Oh, yes, Hell's his, thanks for the reminder, he definitely brought that down onto himself, yeah. The realm he's always first known for, the realm he refuses to ever call home, the realm that's just as much as a shackle to connect him to the Cage.
The realm he likely could have shaped into being more but he just wanted every being to feel the immeasurable darkness that he did, so why not like he twisted humans, twist a portion of the planet, the gem that he loved just to prove he could. If his Father was going to let oblivion swallow him up, then he'd make sure that black hole was permanently going to remain affixed. Lock him up and throw away the key, but Hell wasn't going anywhere, Father, you can't JUST FORGET ABOUT HIM.
"I would've preferred it!"
Dying. He knows that answer clearly, remembers Wanda asking him so long ago, but the where and when escapes him like mist.
Remembers making the foolish decision to try to lock up the Darkness again and all he can further remember from that scene is the way she looked when she realized they (who? who was there other than him?) weren't going kill her. Remembers his own feelings at thinking he was wanted, and loved, and valuable again to their Father that it mattered more than knowing exactly what she was feeling. The desperation and hopelessness and more than anything in existence not wanting to be locked up again and yet he pressed on, anyway.
He doesn't remember how that ended, at all, and he finds himself grasping for a hole in his memories because surely he changed his mind, surely he reached out to her, surely he gave her what she wanted instead of following orders, surely he wasn't like Michael.
"Do you know how long I waited for you to come back?! To pull me out? To see me? To do anything!? Until I realized you weren't coming, none of you."
It's the most raw emotion that's slipped through Lucifer's cool and calculated exterior since he was returned to this form. Figures it would be family.
It was always family. This family. The one he wasn't allowed to choose.
As Michael goes for his bite, teeth break past the automatic uncontrolled flair of a shield. A translucent mantle of a chimera overlaying Lucifer. An old gift from the Singularity from hundreds of years ago, now bolstered. It never seems to particularly sync with a creature that he had a good time with, though he doesn't remember how he acquired this mode.
He just dislikes it because it furthers his appearance more into ravenous beast, not that that has ever been a problem to his siblings. Then again, he thought they would love him for whatever he became, regardless what side he stood on.
I hate what you did. I've never hated you. (It's somewhere, lodged in the sea of his colored thoughts, unmoored, fragmented.)
The shield snaps between his flesh and Michael's teeth, dislodging him, temporarily granting him some distance from Michael even as blood and grace continues to spill, and maybe for once that will be enough to impact the Horizon, make this plane more. Just one other place to share in Lucifer's pain and a feud of brothers.
All his limbs hook into the sand, wings drawn back, back arched, so very feline-like instead of bird, instead of snake. His eyes are sunken and dripping blood and that might be the chimera mantle fading or it might just be him.
Nothing under pulls a belated snarl from Lucifer, scaled tail lashing behind him, turning to fur, feathers, than back to scale. Of course he never came to terms with his chimera shield, why he absorbed that imagery, it was too real much like the myriapod and any other creature in the last eight-hundred years that he shared a symbiosis with.
When Michael closes the distance again and bears down with terrifying power--the barest hope not daring to voice itself in Lucifer's mind because Michael could kill him but Michael hasn't--it cements everything Lucifer has been feeling over lifetimes and universes and maybe other versions of himself.
You want imagination, Michael?
Here's his power from this imaginative reality.
Hilarious that one of Lucifer's last acts in this very fake reality is likely spawning another demigod into this realm. He digs four of the six claws into sand and invokes the blessing of this iteration of himself. The Herald of New Beginnings. Laughable how that title never felt like a slap to his maw until now.
Plantlife springs from sand, though more blighted than it ever has been in the past, and it slams thick thorny vines into Michael to push him away and wreathe him with flora, closing off his limbs and his ability to speak, filling jaws with greenery, continuously binding against Michael's volcanic brand of wrath. Lucifer wonders just what he's lost for the excessive use, but it doesn't matter anymore, does it?
Lucifer slithers away freed once more and everything is too much, held back for so long. It's what he always does, after all. Hold back until it bursts. Only, long ago, Michael wasn't there when it all burst in the Cage, and he was never going to let it happen when they BOTH held the space.
Lucifer wouldn't let himself be that weak again because he knew it would amount to nothing.
"Of course I broke it all apart!" Lucifer roars, like this is the most obvious thing in the world. He was in pain, he made everyone feel it, and wouldn't stop when he rose free. I didn't so much as stand up again as much as I burned everything down to meet my level, he had told River.
He just thought maybe the solution would have been relief not eternal suffering. Not abandonment. He'd rid himself of the Mark after all, left himself a bleeding wound, didn't know what healing was even supposed to look like but it wasn't happening on its own like it should, and there was no one, no one left at his side. He made everyone else bleed, but they were healing just fine, weren't they? They had help, didn't they?
Or so he thought. So why was he the one alone?
Despite his current ability to hold Michael in place, Lucifer can't stay still. Restless, back and forth, not pacing, just... movement. Mercurial.
"Caging me wasn't a solution! He could've ripped my power from me and dumped me on the planet. Would I have resented it? Would I have found a way to try and destroy everything? Of course."
But once upon a time he was powerless in a gilded cage of the once-Thorne and he had to struggle to survive, to make weapons out of those around him, to find a footing because the queen was far too much like him in her mindset and he was going to die when he should have been eternal.
There was a goddamn multiverse out there, apparently. His Father drafted worlds because he couldn't stand to look at them. Lucifer hadn't only been discarded, he'd been discarded like a bad book that was maybe picked up again from time to time.
A multiverse Lucifer could've been tossed to and yet he was thrown to the Cage to be used later, for an Apocalypse that Lucifer thought he could craft as something of his own so that once again all of his millennia of pain bottled-up could be felt by All. He didn't need the Mark anymore. He just was without it.
More than he already was and then some. Burning, vitriolic rage, unhealthy for a being that was naturally so glacial.
"He didn't. He made you do his dirty work. He used you and put me away like a footnote. Why would I ever see value in humanity when I didn't have to?! I had to claw and scrape and pull people around me like a cloak in Thorne because I didn't have enough sliver of power to protect myself. And they all saw the monster that you couldn't stand." It's so much worse when he uses That Word himself. Rolling with smoke now off his limbs, backed by light from his spilled grace. Unnaturally putting off steam as ice crystals collect under his claws. "All of them. All of them. And here, in this place, this reality, they're all still here. They all stayed. Just like I thought you had."
Like a fool. Because he wouldn't press. He wouldn't break. The destructive black hole that was Lucifer wanted to hold to what seemed barely stable and maybe had he done this usual sooner maybe Michael would've still been his brother and not everyone's brother and maybe maybe maybe--
"But no. It's a lie. I should've known. Should've seen it sooner. This could have been perfect but you--"
For a moment, his exhaustion cracks through. For a moment his connection to the Horizon even dips and he sees the sky continuing to shatter. When he jolts back for two seconds it's Nick standing there before his true form reorients.
His vines have loosened in the blip and he pumps more of his god power into them, striking unnatural colors of his space in the Nether that he's spent centuries cultivating through Michael, holding, holding, holding. If he lets go it's all, truly, over.
"All any of you wanted was for me to be someone that I couldn't go back to, even if I tried, even if I wanted," he whispers. He looks to Michael, his desperation flagged, the exhaustion winning. "What? You want to hear that I was wrong? I wasn't. I'm still not."
His point that never mattered did matter, to him.
It always mattered.
It would continue to still matter because no matter what anyone wants, it shaped him into the being he is now. It corroded the core of his being to be flecked with darkness, impure despite the radiant beacon of archangel that he'd always be. Whoever he was before would never exist again. If he did, that would be the greatest lie ever told.
"Humanity is flawed. I've corrupted souls and proven that. I've corrupted minds and proven that."
Lucifer has unwound the minds of hundred of humans in the last centuries. He took them apart and rarely put them back together--that was the 'job' of others. It left him with more fun to break them all over again.
"You want to know what I was wrong about? Thinking that we weren't also flawed." That their Father, their baseline, wasn't flawed.
His hold on Michael is waning and he staggers under the weight of it, and yeah, he can sense it now, a demigod awakening in the Witchwood. Strong and wild and reckless. The sky furthering to crack is likely his own damn fault; he hopes the Singularity won't hold it against him.
His form trembles, his mind in two different places, clearing in a moment.
"Yeah, I wanted to manipulate the Summoned into being my defense buffer. Throw themselves between me and danger. And you know what? It worked. Too damn well! Because guess what? When you're paranoid for your life at every moment and have no secured channel not even trusting the Horizon, and you have to buckle down and trust the people around you? Apparently that's how you make friends. Especially when time and time again they all see the evil in the dark but somehow despite how stupid it is they still put impossible amounts of trust in me."
He isn't going to bother to fight that anymore. What's the point when this reality, for however it's built, however it existed, it existed. He understands how he, himself, got here, to this point. He has to believe the others just the same.
He has to understand how Michael came to be this way, until family and Lucifer's own betrayal spiked awareness through him.
How Awful. How devastating. He wonders if Michael will end up spiting him for that reminder alone.
Some of his vines begin to flake away like ash. The others freeze with ice, easy to crack out of.
Lucifer's out of time.
"I was so. Tired. Of being alone. Do you think I wanted that? Really?"
And yet they could never, would never, talk in the Cage, because--
"Why would I ever have adapt for you? For them? For Him? You all wanted the Light I didn't have anymore! Why are you so surprised I've chosen these others when they looked at the horror I am and accepted it?! All I wanted was acceptance and you would never give me that. I didn't even need you to stand with me I just needed you to see me, not a monster, not a freak."
He's backing away now, the last of his god blessing falling away, fear taking hold at Michael's freedom restored, that tiny speck of hope long gone. His only remaining defense if Michael resumes attacking is a crackling explosion of paralyzing lightning shielding up around Lucifer with a word of Ancient Thornean. Something never used, but kept on his person all the same, the enchantment metallic, shaped like a feather, tucked deep within a wing. His crowning Abraxan spell accomplishment.
Mortal magic.
"No one ever let me put it back together!!" His desperation, now. Like the Darkness, remembered. "I made up conversations in the dead space around me if anyone came back." Until I realized you weren't coming, none of you. "And why would I ever try after. Had to still follow Dad's story, didn't you? His orders. Raphael followed along in your shadow. Gabriel ran again and again and again."
And just when Lucifer wondered at possibility, Gabriel ran again, didn't he? Maybe it wasn't by choice, but Lucifer would be hard-pressed to think otherwise.
Maybe for once Lucifer should take a page from him and run, too, but he's pulling up his remaining strength like a shield not a weapon because at some point in Abraxas he changed his focus to protection not offense and he's scared, again, of Michael, but he won't run in spite of that desperation. But that defense is tissue paper at best. "I don't want to be alone anymore. And if you don't want to be a part of that, I--" There's a flare of molten red through his grace. Of Hell. Lucifer jerks his attention from Michael. He can't say it. He can't handle knowing the truth if Michael is finally, finally done with his little brother.
um. look. I. hrrrrg. yeah. congrats this is the longest tag I've ever written????? erm.
The realm he likely could have shaped into being more but he just wanted every being to feel the immeasurable darkness that he did, so why not like he twisted humans, twist a portion of the planet, the gem that he loved just to prove he could. If his Father was going to let oblivion swallow him up, then he'd make sure that black hole was permanently going to remain affixed. Lock him up and throw away the key, but Hell wasn't going anywhere, Father, you can't JUST FORGET ABOUT HIM.
"I would've preferred it!"
Dying. He knows that answer clearly, remembers Wanda asking him so long ago, but the where and when escapes him like mist.
Remembers making the foolish decision to try to lock up the Darkness again and all he can further remember from that scene is the way she looked when she realized they (who? who was there other than him?) weren't going kill her. Remembers his own feelings at thinking he was wanted, and loved, and valuable again to their Father that it mattered more than knowing exactly what she was feeling. The desperation and hopelessness and more than anything in existence not wanting to be locked up again and yet he pressed on, anyway.
He doesn't remember how that ended, at all, and he finds himself grasping for a hole in his memories because surely he changed his mind, surely he reached out to her, surely he gave her what she wanted instead of following orders, surely he wasn't like Michael.
"Do you know how long I waited for you to come back?! To pull me out? To see me? To do anything!? Until I realized you weren't coming, none of you."
It's the most raw emotion that's slipped through Lucifer's cool and calculated exterior since he was returned to this form. Figures it would be family.
It was always family. This family. The one he wasn't allowed to choose.
As Michael goes for his bite, teeth break past the automatic uncontrolled flair of a shield. A translucent mantle of a chimera overlaying Lucifer. An old gift from the Singularity from hundreds of years ago, now bolstered. It never seems to particularly sync with a creature that he had a good time with, though he doesn't remember how he acquired this mode.
He just dislikes it because it furthers his appearance more into ravenous beast, not that that has ever been a problem to his siblings. Then again, he thought they would love him for whatever he became, regardless what side he stood on.
I hate what you did. I've never hated you. (It's somewhere, lodged in the sea of his colored thoughts, unmoored, fragmented.)
The shield snaps between his flesh and Michael's teeth, dislodging him, temporarily granting him some distance from Michael even as blood and grace continues to spill, and maybe for once that will be enough to impact the Horizon, make this plane more. Just one other place to share in Lucifer's pain and a feud of brothers.
All his limbs hook into the sand, wings drawn back, back arched, so very feline-like instead of bird, instead of snake. His eyes are sunken and dripping blood and that might be the chimera mantle fading or it might just be him.
Nothing under pulls a belated snarl from Lucifer, scaled tail lashing behind him, turning to fur, feathers, than back to scale. Of course he never came to terms with his chimera shield, why he absorbed that imagery, it was too real much like the myriapod and any other creature in the last eight-hundred years that he shared a symbiosis with.
When Michael closes the distance again and bears down with terrifying power--the barest hope not daring to voice itself in Lucifer's mind because Michael could kill him but Michael hasn't--it cements everything Lucifer has been feeling over lifetimes and universes and maybe other versions of himself.
You want imagination, Michael?
Here's his power from this imaginative reality.
Hilarious that one of Lucifer's last acts in this very fake reality is likely spawning another demigod into this realm. He digs four of the six claws into sand and invokes the blessing of this iteration of himself. The Herald of New Beginnings. Laughable how that title never felt like a slap to his maw until now.
Plantlife springs from sand, though more blighted than it ever has been in the past, and it slams thick thorny vines into Michael to push him away and wreathe him with flora, closing off his limbs and his ability to speak, filling jaws with greenery, continuously binding against Michael's volcanic brand of wrath. Lucifer wonders just what he's lost for the excessive use, but it doesn't matter anymore, does it?
Lucifer slithers away freed once more and everything is too much, held back for so long. It's what he always does, after all. Hold back until it bursts. Only, long ago, Michael wasn't there when it all burst in the Cage, and he was never going to let it happen when they BOTH held the space.
Lucifer wouldn't let himself be that weak again because he knew it would amount to nothing.
"Of course I broke it all apart!" Lucifer roars, like this is the most obvious thing in the world. He was in pain, he made everyone feel it, and wouldn't stop when he rose free. I didn't so much as stand up again as much as I burned everything down to meet my level, he had told River.
He just thought maybe the solution would have been relief not eternal suffering. Not abandonment. He'd rid himself of the Mark after all, left himself a bleeding wound, didn't know what healing was even supposed to look like but it wasn't happening on its own like it should, and there was no one, no one left at his side. He made everyone else bleed, but they were healing just fine, weren't they? They had help, didn't they?
Or so he thought. So why was he the one alone?
Despite his current ability to hold Michael in place, Lucifer can't stay still. Restless, back and forth, not pacing, just... movement. Mercurial.
"Caging me wasn't a solution! He could've ripped my power from me and dumped me on the planet. Would I have resented it? Would I have found a way to try and destroy everything? Of course."
But once upon a time he was powerless in a gilded cage of the once-Thorne and he had to struggle to survive, to make weapons out of those around him, to find a footing because the queen was far too much like him in her mindset and he was going to die when he should have been eternal.
There was a goddamn multiverse out there, apparently. His Father drafted worlds because he couldn't stand to look at them. Lucifer hadn't only been discarded, he'd been discarded like a bad book that was maybe picked up again from time to time.
A multiverse Lucifer could've been tossed to and yet he was thrown to the Cage to be used later, for an Apocalypse that Lucifer thought he could craft as something of his own so that once again all of his millennia of pain bottled-up could be felt by All. He didn't need the Mark anymore. He just was without it.
More than he already was and then some. Burning, vitriolic rage, unhealthy for a being that was naturally so glacial.
"He didn't. He made you do his dirty work. He used you and put me away like a footnote. Why would I ever see value in humanity when I didn't have to?! I had to claw and scrape and pull people around me like a cloak in Thorne because I didn't have enough sliver of power to protect myself. And they all saw the monster that you couldn't stand." It's so much worse when he uses That Word himself. Rolling with smoke now off his limbs, backed by light from his spilled grace. Unnaturally putting off steam as ice crystals collect under his claws. "All of them. All of them. And here, in this place, this reality, they're all still here. They all stayed. Just like I thought you had."
Like a fool. Because he wouldn't press. He wouldn't break. The destructive black hole that was Lucifer wanted to hold to what seemed barely stable and maybe had he done this usual sooner maybe Michael would've still been his brother and not everyone's brother and maybe maybe maybe--
"But no. It's a lie. I should've known. Should've seen it sooner. This could have been perfect but you--"
For a moment, his exhaustion cracks through. For a moment his connection to the Horizon even dips and he sees the sky continuing to shatter. When he jolts back for two seconds it's Nick standing there before his true form reorients.
His vines have loosened in the blip and he pumps more of his god power into them, striking unnatural colors of his space in the Nether that he's spent centuries cultivating through Michael, holding, holding, holding. If he lets go it's all, truly, over.
"All any of you wanted was for me to be someone that I couldn't go back to, even if I tried, even if I wanted," he whispers. He looks to Michael, his desperation flagged, the exhaustion winning. "What? You want to hear that I was wrong? I wasn't. I'm still not."
His point that never mattered did matter, to him.
It always mattered.
It would continue to still matter because no matter what anyone wants, it shaped him into the being he is now. It corroded the core of his being to be flecked with darkness, impure despite the radiant beacon of archangel that he'd always be. Whoever he was before would never exist again. If he did, that would be the greatest lie ever told.
"Humanity is flawed. I've corrupted souls and proven that. I've corrupted minds and proven that."
Lucifer has unwound the minds of hundred of humans in the last centuries. He took them apart and rarely put them back together--that was the 'job' of others. It left him with more fun to break them all over again.
"You want to know what I was wrong about? Thinking that we weren't also flawed." That their Father, their baseline, wasn't flawed.
His hold on Michael is waning and he staggers under the weight of it, and yeah, he can sense it now, a demigod awakening in the Witchwood. Strong and wild and reckless. The sky furthering to crack is likely his own damn fault; he hopes the Singularity won't hold it against him.
His form trembles, his mind in two different places, clearing in a moment.
"Yeah, I wanted to manipulate the Summoned into being my defense buffer. Throw themselves between me and danger. And you know what? It worked. Too damn well! Because guess what? When you're paranoid for your life at every moment and have no secured channel not even trusting the Horizon, and you have to buckle down and trust the people around you? Apparently that's how you make friends. Especially when time and time again they all see the evil in the dark but somehow despite how stupid it is they still put impossible amounts of trust in me."
He isn't going to bother to fight that anymore. What's the point when this reality, for however it's built, however it existed, it existed. He understands how he, himself, got here, to this point. He has to believe the others just the same.
He has to understand how Michael came to be this way, until family and Lucifer's own betrayal spiked awareness through him.
How Awful. How devastating. He wonders if Michael will end up spiting him for that reminder alone.
Some of his vines begin to flake away like ash. The others freeze with ice, easy to crack out of.
Lucifer's out of time.
"I was so. Tired. Of being alone. Do you think I wanted that? Really?"
And yet they could never, would never, talk in the Cage, because--
"Why would I ever have adapt for you? For them? For Him? You all wanted the Light I didn't have anymore! Why are you so surprised I've chosen these others when they looked at the horror I am and accepted it?! All I wanted was acceptance and you would never give me that. I didn't even need you to stand with me I just needed you to see me, not a monster, not a freak."
He's backing away now, the last of his god blessing falling away, fear taking hold at Michael's freedom restored, that tiny speck of hope long gone. His only remaining defense if Michael resumes attacking is a crackling explosion of paralyzing lightning shielding up around Lucifer with a word of Ancient Thornean. Something never used, but kept on his person all the same, the enchantment metallic, shaped like a feather, tucked deep within a wing. His crowning Abraxan spell accomplishment.
Mortal magic.
"No one ever let me put it back together!!" His desperation, now. Like the Darkness, remembered. "I made up conversations in the dead space around me if anyone came back." Until I realized you weren't coming, none of you. "And why would I ever try after. Had to still follow Dad's story, didn't you? His orders. Raphael followed along in your shadow. Gabriel ran again and again and again."
And just when Lucifer wondered at possibility, Gabriel ran again, didn't he? Maybe it wasn't by choice, but Lucifer would be hard-pressed to think otherwise.
Maybe for once Lucifer should take a page from him and run, too, but he's pulling up his remaining strength like a shield not a weapon because at some point in Abraxas he changed his focus to protection not offense and he's scared, again, of Michael, but he won't run in spite of that desperation. But that defense is tissue paper at best. "I don't want to be alone anymore. And if you don't want to be a part of that, I--" There's a flare of molten red through his grace. Of Hell. Lucifer jerks his attention from Michael. He can't say it. He can't handle knowing the truth if Michael is finally, finally done with his little brother.
Maybe he'll run, after all.