Chapter Text
Now that he once again had fingers, Lucifer returned to a long-missed hobby: making wooden ducks. Sinking back into one of the plush armchairs, he summoned a lap desk and the necessary tools and materials to begin crafting them. It was a good way to keep his hands busy since they were particularly fidgety after being stuck as paws for so long.
Lucifer looked at the bright yellow base with fondness, inspecting the wood for any flaws and smoothing them out with sandpaper. He had a passion for ducks of course, a deep-seated admiration for their silly beauty, but after making several thousands of them in isolation, he couldn’t help but associate them with loneliness.
It made him sad to fall out of love with yet another part of his life, but here, in the library of his subconsciousness with a certain seven-foot-tall demon seated across from him, he found new solace in the task. It felt, somehow, a little bit like healing.
Certainly, duck-making excelled as a distraction from said demon, who was holding the pieces of Lucifer’s soul in his hands and looking none the happier for it. He was still, of course, smiling, but the smirk was thinner, a bit subdued, and that terrified Lucifer. Did Alastor not like what he was reading about? Or was it a sign that he did? What was he reading about, anyway?
Lucifer shimmied down in his seat, angling his face to better read the title on the covers of the book Alastor was holding. The sinner had already collected a stack of tomes on the floor beside his chair.
Alastor looked up from his own sprawled position across the cushions, legs idly dangling off of one of the armrests. He sent an annoyed look Lucifer’s way. “Can I help you?”
Caught mid-squint, Lucifer wheezed and laughed and thought Hell, give me strength, because I am making an utter fool of myself, before he managed to squeak out, “Uh, hey, read anything interesting?”
Alastor simply turned back to looking at the book, letting out a non-committal, “Hm.”
“Uh huh?”
Several moments passed before Alastor added, “Lucifer, did you know that you have an entire encyclopaedic set of thoughts and feelings on different kinds of fruit?”
Fruit? Alastor had access to every recollection of a millennia-old being, the devil himself, and he was reading about fruit?
Lucifer was busy gaping like a fish in response, while Alastor continued to speak from behind his book’s embroidered covers.
“Well. Apparently you didn’t know.” Alastor kept a finger on his current page as he flipped back to the beginning. “The prelude starts like so:
“Fruit! Oh joyous, wonderful assembly of sucrose, glucose, and fructose combined with juice and the supple give of fibrous flesh that somehow produced a tantalizing morsel of–”
“STOP. PLEASE,” Lucifer was burning up because yes, okay, he did really like most types of fruit, he just hadn’t remembered that his mind tended to wax poetic about things he enjoyed, especially when the first Fruit Volume was being written in his head, which was, oh, around ten thousand years ago?
(As to how Alastor’s delight in learning what his thoughts on mere fruit were was somehow enough to make Lucifer blush fiercely gold, he had not a clue, not a clue at all.)
“Oh, but I was just about to get to the,” Alastor paused for dramedic effect, “juiciest bits!
Without missing a beat, Alastor shifted the book back to his reading place and snorted, “Why, here it says that your favorite fruit is the… Red Delicious. Eugh, what a sickeningly sweet cultivar of apples.”
Lucifer paused and spent a couple seconds processing. The contents of Fruit Volume I were still floating in his mind, he just had to cast out his consciousness… a little bit further until he found– “My favorite fruit is first discussed on page 440, yeah?”
“Well.”
“Well, well, indeed!” Lucifer tutted, grinning smugly.
“Oh, shut up.”
Lucifer burst out in laughter, cackling in fits and starts, while Alastor rolled his eyes but otherwise kept the murderous thoughts to his eyes. Rather loving this exchange, Lucifer couldn’t help but poke at the proverbial bear further.
“No, no, I think I get the picture – you were interested enough about what I had to say about fruit, including thirty pages lambasting lemons and an additional seventy praising pineapples, to read over four hundred pages of it?”
Alastor held his ears still while he answered, “I didn’t… hate the contents…”
Lucifer stopped laughing, suddenly feeling very curious and very exposed. He hazarded, “That is to say, uhhhh, you enjoyed my rambling?”
Alastor didn’t deign that with a verbal response, instead releasing a blare of static and shot-putting the near thousand-page volume at Lucifer’s head, which the latter dodged and rolled his eyes about without a second thought.
Until. He noticed Alastor was staring at him, actually slightly past him and downwards, where the book was still lying on the floor and–
Hastily, Lucifer got up, fetched the book, and brought it back to the radio demon. Even when sitting, Alastor was, infuriatingly, slightly taller than Lucifer. He held the book out to Alastor, who snatched it with a certain irritated reverence that only he could manage and returned to reading.
Lucifer sat back to his chair and resumed working on his ducks. This one was being given several red, twirly pipe cleaners for hair.
And, after a short while, Alastor started playing jazz in Lucifer’s subconscious.
The music did a funny sort of sensory thing to Lucifer, causing him to at once feel the dulcet tones in his ears in combination with every individual sound wave bouncing off the bookshelf-covered walls of his mind. In two words, it was unspeakably comforting.
Moments stretched by. Alastor read to about halfway of Fruit Volume I before setting it down and standing up, muttering quietly, quietly, about he didn’t hate it, he just wanted to start something new.
His claws hovered over the several shelves of books on ducks. His eyes glanced at the entire section of a wall labeled on an elmwood sign, in Lucifer’s haphazard cursive, as “Heaven.” He stared a long time at the section filled with Lucifer’s past memories in heaven, until finally, his gaze drifted to a collection of books with velvet-red covers on one of the more recent shelves.
Each volume was titled with a different name that progressed from “bellhop” to “busboy” to “Alexander” to “Alice,” and finally, several approximately three thousand-page books with “Alastor” written front and center.
Lucifer was, unfortunately, not spared from the endless bits of teasing and chaff that resulted from Alastor’s discovery.
(The lighthearted “Oh my, I hadn’t realized that Hell’s king kept such an obsession with me!” and the more genuinely curious, “Have you been tracking my every act of sin? Is that the reason for the length of these tomes?” sent a violent flush down his face and neck. The devil left the latter question unanswered, reasoning that telling Alastor that no, he didn’t keep records like that in this section of the library, though seriously, did you kill that many people – would result in Alastor asking more questions that Lucifer wasn’t ready to address.)
And besides, even with access to such books about himself, Alastor let them be. A tacit “for next time” hung in the air.
For now, he selected a book about Lucifer’s favorite foods. Speaking of which – Lucifer graciously granted Alastor a few moments to read before inquiring, casually– “It’s around time when everyone gets dinner together. Don’tcha think you ought to join Charlie and the others?”
“Quite frankly, I don’t care. I’ve disappeared for longer,” the demon huffed.
“Alastor.”
“Mmmm?” The eyes of the sinner in question briefly rose from his place in the book to meet Lucifer’s before returning to scour the pages.
“Okay, as much as I hate to admit it, and I hate it, I really, really, really do, Charlie would… worry if you don’t come back on time. And radio signals can’t travel through this space, so she’d stress about not being able to call in on you.”
Sighing, Alastor set down his book. It was sort of… curious to see that the radio demon cared enough about Charlie for this to have been what ultimately won Lucifer this argument. Alastor asked, “Will… you be joining us, then? In your normal form?”
Lucifer shook his head. “I don’t think I can.”
“And why is that?”
“I– I’m not sure if Charlie wants to see me.” Lucifer fixed his gaze on the duck still in his hands, his fingers nervously playing with the duck’s fuzzy red hair
“What.” Alastor’s radio static prickled in the room. “You are aware that your daughter cares quite a bit about her father’s presence, yes?”
“I– Kind of? But it’s like, she still knows I’m here and around, that I’ll always run to her side if she needs help, no matter the time or place.”
Alastor went quiet at that, and looked serious if his grin threatening to falter were any indication. “You don’t seem to be getting my point.”
“I, uh, I’m not sure what point there is to get? Charlie hasn’t asked me to come visit the Hotel after she got the meeting with Heaven, and she’s, um, she’s been doing so well by herself since then – clearly, ha! If anything, she might see me as in the way…”
“In the way,” Alastor echoed, his eyebrows furrowing. He tried a different tack: “Alright, well, did you ever have a parent-like figure… in Heaven? Anyone to picture in order to put yourself in Charlie’s shoes right now?”
Lucifer’s breath hitched. “Not really, I mean, the first angels and I were made at the same time, and God was, uh, is, well—”
His heart racing, Lucifer raised a hand and ducked his head. He levitated a book from the top shelves of the “Heaven” section, slowly sending it hovering to the deer demon.
An offer – for Alastor to learn something from reading about it instead of hearing it from Lucifer’s quivering lips, whimpering voice, all of which he couldn’t help but feel ashamed about.
He was the king of all Hell, one of the strongest beings on either side of Earth, and yet– and yet, he was scared. Of having this conversation with anyone. Especially with Alastor, of all the newly important people in his life.
No matter how much he had told himself he was ready, he couldn’t help but wince at the thought of Alastor eventually seeing something about himself that was weak, that Alastor might come to pity, look down on, and hate. The matter of his lack of parents, or guardians of any kind, was small, in the vastness of all that Lucifer had come to regret, but he feared that it might be the start of everything that Alastor could dislike about him.
But Alastor offered what might– what could be an empathetic glance and shook his head at the offer to read Lucifer’s book. He murmured, “No, I want to hear it from you. And… well, I don’t believe I’d mind holding your paw again if you were willing to shapeshift it. If that would. Make this more pleasant. For yourself.”
Lucifer blinked. Then, he beamed with the radiance of the dawn’s first light. This, at least, was easy enough.
With a poof, his forearm changed into a larger version of his cat form’s. He walked towards the other armchair, where Alastor made space for him to sit on one of the armrests.
With care, with tenderness, the sinner took Lucifer’s smaller paw into his own hand, fingers gently scratching along ashen fur. A warm shiver rippled through Lucifer’s spine. He had missed this.
“Okay, where to start, um,” Lucifer shook his head a bit, regaining his bearings. “I… And the other angels, can’t forget them… We… we were new, back then. We were the first, out of anything sentient in this world. We were good, and we were wholly Theirs.
“There wasn’t much before us, parental figures included. There was God, of course there was God, but They always had… other things to take care of.”
Alastor made a soft noise at that, a quiet, slightly musical hum that seemed to suggest he was starting to understand something.
The sinner nodded at him to continue, and so Lucifer did, “Heaven was a nice place, I guess, sort of pretty, maybe even perfect to some. But I gotta admit that it was… lonely, not having anyone there for me. The feeling definitely persisted after our whole, uh, Falling out, haha… though y’know I kinda get what you mean now.”
“I could, well, I wouldn’t be bothered if, um–” Alastor started, callowly, but cut himself off, catching up to Lucifer’s words. He restarted, “Allow me to reiterate my point then, just to make sure you understand. So, to alleviate this… melancholy, did you jump straight away to demanding someone strong, infallible, to swoop in and fix all your problems?”
Alastor reached for Lucifer’s other hand, putting Lucifer in such an entranced state that it took him a second to poof his hand into a paw before Alastor touched and grasped it, tightly.
The radio demon continued, “Or, back in Heaven, would you have been comforted merely by the idle company of someone friendly, someone you knew for a little while – someone merely willing to stay by your side and exchange the occasional smile with?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay I think I get the point now,” Lucifer rolled his eyes, just for show, and Alastor laughed, just a bit. “You’re saying that I’ve basically been copying God’s shitty parenting tactics. And that I should be a little more present in her life, with or without all the king of Hell pizzazz, because Charlie needs me as her father?”
“Oh, good, you have been paying attention then,” Alastor said but smiled, giving both his paws an affectionate squeeze.
Lucifer knew that he wasn’t just going to become a better father over time, that parts of the reticence and hoard of unpacked emotions that had created the rift between him and Charlie were still baked into him. This time, though, there was someone else beside him. Someone capable, someone who clearly cared about Charlie too.
Absently, then with increasing awareness, he noticed that Alastor had leaned in slightly closer than was necessary to hold his paws. His hair – still curly from when he had woken up, there wasn’t time for him to straighten it – was nearly touching Lucifer’s shoulder. Lucifer watched for a brief moment, transfixed in ways he couldn’t describe, until he looked up and saw Alastor doing the same. Both of their faces brightening, they looked away and coughed, as Lucifer awkwardly returned to the original topic.
“Alright, so I’ll tell Charlie and the others soon. But, uh, for dinner tonight, I’m not sure if I’m ready to have this conversation with Charlie. I think I need some time to figure out what I’d really want from staying at the hotel.”
With a staticky ring of annoyance, Alastor huffed, “Fine. I will… agree to keep up the charade for tonight, though one day I might just slip Charlie a hint or two.”
Lightly scoffing, Lucifer got about to transforming back into a cat. As flesh and bones changed shape, he said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give myself the ability to talk now.” Lucifer smiled coyly, though truthfully, internally, he thought he might never recover if Alastor said he would in fact mind, and–
“No, well, I was actually hoping if I could converse with you more often. It does, after all, become rather stale when I am the only one who contributes any sort of thought.”
“Ha! Don’t value your own idle chatter so highly, oh, poor, dearie you.” With Lucifer’s transformation finished, he followed his excellent comeback with a cocky nudge of his head towards Alastor. The deer demon clicked his tongue but still made his lap open for Lucifer to leap onto it. Immediately, Lucifer found himself making a home there.
After a moment, Alastor’s whole torso leaned down to give him a warm, close hug. It was, quite probably, the best thing that had happened to him today.
Alastor breathed into his fur, tiredly whispering, “That was much too much emotionally charged conversation for today. Let’s never do it again.”
Lucifer arched his neck to meet Alastor’s eyes. There was one more thing that Lucifer wanted to make clear about today. “Okay, yeah, we can take a small break from all the serious talk. But if… if you ever want to come back here and read more, just say so. You were being awfully kind to not touch the books on Heaven and Lilith, but like, if you wanted to, I might be okay with it.”
Alastor started scritching at the place behind Lucifer’s ears that never failed to make Lucifer boneless, while he snarked, “Don’t you ever call me kind again, but yes, sure, that sounds like an acceptable arrangement. I, after all, must know about your whole deal with ducks.”
Cackling, Lucifer replied, “Oh, you shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
“We’ll be here all night, won’t we.”
“Okay, so you see, it all started when I saw the feathery plumes of the most adorable little duckling the first one ever created, in fact, which–”
“ALRIGHT, it’s quite about time that we reconvened with the others. Let me just…”
Alastor snapped his fingers, looking slightly surprised when his shadows could still manifest in this realm. Covering Lucifer’s still-rambling mouth with his other hand, Alastor teleported both of them back to the dining room.
Lucifer found himself quite happily sprawled across Alastor’s legs underneath the table. Alastor not so sneakily began to feed him sauteed cinnamon apple slices from one of the appetizers that Lucifer was 98% sure wasn’t on the menu this morning. The hotel’s residents reacted with varying levels of approval.
(Husk: That cat is gonna get lazy and fat with all you’ve been feeding it.
Angel: Aww, calm your fuzzy little whiskers, I’m sure it’s good for him. Heaven knows he’s had a hard enough life as is.
Charlie: I’m just super glad that he likes my food! Good thing that someone slipped me a note to cook the apples, though, I hadn’t really heard of the recipe before.)
After the meal, Alastor walked back upstairs, with a pleasantly sated Lucifer in arms. This time, Alastor was whispering pesky little digs at Lucifer’s “unhealthy” appetite containing “obscene amounts of sugar and not much else,” Lucifer had to wait until they were well away from the others before he could deliver his rebuke about how a cannibal had no right to insult someone else’s diet (which was incidentally much less protein-heavy and involved significantly fewer murders).
And that was how they arrived in front of the door to Alastor’s room, Lucifer wondering if he should still go inside, if Alastor would even want him to.
Then, he noticed Alastor eyeing a porcelain vase left on a pedestal in the hallway. The vase was circus-themed and had clowns and confetti as the main motif, as it was one of the myriad items Lucifer had installed as aesthetic hallway decor.
Alastor hummed, “I never did appreciate your eye-blistering taste in decor.”
“Excuse me? ”
“I’m simply saying. That. Having to look at your ugly vase by my door has made my day-to-day living significantly less satisfactory. Neither Niffty nor Charlie would particularly take well to me destroying it, but I’ve a new idea now.”
Alastor glanced at the vase one last time and looked back down at the cat in his arms.
Then the bastard, he–
Summoned a shadowy tendril and–
Tipped. It. Over.
Lucifer was too relaxed, his instincts didn’t interpret this as a risk to anyone, and so he was helpless to let it happen. The crash of porcelain rang through the hallway, down the stairs.
Faintly, he could hear Charlie asking if everything was alright, to which Alastor answered in an overly pleasant tone, “Yes, yes, it’s all well and good! It’s just, our cat here got it in his head to push this vase down to the floor, and it shattered, the poor thing. But, well, that was just a cat’s instincts, haha!”
“Wh-” Lucifer spluttered, “But it was you. I could tell Charlie somehow, y’know, like leave a message written somewhere – or a TEXT on one of those devices you hate, ha HA!”
“You very well could, my dear kitten! But!” Alastor leaned in, his nose nearly pressing against Lucifer’s snout. “No. One. Would. Ever. Believe. You.”
And it was, ultimately, with agony and annoyance, his face burning with something that was still not entirely unpleasant, that Lucifer followed Alastor into their room.