Chapter Text
When they woke up the next morning, Alastor and Lucifer did not talk about it.
When they packed their bags, zipped up their suitcases, it hung over their heads. The divots dug deep by Lucifer’s claws stung horribly on Alastor’s back, and the space shared between their rib cages ached and whined and crowed like a howling animal. And they did not talk about it.
They greeted Charlie in the early morning of Wrath, the sun beating down on them. She looked at the bags held in Alastor’s hands, the devils silly suitcase rolling behind him, and the bruises that were still kissed into Lucifer’s jaw. She worried her lip, and did not say anything.
They ate a fairly awful breakfast at a shabby diner. The coffee was poor – water, practically, and it did nothing but sour Alastor’s mood. He could feel a headache growing somewhere between his eyes, and he pressed a finger to his temple, trying to stave it off.
And they did not talk about it.
In fact, the first words Alastor heard Lucifer say at all that morning was when he picked up the phone.
The terrible cellular device played a god-awful tune, and the angel fumbled to take it out of his pocket. The moment he saw the screen, his face pinched, and something like a rumbling growl reverberated through Lucifer’s soul into Alastor’s own. Fury.
“I’ll be right back,” he said with a barely concealed snarl, pushing his half-eaten chicken and waffles away and wandering outside, the bell on the door rattling against Alastor’s skull.
Charlie and Alastor sat in silence, pushing their food – a plate of french toast, eggs, and bacon they elected to share because neither of them were quite so hungry, and every dish seem to have something viciously sweet on it. Their forks scraped on the plate, something weighted heavy on their shoulders. Alastor could apply a metaphor to it, if he tried; the sky on Atlas’s hands, or the trudge of Sisyphus’s boulder. Half baked and half thought. He was, frankly, far too exhausted to think deeper about it.
Charlie worried her lip, tapping her fork against the plates ceramic edge. Her eyes kept glancing to the ring on Alastor’s finger – one that he had not thought, not even once, to remove until now, under her gaze. Maybe he should have, but that horrible word residing within him does not allow it.
Alastor sighed, placing down his fork gently. “Out with it, then.”
Her eyes snapped up to him, wide with the remarkable impression of a deer in headlights. “It’s- it’s okay.”
“Charlie,” he urged, coaxing her far more gently than he intended to.
She shifted in her seat. “Just-“ the princess struggled with her words, for a moment, pursing her lips. “Just be good to him, okay? He doesn’t…talk about it a lot. Or at all. But he and mom- they weren’t- they weren’t happy, anymore.” And she fixed him, then, with a firm, unblinking stare that had him rapidly reminded that she was centuries old. Wise as she was naive. “I just want him to be happy.”
And that.
That, for some reason, had Alastor fumbling so terribly he blurted the first thing that came to mind. “We’re getting a divorce.”
Charlie’s face fell. “Oh.”
“Yes.” Alastor cleared his throat, taking his cup of cold coffee in hand but not drinking from it. “When we get back to the hotel. He didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head, wild strands of hair escaping her braid that she tucked feverishly behind her ears. “No! He just said it was-“ she clamped her teeth around the words, face pinching into something awfully akin to pity when she looked at him. “It was a mistake.”
He hummed, and the static in his throat tasted like bile, or blood, choking him. “Ah, well.” He waved a hand around vaguely. “It was. Of course it was, don’t worry your head about it, dear. Your father wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t in his right mind, I assure you.”
“Would you have?”
“Hm?”
Those wise, childishly wide eyes bore into him. There was a furrow in her brow, and a frown playing on her lips, like he was a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out. “Would you have done it, in your right mind?”
For a very telling moment, Alastor does not answer.
“No.” He lied. “I would never.”
Charlie nodded like he gave her all the answers, and also like she knew he was completely full of it. “Okay.” She picked up a piece of bacon, dipping it in syrup. “Just, you can be happy too, y’know.”
The silence settled over them again, and they did not talk about it.
***
Evidently, they did not get divorced when they got back to the hotel.
Alastor feels he should not be so relieved – for his love he was selfish, but he would also be selfless, if he must. Lucifer was angry, frazzled, when he informed Alastor that the lawyer he employed had not even drafted the papers.
Days passed, then weeks. They didn’t talk about it to any of the guests, or staff – it simply wasn’t their business – but the gossiping whispers of Angel, Cherri, and a reluctant Husker had Alastor a bit on edge. They didn’t talk about it, but the matching rings on their fingers was confirmation enough, he supposed.
They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t really talk at all, actually.
They would pass each other silently in halls; they would stand shoulder to shoulder in elevator, far closer than necessary; they would pause when they found themselves at the bar at the same time, a glass of cherry wine held in Lucifer’s hands that Alastor knew could be so gentle and cold and a tumbler of rye in Alastor's, with fingers Lucifer knew could be so warm within him. They would leave quickly, flee, for the fear they would make another mistake. One they could not take back.
Charlie spent these weeks being less than subtle about trying to get them alone with each other. Sending them out on errands, having them participate in group activities as a team, leaving them to do paperwork while she went to get fucking water. Anything she could think of, she tried. Lucifer had surely picked up on it, and he did not talk about it. Or at least, he did not talk about it to Alastor. Because they weren’t talking.
Alastor cannot recall a time when he had been so lonely.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have noticed, if he wasn’t in love. He would have relished in the absence of the kings voice that grated against his ears – but the thing is, he’s struggling to think back to a time where he wasn’t in love with him. As if, now that he was, he always had been. He was in love back when they fought over the curtains, and he was in love when they bared their teeth at each other the first time they met, and he was in love when he first saw Lucifer’s face, printed on a newspaper some fifty, or sixty, or seventy years ago now.
He thinks he was in love the moment his parents dragged him to church and he learned about a garden, and an apple, and a snake. He thinks he was in love when he poured over tomes to summon something. Something he didn’t care for, at the time, but some part of him wishes it was Lucifer that had answered his call.
Perhaps in another life.
Weeks pass. Alastor goes through it like motions. Meetings, late night work, plumbing issues, and new guests that don’t stay for long. The warm, wriggling thing that is Lucifer in his chest is known. Always known.
Some days, it rubs against his own heart like it is a physical thing. It’ll jump, and stutter, and writhe around. Sometimes Alastor will look down at his own bare chest and expect to see something, but he doesn’t know what. What does a soul look like? Light, perhaps. Or a song. Can a song be physical?
He attempts to ignore it, and fails. It tugs mercilessly at his sternum, drawing him somewhere.
And right now, at this very moment, it is furious.
Sharp like a thousand daggers, arrow points, swords. Burning like hell fire. He lets his own half, the one taken from him and put inside the devil, bite and gnash back but Lucifer’s soul does not relent – so here is how Alastor finds himself; storming across the long, endless hallway between their quarters to chew out the angel himself for being incessantly annoying.
He doesn’t manage that far. The grand doors to the kings room are open, like they had been burst through in a hurry. With no wood to muffle it, Lucifer’s voice carried and echoed.
“We don’t have any assets to settle-“ He cut off with a sigh. “I have told you already, it’s going to be an amicable divorce. We just need the papers.” Quiet, for a moment, before he grumbled something under his breath.
Alastor leaned against the doorframe, silent and unnoticed, barely respecting the No Alastors plaque on the wall outside. He watched as Lucifer paced back and forth, practically burning a hole in the carpet, his long, leathery tail whipping behind him. He was dressed down, rather simply, in a large sweater and the same shorts that he had taken off himself when they had sex last. Shorts that left his legs bare and open, smooth and gorgeous. And also, slippers in the shape of ducks.
Wasn’t he so beautiful?
“Oh, because you’re so busy, right?” Lucifer rolls his eyes, holding the phone between the crook of his neck and his shoulder, manifesting a wine bottle with a cork he popped off with the tip of his claw, pouring a generous amount into a floating wineglass before taking a sip. “How are you such a flimsy fucking lawyer? Your ancestors did it just fucking finewhen I got divorced two hundred years ago.” He snarled at something the other person said down the line. “How about this; you make up these papers by, let’s say, tomorrow, and I won’t, let’s say, take my business elsewhere and throw you into next Sunday where you’ll have to face those ancestors of yours yourself, who will be sorely disappointed in you and your poor firm.”
There was a staggering silence. Something in Alastor's chest throbbed, and he can’t tell if it’s Lucifer’s putrid, acidic anger or something all his own he doesn’t have the name to. It aches.
Lucifer hisses down the line. “Fantastic.” Before he hangs up, hurling his phone at his mattress with an angry yell that had fire spitting from his throat. He whirls around to his open door, and only then does he notice Alastor standing there.
The air around them is stifling. Suffocating. The anger melts from Lucifer’s eyes, and he looks at Alastor. Looks at him, and Alastor is a little less lonely, under his attention. He hates it, he hates him. Alastor hates him, how this man – the angel, the devil – has turned him into a trained dog, ready to heel for a scratch behind the ears.
It isn’t even Lucifer’s fault Alastor loves him. He doesn’t even know.
Alastor hates him for that, too.
The anger burning in his chest – daggers, and arrows, swords and all – is his own when he sinks into shadow.
***
It’s not hard finding the name of the lawyer who is meant to file their divorce – he believes Lucifer told him it offhandedly, or Charlie offhandedly and Alastor had been greedily listening in. It doesn’t matter. He finds it, anyhow.
It’s no more difficult to kill the imp, to bathe his office in blood and swallow his screams. They taste delicious, and they make him feel no different than he had before – if just a bit satisfied.
Alastor is still horribly in love at the end of it, anyways. Something in him had thought, if he were so cruel, a thing beyond him would remember he simply couldn’t love anyone.
Obviously, it hadn’t work.
***
The next morning, while Alastor is brewing coffee in the early A.M., Lucifer storms into the kitchen, yanks on one of his ears, and teleports them swiftly.
They manifest from red glitter and stardust to an office drenched in black blood – the walls splattered, floors stained. It didn’t even look like blood, really. It kind of looked like spilled ink.
Lucifer points to the mangled remains of the lawyer on the floor, hand on his hip. “Explain.”
“Well.” Alastor starts, and then finishes, because he realizes that he can’t. He cannot find the words to justify this. He doesn’t have the right ones to string a sentence together about how much Alastor finds that he cares, and how a look from Lucifer is enough to last him centuries but will have him craving, starving, for more for decades to come, and how he hates him so much he had to kill about it.
Lucifer pinched the space between his eyebrows. “Why would you-“ he gestured vaguely at a torn arm with several missing fingers. “You can’t just- I didn’t actually want him dead.”
“Oh.” Alastor says, a bit dumbly. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?”
“Ask me, maybe?” Lucifer threw his hands wildly. “Fucking talk to me, instead of running away every time?”
“I don’t-“ he fumbled, mouth working around words, twisting his cane around. “Excuse me?”
“Whatever.” Lucifer grumbled, going to open the drawers and rummage through them, closing them with far more force than necessary. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I haven’t been running away,” Alastor ground out between his teeth, feeling the insistent need to beat the horse dead, as it were. “You- We- you haven’t talked to me.”
“You clearly didn’t want to be talked to.” Lucifer grumbled under his breath, just loud enough to hear, shuffling through stacks of papers.
“I make you coffee in the morning,” Alastor said, which was true. He did, every time. Poured coffee into a mug that was not his own and left it on the counter for only him to find. “I find myself following you like a lost fucking dog, I press you through this thing you have put inside me. I have tried.” He really didn’t, actually, but he feels like making some kind of point. He doesn’t know what it is.
Lucifer tossed unimportant files to the floor, dropping them in the pools of blood. “Clearly, not hard enough.”
“Oh, do forgive me, your highness. I’ve never done this before.” Alastor sneered, helping him tear through the papers if only to have something to do with his hands, lest he claw his own hair out.
“Do what?”
Alastor snarled, and a sound like a dying trumpeted struck the air. They didn’t say anything. Alastor was so fucking tiredof not saying anything.
He is the one who finds the divorce papers. They’re tucked under a stack of silly other things he doesn’t care about. He slams it on the hardwood, grabs a pen, and hesitated for a second far too long, staring at the page. It was short, shorter than he thinks it ought to be. There are no details about shares, or assets, because they didn’t even really have a life together, did they? A drunk stumble, a fuck, and a month of silence hanging between them. That’s what they had.
Alastor looks at his king, his husband, through his bangs. “Is this what you want?”
Lucifer’s jaw clenched, and his adam’s apple bobbed. “Did you want it?”
And Alastor.
Well, he can’t help but laugh, a little. It gets stuck in his throat, sounding more like a dying animal than a man.
“Of course I did,” he choked out before he could stop. He tries to, valiantly, but a floodgate opens and he no longer has the will to. “Do you think I would have married you if I didn’t? I don’t do things I don’t want, sire. You should have known that by now. You married me, after all.” He says the words like gnashing on meat. Like he’s tearing them to shreds with his teeth. Lucifer stares at him, and Alastor’s chest crows and howls yes, look at me. Pay attention to me.
“It was a mistake, sure, but one that I would have-“ inexplicably, a sob forced itself out. Dear, he was crying, wasn’t he? “I would have taken it. I was drunk, but I wanted it even then. I wanted it all. I meant every vow I said that I cannot remember.”
Lucifer flinches back as if he’s been struck, his hand clawing at his ribcage. “Alastor…” he says, slow, quiet. Knowing. Now, the man knew his wife, indeed. “You..”
Inhaling a breath far too shaky, Alastor unwinds his back, squaring his shoulders. With a flourish, he signs his name on the dotted line, and rips the ring off his finger before he can think himself out of it. He placed on the desk gently. Kindly. It was his wedding ring, after all.
“In another life, perhaps.” He sniffed indignantly, not even bothering to teleport out, stalking from the room and slamming the door behind him.
***
Alastor doesn’t know how long he stays at the edge of his bayou, sitting in a chair and staring off at the trees. It isn’t a rocking chair, but this reminds him of the ones that had been on the porch of his mamans trailer, when he was alive and young. There had been two, because she had wanted to grow old with her husband.
He takes a generous sip of his whiskey, and it burns on the way down, settling in his chest.
There’s a knock at the door, and his ear flicks at the noise, but he doesn’t answer it. Charlie, most likely. She had knocked a few times, and he had answered most. Always the worrier, she. Poor thing.
He took another sip.
A second knock does not come. Instead, a dim feeling of awareness crawls up his arms, creating a path of goosebumps under his fur. The part of the king in his chest, one that he had thought was dormant – was dead – jerks a gasp out of him, pulling from his manubrium directly through to his spine. Tugging him in a direction he does not want to go.
Lucifer approached like Alastor was a feral, wild beast. Something with a foaming mouth and bared teeth. He perched on the arm of the chair, his weight barely on the edge like he would take flight any second.
Alastor can’t even look at him. He watches the fireflies, instead, yellow-green in the night. Suddenly, he feels so, so tired.
“I think we should talk,” Lucifer rasps.
“Okay,” Alastor says, just as low.
They don’t.
The devil clears his throat, shifting in place. “Okay, so firstly.” He coughs again. “I want you to know I lied.”
Static strikes violently. “What?”
“About not remembering, I mean.” He sniffed, and Alastor belatedly realized that the roughness of his voice was from crying. “At least, most of it. Gets a bit blurry, at the end, but-“ he steeled himself with a shaky breath. “But I remember the things you said, and the things I said. They were-“ he laughed, breathlessly. “They were beautiful.”
Alastor closes his eyes, and when he opens them he’s looking up at the angel, even if he hadn’t meant to be. “You’re welcome, then.” He spits, like vitriol.
“Thank you.” Lucifer whispered, like he meant it. “And the second thing, well.” Now that Alastor can see Lucifer’s face, it’s all he looks at. The way his mouth twists as he tries to find the words to say, the bags under his eyes, the mess of hair around his head like a halo. “To answer your question, I didn’t want it.”
A hand around Alastor’s heart squeezes painfully. “What?”
“The divorce, I mean.” He worried his hands, wringing them together. “I didn’t sign the papers. I didn’t want it. I ripped them apart and set them aflame.”
Alastor leans his head against the chair back, baring his neck. And with his question, baring something he cannot name. “And what did you want?”
“You.” Lucifer answered, like it was the most simple thing in the world, to want. He opens his hands, and in his palms is Alastor’s ring. “Your love, if you’ll let me.”
Alastor cannot breathe. He feels speechless, and he can’t recall a time he ever truly was. He was always such a mouthy boy, with so much to say. He has nothing left, now.
“You..” He trails off, staring at the gold in the devils burnt, charred hands. On his left ring finger, he still wears his own band.
“More than anything,” Lucifer smiled, so nervous. Like he’s a teenager asking his crush to a dance, bless him.
This must be what it feels like to get proposed to, Alastor thinks a bit deliriously. He wonders, in that space he cannot remember all that well, if he or Lucifer had been the one to ask. Or if they had to ask at all. Maybe they had just found themselves at the alter with no words said.
“Alright,” he tries to sound exasperated, like he’s giving in. He doesn’t. Not at all. His grin spilts his face nearly in two.
Lucifer lights up like a coming dawn, taking Alastor's offered hand reverently. Like he had, once, if even for a moment, been holy. Alastor wants to kiss him, a desire he has never had before now.
He wants to, so he does.
It’s sweet, and slow, like warm syrup. The crickets buzz in the bayou beyond the hardwood floors. Alastor grips onto Lucifer’s arm like a lifeline, and claws bury themselves into his hair. Alastor manages to tilt his head just so, deepening it in the way he remembered his husband – his husband – doing. A low moan reverberates down his throat.
Between them, their souls throb, entangled and weaved in ways he cannot comprehend properly, but cherishes nonetheless. One says I love you and the other echoes.