Chapter Text
The invitation seemed destined to go unanswered. From the water, Lucifer watched him remain comfortably seated amongst their discarded clothes, composed smile firmly in place and posture suggesting he had no intention whatsoever of accepting the challenge. Only the slight forward tilt of his ears betrayed him, lingering there for a moment before Alastor finally rose and brushed the sand from his trousers with infuriating leisure.
Even then, he made no apparent effort to hurry. His fingers found the buttons of his coat and worked through them one by one before drawing it from his shoulders with the same deliberate care he seemed to apply to everything, then arranging the garment neatly over the handle of his cane. Without it, his silhouette changed at once, the waistcoat beneath fitted close through his torso, dark red following the narrow line of his waist, his shirtsleeves suddenly visible where Lucifer was so accustomed to layers and lapels and the carefully constructed architecture of the Radio Demon.
For a moment, staring seemed to be the only response available to him, what should have been the perfectly ordinary sight of Alastor undressing becoming inexplicably captivating the instant those long fingers slipped beneath the first button of his waistcoat.
Which was ridiculous. Lucifer had witnessed the birth of stars, seen the first dawn break over Eden, watched humanity build wonders and tear them down again, heard music so beautiful that mortals had carried it with them for centuries after the hands that composed it had gone still.
Apparently none of that held a fucking candle to Alastor undoing a waistcoat.
Lucifer drifted without noticing, the gentle movement of the sea gradually carrying him closer to shore as Alastor worked his way down the row of buttons. There was nothing hurried about it, and under Envy’s influence that patience became almost unbearable, each small movement holding Lucifer’s attention until another replaced it. The waistcoat loosened incrementally before Alastor slipped it from his shoulders, folded it with maddening precision and laid it over the coat.
Lucifer’s hooves found the seabed.
He blinked at the unexpected pressure of sand beneath them and realised he had somehow returned to the shallows, the water now reaching a little above his waist. It was probably for the best. Swimming required concentration, however little, and Lucifer had abruptly become unwilling to devote any part of his mind to something that was not happening on that beach.
Because Alastor had started on his shirt.
The first button opened at his throat, then another beneath it, and Lucifer swallowed as he seized upon every newly exposed inch with an enthusiasm that would have been embarrassing if he had possessed enough spare attention to feelembarrassed. Alastor drew the shirt free from his trousers as he continued, loosening the severe lines of his usual appearance until the familiar image began to come apart before Lucifer’s eyes, piece by carefully constructed piece.
He had spent months looking at him without ever really considering how much of Alastor was hidden beneath all that red.
Now he wanted, needed to see all of it.
The desire arrived with unusual terrifying simplicity, immediate enough that Lucifer stopped trying to disguise where he was looking. When the last button came free and Alastor slipped the shirt from his shoulders, Lucifer allowed his attention to travel openly over the lean lines revealed beneath it, fascinated by how different he looked without the exaggerated structure of his tailoring around him.
There was something almost unfairly intimate about it. Alastor was always so meticulously assembled, every layer part of the performance, that watching those layers disappear felt like being permitted past something Lucifer had never realised he wanted access to until it was already opening in front of him.
Then Alastor folded the shirt.
Of course he did. At this point Alastor could probably have reorganised the entire pile and Lucifer would have regarded it as the finest entertainment Hell had ever produced.
The shirt joined the waistcoat and coat, and Alastor bent to retrieve his shoes, placing them safely beyond the tide before straightening and finally looking towards the water.
Lucifer made absolutely no attempt to pretend he had been doing anything other than watching him.
Their attention caught across the distance. Somewhere beneath Alastor’s composure, a radio frequency skipped, catching on half a note before correcting itself so quickly Lucifer might have missed it if he had been paying any less attention. And he was paying a frankly unreasonable amount of attention.
“Enjoying yourself, Apple?”
“Immensely.”
The answer came far too easily. Lucifer continued looking at him, Covet making discretion seem like a largely pointless exercise when Alastor was standing there with the last of his usual layers steadily disappearing.
“You’re…” Lucifer began, and stopped.
Beautiful.
The word arrived with such uncomplicated certainty that heat immediately climbed into his face.
The sudden pause of Alastor’s hands made Lucifer swallow, abruptly aware that he had come dangerously close to saying it aloud. “You look good,” he finished instead, which was safer by several catastrophic degrees. “Like, really good.”
For the briefest instant, Alastor’s ears flicked back and dipped against his hair, betraying something perilously close to bashfulness before he managed to bring them under control again.
Catching the tiny betrayal, Lucifer felt his embarrassment give way to a slow, delighted satisfaction. Alastor could hold that smile in place as long as he liked, but apparently the rest of him possessed considerably less discipline, and Lucifer made no attempt to look away.
By the time his hands moved towards his waistband, Alastor had recovered remarkably well. His smile sat exactly where it belonged, his posture remained loose and elegant, and even his ears had been brought into such rigidly upright alignment that the effort itself was beginning to look suspicious. Anyone might have taken him for entirely unbothered, though Lucifer had already seen what slipped through when his control faltered.
As those long fingers settled against the fastening of his trousers, a ridiculous little flutter of giddiness went through Lucifer before he could suppress it. They lingered there for a moment, then stopped.
“I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to turn around for the remainder.”
Immediate betrayal swept across Lucifer’s face. “You watched me.”
“My dear, I did not ask you to disrobe before me. You staged that little exhibition entirely of your own accord. It would have been terribly rude of me not to watch.”
The affront only deepened. This was hypocrisy of the highest order and, perhaps more importantly, threatened to deprive Lucifer of the conclusion to what his thoroughly compromised senses had already established as the greatest artistic achievement in the history of existence. Alastor, meanwhile, remained entirely unmoved across the sand.
Eventually, Lucifer drew himself up with as much royal dignity as could reasonably be achieved while standing naked in the sea and turned his back.
“Fine. Because I’m a gentleman, by the way, not because you told me to.”
A sharp little whine of feedback followed him around before breaking into the unmistakable skip of suppressed radio laughter. Lucifer refused to dignify either with a response. He folded his arms instead, fixing his attention on the distant horizon while behind him came the quiet rustle of fabric.
Turning his back did absolutely nothing to improve matters.
Without the distraction of sight, his imagination immediately became intolerable. Fabric whispered against skin somewhere behind him, followed by the softer rustle of each discarded layer meeting the sand, every small sound carrying with exquisite clarity across the quiet shore. Lucifer squeezed his eyes shut as well, because apparently merely facing away no longer felt sufficient proof of his gentlemanly credentials when he was already painfully conscious of what was happening behind him.
He would not turn around. He could wait. He had waited millennia for things, important things, cosmic things, and he could certainly survive thirty seconds without looking at Alastor’s arse.
Probably.
The first sound of water moving behind him put an end to that particular train of thought. Lucifer went still, listening as Alastor stepped into the sea, the measured disturbance of each movement drawing closer until the water around Lucifer began to respond to it. Small currents curled against his waist and thighs before slipping away again, carrying the strange awareness of another body approaching through the water even while he stubbornly kept his eyes closed.
The anticipation stretched with every approaching step, made almost absurdly vivid by the fact that Lucifer could hear Alastor without knowing precisely where he was. He had expected some warning from farther away, perhaps another smug remark thrown across the water. Instead the sound kept coming closer, slow enough that Lucifer became increasingly aware of the space behind him and how steadily there was less of it.
Then the water settled.
For several seconds there was only the sea moving around him, the breeze against his wet shoulders and the quiet certainty that Alastor was very close indeed.
“You can open your eyes, Apple.”
The voice came from directly behind him, softened at the edges by that familiar old-radio resonance.
The treatment bond pulsed.
Once, warm and unmistakable beneath his skin, and this time Lucifer did not resent the intrusion. He let the feeling spread through him, strangely content with what it seemed to be telling him. Alastor was here. He had followed him into the water, into this place Lucifer had kept for himself, and the simple fact of his presence felt good.
A smile crept across his face as he opened his eyes, though he resisted turning around just yet.
Alastor was close enough that Lucifer could feel the shape of his presence behind him, the water shifting differently where another body interrupted its slow movement towards the shore. The warmth at his back, the faint displacement against his skin whenever Alastor moved, even the quiet sound of his breathing seemed impossibly distinct until together they formed a map Lucifer could have followed without ever looking.
Fingertips settled against his shoulder, bringing Lucifer still beneath the touch. For an instant he wondered whether it had been accidental, but instead of withdrawing, Alastor let his fingers travel slowly across the wet curve of his shoulder. Despite the warmth of the water, the exploratory care of it sent a fine shiver down his spine, and it was only when that touch began wandering inwards that Lucifer realised, a fraction too late, exactly where it was going.
Six marks rested along his back, arranged symmetrically between and beneath his shoulder blades where his wings disappeared into the pocket of grace that held them whenever they were hidden. Tucked away like this, they left only narrow, diamond-shaped slits behind, subtle enough to pass for unusual markings to anyone who did not know what they were.
Alastor knew. His fingertips found the first of the closed seams, drawing an immediate jolt from Lucifer as they traced its narrow shape. There was no pain in it, his wings had healed far too well for that, but the places where grace met flesh had always been sensitive, and the sensation travelled through him with startling immediacy. His shoulders tightened on instinct, a reaction Alastor seemed to register in the brief pause that followed before his touch resumed, moving with maddening care towards the next.
Fingertips traced slowly along the edge of the second diamond, and Lucifer became acutely conscious of everything else at once: the warm water surrounding them, Alastor standing directly behind him, the absence of even a scrap of fabric between either of them and the sea. Every sensation arrived with impossible clarity, gathering until there was room for very little beyond the hand moving across his back and the heat it sent spilling lower through his body, settling somewhere decidedly inconvenient. It felt intensely, almost absurdly good.
His treatment bond gave another quiet pulse beneath his skin.
Lucifer closed his eyes again, trying to settle himself.
Apparently content to carry on as though he were doing nothing more provocative than inspecting an interesting architectural feature, Alastor spoke with perfect conversational ease. “The water is peculiar. It feels unlike any water I have ever swum in.” His fingers drifted over another wing mark.
“Y-yeah.” A quick clearing of Lucifer’s throat did little to restore his composure. “It’s, uh… it’s different. I mean, actually different. It’s not…” A thumb brushed slowly along the edge of the mark, and the next word snagged somewhere between his brain and his mouth. “It’s n-not really water.”
“How fascinating.”
“No, I… fuck, hold on.” Swallowing, Lucifer attempted to drag several billion years of accumulated knowledge back into some kind of usable order. “I mean, it is water. Functionally. Sort of. It’s just, on a molecular level, it’s… it’s not the same thing you’d have known on Earth. H-two-O and, and all that.” The exploring touch wandered lower, drawing a small twitch through Lucifer’s shoulders. “It behaves the same because… because that’s the closest physical…” The word vanished entirely. He frowned at the ocean as though it had personally failed him before finally retrieving it. “Analogue. That’s the closest physical analogue. But Hell doesn’t, uh, doesn’t follow the same material rules everywhere.”
There. That was almost coherent.
Another narrow seam came beneath Alastor’s fingertips, and whatever remained of Lucifer’s train of thought scattered all over again.
“Envy’s oceans are b-basically infernal matter held in a stable aqueous state by the Ring itself, so the density is different and the mineral composition is… is different, obviously, and there’s magic suspended through the whole thing at a microscopic level, which changes the way it interacts with your skin and your body and…” His voice faltered as Alastor’s fingertip reached the lowest pair of marks. “And, um.”
He knew this. He had helped shape some of the bloody principles he was attempting to explain.
The renewed touch brought what remained of Lucifer’s explanation to an abrupt end, leaving him to stare helplessly at the horizon.
“It feels different.”
The silence behind him lasted just long enough to become suspicious.
“I see.”
He could hear the smile in those two words, and gold burned hotter across his cheeks as the absurdity of the situation finally caught up with him. Somehow, Alastor had reduced the architect of half the physical laws Lucifer was attempting to describe to H-two-O and all that, and the bastard was almost certainly enjoying every second of it.
“You know exactly what you’re doing,” he muttered.
A small huff escaped behind him, quiet enough that Alastor had probably intended to contain it, though the amusement came through unmistakably. Lucifer turned towards the sound before remembering, rather belatedly, just how close Alastor was.
The movement brought him around within the narrow space between them, Alastor’s hand travelling with him until the fingers that had been exploring his back slipped across his shoulder and came to rest against his upper arm. Lucifer had been preparing some accusation about deliberate torment, perhaps something particularly cutting about personal boundaries and the unfair exploitation of angelic anatomy, but whatever it was disappeared before it reached his mouth.
Somewhere during the conversation, they had drifted closer together and deeper into the water than Lucifer had realised, the warm swells now rising around them and offering enough modesty beneath the surface that there was nowhere particularly sensible to look except upwards, which presented problems of its own. In the strange evening light, dark and yet somehow washed through with pale green, Alastor looked different without the familiar architecture of his clothes. His shoulders were bare, the ends of his hair darkening where they had caught the spray, and for the first time Lucifer realised that patches of fine, soft-looking fur followed parts of his body, catching the muted light differently from the skin around them rather than covering him entirely. A scar stretched across his chest beneath it, pale and unmistakable, interrupting the otherwise elegant lines of him before disappearing towards his side.
Lucifer had never seen any of that before. He found himself taking it in with helpless fascination, the sharpness he associated with Alastor softened in unexpected places now that there were no lapels, waistcoats or carefully arranged layers to define his shape. Even the ridiculous little ponytail remained stubbornly intact, though damp strands had begun escaping around his ears and neck.
He wanted to look at him, wanted him close, wanted the hand resting against his arm to remain exactly where it was, and when those fingers shifted almost imperceptibly against his skin, his attention followed with humiliating devotion. Yet the teasing remark he expected never came.
That had been Alastor’s intention when he approached from behind. He had noticed those curious little marks and remembered the spectacular reaction wing preening had produced at the hotel yesterday, another useful addition to the collection of pressure points he had spent months discovering. Lucifer was wonderfully easy to provoke once one knew where to press, and irritating him had become an increasingly unreasonable source of entertainment.
Somewhere along the way, however, Alastor had gone strangely quiet.
The flush had been expected and the stammering had been delightful. What had not been expected was the quiet, insistent realisation that Alastor did not want to take his hand away.
Alastor had spent his life remarkably untroubled by the desire to touch other people. Attention, certainly. He enjoyed an audience, command of a room and the exquisite satisfaction of making powerful people react when they would rather remain composed. Even his fascination with Lucifer had been easy enough to categorise that way. The King was entertaining, infuriating, powerful enough to make provoking him dangerous in theory and uniquely safe in practice. There was satisfaction in making the King of Hell look at him when Lucifer could have looked at anyone.
Except Alastor had never wanted someone’s attention quite like this.
He had never wanted to put his hands on another person simply to discover how they felt beneath them. Never found himself wondering what would happen if he moved closer rather than away. Never watched somebody laugh and felt the immediate desire to make them do it again.
Somewhere over the course of the evening, something had changed.
Or perhaps, more inconveniently, something had been changing for considerably longer than he had noticed.
Whatever the magic had done to sharpen the edges of it, Alastor could no longer dismiss the simple fact that he felt more awake standing in this impossible sea with Lucifer than he had in years. More alert to every sensation, every shift in expression, every tiny movement beneath his hand. He could not remember the last time Hell itself had seemed this vivid to him, nor the last time he had felt this thoroughly alive.
The realisation settled through Alastor with startling clarity as he looked back at the face turned towards him, at damp blond hair falling loose around a crownless head, at the faint gold still colouring Lucifer’s cheeks from his earlier embarrassment. There was no court around them now, no Lilith at his side, no throne or title being performed for the benefit of people who wanted a piece of him. There was only the creature Alastor had watched laughing helplessly over seafood, arguing about spice, dancing because he wanted to dance, running naked into an impossible sea because the water felt good.
And suddenly Alastor understood.
Lucifer saw it happen, the minute shift from something performed into something quieter, and his heart gave one hard, disorientating beat.
“Well,” Alastor murmured. “I believe I finally have my answer.”
Lucifer barely trusted his voice. “To what?”
“That question I asked you.” For once there was no amusement waiting beneath the words. Alastor’s thumb moved once against Lucifer’s arm, almost absently, while his attention remained fixed upon him. “Why people like you.”
For one suspended moment, Lucifer seemed to forget how to breathe.
He remembered lying in his bedroom when Alastor had asked him that, hollowed out by Leviathan’s call and unable to understand why anyone would miss someone who had spent years making himself impossible to reach.
Hell if I know.
He had meant it.
He still did.
He could have laughed now, could have turned the whole thing into something stupid before Alastor had the opportunity to make it hurt, but he found he wanted the answer far more than he wanted somewhere to hide.
“Why?” he whispered.
Something unfamiliar moved beneath Alastor’s composure as he looked at him, suddenly afforded nowhere to retreat with no audience, no clothes and none of the usual barriers they relied upon to keep each other at a comfortable distance. His hands began to move from Lucifer’s arm, sliding slowly upwards until it settled along the curve of his shoulders, this time without even the pretence of investigation behind the touch.
“Because you are the closest thing to Heaven anyone down here will ever get the chance to see.”
The treatment bond pulsed, and Lucifer felt it everywhere, warmth moving beneath his skin in one great wave as his heart began to hammer so violently that, for one ridiculous second, he wondered whether Alastor could feel it through the hand resting against him. He probably could, and Lucifer found that he did not care.
There were a thousand things wrong with what Alastor had said. Heaven was the last thing Lucifer wanted to be compared to. Heaven had cast him out. Heaven had become synonymous with judgement and distance and everything he had lost.
Yet Lucifer knew, with a certainty that hurt, that Alastor meant something else entirely. He meant the thing Lucifer had once believed Heaven was supposed to be: something beautiful and impossible, something worth reaching for.
His eyes burned.
His heartbeat was completely out of control now. The world seemed to have contracted around the few inches between them, the warmth of Alastor’s hands on him, the slow water moving around their bodies and the impossible thing he had just been given.
They had been interrupted before.
Nobody was here to interrupt them now.
Only then did Lucifer become aware that his own hands had somehow found Alastor’s hips, resting there with an ease that suggested they had been for some time. His fingers shifted against the narrow curve before wandering upwards along his sides, over his shoulders and finally around his neck, drawing them closer as the treatment bond pulsed warm and steady beneath his ribs.
He moved first, though only barely, closing the distance until the question between them became unmistakable before stopping just short of answering it himself. Alastor answered for him, crossing that final fraction of space to meet his mouth in a kiss far softer than Lucifer had expected.
After all the antagonism, all the teeth and insults and deliberate irritation, Lucifer had expected collision. He had expected Alastor to kiss the way he argued, with precision and challenge and that maddening confidence that made everything between them feel like a contest neither was willing to lose.
Instead, Alastor’s mouth settled against his with such careful gentleness that Lucifer forgot to move.
Warm lips rested against his, tentative enough that the contact still felt like a question, and for one suspended second Lucifer could feel Alastor breathing through his nose, could feel the faint movement of his chest where the water pressed them close. Alastor did not chase the kiss or demand anything more from it. He simply stayed there, mouth warm and impossibly soft against Lucifer’s, giving him every opportunity to pull away.
Lucifer’s arms tightened around Alastor’s neck, pulling him closer as he kissed him back, and the soft inhale he drew from him disappeared somewhere between their mouths.
The sound was so slight Lucifer felt it more than heard it, a small disturbance between them before Alastor finally began to kiss him back. Whatever tentative restraint had shaped that first contact gradually softened as they found each other again, closer this time, Lucifer tilting instinctively into him until there was no room left to wonder whether either of them wanted this. The realisation opened something warm and almost painfully tender in his chest, because he had forgotten kissing could feel like this.
Or perhaps it never had.
Already curled around Alastor’s neck, Lucifer’s fingers shifted higher, following the damp hair at his nape until they slipped beneath it and tangled gently through the strands. The moment his fingertips curled there, something in Alastor’s composure gave, subtle but unmistakable, his mouth parting against Lucifer’s as he leaned more fully into the touch.
Lucifer followed without thinking.
The next kiss deepened without losing any of its unhurried softness, whatever uncertainty had lingered between them gradually giving way to something more assured. Alastor’s hands slipped from Lucifer’s shoulders and travelled around him, his arms folding into a proper embrace that drew their bodies closer until the warm water between them was reduced to little more than a shifting film. Their mouths moved together with an easy, growing familiarity, learning rather than competing, and Lucifer found himself helplessly aware of every subtle change, the warmth of Alastor’s mouth, the secure hold around his back, the slight tightening of his arms whenever Lucifer pressed nearer and the quiet breath that brushed his cheek whenever they parted just enough to find a different angle.
Neither of them seemed willing to go very far. Every attempt to breathe became another kiss, another slow meeting of their mouths before either had properly recovered from the last. Lucifer pulled away a fraction, lips tingling, drew one shaky breath and found Alastor following before he had even finished it. Their mouths met slightly off-centre this time, almost clumsy in a way nothing about Alastor ever was, and the imperfection sent a ridiculous rush of affection through Lucifer so suddenly that he smiled into the kiss.
The reaction was impossible to miss, the mouth against Lucifer’s curving into a smile that answered him perfectly and very nearly ruined him.
A laugh tried to escape Lucifer and disappeared between them instead, warm and breathless, while his fingers worked deeper into the damp hair at Alastor’s nape. He had been touching it almost subconsciously, fascinated all evening by its softness, and somewhere in the movement his knuckles caught against whatever Alastor had used to secure the short ponytail.
Something loosened.
Lucifer barely registered it at first. Alastor kissed the last of his laughter from his mouth and drew him closer through the water, and Lucifer’s hand tightened reflexively in his hair. The tie slipped beneath his fingers, followed a moment later by the gathered strands themselves, wet hair sliding over Lucifer’s knuckles and spilling loose around Alastor’s neck and shoulders.
Lucifer’s entire brain simply ceased to function, his mouth going still against Alastor’s until the kiss paused with their lips still touching and their breathing mingling in the narrow space between them. When he finally opened his eyes, the sight waiting only inches away proved catastrophic. He had thought the ponytail was bad enough, but freed from it and thoroughly dampened by the sea, Alastor’s hair had lost almost all of its usual severe shape, the longer strands falling in loose, unruly waves around his face and neck, curling softly where they brushed his bare shoulders while shorter pieces clung to his temples and cheeks. It made him look different yet again, another carefully maintained piece of his presentation accidentally stripped away, and for several helpless seconds all Lucifer could do was stare with his fingers still buried amongst the damp curls responsible.
“You appear to have dismantled my hair.”
The words reached him without their familiar broadcast distortion. The old-radio resonance had disappeared somewhere between one kiss and the next, leaving Alastor’s voice bare beneath it, warmer and more immediate when there was nothing filtering it through another age. It belonged strangely well to the version of Alastor standing in front of him now, stripped of coat and waistcoat and shirt, hair loose beneath Lucifer’s fingers, breathing a little harder than he would ever have permitted an audience to hear.
Still caught amongst the damp waves, Lucifer’s fingers slowly combed them back from Alastor’s face. “I like your real voice.”
Something shifted in the expression inches from his own as Lucifer’s thumb brushed behind one of the large deer ears rising through his wet hair. It yielded softly beneath the touch, warm and unexpectedly pliant, no longer held in that almost unnaturally straight, attentive posture Alastor usually maintained. Damp fur lay slightly mussed along its edges, and when Lucifer’s thumb passed behind it, the ear tipped lazily into the contact before settling at a more relaxed angle amongst the loose curls around his neck.
“And your hair.”
With the familiar radio filter absent from Alastor’s voice, Lucifer could hear the quiet breath he drew before his smile took on a distinctly knowing quality. “My dear, your hands have made your opinion on the matter abundantly clear.”
A soft laugh escaped Lucifer, and Alastor caught it with another kiss.
Lucifer heard every small, involuntary reaction now, the soft exhale against his cheek when their mouths met, the faint hitch of breath when his hold tightened at Alastor’s nape, the barely audible sound that slipped free when he tilted his head and kissed him back. Each one made the man in his arms feel startlingly, devastatingly present, and something about that intimacy drew the urgency out of Lucifer until he found himself kissing him more slowly, lingering over the warmth of his mouth as though there were suddenly no reason at all to rush.
The kiss deepened gradually, Alastor’s arms holding him close as Lucifer parted his lips and felt the tentative brush of tongue against his own. It lingered there for a moment, cautious enough to feel almost like another question, before Lucifer answered and the contact became surer, their mouths shifting together as they explored the unfamiliar intimacy of it. The sensation sent warmth curling pleasantly through him, and when they finally eased apart, neither went far, lips still brushing as Alastor breathed his name between them.
“Lucifer.”
A shiver ran through him. He had heard his own name spoken in worship, fury, disappointment and love, had heard entire choirs sing it until Heaven itself seemed to carry the sound, yet somehow none of those memories had prepared him for the way it sounded here, quiet and unguarded on Alastor’s lips. Before he could decide what to do with the feeling that opened inside him, Lucifer closed the distance and kissed him again.
Neither seemed in any hurry to stop. Their mouths moved together slowly, the urgency of discovery settling into something warmer now that the question had been answered several times over, until standing became increasingly unnecessary. The sea shifted around them, lifting some of their weight, and Lucifer let himself sink with it, his hand sliding from Alastor’s hair to his shoulder as the water climbed over their chests and Alastor followed him down without breaking the kiss.
Strangely, all the heat that had been building between them seemed content to remain exactly there. Lucifer wanted Alastor, certainly, but the desire refused to organise itself into anything beyond the overwhelming need to keep kissing him. There was no impatient pull towards whatever might come next, no thought of taking this further while Alastor’s mouth remained warm against his own and every kiss still felt like something new. For once, wanting someone did not seem to demand a destination. Lucifer could have stayed there indefinitely, half suspended in the sea with Alastor’s arms around him, doing nothing more than learning how he kissed.
They drifted apart only when the water reached their necks, Lucifer pushing gently backwards into deeper water while Alastor’s fingers hooked loosely around his hand. For a while there was no conversation at all. They simply swam, first alongside one another and then farther out into the quiet curve of the bay, where the house disappeared partially behind the flowering vegetation and the sounds of Envy seemed impossibly distant.
Lucifer had been right about the water. It felt wonderful.
He rolled onto his back and floated, wet hair spreading around his head as he looked up into the enormous coral clouds. The sea supported him differently here, denser than earthly water, warm enough that there was no shock of cold against skin whenever he dipped beneath the surface. Beside him, Alastor moved with an ease Lucifer found mildly offensive after all his earlier hesitation about swimming, long strokes carrying him through the water as though he had spent the last ninety years secretly training for this exact occasion.
“You’re annoyingly good at that,” Lucifer said.
“I did live beside a considerable quantity of water.”
“Yeah, well, I invented buoyancy.”
Alastor turned his head towards him. “Did you?”
“Probably.”
That earned him a real laugh.
There was still no radio distortion wrapped around it, and Lucifer felt a ridiculous little rush of pleasure at hearing the sound cleanly. He rolled through the water to swim beside him, and for several minutes they swam without direction, sometimes close enough that their shoulders brushed, sometimes separating only to circle back towards one another. Once Lucifer ducked beneath the surface and came up several feet away with his hair plastered over his face; Alastor laughed again, so Lucifer splashed him, which achieved the remarkable discovery that the Radio Demon could look personally offended by water while being neck-deep in an ocean.
Eventually they slowed.
A little way from him, Alastor had rolled onto his back and surrendered his weight to the sea, loose hair drifting around his head as he floated with his face turned towards the strange evening sky. Something about him had grown quieter in the aftermath of the kissing, his expression softened into an unfamiliar thoughtfulness as he watched whatever held his attention above. Catching the change, Lucifer stopped paddling away and let the water carry him gradually closer.
“Lucifer.”
Something in the way Alastor said his name made Lucifer’s lingering smile fade. There was a weight to it that had not been there moments ago, enough to tell him that whatever came next would not be another joke or an invitation to keep kissing, and he found himself bracing slightly for the question he could already feel coming.
“Mm?”
“How long does this last?”
Understanding came immediately, drawing Lucifer’s attention back towards the distant beach before he looked at Alastor again. “Covet?”
Alastor gave the smallest inclination of his head, about as much as floating with everything but his face submerged seemed to permit. His ears had disappeared entirely beneath the surface, flattened somewhere amongst the drifting red of his hair, which briefly left Lucifer wondering how the hell he could hear anything at all.
“You described its effects rather enthusiastically before we drank it,” Alastor continued, apparently suffering no such difficulty. “You were somewhat less forthcoming about what happens afterwards.”
Considering the question, Lucifer gave a small shake of his head. “It’s not really a comedown, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re not going to suddenly crash or wake up tomorrow wanting to die.”
“How reassuringly specific.”
“I’m serious.” Drifting a little closer, Lucifer kept himself afloat with lazy movements beneath the surface. “It fades. Slowly. You probably won’t even notice exactly when it happens.”
The answer seemed to warrant more consideration than the teasing response suggested. Alastor let his legs sink beneath him and rolled smoothly out of his reclined position until he was upright in the water again, wet hair settling around his face as his ears emerged from beneath the surface. He swept one hand back through it before fixing Lucifer with a more thoughtful look.
Lucifer searched for a way to explain something he had experienced often enough in the past that he had stopped thinking about it. “At first you sort of… miss it, I guess. Everything starts getting quieter again. Less immediate. You remember how good it felt, obviously, but your body adjusts as the magic works its way out. After a while you can’t really recreate the sensation in your head anymore. You know you felt it, but you forget what it was actually like to feel everything that intensely.”
A thoughtful silence followed, and when Alastor’s attention eventually lowered to Lucifer’s mouth, something in his expression became unexpectedly difficult to read. “So I shall forget wanting this.”
The quietness of it turned Lucifer’s stomach over. “No.” He was already moving through the water before Alastor looked back at him, closing the space between them until barely any remained. “No,” he repeated, softer this time. “That isn’t how it works. It can’t put something in you that wasn’t there. It just… clears everything else out of the way for a while.”
His hand found Alastor’s beneath the surface almost without thought, fingers brushing before Alastor turned his palm and let them settle together.
“Some part of you was drawn to this,” Lucifer continued, his voice quieter now. “To me. Whatever that means.”
Alastor’s fingers closed around his, attention remaining fixed on Lucifer as he asked, “And you?”
A small, helpless laugh escaped him. “I think we’ve established that I’m having a fucking fantastic time.”
“I meant afterwards.”
That wiped the humour from Lucifer’s face. The answer was considerably harder to find when he had to consider his own feelings, and his attention dropped to their joined hands beneath the green water, their shapes wavering and distorting with every shift of the surface. His first instinct urged him to promise something, while the second scrambled for a joke, and neither felt particularly fair.
“I don’t know,” he admitted eventually, swallowing when the hold on his hand remained and no distance opened between them. “I really don’t. I can’t tell you how you’re going to feel when it fades, because you’re you, and frankly I’m still trying to work out what the fuck goes on in there on a normal day.”
The corner of Alastor’s mouth lifted at that, and only with the return of that familiar curve did Lucifer realise the smile had disappeared entirely somewhere along the way.
“And I can’t promise how I’ll react either.” Lucifer hesitated, thumb moving slowly across Alastor’s hand. “Because my anxiety’s going to come back. All the stupid little voices that are currently being drowned out are going to start getting loud again, and I might overthink this so hard I achieve some previously undiscovered form of neurosis.”
Lucifer resisted the easy temptation to retreat into the joke, holding Alastor’s attention instead as the admission worked its way free. “I might get scared.”
The words settled quietly between them, softening something in Alastor’s expression, and Lucifer drew a slow breath before continuing. “But scared doesn’t mean I didn’t want it.”
The fingers around his tightened. “And if we discover tomorrow that this was an appalling mistake?”
He considered the man in front of him, the loose wet hair and bare voice, the unfamiliar softness of someone who had kissed him as though he were something precious before either of them had known quite what to do with the discovery. “Then we figure that out.”
“And if it wasn’t?”
His heart picked up again at the question, though this time Lucifer allowed himself to sit with the feeling rather than search for somewhere safer to put it. “Then maybe we figure that out too.”
Alastor remained quiet for several moments, watching him with an expression Lucifer could no longer quite read, before the water shifted softly around his body as he moved closer. At his height, his hooves could just about find the sandy bottom here, giving him enough purchase to stand while Lucifer remained buoyed by the sea. Their joined hands became caught gently between them, knuckles resting against bare skin, and the nearness felt different now that neither of them was using it to provoke the other. There was something almost careful in the way Alastor regarded him, as though he were turning Lucifer’s answer over and finding it unexpectedly acceptable.
“A remarkably sensible proposition.”
The solemn delivery pulled a reluctant smile from Lucifer, some of the tension easing from his shoulders even as his thumb moved absently across the back of Alastor’s hand. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I am attempting to conceal my astonishment.” The familiar dryness had returned to his voice, though it sat strangely beside the tenderness of his hold, his fingers still threaded securely through Lucifer’s rather than withdrawing now that the conversation had found safer ground.
Lucifer’s smile widened despite himself. “Dick.”
The laugh that answered him was quiet and warm, slipping free with an ease Lucifer was beginning to suspect he could become dangerously fond of. He leaned in on instinct, closing what little distance remained until his forehead rested against Alastor’s, and felt the other man soften into the contact rather than pull away.
Their hands eventually slipped apart only because there was no longer any need for them to remain between their bodies. Alastor’s arms came around him instead, one settling securely across his back while the other drew him nearer, and Lucifer folded willingly into the embrace, winding his own arms around the taller man as the water lifted his weight and Alastor’s footing kept them both anchored. It left Lucifer floating comfortably against him, cheek settled against a damp shoulder, close enough that every slow rise of Alastor’s chest moved beneath him while loose wet hair brushed softly against his temple whenever the sea shifted them.
They stayed that way, held together in the warm, impossible water, with none of the frantic curiosity that had driven them together before. Whatever Covet had loosened between them no longer seemed to require anything more. The sea carried Lucifer where Alastor held him, the strange evening stretched quietly overhead, and somewhere beneath it all the magic began, so gradually neither of them could have named the moment, to loosen its grip.