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

Sabine happens to be out in the garden herself. Reading, not gardening. Her appreciation for new books has her devouring at a quick pace the books Jack already had in his room on top of books she picked up in Nocwich and Hale. There's a hell of a lot of backlog in being denied any new books for six years.

The garden isn't the bower of The Rift's raged, ravenous gaping maw of a forest—that self-same where she ran barefoot through, and she and Jack built their treehouse in—but it's better than nothing. There are trees and flowers; an abundance of green, even soft burbling water feature is not too far off. It's not everything, but it, too, is more than she's gotten in those years (and more than she'd supposed she might ever get again before waking up in that fountain).

There's sunshine on her face and a book in her hands,
it could be so, so, so much worse.

The amount of books that the Thorne Summoned all naturally consume when they're first brought in is exceptional, really. That natural pull to find some semblance of knowledge in the books, like their eyes are the particular ones to read just barely, correctly, between the lines in order to gleam something of value.

Lucifer had defaulted to the fairytales--his closest equivalent to the Bible--in hopes that some inane creation story had been between those lines.

He was sorely disappointed, but he never told Yennefer that she was right.

He never told Yennefer a lot of things and really, he maybe should.

It's... fine. If he doesn't.

Most anyone that's been residing in the gardens have been a backdrop of scenery to Lucifer. Something to not care about.

He does, however, notice her. Whatever... she's supposed to be. Approximation. Human-shaped.

But... not. Off enough that she chimes somewhere, still, in his dulled senses.

He's worked in silence for quite awhile as she reads. Doesn't acknowledge her. Moves about the area with a careful, building precision. He doesn't want it to take so much of his focus, but he falls into the act of gardening far-too easily. There's a joke here, somewhere.

She's still just... corner of his eye abnormality. Something he tries not to notice, but there.

It is, eventually, that he asks--not trying for rude, but there's no other way that the question could be interpreted--"What are you, anyway?"

It's a good question. Right up there with Jack's first.
The one he hadn't meant and still flat-footed her.

Lucifer means his.

She knows that.

It'd probably been building since Jack's outburst and the first time they saw each other. When it was clear what they saw and what Jack saw were two different things. A situation that wasn't strictly speaking 'new' on her part at all, but Lucifer was an unknown. And she hadn't heard the best things about him so far. And it's tangled up in what Jack doesn't know any longer.

"Busy with a civil war." An answer without looking up from her book.

A feat that would have been spectacularly familiar behind the gas station counter.
Well. Six years and some change and a coma ago, it would have been.
Sometimes you don't atrophy your best skills, it seems.

"You know that's not what I was asking," he replies sharply. Lucky you, he actually for five seconds decided you might have some intelligence kicking around in there.

"And unless you mean some civil war going on here," which frankly would do the Thorne territories a lot of 'good', "whatever wars you've got going on are gonna just tick on without you." She good be dead in her future, like Lucifer. Like maybe all of existence.

"I won't tell your," pet, he barely doesn't say, "little loverboy if that's what you're so worried about." Come on, what's the big deal. So what if he has a bad rep. If Jack's your only source of info, of course he's gonna have a bad rep. Eugh. People. Entities, whatever. They all (mostly) suck.

The civil war is neither there nor is it here. Sabine has a penchant for being able to ferret out both gorgeous classics and the worst tripe of trope fiction when she goes looking: another of those things Jack picked up from prolonged exposure to her need to devour whatever she could get her hands on from such a 'young' age.

(The Civil War is between a far-flung race of super soldier ants and praying mantis aliens, all of them the size of transformers, fighting over a jungle planet they very much seemed more bent on destroying by causality with their opponents rather than preserving as they claimed their honor and glory of going to war was for. The narration knows in your bones you absolutely, desperately wanted to know for posterity's sake.)

"Wow. What a rousing reason to want to talk to you," Sabine said, glancing over the top of her book, but only just. A raise of her eyebrows scoffing at the fact the derision about Jack exuded beyond the words chosen and easily implied so much worse. "Give me a moment to let my heart stop fluttering."

For as much as she wants to devote zero effort to him, he does keep getting these tiny microscopic breaks from her. That small glance? It's a point, fed to him. Even simply engaging him in 'conversation' is giving him too much allowance, Sabine. But hey, better that, because otherwise he'll just start annoyingly singing until she leaves or talks.

He plucks a weed from the dirt and holds it up towards her, pinched and spun between thumb and forefinger. "A rose befitting of your attitude," he says sweetly, fully aware that he Definitely Thinks all she deserves is a weed.

Neither Sabine's head nor her gaze shifted toward his hand.
She simply stares at him straight on from right over her book.

This time without the surprise or disappointment to go with it. Not that she expected him to be any better than he had been at the execution. It's a similar strain in the same refrain. She is wary of him—both what he is (the quite odd how he is) and what she's been told—but it sits at such odds with the definitive childishness.

"Is that it? The extent of your witty insults that won't help you?"

He shrugs with a face like he's incredibly put out by the lack of "appreciation" towards his "gesture" and after another twirl of the weed it goes up in a small plume of flame that pulls back to his palm afterwards. He brushes ash away with his other hand and resumes his work.

(He'd like to only half-ass this, but they're never going to release him from this--eugh--"service" if he doesn't do a decent job.)

Only people he likes get an actual genuine side to him.

Her?

He's enjoying working around her like a Rubik's Cube. Shifting every which-way each conversation they have and looking for any revealing soft underbelly that isn't just the eternal cacophony of Jack. But maybe that's all the one-track mind that she is.

What a boring life, if so.

"Why should I give you anything else?" he says, the first honest thing he's said to her, without any piles of jest and jeering. He doesn't people. He doesn't need to people. Too many of the Thorne Summoned do actually "know him" that there's no point.

Sabine lowered her book. Marginally. Very marginally.

She does get that on some level this broken angel, once upon a hell king, stitched into a puppet, supposedly isn't one hundred percent a dick to Jack, but she's been gone so long, unable to put herself in between him and anything, that any percent annoys her on a visceral level. One she hasn't been able to act on for too long.

Overcompensation can take a back seat;

it wasn't put into a coma for being right and punished by it.

Her eyebrows raise, and she parrots a counter back to his starting this, taking his words and pressing more on the third word, as he proved her own point on the other side of the chessboard. "Why should I?"

What would ever possess her of a want to confide the things she doesn't even know about what might or might not be happening (or already have happened) to her, what she is or isn't any longer, between opening the white door and waking up in the fountain?

Edited 2023-05-10 02:26 (UTC)

He rounds a grin up to her, bright, a glint to his eyes. "Lookit that, brought down to my level," he sings. "And here you acted so above it and all that."

So nothing; nothing would possess her to actually give anything else, because Lucifer is an asshole.

Sabine doesn't take the time to play through the stupidity of those words. But she doesn't look away either as he ping-pongs again between something level and something outlandish.

"What is the point of asking, then?"

He could have just left her to her book. But she's beginning to think there's something about him that just can't. That weirdly isn't even worryingly malicious as it is an antic play for annoyance. It's a weird side-step from what evil comported itself as in their worlds, universes, and dimensions. It's a more human, very younger sibling, bent than she expected from what she'd heard.

The problem is: he can't get a read on her. If she was human he'd be over and done with her already, but she's an Unknown and that alone makes his skin crawl. Human-shaped, won't crack open like one. Won't sing to Lucifer's tune, won't even rise up to it in humor.

She's an Unknown that he can't even place what she is, just that she's not. Other. Far more than that shape allows and nowhere near the same sense as his family.

He'll rebuff her until the end of time until that skin-crawling feeling fades.

But really, he's never been on the same side of--not himself, at his worst--but whatever irritating form she's putting out front.

He doesn't like it.

"To see where your card fall. How your mask stretches. Where your tolerance ends. Or, I suppose, what your stubbornness level is."

He hums an upbeat, off-key tune, moving over to a new patch for him to reach. "How long you're willing to 'put up' with me or if you'll throw in the towel and find a new spot. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon, I'm working." Why ask? Because he wanted to see how she'd respond; isn't that how conversations work? "We're both dancing, but in two different realities." Neither willing to parlay.

At least, that's honest. For whatever reason, it makes her jaw loosen a little. Her mouth purses toward a faint frown, but it's not all hard lines this time, and her first words are far more honest than he (or anyone) fully understands.

"I was made to endure."

She should mean The Rift. Taking care of Jack. But.

That isn't what she thinks of. It's that the last six years would have driven a human insane. It's not an offering, or an explanation, so much as it is a statement. A fact. If she could withstand The Rift's unending drag, (breaking with her parents for) Jack, and that void, she could endure him (and this newest cage of a castle, world, dimension), too.

There's a peak to her brows. "Were you?"

He's surprised to get anything concrete from her, but he doesn't let it show, keeping his attention on the section of flowers.

"I was," he admits. He does take some time with that, and maybe she's gone back to her book while it's clear he's thinking something over. His siblings may be dead. He may be dead in another world, but Castiel has died several times now. Death is an end only if the powers allow it. If he allows it. It's the same desperation as being free from the Cage; all he needs is a hand to reach out to him.

Eventually, he says, "It's a curse." Being eternal. The Mark, the Cage, the constant fight with family and the reach for freedom.

Though death may have been his only true freedom. So the possibility of coming back could've been just as bad.

It's like chess to her. Her response had still been hooked to his; that assault he implied he would wind away at her; the truth that it was no more or less than the wind currently. Hers more of a hooked challenge, with too much of the answer already known, even unknowing of him more than stories and two interactions.

He doesn't add to it.

There's no song and dance.
No antic caper. No manic smirk.

He stays in the dirt, tending to the gardens, and she waits. But it pauses there, and that's an odd enough impasse that she doesn't move. She wonders if he means it differently, infinitum, even in blink, imprisoned in two different cages, both not of his making. One of them far worse than the other, though no curiosity touches her on whether he had not well earned it.

Sabine only glanced down at her lap, where her book had ended up when he added those last three words. It would be a lie to say she agreed. But it would similarly be a lie to say she had never thought so at any point. But she doesn't love that it stirs up a first-fledgling trill of uncertainty in the cemented stillness of her untouched by him.

"Do you think so?"

Give him something real and he may give something real back. He's an extremely cagey (haha) individual, with Trust Issues to stretch one-way across the cosmos, and Abandonment Issues to stretch the way back.

"Mmmm," is his agreement. "If I went home," he starts. If he went home and didn't filet his son. If he went home and lived. "And, say, my Father erases everything else in existence," hypothetically speaking, "my siblings and I would endure. Rule and dominion over a wasteland. Freedom, maybe. Finally. To an endless nothingness without a point. An empty world is just another cage. When does it end?"

Or his Father executes them with the rest, but he has enough hate in him that he honestly imagines God would allow them to live, just so they would suffer.

It's stated as a fact. Even, currently, in Abraxas Lucifer doesn't so much want to rule, he just wants the world to be different and it's not there yet.

Sabine's eyebrows furrowed, gaze sliding back in Lucifer's direction as words started pouring out of him. They are the fits and starts of sentences, and she knows there's context she's missing, perhaps whole other parts that might go there, but she could translate Jack at his worst, and Lucifer's strung-together bits are still far more straightforward than that.

The image is surprisingly clear and—honestly—a touch more sadistic than Sabine expected or knows whether to believe in even the slightest. Given the spokesperson; and the very bright warning woven all through and around him. Judgment doesn't cloud her this time, and she lets it set itself a different thing to question instead.

"You can't decide to go somewhere else outside of it instead?"

Outside of that universe. Or plane of existence.

"I think that might be gone, too," he says, and then adds, "probably." All his details from Michael are missing pieces and he's just been filling in the blanks just like she's been filling in his sentences. "The fact that this place exists, presumably out of his reach, does not make any sense in the logical realm that I'm accustomed to."

He leans back and blows out an annoyed breath. It's likely he'll swing back into Annoying Child at some point, but for the moment she's got him in the place he's grown more comfortable with as of late.

And it's talking about his terrible parentage. He could take eons on that.

"This--Abraxas--is as 'outside' as my siblings may ever get."

Sabine has never wanted to leave Jack. Not even when they were lividly screaming at each other or not talking at all outside of slamming doors and drawers, and either way, she wanted to throw plates and glasses at the wall just because words weren't big enough and he wasn't listening, wasn't taking care of himself, was dying and losing his time on the shittiest of things that weren't important.

Not even then.

She had wanted to leave the Rift and The Gas Station, their Shitty Little Town, and the greater share of her duty for Jack. But she'd never wanted to leave-leave. The big types of Leave. The kind she'd been in limbo between the last six years. The kind she's always known there were billions on billions on further billions of other options out there.

That she could take.
But never wanted.

She chose her duty as a Keeper,
and more than that, she chose to love Jack.

She'd made her own walls, and sometimes she loved them, and sometimes she hated them—her parents hadn't hovered trapped and waiting for six years, they'd simply slipped elsewhere immediately after 'their car accident'; but she was also this and she'd owned the repercussions of it—but she got to choose them herself.

(All except the coma. That was still entirely someone else's doing.)

"Wow." Short. Punctuated. "Your Dad's an Old Testament dick."

Edited 2023-05-11 02:54 (UTC)

It's the first thing she's said that might mean he could like her one day. It doesn't lessen the skin-crawling but it does perk him up slightly any time someone actually realizes how much God sucks.

"I know, right!" he exclaims. "Everyone gets all mad at me for when I wanted to extinguish humanity but then he takes a page from my book and it's all 'well he's God.'" He huffs.

"No," Sabine says quicker this time. "It's still terrible both times."

"Anyone who thinks otherwise is just as terrible."

If people could stop trying to kill or trap their ragtag bags of humanity in pain-riddled, deathless, infinite perpetuity, that'd be great. It's a warped set of lines to cross when this want just to rid themselves full stop of their 'people problem' is still probably more merciful than The Devastator's thrall was. Would have been.

Past tense for her. Current-future tense for Jack.

Time never was as straightforward as people assumed it to be.

"Yeah, I know, I get it, okay! They're all not horrible!"

He did say 'when I wanted.' Past tense. It's gotten a bit more complicated now. He still hates humanity as a unit, a group. Still hates that his Father wanted him to bow down to a bunch of apes that could barely wipe their own asses. Hates maybe that specific iteration of Earth's batch.

But.

But.

Though it had been a reaction to the latter part of his comparison, Sabine doesn't need to question that he'd taken it personally, that seems to roll pretty seamlessly into the rest of the self-fixated points of this. It also says— no, no, she is n-o-t. Not that she wasn't not saying the earlier wasn't equally so, but no one needed lateral and hypocritical extermination zealotry regardless of who was holding the lead.

"I wouldn't go that far," Sabine says, and maybe, just maybe, it's the first faint twist to her tone. "Some of the people—" and beings "—everywhere are pretty unanimously shitty in the mix, as well. But we don't 'baby with the bathwater' a whole species, or universe, because of it."

She lived in the South. It was a testament to those people not dying every time they opened their mouths. There was a reason she'd only cared for the forest and her books until she'd stumbled on to the child insanity couldn't touch. She might be a Keeper for The Rift—and the whole planet, and even the human race, through that—but it didn't mean she actually had to like any of them.

She just had to agree they didn't deserve an eternity of pain solely for existing.

Look he's very self-centered, the fact that he's grown slightly less so over the course of a near-year is extremely impressive. Everything is, typically, in some way about him. There is a part of that solely from himself and who he is.

There is another part of that where he's just used to people saying shit about him all the damn time that it's just how he takes everything from a New Person.

"Well he's all about it. Get mad at something, throw in the towel." He waves a hand exaggeratedly, leaning slightly more into that childishness, but he's still in the zone. "Byyyye little ants." He plucks a weed with the same hand. "I don't know how much he decided to nuke," if any others at all, but this is where his mind is currently set without talking to Michael, "or how many other drafts of worlds he made in the first place, I've only been to two; my home and another." Oh he was dead in that world, too.

Fun times.

So there were still other places, but his god had locked the doors and clipped their wings, perhaps as far back as their creation, so that they couldn't go any further than the patch of playground laid out for them. It's a cruelty, even when one considers most humans would never begin to understand how much existed beyond their sphere of understanding.

How much of it already lived side-by-side with them, still beyond their comprehension.

Sabine sidesteps the animated denigration.

"He was destroying everything when you were pulled here?"

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

ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ'ꜱ ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ɪ'ᴅ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ʙᴀᴄᴋ

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