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It was only natural, in the grand scheme of their vastly comical joint existence, that an ineffably timed baby would herald its impending arrival in the early morning hours of Christmas Day.
Crowley was extremely calm about it all until the moment he wasn’t.
As the hours wore on and his labor began to progress more quickly than either of them had been remotely prepared for, the demon rapidly went from pacing tireless laps up and down the stairs in his dressing gown and joggers to disappearing somewhere in the cottage without a word. It took a thorough search through all three levels before Aziraphale found Crowley standing on his head atop a pile of cushions in the attic bedroom, socked feet braced against the wall with nine months’ worth of a pregnant belly poking out from beneath his fallen t-shirt like the full moon.
A small angelic conniption fit was had—with enough restrained ferocity to make the dust tremble in the rafters—and then Crowley was brought back downstairs, to be kept under a watchful pair of bespectacled eyes, among a thousand others hidden on a different plane. Christmas Day was growing quite long in the tooth by that point, but their handful of wrapped presents remained unopened under the tree, no longer a priority considering other unfolding events at the helm.
In retaliation, of course, Crowley declared he was going out to the greenhouse—which was about fifteen paces from the cottage’s back door on a stone path, miraculously de-iced—to give his plants one final round of hearty bullying before he went on maternity leave. No angelic chaperones were allowed. Aziraphale agreed on the condition that headstands were strictly off limits and Crowley could spend no longer than an hour out in the wintry night, figuring that anything to distract him from the mounting discomfort and whittle the hours away was worth its weight in gold.
That being decided, Aziraphale dutifully helped his husband into a pair of wool socks and his green wellies, kissed him on the forehead, passed a thermos of hot tea into his hands, and saw him off at the cottage door until Crowley disappeared into the glowing greenhouse. The invisible wards around the cottage were practically ironclad, almost sparking if you touched them just so. Aziraphale reached into the ethereal plane and strummed them like harp strings, just to be sure, and then decided he would sit at the kitchen table overlooking the garden to read his book and drink his tea, rather than in the den, just in case he needed to be anywhere in a hurry.
It was ten minutes shy of eleven o’clock in the evening when Crowley went out into the greenhouse, and Aziraphale hoped—and silently prayed—that they had enough sand left in the hourglass to make it to the 26th of December. It would be a close enough call, all things considered, but they were already nearly there. Surely this maiden voyage baby wouldn’t be ready to come until the wee hours of Boxing Day at the earliest, and Crowley’s frantic Christmas ire would be an averted crisis of the past.
With less than an hour gone, Aziraphale was only four chapters deep and halfway down a fresh page when the back door smacked open with a clatter and both a frozen gust of air and a pregnant demon came stumbling in from the dark garden. It was thirteen minutes to midnight. The sun had long since gone to its early winter bed, but the cottage was alight with twinkling Christmas baubles and tall candles flickering in the window sills. Enough illumination to clearly see the sickly pallor now masking Crowley’s ashen face.
Crowley didn’t speak while he haphazardly kicked off his boots with a glazed-over expression, one hand braced against the wall with the other visibly trembling. Aziraphale set his book to one side and forgot to breathe inside the brief span of time it took for Crowley to hobble through the kitchen into the parlour, swear like a Sumerian sailor with his hands jammed between the apex of his legs, and promptly drop to his knees beside the balsam fir they’d wrapped in tinsel and strings of popcorn two weeks prior.
Aziraphale’s wings didn’t fully manifest on the terrestrial plane, but he did indeed fly into the other room rather than let his feet touch ground.
“Crowley, what’s happening?” the angel blurted out, heart pounding like a drum. He tried to look for any signs of foul play and waved so the deadbolts were thrown into place and the windows were shuttered, thinking the worst and wondering if that much could buy them some time against any unseen evils. “Are you hurt?”
“M’not gonna make it, angel,” Crowley said miserably at the tail end of a chest-deep groan. “I can’t—can’t go any further.”
Aziraphale looked vaguely apoplectic. “Don’t you go saying things about discorporation in a moment like this, Anthony J. Crowley—you are staying right here with me and this unborn child. Topside and intact, thank you kindly.”
“Not like that, you ninny, I mean I’m not—going—to make it—to bloody Boxing Day!” Crowley hissed, visibly straining where he knelt beside the tree. A sharp and wounded sound came out of him then, high and mournful and imminent, and he mindlessly scrabbled between his legs with fumbling hands. “Oh no, no-no-no…oh, fuck. Please, not yet.”
“You’re frightening me,” Aziraphale said, dropping to his knees like a sinner folding over in penance. There was a pinch of hysteria creeping in at the edges of his voice that threatened to boil over into his blood. “Is the baby coming right now? Crowley, please, you have to tell me.”
But there was no more telling that needed to be done. Crowley clawed and shoved at his joggers with an animalistic desperation, and as Aziraphale regained enough brainpower to help him out of them, he watched in stunned awe as streaks of pink fluid ran down Crowley’s inner thighs and stained the velvet tree skirt beneath them. The angel made an intentional flourish with one hand until a tortoiseshell mirror from the dressing table upstairs appeared within his grasp, and as he held it low beneath Crowley’s bottom he could see the unmistakable teardrop shape of something beginning to emerge there by the twinkling lights of their Christmas tree.
“Oh my word,” Aziraphale said in a hushed voice, pulling the mirror away and resting a surprisingly sobered hand on Crowley’s lower back as he blinked. “My dear. My darling—you’re crowning.”
Crowley groaned and contorted until he was on his hands and knees, hair falling across his forehead as he rocked through the pain. “You think I don’t know that, angel,” he gasped, bowing over so his forehead nearly touched the ground. “It happened so fast, I swear they were already halfway down the chute when I was walking in from the garden. One minute I was pruning the roses, and the next—nghk.”
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale murmured, more to himself than to Crowley, but the demon heard him all the same. “All our delivery supplies are still staged upstairs.”
“Can an angel of the Blessed Fucking Lord work a few snappy miracles or not?” Crowley said viciously, and then gnashed his teeth and wailed thinly through the pressed line of his lips as something overtook him. “Pop the ruddy lot of it down here,” he rasped once the contraction was mostly gone. He made another chest-deep sound of mourning and pressed his palm to the emerging head. “Not yet,” he begged, futile as it was. “Not yet, you little bastard. Please. You have to wait.”
Aziraphale glanced woefully at his Victorian tree skirt and decided it would be an unfortunate casualty amidst the war effort of bringing a child into the world. There were more important matters at hand, and if their baby wanted to arrive here by the balsam fir, then so be it. But he couldn’t allow their birth to be bookended with any arguing or disagreeable words, not on this day of all days. No matter how Crowley felt about the finer nuances of Christmas.
“It hurts, blimey it fucking hurts,” Crowley said in a pinched voice, trying in that moment to squeeze his thighs together as if to stave off the inevitable. Aziraphale glanced at his pocket watch and noted they still had seven minutes to midnight. Seven minutes of eternity.
“I know we didn’t plan or ask for this, darling, but we have to make the best of the hand we’ve been dealt,” Aziraphale said evenly, trying to rub slow, gentle circles above Crowley’s bottom so they wouldn’t be overstimulating amidst everything else presently happening. “The little one is nearly here and I’ll be by your side for whatever you need to bring them to us. But you can’t hold yourself back to the point of causing harm to yourself or the baby.”
Crowley peered at Aziraphale with his glassy amber eyes lit up as if burning from within, brimming with unshed tears. He looked afraid more than anything, and the sight sent a dagger straight through the angel’s heart. “You know it can’t bode well, with—with people like us having a baby on Christmas bloody Day,” Crowley gulped out. “You know how it looks on the tin. You know the crucible the precedent was forged in, Aziraphale. We were there for it all, start to finish.”
Aziraphale nodded and swiped a gentle thumb across Crowley’s cheek as a tear finally gathered and fell. The demon was shaking from head to toe with the sheer force of trying to hold on to an unraveling rope. “You and I have rewritten our story many times before,” Aziraphale simply said, cupping his husband’s face. “And tonight we’re going to do it again, together. On a brand new page.”
He didn’t exactly expect it to make much of a difference, but somehow the words softened the sharpest edges of Crowley’s fear and fury as an endless contraction gripped him. The demon breathed through it, still braced on shaking arms and legs, and then painstakingly let his thighs butterfly open once more with a mixed groan of agony and relief.
“Can you—just, hold me up,” Crowley said hoarsely, reaching out with one hand until Aziraphale took it. “Wanna brace against you when I push.”
“You daffy old serpent, as if it would be anything but an utmost honor,” Aziraphale said thickly in painful earnest, and primly snapped their neatly folded receiving blankets and a hot tureen of water within reach. He helped Crowley up into a kneeling position, and the demon immediately bowed over to rest his forehead between Aziraphale’s neck and shoulder. One hand clawed into the opposite shoulder for purchase, and the other hand reached back between his thighs to touch the place where a soft, wet slip of hair was stretching him apart.
The sound Crowley made then was something beyond human language. Aziraphale felt it resonate through his vessel like a struck gong, electric and reverberating while he held his husband up through whatever would come next. Chills skittered across his forearms and calves, even through his woollen trousers. Crowley’s belly was tighter than a stretched drumhead and constricted like a clenched fist where it hung in the delicate balance between one chapter of their lives and the next.
There were only three minutes left until the stroke of midnight.
“I have you now, dove,” Aziraphale said, because he couldn’t think of what else to tell the panting demon in his arms. “I love you so very much. Do what you must.”
That was all that really needed to be said. Crowley dug his knees into the antique velvet and shoved against Aziraphale’s sturdy and unyielding counterweight for what seemed like an impossible eternity but was really only several beating seconds. There was a palpable shift that felt like the earth moving, and then he let out a hoarse shout of triumph when the baby’s head and shoulders slipped free in an abrupt tumble, right there at the popcorn-garlanded and baubled base of the Christmas tree.
Aziraphale held open a receiving blanket across his lap when Crowley drew the tiny body up between his thighs and stared down at them in awe. He laughed, high and ecstatic in his throat, as they waited until the child gurgled and cried upon receiving a firm thump between what could only be two damp wings. The kiss that followed, with Crowley’s smiling mouth pressed wet and trembling against Aziraphale’s lips, was perhaps one of the most exquisite things the angel had ever tasted.
Even as the periwinkle umbilical cord pulsed and he lightly bled onto the tree skirt, Crowley gathered the grunting baby up again to hold them against his deflated tummy. “Look at you, here you are, a wee surprise from Father Christmas in Papa and Daddy’s stocking,” he babbled, lovingly wiping some of the fluid away from the newborn’s scrunched face. He made another squawk of surprise and practically vibrated with joy when he noticed something even more unexpected. “Aziraphale, gosh, look how tiny she is, nubby wings an’ everything. Eve shaped—oy, it’s a girl!”
“She’s absolutely perfect, Crowley,” Aziraphale said around the grateful lump in his throat as his vision began to blur. “Look what you’ve brought us just in time for Christmas, dearest. The most precious gift.”
Crowley was glowing in the golden light now that he had the baby in his arms, and if Aziraphale hadn’t known any better, he might’ve thought the demon’s halo was blinking back into Being.
“Maybe we can’t blame you for coming on Christmas, little squirt,” Crowley murmured as he kissed the top of their firstborn’s hair and nuzzled against it. “Your Papa really knows how to do it up right with the seasonal festooning, eh? Be a shame to miss all the best festive bits.”
Aziraphale laughed, tearful and elated. “Happy Christmas, my loves,” he said. The words in themselves were an unexpected gift he’d waited over six thousand years to utter, and if he never opened another yuletide gift for all his immortal days, it would be a foregone conclusion that this singular one made it all the more worth it. “Shalom, little one,” he added, bending his own head to press a kiss to their daughter’s soft, damp crown.
The immediate room was an indescribable array of scents—blood, balsam, vernix, cinnamon, fir, and the citrusy spice of dried orange slices hanging by their heads. Down the hall, the antique grandfather clock chose that moment to drone out its twelve ringing chimes, finally welcoming in a brand new day on the tiny heels of a brand new life.
Sometime later, after the placenta was delivered and had been stowed away for short-term safekeeping, and after the cord had been tied off and the child neatly swaddled, the hearth was crackling and the smell of brewing cocoa was in the air. The stockings were still hung by the chimney with care, with the wistful dreams of a child that was…well. Already there.
Crowley hadn’t moved very far at all from the very place he’d first reached down and pulled the baby from his body. The ruined Victorian tree skirt was spared with some miraculous intervention, and in the end the demon and child were snuggled up in a lavish nest of cushions and blankets upon the rug between the decorated tree and merrily snapping woodfire. Aziraphale watched over them from his nearby perch in the cushy armchair, sipping a cup of cocoa while Crowley opened his dressing gown and nursed the tiny babe in kind.
It was late, but it was peaceful. The world was still and benevolently gentle for them, bitter-cold outside but with a paper thin layer of freshly fallen snow not yet disturbed by playing children or passing cars. As Crowley stroked around the baby’s ear while she suckled there by the lighted tree, Aziraphale wished he could preserve this moment in crystal and keep it secreted away inside his pocket forever.
The newborn’s duckling fluff wings had dried down to a color that was light, but certainly not white. A dusky cream that subtly darkened to a smoky brown near the delicate joints that would one day flatten out into feathers that shone with striations of gold, if Aziraphale had to take a hopeful guess. Her hair was more of a mystery for the moment—still too fine to truly tell if it would one day develop into something more reddish or pale, or perhaps a healthy mix in between. Whether she would want to grow up and stay a girl or dabble in other areas was yet another question, but they had plenty of time to figure that out when she could decide for herself. All of it was something worth looking forward to.
“Maybe we ought to save our presents and put them away for next Christmas,” Crowley murmured, gazing down into the baby’s face as he said it, though he looked up to meet Aziraphale’s eye. “I dunno if either of us can top this one. Be awfully bold to try.”
“Well, we’ll have a birthday to celebrate every Christmas from here on out,” Aziraphale said, merrily scrunching his nose at the thought. “Perhaps we should just open our Christmas presents on Boxing Day as a new tradition all the same.”
Crowley hummed at that and smiled. “I like how you think, angel,” he said, and then grinned down at the baby as one of their blurry eyes briefly cracked open. “You have the world’s cleverest Papa, did you know? Part of the reason I like him so much.”
Aziraphale flushed at that, feeling warm and tingly in his chest. “Well do make way for the world’s cleverest and oldest Papa, I’m coming down there to join you two,” he said, setting his cocoa to one side and huffing a bit as he knelt down upon the rug on creaking joints. Aziraphale balanced one hand on Crowley’s shoulder as he settled on the velvet tree skirt and leaned over to kiss his crimson hair, gazing down at the precious sight of the baby still snuggled in at the breast.
“Perhaps we need a new name in light of such unprecedented events,” Aziraphale whispered. “Something as a nod to the season.”
“After all this, you must be yanking my chain,” Crowley answered, though it came out in a snort of a whisper. He guffawed again and glanced up at his husband’s neutral expression. “What would you even suggest—Merry? Noelle? Rudolph? Shepherd?”
Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t have to be so precisely on the nose, you fiend, nor the child’s first name,” he said, fidgeting with a bit of the popcorn garland strung above Crowley’s head. “A little touch of magical sentiment never hurt anything, though.”
“I still like Rosemary,” Crowley said, fluffing the drying wisps of what now appeared to be rosy gold hair on top of the baby’s head. “It suits her.”
“You’ve known her in person for all of forty-five minutes,” Aziraphale tutted. “How could you possibly know what suits her?”
“A bit of Rose, a bit of Mary,” Crowley said, counting each half of the name on a flourishing finger in the air. “Mary’s about as Christmas-y as you can get, if you want to go by certain playbooks.”
“And Rose for one of your beloved Golden Girls, I imagine,” Aziraphale said knowingly, which made Crowley flush a vivid shade of raspberry. “Ah, yes. I know, you old snake. And I quite like Rosemary as well, so don’t kick up any more fuss. It’s a fine name.”
Crowley cleared his throat and watched as the baby began to doze off, drowsy and bathed over in love as she was beneath the span of her Daddy’s long fingers and the gentle glow of Christmas lights. “Well, you ought to pick her middle name, then,” he said. “Fair’s fair, after all.”
Aziraphale didn’t need long to contemplate. He thought of the warmth in their home, and the peace and joy and light he felt thrumming through his corporation. Christmas proper was now gone, true, but things felt remarkably whole beneath the bedecked tree. Complete, maybe, in a way that made his grace want to ring out like a golden bell. He realized, then, that he had already said their child’s second name inside the very moment he first greeted her.
“Shalom,” he said.
“Peace on earth,” Crowley replied as if by muscle memory, drawing the baby up onto his shoulder to gently pat her back. “Do you need more time to have a think on it?”
“No,” Aziraphale said softly. “Rosemary Shalom.”
Crowley blinked at that but then a wobbly sort of grin slowly spread across his face. “A touch of sentiment, eh, you soppy old angel,” he said, but then bowed his head into a nod. “Rosemary Shalom it is.”
By then the baby had already burped, and though there were violet half-moons under his eyes Crowley declined the offer to go up to bed and drew the swaddled little bundle back into the cradle of one arm. He reached for Aziraphale’s hand and put on his best puppy dog eyes, inasmuch as a serpent-eyed creature could piteously pretend to beg. It worked every time.
“Spare a lad another miracle or two,” he said, threading their fingers together. “This twee little love nest needs to be spacious and comfy enough for three, if you please. I’m beat.”
And so it was.
Aziraphale climbed in amidst the plush cushions and blankets and curved toward his husband and their little sprig of Rosemary safely tucked between them. He waved all the lights off in the cottage, save for the twinkling bulbs on the tree that never really seemed to be plugged into the wall outlet, and indulgently shook one white wing out to mantle with care over his family.
“So far so good with the first few pages, I think,” he whispered to Crowley, under the canopy of pale, dusky feathers where things smelled even more safe and familiar.
“What d’you mean?” Crowley murmured, one corner of his mouth twitching as he gazed at Aziraphale under sleepy lids.
“Rewriting our own Christmas story, of course,” Aziraphale said. “I think this was a fine start.”
Crowley cracked a grin and yawned wide, stretching an arm overhead until his fingers lovingly brushed against Aziraphale’s primary feathers. “Not half bad,” he agreed, snuggling down deeper into the pillows before touching the tip of his middle finger to the little tip of Rosemary’s nose. “With Papa in his pyjamas and poor old Dad in his mesh knickers, they decided it was time to settle down for a long winter’s nap until the baby, uh…inevitably woke up before dawn’s first sodding flicker.”
“Truly remarkable,” Aziraphale said, tittering quietly. “Your verse would bring a tear to Clement Clarke Moore’s eye.”
“Shuddup,” Crowley snorted, though he couldn’t help but prop himself up on one elbow and gingerly lean in for another kiss. “Hope you enjoyed your bloody Christmas present, you great big budgie. Fully custom, mind you. Freshly baked.”
Aziraphale smiled until it reached his eyes, heart full near to bursting. “I’ve never received anything better on the 25th of December,” he said, laying a gentle hand over the sleeping baby between them. “And I likely never will again, so long as I’m here on this earth. So you’re coming out on top so far, it seems.”
“Write that part of the story down for me, angel,” Crowley said, winking one golden eye in the shadowed safety between his husband’s wing. “I wanna be sure to remember it.”