Archive of Our Own

It’s colder than before, though perhaps not colder than it ever was. Colder than he remembers, certainly, but there isn’t much of that left to compare it to. The marble halls of Heaven stretch out, white and wide, illuminated by an endless, sourceless light. The ground beneath the bench is as pale as selenite, as if the space has been flooded with bleach and allowed to set, the veins in the stone running grey as lightning in a winter sky.

The word forms—bench—lurches, and when he tries to tie it to the thing he is lying on, it rebels and dissipates. It doesn’t seem to apply—or to want to apply—to the unyielding slab of ivory on which he has awoken.

His robes pool, heavy and soft, about his knees. They are the same colour as everything else: not white, precisely, but the colour that pretends to be. He does not know how long he has been here. He does not know why he is here, or where here begins and ends. His mind, on rising, feels as though it has been filled with sand and then swept clean: no memory, no context, only a thick, dull longing humming in his chest and throat. He flexes his hands in his lap. They shake. He watches them for a while, as if the sight of his own fingers might trigger something—an answer, a direction, even a hint of who or what he is. Nothing arrives. He laces them tightly together, the way one might in prayer.

He wonders, vaguely, if he has been here before, like this.

There is a sky above, painted in the style of a Renaissance ceiling, more mural than vault: clouds rolling as if alive, but motionless. The eye of the sun —or what Heaven calls a sun— glares, too bright to look at directly, yet failing to cast a shadow on anything. No warmth. No time of day. Only the suggestion of both, and that is enough to leave him doubting even the hour.

Hours. Time?

Time.

He allows the concept to rattle in his mind. It feels familiar—or as if it ought to be— but when he tries to focus on it, it slides out of place like a floater in one’s eye.

He rises slowly, as if afraid to disturb the silence—a silence so thick that the rustle of his robes against the bench seems to reverberate. He moves forward, slippers soundless on the cold floor, and as he walks, the air parts before him like the water of a baptismal font, reforming, perfect and undisturbed, after he passes. Along the corridor, cherubic statues stand at regular intervals, each pair of stone eyes following him. Their faces are bland, neither kind nor cruel. He tries to remember if he knows any of their names, but there is nothing—only the word cherub, floating up as if summoned from nowhere.

Air. To breathe. It is an idea, and his corporation shifts to accommodate it—an expanding chest, a reflex remembered — but he realises he no longer understands the mechanics of it.

He touches one of the cherub’s hands, marble fingers cool and perfectly rendered, and for a second feels the urge to apologise. It seems an intrusion, to leave the heat of his own palm on something so immaculately clean. The statue’s lips are pursed, as if in anticipation of a secret or a kiss.

It was so quiet that he could hear his thoughts touching every second as he waited. What for? He didn’t know, but a yearning pressed on his chest, and he wished he had another chance.

He wondered, then, if he was dead. What a thought, to die. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream. It rose from within him, and it was sharp as a knife, as a flaming sword. His mouth flooded with the taste of grapes —he knew grapes, didn’t he? His tongue seemed to know them— and it hurt, but he didn’t know why.

If he was dead, was this Heaven, or a dream of Heaven, or merely a white corridor running the length of his own extinction? The urge to move forward grew; it was that or return to the bench and sit forever, uncertain and blank as a page.

He followed the curve of the corridor, past silent witnesses of stone, until he came to a tall, arched window. It looked out over a vast expanse—distance rendered in impossible, perspective-stretching scale. There was a world down there, visible through high clouds that stood like sentinels over the blue-black void.

Except the world was… wrong.

It wasn’t round, wasn’t whole. Fractures ran through the crust in lightning patterns, entire continents peeled away as if by a careless hand. It looked, more than anything, like a snow globe dropped from a great height, frozen mid-shatter. Nothing moved. No auroras, no swirl of cloud, no glint of city light or fire. He stared and found himself shivering.

Earth.

A memory, maybe. Or a premonition. For a moment the window reflected back flickers of something: a pair of golden, slitted eyes; the drone of sirens over a London street, crumbling and rain-slick; the hush of burial chambers, torchlit and close; somewhere so old it had never known the sun; a flood, forty days and forty nights of relentless storm.

Aziraphale gasped, but there was no air, and therefore no sound.

Below him the world turned slowly, though one could hardly blame it if it had stopped. The seasons took all they had come for. Whatever spring had once meant down there—blossom, rain, lambs in wet fields, the vulgar but undeniable optimism of daffodils—it had been interrupted. Winter, a strange type of winter, had dressed the ground in white and grey because there was, apparently, little else remaining in the wardrobe of the world.

Yes, he thought. He had been here before, and he had watched. He fought the vapour-thin quality of the memory and clung on to it, eyes wide open. Unblinking.

He pressed his hand to the glass, which didn’t yield or even fog at his touch. He searched the curve of the ruined Earth, looking for a sign—a city, a monument, even a single living thing. The sun in the sky, here, felt like a lie, a prop to keep him from remembering the End.

He had been here before, and it was London he found himself watching most often.

There was no obvious reason for that. Many cities had burned more spectacularly. Others had been obliterated so thoroughly that one might almost call their destruction merciful, there being little left to trouble the eye afterwards. London, by contrast, endured in fragments, and fragments had a way of imposing themselves on the mind. Something of St Paul’s Cathedral remained. Something of the river. Certain streets, though broken, still retained the insolent suggestion that traffic might return at any moment. Whole terraces stood with their façades attached and their insides gone, like respectable people whose principles had been removed but whose clothing remained impeccable.

There is something particularly English, Aziraphale might once have thought, in surviving as architecture after substance has gone. If he had thought this before, he has no recollection of it now.

The fires and obliterations in his memory were already receding, and he sensed that if he left this spot, this window, he might never come back to them, might lose even the ghost of what he’d once witnessed.

He closed his eyes. He tried to pull a name from the void, his or someone else’s, but there was nothing, only the hollow urge for something more. In the darkness behind his eyelids, the yellow eyes flashed again, and for a moment he felt as if he were tumbling, all his bones made light, plummeting towards some impossible reunion. When he opened them, the world was still broken, and so was he.

He turned away from the window. The corridor led onward, deeper into Heaven’s heart. Each step he took, his feet remembered the rhythm before his mind did: heel, toe, heel. It felt practiced, even if the rest of him had forgotten why. He wondered if there were others here—if somewhere, beyond a door, a friend or foe waited with a cup of tea or a gun. The thought came fully formed, but made no sense at all. He’d never touched a gun, had he? He couldn’t picture it.

But someone else had. And had pointed it at him, and he’d wanted them to.

Trust me.

The next room was wider. Along one side ran a line of empty shelves, as if awaiting something to be catalogued or stored. The air here was still and thick, like the hush before a congregation recites the Lord’s Prayer. In the centre stood a table of pale gypsum, and on the table, a single white feather. He approached, half-expecting it to flutter in a breeze, but it didn’t. It was perfectly motionless, heavy as stone.

He reached out, ran his finger along the shaft of the feather. It was cold, and for a moment, the sense of longing spiked, sharp and violent. He thought he might remember wings—his own, or someone else’s—but the thought was gone before he could grasp it.

We were blessed with wings, once.

He tried to picture it: himself, unshackled from gravity, soaring above a living, unbroken world. And there was someone else, red and white and blindingly beautiful. The thought brought no comfort, only a stab of nostalgia so powerful it hollowed him out. He clutched the feather, but it dissolved in his hand, leaving behind a residue like salt on his palm. He licked it, and it stung his mouth.

He walked on, and the walls opened into a gallery, lined with stained-glass windows. The glass depicted scenes he could not fully understand: a man standing over a burning city, a woman weeping at a blackened river, a snake coiled around the trunk of a tree, the apple gripped in its teeth. The faces of the figures seemed familiar, but when he tried to focus, the details turned watery and fled.

At the far end of the gallery, a gate of mother-of-pearl stood open, framing a blinding rectangle of light. He walked towards it, one slow step after another, his feet raising no sound at all. As he passed through the threshold, the light enveloped him, and for a moment he thought he might be erased entirely—turned into that same clean blankness, stripped of the last tatter of self. But on the other side, he found only a staircase leading downward.

The air was different here. Thinner, colder. He felt the beginnings of gravity again, as if he were being invited to fall.

He stood at the top of the staircase, spiralling down into shadow. He glanced over his shoulder. The corridor behind him was empty, and the gallery was already fading from sight, as if the universe were trimming away everything he’d left behind.

He hesitated, balanced on the edge. He thought of the shattered world, the eyes in the darkness, the longing that would not die. He knew, without knowing how, that whatever waited below would be sharper than this. That to go down was to choose against the comfort of forgetting.

He steadied himself. In the stillness, he spoke a name, but it came out as a whisper of wind, lost before it reached his own ears.

He took the first step down.

*****

There was a moment—a heartbeat, a breathless instant—when the stairs seemed to go on forever. Aziraphale’s feet moved without effort, the soles of his slippers never quite touching the spiral of steps. Down and down and down. The light at his back faded, and the air grew colder. He descended through a sky that had ceased to deserve the name, into a world that was vaguely familiar and entirely ruined.

The cloud cover was not cloud so much as residue. Cinders and chemical dust, the suspended remains of forests, houses, paper, skin, railings, ribbons, window frames, unposted letters, hedgerows, grocery lists, lungs. Here and there the light penetrated it, but without conviction. He passed through layers of dimness in which nothing moved, no bird sang, and an atmosphere that leaked out from the fissures of the globe and would soon cease to exist.

Then the cold took him. It did not merely touch the skin; it entered, established itself, and began the slow, steady work of making everything else secondary. He stood for a moment in the middle of a London street, with snow and remains in drifts about his shoes.

Shoes. He looked down and saw a pair of tan Balmoral boots. His corporation seemed to be remembering this on his behalf. He shuffled a bit, mixing the ashes with the snow, the ground dressed in white and grey. It paired well with the silence and the cold.

He looked up and around him. The street had once been busy. There were traces of it, of double-deckers, of bicycles, of the fretful and unending enterprise of a city forever on the brink of being late for something. Now the corpses of machines lay still and silent in a permanent interruption. A bus leaned into a crater, its upper deck open to the sky. Two motorcars stood nose to tail in the grey drift as if stopped at an invisible light. The names of streets were still fixed to corners in enamel, as though the fidelity of municipal signage might be of some final comfort to the dead.

It might have been, but there was no one left to comfort.

London was a city of ghosts. The Thames, once a living thread, lay solid and choked with grey ice, the bridges nothing but bony spines arching from shore to shore. Buildings, the ones that still pretended to stand, sagged under the weight of frozen fallout. Windows were scabbed over in layers of dust and plastic sheeting, starburst cracks radiating from every pane like veins. In one of them, a hand-painted sign still clung to the frost: “Back in 5 mins.”

Time.

Aziraphale walked, because that was what the body remembered, and because standing still felt like surrender. His footsteps made very little sound. The ash and snow between them had produced a surface both soft and treacherous; now and then his shoes sank deeper than expected, and once he stepped through what looked like ordinary drift only to strike the shattered roof of a buried car beneath. The city had been first burned, then powdered, then preserved.

Union flags hung from a few surviving lamp-posts, the colours leached and ragged, fluttering at the edges. They looked more like surrender banners than symbols of hope. Here and there, piles of sandbags slumped against doorways, hollowed and leaking their contents.

He tried to recall why he was here. The details remained stubbornly absent, but the context grew clearer with every step. There had been something: the Rapture? The Second Coming? He couldn’t summon a vision, but he knew with the certainty of scripture that this desolation was not accidental, nor the product of time alone. Someone had ended the world on purpose. Maybe it had been necessary. Maybe it had been him, and that is why he was forced to forget.

He passed the remains of a bookshop and stopped without knowing why.

There was less left of it than of most of the neighbouring buildings. The front windows were gone; the upper story had collapsed inward, and the lower had followed. Shelves, if shelves there had been, were buried under a compacted black-white mass, which he recognised after a moment as books burned, soaked, frozen, and compressed. It ought not, by any reasonable standard, to have affected him more than any of the other ruins. Yet he stood there a long time, gazing in at the destruction with an expression that, had anyone been present to see it, might have been mistaken for bereavement.

Somewhere in the damaged chambers of his mind, a bell rang above a door.

He saw, or nearly saw, lamplight on polished wood. Stacked volumes. A chair in the back. Cocoa—although whether he remembered the smell or only the idea of it he could not have said. He had the strangest conviction that he had once been happy there in a way both modest and complete, and that he had not been alone. The sensation passed before he could catch it properly, leaving behind only agitation and an absurd inclination to step over the rubble and search for something whose name he did not know.

He put a hand to his face, expecting tears, but found only cold skin. The loneliness that overtook him was so vast, so tightly interwoven with what he was (who am I? What am I?) that pain didn’t dare touch him. Regret seemed a luxury too far gone for this place.

He made his way past St Martin-in-the-Fields, its portico shattered and columns canted, but he did not stop. He seemed to have a destination, even if he didn’t know where or why. So little mattered now. He saw, ahead, the jagged profile of St Paul’s Cathedral, a fraction of its dome still stubbornly in place, though the skin of it was flayed and blackened. The steps up to it were drifted over with ashen snow, and the doors hung open, one sheared off entirely.

He felt drawn there, as if the heart of the world pulsed beneath that dome, even now.

As he crossed the square, a gust of wind tugged at his coat, urging him onward. He looked up at the leaden sky, the thick clouds threatening to collapse at any moment, and in the shapes of them he thought he saw a figure. The twist of a curl (red), the blink of an eye (yellow), a smattering of dots (sienna and sepia) over the slope of a profile (pale).

My beloved, do you know how many times I stared at clouds, thinking that I saw you there? The words came from nowhere, and he tried to follow them to their origin, but there was only the ache, the absence, the unfillable space where someone ought to be.

At the foot of the cathedral’s steps, he stopped. The wind settled, the cold folding in around him like an embrace. He stood, watching the entrance, and wondered if perhaps he was already inside, if this was some echo or memory that the mind conjured at the very end. But he felt the press of the world, the weight of all its sorrow, and knew this was as real as things could get now.

He looked down at his hands and flexed them against the numbness. The veins stood out, blue and bright, beneath papery skin. He wondered if he ought to feel fear, or at least some echo of awe, but what came instead was something like pride—thin, misplaced, almost unrecognisable. Pride in having made it here, to the end of all things, still standing. He had come down from Heaven, crossed the empty city, and not once lost the thread of himself entirely, whatever that self might now be.

He set his foot on the first step. The snow made no sound under his shoe. He climbed.

***

Inside the cathedral, the cold was different—older, if such a thing could be true. Aziraphale stepped through the doorless entrance and was met by the echo of every footfall, as if the building itself were unwilling to let go of the sound. The nave was a trough of shadow, all the old warmth bled out through the wounds in its stained glass. He moved down the central aisle, boots stirring dust and ash in small, hesitant puffs.

The pews were splintered and scattered, most of them reduced to cinders, the rest stripped of any claim to comfort. The floor was littered with fragments: candle stubs, charred hymnals, the twisted brass of collection plates. A whole section of the dome had collapsed, bathing the interior in a sullen, indirect light. Every surface was dusted with grey, the snow from outside having crept in and mingled with the aftermath of fire and ruin.

Near the altar, the devastation was worse. The once-white marble was veined with spiderweb cracks, the steps up to it blackened and slick. And there was a figure. At first, Aziraphale thought it must be a fallen statue, one of the many saints that had been spared the worst. But as he drew closer, he saw it for what it was: a body, flash-cooked into a perfect shell of ash on the charred marble floor.

He stood a few feet away, unsure what to do, feeling as if he’d walked in on a private conversation. The body looked ancient (time), but there was no way of telling for how long it’d been here. Its clothes had been burned away, but the shape of them lingered in the patterns of grey and black on the surface. The face was nearly featureless, all detail sandblasted away, but Aziraphale felt certain it had once been a friend, or at least someone known.

Someone loved.

He knelt, out of respect or habit, and for a moment simply studied the figure. The air here was thick with memory. He was not prepared for the feeling it stirred: an almost unbearable tenderness, something that threatened to break through the numbness that had protected him since waking.

He didn’t feel alone anymore, not quite, even though the cathedral was as empty as a coffin.

A few feet away, the holy water stoup was overturned, its basin shattered. The floor was stained where water had pooled, then evaporated, leaving a white crust behind.

He reached out, almost involuntarily, and laid a hand on the ash-figure’s shoulder. The surface was powdery, fragile, and part of him feared the whole thing would collapse at the slightest pressure. Instead, it held—just enough to convince him he wasn’t imagining it. A breeze slipped in through the dome’s ruin, scattering a swirl of motes around them.

He bowed his head, the words forming in his mind: My beloved.

A rush of everything that had passed and everything that had not come to pass fought its way to his consciousness. A maddening swirl of colours that clashed horribly with the ashen white, the silicate and cinders of the eternal nuclear winter, and now he knew, he knew what it was—that the bombs had gone off, that the planes had fallen from the sky, that for days, for weeks (time!), all things had perished, and the last of them was here under his eyes.

My beloved, and no name came to his lips, for everything that he had ever uttered had ceased to exist, and he could not. He could not.

He looked at the statue’s hands. They were fused together, the fingers interlaced, and he wondered if that had been a comfort in the final moments. He tried to picture his own hands, once, holding another’s—gentle, protective, desperate not to let go.

I’m so proud of what we were, my darling.

A crack had formed across the statue’s chest, and fine powder was leaking out in a slow, inevitable slide. He placed his hand over the break, as if to heal it, and for a moment felt the illusion of warmth pass through his palm.

AZIRAPHALE.

He heard it, and he did not recognise the name, but he knew the voice.

YOU HAVE WANDERED TOO FAR THIS TIME, MY CHILD.

Time.

Aziraphale did not take his hand away from the figure but sat on his hunches and raised his head to listen intently.

YOU MUST RETURN. THE REFORMING OF THE WORLD WILL BEGIN. AND EVERYTHING WILL BE MADE PERFECT, AND NO FLAW WILL REMAIN. HEAVEN’S VICTORY OVER HELL WILL BE ABSOLUTE, THANKS TO YOU. NOW YOU MUST REST AND LET IT HAPPEN.

Aziraphale nodded and felt the voice recede as the ground under him started to rumble. This, he thought as the vibrations shook him, he remembered too.

He had been here before. He had seen the rest of the cathedral crumble, the ashes and snow swirling to the skies —the figure at his feet swirling and rising with them— and leaving the Earth before everything, everything became alight and torn.

How many times (time…) will this happen, he didn’t know.

IT IS TIME TO GO.

He leaned in close, his voice but a whisper. “Not yet,” he said.

For a second, he thought the statue answered him. Thought he saw the lips move, barely, and a single word escaped, dry as paper:

“Angel!”

He drew back. The figure slumped, the shoulder collapsing inward. A gust of wind found its way into the nave, and with it, the statue gave way, the ash breaking apart like a sandcastle under a wave, into a low mound on the altar steps. In the sudden silence, Aziraphale bowed his head. He felt neither sadness nor relief, only the slow thaw of a long winter.

He stood and dusted off his clothes. He looked up at the ragged dome, saw the sky above—still colourless, still cold, but somehow a little less oppressive than before. The world was ruined, yes, but something in it still remembered beauty, even if only as a rumour or a dream.

He turned from the altar, the echo of his steps softer now, as if the cathedral itself were mourning with him. The wind had picked up, swirling the ash into eddies, lifting it high. For an instant, it looked like wings, spread wide and rising towards the broken heavens.

He left the cathedral and stepped out into the dead city. The air was cold and empty, but the longing in his chest was quiet at last. No pain remained, no feeling. Eternity awaited.

He returned to Heaven, to the ivory bench, lay down, and closed his eyes. A fistful of ash now hidden in the seam of his robe.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he’d try to remember again. And then, perhaps—

His eyes flew open.

“Crowley!” He gasped.

__________________________________________________________

BELOVED

VNV Nation