Chapter Text
I once loved a gardener with his dirt-smudged face and hands
Trimmed my weeds and gave me room to grow my flowers again
A Garden, 4004 B.C.E.
Crawley once loved a gardener. Eve’s face and hands were smudged with dirt as she felt the earth under her palms, under her feet, under her stomach and back as she basked in the permanent sun.
She hadn’t been instructed, or even encouraged, to tend to the Garden. But who was Crawley to stop her? If anything, he was probably doing the “right thing” for a demon, as he didn’t imagine the Almighty would be pleased about Her creation being changed, the earth turned over, mysterious seeds being planted. In Crawley’s experience, She didn’t take well to suggestions.
On second thought, he supposed it made sense actually, the Almighty giving all that power to her little creations. She was known for micromanagement, but She probably had other things to do. Was it purposeful? Trusting the humans, trusting the flowers (which, as far as Crawley knew, were not sentient. Either that or they had all been rudely ignoring his attempts at introducing himself) to reproduce?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t know, as the angel over by the Eastern gate constantly reminded him. So, really, what could Crawley do to discourage Eve from gardening?
Crawley would slither behind the woman, watching her toes curl in the grass, watching her step carefully over hot rocks which felt lovely beneath his own underbelly, watching her use sticks and rabid human hands to overturn the soil, to pluck weeds.
Sometimes, Crawley helped. It started as an accident. It turned out that he loved the taste of flowers on his forked tongue. He had known they smelled good, his flickering tongue picking up a scent that was both cloyingly sweet and freshy, green, earthy. He had gotten close to one of the pale pink ones and accidentally touched his tongue to a delicate petal. Oh. Flavour exploded in his senses. It was like scent but… stronger? Potent? The earthiness had dissipated, making the sweetness stand out even more, combined with an almost chemical taste. He licked more. Close to the centre of the flower; the apex was even stronger, a heady taste-scent that made Crawley’s head spin. It made his tongue feel sticky, like there was something tacky in his mouth, something fuzzy. And the taste lingered, even when he withdrew his tongue.
He got a bit sick of the taste, so he slithered away and tried another flower — a white one this time. It tasted the same, if not even stronger due to the combination of the two flowers’ flavours. His tongue felt really, properly sticky now. It was all good tasting the plants, but this lingering feeling was not exactly pleasant. So, he followed Eve. Maybe she knew what she was doing. Surely she had tried the flowers, too?
He watched her dig a small, shallow hole in a bare patch of soil. The dirt smelled deeply earthy, a dark, cool scent; it seemed like just what Crawley needed to freshen his tongue. When Eve moved on, he slithered to the hole and stuck his tongue into the ground. It soothed him, the thirsty earth sucking the sticky, sappy, sweetness from his mouth.
When he came back to the same spot a while later, a plant had appeared. A small, green, hopeful stem had sprouted from the ground, right in the spot where Eve had dug and Crawley had dispatched the flower’s residue.
(Now, of course, Crowley knows that’s not how floral reproduction works. It’s not that simple, and snakes definitely aren’t meant to do it. But he figures that the Almighty was still working out the kinks back then.)
Eve and Crawley continued in this vein for a long time. He distributed seeds and reproductive residue into the plots that she created. It felt like a lovely thing to do, and the symbolism did not go amiss.
Crawley saw Aziraphale almost every day, and he knew the angel didn’t approve of this little collaboration between demon, human, and nature.
‘It must be bad,’ Aziraphale argued repeatedly, ‘or else you wouldn’t be doing it.’
One night, after Eve had retreated to the place where she and Adam rested, Aziraphale and Crawley, now in his human-presenting form, sat in front of one of the bushes that Eve had created. It was flowering very nicely, and little brightly coloured spheres were beginning to form, weighing the branches down. Some of the leaves were so glossy they glimmered in the moonlight.
Aziraphale made his normal argument, shooting a glare at the bush.
‘What’sss wrong with making more plantsss?’ Crawley said. It had been harder to control his hiss back then.
‘Well, presumably, if those plants were supposed to be there, then God would have put them there.’
The angel had a point; Crawley had thought that way at first, too. But…
‘Whatever happened to ineffability?’ Crawley retorted, smirking.
Aziraphale reddened.
‘What if,’ Crawley offered, swaying his head carefully back and forth, hypnotising, ‘this is exactly what the Almighty wantsss Eve to do? If She wantsss her to learn to create?’ Crawley grinned salaciously. ‘To reproduce?’ He drew the end of the word out with a soft, purposeful hiss.
Aziraphale stuttered. He looked at the bush, then back into Crawley’s eyes, then at the little mounds of dirt around them where Eve had dug and refilled holes. Crawley could almost feel the seeds pulsating beneath the soil. Growing, cells multiplying, reaching up to the ground, pushing and pushing and pushing until bursting through the soil, soaking up the sunlight.
‘You…,’ the angel whispered. He cleared his throat. ‘You might be onto something.’
Crawley’s grin widened further.
‘You could…’ he began, choosing his words carefully, tasting them before speaking them through pursed lips, ‘help us. That’s what angels do, isn’t it?’
Aziraphale frowned, averting his eyes. ‘I…’
‘You are here to help the humans, am I right?’
‘Actually, I’m more of a security detail—’
‘What, exactly, are you protecting them from?’ Crawley asked, his voice pitched higher with faux innocence. This line of questioning always got the angel a bit flustered.
‘Well, from- from you, I suppose. From diabolical operations.’
‘From me?’ Crawley raised his eyebrows. ‘What have I done to hurt them?’
Aziraphale’s brow furrowed further. ‘I–’
‘In fact…’ Crawley prepared to deliver the final blow. ‘Am I not helping them? They eat the plants, Aziraphale. What if they were to run out? I’m just… helping Eve grow food for herself and Adam. Nothing diabolical about this operation. Actually, don’t tell a soul. I could get into a lot of trouble, doing this.’
He waited. Aziraphale still looked hesitant, and he had begun to wring his hands, glancing around. Crawley knew this look by now: the angel was on the edge, he just needed one more push, one small phrase to tip the scales…
‘Don’t you want to see how it feels?’
-
Aziraphale found Eve and Crawley, back in his snake form, the next day. Crawley was surprised. He thought the angel would have changed his mind without the cover of darkness. However, the angel refused to touch any of the leaves or flowers. As they made their way through the Garden, Crawley got the sense that Aziraphale was even stepping carefully, touching as little of the grass as he could with the soles of his feet. Crawley knew the angel was sceptical and paranoid, and he supposed that perhaps he himself had just gotten used to the touching, being a snake and all, his body sinking into the blades of grass and parting them as he slithered through. Still, he wanted Aziraphale to feel. He wanted him to touch.
When nighttime fell again, Crawley broached the subject.
‘You didn’t exactly help,’ he said, ‘more just… followed.’
Aziraphale cleared his throat, straightened his already straight robe. ‘I cannot, in good faith’ – ah, there it was, the angel’s ever-present guilt – ‘change that which the Almighty has created. As an angel of the Lord, it is not within my rights to deem myself worthy of- of adding to what the Almighty Herself has designed. I am not a creator, only She is a Creator.’ Aziraphale looked very proud of himself now, clasping his hands together.
Crawley considered this. Then he pointed to a patch of dirt that was overrun by little plants. They were very small, with bright green leaves shooting out in all directions.
‘See those, Aziraphale?’
Aziraphale nodded, confused.
‘Remember when Adam ate those?’ Crawley asked. ‘What happened to him, Aziraphale?’
‘Well,’ the angel began, his voice hoarse, ‘he fell ill. He expelled that foul-smelling waste from his mouth.’ His expression softened in remembered sympathy. ‘Eve seemed very worried for him.’
‘Yeah,’ Crawley agreed, ‘he was very sick, indeed. Now, you’re meant to – what was it – protect the humans, correct?’
Aziraphale nodded again, just a small bob of his head.
‘So, would it not be an act of protection, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, to rid the Garden of these foul little grasses?’
Aziraphale opened his mouth, presumably to protest, but Crawley cut him off. Crawley knew he wanted to touch, to get involved, to feel the plants beneath his fingers, it was just a matter of self-restraint. But if the demon could convince him that he would truly be helping…
‘I saw them taking over a patch of berry bushes the other day. They might infect the food. We don’t want good old Adam getting sick again, now do we?’
‘No, of course not.’ Aziraphale visibly fought a smile. Crawley let his own lips curl upwards.
‘There we are, then.’
The next day, when Aziraphale found Crawley and Eve, he crouched down and slowly, so very slowly, reached out a hand to the infestation of weeds. He pinched one stem between his thumb and forefinger, and, encouraged by a tiny dip of the head from the snake, he pulled.
Aziraphale gasped as the roots of the tiny weed broke free from the earth, he dropped the little, withered plant like it was burning and took a quick step backward. His mouth was still open in shock as he reached a trembling hand toward the weed, picking it up again and holding it at arms length, examining it. Crawley slithered between and around his feet in praise, relishing the sensation of his scales running along the angel’s strong calves (and wasn’t that a feeling worth exploring further?), feeling proud of himself. He’d tempted the angel; not a very potent temptation, but it felt significant nonetheless.
The demon decided, then and there, that he wanted to spend his entire existence tempting this particular angel.
Aziraphale let out a broken sob and Crawley let him loose, putting space between them. Eve had gone ahead, carrying water in her cupped palms to a dry crop. The demon caught the angel’s eye and with another flick of his head, they moved on, in the wake of the human, Aziraphale – reluctantly at first, then with hunger – removing unwanted plants and Crawley carrying pollen on his wicked tongue. Aziraphale ripping up weeds to make room for Crawley’s flowers.
It was during these final days in the Garden, that Crawley began to feel alive again. He saw himself as if from another point of view. This scorned, burnt, squirming creature, this unloved, sinful, evil being – creating life. He felt a spark of something in the deepest spaces of his scorched soul, a crackling flame that reminded him of what he saw in Eve’s eyes when Adam entered her, or what he saw in Aziraphale’s parted lips when he gazed upon a particularly striking sunset… Crawley felt love. Crawley had loved the plants – the grass and flowers and trees, the countless colours, textures, tastes, sizes. Then, he had loved Eve – just like the plants, she took sunlight and water; just like the plants, she was strong and pretty and perseverent. And now, he thought fearfully, with the kind of terror that only comes when something is important and therefore has the potential to go really, properly awry, now , he felt something – not love, not yet, but perhaps akin to love – for Aziraphale. Just like the plants, Aziraphale turned his face to the sun, becoming less afraid of sensation with each passing day; just like the plants, he was beautiful, and colourful, and unpredictable.
And when God – the very God that Aziraphale adored so thoroughly, whose vengeful side the devoted angel had yet to see – expelled Eve from the Garden of Eden, a shattered fragment of that love was gone. The plants withered, the weeds took over, and with one final, devastating look from the angel he had come to know, Crawley slithered away into the bracken, feeling terribly like he had lost something irreplaceable. And that was a very bad thing for a demon to feel.
-
Crowley stares, eyes damp, plant-mister dangling from his limp fingers, at his smallest Dracaena trifasciata — snake plant. It used to sit in an ornate white and gold pot in the far corner of the bookshop, beneath a large window. Now, Crowley has placed it between a pothos and an aloe in his new, barren flat (he couldn’t return to the Mayfair flat, not after everything that happened). The sprawling, draping leaves of the pothos and the strong, wide arms of the aloe make the young Dracaena look tiny, like something to be plucked from a garden. Crowley’s face crumples and a fat tear is squeezed from his eye. The Dracaena has noticeably wilted.
But now my love is gone
And I am left here withering
Withering.