Chapter Text
Lucifer wasn't well.
He'd known it would happen eventually.
It was a cycle he was very familiar with. He would feel the high of inspiration and creation. He would be grateful for his family and the life he'd built here. Then the crushing low would come. The harsh reality that this was his prison and he would never leave it. That no matter what he did this place would chew him and everyone else up, spit them out, and then chew some more.
He was avoiding everyone. Any time anyone tried to see him, he would portal somewhere else, fleeing like a cornered mouse.
Eventually, probably at the behest of Charlie, the one person he couldn't run away from caught him.
Alastor raised a brow from where he had stepped out of shadow.
"Care to explain why Charlie came to me in tears to try and find you when you are perfectly safe right here?" he asked with light disdain.
Lucifer didn't turn to him from the desk he was hunched over.
"Fuck off."
"Well! What a way to greet someone." Alastor walked up to stand beside him. "Honestly sire, it's abominable as a parent to avoid their own child for a week-"
"I told you to leave!" he growled, hellfire erupting from him, his eyes glowing red.
Alastor didn't react. The fire burned around him harmlessly.
"Hm, nope! Unfortunately, it is required of my station to make sure you're safe. That is including from yourself."
Lucifer's anger, as it usually did, burned itself out quickly. He settled down in his chair, features returning to normal.
"It's stupid."
"Oh I have no doubt it is-"
"You are the worst-"
"but the stupidest things are often what bring the most pain."
Lucifer regarded him with a mix of surprise and consideration. He sighed, waving his hand, and a mist seemed to fill the room, images of hell from around the ring projecting onto it.
"We've been working together for a year. And yeah, we've had some success with keeping the sinners from being treated as badly as before, but every time we save someone, it feels like fifty more take their place. It's never ending. What is the point of all this when there is no end? Hell was made as a punishment, and there's no real changing that. I-" he breathes shakily. "I will never leave this place...and I have damned my daughter, the most angelic being here, to the same fate."
Alastor is quiet for some minutes, quietly watching the various injustices occurring, as if it were a lighthearted cooking segment. Then he is suddenly up in Lucifer's face, making him jump.
"Then change it."
"Huh?"
"Change that fate. Use the power that was able to blast a hole through the shield those angels built. The might that nearly destroyed the city with barely a scratch off you."
"What are you suggesting Alastor? Speak plainly for fucking once."
"You have the capacity to take heaven."
Lucifer feels his stomach drop and turn to ice within him. Memories of Vox's crazed sermons fill his head. Alongside them, memories of heaven; his questions, his scoldings, the blaze of fire and screams of himself and the one he loved.
"How dare you. You know that I was cast out the last time I defied them. I created hell-"
"Yes, and from that, you changed." He takes hold of Lucifer's hand. "You see yourself as tainted, sullied, that this version of you was a loss." His grip would be bordering on painful if he weren't who he was. "You do not see yourself as I do; better than them."
"That is the type of pride that made me fall." He shakes his head, but doesn't pull his hand away. His mind can't even acknowledge that Alastor had said something borderline positive about him. "You're forgetting a certain someone."
"Who, God?" Lucifer looks uncomfortable at the mention of his name. "From what I hear, no one has seen or heard from Him in eons. He wasn't even there when you fell. What kind of father doesn't even oversee the punishment of his most beautiful son?"
The words cut Lucifer deeply, as they are the same words that tore through his mind during and after his fall, burned and confused as to why love and knowledge would cause such a horrible outcome.
"Stop."
Alastor's fierce expression lets up.
"Or maybe, this was His plan."
"What are you talking about?"
"If He truly is ineffable, He planted that apple so that you would give Eve knowledge. So humanity would have free will. So you would be born again as the ruler of this pit. So you would have it to create, and create you did. So you could become even more beautiful than those stupid angels on high." Alastor turns Lucifer's hand over, to cradle it, using his other hand to push up the cuff of his sleeve. He lays a kiss on his pulse. "This is a promise. Not as a devotee or a denizen. As the one who will always stand by you.”
Lucifer feels his cheeks go absolutely golden.
"Alastor-"
"So don’t be dull and speak of yourself so lowly. It is an insult to everything you and Charlie have accomplished."
Lucifer tries very hard to keep himself from tearing up.
"Okay."
"Splendid. Now, can we please get back to making this god forsaken place one worth dying over?"
Alastor turns tail and takes long strides towards the door.
Lucifer stares after him.
Using his internal agonies to break him out of a spiral was a new one. One that he wasn't so surprised someone like Alastor would come up with. He was just surprised he'd bother trying to make him feel better. Of course, it was probably just that the man was bored with neither himself or Charlie letting him have fun tormenting sinners.
Lucifer eventually follows.
He cannot help stare at his wrist as he does.