Chapter Text
Morning in the New Earth always smelled like fresh rain.
It didn’t matter whether the sky was clear or storm clouds gathered over the endless fields; there was something about that world that held onto the damp scent of a freshly watered garden. Maybe it was intentional. Maybe someone was still clinging too tightly to the memory of Eden.
Adam Young watched the horizon from the hilltop, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. Before him, the golden grass swayed beneath a strange wind, one that followed no real direction. Sometimes it blew eastward. Sometimes upward.
That was never a good sign.
“It’s getting worse,” he muttered.
A few feet behind him, another man sat calmly on a flat stone, as if the universe weren’t beginning to fold in on itself again.
Yeshua looked like someone far too tired to be surprised anymore, yet he still carried a youthful, innocent light about him—something Adam found strangely endearing.
He wore simple clothes: a cream-colored shirt rolled up to the elbows and dark trousers covered in road dust. The wind gently stirred his hair as he flipped through an old notebook filled with impossible maps and annotations.
Maps of the world.
Maps of the previous world.
“It’s not Her,” Yeshua finally said, closing the notebook. “It’s coming from below.”
Adam let out a dry laugh.
“Well, that definitely doesn’t sound concerning.”
On the horizon, the air distorted again.
As though someone had torn through an invisible sheet of paper.
A black line appeared in the middle of the field.
Thin.
Trembling.
Alive.
Adam immediately felt something inside him react to it; an old power, buried for years beneath a quiet human life, awakening like a scar beginning to burn before a storm.
He didn’t want that again. He didn’t want to become the Antichrist again. They had known peace for a very long time—eons.
The New Earth knew no celestial wars, no Hell, no unavoidable prophecies. People grew old. Loved. Died when their time came. The universe functioned the way it was supposed to.
Aziraphale and Crowley had made sure of that.
And perhaps that was exactly why Adam felt so nervous.
Because if something was powerful enough to disturb the world they had wished for—the world She had built—
Then things could become truly terrible.
The black crack widened slightly, and from within emerged a sound—not a roar, not a voice.
Something worse.
A choir. Thousands of voices whispering at once in what sounded like more than one language.
Yeshua slowly lifted his head.
For the first time since they had arrived there, he looked genuinely afraid.
“That can’t be,” he whispered.
Adam turned toward him.
“What?”
Yeshua took too long to answer.
“I thought all of them no longer existed.”
The ground trembled.
The crack snapped shut.
Absolute silence.
No wind.
No birds.
No insects.
Adam swallowed hard.
It was only a black line across the dawn clouds, so thin it looked like a flaw in one’s vision. A tiny mistake in reality. Something that vanished the moment you blinked.
But Adam had seen it.
And so had Yeshua.
Because there were certain things impossible to ignore when you remembered the previous universe. The old universe—the real one, in Adam and Yeshua’s eyes. The one that had burned itself into nothingness.
Yeshua was still staring toward the horizon, trying to process what they had seen.
“Well, that definitely was…”
“We are completely fucked.”
The coffee tasted awful.
Adam held the cup between his hands while staring out the window of the small empty diner. Outside, rain tapped softly against the streets of London, turning the reflections of the streetlights into golden smears across the wet pavement.
Everything looked normal.
Too normal.
And that was exactly what terrified him.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come here,” he muttered.
Sitting across from him, Yeshua absently flipped through a newspaper he hadn’t actually been reading for the past twenty minutes.
“You like this place.”
“I liked it forty years ago.”
“You still order the same thing.”
Adam grimaced.
Yeshua smiled faintly before carefully folding the newspaper. His movements were always calm, almost unnaturally calm, as if time itself had never managed to hurry him.
Though lately, even he seemed tired.
The first time Adam understood that God had truly disappeared, he felt an enormous emptiness, larger even than the one surrounding him now. He wasn’t sure whether he was alive or dead, nor did he even know if he still possessed a body, but his consciousness remained active, even when it seemed to be the only thing left in existence.
And when the previous universe died, dragging Heaven, Hell, prophecies, archangels, and everything that had governed existence for millennia down with it… an impossible silence remained behind reality.
As if something fundamental had been ripped out of the world.
As if the universe were still waiting for a voice that would never answer again.
Except it did answer.
Only once.
Yeshua had appeared moments later, like a distant voice that didn’t understand what had just happened.
Adam still remembered it.
The absolute void.
The endless darkness.
The remains of a collapsing universe drifting around them like ashes floating through black water.
And then Yeshua spoke:
“She’s still here.”
Adam couldn’t see him. In fact, he couldn’t see anything at all.
“Who’s still here?”
The distant voice seemed startled for a moment before speaking again.
“Oh, you know… Her…”
Adam assumed that was supposed to mean something, but for the moment he was simply glad not to be alone in that enormous void.
“Um. I suppose we haven’t been introduced…”
The distant voice didn’t answer immediately. It sounded shy, and very kind.
“Uh, no, I don’t think we have… nice to meet you, my name is Yeshua.”
“Hi. My name’s Adam.”
The silence returned after that—not an uncomfortable silence, simply… an enormous one. Adam didn’t know how much time passed. Maybe seconds. Maybe centuries. In that place, time didn’t seem to move correctly; it was like trying to measure water with your hands. But one thing he knew for certain:
Yeshua was still there.
Adam couldn’t see him, but the mere presence of another consciousness kept the void from swallowing him completely.
“So…” Adam murmured at last. “Are we dead?”
The answer took too long.
“I don’t know.”
That was concerning.
“You seem like the sort of person who would normally know those things.”
A soft little laugh echoed through the darkness, strangely warm.
“Not necessarily, though I think I can understand one thing or another. I always had help from someone else. I don’t know if from Her, but…”
Adam frowned slightly.
“Wait a minute… you said ‘Her.’”
Yeshua fell silent.
“When you talked about God, it sounded like you know Her…”
More silence. Adam felt something close to nervousness rise through his chest.
“Oh no.”
Yeshua sighed softly.
“Yes, well… I suppose this introduction just became a bit more complicated.”
“How complicated?”
“Quite.”
A chill ran through Adam’s entire consciousness, because there was something familiar in that voice, something absurdly familiar. Not personally—deeper than that. Like a memory buried in his bones.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…” he whispered slowly. “Are you that Yeshua?”
The darkness remained silent for a few seconds.
“Yes.”
Adam wanted to faint, and he would have if he’d still had a body. Adam knew exactly what he was, what he had been born for. Sure, he had been very young when he’d had to come to terms with it, but enough time had passed for him to finally accept it. He was the bloody Antichrist (not that he liked the title), and Yeshua was supposed to be, at the very least, his ultimate enemy. But right now he was just relieved to have someone equally—or perhaps even more—strange and terrifyingly impressive to talk to inside that enormous void.
“Jesus Christ?”
“People don’t usually use my full name with that tone of absolute terror.”
“YOU’RE JESUS CHRIST!”
“Well, technically—”
“AND YOU’RE HERE WITH ME!?”
“Yes.”
Adam processed that for exactly three seconds before arriving at the worst possible conclusion.
“Oh, this is very bad.”
“What part exactly?”
“The part where the Son of God still exists after the end of the universe!”
“Ah.”
“‘AH’ IS NOT A NORMAL RESPONSE TO THAT!”
Yeshua let out another small laugh, and somehow that made everything even stranger, because he sounded genuinely embarrassed, as though he also thought this was a problem. The void around them trembled softly. Adam felt something move in the infinite distance, something enormous. And for the first time he understood that the darkness was not empty. There were remnants there. Fragments. Broken pieces of the previous universe drifting like ashes across an ocean. Adam thought he could make out gigantic wings slowly disintegrating far away from them.
He heard voices. Thousands of voices.
Then nothing again.
“What’s happening?” he asked quietly.
Yeshua took a long time to answer.
“I think… the universe ended before it could completely finish ending.”
That made no sense.
“That is a horribly phrased sentence.”
“I know.”
“What does it mean?”
Yeshua’s voice sounded farther away this time. Sadder.
“It means something was left open. Something doesn’t want to leave completely. And it isn’t us.”
Adam felt something crack in the distance. A tiny fracture, but enough to let light through—a warm golden light piercing the black void like a needle through fabric.
And then Adam saw them: two silhouettes holding hands, glowing faintly in the middle of the universe’s end. Both of them staring at each other one last time.
Yeshua remained silent.
The crack of light widened a little more.
And Adam heard one final sentence before the voices were swallowed once again by the darkness.
A sentence spoken through tears and infinite love.
“May they be free this time.”
Then the light exploded.
And the universe began again.
The new universe was born in silence.
There were no celestial trumpets.
No “let there be light.”
No angelic choirs celebrating creation.
Only an explosion.
Violent.
Beautiful.
Incomprehensibly bright.
Adam watched it from nowhere and everywhere at once. The black void tore open in a single impossible instant, and then time began to move again.
Matter.
Light.
Gravity.
Stars being born like tiny fires inside endless darkness.
Yeshua remained beside him—or at least Adam could feel that he was still there. For a very long time neither of them spoke, not because they didn’t want to, but because they were watching a universe learn how to exist.
Time quickly stopped having meaning; entire galaxies were born and died before them like waves.
Adam tried counting them once. He gave up after the first few million years.
Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t. Yeshua seemed fascinated by small things: nebulae with strange shapes, planets covered in ice, solar systems that collapsed before stabilizing. Adam, meanwhile, could only think about Earth.
His Earth.
Even though he knew it no longer existed, sometimes he still heard Dog barking—not really, just memories, little fragments surfacing without warning in the middle of the vast cosmos.
Brian’s laughter.
Pepper yelling at someone.
Wensleydale talking too fast.
His mother calling him to dinner.
His father trying to fix something he clearly had no idea how to repair.
Adam remembered the exact moment they disappeared, the precise instant the universe folded in on itself and the stars began going out one by one.
He had tried to run toward them, as if that could somehow change anything, but all he managed to see was their bodies turning into light.
And then nothing.
He never spoke about it with Yeshua, because Yeshua had lost everyone too—just differently.
He had time. Time to say goodbye, time to accept the deaths of his friends, time to understand that eventually every person he loved would disappear.
Adam didn’t.
Everything had been ripped away from him in seconds.
The first time they found life again, Yeshua cried.
Not humans—just simple organisms floating in the primitive oceans of a young planet—but it was still life.
The universe was trying again.
“Look at that,” Yeshua whispered with a small smile.
Adam couldn’t answer, because something inside him had just broken.
Or healed.
He wasn’t sure.
—
Millions of years passed before there were humans again. This time there was no Eden, no angels watching over them, no demons tempting them, no divine hand guiding the evolution of the world.
Humanity simply happened. Chaotic, accidental, and beautiful.
Adam watched the first human settlements from the top of a hill while the wind moved through the tall grass around them and, for the first time in countless ages, both of them had bodies again.
Real, human bodies. Adam stared at his own hands for hours on the day they decided it was time to have bodies again. It felt absurd to have lungs again, a heartbeat, hunger, sleep.
Yeshua adapted faster.
He always seemed to accept existence far too easily.
“Do you think we should intervene?” Adam asked one night while they watched a small human town lit by firelight.
Yeshua gently shook his head.
“I don’t think that’s our purpose here.”
“Then what is?”
The silence stretched for a few moments.
“Maybe just to live.”
Adam hated how reasonable that sounded.
They lived among humans for centuries before deciding to write everything down.
The idea was Yeshua’s. Adam found him one dawn sitting at a table covered in loose sheets of paper, staring at a blank page with an oddly melancholic expression.
“What are you doing?”
Yeshua looked up.
“I don’t want to forget them.”
That hurt more than Adam expected, because he had never considered that possibility. He had assumed they would remember forever, but the new universe kept moving forward, the centuries kept passing, and the memories were beginning to feel… distant, like dreams.
Adam slowly sat across from him.
“I don’t know where to start.”
Yeshua gave a small smile.
“Neither do I.”
The first night they wrote names—just names, thousands of them.
People.
Angels.
Demons.
Cities.
Places that no longer existed.
Adam wrote “Dog” so hard he snapped the tip of the pen. Yeshua pretended not to notice.
Over time, the names became stories.
They described Heaven, Hell, the Apocalypse that never happened. Yeshua even trusted Adam enough to finally explain the whole elephant-in-the-room situation.
They wrote down everything they remembered, everything they knew, and everything anyone had ever told them.
Lucifer’s fall.
The sound angel wings made when they unfolded.
Bookshops.
Roads.
Queen songs inexplicably playing in a black Bentley.
And them.
They always ended up writing about them—the angel and the demon.
Adam couldn’t even explain why. Maybe because they had been the last ones to choose love when everything else chose destruction. Maybe because the new universe existed because of them. Or maybe because Adam refused to let them disappear completely.
“Do you think anyone will ever read this?” he asked once.
Yeshua looked at the ink-covered pages.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Then why do we keep writing?”
Yeshua gently brushed his fingers over one of the sheets.
“Because this is all that’s left of them.”
Adam looked toward the mountains in the distance.
The new world kept growing.
Entire cities appeared and vanished with the passing centuries.
Humans loved.
Fought.
Sang.
Moved on.
And in a small house hidden among books and old papers, the last two remnants of the previous universe wrote desperately to keep the past from dying a second time.
The café was almost empty that morning.
The steady sound of rain against the windows blended with the distant murmur of conversations and the hiss of the coffee machine behind the counter. Everything seemed normal. Too normal.
Adam hated that.
He held the cup between both hands while absently watching the rain-soaked street beyond the glass. London kept moving with complete indifference: people running beneath umbrellas, buses cutting through puddles, someone laughing while trying to light a cigarette in the rain.
And yet, only a few hours earlier, the sky had split open.
Adam could still feel it. That black crack suspended above the clouds had lasted less than ten seconds, but it was enough to leave a horrible sensation hanging in the air.
It wasn’t fear. It was melancholy. As if the universe had remembered something painful.
Across from him, Yeshua slowly flipped through the black notebook.
Its pages, completely handwritten by the two of them, had always been like a talisman, like a balm for the heart, as though reading those pages could bring them home for a moment. But today, those pages comforted neither of them.
“That’s never happened before,” Adam murmured.
Yeshua nodded softly.
“No.”
Adam let out a slow breath.
In all the millions of years since the birth of the new universe, they had never seen a rupture that clear.
There had been anomalies, yes.
Small impossible echoes.
People dreaming of places that had never existed.
Songs repeating themselves across centuries.
Children speaking dead languages.
Adam and Yeshua had always attributed it to lingering remnants of the previous universe, though neither of them could truly make sense of it.
Because the previous universe was dead.
It had to be.
They had watched it disappear.
They had seen the stars go dark one by one while reality collapsed in on itself like paper burning from the edges inward. They had heard the silence that came afterward—that immense void where even God had stopped answering.
Nothing should have remained.
And yet the echoes kept appearing.
Small errors. As though the new universe had inherited memories that did not belong to it.
And then there were the people.
Faces.
Too many faces.
Adam had learned to look away when it happened. A man on the subway with Newton Pulsifer’s exact eyes. A little girl laughing just like Pepper. An old woman smiling exactly like Tracy.
Echoes.
They were not the same people. Adam knew that.
But the resemblance was enough to make him feel a new kind of grief every single time.
Yeshua had once tried to explain it.
“Maybe existence has patterns,” he had said softly. “Maybe some things are always meant to find each other again.”
Adam had hated that answer, because it implied that the universe remembered. And the fact that they themselves still existed was already proof enough that the previous universe had never completely vanished. Adam had thought about that a lot during the first few million years—too much, probably—because the more he analyzed it, the less sense it made.
They should not have survived. Neither him nor Yeshua. Everything else had disappeared.
Heaven.
Hell.
The archangels.
The demons.
The prophecies.
The divine hand guiding creation.
Even God seemed to have faded into little more than an impossible echo behind reality.
And yet… they were still here.
Sometimes Adam wondered whether they had truly survived at all, or if they were something else entirely. Scars, perhaps. Residue. Mistakes the new universe had never figured out how to erase.
Because Yeshua was still the son of a divinity that no longer existed. And Adam… Adam was still the Antichrist, even in a universe where Satan had never existed.
That wasn’t logic. It was continuity. Like a torn page from an old book pasted inside a new one.
And if they existed… then maybe the previous universe had not truly died. Maybe it had simply been buried beneath everything else. Beneath the new stars, the new humanity, reality itself.
The new universe had not replaced the old one. It had been built on top of it. Like layers of paint covering an older image still visible under the right light.
Adam watched the rain sliding down the café window again. The crack from that morning had felt exactly like that: a layer breaking.
A moment where something ancient managed to peek through beneath the new reality. And the most terrifying part was that it hadn’t felt violent. It had felt nostalgic. As though the lost universe was trying to come home.
And if the universe remembered… what else could?
The crack had been real.
Not a sensation.
Not a dream.
Not an impossible coincidence.
A genuine rupture splitting through the sky.
And worse still… it had felt familiar.
Adam rested his arms on the table.
“It felt… different.”
Yeshua looked up.
“Different how?”
Adam took too long to answer.
Because it was difficult to put into words.
The crack had not felt hostile.
Not like Hell.
Not like Satan’s presence.
Not like the remnants of Heaven during the war.
It had felt sad.
Profoundly sad.
Like an old wound trying to reopen.
“Melancholic,” he finally said.
Yeshua slowly lowered his gaze to the notebook.
“Yes.”
Silence settled between them.
Adam watched the raindrops trail down the glass while trying to ignore the weight in his chest. Because there was something neither of them wanted to say out loud.
The new universe was slowly reaching the same point in time the previous one had reached before it disappeared.
Same cities.
Same humanity.
Same patterns.
Even certain people were beginning to resemble those who had existed before. The universe repeating itself like a habit.
Adam swallowed hard.
“Do you think there could still be remnants?”
Yeshua slowly looked up.
“Of the previous universe?”
Adam nodded.
“Maybe it didn’t disappear completely. Maybe… parts of it are still trying to exist.”
Yeshua didn’t answer immediately. That alone was enough to make Adam’s stomach drop. Because if Yeshua hesitated, it meant he had thought the same thing too.
The rain struck the glass harder. The café lights flickered.
Once.
Adam immediately tensed.
Twice.
And then it happened again.
The world split apart.
Not physically. Reality simply… slipped out of place.
The conversations vanished abruptly.
The sound of the rain distorted.
The lights began buzzing violently.
And in front of the café window, the crack appeared.
Black.
Massive.
Suspended above the street like an open scar in the air.
Adam dropped his cup.
Coffee spilled across the table.
No one else reacted.
The waitress kept polishing glasses.
People continued talking.
A man kept reading his newspaper as though the universe had not just broken open in front of him.
“Can they see it?” Adam whispered.
“Yes,” Yeshua answered quietly.
The crack vibrated.
And then Adam felt something pass through him.
A memory. Not his own.
A warm bookshop full of plants.
The smell of old books.
Music playing softly in the background.
Gentle laughter in the middle of the night.
A melancholy so intense it made his chest ache.
The crack widened slightly. And Adam saw silhouettes moving inside it.
Two blurred figures sitting together.
One reading.
The other dozing against their shoulder.
Adam stopped breathing for a second.
“That can’t be…”
Yeshua stared at the crack, his face completely pale. Because he had seen them too.
The lights flickered violently again.
The café windows trembled.
And for one instant—
just one instant—
the reflection in the glass stopped showing London.
It showed a bookshop.
The old bookshop.
A brutal shiver ran through Adam’s entire body. Because he would recognize it in any universe.
The shelves.
The lamps.
The plants near the windows.
And behind the counter… an angel smiling while a demon pretended not to look at him too much.
The image vanished abruptly.
The crack closed.
The noise of the café returned all at once.
Cups.
Rain.
Conversations.
As though nothing had happened.
Adam was breathing hard. Yeshua was still staring at the window.
“The memories are trying to come back,” he murmured.
Adam swallowed.
“They weren’t memories.”
Yeshua slowly turned toward him. Adam felt real terror for the first time in a very long while. Because he knew exactly what he had seen.
It had not been a vision.
It had not been nostalgia.
It had been a window.
And for a few seconds, the previous universe had existed again.
Yeshua gripped the notebook tighter the moment the crack vanished. The small black object looked absurdly insignificant on the café table. Worn around the edges. Filled with folded pages, ink stains, and notes written over entire centuries.
A simple human notebook.
And yet Adam felt a chill when he looked at it. Because that was all that remained of the previous universe.
No magic.
No divine power.
No heavenly relics.
Only memories.
Thousands and thousands of handwritten memories preserved to keep them from disappearing.
Adam still remembered the first page.
If anyone ever finds this someday…
They had started writing it thousands of years ago, when humanity was only beginning to build cities. At first, it was only names—people they refused to forget.
Then came the stories.
Eden.
Heaven.
Hell.
The war.
The Apocalypse that never happened.
And them. Always them.
Aziraphale and Crowley appeared on almost every page sooner or later. Sometimes as protagonists. Sometimes only mentioned between lines.
But always present. As though even the memory of the universe refused to separate them.
Adam watched Yeshua’s hands tremble slightly around the notebook. That was not normal.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.
Yeshua didn’t answer immediately.
His eyes remained fixed on the black cover.
“The crack appeared right after I opened this page.”
Adam frowned.
“What page?”
Yeshua slowly turned the notebook toward him. Adam felt his stomach sink. Because he recognized the handwriting.
The handwriting definitely did not belong to either of them. It was delicate, orderly. Slightly slanted.
Aziraphale.
The page was filled with hurried notes written between pages they themselves had written centuries earlier, back when both of them were trying to record everything they remembered before time began to erode it.
The bookshop smelled like cocoa and old dust whenever it rained.
Crowley pretended to sleep just to listen to me read.
The Bentley never played the correct song.
```
Adam swallowed hard.
Beneath those lines was another, more recent note.
Written by Yeshua.
If this universe was built upon the ruins of the previous one, then perhaps memories are not just memories
The café lights flickered again.
Adam and Yeshua looked up immediately. Nothing happened this time. But the air felt… charged. Like the moment before a storm.
Adam looked back down at the notebook.
“You think this is connected to the rifts.”
Yeshua slowly ran his fingers across the page.
“I don’t know.”
“But you suspect it is.”
Yeshua remained silent for a few seconds.
“When reality opened… I felt like it was reacting to something.”
Adam felt a chill run through him. Because he had noticed it too.
The melancholy.
The nostalgia.
That feeling of recognition.
The rift didn’t feel like an invasion. It felt like a memory trying to return home.
Adam looked again at the page written by Aziraphale.
The words seemed… darker. More recent. Like fresh ink.
“Yeshua.”
“I know.”
Adam slowly lifted his gaze.
“We wrote this centuries ago.”
“Yes.”
“Then why does it look freshly written?”
Neither of them spoke.
The rain continued striking the windows. And then the notebook opened on its own. The pages began flipping rapidly.
One.
Another.
Another.
Adam felt his heart pounding too hard, because that had never happened before, not once. The notebook had always been exactly that: a record. A desperate attempt to preserve the memory of the lost universe.
Nothing more, at least until now. The pages stopped moving abruptly.
A blank page lay open before them.
And slowly, as though an invisible hand were writing, ink began to appear.
Adam felt genuine terror. Not because of the writing.
Because of the handwriting. It was different—messy, quick.
Crowley’s.
The words appeared one by one.
You really are terrible at leaving things alone.
Adam stopped breathing. Yeshua stared at the page, completely motionless.
More ink appeared beneath it.
Honestly, angel, I told you someone would notice sooner or later
The entire world seemed to stop. Adam felt an unbearable ringing inside his head. Because these were not memories. They couldn’t be.
Memories did not write back.