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While Crawly had been given the first instruction “get up there and make some trouble,” no one had told him the consequences of what would happen if he stopped doing so.
He hadn’t realised that the order was ongoing, and permanent, unceasing. A demon’s sole purpose in existence is to create discord, pain, distress, fear and sin - the seven deadlies being most popular of course. Demon is not a job description so much as what you are . It’s inescapable. Death and destruction is what keeps them alive.
Crawly had begun with the first temptation, but afterwards he began to feel progressively worse and worse. Not regret. Honestly he thought he’d done the humans a favour, but with physical pain that ground away at his bones and joints, sawed at his insides, jabbed into his skull, and ate away at his thoughts with an infuriating brain fog that drove him to distraction.
He had an unspoken need, an urge for something he couldn’t put a name to, and had no way to understand what it was, or how to put it right. He stalked the land, observing the humans from afar as societies grew, and with it, his agony.
He was almost incapacitated by the time Dagon found him, lying immobile in a tightly coiled ball of scales, which eased the pain slightly compared to his humanoid corporation.
“Crawly, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Can’t do anything,” he hissed back through the pain.
“When was the last time you messed with the humans?”
“Huh? Apple thing. Thought everyone knew that.”
“That’s it?” Dagon was incredulous. “Nothing since then? No wonder you’re broken. For fuck’s sake, get it together and go do something evil with the humans. You have to feed your demonic soul or you’ll disintegrate.”
“Discorporate?”
“No. Disintegrate - cease to exist, in a very slow and painful way. If you don’t do evil, you’ll die.”
“The fuck?”
“D-I-E, Die. Go fuck shit up while you still can. The bigger the better. Start small if you have to, to get a bit of strength back, but then you’d better do something big to recover properly.”
All Crawly could manage in his weakened state was to tempt a boy out picking fruit in the undergrowth to take back to his family, to eat half of what he picked. It was tiny, but he felt a little pain recede, and he gathered his strength to wander a little further afield. Next he found two brothers harvesting grain, and had them get into a fight over who got to use the good sickle, and who got the old blunt one. They came to blows, and were soon bruised and bloodied.
Whilst Crawly felt the pain begin to ebb from his bones a little again, he still needed more, and headed into the small town. There he started a bar fight, which seemed to be enough to boost his health considerably once several people got involved. The more the humans hurt, the less he did - physically at least. Mentally, he was not coping well. He’d rather keep a certain level of physical pain if it meant avoiding the mental anguish of what he had to do to achieve it.
It was difficult, finding things to do that caused enough evil in the world to keep himself alive, the other demons managed it just fine, but then they were not above inciting murder and genocide. Filth like Hastur could get over a century’s worth of occult manna through prodding a despotic ruler in the right direction to slaughtering masses.
Beelzebub was still flying high on having got Cain to murder Abel, that had been a big one.
Crowley never stooped so low. The worst he’d done was cause humans to come to physical blows, but stopped short of actual killing. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t push them that far. It meant that he struggled. Every other demon was doing the equivalent to having five course dinners, while Crowley was scraping crumbs off the floor trying to survive rather than taking a proper place at the table.
He tried to hide it - it was weakness, and weakness was not something you allowed to show amongst other demons. Instead he took credit for things that humans thought up for themselves. If some humans had a revolution, a war or something that ended up causing death and destruction, and there wasn’t anything Crowley could do to stop them, he’d report it back as one of his.
Unfortunately this didn’t feed his demonic soul. He didn’t do it, so he gained no benefit save for making the other demons think he was more successful than he actually was and keeping them off his back.
There had to be another way to do it. Other demons spent time occasionally in the pits of hell, torturing damned souls in a variety of cruel and inventive ways. Crowley, if ever called upon to do stints in the pits, instead used more cerebral methods or psychological manipulation rather than physical, and still hated himself for it.
The other demons would straight up kill humans if they couldn’t get humans to do it to one another. Torture them, murder them, set them up into horrific accidents, then sit back and drink up the occult manna like fine wine.
Crowley just couldn’t.
He tried to tempt them into the more pleasurable sins, lust, gluttony and suchlike. It was enough to keep him ticking over - just.
Then he saw another demon branching out, instead of torturing a human, he was making the human beat his donkey, hitched to a cart loaded far too heavy for it. The demon appeared to be getting as much out of the animal’s suffering as the human’s anger. Crowley couldn’t watch any longer, he made the harness break. The donkey bolted, leaving the human stranded.
But it gave him an idea.
He could no more hurt an animal than he could a human, but not all living things had a central nervous system. The idea had come to him while watching Dagon curse several fields of crops to fail, causing a famine in the local area. She appeared to get some kind of boost from the killed plants before the delayed reaction of the human’s suffering even hit.
So Crowley sought out a jungle. He took his rage out on a verdant green plant, shredding it with teeth and claws, venting all his frustrations on it until it was shreds of ripped greenery on the ground.
He felt something. It was small, but it was there. He’d killed it. He got something. And the other plants around were terrified. He snarled at them and felt another wave of power. He reached out and snapped a single leaf from a neighbouring plant. Another spike of fear fed his demonic soul. He grinned slowly and turned around, treating the surrounding foliage to the full force of his demonic glare. The feedback was instant.
Finally, he had an alternative. And plants grew back. He looked at the roots just poking from the soil. Plants could “die”, but “death” was a flexible concept for them. They could come back to life from almost nothing. You could take a Japanese knotweed, shred it into the tiniest pieces, then plant a fragment no bigger than a fingernail, and an entire new plant could sprout from it. Bamboo was similar. Crowley had stumbled upon a loophole, a renewable source of demonic power.
True, it wasn’t as powerful as destroying a human would be, but there were far more plants in the world than humans, plus you can plant replacements rather easier and quicker than humans replaced themselves.
He began to study the growth and propagation of plants. He’d take himself off to forested areas, wreak a wave of destruction through a swathe of forest, then replant with seeds and root stock from the local flora, leave a quick miracle to ensure optimum growing conditions, and to keep browsing animals away from the area for a while, and move on.
It became a habit wherever he lived, to keep a garden, or a collection of indoor plants if nothing else, to keep him topped up when he was feeling low. He could feed off their terror and rarely needed to destroy one to keep that going.
So Aziraphale radiated gentle disapproval whenever another fern went down the waste disposal unit he’d had installed, but Crowley didn’t want to worry the angel with an explanation as to why it was necessary. It kept the humans safe. One less demon sowing death and destruction in the world.
Let people think what they wanted to think, it was a quirk, yelling at his plants, disciplining them, funny old Crowley, or maybe they felt sorry for him, that he was projecting something on them, when really he was just finding the least harmful way to feed his demonic soul.
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When they moved into the cottage they ensured it had a lovely big garden of course, and Crowley got a huge boost just training it into obedience while Aziraphale decorated inside the house.
He leaned on the fence and gazed out at the surrounding countryside. Barley waving gently in the breeze with golden ripples like an ocean across the landscape, a dry sea under a scorching summer sun that dried out the stalks and grains to the optimum. He reached over the fence and plucked one, picking the grains out then walking over to deposit them on the bird table, thoughtful.
When Catherine turned up with her team and a couple of combine harvesters, he went out to say hi when they broke for lunch, took them some home made refreshing mint tea, some sandwiches and some of Aziraphale’s Victoria sponge cake filled with jam made using Crowlely’s home grown strawberries.
He used a demonic wile or two while chatting with his new friends, until Will offered to show Crowley how the combine worked. He invited him up into the cab of the huge Claas Lexion 7400 and gave him a ride to show him how it was done. After a while, with a bit of temptation, he let Crowley have a go.
The feedback was instantaneous. Fast, efficient despatch of hundreds of thousands of plants at his hands. Crowley just about glowed. He grinned and began to hatch a plan.
Aziraphale was politely confused of course, as to why a retired demon should want to start attending classes at the local agricultural college a few miles away and study arable land management, why he wanted to help out at Catherine’s farm for free and take any opportunity to get his hands on the tractors, hay cutters, balers, combines and more.
But Aziraphale knew his demon well enough to know that the happy contented glow he was emitting meant he was getting something out of the experience, and he smiled.