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She found him in the library, where she often did, alone. The Avatar of Wrath, for all the deafening thunder of his fiery reputation, lived for the solace found in quiet corners of the Devildom. He was most at home in the library or his room with a book, a cup of tea, and the hum of a fire to quiet his thoughts.
"Hello," she said, "I knew I'd find you here."
Satan gave her a gentle smile.
"I'm easy to find, if you know where to look." There was an intimacy implied between them; she always knew where to look.
The events of the week before had been taxing for everyone. The revelation of Lilith's human life and the repercussions of Lucifer's deal with Diavolo reverberated through the House of Lamentation like a bell had been rung, calling them to mourn their sister anew.
The elder brothers—Lucifer, Mammon, and Leviathan—sulked in their collective guilt while the younger brothers—Asmodeus and Beelzebub—worried after the recently freed Belphegor.
Satan, as always, was caught in the middle, twisting silently with complicated emotions. He’d escaped to the solace of the library, leaving his brothers to their grief. It had almost been prophetic of a Diavolo to assign him the role of the middle child. It suited him, the oft-forgotten fourth brother, as he was long-suffering despite his fatal sin.
“How are you?” She asked, sitting carefully on the arm of his chair. If he were in a better mood, she’d turn and rest her legs across his lap or drape an arm across his shoulders. If he were in a better mood, he’d loop an arm around her waist or pull her from her perch and into the large chair with him.
His hands remained firmly on the book in his lap. She kept her distance.
Satan turned, looking her up and down. His expression was soft but reserved, like he was holding back crashing waves with nothing more than an umbrella.
“Family therapist,” he accused.
She only shrugged. The joke held a piece of the truth. She’d been checking in on all of the brothers since the incident, offering an empathetic ear. And, on a grander scale, she was always attentive of the brothers’ feelings.
In the beginning, this had been a method of survival—she’d felt it prudent to avoid demons in poor moods for her own safety. Now that she no longer feared the brothers, she found that a lot was to be gained by allowing them to open up to her. She’d made herself indispensable to the Devildom, just by being a good friend to her hosts.
"Your friend," she reminded him, though she'd be lying if she said she didn't desire to be more. And there'd been whispers between the brothers that Satan felt the same.
They all cared for her, that was abundantly clear in the way they doted on her and fought constantly for her attention, but they were starting to catch on to the special care she gave to Satan in return.
Just before the incident, she'd finally made her pact with the Avatar of Wrath. The other pacts had been easy enough—any reluctance had been mostly for show—but Satan had been more sanctimonious about the ordeal. In private conversations, he’d expressed that he feared for the transmutation that their relationship would undergo by way of the pact. He was afraid of the commitment, too. Her reassurances had been enough, in the end, as well as the knowledge that she'd been afraid of the same things.
When the pact was finally formed, it was true that something had shifted between them. There was that same supernatural feeling of trust that she'd been imbued with, just like with the other pacts. There was that same intimacy, as well, when they touched foreheads and she got the tiny glimpse into his mind that such contact afforded her. There was something else with Satan, though, that took some time to appear.
By the time she'd fully inhabited the feeling, they were swept up into Lucifer's revelations and into Belphegor's escape from the attic. There was no time, with the brothers so out of sorts in the fallout, to wonder after the pit in her stomach.
Satan hummed noncommittally. Fear of his fatal sin kept him from allowing himself closeness to others, she knew this. Still, she pushed.
She didn't fear him.
Really, of all the brothers, she'd always felt safest with Satan. He was soft-spoken and stoic but he never came across as cold or intimidating. His characteristic silence came with a strong, calming aura. Silent moments by his side felt like taking refuge in the shade beneath a tall camphor tree.
"You know, you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to," she said, "but I enjoy hearing your thoughts."
Satan usually responded to gentle prodding. He needed to know that she cared, that she wasn't just checking with him out of some sense of obligation.
"My thoughts are complicated."
She laughed. "Aren't they always?"
Satan sighed, dropping the book from his lap onto the table next to him. He surprised her, then, by taking one of her hands into his own. He was careful, balancing their interwoven hands on her knee.
He didn't like to be touched when he was upset, so, even though he'd initiated contact, she kept still so as not to overwhelm him.
"Tell me," she said, after a moment of silence passed between them. "Even if I don't understand, I'll listen."
He squeezed her hand and began, "You know that I wasn't born in the Celestial Realm like the others, right?"
"Right." She didn’t understand this exactly, but she knew enough to follow the threads of worry that extended from the event of Satan’s creation.
"That means that I never met Lilith. I know about her, but she was gone before I was..." He hesitated to say 'born.’ That wasn't quite the right word. He shook his head. "I have these bits of me that aren't me and all of those pieces remember loving her."
She held tight to his hand as he shuddered. Though she couldn’t quite grasp the way Satan had come into being, she knew that he struggled with feeling like some part of him would always belong to something or someone else.
It was where his anger toward Lucifer stemmed from, this feeling of a debt forever unpaid.
"Do you wish you had gotten to know her?" She asked, unsure if this was the right question but hoping it would keep him talking.
"Maybe." He frowned. That wasn't it. "I think... I resent the inauthenticity of the feelings."
The answer was so precise, so narrow. He'd pinpointed the issue exactly. She wondered how long he'd had to sit there, half of his mind occupied with a novel while the other half grasped for the perfect verbiage to wholly encapsulate his frustration.
“That is complicated.”
The problems that the demons had were far beyond her as a human, though this was something she’d never admit to any of the brothers out loud. She usually found herself unable to offer advice. This time, though, she had a unique perspective in that Lucifer had offered insight on this same issue.
While Satan was created from Lucifer’s wrath and bore the curse of this as his fatal sin, his positive traits were all his own. He was uniquely able to mitigate the effects of his flaw, and uniquely steadfast in his concern for doing so.
It was a testament to Satan’s will that Lucifer so often found it hard to relate to him. Those parts of Satan that held foreign memories weren’t so much pieces of Lucifer as they were the foundations of Satan’s own life.
These feelings for his sister and these echoes of the Celestial Realm were as much Satan’s as they were Lucifer’s—they were his birthright.
She took a breath, wishing she shared Satan’s grasp on language as she searched for the proper words to express all of this.
“You’re going to hate that I’ve heard about this from Lucifer,” she began, finding it easiest to come clean ahead of what she had to say, “but I know he worries about most of the same things you do.”
Expecting anger, she paused, waiting for Satan to object. Instead, his face remained fixed, his mouth a thin line, his brows furrowed as he listened intently.
It struck her, in times like these, how much the brothers trusted her. Against all odds, against everything they’d been taught to believe about humans, they cared for what she had to say.
“All of those feelings are yours, because they’re a part of you.” She spoke in a soft voice, hoping to convey that she believed this to be a good thing. “That’s enough. There’s no use ignoring the way you feel just because it doesn’t make sense.”
“Hm.” Satan was thinking, there was no use for words as he took in what she was saying.
“When I made the pacts, there was this sudden wave of trust and affection every time. Those feelings are real, even if they originated from some place outside of me.”
“Right.” He nodded, looking away. She could see the ideas shifting behind his flickering eyes.
She squeezed his hand, bringing him back to her.
“I’m sorry if I’m speaking out of turn, I just worry about you.”
“I know.” He laughed. “You’re the only one who ever does.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
He turned back to her, flashing an odd grin. “I’m not just taking your word for it.”
“Fine.” She could convince him that his brothers cared for him another day. It was enough, in that moment, that he knew she cared for him. That war had seen many a losing battle.
“Thank you,” he said. “For finding me.”
Satan wouldn’t admit it, but she could tell by his lightened mood that she’d gotten through to him. This was as close as she’d get to him admitting that she was right. The problem wasn’t solved, necessarily, but he could move forward with new, more hopeful datapoints to tangle with.
He raised her hand to his lips, pressing a gentle kiss to the inside of her wrist.
“You always know where to look.”