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Fakir offers the bottle of wine in his hand to Duck to see if she wants another sip, but isn’t particularly surprised when she crinkles her nose in distaste and shakes her head. The wine is almost unbearably sweet to Fakir’s taste, but Duck tends to prefer her alcohol in the form of fruity or creamy drinks that are more sugar than liquor. And that’s if she’s drinking alcohol at all; she’s more likely to be sipping on lemonade or hot cocoa, depending on the weather.
He sets the bottle down on the ground and decides to leave it there. He’s not sure if he’s drinking to celebrate the world not ending or to stave off the impending sense of doom from Heaven and Hell’s forthcoming retribution, and it’s probably better if he doesn’t get drunk enough to figure it out.
“There it is,” Duck says, nodding at the bus coming around the corner. She frowns. “It says Oxford on the front.”
“Yeah, but he’ll drive to London anyway. He just won’t know why,” Fakir says. He waits for the protest at using his powers to mess with a human’s mind, even just a little. There is no other miracle too frivolous or over-the-top for Duck’s taste, but that’s the one she always objects too.
But not tonight. She must be feeling just as weary as Fakir is. She merely nods and says, “I guess I should get him to drop me off at the studio.”
Fakir’s heart breaks. He remembers the very first day Duck bought the building. She hadn’t begun remodelling it into the dance studio yet, hadn’t even walked in the front doors before she had dragged Fakir there with her, wiggling with glee with every step. She’d run to the middle of the front room and spun around dizzily, laughing in delight. The sun had streamed in the open windows and bounced off her bright red hair and the brilliant white dress she'd wore, her skirts billowing out. She'd glowed that day, not ethereally, but with radiating joy and excitement.
He swallows. "It burned down, remember?" Her expression is utterly desolate and his next words come out before he can consciously process them. "You can stay at my place if you like."
Duck looks at him in surprise, though she can't have been any more surprised to hear the words than he had been to say them. "I thought your side wouldn't like that?”
“I don’t have a side anymore,” he admits, and it’s strange really. He’d never felt any loyalty or love toward Hell, certainly not the way Duck had toward Heaven, and yet its only now he’s willing to abandon their expectations of them like Duck had been ready to do for millennia.
“Neither of us do,” he continues. “We’re on our own side. Like Agnes said, we’re going to have to choose our faces wisely.” He fingers the scorched remains of Agnes Nutter’s last prophecy and feels a little spark of warmth in his chest that he pretends is hope.
The bus pulls to a stop. Fakir boards first, taking a seat midway back. Duck pauses at the front of the bus, chatting with the driver. By the end of a two minute conversation the pair of them are fast friends. Fakir finds it monstrously unfair of her to get mad at him for manipulating human minds when she’s able to do things like that as easily as breathing. Something else they don’t need to do, he doesn’t mind pointing out.
Finally Duck walks further into the bus to find her seat. She hesitates when she reaches Fakir’s row. The two of them don’t sit next to each other on buses. They don’t do a lot of things, for fear of what might happen if they were discovered. Hell can do what it likes to him, but if Duck were found to be fraternizing with a demon, they’d make her Fall. And if Fakir was a bad angel, Duck would be an even worse demon. Hell would destroy her, and he can’t decide if it’d be worse or not if she was still alive in the aftermath.
They stare at each other for a long moment, then Duck sits down next to him with a defiant expression. Years, centuries of drilling caution into her, all undone in an instant. Fakir can’t say he minds. And when she takes his hand and twines their fingers together, he doesn’t mind that either, though he does have to look away to hide his blush.
They’re both silent as the bus makes its way to London. That’s unusual for Duck, but Fakir is so deep in trying to figure out the meaning of Agnes’s prophecy he doesn’t notice straightaway. Not until Duck’s head drops onto his shoulder. He looks over in surprise and finds her mouth hanging open as she begins to snore. It probably says a lot about him that he finds it hopelessly endearing. It probably says even more that he spends the rest of the ride watching her.
When the bus stops in front of his flat, he gently shakes Duck awake. She blearily gets up and walks to the front of the bus. She does not let go of Fakir’s hand.
“Have a good-night, Larry. Wish Katy luck at her swim meet for me!” she says to the bus driver. He thanks her and returns the sentiment, and as he does so she places one of the strongest blessings Fakir’s ever felt on the man. Literal saints have gotten blessings with less feeling behind them. It doesn’t stop Fakir from twitching his fingers – the left ones as the right are still busy holding Duck’s – and adding his own demonic power to it. Duck grins at him approvingly.
They go inside the building and board the lift, which has been broken for years and only continues to function because Fakir expects it to. The whole ride up Duck’s eyes keep drifting closed and she sways on her feet. He only gets her the rest of the way to his flat by half-dragging her, and once inside the door she lets out a huge yawn.
“When did you last sleep?” he asks her.
She crinkles his nose at him. “What do you mean when did I last sleep? I was sleeping on the bus.”
Fakir rolls his eyes, exaggerating the motion to be visible even with his sunglasses on. “I mean before that, idiot.”
“Oh,” she says. “Um… when was Uzura’s birthday party? It was before that.”
That’s less than a week, assuming she meant since Tuesday night, which shouldn’t be that long for a being who doesn’t even need sleep. But Duck sleeps with the indulgent regularity of the average human, not to mention the one time she’d slept for nearly a century straight. She’s positively slothful for an angel, though Fakir supposes she does balance it out a bit by being unendingly exuberant every other hour of the day.
“C’mon, let’s get you to bed,” he says, tugging her along further into his flat. Fakir doesn’t technically have a bed, but he does have a bedroom, and another demonic miracle fixes its present lack.
The miracle is rather rushed and Fakir isn’t thinking about what he’s doing too hard as he’s doing it. When he opens the door, he finds the bed reveals a little more than he’d been intending. It’s a four poster bed, carved with a wing-and-feather motif and draped with gauzy curtains. The duvet is thick and full, white, and probably stuffed with goose down. Possibly even swan down, as that appears to be the ridiculous direction his mind had been trending it. There is a veritable pile of pillows on it, some in white to match the duvet and sheets and others in pastel pinks and yellows. It’s a bed equally fit for a little girl’s idea of a fairy princess as it is an angel.
“Fakir,” Duck breathes. She looks at him with her big blue eyes, the ones that have always been so open and are now spilling over with emotion, and he feels raw and vulnerable. “It’s beautiful. But not quite right, I don’t think.” She narrows her gaze at the bed and it begins to shift. The whites darken to a soft dove grey and half the pillows stay pink and yellow while the other half turn to rich blues and greens. It should look absurd; it does look absurd. It definitely shouldn’t make his heart clench or his knees feel a bit weak.
“There,” Duck declares, obviously pleased with her beautiful monstrosity. She finally lets go of his hand to give a satisfied clap. Her clothing changes into pyjamas, sky blue cotton with a repeating duck pattern. For some reason she’s made them to be a little long, so they pool at her feet and flop over her hands. Thus attired, she runs and jumps onto the bed, laughing when she bounces. “It’s perfect,” she declares.
Fakir leans against the doorway and watches as she rolls about luxuriating, taking the time to test the softness of each one of the pillows. Finally she burrows her way down under the covers, lays back, and sighs. He straightens. “Good night,” he says, turning to go.
“Fakir!” Duck says with such alarm that he immediately whips back around. She’s sat up and looks about a second away from crawling across the bed to get to him. “Where are you going?”
“I was just…” he gestures vaguely at the rest of the flat behind him. “I’m not leaving,” he assures her.
“No you’re not,” Duck says stubbornly. “You’re going to come get in this amazing bed with me and sleep.”
“I don’t sleep,” he informs her dryly. He’d tried it a few times, just to see what all the fuss was about. Each time, he’d had unrelenting nightmares of falling, of being torn apart while glittering malicious red eyes watched.
“I can teach you,” Duck offers brightly.
“You’re a terrible teacher,” he retorts.
“I’m a great teacher! All my students love me.”
The first point is debatable – she’s certainly a terrible dancer at any rate. But he can’t argue the second. Everyone loves Duck. Everyone.
“Okay,” he says. He’s never been able to deny her anything she truly wants save one, and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to deny her that anymore either. Not now when they might have so little time left to pass. He walks over to stand awkwardly at the side of the bed. “What should I…?”
“Pyjamas first,” Duck declares. “Whatever you want, as long as it’s comfortable.”
Fakir looks sceptically at her duck pyjamas. He certainly doesn’t want anything like that. He waves his hand at himself and ends up in a T-shirt and a pair of pants. Comfortable enough.
Duck nods approvingly at his outfit, but pouts when she looks up at his face again. “Fakir…”
He knows exactly what she’s getting at, but he still hesitates. Crow eyes don’t actually look all that different to human eyes. Even if they did, no human would ever know the difference if he didn’t want them to notice. But he knows the difference and Duck does too. So he hesitates, but eventually he pulls his sunglasses off and places them on the side table. Duck’s smile is beatific.
“Get in and lay down,” she says, throwing back the covers invitingly. He does and then lets her manhandle him into position. He ends up on his back with his feet roughly shoulder-width apart, the arm toward the edge of the bed alongside his body and his other arm extended outward toward the centre of the bed. “Now close your eyes and relax.”
Fakir’s eyes close as commanded, but he doesn’t know how successful he is at relaxing. At best he is resigned to staying in this positon for a while. Once Duck drifts off he’ll sit back up and summon one of his books. A night reading in bed while Duck sleeps next to him doesn’t sound terrible at all.
Then suddenly Duck has plastered herself against him. Her head rests on his shoulder, her chest pressed up to his side, and one of her legs slotted neatly between his. She curls into him, her hair tickling his chin. After a breathless, frozen moment, Fakir brings his extended arm in to hold her, and buries his face into her hair, breathing her in. In an appropriately ironic twist, she smells like apple blossoms.
Duck lets out a contented sigh. With a snap of her fingers the lights go out and the bed curtains swing closed. “Don’t worry so much, Fakir. Everything’s going to be alright,” she says into his chest. She falls asleep, her breaths fluttering gently against his sternum.
It seemed like all he’d ever wanted to do since the Beginning was to protect Duck. And he had been doing just that for the past six thousand years. Protecting her from all her silly mistakes and the disastrous situations she’d stumble into because she believed in people and trusted them more than they always deserved credit for. Even the forced distance he’d kept between them was just another way of protecting her.
But she’d been protecting him too, ever since she’d held her wing aloft to shield him from the first rain. She’d been gently but relentlessly searching out all the broken and fragile places within him, and she’d been healing and sheltering them. She’d helped him become more of who he really was and not who he and everyone else thought he ought to be.
Fakir has a sudden burst of insight and realizes what Agnes’s last prophecy means. He and Duck have always protected each other, and facing off against the forces of Heaven and Hell tomorrow will be no different. They’ll protect each other, and everything will be alright.
With Duck in his arms, he finally, for perhaps the first time in six thousand years, lets himself truly and completely relax. He falls asleep, and does not dream.