Work Text:
There’s a lot of talking.
“Should we keep that apple tree? You know. In the centre, there? I know how impractical it would be, but. Well - It’s pretty.”
An affectionate scoff.
“What else’d we be using our miracles for?“
A decision.
Trust placed in one thing or another.
Either way, a much deeper trust placed in each other. Hands interlocked are much stronger than fingers crossed.
And then: everything. Everything they’d ever wanted. Just maybe not exactly at first. There were many, many more discussions to be had without the pressure of god or the universe.
But now?
Warm lamp and sunlight floods a red bookshop, now home to plants and a bedroom that sees use. The books are filled with all the right words: extensive and handwritten lists and records of everything in the universe, or exactly the printed text that their hardback covers promise.
There’s an armchair in the bookshop, and someone sitting in it, wearing all creams and whites and reading yet another book while they wait for someone else to get back from lunch.
They’re under strict instructions:
“The bookshop is closed, my dear.”
“That means you tell anyone who knocks on that door,” a point towards said door, for emphasis, “to piss off.”
“Well - You could do that, if you’d like…I’d advise against it-”
“Come on, angel,”
“Don’t let anyone buy any books!”
Outside the bookshop, the owner of a coffee shop slips out on a break to bring two takeaway cups and a paper bag over the road to the record shop. The woman who opens the door greets her with a smile so wide that all the noise of the bustling street, so full of life and with things, becomes background noise to it.
Elsewhere entirely (but surely somewhere), two people, both dressed incredibly strange in two very different ways, find themselves once again bitching about their ex-colleagues (a prefix always added with a smirk), how great it is not to be them.
Unbeknownst to them, of course, said colleagues have been doomed: cursed by forces unknown to remain in their grimy or blinding workplaces, but to never argue over anything important. Rummaging through paper or scrolling through screens, climbing a corporate ladder that they are unable to see has no top rung. Locked up in a self contained, self perpetuating rat race. Just something to keep them from killing each other, something anyone could spend all of eternity doing. And hating - that’s no coincidence.
The only thing they could think of worse than an eternity spent doing something that you’re told only matters to someone more important than you, blindly following that authority? Well…that, they supposed, would be not having any time at all. Or, a little voice reminds them, if you were to somehow have both. Surely that would be the worst outcome imaginable.
Above everything, something watches in benevolent, omnipresent amusement. Always a storyteller. Always the audience. Always smiling.
Back in London, however, there is a table set and waiting at the Ritz, and two people - neither mortal, but both so undeniably human - emerging from a black Bentley to take their seats at either side of it.
Later, there will be many things to do: tending to books and plants, talking to neighbours, listening to Muriel tell them about their day, looking up at the stars. But for now, it’s just time for lunch. Lunch, and talking, and listening to the nightingales, and enjoying each other’s presence. Really, all they’ve ever wanted.