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The shop was fairly quiet, as it usually was on a Thursday, just after lunchtime. Derek had gone home early to celebrate his husband's birthday, so Asa was left to manage the shop alone. Well, almost alone.
"Asa! Look!" Anthony called from the history section. On instinct, Asa looked. It was a book on The Spanish Inquisition, albeit not in the right spot according to the Dewey Decimal system. Anthony grinned the grin that Asa knew meant he was about to make a horrible joke. He hadn't stopped grinning like that all afternoon.
"Wasn't expecting to see this here," he said, and burst into laughter. Asa hit him playfully on the arm, laughing along, and took the book back where it was meant to be.
"You idiot…" he chuckled.
"Yeah. You love me, though."
"That I do."
Hours passed. Very few customers showed up. The only notable occurrence was a regular, an old friend of Asa's, popping in for a quick chat more than a look at any books. Tracy was getting along with Anthony more than she did with any man Asa had ever introduced to her.
"You ought to keep that fellow," she told him. "I've seen the way he makes you smile. I've never seen you smile at anyone else like that before."
Asa had simply blushed and seemed very interested in the ground all of a sudden.
"Hey, look at this one!" Anthony blew the dust off an old tome. "All about demonology, ooh…" He punctuated his sentence with what he called 'spooky hands', waving his fingers around in a ghostly manner.
Asa laughed him off. "Gosh, we haven't sold a copy of that one in a long time. Not since that American woman with the bicycle came in and bought every book on witchcraft and demons we stocked."
Anthony flicked through the pages.
"Lots of grim illustrations, let me tell you…" he muttered. "Lots of stuff about how we're all going to Hell, lots of little devil drawings that are actually pretty cute, etcetera, etcetera… ah!"
"What?"
"How to summon a demon." Anthony said, and grinned slyly at his partner. "Could I tempt you into a bit of a summoning?"
"Oh, listen to yourself," Asa scoffed. "We can't spend all afternoon with this rubbish. And besides, I don't think you even know how to read Latin."
"I do!" Anthony insisted. "A little, at least. Studied it in university!"
He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and put on his best Showman Voice.
"Let's see… uh, something, something, daemon, esto subjecto voluntati meae!" He wiggled his fingers dramatically. "See, angel? Latin expert, me."
But Asa wasn't listening.
"Darling," he said incredulously, grabbing Anthony's sleeve.
"Hm?" Anthony looked up. His jaw dropped.
"Angel? Angel, we're okay!" Said one of the newcomers. "We're alive! How?"
"I'm really not sure," the other answered. "But, oh, I'm so glad, Crowley…"
The two flung themselves into each other's embrace.
"Crowley?" Anthony managed to say aloud. This broke the visitors out of their shared moment.
"Wow, you look…" the red haired one —Crowley — stepped closer, "Just like us." He tilted his head. He reached out to take off Anthony's glasses. "Are those eyes real?" The man stood, a stuttering mess in front of him.
"Excuse me," Asa said. "What gives you the right to touch my partner?"
The other being choked on nothing. "Partner?"
"That's right," Anthony declared, once he found the ability to speak again. "Is there a problem with that?" If he had just summoned a real, biblical demon, possibly two of them, it would be a real let-down for them to turn out to be homophobic.
"Problem? Quite the opposite." The blonde one took Crowley's arm with one hand, and extended his other one to the humans, who shook it, still dumbstruck at the appearance of the two. "Aziraphale," he introduced himself. "Retired angel, and part-time rare book dealer."
"Asa Fell. Strikingly simar name."
"I used to go by the name of Fell, once. A long time ago now," the angel mused. "And this is my, uhm—"
"Anthony Crowley. Retired demon. Charmed." Aziraphale smiled fondly at him.
"Me too," said Anthony. "Not the demon part, but the name. I'm Professor Anthony Crowley."
"Professor?"
"He wrote a book on astrophysics," Asa supplied. "It's really very good."
Crowley stared at him. "You love the stars…" he whispered. "I made them so long ago, I never thought…"
"Your love for them must have been absorbed into the new universe. Oh darling, that's beautiful."
"And our love for each other." Crowley nodded in the direction of the humans.
"Sorry, new universe?" Asa interrupted. "What happened to the old one?"
"Long story," Crowley and Aziraphale said in unison. Aziraphale continued. "I think you two are somewhat echoes of us. The universe not quite forgetting who we were. Are. Someone, this might get confusing."
"You made the stars?" Anthony piped up, a smile splitting his face. It quickly spread to the demon's. "Tell me…everything."
Asa and Aziraphale traded eye rolls and smiles between them as their partners gushed over the stars, Anthony frantically rushing to write everything down in a notepad miraculously conjured up by Crowley.
"Cup of tea?" Asa suggested.
"Oh, that would be heavenly. Technically speaking, I don't think I've had a cup of tea in billions of years, given that I don't think I existed in this universe until you summoned us."
"Billions of years without tea? That just won't do."
The two of them snuck off into the kitchen, unnoticed.
"I still don't understand," Anthony said, when the four reconvened. "Why is the universe so desperate to keep you two around?"
Crowley sighed, deep and heavy. "Because we loved." He leaned against a bookcase. "We loved the universe itself, and each other. Against all odds, everything keeping us apart, we fell in love."
They hadn't actually addressed that yet. It was the first time either of them had said that out loud. In love. It somehow seemed a bigger confession than simply loving each other. It felt and sounded so right coming out of Crowley's mouth.
"And I guess that love was strong enough to survive the destruction and restoration of everything else." He took in a shaky breath. Aziraphale took his hand. "In the form of two humans with our faces."
"So is that all we are?" Anthony's smile faded. He sat down. "Echoes, like you said? Does nothing we've done have meaning?"
"Oh, goodness no!" Aziraphale rushed to assure him. "Your experience of the universe means so much. As did ours in the old one. We're not even supposed to exist in this one."
"What was your experience?" Asa asked.
"Sorry?"
"What was your universe like? What were your lives like?"
Aziraphale and Crowley turned to each other and shared a soft look between themselves.
"Well, you see, in the beginning, there was— well, he was— a wily old serpent, and I was technically on apple tree duty…"
Crowley sat back and let Aziraphale tell it, only chiming in on occasion to add a detail forgotten left out by the angel. Asa and Anthony listened to their counterparts tell the story of the times they rescued each other, the expensive dates, the days they fell in love with each other over and over again, deeper and deeper.
They told stories of wine and ox ribs in a dark cellar, crepes in Paris, sushi in London. They stared into each other's eyes, humans all but forgotten as they relived the nights of books in churches, and holy water in a Bentley, and body swaps in a barely lived in flat after an almost apocalyptic day. They told them about Muriel, Gabriel, Beelzebub, the humans they knew, both modern and historical, and they very nearly cried. It was all gone.
"Do you not know that a man is not dead if his name is still spoken?" Asa told them, quoting a favourite author of his. "If they live on as echoes, as you have, and you keep the memories of your versions alive, then they will never truly be gone."
"Quite right." Aziraphale dried his eyes on Crowley's sleeve. The demon didn't protest, just pulled him closer.
"So what will you two do now? Now that you exist again?" Anthony asked.
Crowley looked at Aziraphale knowingly. "You know…" he said. "Alpha Centauri's always nice. I've always wanted to take you there."
"Alpha Centauri it is, then."
Firmly, they took each other by the hands and gazed at each other with all the love in the universe.
"It was such a romantic affair," Crowley sung under his breath.
"And as you turned and smiled at me…" Aziraphale continued.
They finished in chorus, their voices blending together seamlessly. "A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square." They kissed softly as they faded away into nothing, into the stars.
"I hope we see them again, one day," Asa said, a few moments after the pair disappeared.
"I'll keep an eye out for them in the sky."
In another universe, we loved each other for thousands of years and counting. Asa smiled to himself.
"Angel?" The petname suddenly made sense. Why he'd always been drawn to that one for Asa. "There's something I wanted to ask. I was going to wait until after our date tonight, but now probably works just as well. No time like the present, I guess."
Asa turned around to see Anthony kneeling on one knee on the somewhat dirty floor of the bookshop, struggling to pull a little box out of his pocket. It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He pulled Anthony up off his feet and kissed him, quite a bit more enthusiastically than he intended to. He whispered yes against his lips a hundred times, giggling between each one.
From Alpha Centauri, Crowley and Aziraphale sat on a bench that would later be reported missing from Saint James's Park, and shared a bottle of… something. It didn't matter really, what it was, but it was extremely alcoholic. And, after all of that non-existence for billions of years, extremely alcoholic was exactly what they needed to take the edge off. They clinked their glasses together, and watched the galaxy around them.