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London did not end suddenly, but in a long, suffocating exhalation, as though the city itself had grown too weary to continue bearing the weight of its own existence. That was at the beginning. Now, it feels as though something has tipped the scale, and it is happening—all of it, at once.
The sky hangs low and ruptured above the city, aflame and viciously alive, its vault split open into searing veins of gold and white that bleed through a canopy of smoke. The thick, acrid fumes press downward upon the streets, making the air feel weighted, viscous, so that each breath must be dragged in through ash.
Buildings collapse as if the bones of the city are breaking one by one; the streets are no longer streets but corridors of masonry, glass shards, human bodies, twisted iron, and burning timber, and the sound—more even than the sight, more than the heat—is what makes the end unbearable.
Bombs fall in arrhythmic succession somewhere beyond the veil of smoke, the impacts rolling through London like the pulse of a monstrous heart, and everywhere beneath it, through it, around it, there rises the raw, unshaped chorus of human terror, not words now but the final animal speech of a species watching its world come apart around it. Extinction is imminent.
He moves through it all as though already absent from it, a dark figure passing in and out of firelight, his face greyed with dust, his hair dimmed under settling grit, the back of his throat coated with soot so thick that every swallow tastes of cinders.
He does not hurry. There’s no reason to. The deafening sounds envelop him as much as the heat of the burning sky and the sporadic explosions of gas pipes, fuel tanks, and electricity mains. He walks. He’s been walking for Hell knows how long, perhaps all the way from Sussex, perhaps only from Mayfair, or was he in Soho last? He doesn’t remember, all thought of origin and destination suspended. It doesn’t matter anymore.
The Bentley is lost somewhere, inert, a pile of bent metal and melting leather, Queen blaring until its last breath, destroyed in the first day’s upheaval beneath some incandescent fragment fallen from the riven skies. He had left it outside a café while he nipped in for an espresso and returned to find it crushed beneath a chunk of something that might once have been part of Heaven. Rather fitting, perhaps, that Heaven should destroy the thing he loved most on Earth.
Well. Second-most.
That piece of sky should’ve ended Crowley. If only he’d been inside the car, this would be over by now. But he wasn’t, so it isn’t, and he’s walking as the humans that remain run and shove and scream at the limits of their burning lungs, as if there were some corner of the earth left they could flee to that would be safe. Stupid. Their hope is stupid. It makes him itch.
There is urgency all around him, in the running forms that still break from doorways or vanish into the smoke, in the frantic cries that flare and are cut off, in the unnatural tremor that seems now to live continuously inside the ground itself; but none of it reaches him anymore. Only the habit of motion remains, that is all, a futile inertia of carrying on even when all possible destinations have collapsed into nothing. Maybe he’s as stupid as them. At least he harbours no hope.
The sky, when he lifts his eyes to it again, is not something language can adequately contain. It is not simply burning, though it burns; not merely opening, though it has been torn wide; it is a violence of light and darkness. Things move within it that should not be there, shapes suggested and withdrawn within fire and cloud, vast and formless and familiar to him in the most dreadful sense, as though the first substances of Creation have begun to show through the skin of the world now that the skin itself has split apart.
He thinks, with a fatigue so deep it barely rises to the level of thought, that humans imagined endings too gently. Even their terrors were provincial. Trumpets, thrones, white robes. A clear division of the blessed and the damned. They didn’t imagine this—not a sky on fire above London, not angels screaming overhead, not air tasting of metal and scorched brick. They, somehow, imagined an ending but never the End.
He does not remember deciding to turn toward St Paul’s, but turn he does. He walks along the Thames as it burns, slick with oil and running fire, its surface no longer water but a slow, coagulating mass of boiling liquid and bodies—fish, whales, and other creatures split open or half-cooked—and ships’ debris, everything churned together into something too thick to move cleanly, too ruined to name, and in the back of his mind the memory of Aziraphale’s mouth forming the word bouillabaisse rises unprompted, and he almost huffs a chuckle, because why the hell not—the world is coming to an end; one might as well laugh while there’s oxygen left to do it.
Where boutique cafés and well-manicured gardens once stood, there is nothing now but a wasteland of charred, twisted metal and crumbled stone, and atop a small rise, a church. St Paul’s Cathedral enters his vision—or what remains of it—as though someone had wasted a miracle trying to make a point that no longer matters, perhaps guarding a negligible number of humans, perhaps believing that God might spare them from Her own plans.
As he walks towards it, Crowley narrowly avoids being hit by a runaway ambulance that swerves and crashes against a lamp post, instantly killing the driver. Lucky bastard. The passenger is alive, but barely—the airbag crushing his mangled lungs—and Crowley spares him a thought that stills his heart, sending him straight to Hell, where he’ll be a little bit cooler than here, at least.
The cathedral rises above the shattered city with a kind of exhausted grandeur, its half-dome catching and reflecting the broken light so that it appears both illuminated and already consumed, like an artefact held between two states of being. Its persistence is almost insulting. He stares at it from the smoke-hazed street and thinks, not with irony but with bleak recognition, that it is a suitable place for a demon to end. There is, after all, a symmetry to it. Something Aziraphale might appreciate, and the thought of the angel is intolerable. Crowley refuses for several paces to follow it to its conclusion, as if by not finishing the thought he can still hold off the truth nested inside it: if he were still—no. Not that. Not yet. Not until there is no strength left to refuse even memory.
Sirens blare over the cathedral, over the city, over it all, and they go on screaming long after they have ceased to promise rescue. They pull Crowley backwards through time, to the Blitz—to Aziraphale—to that one night in 1941—the one time, the only time.
The world had been burning then, too, dust thick in the air, firelight through shattered glass, the press of Aziraphale close enough to feel him without quite touching, afraid of what would happen if they crossed that last, invisible line. And then they had. They did—they reached out and touched, kissed and moaned into each other’s open mouths as though it might undo the war, or them, or both.
They had been so afraid, and so relieved, and so unbearably, unforgivably human in that moment—and then they had been so quick to retreat from it, to fold it away, to pretend it had not changed everything. They had been quick not to stay. Not to reach again in the morning. Not to say anything that would make it real and theirs, and therefore impossible to lose.
You cannot lose what you don’t have, you idiot. So don’t have it. Just don’t.
They could have become something then, an us—fragile, defiant, and entirely theirs. But they hadn’t.
It took them too damn long to circle back to it, too long to even dare name what had already existed between them, and then—far too soon—it was over. It was all over.
I forgive you.
Don’t bother.
The words sit inside him like fresh wounds, as if time has not passed at all, and as if the world has been ending ever since. And now here he is, surrounded by people—some alive, some dying, some already dead—and yet utterly alone. He wishes, and it’s futile and he hates it, but he wishes to be laid down and washed clean of all of it—of the horror, of the history of their time apart, of every wrong choice. When they left each other behind. He wishes—and isn’t wishing just another form of hope?—that Aziraphale would take him, make him complete, because he knows, deep inside his damned soul, that they are only halves of something that failed to become anything at all.
A nearby siren is hit—by a bomb or a meteorite, or the collapsing spine of a building, who knows at this point—and it wails and dies with a groan as Eurofighter Typhoons roar overhead.
The heavy doors of St Paul’s are still on their hinges, and when Crowley walks in he feels the last of the fresh air that exists in all of God’s green Earth rush past him and vanish. What a waste. But at least inside it’s ever so slightly cooler, everywhere except on the soles of his feet, which burn as though he were barefoot on scorching sand, his boots already smoking, though he pays them no mind. The pain is nothing—nothing compared to what he has felt before: the despair he’s survived, the loneliness that has eaten through him, leaving only the shape of something that used to be him.
The sound changes in here. The cathedral does not silence the apocalypse; it contains it, reshapes it into tremors in the stone, into low concussions swallowed by the half-dome and repeated there until they seem to come from above as much as beyond. Incense still lingers faintly in the old fabric of the place, disturbed now by falling dust and by the slow infiltration of smoke; beneath it is the mineral smell of ancient stone, and beneath that something acrid and immediate—burning varnish, scorched wood—the first breaths of ruin moving inward. Dust shakes loose from the ceiling with every distant impact and settles over his black clothes in a pale film that pricks against his skin like dry salt. Holy residue. Even that is enough to make him feel the old instinctive recoil, but instinct has become irrelevant. There is nowhere left to recoil to.
He half expects to find the angel in here, waiting for him, but there’s no one—no one to look at him with that fond annoyance that always said, between the lines, you stupid demon—oh, how I love you—because he knows. Crowley knows that Aziraphale loved him, even if the angel didn’t know it himself. It was never said, and Crowley doesn’t mind, not really; words may be able to create stars and nebulae and entire universes, but what he had with the angel existed before them, beyond them, around them. To say it would not have changed anything anyway.
He walks down the aisle, and the closer he gets to the altar, the sharper the pain rises. It shoots with such immediate and intimate precision that for a moment he thinks the very stone has teeth. He sinks to his knees, and as they meet the consecrated floor something in the contact recognises him. That is the only word for it: recognition. The ground knows what he is and rejects him in the same instant, sending a thin white agony upward through flesh, through bone, through tendon, through every pathway by which a body understands itself.
He could miracle the pain away, perhaps, blunt the sensation for a little while, fabricate some last comfort against the inevitable, but the idea barely forms. What would be the point? The world is ending exactly as they had feared it would, and exactly as, somewhere in the pitiless arithmetic of Heaven, it was always meant to. They failed. He and his angel. The demon who wanted to save the world and the angel who helped him try, who so often stood beside him through all those ridiculous centuries of compromise and appetite and unauthorised tenderness—and in the end it changed nothing. The thought is almost more than the pain can hold. It opens inside him like a second wound.
“We tried our damned best,” he says to the empty cathedral, and his voice echoes back to him, hollow and unconvincing.
Did he, though? Could he have done more? Could he have taken Aziraphale by the wrist and said no, enough, not this time, not at the price of us? Could they have loved more openly, fought more fiercely? The questions move through him hotter than the agony beneath his knees, and because there is no answer now, because all answers have been overtaken by flame, they remain inside him like molten metal, incapable of cooling.
The holy water stoups gleam to his left in the strange apocalyptic light filtering through the cracked stained glass, and he turns his head toward them as a thirsty creature might turn toward a well that will kill it. They look absurdly harmless, those small, basins, holding their still, clear surfaces amid all this grandeur of ending. To humans, only water. To him, obliteration: a mercy so absolute it approaches tenderness.
Outside the cathedral, the screaming changes timbre. Something inhuman has joined the choir of the dying. He thinks, with that same exhausted drift of mind, that the world has begun to sound like the places that existed before the Earth itself came to exist.
“Should’ve left,” Crowley mutters to himself. “Alpha Centauri. Should’ve just grabbed him and gone.”
But he knows that was never an option. Aziraphale wouldn’t have left, and Crowley wouldn’t have gone without him. Simple as that. Six thousand years boiled down to a single, stubborn truth: where Aziraphale was, Crowley would be also. In Eden, in Rome, in Paris, in bomb craters and bookshops and rainstorms and traffic and drunken dinners and silences that stretched for decades, the fact had remained constant beneath every argument and every retreat.
Where the angel was, the demon would follow. Even at the end of the world. Especially at the end of the world.
He forces himself onward on shaking legs but his body fails him again just short of the altar. It is less collapse than surrender, the corporation at last refusing to perform the impossible labour of holding itself upright on consecrated stone. He goes down hard. His palms slap instinctively to the ground to catch himself, and the fresh contact sends a white flare of pain through his arms. He remains there, bent over, supported by the very thing that is undoing him, breath scraping thinly in and out. Then, with an effort that feels both deliberate and beyond all will, he lets himself roll onto his back. The stone receives him with full and immediate cruelty.
Now the scorching pain is everywhere at once—along his spine, across his shoulders, through his hips and the backs of his legs. His eyes, unshielded and gone fully serpentine, fix on the half-dome looming above. Cracks run through it in widening branches—three great fractures already, and fine tributaries spreading from each with every new concussion. It will not hold much longer.
“So this is how it ends,” he says to no one. To everyone. To the universe collapsing above him and within him. “At least we’re going in style.”
The line of thought flickers and dims. The edges of his jacket begin to smoulder, and the fire seems almost disappointingly ordinary, an unworthy punishment for a demon daring to tread on consecrated ground. It doesn’t hurt as much as he expected. Maybe pain has a ceiling. Maybe, after a certain point, you can’t feel anything worse.
Crowley laughs at that, and the sound echoes strangely through the cathedral. Not true. He’s felt worse. He felt worse when Aziraphale looked at him in that bandstand and said they weren’t friends. He felt worse standing in a burning bookshop, believing his angel was gone forever. He felt worse a year ago, when Aziraphale had looked at him with such terrible understanding and said, “Come with me to Heaven.”
The memory stings more than his burning skin. Crowley had begged, on his knees in Aziraphale’s bookshop as the first tremors shook the earth.
“Don’t go. Stay with me. We’ll figure something out. We always do.”
Except he hadn’t done it, had he? And now he’s here, burning, and he’s watching the patches of exposed flesh, now charred, with detached fascination. What was meant to happen had indeed happened, because it had been ineffable.
That fucking word. Ineffable. Crowley had hated it for centuries, but never like that—never as he watched the angel straighten his bow tie one last time, smooth down his waistcoat, prepare to return, heartbreakingly, to Heaven’s ranks. No more fraternising with the enemy. No more pretending they had slipped beyond notice. No more fragile little republic of two carved out between opposing eternities.
“I’ll see you after, perhaps,” Aziraphale had said, and both of them had known it for the mercy of a lie.
There would be no after fit for them. Heaven and Hell, whatever else was ending, would not relinquish the chance to divide them one final time.
He stares up at the dome, thinking of stars. He helped build them, once. Back before, when he was someone else, someone with a different name and a different purpose. He wonders if they‘ll survive this, his stars. They‘re so far away from Earth, from Heaven and Hell and all this damned mess. Maybe they’ll keep burning long after he’s gone, long after all of this is forgotten.
He hopes so. It would be nice to think something he created endures. Fucking hope, again.
“Should’ve told you,” Crowley murmurs, not sure if he is speaking aloud anymore. The burning has reached his throat, he can smell charred flesh and bone, and it’s hard to speak. “Should’ve said it. All those chances and I never did.”
The words he never said hang in the smoky air of the cathedral. Three words. Small, stupid, useless words. Humans say them carelessly, often badly, fling them into the world without calculation, and yet for him they remained impossible. I love you. There. Even now he cannot quite bear to shape them aloud, and that failure, arriving at the end, sits heavier than the fire eating through him.
He had shown it, yes. In every ridiculous rescue, every bottle uncorked, every restaurant found, every book preserved, every summons answered, every appearance made at precisely the right moment with precisely the right expression of exasperation to hide devotion too bright to be looked at directly. The little miracles performed simply to make Aziraphale smile. Love written across the centuries in acts so numerous they ought to have amounted to speech.
But they did not. They do not. And they will never do.
He wonders, with a bitterness made strangely tender by exhaustion, how Aziraphale would have answered had he spoken at last. Probably with that flustered little smile, the one that always seemed to say I’m terribly flattered—and terribly afraid. Or maybe not.
Maybe not.
The burning works its way through muscle and bone. It is different from ordinary flame, more exact and more invasive, not content merely to injure his corporation but seeking beneath it, through it, toward the demonic essence housed there. His body arches against it and then falls back again, for there is nowhere to go, nowhere upon this floor that is not equally fatal, and outside the cathedral there is only the greater fire. The agony has become a low, relentless brilliance filling the body from within, and thought now must thread itself through it or be consumed.
“You could’ve told us, you know,” he says to the cracked ceiling, to the absent Almighty who might or might not be listening. “About the Plan. Given us a sporting chance.”
But even as he says it, he knows no answer will come.
And yet beneath the pain, through it, his gratitude begins to bloom. That, more than anything, feels like a mistake. This must certainly be the end.
It surprises him that love should refuse to become only sorrow. He had loved Earth. Not abstractly, not as a principle or a project, but as a place: rain-dark streets and overheated flats, bad behaviour and ingenious machinery, the first astonishment of coffee, the obscene elegance of wine, the snarl of traffic, the smell of paper in old shops, human music leaking from open windows into summer evening, the sudden emptiness of a road at night when the Bentley ran so fast it seemed less a car than desire given wheels.
“I loved it here,” he says. “All of it. The whole damned mess. The clever little humans with their clever little inventions. Their music and their movies. The cars you can drive fast down long, empty motorways. I loved it all. And I loved seeing it with you.”
His voice cracks on the last words. They tighten in him like a fist closing around his heart. Always back to you, angel. Every road led there. Every pleasure. Every memory worth keeping. Oysters in Rome. Crepes in Paris. Sushi in London. A tartan bow tie bent over a menu. Blue eyes bright over some ridiculous dessert. Those soft, manicured hands failing to perform magic tricks and succeeding, every time, in undoing him.
His thoughts begin to fragment at the edges. He thinks absurdly of his plants and whether any of them have survived this long, whether fear itself burns away when the world does. Stupid thought. Plants do not have feelings. But his did. He had made sure of it. Made sure they knew fear, at least. What is the point of beautiful things, after all, if they do not know they are one mistake away from ruin? The thought turns, as all thoughts do, toward Aziraphale: beautiful, impossible Aziraphale, who never seemed to realise how close he came to falling. All his little rebellions, all those tiny acts of disobedience, each one bright enough to make Crowley love him more, and more hopelessly, and more irreparably, with every passing century.
And now he is gone, returned to the cold, sterile ranks of Heaven, leaving Crowley alone at the end of all things.
His vision blurs as the holy fire reaches his eyes. His corneas burn and collapse, and the cracks above him widen, and through them the sky shows in terrible glimpses, red and gold and stranger colours for which neither angelic nor demonic language has prepared him. Everything is returning. Heaven and Hell spilling into matter, all borders undone, all arrangements cancelled. No more negotiation. No more stolen spaces. No more pretending the universe might leave them a corner to inhabit together.
It doesn’t matter what is coming down from the skies because he cannot see anymore. That, at least, is a mercy.
Through the haze of pain he feels a ripple pass through the cathedral, and one of the stoups near him begins to rock on its base. The clear water inside sloshes dangerously against the rim. Another bomb lands. The pedestal tips. The basin falls.
The spill runs outward across the stone in a thin, shining sheet. It moves with appalling calm, finding every slight depression, every invisible gradient in the floor, reflecting firelight in unstable patterns. Toward him comes oblivion, slow and certain, in a narrow silver tongue.
Crowley does not move. He cannot, perhaps, but even if he could, he finds he doesn’t want to. He welcomes this moment. The water will finish what the ground began. There is peace in that knowledge, or something near it, something at least stripped of panic, exhaustion, and pain.
The holy water is inches from his outstretched hand now. One touch and it is over. One drop and Anthony J. Crowley ceases to exist, as if he had never been. He closes his unseeing eyes.
God. Lay me down and wash this world from me. Open the skies and burn it all away.
He hears the dome collapse, and despite his darkened gaze he sees—for an instant, he sees—and it’s a vision of wings and blue eyes—Aegean blue, periwinkle blue, the bluest blue. And a smile. The brightest of them all.
At least the last thing I see is beautiful, he thinks. At least it looks like you.
Then the pain stops.
And the roaring fires fall silent.
And the sirens, the screaming, the Typhoons all fade.
A light shines on him. It soothes. It gathers. It feels like—
“Not yet,” he hears, and hands —or something like hands— close around him.
“Angel!” he gasps.
And then—
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NOVA (Shine a Light On Me)
VNV Nation
I long to feel my heart burned open wide, till nothing else remains
Except the fires from which I came
Like parted souls, divided for an age, awe and wonder I'd embrace
And the world anew again
But now, this picture from me fades
From still's cold hand there's no reprieve, light the fire in me
Shine, shine your light on me
Illuminate me, make me complete
Lay me down, and wash this world from me
Open the skies, and burn it all away
'Cause I've been waiting, all my life just waiting
For you to shine, shine your light on me
I dreamed the world, with my eyes open
But time moved on and then, new worlds begin again
Oh my heart, in this universe so vast
No moment was made to last, so light the fire in me
Shine, shine your light on me
Illuminate me, make me complete
Please shine, shine your light on me
No hesitation, make me complete
Lay me down, and wash this world from me
Open the skies, and burn it all away
'Cause I've been waiting, all my life just waiting
For you to shine, shine your light on me