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“Say goodbye, then.”
With the Lord’s voice – for the first time in so many millennia – ringing in his ears, Aziraphale turned for the last time to the being who had been there beside him for every step of the way. Well. If they were to become stardust once again, then let them be the stardust that formed a new universe.
A touch of fingers to lips and the world was entirely in those golden eyes and then there was silence.
It lasted for an eternity.
Aziraphale opened his eyes.
Wait. No.
There was light and brightness and he was standing. Not in the bookshop, not anymore. But there was light. Not golden like the eyes he had been looking into and it took a moment, to adjust, to be able to see, to see his face reflected back at him in a pane of glass.
Himself.
Only himself.
Aziraphale’s heart stuttered in his chest. Crowley! His hand was empty, golden eyes were gone. Was this a punishment? Had She changed the game again, playing with them like pieces to be knocked off the board at will.
“Crowley!” He spun, ready to face whatever hells or torments or–
A… a living room?
Aziraphale turned on the spot, warily. Painted walls. Beams. Shelves lined with books – his books, no less. Plush armchairs and couches. A fireplace with a merrily blazing fire. Broad windows edged with curtains, a couple of folded tartan blankets tucked under one of them.
His things.
They were his things from the bookshop.
Only there were other things too.
On the walls between the many shelves, propped here and there against books, incongruous but there: pictures. Pictures of them. Some formal, some not so, but all of them, every one of them, he and Crowley and their misadventures.
Taking a quivering breath, Aziraphale stepped closer to one of the shelves, lifting down a polished brass frame. Rome. A picture from Rome. How was that even possible?
A thunder from above jolted him from his dazed reverie.
Above.
Oh. Yes.
At the far end of the room, he could see the edge of a staircase.
“Hello?” he called out, setting down the frame. “Hello, is someone there?”
“Angel?” Crowley!
Aziraphale was running even before the thunder of footsteps upstairs began again and they met in the middle, crashing into one another halfway up the stairs, grasping at one another, hands on arms and chest and faces, as if–
As if they hadn’t seen one another fading out of very existence.
“You’re here,” Aziraphale burst out, tears leaping to his eyes. “Crowley, you’re here.”
Broad warm hands cupped his face, Crowley staring searchingly – for what, Aziraphale didn’t know – and, sulphur-and-lava bright, those lovely eyes were brimming over too. “You’re alive,” Crowley’s voice was a cracked thing. “You’re alive.”
“I am,” Aziraphale managed, though it was a near thing. “I am, my darling, darling boy.”
Crowley lolloped down the last stair between them – broad, generous stairs – and pulled Aziraphale into the tightest of embraces, clinging to him so tightly, as if he might never ever let go. He was breathing so hard, shaking all over, and Aziraphale was… well. Blancmange couldn’t match him for quivering.
They stood like that for a long, long while. Aziraphale didn’t – could never – want to let go, not with the living breathing rasp of Crowley’s breath in his ear and the rise and fall of his narrow ribs under Aziraphale’s palm. If he cried, no one but Crowley knew, and vice versa.
Crowley was the one to draw back, but only a little way, and his hands never left Aziraphale’s shoulders as he looked around.
“This,” he said in that emotionally-wrung murmur, “isn’t oblivion.”
“No.” Aziraphale brought a hand up to smooth the front of Crowley’s shirt. Gently. Arranging it just so. “I don’t think it is.”
Crowley’s features thrummed through a dozen expressions like a flickbook: puzzled, relieved, bewildered, alarmed, wary and so many more. “There’s bedrooms upstairs,” he said. “And a bathroom and study and some other doors I didn’t check yet.”
“A house?” Aziraphale frowned.
“Maybe.” Crowley slid his hands down, one of them closing on Aziraphale’s. “Come with me, angel?”
Aziraphale threaded his fingers between his beloved demon’s. “Always,” he murmured.
The lines creasing up Crowley’s brow softened and the small smile – the one Aziraphale knew no one but he had ever seen – returned. “Getting soft on me, angel?”
“As pudding, I’m afraid,” he replied, just to make Crowley’s eyes crinkle.
Hand-in-hand, they made their way through the house. Yes, it was a house. A quite lovely one. A kitchen with all kinds of foods. Cosy rooms decorated with little knick knacks that they both recognised well, had thought long gone, or had simply forgotten they had over so many, many years.
“Why is it all here?” Aziraphale wondered, not for the first time. “It should be gone.”
“So should we,” Crowley pointed out quietly. He scooped up Aziraphale’s hand and kissed his knuckles. “Glad we’re not though.”
Even though they didn’t know where here was. Even if they didn’t know when or how they were here. Or what lay ahead of them. But it didn’t matter because – as he had said in the bookshop at the very end of the world – they were together.
There were windows, several of them, but Aziraphale hadn’t dared to look beyond them yet. Some seemed to have darkness, but light – not sunlight – gleamed in others. And, of course, a door in the hall that seemed to lead to the outside, an outside that could be anywhere.
“We should look,” he said, eyeing the polished brass handle as if it might bite him. “Oughtn’t we?”
“Could just… not,” Crowley said. “Stay in here with all our things.”
Even as he said it, Aziraphale could see the indecision in his eyes. Too curious, Crowley. Always wanted to know why. “Because you’d have too many questions, otherwise,” he said as gently as he could. “This way, you know the answer.”
“For a given degree of answer,” Crowley grumbled, but took a wobbly breath. “All right. On three, then?”
It almost felt like a damp squib when they opened the door onto a garden. A very ordinary – although very nice – garden. There was even–
“Oh good Lord,” Aziraphale breathed. “It can’t be.”
A very, very familiar tree, heavy with fruit, stood under the star-smeared sky. So many stars, the indigo sky teeming with them, brilliant and colourful and radiant and as staggeringly beautiful as the day they had first met.
“It’s wrong,” Crowley said, his hand tightening on Aziraphale’s.
Given the circumstances, that could be anything.
“Which bit?” Aziraphale asked.
Crowley pointed upwards. “The stars. Never seen those stars in my life and I know stars.” He narrowed his eyes at them. “They’re new. Freshly baked.”
“A new universe,” Aziraphale breathed. “She did it.”
“No. No, no, no.” Crowley twisted anxiously around. “That was for them. It was for them. We’re not meant to be part of it.” He looked around wildly. “This isn’t – it’s a new game, isn’t it?” He threw his head back. “Is this your idea of a joke? A punishment? You think we wouldn’t notice?”
All at once, the air felt tight and just as suddenly, the sensation was gone.
“Oh, is that how it’s gonna be?” Crowley snarled.
“Crowley–” Aziraphale shook his arm.
“It’s not–”
“Crowley!” Grabbing his arm with both hands, Aziraphale tugged sharply. “Look!”
There, on a doorstep that had been bare a moment ago, there was a box. Neatly wrapped with a bow. A present.
Crowley made a wary sound, nudging it with the tip of his toe.
“Feels like one of those cartoons,” he grumbled. “If we open that and there’s a cannonball or a lit stick of dynamite, I reserve the right to yell some more.”
Aziraphale leaned down and gingerly picked it up. Barely as big as his hands, it hardly weighed a thing, but for some reason, it made him tremble all over. He set it on the nearest window ledge, untying the bow. A tag slithered free, caught by Crowley before it could hit the floor.
“Enjoy your new home. Here is a final gift,” he read, squinting at the letters, “for your ineffable work.”
Her sigil glistened in gold and octarine.
Taking a breath to fortify himself, Aziraphale lifted the lid.
Within the box, there was…
“Oh.”
There was…
“Is that–”
Aziraphale nodded, eyes brimming again. He reached into the box and lifted out the glass orb filled with a blazing burst of light, a beginning of all things.
Before the end, there had been a bookshop in a bubble at the end of the world.
Now…
“It’s everything,” he whispered. “A new universe.” Tears spilled over and down his cheeks. “For them.”
With no angels in there, no demons, no interference or wars or ineffable or great plans.
Crowley reached out and tentatively, carefully touched the glass. “And we get to see it happen,” he breathed.
A final gift, She had written. Letting them see the world they had caused to come into being, for as long as it would last. Maybe not the heat death of the universe, but there, for them, to watch and appreciate and remember.
He looked up through the window at the new stars above them – in their own personal universe – and nodded. “Thank you,” he said softly.
She never replied, but, then again, She never really had.