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The kettle alone knows the good he does,
Here in the kitchen, loving the world,
Steadfastly loving
See how easy it is, he whistles
-Penelope Shuttle, In The Kitchen
What if they end up in the shop after everything has been erased, only this time Crowley thinks: was the place always this big? It’s more of a maze than he remembers, now that he’s properly looking. Rows and rows of shelves twisting and turning in a dozen labyrinthine directions. Staircases spiraling up to nowhere. Hallways branching off the foyer like tree roots, that’s new.
Aziraphale emerges from the bowels of the shop, successful in his quest for cocoa. A warm drink at the end of all things, how painfully British. As far as Crowley can tell, nothing has survived; not the Earth, or Alpha Centauri, or any distant stars and nebulae clinging to the skin of the universe. Not even light, the fastest, most fundamental thing in all of creation. But somehow, Fortnum & Mason has. Somehow, Aziraphale’s chintzy mug embossed with the words HOT STUFF in blazing cherry red above a little cartoon devil has.
“Don’t ask,” he says, pushing it into Crowley’s hands.
Crowley opens his mouth, several questions and a taunt or two already lined up in the wings— and that’s when he sees it.
Oh.
That’s definitely new.
“Angel.”
“It was a gift, if you must know, white elephant gone horribly, horribly wrong, and then I couldn’t bring myself to donate it, one can never have too much drinkware—”
“Aziraphale, shut up a moment, would you, and look.”
To the angel’s credit, he shuts up and looks.
Memory is a funny thing, unreliable, easily eroded. Crowley would have sworn, cross his char-blackened heart, that the tree was taller. In his mind, the branches extend like reverent hands towards the heavens, heavy with fruit, wide and green and swallowing up the whole sky. He is very small, beneath it.
Aziraphale’s hand finds his shoulder. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s…certainly a design choice. Did we…?”
“Who else? We’re all that’s left.” But no, that’s not quite right. The Dickens. Crowley scoops it up, flips it open, then keeps flipping, eyes dancing over pages that are no longer empty.
Next to him, Aziraphale frowns into his mug. “But how? If this is some sort of, of…cosmic leg-pull, I confess I'm failing to see the—” His face goes blank, then lights up like a Christmas tree, a study in giddy. "Oh! Oh, of course. Even the Dickens.”
“It was you.” Crowley takes his time with the words, feeling each one rush through him. An equal yet opposite kind of flood. “And him. You named him, because he was always there to be named.”
They gaze at each other, stunned.
“We need more books,” says Crowley, at the same time that Aziraphale declares, “We need more cocoa.”
And so it goes. They start with the classics, squabbling over semantics (“For the last time, Crowley, Twilight does not count, I don’t care how many copies were sold worldwide.”) They brave the Jeffrey Archers. They pore over encyclopedias, scraping their teeth on words like lithospheric mantle, reveling in the euphony of sonoluminescence. And something peculiar starts to happen, a sort of Field of Dreams situation.
People start happening.
They’re the only thing that could, really. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it matter? The tree was there; the knowledge was there. It was real. It existed, in spite of. Because of. What use does humanity have for a book that tells them, yes, you can be, I will allow it, I will permit it. We create our own mythos, simply by living, by looking at the Rorschach blob and finding joy in the mess, beauty in the mundane. You’ve seen the post: forty-thousand years ago, humans stenciled their handprints on the wall of a cave, and this morning, my niece learned to fingerpaint.
So yes, people start happening. Friends curl up in the shop’s back room, trashing Oprah’s book club pick of the month. Lovers spin in a slow circle beneath the oculus as Fred Astaire croons from the gramophone. Someone brings up the duct-taped banana (“How fucking pretentious. Anyone could do that shit.” “Yeah, but they didn’t. This dude did. In this essay, I will—”), and someone else says, have some Art Nouveau, maybe you’ll calm down, and the far atrium is suddenly a tribute to Klimt, bursting with geometric golds and ornamental greens. In the foyer, a young man teaches amateur card tricks from a folding table that Aziraphale will swear up and down isn’t his; the tag on his jumper reads, Hi, My Name is Josh. Here, a neolithic wheel. There, a 7th-century chaturanga board. Paul Blart: Mall Cop, wedged between the self-helps and memoirs. People begetting creation begetting people, an ouroboros of abracadabra, creating as they speak, until the bookshop is overflowing with it. Bursting at the seams with humanity. The world is remade here, in the gaps between stanzas of that shitty poem you wrote when you were twelve, in the canned laughter on your best friend’s favorite sitcom. I am trying to get the seas back on the maps, where they belong. I am trying to love the world back to normal. We survive through storytelling, that ineffable collision of necessity and ingenuity, anchoring the world like the roots of a great tree. We tell stories to remind ourselves that we are alive. We are here.
Slowly but surely, the void beyond the bookshop’s windows begins to brighten. Human hands stitch the universe back together. And a small eternity later, Crowley and Aziraphale pull the stream of time around themselves like a cocoon, and rest.
“There’s nothing to forgive, you know,” Crowley says. “I know I was flippant about it before, but the truth is— we were both a little bit right, in the end. Weren’t we?”
“And a little bit wrong,” Aziraphale agrees.
There is sunlight, their time-adjacent bubble. It catches Aziraphale’s cloud of curls, limning him in gold. Not a halo, but a frame. The contour of a face and form freely chosen. Every day for the rest of our lives, we’ll get to choose, Crowley will think, the realization settling just behind his ribs. How about that.
He sees it, the moment Aziraphale realizes it too.
“Actually, I take it back.” Crowley grins, and the space between them contracts, then shrinks, a star collapsing. “Yeah, I’d like an apology for the pointy teeth. My culture’s not your costume, angel.”
Aziraphale’s smile is luminous. “Crowley. Beloved.”
“Hm?”
“Shut up a moment, would you, and kiss me. Properly, this time.”
“Such hard work,” says Crowley, and does. There might be supernovas. Maybe another big bang. Nobody is around to see it, celestial, infernal, or otherwise, but that’s alright. It exists, it has always existed. Here, in the kitchen, loving the world. Steadfastly loving.
See how easy it is.