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“If there is any more out there than this, please show me a sign.”
Asa and Anthony retired late, still smelling faintly of cold air and candle wax after hours spent watching celestial bodies together from the hillside beyond the village. Anthony had spoken animatedly about constellations while Asa listened beside him, smiling at the sound of his voice even when he failed to follow half the explanations.
Now Anthony slept beside him, one arm flung carelessly across the blankets, snoring softly enough that another person might have found it irritating.
Asa never had even though sleep never found him as easily. His eyelids were moving rapidly, indicating he had just entered the stage of dreams.
“Aziraphale, former Guardian of the Eastern Gate, you have summoned me again.”
The voice existed everywhere at once without an echo. Asa became abruptly aware that he no longer knew where he was. That should have frightened him more than it did.
Around him stretched a place beyond shape or horizon, somewhere that all of Anthony’s lectures had never once mentioned. Colours moved through it in slow currents: impossible blues, violent reds, shades of white so bright they bordered on pain.
And Asa was suspended within it, weightless. No, on second thought, he was flying. White wings, immense and immaculate, moved behind him, carrying him through the strange vastness with a sense of familiarity. Dream, he thought immediately. It had the peculiar certainty dreams sometimes possessed. The kind where one knew without question that none of it could possibly be real. Apparently, his dream self was called Aziraphale.
“You have the advantage of me, I’m afraid,” he finally managed.
“Yes,” the voice replied. “I do. But not for long.” The light around him pulsed once.
Aziraphale closed his eyes against the intensified brilliance and remembered. The memories found him in fragments, each of them sharp enough to cut. A flaming sword was passed over trembling fingers outside Eden’s walls, rain hammered against the Ark, the smell of old books and cocoa filled a corner shop in Soho.
Black wings stretched next to the Antichrist, yellow eyes were hidden badly behind dark lenses. Crowley. Not Anthony.
Just… Crowley.
His Crowley. Sharp-tongued and clever and endlessly kind in ways he pretended not to be. Crowley laughing on a bench, Crowley driving too fast through London. Crowley looking at him like something fragile that was impossible to have, stumbling over words that never got a second chance to be said.
But there was more. Together as humans, both of them, they had attended the first performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” which Anthony had reluctantly agreed to go to, fan of comedies that he was. They had seen the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1889. Their hands brushed across countless lifetimes, when they found each other beneath different names and different faces. But there were other lives.
Aziraphale remembered lonely years spent searching for something he could never properly name. A persistent absence haunting him across entire lifetimes. The certainty that someone ought to have been standing him beneath the stars. There had been lives, too many of them, where they never met at all. The ones where they met too late or when Crowley died young while Aziraphale remained behind with a grief that felt far too large for the short years they had shared. And then there were the lives where they loved each other openly and still failed to remain together. Human life, Aziraphale learned, possessed countless small methods of separation entirely unrelated to Heaven or Hell. Even across lifetimes, it seemed, loving Crowley had never guaranteed keeping him.
Around him, the voice spoke again. “I know what you saw.”
Aziraphale didn’t respond. The sheer enormity of remembering Crowley again made it difficult to breathe.
“And in every universe,” God continued, “there comes a moment where you ask the same question.”
Aziraphale looked around slowly, understanding dawning. Every universe. This wasn’t a metaphor, not dream logic. All those lives had happened; the lonely ones, the happy ones, the brief ones. But how was this possible? They had been told that there would be a new Earth, but that they would cease without a chance of experiencing any of it.
“Why?” he whispered at last and somewhere another voice echoed that question. Why? Someone else, a long time ago, had wondered the same.
God’s presence shifted around him, impossibly vast and impossibly close all at once. “Time has passed, Aziraphale,” She said. “Much of it.” The words carried no triumph and no defensiveness. There was only indifference. “Yours is not the only universe anymore. I promised I would not interfere. That does not mean I do not know.”
“Does Crowley know?” Aziraphale asked suddenly before he could stop himself. The answer mattered with frightening immediacy. He turned sharply within the endless light, searching for something to locate within God’s presence. “Has he ever asked? Has he ever asked you one more question?”
God sighed softly and in that instant Aziraphale knew, with the awful familiarity of repetition, that he had asked this before, too. The silence that followed became an answer in itself. Not once, not across all those scattered lives and borrowed names and endless human years.
Aziraphale closed his eyes briefly. He could picture Crowley so easily now. Not merely the demon he had loved for so long, but Anthony as well. Anthony laughing breathlessly at his own terrible jokes beneath the stars. Anthony reaching for his hand half-asleep without ever fully waking. Anthony existing with that simple form of happiness Crowley himself had so rarely been allowed, if ever.
And through all of it, he had never searched, never looked upward and demanded more. Once he had questioned Heaven itself with the fearless certainty of someone who believed understanding and love could never possibly contradict one another.
God’s voice interrupted the thought. “There are other universes where you can be together with the Crowley you knew. But you cannot live with those memories in this universe. You will not remember anything when you wake up.” Until you seek me out again in your next lifetime. The implication was clear.
Aziraphale looked down at his hands and saw human hands again, temporary things. Things that were fragile enough to forget. “And if I asked?” he whispered. “If I asked for us to truly remember in another universe?”
The light around him shifted faintly. “You would.”
But memory was never only memory, was it? Certainly not for Crowley. To remember would mean the Fall again, the loneliness. He would know fear, would know what six thousand years of waiting outside every place he had once called home would mean. He would have to face every rejection, every abandonment anew. He would feel every moment of believing himself unforgivable and would hear it confirmed in Aziraphale’s voice.
Maybe worse, Crowley would learn that even now there remained an Almighty watching them quietly from beyond it all. Aziraphale could almost feel the betrayal that realisation would carve through him. Anthony slept peacefully beside him tonight because he did not know these things. Because somewhere along the line, forgetting had become mercy.
And Aziraphale had hurt him too much in the past, loved him too much in the present to take that away. He couldn’t pull Crowley down once more. There would be no universe where they could remain together as themselves. Not unless Crowley chose it as well. Not unless Crowley one day looked at the stars and reached again for the same dangerous longing that had once destroyed him.
Aziraphale knew he would only be able to choose this if this was what Crowley wanted. He also knew that this day would never come.