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Snow. There's snow everywhere. He doesn't remember how he got here. Where he is. How long it's been. Just has to keep going. Keep fighting. Keep his people- he flinches away from that thought, somehow knowing it's the wrong place to go, but he can't get free of it. Not today, not tonight of all nights in the calender.
Movement ahead signals danger. He reaches for the formae out of habit and instinct, the only two things that keep him going right now. Someone hisses - like but unlike the way Molly hisses - and the formae winks out without him willing it.
A hand, cool, smooth, strong, wraps around his wrist. "Not in my street, you don't."
Street? He blinks and snow-caked buildings replace the snowy trees, but they won't stay. There's a man in a sharp black suit right in front of him, blocking him in all the ways that matter, and if he can't make the magic work, he will fight to the last of his fingernails.
"Oh, for Hell's sake... A'right, you're coming with me, get you sorted out. I owe the Folly one anyhow."
And just like that, he's suddenly indoors, some little lamplit backroom he doesn't know, with a mug of tea that's more alcohol than water on the table in front of him. He lifts his gaze warily, but the man in the suit is still there. "What obligations does this place on me?" he asks, the words scraping from a raw, frozen, throat.
The man sighs and tosses his hat aside to reveal red hair and dark glasses. He looks about Nightingale's own age, give or take a decade. "No obligation, deal, arrangement etc. You're free to consume." He slithers into the opposite chair and folds his arms on the table. "Name's Crowley. British Intelligence. You are?"
"Nightingale. The Folly." He sits himself stiffly, shivering as the cold finally hits him and gulps tea. It burns all the way down.
Crowley looks at him, as if he can see through to his heart and all the mistakes and scars it holds. "Thought so. Not many wizards wandering about London these days. What was it for you tonight?"
Nightingale closes his eyes but the parade of dead faces continues marching across his mind. He opens them again, seeking refuge in reality. One word escapes. "Ettersberg."
Crowley just nods and points at the mug, now full again.
Nightingale drains it.
"Spanish inquisition," Crowley says quietly, arms still folded tight, and Nightingale has to abruptly revise his estimate of the man's age to centuries rather than decades. "Head Office thought I had to be involved. A - friend - sat with me while I drank, after, and listened 'til it hurt less. You got anyone to do that for you?"
"Dead," he says. "All of them."
"A'right. S'only been a year, hasn't it?"
Nightingale nods.
"First anniversary's always rough. So right now I'm going to sit here and tempt you until you drink and listen to you talk." His mouth twitches at the corners and his head sways side to side, as hypnotic as a snake."Whatever you want to talk about. Don't feel you have to censor yourself. I've got battlefield experience and official clearance. I've seen Hell in all its - hellishness. Doubt you could say anything that'll shock me."
Nightingale raises a wary eyebrow and narrows his eyes to study the man.
The mouth twitches wider, into a small, discreet, smile as if to say that yes, this man is like Nightingale in that way too. He'll understand if memories go there.
There's a frozen lump in Nightingale's throat that the tea isn't melting, and now he's out of the snow and trying to pay attention something feels off about the man before him. He - he sheds vestigia like something fae, not a human practitioner, but it isn't the overpowering kind of the older Rivers. A sulphur-match flaring into flame, a smell of apples, the sound of scales sliding across stone. "Why?" he grinds out.
"Back in '41, the Folly passed some information about a fae bookshop owner making a deal with some Nazis onto us - me," Crowley says with a shrug. He lifts a bottle and pours a refill. "Turned out to be personally important, so I owe you one."
"You're not human. Or a practitioner."
"No. Your lot would call me fae." Crowley looks amused. He produces a glass of his own, pours himself some. "To absent friends."
Nightingale repeats the toast out of old ingrained manners. Drinks to it. "What sort of fae?"
Crowley considers as he pours the next round. Teeth shearing through apple-skin. He finally says with a wicked grin, "Wily old serpent."
Which, Nightingale realises, explains a lot about the way he moves. He frowns at his mug. "I have questions." The snow is still there inside, numbing him so he can keep going, but it makes it harder to think.
"A'right. Ask them. One drink, one question."
The questions come slowly, slower than the refills, and he's aware this isn't the best way of coping, but he's too lost in the dark and the cold to find another way out.
"Did you ever meet someone..."
"We can't be together, he and I. Too risky."
"How did you stop my magic?"
Crowley snaps his fingers and a formless glow blooms above them for a moment, whiter than the lamp light, then winks out. Hurtling downwards, flaring flame, tearing wind. "A knack my boss likes to make use of."
"Have you... lost people?"
"Yeah." There's an almost ancient ache in the single word.
"Does it ever - go away?"
"Not really," Crowley says, with a gently courteous lightness. "It's like any other kind of scar. Some days you almost forget they're there, other days everything just hurts too much to blot out."
He thinks later that it's that gentleness that undoes him. That and the lack of judgement, because the room blurs more than the drink could account for. Drunken tears finally melt the frozen lump in his throat, and it washes out of him in a stumbling flood of words that he can't muster enough strength to stem.
The faces are back, filling his vision, only this time he gets to say the goodbyes he never had a chance to before. To talk to them, and promise them - promise it won't be for nothing, that he'll keep things going for them, that they won't, friend and lover and colleague alike, be completely forgotten. And there are hand clasps and shoulder claps in response. In thanks and farewells of their own. But there's no blame in the words that reach his ears, or the hands that touch him. Or in the bony shoulder he's weeping into when he resurfaces at last, held and sheltered like a once-lost child in Crowley's arms.
It's the first time in a year that he feels safe. The first time in much longer that he doesn't feel he has to be strong. The first time he's free to let go completely, without fear or shame or judgement. It can't last. He knows it can't last, even as his leaden eyelids flutter closed and he leans into the touch before he can stop himself.
He barely rouses when they reach the Folly, only enough to hear Molly's soft hiss of disapproval.
Crowley hisses back at her and Nightingale does rouse at her sharp intake of breath. She cants her head to one side and frowns as if picking out words in an unfamiliar accent.
He falls back on ingrained manners. "Won't you come in?" he asks Crowley.
"Can't," the other man tells him, setting him on his unsteady feet. "Warded out." Burning skin, burning building, burning brimstone.
Nightingale stumbles across the threshold between the new protector who can't enter, and the old one who can't leave, passing from Crowley's supporting arm into Molly's, and misses the look between the two of them. Gratitude, and guardedness, and wry recognition.
For a breath, they all stand there.
Then Crowley touches his hat to Molly, nods to Nightingale, and walks away, a dark figure sauntering untouched between the softly falling flakes of snow, unbowed by all the cares of the world.