Chapter Text
My father taught us that there was, generally, a fire at the core of things, and that change was the only constant, and that we--like everybody else--were both the most important people in the universe, and utterly without significance, depending, and that individuals mattered before their institutions, and that people were people, much the same everywhere, and when they appeared to do things that were stupid or evil, often you hadn't been told the whole story, but that sometimes people did behave badly, usually because some idea had taken hold of them and given them an excuse to regard other people as expendable (or bad), and that was part of who we were too, as a species, and it wasn't always possible to know that you were right and they were wrong , but the important thing was to keep trying to find out, and always to face the truth. Because truth mattered.
˗ˏˋ ★ ˊˎ˗
Muriel was confused. They didn’t understand what “us time” was, or why Crowley wanted it with Aziraphale. They couldn’t understand, watching through the bookshop window, why they both looked so sad, when they had seemed so happy together before.
Then Crowley had kissed Aziraphale, and Muriel had started to make sense of it all; the looks the pair had given each other, the closeness, the “us time.” They were pressing their lips to each other’s, and that was what humans did when they loved each other.
Muriel was still confused. If they both loved each other, why would they be upset?
Crowley had given Muriel The Crow Road. They didn’t understand much of it, but they didn’t mind. They didn’t understand much about people, either, and books were much more forgiving. It was difficult for Muriel, getting to grips with Earth with no one there to guide them. They had been eager to agree to Metatron’s suggestion that they look after the bookshop, but they hadn’t realised quite how cold and empty the place felt without Aziraphale there, or how lost they would feel, abandoned with no instructions for an undetermined amount of time. They’d be OK though. They had plenty of books to keep them company!
They’d started to organise the books— which seemed to be alphabetised strangely— but the task overwhelmed them, so they abandoned it, put up the ‘closed’ sign, and just started reading. As Muriel made their way through the shelves of romances, they began to understand what had happened between Aziraphale and Crowley. Perhaps it wasn’t so strange after all, Muriel thought then, that the pair had been so sad. Perhaps the problem wasn’t that they loved each other, but that they loved each other too much. Maybe circumstance or time or fate wasn’t on their side, maybe it wasn’t written in the stars, but that was OK! Because people in love stories overcame things like that all the time! It would all be OK, they assured themselves.
Weeks passed. Muriel barely noticed at first, buried in books with no one to disturb them. The grandfather clock tick-tocked away in the corner, and occasional rain drummed on the window. The sky outside became dark, then light again, then dark. Muriel was unbothered; angels didn’t need light to be able to see. But eventually, the ticking clock seemed to get louder. Muriel tried to ignore it, but it seemed to reverberate in their head until it drowned out the words of the stories. The consistency of the rhythm had at first been a comforting sound, but now, they were afraid. They couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control it, couldn’t prevent it from echoing through their mind. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. And when they couldn’t fill their head with other people’s words, their own thoughts crept in. Worrying ones. Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley had returned to resolve their conflict. And what if real life wasn’t the same as fiction? What if it wasn’t all as easy as in their beloved books? What if there wasn’t a happy ending still to come?
They read somewhere that “every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.” It was sad, but true. Nothing lasted forever.
Thunder rumbled outside.
Muriel took a deep breath, stood up for the first time in days, and resolved to work out how to make a cuppatea. They were in just the mood for a good cuppatea to look at.
˗ˏˋ ★ ˊˎ˗
God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn't have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, and was not burned, and was not pulled up by the roots, or poisoned, or buried when the ground was turned over, and some bits just happened to be on a line that humans wanted to walk on, and so got trampled, broken, pressed flat, with no malice; just effect.