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Saint-Yves, Christmas 1914
Crowley was exhausted. He’d been exhausted for the last several months, ever since a random assassination had lead to a pan-European dick-measuring contest had lead to a much more violent dick-measuring contest. He’d signed on (against his will, but Gabriel had insisted, and he couldn’t very well say no) as a field medic in the British army with the help of a few well-placed miracles, shipped out to the front lines, and spent his time for the past three months miracling away gunshot wounds and bloody trench-foot in equal measure while shells sailed endlessly overhead. He’d missed out on the very first War in Heaven, hidden away as he’d been in the stars at the time, but from what he’d heard after the fact, it had been rather a lot like this.
Azra had been there, for that first War, and the desperate, haunted look in his eyes when he’d been ordered by Hell to head out to the front hadn’t done anything to change Crowley’s impression.
But, for today at least, things were… quiet. Calm. There’d been a ceasefire, all up and down the Western Front, and the soldiers had emerged from their respective trenches and met in the middle, singing carols and playing football and even giving the other side gifts.
Crowley and Azra had emerged, too, meeting in the middle of no man’s land with the rest of their respective armies. At the moment, they were sat to the side, passing a flask of what had once been water but was now something considerably stronger back and forth.
That horrible haunted look had spread across Azra’s whole face, bringing with it deep furrows in his brow and dark shadows under his eyes and the blood of his fellow soldiers caked into the medic’s gloves he never took off, and Crowley hated all of Heaven and Hell and humanity for making his bunny look like that.
Right now, though. Right now, Azra’s face had relaxed, ever so slightly, and he even smiled as he passed the flask back to Crowley, watching the football match in front of them and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Remarkable, isn’t it? How a couple of songs can bring them all together like this.”
“It won’t last,” Crowley said, taking a swig of his own. The flask wouldn’t run out any time soon, not if it knew what was good for it. “By tomorrow, they’ll be back to killing each other for no bloody reason.”
Azra sighed, the smile falling off his face, and Crowley added himself to the list of beings he hated, just for the moment, as Azra spoke. “Perhaps. But… well, it is nice, for now.” He scooted a touch closer to Crowley, so that their shoulders were pressed up against each other. “It… it’s so very human of them, isn’t it? The capacity for… for what they’ve done in the past few months, and for what they’ve done today. They’re on opposite sides, they’ve been attacking each other for months, they can hardly even talk to one another, and yet... here they are.”
“I’ll be more impressed if it manages to stick,” Crowley said, passing the flask back to Azra.
The demon sighed again. “Well. Perhaps we’ll both be surprised.”
Crowley glanced Up briefly, miracled himself and Azra into invisibility, and then wrapped an arm around Azra’s shoulders, pulling him in close and burying his nose in Azra’s white curls. He still smelt of ancient paper and tea and warmth, even after months of this godforsaken war, and Crowley breathed the scent in deeply, desperate for the comfort of it. “I hope so, bunny. God, I hope so.”
Azra turned his head as well, pressing his face into the crook of Crowley’s neck, and when he spoke again, his voice wavered faintly. “I wish we could just go home.”
“It can’t last that long,” Crowley said, squeezing Azra just a little closer, just for a moment. “At this rate, if it goes on for more than a few years, there won’t be anyone left, and even these stupid bloody politicians can’t be quite that idiotic.”
“I’m afraid you might be overestimating them, my dear,” Azra said.
“Ugh. I really hope not. If even you think they’re hopeless…”
Azra laughed, wrapping an arm around Crowley’s waist, and Crowley closed his eyes, relaxing into the touch.
In the end, Crowley ended up being right about the humans getting right back to it. Azra ended up being right about the useless, idiotic politicians absolutely refusing to just let it end.
Crowley stayed on the front lines for two years, throwing himself into his work and having to get bailed out of more than a few close calls by Azra, who’d been here before, who knew the drill, who had kept himself and his whole platoon alive through the first War and was well on his way to doing so again, before he managed to get himself invalided back to London, convincing Gabriel that he’d be more help from the home front.
Azra stayed until the very end.
They didn’t talk about it, after he got back. They didn’t talk about the way they both jumped at loud noises, how Azra began to avoid the same dark, close spaces that Crowley had started to seek out, the way that Azra never turned the lights all the way off anymore, the images that haunted them both at night.
They didn’t talk about how stupid it was, how utterly, completely pointless. How pointless all of it was, the way the humans divided themselves, the way all of Creation had divided itself. Azra went back to his shop, and Crowley went back to his flat, and they didn’t talk about the millions of people dead, and they didn’t talk about the millions more who had survived, but not like they were before, and they didn’t talk about everything that had been destroyed in the process.
Crowley found himself more and more glad with every day of distance between himself and the war that it was the first one he’d properly fought in. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to fight– he was a bloody Seraph, he could handle himself– but, really, in a war like that, how one handled oneself made very little difference, and that honestly drove Crowley mad. The randomness of it, the chaos. The sheer bloody pointlessness.
All of it was pointless. All the fighting. All the killing. Whether it was the humans doing it or Heaven and Hell, there couldn’t be any good reason for that sort of senseless slaughter.
It was then, in the aftermath of his very first war, that Crowley made his decision.
I won’t let it happen, he promised, to himself and to Azra and to humanity and to God Herself. I won’t let Armageddon happen. Not if there’s anything in the entire bloody universe I can do to stop it. It won’t happen. The world won’t end. They don’t all have to die.
Nobody should have to die for something so absolutely useless, not ever, ever again.