Work Text:
Anthony leaves this letter tucked into the Book of Life, the one they bought on their honey moon in Scotland, between two blank pages.
***
Dear Aziraphale,
If you are reading this, then one of two things has happened.
Either I have died dramatically, which frankly would suit my brand terribly well, or I have become incapable of saying these things aloud without you interrupting every few minutes to cry into your cardigan.
I suspect it is the second one.
You always did leak emotionally at inconvenient moments.
I have been thinking about Alpha Centauri again.
You know the one. You always pretended to understand the astronomy for my sake, though I caught you once describing it to Muriel as “Anthony’s favorite shiny thing.”
Technically inaccurate, incidentally. Saturn’s rings still hold that title.
But Alpha Centauri is close enough to matter. Only a little over four light-years away. Cosmically speaking, next door. If humanity survives itself long enough, someone will stand beneath those stars one day.
And we will never see it.
That used to grieve me.
Not simply because I wanted more time, though naturally I did. Greedy creature that I am. No, what hurt was the scale of it all. The endlessness of the universe compared to the terrible brevity of us.
There are nebulae we will never drift through together.
Clouds of stellar dust taller than empires where newborn stars open their burning eyes for the first time.
There are oceans beneath frozen moons. Rings around distant planets glittering like shattered cathedral windows. Galaxies so far away their light began traveling toward Earth before humans learned to write poetry.
Imagine that.
Somewhere in the universe, ancient starlight is still on its way here while you are downstairs complaining that I’ve once again left books on the stairs “like literary landmines.”
It all seemed unbearably unfair once.
The infinite things we cannot reach.
The infinite things we cannot be.
I used to lie awake sometimes thinking about death in astronomical terms. The eventual cooling of the Sun. Entropy. Expansion. The universe slowly thinning into silence over unimaginable ages.
Then you would roll over half-asleep, place your hand on my chest as though checking whether I still existed, and suddenly oblivion felt strangely unconvincing.
You ridiculous man.
You soft miraculous thing.
Do you remember the night in Wales when we watched the Perseids from the bonnet of the Bentley-equivalent disaster you insisted was “still perfectly functional”? You fell asleep halfway through and snored gently while meteors crossed the sky overhead.
At one point I looked at you and realized something that frightened me with its simplicity:
I would rather spend one mortal lifetime loving you than an eternity untouched by you.
There it is.
The whole thing.
That is the center of me.
Not the stars. Not science. Not all the elegant terrible machinery of the cosmos.
You.
You, reading in bed with your glasses sliding down your nose.
You, standing in the garden speaking to roses as though negotiations are underway.
You, saying “good lord” every time I drive too fast, which is always.
I have spent my life studying the universe, and still my favorite discovery remains the expression you make when handed particularly good cocoa.
I know we are old now.
Our bodies creak like haunted floorboards. We make noises sitting down that would alarm younger people. Last Tuesday you injured your shoulder reaching for marmalade with excessive enthusiasm.
And yet.
And yet I look at you sometimes and feel exactly as I did the first day in the bookshop.
There you are.
As though my soul recognized yours before my mind managed to catch up.
Funny thing is, I do not think it would matter what we were.
Human.
Angel.
Demon.
Dust.
I think I would find you in every version of existence.
I think somewhere in some impossible universe, we are still ourselves beneath different names. Perhaps beings made of starlight drifting between galaxies. Perhaps two monks copying manuscripts in candlelight. Perhaps sailors. Perhaps astronomers standing on alien shores beneath unfamiliar constellations.
And in every universe, you would still overpack for trips.
Some laws transcend physics.
Sometimes I imagine taking your hand and showing you everything we will never truly see.
We would leave Earth quietly at dusk.
No rockets. Too vulgar.
Just the two of us stepping gently into the dark between stars.
You would complain immediately about the temperature.
I would explain vacuum exposure.
You would ignore me.
We would pass Mars first, rust-red and lonely as an abandoned prayer. Then Jupiter with storms large enough to swallow histories whole. Saturn, naturally, because I would insist.
You would cry when you saw the rings properly.
Do not deny it. You absolutely would.
Then outward.
Beyond the heliopause where the Sun becomes merely another bright thing among billions.
We would drift through the Orion Nebula where stars are born inside vast glowing clouds of hydrogen and dust. Pink and gold and blue stretching across light-years like paint spilled by God after too much wine.
You would say it looked holy.
I would say everything does when you’re holding the right hand.
And eventually we would reach Alpha Centauri.
Three stars dancing around one another across the dark.
Close enough to touch if measured against eternity.
Far beyond us if measured by flesh.
Perhaps we would stand there silently awhile.
Then you would slip your hand into mine and ask whether there was anywhere further to go.
And because I love you, I would say yes.
Always yes.
That is the strange miracle of loving another person. The universe stops being a place you observe and becomes a place you share.
Before you, the stars were beautiful.
After you, they became home.
I know what is coming eventually.
We do not say it often, but it sits quietly beside us these days like a polite guest neither of us invited.
One of us will go first.
Statistically likely me, unless your diet of cheese finally achieves sentience and murders you in your sleep.
I am afraid of it sometimes.
Not death itself.
Leaving you behind inside a world still full of ordinary mornings.
Because who will remind you to eat lunch while writing?
Who will fix the ancient boiler by threatening it creatively?
Who will love you with sufficient theatrical devotion?
But darling, listen carefully.
If there is anything after this, I will find you.
And if there is nothing, then loving you was still enough.
More than enough.
A lifetime.
A real one.
Not grand. Not cosmic.
Just ours.
Two old men beneath meteor showers writing tiny beautiful things in an unfinished book.
Today the flowers are in full bloom.
And they will be.
For as long as someone remembers.
Yours, in this life and every impossible one,
Anthony