They inscribed Xas’ skin with their pact, and Lucifer thought So mote it be as he walked away.
He didn’t think about it again until ripples of— something, a slow spread of sensation along his spine and up from the tips of his fingers. It was so obviously disconnected from the endless bureaucratic meeting Lucifer had been stuck in for the last five days that he abruptly stood and said, “Enough,” because this Other thing was the final test of his patience. He glared at Shemyaza, who sat eternally unrepentant (and: Whoever would, or should, ask them to repent now?) across the table from him.
“Lucifer,” Shemyaza said, every syllable perfect and dripping with their desire to continue arguing, “is the matter thus decided?”
The heady sensation sat warm in Lucifer’s gut, even behind his irritation. “So long as the library’s new wing is built, I don’t care,” he growled. He was posturing. They both knew it. “Use the humans if you would prefer. It’s labor as worthy of them as any other.”
Shemyaza bowed unctuously, reminding Lucifer of why—despite Shemyaza’s questioning following similar lines as Lucifer’s own—he’d never liked them, and wasn’t intending to start now. “As you wish.”
Lucifer snapped open his wings and left the great stone table in a rush. This pleasure was all his own, he knew: The chilling wind he generated blew the cloying heat of Hell away if only for a moment, and his wings stretched to their fullest. He was one of the firstborn, one of the greatest children God would ever have, and his size proved it. Yet that, too, was a problem in a world where most of his brethren were sized like the humans their Father watched over. Mostly, he just thought that helped prove the theory that they were but copies of humankind; he was a flawed copy, and that had led to— everything else.
(How intentionally was he flawed? That was the question, and Lucifer didn’t like thinking about it too hard.)
Xas was grubbing away in his garden, Lucifer realised as he allowed himself to focus on the sensations fluttering through his body. It was Xas’ fingers in the soil, Xas’ delight at seeing a new plant take root, Xas’ pleasure seeping into his bones that so often knew only the endless grind of work. Xas, too, did work; Xas was simply free to go where he wished, and so his toil was of his choosing and for nothing but his joy.
Lucifer ground his teeth and stared at the distant corner where Xas’ garden grew.
He didn’t go look.
He grew used to the sensations, the minor pleasures of Xas’ life ebbing and flowing through his body with the seasons. The occasional sparks of delight when he found a new plant. The basal hum of hard but meaningful work as he built something new with his own hands (and there, Lucifer wondered about the humanity inherent in Xas’ freedom; no matter how long he argued with the other fallen they did not build for themselves but merely supervised the work of demons and humans alike). The sweet feeling of cold air along his wings as Xas flew through mortal air unencumbered and unseen.
Lucifer didn’t get close to him. It was tempting, sometimes; he watched from afar, eyes sharp even through the haze of Xas’ opaque greenhouse wall. But as much as he refuted God’s choices and plans, he couldn’t bring himself to break the implied rule of their pact: If God was given Xas’ pains and Lucifer his pleasures, then neither was allowed to actively inflict one or the other upon him.
It wasn’t too hard a rule to follow until the first time Xas kissed his mortal lover.
Lucifer felt the exact moment Xas chose his path, because it was nothing like the heat he’d felt before (Xas’ yearly visit reminded Lucifer of the passage of time like nothing else had; none of Xas’ other mortals had elicited such constancy of joy). This was a flood. A deluge. An awful, too-powerful pleasure that felt the same as the first time Lucifer had stood up to God and said No, I don’t agree.
He realised he was crying, and then—
Lucifer shut himself away from the rest of Hell until Xas finally left his mortal lover, and even then there was such a suffusion of satisfaction that he didn’t know what to do with himself but stand in Xas’ garden and wait.
The wait was no hardship; Xas’ garden had always been beautiful, always made Lucifer wonder how much Xas had seen of Eden before it was locked forever away. Sometimes, he wondered if Xas was simply made too well in God’s image, as the humans imagined they too were, and if he was working off the same blueprint that God had in creating Eden. Lucifer strolled through the greenery, relishing the humidity and the overwhelming scent of life that could never linger elsewhere in Hell.
Xas landed behind him in a flurry of ozone. “Lucifer,” he said, and though he tried to hide it there was still pleasure in every word he spoke. “I hadn’t expected—”
Lucifer sighed and turned, regretful, from the roses blooming pale enough to match Xas’ skin. “Had you expected what you found?”
Xas shrugged and poured the bucket of water he’d brought into the fountain burbling (the sound of a cut throat more than an infant’s laughter) in the garden’s center. “It was only a matter of time.”
“You could have had this years ago.” Lucifer could still feel that first kiss on his lips, nettle-sharp and panic-bright, pleasure a startling electricity feeding through both their bodies. “Why didn’t you?” He ran a finger along the thorny stem of a night-dark rose, pretending to nonchalance. It may be his pleasure that drove him here, but it was Xas’ he cared for, even now. Xas was the one who could deserve it still, after all.
“I was afraid.” Xas laughed, and Lucifer shivered in frustration, love, jealousy—the wonder in every line of Xas’ body spoke more than his words. “I still am. Does it color what you feel?”
Lucifer tilted his head. “Does it matter?” he said at last, when it was clear Xas’ curiosity wouldn’t fade. “It’s pleasure nonetheless.”
At that, Xas finally looked away, turning to the bruised shadows of his garden. “I forgot, sometimes, that you would feel it too.” The briefest flicker of his wings resettling. “I think that’s the only reason I could accept what Sobran had to offer.”
Sobran. Lucifer breathed the name, tasting it on his tongue, comparing how it felt to how Xas savored each syllable and caressed it like a new-hatched bird. “You’ve never told me their names before.”
“They’ve never mattered enough to.” Xas looked at him, then, in the same way God did when they signed his skin: Seeing straight through him to the core of what he’s not saying. “You didn’t want to know their names.”
“I still don’t.”
Xas didn’t comment, just picked up his pruning shears. “This isn’t a one-night stand.”
“You pledged your troth?” Lucifer’s wings flared, and something began to burn in his heart. He didn’t want to identify it. “So you will return.”
“Obviously.”
“Just—” Lucifer ground his teeth. “Warn me. It is impossible for me to accomplish anything when you lie together so intimately.”
Xas stopped moving, not even breathing, for a full minute. Then, slowly, he fixed his midnight-blue eyes on Lucifer’s. “No.”
“Xas—”
“You are not allowed to bind me,” Xas reminded him, and Lucifer growled; that wasn’t the point. “I will do as I wish. Or, in this case—” another blinding smile that made the garden feel achingly like Eden “—who I wish.”
Lucifer left, then, because there was nothing more to say.
That was that, until Yaqom handed him a sheaf of neatly-copied writing telling him that Xas was dying in the mortal world. He hadn’t been thinking about Xas much—Xas’ pleasure distracted and disrupted his days occasionally, but never as profoundly as that first extended time. Reading the note, Lucifer realised two things:
First, Xas had told his lover—told Sobran—about how copies came to Hell.
Second, Xas had pushed an archangel too far, because Lucifer had yet to encounter anything else that could leave an angel dying.
His gut clenched in terror and panic he hadn’t felt for thousands of years. Quietly, carefully, he told Yaqom, “I must take care of this,” thinking If God will not tend to His child, then I must.
Yaqom nodded, asked, “And who shall govern in your stead?”
Lucifer stared fixedly at the guttering darkness above. “Shemyaza.” He hated them, but they were very good at their job. “With Kasyade’s aid.” He didn’t find Kasyade to be particularly innovative or imaginative, the way Shemyaza was, but Kasyade would certainly curb any dreams Shemyaza had of potentially overthrowing Lucifer’s rule: He was loyal to a fault, and had cleaned up other potential… messes for Lucifer before; hopefully Shemyaza wouldn’t be another one.
“Your words to their ears,” Yaqom said with a bow.
Then, and only then, did Lucifer finally spread his wings once more and follow Xas’ path out past the garden and once more to the mortal Earth.
He forgot, in the long stretches where he never left Hell, how alive everything here was. It thrummed against his feathers and his skin as he soared unerringly towards the little village Xas’ lover lived within. The sky above him was deep and filled with stars he missed with a fierce ache he normally squelched; the sky below him was cloud-bright and spotted with birds who flew on, unconcerned by his presence looming above them. They knew he meant no harm.
Lucifer had worried, for a little, that he wouldn’t be able to find Xas once he reached Chateau Vully. As soon as he arrived, he worried no longer about that: He worried, instead, about what he would find surrounding Xas. The trees were already dying, and if Xas’ mortal lover had sent the missive, then—
But no, instead there were dying goats and lambs, and two mortals at Xas’ side. The man (Sobran, obvious from how he lay entwined in mourning with Xas’ stagnant body) barely stirred as Lucifer entered. The woman, on the other hand—
She was beautiful, in the mortal way, and looked at him with wide intelligent eyes. Seeing her, Lucifer almost understood how Xas could give himself over to mortals. He smiled at her, just to see the way she flinched away, and then set about the more important business at hand: Saving Xas’ life.
The woman—Aurora, he learned, from what little the mortals said—brought him everything he asked for. The man simply got in the way.
Lucifer ignored both of them equally as he staunched the bleeding and touched the pact he and God had made so long ago and said, in a language only God’s created knew, “Is this Your will?”
God laughed at him, not unkindly, and Lucifer basked in the sound even as his hands cleaned away the blood and his eyes took in Xas’ deep wound. He drew a deep breath, because he knew the wound and the hand that had made it, and threw as much of his frustration and spite into his words to God. “Why do You not work towards his life?”
No words in response—but then, God had never needed words to make Himself clear—just the gut-wrenching certainty that Lucifer was God’s hands in this healing.
Lucifer did not cry as he sutured flesh and filled Xas with energy bled from his own heart. It would contaminate things.
Only when he had finished and Xas’ wings lay inert on the floor, and he had drawn Xas into his embrace did he cry, for all that he had lost and taken. Somewhere behind him, the humans watched, but they were unimportant and they would see nothing but his wings and be unable to read his emotions through their slightest trembles.
He lingered, after leaving, after giving Aurora a string of pearls for her clever eyes and unasked questions and steadfast heart. It would raise more questions than it answered; that was good, she needed to have mysteries to unravel, Lucifer thought, or else she would grow bored. Instead of flying straight back to Hell (or to Xas’ garden, which— he would need to tend it, the way he had once tended Eden), he waited long human days, until Xas finally emerged on his own feet.
Then, and only then, did Lucifer make his way back to Hell, plans for piping water carefully into the garden he knew he must claim for his own keeping him company.
Nobody else could, anymore.