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go_exchangeTitle: That Time They Raised the Messiah
Recipient:tomato_greens
Author:song_lin
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Relationship: Aziraphale/Crowley
Request: Crowley-centric kid!fic, any rating. (Not Warlock or Adam, preferably; we know they sent agents to Warlock and I'd presume they'd be too busy picking up the pieces to hang out with Adam post-Almostalypse. However, the descendants of the Them, or of Newt and Anathema, or ...anybody else would be fabulous!)
Author's Notes: Started as a Five Things and One fic, which turned out to be woefully overambitious. Enjoy!
Summary: Crowley had once mentioned he might like a cat. There was, however, a bit of a leap from "cat" to "infant Messiah."
Aziraphale was not optimistic about his summons. At the best of times, silence from Upstairs meant that all was well in Whoville, so to speak. If management called you in for a word, it was rarely for a promotion.
At some point in the last thirty years or so, the office of the Supervising Principality had grown to resemble that of a particularly energetic office manager or a friendly primary school headmaster. The walls were decorated with motivational posters in large, serifed letters, and there was a china pineapple on the desk. Aziraphale supposed it was some sort of quirky commentary on the gifting of apples to superiors.
“Aziraphale!” Sarasael, Supervising Principality, said in a startlingly cheerful tone. She held out a hand. Aziraphale stood and shook it, a bit bemusedly. “Good to see you in person again! Good to see you!” She took her seat behind the desk. Aziraphale did the same.
Sarasael was pleasantly plump, sporting a short layer of wildly curling black hair and a complexion that spoke of too much time sunbathing in her youth. She was dressed in the same schoolteacher aesthetic as her office, in a dark green pantsuit with sensible clogs. She did not strike Aziraphale as a deliverer of bad news. Sweets, perhaps.
“Aziraphale,” Sarasael said, clapping his hands together and beaming. “We’ve got a job for you.”
Aziraphale blinked. “Oh! Really?”
“Absolutely!” She leaned close and lowered her voice. “There’s a special project we’d like to put you on. Now, it’ll take a lot of work at home, but we’re confident--”
“Actually,” Aziraphale said, slightly resenting being spoken to like a very bright eight-year-old, “if there’s to be a lot of--erm--homework, in the--er--interests of full disclosure, I feel I must let you know--”
“Oh, we know about you and your special friend,” Sarasael said with a wink. “Part of why we chose you, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh!” Aziraphale sat back with a sigh of relief. What was there to worry about?
Thirty seconds later, he fainted straight out of his chair and had to be revived with some strong tea and a biscuit.
About thirty minutes after that, he reappeared inside the front door of their little house in the South Downs with his fragile package on his right arm.
“Hello,” he said weakly. “I’m, er, not quite sure--"
Crowley squinted suspiciously into the carrycot. “Has he--is he a he?”
“She’s a ‘she,’ actually,” Aziraphale said, “about as much as you and I are ‘he’s.’ Well,” he added, “I mean. Not as we’re...you know.”
Crowley smirked.
“And we’re supposed to give her a name.”
Crowley looked faintly disgusted. “Why is it our job? We never had to be named. We just...got them.”
Aziraphale shrugged. “Perhaps it’s got something to do with bonding. Human parents talk quite a bit about the bond between parent and child, and the Messiah’s supposed to be equally human and Divine.”
“Wasn’t the Second Coming supposed to be with the Apocalypse? Descending from the heavens on a cloud and all?”
“They’ve had a change of plans,” Aziraphale said, absently rocking the carrycot. “Since that didn’t...ahem.”
“Well, you stay and brainstorm names,” Crowley said, rising to his feet. “I’m going to go and strengthen the bond between a glass of whiskey and my mouth.”
Aziraphale pursed his lips. “You are most certainly not. I have to run to the shops.”
Crowley shrugged. “You could take her with you. People do.”
Aziraphale looked scandalized. “We haven’t got a proper car-seat!”
“She’s the Messiah. I’m fairly sure there’s some sort of...insurance on her.”
Aziraphale scowled. “The instructions were very clear. As the humans do, they said.”
“I’m not touching her.”
“You’ll leave her on the floor to cry?”
“If she cries, I’ll rock the carrycot.”
It was an acceptable enough compromise. Aziraphale left with the keys to the Bentley and a wallet full of credit cards that never actually had been applied for nor paid off. [1]
Crowley fetched his drink and sat down opposite the baby.
“I’ll have you know I’m not pleased,” he told her.
The baby blinked her wide, bright eyes and yawned. Crowley wondered how old she was. How did one assess the age of an infant? He extracted a smartphone from his pocket. According to Google Image Search, the answer was not very old at all.
“What do you do all day?” he asked.
The baby blinked again. Her eyebrows started to sink together in a worrying manner.
“Don’t bother,” Crowley told her. “It won’t get you anywhere.”
The baby opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and let out an unholy squall.
Crowley quickly discovered two things: that very small lungs produced a surprising amount of noise (this being more of a reminder than a discovery), and that rocking the carrycot was tragically insufficient.
“Okay, okay,” he sighed.
[1] Aziraphale let Crowley believe that he had never quite worked out how credit cards functioned. In truth, he had, but thought the entire system was an absolute racket and refused to participate. Convenience won him over in the end, and he was fairly confident that the merchants were receiving payment of some sort. Crowley, being in possession of a better understanding of economics and inflation, was equally horrified and entertained.
---
Aziraphale returned home to find his partner not just touching the baby, but sprawled across the couch, watching the infant asleep in the crook of his arm.
“She’s very stubborn,” he whispered. “I expect that’s from your side.”
---
“That’s not even a name,” Aziraphale hissed, shutting the door to what had recently been the guest bedroom.
“It most certainly is,” Crowley insisted.
“I’m fairly certain it’s a mold spore.”
“And you’ve got a better suggestion?”
“Something classic,” Aziraphale said, flopping back onto the sofa. The sort of controlled fall was a movement necessitated by the numerous shopping bags littering the sitting room floor.
Crowley gingerly perched on the coffee table. “Like Gwendolyn or Isolde.”
Aziraphale snorted. “The other children will beat her. Actually beat her. I mean, the last Messiah put a stop to that quite quickly, but I’m in favor of discouraging any stunts like...well, it’s not as if there’s an abundance of serpents in the British Isles anyways…”
“I think they’re lovely.”
“She’ll be going by Sarah by the time she’s twelve.”
Aziraphale sniffed. “So long as it’s not a city, animal, or inanimate object.”
They both winced.
“Shakespeare,” Aziraphale suggested. “Hermione.”
“Harry Potter.”
“Is that a footballer?”
Crowley sighed. “Viola.”
Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “Juliet.”
“Mm, obvious. Nerissa?”
Crowley shuddered.
“Bianca," Aziraphale suggested.
“Sounds like it should be on a tabloid magazine.”
“Rosalind.”
“Too nineteenth-century.”
“Amelia.”
“That’s not even Shakespeare!”
“It is. The Comedy of Errors.”
Crowley knew better than to debate Aziraphale on literature. [2] “That’s not terrible,” he admitted.
“So we’re settled?”
Crowley shrugged. “I suppose. It’s workable.”
“It’s got a nice sound to it. Oh, I hope it hasn’t got some terrible meaning like ‘cursed of God,’ or belonged to some serial killer.”
Crowley looked off to the side, then shook his head. “I’ve not got a thing. Let’s chance it. Middle name?”
“I’ve never really understood the point of middle names. Not in English at least.”
“It’s where you put the name you’d give it in a world where children don’t hit each other for having funny names.”
“Skip it?”
“Skip it.” Crowley plucks a box from one of the shopping bags littering the room. “What is this?”
“It’s a bottle warmer.”
“You have to warm them? Whatever for?”
“Well,” Aziraphale mused, “I suppose it’s to simulate, er...natural circumstances.”
“And they won’t drink it unless it’s suitably warm?” Crowley shook his head. “Funny creatures, these little humans. Well.”
“She’s mostly human.” Aziraphale started going through an intimidatingly large bag of baby clothes and snipping off the tags with a pair of infant nail clippers.
“Or so they say,” Crowley muttered darkly.
“Though she’s of ethereal stock,” Aziraphale continued, pointedly ignoring the interruption. “The closest comparison would be the Antichrist if he’d had a lot more direct celestial interference in his upbringing. She won’t develop powers until she’s got a bit of impulse control.”
“Whatever for?” said Crowley.
“Well, I can think of quite a few reasons a two-year-old should not be able to put your insides very abruptly outside--”
“No, that’s not--I mean, what is Upstairs up to?”
Aziraphale shrugged. “Something about the shifting nature of plans in light of recent rearrangement of--”
“Bit unfair, really,” Crowley grumbled. “Expecting us to just--drop everything and...besides, I don’t think either of us is particularly qualified for the task.”
“Hmm,” said Aziraphale, “you never know. You did say it might be nice to have a bit more life around here.”
“I meant a cat. Perhaps a particularly calm, well-trained dog. I did not mean an infant.”
“It’s the same principle.”
Crowley looked doubtful.
“Regardless, I’d rather not start anything with the management, considering our recent history. Come, now, Crowley; it’ll be an adventure.”
Crowley sighed.
In the other room, they could hear Amelia just beginning to stir and let out a weak, fussy cry.
[2] With the exception of 1950s pornographic paperbacks and any books published in the last fifty years that had been turned into films (or vice versa). Crowley was very proud of coming up with the novelization.
---
Sometime between three and four-thirty in the morning, Aziraphale rolled over, seized hold of Crowley’s arm and pushed him straight out of bed.
“Get up,” he mumbled. “‘s your turn.” [3]
He immediately slumped back into his pillow and into unconsciousness.
Babies, Crowley decided, were more trouble than they were worth. He staggered down the hall into the hurriedly-constructed nursery and flicked on the lights. Bottle. You were supposed to feed them when they woke at horrid hours, he knew that much. He eyed the empty bottle on the top of the dresser.
The less said about the process, the better. Suffice it to say that Crowley prepared the bottle with only a minimum of spillage on his silk pyjamas, scooped up the baby, and popped the bottle into her mouth. She let out a little snuffly coo or two while she got a decent grip on the bottle with her mouth, and then fell silent.
“Not so hard, is it?”
Amelia blinked at him. Her eyes were really quite a startling shade of green. Crowley smiled and backed into a rocking chair.
“See? We can be cooperative, yes? There.”
Five minutes later, Amelia spat up on the shoulder of Crowley’s couture Armani pyjamas, and he questioned whether or not the Messiah was really worth it.
[3] They’d both taken to sleeping regularly since retiring after tiring of the neighbors’ questioning. To Aziraphale's great displeasure, he'd found that it was a hard habit to break.
---
Aziraphale liked to buy Amelia books with soft things inside to touch and Mozart CDs and teddy bears and toys shaped like boxes with little shapes you were supposed to fit into the proper holes.
Crowley liked to buy her onesies emblazoned with slogans like Oops! and noisy toys with lots of flashy lights and stuffed animals that talked if you squeezed them and books that sang at you when you pressed buttons.
Amelia liked all of the books and stuffed animals. She didn’t care for the onesies, Mozart, or toys with shapes, and was actively terrified by the noisy toys. Crowley and Aziraphale declared it a truce. [4]
Aziraphale found a list of so-called benchmarks that babies were supposed to reach: when they should be crawling, walking, and so on. Amelia passed them like clockwork.
Overall, she was remarkably...human. [5]
“Perhaps they made a mistake,” Aziraphale said from the doorway of Amelia’s room.
Crowley snorted.
Inside, the Messiah slumbered on.
[4] Though of course it wasn’t actually a competition.
[5] With the exception of her first word: “Ineffable.”
Recipient:
tomato_greensAuthor:
song_linRating: PG-13
Characters/Relationship: Aziraphale/Crowley
Request: Crowley-centric kid!fic, any rating. (Not Warlock or Adam, preferably; we know they sent agents to Warlock and I'd presume they'd be too busy picking up the pieces to hang out with Adam post-Almostalypse. However, the descendants of the Them, or of Newt and Anathema, or ...anybody else would be fabulous!)
Author's Notes: Started as a Five Things and One fic, which turned out to be woefully overambitious. Enjoy!
Summary: Crowley had once mentioned he might like a cat. There was, however, a bit of a leap from "cat" to "infant Messiah."
Aziraphale was not optimistic about his summons. At the best of times, silence from Upstairs meant that all was well in Whoville, so to speak. If management called you in for a word, it was rarely for a promotion.
At some point in the last thirty years or so, the office of the Supervising Principality had grown to resemble that of a particularly energetic office manager or a friendly primary school headmaster. The walls were decorated with motivational posters in large, serifed letters, and there was a china pineapple on the desk. Aziraphale supposed it was some sort of quirky commentary on the gifting of apples to superiors.
“Aziraphale!” Sarasael, Supervising Principality, said in a startlingly cheerful tone. She held out a hand. Aziraphale stood and shook it, a bit bemusedly. “Good to see you in person again! Good to see you!” She took her seat behind the desk. Aziraphale did the same.
Sarasael was pleasantly plump, sporting a short layer of wildly curling black hair and a complexion that spoke of too much time sunbathing in her youth. She was dressed in the same schoolteacher aesthetic as her office, in a dark green pantsuit with sensible clogs. She did not strike Aziraphale as a deliverer of bad news. Sweets, perhaps.
“Aziraphale,” Sarasael said, clapping his hands together and beaming. “We’ve got a job for you.”
Aziraphale blinked. “Oh! Really?”
“Absolutely!” She leaned close and lowered her voice. “There’s a special project we’d like to put you on. Now, it’ll take a lot of work at home, but we’re confident--”
“Actually,” Aziraphale said, slightly resenting being spoken to like a very bright eight-year-old, “if there’s to be a lot of--erm--homework, in the--er--interests of full disclosure, I feel I must let you know--”
“Oh, we know about you and your special friend,” Sarasael said with a wink. “Part of why we chose you, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh!” Aziraphale sat back with a sigh of relief. What was there to worry about?
Thirty seconds later, he fainted straight out of his chair and had to be revived with some strong tea and a biscuit.
About thirty minutes after that, he reappeared inside the front door of their little house in the South Downs with his fragile package on his right arm.
“Hello,” he said weakly. “I’m, er, not quite sure--"
Crowley squinted suspiciously into the carrycot. “Has he--is he a he?”
“She’s a ‘she,’ actually,” Aziraphale said, “about as much as you and I are ‘he’s.’ Well,” he added, “I mean. Not as we’re...you know.”
Crowley smirked.
“And we’re supposed to give her a name.”
Crowley looked faintly disgusted. “Why is it our job? We never had to be named. We just...got them.”
Aziraphale shrugged. “Perhaps it’s got something to do with bonding. Human parents talk quite a bit about the bond between parent and child, and the Messiah’s supposed to be equally human and Divine.”
“Wasn’t the Second Coming supposed to be with the Apocalypse? Descending from the heavens on a cloud and all?”
“They’ve had a change of plans,” Aziraphale said, absently rocking the carrycot. “Since that didn’t...ahem.”
“Well, you stay and brainstorm names,” Crowley said, rising to his feet. “I’m going to go and strengthen the bond between a glass of whiskey and my mouth.”
Aziraphale pursed his lips. “You are most certainly not. I have to run to the shops.”
Crowley shrugged. “You could take her with you. People do.”
Aziraphale looked scandalized. “We haven’t got a proper car-seat!”
“She’s the Messiah. I’m fairly sure there’s some sort of...insurance on her.”
Aziraphale scowled. “The instructions were very clear. As the humans do, they said.”
“I’m not touching her.”
“You’ll leave her on the floor to cry?”
“If she cries, I’ll rock the carrycot.”
It was an acceptable enough compromise. Aziraphale left with the keys to the Bentley and a wallet full of credit cards that never actually had been applied for nor paid off. [1]
Crowley fetched his drink and sat down opposite the baby.
“I’ll have you know I’m not pleased,” he told her.
The baby blinked her wide, bright eyes and yawned. Crowley wondered how old she was. How did one assess the age of an infant? He extracted a smartphone from his pocket. According to Google Image Search, the answer was not very old at all.
“What do you do all day?” he asked.
The baby blinked again. Her eyebrows started to sink together in a worrying manner.
“Don’t bother,” Crowley told her. “It won’t get you anywhere.”
The baby opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and let out an unholy squall.
Crowley quickly discovered two things: that very small lungs produced a surprising amount of noise (this being more of a reminder than a discovery), and that rocking the carrycot was tragically insufficient.
“Okay, okay,” he sighed.
[1] Aziraphale let Crowley believe that he had never quite worked out how credit cards functioned. In truth, he had, but thought the entire system was an absolute racket and refused to participate. Convenience won him over in the end, and he was fairly confident that the merchants were receiving payment of some sort. Crowley, being in possession of a better understanding of economics and inflation, was equally horrified and entertained.
---
Aziraphale returned home to find his partner not just touching the baby, but sprawled across the couch, watching the infant asleep in the crook of his arm.
“She’s very stubborn,” he whispered. “I expect that’s from your side.”
---
“That’s not even a name,” Aziraphale hissed, shutting the door to what had recently been the guest bedroom.
“It most certainly is,” Crowley insisted.
“I’m fairly certain it’s a mold spore.”
“And you’ve got a better suggestion?”
“Something classic,” Aziraphale said, flopping back onto the sofa. The sort of controlled fall was a movement necessitated by the numerous shopping bags littering the sitting room floor.
Crowley gingerly perched on the coffee table. “Like Gwendolyn or Isolde.”
Aziraphale snorted. “The other children will beat her. Actually beat her. I mean, the last Messiah put a stop to that quite quickly, but I’m in favor of discouraging any stunts like...well, it’s not as if there’s an abundance of serpents in the British Isles anyways…”
“I think they’re lovely.”
“She’ll be going by Sarah by the time she’s twelve.”
Aziraphale sniffed. “So long as it’s not a city, animal, or inanimate object.”
They both winced.
“Shakespeare,” Aziraphale suggested. “Hermione.”
“Harry Potter.”
“Is that a footballer?”
Crowley sighed. “Viola.”
Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “Juliet.”
“Mm, obvious. Nerissa?”
Crowley shuddered.
“Bianca," Aziraphale suggested.
“Sounds like it should be on a tabloid magazine.”
“Rosalind.”
“Too nineteenth-century.”
“Amelia.”
“That’s not even Shakespeare!”
“It is. The Comedy of Errors.”
Crowley knew better than to debate Aziraphale on literature. [2] “That’s not terrible,” he admitted.
“So we’re settled?”
Crowley shrugged. “I suppose. It’s workable.”
“It’s got a nice sound to it. Oh, I hope it hasn’t got some terrible meaning like ‘cursed of God,’ or belonged to some serial killer.”
Crowley looked off to the side, then shook his head. “I’ve not got a thing. Let’s chance it. Middle name?”
“I’ve never really understood the point of middle names. Not in English at least.”
“It’s where you put the name you’d give it in a world where children don’t hit each other for having funny names.”
“Skip it?”
“Skip it.” Crowley plucks a box from one of the shopping bags littering the room. “What is this?”
“It’s a bottle warmer.”
“You have to warm them? Whatever for?”
“Well,” Aziraphale mused, “I suppose it’s to simulate, er...natural circumstances.”
“And they won’t drink it unless it’s suitably warm?” Crowley shook his head. “Funny creatures, these little humans. Well.”
“She’s mostly human.” Aziraphale started going through an intimidatingly large bag of baby clothes and snipping off the tags with a pair of infant nail clippers.
“Or so they say,” Crowley muttered darkly.
“Though she’s of ethereal stock,” Aziraphale continued, pointedly ignoring the interruption. “The closest comparison would be the Antichrist if he’d had a lot more direct celestial interference in his upbringing. She won’t develop powers until she’s got a bit of impulse control.”
“Whatever for?” said Crowley.
“Well, I can think of quite a few reasons a two-year-old should not be able to put your insides very abruptly outside--”
“No, that’s not--I mean, what is Upstairs up to?”
Aziraphale shrugged. “Something about the shifting nature of plans in light of recent rearrangement of--”
“Bit unfair, really,” Crowley grumbled. “Expecting us to just--drop everything and...besides, I don’t think either of us is particularly qualified for the task.”
“Hmm,” said Aziraphale, “you never know. You did say it might be nice to have a bit more life around here.”
“I meant a cat. Perhaps a particularly calm, well-trained dog. I did not mean an infant.”
“It’s the same principle.”
Crowley looked doubtful.
“Regardless, I’d rather not start anything with the management, considering our recent history. Come, now, Crowley; it’ll be an adventure.”
Crowley sighed.
In the other room, they could hear Amelia just beginning to stir and let out a weak, fussy cry.
[2] With the exception of 1950s pornographic paperbacks and any books published in the last fifty years that had been turned into films (or vice versa). Crowley was very proud of coming up with the novelization.
---
Sometime between three and four-thirty in the morning, Aziraphale rolled over, seized hold of Crowley’s arm and pushed him straight out of bed.
“Get up,” he mumbled. “‘s your turn.” [3]
He immediately slumped back into his pillow and into unconsciousness.
Babies, Crowley decided, were more trouble than they were worth. He staggered down the hall into the hurriedly-constructed nursery and flicked on the lights. Bottle. You were supposed to feed them when they woke at horrid hours, he knew that much. He eyed the empty bottle on the top of the dresser.
The less said about the process, the better. Suffice it to say that Crowley prepared the bottle with only a minimum of spillage on his silk pyjamas, scooped up the baby, and popped the bottle into her mouth. She let out a little snuffly coo or two while she got a decent grip on the bottle with her mouth, and then fell silent.
“Not so hard, is it?”
Amelia blinked at him. Her eyes were really quite a startling shade of green. Crowley smiled and backed into a rocking chair.
“See? We can be cooperative, yes? There.”
Five minutes later, Amelia spat up on the shoulder of Crowley’s couture Armani pyjamas, and he questioned whether or not the Messiah was really worth it.
[3] They’d both taken to sleeping regularly since retiring after tiring of the neighbors’ questioning. To Aziraphale's great displeasure, he'd found that it was a hard habit to break.
---
Aziraphale liked to buy Amelia books with soft things inside to touch and Mozart CDs and teddy bears and toys shaped like boxes with little shapes you were supposed to fit into the proper holes.
Crowley liked to buy her onesies emblazoned with slogans like Oops! and noisy toys with lots of flashy lights and stuffed animals that talked if you squeezed them and books that sang at you when you pressed buttons.
Amelia liked all of the books and stuffed animals. She didn’t care for the onesies, Mozart, or toys with shapes, and was actively terrified by the noisy toys. Crowley and Aziraphale declared it a truce. [4]
Aziraphale found a list of so-called benchmarks that babies were supposed to reach: when they should be crawling, walking, and so on. Amelia passed them like clockwork.
Overall, she was remarkably...human. [5]
“Perhaps they made a mistake,” Aziraphale said from the doorway of Amelia’s room.
Crowley snorted.
Inside, the Messiah slumbered on.
[4] Though of course it wasn’t actually a competition.
[5] With the exception of her first word: “Ineffable.”
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