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They’re in the bookshop at the end of the world. The angel, the demon, God and the Adversary. Nothingness stretches all around them, infinite nothingness, heartbreakingly empty.
Crowley’s corporeal form feels heavy, weighing on him. In all his six thousand years of life on Earth he’s never fully appreciated the miracle of having a body, a form that can move and talk and eat and drink and breathe and feel. He’s never fully appreciated how miraculous humans are, with all their infinite delicate systems, brain and blood vessels and lungs and heart, all somehow working to keep them alive.
His heart is pounding. He’s never really focused on that before, on the fact that he has a heartbeat. How strange to discover that fact now, when in moments he’ll be taken away from it.
“You two fully comprehend the cost?” God says. Her eyes are sparkling. This is a game to Her. It’s always a game.
Crowley feels Aziraphale’s hand in his, and it’s enough to break him, almost. Aziraphale’s hands, his lovely soft hands that Crowley has seen a million different ways — sorting through books, wielding a flaming sword, curled around the stem of a champagne flute. They will vanish, and Aziraphale will vanish, and Crowley will vanish, and how can he do it? How can they go through with this?
But then there’s the world. The mad, beautiful, wild planet that Crowley has loved ever since he first slithered onto the surface all those years ago. The way the sunrise looks in the desert. The taste of wine. His Bentley, his poor vanished Bentley, lost somewhere in the wilds of infinity. Ducks and dolphins and gorillas and the flight of birds, and Crowley loves it all, damn it.
And the people. The strange, awful, wonderful, infinitely surprising people. Everyone they’ve met, everyone Crowley has ever spoken to or threatened or hissed at. Maggie and Nina and Newt and Anathema and Shadwell and Madame Tracy and Adam and those mad kids, and Jesus, dammit, poor beautiful Jesus who just loved everyone all the time.
How can they just let all of that go? How can they just walk away?
He and Aziraphale stand resolute, hand in hand. Crowley looks God in the eye.
“We know what we’re asking for,” he says. Aziraphale holds his hand tighter, and Crowley grips back, holding on. He’s spent six millennia arguing with this maddening, gorgeous angel, but for once, they’re in perfect agreement. They know each other too well to turn away from the world.
How could Crowley not love the world, when he knows how much Aziraphale loves it too? When it was the place they found each other, over and over again?
“Very well,” God says, and stands. The Adversary stands too, and they face off, Heaven to Heaven, Hell to Hell, and all of humanity hanging in the balance.
“I’ll make it,” God says. “I’ll make the Universe your way. I’ll even let an Earth happen. Eventually there’ll be humans—” She almost spits the word — “and life, in all of its mundane glory.”
Mundane? Crowley thinks. There are a lot of words he could use to describe life, but mundane is not one of them.
“Something that both of you,” God continues, “will neither know or experience, though.”
There’s something in Her eyes, some spark. There’s something She’s not telling them. Is it a trick, a trap? But Crowley stands his ground. This is a game of cards, after all, and the dealer never blinks. Crowley doesn’t blink either.
“That doesn’t matter,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley has never loved him more. He thinks he could die of love just then, just from holding Aziraphale’s hand.
How do humans do it? How do their fragile mortal bodies hold so much love, how do they not just explode? Do they know how lucky they are?
“Say goodbye, then.” God says, and Crowley turns to his angel. He can see himself reflected in Aziraphale’s eyes.
There’s so much Crowley wants to say, too much. He could never say it all, not even if they had another six thousand years together.
So he doesn’t speak, and it’s okay. He knows Aziraphale can see what he’s feeling. It’s in the look in his eyes, in the press of his hand.
Aziraphale presses his fingertips to his mouth, kissing them, and touches them to Crowley’s lips. It’s like he’s giving back the kiss Crowley gave him, what feels like a lifetime ago. Crowley remembers the desperation and passion he’d felt in that moment, the urge to clutch at Aziraphale, to know, just once, what the angel’s lips felt like against his.
Angels and demons don’t really kiss, as a rule. It’s a human ritual, and something that supernatural beings don’t really understand. Kissing is something that requires a corporeal body, which is not something that angels and demons usually have. Heaven and Hell aren’t physical realms, after all. They exist outside of time and space. Most angels and demons wouldn’t see the point of mashing their lips together, such a human action, so awkward and messy.
But this — Aziraphale’s fingers against his mouth, the warmth of his kiss lingering — doesn’t feel awkward or messy. There’s a look in his eyes that Crowley can only describe as adoration. In all his long existence — as an angel, as a demon, his time on Earth — he’s never felt truly adored before. He’s never felt the kind of love that he sees in Aziraphale’s eyes.
So he does what he’s wanted to do for six thousand years and kisses the angel’s fingertips. And it’s a pact, a promise between them. Wherever they’re going, they’re going together.
Crowley looks into Aziraphale’s eyes and sees every bit of the love he feels reflected there. And his body, his miracle of a body, it can’t keep up, it’s cracking and falling apart, unable to hold so much love. They are dissolving, dissolving, dissolving. The bookshop is vanishing around them and Crowley is fading away, and the last thing he feels is Aziraphale’s hand in his…
✴ ✴
Nothingness.
That’s all Crowley knows. Darkness all around. He’s not standing on anything. He no longer has a body. Eyes, ears, lips, hands, feet — they’re all gone. He is nothing. He is only a consciousness floating in the void, beyond sight, beyond feeling. There is nothing left.
The fact that he can still think surprises him. He should have vanished completely, and Aziraphale too.
Maybe this is where you go when you don’t exist anymore. Maybe this is his fate, eternity alone in the nothingness.
Crowley drifts.
In the darkness, there’s a rustle of feathers.
Crowley doesn’t know how he’s hearing it, given that he doesn’t have ears anymore. But he hears it anyway. He knows that sound. Knows how the wind sounds when it ruffles an angel’s wing — or a demon’s, for that matter. Demons have feathered wings, too. They’ve always been more similar than Aziraphale would care to admit.
And suddenly he knows, with a surety greater than anything he’s ever felt, that Aziraphale is there with him. And he knows that Aziraphale knows it too. They’re not alone. In the space without words, in a time beyond meaning, they are together.
Crowley has no body, no way to speak, even if Aziraphale had ears to hear. It doesn’t matter. They’re together. Beyond existence, beyond reality, they are still together.
They drift together. And Crowley thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, this existence. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to stay like this forever. To just be in the darkness, with Aziraphale. Darkness, and the rustle of feathers.
They drift for who knows how long. Time has no meaning. This is a space beyond Creation, in the darkness before God made the world.
And then—
BANG.
The Big Bang, when it happens, is the loudest thing Crowley has ever heard. He knows it should be silent, because there’s no sound in space, but he hears it anyway. And he is suddenly shooting outwards, he is photons and neutrons and hydrogen and helium, he is atoms rushing ever outwards and he knows, without knowing how he knows, that Aziraphale is at his side. They are rushing onwards together.
And there is light.
The nebulae burst into existence, red and blue and purple and gold. Clouds of stardust billow across the sky. The Pillars of Creation shimmer into existence, like a hand reaching across the cosmos, and Crowley doesn’t know how he’s here, he doesn’t know how Aziraphale is here, how they’re rushing through the stars like this, but it doesn’t matter. God does play cards with the universe, and he understands suddenly that She has, metaphorically speaking, slipped them an ace.
And they’re spinning, and everything is suddenly white-hot. If he still had a body, Crowley would be in agony, but he doesn’t feel a thing. He is molecular; he is heat. They’re spinning around each other, Crowley and Aziraphale, and Crowley knows it should be impossible, but he hears, just for a second, his angel laughing.
They're spinning faster than ever and they’re burning, hotter than ever as the Universe expands around them—
And then there are two stars orbiting each other. Bound together, two celestial bodies that have somehow found each other, that share the same orbit.
The stars speak, not with an ordinary language but with the ripples of light coming off their surfaces. It doesn’t matter who speaks first, because they have always been speaking. Their conversation takes place over billions of years, but if it could be translated into human speech it would look something like this:
Are you there?
Yes. Are you there?
Yes. I’m here.
I’m glad.
So am I.
Are we together?
Yes. We’re together.
Pause. Then:
I’ve always wanted to dance with you, actually.
So have I.
Let’s dance, then.
And they are dancing. They are spinning around each other in a neverending pattern, now close together, now further apart, but always returning, always finding each other again. They exist outside of time and space, they are angels on the head of a pin, and they are dancing.
A long time passes.
Then Rigel Kentaurus, the slightly larger star, speaks.
Was it… was it worth it, angel? Saving the world? Giving the humans a second chance?
From their place in the sky, the stars can see the small blue-green planet some 4.34 light-years away. London doesn’t exist yet, but they can just make out the silvery curve of the Thames, and, maybe, the smoke from a few cooking fires.
The smaller star, Toliman, twinkles brighter for just a moment.
Oh yes, dear boy. It was worth it.
✴ ✴
Earth keeps turning, and they are in it and they are of it. They are two leaves on the same twig. They are two pebbles on the same mountainside. They are two grains of sand on the same beach.
And in Australia (oh, Australia!) a black cockatoo and a white one take off from the same branch and fly shrieking into the sunrise.
The star that was once an angel and the star that was once a demon circle each other in their neverending dance. They are together, always. The stars flash out like fire, like the brightest kind of flame, and what every flicker is saying is iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou.
And then it is the time called Now and there is a country called England, with a cottage in the South Downs. An aging bookseller and a retired astrophysicist sit out in their garden, holding hands, looking up at the night sky. High above their heads the stars shimmer. Alpha Centauri, the two stars orbiting each other, that are so close together they appear to be one.
A nightingale sings in the cool air. Over their heads the apple tree nods gently in the breeze. A meteor arcs across the sky.
The stars keep dancing.