Work Text:
The chardonnay was starting to lose its flavor, slowly fading out of existence like everything else in Charlotte Richards’ empty Hell loop.
The dead-eyed facsimiles of Charlotte’s family had been the first to go, thank all that was unholy. The stash of cocaine he had once found in her husband’s closet had never made an appearance, more’s the pity, but there had been a reasonably well-stocked wet bar in the expansive living room. It was gone now, like the marble-lined jacuzzi, and the king-sized bed with its delightfully soft, silken comforter.
All of the outlying regions of the house had become indistinct, colors washed out and running like a drenched watercolor painting. Only the region surrounding the well-appointed kitchen remained. He had found the chardonnay in a wine chiller, tucked under one of the marble countertops.
Lucifer swirled the golden liquid in the wine glass. It was crystal, with a band of platinum around its rim. He smiled, but the expression was lopsided and sad.
Nothing but the best for our Charlotte.
He would never, ever wish her back here, not even to slake his boredom, but he did… miss her. She was safe in the Silver City, and all Lucifer had was this fading echo of her memories to remember her by.
With a bitterly ironic toast, he downed the last of the nearly flavorless liquid that was, and was not, wine. It was still vastly better than the alternatives. The alcohol in Hell truly was atrocious. Lucifer had never looked too closely into what the demons used to make their preferred rotgut, determining that he was probably happier not knowing on the very rare occasion that he elected to imbibe.
Lucifer had sought this place out, once tedium and a deep, hollow ache in his chest had driven him from his throne to seek something, anything, that might alleviate the boredom.
There were no locks in Hell, and yet, in all of Lucifer’s millennia playing warden to the damned, no one had ever left his realm. No one until Charlotte. It made her abandoned Hell loop unique.
Well, nearly. Lucifer’s own empty Hell loop, along with its mimicry of Lux’s penthouse and Uriel-shaped shade, had been resorbed by living stone long before his recent return to Hell. He could still feel its echo though, whenever his responsibilities took him into that section of twisting hallways.
Lucifer leaned on the marble countertop in the kitchen that was, and was not, Charlotte’s and looked at the empty wineglass. He had discovered that if he exited the Hell loop, upon his return, everything would reset. The wine bottle would be full again and resting in the chiller. The glass would be clean and waiting in its place in the cabinet next to the sink, even if he smashed the leaded crystal and ground the shards into the tile floors. He had been playing this game for days. Or was it weeks? Time lost some of its meaning without day or night, hunger or thirst.
Decent company.
He could return and return, and these artifacts would remain ever new. Until, of course, they faded completely, leaving twisted walls of columnar basalt and wafting ash behind.
Lucifer drummed his fingers on the surface that was, and was not, richly polished marble. Nervous energy and agitation that, in decades past, would have eventually driven him into escaping to Earth, if only for a brief distraction.
That outlet was now closed to him. What rules and threats and punishments had failed to accomplish, Lucifer now submitted to of his own free will. So long as the Detective, or her Spawn, or anyone of their line yet lived, he would remain in Hell.
It truly was the best trick his Father had ever played on him.
Charlotte’s Hell loop had become his refuge, but he had known that even this meager comfort was finite. Whether days, or weeks, or months from now, it would fade out of existence, leaving Hell much as it ever had been. And what were months to an immortal?
And Charlotte’s fading Hell loop was unique.
Lucifer’s subconscious finger drumming slowed to an abrupt stop.
Charlotte’s Hell loop was unique, but did it have to stay that way?
The kernel of an idea forming in his mind, Lucifer flicked the rim of the now-empty wine glass, listening to the ring of what was, and was not, fine crystal. It certainly sounded solid still. The wine glass and fading chardonnay would reset in the time it took Lucifer to make a few, discreet queries.
~*~*~*~
“I believe you will find that this soul meets your specifications, my King,” said Paimon, who was leading Lucifer down a long, twisting corridor.
Lucifer’s red-soled Louboutins raised small puffs of ash with each footfall. Other than Paimon’s sandaled footprints, the thick, gray ash sat heavy and undisturbed on the jointed stone floor. The muffled sounds from behind each passed door suggested that his demons were not shirking their duties in this region of Hell, but that instead, these souls were doing a reasonably adequate job of tormenting themselves without demonic intervention.
Perhaps some were doing too good of a job?
The unfairness of Hell had occurred to Lucifer. Of course it had. An eternity of punishment with no recourse. It was so very like Father.
Some souls deserved all the punishment they received and more, but Lucifer now wondered how many of them might be like Charlotte, able to redeem themselves if they were only given a second chance.
He wondered why he had challenged Father on so many other things, but had not thought previously to test this one, last boundary.
Paimon came to a stop and gestured towards a door with a thin, graceful hand. His eyes were downcast with deference, but Lucifer did not miss the hungry curiosity in the demon’s delicate, androgynous face.
“Paimon,” Lucifer said, waiting until the demon cautiously met his eyes before continuing. “If this little experiment works, then you may have as many empty Hell loops to investigate as your swotty heart desires.”
The demon brightened at the prospect, and bowed, leather armor creaking. “Thank you, my King.”
Lucifer nodded, willing to be magnanimous, especially if this experiment actually played out as he hoped, and stepped past Paimon to the door of the Hell loop.
It looked much like any other door in Hell. Solid, heavy…
Unlocked.
Lucifer pushed it open and stepped inside.
He never knew what to expect whenever he entered a Hell loop; they were as diverse and varied as their occupants. Some, like Charlotte’s, drew from seemingly normal, even domestic, scenes. Others leaned towards more stereotypical settings of torment: rivers of fire, lakes of acid, Nickleback concerts. Each soul consigned itself to Hell, and each soul chose the form of its own torment.
This Hell loop took the form of a burned out husk of a small, ramshackle house, surrounded by a snow-dusted, ill kempt yard. Lucifer walked up the gravel pathway that led to the house’s partially collapsed front porch, carefully stepping over a toppled, rusting tricycle. He noted a few other toys, scattered around the patchy yard and porch, mostly covered in snow and ash, and there was a tire swing hanging from one branch of a half-dead oak tree.
Lucifer sighed a little in disappointment. The chances of finding anything entertaining in this Hell loop were vanishingly small. Still, he had made a deal of sorts with Paimon, and like the demon, he found himself… curious.
The steps of the porch creaked under Lucifer’s feet. He had to duck awkwardly to pass through the charred front door, which was swinging erratically on a single hinge. The interior of the structure was in even worse shape. The walls themselves were largely burned away, revealing charred timbers that did not look capable of supporting what remained of the house’s roof.
A few charred pieces of furniture were recognizable among the burned debris. Lucifer passed through what had obviously been a family room and into a narrow hallway. He looked in the first door he passed on the left and spotted a few heat-shattered dishes buried under thick dustings of snow and ash on what had been a kitchen table. He thought he heard a rasping gasp at the end of the hall and walked towards the faint sound.
The fire damage was worse as he continued down the hall, passing two small bedrooms and a bathroom so tiny it hardly warranted the name. The shallow, wheezing sound led him to the end of the short hallway. The door to the room there was already pushed open, so Lucifer stepped inside and got his first look at the occupant of this Hell loop.
A young woman lay on her side in the floor of a room so damaged by fire that he could not hazard to guess what it had originally housed. She was dressed in a light summer dress decorated with a floral print in browns and oranges, but torn and stained with ash and even less pleasant things. One outer wall of the room had completely burned away, leaving a gaping hole that allowed snow to blow into the room. Despite her flimsy attire, the woman did not seem to notice the snow that was gathering on her clothes and clinging to her matted, dirty blond hair. She didn’t stir when Lucifer entered the room, her shallow breathing didn’t hitch and her staring eyes didn’t move as he stepped around her sprawling form, in order to better see what held her attention.
Two badly charred skeletons lay on the floor of the room. Despite being mostly covered with snow, Lucifer could tell that they were both very small. One of them was tiny.
Lucifer had seen worse, had caused worse. There was no accounting for the uncomfortable clench in the pit of his stomach as he looked at the bodies that presumably had been, and yet were not, this woman’s children.
He stepped purposefully in front of the woman, breaking her line of sight. She made a soft sound, though it was difficult to tell whether she was expressing desperate relief or protest.
Lucifer did not create Hell loops, they grew of their own accord whenever a new resident presented itself, but he could exert some level of control over them. The blowing snow hung motionless in the air as he crouched down to look at the woman more closely. He knew instinctively that this Hell loop repeated every few hours, and that this woman had been lying on the floor, staring at the pitiful bodies, for a very, very long time.
She had never been particularly beautiful, and whatever zest animation might have brought to her face obviously had been hollowed out of her and replaced with grief. Silent tears gathered on the floor, a small puddle that was starting to freeze around the edges. She looked hollow cheeked and sapped of all vitality, her skin bordering on desiccated. She did not move her head, but her bleary eyes, faded blue and bloodshot, tried to focus on Lucifer’s face.
“Who are you?” she whispered through cracked, bleeding lips. Her voice was weak and reedy with disuse.
Lucifer tilted his head to one side. He hadn’t exactly entered her Hell loop with an elaborate plan. Some souls were perfectly capable of adequately tormenting themselves, and some lacked the creativity to do the job justice without a little help and inspiration from his demons. Lucifer had simply asked Paimon to identify a soul that was possibly situated at the other end of the spectrum: one that was, perhaps, doing a little too good of a job in torturing itself.
Trust was difficult to come by in Hell, but Lucifer could put a modicum of stock in Paimon’s obsessive love of unraveling mysteries and discovering secrets. The selection of this Hell loop was undoubtedly calculated to maximize the chance that Paimon would actually get to explore another empty Hell loop.
“Who do you think I am?” Lucifer asked, trying to draw this emaciated wreck of a soul into a conversation. He wasn’t particularly gentle about it though, souls ended up here for a reason.
The woman’s eyes sank back down, staring at Lucifer’s shoes, in the direction of the skeletons again. She was silent for a long time, but eventually whispered, “The coroner?”
Lucifer sighed, reached his hand down in front of the woman’s face, and snapped his fingers to focus the woman’s attention. Even with the mechanics of the Hell loop frozen in place, souls could become confused, especially if they have been imprisoned for any lengthy amount of time. “How about now?” he asked again.
The bleary blue eyes focused on his face a little more, and this time, he thought he saw the barest glimmer of recognition. “You’re… Him,” she said, her emphasis adding weight and understanding to the pronoun.
“Indeed,” Lucifer replied easily. “Tell me your name.”
“Patricia,” she said, and then tried to clear her throat with little success. “Patricia Coleman.”
“Well Patricia, think of me as your parole officer,” Lucifer said, reaching forward and hooking a hand under the woman’s frail arm. “We should go have a little chat.”
He managed to get her to her feet, but when he started to pull her faltering steps in the direction of the door, she fought him. Lucifer stopped, mildly surprised that she was able to summon even that feeble amount of strength. “You’d prefer to stay in here?” he asked with equal parts incredulity and scorn. Most souls would sell their own… well, whatever… to have even a moment’s respite from their torment.
“I won’t leave them here,” she said desperately, struggling futilely against Lucifer’s iron grip. “Not again.”
That anguished confession made Lucifer release her arm abruptly, and the soul, Patricia, sank to her knees in front of the tiny skeletons again. “You should explain,” he said, putting the force of command behind his words.
Patricia shuddered, staring at the bodies, but the words started trickle out of her, hoarse and disjointed. “Suzy wouldn’t stop crying, and I just… there wasn’t anything wrong with her. She wasn’t hungry, she was dry, she didn’t want to be held… And Andrew couldn’t stand that the new baby was getting all of the attention, so he was acting out. I… I just wanted a second, with no one screaming at me. I just needed some air…” She paused, taking a deep, ragged breath. “The police said the space heater must have had a short. They said they found… Andrew must have tried... He was holding her.”
It occurred to Lucifer that he hadn’t entirely thought this through. He had walked into the Hell loop expecting something like an interrogation. Something combative, where he could summon up warm memories of his Detective, imagine what she might have done or said in his shoes. Something like a deal, where he could entice the woman into pleading her case, to convince Lucifer that among all of the souls in Hell, she deserved a second chance.
This was something very different.
He was singularly uncomfortable with these types of human emotions. They tended to be quite messy and made him feel deeply unsettled. However, the creeping knowledge that there had to be more to the story, because if something this blameless could land a young mother in a Hell loop… “So that’s it?” he asked, voice harsh with accusation and something resembling dread. “An act of my Father’s? You say that you’re here through no fault of your own?”
“What do you know?” Patricia said with real venom in her rasping voice, turning to glare at him, hate hot in her eyes. “Andrew was three, and he was there for… And where was I? Walking around the block, having a smoke to clear my head?”
She looked back at the charred skeletons, her whole frame slumping towards the pitiful remains. “I blamed Bob, told him it was his fault. All the time. If he’d fixed the heater… But how was he supposed to do that? We didn’t have the money,” she said, voice again becoming flat and dull. “Bob’s brother Carl took us in, with the house gone. Bob lost his job and started drinking. We fought… A lot. I slept with Carl. I don’t know why, I didn’t even like him much. I just wanted to feel something other than… Bob caught us. He didn’t really say much after that, just shot himself a couple weeks later. Marie found his suicide note. She told Carl to throw me out or she’d divorce him. I said… a lot of things that weren’t true. The most hurtful, hateful things I could think of. Then I took their car, and I… I think I lost control and drove it into a tree. I don’t really remember that part.”
Lucifer had become extremely still during the litany of sins, in the way only an immortal, for whom breathing was a choice rather than a necessity, could be.
Patricia leaned back down on the floor, taking up the same position in which Lucifer had found her.
No, this wasn’t anything like an interrogation.
In fact, it reminded him a little more of…
Lucifer crouched back down again, capturing and holding her gaze with all his celestial powers of persuasion. “Patricia, tell me,” he said, compulsion humming in the harmonics of his voice, “What do you truly desire?”
Her answer was… illuminating.
After a brief walk, Lucifer opened the door to Patricia Coleman’s Hell loop. Outside, Paimon was sitting on the floor, reading a book that was bound in a particularly suspicious-looking, wrinkled leather. He looked up as the door swung open and scrambled to his feet.
“Bring me a chair,” Lucifer ordered, without further preamble. When Paimon nodded, his expression somewhat confused, Lucifer continued. “And some of that swill Oeillet was trying to hawk earlier. This might take a while.”
Paimon bowed in acquiescence, and Lucifer shut the door to forestall any annoying questions.
He turned back and gave the burned out house an appraising look.
“Now,” Lucifer said to himself. “What would Dr. Linda do?”
~*~*~*~
The soul’s appearance in the Silver City caused quite the uproar. Souls appeared all of the time of course, the human population being what it was, but rarely in such an unhinged state, and never reeking, at least to angelic senses, of Hell.
The soul had seemingly united with two others she had known in life, and while there was obvious joy in the reunion, the soul was nearly incoherent with sobs. She seemed barely capable of speech, and what few words could be understood amidst her tears consisted of rambling apologies.
No one seemed to know what to do to soothe the soul or determine how it had come to arrive in the Silver City trailing brimstone and demon-stench. Finally Raphael, who was versed in all forms of human and celestial healing, had been called forth to see if he could aid her.
The soul was taken into Raphael’s domain, where she could recover among peaceful gardens, white colonnaded walkways, and soothing resting chambers. The other two souls of her acquaintance, seemingly her two children, accompanied the soul into the healing sanctum.
Many souls arrived in Heaven wounded by the transition or their lives preceding it. Raphael had spent an eternity learning how to help even the most damaged of them find peace. If anyone could help this formerly damned soul, it was he.
Still, whispers and speculation spread through the Silver City. How had the soul escaped from Hell? What torments had she suffered there, and could Raphael, even with all his skills and experience, save one who had suffered at the hands of the Fallen One and his demons?
A handful of celestial cycles passed, relatively unmoored from Earthly concepts of time, but eventually, Raphael called a meeting of his eldest siblings. Most heeded his summons, though Azrael was too busy shepherding souls between realms to attend and Amenadiel was occupied with his Nephilim on Earth.
“The soul has calmed enough to relate at least some of her story,” Raphael said once the last of his siblings entered the small amphitheater, surrounded with hanging gardens. “She died some fifty-three years ago, as humans recon time, and as we suspected, she has spent all the intervening time in Hell.”
“But how did she come to escape our brother?” asked Michael, hand pointedly resting on the hilt of his sword. He, among all of their siblings, had been most convinced that the soul’s appearance represented some kind of a threat.
Raphael raised a calming hand. “Her story makes little sense,” he admitted. “She says that our brother came to her, unbidden. He,” and now Raphael did pause, looking around the circle of his siblings with confusion, and yes, no small amount of suspicion. “He gave her counsel.”
Gabriel shared a suspicious glance with Michael. “What kind of counsel?” he asked.
“That she needed to,” Raphael paused, as much to summon up the exact words used by the soul as to brace himself for his sibling’s reactions, “Work on her abysmal coping mechanisms.”
According to the soul, Lucifer had said a great deal more than that, most of which made Raphael, with his knowledge of human healing, cringe with what a mortal psychologist might have called professional mortification. However, the impulsive, poorly considered, casually callous nature of those very words convinced Raphael that the soul had, in fact, been speaking to their brother and not some other entity. It was somewhat within his character, to strike deals with mortals. But even that line of reasoning presented one glaring inconsistency.
“And what did he ask in return?” asked Jegudiel.
Yes, that.
“Nothing,” Raphael told his disbelieving siblings with a helpless shrug. “He compelled her to confess that she wanted, more than anything, to see her children again, to apologize to them, but he did not ask her for payment in return for granting her heart’s desire.”
That was met with a long silence. It was Barachiel, who finally spoke what they were all thinking. “Grateful as I am, to see this soul brought back to the light, I cannot trust our brother’s motivations.”
One by one, they all looked to Michael, who long ago had been tasked with defending the Silver City from their fallen brother’s schemes.
Michael sat for a long moment, considering. Then he rose and faced his eldest sister. “Jophiel, you are the wisest of us,” he said. “Visit Earth, speak to Amenadiel. He must have some insight into this newest scheme of our brother’s.”
~*~*~*~
It had been centuries since Lucifer had played a lyre. The tuning of the strings did not lend itself well to modern music, but with a little creativity, he was able to coax a few stanzas of Hotel California out of the primitive instrument.
And if modulating the song into an oddly structured key made it sound even more melancholy than usual, well that was fine too. It suited his mood.
This Hell loop was pleasant enough though, at least now that the giant eagle had stopped repeatedly eating the former resident’s liver. The screaming had somewhat detracted from the stunning view of the Aegean. Philocles had been quite mad there at the beginning, which Lucifer supposed was to be expected after a few thousand years of torment. Talking the soul around had taken significantly longer than his last two experiments. Now the Koan soldier was gone, leaving his small homestead, situated high on a cliff overlooking the turquois waves, to Lucifer alone.
He hummed along with the notes, pausing only long enough to take a sip from the pottery cup, filled with a sweet red wine he had pilfered from what was, and was not, Philocles’ home.
The view really was lovely, if you ignored the bloody slab of rock covered with chains and manacles. That wasn’t terribly hard to do, now that the giant eagle had stopped screeching and had perched on the edge of the rocky cliffs. It sat there still, silent and motionless, now that its purpose for being had been removed.
The rush of wings Lucifer heard could not, then, be attributed to the great bird.
The lyre hit the stony ground with a discordant twang as Lucifer twisted around into a half-crouch, wings flaring out in blatant threat.
“Peace, brother,” said a solemn voice he had not heard in… ages.
Lucifer straightened, wings relaxing slightly into a more defensive posture. “Jophiel?” he said, surprise going far to conceal the painful wrench he felt deep in his chest. The feeling quickly curdled. “It has been a long time, sister. You don’t call, you don’t write.” Lucifer spoke with flippant sarcasm, knowing that the insincerity would get under his sister’s skin. She always had been a serious one. “I might start to think you didn’t care.”
She had not changed, in all the millennia since his fall. She still kept her long, bluish-black hair in a complex braid, she still wore loose-fitting, silvery robes, and she still had an air of cool superiority that had made her younger siblings delight in ruffling her feathers.
If his barbed words touched her in any way, Lucifer could not see a reaction in Jophiel’s dark, imperturbable eyes. “It has been a very long time,” she said, a statement of fact, lacking any discernable shading to imply regret or accusation.
It set Lucifer’s teeth on edge.
“I have been making inquiries, brother, and I must admit, some of the answers I have found puzzle me greatly,” she said, tilting her head slightly to one side.
“Oh,” Lucifer said, trying to sound bored, even though his muscles remained tripwire tight in anticipation of a fight. “I’d say I deny everything, but who are we kidding? I’m sure I did whatever you’re here to accuse me of.”
The flippant bravado was possibly ill conceived. Jophiel was no pushover in battle, even though she was not, primarily, a warrior. Her skills lay more in negotiation and diplomacy than war.
A fact that was rather interesting, considering how Lucifer had been diverting himself recently.
That was… potentially unfortunate. He had expected that it would take a little longer before his siblings noticed their unexpected new arrivals and decided to try to ruin everything. Lucifer himself barely noticed when new souls arrived in his domain. There were so many of them, and the fabric of Hell itself tended to self-organize, at least with regards to forming new Hell loops for incoming souls. (The same could not be said for Hell’s other residents, as the incident with Dromos had demonstrated.)
Of course Father would have known about Lucifer’s latest exploits. Perhaps this was all His fault, as usual.
And even if Jophiel’s visit was not related to the souls he was surreptitiously sending off to the Silver City, here he was, caught quite red handed inside a conspicuously empty Hell loop.
“Your humans had some interesting theories, regarding your recent behavior,” Jophiel said, her voice still even and calm.
With no memory of having moved, Lucifer found himself threateningly close to his sister, his abruptly red-skinned, taloned hand fisted in the front of her robes, twisting the fabric around Jophiel’s throat.
“If you have hurt any of them,” he said, the instinctive shift to his fully demonic guise lending him several inches in height and an echo to the dire threat, and though he fought to conceal it, the fear in his voice.
A deceptively gentle hand wrapped around his wrist, cutting short his litany. “I said peace, brother,” Jophiel said, voice still calm despite the constriction of her robes around her throat. “I have not harmed your mortals.”
Lucifer stared in her dark eyes, searching for some evidence, some proof that might slow the panicked pounding of his heart. Jophiel, for her part, remained still in his grasp, but her grip on his wrist was becoming incrementally tighter, her pointed chin was tilted up, and her dark eyes were narrowed dangerously in an unspoken threat of her own.
Lucifer released her abruptly, but he did not concede ground, looming over his sister, the claw-tipped digits of his bat-like wings curving dangerously forward.
“It is true then,” Jophiel said, her gentle voice at odds with the forbidding expression on her face. She released her grip on Lucifer’s wrist and reached out as if to cup his cheek. “You love these mortals. Truly.”
The graze of her fingers against his face made Lucifer flinch away, baring abruptly sharpened fangs at his sister. “If you dare to use this as leverage,” he hissed, but Jophiel raised her hands again in an appeasing gesture.
“I come to make a deal.”
That… wasn’t what Lucifer was expecting. His leathery wings sagged in surprise and he took an instinctive, defensive step backwards. “A deal,” he repeated stupidly, and then sneered. “Dad’s personal diplomat wants to strike a deal with the Devil?”
“Are you so surprised?” she asked, folding her hands back into the trailing sleeves of her silvery robes.
Lucifer scoffed.
“You have been finding souls that while tarnished, seem capable of reaching for the light,” she said, as if those words explained everything.
And perhaps they did.
Lucifer flexed his clawed hands, but then allowed himself to shift back into his more usual guise, pale skin taking the place of red, ropey scars and leathery hide. “I am listening,” he said, unconsciously adjusting the cuffs of his shirt after his transformation. The seams at his shoulders had ripped again, curse it all.
Jophiel drew a silver-capped scroll case from the depths of her sleeve. When she extended it to him, Lucifer hesitated for a long moment, burning curiosity warring with deep distrust. Finally, he did take the case and uncap it, but not without another sideways, suspicious glance at his sister.
The paper had a silvery sheen, was smooth to the touch and hatefully perfect. The words written on it though, inked out in flowing black ink, arrested the sneer that had been growing on his face.
He glanced up at Jophiel again, not even pretending to conceal his surprise. “This is a contract,” he said, pausing for a long, baffled moment. “For souls.”
Jophiel nodded in narrow-eyed assent. She was weighing his reaction to the contract at least as much as he was scrutinizing her for hints as to her motivations.
And Father’s.
The contract was fairly straightforward, as these things go. For each redeemed soul Lucifer sent to the Silver City, he would be allowed one week on Earth. One of his siblings would serve as Regent in his absence, ensuring that his realm did not descend into chaos and rebellion in his absence. There were stipulations of course, but they were remarkably sparse, all things considered. Undeserving souls could not be forcibly evicted from Hell. (Lucifer bristled at the assumption, but the prospect of summarily turning out enough residents to cover an extended human lifespan had, in all fairness, occurred to him.). He was to continue meeting with Dr. Linda (or a suitable substitute, the definition of which went on for several, patronizingly detailed lines). Amenadiel was to be tasked with overseeing that the terms of this contract were being honored on Earth, and if Lucifer was found to be abusing the terms or spirit of this opportunity, or using it to foment further rebellion, all details of the contract would be revoked. (Lucifer could almost hear Michael’s smug assumptions between the lines of that section.) The text went on and on, but at its heart…
“I will give you three days to consider the terms and draft any proposed amendments,” Jophiel started to say, but Lucifer cut her off with a peremptory slash of his hand.
Lucifer read, unrolling the scroll as he went, heedless of the trailing edge that was dragging in what was, and was not, the dusty soil. He tightly clamped down on flares of humor and offended rage alike at each caveat or limitation inked into the contract, poring through the text until he reached the very end.
There was nothing in here he could not live with, or carefully dance around, nothing that truly compromised his free will. And when weighed against the benefits…
“You have a deal,” he said, looking over at Jophiel with red-flecked eyes.
His sister actually gaped.
Lucifer could not stifle a bark of laughter at her expense. It had been, what? Eight or nine millennia since he had seen her caught so thoroughly flatfooted. “Which stipulation did you expect me to fight, sister?” he asked, but his casual tone of voice did little to conceal the venom in his words. “Did you think I would balk at returning to my therapist, the one I selected with no input from the Silver City? Should I beg permission to kill guilt-wracked humans I intend to turn immediately away from my realm? Or was it Amenadiel’s yoke you thought I would balk at?” Lucifer barked another laugh at the spots of color darkening Jophiel’s olive-skinned cheeks.
Lucifer stalked over to the slab of stone where the soul of Philocles had so recently been restrained. He stooped to pick up a stray twig from the ground and spread the scroll on the blood-smeared stone. “You think you wrote this contract to weigh heavily in your own favor,” he said, dipping the tip of the stick into what was, and was not, a smear of Philocles’ blood. He signed his true name, a burning sigil of angelic text, at the end of the scroll, and turned, extending the crude writing implement to his still staring sister. “You don’t know me at all,” he said bitterly.
He probably could have bargained on a few of the points, but what did he care? His Detective, Chloe, was waiting for him.
Jophiel did walk to the stone slab then. She took the stick, distaste finally chasing the shock from her face, but she did sign her name next to Lucifer’s own.
She seemed disquieted now, Heaven’s diplomat unsure if she had misjudged in some way.
Let her worry.
Lucifer stepped back and let his wings spread wide, heart lighter than it had been in… eons.
Jophiel dropped the stick, reaching out a red-smeared hand in protest. “Wait!” she said, startled.
Lucifer just smirked. “You owe me three weeks,” he said.
And shifted across dimensions, following a deeply-buried warmth, a tug in the region of his heart…
… to the balcony of the penthouse above Lux.
Home.