Chapter Text
It started with a falling star.
Lucifer didn’t see it with his own two eyes. He was too caught up in catching Charlie. The world around him could have been ending and he wouldn't have been able to look away from her; the blood and scratches covering her person, the terror wrought across her face, every inch of damage that Adam and his cronies had done.
He knew that for a fact, for the world ended in that moment and he didn’t realize until it was too late.
Lucifer didn’t see the star with his own two eyes, but he saw it reflected in Charlie’s, with horror and awe. The first part made sense immediately. He wouldn’t understand the reason for the second until years later.
Charlie had never seen a real star. For all the horror that it wrought, the one that fell upon Hell must have been beautiful for a moment.
She parted her lips to say something, but the hope that she may be able to give a warning was gone before she tried. When the sky fell, it did so quickly. No one had a chance to run. No one had a chance to hide. No one had a chance to make a difference.
No one except for him.
Lucifer was too late to save the world, but he was fast enough to save his world.
He felt the light before he saw it. It was a wave of power unlike anything that he’d felt since the beginning, holy intertwined with something beyond infernal. It clung to his skin and tried to seep through, an oily magic that reeked of rot and decay and an end that made death look like a mercy.
The years took their toll. Lucifer couldn’t remember the last time he truly acted without thinking, too caught up in anxiety and regret for instinct to hold any power. Even saving Charlie was premeditated in that he had spent hours stewing in dread and fear before deciding to do whatever it took to keep her alive when the extermination came. The touch of something darker than his own mind that awakened the part of him that had long since fallen into lethargy. The end arrived and Lucifer disappeared in a puff of red smoke, holding Charlie tight and taking her as far from the disease as he could.
That should have been the very edge of Hell. He was supposed to feel himself tearing through the walls between the rings to bring them as far down as possible. Such a feat took time though, even for him, and he didn’t have time. He didn’t have so much as a second. Lucifer pulled Charlie through the space between spaces for the span of a single heartbeat, only to be struck by a sudden absence. It was a familiar sensation, the same one that he’d felt when he was cut off from Heaven’s light.
When he thought he had been cut off.
As the untold profane took hold of hell, he realized that some spark had remained, even in his darkest hours. He knew its presence from its loss. A warmth that he hadn’t known to appreciate faded from the air. His power disappeared like a light switched off, leaving behind only the last crackling whispers of energy. He felt like a shell of a person when he reappeared in the skies of hell, his daughter grasped tight in his arms.
Lucifer had been a shell for a long time.
The ache of magic’s absence weighed too heavily for him to stay aloft; it wasn’t so overwhelming as to kill all sense. He flared his wings out and focused on slowing his descent as he looked for a decent place to land. In the process, he took in what he could of his surroundings. Dilapidated buildings, empty streets, more space than he is used to seeing; he may not have been able to get them out of the Pride Ring, but he got them far, far away from Pentagram City.
He would recognize that for the miracle it was later.
Right then, there was nothing but light.
It was beyond blinding, the sort of white that could only be born from the divine. It overtook him the second his feet hit the ground, a wave of oblivion crashing over the entirety of damnation and bringing with it the same warped magic he ran from. With a ragged gasp, Lucifer seized hold of what sparks of power remained within him, prepared to drain himself dry in order to protect Charlie.
He never got the chance. The power within the light only gnawed at them until it found the spark of life inside, at which point it bounced off as soon as it had come.
It left them.
It didn’t leave.
Lucifer felt it moving forward, spreading further, deeper, promising to seep into the parts of hell that even he had never stepped foot in.
He’d never really cared about his people. Hell has always been worthless for him. Lilith and Charlie were to be protected, but if the end were to come for the realm itself, he knew he wouldn’t care.
He thought he wouldn’t care.
Like a knife to the heart, as he felt the unstoppable power of the end surge forward, it struck him that he may have been wrong.
When he turned around to see the glowing white light clinging to the distant form of Pentagram City, breathing a sickness just to the left of death into hell with the same dedication that he once breathed life into the earth, he realized that he had no idea what real damnation was.
*
The light had died out by the time Charlie regained consciousness.
He didn’t think that the light was the reason she passed out. She was never an angel with heavenly magic to lose access to. Whatever that holy curse was, he could feel that it didn’t stick to her. Her exhaustion was probably because of that angelic bastard.
And maybe a little him snatching her out of the air and teleporting her across the Pride Ring at the speed of light, but…
Mostly Adam.
Adam. He was an angel with heavenly magic. Heaven, which was nowhere to be found now. It had been closed to Lucifer for so long, but that was the lock of a closed door. What he felt now was the absence of a door altogether. If Adam was still alive, then he should be just as trapped as him. Because he is trapped, he would be feeling the same thing he was: the screaming of nerves that he didn’t even know he had as a fundamental part of him was cut off. No, not off. Out. It would feel like a part of home as being carved out, but so, so much worse. Lucifer had little divinity left in him to begin with.
Adam…
He must feel an awful lot like Lucifer had, all those thousands of years ago
Good.
He wanted to find comfort in Charlie’s safety and satisfaction in Adam’s damnation. He couldn’t. After all, instinct wouldn’t have driven him to take her and hide away in some dilapidated house that smelled of piss and drugs if she were safe. How could he give a fuck about her would-be murderer’s suffering when she was going to face the same hell as him?
There is one thing that offered him a drop of bitter relief.
He didn’t know what had happened to his kingdom yet.
Inevitably, Charlie gasped awake with a strangled cry of, “Is everyone okay!?”
Because he didn’t know what happened, he was able to honestly say, “I don’t know.”
Lucifer laid his hand on Charlie’s shoulder in a wordless request for her to stay down. She forced her way upright anyway. He reigned in his impulse to force the matter at the sight of the desperate terror in her eyes. If he knew his daughter, and he liked to think that he did by this point, then all that he would succeed in doing was making her more upset.
“How can you not know!?” Charlie cried. She looked frantically around the scuzzy room that he’d holed them up in, fists clenching around the ratty gray blanket covering the bed beneath her. “Dad, where are we?”
“I don’t know,” Lucifer said. Three damning words that he could already tell that they were both going to come to hate, but he would be forced to repeat all the same. “There wasn’t time to decide where to go or grab anyone else. I’m sorry, Charlie.”
His heart broke in two at the grief with which his daughter looked back at him.
It warmed with pride at the shadow of a shadow slowly rising up beneath it, burning and unyielding.
More than anything, however, he feared what might come of all of it.
“What did Adam do?” she breathed.
“It wasn’t Adam,” Lucifer said.
Confusion broke through Charlie’s grief and terror. “Then… What…?”
“I don’t know,” Lucifer repeated. Again.
No. He wasn’t going to spend who knew how long repeating those damn words over and over again. He didn’t know what had happened? Great! He was the fucking devil. If he didn’t know what was happening, then he was willing to bet that no one else knew either. He could try to piece it together though. It probably wouldn’t amount too much, but it was a sight better than nothing.
Lucifer took a deep breath and tried again. “I think it was heaven. They dropped some sort of—” He stopped himself short of saying ‘bomb’. He didn’t know why. With everything that was already happening, it made no sense for a single, accurate, descriptive word to cross some sort of line. Yet the sight of Charlie’s face had him pushing it aside and continuing, “—Spell. It was holy, but it didn’t feel that way.”
“The star,” Charlie whispered.
“What?”
“What kind of spell was it?”
Lucifer frowned. “You can’t feel it?”
“Not… Really?” Charlie squirmed in place. “Something feels wrong, but I thought that was just because because of…” Her face darkened. Everything about her went distant for a short while. At the same time, he knew exactly what she was seeing. He knew what she was going to say before she jerked back to the present and asked, “Do you think it hurt anyone?”
…Oh.
Well. Fuck.
A moment ago he had been thinking about how much he never wanted to say ‘I don’t know’ again. Then Charlie asked that question, and all of a sudden, he wished that he could repeat those words without it being a bold-faced lie.
It was kind of funny in a sick and twisted sort of way.
He wondered if anyone in hell was laughing right now.
For all of his ignorance of the situation, he suspected that the answer was no.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said. Three more words that he knew he was going to end up saying a lot. Three words that he wouldn’t stop saying, no matter how much he came to hate them. “I think it hurt everyone. Whatever was in the spell, it felt like decay. Heaven cut off all connections with hell as soon as it dropped. I think they even locked the exorcists out.”
“Are you saying that they killed everyone!?” Charlie shouted.
With that, there was absolutely no stopping her. Charlie jumped to her feet and raced out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and toward the front door that he had barely thought to bar. Lucifer was helpless to do anything but raced out of her.
“Charlie, wait!”
“No! I need to help! We’re still alive, so there must be other survivors too! I need to—”
“Charlie! Stop!”
Lucifer caught her wrist an instant before she could reach the door. She whirled on him with eyes that blazed not with anger, but something far, far worse. Grief. Guilt. The look of a girl who was going to look at whatever sight met her and take the blame squarely on her own shoulders.
“I don’t think they killed anyone,” he said.
“You… Don’t?”
She sounded like she wanted to be hopeful. The hesitancy written across her features told him she knew better.
He wished that she didn’t have it.
“Whatever that magic was, it hit us and it didn’t do anything. It only pushed as far as my life force and then moved on. I think…” Lucifer swallowed the bile that was trying to rise up his throat. “I think it was looking for people who were already dead.”
“Dead?” Charlie whispered. “But… Why?”
Lucifer knew the answer to that question too. Once again, he wished that he didn’t.
Maybe he just wasn’t going to like talking at all for a long while. Goodness knew that Charlie deserved better than whatever reassurance and comfort he could give her right now. But the world was unfair, hell was sick, and heaven was even worse, and that meant he was all she had.
That meant that he had to try to do his best for her despite being forced to say, “Because they thought that this would be more effective than killing us.”
Charlie stayed still long enough for the image of horror dawning on her to forever carve itself into his memory. No longer, no shorter. A hesitation long enough to serve as a brand on his soul, then she pulled her wrist out of his hand and turned toward the door with a declaration of, “I need to see what’s out there.”
“Charlie—”
“No!” She pressed her back against the door when she turned back to him. Her hand was already on the doorknob, poised to pull it open at a moment’s notice. “We can’t hide out here forever. We’re going to need to go out eventually. The sooner we do, the sooner we can help with whatever’s going on out there.”
“…Okay,” Lucifer breathed.
“Okay?” Charlie repeated.
“Okay,” he said. “We can go outside, but you need to stick close to me, and the second that something goes wrong, we’re out of there.”
Charlie’s grin was simultaneously one of the worst and bravest things he had ever seen. “Unless there’s something that we can do to fix it.”
He didn’t know how to tell her that whatever was out there was guaranteed to be beyond fixing.
He settled for offering his own weak, horrible smile and, for the sake of letting her hold onto her hope for a little while, to appease his own cowardice, to keep them both out of the abyss for a little while longer, he repeated, “Unless there’s something we can do to fix it.”
“Thank you, dad,” Charlie said.
“Don’t thank me,” Lucifer whispered.
Charlie lingered on the verge of speaking for a few seconds; the time that it took for her to accept that there was nothing to be said.
She opened the door and stepped out into oblivion.
Lucifer followed her, for it was the only thing he could possibly do.
*
A noxious, magical haze of what Lucifer could only describe as infection hung heavily in the air, yet the neighborhood they had landed in looked the same as ever. At least, he assumed it was the same. The streets were shady, gritty, and generally hellish with lots of shattered windows and a few severed limbs, but this was hell. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, as he has assured Charlie after they walked out the door. In some parts of his kingdom crawls and dismemberment-type violence for typical ‘it’s a day that ends in y’ sort of activities.
That had probably been what he heard for… what the first five hours? That sounded about right. Charlie had been unconscious for nine hours. For the first five, sounds that he tried his very best not to listen to echoed through the windows. Then, in the fifth hour, it went quiet again.
That was normal too. Those sorts of sounds came with brawls and turf wars. It hadn’t been worth telling Charlie and scaring her worse than it was. It wasn’t worth his attention at all.
So! If he discarded that, nothing seemed wrong other than the suffocating spelling hanging in the air.
Nothing save for the emptiness of the streets.
They had been walking for over half an hour and hadn’t seen a single soul. It was true that some parts of hell weren’t as populated as others, but wherever they were was meant to be a populated area. There were houses, for fuck’s sake! Even if the place was mostly abandoned, it should have been impossible for them to go that long without seeing anyone. Heck, the brawl-sounds were proof that there were people.
…The sounds that had ended four hours ago.
Charlie had been unconscious for nine hours.
Lucifer looked down at his feet. The pavement beneath was stained in varying shades of mottled, rusty red.
Lots of things in hell were red.
He didn’t remember what color the ground had been when he landed, but there was every chance that…
No.
He was the one who had warned Charlie that the hell she stepped into was going to be even worse than the one she remembered. He already knew that what they found would be beyond helping. Why start lying to himself now?
Lucifer looked up at the sky.
Heaven wasn’t visible anymore.
Did that mean they’d finally decided that there wasn’t anything that they could do to hurt him and his family even worse? Were they finally satisfied?
Lucifer half expected to hear the universe laughing at him, because of course they wouldn’t be.
He got a groan instead.
Charlie was the first one to react. She was moving before he had even registered it, drawn to any sign of life and the hope that came with it like a moth to a flame.
She moved too fast to realize that the thing she was racing toward wasn’t alive at all.
It walked with an odd, shambling gait, head tilted and body twitching spastically with every step. The green scales covering its body had faded into a sickly pale coloration. A chunk of them had been torn off near its upper arm, leaving a bloody mass of a wound behind.
At a glance, it looked like it might still be a woman. To anyone who couldn’t see what he saw, it might look like a person who could be saved. A person in a truly terrible condition, but a person nonetheless. There was an untold number of things that could reduce someone to something akin to a walking corpse in the depths of hell. Lucifer could think of at least twenty of them at the top of his head.
None of them could cause the hazy film over the creature’s eyes. None of them would leave bloody strings of drool dripping out of its mouth.
A virus could. He didn’t know of any that could reduce someone to the empty shell that stood before him now – heck, he didn’t know very much about medicine at all – but there was doubtlessly some combination of disease that could ravage the body in such a way.
Add a strong enough dose of magic to the mix, and you could turn that virus into something that transcended flesh and blood.
Lucifer looked at the thing that had once been a person, felt the hollow waves of rot and darkness radiating off of it, and saw a fate worse than oblivion.
Charlie looked at it and saw someone in need of her help.
“Are you okay!?” she cried as she raced toward it. “What happened? If you tell me, we’ll do everything we can to he–”
The beast opened its mouth and lunged at Charlie with an ear-piercing screech. It was faster than anything so clumsy had any right to be.
Lucifer was faster. His hand clasped around Charlie’s wrist a second before blood-splattered teeth could sink into her outstretched hand. With an unforgiving flap of exhausted wings, he pulled her up into the air. Her feet kicked a scant few inches above the thing’s head in the precarious moments where she dangled by her wrist. A surge of the same burning dedication that had once let him save the woman he loved from heaven itself allowed him to pull her up as if his muscles and magic alike weren’t quivering with every move he made.
Charlie twisted in his arms. “Let me go! I need to help her!”
Lucifer automatically tightened his arms around her waist. He imagined that it had to be a little uncomfortable, but at this point, that was the least important thing. “It tried to bite you!”
“Look at her! She’s scared and confused! I have to try to—”
“No!” he shouted. “There’s nothing you can do to help her, Charlie!”
His brave, beautiful, reckless, dangerously selfless daughter responded by struggling harder. “There has to be! She might be disoriented! If she hit her head, maybe we can find somewhere she can rest and—”
“She’s already dead!”
Charlie stilled so completely and suddenly that it was as if she herself had become a corpse. It allowed Lucifer to pull her higher. It did nothing to bring him even an iota of comfort. Not that he cared about that. He would gladly be miserable for the rest of his existence if it could spare Charlie’s heart when she reached the same realization that had begun to dawn upon him.
It couldn’t. Nothing could. The only thing he had to be grateful for was that he couldn’t see her expression as they climbed higher and higher into the sky. Her eyes were still locked onto the walking corpse they had left behind.
It twisted and spat at them for a while longer before accepting that they were well out of reach and limping away.
“What do you mean she’s dead?” she whispered as it walked away.
“Its soul is gone or…” Broken. Eradicated. Warped into something that was no longer recognizable as a person, even a loathsome one. “…It’s not there anymore. I could feel the magic coming from it and… Charlie… It felt sick.”
Charlie shook her head. “How could she be sick if she’s dead?”
“The person is gone. The body she left behind is sick.” His grip on his daughter tightened once more. This time, she leaned into his touch.
“Is it the sort of sick that can spread?” she asked, voice trembling with every syllable.
He would give anything, anything at all, for this not to be happening. He would throw himself at Adam’s feet and let heaven laugh in his face as it struck him down if it would undo what had been done.
That would not be happening. It would mean that he was actually doing something good. Heaven, hell, and everything in between knew that would never happen.
“I think that’s the point,” he whispered. “I think the wound on its arm was a bite.”
“You mean… You think that anyone who…”
Lucifer had never associated heartbreak with any specific sound. A sob was probably what came the closest, but people sobbed for many reasons, many of them silly. It didn’t feel like there was a sound capable of encapsulating the true depths of agony that a soul could feel.
The sound that left Charlie’s lips proved him wrong.
Lucifer saw the same thing that she did. It did not break his heart in the same way it did her. Perhaps it would later. Fuck, it probably would. He wished that it wouldn’t, but he didn’t think that there was a depression cocoon in the world that could make someone immune to…
Later. He would let himself mourn later. He would look back at the kingdom he had been given, the people he and failed right when he realized that they may have deserved better, and pinpoint all of the places he went wrong later. For now, he held his daughter close and turned to fly her further away from the city.
She was trembling in his arms. It was honestly really impressive that, apart from that initial burst of despair that would ring in his ears forever, she was able to keep her sobs too quiet for him to hear.
He wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to make that effort. She shouldn’t need to hold herself together. It was another thing that shouldn’t be yet decidedly was, another desire of his that would amount to nothing. Although he would never, ever let Charlie fall, it was already difficult enough to keep them aloft. If she moved too much, it would take that much longer for him to get her to safety.
As if there was anywhere left in hell that was safe.
There were places that were harder to reach though, little holes and hovels where few souls cared to live even in the midst of an overpopulation crisis. The fewer people that were around, the fewer people could get sick. The further away from everyone he kept Charlie, the longer than she would live.
If she lived long enough, then she would live through this. Lucifer had not made a miracle happen for a very long time. Not since he was a different person. For her sake, he would try to be that person once again.
And only for her.
As far as he knew, she was the only thing that was left to save. If she wasn’t, then he wasn’t going to risk her trying to fight in what was so clearly a losing battle.
No. Not a losing battle. It was a battle that had already been lost.
Lucifer did not dare turn back. He could not bring himself to look back. He knew what he would see if he did. If he looked again…
He didn’t want to look. He wanted to close his eyes and never open them again.
Lucifer never wanted to close his eyes again, for he knew what he would see every time he did for the rest of eternity.
What remained of a neighborhood clustered together in an impenetrable, lurching mob of desolation, steadily marching deeper into Pentagram City in their quest to sate their accursed hunger.
And devour what little life had managed to flourish in the depths of damnation.