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The new universe - Heat death of it all
It had been a long, long time. Even the atoms were tired. They had been slowing down for quite some time now, while the universe became colder and colder. Until, with what would have been a deafening screech if only there had been someone with the ability to hear it, the last electron-proton pair slammed the brakes to a halt.
Everything went still. Cold. Dead.
Then Aziraphale’s eyes shot open, as he took a deep breath of air that wasn’t there. He looked at his palms, confused and, quite frankly, scared; the last thing he could remember was holding Crowley’s hand as they both disappeared from existence, but his hands were empty now.
In the vast nothingness surrounding him, it would have been nearly impossible to miss the presence of someone, let alone someone whose features he’d learned to recognize from half a glance anywhere, anytime, no matter how many times he changed styles. He looked in every direction, except in the one where he felt (or knew, or simply hoped, or prayed even) he would find him. It took him a few moments to gather the necessary courage to finally look to his left, just as Crowley finally looked to his right.
The moment their eyes met, a new set of memories - several sets, actually - flooded Aziraphale’s mind. He saw himself - a human version of himself, at least - arguing with Crowley in what appeared to be ancient Ur, complaining about the quality of some copper he’d sold him. As a farmer in Wales, at the end of the 11th century, ambushed in his own barn by a runaway Norman soldier, who had hobbled away from a lost battle on a broken leg. Halfway through the 5th millennium, shielding another space traveler from the acidic rain, on a planet they’d been tasked to terraform for rival companies in the Alpha Centauri star system (so they had gotten there, eventually, just taking the long way round).
One after the other, millions, billions of lifetimes flashed before his eyes, so numerous and so fast that by all means he shouldn’t have been able to process them all. From the dawn of humanity to the disappearance of all life, he had always been there, one reincarnation after the other. And Crowley had been there too. Billions of lives, and not in one of them he’d been alone. They’d always found each other; sometimes as children, playing in the same garden. Other times as young men (or young women, if his memory served him right) who then built a life together, or tried to, to the best of their abilities, often against far-from-ideal odds. Other times yet they’d met later in life, finding more meaning in their short years together than in the decades past. Most times it hadn’t been easy. Most times they’d still had to fight the prejudices of the world, they’d still had to fight their own fears. So many times they’d never found the courage to express their feelings openly, so many times they’d fought, and broken up, and grown apart, but they’d always found their way back to each other, no matter how long it took.
Aziraphale exhaled softly, taking in the vision of Crowley standing before him; not any of the billions of versions of him in his memories, but Crowley as he was on the day they sacrificed themselves. On the day Aziraphale thought he’d lost him forever. He took a tentative step forward, not sure whether it was even possible to take steps in the emptiness surrounding him; it was. As he stepped forward, Crowley did the same. One step, two, faster now, they were almost running, until they met in the middle, as they always had. They stopped abruptly, just shy of each other, millenia of habit kicking in. It was impossible to tell if the distance they’d covered was just a few meters or a couple parsecs; nothing felt quite real, nothing except them.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said breathlessly, despite there being no atmosphere to carry the sound.
“Aziraphale,” replied Crowley, with the same note of both relief and disbelief in his voice.
As the seconds passed, Aziraphale felt another habit fighting to come to the surface. An habit that didn’t quite belong to him, but to a billion different hims who had long since learned how to hold Crowley in their arms.
He remembered the feeling of something pressing against his neck, as the Norman whispered words in a language he could not understand, but that definitely sounded like a threat. He remembered dropping his scythe and handing him his flaming torch, only to watch the other man collapse in pain as he accidentally put his weight on the wrong leg. In the flickering light of the torch, the poor thing looked up at him, terrified. Aziraphale - in that life he had a different name, of course - looked down at him, knowing full well that he should kill him, should alert someone, should do anything except what he did: crouch down at his level, and immobilize his broken leg, so that the bone could heal properly. The most difficult part was to convince Crowley, with nothing but gestures and what he hoped was a soothing tone of voice, that he was just trying to help.
“You are alive,” Crowley said, his hands twitching, as if he were resisting the urge to reach out and touch him to make sure of it.
“We both are,” Aziraphale pointed out, a smile tugging at his lips, despite everything. He had Crowley: they could figure everything else out in due time.
It took several weeks for the stranger to heal. Aziraphale kept him hidden in the barn, bringing him food and water. He also brought him wine; at first to dull the pain, and then because it was just nice to have a drink with someone in the evening. They eventually learned how to communicate a bit, teaching each other words in their own language. Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure why he was willing to risk his life for someone he didn’t even know; maybe he was tired of seeing his homeland littered with dying or dead soldiers. Maybe he wanted to be of help, just this once, just because he could. Maybe he was just tired of being alone. By the time the stranger was healed, he was not a stranger anymore, and Aziraphale didn’t want to see him go. He had to, of course, he had been lucky enough to keep his presence a secret to the village for so long. But on the night when he was supposed to sneak out of the barn, never to be seen again, the red-headed soldier kissed him, soft and desperate, and in this life Aziraphale didn’t let him go. He held onto him, hungry and just as desperate, and neither of them left the barn that night.
“I watched you die,” Crowley insisted. Among all the memories now stuffed inside Aziraphale’s brain, that seemed to be the blurriest one. He remembered looking at Crowley, smiling at him through the heartbreak and the fear, clinging to the thought that at least they’d managed to do something good, and they’d done it together. He had a vague feeling of having lost consciousness after that, but if he tried to remember it in detail, his head hurt. Next thing he could remember, he was a human child at the dawn of civilization.
“We found each other again,” Aziraphale said. It was so, so much more than he’d thought they would get when they gave up their lives for the sake of humanity; he’d held back the tears for all the chances they’d lost in their lifetime, only to be gifted a billion more lifetimes to try again.
“And every time I had to watch you die again,” Crowley’s gaze was unfocused, his voice hollow. It wasn’t hard to guess that he was remembering, reliving every devastating detail.
In the burning library of Alexandria, that Crowley had run into to try and save him, only to realize, after he’d finally found him, that there was no longer a way out; they’d said their goodbyes and held onto each other until the end.
In the barn in Wales, when they’d been found in the morning, still asleep together in the hay. They had been executed almost immediately.
In the freezing water of the Atlantic, after Aziraphale had given up the chance to get onto a lifeboat because she couldn’t just abandon the love of her life - who was still stuck somewhere in the third class section - on a sinking ship.
It hadn’t always been violent. In many, many cases they’d just gone to bed in their old age, fallen asleep and never woken up. But, violent or not, Death had always found them on the same day, as if their last choice - dying together - had left an imprint on the new universe, a new law of physics that prohibited their souls from ever being parted.
“I am so sorry,” Crowley went on, “How could I even think of it? Of asking you to, to… Just to grant my wish.” In the heat of the moment, when literally everything was at stake, asking for a new universe hadn’t felt like a bad idea. Now, the memories of countless Aziraphales dying before him was driving home the realization that he really had killed his angel. He remembered holding his hand in their last moments - the first of a long list of last moments - and the thought of the trust that Aziraphale had put in him made him sick.
“There is nothing to apologize for,” said Aziraphale, finally giving in to the need to touch Crowley, taking his face in his hands and making him look at him. “You told me what you wanted and I agreed to it. If I had wanted to, I could have stopped you, couldn’t I?”
Crowley shook his head, or at least tried to, but couldn’t move much with Aziraphale’s hands still cradling his face.
“It was a stupid idea and you should have told me that much. I was just… I was so tired. For the first time I truly couldn’t see a way forward. Or out. Not for us. And I thought that if there was no hope for us, at least we could give everyone else a chance.”
“And it didn’t turn out all that bad, did it? We are here now. We’ve always been here. And…” what Aziraphale had to say next was going to hurt him, but he had to do it. Crowley deserved to hear it. “And I know that if I hadn’t left you you wouldn’t have felt so hopeless. I know I wouldn’t. Because - even if I put a lot of effort into pretending I wasn’t - I was tired. Tired and scared. And the idea of death didn’t feel as crushing as the fear of being without you again.”
If he hadn’t agreed to Crowley’s request, would they have fallen apart again? If they had been allowed to continue living in a restored world, would Crowley have resented him forever for taking away his one chance at making a difference? Aziraphale hadn’t been able to take that risk, not after feeling the burn of heartbreak and loneliness for three years.
Crowley’s hands found their way to Aziraphale’s waist. He pulled him in, and for the first time - the first time as themselves, at least - they hugged. In their six thousand years together, they had touched sparingly, and never like this. They had shook hands many times, they had occasionally supported the other after a few drinks too many, and after the averted apocalypse they’d definitely gotten used to an increased number of casual touches, but this… this was something else. This was the kind of hug that could hurt your bones and heal your soul.
“I’m so sorry,” Crowley said against Aziraphale’s shoulder, his voice breaking with unshed tears. Sorry for making you go through with this, sorry for being too hurt to see that I was hurting you as well, sorry for not choosing you when it mattered the most.
“I forgive you,” Aziraphale said, his voice trembling just as much as Crowley’s, “and I hope you can forgive me as well.”
Forgive me for not telling you how I felt, for making you feel not chosen, for not knowing how to apologize when I came back.
“It’s not the same. I killed you, angel, I…”
“Enough of this.” Aziraphale pulled away from the hug, and he could see, in Crowley’s eyes, the resigned terror of someone who believed he was stepping away in anger. Instead, Aziraphale cradled Crowley’s face in his hands once more. “You didn’t kill me. We made a choice. Maybe it was the right one, maybe it wasn’t, but it was ours. It was shared, and I will not hear any more apologies from you. We are here now. I don’t know how we got this new chance, or why, but I think we shouldn’t waste it consuming ourselves with guilt.”
He’d done plenty of that already, for six thousand years. And in several more lifetimes as well.
A priest at war with his own faith in the sixteenth century. A minor noble too afraid to say anything to his dear friend in Victorian London. A general conflicted about his growing affection for the leader of a rival human colony on the same planet.
So many times he’d never said anything, and yet in every lifetime Crowley had still known, known him, known his heart. But he’d never pushed his boundaries further than Aziraphale had wanted him to. And if there was one thing that all his lifetimes had taught Aziraphale, was that they both turned out to be much, much happier when he let himself be selfish and have what he wanted the most. Have him.
“Now that you mention it… how are we still here?” Crowley said, stopping the train of Aziraphale’s thoughts. Crowley stepped away, looking around them as if the answer could be hidden right behind a corner (there were no corners. There wasn’t much of anything, really). Aziraphale already missed the feeling of having him in his arms.
“Do you think She is behind this? Is this just another plan of Hers?”
Aziraphale could see Crowley growing more tense by the second. All this time, all those lifetimes, and they were back to square one: not knowing a damn thing. A part of him was tempted to just say who cares. Who cares if She’s behind it all, if She lied, if She’s still out there: if She lets me have you, I’ll go along with whatever Her plan is. So long as I can have you, I’ll give up everything else. Just don’t slip away from me again, looking for an answer I cannot give you. Aziraphale racked his brain, combing through countless years of memories trying to find a clue, a sign, something that might point him in the right direction and tell him whether they were truly alone in this universe, or not. He found nothing. And in that nothing, something tugged at the back of his mind.
“Wait a minute, that’s the point,” he gasped.
“What?”
“We cannot know. That’s the point.”
“That’s not the point, that’s frustrating. And maddening, if I am being honest.”
“I know, but… it’s all over our memories, isn’t it? Not knowing. Humans never knew. We just lived countless lives in a Godless world, or at least what we can assume was a Godless world, and… it didn’t make much of a difference on history or human lives, didn’t it? Humans still believed. They prayed and helped each other and killed each other, all in the name of so many Gods that never existed. And we did the same.”
They had gotten married countless times, under thousands of different religions. Even when marriage was not allowed for them, they had still put together their own ceremonies, exchanging tokens and vows as a promise that they were choosing each other for life. They’d believed in one God, in many Gods, in Gods that were peaceful and others that were vengeful, and if someone had told Aziraphale, at any point, that the altar he was standing in front of had absolutely no God behind it, he would have come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter who was or wasn’t behind the altar, so long as it was Crowley he was meeting in front of it.
“And it doesn’t bother you? Not knowing?” Crowley asked.
“It used to, yes,” he had once hoped, prayed, begged to know whether God was listening, whether She truly approved of everything Heaven was doing in Her name. “But there are a few things I hope to have learned from all those lives, and one of them is the ability to accept this.”
“But what if She is still out there and one day She decides to destroy us, no warning or explanation, just BAM and we’re gone?”
Aziraphale thought about it for a minute.
“If you think about it, humans had to deal with this as well. And not just from the possibility of God existing. They knew - we knew - that all it would have taken to end our lives was another human with some ill intent and the right chance. And that’s not even mentioning powerful humans, like kings and emperors and leaders. Humans fought and died in wars without ever getting a say in when or how they started and finished. They still made it work. They lived their lives, found happiness and meaning not despite the lack of any certainty, but because of it. They valued their life all the more because they had no idea whether there was some Great Plan beyond. And we could do the same now,” Aziraphale concluded, taking Crowley’s hands in his own.
“Thats’s lunatic,” said Crowley.
“No,” replied Aziraphale, “that’s-”
“Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it.”
“Ineffable,” Aziraphale said anyway. Crowley rolled his eyes at him with the practiced ease of someone who had been rolling his eyes at him for billions of years.
“You do love that word, don’t you?”
“More than I used to actually,” admitted Aziraphale, a pensive smile on his lips. “For six thousand years, I used ineffability as a shield: I brought it up to avoid confronting my own doubts about God’s plan. Now it just means accepting that I cannot have all the answers, I cannot know everything, but it also means that I can stop worrying about following some Great Plan that might or might not exist, and I can finally start doing what I think is right without feeling guilty about it.”
“When you put it this way, it doesn’t sound too bad,” Crowley conceded.
“No Heaven, no Hell, just us. And whatever we want to make of this,” Aziraphale said, gesturing vaguely at the vast emptiness surrounding them with one hand, the other one still holding onto Crowley’s.
“Surely you don’t mean…”
“Why not?”
“Angel, we’re talking about building a whole new universe.”
“It’s not like we don’t have the time. You could make stars again.”
“We’d be playing Gods.”
“At the beginning, yes. But then we could leave the world to do its own thing and just enjoy the ride.”
Crowley smiled.
“I would get boring here after a while, I suppose. Let me check something.” He took a step back, closed his eyes to focus, and then snapped his fingers. Slowly, as if being re-composed one atom at a time, the bookshop materialized around them.
“We do still have our powers, then,” he said, smiling. “We could do it. Theoretically. I mean, there are so many things to decide and plan and I really would like to give unicorns another go and… is everything okay?”
Aziraphale turned to look at him. He’d wandered off a bit, gently running his hand over the spines of the books, the old wood of the bookshelves, the familiar surface of his desk.
“It’s all there. Every book, every detail… it’s the same as it was.”
“Do you want to change something? That would be a first,” Crowley said, smirking.
“No, actually. I like it. It’s perfect, just the way it was. And you remembered it. In detail. Out of anything you could have materialized, you chose the bookshop. Why?”
Crowley tried to give a nonchalant shrug. He failed.
“It’s the first thing that came to my mind. Closest thing to a home that we ever got. And I knew you’d miss it.”
Little demonic miracle of my own, Aziraphale’s memory provided, and out of all the lives now neatly stacked in his mind, it was his own past that brought Aziraphale to the verge of tears.
“Oh, Crowley,” he said, not knowing what to say next, just as he hadn’t known on that distant night. All he knew was that this time he couldn’t just stay silent.
“You know, before… before we start crafting the new universe, there is something I need to tell you. Want to tell you. I’m not really sure. Bit of both, I suppose.”
He took a deep breath. Crowley was staring at him, his sunglasses still off, and it made it harder for Aziraphale to focus.
“I don’t know how I would have managed without you,” he started off, because it was the easiest and yet deepest truth he could think of, “For those six thousand years and all those that came after. Every time I try to remember who I was or what I wanted before I met you… I hardly recognize that angel as myself. You have shaped me into what I am, and I couldn’t be more grateful. And now that we have this new universe, now that there are no more sides, I would like to - I want to…”
Words were failing him. How could he ever put six thousand years of yearning into a few sentences, a few words? How could he summarize six thousand years of repressed wants into something intelligible?
“Aziraphale,” Crowley’s voice brought him back to the present, grounding him. He was closer now, so close that Aziraphale could feel his breath on his own face. “Tell me what you want. Please. I need to hear it.”
He was too close. Aziraphale couldn’t think. He could hardly breathe, if he were to be honest. But, maybe, that was the point: he needed to stop thinking, just as Crowley needed to stop worrying. At least for now, at least about this.
“What do you want?” Crowley repeated, his voice low and tender. A few words had felt like too little to Aziraphale, but now he realized he only needed one.
“Us.”
Crowley barely had time to react, his eyes growing wide and shiny with tears, before Aziraphale did what all of his memories had been screaming at him to do since the moment he saw Crowley again; something he had been wanting to do for centuries and had done so many times, in so many lives, except his own.
He kissed him.
God had once told Aziraphale that he knew how to value what most humans didn’t even know they had. As far as Aziraphale was concerned, She had been wrong. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known what it would feel like to love Crowley the way he wanted to, what it would feel like to kiss him as he was doing now, to wrap his arms around him and feel him doing the same. He knew now. He’d known for billions of years.
Stolen kisses in the night, hidden in the shadow of a newly-build Colosseum. A peck on the lips for good luck, in the backstage of a theatre of the West End, in 1941. A passionate first kiss under a canopy, after being surprised by a rainstorm in 2391.
He knew the surprised sound Crowley would make when their lips met. He knew the way Crowley would caress his back, sending shivers down his spine. He knew the spot on Crowley’s neck that would make his knees go weak the moment Aziraphale bit it. He knew it all, and yet it was still all new, because this time it was Crowley, his Crowley, and he may have loved a billion versions of him, but he’d loved this one for longer than any other.
They stumbled backwards, into the couch, which felt bigger than Aziraphale remembered it ever being, but he wasn’t exactly going to complain about the change, was he? And he knew the way Crowley would wrap his legs around him as Aziraphale gently pushed him to lay amongst the pillows. He knew the needy sounds he would make as Aziraphale slowly undressed him, peppering his body with kisses as he did so. He knew the way Crowley’s back would arch into him when Aziraphale’s hand reached the zipper of his trousers. He’d seen it happen countless times. But when Crowley opened his eyes and looked up at him, it was golden irises that shone in the darkness, and that was a first.
“Oh, how I’ve missed you,” Aziraphale whispered, leaning down to kiss him again.
“Missed me? I’ve always been there. You’ve literally just spent all of human history with different versions of me.”
“Well, yes, but I missed this version. My favourite,” Aziraphale explained, trailing soft kisses across Crowley’s face. It would have been incredibly sweet, almost innocent, if they hadn’t been laying half naked on the couch.
“Your favourite,” Crowley repeated, looking a bit sad all of a sudden. “Even over the version of me that was still an angel?”
The words were barely more than a whisper, as if Crowley weren’t entirely sure whether to speak them or merely think them, and he regretted the question the moment it left his lips, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He never had been, and what had that ever brought him? Only trouble, that’s what.
Aziraphale stared at him wide-eyed.
“Oh, Crowley,” he said, pulling back. Crowley braced himself for the blow, but Aziraphale pulled him up as well, so that they were both sitting on the couch, breath still laboured and hair mussled. It wasn’t exactly the right setting for a serious conversation, but it looked like they were going to have one anyway.
“The angel version of you was with me for what, five minutes? He didn’t walk with me through six millenia of history. He wasn’t by my side when I tried to stop the End of the World twice. He didn’t teach me to fight for what I believe in. The angel you were was a possibility, someone I would have certainly grown to care about if we’d had the time, but it would have happened because he was you. Not the other way around. I didn’t choose death over the possibility of being separated by you because I was chasing the idea of the angel you once were. And if you’ve ever felt like I missed that version of you, or liked it more than I liked you, I am sorry. I just wish I could have spared you the pain of Falling. I wish I could see you smile the way you did back then, so full of hope and enthusiasm. You have a lovely smile, my dear, but I don’t get to see it very often, and that saddens me.”
A lanky woman in worn-out animal hides, smiling as she showed Aziraphale the progress she was making growing new plants instead of foraging (just a few more generations and humanity would have agriculture all figured out).
A man in Elizabethan London, proudly whispering to his friend that Shakespeare had actually taken his suggestions and that the play he was about to see had been more of a shared work, really.
An astronomy professor, excitedly showing his husband the telescopic images of the asteroid he’d just discovered, and that he’d named after him.
“Well, I was young. Naive. And I felt loved. I thought I was,” said Crowley, not looking him in the eyes.
“I love you,” said Aziraphale instinctively. The words he’d bottled up for six thousand years suddenly slipped from his tongue and floated in the space between them, heavy as the whole universe and soft as the couch that currently made up their whole universe.
“I know it’s not the same as when you felt loved by Her, but-”
Crowley interrupted him. “It’s enough,” he said, cradling Aziraphale’s face in his hands. “More than enough, in fact, it’s better. I don’t need a love that is so conditional, so cruel. I want a love that is soft, and messy, and silly. I want a love that will drag me down ridiculous paths I never would have taken otherwise, one that will tell me when I am wrong but not hold it against me. I want exactly what you’re offering me, what you’ve been offering me for the past… however many years it’s been, I’ve honestly lost count at this point.”
Aziraphale kissed him, slowly, gently, as if he could pour into the kiss all of the love that the Creation had ever contained.
“I love you,” he repeated, enjoying the feel of the words on his tongue. They tasted like Crowley’s lips.
“I love you too,” whispered Crowley, blushing almost as red as his hair, “always have.”
“Always will,” replied Aziraphale, then kissed him again. They slid back down onto the couch, and when Crowley looked up at him, he smiled.
“There it is,” said Aziraphale, caressing his face, “my favourite smile. You’re happy then?”
“I’ve got a whole universe to rebuild, and I’ve got you. That’s all I ever wanted.”
Aziraphale kissed him, and for a while there was no more talking between them. So, as a universe came to an end, another began.
In the beginning was the Word.
No, wait, this was last time. In the beginning was… a couch? A bookshop? An angel and a demon? No, that doesn’t sound right. Everybody would laugh at the universe if it started off like this. Wait, I think I’ve got it now. Yes, this is definitely more like it.
In the beginning was Love.