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The ash makes no sound as it sifts between his fingers, leaves his palms coated in a powdery gray, as it falls from the bottom of his shoes.
The moon is quiet tonight.
Quiet every night, Crowley supposes. No atmosphere. He has to imagine the sound his footsteps would make, crunching through the fine white dust of the surface, as he makes his way toward a large slab where he can sit and look out over the wide black dark.
That’s the problem with life on Earth, with life-as-you-know-it, becomes your frame of reference for everything else. What’s life without sound, you start to wonder. Life without music, life without –
It hangs before him, set just above his right shoulder. Huge and silent, a vivid and beautiful blue.
Crowley claps his hands to rid them of moondust. No one can hear him, not even Crowley himself, his audience of one, and even if anybody could, the performers are too far away, too caught up in the action to know or care that someone’s up there watching. Why should they? The play has gone on for a long time and – thanks in part to certain semi-heroic deeds – will probably go on for a lot longer, now. Life goes on, is the saying. And so it goes, all that living.
Fuck all of it, honestly. He’d lasted about ten minutes before finding himself here, surface of the moon, gazing out over the world and realizing there is no one now who will notice if he slips out for a bit, or for longer, Crowley, exit stage left.
It’s not a bad idea. He just needs – and here Crowley’s head tips back, as he looks up into a vastness of stars – a little space.
**
What was it he’d said? Even in his own head he pretends it’s casual, like the words haven’t been rattling around against the insides of his skull ever since Aziraphale had given them voice, and in saying it made it true: Nothing lasts forever.
**
With one hand on the wheel, he rummages through the mess scattered across the back seat. Paper maps, books he’d taken from Aziraphale’s – from the bookshop, before he left. Whatever seemed like it might be useful. Celestial Navigation. The Book of Fixed Stars. This next one bound in indigo, scattered with a fine stellar dust. The Heavens, 2nd Edition. Crowley tosses it back behind the seat, grabs for whatever his fingers close around next. The Night: An Atlas.
That’ll do.
Crowley floats the book up to his left, flips through the pages with a wave of his hand. There they are. The bright nebulae and the dark, the bands of young protostars spinning up out of the ether, wrapped in their ecstatic, sweaty glow. He’s always been partial to these, the birthplaces of the universe, the great big bowls of cosmic soup, places where dust and color and light became more: more color, more light.
He still remembers how it felt to fly through it, come away shaking it free of your feathers: the once-was stuff of almost-stars.
There’s pages and pages of them here, but against the library of the universe, it would hardly ink the dedication in a single book. He gets distracted just looking at them, has to spend a twitchy minute wrestling the car from the gravity of a minor moon because of it, still the one hand flat on the page, marking his place – one of the pulsar wind types, a shattered stained glass window that had once encased a dying star. Crowley had been on Earth when that one blew, so brilliant as it burned that it sat stubbornly in the sky for nearly two years. For a time, you could even see it in the daylight.
I knew you when we were young, Crowley remembers thinking then, and he thinks it again now, pads of his fingers light over the gloss. Look at you, he murmurs.
Something similar is happening to what Crowley had seen in an old movie, once, where at the end of the film the wheels tipped away from the ground and the car sailed off into the blue. Crowley had looked at the Bentley and thought, why not?
Minor miracle. Major, maybe. Elbow grease and a little bit of faith. It had been surprising, finding any of it left.
Right, he says to no one, not used, after all this time, to being alone. Where to next?
**
He likes the comets. They dance alongside the windows, long white hair streaming back behind them, dipping in and out of his wake. When they finally veer off, he lifts a hand in farewell, and for a long time as the distance between them grows he adjusts his mirrors to keep them in view.
The asteroid belt had been, well. Rocky . But he’s well past that now. Shifting gear, he pulls the car into a space outside a bar on one of the far arms of the Milky Way.
This one used to be popular with travelers back in the day, angels stopping over on their way back from the outer reaches during the build phase, a couple species of aliens and early-concept prototypes moving in after evolving somewhat more sophisticated space travel than anyone on Earth would have for at least a few more centuries.
Still faster than anybody else had done it, you had to give the humans some credit – in the balance, always a little better at innovation than they were at almost anything else. There they were, going about their days all quietly miraculous, making coffee and love and interplanetary voyages. All you had to give them was time.
Your house red, he says, sinking down at the bar, and though the place is a little shabbier than the last time he’d seen it they still produce some lovely little number from out in the fields of Sagittarius, where they’ve managed to brew a kind of wine from the pink froth of an interstellar dust cloud. It tastes like raspberries, stains his lips a moody rum red. He can’t put his finger on it, but the smell is familiar – a sweetness, slightly burnt at the edges.
Crowley sets his glass down carefully. He’s a little unsettled by it. Maybe just that something could feel familiar at all, all the way out here.
The bar isn’t busy, light falling over a few blurred figures by the windows, a low, conversational hum. They have a jukebox in the corner and after ten minutes of trying and failing to look like he’s enjoying himself Crowley strolls over to see what they’ve got. Languages he hasn’t spoken in years, ones that don’t exist in any human tongue – he flips past these with a flick of his wrist. Buddy Holly, How and why in the name of – he flips past this, too, on down the list, which isn’t in any order he can make sense of. Something easy, that’s all he needs, just a bit of atmosphere. The kind of thing you’d hear in a dive at the edge of the galaxy.
What’s this take? he calls to the bartender, but they don’t seem to hear, and in any case it doesn’t matter because the record stutters, silence, then the next song’s up, spilling out into space packing a neutron core’s worth of wistful and twangy, and Crowley panics because it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d hear in a pathetic dive like this at the edge of a pathetic galaxy like this.
He escapes onto the balcony, which is empty and devoid of sound and so suits him just fine. Folding his arms over the railing, he wonders if any of the bright specks in the distance might be something he’d recognize.
**
Almonds, Crowley realizes halfway to Andromeda, and has to pull over to dry heave on the side of the not-a-road. The wine, that sugar-roasted scent – it had smelled like almonds.
**
Aziraphale had successfully kept exactly one secret from Crowley over the course of their acquaintance. And even then, he’d practically wriggled the entire way there, a pretty strong indication that some angelry was afoot.
Please, Aziraphale had begged, back at the bookshop, his eyes a vivid, pleading blue.
You’d have, Crowley had blinked down at the blindfold for a second too long, to be out of your –
But he’d been surprised all the same when Aziraphale pointed left, and again when they’d parked the car and he walked them down a side street, through an alley crawling with cats over to a door, freshly painted and propped open with a head of lettuce, which – Crowley cocked an eyebrow – Hungry? – Aziraphale sighed impatiently – Just go – Aziraphale pushing Crowley through ahead of him faster than his eyes could adjust, his head, too distracted by the touch at the base of his spine to notice more than vaguely the sensation of a big dark room, of space, and he’d turned around to say –
– something. It didn’t matter what. Because then, above their heads: the universe.
They took their seats in the back of the auditorium, Crowley gaping up at the ceiling and managing to get all twisted up in his own legs on the way over. It had been a long time since he’d seen them this close, was all. Like seeing old friends.
Beside him, Aziraphale was in awe, too. His face upturned, mouth a small o . He’d noticed Crowley watching, and even in the dark, Crowley could see him flush. He’d leaned in, his words warm and excited against Crowley’s cheek. It’s quite marvelous. Almost as good as you were.
Projected on the screen, a star glowing whiter, and white –
Afterward, they had stepped out into the afternoon, dazed and blinking, but Crowley had figured they could be given grace for this: if you’d watched the entire universe go by it would be strange, to find yourself here.
Here, where Aziraphale was asking Did you like it?, so tentative, the small hope nurtured in his voice burning so bright it knocked Crowley off balance; collapsing through him with a wanting like gravity, bowling ball or a thing with feathers – it didn’t matter, he’d still want to bury his fingers in Aziraphale’s white curls and kiss him right there in the middle of the street either way, Heaven and Hell and all of it be damned, all the stars, too, somehow in the middle of it all Crowley managing to nod his head yes, to hold his hands behind his back where they would not betray him, the way for hours after this body kept the image of the dying star burning on the back of his eyelids.
**
He steers clear of the black holes. Best not to risk it, even if – even if.
**
This exoplanet’s got rings, and he breaks for a smoke on one of them, legs dangling over the side. Technically, he’s on a rocky object orbiting the planet somewhere within the structure of the ring, an object that is called, no shit, a moonlet. Not Crowley’s choice, that one. Some of these things are kilometers long. If it’s not outright disrespectful it’s at least a little bit lazy.
Crowley taps ash over the side of the moonlet, watches it fall into line with the rest of the rubble. Not a No Smoking sign to be found up here, but this feels a little disrespectful, too. Everybody’s got a soft spot for the ones with rings, and here he is, using it as an ashtray.
Sorry, old girl. Demon now. Long story. He exhales a lungful of smoke. Lot’s changed since the last time I saw you.
He doesn’t smoke, not really. Done it in all the eras where it was the done thing. Always has a pack on him, just so Aziraphale can huff disapprovingly when he finds it, pocket of a jacket hung from a chair in the bookshop.
If, when he’s been angry, he’s found himself out on a balcony or hunched into some alcove outside Hell’s gates, the white twist of it rising from the curl of his fingers, well then. That’s nobody’s business but his own.
Is he angry? Crowley considers the cigarette. He’d like to be. He feels like it’d be easier.
And he is, a little. At Gabriel and Beelzebub, that whole loathsome affair. Maggie and Nina. Heaven most of all, how they’d put a spin on anything, tell you everything you wanted to hear, make it shiny as the tiles on the floor. Make it seem like they gave any kind of a shit about you or anybody when all they really wanted was to keep you wriggling under their thumb. Free to do what you wanted, sure – free up to the end of your chain.
Obedience was too nice a name for it.
It’s hard to be angry at Aziraphale when he knows exactly how that chain feels around your neck.
He replays their final conversation in his head over and over until the cigarette burns out, and then he lights himself another. What could he have said differently, he wonders. What words might have convinced Aziraphale that Heaven was a – and this was the technical term – manipulative, two-faced bastard? He would’ve gotten down on his knees, if it would’ve worked. Would’ve fisted his hands in the fabric of Aziraphale’s thighs and begged, Choose me. Choose me, angel.
But he doesn’t think it would have worked, and this is the part of it he can’t stop turning over and over. The part of himself. He tips the pack out and the rest of the cigarettes tumble clumsily into zero gravity, fill in the outline of where he’d been as he stands and makes his way back to the car. He could think himself in circles, trying to find the one thing he could have said that would have made Aziraphale stay.
**
And about the Gabriel and Beelzebub thing: first of all, it’s gross. He hopes they’re repulsively happy somewhere extraordinarily far away from him.
And second: why did it get to be so easy, for them?
**
Though he’d gone back many times with Aziraphale, when they’d argued or when Aziraphale was busy, Crowley had often found himself there alone, his thoughts drifting up through the exosphere on the ceiling, through the echoing recitations – these are variable stars. Their brightness changes with time. Or, this is called a planemo, a wandering planet. Their most popular show was about the night sky in London, what you could climb out onto your roof and find if you knew what you were looking for: the moon, Venus, sometimes a meteor or two. Orion, the sword hanging from his belt.
They once had a physicist in to give a talk about cosmology and the ultimate fate of the universe. He found it amusing, a little endearing, even, their theories about how all of this came to be. You had to be there, he supposes.
But if someone had decided on an ending, no one had bothered to tell him, so Crowley had tried very hard to look uninterested as she started by explaining that the universe is flat: that two parallel lines traveling through the center would keep going, and never meet.
And it’s the going that’s important, everything moving away and away and away from each other, faster and faster and faster – this is how we end up with heat death, she had said, with empty spaces that are more vast and numerous than the stuff in between, and getting more so all the time. The universe would pull apart, she said, like wax, and it would become very cold, and all the stars would quietly go out and there would be no more.
There are other theories, of course. In some of them, Crowley learned, they would all blip out of existence, just like that, for no reason that anybody could see. Random Tuesday, halfway down to the shops, maybe bending to get your newspaper, nice glass of wine in the bath – poof. Though this is preferable to the one where everybody gets cooked.
The physicist had attempted to assure them that, in the most likely scenario, the heat death one, everyone on Earth, and the Earth itself, the Sun, even – they’d all be long gone by then.
Crowley had looked around him at all the human faces, then stared down at his hands.
For Crowley, the worst of it was a stray comment the physicist made as she explained the shape of the cosmos. That because of the way the universe is expanding, the part of it that can be seen is getting smaller. At every second, they were leaving forever, thousands and thousands of stars vanishing from view, and we would not get them back.
In a distant future, if someone stood on the surface of the Earth, or where the Earth used to be, they would look up and find that there was nothing left to see.
**
If Aziraphale had been there, though: that’s nonsense, he would have said, and he would’ve started with a strongly worded letter and taken it all the way to the top if he had to. And he would have committed all those human faces to memory, and remembered their names, just in case.
And Crowley would have wanted to touch his wrists and his shoulder and the lid of each eye, and ask how are you you, but this was nothing new.
**
On a milky white beach beside a river of stars: Crowley considers the binaries. Some can be seen from Earth, distinct, a primary and secondary star holding one another at a respectable distance. In some publications, this second star is referred to as a companion. (This had been a different lecture).
Other times, they are too close. The human eye is limited, and sees them as one being. One star. By the light they emit as they dance, it’s possible to discern the difference: when these stars eclipse one another, they dim.
There are some stars that seem to orbit around empty points in space. You can’t see it, but you know something’s there, and physics allows Earth’s astronomers to deduce the shape and weight of the absence. You can tell by the path the other star takes, the weight it carries as it vacillates across the sky.
As seen from Earth, Alpha Centauri’s one of the ones that looks like a single star. Crowley hadn’t known when he suggested it that it wasn’t. One could be forgiven, he hopes, at the end of the world, for seeing something luminous and not stopping to ask questions.
And he had been, hadn’t he? Aziraphale’s face as he said it: I forgive you. Shame, sadness. Fear.
And something else, he’s sure of it. He’ll allow himself that. He knows because he recognized it, a brief glimpse, like catching the sun in a mirror.
Still: that didn’t make the light yours.
Aziraphale would have hated it here. That, he had known, when he asked, but he’d been desperate, still under the impression that if he could just keep them together they’d figure out the rest.
And in the end they did, though Crowley wasn’t naïve enough to have thought that was the end of it. Heaven and Hell wouldn’t have left them alone forever. But he’d thought maybe they could at least exhale, and when the worst came, well – they’d figure it out again.
Even in his head, it’s hard to look directly at him. He stares instead at the lap of the tide, at the stars coming in. Crowley doesn’t think it’s so bad up here, and that must be the difference between them, he thinks, that it would have been enough for Crowley to sit beside Aziraphale here forever and never look fully into his face.
Though – he rises, kicking a pebble of almost-planet down the beach as he makes his way to the shoreline – maybe Aziraphale isn’t the only person who’s very bad at lying to anybody else and very good at lying to themselves, because he finds for the first time that he’s tired of it, of carrying the longing for them both.
A record Aziraphale used to play in the bookshop, whenever it rained: Oh, dreammaker, you heartbreaker…
Crowley bends, to trail his fingers through the cosmos.
**
Not fucking far enough, apparently –
No, Crowley says, brandishing the atlas and standing up from the cafe table, no, no, no, no –
Gabriel turns beseechingly to Beelzebub, which makes Crowley throw up his hands all over again, trying to find an escape route, but the patio is thin enough that they’ve got him backed up with nowhere to run. Okay, so he’d told them to come here, but he hadn’t thought they’d actually do it.
Crowley, Beelzebub sighs, be sensible.
And he’s gonna tell me to stop quaking in my boots, I remember the lines, Crowley snaps, and sinks back with despair as they pull chairs up opposite.
Gabriel smiles. How’ve you been?
Crowley addresses his former boss. Do the teeth come with complementary sunglasses?
You already have – Beelzebub sighs again. Listen, I don’t want to be here anymore than you do –
I guarantee that’s not true.
– but I needed to warn you. About us. Not me and Gabe, they roll their eyes, as Crowley feels himself going green at the edges, you and me.
Gabe? Crowley says faintly.
The two of us, Beez says, we did it back then, and we’d do it again. We’ll choose it every time.
Choose what?
To leave. Beez has nixed the flies, Crowley notes, gone the ink route – how original! – an iridescent matrix caged over their forearm like wings where they jerk a thumb in Gabriel’s direction. But they’re not like that. And that’s what’s different about them, isn't it? You’d stay, for them.
Crowley says nothing, hopes that in the light of this planet’s twin suns, his glasses are opaque.
And Crowley, they frown, a memory on their face that is familiar to Crowley and the others like them. Leaving – don’t forget how hard it is, the first time.
**
The fall is hard, the landing’s harder, and everything that comes before and after – that’s the worst, the after for obvious reasons, sulfur clinging to your hands, to your hair, your wings dripping with it, emerging from the pool that thick and lightless black –
But the before:
Why even make it if it’s just going to end?
The memories are hazy, suffused with gold. They were in a garden, he thinks.
He had been angry, for the first time. She’d told him that’s what it was, anger, that hot feeling in the middle of him like the core of a star. Why is there anger, he’d asked, and She’d said Because bad things happen, and then he’d asked why bad things happen and She’d said So that there can be anger, and when he’d asked why they couldn’t just skip it altogether in that case She’d held his hands between Her own and said so you can make something with these that isn’t anger.
I don’t understand, he’d said, and begun to cry, hot tears of frustration and fear.
Oh, beloved, and She had cupped his face in Her palms. I forget that you’ve never been lonely.
**
(As Crowley fell, his edges igniting, the streak of his descent tearing a hole through the night, though the memory had burned off in the mesosphere: Only the meteors know how I feel.)
**
As Gabriel had turned to go: Aziraphale didn’t always like the world. Not the way he does now. You seem to have had a lot to do with that. I’ve seen the file, he’d assured Crowley, who had not found it reassuring.
But Gabriel had hesitated. Whatever Aziraphale is doing – in his head, I think he’s probably doing it for you.
The atlas, open on the table. Gabriel had paged through until he found what he was looking for. If you don’t believe me, he’d said, and tapped the page, ask him.
**
What could they have done, there in the dark? Crowley clambering into Aziraphale’s lap, a warning thumbed against his mouth – hush.
Aziraphale’s hands would waver to his waist, where he’d pull Crowley’s shirt free of his belt. A hitch in his chest at his own palm against Crowley’s ribs. Crowley would have leaned in to swallow the sound, each awed gasp, would’ve pressed his hips to Aziraphale’s just to tempt them out into Crowley’s teeth.
Aziraphale might have laid his nose against Crowley’s neck, kissed at his jaw, dragged aside his collar to exhale open-mouthed against his shoulder and all the slow way up to his ear, breath deepening as Crowley slipped a soft hand inside his trousers. Might have whispered there yes and good and oh, Crowley as his thighs tensed and he spilled over Crowley’s hand, right there beneath the projector, beneath the dizzying array of stars, a thousand million of them reflected up at him from Aziraphale’s eyes, wide and hot and dark, brimming with the kind of wonder Crowley had only ever seen once before, there at the beginning of everything –
Let there be light.
If Crowley ever let himself get carried away in the daydream, he’d end up hastily jamming his sunglasses back on while the applause broke out, filing out a few paces behind Aziraphale so there wouldn’t be questions about the damp sheen of sweat at his temples. Crowley would hang back, slowing his heartbeat, Aziraphale up ahead chatting with visitors like it was his job, but when he inevitably turned to search the crowd for Crowley his face would do that thing it always did when he found him, and there it would go again, his pathetic heart.
He’d shoulder past, shove a couple people aside if he needed to, for effect. Growl, Come on, ambassador. Step out into the daylight and let the sun wash over his face.
The things they could have done, if anyone had ever left them alone long enough to get it right.
**
Among the questions he’d asked at the end: The amygdala is the shape of an almond. Why? As if it’s supposed to mean something, or is it all just random? Is there any point to any of it?
She’d listened. God was good at that, he’d give Her credit, She’d listened until he ran out of questions, taking his anger until he’d run out of that, too, and then Yes, She’d said, and smiled.
Crowley puts his fingers to his lips: for the thousandth time wishes he could forget the feeling, the taste – then immediately takes it back.
**
At the edge of the observable universe is a library.
The library is bigger than the universe itself and fits on the smallest exoplanet, so small that Crowley leaves the car parked with two wheels dangling off into space.
Inside, the ceilings are so high they have formed their own clouds, and in all directions are tall, pale stacks of books, rows and rows of them waning back into a white-green mist. A few times in the early days he’d seen God here, as She flipped through an enormous tome at one of the long silver tables. She’d never said anything, but She always smiled – like seeing an old friend.
No God, today, but someone is standing at the shelves with their back to Crowley, a book open in their hands. A halo of fine, silver hair.
Crowley’s knees buckle, his hand flying out to steady himself at a table. Maybe all the faster-than-light travel is catching up to him; suddenly, his ribs have jellied. He feels like a watery mess inside, like he might cry, only in his stomach, like rain might fall from the palms of his hands.
Angel?
Aziraphale – Aziraphale closes the book.
I’m the Librarian. Is there something I can help you find?
Why do you look like him? It’s like the moon up here. He’s sure he’s talking – shouting, even – but there is no sound.
Aziraphale looks at him with a kindness that might very well eviscerate Crowley where he stands. Should I look like somebody else?
No, Crowley says, too fast. Not even when he’d had no legs had he felt like so much of a worm. He wants to keep looking at Aziraphale. Please.
The Librarian’s eyes – watchful, quick, that same gold afternoon in a green lagoon. Here . They’re sitting at a table now, and Aziraphale is pushing a cup of tea across the table. Drink . He can’t hear the scrape of it, but he can see the red amber bobbing at the lip, can smell it, too, hot and rich as earth. He is suddenly, violently homesick.
Crowley does cry, then, for the first time since, a tear slipping past the edge of his sunglasses and down the side of his nose. He folds the glasses closed and places them on the tabletop by his wrist so he can squeeze at the bridge between his eyebrows.
Aziraphale – the Librarian – says nothing. Crowley feels oddly exposed, and reaches for the cup of tea just to have something to do with his hands.
It’s raining, Crowley says finally.
It is.
Behind them, water has begun to seep from the clouds, a soft sheen coating the aisles.
No sound, though. Odd kind of atmosphere you’ve got here.
Aziraphale smiles quietly. It stretches the bounds of the imagination, doesn’t it?
Crowley’s head aches. Inside it, dimly, pops of color and light. At the back of his tongue, gunpowder and almonds. At the tip of it, a thought:
A brain is a little like a universe, don’t you think? Aziraphale says, shifting in his chair. The gesture is so familiar Crowley feels his heart wringing itself out like a rag.
I do not, he manages.
Hearts, too.
Crowley snorts. I don’t think any of this is the kind of thing he’d say.
Aziraphale folds his hands casually over the table. You can know someone pretty well and still not know what it’s like to be in their head.
I was you, Crowley shouts, and backhands the cup of tea. It flies down the table, bouncing once and splintering into blue-patterned shards. I was you and you were me. The tea is bleeding into a red-gold lake and spilling across the floor. We wore each other’s skin.
Crowley blinks. The cup of tea is sitting there again, steaming, untouched.
Go on, the angel says.
Crowley stares. There is no need to breathe, but he does it anyway, what the humans do to keep their anger at bay. How are they not angry, all the time? How are they not –
How could you go back? Crowley tries. How could you be so –
Now that he’s been given the floor, he doesn’t know what to do with it. Now that he’s angry, he finds he doesn’t want to be. The angel sits there patiently, hands folded on the table, and Crowley would love him to the bitter end of every universe.
I never wanted to take Heaven from you, angel. Just wanted us to carry on the way we were forever, you doing good, me doing the rest – just that, forever and ever. For a long time I thought I would have been okay with that, and for a long time I would’ve been, you know. Happy, even, probably. Content, at least. But they would never have let us.
He’s pacing now, back and forth in front of the table. And you, you can look at it all and want to make it better. I understand, I do, that’s why I asked all those – Crowley bends his head, breathing at the ground while his hands tremble at his hips. But after everything they did, everything they’ve done. How could you ask me to go back?
Crowley looks up, up to where the clouds on the ceiling have given way to stars. They are far from Crowley, impossibly far. They cast me out.
I’m sorry, the Librarian says into the silence that follows. That must have hurt very much.
It did. Crowley swallows. Thank you.
The Librarian tilts his head. Anything else?
I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I don’t – you were right about one thing, and I don’t think we would’ve let us stay like that, either.
All of this, Aziraphale concedes, his hand gesturing vaguely to the everything, tends toward change. I don’t know if he was being so high-minded when he made the choices that he did, but part of him might have realized that you could not continue as you were.
Crowley sighs and folds back into his chair, holding himself by the elbows. It’s going to hurt him. I wish I could – he doesn’t know.
Aziraphale, the Librarian says, and hesitates. He is your equal and your opposite. Give him time to reach his own conclusions and make his own mistakes.
He leans in, and there is a familiar, aching warmth in his face. You can’t spare him pain. But you can be there, and you can wait. Or not.
Behind Aziraphale are windows through which it is possible to see the whole of space, back all the long way he has come. If he wanted, there’s a room here where he could lift the lid off of Earth like a dollhouse, peer down into the bookshop and over the busy street. What would be happening there now? Muriel with a cup of tea at the desk, maybe the girls watching one another through the windows. When he’s ready.
Isn’t it more of an if? In the center of Crowley’s chest is a hole filled with doubt, and he looks away from the window and down at his hands.
A finger tips his chin upwards. You came to the end of the universe to find me. Aziraphale is smiling. You could do it again.
Would you kiss me, if I asked? Crowley murmurs, and Aziraphale lays his hands along Crowley’s face. Slowly, he presses his lips to Crowley’s forehead.
And with great gentleness Aziraphale says: Give him time.
**
On his way out, Crowley allows himself a backward glance. The angel standing among the shelves and the stars, a candle’s fire from within, his own inexplicable light.
Maybe it would look different to some, but to Crowley this is faith: somewhere out there the angel and the books, all through the night held tender as a prayer between the palms of his hands.
**
For the second time, he and Aziraphale and the cosmos come into being between them. It’s a faithful reproduction. The artists, if not the physicists, get so much of it right.
But nothing can touch it, what it felt like the first time, to stand in the center of the universe. To fit the key in the lock and open it like a door. (Though: Aziraphale’s face, his expression blanketed with color and light –)
Aziraphale’s hand resting along the arm of the chair, palm turned up to the heavens. A temptation not even Crowley could have imagined.
Gently, he takes Aziraphale’s hand. Aziraphale doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even look down at their interlocked fingers, only smiles softly up at the clouds moving across the dome.
When the show has ended, and the lights go out, they don’t get up with the rest of the audience. Crowley’s head tips to the side, his eyes finding Aziraphale’s profile in the dark. A faint glow, like a distant fire, a sleeping star.
Crowley thinks: I only ever saw the one side of your face.
Aziraphale waits quietly.
I don’t know – Crowley tries, and his heart surges into his throat, threatens to break him open as he speaks: I don’t know how to be without you.
I don’t want to be, Crowley adds, into the empty.
The show is ending, Aziraphale says, his voice coming to Crowley muffled, as if from a great distance, and Crowley is puzzled, hadn’t the show already ended? Weren’t they sitting here as the credits rolled? But then it hits him, and he says Oh, and I understand now, and it certainly makes more sense than driving his funny old car to the edge of the universe.
Will we ever have this? Crowley asks desperately, as one by one around them, what little light is left starts to gutter.
Come and see, Aziraphale says, and Crowley realizes the lights aren’t going out, not at all: they are drawing together at the center, pulling in from the corners, dust and matter and light, their faces ablaze with it as the particles collect in the middle of the room, spinning faster and faster, growing and building and –
Crowley’s head falls back against the seat, awash in light, in ripples of gold and red and blue. As if staring up from the bottom of the sea, the ends of the universe, as if there were no place deep or far enough that this light could not reach. As if from the cradle of stars as they bloomed into being, or as he imagines it must look at the end, when a star grows so heavy it bends over its own beating heart and collapses, explodes, still burning, a spectacular applause, an incandescent curtain call, coughing and bleeding matter and light and heat, all that made it what it was flung out into the farthest corners of space as it sinks to its knees –
And what is left, the gas and the dust –
They will litter the skies. Some of them will crash into one another, bewildered, fumbling a little, and take hands. For a moment, they will exhale , and then they will begin to gather slowly into clouds, where they will become something new entirely.
**
Crowley throws an arm up against the light, eclipsing the sun with his hand. It’s low in the sky, bright against his face, as he emerges from the planetarium.
He checks his watch and finds hardly any time has passed at all. If humans ever get the hang of space travel, they’ll find that the opposite is true: that you can travel a great distance at speeds close to light and find the world has changed without you.
In front of his face, Crowley’s hand trembles a little, like something newborn, his fingers haloed with gold.
Crowley drives home, where he mounts the stairs to the bookshop, the sun’s warm hand at his back. He opens the door. He waits.