Work Text:
They are the universe.
They are the very first stirring of anything anywhere, all heat and pressure, expanding and cooling as one.
They are two separate pieces of matter, floating together again and again to form gas clouds, stars, even entire galaxies, the universe becoming at a pace all its own.
They are a little ball amidst it all, green and blue and black and white, which eventually swirled into existence despite all odds, formed within a blistering sun and cast out to spin alone in the cold. They huddle beside one another, North and South, East and West, sea and land, both beautiful and silent and waiting.
They are the first miniscule signs of life, replicating and replicating faster than you can say ‘eternity’, tumbling over themselves and one another to create and create and create once more.
They are the twists and turns in each mountain spring, the droplets of dew in each valley, the foam in every wave that crashes on every shore.
Many, many years later, they are the scales shifting on the sea creatures that somehow, some way, find themselves living in shallower waters, and eventually coming to dwell on land.
Many years later still, they are a shriek and a roar between two dinosaurs, powered by each beast knowing they must attack the other simply because their paths have crossed, and yet somehow evading their instincts to survive and allowing their would-be-opponent safe passage.
Eventually, they are the beam of light which animates every mammal from deep within its belly; they are the unique glints in the eyes of two fox kits wrestling in the long, verdant grasses of England, two flaps made by the wings of two migrating birds, racing one another across vast continents, higher and higher and higher and higher. They are the identical thudding hearts, the twin churning stomachs, of each pair of human beings who find themselves wordlessly, tragically and buoyantly in love, their fate undetermined but their faith in their futures unshakeable.
After working together over centuries to move the ink and the nibs that write every book, individually occupying the warring factions of dog-ear and bookmark (it needn’t be explained who was on which side) and dually experiencing the flutter of a page turning, because together, they were each page of every book - the good ones, the bad ones, the “it was alright” ones, the ones lost to history and the ones humans will keep reading until the end of days - they felt it was time to experience the other side of humanity’s greatest invention: literature.
And so they are, at long last, a bookseller and an astrophysicist. Meeting in a bookshop, because where else would they possibly meet? One writes books, one reads them, and both has yet to experience a truly worthy story of his own.
Then, before they know it, they are sitting on deck chairs, in the South Downs, with a telescope and mugs of cocoa. There are wedding rings, two of them, that they have decided they will pass on, when the time is right, to a human who can look after them; they will inhabit them for a while when the next Earthly couple assumes possession of them. They will sit there, in the garden, for what feels like forever, and it will be forever, because they are the quivers of each blade of grass, too, and the juice of the fruit on the crooked tree above them, and its curling roots and snapping branches and the spindly legs of each bug that crawls on it, the twitching nose of each field mouse that shelters under it.
They are the universe. And they are us, as you have come to understand by now.
They love us, you see. And they know, better than they know themselves, better than they know each other, that we, in turn, love them.