Chapter Text
5.
Despite weeks of moping after the dismissal of his two favourite staff members, the birthday boy enjoyed his party immensely. The ever-present American guards were less pleased at discovering their weapons had been turned into water pistols, but given other options, they really ought to have been grateful at the change. The supersoakers found at child-height, the basket of water balloons half-hidden under a bush, and the perfect lobbing-sized cupcakes were just a cherry on top. The actual cherries - which had been there previously through no miraculous circumstances - were eaten by the children as they played. Cherry pits were excellent small missiles, especially when spat expertly at others.
Adults, of course, rarely appreciated such things. That was the main problem with them, if you asked any child there.
The enjoyable chaos was loud enough to carry over the back garden and into the secluded car park where staff and hired workers placed their less-than-upper-class vehicles. There, a caterer and a magician sat inside a 1933 Bentley coupe, both staring forward through the windshield. The caterer was spotless. The magician had stood in the way of several lobbed cupcakes, as well as a few of the less appetizing hors d’oeuvre. The Bentley alone cared about the upholstery. Both person-shaped beings were too distracted to think of it.
Pale and wan in a distinctly unfashionable manner, the caterer held onto the steering wheel as though it could provide any sort of guidance as what to do next. He was thinking of countless moments of tenderness and guidance. At the time, it had seemed necessary - even nice. (Though one would be better off to shut their brain before saying as much.) Now, all that was apparent was the normalcy of it. The simple lack of power beyond what a tantrum and a whine might accomplish. It was glaring, the metaphorical signs in the literal rear-view mirror, which only held rustling bushes as children started forming factions in their imaginative war.
It had been so evident, and he had missed it entirely.
Next to him, greasepaint mustache only slightly smudged from nervous sweat, the magician sat with hands tightly clasped and mind on endless times of comfort and solace. It was hard to regret either, given his nature, but the abject terror of failure hung sharply overhead. He had spent years in a self-imposed mission, talked it up to colleagues and irritating minders, and he had missed all of the signals that this was a completely normal child. Neither evil or good, but made up of both. Wholly human, belonging entirely to the throngs of screaming warriors that resisted corralling with bloody-minded fervor.
He was a being made of hope, and it had been misplaced.
Neither knew what to do. Where was the real Antichrist?
Without a real Plan for the moment, the two sat alone together, afraid to further voice their worries to the only other person on the planet that might understand. Each stared forward because to look at the other would be to break.
“Are we going to leave?” said the magician with a thin brittleness that could have been irritation, if one listened with the wrong ears.
“Yeah, hang on,” muttered the caterer. He didn't turn the ignition. His expression was akin to aggravation, if not for desolation of his hidden eyes.
Hands squeezed a steering wheel in a wordless prayer.
Hands clasped together for want to enfold a familiar set.
It was a Monday, it was six days before the end of the world, and they and everyone else were surely doomed.