blood, white marble, and starlight - blackeyedblonde (2024)

Chapter Text

The twelfth month in Crowley’s self-imposed year of bleeding comes and goes on the shaky, tremulous legs of a newborn lamb. A few errant spots of blood dot the boiled rag she dutifully hitches between her legs for only one day, and then stops altogether.

Crowley inspects the bright splotches of red with a small furrow between her brows and wonders if her own wretched heartsickness is to blame for the faulty plumbing. Perhaps eating less than usual, despite not truly needing to eat at all, was to her detriment. She knows some human bodies on the thinner side can have trouble with maintaining the natural flow of menses, and makes a mental note to indulge in the humble meals of the midwives with a little more gusto than she has in the weeks since the angel left.

Aziraphale’s absence has been more difficult to weather, this time. Crowley goes about her work and daily chores with something wounded silently weeping behind her ribcage while she grits her teeth against the abject humiliation of yearning for what she can’t have, and maybe that’s where her monthly blood has gone—relocated to the slow leak coming from a lance in her cursed heart.

In her darker moments of restless reflection, when the birthing tent is quiet and the other midwives are busy dreaming, Crowley convinces herself that what she and Aziraphale did together can’t ever happen again, if only to spare her the stark pain of wanting the angel so damn badly. She steadfastly doesn’t think about love. As far as she knows as a demon, love isn’t supposed to hurt as much as this does. Or maybe, in a cruel twist of irony, that was part of her punishment all along.

At the end of the thirteenth month there is no blood to be found at all, pouring neither from her womb nor her heart. Crowley’s stomach boils in its place, burbling with a malaise so potent it makes tears leak from her eyes when she crouches in the sand beneath a scrappy olive tree and dry heaves against the twisting convulsions of her empty stomach.

She supposes the Almighty would be the type to have a bit more fun with her before They wring her corporeal form inside out and blot her dark smudge from the face of existence. That would be par for the course, given Crowley’s track record. She muddied the virginal holiness of the Angel of the Eastern Gate, tempted him into wickedness, and this will be her deserved undoing. She can only hope Aziraphale’s punishment will be far less than half of this horror.

As Crowley spits up bile and wipes the back of one hand across her mouth, kneeling in the cool sand where she pants against brewing nausea, it’s the elder midwife who comes to find her in the paltry shade of the olive branches and offers an alternate perspective on her body’s newfound betrayal.

“I remember the day you told me your blood never comes,” the crone says almost conversationally, crossed forearms propped on the bent handle of her petrified walking stick. “But then it came, and now it stops again when the white shepherd wanders back into your life.”

Crowley’s eyes flicker as she looks up, glassy and bloodshot from her retching. “And what of it?” she snaps, settling back on her haunches. “You don’t know enough about him to speak as if he’s some thief or scoundrel—you don’t even know his true name.”

“I never suggested he was any of those things,” the elder midwife says with a mild shrug of one bony shoulder. She hazily considers one of the branches in front of her face and reaches up to pluck an underripe olive from the tree. “It only appears that your beloved goatherd has left one of his flock behind.”

They watch each other in silence as the sun crests over the distant mountain crags. Crowley, still rallying against the grinding gears in her sick-addled brain, can only think to preserve Aziraphale’s honor. “He has work to do, vital work in the world that you’d never understand the full scope of,” she rasps, and though the words sound harsh her voice isn’t laced with any venom, only resigned fatigue. “Undertakings you couldn’t even possibly fathom if I were to stand here and tell you only half the bleeding truth.”

“That may be true, but I see where you stand, Antonia,” the crone says with a flash of her rheumy eyes. She raises one bent finger from where it’s braced against her stick, pointing due south to Crowley’s flat abdomen, and pitches the green olive so it drops into the sand at Crowley’s knees. “The shepherd can have his worldly duties, but you have his child planted in your belly like a seed.”

Crowley falls back onto one hip like she’s been struck, wrist throbbing when it awkwardly braces in the sand. She opens her mouth and then clamps it shut again. Another roiling bout of malaise rises in her throat and she has to hiss through her teeth when she finally speaks, numb now from her ashen cheeks to her bare toes. Her heart is pounding so hard it makes her eyeballs vibrate in their sockets.

“No,” Crowley croaks, eyes stinging with wet, scalding heat. “That’s a lie. You don’t know anything about it—nothing!”

“I know how to follow the sidewinder’s tracks in the sand,” the elder midwife says, making a clammy chill skitter over Crowley’s skin. “And I have brought enough children into this world to know the simple beginnings of one. I suggest you begin to plan for your future accordingly.”

“You would cast me away?” Crowley manages to spit out, one disbelieving hand clawing into the black gauze over her belly while her entire world ripples at the edges. “Just like that?”

“No,” the old woman sighs, head turning to one side so Crowley can see the waddled skin of her neck. “You are welcome to stay with us as long as you wish, even after the child comes. But I would not allow the white shepherd to take up the path of the midwives. So if that choice is one you should have to make in due time, so be it.”

She slowly hobbles away with only those words offered in final parting, leaving Crowley where she’s crumpled on the ground, still panting with her hair hanging in frizzy hanks around her face. The hand on her belly twists and digs desperate fingers into the soft flesh beneath her shift, trying to comprehend the possibility of something living beneath her touch. Something she and her angel made together.

Laughter suddenly burns through her tears, coming up out of Crowley in a startled cackle that makes the grazing donkeys balk and shy away from her where they’d been nibbling roughage nearby. She laughs until the incredulous mirth turns sour and then bites against one fist, snarling around a terrible wail that threatens to split her throat at the seams.

Of course this would be her fate. They’d let their essences merge on that stormy night in the goatherd’s tent, in both physical body and ethereal spirit, mingling on the white sands of Aziraphale’s untouched shores. Crowley had freely traded her virgin blood to feel the angel’s ecstasy inside her, and her careless greed had allowed his seed to take root in her corporeal form. The fact that her damned womb was fertile enough for something to flourish there is as dizzying a thought as the dawning reconciliation that she may be pregnant. It would be dangerously early, yet—with the baby inside her no bigger than the green olive the crone had thrown at her feet.

It’s everything Crowley has always wanted dangling above the edge of a treacherous blade so sharp it could cut through bone like butter, and simultaneously the makings of her greatest nightmare if anybody—or any One—beyond the margins of Earth were to find out.

Some time later, it’s young Abeni who walks out and discreetly kicks some sand over the sticky pools of stomach bile on the ground beneath the tree. She goes down on one knee beside the dark figure lying upon the sand and carefully pulls the gauzy shroud away from Crowley’s face until she sees a flutter of gingery eyelashes.

“Antonia,” Abeni says, pushing some of the hair back from Crowley’s temples. “My mother showed me how to brew a tincture for a curdled stomach. It should be ready soon, if you would like to take a few drops under your tongue.”

“Mrpghh,” Crowley answers, allowing the girl to drape one of her weak arms across her shoulders so they can rise up into a sitting position together. “You’re too kind for your own good, kid. I’m not sure any medicine could help me at this rate.”

“You should try,” Abeni urges, busying herself with brushing some of the sand from Crowley’s legs. “It’s mild enough even for a sick child to take.”

Crowley grunts at that and squeezes her eyes shut against the golden brilliance of the morning sun beating down upon them. She knows, in the back of her mind, that Abeni’s mother also brews herbs into a different elixir that will expel an unborn child from its mother’s womb within three days of drinking the mixture. The traveling midwives have doled it out many times in clay bottles corked and wrapped in muslin, to be passed on from their copper kettle to the hands of those in need. The cost of the remedy is always different—a sack of grain for the donkeys, a bundle of shorn alpaca wool, a jar of jasmine anointing oil, a string of glass beads the color of some distant ocean most of the midwives will never see.

That train of thought leaves her almost as quickly as it arrived. Crowley doesn’t yet feel the quickening of a life inside her, but she will dutifully wait for it, and then embrace her unraveling fate from there when, and if, it comes. She reaches up and dashes a drop of strange, sorrowful wetness from the corner of one eye and finally stands, still leaning on Abeni as they hobble back beneath the midwives’ tent together.

“C’mon, then,” Crowley mumbles, squeezing the girl’s shoulder in silent thanks. “Give me a bit of this special sauce you’ve brewed up, and I’m sure I’ll be as good as new in no time.”

Crowley continues to guide new life into the world with her practiced hands as something else altogether begins blooming inside her.

The worst of the sickness passes within two full cycles of the moon, for which she’s endlessly thankful after too many mornings spent doubled over in the rocky sand. The idea of food slowly becomes moderately appetizing again, and then—somewhere in that haze of awestruck disbelief when she first notices a tiny swell rising between the rawboned juts of her pelvis, that wee olive somehow unfurling into a sapling—transforms into a newfound sense of hunger that makes Crowley into something bordering on voracious for the first time in her vast existence.

As the midwives travel on foot between far-flung villages and the stars dutifully wheel overhead, Crowley continues to hide her secret from all but the eldest of the women. Abeni seems to sense that something strange or unexpected has occurred, intrigued as she is with Crowley’s shifting bouts of sickness and then animalistic appetite, but still hasn’t asked the million dollar question. For all the babies she’s seen birthed at her mother’s heels, Crowley wonders if the girl even knows the full extent of how they’re made and grown at the source. The midwives have always kept minimal contact with men at large, and the only male-shaped figures they sporadically cross paths with are an angel, sweat-stained merchants with their strings of grumbling camels, and the occasional messenger boy sent to them on errand.

Crowley’s miraculous burden remains her own to carry, and she prefers to keep it that way for as long as possible. What the other midwives don’t yet know won’t hurt them, and if any of them have noticed that her shift is a bit baggier than it had been in the years past, or that she drapes her shroud over one shoulder and across her belly to knot it at one hip, nobody utters a word about it.

Truthfully, Crowley still hasn’t found her own grip on a strong enough vocabulary to describe the reality of her situation. There are too many words in a jumble of knotted emotions, clotted up like a congealed thing in the hull of her throat—relief, anxiety, excitement, loneliness, joy, and terror. A gnawing sense of dread, as omnipresent as the staunch silence of her Creator. And sometimes an unshakeable, embittered doubt that this is even truly happening in her corporation at all, or that she’ll manage to pull the whole thing off without a hitch involving further damnation or discorporation, of which at least one seems likely.

Crowley thinks of Aziraphale often. She gazes up at stars she once fashioned from nothing but whimsy and dust and wonders if he’s thinking of her in kind, or what he would say if he knew what they’d done together—what they’d made, here on the planet entrusted between them. If Aziraphale would run from her, or if he would take her in his arms as Adam had taken Eve all those millennia ago.

Even as her belly steadily waxes like the growing moon, Crowley’s not certain she’ll ever find out.

The midwives have set up camp on the outskirts of a village that runs parallel to the Jordan river again.

It’s not the sand-swept helm of despair where Esther was born, but close enough that Crowley could reach that place on foot again if she got up at daybreak and walked until the brink of dusk. Not that it would matter anymore, but she would be a liar to say the infant she nursed isn’t hanging heavily on her mind as she winds her way around the sun-bleached rocks and arrives at the rushing water.

Crowley has come alone in the last few hours before nightfall, when most humans would urge their brethren to steer clear of the valley riverbanks. The occasional breeding float of Nile crocodiles sometimes find their way into the Jordan tributaries, but Crowley has no real concern for the wiles of her fellow reptiles. She doesn’t figure her rangy flesh would taste all that great, truth be told.

The day’s sinking sun glitters on the water like golden scales as Crowley undresses. She snaps her shift and shroud fresh anew with a pointed thought, but the ritual of bathing with actual water and soap has always done her vessel better than a miraculous cleansing. The other midwives wouldn’t dare come to bathe at this time of day in an open place like this, preferring the discreet splash of water from their pots and cisterns closer to the birthing tent, and that is precisely why Crowley has come alone. Because when she finally stands bare and unclothed with her toes in the cool water, the pale roundness of her pregnant belly is as unmistakable as the redness of her long hair.

There are no other living creatures at this bend of riverbank, with only the hushing rush of water to keep her company. Crowley takes her filched bit of ash lye and rubs it into her wet skin, then wades out further to dunk her head beneath the surface. She digs her fingers into her scalp with the cleansing remnants of lye and stays submerged in that shadowy, tempting coolness for as long as she can stand it, and then resurfaces with a gasp of pleasure and her swath of soaked hair flipping over onto her back like ribbons of sea kelp.

Refreshed now, Crowley blindly wades back until the water is only at waist level, wringing her hair out as she goes. When she reopens her eyes she nearly lets out a strangled scream because a pair of wide brown ones set in a familiar face are gazing back at her from the rocky bank.

“Abeni!” she yelps, crossing both arms over her chest before she realizes her folly in trying to hide that nakedness when her belly is what she’s spent the past few months concealing. “What on earth are you doing, faffing around out here?”

“I—it was late,” Abeni babbles, hugging her skinny knees against herself and finally tearing her gaze away from Crowley’s naked body, cheeks flushing dark with shame. “It’s dangerous to come to the river alone at night, and I thought you’d like company on the way back, I didn’t know…” She peers back at Crowley again, as if to reaffirm something she still can’t believe is real, and lets out a woeful sort of sound as her beaded braids clack together. “Why haven’t you told anybody you’re going to have a baby!”

“Shhh, keep your voice down,” Crowley hisses in a furtive whisper, but she quickly withers and merely lets her arms fall slack against her sides in defeat. “Look the other way for a second, m’not decent,” she adds as she wades up out of the water to grab her shift and shroud where they’re still folded upon a rock.

Crowley’s mind reels while she quickly dresses, but soon comes to the simple conclusion that she never truly needed to hide this from the young midwifery apprentice. Of all the women in their motley group of wandering nomads, Abeni has always been the least likely to hold anything against her.

“Look,” Crowley sighs once she’s clothed again, flicking Abeni’s knee with some summoned affection before she heavily settles down next to her on the long rock. They both gaze out at the water, still not quite able to look each other in the eye. “It’s complicated. I’m not exactly a married broad of fine breeding and high standing, you know? I’m also not a broad, but—erm, that’s beside the point. Facts are, kinda felt like I needed to keep it on the down-low for as long as I could. For various reasons, but…yeah. The overarching patriarchal landscape you people have stoked up over the years definitely doesn’t help my case.”

“You shouldn’t carry any shame, not among the midwives,” Abeni says in a serious voice before cutting her eyes low at Crowley’s bare feet. “When have you ever cared about what men think of you, Antonia? Other than Ezra—oh.”

Crowley knows she’s been found out the moment the name leaves Abeni’s lips. Her stomach plummets into a betraying freefall, and Abeni’s mouth drops open as her eyes slowly swivel up to find the demon’s blood-drained face.

“I need you to keep this sssecret for me,” Crowley says desperately, reaching out to catch Abeni’s hand with her own before the girl can speak again. “I know—I can’t hide my body or a bloody baby, not forever, but we can’t speak of that part out loud anymore, in front of anyone. You have to promise me, for my safety and Ezra’s safety. You understand?”

Much to Crowley’s horror, Abeni nods even though her glassy eyes threaten to overflow with tears. Looking into them makes Crowley’s throat ache and she has to turn slightly to one side, focusing just beyond the dark curve of the girl’s shoulder.

“Good,” she says, swallowing tightly. “Thanks, Beni.”

“We’ll always be here for you, just like you’ve been here for us,” Abeni says shakily, slender shoulders bowed up into a defiant posture even as she sniffles and squeezes Crowley’s hand. “You aren’t as alone as you like to think you are.”

“Maybe not,” Crowley says with a wobbly smile. “But Ezra and I, we—we aren’t quite like other people. We come from a different place, where babies don’t usually come into the world. Actually,” she says, wheezing out a feeble laugh she knows Abeni won’t understand, “I think this one may be the first of its kind.”

“You’re no different from me and the other midwives,” Abeni insists. “Hair color and skin color mean nothing. If they did, why would you be here with us? Working and traveling and sharing our bedrolls for so long?”

Crowley tries to grin around a taut grimace. “Well, I suppose we’re different in a way that’s usually difficult to see,” she says. “I’m a hell of a lot older than I look. You’ll just have to take my word for it when I say this kid may not—well. May not be like any other baby you’ve seen before.”

“No two babies are born identical,” Abeni counters in a tactful voice. “Even the pairs of twins have little things to tell them apart, so your baby would be as unique as any other.”

Part of Crowley wants to argue, to make Abeni understand the stakes of what’s at hand, but she shakes her head and decides against it. The girl is too young, and too innocent still to be yoked with the knowledge of things like celestial immortals, or the unplanned offspring produced between their illicit coupling.

“I like where your heart is, Beni,” Crowley sighs, bumping their knees together. “And I hope you’re right.”

“The white shepherd doesn’t know, does he,” Abeni says abruptly. Her voice is terribly soft, and somewhat sad—but there isn’t any scorn in it, only the somber reality of the bed Crowley’s made for herself. They both blink into the deepening dusk as the water of the Jordan moves on its tireless journey south.

“No,” Crowley croaks, bowing her head. “He doesn’t. Not yet.”

Admitting that out loud is frightening in a way Crowley has tried to keep hidden even from herself over the past several months. She fusses for a moment with the gauzy fabric covering her bump and then stands, gently pulling Abeni up with her. “C’mon, we’ve got to hit the road,” she says. “Your mother will pluck my eyes out if anything happens to you. Which it won’t, but, on sheer principle and all.”

The young apprentice comes willingly, not even dropping Crowley’s hand once they’ve moved past the rocky bank and returned to the sandy path that will lead them back to the safe harbor of the birthing tent.

With another turn of the moon, the dynamic shifts among the midwives in subtle little ways that could be passed off as mere coincidence, but Crowley knows better than to believe it as any manifestation of luck. The women go out of their way to keep her from the hardest of the daily chores and regularly shoo her under the cooler shade of the canopy at midday when the sun is its hottest.

Crowley’s body is no longer easily hidden beneath the drape of her black shroud, and she gives up any pretense of keeping the pregnancy anything beyond an openly acknowledged—yet staunchly unspoken—secret. The baby growing inside her begins to move, quickened now into the undeniable confirmation of life, and she spends restless but sedate evenings with a hand pressed to her middle, smiling as she feels the strange, navel-tug slugs of partial vertigo as the child kicks and even hiccups within her belly. The weight of the pregnancy even begins to press down upon her former fortress of a bladder, and Crowley finds herself squatting in the sand at all hours of the day and night, murmuring at the inconvenience of needing to wee without the ease of a co*ck for the first time in thousands of years but not truly holding it against her womb’s new tenant, either.

There comes a day, somewhere around the beginning of what must be the seventh month, when the elder midwife comes to Crowley’s bedroll after the other women have settled down for the night, only speaking to each other in the low hush of traded whispers.

“I know you insist on carrying your burden all your own, but we still must do our jobs as midwives in good conscience,” the crone says, bidding Crowley to stay reclined where she rests. “If you allow nobody but me or the girl to know you in confidence,” she adds, “then I suppose it must be me for now who checks your progression. Have you been eating enough?”

Crowley goes still but then stiffly nods. “Abeni’s been sneaking me more food than I can manage, m’afraid,” she says, trying not to smile. “You know how that one is.”

“Yes, she will be running this operation like an army general one day, I have no doubts about that,” the elder midwife grunts in what could be a fond tone of voice, slowly folding in on herself until she’s sitting beside Crowley but not quite touching her. She lays her walking stick down on the sleeping rug and holds up her arthritic hands in offering. “Would you let me examine your abdomen? Only to feel the size of the baby, nothing more.”

“Uhm, sure?” Crowley says, swallowing a bit thickly. She blinks a few times and then parts open the front of her shift where it crosses over her belly, exposing the shape of her body to the faint throw of light. “It’s a bit strange, er—being on the receiving end of all this, for once.”

“You tend to get used to it,” the crone says, palming either side of Crowley’s rounded stomach to gently palpate it. “At your age, if this is truly your first child, it’s important to stay cognizant of anything out of the ordinary. Older mothers can be at greater risk than the spring hens.”

Crowley grunts out a snort and tries to relax when the old woman’s thumb grazes over her navel and then traces down the dark line beneath to feel the lowest part of her abdomen. “Does everything seem…normal?”

“For the most part, yes,” the elder midwife says, still feeling with her hands while her cloudy eyes focus elsewhere. “The size of the child feels correct, so they’re developing well.” She pauses for a moment to carefully press somewhere under Crowley’s ribs, and then reaches up to ask for the demon’s hand. “Here, feel this—what do you suppose that is? A shoulder, or perhaps a knee.”

Crowley lets her hand be guided to the place in question, and then they feel the shape of the child within her together. There’s a strange intimacy in it that makes her breath leave her for a moment—not the balmy passion of two lovers, no, but something to do with the intrinsic kinship held among humanity. A silent bond between women, perhaps, even though Crowley has never once claimed to know the true strife of womanhood.

“I don’t know,” Crowley says quietly, thinking that this is unlike any knee or shoulder she’s felt through the womb wall before. A sudden realization dawns upon her, so swift that a bead of sweat is already prickling between her shoulder blades before she can bring herself to speak again. She’s not completely certain of that harrowing suspicion, not yet, not without seeing the child alive and in her arms—but the mere possibility is enough to sway her.

“When the baby comes,” the demon blurts out, almost hoarse in her urgency, “I want to deliver it myself. I don’t want any interference from the other midwives, not even you or Abeni.”

The elder midwife slowly pulls her hands from Crowley’s abdomen and silently arranges her black shroud back into place before she says anything. “You think you would be sound enough in your abilities to do so without assistance, Antonia?” she asks, quiet but serious. “As a maiden mother yourself, even a seasoned one.”

“I would have to be,” Crowley insists, blinking her serpentine eyes. She’s never been sure if the elder midwife’s sight is good enough to have discerned the vertical slits of her pupils, and she’s also never bothered to ask. “There are thingsss at stake—risks, that I wouldn’t want to burden the women with.”

She can’t bring herself to say anything more, but after a long beat of silence the old woman merely nods. “I will allow it,” she says, making the air rush out of Crowley’s lungs in relief, “under one small condition.”

“Which is?” Crowley asks, stiffening.

“I will be present as a guide,” the crone says. “You will deliver the child as you wish, with your own hands, but I will oversee your progress in case you need counsel.”

Crowley feels her lips curl back over her teeth. “I don’t think that should be necessary—”

“You may not right now, but the mind plays tricks on itself when you’re pushing a fire-heated stone through your pelvis,” the old woman says with a meaningful flourish of her brows before she reaches for her walking stick and wraps both hands around the petrified wood. “Should you momentarily lose your sense or reason, I’ll merely be there to call you back. Nothing more.”

Crowley has never been beholden to the whims and fancies of humans, not even since the day she slithered up into Eden and whispered in the first woman’s ear, but the vast unknowns of this particular venture and the idea of facing it alone cows her enough to swallow back any more contrarian venom. She could flee just as easily as she arrived, she tells herself. She could run in the night and not once ever look back, if she had to. But she doesn’t think she wants to. Not now—or at least, not quite yet.

What she does is hold out her freckled hand to grip the crone’s weathered one. “Consider it sound,” Crowley says, and if the old woman senses the binding pact of having made a deal with a devil coursing through her veins, she doesn’t pull back or falter.

“Very good,” the elder midwife says, pressing her stick into the earth and slowly rising with only moderate difficulty until she’s standing once more. “I will leave you to rest for now. Good night.”

Crowley slumps back onto her bedroll when she’s alone again with only the distant starlight twinkling overhead. She closes her eyes, swearing a single foul word under her breath, and reaches to press against the shape of her belly again, gasping slightly when something thumps against her hand.

She bites against her lower lip, trying in vain to discern the shape of the baby within from the outside. There’s no question that it has limbs, whatever it may be, but Crowley can’t be sure of how many, exactly—or in what shapes those limbs may have formed into along the way. Her dawning suspicion resurfaces again, and she knows that if the baby is born with the wings she and Aziraphale were created with, there would be no welcoming place left for them among the wary humans, with their superstitions and killing rituals and whispered fear of chariots of fire in the sky.

“If I have to take you to the edge of the universe to keep you safe, I’ll do it,” Crowley whispers into the night air as she protectively cups her belly. “Maybe we’ll leave. We’ll go off somewhere nobody can find us. I don’t know where the blasted angel is, but I’d figure out a way to tell him where we set up shop—he’s clever enough to catch on if you give him enough time.”

Crowley squeezes her lashes together, trying not to hiccup around the sudden welt of hurt rising in her throat. “I think he’d want you, too,” she says, mouthing the words almost silently as she shakily thumbs a trail of wetness away from one temple. “Or at least I hope he would. He’s never been quite like the rest of them.”

She laughs around a painful little sob, but there’s no comfort or company to be had at this hour beyond her own, so she turns over onto her side and draws her knees up under her belly, draping one hand around the full shape of it to hold herself. To any stranger peering in from the outside, the black-shrouded figure would look like a widow in mourning, but Crowley’s perfectly aware that her beloved angel is still alive, out there somewhere roaming the earth.

She doesn’t know when he’d planned on coming back, but she hopes with everything left in her blackened heart that it’s sometime soon.

On the morning the young servant girl comes to the midwives with her green eyes full of fear and her belly full of a prince’s secret child, Crowley’s own body is distended with nine moons’ worth of pregnancy.

Her hips ache tirelessly, and her skin has pulled taut with vivid lines of raspberry crisscrossing beneath her useless navel, but she still takes the girl under her metaphorical wing and guides her into the shade of the birthing tent to offer her a cool drink of water. They’re both partially winded by the effort of getting the girl undressed down to her small clothes, but even when the laboring truly progresses later that afternoon Crowley refuses to give up her tireless vigil.

The servant girl is named Roya. She’s seventeen years old, and was owned by the sister of a king from a foreign land, so she says. The king’s youngest son took her as a lover in his chambers while Roya’s mistress slept day and night with a heady opium draught made for the dreamless, and within five months’ time of keeping the prince’s company the budding delicacy of her newfound condition became all too clear. Bastard children were often sold or slain at birth to keep them from uprising against the king, so Roya broke her bonds with a pair of stolen shearing scissors and fled at the heels of a passing caravan.

Crowley doesn’t believe her story until she sees the broken chain of finely woven metal trailing from the elaborate silver bangle locked around Roya’s ankle, not dissimilar from the golden tether keeping a goldfinch from fleeing its perch. When the girl is grunting through contracting pangs and calling out for a mother long dead in a distant land, distracted by a whole new world of agony, Crowley silently touches two fingers to the bracelet and watches it fall into the sand. She whisks it away from view and heals the dark scar circumventing Roya’s ankle, as if the silver chain had never been there at all.

As twilight approaches and brings out the squeaking bats, Roya grips the wooden anchor pole at the center of the birthing tent and screams through her teeth as the prince’s bastard begins to crown.

Crowley sits on the ground behind her, murmuring encouraging words as she soothingly strokes one shaking thigh and reaches up to press a warm cloth between the girl’s legs where the searing pain is its worst and the blood has begun to well. Her own belly vaguely tightens and releases in intermittent spells, and she’s unsure if it’s in sympathy for the way active labor is ripping through Roya’s young body like a relentless storm, or if it’s something more pressing she ought to be concerned about.

There isn’t any time for prolonged navel-gazing. Roya drops into a squat, lets out a vicious snarl, and within two more brutalizing pushes the child all but rockets into the receiving cloth in Crowley’s waiting hands, already with both eyes open and one tiny hand clenched into a fist.

The baby quietly burbles through his first few pulls of air to let everyone know he’s breathing but doesn’t otherwise wail or scream. Roya sits with her back against the tent pole and reaches for her child, unbothered even as the other midwives come to her with a boiled needle and silk thread for stitching, and a square of flax linen for wrapping the afterbirth when it arrives.

Crowley wipes some of the sweat from the young mother’s brow and then looks down into the baby’s strangely lucid face, simultaneously amazed and relieved that he came so quickly and easily into the world. “Does he look more like a wee bastard or a little prince?” she gently teases, pushing Roya’s dark hair back from her sweaty temples to wind it up in a braid. Her own child shifts and turns within her womb, seeming to drop lower toward the cradle of her pelvis with every passing hour.

“Neither,” Roya says. She pulls the cloth binding away from her chest and nestles her small son against her bosom, letting Crowley’s practiced hands guide her until the child instinctively turns to suckle with a strong, deep latch. “He’ll be the king one day.”

“Of the kingdom you ran from…?” Crowley asks with a slight furrow between her brows, finally sitting back to rest at long last while the midwives work like buzzing bees around them.

“No,” Roya says as she gazes into the baby’s face with utmost certainty, green eyes ablaze. “A king of the new world and the free people in it.”

By the time Roya and her newborn king have been fed and bedded down for the night under the watchful eye of the midwives, Crowley has quietly fled the safety of their camp in search of some impossible reprieve.

Her time of labor isn’t truly upon her yet, but she can sense it waiting in the wings like a heavy cloud hanging above her head. Still, the building desperation of that knowledge claws at her conscience alongside the unbearable weight of her belly, and Crowley strides through the desert night as swiftly as her feet will take her, blindly searching for answers to questions she doesn’t know how to ask.

She doesn’t walk far until she reaches the edge of an olive grove. Some of the trees are healthy and ripe with fat olives, and others yet are shrubby and malnourished, shriveled somewhat despite the thriving brilliance of their neighbors. Crowley briefly considers the strangeness of this but slips between the trees anyway, disappearing into the empty grove with only the moon guiding her overhead.

The long, spindly shadows the olive limbs cast over the ground make her think of things she’d rather forget lurking in hell, and in turn the idea of her peers from Below finding her at this moment makes her blood turn frosty. She has played a long game of chance over the past nine months, somehow evading the eyes and ires of her superiors. If they knew, even for a single moment, the parentage of the child in her belly—well. Crowley doesn’t know what would happen, but she has a harrowing feeling it would be unprecedented, even by hell’s standards.

The further she goes into the olive grove, the more that hysterical desperation seems to overtake her. Tears run down her face unbidden, and she doesn’t even know they’re there until one runs over her lips and she tastes the salt of her own wretched despair. The luminescent moon loiters above in its mocking roundness, pulling her like some hidden tide toward an unknowable ending. The baby shifts again, precariously low inside her, and Crowley has to stop and hold a hand to herself as a sharp shear of pain shoots through her nether region. Her other hand twists in the branches of the closest tree to stay upright, and she laughs bitterly at the irony of the full circle she’s walked since that morning the crone tossed the underripe olive at her feet.

Silent tears turn into hitching sobs, and eventually the muffled sobs break open into a chest-deep wail. It’s not the physical pain that unmoors her, but the imminent unraveling of the living secret she’s held in her core since the angel left her nine moons ago. Time has always been on Crowley’s side, but no longer. She allowed fate and folly to grow the impossible thing inside her, and now fate has come back to finally reap what it sowed.

The weight of the world and its suffering since the day she tempted Eve with the apple physically yanks Crowley to her knees. She goes down on all fours in the rocky sand with her heavy belly hanging beneath her, fingers mindlessly scrabbling in the dirt to claim purchase on anything at all that will help her get through this. She groans again behind tightened lips, trying to hold back her grief, and then openly cries out in the night because she knows she deserves every bit of divine punishment and more. Here it is, rending her apart. Here is the summation of all her guilt and hapless yearning, her comeuppance for having the audacity to try and claim something she loves.

Before she can think to stop herself, to rein back her dwindling senses, the invocations begin falling from her lips like they never have before.

“Aziraphale, wherever you are, bend your f*cking ear and dial in,” she starts. “I can’t do it alone anymore. I thought I could, but I don’t have the guts in me to see it through like this. You’ve got to come back before it’s too late.” Crowley hums with the scourging burn of the next string of words rising in her throat but presses onward, coughing around the divinity of it all. “Mother, please hear this prayer,” she begs. “If Somebody is listening, bring my angel back to me. Damn it—I need you, Aziraphale. We both need you now.”

Crowley clenches her jaw and raggedly coughs again, this time spitting up a tiny spray of something that shines dark in the moonlight as her bleary eyes stream. She rallies for the finish, trembling where she’s still hunched on her hands and knees. “Angel of the Eastern Gate, guardian of fire and a serpent’s heart, to whom— eff me, to whom God’s broken love commits me here, ever this day…please be at my side,” the demon rasps, bitterly uttering the final words through her gnashed teeth. “To light and guard my way, and to love and protect the life we’ve made together. In the Lord’sss name I pray, amen.”

The searing echo of holiness leaves her throat as Crowley bows her head against the ground and pants through the dizzying pain. Blood, tears, and spittle mingle on the earth beneath her, but she doesn’t care to move. Not until another voice sounds from somewhere in the nearby darkness, still hidden in the shadows of the olive grove.

“You pray to a God you don’t believe in,” the elder midwife says, stepping forward with her walking stick. “I wouldn’t have expected that from somebody like you.”

“Oh, trust me, it’s not that I don’t believe in Her,” Crowley hoarsely answers, pushing herself up on straining arms. “It’s more like she stopped believing in me a long ruddy time ago.”

The crone harrumphs but doesn’t say anything else on the matter. “I was afraid you’d come out here to have the child in the dirt like a wild animal and break our bargain,” she says. “Is it your time?”

Crowley laughs, sitting up on her knees with some effort before accepting the elder midwife’s extended hands so that she can shakily rise to her feet again. “Not just yet…but soon, I think,” she says between steadying breaths as she mops some of the wetness and perspiration from her face. “You’re harder to shake off than a bloody leech, you know?”

“To your great benefit, Antonia,” the elder says, almost smiling. “Abeni’s mother suggested we lash you to the tent pole so you can’t run again before the child comes, but I told her there’s no use. You would still find a way to fly away.”

“Well, she’s not wrong,” Crowley snorts, pressing two fists into the small of her back to try and alleviate some of the strain. She still feels slightly lightheaded and woozy in light of the prayer, rambling would-be nonsense from the corner of her mouth. “Even with wings, I don’t think there’d be much flying I could do at this rate…center of gravity is downright f*cked, too ungainly to get off the sodding ground…”

The oldest of the midwives considers Crowley and those words in the solemn quiet of the olive grove surrounding them. “You are unlike most of the women I’ve ever known,” she says. “And I have known many in my time.”

Crowley glances up at her, eyes narrowed into slits. “M’not a woman,” she says bleakly. “Not really.”

“No, I suppose not,” the crone agrees. “You and the white shepherd are something else entirely.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Crowley mumbles. “But if you want to revere one of us, make sure it’s him. I’m not the kind of person worth looking up to, or holding in any outstandingly good gracesss,” she hisses. “I’d tell you to take me at my word, but maybe you shouldn’t even do that.”

The elder silently reaches out to take Crowley by the arm, slowly turning so that they can wander back through the fruiting trees from which they came. “You love him a great deal,” she observes. “But somehow you both insist on spending your lives apart.”

Crowley grunts and pulls a ripe olive from a tree as they pass, secreting it away in the palm of her hand. “Water and oil,” she says. “Mix us together on a cheeky lark and we still manage to separate. It’s better that way—safer, I s’pose, given our respective job titles.”

“The child in your belly contradicts what you say,” the old woman offers. “You still came together and made something whole.”

Crowley hollowly laughs because it’s all she can do. “Point taken,” she says, glancing back up at the moon, almost full but still not quite. Another day and it will be at its peak before waning away again. Crowley hopes she can hold on until then, that her own full belly will grant her one more night before sinking back into empty darkness.

The demon lets the old woman lead her back to the midwives’ tent, arm in arm, to face whatever may come next.

By dawn of the following day Crowley knows her time of reckoning is upon her.

Her waters haven’t yet broken, but the contractions in her abdomen have gradually intensified enough overnight that she has to take pause when they grip her. She can still speak through them, not yet so far gone that she’s gone daffy with pain, but when she kneels and slips a hand beneath her shift to feel her body opening she knows the process of bringing new life into the world is well underway.

Abeni stays all but glued to Crowley’s side, offering small bites of bread or fig and cups of water. She insists on winding Crowley’s hair up into three woven plaits that she secures near the crown of the demon’s head, a pampering sort of affair that Crowley accepts with as much grace as she can muster, breathing deeply in the desert heat and trying to focus on the gentle swipes of the girl’s comb instead of the incredible heaviness descending within her.

The hours pass in a sluggish haze of discomfort and quiet hopelessness, on and on, silently mocking Crowley as they flutter away like bits of feathery ash. She refuses to take any more food, unable to stomach anything more than the occasional sip of water simply to keep Abeni’s anxiety at bay. The other midwives keep a wide berth, letting Crowley labor in her own company rather than intrude while she braces herself on hands and knees to try and rock herself through the pangs.

Even with Abeni’s careful care, the loneliness of this undertaking feels all-consuming. The child inside her has gone still for the most part, seeming to know that they need to conserve their energy before emerging into the world. Crowley has nothing to do but wait on fate’s arrival and contemplate her existence leading up to this point. She thinks of Eve often, almost obsessively, and wishes she could reach through the fabric of a few thousand years to touch her with a ringing note of newfound empathy.

Look, see, we’re two alike, Crowley envisions herself saying, whispering it to the first woman where they grip each other outside the locked tomb of Paradise. My just desserts have finally found me, and you aren’t alone anymore. You never were. I’ve wanted to take it all back from the start.

Early in the evening, when she’s stripped down to nothing but her open shroud to let the cooler air lick her damp skin, Crowley asks for the elder midwife to come find her.

The crone stands several feet away and doesn’t reach to touch or comfort Crowley. “Your body isn’t ready,” the old woman observes. “Your waters haven’t come, and the pains aren’t close enough yet. We have time left to wait.”

“Thisss isn’t about that,” Crowley tells her, feeling a wildness thread into her voice. She’s partially convinced that she may be so cursed beneath the heel of Holiness that she’ll discorporate in the throes of whatever agony awaits her, unable to endure it simply because the punishment was designed to contradict the first sin she’d hand-delivered upon the world. “I just need you to make me a promise. If I don’t come through this, if the baby lives and I go belly up, and the ang—if Aziraphale, if the white shepherd comes back—”

“You aren’t going to die, Antonia,” the elder midwife says sagely. “Every woman who has ever done this assumes she’s going to perish before it’s finished, but most of them don’t. You’re strong enough to see it through.”

“I thought we’ve already long established,” Crowley says through her teeth, gripping her thighs as another pain begins to build inside her, “that I am not any ordinary woman.”

“No, but you’re as obstinate as a donkey and as clever as any snake, and that should be enough to secure your spirit in the realm of the living for many years yet to come,” the elder midwife says, tapping her stick with an air of finality. “Abeni will fetch me when you’re ready. I imagine the child will be here before the moon fully rises.”

Crowley watches her hobble away again and has to swallow the urge to scream. Furious tears burn in her eyes without falling, but her heaving chest aches with the knotted agony of being eternally unwanted, unheard, and unforgiven.

Ever-faithful Abeni is there even if all the rest of them have fallen away, and if Crowley does one last thing on the earth before she leaves it, she knows she’ll grant this girl a long life of joy and prosperity, Hell’s agenda be damned. The young apprentice brings a damp rag freshly wrung out in a pot of cool water, and daubs at the pulse points along Crowley’s neck to help soothe her.

“If anything were to ever happen, I would find Ezra for you,” Abeni whispers, patting the cool cloth along Crowley’s collarbones and then the nape of her neck. “Our elder—she cares for you, but she’s afraid to say it out loud.”

“Go figure on that one,” Crowley says, letting her chin drop to her chest as her lashes fall. “You’re a good egg, Beni,” she mutters, heartfelt. “The greatest of eggs, even.”

“That’s what friends are for,” Abeni says warmly, touching the curve of Crowley’s freckled shoulder. “You would do the same for me.”

“I would,” Crowley agrees, hoping a life full of demonic blessings is enough to uphold that promise. If only she has the infernal strength left in her corporation to see it made good by the time this finishes—with her or without her.

The evening begins to deepen into the lowering drape of a moonlit dusk. There is only time left now, and the omnipresent starlight. Crowley feels something stir inside her, a prickling frisson of something that isn’t the baby waiting to be pushed forth from her wretched vessel, and it plucks a broken harp string of familiarity in the back of her essence.

Somewhere deep within herself, where she holds the white sands of a benevolent shore, the same grains of sand that grew into a life inside her, Crowley finds a gossamer thread of unraveling time and clamps it down for safekeeping between her finger and thumb.

“Come on, angel,” she whispers, closing her eyes and keeping her head bowed into what isn’t quite an earnest mockery of prayer. “We’re waiting for you.”

It’s only when the moon has climbed to her highest ladder rung in the night sky that Crowley feels her waters break free.

She’s kneeling on a birthing rug, thighs spread to accommodate her widening pelvis, sucking in slow, deep breaths into her lungs before letting them back out again. Clammy sweat sticks to her heated skin like midnight dew and she knows her last silken thread of stolen time has forsaken her. She held onto it for as long as she could muster, but her body is beginning to clench like a wrathful fist and there are no moments left to spare.

“Beni,” Crowley says, visibly shaking now between the gauntlet of endless contractions that roll over her in waves. She’d checked her progress one last time a few minutes ago and her body is more than ready to do what nature bids. “Beni, fetch the elder midwife.”

Abeni looks up at her mother, who has been mending a linen shift nearby by paltry firelight with a shadow of concern clouding her dark face. Crowley knows she’s there but doesn’t tell her to leave or move away, and when the woman mutely nods Abeni scrambles up with a quickness and darts to the other side of the camp to find the crone.

A fresh contraction all bit rips through Crowley when the girl is gone, and she bites her lips and digs her fingers into her bare thighs, making a wounded sound low in her chest as the weight within her begins to crest into the unbearable. She keeps her eyes squeezed shut, watching starbursts flicker across the back of her dark lids as her muscles involuntarily squeeze, slave to a biological will Crowley can’t stave off anymore.

She can hear the sound of sandaled footsteps approaching, far quicker than the elder midwife and with longer and more solid strides than barefoot Abeni, but Crowley doesn’t have the presence of mind left to consider those details. She sucks in a shocking pull of air, drops down onto the heels of her hands to brace herself, and moans long and low in a wordless kind of agony.

There is a slight commotion as the tent flaps are parted through with some force and then the footsteps come to an abrupt halt. A heartbeat’s breadth of strange silence follows suit, wherein Crowley assumes the elder midwife has merely returned to her post, but then the sound of Abeni’s mother’s voice cuts like a scimitar through the fog.

“You!” she cries. “ You should not be here amidst the toils of women, not now, when it’s too late and she’s in no condition to entertain the whims of a f*ckless man!”

Crowley’s eyes snap open, a vivid shade of fire-heated amber consuming the white sclera as her pupils dilate in recognition. “He’s not a man,” she croaks, looking up at Aziraphale’s illuminated face gazing down at her in an unreadable shade of shock. “He’s an angel.”

Angel and demon gaze at each other, a thousand silent things passing between them. It’s Crowley who breaks first, with tears already streaming down her face. “I prayed to you, you bastard,” she hisses.

“I know,” Aziraphale whispers. “I heard every word.”

Crowley chokes out a weary laugh. “I can’t believe you came.”

“My darling,” the angel says, taking two steps until he’s kneeling at Crowley’s side, “I flew.”

Abeni’s mother has abandoned her mending and stood up, bowed into a stance that reminds Crowley all too well of the defiant girl she’s raised. “It’s not decent for you to see her like this,” she argues. “I have no care about what you are, you still have no rule or sovereignty here—”

“I will allow it,” the elder midwife says as she steps over to the edge of the birthing rug with Abeni in tow, gently touching the woman’s arm. “He has traveled a great distance to be here, and so he will welcome his child into the world as our guest. You may leave us for now, if the indecency compromises your sensibilities.”

Aziraphale’s complexion is the color of white marble when Crowley turns to look into his face. He shakes his head, mouth trembling when it can’t manage to form any words, but he seems to compose himself long enough to quickly reach into a pocket sewn into one side of his tunic and produce—against all possible odds—a rather large handful of sleepy, speckled mice.

“Here, dear girl, take these small fellows for me if you could,” Aziraphale says, entrusting the mice with Abeni, who accepts them in the drawn up hem of her shift. “Pay no mind if they bleat a bit, they’ve had a long journey and may be somewhat peckish. A pinch of grain would do them good.”

“No crows?” Crowley rasps through her tears. “You utter sap.”

“I couldn’t have them wandering too far,” Aziraphale says, bringing a hand up to thumb some of the wetness from her face. “It seems my immediate attention needs to be directed elsewhere.”

Abeni’s mother takes her daughter by the elbow and quietly steers her away from the scene, whisking her off into the further reaches of the midwives’ tent with her new charges. The crone simply settles on a wool-stuffed cushion a stone’s toss away where she’s closer to the fire, crossing her legs and then her gnarled hands over the head of her omnipresent walking stick. She turns her face partially away from them to sit in repose, only there to bear quiet but judicious witness to everything that follows if she’s needed.

Aziraphale wilts in their audience’s absence and bows his head against Crowley’s damp temple. “Crowley,” he says in a tremulous voice. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve come sooner, I could’ve been with you all this time…”

“No, you couldn’t have,” Crowley growls, bracing as another contraction begins to overtake her. “Was safer this way. Doesn’t matter, you’re here now and our baby’s arriving right on schedule.”

“Right now?” Aziraphale blurts out, as if realizing the unfolding reality of their situation again. “Oh dear, a baby. Our baby! Oh my goodness, Crowley—”

“Right effingnow!” Crowley brokenly shouts, and then words leave her as the pain eclipses everything else but the angel’s aura burning like a beacon around her darkness. He grips her clawed hand as the contraction threatens to swallow her whole, and even when Crowley sneers against the hurt, as the blood and fluids run down her trembling thighs, Aziraphale is still there, cupping the weight of her tight belly with one broad hand.

“Easy does it, darling, steady now,” Aziraphale murmurs in a gentle voice that betrays his own gathering tears, watching Crowley fight through the pain with frightened eyes. “I’m here with you, I’m not going anywhere.”

Crowley gasps around panting breaths when the contraction releases and shakily fumbles between her legs, hiccuping out a wet laugh when she feels something warm and solid at the tips of her long fingers. “Oh, they’re r-real,” she babbles, turning her face into Aziraphale’s shoulder while one bloody hand clutches at the ivory linen of his tunic. “They’re real, angel. I can feel them just there.”

“Of course they’re real,” Aziraphale croaks, shakily stroking Crowley’s hair through his dwindling shellshock. “You grew them into something whole, all on your own. How incredible you are, my beautiful Crowley.”

Another wave of pain begins to crest inside her and Crowley goes up on the ball of one foot, bracing herself against Aziraphale’s side to stay upright while her knee grounds her against the earth. Her belly feels as tight as a drumhead, stone solid, and the urge to push is closing around her like a suffocating vise. Crowley cups one hand around the place where she’s being steadily split open, uncaring about the shame of her nakedness and sweat and her blood-smeared thighs, and only allows herself to bear down when she feels the angel’s arm lock around her with unwavering strength.

Crowley is deaf to the feral sounds she makes as she pushes, her own muffled swearing and pleading and wordless howls, but she doesn’t stop to rest until she feels a crown of damp hair nestle into her palm. The relief of that moment is cut short by the reinvigorated hellfire licking between her legs, surely tearing her apart, and when she sucks in a desperate gust of wind she’s scared beyond reason that the teardrop shape of the baby’s head she’s fought so hard for will disappear.

“f*cking hurts, angel,” Crowley hoarsely gasps, gritting her teeth against the onslaught of neverending intensity. “Almost as ruddy much as I thought it would.”

“You’re doing so well, dove, look at how strong you are,” Aziraphale says around the lump in his throat. “Look what you’ve done.”

Crowley blindly grapples for his hand and presses it first to her pounding heart and then drags it over the front of her taut belly. “Not finished yet,” she chokes out, threading their fingers together before reaching to find the baby’s crown again. Aziraphale doesn’t shy away from her or the reality of his child emerging at his fingertips, merely nods and presses his lips to the demon’s shoulder as she rallies for the next contraction. It comes quickly, and Crowley bears down with everything she has until there’s a penultimate shift inside her and then, with a half-shout of breathless victory, the baby’s head emerges in a rush of fluid and falls right into their waiting hands.

Aziraphale catches her when Crowley slumps sideways against him, trembling all over as the vestiges of adrenaline course through her battered body. She takes a moment to find her breath, and then weakly laughs again, snared as she is between the razor-thin bookends of her awaited fate. “There,” she cries. “There they are.”

“You’re almost finished,” Aziraphale whispers, shamelessly supporting Crowley’s hand and their child’s head still cupped within it as blood drips through their fingers, then gasps when his thumb brushes over the unmistakable shape of a tiny ear. “Oh, Crowley, you’re almost through—they’re nearly here now.”

“Check the child’s neck for the cord, Antonia,” the elder midwife’s voice quietly calls from where she’s still keeping counsel from a distance. “You know the way of it.”

Crowley nods, eyes fluttering shut in concentration as she touches the baby’s lips, chin, and then the small ring of their neck. She sweeps two fingers around it, amazed that they’re still locked inside the heated grip of her body, and finds no trace of the cord in the way.

“Need both hands for the grand finale,” she grunts, settling there in the stained spread of Aziraphale’s lap. The front of his shift is ruined, covered in bright blood and other unspeakable things, but the angel merely nods and balances both hands around Crowley’s waist.

“I’m here,” he whispers again, those two words like a prayer by their own right, blinking up at Crowley with tears glittering in his fair lashes. “Lean on me if you need to, darling. Take anything you need.”

Crowley feels her mouth wobble around a ghost of a smile. She feels bled dry, cried out into a desiccated husk, and still fresh tears somehow manage to burn in her eyes. She would die for a kiss at this moment, just one press of the angel’s lips to see her through, but there’s no time left and all Crowley can do is drop her face into the crook between his neck and shoulder, sweltering as she is in the desert night. She hears herself cry out against Aziraphale’s skin as she pushes once, then twice, and with a heady rush of blinding euphoria and disbelief she guides the baby out of herself with her own hands and draws the newborn up into the shallow space between their bellies.

Crowley all but collapses in Aziraphale’s lap once the baby is free and clutched against her empty abdomen, falling forward with one knee on the birthing rug and the other caught between the angel’s thighs. He draws them in close before she can topple any further, holding her up with the grunting baby and umbilical cord married between them.

“Crowley, stay here with us,” Aziraphale pleads in a slightly hysterical voice as her head briefly lolls. “Crowley! Don’t you dare make me do paperwork at a time like this —”

“M’fine, angel, I’m all good,” she mumbles, slowly coming back into her corporeal body. She can feel her heart beating, her blood rushing, and the hot, impossibly tiny body she draws against her sternum. Crowley belatedly gapes down at the top of the baby’s head, suddenly aware that she still hasn’t heard them cry, and blindly reaches into their mouth to clear any mucus with the swipe of a well-practiced finger. It wasn’t needed, she soon finds out, because the scrunched face wails like a little lion against her and the feeling of that singular cry reverberating through her chest makes her face crumple, the whole of her essence filled with such agonizing love that all Crowley can do is choke out a soft sound of joy and weep alongside her baby.

“Here you are, my wee olive, listen to those good strong pipes,” she babbles, swiping some of the vernix and blood away from the baby’s face with shaking fingers. “Hello there, hello sweetheart, I can’t believe you’re finally here. Oh, ‘Ziraphale, just look at them.”

“I already am, darling,” Aziraphale says, openly crying so much that his tears are dampening the neck of his ruined tunic. He leans forward and finally blesses Crowley with her long-awaited kiss, pressing their lips together over the top of the squalling baby. “You’re the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen.”

Crowley laughs against his cheek, feeling the ache of exhaustion slowly creeping back in, and gingerly extricates herself from Aziraphale’s lap so she can turn and lean back against his chest, resting at long last. The angel’s fine fingers smooth some of the fiery flyaways away from her cheeks and temples as she slumps there with the baby on her belly, still tethered to them by the periwinkle cord pulsing against her skin. The world keeps coming back into clearer focus in short, staggered tiers of sensation: a draught of cool desert wind, the squeaking of the bats, the crackling of the midwives’ fire, Aziraphale’s hand resting on top of Crowley’s where she cradles the newborn, who she still keeps checking to see is remotely real.

The elder midwife hobbles over without her walking stick, hands outstretched with a clean length of swaddling cloth. She drapes one end of the spun linen over Crowley’s knees for some small pinch of modesty, and then kneels down on her old bones to take the other corner in hand to gently wipe some of the fluid away from the baby’s back and shoulders.

“Well done, my friend,” the crone says, and then jerks her chin to one side, as if indicating something beyond her shoulder. “Should I allow our apprentice in to see you, or would you like some more time to yourselves?”

“Abeni can come,” Crowley croaks, looking up to search for those brown eyes somewhere in the fire-lit darkness. “I want her to meet them.”

“Very well,” the elder says, accepting Aziraphale’s offered hand for balance with a quiet nod of thanks as she slowly stands on creaking joints. “She can help you clean up when you’re ready. And take this, white shepherd,” she adds with a meaningful look at Aziraphale, producing a small, bone-handled knife from somewhere inside her smock that she leaves in his palm. “It’s been boiled and is ready to cut the cord.”

Abeni appears like an apparition with a pot of heated water, visibly trembling with nerves or excitement, or perhaps both. For a moment while the girl stands there in Crowley’s line of sight, stoically waiting for the elder midwife to pass and give leave of them, they three exist in an unbroken bubble almost as old as humanity itself, unrelated by blood but still wrought into the circle of something resembling womanhood—maiden, new mother, and crone.

Crowley relaxes as much as she can in Aziraphale’s embrace and catches Abeni’s eye. “It’s okay, Beni,” she says softly, trying to muster up a reassuring smile. “You can come over. Looks like we made it through in one piece, eh?”

Abeni mutely nods, momentarily stricken by shyness, but grins so widely that it reaches her eyes. She dampens her cloth in the hot water and then looks up at Aziraphale, almost in question, but the angel merely smiles in that gentle way of his and nods, encouraging her to continue. “Thank you for all your help, dear girl,” he says, with such profound gratitude that Crowley shivers in the presence of it. “You’re doing a wonderful job.”

“They’re so small,” Abeni whispers, craning her neck a bit to peer into the baby’s face. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“M’not sure just yet,” Crowley says, winking despite all her fatigue. “May have to let them decide.”

The young apprentice gently cleans Crowley’s chest and shoulders and what she can reach of her deflated belly, then rinses her cloth and ever so gently wipes around the baby’s fine wisps of hair and ears. The little thing still snuggled against Crowley’s chest grunts but doesn’t otherwise complain, and it’s only in the moment that Abeni quietly asks to wash their back that Crowley finally peels her hands away long enough to find the hidden miracle waiting for her underneath.

They aren’t fully feathered or developed yet, but there are two telltale little appendages folded flush between the infant’s tiny shoulder blades, still damp from birth. Crowley gasps in surprise when she sees them, tipping her head back against Aziraphale’s shoulder to first joyously cackle into the night and then turn her face against his neck to hide the worst of her tears.

“Oh my word,” Aziraphale breathes out in awe, reaching to touch their child’s wing for himself while Abeni dutifully wipes the afterbirth away from the other with utmost care. “Look at what perfection you’ve made, Crowley,” he whispers, swallowing thickly as he noses against her face and closes his eyes in a renewed sort of gentle overwhelm. “A gift in every way.”

“I didn’t think,” Crowley rasps, voice fracturing around her tears. “I didn’t know if they’d be like us, or if they’d be—somethin’ else…”

“A little bit of everything good we have to offer between this world and the rest of it, I hope,” Aziraphale says, kissing the damp crow’s feet beside the demon’s eye as she cries through her exhaustion. “Shhh, it’s alright, my darling. You’ve done so very well. So very well, Crowley.”

Abeni doesn’t once mention the strangeness or rarity of a child like this one, but finishes her careful bathing with an undeniable air of maturity and grace and then passes off a fresh swaddling cloth to wrap around the newborn’s tiny body. Still enraptured as she is by the sight of the new family, the young apprentice sits back on her heels at a respectful distance and watches as Crowley shifts the baby in her arms so that they can nuzzle against her breast.

The afterbirth still hasn’t arrived, and Aziraphale asks for another shroud that he carefully tucks around Crowley’s trembling shoulders. She’s grateful for the spare layer, still nestled against Aziraphale’s radiating warmth, and somehow finds the strength to patiently guide her baby’s mouth toward a soft nipple. The first proper latch makes her heart leap and flutter behind her ribs, and though this isn’t the first child Crowley’s nursed, that instinctual pull of their tiny mouth drawing what they need from her vessel makes her reel with something so profound it goes beyond common language.

She blearily smiles around the outpouring of love hitching tight in her lungs, cradling the tiny head in her palm with utmost awe while they drink. Crowley thumbs over the drying wisps of light hair, unsure if they’ll be rosy or white in tomorrow’s daylight, but decides she’ll be pleased with either outcome. The color of those downy feathers is difficult to decipher by cover of night as well, even with her serpentine eyes, and promises even more surprises yet to come.

“I waited for you, you know,” Crowley whispers to the newborn, reverently tracing a fingertip around their rosy cheek. “I would’ve waited a lot longer. Another eternity, if I had to. Just like I waited for your Papa.”

“Don’t you start with all that,” Aziraphale sniffs, looking away for a moment to clear his throat. He doesn’t say anything else for a time, but holds Crowley more firmly against him than even before. Residual contractions are cramping in her abdomen again, preparing to bring the placenta forth at last, and she goes quiet herself for a while to soak in those last few precious moments of the baby’s first feed.

The eastern horizon is beginning to brighten into a soft shade of rose by the time the afterbirth is delivered and the umbilical is severed. Aziraphale does the honors himself, making a quick but intentional cut with the knife, and then allows Abeni to wrap up the organ before he politely insists she go get some well-deserved rest. He produces a short length of twine from somewhere unseen, and kneels at Crowley’s side where the sleeping baby is resting against her belly to tie off the little stump at their navel.

“I still can’t fully fathom that this is reality,” he murmurs, looking down at the evidence of the long few hours they’ve had on his tunic. “Can’t quite believe, really, that they’re real. Here! In the flesh.”

“Real as real can be, angel,” Crowley says, jaw cracking around a terrifically wide yawn. She is utterly spent, still tacky with residual fluids and now leaking little dribbles of clearish fluid from her chest, but more at peace in these stolen moments before dawn than she’s felt since that night she took shelter from the storm in Aziraphale’s arms. “Getting more real by the minute, even.”

“It’s quite a lot to take in, isn’t it,” he says in a breakable sort of voice, lower lip quivering until he bites against it. “Oh, Crowley. What a mess we’ve made. A beautiful, wonderful, terrifying sort of mess.”

“Things will change, now, some way or another,” Crowley says, blinking hard. “They have to. We’ve got no choice left but to adapt and conquer.”

Aziraphale nods and brings her hand up to his lips to kiss the back of her knuckles. “Yes, you’re right,” he says, throat working in place. “Of course they will. It’s the only way.”

“Don’t think about all that right now,” Crowley whispers, pleading. “Just—be with us, angel. Like this. For as long as we can have it.”

Their eyes catch and hold, and any scraps of Aziraphale’s worrying resolve melts away. He goes and lies down beside Crowley on the clean bedroll, still wrapped in his bloodied tunic, and extends an arm so she can rest her head against his pale bicep while they both gaze at the freshly swaddled newborn nestled between them.

“We have to give them a name at some point,” Aziraphale says after a while, just before Crowley’s allowed herself to slip into a doze. “You’ve known them a lot longer than I have, technically speaking. Did you have anything in mind…?”

“Dunno,” Crowley murmurs, touching the downy wisps on the top of the baby’s head. Now that daylight proper is heralding its arrival, she can see that their hair is a peachy sort of gold, darker than Aziraphale’s blond but brighter and lighter than her rich red. “I never really called ‘em anything when they were busy baking—guess I thought it’d come to me sooner or later.”

Crowley shifts, subtly adjusting the boiled rag hitched between her thighs for an altogether different reason than the last time she laid near Aziraphale like this. From virgin menses to childbirth’s healing bloodlet, all in the span of a year. Her womb faintly contracts inside her, already working hard to expel any residual fluid so it may shrink itself back down to size. Crowley’s in no big rush to see her flat tummy again, but presses a hand to her softened belly and thinks back to the morning she refused to believe she was pregnant, when it seemed impossible that something so small and fragile could take root to grow inside her.

“Olive,” she says abruptly, already pleased with the word as soon as it rolls off her tongue. “Our little olive, sown and grown in the desert.”

“Oh, goodness gracious,” Aziraphale mutters, features doing an admirable number of flourishes before he settles on quietly amused. “I think it could do with a touch more melody at one end, something that rolls and then bounces on the tongue.”

“Like what?” Crowley snorts, putting on a little sing-song affectation. “Oliver, Olivay, Olivoe, Olivie—”

“That one,” Aziraphale says, stopping her short with a maestro sort of twist of one hand. “It has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Olivie,” Crowley repeats, bowing her head to press her nose and lips to the sweet-smelling crown of the baby’s head. “What do you think, wee one?” she murmurs, leaving a tender kiss there. “You could be Oli, or Vee, or anything in between if you’d like, one day.”

Olivie, for their own part, cracks open their eyes to appraise their parents before granting them a miniature yawn of bored approval. Their tiny lips twist into something that looks like an approximation of a smile, and Aziraphale gasps, face lighting up like the rising sun even as the baby begins to faintly grizzle.

“Oh, come off it,” Crowley tells him, “they’ve probably got some gas. Too tiny to be smiling like that, fresh out of the fanny an’ all.”

But Aziraphale isn’t swayed, sitting up to reach for their swaddled bundle of new joy. Crowley stays reclined where she is, propped up on one elbow, smiling despite herself as she watches the angel gather the child up against him, shushing and cooing as they gently fuss and eventually quiet under his soothing.

“There now, your Papa’s here,” Aziraphale murmurs, pressing his lips to Olivie’s temple. “I didn’t know who you were until just yesterday, but isn’t that something remarkable? I feel like we’ve been waiting to meet for such a long time, you and I.”

He studies the baby’s face for a while longer, and then looks up at Crowley with a new sheen of something hopeful shining in his eyes. “Would you let me bless them?” he asks. “With anointing oils, of course—no water.”

Crowley pretends to think it over for a few seconds before she caves. “Yeah, ‘course you can,” she says, swallowing thickly. “At some point before you have to go.”

Neither of them are ready to acknowledge that part of their reality, but it’s waiting for them in the near distant future. As if on cue, Abeni’s mother reemerges at that moment with the leather satchel Aziraphale must’ve dropped on his way into the birthing tent the night before, and gives the new family a faint smile before setting it at the angel’s side.

“Your mice are in the sewing basket, if you should need to find them,” she says before turning and silently going out into the haze of morning to bring the donkeys their grain.

Aziraphale reaches into his satchel when the midwife is gone and produces a fresh tunic and the glass orb Crowley recognizes from their stormy night spent in the goatherd’s tent, which illuminates with diffused white light at the mere touch of the angel’s fingertips. He passes it over to Crowley, and then readjusts to hand her the bundle of Olivie when they begin to snuffle and whine.

“I want you to hold onto this for me,” he says gently, indicating the queer little glowing sphere. “It knows when I’m somewhere nearby, but the light shouldn’t ever go out regardless—unless you ask it to, of course.”

Crowley taps a blunt fingernail against the smooth surface of the object and nods, trying not to reveal the aching welt rising in her throat as she opens the front of her shift and gathers the baby into her arms. She lies there in the desert daybreak, freckled chest bared to the world, and doesn’t find her voice again until Olivie is quieted and nursing beside her, making the soothing coolness of a hard-won peace trickle through Crowley’s essence like crystalline water.

“Come here, angel,” she says, reaching for him with her free hand. “Gotta tell you something important.” Aziraphale comes as willingly as a lamb, kneeling before her like a supplicant in his bloodied white linen, and lets Crowley touch under his chin so she can draw his face into a sweet brush of a kiss.

“I love you,” she mouths against his soft lips, and Aziraphale sinks down beside her at the admission of it, bringing a hand up to touch the back of Crowley’s hand where it clutches their baby to her breast.