abraxaslogs | I don't trust, but I see right in front of me

Coming up on a year in this world, Wilhelm has seen a lot of weird shit. Somehow, none of it prepares him for the would-be mundane sight of Lucifer knelt beside a flowerbed, purging it of weeds. Would be mundane, if it were almost anyone else. He knows better than most that the devil has a few soft spots, but he never would have guessed a green thumb was one of them.

Or maybe he's up to something. (These days, the idea does not slink in on suspicion, but drifts in on curiosity.) With a grin tugging at his lips, he shuffles closer.

"Pick up a new hobby?"

"Don't you see the humor in it?"

The full circle is that because they're coming up on a year Lucifer can actually joke about who he is now to the kid, when before it was all lies, lies, lies.

"I got humanity kicked out of their Garden and now I'm tending one."

"Ironic," he agrees.

He too can appreciate how ordinary moments like this mark how much has changed. That steel-edged sarcasm was one of the things that drew him to Lucifer back then, because it's the weapon of those who feel that the world is against them. All teenagers feel that way to some extent, and Wilhelm could pull up a fistful of receipts that prove his feelings are justified.

Now he knows a little bit of the man behind that steel edge. Maybe it should bother him, to relate to someone who's supposed to be the root and fountain of all sin or whatever, but it doesn't.

Wilhelm hasn't got much else to do — he was wandering the gardens because sometimes you just need to touch grass and feel the sun on your face — so he squats down beside Lucifer. His elbows fold over his knees.

"Want help?"

"You can't be any worse at this than I am," he says, which might be the first he's admitted to anyone that he's just winging it.

Pull the stringy or dying bits, and... yeah. He's just focusing on the weeding part of this right now. Plants are not his forte.

He thinks about Wilhelm's princehood and wonders if maybe gardens are one of those things he was forced to learn and grins at the kid.

"Actually, maybe you'll be better at it."

He aims at Lucifer a sideways look that says something like you're joking, right? His experience with crawling around in a flowerbed adds up to exactly zero. In what he's now come to think of as his old life, gardens were for walking past or posing stiffly for pictures in.

"Not like it's hard to pick out the weeds," he shrugs. Yanking up some grassy looking thing that doesn't look like it belongs there, he tosses it into the basket that's half full of plant detritus.

"So did you just feel like being ironic, or...?"

Look, what does he know, he's Prince of Darkness, not Prince of... wow. He actually doesn't know what Wilhelm is Prince of. It was never exactly important given that the kid wanted nothing to do with it.

He considers his answer. This whole trying not to lie to Wilhelm comes with some drawbacks.

He'll keep with the lie they told Thorne. There's enough truth to it.

"We had a bit of a magical accident in Hayle. Thorne covered the cost." He holds up dirt-coated fingers. "And we're working to pay it off. Istredd's been reading to kids, I think." Lucifer did a couple times too, but he's not admitting that out loud.

Concern enters his expression at the phrase magical accident. Wilhelm is a certified expert in magical fuck-ups, after all, but it sounds like this one was less grave, if the punishment amounts to light community service. His lips twitch at the thought of Istredd, so serious in his studies, reciting children's books and towering over the gaggle of kids gathered around him. Then he switches Istredd out for Lucifer, and that's even funnier. Laughing, he tosses another conquered weed into the basket.

"I can see why you picked this instead."

He of course doesn't consider himself to be a kid. Never mind that on the cosmic scale of time, the difference between seven years and seventeen years is negligible.

"I did do a couple readings," he says, just to give Wilhelm that horrible image. "I think my performance was exceptional. Maybe they just didn't like my book selection? But classic fairy tales are so much more entertaining than the newfangled things. Rewrites, ugh."

Classic fairy tales are also waaaaaay more dark no matter the universe and likely shouldn't be read to children.

Whatever, he had a brief, oddly good time.

So of course he's out here by his preference and the librarians.

"So Istredd read to the kids. You traumatized them," he corrects with a chuckle. This time, he misses on purpose and bombs Lucifer's leg with a weed and the clump of dirt its roots are still clinging to.

Now that he's got Lucifer and Istredd and Hayle all on the same page in his mind, he can't help but turn back to a different scene from that trip. The two of them dancing together, and Lucifer looking...lighter than Wilhelm had ever seen him. It's what stopped him from ditching the party early to lie face down in his depression, because if Lucifer could find someone to have fun with, then why the hell couldn't he?

He hates to pry on principle, and he doesn't know if he's reading too much into it, or if it's supposed to be a secret or so obvious that asking would be stupid, but—

"Hey, Lucifer? Can I ask you something?"

"Being traumatized in their youth in perfectly healthy," he argues. He tosses the weed-dirt-ball right back without even looking, some of the dirt breaking away from the roots at second impact. Excuse you. "They're not going to even remember when they're older. They'll just look back and have some vague memory of hearing some dark crap but nothing about its contents, or from who."

Human memory was so weak.

He does tense, just slightly, at Wilhelm's probing question. Wilhelm has quite a lot of knowledge about Lucifer at this point, he could ask quite a lot. The dread is there, but brief, and squashed down, because it's not like Wilhelm could ask a lot at this point for him to turn away now.

"Yeah?"

He pulls a face as Lucifer tosses his ammo right back, but he did start it, so he chucks it into the basket without complaint. As someone who holds his private life close, he thinks he recognizes the guardedness that comes over Lucifer like a cloak. He hesitates a moment, searching the flowerbed for more weeds to pull.

"Are you and Istredd..." His eyes flick back to Lucifer, then away again just as quick. "Um, are you, like...together now?"

No judgment hangs in his words. If anything, he sounds expectant. Almost hopeful that the answer could be yes.

Oh.

Is that all?

"Uh. Yeah. We are."

Thus his current community service, but he's sure not mentioning that much.

He chews at his lip and because he isn't hearing any judgment from the kid, adds, "Kind of new. After we got back to Thorne from..." Pit Times? Ehhhh. "Nocwich's Recovery Stint."

His gaze returns undivided to Lucifer, hanging on his answer. A smile softens his expression. It's half because Lucifer is someone he's come to care for, and half because it's nice to find a piece of yourself in someone else. Another piece, in this case.

"That's great. You look...happy when you're with him."

Is it surprising that the so-called devil has a boyfriend? Not completely. Istredd has long since seen something in Lucifer that most would miss — that he himself had almost missed, blinded by anger and blinkered by stories someone spun thousands of years ago. Everyone can change, even ancient archangels, but it is a choice. Wilhelm believes it now too. Lucifer didn't have to apologize to him for trying to sharpen him into a tool. He didn't have to save him when he was taken by the Acolytes. But he had. He made that choice.

Nobody made you.

As for Lucifer, he has waited for someone to see through to him. At least, that's what Wilhelm suspects. That's the thing about seeing pieces of yourself in someone else — sometimes you know too much. So how could he not be drawn to Istredd? They fit together like two landmasses that used to be one hundreds of millions of years ago. When you look at the map, all you see are jagged edges, but somehow they line up perfectly.

"... I do?" It slips out of him, unbidden, and he looks a little surprised, a faint bit sheepish, and he busies himself with multiple weeds.

He hasn't gotten as much push-back from external sources about their relationship as he expected, and he certainly knows those like Castiel will definitely not be able to understand anything, but... Thorne was maybe a different story. The cautionary tales would be there, correct even, but... he truly didn't know how they looked to an outsider perspective. So much of their relationship was mental, behind closed doors, hidden.

He didn't expect anyone to really see even a glimpse of them.

Edited 2023-06-05 07:00 (UTC)

"Yeah, I mean..." He shifts to position himself a little farther down the flowerbed, but they easily remain within conversation distance. "You're, like, more relaxed. I saw you dancing."

Wilhelm is happy for Lucifer, he really is. But because he's seventeen and his world revolves on a narrow orbit around his own problems, he can't help but feel the gravity of his loneliness all the more heavily in this moment. The absence of someone that's all his, like a blackhole somewhere between the slats of his ribcage. He doesn't know if he should find it inspirational or depressing that even Satan can manage to find that someone.

At the very least, he'll try to hold all his moping inside as he attacks the weeds encroaching on the garden.

It can easily be both inspirational and depressing.

"Well, it's rare I can equally be a problem and give him a hard time, in public," he jokes, grinning, and it's relatively true. He was being Very Much a Problem.

"Wow, super romantic of you," he fires back.

But he supposes it would be weirder if Lucifer were the sort of guy to pile elaborate bouquets on his partner, to engage in all the stock romantic fare that they've already told a thousand stories about. There is romance in the weird, the unique contours of every relationship.

"Isn't it?" he sings airily. The only one that has gotten any semblance of Lucifer's actual feelings out of him was Castiel, and they were out of their minds on bug juices and neither of them have deemed to converse again since. Just pretend the conversation never happened, it would be better that way.

Besides, Wilhelm did see the two of them dancing. Lucifer can joke all he wants but there's no hiding what he was feeling from that display.

"You should have done some dancing." If Wilhelm did, Lucifer didn't see. He was highly distracted, obviously. "Maybe you don't have gardening skills but surely that you must know." That's like Court 101, isn't it? "You could've showed off some fancy footwork to some native." Strut around like a peacock for Hayle? Look, they all gotta rub things into the natives' faces sometimes.

No, Lucifer can't hide it very well. But Wilhelm understands the desire to keep your love to yourself, to keep it away from the world, which has the habit of ruining precious things with all its pre-conceived notions of how things should be.

"I danced some," he protests. With Robin, as friends, and then with Rhy — also, unfortunately, as friends.

"You were probably just too busy staring at Istredd to notice."

It straddles the line between affection and insolence.

Rude.

... But not inaccurate, unfortunately.

He huffs a light breath. He can't even be mad. This kid's ended up under many people's wings, literally and metaphorically, for just being himself. It's likely the only thing that's given Lucifer freedom, too, is being able to be himself without the masks and all the open vitriol and constant calculation.

But being under Lucifer's wing may not be safe anymore. Lucifer's lost the ability to protect Wilehlm in the castle. It'd be safer, maybe, for Wilhelm to cut ties with him. Bad enough that some of Lucifer's reputation may be causing Istredd problems down the road, but there's no changing that. Any two steps forward Lucifer gets with the castle is immediately set back, but even if he begged and offered apologizes and bled his grace for Thorne (all things he would never do, but to just theorize) he'd never make up for trying to chase at Ambrose.

Always the flight risk.

He throws more dirt at Wilhelm.

"Fine, I was distracted, so sue me."

He raises his arm like a shield, and the dirt clod explodes against his skin. Laughing, he lobs a clump of weeds back at Lucifer. (He wonders, a few seconds late, how many others could get away with that.)

"Yeah, I'll get my lawyers," he retorts.

I don't trust, but I see right in front of me

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