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“Made your decision?”
Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged a glance. Without a word, Crowley reached for the discarded book they had used to summon the Almighty, and Aziraphale handed him the pen.
“What are you doing?” God asked mildly. Her dark eyes bore into Aziraphale’s own, and he held that gaze, unflinching, as Crowley scribbled across the page.
“Wait. They’re not—” Satan began. And then he was gone.
He and the Almighty vanished without ceremony.
The book slid from Crowley's fingers. He fumbled to catch it, crushing several pages against his chest in the process. He hadn't been entirely certain it would work, and the shock of it numbed him to his core.
“Well…” he muttered. “...that was easier than I thought it would be.”
“Where did you send them?” Aziraphale croaked, still staring wide-eyed at the empty seats where the Almighty and the Adversary had been moments before.
“Just…away. Another universe. Not here,” Crowley said vaguely, and he held out the mostly empty book.
Aziraphale peered at it. True to his word, Away. Another universe. Not here was written in Crowley’s looping scrawl.
They stood in the silence. The bookshop had never been so quiet – Aziraphale had never noticed before how much noise used to filter in from outside, filling his cosy cavern of books with the ambience and bustle of Soho. Of London. Of the world.
“So, what now?” Aziraphale asked, though it was rather a pointless question. They had discussed the plan when they were alone mere moments ago, and unlike usual, nothing had gone spectacularly wrong.
Crowley smoothed out the crumpled pages and flexed the wrist of the hand still holding the pen.
“We get writing.”
So they did.
The bookshop was filled to the brim with volumes of every shape and size, all sporting crisp, blank pages waiting to be filled. Every memory, every moment of human history – they would write it back into existence. The Book of Life was gone, but they could make it anew. Thousands upon thousands of volumes spanning the whole of recorded time, and they were the only two beings in all of creation who had been there to see it unfold: its complexity, its beauty, its frequent and spectacular pain.
They began separately. Aziraphale settled at his desk whilst Crowley claimed an armchair at the far end of the room. Dividing and conquering. Aziraphale wrote about the garden – about Adam and Eve, the flaming sword, the way the afternoon light had fallen golden through the trees before everything changed. Crowley tackled Noah and the ark, briefly entertaining the notion that perhaps that second unicorn had made it after all, before reminding himself that the goal was simple: to put things back the way they were.
With the added caveat that neither God nor Satan, nor Heaven nor Hell, could interfere.
The process took time, of course. But time no longer existed in any meaningful sense, so who could really say how long it was? Years, certainly. Perhaps decades. All the while they wrote, filling book after book with their combined knowledge – the rise and fall of empires, plagues and revolutions, the slow grinding of history's wheel.
Somewhere around the Industrial Revolution, Aziraphale realised he had migrated to the sofa. He wasn't sure precisely when it had happened. Crowley was seated beside him.
The last book was Aziraphale's to finish. Its cover bore the faded gold title of what had once been Paradise Lost. He wrote slowly now, choosing each word with the care it deserved, the pen moving in a steady hand. Crowley's head rested against his shoulder, his amber gaze following the ink across the page. His hair tickled the side of Aziraphale's face. Aziraphale's heart had not slowed since Crowley had rested his head there, in what he estimated to be the equivalent of three weeks ago.
“...and then, Crowley grabbed Aziraphale by the lapels and kissed him,” Aziraphale murmured as he wrote, warmth creeping up the back of his neck. The pen stilled. Beside him, Crowley stopped breathing.
“What happened next?” Crowley asked, very quietly.
Aziraphale closed his eyes. “I pulled away,” he said. “And told you I forgave you.” His pen did not move.
Crowley lifted his head slowly until they were level, eye to eye. “Is that still what happens?”
The grief that crossed Aziraphale's face was soft and devastating. The book and pen slid to his lap, and his forehead came to rest against Crowley's.
“Can we try again?” he whispered.
Crowley answered with a tentative brush of lips, and Aziraphale exhaled into it – a small, helpless sound. There was none of the desperate, unsteady energy of last time. Their lips found each other gradually, and Aziraphale leaned in, chasing that warmth like he’d been starved of it. Crowley tilted his head, their noses brushing, and poured everything he had wanted to say that day into each graze of their lips – six thousand years’ worth of almost. If time hadn't already been standing still, it would have stopped then, in that quiet bookshop, as an angel and a demon who had known each other since the first light of creation finally allowed what had always existed between them to simply be.
When they parted, it was gradual, not a pulling away but simply coming to stillness, like a song ending its final note. Their eyes met. A warm smile spread across Crowley’s face
“So. It’s complete,” he murmured.
Aziraphale couldn't contain his answering smile. “It's complete,” he agreed, and closed the book in his lap.
The moment the pages met, light poured in through the bookshop windows. Not the familiar amber warmth of the lamps they'd lived by these past years, but a sharper, cleaner light like that of the sun. A light that said the world was waking up. Voices followed it in: laughter, the hum of passing cars, the overlapping percussion of footsteps on pavement. Aziraphale and Crowley rose on unsteady legs and made their way to the door.
Instead of an empty abyss, they found Soho. Alive and entirely itself. Parents steering children along the pavement by the hand, a busker trying his luck on the corner with a battered acoustic guitar, Maggie's record shop and Nina's coffee shop restored and open for business – both women visible through their respective windows, going about the ordinary routine of an ordinary morning.
Aziraphale's jaw worked silently. It was exactly as it had been before he'd ascended. He lifted a hand, fingers poised out of old habit, and drew downward. Nothing happened. Crowley tried the reverse gesture and was met with the same absence.
“We’re the last ones,” Crowley said. He turned to Aziraphale. “What do we do now?”
Aziraphale took a long moment, breathing it all in – the noise, the light, the particular smell of a London street in the morning. Then he looked at Crowley, eyes bright.
“I don’t know about you, but I rather fancy a spot of lunch.”
Crowley let out a startled laugh. “Course. The usual?”
They set off together down the street, arms swinging loose at their sides. Three steps along, Aziraphale's fingers brushed Crowley's. Rather than create distance, Crowley folded his hand around the angel's, threading their fingers together without breaking stride or acknowledging it in any way whatsoever, as though it were simply what hands were for.
A blonde head appeared in the doorway of a seamstress's shop and fixed them both with a pointed look.
“About bloody time, you two!” called Mrs Sandwich, grinning broadly.
They wore matching smiles all the way to the Ritz.
Over a long and thoroughly scrumptious lunch, they talked about things that had no longer happened, offered apologies that were both given and received, and made promises for the future. A future that might, one day, take them out of London. Find them somewhere quieter. A cottage, perhaps, somewhere in the South Downs, with a garden, and time that was entirely their own.
It sounded, they agreed, just about perfect.