Warlock asks Nanny about it once.
She’s cutting apples for him, just the way he likes, and he’s gazing out of the window at the lush, green gardens that his mother so proudly upholds. Among the waxy leaves and spindly saplings, Brother Francis tends to the flora carefully, though Warlock’s quite sure he’s just taking certain leaves between his finger and his thumb, and studying them closely. But what did Warlock know about gardening?
He notices Nanny looking out those windows, too. Though she always gazes and stares with a deep intent, as if she only cares when she does, and it so happens that she never looks upon the garden empty.
What was that funny thing Nanny and Brother Francis had taught him? The thing that Nanny discouraged, to which Brother Francis promoted quite devoutly?
“Nanny, have you ever been married?”
Warlock knows what marriage is. After all, his parents are married, if you can call it that. They married, once, out of love. But it’s since faded. It’s more traditional, now. Out of convenience and a general apathy to trying again.
Nanny’s quick hand stills, blade edge flat against the cutting board. With her back turned to the young boy, he cannot make out her expression. He never can, what with her poised shades she wears pointedly upon her nose. But she speaks soon again.
“No,” she replies, simply.
Warlock considers this. “Do you ever want to be?”
Nanny, who had taken up the cutting again, pauses once more. She sets the knife against the board and tilts her chin towards Warlock. “Wherever have you learned such personal questions, dear?”
She’s not refusing to answer him. She never has. She just asks in true curiosity, and perhaps a slight avoidance. But Warlock’s eight, now, and he knows how to navigate her tricks.
“Where do you think?”
At that, she pauses, lips pursed with their consistent purple tint. The lipstick she wears, that faintly stains Warlock’s forehead when she kisses him goodnight and tucks him in after a bedtime story: often about a garden, or a bird that chirped too loudly, and was cast down to the ground by the other birds. One who became the kind bird of the grounds, and took in other reject birds that had fallen similarly.
She considers his answer a moment more, satisfied with the obvious influence she’s had on him. She turns back to the apple slices.
“Perhaps,” she answers.
There is quiet for a moment. He doesn’t mind, he’s grown up with Nanny at his side, and has become quite fond of the silence. It is where thoughts are made, she said once.
She finishes cutting the apples, and plates the sweet snack to serve to the boy. “What troubles you, dear? You seem awfully curious, all of the sudden.”
Not that she minds. Nanny never rejects curiosity.
“Nothing’s wrong, Nanny, it’s just—” he pauses, considers his next words and how to place them. “You look at Brother Francis a lot, and—”
Nanny interrupts him after an audible, suspicious gulp. “Who?”
He frowns, eyes boring into the back of her head. “You know Brother Francis.”
She seems quite comically nervous, like she’s pressed a wax-seal act over her true thoughts. “Oh, yes,” she decides, too much breath coming with her words. “The gardener.”
“You like him, Nanny.”
She turns, abruptly. “I most certainly do not!” Her voice comes out a tad shrill, though perhaps it’s just outrage and scandal.
Warlock narrows his eyes, perplexed. “But you look at him all of the time.”
“When has that ever had anything to do with- with love?” She struggles with the word.
The boy shrugs. “Mum and Dad don’t look at each other,” Warlock observes. “But Brother Francis looks for you, too.”
Nanny’s mouth, ready with a retort, or perhaps a counter-argument, flicks towards a different shape. One that might be, he does? Or perhaps Warlock is mistaken. She pauses, lips pursed again, and sets her teeth.
“I’m sure he does, love.”
The plate is set before him, and Warlock soon forgets his questions. He never asks Nanny again.
But he’s reminded of it when her eyes, barely visible in the light, flick towards the window into the dazzling garden.
Years later, Warlock is nearly sixteen, and has since let the thoughts from half his lifetime ago fade. They never die, just sort of… wait. Wait to be plucked again, notes of memory leaping from their tinny strings. Like a harp.
His mother takes him into town. Soho, where he has no interest in seeing, but his mother so desperately needs a new vinyl, a coffee, and though she never says it: a moment to get away from the house, or more specifically, her husband within it.
She agrees to let him wander. She trusts him, for all she hasn’t before. And perhaps, she says, the fresh, un-televised air could do him some good.
He’s only taken two steps out of the coffee shop, where his mother remains to await her tea, before he almost runs smack into two pedestrians, arm in arm. He takes a surprised jump back, tongue set with an angry scolding, when he gets a good look at them from behind.
“Nanny?”
They both freeze in unison, as if they both know the name, and the voice that has conjured it forth once more for the first time in five years. Warlock notices something else.
“Brother Francis?” He prods, shocked. “Izzat you?”
Both of the two now turn, and everything around the three fades into blurring colors and churning noises.
Warlock would be a rotten liar if he had said he hadn’t missed them dearly. He would also be a lousy boy if he didn’t recognize them by the backs of their heads alone, he thinks. Because he would know them anywhere. They’d always done a much better job at raising him than his own parents.
They both look different now. Brother Francis seems to have had dental work done, and has cleaned up quite nicely. Nanny, though, appears to have changed her style completely. Her- his? Their? Who knows. But she still sports a fine pair of shades upon the bridge of her nose.
The pair seem to stutter, splutter with a little awestruck surprise. It’s as if they’d never expected to see him again.
“Oh- Warlock,” Nanny Ashtoreth begins, feigning a cool-headed surprise. “How good to see you.”
She sounds different too. Less of a high strain on her voice, more natural.
But Warlock seems to finally feel a gear shift, and a puzzle piece clicks into place. He glances down to the space between the two, where their arms are linked.
In his dumbfounded state, he feels a smile split the trance.
They both see it at the same time, chins tilting to follow his gaze. When they catch where his eyes are, their stares mingle together in concern. It’s a look that wonders aloud whether or not they should be worried, or blatant.
Warlock looks back up to their faces. “I see now why you two left,” he adds, grinning wider.
He can’t help it. He was right all along.
Warlock remembers something, then. It takes all of his power not to burst out into a triumphant laugh.
“I’m sure he does,” he says, slyly.
Nanny’s eyes, illuminated from behind with daylight, widen. She remembers, too. Of course she does.
And she bites back a twinning smile.
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Warlock Dowling: Disabled Icon?
Okay so this is all based on like five seconds of the show and has no real bearing on the plot, but I'm intrigued and wanted to look into it so here we go:)
When asked how old he is, Warlock signs when he speaks:
"Five."
"I'm"
"Five."
I don't know how this carries over to BSL, simply because this is not technically the correct way to indicate age in either ASL or BSL according to my brief research, but this is a sign for "I am" in ASL (Source) which is simpler and age appropriate.*
So did Warlock pick this up from someone? The most straight-forward explanation would be that he's been exposed to someone hard of hearing or deaf that uses ASL and picked it up, which isn't entirely uncommon for children and it's a pretty easy sign. This is nice to imagine, simply because it fleshes out the world beyond what's shown onscreen.
There's another explanation, one I quite favor, though there's not a ton of textual evidence for it. Total, pure speculation based on what cannot technically be proven wrong. This would be that Warlock himself is hard of hearing.
At his birthday, he totally talks right over this girl in pigtails and doesn't really seem to have processed or responded to anything she says.
But he turns around to look at this kid when he's talking, and then responds. One explanation for his behavior is of course that he's a little shit. And he is, yeah. But also, it could be used, if one was as insane as me, as evidence that he relies at least partially on lip-reading to fully process things being said to him. We also literally never see this kid's ears, so we can't prove he's not wearing hearing aids.
On a more down to earth note, his signing is not mentioned in the script book, and there's very little information about the child actor on the internet to determine if he himself might be deaf or hard of hearing. There's almost certainly a boring explanation of course, but it's kind of fun to imagine. Either way, it's neat that sign language is used onscreen, and it definitely implies that canonically Warlock himself or someone in his caretaking sphere is deaf/hoh. Hopefully in the future we'll see more openly disabled characters on screen, but until then, we have headcanon. <3
*I am not an expert in this and base this off my minimal research. It is always best to learn sign from actual deaf/hoh educators when at all possible!
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Innefable Inktober Prompt 1-Creation
"Nanny look!" Warlock yelled excitedly. He held up a lump of greenish clay in the rough shape of a star.
"Hello Warlock. What have you made?" Crowley said. She wrinkled her nose at the sage smell that came off the clay.
"It's a creation! I'm calling it Wormwood. An' it can be my new friend!"
"Very nice dear. Why does it smell like that?" The woman tried to be patient with Warlock. He was the Antichrist, but currently he was four and did not need a snappish, uncaring nanny.
The boy shrugged. "I dunno. Just does."
Crowley sighed. "Warlock, I love your creation, but we really must do something about that smell." Warlock frowned and shook his head, tears forming in his eyes.
"Nuh-uh. It's my creation and it can smell however I want it to!" He suddenly turned and ran into the woods.
"Warlock! Come here this instant!" Crowley started to follow her charge into the woods, yelling vauge threats the whole way. She eventually found Warlock and his creation huddled under a fallen tree.
"Do you want to talk about what upset you so much?" She looked at the small boy. He stared up at her with tears in his eyes.
"It's good the way it is. Wormwood doesn't need'tah be changed to be good." Crowley nodded and sat down next to him.
"No, it doesn't. Wormwood is good the way it is." He was suddenly in her lap, burying his face into his shoulder and clutching his creation tight.
"I'm good too." It was a whisper, Crowley just barely caught it.
"Of course you are dear. So good, just the way you are."
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