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Crowley could scarcely believe his eyes.
He blinked, a thing that he rarely did even when human-shaped, and resisted the futile urge to rub them.
This order of satanic nuns had been active for centuries and they were making a mess of their Assignment anyway. Their whole purpose on Her’s green Earth was to plant the Antichrist within the right family and yet…
Crowley stared, dumbfounded, as the American Ambassador’s wife presented the British baby at his husband, while the British family was unknowingly cooing over the Lord of Darkness and the American baby had disappeared.
Right.
This wouldn’t do at all. The plan he had hurriedly cobbled together on the ride there hinged on knowing where the Destroyer of Kings actually was.
His contract had been fulfilled (deliver the Antichrist to the Chattering Order of St. Beryl at Tadfield Manor) and Hell was so disorganized that nobody had read his miracle logs for at least two millennia, but Crowley chose to be careful anyway.
After a few minutes of skulking in hallways and smiling apologetically at the parents, he had re-swapped the babies without alerting neither Hell with the use of his demonic powers nor the nuns, which really emphasized the utter incompetence of these obstetricians since he had been carting around three babies with not even that much stealth.
Now Harriet Dowling was sleeping in her room with the real Warlock Dowling beside her, and the same could be said for Deidre and Arthur Young, which child Adam had been spared the utter humiliation of a name like Warlock and wrapped around the red blanket that had been swaddling the son of Satan.
The Adversary, meanwhile, strictly confined by a light blue blanket, was looking up silently at Crowley from the picnic basket.
‘What in Heaven’s name am I doing?’, Crowley thought, putting the basket on the passenger side of the Bentley and securing it with a seatbelt who wasn’t there a few seconds before (but now, because Crowley expected it to be, it was).
The car teared down the street at breakneck speed, leaving the two completely human families behind.
Warlock Dowling will become a spoiled and neglected kid who’ll grow up as a bitter and arrogant adult with daddy issues.
Adam Young will live peacefully in a little village in Oxfordshire, play in the woods with his friends and win a lot of prizes for his tropical fish later in life.
Silently berating himself (who was the moron that spent two days bringing down the entirety of London’s mobile network with an army of rats and a clever bit of undercover work and then forgot about it literally one hour after reporting it to his fellow demons? Anthony J. Crowley, apparently!), Crowley called Aziraphale bookshop’s number without bothering to insert any coins in the appropriate slot.
The call, of course, connected, and his angel, who had slept maybe twice in his long life, answered despite the late hour.
“I’m afraid we’re quite definitely closed”, said Aziraphale with a polite but smug tone, the one he always used when he wanted to chase a particularly persistent customer out of the shop.
“Aziraphale, it’s me. We need to talk”, Crowley replied.
“Yes…”, came the uncertain voice of Aziraphale out of the receiver. “Yes, I rather think we do. I assume this is about…?”
“Armageddon, yes.”
Evidently someone had alerted the angel of the situation while Crowley was meeting with Hastur and Ligur: he had left him outside that little sushi restaurant whose owner knew Aziraphale by name. He dearly hoped, for the sake of his partner’s blood pressure, that it hadn’t been Gabriel.
“I’m coming to the bookshop now”, he said, looking out into the darkness at the Bentley, mentally calculating the travel time.
He obviously couldn’t go as fast as he usually did with Lucifer’s baby in the car: while he wasn’t opposed to killing the Antichrist with a car accident, he really despised ruining his Bentley in any way and not even preventing Armageddon was worth the infinite quantity of paperwork that followed a discorporation and the request for a new body.
The aforementioned hell spawn chose that moment to start crying at the top of his lungs.
“Crowley, is that… Is that a baby?”, asked a shocked Aziraphale.
“Uuuh”, hesitated the demon, looking at the distraught, tear-streaked and bright red little face visible from the open lid of the basket at his feet. “Kinda?”
“What do you mean ‘kind of’?”, demanded Aziraphale, who you could always rely on for correct pronunciation, except when he was so far in his cups that you needed a map, a torch and a diving suit to find him.
“It’s a baby or it isn’t, there isn’t a third op… Oh, no. No, Crowley, you didn’t. Dear, please tell me you…”
“See you in a bit, angel, bye!”, said Crowley, talking over the horrified realization of his partner and slamming the receiver back in place.
“What?”, he asked to the wailing creature in the basket, lifting it up to his face to talk to him better. “What do you want?”
The newborn, surprisingly, didn’t answer, paused for a moment, inhaled deeply and resumed his screaming.
“Alright, alright, what do babies need?”, he thought aloud, hurrying back to the Bentley and securing the basket again on the passenger seat.
The container was large enough and padded enough to be comfortable; the child was neither too hot (Crowley checked the back of his neck for signs of sweating, but it was dry) or too cold (he checked the fit of his white socks and beanie, just in case). A quick snap of his fingers changed the kid’s nappy: this reduced but didn’t stop the infernal screeching.
“Are you hungry, then?”, the demon asked, looming over the Antichrist and fretting. “What do you drink? Blood of the innocents? Virgin’s tears?”
Miracled up colostrum, Crowley found out, was equally effective on future Earth destroyers than it was on normal, human newborns.
The ride back to London was mercifully silent. Crowley wasn’t in the mood for music, so he didn’t insert a CD nor put on the radio while the Prince of this World slept.
Aziraphale welcomed them on the threshold of the bookshop with his angelic wards activated and his wings raised, puffed up and high, behind him.
If the threat display wasn’t enough to bring the point home, the steely gaze of the angel made Crowley suddenly remember that his partner had commanded a platoon during the Celestial War.
Yes, he had been demoted from Cherubim to Principality after failing to guard Eden’s Eastern Gate, but even Heaven couldn’t modify an angel’s nature and, to the others’ eternal irritation, the change in ranks had been in name only.
Crowley brought out his black wings and mantled them around the basked clutched to his chest in a purely instinctive reaction. Thankfully (or miraculously), everyone in the street was asleep.
“I will not have”, enunciated clearly Aziraphale, obviously trying with all his might to keep his voice down and not imbue it with angelic wrath, “the Antichrist inside my domain, Crowley.”
“All right, angel”, replied the demon, trying to soothe his partner and possibly avoid a smiting, “let’s go back to my place then. Want a lift?”
“I can get there myself, thanks”, snapped Aziraphale, closing the shop and launching into the air with a flurry of white feathers and a gesture of his fingers for invisibility.
“Right”, Crowley said, looking at the deceptively normal-looking baby asleep inside the wicker basket. “You’re already causing too much trouble.”
Then he got into the Bentley and drove to his apartment.
Aziraphale landed outside Crowley’s building and made his wings disappear from the mortal plane, revealing himself to human eyes again. It was more difficult than usual, and the angel fumed silently during the entirety of the climb to Crawley’s penthouse apartment. He was too ramped up to take the elevator and the physical exercise of flying and walking up five floors was helping him dissipate all that excessive angelic energy.
‘What the Hell is Crowley doing?’, he thought, pacing back and forth outside the front door. His partner’s demonic wards were not letting him in, still full of heavenly power as he was.
Why had he kidnapped the baby? It wasn’t even a normal baby, which would have been bad enough, but the Antichrist! Wasn’t he supposed to be raised by a human family util the End of the World?
Maybe there had been a change in the Great Plan, Aziraphale thought, stopping suddenly in his silent tirade. But if so, why he, as England’s Principality and only angel permanently on Earth since the 3rd century AD, hadn’t been made aware of it?
Before he could start pacing again, Crowley sauntered out of the elevator with the basket containing the son of Satan swinging at his side. His wings were nowhere to be seen, and he swiftly opened the door with an “after you” gesture to Aziraphale.
The angel had calmed down a bit and crossed the threshold without burning to a crisp inside his demon’s Hellfire wards, thankfully.
Crowley opened his bedroom door, extracted the remarkably normal-looking baby from his makeshift cot and laid him on the bed on his back, arranging a little nest of pillows around him to make sure he stayed put.
“Aziraphale, may I present to you The Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Prince of this World and Lord of Darkness, notorious son of Satan, aka the Antichrist?”, said Aziraphale’s favourite drama queen with an appropriately dark tone.
“Nice to meet you”, said Aziraphale to the sleeping newborn, because he was very polite.
Then, because he was not very polite when Crowley made him seriously mad, he asked: “Now will you tell me why the child who will become the Great Beast is not with his human parents, and specifically why in the name of God he’s sleeping on your bed?”
Crowley, for his credit, explained it all quickly and efficiently, without the detours that Aziraphale tended to take when telling a story. It even made sense, according to Crowley’s somewhat skewed moral compass.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but I told you, I… I can’t disobey”, said Aziraphale, moving the baby in his arms back and forth gently. “I’m an angel!”
During Crowley’s recount of the evening’s events and of his harebrained solution to the End of the World, the little Antichrist had woken up and welcomed the sight of the demon with a pleased gurgle. Then he had turned his head, stared at Aziraphale with his newborn-typical grey eyes and screamed excitedly, squirming around until the angel had relented and picked him up, sitting on the bed.
Now here Aziraphale was, clutching a baby demon to his vintage three-piece suit and watching his life partner carve a groove in the floor in front of the bed with his snakelike, wobbling gait. Human anatomy had always been difficult for the Serpent of Eden, especially when walking or sitting.
The Antichrist whined and Aziraphale hushed him, resuming his arm’s movements absent-mindedly.
“Even if I wanted to help, I couldn’t”, he explained, serious and worried. “I can’t interfere with the Divine Plan”, he said, raising his eyes Heavenward for a moment and moving one hand in a half-circle to drive the point home.
“Well, what about diabolical plans?”, said Crowley, turning around and facing him with a pleadingly earnest expression on his face. His eyes had been uncovered for a while and Aziraphale could only see sincerity in those lovely golden irises and slit pupils.
“You can’t be certain that thwarting me isn’t part of the Divine Plan too. I mean, you’re supposed to thwart the wiles of the Evil One at every turn, aren’t you?”
“Well…”, he mumbled, thinking about what his partner was saying.
As always, Crowley was the one who discovered the loopholes that allowed Aziraphale to do whatever he wanted to do without fearing retribution from Above.
That had always been their relationship through the millennia: Hey, angel, I know you think this is wrong, so here’s some reasons you can tell yourself it isn’t wrong so you can do it anyway, because you want to.*
These things were usually some minor sins of pride (as an angel, he had certain moral standards to maintain), greed (he was aware that his love for collecting, restoring and refusing to part with antique books could easily be called worshipping them), gluttony (but who didn’t like a dessert o five?) or sloth (Crowley had caught him more than once absorbed in a book for so long that he had started to gather dust), or justifications for his millennia-long habit of fraternizing with the enemy.
What his demon was proposing now, though, was a transgression a thousand times worse than his usual ones: Aziraphale could Fall from this, especially with his track record.
“See a wile, ya’ thwart. Am I right?”
“I… Broadly”, Aziraphale conceded. “Actually, I encourage humans to do the actual…”
Before he could finish his explanations on the role of a Principality (guiding and protecting nations, groups of people and religious institutions, while also presiding over other lower-ranking angels), Crowley interrupted, slouching next to him on the bed, on the other side of the baby’s empty nest of pillows.
“Look, the Antichrist has been born”, he said, pinning Aziraphale under his yellow gaze and gesturing emphatically to the newborn demon that the angel was still cradling in the nook of one of his arms. “But it’s the upbringing that’s important, the influences. The evil influences, that’s all gonna be me.”
“It’d be too bad”, Crowley continued slowly, using a tone which was very familiar to Aziraphale after way too many witnessed or experienced temptations, “if someone made sure that I failed.”
“It might work. If you put it that way”, Aziraphale realized, glancing down at the silent little face and then up towards the ceiling, “Heaven couldn’t actually object if I was thwarting you.”
“No”, whispered Crowley. “Be a real feather in your wing.”
“We’d be his parents, yeah? Overseeing his upbringing”, Crowley then affirmed, smiling and gesticulating.
Aziraphale recognized that smile: it was the one that Crowley had used since Eden to cajole Aziraphale into doing something mischievous at best and smite-worthy at worst. This situation was more the latter than the former, but damn if it wasn’t effective.
His demon knew how to pluck Aziraphale’s strings and played him like an harp whenever he wanted, and the angel loved him and resented him for it at the same time.
Aziraphale, against his better judgment (who sounded a lot like Gabriel), started to smile as well.
“We do it right, he won’t be evil”, Crowley said, now looking at the baby with the soft expression that Aziraphale had seen on him in the presence of children since the birth of Adam and Eve’s firstborn. “Or good. He’ll just… Just be normal.”
Aziraphale looked at the child in his arms, then at Crowley. Crowley looked back, waiting for his verdict.
“This is so much more than collaborating on Assignments or casually leaving an area just before the other has to do something which requires too much power to be innocently ignored, Crowley. You’re asking me to raise the Antichrist.”
“I’m asking you to raise the Antichrist with me”, replied his partner, and that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it?
They had both managed to pass their close contact over the last few centuries as a “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” sort of thing with their respective Head Offices but, in reality, both Heaven and Hell didn’t care about what happened on Earth as long as the Assignments were completed and the souls kept coming.
But how they could explain raising a child with your Earthly rival and counterpart? Especially since, as Crowley had said, the real identity of said child was to be kept secret at all times, for both their safeties and the safety of the planet.
While Aziraphale was thinking, Crowley had slithered around the pillow nest and was now sitting behind him, wrapped around the angel and looking at the Antichrist from over his shoulder.
Aziraphale raised a hand and grabbed one of Crowley’s, intertwining their fingers.
“It’s not like you or me haven’t done it before, together or separate. Adam and Eve’s children, Moses, Yeshua…”, murmured the demon in Aziraphale’s ear.
“Yes, yes, alright”, the angel interrupted before Crowley started to list all the humans that he or his partner had influenced since infancy over the millennia. “But those children had parents, my dear, we weren’t responsible for them. We were just the helpful neighbors, or the alternative caregivers, or the estranged relatives. Godfathers, sort of. This is very different.”
“Look at him, Aziraphale. Look at yourself. Look at how you are with him and tell me you don’t want this. If you can tell me sincerely that you won’t do this with me, angel, I’ll bring him to the Dowling this very night, I swear it on my name.”
Aziraphale felt the oath complete itself like a heavy weight on his shoulders and he shuddered at Crowley’s serious tone. This wasn’t a game anymore, or a temptation, or a prayer. This was Crowley, his Crowley, stating the facts.
“We’ll influence him from afar, maybe as members of the staff, and hope for the best. But you have to be sure, angel.”
Aziraphale looked at the creature in his arms, with his unfocused gray eyes, his white and blue clothing and the little whisps of golden hair that had escaped his beanie. The angel looked at the Earth’s Destroyer and he could only see a calm, fragile and entirely human-looking newborn.
Crowley’s free arm released Aziraphale’s plump middle and came into view. The demon tickled his fingers on the Antichrist’s belly and the baby captured them in his tiny fists with a gurgle of delight.
Aziraphale caved.
“He’ll need a name”, he said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. This was blasphemy, but for Crowley, and for the World, it was worth it.
Crowley hugged him with a force that would have broken a human’s spine. The heavy sigh he exhaled on Aziraphale’s nape sounded a lot like a thank you.
“What about Samuel?”, Crowley proposed, moving back to the other side of the bed. He was beaming, and he was beautiful.
“We’re not calling him like his father**, Crowley”, replied Aziraphale, stern. “Do you think he’ll look like him, when he grows up?”
Samael was the first one to receive a corporation made by God Herself, and he had looked absolutely striking, with high and prominent cheekbones, opal eyes, a strong nose, heart-shaped full lips and brown curls.
“Could be. He’ll probably not be an exact copy, being half-human and all”, mused Crowley, taking the baby from Aziraphale’s arms and settling him again in his little nest.
There was a pause in the conversation because the child was definitely not amused at this change of position and kicked up a fuss, calming once again only when he had Aziraphale and Crowley’s index fingers in his little fists and their faces looking down above him.
“Raphael?”, said Crowley with a smirk. The mischievous glint in his eyes told Aziraphale that he was joking, but he decided to humor him and answer anyway.
“If we’re not calling him like his father, we’re not calling him like us*** either, my dear”, he smiled, returning the look. “What names did the nurses suggest, other than Warlock and Adam?”
“Well, one of them proposed Wormwood, like the plant, then said that Cain had a really modern sound”, Crowley snickered.
“Oh dear”, Aziraphale said, “Cain was a good boy before the… you know…”
“The First Murder.”
“Yes, that. But naming a child Cain is really not the done thing. It’s like calling him Judas.”
They both fell into silence for a few seconds, looking pensively at the baby gurgling and whining at them and seemingly at peace with the world.
“Damien”, said Aziraphale suddenly.
Crowley glanced at him, then at the baby. “That was one of the nun’s options too, I guess because of that horror film from the seventies****. But this is a name I actually like. Damien it is.”
Aziraphale extended a hand and Crowley grabbed it, smiling. They shook their agreement over Damien’s head and felt the name settle inside the newborn like a second skin.
“Parents”, said Aziraphale, joy rushing in his veins like holy fire. He looked down at his son and chuckled: “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“It’s not that bad when you get used to it”, winked cheekily Crowley from the other side of the pillow nest, but he was smiling too.
Notes:
*semicit “Let Me In Your Heart Again” by AshCommaMan, EmAndFandems
**“Lucifer” TV series canon, the Angelic name of Lucifer Morningstar is Samael
***I saw various headcanons for Crowley’s Angelic name, from Gadreel (the Fallen Angel who deceived Eve, the one I ascribe to) to Raphael (there is a lot of ‘proof’ to sustain this one on the internet, it’s too long to list here but you can find it easily).
Personally, I love the version that says that Raphael is an angel alter-ego that Crowley invented when someone saw him do Aziraphale’s miracles and he panicked; then they both used this name from time to time to make sure that Heaven didn’t suspect Crowley’s involvement (there also are a lot of religious tidbits that support the ‘Aziraphale is Raphael’ theory on the internet, same as before).
****The film here referenced is “The Omen” (1976). Good Omens is a parody of (or at least heavily inspired by) this film.