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In Crowley’s defense, it had been a long day. A long day, and he hadn’t slept right, and combine that with a high-stakes baby swap, and really, who could blame him for making a small mistake or two?
—Leaving aside the fact that he didn’t need sleep, of course, and the fact that every other demon in hell would have said that his job was both easy and an honor. After all, he merely needed to drop the baby Antichrist off at the hospital and then leave, la di dah, eleven years ‘til the end of the world and they won’t let you forget it.
However, as with most things in Crowley’s long, long life, things had not gone that easily. First, he’d run into the chosen father of the Antichrist—some foreign diplomat, apparently, though he didn’t look much like a diplomat to Crowley. He looked rather more similar to a citizen of the English countryside who had found himself suddenly a father, who had not expected that his wife might want a child, and even now, nine months into the pregnancy and around half a year after it had been really, clearly obvious that this was in fact happening, did not quite expect to be going home with an infant.
Crowley, who had been in a car with an infant for about forty-five minutes now, felt that he could relate.
Swinging the basket containing the Destroyer of Worlds, which had finally stopped crying around the time Crowley had started seriously considering driving his car into a tree, out of the backseat, Crowley started towards the nunnery and fumbled his way through small-talk with the expectant and unsuspecting father until, right before he asked about the room the other baby was presently being born in, the thing in his basket started to scream again. The new father rapidly looked between Crowley and the basket, shocked; Crowley considered giving the basket a good hard shake to shut the thing inside up, but his self-preservation instincts got the better of him—what if it remembered this, when it came into its power? Crowley would be seriously screwed—and instead he just gave the man a what-can-you-do shrug, and lifted the basket in a kind of half apology.
“What room?” he asked.
“Er—sorry?”
“The American diplomat’s wife?” said Crowley. “Birth should be happening about now. What room’s it in?”
“Is that a baby in the basket?”
“Look,” snapped Crowley, having reached the end of his rope and desperately clinging to it in order to keep from dropping into the abyss that was actually thinking about the future of the world, “you’re obviously here for a reason, right? They wouldn’t have let you in otherwise. So just tell me what room the diplomat is in so that the Satanic nuns can swap that baby with the Antichrist, and we can all go on our merry way until the world ends in eleven years. Capiche?”
“What?!”
“This is the hospital run by the Chattering Order of St/ Beryl, right?” said Crowley, stressed. “I can’t have gone to the wrong hospital. Really, I’m not sure that’s physically possible.”
“I think you might need a different kind of hospital,” said the expectant father, eyes darting between the basket, Crowley, the door, the basket again. “Or—I mean—is that really a baby in there?”
“Newborn as the freshest lamb,” Crowley drawled. “The room. If you please.”
“Can I—see it?”
Displeased, Crowley flipped the lid up, and showed the man the Antichrist. A certain smell came from the basket, as well: the Antichrist appeared to have soiled his diaper. Without thinking, Crowley snapped his fingers and the mess was replaced with a completely clean diaper, and the creature’s cries died down.
Luckily for Crowley, the expectant father had not noticed yet that the diaper was dirty, and so did not note that it had been miraculously replaced. Unluckily for Crowley, not only was the man not in on the Antichrist-baby swap, but he was an element that none of the players that Crowley was aware of had predicted. He stared at the baby for a moment more, and then straightened up, marched back into the waiting room, and grabbed the phone on the reception desk and called emergency services.
Crowley completely ignored this. He didn’t even bother cutting off the line. Instead, he flipped the lid of the basket shut and made a beeline for the nearest nun, who likely had a marginally better idea of what was going on here than Crowley did. She did, or at least her manner gave off the impression that she did, and the baby was taken off of his hands while a suggestion was made that he might stay for some tea. Crowley acquiesced. Somewhere between the highway and the handoff he’d realized that he already knew where he was going next, and he figured that biscuits stolen from the nuns would probably make a good peace offering for Aziraphale, who would freak out over this new development just as much as Crowley already was. He was in the process of filling his pockets with the biscuits just as the police arrived, though none of them noticed him as they searched the hospital and found the three babies. Crowley crunched on biscuits as the nuns were questioned and wondered about what the hell was going on here. Maybe there was someone else giving birth in the hospital—it would make sense, since the police had produced a third infant—but really, you’d think that somebody would have had that handled. Delayed the labor by a day, maybe, or sped it up so that it was over by the time the switch was supposed to occur, but who could say? Nobody asked Crowley for his opinion on things. He was just supposed to deliver the baby, and deliver the baby he had. What happened next was none of his concern.
Still, though, the police were bungling the situation about as badly as Hell had done only slightly earlier. They had all three babies—they were questioning the nuns, the Americans, even the couple having an unexpected baby here and now—but they had done absolutely nothing to differentiate the babies from each other. Crowley had no clue which was which, and he was almost certain that nobody else knew either—but he wasn’t about to stop keeping the humans from noticing him in order to ask. Instead, he examined the babies. Which one was—it? The Beast, the Great Adversary, the Destroyer of All Worlds? For the first time, he regretted not looking at the infant closer when he’d had it in his car.
All three babies looked the same—pink, angry, wrinkled, swaddled in identical white blankets—but one of them looked somewhat angrier at the world than the other two, and so after a second’s deliberation, Crowley snatched it up, put it in his basket, and rushed back to his car. They could do the switch another time, or—something. Right now he just needed to get out of the situation, and do something to keep things somewhere under the illusion of ‘control’, so that hopefully when Hell came down on whoever had screwed this one up they wouldn’t come down on him.
That reason probably wasn’t the same reason for which he drove directly to a certain bookstore in London, but he hadn’t had to justify that kind of a choice in hundreds if not thousands of years, and it did not occur to him to start now. He went from a hundred and ten kilometers an hour to a full stop in seconds, landing perfectly in a spot of street parking that simply had not existed a moment before, and, for the second time, exited the car, grabbed the baby-containing basket, and walked up to the door of a building with rather more and different supernatural ties than one might expect.
The door was opened before Crowley had to knock, the bookstore’s angelic standing there, confused.
“My dear,” he said, “what are you doing here? It’s barely six o’clock in the morning, and—”
“Hey, angel,” Crowley said, hoisting the basket. “How d’you like playing the odds? One in three I’ve got the Antichrist in here.”
Aziraphale gaped.
“World’s gonna end in eleven years,” he said with the kind of fake-brightness that always accompanied the very worst inevitabilities. “Mind letting us in?”