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At the beginning, there was an angel assigned to stand watch over the Eastern Gate of Eden. He was given a flaming sword and vague directions. He was also on apple tree duty.
Aziraphale had overheard the Almighty explain the rules of the garden. The humans were free to enjoy everything-- except the fruit of one tree. Should they bite into an apple, they would gain the knowledge of good and evil, and die.
Aziraphale did not know what “die” meant. He was fairly sure the knowledge of good and evil had something to do with the war between Heaven and Hell. He did not understand why knowing of it was forbidden to the humans, but he did his job as directed.
Well, he tried . He really did.
The garden was just so lovely, you see. Aziraphale stood at his post and overlooked it all, his eyes following the varied and vibrant life around him. The apple tree's canopy was as charming as any other foliage, but it did not move, and so Aziraphale found himself watching more interesting things. He’d seen the snake. Thought it was quite fascinating, how it moved about with no legs through the grass. The Almighty was an artist. He lost track of the scaled creature when a small bird landed on the ledge of the wall beside him, hopping towards his feet, feathered head cocked and looking at him curiously. He smiled and wondered at their similarities, stretching his wings out wide beneath the sun.
The next time he saw the snake, his sword was gone, as were the humans. They’d eaten of the tree and had been banished out into the sands. Aziraphale was distraught about their fate and his role in bringing it upon them.
“Funny if we both got it wrong, eh? Funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one, eh?”
“Not really,” he responded to the demon.
“No. I suppose not.”
They began writing in Mesopotamia, the humans, that is. They’d been doing something like it for a while, sketching into stone for accounting purposes (amazing, what they assigned arbitrary value to), but after a few centuries, it got very interesting. They started to use phonetic signs for names, bringing their records closer to their speech, and after another couple thousand years, they had an alphabet.
They liked to write about their beliefs. Aziraphale nodded along to their theories, not pointing out when they were wrong. It didn’t seem the sort of thing he was supposed to do. That’s what prophets were for, wasn’t it? He watched with interest each stone wall they chipped at, the tablets they hauled around and shared-- there was a rumor the Almighty had written the Tablets of Testimony. Yes, the tablets were very nice, but not very practical.
Scrolls, on the other hand, those were a wonder. The first one Aziraphale held was in Egypt. It was beautiful, surprisingly smooth to the touch. They told him it was made from the pith of the papyrus plant and illustrated using pigments from the earth. He ran his fingers over the language, forgetting to breathe.
It was in their creativity that Aziraphale understood humans to be in God’s image.
Aziraphale did not see it as blasphemous to preserve one of the gods they created. He kept a single scroll for himself, one that detailed how Anubis judged those in the afterlife. The scales spoke to him. The image held, perhaps, a grain of truth.
The Romans were the first to make books.
They used the skin of animals and sewed them together into volumes of information. They put them into communal centers for the literate to read, and Aziraphale found he spent most of his days in the Bibliotheca Ulpia. He couldn’t tell you why, exactly. It was a lovely place, no doubt about it, where he could spend hours in the courtyard observing the come-and-go of scholars, or he could spend hours inside under high vaulted ceilings, natural light filtering in to illuminate the pages he touched with reverence. A part of him considered that he was there to protect it; the same part of him that mourned the loss of the Library of Alexandria. All those scrolls and the knowledge they contained turned to ash.
He did what he could to keep the next great library safe.
It survived only as long as Rome.
The 14th century was terrible for many reasons, including, but not limited to: famine, plague, and war.
It was wonderful for one: the evolution of woodblock printing and movable type in Europe and Asia, which would, come the next century, give birth to the printing press.
Aziraphale had a soft spot for illuminated manuscripts. There was something to be said for the long hours dedicated to meticulously printing or hand-copying them out, for those religious texts infused with the devotion of worshippers, their love bled out onto the page with ink.
There was something else to be said about reproducing that same text in a quicker, less costly manner. The idea that a man could possess his own copy, that it wasn’t a text reserved only for the Church or select individuals, made his heart glow.
Aziraphale’s Gutenberg Bible was a treasure, even before it became something sought after by museums, because it combined the beauty of labor and art with a revolution in how knowledge would be shared.
In 1800, Aziraphale decided to open a bookshop. He did not have any interest in selling books, mind you. It was mostly an excuse to explain the sheer quantity of books he’d amassed over the previous 300 odd years. Throughout the millennia, he’d needed to leave the knowledge he yearned to protect behind -- it had belonged to where it was created -- but he could now collect copies of everything that piqued his interest. Original prints were something of a guilty pleasure, books of prophecy even more so. It was amazing that humans thought they could predict the future. Not even he knew that; all he knew was one day, there would be an End.
Did that stop him from trying to find a copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch ? No. First-hand accounts showed the woman had been frightfully accurate with her predictions when alive. He regretted he hadn’t met her. He regretted even more that her books had been burned. Where was the only surviving copy?
His personal interests aside, Aziraphale thought making his base a bookshop was a brilliant idea… until he opened his doors for the first time and several humans wandered in to try buying his books. He watched them touch the spines of volumes centuries old and grew irked. The books were not for them. They wouldn’t know what to do with them, how to care for them, or appreciate their true value.
Aziraphale organized his shelves in a way that made sense to only him, trying to dissuade those who sought particular topics. He let dust gather and windows grime, wrote up business hours in a manner that painted him as a madman, and that was fine. Fewer people would want to buy books from a madman.
The humans were still drawn inside though. Still touched despite the big “Do Not Touch” signs he’d placed around the shop. It must have been in their nature.
Crowley was the one to suggest he start selling books, after nearly a decade of refusing all sales. He told the angel it was necessary for appearances, although it was unlikely Heaven would check his ledgers. The demon name-dropped a couple of recently popular authors.
If the books Aziraphale purchased the following week for the express purpose of selling them served Crowley’s agenda, it was neither here nor there. Aziraphale did not consider himself a judge of writing. He was merely a bookshop owner, and in his collection, as with any other, one could find books both Good and Bad.
It wasn’t until the End of the World that Was’t, after losing and regaining everything, that Aziraphale decided to close up the bookshop and take his collection where humans wouldn’t need to peruse it on the daily.
The books could simply be his; no front necessary.
He and Crowley moved into a cottage together in the South Downs. They had to miraculously add an entire floor to accommodate his personal library. Aziraphale spent days organizing and reorganizing his books, trying to create an order that made sense to his new situation. Crowley did the same with the plants in his garden outside.
Within a year, they were settled.
The backyard was their own Eden, lush and fruit-bearing. They liked to picnic under the apple tree, indulging themselves on cheeses and wine; sometimes talking, sometimes quiet, breathing in the fresh air for the pure pleasure of it. Aziraphale enjoyed leaning his back against the tree trunk and reading. Crowley, more often than not, chose to sprawl himself across the blanket and nap. Sometimes, his head would end up in Aziraphale’s lap, and the angel would rest one hand gently on the demon’s chest, feeling the rise and fall of it, the pulse of a heart that didn’t really need to beat, but did so anyway, slow and sure.
It was one such afternoon when Crowley pulled his book out of his hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure out what the big deal is.” Crowley flipped through the pages, studied none, closed the book, and passed it back, “Nah, I like my smartphone better.”
Aziraphale sighed, setting his reading aside, “What do you read on there, anyway?”
“Nonsense, mostly. The comments section of news articles. Twitter threads. Lots of chaos on the internet.”
“What about knowledge ?”
“Plenty of that too. I don’t particularly care for it. Lived through everything on Wikipedia myself.”
Aziraphale did not like when Crowley used words he didn’t know. It made him uncomfortable. He’d come to reluctantly admit his ignorance over the years, after one too many times embarrassing himself (see: agreeing to something he didn’t fully understand). “What is ‘wikipedia’?”
“Seriously?” At Aziraphale’s pointed stare, he went on, “Guess it hasn’t been around 30 years yet for you to know it. It’s a website, angel. Has everything on it. Like one big library.”
“Oh, I like libraries.”
“Know you do.”
“Will you show it to me one day?”
Crowley snorted, “Sure. Good for them if you like it. You’ll become a top sponsor.”
Aziraphale hummed, agreeing for lack of knowing what else to say on the topic. The wind rustled the leaves above them.
“Is that your thing?”
“What?”
“Hoarding knowledge, or protecting it, or whatever. Do you feel like you have to, since then?”
The angel’s brow furrowed, “Since when?”
Crowley sat up, stretched, and stood. He reached one long arm up, plucking a ripe apple from the branches, and squatted back down to bring it to Aziraphale’s eye level, “Since this.”
“Ah.”
He’d failed to protect the knowledge of good and evil.
Had he spent the last 6000 years trying to make up for it? Trying to keep knowledge close? Trying to gather it up in a physical form, as if his re-claiming of it all would remove the sin from humanity?
He looked at the apple, then into Crowley’s eyes, “I don’t know, my dear.”
“Fair enough.” The demon took a bite of the apple, flopping back down onto the picnic blanket. “Thought I was being clever.”
“Might be.” Aziraphale picked up his book again, finding the place where he’d left off. Whatever his intentions might have been, he was fairly certain he just liked reading. There were whole worlds to be had in words. “Close your mouth when you chew. The sound is distracting.”
Crowley did not close his mouth; instead, he found a way to crunch even louder, slurping at the juices in a completely unnecessary fashion. Aziraphale ignored him.
They settled back into the peaceful afternoon, with the breeze ruffling their hair and the sun warm on their skin. The summer seemed to stretch lazily out before them.
It was a nice day.