think–? Pah! Heck no!”

“Hey, I was just asking.” She grinned.

“Not gonna happen, nu-uh. Not so long as I’m breathing and my hands still work.” This was a priority of his, naturally. It was going to get tougher to find time to rehearse, but he’d already worked out a new plan with all his bandmates. “Got a gig tomorrow night, in fact.”

“Oh yeah?” Her interest was feigned, but in a friendly way.

“Out at the winery–uh, you know the one?” He couldn’t remember its name. “On Ridge Road? Out past Garland?”

“Wine was never my drink.”

No matter. “We’ve played there a few times. Get some good crowds. I like the owner, he’s a good guy.”

Just like that, here he was chitchatting away again, so he quieted himself. The freezing carton was still on his lap, which was silly. He leaned over to set it on the ground.

Aubrey occupied herself by giving her can a good close look. And then, when she was ready, she said, “I’m going to be honest with you, Dave.”

By all appearances, it was a warning shot.

Her face took on a quick grimace, before she continued. It was like she had to build up the druthers before she could go on. Then she came out with it: “I’m never going to go to one of your shows.”

Davey guffawed. Her timing was impeccable, and he was tickled. Her eyes peaked over at him, like she was pleased by his reaction.

“Never,” she repeated.

“Naw, I know..” He let some laughter bubble. “It’s not your scene. I get that.”

“I mean, seriously, Dave…”

“But I will not hear you badmouthing ska!”

This was a dynamic that worked for them, wasn’t it? It felt like it. She chuckled, looking satisfied enough, and then she turned her head to look off, elsewhere. “It doesn’t hurt to get an invite, though.”

Yeah. This was a dynamic that worked.

She’d done it so deftly, like a con artist setting up her mark. The announced drop into sincerity, and then the jokey reversal: it was a ploy. In the end, she had done exactly what she had said she would. She had been honest.

For neither the first time nor the last, Davey recognized how strange was this connection between them.

He didn’t want to lose touch with her, either.

“I’ll make sure to keep you up to date.” It was a promise.

“Sure.”

She wasn’t an easy person to get to know. There were more roadblocks to her than comfort.

Davey considered. “You specialize in trauma, don’t you?”

It’s always easier to communicate in your own language, and this was hers. “Yeah, I do.”

“You know, my team’s gonna have plenty of need for trauma specialists…”

She laughed, knowingly, not bitterly. “I am not cut out for agency work.”

“No, I wouldn’t have thought so.” The point was the offer, not the chance of acceptance. He chuckled along with her. “You’re more of a… burn the whole ship down and rebuild from the ground up type, ain’t ya?”

She was. “You build ships on the ground?”

“Well, you gotta start somewhere.” That was neither here nor there. “Still, all I’m saying is, I know I don’t know as much about trauma as I really ought to… I’ll be in need of a consult now and then.”

This made sense to her, just as his gig calendar had made sense to him. She caught his eye, and she nodded. “You know where I’ll be.”

Good; it was settled. They had an understanding.

He reached out with his can of co*ke, and he said, “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she agreed.

They clinked cans, and then they both took a drink.

***

He heard Jimmy first, loud and tinny, before the rattle of the old truck’s engine reached him. Davey looked up to the road in time to catch the moment that Sadie came into sight, as she was driving back to get him.

That’s how it was, with her. She had always loved getting to drive with her music blasting, windows open so her hair danced every which way in the wind. Her eyes would crinkle and her head would bop along to the tune. Ages ago, when it was their truck, they had replaced the entire sound system, because her CD of Son of a Son of a Sailor got stuck in it. As if that weren’t a waste of money, given how she could–and would–happily listen to it on endless repeat. Sometimes, even, when she was happy, she would lose herself completely and belt out the lyrics, because of course she knew them all by heart.

The sun hit the windshield just right, as she turned into the parking lot, and it bathed her in light. It illuminated her and turned her golden. Davey saw her like that, just as he always had, and he was struck by a thought.

Rather, on this beautiful day, as he sat beneath a glorious and blue sky, he struck at the thought. Because it had always been there, just waiting for him to get to it. It was inside him, reverberating within his very bones. He did not think it so much as feel it. He felt how he was the embodiment of it, how it was the stuff of him, what made him more than a speck, how it rang clear and true, and how joyously he ached with it.

Davey watched Sadie drive towards him, and he thought:

yes.