AN: I prefer archive of our own nowadays, but this site doesn't have nearly enough Good Omens fics. So here I am.
Warlock Dowling was born a perfectly normal, blonde-haired, blue-eyed little boy to a very normal, very human pair of parents from Tadfield, England. He was then given to a pair - well, only one of said pair was actually present, but it still counted - Americans, who, for Americans (and American politicians especially), were also perfectly normal.
He then spent the next eleven years of his life being raised by a pair of very not-normal occult (or, if you preferred, ethereal) beings, who were indeed very abnormal even by supernatural standards.
Perhaps this would have been important only to Warlock's future therapist if only reality had been a little less... Wibbly-wobbly, as one might say. For belief is a powerful thing. Belief had played a major role in deciding who Fell, for example, and it fueled every miracle and action made by demon and angel alike. This was true most of all for one particular demon who, by most accounts [1], was fairly average and ordinary as far as demons go.
These accounts were, naturally, incorrect, as most majority opinions are. For, unlike all other demons (and, indeed, most angels), Crowley had an Imagination. And, more than that, he used it. Far more than even he realized.
He decreed that his plants would understand and fear him, and so they did. He said that his Bentley would not hit anyone or anything, and so it did not. [2] Time would stop and hellfire would fail to burn simply because Crowley said it would be so, and believed that it would be so, and so it was.
Similarly, Crowley believed that Warlock was the antichrist, and so, he too was.
While Adam Young received a dog in the woods of Tadfield, Warlock Dowling was holding a suspiciously red-eyed gerbil in the ruins of his birthday party tent. And, more importantly, he was watching two vaguely familiar figures retreat into the distance.
Now, this is the moment that everything could have smoothed out.
Warlock Dowling could have remained a very normal and somewhat bratty human child, son of two very normal and sad excuses for parents. He could have gone to University, become a reluctant politician, gone to therapy, returned to University, earned doctorates in astrophysics and botany, and become one of the first people to study traces of life on other planets while writing a to-be-best-selling novel vaguely similar to Mary Poppins, but with a snarkier nanny and kind gardener tag team.
The demon known as Anthony J. Crowley could have made it back to his Bentley without being disturbed, resurrected his best friend's dove, and then decided with said best friend that Warlock Dowling was certainly Not the antichrist. And reality, loose and weak and easily influenced during this particularly end-flavored time, would have fixed itself quite apologetically.
Instead, he was all but bowled over by a 37.6 kg boy-shaped-being (or 84 lbs, for those who prefer) and also one increasingly demonic gerbil. Which was starting to look quite a bit like a cat, to the consternation of anyone who noticed. [3]
And that is when the plans of angels and demons take a hop, skip, and swaggering slither - or is it step? - to the side.
[1] - Accounts not counted would include Leonardo da Vinci, several confused Romans, a group of Mesopotamian children who decidedly were not drowned, and several million other humans. However, as human accounts were not, in general, counted at all, the only ones that thought otherwise and Mattered were G d Herself and an angel named Aziraphale.
[2] Aside from ineffably planned bicycle crashes, that is.
[3] No one noticed, so it was to the consternation of none, really.