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“What’s your favorite ice cream flavor, nanny?”
Warlock's tenth birthday party had an ice cream van, the fancy kind that served organic carbon-neutral artisan ice cream in at least thirty-nine flavors. Warlock's current favorite was squid ink, tar-black and wicked-looking despite saltwater aftertaste.
“Whatever Brother Francis is having at the moment, darling,” Nanny Ashtoreth said absently, watching the gardener enjoy his selection.
Crowley's short stint at the garden of Eden earned him a curse that turned food into dust in his mouth. He had given up on experimenting with human food pretty fast and stuck to alcohol and, later, coffee—some of the finest inventions of humanity, in his opinion. (The time he turned into a snake and swallowed a whole rat was firmly relegated to the same walled-off corner of his memories as his Fall and the entirety of the fourteenth century.) Crowley was extremely proud of his Gluttony temptations, despite having never gotten a single commendation for them, since he worked them with pretty much zero idea of the subject. (There had been one commendation-worthy temptation that involved an angel and most of a roasted ox. It had been off-the-books, though, and Crowley intended to keep it that way until the end of eternity and possibly even beyond that.)
However, there was a trick that Crowley discovered by accident when he got very drunk with Aziraphale some decades before joining the Dowling household. Whether a linguistic loophole or something She planned like this all along—Crowley wouldn’t put it past Her—but kissing was definitely, unquestionably, without doubt not eating. Crowley still couldn’t eat things, but he could taste them, assuming Aziraphale had eaten them first and they got some quality time alone immediately after. Of course, that meant that everything tasted first and foremost of Aziraphale; Crowley found that he didn’t mind.
Warlock scrunched his nose. Brother Francis was having vanilla, the most boring flavor ever. (It was Madagascar bourbon vanilla, but Warlock was too young to appreciate the nuance.) He just couldn't imagine his cool and sometimes intimidating nanny favoring plain vanilla. Something more adventurous would be more fitting: maybe spicy like the Mexican hot chocolate flavor Warlock had tried once and regretted immediately (Nanny explained it had cinnamon and chili peppers in it), or super weird like blue cheese or sea salt caramel (Warlock was not sure why anybody would put gross stuff like that in perfectly good ice cream, but adults were weird), or at least exotic like dragonfruit (he was trying that one next, just in case it tasted as wicked as it sounded)…
The strangest thing was that Nanny didn't get ice cream for herself; she just kept watching Brother Francis. She didn’t blink, though it was hard to tell with the dark glasses, and possibly didn’t even breathe. Warlock loved ice cream himself, and he was certain that eating it was much better than watching someone else eat it, so he thought that very strange indeed.
Oh well.
Adults were weird.