Chapter Text
‘… well I just wished to confirm in advance, that I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about.’
Lucifer had already been holding back his laughter – he couldn’t manage it any more. He lost it, it ran away, tears streamed down his face and he could only breathe in hysterical little gasps for far too long. Alastor watched, seemingly stunned at first before he too started to laugh.
‘Well…’ Lucifer said as he wiped tears from his face. ‘At least if the whole radio thing goes sideways, at least you could always go for a career in stand-up comedy.’
‘Hmm… well, you know what they call stand up comedy in Hell?’ Alastor asked.
Lucifer didn’t – he said as much and a smirk split across Alastor’s face. He paused for a beat, his timing as impeccable as always.
‘Stand up comedy.’
The room was cold and as much as Lucifer had the power to light the fire, since he was still a fragment of God, a being both incomprehensible and simple who existed to create, create anything which included the balance of fuel, heat and oxidisation required to create fire, that process which had been mastered by humans long before they left the Garden… he didn’t have it in him to try.
The room was cold, he was alone and there was really nothing else to it. Even if he lit that fire, it wasn’t like a light in a window that would guide a lost soul home on a cold night. He’d still be alone, his lost soul not one that could be retrieved by a warm and welcoming light through the trees.
At some point he thought that Charlie might have been by and said words that he didn’t hear, but he didn’t know what they were because he didn’t hear them. He wasn’t certain if she’d really been there at all.
Lucifer wasn’t certain of much these days, but there was one thing he was certain of and that was that he was currently alone in the room which was cold, which could be warm but he didn’t want it to be.
He needed to…
…
…
Get up. That was the first step. Get up out of bed, and get a coffee.
That was all. That was all that he needed to do today. It was something, and once he completed it he would allow himself to get right on back to being miserable.
It took Lucifer a long time to even move one leg from the bed, but he did it. Then, the other leg followed and he was standing and look, wasn’t that something. He put on clothes, because although nudity didn’t bother him, since he existed long before shame as a concept was even imagined, it bothered others at the Hotel and he still needed to be… needed to… not upset Charlie’s guests… or something… not upset Charlie.
He wasn’t so sure why he cared any more, but he did. For some reason. For some reason he couldn’t quite explain, but it was there. The clothes he put on weren’t anything flash, just a shirt that was too big for him because it didn’t belong to him and his ducky pyjamas with a hole in the knee. They were lucky he bothered at all, any complaints he’d direct to his office he hadn’t stepped foot in for years and to the staff he didn’t speak to. Like any good monarchy, Hell mostly ran itself without his guidance.
Charlie wasn’t waiting for him in the kitchen because not only did she have no reason to believe that he would even bother coming down from that room he had been sulking in for the past… indeterminate period of time, it wasn’t morning like he’d originally thought but instead late afternoon. His idea of catching Charlie with her morning coffee was either hours too late, or hours too early.
Lucifer still made himself a coffee. It was… not good. Bad, even. Not poisoned, but it certainly tasted like it might have been.
There was no-one else in the kitchen. No-one had beaten him down here because there was no-one else who had the intention of being there. It was just Lucifer, and he was alone.
Months ago, years or maybe decades. Maybe a century ago, what felt like it may have been a century ago he’d sat in this chair, in this kitchen and considered the possibility that at the end of all things it would be him and it may have been Alastor. He’d promised his daughter that he would talk to Alastor about… something which seemed trivial at the time and which seemed trivial now. He couldn’t even remember what it had been, but it had led to…
…
…
…
‘Good morning, Dad!’ Charlie chirped like the early bird she was and Lucifer turned to stare at her. It wasn’t morning, it couldn’t be morning and the sunlight streaming through the kitchen curtains told him that Charlie was right, as she often was and he was wrong, as he often was.
The coffee in front of him had long since gone cold and congealed. He stared down at it, half expected it to stare back up at him.
It didn’t. It remained as just cold, congealed coffee and Lucifer resented it for its continued existence.
There had been a strain to Charlie’s greeting and it itched. It was wrong, somehow. It was all wrong. This wasn’t how this was supposed to end, this wasn’t how any of it was supposed to end.
Charlie was staring at him like she expected a response to a question, and Lucifer didn’t even have to ask her to repeat herself because there was really only one question she could have asked and it wasn’t something he wanted to answer. It was something she would already know.
‘Well, how are you doing?’ He asked instead, and he managed to stop himself before he took a sip of the solidified but not yet sentient coffee in front of him. There was nothing wrong with appearing to be casual and not… whatever it was that he was, but taking in a mouthful of that ick was a step too far.
Charlie took the mug from his hands and poured it down the drain. The noises the chunks made were almost obscene and it wasn’t until she had pressed a fresh, warm mug into his hands that Lucifer realised if Charlie had answered his question, he had missed her reply.
Maybe he didn’t need it either. There were dark shadows under her eyes that shouldn’t be there, and her hair wasn’t as neatly bound as it should have been. There was an awkwardness in the kitchen too, like they were… not strangers, not exactly, but people who didn’t know each other any more.
Lucifer wasn’t sure if they had ever known each other. Once he hadn’t cared, but now it grated on him as another failure. Another person in his life who he had let down.
‘I’m fine, Dad.’ Charlie said, or perhaps repeated. There was no way to know which it was. Time only went one way, even for Lucifer and his fingers curled so tight around his mug he was surprised it didn’t shatter in his hands.
He would have shattered, if he was the mug. It wouldn’t take much pressure right now and boom. He’d be in pieces on the ground. Maybe he already had.
If he had shattered, it was in Alastor’s hands and he didn’t know if Alastor would be the one to pick up the pieces. If Alastor even wanted to, or if he’d ever have the means to do so.
If they’d ever see each other again, because he had been too late.
‘Vaggie has been trying to find him.’ Charlie said, and she didn’t need to specify who he was because there was no-one else he could be. ‘We’ll find him. He’s alive we know that much. It will all work out fine.’
Lucifer wondered where her perpetual optimism had come from. It hadn’t been from him, and he wasn’t so sure it had come from her mother either.
‘I know where he is.’ Lucifer said through a mouth that felt numb, because he did know where Alastor was even if he didn't want to admit it. But even if he didn’t say it out loud that wasn’t going to change the reality of the situation. Charlie needed to know.
Lucifer was a fragment of God, one of the original angels. There was no place in the universe that Alastor would be able to fully hide from him, no where that a stray burst of his static or a wave that was bent in a way just a touch too strange to be completely natural couldn’t be felt, except for one. The one place that Lucifer was completely and utterly blocked from seeing, from feeling and from knowing. That place he doubted he would recognise now, not after all these years.
‘What?’ Charlie said. She spilled her coffee and she didn’t seem to notice. Lucifer did. He watched it creep closer to the edge of the bench. ‘What do you mean you know? Vaggie hasn’t been able to find anything…’
‘Heaven.’ Lucifer said. A droplet of coffee fell and hit the ground and didn’t he just know what that felt like. ‘He’s there.’
‘What? How? Why? That doesn’t make any sense? Wait… you don’t think that…’
There was an optimism in Charlie’s face that Lucifer didn’t want to destroy, but he had no choice. It was a hope she would not have granted to herself if she’d stopped to think on the matter for even a second.
‘He wasn’t redeemed.’ Lucifer said quietly. ‘They likely wish to use him for… something.’
‘Oh.’ Charlie sat back down and put her sleeve right into the spilled coffee. ‘Use him? Why?’
Where would he even begin with that. There was so much he would have to explain, and there was so much he didn’t wish to explain. So many little things that should remain between him and Alastor because if he shared them with anyone, even with his daughter then they would be just that little bit less special. They’d feel just a little more distant.
‘He’s… unique.’ Lucifer settled on. Charlie got to her feet to get a cloth and wipe up the spilled coffee.
‘You can say that again.’ She said under her breath. Lucifer still heard her, but he didn’t respond.
‘They’ll kill him.’ Lucifer said instead, and Charlie froze. ‘They might not mean to, but they will.’
Lucifer didn’t know where God had gone once they left, and neither would Heaven. Alastor? Alastor hadn’t known of the existence of God as much as he’d known when they were there no longer but as powerful as he was, his power was not greater than Lucifer’s. Or Sera’s. Or Michael’s, or Gabriel’s, or Raphael’s. It was not greater than the power of those who had come before that indifferent being was known as God. Those who had once been them.
If Lucifer had failed and if Heaven had failed there was no way that a mere mortal would be able to locate their missing God. The only reason Heaven would even force him to try would be out of sheer desperation, and nothing more.
(If they were even able to do so. There was a part of Lucifer, a little part, a part that wasn’t swallowed by the terrible apathy in which he was drowning, that wished desperately that he would be able to witness their attempt at forcing Alastor to do something he would not wish to do. There was a greater part of him that was sick with the knowledge that Alastor’s refusal would end with nothing less than death brought upon him by Michael’s sword.)
Lucifer looked up, opened his mouth to continue the discussion but Charlie wasn’t there. The coffee mug wasn’t in his hands, and the sunlight streaming through the window was gone.
There was a blanket over his shoulders, once of the plain ones which were kept aside for patrons if they got cold at nigh. Which was rare because they were in Hell, and so they were rarely used.
There was a little drop of coffee from Charlie’s spill which she hadn’t wiped clean. That one that had fallen all the way down to the ground, and then shattered into little pieces. Lucifer fought the urge to taste it, to see how sour the milk had become and to try and determine just how much time he had lost, but it didn’t matter. Not really.
It didn’t matter how much time had passed, it wouldn’t change the fact that he had been too late.