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“Anthony,” Asa Fell questions one day, a year into their marriage. “Don’t you feel like something’s missing from our lives?”
Professor Anthony Crowley tilts his head curiously. “No,” he says, “why?”
“Nothing, it’s just…” Asa hesitates, “I feel like there’s a big chunk of my life missing. Some parts of my memory feel rather empty, like something that should be there isn’t. The weirdest thing is that the missing memories involve you too.”
“What?” Anthony frowns in concern. “Asa, are you feeling alright?”
“I’m pretty sure of that, yes. Forget it. Must be some dream that I’ve gotten mixed up with reality,” Asa sighs, “happens.”
“I just had the weirdest dream.” Asa tells Anthony on a Sunday morning, a year and a half into their marriage.
“Tell me about it.”
“I was an angel. You were an angel too, but I think you became a demon. We stopped the apocalypse.”
Anthony smiles at Asa, his eyes twinkling.
“Of course I’m a demon. Fear me, ya loathsome angel!” Anthony snarls in imitation on a demon. “The apocalypse? Oh, I bet we did!”
Asa starts laughing. Anthony presses a lingering kiss on his forehead.
It isn’t half a year later when Asa starts having visions.
“The garden, Crowley, the garden!” are the first words that come out of Asa’s mouth on a mundane Friday evening, after he decides to take a nap on the sofa.
“Asa?”
“The garden!”
A thoroughly confused Anthony shows up within Asa’s vision. “Asa, love, what garden?”
“Oh that’s nothing, nothing…”
At this point Asa is fully awake and in control of what comes out of his mouth.
“Do you have a fever? We can go to the doctors if you’re not feeling well.”
“No, I’m fine. Just a nightmare,” Asa says, knowing full well that what he dreamt about was not just a nightmare. It was actually a pleasant dream too.
He stares into the spruce wall opposite of him as Anthony fusses over him from head to toe.
The visions get more intense and prolonged over time.
With trembling hands, Asa hastily scribbles a note to Anthony in the early hours of Thursday, exactly half a year after he first started having these strange visions.
He pins the note down onto the table with a paperweight, and heads out their house with nothing but a sling bag.
Asa takes a long look at their cottage, before turning his head around in stoic resolution, walking steadily down the path and never once looking back.
When Anthony wakes up, Asa is long gone.
‘Dearest Anthony,
I will be gone for a few days, in search of my memories that are lost in time. I wish I can bring you along. I can’t, I’m sorry. Please do not be angry with me. I will explain everything when I’m back.
With love, Asa’
Anthony starts panicking.
It is just an intuition, but it is a strong one. As minutes turn to hours, day turns into night, Asa can sense that whatever scientifically impossible source that has been calling to him through visions for the better part of a year is getting closer.
And closer.
And closer.
Until a brilliant beam of light shines down from the skies directly onto him.
And suddenly his reality shifts, folding into itself like layers upon layers of malleable materials, twisting and stretching and warping and convulsing and suddenly he’s floating. Not mentally, but physically floating, his feet a good one half of a metre off the ground but he’s not falling, like all of a sudden gravity decides to stop working around him.
His head short-circuits as years upon years upon centuries of information floods his tiny human brain — but wait, his brain is not human anymore, he isn’t human anymore, at least he doesn’t think he is — and overwhelms it, completely rewiring his brain systems down to the core.
He thinks he might have died, but then he comes back anew, fresh with all his memories complete and intact, and suddenly he’s not Asa Fell any longer.
He is Aziraphale.
He remembers pain, remembers joy, remembers Heaven, remembers Hell. He remembers the Garden, the Great Battle, the Archangels—
He remembers Crowley.
“Asa! Where were you? Are you hurt? What happened?” Anthony bombards him with questions when he returns to the cottage.
Aziraphale doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes a step forward, grabs Anthony’s lapels, and smashes their lips together.
Professor Anthony Crowley dies in a spectacular display of flames, and out from the ashes rises Crowley the former demon. They pull apart.
“Angel.” Crowley breathes the word out as if it's delicate, which it is.
“Crowley. Oh, Crowley.” Aziraphale gazes into Crowley’s irises, which has turned into that lovely shade of yellow he always adored.
“Angel. Aziraphale.”
Aziraphale doesn’t realise that he is crying until Crowley runs a gentle thumb across his cheekbones to wipe the tears away.
Crowley is crying too.
“Don’t ever leave me again,” Crowley says.
“Never.”
Crowley kisses Aziraphale, soft and sweet and loving, like how he never did back in their universe, like how Aziraphale had wanted it to be but never had the courage to initiate it, like how they always meant to until it was too late and the universe they know and love was reduced to nothing, bringing them down along with it.
But now they are back, no demons, no angels, no ineffable plan, no supernatural conflicts, just them and them only, the only two angels left in all of creation. They are free to be them, forever and ever until the heat death of the universe, or by some other natural means.
They break apart, but not for long. Aziraphale embraces Crowley in a crushing hug, mumbling apologies for not listening to Crowley’s plan for them in the original universe, and Crowley waving it all off and saying that he has forgiven him a long time ago.
“I love you,” Aziraphale tells Crowley.
Crowley makes a soft noise from the back of his throat. “I love you too, angel.”
Somewhere outside the universe, God looks down at them and smiles.