the rain in spain falls mainly on the PUT THAT DOWN THIS INSTANT

[bibliophale]

Aziraphale is up bright and early, in that he has been up for several days straight, finally having a bit more luck not getting trapped in the Rift's infernal dreamspace. Melanie is still asleep and he doesn't want to disturb her, so he miracles himself some tea silently and drinks it just as silently, mentally preparing himself for the task that awaits him. He promised to help Gabriel with this new child, and he will help. Melanie had seemed both excited and a little daunted by the prospect of having a real human child around, but he isn't terribly worried about how she'll get on. It's himself he isn't so sure about.

Well, nothing for it but to get on. He'd been directed to the apartment below Gabriel's - the evident home of his so-called "boytoy" - to retrieve the girl, so he focuses in on the place and the minds therein (odd little minds, both of them) and departs.

He arrives to find the young man sitting at his desk with a cup of coffee, smiling faintly at the little girl, who appears to be playing with a rabbit. Johnny startles slightly to see the new presence, looking vaguely annoyed. Perhaps he should have knocked.

"Sorry," he says. "Er, Johnny, right? I'm here for Lilly?" He looks at the little girl and offers an uncertain smile. "Hallo."

The childish crayon drawings that cover the wall have certainly not gone unnoticed. Such behavior will not be allowed at his house. That will have to be corrected.

"Nice to meet you," says Johnny in a tone that makes it very clear it isn't. What an unpleasant little man. When he addresses the girl, however, his tone becomes completely different: soft and gentle. Hrmph. Why isn't he good enough to keep the child around?

Perhaps because he allows her to draw on walls.

"Lilly," says Johnny. "This is the guy we told you about. He's gonna take you somewhere nice that you can stay, okay?" He glances up at Aziraphale. "Is there anything she can call you that isn't that many syllables?"

"There is not," says Aziraphale, mildly affronted at the suggestion.

Johnny stares coldly at him, then says pointedly to the girl, "This is Greg."

A very unpleasant little man.

compile: newSubroutine designate: unwantedHouseguest [closed]

[lottawork]

The dog is in no way growing on him.

It has proved to be admittedly unobjectionable in its patient, unhurried treatment of its surroundings, largely content to dominate sections of Rush's floor with a leisurely sprawl. He may have been presumptuous to assume his work may progress unimpeded as of the moderately alarming moment where, upon his denotation of a particularly relevant equation scrawled in the lower corner of one wall, the dog evidently thought it prudent to rest its head in his lap with little warning aside from the preceding whisper of its paws over hardwood and a low, contented huff from its nose.

The action has subsequently left Rush with an incomplete understanding as to how one would (a) rise without disrupting the ostensibly sleeping creature cradling its head in his lap, (b) purport to care very little for the animal's well-being despite his inexplicable inability to simply stand and dislodge the thing and be done with it, (c) in any way continue to maintain his reputation as a cold-hearted bastard.

Unhelpfully, this entire subsidiary of events has very likely fucked that sequential agenda truly, wholly, devotedly, and completely.

He is not, he thinks vehemently in the general direction of the continuously absent and probably totally indifferent Colonel Young, a completely cold-hearted bastard. This, if nothing else, would prove as much.

"Off," he commands the dog, raising a hand to point in a direction away from himself.

The dog yawns at him, perhaps pointedly. Rush glares at it.

"Off," he repeats.

The dog's eyes droop closed in drowsy recumbence. Rush's hand drops as he regards the recusant animal with disgust.

"You are insufferable," he informs the creature, who continues to doze on, in his lap of all places, utterly indifferent.

Rush sighs.