Happy Holidays, rainbow_salt!
Dec. 16th, 2022 05:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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go_exchangeTitle: If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe
Summary: Things are changing in Heaven. Angels can no longer see the fourth dimension, and Aziraphale’s been assigned to tasting fruit– that is, quality checking the biological life forms that will populate the Earth. He thinks senses are among God’s best inventions, but his friend Kabaiel misses crafting stars. When Lucifer appears with an idea for a secret project that will pit gravity against quantum level forces, Kabaiel signs on eagerly. Everything seems to be going well, but Aziraphale is worried. There’s something about the new project that he doesn’t like. If only he’d stop remembering the future…
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Word Count: 9,137
Tags: Pre-Fall, Angel Crowley, Angel Aziraphale, theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, what if the angels were weird energy beings in a Lovecraftian Heaven, angst, the Fall, temporary memory loss, getting together, Aziraphale loves Crowley, Crowley loves Aziraphale, happy ending, neutron stars, black holes
Notes: Happy holidays, rainbow_salt! You had requested a pre-Fall fic exploring Aziraphale and Crowley’s friendship, and Aziraphale’s reaction to Crowley conspiring with Lucifer. I hope you enjoy!
When he heard the door open, Aziraphale carefully placed the object he’d been holding back in its protective wrapping. The Four Winds had been picking up construction dust lately, blowing it in through windows and along corridors to pile in the corners of the new laboratory, even though it was meant to be sealed. He’d written to the quality team about it.
A shape shambled over to his workstation, humanoid, with rather spindly lower appendages and a crown of fiery hair. “I changed,” it said in the new way they’d been encouraged to communicate, using the bands in its throat to vibrate the air. “Can I come in now?”
Aziraphale practised the movement of facial muscles God had taught them. “Kabaiel! You finally picked one.”
Kabaiel’s outline was fuzzy, and he flicked through his other shapes in the fifth dimension– Aziraphale could see the sinuous ripples and coiled shells and golden orbs as if they were superimposed over his human body– but he stayed solid enough. “I think it’s too small for me. The skin is tight. What’re you doing with your mouth?”
“Smiling. I’m attempting to convey pleasure. Do you like it?” Aziraphale touched his cheek and felt the protrusion of muscle there. He felt a little self-conscious.
“We’re crammed into three-dimensional bodies, half-blind, can’t even see the timestream, and he wants to know if I like his smile,” Kabaiel complained.
“Don’t be glum. Take a look at this.” Aziraphale pulled the wrapper away again and held out a bulbous purple object.
They’d both been busy the last little while. Aziraphale wasn’t sure how long; time was changing, the unbroken line of it no longer visible as it once was. But there was certainly a “before”. Before, angels had been creatures of pure energy, orbiting the Throne and bouncing off one another as they exchanged joyous greetings. They’d tended the Halls and the clouds and the fire streams, they’d composed symphonies on the electromagnetic spectrum, but mostly they’d gazed out at the wonder of Her creation. Aziraphale had spent several aeons watching the birth of a star, and when the dust cloud finally ignited he’d felt something he had no way to name. He wished he’d known then what a smile was.
Everything changed when the sapphire throne came down to the plane where the third sphere angels spent their time. The cherubim with their multifaceted aspects drove chariots out in front of it, the wind blew fiercely, and there was an explosion of sharp-rimmed, eye-studded wheels all around. Seraphim swooped about on their many wings calling out to God, who sat on the throne in Her finest whites and blazed like She was aflame.
“She’s makin’ quite the entrance,” Kabaiel had whispered to him. “This oughta be good.”
Aziraphale thought it had been good. She’d announced that they were to break ground on a new kind of life form, a strictly three-dimensional one that would live on a warm, wet planet and use things called “senses” to explore the cosmos. Aziraphale had never had senses before. He’d been the light, but he’d never experienced light the way he had when he’d opened human eyes for the first time. And that was just the beginning.
Kabaiel was staring at the purple globe. He used long, delicate fingers to poke into its flesh, too hard– there was a pop and then a sucking sound as he pulled the digit back, dripping. “Eugggh.”
Aziraphale laughed. “Don’t stick holes in it, dear. Take a bite.”
“What do you mean?”
Aziraphale mimed opening his mouth and biting into an imaginary sphere. “It’s a fruit. You’re meant to eat it.”
Kabaiel’s golden eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so.”
“You’ll like it.” Aziraphale, still laughing, took the thing back from him and demonstrated. He watched Kabaiel tracking a line of juice down his chin. “It’s gone through five rounds of testing and two focus groups already. I’m just the final quality check. I promise it’s harmless.”
Kabaiel, hesitantly, put his wet finger to his mouth and sucked. “Oh! It’s… it’s…”
“There was a word I used to know that might fit.” Before God had hidden the fourth dimension from them, they’d been able to look through time like someone putting their eye to a long, hollow tube. There was too much information to make heads or tails of it, but Aziraphale had picked up British colloquialisms at some point. “Scrummy.”
Kabaiel tried on a smile of his own. He had tiny depressions in the centre of each cheek. Aziraphale thought they were fascinating. “It’s different. Give it ‘ere.” He tried his own bite and grimaced. “Mushy.”
“It’s meant to be soft. Some of the things that will eat this won’t have teeth.”
“I remember fruits a little. From before.” That was how they referred to things they recalled from the future. “Seems like the good ones had more snap.” He looked alarmed. “Now what do I do?”
“Swallow.” Aziraphale traced the line of his neck as his own bolus travelled down to his stomach.
Kabaiel tried it, sputtered, gasped a breath, and got it down at last. “I’m a tube on legs,” he said, “and I can’t even work the tube right. Or the legs.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, when’re you off? Want to hit the ambrosia bar?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve a whole line of new products due for the final check, and later they’re delivering insects. The memo said there’d be a few species to sort through.”
It was harder to sense one another in these corporations. Kabaiel’s extra eyes blinked, and a knotted sphere twisted through seven dimensions over his left shoulder. Aziraphale wasn’t sure what that meant. “No problem. Come see me in the basement later.”
“When I’m free.”
“Yeah. See you.” Kabaiel left, torso listing slightly to one side as he tried to work out where his knees and hips were meant to be.
When he’d gone, Aziraphale picked up the plum that now held the marks of Kabaiel’s brand new teeth. “See you,” he said.
Kabaiel ditched the human corporation as soon as he was outside the lab. Aziraphale had chased him out earlier, saying the radiation from his true form would contaminate the organic material. He’d always been a fussy little stickler about rules. But he was kind, and Kabaiel liked the way he glowed: tucked into a neat blue-white sphere of radiance, with bands of colour rippling through that Kabaiel had never seen anywhere else. He looked soft, and somehow inviting–
“Kabaiel!”
Lucifer raised one of his many appendages. If Aziraphale was a soft light, Lucifer was a supernova– his luminosity too much for human visual equipment (he’d been reprimanded about that three times already). His surface was glossy, and his eyes always gave the impression that they were overlarge for his face, though he had no face. “I saw you leaving. Did you try a body on?”
“Yeah. Looked ridiculous. Where’re you off to?”
“A few of the guys are meeting about a new project.” Lucifer glanced around, and lowered his voice. “I was hoping to get you on board. We could use your skill set.”
Kabaiel let his form run through itself in a thoughtful loop. Up above them, lights flashed as ten-dimensional archangels winked in and out of existence. A school of manifold fish rippled through the air, tiny protrusions in this reality but with vast, bulky bodies just one universe over. “Sure, why not? Don’t have anything on for the rest of the day. I was going to the cafeteria, but the food hasn’t been that good lately.”
There weren’t “a few” species of insects, there were bloody thousands, and Aziraphale’s head ached. He leaned back at his workstation, letting a bug with black-spotted red wings explore his knuckles. Why had She gone all in on beetles, he wondered. He’d meant to meet Kabaiel ages ago, but there was no getting free. Too bad, he could have used an ambrosia–
“Pick-me-up?” Kabaiel perched on the edge of the desk, holding a steaming mug, like Aziraphale had summoned him out of the ether. His lower appendages were really very long indeed. Aziraphale liked the corporation he’d chosen.
“You, my dear, are a sight for sore eyes. Even if I’ve only two of them at the moment.” Aziraphale took the drink and inhaled the steam. In his true form, he’d absorb the plasma’s energy directly into his core and grow a little larger, but as a human he could savour this.
“I take it you’ve been busy.”
“I know She made the humans in Her image, but I’m not sure they’re Her favourite after all,” Aziraphale said sourly. “Hold on, I’m just now finishing the report on Things With Six Legs, which is basically all of them.” He signed the form hastily and rolled it up before tossing it into the air, where it vanished. Presumably it would end up in central processing.
“Know what you mean. Be nice to know what She’s thinking.” Kabaiel sighed. “Does She want gravity to make sense, or does She want subatomic particle interactions to make sense? Because She can’t have both.”
“It’s not for us to question, I’m sure. Shall we take a walk? I’d like to see the stars; I feel like I’ve spent the last thousand years indoors.”
When they got outside Kabaiel vibrated, but Aziraphale reached over and grabbed his hand. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted his friend to stay corporeal, at least for a little while.
Kabaiel gave him a curious look but remained human-shaped, though as usual he could hardly keep still. He liked to leak out around the edges of his primary form, and tonight he was making fractals in the air above their heads. Aziraphale sipped his ambrosia and observed the texture of his skin. Kabaiel’s palm was warm, and his fingers curled around the back of Aziraphale’s hand, dry, rubbing in a way that felt alien but not unpleasant. “What do you think of the body?” he asked, at length.
“It’s stopped chafing so much, but it still feels like…” Kabaiel looked thoughtful. “...like putting dark glasses over my eyes. Hard to really see anything.”
“What are glasses?”
“I don’t remember.”
They walked in silence for a little while. The arm of the nearest galaxy was directly overhead, and the sky was flooded with blue and red and ultraviolet light. Aziraphale gestured upwards. “Your stars are looking well.”
“Yeah, they took to each other real nice. Took some figuring to get them to dance, though. In the end I had to add a third star; system was only meant to have two.”
“I could never get my mind around the mechanics of building orbits. Biology is suiting me much better.” Aziraphale squeezed his hand. “It’s nice to feel adept at something, at last.”
Kabaiel’s cheeks looked pinker than they had earlier. “You were always–” he started, but at that moment they rounded a conical distortion in the energy field and came face to face with an inferno. They lost their grip on one another, instinctively throwing their arms up to shield their eyes. Kabaiel slipped out of his corporation, and Aziraphale followed after a moment.
Lucifer’s many eyes wreathed them, crinkled with amusement. He was long-bodied and claw-tipped, like some of the reptiles Aziraphale had catalogued, and his wings flickered in and out of view as they flapped through one of the higher dimensions.
Kabaiel had resumed his favourite shape, a trefoil knot that slipped over and through itself with a low susurration. Aziraphale became a glowing orb with a flicker of pique. “Lucifer.”
“Hi! Fancy meeting you here. Lovely night, isn’t it? I was just on my way to the basement.”
“I nipped out to get some air. I fed it some silicon earlier and the outer layers are starting to expand, just like you said.” Kabaiel was practically radiating excitement.
“Wonderful! I asked some of the others to come by and see. Shall we?”
Aziraphale felt a stab of– something. He still hadn’t been by to see Kabaiel’s work, even though he’d promised. “Capital idea. I’ll go with you,” he said firmly. He flashed warm colours in Kabaiel’s direction.
Instead of responding, Kabaiel vanished. When he reappeared there were briefly three of him, and then he pulled himself back together. Aziraphale guessed he’d popped up to the fifth dimension to think. It was peaceful, with the sound of collapsing waveforms surging and receding like surf on a beach. “Sorry, Aziraphale. This is something Lucifer and I have been working on together. Just… physics stuff. You won’t like it.”
“I’d still like to–”
“Another time.”
Aziraphale dimmed, stung by the clear rejection. Lucifer blazed a little brighter, ostentatious git that he was. Kabaiel drifted towards that glow, unfolding, reaching out to twine around one of Lucifer’s many appendages in the same way he’d held Aziraphale’s hand.
“Another time, then,” Aziraphale echoed, and turned away.
Once Aziraphale had faded into the distance Kabaiel relaxed his coils in a sigh of relief.
Lucifer pulsed a question. “Why didn’t you let him come along? We can use all the help we can get.”
“Nah, you don’t want Aziraphale. He’s got the entire policy manual by heart. He’d never go in for an unauthorised project.”
“He might if you asked.” Several of Lucifer’s eyes turned towards him.
Kabaiel didn’t think they’d get in trouble for this, but the idea of involving Aziraphale made him deeply uneasy. He surged back up to the fifth and folded the third dimension to cross the distance to his office instantaneously, Lucifer close behind him.
The subatomic particle lab was a torus half-buried in the firmament, hence “the basement”. There were several angels already assembled outside.
He switched back to his human form. Having a body wasn’t so bad, when you got used to it. “Hey guys,” he said, raising a hand in a little half-wave.
Kabaiel worked a little ways outside of the third-sphere plane, which was a more or less featureless area where the energy fields were calm and angels could focus on their tasks without being disturbed by random fluctuations. Aziraphale could have reached “the basement” instantaneously, of course, but the walk gave him time to think. He passed the mountains, towering jagged against the skyline, their summits hidden by mist: places where the firmament held enough mass to become warped and elongated by gravity wells. Strange angles formed on the borders between higher dimensions, where objects curled in on themselves in ever-diminishing spiral fractals. Stars of all colours glittered in the polychromatic sky.
He knocked on the door of the torus. The being that answered was fragmentary, continuously scattering and reforming around a core of ultraviolet light, and it seemed suspicious– a word Aziraphale remembered from before, because what did they have to be suspicious of here? –to see an angel in human form standing on the doorstep. “Is Kabaiel in?” he asked.
“You might want to change,” it buzzed. “Organic formzz don’t respond well to unszztable neutrons.”
“I shan’t be long, and anyway I’m sure Kabaiel won’t let my corporation come to harm,” Aziraphale said. The entity looked as doubtful as it was possible for a swarm to look– Aziraphale was put in mind of the flies he’d been sorting earlier– but it parted to let him enter.
To his surprise, when he found Kabaiel hunched over a viewing port that gave way to a tunnel curving off in either direction, he was human-shaped too. “C’mon, c’mon, just show me where you are,” he heard the other angel muttering. “You’ve got a good thing going here. Steady electron supply, nice ring for racing, place to store your muons. If you don’t start living up to your potential you’re gonna find yourself decayed into low-energy photons and pointed towards the darkest place in the sky I can find.”
“Don’t bully them. I’m sure they’re doing their best.”
Kabaiel looked up. “Hey.”
“Hello. Er. I just wanted to say that I… um. If you’re angry with me, for not… before… well, anyway, I’m here now.” The muscles in Aziraphale’s face were smiling again– this time with the desire for acceptance. Humans seemed to have been built with a wish to be included, and avoid the displeasure of those they cared for. They weren't so different from angels that way.
Kabaiel leaned back, stretching his wings. “Don’t be daft. I’m glad you came.” He waved Aziraphale closer. His golden eyes were steaming, as if the intensity of his concentration had heated them.
Aziraphale peered into the window. “What is it?”
“At the moment, a right pain in the arse. She wants an itemised list of the elementary particles, and they show up just fine if you crash atoms together hard enough, but they won’t stand still for a photo. See?” He handed Aziraphale a tablet. On it were images of nebulous, blurry blobs, lacking distinguishing features of any kind.
“Oh dear.”
“Plus, they’re completely dependent on each other, worse’n stars that way. Try pulling two quarks apart. There’s a reason they call it the ‘strong force’. Easier to separate Lucifer from that glow he’s so determined to have.”
“Then it’s hopeless,” said Aziraphale. “You may as well throw in the towel and come to lunch with me.”
Kabaiel’s eyes slid back to the viewing port, and Aziraphale took a closer look at him. He seemed… different, somehow. His corporation was thinner than it had been. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his movements were quick and nervous. The thing that struck him most deeply, though, was the fact that he seemed to be entirely contained within his form, for the first time in Aziraphale’s memory. There were no orbiting spheres, no sinuous ribbons of energy, no radiation, no strange polyhedrons bending the space around him. Possibly it was a protective mechanism, to keep the organic corporation from being damaged by the volatile material in the lab? Nevertheless, it was disconcerting.
Aziraphale put a hand on his arm, and Kabaiel twitched in surprise. “Dear? Are you alright?”
“Never better.” Kabaiel refocused and grinned at him. It really was a striking smile. Aziraphale didn’t know what his own looked like, but Kabaiel’s was mischievous, infectious, with long white teeth and those little dimples in his cheeks. “But I can’t get away. Been burning the candle at both ends, trying to get this extra project up and running.”
“What’s a candle?”
Kabaiel frowned. “I’m not sure.”
“Alright, then, what’s the extra project?” Aziraphale made a show of leaning against the wall of the particle accelerator tube, projecting his intention to settle in for as long as it took.
Kabaiel hesitated. Aziraphale tried lifting one eyebrow. It must have been effective because the other angel looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He made a beckoning gesture. “Come on.”
They were deep in the subterranean portion of the lab when Kabaiel stopped at an unmarked area of wall. Aziraphale heard a sound, subtly vibrant, musical like the hymns they sang to Her, though he didn’t recognise the melody– if indeed there was one. “Leave the corporation outside,” Kabaiel said, and dissolved into a knot that unravelled and reformed itself as it stretched into the fifth dimension. He pushed through the wall, and Aziraphale followed in his orb form.
They emerged above a scaffolding that stretched a little ways into a space without end, at least as far as Aziraphale could tell, as the far walls of the room could not be seen. The air itself was alive with bulges and flashes and little ripples as beings moved from place to place– perhaps themselves in the past or future, perhaps not. Some of the half-glimpsed figures were very strange; dark, with eyes that glowed red and twisting, reaching tentacles. He noticed all these things in an instant, before his attention was drawn to the object out in the middle of the abyss.
It had indistinct borders, like the images of elementary particles Kabaiel had shown him earlier, and it wasn’t large– perhaps the size of Earth’s new moon (still in the blueprint stage)– but it conveyed a sense of dangerous heaviness Aziraphale couldn’t explain. A cold, nameless unease stole over him. The thing warped light around itself, it sucked at the space like it possessed some uncanny, overwhelming gravity, and it hummed a low hum that shook the iron structure beneath them.
He knew at once it wasn’t one of Her projects. This was malevolent, it was destructive, and it didn’t belong in God’s kingdom. “Kabaiel–”
“It’s not quite done. But I think we had a breakthrough the other night. We just have to get the right balance of elements– it’s already helium-depleted and burning through the heavier stuff almost faster than we can feed it; it wants to collapse into its core and as soon as it’s the right size we’re gonna let it. When it’s heavy enough its gravity will overcome the repellent subatomic forces and then we’ll see some fireworks!” Kabaiel spoke quickly, slithering over and through himself in a blur of excited motion.
Aziraphale swallowed the frantic questions that were threatening to burst out of him. Kabaiel had always been proud, and a little touchy, and Aziraphale needed to find out more. “We?” he asked, finally.
“Me an’ Lucifer, and a few others.”
“Does God know?”
“She doesn’t need to yet. We’ll show Her when it’s done.”
“But my dear… that thing is… it’s…”
“Impressive, right?” Kabaiel couldn’t smile in this form, but Aziraphale could sense his pleasure in the way his coils writhed; the way his colour changed from red to pale green to amber. “I was talkin’ to Lucifer about how much space there is between atoms, and between parts of the atom, too, I mean, the electrons might as well be on the other side of the universe, right? Seemed like a lot of wasted space. And he said, ‘What happens if you squeeze ‘em together’, and I said they fight you like the dickens, that’s what, and he said, ‘Let’s try it’. An’ it’s true, they don’t like it, but if you keep putting more and more matter into less and less space–”
“I don’t like it.” Aziraphale, with a last, apprehensive glance around, flashed back through the portal. When Kabaiel came through after him he’d put his corporation back on. The fingers were shaking.
Kabaiel remained knotted, his loops now drawn close together. The image of hundreds of wings beat the air, a sort of visual echo; he was half in the third dimension and half in the fifth. “I don’t think you understand what it can do, Aziraphale. For one thing, it’ll retain the energy signature of anything you put into it. A perfect recording of the arrangement of every molecule, down to the atomic level and beyond. Think how helpful that’ll be for all this cataloguing and indexing She’s got us doing!”
“I know making lists isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, but you don’t go and unravel the whole tapestry just because you don’t like the picture it shows! What I saw in there isn’t a tool for creation, it’s a tool for destruction.”
“You don’t understand.” Kabaiel spun in a brief, agitated circle. “I knew you wouldn’t. Nothing matters to you if it isn’t written down on some form you have to fill out in triplicate.”
“I didn’t say that!” You matter, Aziraphale thought fiercely. You matter, and this is going to hurt you. I don’t know how I know that. I think I remember it. “But what happens to the things it takes in? Do you know where they go? I don’t want to see Her work put into some… some book, pressed between pages and flattened into a shadow of itself. Not even to save it, o-or retain it. I don’t need to reinvent the universe just to make an apple pie from scratch. That’s Her job.”
“Aziraphale, relax.” The words were accompanied by a blaze of painful light. Aziraphale bit back a half-remembered curse word and became an orb again before Lucifer’s glaring, showy presence could hurt his corporation’s eyes.
Kabaiel glowed in welcome. “Lucifer!”
“I was in the area, thought I’d stop by.” Lucifer’s eyes zipped around the hallway while his long, scaly form circled Kabaiel like an affectionate cat. “I’m afraid I overheard a little of your conversation, forgive me. Do you mind if I shed some light?”
“As if we could stop you,” Aziraphale muttered.
“I admit Kabaiel and I have been somewhat unconventional in our approach here, but once you understand I’m sure you’ll agree with what we’re doing. God didn’t provide us with a way to unite gravity with the forces that bind particles at the subatomic level, but it can be done– with dedication, intelligence and a little thinking outside the box. The worlds it opens up, Aziraphale! This will let us bend the fabric of space time, to travel between parallel universes— the way the manifold fish do, and stranger creatures like the tentacled fellows you saw in there. We’ll be able to manipulate the fourth dimension again. Step between all possible timelines. Take back the things She’s hidden from us.” He glittered coldly.
Aziraphale fell back. “We’re meant to be working on the Earth.”
“The Earth.” Lucifer’s opinion on that was clear in the dismissive way he flicked his upper appendages. “A slime-covered ball perpetually circling a single star. It’s boring.”
“You don’t know what it is. You haven’t seen anything She’s got planned for it. You haven’t even tried a corporation on. Kabaiel has. Tell him.”
Kabaiel flickered in and out of sight. “Well…”
“I’ve got a new batch of specimens to test,” Aziraphale said, a little desperately. “More fruit. Little round ones that grow in bunches, and thick-skinned ones with bright red seeds that look like jewels. Come back with me. You don’t have to do this.”
“I…”
“The singularity might form at any time, Kabaiel. We should stay and keep an eye on it.”
Kabaiel looped around once, twice, three times, and seemed to come to a decision. “Sorry, Aziraphale. Let me know how the taste tests go, huh? I’ll see you soon.”
“I shan't wait up.” Aziraphale barreled back along the ramp to the surface. When he was safely out of Lucifer’s presence he resumed his human form. There must have been a little extra radiation around the place, though, or maybe the eyes were still recovering from his encounter with the bloody ‘light-bringer’, because he could hardly see. His vision was blurred with salt water.
Heaven had no sun. There was no “night” or “day”, just the perpetual plane bordered by the mountains with their needle-like spires and sharp, dizzying peaks; surrounded by ice-vapour and distorting spacetime with their presence. There was always light, though, because what God wants God gets. Kabaiel hurried through a shimmery mist that he remembered– vaguely– as the sort of thing that rose from the surface of water on cold mornings, feeling exposed as a bug in the beam of a torch. But Lucifer, blazing with anger and nervous agitation, had gone off to rally the others, and he didn’t have much time.
He pushed open the door of the lab with human hands, and found Aziraphale slumped in front of a row of tall plants with brown, rough-textured stems. Gnarled root balls heavy with soil littered the work bench, the leaves were dense and brilliantly green, white flowers sparkled with dewdrops... and Aziraphale stared, unseeing, through all of it. He held a fruit with mottled, reddish-yellow, shiny skin.
Kabaiel stopped short. Aziraphale didn’t look up, but he said, “This is an apple. Do you remember apples?”
“I remember…” Kabaiel started, then shook his head. There was an odd knot in that recollection. It felt like he’d need to go up a dimension or two to unravel it.
“I haven’t been able to bring myself to try it. I have the strangest feeling that once it’s tasted, nothing will ever be the same again.” Aziraphale lifted his face. His eyes were leaking big, round droplets of clear liquid.
“You wanted to know what the… what my project does with the things it takes in. Truth is, I don’t know. There’s a line, like a horizon, and once something’s crossed it– even light– there’s no coming back.”
“Why are you here, Kabaiel?” Aziraphale said. He raised his hands and wiped wetness from his cheeks.
“I wanted to warn you. Um. There may be some trouble over at my office later. I’m not sure She…” Kabaiel bit back what he hadn’t even dared to think in the silence of his own mind. “Anyway, stay here, yeah? Even if you… well, just stay out of it. Safer that way.”
“Stay with me.” Aziraphale put the apple down.
“Aziraphale…”
“Please. Please, Kabaiel. I remember this now. You crossed over, and you never came back.” Aziraphale walked towards him, upper appendages held out beseechingly.
They were new to human corporations, and it was awkward, but somehow they found themselves wrapped around each other, Kabaiel’s arms over Aziraphale’s shoulders while Aziraphale’s hands clutched his waist. “Stay,” Aziraphale whispered again, and rested his head on Kabaiel’s chest.
Kabaiel had felt all the tumultuous highs and lows of working with strange forces; gravity and three-body orbits, supernovas and dark matter, quarks and leptons and bosons. God’s cosmos was magnificently complex, and he’d touched it all, from the massive bulk of the galaxies to the tiniest and most evasive of the elementary particles. He’d been a tight-packed beam of photons traversing the dimensions, up where the superstrings vibrated creation’s song and all possible timelines collapsed into a single point, but he’d never felt anything like this before. His eyes widened, and Aziraphale gasped, and they drew back to look into one another’s strange, dear, human faces.
“Aziraphale, I–”
“Time to go, Kabaiel.”
Kabaiel winced at the familiar tone; words formed by the beating of hundreds of thousands of tiny wings. In the open doorway were three figures: the swarm of Baal; Bekalam’s silvery ripples, swimming on the very edge of vision; and Hanibal, who was at once a collection of strange-angled polyhedrons and a climbing, branching figure of eerie purple lightning. It was Hanibal who extended his body to encircle them, horrifyingly quick, a poisonous vine wrapping the trunk of a tree. Baal came closer and glittered in an oppressive cloud around their heads. “Bring your friend. He should szzee this too.”
Aziraphale refused to change out of his human corporation, though the other angels pressed in around him, closer and closer, compelling him in a most unpleasant manner. He didn’t want to give up his senses, not when they might be important for understanding what this thing Kabaiel had built was, and what it could do.
Kabaiel, who had been speaking with Lucifer in hushed tones (keeping his human eyes averted and tightly shut all the while) returned to Aziraphale’s side at length and, surprisingly, took his hand. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured.
The painful glow that was Lucifer’s presence dimmed, and Aziraphale looked up. Without it, he could see the scales that covered the angel’s form, marred here and there by jagged cracks that gaped onto an interior of liquid fire, red and blazing hot. The eyes he turned towards Aziraphale and Kabaiel held that same furious light. “Your organic forms won’t survive the transition,” he warned.
Aziraphale lifted his chin. “Very well, then. We’ll just be off.”
Lucifer quivered with mirth. “You won’t want to miss this. Come through, but stay well back.”
“I’d really rather–”
“Come along, little principality,” said Hanibal. “You’re one of our lot now, right? Your friend Kabaiel made sure of that.”
Kabaiel’s face was very pale. “He’s not. I was just warning him off. Let him go, he doesn’t know anything.”
There were too many of them, and some of them were archangels, rapidly spinning cores of light with fluttering edges that moved too quickly to make out, like the wings of a hummingbird. Aziraphale and Kabaiel found themselves jostled and pushed through the portal and out onto the scaffolding, where the strange object hung in the air.
It was smaller than it had been, and it was spinning now. Light spiralled around it and into it, vanishing for a moment at the apex of the whirlpool and then beaming out again with renewed intensity, as if flung by powerful, unseen hands.
Aziraphale’s corporation was trembling, and he squeezed Kabaiel’s fingers. “What is it?” he whispered.
“Something that’ll be important,” Kabaiel said stubbornly. “I still believe that. It’s close now, but it’s very unstable. I wanted you to stay clear ‘cause God’s generals got wind this morning and they’re on their way. No telling what’ll happen if that bunch of bellends start messing about.”
“It looks like it wants to devour the light.”
“When it’s finished, it’ll have a gravitational pull even light can’t escape from,” Kabaiel said. The rising wind whipped some of his crimson hair across his face, and he pushed it away. “I tried to tell you before. God thinks She can just keep endlessly creating, but there has to be balance, don’t you see?”
Aziraphale shook his head.
“Things also need to end, so they can be remade as something else. Universe’ll never be self-sufficient otherwise.”
“But She said everything is precious.”
“That doesn’t mean it can last forever. Just look at fruit.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes. He saw Kabaiel, wincingly swallowing his bite of plum. He wasn’t sure what happened to food after it was eaten, but it was clearly never the same again. “Transformation,” he said softly.
“Exactly!” Kabaiel gestured out into the abyss. “Change. You can’t make a soufflé without breaking eggs!”
“What?”
“Look, already we’ve created dozens of new elements in the process of making this thing. And soon it’ll collapse into a singularity– that’s the ultimate agent of transformation, we think it tears things down to elemental particles. But at the same time, it stores the information so nothing gets lost. No more forgetting. There may even be a way out the other side, after information is scattered and rearranged, to an entirely new and unimaginable future. The possibilities are endless.” Kabaiel’s eyes were wild. “At least… that’s how it ought to work.”
Kabaiel’s voice had grown progressively louder. Aziraphale suddenly realised that the rest of the angels were watching them curiously. After a moment, Lucifer drifted forward. “Ah, yes. Thank you Kabaiel. That’s what your black hole was meant to do, and I think it would have worked very well.”
Kabaiel blinked. “Would have?”
“You never did get the quarks on your side, though, did you? They always wriggled away, but I found a way to engage them. Just by syphoning off a little gravity at the right times…” he waved an appendage. The vast room pulsed, and then the atmosphere palpably lightened, as if there’d been an abrupt pressure change. Aziraphale’s ears made a popping sound. “...I can give the strong forces the upper hand.”
“But then it’ll…” Kabaiel trailed off, looking horrified. “No.”
“Yes. We talked about this, remember?”
“In theory! In theory!” Kabaiel dropped Aziraphale’s hand and stepped forward, gesturing wildly. “It’s too dangerous, Lucifer!”
“Dangerous to whom? Not to us.” The surrounding angels made musical noises of agreement, voices rising in a jarring harmony that pierced Aziraphale’s human ears. “Dangerous to biology, perhaps, but so what?”
“Kabaiel, what’s he talking about?” Aziraphale whispered.
Kabaiel winced. “Shit, shit, shit. Long story, no time.” He looked out at the thing… Lucifer had called it a ‘black hole’… with wide eyes. It was pulsing now, its borders shrinking as it began to collapse in on itself.
Lucifer ignited, blazing with the brightness of a hundred suns. “It’s happening,” he crowed.
Aziraphale could no longer see, but he could feel the wind rising. The air was hot and heavy, and the void sucked at his body. The humming of the black hole rose to a painful pitch and he cried out.
When he remembered the rest– and it was a long, long time later that he remembered it at all, on the other side of another great transition– it was just as a series of confused images, like a slideshow after the cassette had been dropped and the slides jammed back in any old way.
The force was too much. His corporation shattered as the individual atoms were pulled apart.
A dozen archangels, beautiful and terrible, glowing like hot coals and surrounded by an absolute fury of wings, burst into the space. Michael sprang straight at Lucifer, who met her in midair. There was an explosion of light.
Kabaiel, who’d also lost his corporation, twined around Aziraphale.
Michael fell, Lucifer and Baal swarming over her.
A pulse of energy was pressed against Aziraphale’s form. He didn’t remember what a kiss was… but it felt like a kiss. Then Kabaiel was gone.
There was a great, terrible percussive noise. Everything went dark and still.
“Where am I?”
Blinding whiteness, broken here and there by sunspots. After a time, these darker areas ran together to form the branches of a tree, stark against the sky. Aziraphale blinked, and was surprised to find himself in possession of human eyelids again.
“You’re in the Garden of Eden. And it’s ten days before the beginning of the world, if you want to know.” The voice was kind, and a little amused, but Aziraphale scrambled up off of his back to kneel. He’d know that voice anywhere.
“My Lord.”
“Rise, Aziraphale. It’s alright.” God chuckled. She’d taken the form of a female human with cascading, greying locks, and was examining a budding twig with evident fascination.
Aziraphale rose cautiously. “It’s still here, then. I thought… I mean, Lucifer said–”
“Lucifer wanted me to stop mucking about with biology. If his idea had succeeded, the result would have enabled him to destroy the earth and everything on it.”
Aziraphale couldn’t help himself. “How?”
“Compressing atoms at that pressure breaks the bonds between quarks and allows strange matter to form. I experimented with it when the universe was young. Very intriguing stuff, but it doesn’t allow any variation. It would have turned all this–” she waved a white-robed arm– “into more of itself. If it got loose.”
“Oh.” Aziraphale ran his fingers through the grass. It felt as though there was a stone in his belly. “What happened to– to everyone else?”
“Lucifer and Kabaiel thought I didn’t understand destructive forces.” The bud on the twig burst into bloom. In the blink of an eye, the flower withered, and a hard, green fruit began to swell.
Aziraphale couldn’t make his lungs work. The stone inside him was growing, pressing the air out of him. “They’re… gone?”
God watched the fruit. It became an apple, red and tempting, sides slippery with dew, and then the skin wrinkled and grew slack. When the rotting stopped and all that remained was a brown husk, she set the branch on the ground. “Those who conspired against me have undergone a change,” she said at last. “To stop the formation of a neutron star within the borders of Heaven, mass and energy were added to the unstable creation in Kabaiel’s lab. This allowed gravity to re-exert itself, and a black hole formed– still dangerous, but infinitely more stable. I’ve made a place for it right at the centre of the galaxy.”
Somehow Aziraphale made himself ask the question. “Mass… and energy…?”
God turned sympathetic eyes on him. “Every transition, even the most dramatic, is simply that. If it comforts you, Kabaiel and the others remain. Somewhere. In some form.”
Aziraphale didn’t respond. His eyes were leaking again.
God put a hand under his chin. “Child, I didn’t throw him in. He jumped.”
“What?”
“Kabaiel anchored himself to the other rebels. He was an expert at working with gravity and subatomic attractive forces; it was easy enough for him to bind them up. Then he pulled them all into the collapsing star. Right in the nick of time, too.” She smiled.
What followed was a long, black stretch of time where Aziraphale was aware of nothing but his own devastation. When he opened his eyes again, he was still in the Garden, the stars were out, God was standing before him… and Kabaiel was dead.
He drew a painful breath. “Lord. When you hid the timestream from us, we… forgot many of the things we saw.”
“You will need to navigate time in a linear fashion to serve the humans. But without being able to see the fourth dimension, I’m afraid it’s difficult to retain the information.”
“Can you make me forget one more thing?”
When he heard the door open, Aziraphale carefully placed the object he’d been holding back in its protective wrapping. He’d got his hands on a rare first edition of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo, dove ne i congressi di quattro giornate si discorre sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, which included the previously lost Letter to Christina, and the wind had a tendency to blow leaves and dust into the shop at this time of year.
A lanky shape with a short-cropped crown of fiery hair and dark glasses entered, perched on the edge of his desk, and held out a steaming cardboard takeaway mug. “Pick-me-up?” Crowley said. “You’ve been staring at that mouldy old manuscript so long I’m worried you’ll grow mould yourself.”
Aziraphale shooed him away. “No drinks near the book! It’s the only one of its kind, and if I spill tea on it the Royal Society will never let me back in the archives.”
Crowley peered over his shoulder as he returned the wrapped parcel to the glass case. “Galileo?”
“A remarkable mind. They’d been trying to understand the cosmos for years, and he was the first to start getting things right.”
“The first one not to make things up out of whole cloth, you mean,” Crowley snorted.
“Well, the one leads to the other.” Aziraphale smiled. “Shall we take a walk? I’d like to see the stars.”
Crowley blinked, face going slack for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Have you asked me that before?”
“I can’t imagine there’s anything new between us, dear. It’s been six thousand years.”
“Right, right, it’s just…” Crowley snapped his fingers. “Hey, I have an idea. You hungry?”
“Er, well, yes, a little peckish I suppose,” said Aziraphale.
“Okay angel, hold tight,” said Crowley. “We’re gonna hit an ambrosia bar.”
“What do you–”
Crowley grabbed his hand, and they were gone.
The humans had named it Sagittarius A*, and it was a corker. Human food was alright, but there was nothing like a burst of gamma rays shot from a black hole’s accretion disc at near the speed of light.
Crowley turned towards Aziraphale. The angel had taken the form of a blue orb with flickers of vibrant colour playing over his surface: purple, magenta, azure, indigo, and many Crowley couldn’t name. “You look nice,” he said, as if they were talking across the table at a restaurant.
“Really, Crowley. You might have warned me.”
Crowley beamed with amusement. Aziraphale, it seemed, was fussy in any form. “You said you wanted to see the stars, and that you were peckish.”
“A walk along the Thames and dinner at Da Terra was what I had in mind,” said Aziraphale, but without any real pique. He drifted forward curiously. “Where are we?”
“Smack dab in the centre of it all. Look out.”
Aziraphale took in the arms of the Milky Way, swirling around and over them like they were down the vortex of some unimaginably immense whirlpool of starlight, or at the heart of a glittering spider web crafted by God’s enormous hands.
“It’s beautiful.” Aziraphale’s blues were warming to a pleased, delicate pink. Crowley dared to brush his side with one of his many loops, and the angel’s glow brightened.
Then, abruptly, it dimmed. “What’s that dark spot?”
“Ah!” Crowley twined around him, as if he were draping an arm over his shoulders. “That’s the axle of the galaxy, and our ambrosia bar. A little rough and ready, I know, but Heaven’s sort of off limits now that we’ve both been made redundant. This thing throws all kinds of radiation out, so take your pick. X-rays, gamma rays, plasma jets, whatever you fancy.”
“It‘s…”
“Stimulating, ennit? The plasma’s got a real kick to it.”
“No, Crowley. It feels…” Aziraphale flickered nervously. “I know this place. This thing… what’s it called?”
“Aziraphale, are you alright?”
“What’s it called, Crowley?”
“It’s a black hole. Biggest one in the galaxy– shit. Aziraphale, come back!”
Aziraphale was speeding towards the dark maw. Crowley caught him up, binding the agitated, pulsing orb in his own coils. “You can’t go near it, angel! Don’t you feel the gravitational pull? Put one foot over the event horizon and you’ll be its dinner.”
“Let me go.” Aziraphale writhed and threw him off, but at least he stayed put. “I’m calm. But I need to see it. The… event horizon, as you say. I think there’s something written there.”
“You’re barking.” Then Crowley felt it too… a compulsion to investigate, like he was being urged on by some unseen presence. In his experience, that meant he ought to turn around and go home, probably hide under the covers for good measure.
But Aziraphale was determined, and what the angel wanted the angel generally got. Crowley sighed and wrapped a loop around Aziraphale’s body again, like he was leashing an excitable puppy. “Okay. Just stay close to me.”
They didn’t speak. The light– which should have been fading and shifting to red as they approached– instead grew more brilliant, blinding even in their true forms, the way… Crowley frowned to himself. The way Lucifer used to look to my human eyes, up in Heaven, his memory whispered. But he didn’t remember anything like that. Did he?
Despite the jets of energy spewing from the black hole’s rotating rim, spacetime near the boundary was very still. “What do you see, Crowley?” Aziraphale whispered at length.
“I see whiteness. All along the horizon. Seems to go on forever.” Crowley tugged at him. “Go slow, angel.”
Cautiously, they drifted forward, and at length it was as if a wall stood between them and the sucking blackness of the singularity: a barrier opalescent and towering and incandescent, shining like the thousand doomed suns the black hole had consumed since its birth. Crowley heard Aziraphale gasp, but he hardly noticed because at that moment he also saw the things beyond the wall.
He rushed closer, forgetting to be afraid. Aziraphale had been right. Something was written there, if by “written” you meant projected in three dimensions, like the wall was the biggest movie screen in the universe. There were towering mountains, their peaks hidden in the mist; hundreds of prisms, cubes and planes; seemingly organic things resembling bubbles and octopi; strangely angled objects with rapidly shifting facets, inexplicably coloured and whose geometry defied the laws of the third dimension. And there were other forms… forms he knew as intimately as his own face.
One of them was an angel who seemed to be two things at once: an intricately knotted, coiled arabesque of sinuous energy; and a tall human with pale, luminous wings, red hair and golden eyes.
A realisation was barrelling towards him at something close to the speed of light. The black hole hummed its crystalline hum, the air vibrated painfully around him, he thought he might have screamed– and the last image he had before being yanked painfully back into the third dimension, back to his blessedly half-blind corporation on the dear, prosaic surface of the Earth, was that of millions upon millions of apple blossoms, white petals shot through with gold.
Aziraphale gulped air. He felt his fingers claw his hair, heard a low, sobbing moan, and realised the sound was coming from him.
He breathed in. Breathed out. Crowley had collapsed into the armchair.
Aziraphale breathed in once more, and then let his next breath out in a tirade of wounded outrage. “Kabaiel! You– you– you absolute bastard! It’s been you all along! Did you know?”
Crowley reached up. He pulled his glasses off, revealing wild, haunted eyes that stared at nothing. He didn’t answer.
There was a sob stuck in Aziraphale’s chest, and if he let it out he’d be howling. “How could you make that thing? Conspiring with bloody Lucifer, of all people? And not tell me?” His chest hitched. “What the– what the fuck were you thinking? And then destroying yourself to stop it, you s-selfish, thoughtless demon!”
Crowley raised his head, movements slow as if he were moving underwater. “Selfish?” he said with a small frown. Bastard. They might have been discussing the bloody weather.
“Yes! Selfish! To– to leave me alone, and not even say goodbye, I, I thought you were dead–!”
Aziraphale had more to say, much more… but Crowley surged up and forward, took his face between his hands, and kissed him.
Sometimes, Aziraphale got flashes of things he remembered, back when the fourth dimension had been laid out before them like a river. Crowley did too; they’d talked about it, on certain nights when they were deep enough in their cups to put hesitant words around loaded concepts like “before”. Neither of them recalled much about their lives before the Earth had become their job, ward and home… but certain things came back to them in the moment, as if they’d sighted them long ago, perhaps warped and distorted through the wrong end of a telescope. Aziraphale had thought he remembered kissing from the future… but now realised he also remembered it from the past. Remembered the crackling, caressing flare of energy Kabaiel had pulsed into him before he disappeared.
This wasn’t that. Kabaiel– Crowley– had described wearing a human corporation as going around in dark glasses; Aziraphale thought of it more as a whole-body glove. It numbed you to certain things, true, but you got to have senses and sensations: the pressure of desperately clutching fingers, for example. The velvety feel of parted lips pressed against his own. The sound of the shaky breaths they traded between them, and the rasp of stubble against his cheek. When it came to kissing, Aziraphale thought the human experience was just about perfect.
When they parted, their faces were wet. Crowley drew back to look at him. “To answer your question: no, I didn’t know. Forgot everything before the Fall ‘cept little bits and here ‘n there. Now I see why.”
“You said the singularity would tear everything to pieces.”
“Said I thought it would. It was supposed to be a fun little experiment– least, that’s what I thought at first,” Crowley said with a touch of bitterness. “If we could make something with gravitational pull stronger than the speed of light, it’d hide anything dropped into it forever– only it can’t, ‘cause quantum physics doesn’t allow for loss of information from the universe. It was a paradox, and I was curious… and then before I knew it Lucifer was telling me how we’d be instrumental in balancing creation and destruction, and plotting to overthrow Heaven’s government.” Crowley rolled his eyes. “He sort of gets in your head, after a while.”
“I saw you, out there. And the others, the way they used to be. Before.”
“I told you. It’s like a big computer hard drive. Anything that goes in gets encoded on the event horizon– little quantum fluctuations that can be read, if you know the language. Guess we do. It preserved a perfect record of that day.”
“And you’re changed… but here you are.” Aziraphale touched his face with wondering fingers. “This mark is one of the shapes you used to take. If you had to draw it in two dimensions instead of five, that is.”
Crowley pulled him closer. “Been seeing it in the mirror as long as there’ve been mirrors, and I never knew.”
“But you shouldn’t have survived. How…?”
“It’s not for us to question, I’m sure.” Crowley smiled. He’d always had such a lovely smile. “I loved you then, Aziraphale. I want you to know that.”
“And now?”
“Well, as you said, I’ve changed.”
“Crowley–?”
“Love you even more.”
They kissed. (Aziraphale decided he would never need to remember kissing again. He didn’t intend to go more than a few hours without it from here on out.) “God told me something once,” he said, at length.
Crowley raised an eyebrow.
“She said… change is just a transition, or something like that. Everything that ever existed continues to exist, in some form. Perhaps that’s why I loved you when I first saw you on the wall of Eden– because I loved you before, and nothing is ever truly gone.”
“Always wondered why I didn’t get smited.”
Aziraphale shook his head. “I’ve missed you so much.” There was a hollow aching in his throat.
“You never lost me.” Crowley took his hands and pressed them. Above his head and over his shoulders, glowing shapes were forming in the air: spiralling fractal shells, a series of golden orbs, something that looked like the lifecycle of a flower all in one moment. Aziraphale smiled. “As long as you and I are a part of creation, we belong to each other. If going through an actual black hole can’t change that, I guess nothing ever will.”
There was so much more Aziraphale needed to say. How could they reconcile a long-forgotten intimacy with six thousand years of selective amnesia? Not to mention the fact that they were kissing now; Aziraphale would have to figure out how to work some of his corporation’s dormant accessories…
He sighed. There was one thing they both knew how to do. “We never got dinner. I can’t say I’m up for another tour of the galaxy, but there’s a cafe that’s just opened down the street.”
As Crowley held the door for him, Aziraphale paused and looked up. “Had you really been eating at that black hole all this time?”
Crowley shrugged. “There aren’t a lot of places out there serving gamma rays. It’s fine dining.”
“I wonder why we only remembered now.”
“Ineffable, I expect.”
Crowley’s reached out and twined their fingers. Aziraphale felt the brush of his dry, cool skin. He laid his head on Crowley’s shoulder.
As they walked away, an apple tree in Golden Square exploded in white blossoms. Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t see them, but they were there all the same.
Summary: Things are changing in Heaven. Angels can no longer see the fourth dimension, and Aziraphale’s been assigned to tasting fruit– that is, quality checking the biological life forms that will populate the Earth. He thinks senses are among God’s best inventions, but his friend Kabaiel misses crafting stars. When Lucifer appears with an idea for a secret project that will pit gravity against quantum level forces, Kabaiel signs on eagerly. Everything seems to be going well, but Aziraphale is worried. There’s something about the new project that he doesn’t like. If only he’d stop remembering the future…
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley
Word Count: 9,137
Tags: Pre-Fall, Angel Crowley, Angel Aziraphale, theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, what if the angels were weird energy beings in a Lovecraftian Heaven, angst, the Fall, temporary memory loss, getting together, Aziraphale loves Crowley, Crowley loves Aziraphale, happy ending, neutron stars, black holes
Notes: Happy holidays, rainbow_salt! You had requested a pre-Fall fic exploring Aziraphale and Crowley’s friendship, and Aziraphale’s reaction to Crowley conspiring with Lucifer. I hope you enjoy!
When he heard the door open, Aziraphale carefully placed the object he’d been holding back in its protective wrapping. The Four Winds had been picking up construction dust lately, blowing it in through windows and along corridors to pile in the corners of the new laboratory, even though it was meant to be sealed. He’d written to the quality team about it.
A shape shambled over to his workstation, humanoid, with rather spindly lower appendages and a crown of fiery hair. “I changed,” it said in the new way they’d been encouraged to communicate, using the bands in its throat to vibrate the air. “Can I come in now?”
Aziraphale practised the movement of facial muscles God had taught them. “Kabaiel! You finally picked one.”
Kabaiel’s outline was fuzzy, and he flicked through his other shapes in the fifth dimension– Aziraphale could see the sinuous ripples and coiled shells and golden orbs as if they were superimposed over his human body– but he stayed solid enough. “I think it’s too small for me. The skin is tight. What’re you doing with your mouth?”
“Smiling. I’m attempting to convey pleasure. Do you like it?” Aziraphale touched his cheek and felt the protrusion of muscle there. He felt a little self-conscious.
“We’re crammed into three-dimensional bodies, half-blind, can’t even see the timestream, and he wants to know if I like his smile,” Kabaiel complained.
“Don’t be glum. Take a look at this.” Aziraphale pulled the wrapper away again and held out a bulbous purple object.
They’d both been busy the last little while. Aziraphale wasn’t sure how long; time was changing, the unbroken line of it no longer visible as it once was. But there was certainly a “before”. Before, angels had been creatures of pure energy, orbiting the Throne and bouncing off one another as they exchanged joyous greetings. They’d tended the Halls and the clouds and the fire streams, they’d composed symphonies on the electromagnetic spectrum, but mostly they’d gazed out at the wonder of Her creation. Aziraphale had spent several aeons watching the birth of a star, and when the dust cloud finally ignited he’d felt something he had no way to name. He wished he’d known then what a smile was.
Everything changed when the sapphire throne came down to the plane where the third sphere angels spent their time. The cherubim with their multifaceted aspects drove chariots out in front of it, the wind blew fiercely, and there was an explosion of sharp-rimmed, eye-studded wheels all around. Seraphim swooped about on their many wings calling out to God, who sat on the throne in Her finest whites and blazed like She was aflame.
“She’s makin’ quite the entrance,” Kabaiel had whispered to him. “This oughta be good.”
Aziraphale thought it had been good. She’d announced that they were to break ground on a new kind of life form, a strictly three-dimensional one that would live on a warm, wet planet and use things called “senses” to explore the cosmos. Aziraphale had never had senses before. He’d been the light, but he’d never experienced light the way he had when he’d opened human eyes for the first time. And that was just the beginning.
Kabaiel was staring at the purple globe. He used long, delicate fingers to poke into its flesh, too hard– there was a pop and then a sucking sound as he pulled the digit back, dripping. “Eugggh.”
Aziraphale laughed. “Don’t stick holes in it, dear. Take a bite.”
“What do you mean?”
Aziraphale mimed opening his mouth and biting into an imaginary sphere. “It’s a fruit. You’re meant to eat it.”
Kabaiel’s golden eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so.”
“You’ll like it.” Aziraphale, still laughing, took the thing back from him and demonstrated. He watched Kabaiel tracking a line of juice down his chin. “It’s gone through five rounds of testing and two focus groups already. I’m just the final quality check. I promise it’s harmless.”
Kabaiel, hesitantly, put his wet finger to his mouth and sucked. “Oh! It’s… it’s…”
“There was a word I used to know that might fit.” Before God had hidden the fourth dimension from them, they’d been able to look through time like someone putting their eye to a long, hollow tube. There was too much information to make heads or tails of it, but Aziraphale had picked up British colloquialisms at some point. “Scrummy.”
Kabaiel tried on a smile of his own. He had tiny depressions in the centre of each cheek. Aziraphale thought they were fascinating. “It’s different. Give it ‘ere.” He tried his own bite and grimaced. “Mushy.”
“It’s meant to be soft. Some of the things that will eat this won’t have teeth.”
“I remember fruits a little. From before.” That was how they referred to things they recalled from the future. “Seems like the good ones had more snap.” He looked alarmed. “Now what do I do?”
“Swallow.” Aziraphale traced the line of his neck as his own bolus travelled down to his stomach.
Kabaiel tried it, sputtered, gasped a breath, and got it down at last. “I’m a tube on legs,” he said, “and I can’t even work the tube right. Or the legs.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, when’re you off? Want to hit the ambrosia bar?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve a whole line of new products due for the final check, and later they’re delivering insects. The memo said there’d be a few species to sort through.”
It was harder to sense one another in these corporations. Kabaiel’s extra eyes blinked, and a knotted sphere twisted through seven dimensions over his left shoulder. Aziraphale wasn’t sure what that meant. “No problem. Come see me in the basement later.”
“When I’m free.”
“Yeah. See you.” Kabaiel left, torso listing slightly to one side as he tried to work out where his knees and hips were meant to be.
When he’d gone, Aziraphale picked up the plum that now held the marks of Kabaiel’s brand new teeth. “See you,” he said.
Kabaiel ditched the human corporation as soon as he was outside the lab. Aziraphale had chased him out earlier, saying the radiation from his true form would contaminate the organic material. He’d always been a fussy little stickler about rules. But he was kind, and Kabaiel liked the way he glowed: tucked into a neat blue-white sphere of radiance, with bands of colour rippling through that Kabaiel had never seen anywhere else. He looked soft, and somehow inviting–
“Kabaiel!”
Lucifer raised one of his many appendages. If Aziraphale was a soft light, Lucifer was a supernova– his luminosity too much for human visual equipment (he’d been reprimanded about that three times already). His surface was glossy, and his eyes always gave the impression that they were overlarge for his face, though he had no face. “I saw you leaving. Did you try a body on?”
“Yeah. Looked ridiculous. Where’re you off to?”
“A few of the guys are meeting about a new project.” Lucifer glanced around, and lowered his voice. “I was hoping to get you on board. We could use your skill set.”
Kabaiel let his form run through itself in a thoughtful loop. Up above them, lights flashed as ten-dimensional archangels winked in and out of existence. A school of manifold fish rippled through the air, tiny protrusions in this reality but with vast, bulky bodies just one universe over. “Sure, why not? Don’t have anything on for the rest of the day. I was going to the cafeteria, but the food hasn’t been that good lately.”
There weren’t “a few” species of insects, there were bloody thousands, and Aziraphale’s head ached. He leaned back at his workstation, letting a bug with black-spotted red wings explore his knuckles. Why had She gone all in on beetles, he wondered. He’d meant to meet Kabaiel ages ago, but there was no getting free. Too bad, he could have used an ambrosia–
“Pick-me-up?” Kabaiel perched on the edge of the desk, holding a steaming mug, like Aziraphale had summoned him out of the ether. His lower appendages were really very long indeed. Aziraphale liked the corporation he’d chosen.
“You, my dear, are a sight for sore eyes. Even if I’ve only two of them at the moment.” Aziraphale took the drink and inhaled the steam. In his true form, he’d absorb the plasma’s energy directly into his core and grow a little larger, but as a human he could savour this.
“I take it you’ve been busy.”
“I know She made the humans in Her image, but I’m not sure they’re Her favourite after all,” Aziraphale said sourly. “Hold on, I’m just now finishing the report on Things With Six Legs, which is basically all of them.” He signed the form hastily and rolled it up before tossing it into the air, where it vanished. Presumably it would end up in central processing.
“Know what you mean. Be nice to know what She’s thinking.” Kabaiel sighed. “Does She want gravity to make sense, or does She want subatomic particle interactions to make sense? Because She can’t have both.”
“It’s not for us to question, I’m sure. Shall we take a walk? I’d like to see the stars; I feel like I’ve spent the last thousand years indoors.”
When they got outside Kabaiel vibrated, but Aziraphale reached over and grabbed his hand. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted his friend to stay corporeal, at least for a little while.
Kabaiel gave him a curious look but remained human-shaped, though as usual he could hardly keep still. He liked to leak out around the edges of his primary form, and tonight he was making fractals in the air above their heads. Aziraphale sipped his ambrosia and observed the texture of his skin. Kabaiel’s palm was warm, and his fingers curled around the back of Aziraphale’s hand, dry, rubbing in a way that felt alien but not unpleasant. “What do you think of the body?” he asked, at length.
“It’s stopped chafing so much, but it still feels like…” Kabaiel looked thoughtful. “...like putting dark glasses over my eyes. Hard to really see anything.”
“What are glasses?”
“I don’t remember.”
They walked in silence for a little while. The arm of the nearest galaxy was directly overhead, and the sky was flooded with blue and red and ultraviolet light. Aziraphale gestured upwards. “Your stars are looking well.”
“Yeah, they took to each other real nice. Took some figuring to get them to dance, though. In the end I had to add a third star; system was only meant to have two.”
“I could never get my mind around the mechanics of building orbits. Biology is suiting me much better.” Aziraphale squeezed his hand. “It’s nice to feel adept at something, at last.”
Kabaiel’s cheeks looked pinker than they had earlier. “You were always–” he started, but at that moment they rounded a conical distortion in the energy field and came face to face with an inferno. They lost their grip on one another, instinctively throwing their arms up to shield their eyes. Kabaiel slipped out of his corporation, and Aziraphale followed after a moment.
Lucifer’s many eyes wreathed them, crinkled with amusement. He was long-bodied and claw-tipped, like some of the reptiles Aziraphale had catalogued, and his wings flickered in and out of view as they flapped through one of the higher dimensions.
Kabaiel had resumed his favourite shape, a trefoil knot that slipped over and through itself with a low susurration. Aziraphale became a glowing orb with a flicker of pique. “Lucifer.”
“Hi! Fancy meeting you here. Lovely night, isn’t it? I was just on my way to the basement.”
“I nipped out to get some air. I fed it some silicon earlier and the outer layers are starting to expand, just like you said.” Kabaiel was practically radiating excitement.
“Wonderful! I asked some of the others to come by and see. Shall we?”
Aziraphale felt a stab of– something. He still hadn’t been by to see Kabaiel’s work, even though he’d promised. “Capital idea. I’ll go with you,” he said firmly. He flashed warm colours in Kabaiel’s direction.
Instead of responding, Kabaiel vanished. When he reappeared there were briefly three of him, and then he pulled himself back together. Aziraphale guessed he’d popped up to the fifth dimension to think. It was peaceful, with the sound of collapsing waveforms surging and receding like surf on a beach. “Sorry, Aziraphale. This is something Lucifer and I have been working on together. Just… physics stuff. You won’t like it.”
“I’d still like to–”
“Another time.”
Aziraphale dimmed, stung by the clear rejection. Lucifer blazed a little brighter, ostentatious git that he was. Kabaiel drifted towards that glow, unfolding, reaching out to twine around one of Lucifer’s many appendages in the same way he’d held Aziraphale’s hand.
“Another time, then,” Aziraphale echoed, and turned away.
Once Aziraphale had faded into the distance Kabaiel relaxed his coils in a sigh of relief.
Lucifer pulsed a question. “Why didn’t you let him come along? We can use all the help we can get.”
“Nah, you don’t want Aziraphale. He’s got the entire policy manual by heart. He’d never go in for an unauthorised project.”
“He might if you asked.” Several of Lucifer’s eyes turned towards him.
Kabaiel didn’t think they’d get in trouble for this, but the idea of involving Aziraphale made him deeply uneasy. He surged back up to the fifth and folded the third dimension to cross the distance to his office instantaneously, Lucifer close behind him.
The subatomic particle lab was a torus half-buried in the firmament, hence “the basement”. There were several angels already assembled outside.
He switched back to his human form. Having a body wasn’t so bad, when you got used to it. “Hey guys,” he said, raising a hand in a little half-wave.
Kabaiel worked a little ways outside of the third-sphere plane, which was a more or less featureless area where the energy fields were calm and angels could focus on their tasks without being disturbed by random fluctuations. Aziraphale could have reached “the basement” instantaneously, of course, but the walk gave him time to think. He passed the mountains, towering jagged against the skyline, their summits hidden by mist: places where the firmament held enough mass to become warped and elongated by gravity wells. Strange angles formed on the borders between higher dimensions, where objects curled in on themselves in ever-diminishing spiral fractals. Stars of all colours glittered in the polychromatic sky.
He knocked on the door of the torus. The being that answered was fragmentary, continuously scattering and reforming around a core of ultraviolet light, and it seemed suspicious– a word Aziraphale remembered from before, because what did they have to be suspicious of here? –to see an angel in human form standing on the doorstep. “Is Kabaiel in?” he asked.
“You might want to change,” it buzzed. “Organic formzz don’t respond well to unszztable neutrons.”
“I shan’t be long, and anyway I’m sure Kabaiel won’t let my corporation come to harm,” Aziraphale said. The entity looked as doubtful as it was possible for a swarm to look– Aziraphale was put in mind of the flies he’d been sorting earlier– but it parted to let him enter.
To his surprise, when he found Kabaiel hunched over a viewing port that gave way to a tunnel curving off in either direction, he was human-shaped too. “C’mon, c’mon, just show me where you are,” he heard the other angel muttering. “You’ve got a good thing going here. Steady electron supply, nice ring for racing, place to store your muons. If you don’t start living up to your potential you’re gonna find yourself decayed into low-energy photons and pointed towards the darkest place in the sky I can find.”
“Don’t bully them. I’m sure they’re doing their best.”
Kabaiel looked up. “Hey.”
“Hello. Er. I just wanted to say that I… um. If you’re angry with me, for not… before… well, anyway, I’m here now.” The muscles in Aziraphale’s face were smiling again– this time with the desire for acceptance. Humans seemed to have been built with a wish to be included, and avoid the displeasure of those they cared for. They weren't so different from angels that way.
Kabaiel leaned back, stretching his wings. “Don’t be daft. I’m glad you came.” He waved Aziraphale closer. His golden eyes were steaming, as if the intensity of his concentration had heated them.
Aziraphale peered into the window. “What is it?”
“At the moment, a right pain in the arse. She wants an itemised list of the elementary particles, and they show up just fine if you crash atoms together hard enough, but they won’t stand still for a photo. See?” He handed Aziraphale a tablet. On it were images of nebulous, blurry blobs, lacking distinguishing features of any kind.
“Oh dear.”
“Plus, they’re completely dependent on each other, worse’n stars that way. Try pulling two quarks apart. There’s a reason they call it the ‘strong force’. Easier to separate Lucifer from that glow he’s so determined to have.”
“Then it’s hopeless,” said Aziraphale. “You may as well throw in the towel and come to lunch with me.”
Kabaiel’s eyes slid back to the viewing port, and Aziraphale took a closer look at him. He seemed… different, somehow. His corporation was thinner than it had been. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his movements were quick and nervous. The thing that struck him most deeply, though, was the fact that he seemed to be entirely contained within his form, for the first time in Aziraphale’s memory. There were no orbiting spheres, no sinuous ribbons of energy, no radiation, no strange polyhedrons bending the space around him. Possibly it was a protective mechanism, to keep the organic corporation from being damaged by the volatile material in the lab? Nevertheless, it was disconcerting.
Aziraphale put a hand on his arm, and Kabaiel twitched in surprise. “Dear? Are you alright?”
“Never better.” Kabaiel refocused and grinned at him. It really was a striking smile. Aziraphale didn’t know what his own looked like, but Kabaiel’s was mischievous, infectious, with long white teeth and those little dimples in his cheeks. “But I can’t get away. Been burning the candle at both ends, trying to get this extra project up and running.”
“What’s a candle?”
Kabaiel frowned. “I’m not sure.”
“Alright, then, what’s the extra project?” Aziraphale made a show of leaning against the wall of the particle accelerator tube, projecting his intention to settle in for as long as it took.
Kabaiel hesitated. Aziraphale tried lifting one eyebrow. It must have been effective because the other angel looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He made a beckoning gesture. “Come on.”
They were deep in the subterranean portion of the lab when Kabaiel stopped at an unmarked area of wall. Aziraphale heard a sound, subtly vibrant, musical like the hymns they sang to Her, though he didn’t recognise the melody– if indeed there was one. “Leave the corporation outside,” Kabaiel said, and dissolved into a knot that unravelled and reformed itself as it stretched into the fifth dimension. He pushed through the wall, and Aziraphale followed in his orb form.
They emerged above a scaffolding that stretched a little ways into a space without end, at least as far as Aziraphale could tell, as the far walls of the room could not be seen. The air itself was alive with bulges and flashes and little ripples as beings moved from place to place– perhaps themselves in the past or future, perhaps not. Some of the half-glimpsed figures were very strange; dark, with eyes that glowed red and twisting, reaching tentacles. He noticed all these things in an instant, before his attention was drawn to the object out in the middle of the abyss.
It had indistinct borders, like the images of elementary particles Kabaiel had shown him earlier, and it wasn’t large– perhaps the size of Earth’s new moon (still in the blueprint stage)– but it conveyed a sense of dangerous heaviness Aziraphale couldn’t explain. A cold, nameless unease stole over him. The thing warped light around itself, it sucked at the space like it possessed some uncanny, overwhelming gravity, and it hummed a low hum that shook the iron structure beneath them.
He knew at once it wasn’t one of Her projects. This was malevolent, it was destructive, and it didn’t belong in God’s kingdom. “Kabaiel–”
“It’s not quite done. But I think we had a breakthrough the other night. We just have to get the right balance of elements– it’s already helium-depleted and burning through the heavier stuff almost faster than we can feed it; it wants to collapse into its core and as soon as it’s the right size we’re gonna let it. When it’s heavy enough its gravity will overcome the repellent subatomic forces and then we’ll see some fireworks!” Kabaiel spoke quickly, slithering over and through himself in a blur of excited motion.
Aziraphale swallowed the frantic questions that were threatening to burst out of him. Kabaiel had always been proud, and a little touchy, and Aziraphale needed to find out more. “We?” he asked, finally.
“Me an’ Lucifer, and a few others.”
“Does God know?”
“She doesn’t need to yet. We’ll show Her when it’s done.”
“But my dear… that thing is… it’s…”
“Impressive, right?” Kabaiel couldn’t smile in this form, but Aziraphale could sense his pleasure in the way his coils writhed; the way his colour changed from red to pale green to amber. “I was talkin’ to Lucifer about how much space there is between atoms, and between parts of the atom, too, I mean, the electrons might as well be on the other side of the universe, right? Seemed like a lot of wasted space. And he said, ‘What happens if you squeeze ‘em together’, and I said they fight you like the dickens, that’s what, and he said, ‘Let’s try it’. An’ it’s true, they don’t like it, but if you keep putting more and more matter into less and less space–”
“I don’t like it.” Aziraphale, with a last, apprehensive glance around, flashed back through the portal. When Kabaiel came through after him he’d put his corporation back on. The fingers were shaking.
Kabaiel remained knotted, his loops now drawn close together. The image of hundreds of wings beat the air, a sort of visual echo; he was half in the third dimension and half in the fifth. “I don’t think you understand what it can do, Aziraphale. For one thing, it’ll retain the energy signature of anything you put into it. A perfect recording of the arrangement of every molecule, down to the atomic level and beyond. Think how helpful that’ll be for all this cataloguing and indexing She’s got us doing!”
“I know making lists isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, but you don’t go and unravel the whole tapestry just because you don’t like the picture it shows! What I saw in there isn’t a tool for creation, it’s a tool for destruction.”
“You don’t understand.” Kabaiel spun in a brief, agitated circle. “I knew you wouldn’t. Nothing matters to you if it isn’t written down on some form you have to fill out in triplicate.”
“I didn’t say that!” You matter, Aziraphale thought fiercely. You matter, and this is going to hurt you. I don’t know how I know that. I think I remember it. “But what happens to the things it takes in? Do you know where they go? I don’t want to see Her work put into some… some book, pressed between pages and flattened into a shadow of itself. Not even to save it, o-or retain it. I don’t need to reinvent the universe just to make an apple pie from scratch. That’s Her job.”
“Aziraphale, relax.” The words were accompanied by a blaze of painful light. Aziraphale bit back a half-remembered curse word and became an orb again before Lucifer’s glaring, showy presence could hurt his corporation’s eyes.
Kabaiel glowed in welcome. “Lucifer!”
“I was in the area, thought I’d stop by.” Lucifer’s eyes zipped around the hallway while his long, scaly form circled Kabaiel like an affectionate cat. “I’m afraid I overheard a little of your conversation, forgive me. Do you mind if I shed some light?”
“As if we could stop you,” Aziraphale muttered.
“I admit Kabaiel and I have been somewhat unconventional in our approach here, but once you understand I’m sure you’ll agree with what we’re doing. God didn’t provide us with a way to unite gravity with the forces that bind particles at the subatomic level, but it can be done– with dedication, intelligence and a little thinking outside the box. The worlds it opens up, Aziraphale! This will let us bend the fabric of space time, to travel between parallel universes— the way the manifold fish do, and stranger creatures like the tentacled fellows you saw in there. We’ll be able to manipulate the fourth dimension again. Step between all possible timelines. Take back the things She’s hidden from us.” He glittered coldly.
Aziraphale fell back. “We’re meant to be working on the Earth.”
“The Earth.” Lucifer’s opinion on that was clear in the dismissive way he flicked his upper appendages. “A slime-covered ball perpetually circling a single star. It’s boring.”
“You don’t know what it is. You haven’t seen anything She’s got planned for it. You haven’t even tried a corporation on. Kabaiel has. Tell him.”
Kabaiel flickered in and out of sight. “Well…”
“I’ve got a new batch of specimens to test,” Aziraphale said, a little desperately. “More fruit. Little round ones that grow in bunches, and thick-skinned ones with bright red seeds that look like jewels. Come back with me. You don’t have to do this.”
“I…”
“The singularity might form at any time, Kabaiel. We should stay and keep an eye on it.”
Kabaiel looped around once, twice, three times, and seemed to come to a decision. “Sorry, Aziraphale. Let me know how the taste tests go, huh? I’ll see you soon.”
“I shan't wait up.” Aziraphale barreled back along the ramp to the surface. When he was safely out of Lucifer’s presence he resumed his human form. There must have been a little extra radiation around the place, though, or maybe the eyes were still recovering from his encounter with the bloody ‘light-bringer’, because he could hardly see. His vision was blurred with salt water.
Heaven had no sun. There was no “night” or “day”, just the perpetual plane bordered by the mountains with their needle-like spires and sharp, dizzying peaks; surrounded by ice-vapour and distorting spacetime with their presence. There was always light, though, because what God wants God gets. Kabaiel hurried through a shimmery mist that he remembered– vaguely– as the sort of thing that rose from the surface of water on cold mornings, feeling exposed as a bug in the beam of a torch. But Lucifer, blazing with anger and nervous agitation, had gone off to rally the others, and he didn’t have much time.
He pushed open the door of the lab with human hands, and found Aziraphale slumped in front of a row of tall plants with brown, rough-textured stems. Gnarled root balls heavy with soil littered the work bench, the leaves were dense and brilliantly green, white flowers sparkled with dewdrops... and Aziraphale stared, unseeing, through all of it. He held a fruit with mottled, reddish-yellow, shiny skin.
Kabaiel stopped short. Aziraphale didn’t look up, but he said, “This is an apple. Do you remember apples?”
“I remember…” Kabaiel started, then shook his head. There was an odd knot in that recollection. It felt like he’d need to go up a dimension or two to unravel it.
“I haven’t been able to bring myself to try it. I have the strangest feeling that once it’s tasted, nothing will ever be the same again.” Aziraphale lifted his face. His eyes were leaking big, round droplets of clear liquid.
“You wanted to know what the… what my project does with the things it takes in. Truth is, I don’t know. There’s a line, like a horizon, and once something’s crossed it– even light– there’s no coming back.”
“Why are you here, Kabaiel?” Aziraphale said. He raised his hands and wiped wetness from his cheeks.
“I wanted to warn you. Um. There may be some trouble over at my office later. I’m not sure She…” Kabaiel bit back what he hadn’t even dared to think in the silence of his own mind. “Anyway, stay here, yeah? Even if you… well, just stay out of it. Safer that way.”
“Stay with me.” Aziraphale put the apple down.
“Aziraphale…”
“Please. Please, Kabaiel. I remember this now. You crossed over, and you never came back.” Aziraphale walked towards him, upper appendages held out beseechingly.
They were new to human corporations, and it was awkward, but somehow they found themselves wrapped around each other, Kabaiel’s arms over Aziraphale’s shoulders while Aziraphale’s hands clutched his waist. “Stay,” Aziraphale whispered again, and rested his head on Kabaiel’s chest.
Kabaiel had felt all the tumultuous highs and lows of working with strange forces; gravity and three-body orbits, supernovas and dark matter, quarks and leptons and bosons. God’s cosmos was magnificently complex, and he’d touched it all, from the massive bulk of the galaxies to the tiniest and most evasive of the elementary particles. He’d been a tight-packed beam of photons traversing the dimensions, up where the superstrings vibrated creation’s song and all possible timelines collapsed into a single point, but he’d never felt anything like this before. His eyes widened, and Aziraphale gasped, and they drew back to look into one another’s strange, dear, human faces.
“Aziraphale, I–”
“Time to go, Kabaiel.”
Kabaiel winced at the familiar tone; words formed by the beating of hundreds of thousands of tiny wings. In the open doorway were three figures: the swarm of Baal; Bekalam’s silvery ripples, swimming on the very edge of vision; and Hanibal, who was at once a collection of strange-angled polyhedrons and a climbing, branching figure of eerie purple lightning. It was Hanibal who extended his body to encircle them, horrifyingly quick, a poisonous vine wrapping the trunk of a tree. Baal came closer and glittered in an oppressive cloud around their heads. “Bring your friend. He should szzee this too.”
Aziraphale refused to change out of his human corporation, though the other angels pressed in around him, closer and closer, compelling him in a most unpleasant manner. He didn’t want to give up his senses, not when they might be important for understanding what this thing Kabaiel had built was, and what it could do.
Kabaiel, who had been speaking with Lucifer in hushed tones (keeping his human eyes averted and tightly shut all the while) returned to Aziraphale’s side at length and, surprisingly, took his hand. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured.
The painful glow that was Lucifer’s presence dimmed, and Aziraphale looked up. Without it, he could see the scales that covered the angel’s form, marred here and there by jagged cracks that gaped onto an interior of liquid fire, red and blazing hot. The eyes he turned towards Aziraphale and Kabaiel held that same furious light. “Your organic forms won’t survive the transition,” he warned.
Aziraphale lifted his chin. “Very well, then. We’ll just be off.”
Lucifer quivered with mirth. “You won’t want to miss this. Come through, but stay well back.”
“I’d really rather–”
“Come along, little principality,” said Hanibal. “You’re one of our lot now, right? Your friend Kabaiel made sure of that.”
Kabaiel’s face was very pale. “He’s not. I was just warning him off. Let him go, he doesn’t know anything.”
There were too many of them, and some of them were archangels, rapidly spinning cores of light with fluttering edges that moved too quickly to make out, like the wings of a hummingbird. Aziraphale and Kabaiel found themselves jostled and pushed through the portal and out onto the scaffolding, where the strange object hung in the air.
It was smaller than it had been, and it was spinning now. Light spiralled around it and into it, vanishing for a moment at the apex of the whirlpool and then beaming out again with renewed intensity, as if flung by powerful, unseen hands.
Aziraphale’s corporation was trembling, and he squeezed Kabaiel’s fingers. “What is it?” he whispered.
“Something that’ll be important,” Kabaiel said stubbornly. “I still believe that. It’s close now, but it’s very unstable. I wanted you to stay clear ‘cause God’s generals got wind this morning and they’re on their way. No telling what’ll happen if that bunch of bellends start messing about.”
“It looks like it wants to devour the light.”
“When it’s finished, it’ll have a gravitational pull even light can’t escape from,” Kabaiel said. The rising wind whipped some of his crimson hair across his face, and he pushed it away. “I tried to tell you before. God thinks She can just keep endlessly creating, but there has to be balance, don’t you see?”
Aziraphale shook his head.
“Things also need to end, so they can be remade as something else. Universe’ll never be self-sufficient otherwise.”
“But She said everything is precious.”
“That doesn’t mean it can last forever. Just look at fruit.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes. He saw Kabaiel, wincingly swallowing his bite of plum. He wasn’t sure what happened to food after it was eaten, but it was clearly never the same again. “Transformation,” he said softly.
“Exactly!” Kabaiel gestured out into the abyss. “Change. You can’t make a soufflé without breaking eggs!”
“What?”
“Look, already we’ve created dozens of new elements in the process of making this thing. And soon it’ll collapse into a singularity– that’s the ultimate agent of transformation, we think it tears things down to elemental particles. But at the same time, it stores the information so nothing gets lost. No more forgetting. There may even be a way out the other side, after information is scattered and rearranged, to an entirely new and unimaginable future. The possibilities are endless.” Kabaiel’s eyes were wild. “At least… that’s how it ought to work.”
Kabaiel’s voice had grown progressively louder. Aziraphale suddenly realised that the rest of the angels were watching them curiously. After a moment, Lucifer drifted forward. “Ah, yes. Thank you Kabaiel. That’s what your black hole was meant to do, and I think it would have worked very well.”
Kabaiel blinked. “Would have?”
“You never did get the quarks on your side, though, did you? They always wriggled away, but I found a way to engage them. Just by syphoning off a little gravity at the right times…” he waved an appendage. The vast room pulsed, and then the atmosphere palpably lightened, as if there’d been an abrupt pressure change. Aziraphale’s ears made a popping sound. “...I can give the strong forces the upper hand.”
“But then it’ll…” Kabaiel trailed off, looking horrified. “No.”
“Yes. We talked about this, remember?”
“In theory! In theory!” Kabaiel dropped Aziraphale’s hand and stepped forward, gesturing wildly. “It’s too dangerous, Lucifer!”
“Dangerous to whom? Not to us.” The surrounding angels made musical noises of agreement, voices rising in a jarring harmony that pierced Aziraphale’s human ears. “Dangerous to biology, perhaps, but so what?”
“Kabaiel, what’s he talking about?” Aziraphale whispered.
Kabaiel winced. “Shit, shit, shit. Long story, no time.” He looked out at the thing… Lucifer had called it a ‘black hole’… with wide eyes. It was pulsing now, its borders shrinking as it began to collapse in on itself.
Lucifer ignited, blazing with the brightness of a hundred suns. “It’s happening,” he crowed.
Aziraphale could no longer see, but he could feel the wind rising. The air was hot and heavy, and the void sucked at his body. The humming of the black hole rose to a painful pitch and he cried out.
When he remembered the rest– and it was a long, long time later that he remembered it at all, on the other side of another great transition– it was just as a series of confused images, like a slideshow after the cassette had been dropped and the slides jammed back in any old way.
The force was too much. His corporation shattered as the individual atoms were pulled apart.
A dozen archangels, beautiful and terrible, glowing like hot coals and surrounded by an absolute fury of wings, burst into the space. Michael sprang straight at Lucifer, who met her in midair. There was an explosion of light.
Kabaiel, who’d also lost his corporation, twined around Aziraphale.
Michael fell, Lucifer and Baal swarming over her.
A pulse of energy was pressed against Aziraphale’s form. He didn’t remember what a kiss was… but it felt like a kiss. Then Kabaiel was gone.
There was a great, terrible percussive noise. Everything went dark and still.
“Where am I?”
Blinding whiteness, broken here and there by sunspots. After a time, these darker areas ran together to form the branches of a tree, stark against the sky. Aziraphale blinked, and was surprised to find himself in possession of human eyelids again.
“You’re in the Garden of Eden. And it’s ten days before the beginning of the world, if you want to know.” The voice was kind, and a little amused, but Aziraphale scrambled up off of his back to kneel. He’d know that voice anywhere.
“My Lord.”
“Rise, Aziraphale. It’s alright.” God chuckled. She’d taken the form of a female human with cascading, greying locks, and was examining a budding twig with evident fascination.
Aziraphale rose cautiously. “It’s still here, then. I thought… I mean, Lucifer said–”
“Lucifer wanted me to stop mucking about with biology. If his idea had succeeded, the result would have enabled him to destroy the earth and everything on it.”
Aziraphale couldn’t help himself. “How?”
“Compressing atoms at that pressure breaks the bonds between quarks and allows strange matter to form. I experimented with it when the universe was young. Very intriguing stuff, but it doesn’t allow any variation. It would have turned all this–” she waved a white-robed arm– “into more of itself. If it got loose.”
“Oh.” Aziraphale ran his fingers through the grass. It felt as though there was a stone in his belly. “What happened to– to everyone else?”
“Lucifer and Kabaiel thought I didn’t understand destructive forces.” The bud on the twig burst into bloom. In the blink of an eye, the flower withered, and a hard, green fruit began to swell.
Aziraphale couldn’t make his lungs work. The stone inside him was growing, pressing the air out of him. “They’re… gone?”
God watched the fruit. It became an apple, red and tempting, sides slippery with dew, and then the skin wrinkled and grew slack. When the rotting stopped and all that remained was a brown husk, she set the branch on the ground. “Those who conspired against me have undergone a change,” she said at last. “To stop the formation of a neutron star within the borders of Heaven, mass and energy were added to the unstable creation in Kabaiel’s lab. This allowed gravity to re-exert itself, and a black hole formed– still dangerous, but infinitely more stable. I’ve made a place for it right at the centre of the galaxy.”
Somehow Aziraphale made himself ask the question. “Mass… and energy…?”
God turned sympathetic eyes on him. “Every transition, even the most dramatic, is simply that. If it comforts you, Kabaiel and the others remain. Somewhere. In some form.”
Aziraphale didn’t respond. His eyes were leaking again.
God put a hand under his chin. “Child, I didn’t throw him in. He jumped.”
“What?”
“Kabaiel anchored himself to the other rebels. He was an expert at working with gravity and subatomic attractive forces; it was easy enough for him to bind them up. Then he pulled them all into the collapsing star. Right in the nick of time, too.” She smiled.
What followed was a long, black stretch of time where Aziraphale was aware of nothing but his own devastation. When he opened his eyes again, he was still in the Garden, the stars were out, God was standing before him… and Kabaiel was dead.
He drew a painful breath. “Lord. When you hid the timestream from us, we… forgot many of the things we saw.”
“You will need to navigate time in a linear fashion to serve the humans. But without being able to see the fourth dimension, I’m afraid it’s difficult to retain the information.”
“Can you make me forget one more thing?”
When he heard the door open, Aziraphale carefully placed the object he’d been holding back in its protective wrapping. He’d got his hands on a rare first edition of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo, dove ne i congressi di quattro giornate si discorre sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, which included the previously lost Letter to Christina, and the wind had a tendency to blow leaves and dust into the shop at this time of year.
A lanky shape with a short-cropped crown of fiery hair and dark glasses entered, perched on the edge of his desk, and held out a steaming cardboard takeaway mug. “Pick-me-up?” Crowley said. “You’ve been staring at that mouldy old manuscript so long I’m worried you’ll grow mould yourself.”
Aziraphale shooed him away. “No drinks near the book! It’s the only one of its kind, and if I spill tea on it the Royal Society will never let me back in the archives.”
Crowley peered over his shoulder as he returned the wrapped parcel to the glass case. “Galileo?”
“A remarkable mind. They’d been trying to understand the cosmos for years, and he was the first to start getting things right.”
“The first one not to make things up out of whole cloth, you mean,” Crowley snorted.
“Well, the one leads to the other.” Aziraphale smiled. “Shall we take a walk? I’d like to see the stars.”
Crowley blinked, face going slack for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Have you asked me that before?”
“I can’t imagine there’s anything new between us, dear. It’s been six thousand years.”
“Right, right, it’s just…” Crowley snapped his fingers. “Hey, I have an idea. You hungry?”
“Er, well, yes, a little peckish I suppose,” said Aziraphale.
“Okay angel, hold tight,” said Crowley. “We’re gonna hit an ambrosia bar.”
“What do you–”
Crowley grabbed his hand, and they were gone.
The humans had named it Sagittarius A*, and it was a corker. Human food was alright, but there was nothing like a burst of gamma rays shot from a black hole’s accretion disc at near the speed of light.
Crowley turned towards Aziraphale. The angel had taken the form of a blue orb with flickers of vibrant colour playing over his surface: purple, magenta, azure, indigo, and many Crowley couldn’t name. “You look nice,” he said, as if they were talking across the table at a restaurant.
“Really, Crowley. You might have warned me.”
Crowley beamed with amusement. Aziraphale, it seemed, was fussy in any form. “You said you wanted to see the stars, and that you were peckish.”
“A walk along the Thames and dinner at Da Terra was what I had in mind,” said Aziraphale, but without any real pique. He drifted forward curiously. “Where are we?”
“Smack dab in the centre of it all. Look out.”
Aziraphale took in the arms of the Milky Way, swirling around and over them like they were down the vortex of some unimaginably immense whirlpool of starlight, or at the heart of a glittering spider web crafted by God’s enormous hands.
“It’s beautiful.” Aziraphale’s blues were warming to a pleased, delicate pink. Crowley dared to brush his side with one of his many loops, and the angel’s glow brightened.
Then, abruptly, it dimmed. “What’s that dark spot?”
“Ah!” Crowley twined around him, as if he were draping an arm over his shoulders. “That’s the axle of the galaxy, and our ambrosia bar. A little rough and ready, I know, but Heaven’s sort of off limits now that we’ve both been made redundant. This thing throws all kinds of radiation out, so take your pick. X-rays, gamma rays, plasma jets, whatever you fancy.”
“It‘s…”
“Stimulating, ennit? The plasma’s got a real kick to it.”
“No, Crowley. It feels…” Aziraphale flickered nervously. “I know this place. This thing… what’s it called?”
“Aziraphale, are you alright?”
“What’s it called, Crowley?”
“It’s a black hole. Biggest one in the galaxy– shit. Aziraphale, come back!”
Aziraphale was speeding towards the dark maw. Crowley caught him up, binding the agitated, pulsing orb in his own coils. “You can’t go near it, angel! Don’t you feel the gravitational pull? Put one foot over the event horizon and you’ll be its dinner.”
“Let me go.” Aziraphale writhed and threw him off, but at least he stayed put. “I’m calm. But I need to see it. The… event horizon, as you say. I think there’s something written there.”
“You’re barking.” Then Crowley felt it too… a compulsion to investigate, like he was being urged on by some unseen presence. In his experience, that meant he ought to turn around and go home, probably hide under the covers for good measure.
But Aziraphale was determined, and what the angel wanted the angel generally got. Crowley sighed and wrapped a loop around Aziraphale’s body again, like he was leashing an excitable puppy. “Okay. Just stay close to me.”
They didn’t speak. The light– which should have been fading and shifting to red as they approached– instead grew more brilliant, blinding even in their true forms, the way… Crowley frowned to himself. The way Lucifer used to look to my human eyes, up in Heaven, his memory whispered. But he didn’t remember anything like that. Did he?
Despite the jets of energy spewing from the black hole’s rotating rim, spacetime near the boundary was very still. “What do you see, Crowley?” Aziraphale whispered at length.
“I see whiteness. All along the horizon. Seems to go on forever.” Crowley tugged at him. “Go slow, angel.”
Cautiously, they drifted forward, and at length it was as if a wall stood between them and the sucking blackness of the singularity: a barrier opalescent and towering and incandescent, shining like the thousand doomed suns the black hole had consumed since its birth. Crowley heard Aziraphale gasp, but he hardly noticed because at that moment he also saw the things beyond the wall.
He rushed closer, forgetting to be afraid. Aziraphale had been right. Something was written there, if by “written” you meant projected in three dimensions, like the wall was the biggest movie screen in the universe. There were towering mountains, their peaks hidden in the mist; hundreds of prisms, cubes and planes; seemingly organic things resembling bubbles and octopi; strangely angled objects with rapidly shifting facets, inexplicably coloured and whose geometry defied the laws of the third dimension. And there were other forms… forms he knew as intimately as his own face.
One of them was an angel who seemed to be two things at once: an intricately knotted, coiled arabesque of sinuous energy; and a tall human with pale, luminous wings, red hair and golden eyes.
A realisation was barrelling towards him at something close to the speed of light. The black hole hummed its crystalline hum, the air vibrated painfully around him, he thought he might have screamed– and the last image he had before being yanked painfully back into the third dimension, back to his blessedly half-blind corporation on the dear, prosaic surface of the Earth, was that of millions upon millions of apple blossoms, white petals shot through with gold.
Aziraphale gulped air. He felt his fingers claw his hair, heard a low, sobbing moan, and realised the sound was coming from him.
He breathed in. Breathed out. Crowley had collapsed into the armchair.
Aziraphale breathed in once more, and then let his next breath out in a tirade of wounded outrage. “Kabaiel! You– you– you absolute bastard! It’s been you all along! Did you know?”
Crowley reached up. He pulled his glasses off, revealing wild, haunted eyes that stared at nothing. He didn’t answer.
There was a sob stuck in Aziraphale’s chest, and if he let it out he’d be howling. “How could you make that thing? Conspiring with bloody Lucifer, of all people? And not tell me?” His chest hitched. “What the– what the fuck were you thinking? And then destroying yourself to stop it, you s-selfish, thoughtless demon!”
Crowley raised his head, movements slow as if he were moving underwater. “Selfish?” he said with a small frown. Bastard. They might have been discussing the bloody weather.
“Yes! Selfish! To– to leave me alone, and not even say goodbye, I, I thought you were dead–!”
Aziraphale had more to say, much more… but Crowley surged up and forward, took his face between his hands, and kissed him.
Sometimes, Aziraphale got flashes of things he remembered, back when the fourth dimension had been laid out before them like a river. Crowley did too; they’d talked about it, on certain nights when they were deep enough in their cups to put hesitant words around loaded concepts like “before”. Neither of them recalled much about their lives before the Earth had become their job, ward and home… but certain things came back to them in the moment, as if they’d sighted them long ago, perhaps warped and distorted through the wrong end of a telescope. Aziraphale had thought he remembered kissing from the future… but now realised he also remembered it from the past. Remembered the crackling, caressing flare of energy Kabaiel had pulsed into him before he disappeared.
This wasn’t that. Kabaiel– Crowley– had described wearing a human corporation as going around in dark glasses; Aziraphale thought of it more as a whole-body glove. It numbed you to certain things, true, but you got to have senses and sensations: the pressure of desperately clutching fingers, for example. The velvety feel of parted lips pressed against his own. The sound of the shaky breaths they traded between them, and the rasp of stubble against his cheek. When it came to kissing, Aziraphale thought the human experience was just about perfect.
When they parted, their faces were wet. Crowley drew back to look at him. “To answer your question: no, I didn’t know. Forgot everything before the Fall ‘cept little bits and here ‘n there. Now I see why.”
“You said the singularity would tear everything to pieces.”
“Said I thought it would. It was supposed to be a fun little experiment– least, that’s what I thought at first,” Crowley said with a touch of bitterness. “If we could make something with gravitational pull stronger than the speed of light, it’d hide anything dropped into it forever– only it can’t, ‘cause quantum physics doesn’t allow for loss of information from the universe. It was a paradox, and I was curious… and then before I knew it Lucifer was telling me how we’d be instrumental in balancing creation and destruction, and plotting to overthrow Heaven’s government.” Crowley rolled his eyes. “He sort of gets in your head, after a while.”
“I saw you, out there. And the others, the way they used to be. Before.”
“I told you. It’s like a big computer hard drive. Anything that goes in gets encoded on the event horizon– little quantum fluctuations that can be read, if you know the language. Guess we do. It preserved a perfect record of that day.”
“And you’re changed… but here you are.” Aziraphale touched his face with wondering fingers. “This mark is one of the shapes you used to take. If you had to draw it in two dimensions instead of five, that is.”
Crowley pulled him closer. “Been seeing it in the mirror as long as there’ve been mirrors, and I never knew.”
“But you shouldn’t have survived. How…?”
“It’s not for us to question, I’m sure.” Crowley smiled. He’d always had such a lovely smile. “I loved you then, Aziraphale. I want you to know that.”
“And now?”
“Well, as you said, I’ve changed.”
“Crowley–?”
“Love you even more.”
They kissed. (Aziraphale decided he would never need to remember kissing again. He didn’t intend to go more than a few hours without it from here on out.) “God told me something once,” he said, at length.
Crowley raised an eyebrow.
“She said… change is just a transition, or something like that. Everything that ever existed continues to exist, in some form. Perhaps that’s why I loved you when I first saw you on the wall of Eden– because I loved you before, and nothing is ever truly gone.”
“Always wondered why I didn’t get smited.”
Aziraphale shook his head. “I’ve missed you so much.” There was a hollow aching in his throat.
“You never lost me.” Crowley took his hands and pressed them. Above his head and over his shoulders, glowing shapes were forming in the air: spiralling fractal shells, a series of golden orbs, something that looked like the lifecycle of a flower all in one moment. Aziraphale smiled. “As long as you and I are a part of creation, we belong to each other. If going through an actual black hole can’t change that, I guess nothing ever will.”
There was so much more Aziraphale needed to say. How could they reconcile a long-forgotten intimacy with six thousand years of selective amnesia? Not to mention the fact that they were kissing now; Aziraphale would have to figure out how to work some of his corporation’s dormant accessories…
He sighed. There was one thing they both knew how to do. “We never got dinner. I can’t say I’m up for another tour of the galaxy, but there’s a cafe that’s just opened down the street.”
As Crowley held the door for him, Aziraphale paused and looked up. “Had you really been eating at that black hole all this time?”
Crowley shrugged. “There aren’t a lot of places out there serving gamma rays. It’s fine dining.”
“I wonder why we only remembered now.”
“Ineffable, I expect.”
Crowley’s reached out and twined their fingers. Aziraphale felt the brush of his dry, cool skin. He laid his head on Crowley’s shoulder.
As they walked away, an apple tree in Golden Square exploded in white blossoms. Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t see them, but they were there all the same.
