Happy Holidays, Naesadx2!
title: Let's Get It Over With
rating: gen
characters: Hastur, Satan, Crowley, Aziraphale, Adam & The Them
summary: It's been only thirty-something years, but Satan already wants to make amends with his son, and Hastur gets the raw end of the deal.
additional tags: birthdays, antichristmas, awkwardness, daydrinking, gardening, crocs warning
Dear naesadx2! I wish you the merriest, happiest holidays! the story has strayed for the prompt somewhat, but I tried to keep it up to Hastur <3 I hope you like it!! <3
The Devil was very generous and forgiving about the whole thing, come to think of it. Not that Hastur would judge him for that - an unwise enterprise anyway, - but, see, he wasn’t the judgy type, Hastur. Yes, he did enjoy corruption and torture and all the other demonly things, but he wasn’t judgy about it. He was perfectly satisfied with everything as long as he got a good gig and could burn down a thing or two.
The point is, he didn’t expect Satan to cool down about the whole disastrous business with the to-be Apocalypse so quickly. It wasn’t much spoken about in the narrow and dark corridors of Hell, of course, but the general feeling of embarrassment lingered. Hastur was, frankly, quite surprised, when Himself asked him to the side one day and said quietly:
“So, Hastur, you were the one who took my son up there some years ago, correct?”
In the days following the not-Apocalypse Hastur mostly kept his head down and took to the shadows (lurking skills helped). The whole debacle was all Crawly’s fault, but Hastur has seen and personally participated in too many scapegoat executions not to expect to be found guilty of everything just by association with that pitiful excuse for a demon, and be made an example of. So his unease was understandable when it was pointed out to him that with Crawly out of range and Ligur gone, he was the sole surviving witness of the Antichrist’s first appearance on Earth (which wasn’t strictly true, but he wasn’t about to tell just anyone about how he doubled back to Crawly’s house, scraped what was left of Ligur off the carpet and brought him back to life with several nifty incantations. Ligur wasn’t too big to begin with, but after the Holy Water incident he never grew taller than four inches. Hastur kept him in a drawer in his office).
“Yes, Your Fiendishness,” he said cautiously.
“Well then,” Satan wrought his clawed hands. “I know he was just a baby back then, but maybe you noticed something peculiar about him? Maybe Adam - a good name, by the way! - gave off signs of proclivities? What could he like? Maybe… what is it that children love these days, dibs? Cococubs?”
“I wouldn’t know, sire,” Hastur answered. “He was too small then.”
“You’re sure there’s nothing you could recall? Anyone who would know?”
“Ask Crawly,” Hastur sneered with a swell of ill-advised but gleeful vengeance.
Satan beamed at him. Quite literally, with the bright beams of glowing red light coming out of his eyes, and everything.
“Then this is a job for you!”
“Uh... for me, Your Fiendishness?”
“Well, my son’s birthday is coming up, and I thought it’s time I extended an olive branch. After all, I wasn’t there for him at the time; you could say the unfortunate business a while ago was due to the issues of an abandoned child…”
It was more along the lines of ‘ungrateful bastard’, if you asked Hastur, but he cleverly kept his mouth shut.
“So, go find Crawly - does he go by Crawford or something now?.. - find out what Adam likes, and get him an appropriate birthday present with my best wishes.”
“Yes, sire.”
Satan sighed.
“Children. Fatherhood changes you. One day you are taking on the whole of Heaven and kicking Michael’s arse, and next thing you know you just want to settle and provide for your ankle-biters.”
“Yeah, those kids,” Hastur mumbled, nodding.
He had no idea what any of that meant, he’d never had children, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“Yes, strictly business,” Hastur grumbled for what seemed like a thousandth time. “And I’ll leave you alone. Lower the corkscrew.”
Yeah, to be completely honest, he’d love to have his way with Crawly, but he had a job to do first. Anyway, he figured, he didn’t have an opportunity right now. One-on-one, in a dark corner? Sign him the Hell up! Crawly may be a resourceful snake, but for all his trickery, he stood no chance against Hastur. Here though, in the company of a blessed angel? Not a good idea. The angel - Aziraphale - had an unsettling stare and, behind the blank facial expression, an aura of someone who wouldn’t hesitate to give you a good smiting, if provoked, even armed with only a corkscrew.
To Hastur’s glee, his visit to the bookshop caused a bout of panic. Having interrupted what looked like a usual occurrence of wine-drinking and tooth-rotting intimacy between Crawly and the Principality (urgh), he had a look around. The antique shop was filled to the brim with books and dust. He wasn’t even considering it at first, but the thought just thought itself in his mind by it’s own accord: paper burns well. Paper burns awesome, actually. Hastur tabled it for now, but he didn’t forget.
They sat now on the opposite sides of the back room, decorated, inexplicably, with apples.
“Didn’t think ol’ Luce would make peace so quickly. It hasn’t even been forty years!” Crawly snorted.
“My point exactly! So. Crawly. What is an acceptable present for the Antichrist?”
“That’s not my name.”
“Uh. Whatever. Crowley. What is it?”
“Why are you asking me? I haven’t seen him in years,” Crawly said defensively.
“Well, what do kids like to get for birthdays these days, then? You gotta know all sorts of useless things about them people.”
Crawly laughed.
“Hastur. Adam Young is thirty-seven. He is an adult. Probably has children of his own!”
Aziraphale finally stopped staring at Hastur and said:
“A book is the best gift.”
“Yeah, for you,” Crawly said rolling his eyes so hard that hastur saw it through his flashy sunglasses.
Deep inside Hastur felt a pang of something not unlike solidarity. Not that he would ever admit it to Crawly, of course.
“Really, my dear,” the angel said, slightly affronted. “As I recall, the boy quite enjoyed reading! There were no less than two hundred books he put on my shelves. Going by their contents, Adam has an aptitude for natural sciences, experiments and adventure in space.”
“Mind of a scientist!” Hastur exclaimed.
It was something to start from.
“Or an engineer.”
“Okay, so we need a present for a geek,” Crawly mumbled.
Hastur didn’t know what a geek was, but he wasn’t about to ask. It probably meant “smartass” or something.
“Let’s ask the internet.”
Aziraphale brought forth a portable computing machine and typed the words into the search engine. (See, Hastur wasn’t as inept at humans’ latest worthless inventions as Crawly liked to think.) The angel studied whatever the machine showed him, page after page, his face lit up blue in the gloom of the back room.
“There is a disturbing number of Star Wars themed items on sale,” he said eventually, clearly uneasy. “Do you think we can get any of these?..”
Hastur wondered about the “Star Wars” thing and whether it could be used to torment humanity, or at least this particular angel. The name seemed promising.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Crawly answered darkly. “Wait, let’s try this.”
He hip-bumped the angel from behind the machine with a sickening familiarity.
“Gimme. Let’s look. If he’s anything like his dad… the human one, I mean, - he’s got to have a respectable burgher vibe, and, by extension, a Facebook page. Aziraphale, look, is this our guy? Haha, he’s even got a wishlist!”
At this point Hastur couldn’t pretend any longer that he wasn’t curious; also, he didn’t want to leave the choice completely in the hands of Crawly and the angel, of all beings. He joined them at the machine. On the screen he saw a list of items that Adam apparently wanted to receive as a gift on his birthday.
“Are you sure this is the right one?” Hastur asked cautiously.
“Yes,” Crawly whispered and started reading out the list: “Solar-powered freezer… I have no idea where to get that, and we don’t have time. Edible water… socks - no, that’s just lame. Number four: integrity ball.”
“What even is ‘an integrity ball’?” Aziraphale asked.
It seemed, Hastur wasn’t the only one perplexed by the boy’s choices.
“I don’t know. Oh wait! Next one - gardening supplies,” Crawly said in a much more cheerful tone. “I can do that.”
“Living in the country?” Hastur asked.
“Yes, in Lower Tadfield. It’s not a very long drive.”
“Should we all go in the morning?” Aziraphale asked and resumed staring at Hastur.
It was clear he didn’t want him in his shop the whole night. The feeling was mutual.
“No,” Crawly said. “Let’s get it over with.”
It was probably the first and last time all three of them ever agreed about anything.
After a midnight visit to a giant round-the-clock store (Hastur expected it to be deserted at this hour of the day, but he was mistaken) and an awkwardly quiet breakfast in a roadside cafe at dawn, the morning found them driving across the countryside. Hastur sat in the backseat of Crawly’s car in the company of a spade and gloves (Crawly and Aziraphale decided that visiting Adam without gifts of their own would be impolite) with a pair of pruner shears that Crawly recommended, packed in a glittery box with a bow on top of it. In the relative silence of the ride (Crawly blasted music through the speakers, but didn’t talk) Hastur felt increasingly stupid. What sort of gift for the Antichrist was a gardening appliance?
He wished he’d looked more into the ‘integrity ball’; that would have looked way more meaningful, especially given that it was supposed to be coming from his father. Going back was out of the question, though, so as a last resort to fix this mess Hastur slipped a claw under the lid and cursed the shears to snip the fingers of anyone who took them without permission, There, much better, more demonic. He also added a lighter on the side, just because he was good at those, and who wouldn’t want a lighter on their every tool?..
“I remember this road,” Crawly mumbled around ten in the morning after the area had grown rural and they’d passed a mansion in the distance.
“It brings up memories, yes,” Aziraphale agreed.
“This must be it.”
They turned and drove along a narrow road where all the houses drowned in the thick green of the gardens and were decorated with apples.
“What’s with the apples?” Hastur asked.
“It’s Adam’s birthday.” Aziraphale answered, as if it explained anything.
Adam Young, the Antichrist, the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness lived in a surprisingly friendly-looking cottage surrounded by old apple and pear trees. Two demons and an angel were welcomed in the garden where a small company had already gathered.
“I know you lot!” Adam exclaimed as soon as the gate opened. “Come on in.”
He beamed, almost like his father down below - without the actual rays shining out of any orifices, maybe, but the resemblance was uncanny. Hastur had to part with the vague hope that maybe it was the wrong guy, after all. To his further dismay, Adam turned out to be really tall: he had a good inch on Hastur.
“Everyone, do you remember these two guys we met at the airbase some years ago? And this bloke helped deliver me, together with Crowley,” Adam gestured at Hastur. “Get our guests some champagne!”
Hastur floated through introductions and handshakes, his mind still reeling from the fact that Adam a) remembered him, and b) lumped him together with Crawly as some sort of midwife. He did lend a hand to Lucifer at the key moment, yes, but that was no reason to mix him with the likes of Crawly, for Hell’s sake. He didn’t pay much attention to Adam’s friends, but he remembered who was who: Brian, a shady sort; Wenslydale, a tidy sort; and Pepper, a large red-haired woman, whose gaze gave Hastur the creeps. Champagne fizzled dangerously in their glasses.
“It’s not even noon yet,” he heard Crowley’s faint whisper behind his back.
“My dear, Adam is wearing crocs to his own birthday party,” Aziraphale answered. “I don’t believe we have any agency here.”
“I bring you a present from your father,” Hastur announced.
“We too bear gifts,” said Crawly.
“How very biblical of you,” someone said; and it all went downhill from there.
Hastur had only planned to stay long enough to give Adam the present, convey Satan’s sentiments to the best of his abilities, and then withdraw. Champagne turned out to be great, though; and he couldn’t help but appreciate the blatant indulgence of that. One thing led to another; Adam’s human parents dropped by; then a witch; then War herself made an appearance, and half an hour later Hastur saw her and Aziraphale talk in the garden, the general expression of nostalgia on their faces:
“It was a jolly good sword… I wish I could hold it one more time…”
“No backsies,” War hiccuped drunkenly. “Fight me.”
“I’d rather not,” the angel said.
Later that day, when the golden light turned pink and red and purple, there was music and mingling, and playing fetch with Adam’s dog (it kept bringing various bones, but only to Hastur), and dancing slow with Pepper and Brian; and suddenly he didn’t really want to leave, even though he had to report to Satan some time soon.
Hastur had a - bad, ominous, nasty - feeling that he was going to like this human crowd.
Happy holidays, naedasx2, from your Secret Writer/Artist