Chapter Text
Crowley watched, helpless and struck by some full-body terror—the potent slap of it numbing and somehow agonizing at the same time—as the light gradually began to leave the young woman’s eyes.
She had seen countless lives snuffed out in the past few thousand years; men, women, children, sacrificial animals led to the altar in numbers too great to recall. Some of them faced death through means brutal and bloody, and others found their endings with an ease almost quiet and peaceful. But none had ever been quite like this.
“You have to push again, the child’s shoulders need to come through,” the demon rasped, squeezing the ailing mother’s knee in her left hand, trying to futilely will life into a failing body that wouldn’t heed her touch. The baby’s weak head was partially cradled in Crowley’s right palm, already delivered, but there was too much blood, bright red but seeming to grow darker by the moment, slowly pooling there on the blankets beneath them. “Calah. Calah, listen to me, girl—your baby. The baby must come or you’ll both die. Do you understand me?”
Calah looked at Crowley with eyes the color of dark honey, dull and lethargic. Cooling sweat was dotted on her brow, darkening her hair at the temples. Something in her face was different, there on the precipice of death; like she recognized something in Crowley’s own serpentine eyes and had come to accept it as a foregone conclusion.
They both knew she wasn’t long for the world.
“My baby,” Calah said, weakly reaching for Crowley’s forearm, clammy fingers on the inside of her pale wrist, seeking promises she couldn’t see through. The other midwives lingered behind them, knowing there was nothing left they could do. “Take the baby...to my husband. Please.”
Calah did not speak or cry out again; Crowley cursed something terrible under her breath, eyes burning in an embittered, wordless rage, and pressed her bare hands into the girl’s failing body to grip the child around the shoulders. She tugged, firmly and with a determined carefulness she otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford if she hadn’t willed a miracle to wrap around them in that singular moment, and then she was guiding the tiny body free and the wine-dark blood was rushing out after it, unrelenting, evidence of a life’s essence poured into the dirt.
Crowley brought the newborn to her shoulder, uncaring about the blood and the mess and the cord still tethering it to its dying mother, and thumped it hard against the back with the flat of her hand. There was no cry, and still cursing Everyone, Everything, the demon laid the baby face down across her shrouded knees and reached into its tiny mouth with a hooked finger to clear the mucus, and slapping it firmly again, finally heard a weak cry tumble forth.
When she looked up at Calah again, the girl’s empty eyes were somewhere behind them. She wasn’t smiling, not quite, but Crowley could feel the other immortal presence in the birthing tent, the inevitable and great equalizer for all humanity. She did not turn or stand to greet Death, but focused instead on the tentative new life mewling in her hands.
The other midwives came to them, then, and helped Crowley clamp and sever the umbilical. There was no use in delivering the afterbirth now; it would be buried with Calah, as these things were done and had been done for centuries. With great efficiency despite the mournful wailing of a few who had known Calah in life, the gathered women cleaned the body and wrapped it in a shroud, binding it for burial. The entire ordeal took no more than fifteen minutes from beginning to end.
Settled away from them all, Crowley took a warmed basin of water and slowly washed the infant with a piece of soft cloth, wiping away the blood and fluids with care from the baby’s face and eyes.
The child, she noted with a subtle pang, was a girl.
“One day it won’t be such a terrible thing to be,” she promised, and then felt something painful rise in the back of her throat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered, only loud enough for the child to hear. The baby did not answer, of course, but merely squirmed and peered up at Crowley with murky, indistinct eyes, before beginning to grizzle and cry.
“I’ll fix it,” Crowley said, swaddling the baby up and clutching her close, scenting the peculiar smell of a tiny life so new. “Shh, shh, little one. We’ll figure this out.”
This was all her fault, after all, if you looked right back to the start.
The patriarch only comes out to appraise them after the other two wives run inside to fetch him, already tearing at the hair beneath their veils and keening death’s song. Crowley stands on the hot sand, barefoot and statuesque, red curls whipping across her face in the dry desert wind. She has not surrendered the child to them, yet; it’s still curled up and tucked against her chest, swaddled and bound in a sling knotted at her back.
The bearded man does not greet Crowley when he comes out from the large tent, and unlike the two surviving wives, is not wrecked with grief or weeping. His dark eyes flick over the demon’s pale face, the strange vermillion hair, the golden eyes, and then move beyond them, somewhere over Crowley’s right shoulder.
“Where is Calah’s body?” he asks, squinting in the brightness of day.
“With the other midwives,” Crowley says with all the diplomacy she has left to muster. “You’ll need to harness a donkey or camel to bring it back, if that’s something you intend to do. She’s already been washed and bound for burial.”
The man nods, purposefully still not looking at Crowley, but in the bleak landscape beyond. “The child?”
“I have the baby here,” Crowley says, one freckled hand held protectively over the telltale lump at her middle. “One of your other wives may be able to nurse—”
“Is it a male or female?” the man interrupts.
Crowley blinks at this but does not falter. “A girl,” she says through her teeth.
“I don’t want it,” the man says, and then turns to walk away.
“What would you have me do, then?” Crowley calls after him. “Your wife’s dying wish was for you to keep the child.”
“Take it to the rocks by the river and dash its head like a snake,” the man says, only halfway turning to deliver his parting words. “It will be a quick and painless death.”
Crowley watches him disappear back into the tent amidst the shrieking wails of the wives. Her left hand shakes at her side, the one not braced around the infant, and she briefly considers sending the sewn skin structure up in hellish flames with a single snap of her fingers. It would not be so quick and painless, she decides. Far from it.
A small child of two or three walks out from the tent flaps abruptly, wearing nothing but tattered small clothes at their waist. Crowley looks at the toddler and the toddler gazes back with familiar wide, honey-brown eyes, little thumb stuck in their mouth.
“You deserve better,” Crowley hisses, even if the child doesn’t understand her. “You all deserve better than thisss.”
She turns on her heel and stalks back across the parched earth, clutching the baby with both hands now. It’s beginning to cry again, small little whimpers that will soon become peals of newborn agony.
Crowley makes for the riverbank, hell bent, and does not once blink the entire way.
Aziraphale is guiding his small herd of goats to the watering pool to drink when he spots a dark figure sitting a-ways down the rocky bank.
It’s not an unusual sight in these parts, a woman doing her washing or bathing by the water, though the flash of red hair immediately makes his heart leap into his throat. There is nobody else in this part of the world with hair like that—not yet. Not for many years to come.
He leaves his herd to laze in the paltry shade of what few scraggly trees grow in this place and carefully picks his way down the bank, using his staff to guide his already sure feet. When Aziraphale is halfway there the figure looks up, instantaneously vicious and wild-eyed, and then relaxes and merely stares upon the newfound relief of recognition. They both seem hyper-aware of the bundle in Crowley’s arms, but it’s not until the angel is standing a short meter away that he sees the tiny baby nursing at her exposed chest.
“My word,” he says, for lack of anything else, and because it comes out in a rush he can’t quite stop. “Where on earth did you find that?”
“Mum died,” Crowley offers by way of greeting in a bland voice. “Arsehole of a dad didn’t want her, so. Had to do something.”
“Yes, well, you’re certainly doing that,” Aziraphale says, inching a small step closer. He wavers a bit, switching his staff between both hands. “May I, uhm. See? Or is that uncouth to ask—”
“It’s just a kid on a tit, angel, honestly,” Crowley says, and then sighs as she pulls her shroud back a little more to show off the dark-headed child greedily suckling. “She was hungry, and I couldn’t bear to hear her cry anymore, so, uh. Least this bloody vessel’s half-decent at something, yeah?”
Aziraphale leans in to curiously peer at the infant’s tiny mouth latched around the pinkness of a nipple, and does not remark on the smattering of russet freckles across Crowley’s chest.
“She’s incredibly small,” he decides, clearing his throat and pulling back again, but only slightly.
“No kidding,” Crowley snorts, and Aziraphale does not miss her thumb smoothing over the back of the child’s head as she nurses. “S’only about two hours old, give or take. Fresh from the oven.”
Aziraphale doesn’t speak for a moment, and then Crowley arches a brow and squints up at him. “Take a holy load off,” she says, indicating the open space beside her. “Making me nervous just standing there.”
“Very well,” the angel says, settling down next to the demon and resting his staff back against one shoulder. He peers at the baby again, whose tiny hand has now come up to tangle in the gauzy fabric of Crowley’s shroud. “Whyever didn’t the father want her?”
“Because he’s a ruddy tosser,” Crowley says straightaway. “I’d rather not even mention what he wanted me to do with her, it’d offend your delicate angel sensibilities.”
“I’m not delicate,” Aziraphale protests with a little scoff of his own. His brow knits together as he thinks, somewhat unwillingly, about the past horrors they’ve both seen. “There aren’t any crocodiles around here for miles.”
“No, but there’s that ridged stone right there they use for the washing,” Crowley says bitterly, indicating a large rock several steps away from where they sit. “What do you think might happen if I were to swing a newborn around by the ankles and—”
“Don’t finish that thought, I needn’t hear another word of it,” Aziraphale murmurs wretchedly, reaching up to pass a hand over his eyes. “Heavens above.”
“Your lot’s got nothing to do with it,” Crowley mutters, mostly to herself, as she peers down at the baby beginning to drowse in her arms. “Neither good nor bad for that matter, as far as I can tell.” With a deft but gentle finger she breaks the suction between herself and the child, cradling the infant there in her lap while she goes about getting her chest tucked away again.
Aziraphale’s hand drops away and he gazes at the swaddled newborn lying there along the seam of Crowley’s legs, lulled into milk-drunk stupor. “What are you going to do with her?” he asks, even if he regrets the words the moment they leave his mouth.
Crowley bites into her lower lip and shrugs one shoulder, golden eyes lingering on the rosy-faced baby. “Uhm.”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale says softly, after a few beats of silence. “You couldn’t. You can’t.”
“I know I can’t, angel, I’m a flaming demon,” Crowley hisses, even as she gathers up the child with aching tenderness and brings her up to a shoulder to begin patting her back. “I’ll figure something out, alright? Just—give me a couple days to get it sorted. She’ll be safe with me in the midwives’ tent until then.”
Aziraphale breathes out a sigh but nods. Then carefully, almost tentatively, he reaches up and swipes two fingers over the fine, dark hair on the child’s head. It’s softer than spun lambswool under his touch.
“They grow on you a bit, don’t they,” Crowley says, serpent eyes slanted knowingly to one side.
“Blessings be upon you, child,” Aziraphale whispers, moving his staff to stand. He seems caught in a net of his own devise, visibly struggling there on the riverbank, and then he forces the words out. “If you should need me, Crowley, you know—”
“Trust me, you aren’t a hard one to find,” Crowley says, satisfied with the baby’s tiny burp. She tucks the child away in the sling again, holding her close to her chest. “I can ask anybody within ten kilometres of you if they’ve ‘seen that soft fellow who shines like the bright side of the moon under the midday sun,’ and even a blind man would point the way.”
Aziraphale makes a dour face and rolls his eyes heavenward. “The way you talk, sometimes,” he huffs, face gone pink but not from the desert sun. “Well, I’ve got to be on my way—I’m expected at the inn near Calvary by sundown.”
“Oh, that inn,” Crowley says, raising her brows. “What kind of business does an angel and a herd of goats have at a brothel along the trade roads?”
“None that concerns you, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale says primly, and then bows his head with a little wink. “Take care, foul fiend of mine. Remember what I said if you should need a hand with the child.”
“Yeah, yeah, begone with you,” Crowley says, waving him off. “We’ll find our own way.”
“I should hope,” Aziraphale sighs, and then smiles just a bit. “I’ll be seeing you sometime, I’m sure.”
“If you’re lucky,” Crowley retorts. “Don’t expect a cracking pair of tits next time, I may have changed my mind by then.”
Aziraphale has already begun walking down the bank again with his staff, and lets a chortle up into the air. “Wouldn’t put it past you, dear,” his voice drifts back. “Good on you for doing an honorable deed with them in the meantime.”
The angel rounds up his spotted goats and then they’re off again, crossing the shallow part of the river and tumbling up over the opposite bank. Crowley watches them all go, and then peers down at the tiny face snuggled against her bosom.
“Honorable, pfft—he’s a right bastard sometimes, that angel,” she sighs, gently rocking the baby in place a bit before moving to stand herself. “Guess we ought to find something for me to eat, eh, since I’ve got you to look after for a bit? Can’t churn out free nosh on an empty stomach.”
And so the wicked purveyor of original sin, Accursed Serpent of Eden, holds the nameless babe close and climbs the bank until they’re in view of the throng of tents flapping in the distance. She stands there for a long moment, loose hair swaying idly between her shoulders, and pulls in a deep breath before drawing her shroud back up.
Tending an orphan newborn had never been an underscored part of Crowley’s job description, but then again, she’s always been one for coloring outside the lines.
The birthing tent is empty and quiet that night, with no other women having come to deliver their babies unto the unforgiving earth after Calah’s body was reclaimed and taken away for burial.
Crowley is glad for the easy silence, the peculiar serenity of the crackling fire the oldest midwife keeps perpetually stoked with her wrinkled hands, as brown as tanned oxhide. The younger women take to weaving at their loom by firelight, and others still busy themselves with preparing bedrolls and rugs for the inevitable arrivals that will come in the passing days; they boil rags over the fire in a large pot, along with bone-handled knives and ivory needles for stitching. The youngest girl with a head full of braids tends the donkeys at her mother’s bidding, rubbing the sweet-faced creatures between their fuzzy ears as they nibble grain from the palm of her hand before turning out to graze the scrubby foliage by moonlight.
None of the women had questioned Crowley when she arrived back in time for supper, humbly ladeling herself out a wooden bowl of mutton stew with the infant slung across her front. Their eyes wandered and a few whispered behind their hands, but they knew better than to pry, and Crowley made sure to keep it that way. After two full years of traveling with them, she’s drawn her lines in the sand and kept any straying toes from encroaching on her personal affairs.
After she’s eaten, Crowley goes to wash her hands and face for the mere ritual of it, and then fetches fresh swaddling clothes for the baby. She lays the child out on her own bedroll and tidies her up, murmuring soft nonsense words as the baby grunts and protests the cool air on her bare skin. Curiosity gets the better of the demon, and with a long-fingered hand placed over the child’s small torso she tries to feel through the surface-level plane of Being for any signs of disease, sickness, weakness, or figural abnormality lurking underneath.
There is nothing there, save for the steady thrum of a healthy pulse and the resounding beat of a tiny heart.
Crowley pulls her shroud from her hair and opens her robes this time to feed the baby under cover of fire-dappled darkness, humming with her narrow back resting against one of the sturdy tent poles. They’ve both adapted even better since the first feeding, more used to each other’s shape and warmth, and the child latches on right away and suckles hard despite how small she is.
It’s not a bad feeling, all in all, Crowley privately decides. Holding the tiny body close is soothing in a way, validating in an entirely human experience she never would’ve expected or known if she hadn’t acted in direct defiance of a cruel man. She strokes the child’s cheek and can’t quite chase the picture of Calah’s fading face from the corners of her mind, but there’s nothing to be done to help it, now. Crowley is only doing her best.
Funny thing to be doing, for a demon.
But then the baby is lulled into slumber again, and Crowley lies down on her bedroll with the child tucked in a woven basket there by her side. A striped cat slinks by them, eyes glinting green in the throw of firelight, and peeks inside to sniff the baby’s head, probably drawn in by the sweet smell of milk. Crowley watches it with narrowed eyes but doesn’t shoo it away, and soon enough the cat is on its way again, scurrying off to be some poor rodent’s worst nightmare somewhere in the fallen darkness.
The baby sleeps soundly through most of the night with Crowley watching over her. She wakes only once to feed in the wee hours of the morning, the two of them sitting there in the rising hint of desert twilight while pug-faced bats still zip through the air. Crowley holds the child close to her demonic heart after she’s drank her fill, skin to skin, studying the vivid stars between the heavy flaps of their tent while the other women dream nearby.
She thinks about a great many things, things she hasn’t thought about in a long, long time, and wonders if she had a hand in creating any of the far-flung balls of white light visible in the distant slivers of heavenly cosmos.
Two days later, the young women make a small commotion of preparing water and bread for the golden-haired goatherd they’ve spotted in the distance. Crowley peers out into the drape of coming dusk and snorts to herself. Behind them in the birthing tent, a mother of middling age has been laboring for the past thirteen hours with no signs of the baby having descended into place.
“Don’t waste your time,” Crowley mutters to the girls, already stepping out onto the sand to meet the goatherd halfway. “He’s not much of one for shacking up and taking wives.”
When Crowley stops in front of Aziraphale, they’re angled in such a way that the full moon has settled like a pitted halo behind his fair head. The angel gazes at her with his grey-blue eyes, silent but knowing when he sees the little bundle slung at Crowley’s front.
“The tits are still cracking, I know,” Crowley scoffs, batting her gingery eyelashes for effect. It’s not the most apt deflection, and they both know it. Aziraphale only sighs and reaches out to touch the baby through the sling.
“May I hold her?” he asks, and Crowley wordlessly obliges, carefully maneuvering the infant into Aziraphale’s fine hands while the goats bleat and wander around them. She can feel the eyes of the other midwives burning into her back, but they have more important things to attend to, and she reminds them of that fact with a cruel flick of one wrist that snaps their heads away.
Aziraphale cradles the baby like he’s known how to do it forever, supporting her head in the crook of one arm. He peers down into her tiny face and this time, when her eyes open, they can both see that the murky color is more honeyed at the edges than blue.
“I know I can’t keep her,” Crowley says, even if it makes her throat ache when she admits it aloud. She’s already had this discussion with herself in the locked room of her mind several hundred times, perhaps a thousand times in the past two days, mentally weathering a mountain into mere pebbles with worry and what-ifs. “The midwives are pulling up anchor and moving on to the next place tomorrow night, and I’m meant to go with them. At least—that was the plan, anyways. But plans can change, right?”
“They can,” Aziraphale says, somber in a way, as he bends and gently presses his lips to the baby’s forehead, seemingly for the mere indulgence of it and nothing more. “But sometimes things do work out in odd little ways, don’t they?”
His eyes literally sparkle when he looks up at Crowley’s face, strange and inhuman for a split second, but somehow entirely familiar. Crowley wants to be held and captured by those eyes, she knows, deep down. But she can’t. She can’t ever have what she wants to take for the keeping.
“The woman in the birthing tent,” Aziraphale says eventually, inclining his head toward the sounds of agonized labor in the distance. “Her child won’t live, but she will.”
Crowley’s blood turns to hellfire in her veins, throbbing like a war drum in her heart. “You can’t,” she hisses through her teeth, suddenly incensed. “You wouldn’t dare—”
“It was already done and decided before I even came to see you,” Aziraphale says, sadly. “I merely offer the pearl of suggestion, if you should be so inclined to take it.” He hands the child back to Crowley, transferring her easily into the demon’s arms.
“It wasn’t my choice,” the angel adds, when Crowley isn’t able to speak. “I know you understand how these things work, even if you despise them so.”
Crowley holds the baby close under her chin and suppresses a terrible sob, swallowing it down in a painful gulp. “It’s not fair,” she whispers through the half-dark, words turned to fractured glass shards that drop between them. “It’s never been fair.” Her voice does break this time, and hot tears are welling at the corners of her eyes—rage, rage, fury, a bitter poison rising like bile in the back of her wretched throat. “If I’d known, Aziraphale. If I’d known, in the beginning—”
“You didn’t,” Aziraphale says, the words neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic. He smiles, though, in something verging on a grimace, and catches Crowley’s gaze. “We’ve only ever been doing what we’re told.”
A lowing scream sounds in the distance, shrill and run through with such depthless mourning that all the hair raises on their human-shaped bodies. Crowley turns away so the angel won’t see the tears streaking her cheeks, shrugging off the warm hand that touches down on her shoulder.
“I have to go,” she says, stalking back toward the birthing tent, and then lets out a rueful laugh that spirits up into the air like a ghost. “To do what must be done.”
“You’re doing the right thing,” Aziraphale’s voice calls after her, but Crowley doesn’t stop or make any indication that she heard the angel’s words at all.
The bereft mother sleeps fitfully through the night before she finds the energy to even open her eyes.
Inan, the midwives call her, speaking in soft voices as they dab her forehead with a cool cloth and tend to her battered body. The lost child, cleaned and bound for burial like Calah had been, has been moved away to another part of the birthing tent, hidden away from sight. Crowley had gone to look at the tiny bundle with her own charge warm and nestled against her chest, and found she didn’t have the energy left to question the meaning of anything anymore.
There was no use; she would simply never know. None of them would.
While they waited for Inan to rouse, Crowley held the nameless orphan close and whispered blessings over her like swirling incantations as the infant nursed one last time, energetic wards that interlock and seal into perfect place. Demonic blessings are not so different from angelic ones, technically speaking—it’s all a matter of intention, Crowley knows. And she’s made her intentions clear when it comes to the child in her arms.
Inan’s weeping rises alongside the climbing sun, and when she cries out for her baby Crowley goes to her, settling the pink-faced infant with dark hair into the woman’s arms. It doesn’t take much power of suggestion, in the end, for Inan to bring the child to her face and breathe in the sweet, comforting scent of a thriving newborn. She cradles the baby close and weeps anew, thanking a God she’s never seen and will never know. The same God who thrust her unspoken saviour from the realm of Heaven into the everlasting pit of despair.
And so one tragedy is exchanged for another, like a passing handshake in the night. Crowley doesn’t cry or begrudge Inan’s mortal comfort, accepting her own fate as one of the damned, one of the tainted, stripped of divinity and incapable of love. She does wander from the midwives’ tent after Inan accepts the baby, though, and watches her bare feet leave sidewinding prints on the sandy ground until she finds herself back in the company of a motley herd of goats.
Aziraphale is sitting near a small fire, brewing his morning cup of black tea in a copper pot. His shepherding staff and small satchel rests nearby, tied with a bundle of some sort of sweet-smelling herb.
“Join me,” the angel says by way of greeting, gesturing to the second enameled cup already set out on a flat stone. “I even have a bit of honey somewhere to sweeten it, if you’d like.”
“You’d share your prized honey with a demon, eh,” Crowley says, sipping the dark brew huddled next to her foremost adversary. It’s rich and aromatic even without the honey, but she allows the angel to drop a golden wedge of comb into her cup and stir it with a long spoon for good measure.
“I think you deserve it, if only this once,” Aziraphale says, smiling indulgently. He finishes his own tea and then reaches for a sewn waterskin with a makeshift teat on one end, and as he takes it up a tiny goat kid bleats and rushes over into the angel’s open arms.
Crowley watches with one side of her mouth quirked up as the little caramel-colored goat kneels on its front legs and nurses from the fashioned bottle filled with fresh milk, tiny tail wagging back and forth as it suckles.
Aziraphale clears his throat, reaching a hand forth to steady the young creature in its eagerness. “I’ve come into a temporary guardianship of my own, it would seem,” he says, the dimple in his chin deepening as he tries to stave off a smile. “Steady now, dearie, you’re going to make yourself sick.”
“You’re a natural, angel,” Crowley snorts, leaning closer just to be in proximity of something so pure. She strokes the little goat’s side for a moment, the bristly hair warm and distinctly animal compared to the soft, downy hair on the baby’s head.
It makes the line of her mouth wobble, just a bit, and she sets her tea down and draws her knees up close to her chest. Aziraphale must have eyes in the side of his head, because he sets the waterskin bottle aside and turns to the demon as the goat kid scampers off to play with its kin nearby.
“I think you’ve been terribly brave, Crowley, and so very kind,” the angel says, and then reaches out, slowly, to lay a hand on Crowley’s forearm. “Even if you don’t think so, I certainly do.”
“Is it bravery, giving up something you let yourself love?” Crowley croaks, reaching up to angrily wipe across her face. “Is that what ruddy kindness is?”
She will think of these past two days for centuries and millennia to come, so far-flung into the future that neither of them can possibly comprehend it. But in the moment everything feels like a dagger wedged in her heart, twisting in a cruel turn of predetermined fate.
“Come now, darling, don’t weep,” Aziraphale says, so close, and right there beside her where he doesn’t belong. But Crowley lets her head drop onto the angel’s shoulder anyway, right here beneath the open sky, where the all-seeing eye of God could strike them both down in an instant.
She would welcome it, at this point. But the divine wrath never does come. Aziraphale’s hand does, though, rising to touch the mess of curls and braided plaits at the back of her head.
“What makes us mourn something that was never ours to keep?” Crowley rasps, dampening the ivory robes beneath her face. It would be impossible to voice the secret mourning she does for the angel, his arms wrapped around her—a fleeting comfort that will be ripped away like all the rest, like everything. It’s a loss she feels before it’s even gone.
“You helped bring the child into the world, and you nurtured her, and you have given her hope where she had none before,” Aziraphale whispers, lips somewhere against Crowley’s freckled temple. “That isn’t nothing, you know. You can hold onto the truth of that as much as anything else.”
He kisses the demon’s forehead, then, in a move perhaps neither of them expected, but which both lean into for the few eternal seconds it lasts. And then Aziraphale is drawing back, fussing a bit with the edge of Crowley’s shroud where it’s fallen loose and slipped off her hair.
“I don’t have any dutiful obligations for the next little while or so,” he says, not quite meeting her eyes. “Perhaps it would be prudent of me to travel nearby with the herd, in case there are any unexpected wiles that need thwarting.”
Crowley laughs, because it’s all she can do. It’s a promise veiled in that secret language between them, the one that never does accurately translate onto scrolls and reports about the enemy sent to their respective offices both upstairs and down.
“I may have some saucy wickedness to sow up these sleeves of mine,” Crowley says, tears already dried down into sticky tracks on her face. “Somebody’s got to keep you on your toes.”
The sun crests above a plateau behind them, lighting up the desert valley with gold. Further away, in the midwives’ tent, Inan passes a thumb over her daughter’s head and gives her a name before custom would usually allow. There is nothing frail or uncertain about this particular child, and no uncertain doubt in her mind that the baby will thrive.
“Esther,” Inan decides, smoothing the child’s dark hair beneath her fingertips, and somewhere, far above them all on a plane quite unlike the earthly one, Somebody dips their pen in an inkwell and brings a line of script to a contented close.