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The Soho sun had that pale and persistent quality of afternoons that refuse to die. Inside the “Alpha Centauri” bookstore, the air was stagnant, heavy with dust that seemed to contain fragments of forgotten stories.
Asa sighed, brushing the back of his hand across his forehead. There was something about that place that always stirred an ache of nostalgia he couldn’t explain, a kind of constant déjà vu that vibrated at the tips of his fingers whenever he touched the spine of an old book.
Ever since he had taken over the care of the shop, after Derek’s convenient decision to take a long vacation with his husband, he felt less like a bookseller and more like a ghost inhabiting someone else’s memory.
“Still checking the shelves in the back? You’ve been in ‘organization maniac’ mode for like a week.” Anthony’s voice came from the entrance, amused and tinged with the sweet sarcasm that was his personal trademark.
Asa turned around. Anthony was leaning against the doorframe, his dark sunglasses hiding his eyes despite the dimness of the shop. He wore chocolate brown and cream white, as always, with a careless elegance that defied the laws of fashion and possibly physics.
“Anthony, this shelf is… badly organized; there are botany volumes mixed with seventeenth-century prophecies, it’s complete chaos,” he said while making his usual expressions that always softened Anthony’s heart.
“Chaos is natural, Asa. Order is for people who don’t want others to see their lives as a mess.”
Asa turned his attention back to the bottom shelf, almost pressed against the floor. There was a dark gap there, a shadow that seemed to swallow the light. He reached inside, expecting cobwebs or the usual dust, but his fingers brushed against something cold and smooth.
With some effort, he pulled out a heavy volume that had neither a title on the spine nor an author’s name. It was bound in white leather, so immaculate it seemed to emit its own faint glow in the darkness of the corner.
“What is that?” Anthony asked, curiosity replacing his usual nonchalance.
Asa opened the book. “It’s blank,” Asa whispered, flipping through the pages.
There were hundreds of pages made of high-quality cream paper, but there wasn’t a single stain of ink. Not one letter, not one number. It was a book waiting to be written, or one that had been completely erased. However, when he reached the middle, something fell onto the wooden floor.
A small piece of photographic paper, satin-finished and old. Asa bent down to pick it up. The moment he turned it over, he felt the ground disappear beneath his feet.
“That can’t be…”
In the photograph, beneath a gazebo covered in wisteria that Asa vaguely recognized as part of St. James’s Park, there were two men.
The one on the left wore a tweed suit of almost comical neatness. He had nearly white blond curly hair and an expression of kindness so absolute it was painful to look at. His hands were clasped together, and he looked at the camera with a shy smile. It was Asa. Not someone who looked like him. It was him, down to the last expression line around his eyes.
The man on his right was tall and thin, dressed in a black frock coat from another era. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. His eyes were an intense yellow, with vertical pupils, and he was looking at the man in the tweed suit—not at the camera—with a devotion that bordered on the sacred. It was definitely Anthony.
“Anthony, look at this,” Asa said, his voice breaking. He felt Anthony’s presence right behind him. The air around the red-haired man seemed to have grown dense, charged with static electricity. Anthony took the photo with trembling fingers.
“That… that’s not possible,” Anthony muttered. His glasses slipped slightly down the bridge of his nose, revealing for a second an amber gleam Asa had never noticed before. “We didn’t… we weren’t there, at least not a hundred years ago.”
“Then who are they?” Asa pointed at the blank book. “And why does this book feel like it belongs to me? I feel like if I close my eyes… Anthony, I feel like I’ve known you since long before you walked into the bookstore last year.
･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･
Anthony dropped the photo as if it had burned him. He turned around and started pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly.
“It can’t be!” he exclaimed. “Oh damn hell, now I remember everything.”
Asa stood up, holding the white book against his chest as if it were a shield. “What do you mean you remember everything? What are you talking about?”
Anthony stopped abruptly. He removed his sunglasses completely and, as if for the first time, Asa saw those eyes without any filter. He wasn’t afraid. Instead, he felt a familiar warmth, a deeply familiar sensation striking him in the chest.
“We were supposed to have a normal life,” Anthony said, and his voice sounded as though it were containing millennia of screams. “After what happened with the Metatron, after you decided that… that you wanted to try fixing the system from the inside… after Michael destroyed the Book of Life… after God reset the universe…”
Asa blinked. Blurry images began to seep into his mind: a Bentley speeding down the road, lunch, an angel and a demon stopping an Apocalypse nobody wanted, the two of them in the bookstore as the only beings left in the universe.
“Crowley,” Asa whispered. The name did not come from his throat, but from his soul. Anthony froze. A single tear rolled down his cheek. “Aziraphale,” he replied, almost in a whisper.
Asa looked again at the blank book. Suddenly, the pages no longer seemed empty. Golden filigree began appearing along the edges. A sentence started materializing on the first page, written in an elegant and ancient handwriting Asa recognized as his own:
“There were four beings in that bookstore that was the entire world. An angel, an ex-demon, the devil himself, and one more, one who was there because they were omnipresent. Who had always been there and always would be…”
“God erased everything,” Asa said, stepping closer to Anthony, or Crowley, or whoever that man was who looked at him with such longing. “They left us a chance, a reset for us.”
Crowley looked at the book and then at Asa. A slow and dangerous smile—the smile of someone willing to fight the entire universe a second time—spread across his face.
“Well…” Crowley said, recovering his drawn-out tone but with a new gleam in his eyes, “I’ve always thought bookstores are places with far too much information.”
Asa closed the book with a sharp thud and carefully placed it on the main table. “I think we have a lot to write, Anthony. Or Crowley.”
“Let’s start from the beginning, even if it’s not from a garden,” said the man with amber eyes, offering his arm with an exaggerated bow Asa knew by heart. “Or better yet, let’s start with lunch. Maybe we could go to the Ritz, you know, for the ‘old times.’” Asa smiled, took his companion’s arm, and for the first time in what felt like eternity, he felt that the book of his life was no longer blank.