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The bookshop began to dissolve. It happened in an instant: Crowley knew that much, and yet, eternity spun before his eyes as all the bits that were the place he’d come to think of has home flew apart and into nothingness. Eternity spun before his eyes and inside his mind; all was dissolved; all but the one thing that had been the hardest to give up in his resolution to give the people a chance. Aziraphale turned on the spot beside him, looking up and around at the swirling bits and the turn of the sun and the stars and all the things that had made up the universe; whole, somehow, or at least as whole as Crowley was, there in… wherever it was. Not void, not Heaven, not Hell; not a frozen instant, but something greater. Something, somehow, much more ineffable.
“Look at it all,” Aziraphale breathed, and Crowley did. He turned on his heels, hands in the pockets that somehow still felt like they were there. Crowley tilted his head to one side, and all of a sudden flashes of history found themselves amongst the bits; pieces and parts of the existence they’d shared, manifesting in prismatic fragments amongst the stuff. And not only their life on Earth, but the whole expanse of Creation; all the layers of the Cosmos and the seas and the mountains and stars and all the vast, unknowable things no human had ever touched, striving to capture in pictures, and all the things beyond their sight. Crowley remembered, amidst the spin of eternity, spinning each one of them into being.
“All this,” he said, turning to Aziraphale, “all this and still we met.”
“Yes,” Aziraphale was smiling; smiling behind the trembling water that lined his lashes, “we did, didn’t we?”
Crowley wasn’t sure when he had let go of Aziraphale’s hand. He took it up again. The swirl of eternity was fading, all the bits growing smaller and smaller and fading into dust. Around them, the coruscating opalescence of a nebula had formed, and all its colours danced in Aziraphale’s eyes. Crowley felt curiously light.
“Who could ask for anything more?”
“Not I.”
As stardust they fled, entwined in the fiery birth of a new universe.