Tuesday Afternoon, on a bus some way outside London

Aziraphale knows exactly what he is doing, and wishes that he didn't.

He's being ridiculous, for one thing. This entire idea is ridiculous. He could just tell Crowley, there's nothing stopping him now but his own habit. Miss Device will tell him so, surely, and she will be right, and he will be embarrassed. Neither will have any effect whatsoever on Aziraphale's ability to tell Crowley. This is because habits are like cats, but invisible: it's not quite clear whether you have them or they have you, and they care little about what is right, logical, or practical.

Habits are chains too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken, as a discerning human had once said. Six thousand years is a long time for fear and silence to carve themselves a home in one's bones. It takes more than three days to drive them out. Maybe. Or maybe it is merely the familiar comfort of dancing the same old steps one always has.

"Conscience doth make cowards of us all," he sighs quietly. No matter what Crowley thinks of Hamlet, it is one of William's best, and Aziraphale will stand by that until the end of days. This is only tangentially related to the fact that Crowley miracled the play a success as a gift to him, although that was an incredibly kind thing to do.

That, perhaps, is the true heart of the matter. The giving. Crowley has always been giving; every look and word has been an offer that Aziraphale can have more, if he just asks – can have everything, if he wants it. The heart of the matter is that Crowley has been spoiling him well and truly rotten with affection despite the risks, and Aziraphale has never had the courage to do the same. The one time he had given Crowley anything it had been a chalice laced with poison, a thermos containing the demon's ultimate destruction. Then he had hidden away in his bookshop and wept.

And that may be what's truly ridiculous. That it took him this long to make up his mind, to act. Crowley deserves affection, deserves gifts, deserves the world , and he will give it to him. What's a minor art theft, in the grand scheme of things? Humans make lots of art. One small piece to share between himself and Crowley is practically nothing, he decides, and traces his fingers over the curved metal in his hands with renewed determination.

"Hello, Miss Device! Or maybe that's too formal these days? She might think it odd. Hm. 'Sup, Anathema dear?"

Sup had meant to eat supper since the 14 th century, and if that had changed somebody ought to have notified him of it, not let him blunder into the discovery by telling Crowley how lovely it was that so many young people were asking each other out to eat these days. Crowley had happily notified him of other modern expressions after that, such as bruh (brunch), yo (yoghurt), and pip pip (pizza and piroshki). Aziraphale hadn't spoken to him for a week.

"You demonstrated truly remarkable courage and skill in averting Armageddon, and I – we – are deeply grateful. I don't suppose you'd be willing to put those skills to use again? If so, might I perhaps ask a favor? " Favor and temptation are two different words, which means they are not the same thing. "I need someone to… I would like your help with..." There are many synonyms for stealing, of which none sound any better than stealing. "I can't do this," he groans, a pained sound that leaves him spiritually and physically deflated. He slumps back against the headrest of his bus seat. "It's not right. They're good people."

What pains Aziraphale is, of course, not the temptation itself. He has performed temptations before: they are a necessary evil. Like maths.

A certain type of people will say that everything in this world is based on maths, and that is how you know who is most likely to work at the HMRC in a few years. They aren't wrong, mind, but they aren't right either. It would be more accurate to say that everything is based on ecosystems. Ecosystems are vaguely like math – preschooler math, the kind with brightly illustrated animals and plants that can be subtracted from or added to. They can also multiply, but that's not taught in preschooler books.

There's a balance, is the bottom line, in both ecosystems and maths. There is balance in everything, and temptations are as necessary for that equilibrium as virtue; they are what form the foundation of free will. And therein, as good old William said, lies the rub: free will.

Aziraphale has performed temptations before, but they were always orders from above – or Below, as it were. The thing about following orders is that it's deceptively easy, as both Aziraphale and a number of mid-20 th century German officials can attest. Because the choices are not made by you. It's easy because you are the middleman, the faceless instrument in between decision and consequence, and innocent of both. Free will is always about choice, and choice always comes with the burden of responsibility.

Aziraphale knows exactly what he is doing, and it is not God's Will.

"I wish you were here, " he thinks miserably.

There are two tell-tale signs that Aziraphale is in a state of distress: he fidgets, he quotes, and he wishes Crowley were there. That is more than two, but the last one is ambiguous since wishing for Crowley to be with him is not so much a situational response as a lifestyle. That one had taken ridiculous forms, even Aziraphale will admit that. Like that embarrassing detour in Paris. It was just that phones hadn't been invented yet, and Crowley hated being summoned magically. Means and ends and all that.

There wasn't much need for that kind of prompting to begin with. Crowley has always known what Aziraphale wants. He has always given it to him.

On their first day of freedom, they had dined at the Ritz; on the second, Crowley had thrown a surprise picnic in St. James' park. That is to say, he had in the most casual manner possible pulled out all the stops to recreate the experience of dining on the ground in a way they hadn't done for centuries. Aziraphale suspects he must have prepared many of the dishes himself, because those recipes tasted like star-strewn evenings in the desert and the susurrous warmth of the Ganges delta, just like they had thousands of years ago.

And he had grown his hair out.

Things go a bit fuzzy after that. Like a record left too long in Crowley's car, the memory of their picnic had transubstantiated. Not quite into the blood and body of Christ, but it had been divine, and it had done a number on the blood and body of Aziraphale's corporation. Like rhapsody, like a shooting star leaping through the sky, it had smashed into his chest and all the things he'd kept in there had come crashing down on his head. It happens to the best of hoarders. One treasure too many throws the piles off balance and down come books, pencils, antique snuff boxes, and oyster shells, and with them come the memories.

Aziraphale is a hoarder par excellence when it comes to memories. If he is honest, he used to believe that that was all he could hope to have of Crowley. Angel, demon – they never had a future, he'd known that. They had a past, and he held on fiercely to every last scrap of it.

They had enjoyed a picnic together, and Aziraphale had remembered all the times he'd watched Crowley's hair catch the sun like spun fire. All the times he'd wondered if it would really burn him if he touched it. All the times he hadn't. He had felt them, each little scrap of time that he had quietly pressed and preserved between pages, dried and added to the trove of memories he kept for the day the future would arrive.

He remembers the hair clasp, too. It had glittered like a star tangled in Crowley's curls back then, when the Flood had receded and the world began anew. The golden sheen is dull now, the delicate embossing worn smooth under his fingers – it's been 4,000 years, after all. There's a lot of memories in 4,000 years. Incidentally, that's also the only thing that gives the illusion away.

Carbon dating is a wonderfully useful tool for science, but it is also the only form of dating that involves none of the food, drink, or pleasant chit-chat, and all of the rude insinuations about the respective party's age. Most atoms prefer not to date. Gold sure doesn't. But if gold hypothetically were available for dating – because that science is built exclusively on hopeful hypotheses – the replica Aziraphale miracled into existence minutes ago would still be 4,000 years old. It would be perfectly, inseparably identical to the real hair clasp in every bit of its making, and no human could tell the difference. This is because humans by and large don't have 38 eyes.

All things remember, although not exactly the way humans do. Not in a way humans can grasp. Things don't speak of where they learnt to love, where they found a home, or when they came to know the bitterness of regret. They don't tell you how they survived the tempest of passion, or when they understood the full ten octaves of loss. It doesn't mean they never did. Only that some things can't be put in words.

He could just tell Crowley. He could reach out and brush his fingers through his hair. He could, but his fingers are worrying the edges of a hair clasp, and he is on a bus to Tadfield, on his way to tempt kind, decent people into breaking the eighth Commandment.

Necessity had been the mother of invention long before catchy quotes and virgin births came into fashion. She thrived where little else did: on the arid plains and the unforgiving permafrost, in the soggy swamps and the barren deserts, and everywhere else humanity decided was a lovely place to live. One such place was ancient Mesopotamia, where civilisation started out with nothing, and invented practically everything. Agriculture. The wheel. Maths. In fact, they had invented civilisation itself.

Aziraphale strode down the busy market street of Susa like one who enters a forest rumoured to be haunted. He had never seen anything like it. There had never been anything like it. Houses of stone that withstood wind and rain, streets paved to permit wagon wheels – wheels. Tens of thousands of humans living in the same place, all year round. This new thing called writing. Everywhere he looked there were fresh, exciting novelties, and not a single trace of the waterlogged marshlands and cadavers the Flood had left in its wake centuries earlier.

This was completely wrong, but in his defence it is easy to forget that change lives not in the flesh but in the mind. As Aziraphale came to know Susa better, he would note that the city had been built not on the ground, like all settlements before it, but on three gigantic, man-made mounds of dirt. When he thought about it, he would realise that neither marshland nor desert actually allowed for growing crops, but that the Mesopotamians had learnt to control water through miles and miles of ceramic pipelines. And when it came right down to it, civilisation depended on structure, and a culture like this could not have risen without a central administration led by a practiced hand.

The traces of the Flood were in fact everywhere, and when he found out that Susa had been founded by Shem, it all made perfect sense.

Stones did not make sense. Not when they got into one's sandals. Aziraphale's pensive striding along the market street had become a staccato wince every other step he took towards the nearest house corner. He loathed stones in his sandals. There had to be demonic forces involved somehow – how else would one explain that footwear, a commendable invention made for the express purpose of protecting feet from rocky ground, so often seemed to become portable rocky ground?

He rested one hand against the limestone wall, pulled his sandal off, and gave it good shake. The offending pebble skittered across the flagstones with a chipper tink of wiggling air. And maybe there were demonic forces involved, for another sound reached him across the noisy market just then. One that wasn't quite a sound.

There is the old adage that a watched pot never boils, but there is also the lesser known cousin of that adage, which is that a sought object is under the floorboards. Not literally under the floorboards, but it might as well have been, because the harder you look for it the more impossible will it be to find. This shouldn't have applied to spotting a redhead in a throng of black hair, but apparently it did. Aziraphale wove through the river of humans, neck craned and gaze searching. He was about to apply reverse psychology to the smug old adage, and simply stop looking, when a flash of sunlight in metal caught him square in the eye. The metal in question was a golden clasp that shone brightly in very red, very curly hair. Crawly's lithe body was folded into a squat, made small and unnoticeable near the mouth of an alley that branched off the main street. She, too, was turning her head about as if looking for something.

Hearts can't technically leap, as they don't have legs. Aziraphale's heart didn't have legs either, but it also wasn't bound by the rules of normal physiology and therefore did, in fact, leap. He set a beeline course for Crawly, jostling past people as politely as he could, and was about to call out to her when she spotted what she had been looking for.

Faces don't light up any more than hearts leap, but Crawly's face lit up when four small shapes, children, extracted themselves from the crowd and dashed towards her. They were a bedraggled sort, barefoot and with no one to brush the tangles out of their hair. Aziraphale slowed to a halt, aghast. Each of the children proudly showed Crawly their spoils: bread, fresh fruits, a leg of salted mutton – a particularly bold duo that might be siblings were animatedly explaining how they had stolen that one by using one of them as a decoy. Crawly had gone from lit up to positively glowing, praised their excellent teamwork, and was utterly untroubled by the divine power that crackled with outrage as it closed in on her.

"Aziraphale!" Crawly beamed at the sight of him; the urchins blanched and took off down the alley as fast as their feet could carry them. "Been a while!"

Aziraphale was not in the mood for chit-chat. He was flustered, and he was appalled.

"What are you doing?! They're children, Crawly!" he hissed out between clenched teeth.

"Oh yeah. Your side hates kids. Can't believe I forgot."

There were, Aziraphale learned, two different ways to be flustered.

"Nobody hates children! We don't hate–"

"No, you just kill 'em."

"We don't–" Angels didn't lie. Demons lied, because demons were evil. "We do not interfere with the Great Plan, and that is different–"

"Well I interfere all I like." Crawly's blistering yellow eyes were suddenly very close to his own. Her lips, too, had come very close to his own, and the heat of her words ghosted his skin like brimstone. "If you don't like that, how about you give them a better option?"

"Not stealing would be a better option," he said reluctantly. Heaven only offered two options, as a general rule: the right one and the wrong one. More efficient that way. Couldn't very well evaluate every single action based on intent and context and personal history; the paperwork would be a nightmare.

"Ah. The tough choice of 'dying' and 'not dying'. You really gonna trust five-year-olds to be mature enough to make that call? Not gonna wait till they're at least six?"

There were times when Aziraphale had wondered how one got cast out of Heaven simply for asking questions. This was not one of those times.

This was rather one of the times when he had a great deal to say about unjust accusations, barefaced insolence, and the decency of respecting personal space. He was Heaven's agent on Earth, for goodness' sake, he couldn't stand idly by while his Side was slandered by a demon. So Aziraphale drew himself up to his full height, and didn't speak a word.

Angels didn't lie. Not yet. And angels could most definitely be cast out of Heaven for saying the wrong things.

There were words coming out of his mouth, technically, but not in any semblance of a sentence. Good Lord, how many kinds of flustered were there? And was Crawly determined to put him through them all in succession? The demon watched him flounder for solid ground with the sedate sort of amusement with which a shark might watch a drowning man flail about at sea. Aziraphale suspected he must have been red all the way up to his hairline before Crawly took pity and threw him a rope:

"Or is it all ineffable?"

"Yes!" He latched onto the rope like a mollusc. Molluscs don't drown, but they do need something to keep them steady against the waves. They are also quite delicious, if only you get past the shell. "It's not for us to know why the state of Earth is the way it is, only that it has to be so. For the Great Plan. And besides, children are innocent. They are sure to see Heaven." Solid ground, at last: high ground, from which he could dump blame back where it belonged. "Unless some demon takes advantage of their misfortune."

"So sssave them, angel." Crawly's voice was lofty and silken like shade in the billowing desert heat, and she still did not possess the decency to respect personal space. "There's a demon right here, leading innocent souls onto the path of damnation before your very eyes. Not gonna thwart my evil wiles?"

"What?" Then Aziraphale's eyes widened. "Oh."

Free will was, and always had been, a bugger. It let humans choose to be good or to be wicked, and it constituted the ink with which the Ineffable Plan was written. It looked rather nice on paper, as is the case with most bureaucratic decisions, and its application to reality was someone else's problem, as is also the case with most bureaucratic decisions. The someone in question was usually one from the proverbial factory floor who was told it was a great honour and that no one else was more qualified for the job.

As Heaven's agent on Earth, Aziraphale was effectively a zookeeper who wasn't allowed to interfere with anything the animals did, even when what they did was to escape their habitats and plunder the cotton candy booth for everything edible, and quite a few things that weren't edible but could still be swallowed if you just set your mind to it. On the other hand, he was well within his rights to interfere with any zoo visitor trying to feed the monkeys through the fence.

And perhaps there was a woman eyeing pottery at the market stalls, her chest heavy with gloom that she was unable to bear children. And it might just be that the orphans ran into her, that their dishevelled appearances made her heart twist, and that she insisted she must at least make sure they had a warm meal and a chance to wash up.

It doesn't take much of a nudge to create a perhaps. Nobody would notice, except for the entity standing close enough to count Aziraphale's eyelashes.

"Oh curses. Foiled by my Heavenly nemesis." Like the flagstones of the bazaar, Crawly's voice was flat, dry, and deceptively dispassionate for something hiding such potential for blunt head trauma. "I shall have to retreat in the face of this utter defeat." Her smile didn't look particularly defeated. "See you around, angel." If the smile hadn't clued him in that something was off, the cheerful wink did.

Aziraphale watched her walk away – or something to that effect – down the street. No matter what form she wore, her footsteps seemed to remember the whisper of scales sliding through grass. That's what the clasp in her hair was, he realised. A snake, beautifully embossed and doubled back in ringlets to bite its own tail. Evil devouring itself, eternally.

He frowned at the easy sway in her step. No demon ought to look so happy about being thwarted. Then again, it was Crawly herself who had suggested that he– that he–

Aziraphale discovered yet another flavour of flustered.

"You tempted me?!" He didn't mean to shout. It just happened.

Crawly swerved on her heel and shouted back at him: "On the house!"

Oh this was bad. He was supposed to thwart any attempt to– Well he had thwarted her, and it was quite a satisfying thwarting if he may say so, doing something for those poor children. Oh but temptations were all about that, weren't they? Satisfaction. They were meant to be enjoyable, and wrong. Though could it be wrong to help the unfortunate out of poverty? It was the right thing, morally speaking, but if a demon had tempted him to do it, was it still… right?

This is how Aziraphale first came to be acquainted with existential crises, and it was not the last one Crowley would inflict on him. That is because Crowley has always known what Aziraphale wants, but he has also known what Aziraphale needs. He has given him that, too.

Aziraphale is on a bus to Tadfield, on his way to tempt kind, decent people into sin, and he is crying. It's ridiculous, but he doesn't know what else to do. Doesn't know how to stop. It hits him in full, the magnitude of it, and his body buckles under the tears that rattle his shoulders. He sobs into his hand, breathes in shallow hiccups that don't know which direction the air is supposed to go. There's no room for it in his lungs. There's not room enough in his entire celestial host for everything that Crowley has given him.

Any smug old adage with a sliver of self-respect will take the opportunity to point out when it is right. This one is no different, and the solution to Aziraphale's dilemma has been there under the floorboards all along. It was never about twisting words to make a questionable action sound more palatable. It's a matter of shifting focus, of reframing the way you think.

Is it really stealing, if you are returning an object to its rightful owner?

A/N

§ "Habits are chains too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken" is a derivation of a quote by author Samuel Johnson.
§ HMRC - Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs, i.e. the tax inspection.
§ Biblically speaking, the area where Susa lay (modern Iran, near the Persian Gulf) was given to Shem and his descendants. Lots of historical nerdery because looking at the things the Mesopotamians did - including a city built on what's basically artificial mountains - so much of it screams "we remember the Flood and we won't let it happen again".
§ Gratuitous use of Queen lyrics!