Chapter Text
Hastur and Ligur were good at lurking. They liked it. It was quiet, comfortable, as peaceful or eventful as they wanted to make it, counted as work, and when you were a very busy Duke of Hell, a few hours of privacy with your husband gave you a nice work-sexlife balance, because you could have both at once.
They had assumed they’d have a quiet night, waiting to send the newborn Antichrist off to his glorious destiny. Babies were supposed to sleep most of the time, right? Wrong.
“It’s crying! Why is it crying?” asked Hastur, getting agitated along with the baby in the basket.
“I don’t know,” said Ligur, clutching the basket with the baby inside to his chest. “You’re the one breeding puppies. What do human puppies need?”
“How am I supposed to know? Hellhound puppies drink milk and get licked a lot.”
Ligur made a doubtful face. “I’ve never seen a human lick their baby. And no offense, but I’d rather not lick that. If it’s the wrong thing to do, I don’t want to explain to our Master why we did it.”
“Well, I can’t lick it either. You know what my saliva does.”
Ligur knew, and a broad smile appeared on his face. “You’ll have to lick me then.”
Hastur huffed. “Not while we’re guarding the Master’s precious spawn.”
“Lick the baby then. Maybe seeing some nicer colors will make it shut up.”
“I’m not going to drug our Master’s baby. We need to find out what it really wants!”
“You said milk. Do humans produce milk?”
“Yeah, they do.”
“Really?”
Hastur cupped his hands before his chest. “The boobs. That’s what they’re for.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
“So. Which one of us gets boobs?”
“What?” squealed Hastur. “No one! We’re not humans. Even if we give ourselves boobs, the milk would probably just make the baby sick.”
“It’s a demon baby.”
“In a human body! We need to get it human milk.”
“Okay. We go get ourselves a human woman then.”
“No, they don’t have milk all the time. Only sometimes, and we don't know when.”
“Are you sure? Why are you an expert all of sudden? We could just take an ordinary woman and try.”
“We don’t have time to try and fail,” wailed Hastur over the wailing from the basket. “We need something that works fast.”
“Well, do you have a nursing bitch down in the hellhound kennels at the moment?”
“No!”
“Then one of us has to get boobs!”
“Goats!” screamed Hastur in a flash of desperate genius.
“What?”
“We need a goat! People milk them! That’s what they keep them for!”
Ligur stared at him in disbelief, but he was so very done with the wailing and the idea that they could fail their Master was unfathomable anyway, so he clicked his tongue, and a bleeting horned beast stood before them.
Hastur crouched down and peered under the animal.
“You idiot, that’s a male!” he shouted.
“How am I supposed to know?” shouted Ligur back. “All goats look the same!”
Hastur pushed his palm forward, and a second animal, almost idential looking, stood next to the first, looked around, panicked, and with a few quick, nimble jumps vanished into the night, the other goat following her closely.
Ligur shook his head. “Why is every creature you miracle up always a nervous wreck?”
Hastur smiled fondly. “That’s when they see you.”
Ligur chuckled.
The baby in the basket was still wailing, even louder now. Ligur pressed the basket against his chest so firmly that it started creaking. He was going to protect this baby. And someone would have to feed it and it wasn’t going to be him.
“Hastur,” he said, raising his voice over the crying child. “You’ve been raising puppies with bottles.”
“I have not,” said Hastur, avoiding his gaze.
“Yes you have. What’s in the bottle you feed the puppies?”
Hastur was still embarassed about it, but he answered. “Special puppy mix.”
“You miracled that up?”
“Yeah.”
“And the puppies lived?”
Hastur shot him a wounded look. “Thrived.”
Ligur took a deep breath. Hastur was crazy about Hellhounds. Even crazier about the puppies. Everyone knew it. He didn’t know what Hastur trying to hide it was all about. Hellhounds were properly demonic, even when a Duke of Hell was cooing about their young.
“Then miracle a bottle of it up now.”
Hastur threw him a panicked look. “What if it’s bad for humans?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Ligur!”
“Hastur, we can always miracle the little one better if the stuff you put into puppies isn’t good for it. Not being fed at all can’t be good for the little one either. Who knows how long it’ll take for Crowley to turn up? Could be hours.”
Hastur gave in, and suddenly had a bottle in his hand that he tried to pass on to Ligur, avoiding his eyes.
“Oh no,” said Ligur. “You’re the mammal expert, you feed him, you know how it’s done.”
He ignored Hastur’s pleading looks and opened the basket. Holding it in Hastur’s direction, Hastur finally kicked into gear.
“Not like that,” he said. He put the bottle into the pocket of his coat and carefully, with both hands, lifted the baby out. It was a bit difficult at first, with human babies not coming with a lot of loose skin to get a hold onto, but the wobbly head was familiar, and so were the uncoordinated, flailing movements of the limbs. Hastur’s grim facial expression melted.
“They really are like puppies,” he said.
He opened the upper buttons of his coat and packed the baby inside.
“What’s that for?”
“They need to hear a heartbeat, and keep warm.”
“You have a heartbeat?”
“Sometimes.”
Hastur arranged the baby such that the little face was poking out of his coat and offered it the bottle. The baby didn’t care about the bottle and kept wailing.
“Maybe it’s not hungry.”
“Maybe its tummy hurts. Digestion is pretty weird, and often goes wrong.”
“Always goes wrong, considering the end product.”
“Can you miracle it better?”
Hastur shook his head.
“If I don’t know what’s the matter with it, I don’t know what to do about it. I can try to massage it a little, ease its tummy, but if that doesn’t help, you need to lick it.”
Hastur’s hand vanished inside his coat, trying to do a massage on someone with no fur on. It was weird.
But it helped, because the baby calmed down.
“Maybe he was just cold,” said Ligur. “Better keep him in the coat then.”
Hastur tightened the coat’s belt to hold the weight of the baby better and the coat, as he expected it to, shaped itsself to snugly hold a newborn.
“It’s trying to suckle on my shirt,” said Hastur, his voice softer than any time Ligur had heard it. “Don’t do that, little Antichrist, it’s all dog slobber, blood and soot on it, not good for babies. Maybe you want the bottle now.”
It turned out the little one did. Hastur stood there, feeding the baby, avoiding Ligur’s eyes. He didn’t want to know what he would see there. For a while, they were silent. Very silent. It was deafening after all the wailing.
When the bottle was empty, Hastur nestled the baby deeper into his coat, adding the blanket from the basket in there, and his scarf too, for good measure. “To keep it warm,” he mumbled.
He looked up for a second to see how Ligur was taking the news, and he wished he hadn’t. Ligur’s eyes were oscillating through shades of deep purple. Fuck.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Hastur mumbled. “But we said we’re not going there again.”
“I know,” said Ligur, his voice a bit thicker than usual. “I know we said we won’t be sad. I know we said we won’t mention it again. But Hastur, when Armageddon is over and we can do whatever we want…”
He didn’t finish the sentence right away, and Hastur thought he never would, and wasn’t sure if he wanted him to.
But eventually, he looked up and saw a small smile on Ligur’s face.
“When we’re free of Hell, Hastur, I want us to try again.”
And Hastur nodded.