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They’re there. They are. Or… No, they were… are always… they will be in the bookshop.
Wait.
They’re in the bookshop now.
“What the fuck?” Crowley finds his voice first and it’s a brand new voice that’s never been used in a universe that’s never heard noise. He sounds exactly the same though — don’t worry.
Creation is weird and, for a handful of seconds, Time is still figuring itself out. Thank goodness the other three dimensions have got their shit together and the bookshop is, more or less, exactly as it never was.
So are Crowley and Aziraphale. Same old clothes, same old skin, same old eyes and brains and molecules. By extension, same old souls. Some of the electrons have suffered spin forbidden flips and there’s been a consequent flurry of triplet-triplet annihilation events, but that probably won’t have much of an effect in the grand scheme of things. If they choose to implement one.
“Aren’t we meant to be gone?” Aziraphale asks, breathless until he fills his new lungs for the first time.
Crowley rakes a hand through his hair, looking as tired and miserable as someone who’s existed for a lot longer than twenty-two seconds, and says, “I knew none of that made any sense.”
Off to his side, Aziraphale fidgets and looks lost until, suddenly, his eyes light up. He pats himself down until he finds and reveals The Book.
It’s so big it shouldn’t have even fit in his inner jacket pocket, but it had needed to, so it had managed. As Time will attest, the laws of physics that should exist but don’t quite yet, are still settling down.
They both stare at each other and think for several long moments, shrouded in the deafening silence of an empty oblivion (except for a bookshop). The way it seems like they can almost hear the pages of every book, pressed up against each other, waiting, inevitably forces Aziraphale to speak: “I think, perhaps, all of that was a bit —”
“Wrong?” Crowley supplies.
“Nonsensical, at least.”
“That was God,” Crowley stresses, shocked he needs to explain this to Aziraphale.
“I know!” Aziraphale’s hands fidget and clasp in front of his stomach. “It’s inconceivable that She even appeared, that She let us ask questions —”
“She didn’t really answer them,” Crowley interrupts.
“No, I never would have expected Her to. It’s remarkable that your trick with The Book worked to summon Her! It didn’t feel real, did it?”
Crowley pulls a face at him and wishes it all made a lot more sense and that it had felt real, that it had been real and that they were subsequently, very much no longer here — anywhere — to think about it. “She ended everything, including us,” Crowley presses.
“Did she?” Aziraphale looks around the bookshop, brow raised as they both take it all in.
When he looks back to Crowley, the demon has to admit, “Evidently not.”
“Michael was the one that ended everything, and did a pretty terrible job of it, if you ask me,” Aziraphale continues to think out loud.
“But everything’s gone,” Crowley counters, crossing the room in three long steps to peer out the window into the complete absence of anything. It’s not even dark — it’s just nothing.
“Everything’s gone here,” Aziraphale corrects. “Wherever here is.” He pauses and Crowley thinks it’s for effect, which is a bit rich given their current dire circumstances. “Do you remember?”
“Do I remember?” Crowley repeats, baffled by the question. “Do I remember what?”
Aziraphale’s smile is tight but hopeful, which Crowley either fiercely loves or finds depressingly futile. He can’t quite decide. “Earth?” Aziraphale asks. “The Metatron? Rubber ducks and Whickber street and sushi?”
“Yes, of course I remember all of that.”
Aziraphale punctuates his big revelation with a fist pump: “That’s not how The Book’s meant to work!”
Crowley stares at The Book still held in Aziraphale’s hand — the one that still has ‘Bleak House’ emblazoned down the spine, but contains the new title Crowley had scrawled inside and then only one sentence of existence. None of this makes sense and yet…
“Open it,” Crowley tells him.
Aziraphale does so eagerly and Crowley moves to stand beside him so he can see. Inside is Crowley’s title and Aziraphale’s hurried but elegant handwriting describing god in the bookshop. On the next page is the bookshop itself, a perfect, restored copy of the last remaining page of the previous book of life somehow transferred onto the new pages. Aziraphale flicks through the remaining pages, but they’re all blank.
“What does it mean?” Aziraphale asks.
“I don’t know,” Crowley replies. “You were the one explaining it to me.”
“I’m… not sure that was God in the bookshop,” Aziraphale says as though he’s thinking it for the first time as he’s saying it out loud. He looks positively shellshocked.
“It bloody was,” Crowley snaps back at him, but the mental dust is starting to settle and the puzzle pieces are arranging themselves into some sort of image, albeit a very distorted one. “It was. She backed us into a corner and we sacrificed ourselves and She remade the earth.”
Oh, it doesn’t sound right at all.
Aziraphale looks unconvinced. “Did she, though?”
Crowley watches as Aziraphale’s mind ticks over for another brand new handful of seconds before the angel continues: “Did she — the god in the bookshop — actually have anything to do with the other one ending? That was gone before she even arrived. And is it really gone if we can still remember it? Something is incredibly off here and —”
“I started a new Book,” Crowley realises. “Before she showed up, we wrote a new The Book. There was nothing except us and the bookshop.”
“What do you mean?” Evidently it is Aziraphale’s turn to be lost.
Crowley points at The Book that used to be Bleak House again. “Michael destroyed everything, except clearly not because we both remember it all happening, so not really destroyed, more like, maybe misplaced or relocated or… reimagined. But while everything else wasn’t there — with Michael, I mean — the bookshop still was.”
“And you started a new Book of Life,” Aziraphale joins him in his revelation.
Crowley’s eyes narrow and his brow creases because it still doesn’t really make sense.
Aziraphale continues, “You authored it. Well, co-authored it, because then I wrote — oh of course, she really wasn’t God at all! She was… she was only what I imagined her to be.”
“Because you were the one who wrote her into existence in The Book,” Crowley says.
Aziraphale is nodding at him. “All the other rules of the universe were gone, maybe even… Surely not the actual God? But only the rules of the bookshop remained and they were —” Aziraphale physically depicts hand-wavey by flapping his arms around.
“This explains why we were still there at all,” Crowley adds. “And why we were still there in the other bookshop, with her.”
“How so?”
“Intrinsic part of the bookshop?” Crowley tries the idea on. “Two hundred years of protection spells and hiding spells and —”
“Had you been doing that while I was gone?” Aziraphale asks.
Crowley rankles that Aziraphale would feel the need to ask and at his own subsequent need to confess he’d done exactly that. “‘Course. Pretty sure that’s why Hell cut my miracles off in the end.” He tries to play it off casually, but it doesn’t land based on the open adoration that crosses Aziraphale’s face. “But by then the bookshop was a fortress. Nothing could touch it. Or us inside.” Crowley lays a hand against one of the mustard yellow pillars and tries to feel the life of the place against his fingers. He thinks he still can, but he also knows he could be imagining it. “So, that was your idea of god?”
Aziraphale shrugs some form of acknowledgement and goes on: “You made The Book, so The Book played by your rules. It inherently had to build itself around that one bookshop page and whatever power you expected it to have.”
“That… actually might make some degree of sense,” Crowley agrees. “Then you were the one who wrote that god was in the bookshop.”
“So when she was, she had to exist by your rules for a new universe, as dictated by The new Book, and she had to exist as what I expected her to be.”
“She was incredibly mean to you —” Crowley begins because she had been.
“And insufferably rude to you —” Aziraphale interjects.
Crowley pulls a face and tries to remember exactly what she had said and then to dissect what that means Aziraphale actually thought. Several unpleasant ideas strike him all at once. “I’ve never thought of you as lazy,” Crowley begins with one of the easier ones. “Gluttonous, sure, but not in a bad way. But you have,” he realises. “Aziraphale —”
“We can dwell on these things later,” Aziraphale dismisses the line of inquiry. “She was terrible at her job!”
“What?”
“I… I mean I know it’s blasphemous —”
“There’s no god here and she wasn’t… I don’t think she counts.”
“No, she doesn’t. Because recently I’d been starting to think she wasn’t very good at being god,” Aziraphale reveals, like it’s a naughty secret.
“Right. So when she appeared in the bookshop, she was what you expected. Which was a big old meany who wasn’t even that effective.”
“No wonder we escaped,” Aziraphale says.
“The whole bloody world might have,” Crowley adds, wondering what might still exist somewhere else, where there’s still, possibly, presumably, something.
Aziraphale considers it. “Maybe.”
“And she probably kickstarted another one,” Crowley hopes, out loud. Because Aziraphale still would have expected her to hold up her end of the bargain. Crowley might not have, but surely Aziraphale would have.
Aziraphale hums a thoughtful sound as he ponders. “But what does this mean for the real God?”
“Perhaps even God had a page in The Book of Life,” Crowley thinks, although it doesn’t feel right.
“Surely Michael wouldn’t have burned that,” Aziraphale says.
“Michael was pretty bloody unhinged by the end there. Maybe God was The Book of Life and burning all of it except the bookshop page wiped Her out for good.”
“Or maybe She’s still here as some small part of this new existence.”
They fall silent, waiting, wondering if there will be a sign, but it remains eerily quiet and still. Which is probably how She will be playing it if She is there anyway.
“What about Satan?” Crowley wonders.
“Haven’t a clue,” Aziraphale admits, and they fall silent again.
“Soooo…” Crowley eventually drawls, doing his best to seem casual as he plucks a book at random from a stack nearby. He leafs through the empty pages. “We sacrificed everything, put it all on the line, and we’re right back at square one.”
“Exactly!” Aziraphale says but he sounds marvelously excited instead of miserable.
“Exactly?” Crowley echoes back uncertainly.
“She probably did make a new universe, with humans and happiness and free will,” Aziraphale starts up again and Crowley can see his mind ticking over once more. “No, she definitely did, because that’s what I thought she would do. I thought she’d back us into an impossible corner and be awful to me, but be absolutely viciously cruel to you. She always has been. She’s always taken everything from you so I knew she would do it again.”
Aziraphale’s face creases up in deeper thoughts and he chews on his bottom lip for a second before continuing. “I also thought there was at least a chance that you would be able to beat her at her own game — to find the lady, as it were — but still at great sacrifice. Because it never occurred to me that we could actually be happy. You always have to lose everything and I always have to lose you. I just assumed… I didn’t want that, you must understand, but I thought, deep down, she’d let her humans live if it meant she could take everything from you. Oh, I’m sorry Crowley, I’m so very sorry. But I think that’s how this works.”
Crowley tilts his chin up, defensive not at Aziraphale’s expectations — which he’s pretty sure just inadvertently saved two, if not three universes, and also finally rid them of God in a meaningful way — but at an apology that feels genuine even though it’s misplaced.
“But we’re still here,” Crowley says, and this is the one puzzle piece he can’t quite get to fit.
Aziraphale’s expression turns soft and Crowley can see he already thinks he has the answer. “Because it’s your Book that has the bookshop still in it and we were always safe in the bookshop.”
“But —”
“You always had hope.”
Crowley recoils at that because he’s been the most hopeless individual in all of time and space, as far as he’s concerned, for a very long time. But Aziraphale just chuckles under his breath and not unkindly.
“You did. It was often infinitesimal, and rightly so, in the face of everything. But that’s how you kept it safe, how you protected it. It’s why you never really gave up.”
Crowley hadn’t realised Aziraphale knew that. Crowley, in fact, had not really known that about himself, but it’s undeniably true. He swallows down the rising emotions and tries to sort through his rational thoughts. “We don’t know about the old world,” he begins.
“Or the new one — the one she made without any of it,” Aziraphale admits.
“And what are we even meant to do with this one?” Crowley asks because that, he realises, is the actual question.
Aziraphale blinks at him. “I would have thought that was obvious.”
Crowley slowly arches an eyebrow because whatever is self-evident to Aziraphale continues to escape him.
“You’re the new author — the artist. You get to write it,” Aziraphale tells him, excitement slipping into his voice, eyes sparkling and lips quirking up at whatever possibilities he’s already imagining.
Of course. Among all the wrongness, the nonsense, the multitude of remaining questions, this, at least, might make sense.
“We can make it whatever we want,” Aziraphale exclaims.
Crowley isn’t so sure it’s that easy. “The angel I was, he was the artist, not me. I wouldn’t know where to —”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve heard your stories, the ones you told me and all the ones you told the humans. I’ve seen you create as a demon just as much as I imagine you ever did as an angel! And for far better reasons! Ever since the flood, and at Sodom and Gamorrah, I watched you construct stories. I didn’t understand why until Job, but ever since then. You create ideas to entertain and to protect, to advise and to question, to just get by —”
“I lie,” Crowley corrects because otherwise Aziraphale is absolutely correct.
“You invent,” Aziraphale counters, sharp and quick. “We have an existence fundamentally lacking in substance. Whatever you create is true.”
Crowley struggles to find a counter argument to that and, looking around the bookshop, there are countless blank pages to fill and a thousand — a million — immediate thoughts in his head. He did always love telling stories. “And you would help me?” he asks, sure of Aziraphale’s answer but needing to hear it.
“Yes. Very happily.”
Crowley nods and can already feel himself considering where he could possibly start.
“And the humans — we’ll make humans again, won’t we?” Aziraphale asks.
“That’s the whole point.”
“With free will?” Aziraphale continues and Crowley nods because that’s the whole point. “And us? What about us?” Aziraphale asks.
Crowley swallows because he still doesn’t know. “What do you want?”
Aziraphale laughs but it’s a hiccupping, tense sort of sound. “I still only want one thing,” he admits.
Before Crowley can respond, Aziraphale continues: “No, I want two. Two things! They were mutually exclusive, but now I don’t… I hope they might not be.”
Back in the bookshop, in the other universe, with Aziraphale’s cruel, ineffective god, Crowley had imagined that Aziraphale had meant him — that Crowley was his one thing. That tiny sliver of hope had stayed alive in him because he’d thought Aziraphale had told him he was wanted and worthy and then they’d agreed that wasn’t enough to burn down a whole universe to save. But now…
“I want you,” Aziraphale says, sparking hope into reality. “I want us. And I also want you to have everything you want. I just… I hope you can see a way we can have that and still exist here.”
Crowley swallows another upswell of emotion and feels the sting in his eyes that tells him the overwhelm has outgrown the confines of his skin and is about to spill out. He’s not sure he cares because a tear has already escaped Aziraphale and is tracking down his hopeful, obstinate, insistent cheek.
“I can,” he says. “I’d like that. Very much. Everyone gets free will,” he continues, voice shaky and rough. “We’d be people.”
Aziraphale nods.
“People have autonomy and rational consciousness and second order desires,” Crowley considers.
“We have all those things,” Aziraphale interjects.
“But with free will we would have it for real. Everyone would.”
“You can do that?” Aziraphale says, half as a question and half as a statement. “You can write that into The Book.”
“I think so,” Crowley says and he believes it. He allows himself to smile, to breathe, for the first time in a long while.
Aziraphale smiles back at him. “I’ll fetch you a pen.”