Chapter Text
Not too long after the serpent with the great red eyes broke through the Garden ground like a dead man clawing free from their grave, Caleb stands atop the fence to watch the first humans flee blindly through the dunes.
"Well, that went down like a house of cards." Caleb starts. Beside him now stands what is quite clearly a demon—even without the dark wings and black garb, their purple skin and red eyes and the tail flicking idly about their legs spoke for themselves.
Not to mention the horns.
"Er, sorry, was?" he asks, flustered. He'd been so occupied with his thoughts and transfixed by the flames licking from his—Adam's, now—sword that he hadn't even noticed the person appear.
The demon turns to look at him, their short purple curls flowing like water. "I said, that went down like a house of cards." Their voice lilts with an accent yet to be invented, much like Caleb's.
Caleb nods and shifts, feathers fluffing like the hair on the back of a threatened cat. Those eyes, empty but piercing, are fixed on his. It's... disquieting. "Ja, it did." He tries to break eye contact, looking back to the humans. They've gotten surprisingly far.
"Bit of an overreaction, if you ask me. It was only their first offense. I really don't see what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil, anyway."
Caleb shifts again and coughs. He can feel the demon watching him still, unblinking. "Well... it must be bad, er..." His gaze is drawn back to them, one brow raised in question.
"Lucien," they supply, lips drawing back to show off a canine-heavy grin.
"Lucien," he repeats. For some reason, the name doesn't feel right in his mouth. Too short, too simple for the demon smiling at him. "Otherwise... you would not have tempted them into it."
Lucien rolls their head dismissively. "Oh, they just said 'Get up there, make some trouble. It's what you're good at.'" They lean towards him, making the gap of several feet suddenly feel much too small. "And I am very good at it." Those teeth again.
"Well, ja, you are a... demon, after all, it is what you do."
They lean back, and Caleb can breathe again. "Not very subtle of the Almighty, though." Their eyes snap away, to the humans, now quite in the distance. Caleb relaxes without the pointed weight of their gaze on him. "I mean, fruit tree in the middle of the garden with a great big 'Don't Touch' sign on it. Biggest temptation of them all—bet even you couldn't resist that." They continue before Caleb can question why a defense did not jump to the tip of his tongue, why such a blatant insult from a demon, of all things, did not fill him with anything but weary acceptance. "If it was really so bad, why not put it somewhere no one can touch it? Like the top of a mountain?" Their eyes are back on Caleb and he stiffens. "Or the moon?" They lean towards him again, and Caleb cannot move. "Makes you wonder what God's really planning."
Caleb swallows, eyes on the soft dunes, though he feels the demon's pressing into him like the tip of a flaming sword. "It is not up to us to speculate." He continues with a certainty he does not feel, "It is all part of the Great Plan. It is not for us to understand. It is..." He gestures vaguely. "Ineffable."
Lucien laughs, the sound carried by the wind in a loud tinkling chorus. "Ineffable?"
He repeats what Fjord told him, not too long ago. "It is beyond understanding, and we cannot define it. That is not our job."
The demon, Lucien, is not listening. Though Caleb cannot tell exactly where they are looking from the brief glimpses he takes of their face—a handsome, sharp, charming face—he feels their gaze burn down his body. He fidgets with his robes. "Didn't you have a flaming sword?" they ask abruptly.
"Er." He fidgets some more.
"You did! Flaming like anything, big lovely bonfire with a hilt, what happened to it?"
"Uh."
"Lost it already, did you?" Lucien laughs again. Caleb cannot tell how cruelly.
His fussing hands tug up the loose collar of his robes to his mouth, eyes out on the humans again. He mumbles something through the fabric.
"What?"
"I gave it away."
"You what?" they ask, delighted.
"It is dangerous out there," he protests. Weakly, but. Still. "It will be cold. There are... vicious animals, and Eve is pregnant." After a moment of nerve-wracking silence from Lucien, Caleb admits, "I... can only hope that I did the right thing."
Lucien's smirk fades. "Oh, you're an angel. I don't think you can do the wrong thing."
Caleb almost smiles at that, Lucien's cynicism clear for even him to see. "Oh, thank you." He hopes, and does not hope, that Lucien cannot hear his sarcasm. "I was so worried. I am glad to have your faith in my abilities to put such fears to rest." Lucien doesn't look back to him, but he still feels watched. Studying the way the sun catches on the arch of their throat, he realises they have a third eye, tattooed on their neck. It glares at him.
"I've been worrying too, you know." They sigh, reaching up to tug on the scruff of their chin. "What if I did the right thing? Leading them to eat the apple. A demon can get into a lot of trouble for doing the right thing." Caleb can tell from the angle of their lashes that they're looking at him sidelong, that smile creeping back to their face.
"And we would not want you to get into trouble, Miss? Mister? Lucien."
"Oh, mister is fine for now." Lucien tilts their head at him. "Wouldn't it be funny if we both got it wrong, eh? If I did the good thing, and you the bad."
The mirth drops from Caleb like a stone. "No. No, it would not be funny at all."
Lucien's grin grows.
Some time later, in Mesopotamia, the demon finds him again.
Caleb is wringing his hands in a crowd of humans when Lucien appears at his shoulder, hair longer, eyes just as bright as they take Caleb in like an old friend. "Mister Caleb! Hello again."
"Lucien."
"Oh," they say, still watching him, utterly ignoring the large boat being crammed full of animals in front of the crowd. "Not Lucien anymore."
"Ja? What is it now?"
"Mollymauk." They flash a smile at him. "Molly to my friends."
"Well, Mollymauk," Caleb repeats, "what do you think?" He has to admit, Mollymauk does feel more... right on his tongue than Lucien ever did. But right now he has more important things to think about.
"Think?" They look around when Caleb gestures. "Ah! The whole boat thing? What are they... filling it with animals, what for?"
Caleb watches another animal board. "God has decided to kill the humans they made." His voice is flat, cold.
Mollymauk blinks, and looks from him to the boat to the dozens of innocent humans around them. "What, all of them? How? Why?"
"The world will be flooded by a great rain, and only those on the boat," he says, nodding towards it, "will survive."
"What?" Molly repeats, louder this time, outraged. "Why? What did they do? What could they all possibly have done to deserve that?"
The angel's expression is unreadable. "They failed God."
"What, all of them? I don't fucking think so."
"Enough of them."
"Well—that's—" They turn wildly, taking in the humans who are fated to die and be buried beneath a torrent of rain. "Even the kids? No, no, you can't do that to children. They can't have done anything to deserve that."
Caleb is silent.
Molly is infuriated. "No, that's something demons would try to do—God's supposed to stop that sort of thing, not do it themself."
"The humans must learn their place," Caleb says, with a voice and a will that is not his own.
"They can't learn anything if they're dead!"
"The Almighty is above question, Mollymauk. Even by me. And especially by you."
They look at him again, and he can feel the judgement in those eyes even as he stares blankly forward. A child who can only be six or seven and will not make it to eight brushes past his leg. "You can't really be fine with this."
"Even if I were not fine, there would be nothing I could do."
"Nothing, my ass—you're an angel! We can—" They glance around again. There's only a few dozen humans here, he can do this with some help. "We can get this lot to high ground." They grab his shoulder. Their fingers are long, delicate, clawed. "We can save them, Caleb."
"And why do you think I would do something like that?" Caleb asks. He is a man hewn of stone beneath God's grace, and any other demon would turn from him in defeat. Molly, meanwhile, digs their fingers in deeper.
"You gave them your sword. You gave them a God-gifted flaming sword so they wouldn't get cold." They shake him gently. "I know you weren't supposed to do that. But you did, because it was the right thing to do. This? This is wrong, and you know it."
Caleb still won't meet their gaze. "It will not change anything."
Mollymauk scoffs. "It'll change everything for these people. Literally the difference between life and death, here." Caleb goes quiet again, so he continues. "Listen, all we need to do is move these people to safety. It's what angels do! Your lot go around helping humans all the time. Won't take a minute. Then we can both go back to doing what we're supposed to."
Caleb remains silent and still, eyes downcast, face utterly without expression. Mollymauk's tail whips, sending his robes swishing around his legs. He's just about to run out of patience when Caleb waves a hand and they are all atop a mountain; grassy and covered with trees, the sun in a new position in the sky, clearly far from where they'd been.
The humans cry and scatter, confused, but Molly only has eyes for the angel.
When Caleb finally looks at them, he is blinded. Mollymauk's smile outshines the sun, and right now, it's all for him. He only has a second to reel before that smile gets very close indeed.
Molly is so proud of this strange angel that he really can't resist—and why would he?—covering that stupid, sad face with a handful of kisses. Just his forehead, mind. And his cheeks. Molly even presses a kiss to his nose for good measure, grinning. "You did it! I wasn't sure if you would." He pulls back, gleefully watching the blush rise from Caleb's collar as he tries to sink further into it. "Now, let's go save the rest of them, hmm?"
Caleb's indignation overrules his shock. "The rest? Mollymauk, you only said we would save these humans."
"Yes, well, had to, you know? Foot in the door and all. Well? Let's go. I can't go around saving people all day. Might ruin my terrible reputation."
Mollymauk is still far too close for Caleb to think up any further retort, and the demon takes his silence for acceptance and whisks them away to another group of humans.
They meet several more times over the years, Mollymauk's hair changing styles, his horns gaining piercings and more tattoos spreading like ivy across his body, while Caleb stays mostly the same. He lets his hair grow out some, coincidentally after Molly toys with a strand and says he looks nice with longer hair, but otherwise his appearance is clearly of less consequence to him than Mollymauk's own is to him.
He does, on one occasion, find himself quietly pitying humans for missing out on Mollymauk's true self. He isn't sure what they do see, but they certainly miss out on the horns, the skin, and the eyes. Not to mention the tail that has, on more than one occasion, found itself wrapped around his calf when he does something Mollymauk likes.
Caleb has, as a result of this habit, collected a mental catalogue of all the things that prompted Mollymauk to trace some part of him with his tail: Caleb saving people, for example. Caleb smiling. Caleb laughing. Caleb (once) making a joke. Every time he reveals that he has named another cat Frumpkin. Whenever Caleb goes off on a tangent about whatever rare book he's managed to find—a strange one to entertain Mollymauk so, since Caleb knows well that heathen doesn't read.
Once, in Greece, he grows curious and asks to see Mollymauk's other face; the ones that humans see. And Mollymauk, as always, obliges with a snap of his fingers.
His face and body stay the same, as does the texture and length of his hair, the sharp curve of his nails, the tattoos. The thickness of his lashes. But his purple skin shifts to a tanned human shade, and Caleb is startled despite himself when he meets Mollymauk's eyes and sees pupils and irises—brown ones. Dark and warm like coffee. When he grins, his teeth are blunt and human. Caleb supposes this is how Mollymauk looked before his fall.
When Caleb can't stop staring, Mollymauk does a flashy twirl that sends his peplos swirling around his ankles. "How do I look?"
"Ah," stutters Caleb, "you—you look. Good. Ja. Very... good. As always. You know you do." It's strange to know where Mollymauk is looking without simply having to feel for it.
"Well, of course. But it's always nice to get an outside opinion."
After they talk for a few minutes more, Caleb has to ask him to take his mirage down. It is... distracting to know for certain just how often Mollymauk's gaze falls on his lips. He absolutely does not tell Mollymauk that this is the reason he asked him to switch back.