Archive of Our Own ^beta

Lucifer isn’t sure exactly what pulls him from his sleep, but he’s fairly certain he’s found the reason when he reaches for his partner and finds his side of the bed empty. 

He sits up and yawns, stretching his arms and then his wings before quietly slipping from the bed. He doesn’t hurry. It’s not unusual to wake and find his lover gone these days. Although breathing has become considerably easier now that the baby has dropped, Alastor still finds it increasingly difficult to find comfortable positions to sleep due to the size and weight of his belly. Nightly, Lucifer makes a “nest” for his partner, experimenting with pillows of different shapes and sizes, but often Alastor simply abandons trying and gets up. 

As he has for the past several nights, Lucifer finds him standing by their window, bathed in the moonlight of a quiet night. He sways his hips as though moving to music only he can hear, a clawed hand stroking rhythmically over his belly. 

And just as he has for the past several nights, Lucifer is convinced that he falls in love with his partner just a little more. 

Alastor says nothing to acknowledge his presence as he moves to his side, which is how Lucifer knows he is welcome. He’s become something of an expert in reading Alastor over the years, but even if he hadn’t, Alastor has never been the type to hold back from expressing his displeasure. He places his hands on Alastor’s hips from behind and gently presses his thumbs into the muscles of his lower back, unsurprised to find them tight. He moves in tandem with Alastor’s gentle sway as he massages circles into the overworked muscles. Some time later, he subtly shifts his form so that he stands a head taller than his buck. He slips his hands under the curve of Alastor’s belly and slowly lifts up, taking on its weight. He is rewarded with an audible sigh of relief.

Neither of them say anything. There is no need.

Then, Lucifer feels Alastor tense beneath his hands. Lucifer looks up, but Alastor says nothing. Instead, Alastor presses a hand to the side of his belly as his breaths grow longer. More intentional. 

“Alastor?” he ventures, but his partner hushes him immediately. Alastor looks down, a blush staining his cheeks and his ears pinned back against his head. It’s all the confirmation that Lucifer needs as to what is happening, but he can’t understand why Alastor seems embarrassed. It’s as natural as the day turning into night—the culmination of nearly ten months of waiting. 

Alastor pulls away from Lucifer and begins to walk around the room. His gait is slow and wide as the baby—their baby—moves further down. Lucifer follows, comfortable in the quiet, simply existing beside his partner. He smirks. This may be the last quiet moment they have in some time. 

“I just need a moment,” Alastor manages the first time he needs to breathe through a contraction.

“Sure,” Lucifer replies, content to play this game. It’s almost sweet how shy Alastor is about something so natural. 

So beautiful. 

So he doesn’t press the matter, not even when Alastor’s “moments” grow in frequency and duration and he has to lean against the dresser or the wall or even just brace his hands against his knees. For his part, Lucifer remains unquestioningly at his side. He’s played this role once before and still remembers ways he can be helpful. He presses in and up on Alastor’s hips when he stops walking and offers soft words of encouragement, swaying with him.  

Lucifer hardly knows how long they continue this dance. It really doesn’t matter. Things will proceed in their own time. Eventually, Lucifer clocks a change in Alastor, and the next time he stops to lean against the wall, he watches in awe as the muscles in Alastor’s belly contract so that it lifts up. Alastor groans.

“Lucifer!” His trembling right hand cradles the underside of his belly and he grabs Lucifer’s arm with his left. His ears pin back against his head. “It’s coming…!” 

“I know, Bambi,” Lucifer murmurs in reply, almost laughing. He presses a kiss to the side of Alastor’s head as he squeezes his hips through the contraction. “You’re doing great. What do you want to do? What do you need?”

“I don’t know,” Alastor replies. His ears indicate his distress as much as his voice. Alastor had scoffed any time Lucifer had tried to talk with him about a birth plan, stating simply that he would give birth in bed as his mother had done with him. Now, he didn’t seem so sure. 

“It’s okay,” Lucifer says quickly before Alastor can panic, moving his hands up and down Alastor’s sides in smooth, steady strokes. “We can play it by ear. Go with what feels right. Do you want to keep walking around?”

Alastor shakes his head no. 

“Okay, you wanna head to the bed? We can try and get comfy there.” 

Alastor starts to walk in that direction, but he’s barely taken a step before he’s grasping at Lucifer again. 

“It’s so low, ” he moans, bending over with his other hand braced against his knee. “I can feel it…” 

“That’s good,” Lucifer whispers, moving to support his partner. “That’s really good, sweetheart. The baby’s just getting ready for their big debut. Just take it slow. You’re okay.”

They eventually make it to the bed. Alastor is surprised when Lucifer guides him onto his hands and knees instead of his back. 

“Let’s try something, okay?” Lucifer says with a smile. He conjures up a stack of pillows in front of Alastor and guides him to rest his forearms on it while leaning forward on his knees. “Good, good. Keep your knees spread apart, just like that. Your hips are really narrow. This will help get everything nice and open.”

Alastor blushes and scowls, an adorable mix of embarrassed and irritated. “Getting ‘nice and open’ is exactly how I got myself into this predicament.” 

The snipe earns a laugh from the Devil who has the good grace to look a little bashful, but he puts jokes aside when the next contraction comes. He settles in front of Alastor and traces circles with his thumbs on the back of his hands. 

“This position feel good?” Lucifer asks once the contraction has eased off, and Alastor nods in reply. They settle into this new rhythm with Alastor sitting back to rest on his haunches and leaning forward against the pillows when a contraction comes. It only takes a few cycles before Lucifer realizes that Alastor is clenching his jaw shut with each contraction as though struggling to keep quiet. 

“Trying making some noise, sweetheart,” he encourages, but Alastor shakes his head. 

“...humiliating…” he pants, face hidden in his arms. 

“Oh, honey. It’s not. Not at all,” he soothes, stroking his claws through Alastor’s hair. “Oh! I know. We can try humming, huh? That’d be good, too.” 

Lucifer’s suggestion is rewarded with a withering glare. Unphased, he hums a three-note pattern, soft and low. Alastor’s stubborn silence can only last so long. He reaches for Lucifer as a contraction begins to build and starts to hum along with him. He sounds almost resentful at first, but his voice grows louder as the contraction crests before swelling into a moan.  

“That’s it,” Lucifer soothes as Alastor fists tighten in his shirt. “You’re doing so good, Al.” 

Alastor slumps bonelessly into Lucifer, hiding his face in the crook of his neck as best he can, but the next thing he says catches the Devil completely off guard. 

“Don’t look at me.” 

“Alastor, what—”

“Leave me alone!”  

Concerned, Lucifer lifts Alastor’s head up with a gentle hand to his cheek, his golden eyes searching. Besides the pain and fear that he would have expected to see, Lucifer is thunderstruck to see shame as well. 

When the penny finally drops, Lucifer cannot believe that he hadn’t seen this coming. 

Few things are more important to the Radio Demon than control. 

Control over others. 

Control over situations.

Control over himself. 

That control had protected him as he clawed his way to the upper echelons of the overlord caste, but now his body is preparing to expel an infant and Alastor is utterly helpless to stop it. It’s no wonder that Alastor had been so reluctant to admit that the baby was coming, let alone tacitly admit to being in pain by allowing himself the release of making sound as he labored. 

“Oh, Alastor,” Lucifer whispers, his voice heavy with a mix of emotion, and presses a kiss to the side of his head. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re doing so well. I know it all feels out of control.”

“You know nothing!” Alastor hisses under a cloud of radio static, but the vitriol is short-lived. His ears pin back against his head. “...humiliating displays of weakness…” 

“You’re not weak. You carried a brand new person in your belly for nine whole months and now you’re getting ready to bring them into the world. You created life, Alastor. You’re like a god.”

“I don’t feel very god-like right now,” Alastor replies, his voice small. 

Lucifer stroked his hair. “I’ll leave, if you want me to.” 

There is no hurt in Lucifer’s voice, no anger or hint of manipulation. If privacy is what his partner truly wants, he will grant it—albeit, he has absolutely no intention of going anywhere further than just outside the door. But the offer is for not, because Alastor’s hands tighten in Lucifer’s shirt. 

“No. Stay. Please.”

Another contraction comes, and Lucifer hums soft and low in Alastor’s ear as his lover whimpers. “It hurts. There’s so much pressure.” 

Lucifer nods. “I got you, Bambi. Just hang on.”

Alastor startles as Lucifer pulls away from him, and Lucifer can almost taste his panic as he starts to speak. “Lucifer, what—”  

But Lucifer gently hushes him as he moves to kneel behind him. He presses firmly in and up on Alastor’s hips like he had before. 

“Sway your hips from side to side,” he whispers, moving with his lover. He smiles as Alastor hums their little melody in that beautiful voice of his. 

“Is this helping?” Lucifer asks, and Alastor hums affirmatively. Once the contraction has passed, Lucifer leans over to press a kiss on Alastor’s shoulder as he strokes his tail on a whim. He is amused when he is rewarded with a little shiver that has nothing to do with pain. 

Alastor huffs, sitting back on his haunches and looking over his shoulder at Lucifer in fond exasperation. “I cannot possibly believe that you have designs on my person even now, your Majesty.”

Lucifer grins. “You know what they say. What gets the baby in can help get the baby out!”

Alastor’s flush is accompanied by a scandalized squeak of microphone feedback. “Lucifer! ”

“What? It’s true! There’s been a bunch of research on Earth that sex during the early stages of labor can—whoops, okay.” Lucifer cuts himself off as Alastor groans and leans forward. After he catches his breath, he sits back and reaches for Lucifer. 

The kiss they share is soft and slow, a gentle revisiting of places well explored and much cherished. Alastor guides Lucifer’s hand to the swell of his belly and holds it there. Soon the nest he has made inside of it will be empty, and it fills him with both excitement and a strange kind of heartache. They spend the next few hours like this: kissing and touching, swaying and groaning, as their child draws closer to the world. 

Alastor’s water breaking is an inflection point in his labor. It’s all Lucifer can do to keep him from panicking at the suddenness of it all, and any relief he might have found is quickly eclipsed by increasingly intense contractions. 

It won’t be long now. 

No longer comfortable on his hands and knees, they explore a few different options before Alastor settles onto his side, his top leg drawn up and bent at the knee. His now misshapen belly rises and falls with every panting breath.  

“Ah… oh… hmm—Lucifer! ” 

Lucifer brushes a kiss against the knuckles of Alastor’s hand as it grips his own. The former seraph is grateful for his angelic bones; Alastor’s strength is formidable among sinners and right now, he is holding on tight. “I’m here, Al. I’m here.” 

“Something’s happening,” he says, panting openly in the now brief lulls in between contractions.  

“Okay. Do you feel like you want to push, or—” 

But Alastor is already pushing, his free hand resting on the top of his belly as he bears down. He gasps for breath when the contraction fades and tries to push again. 

Lucifer strokes his sweat-damp hair from his face. “Hey, hey. Wait for the next contraction, sweetheart. Push with the contractions,” he says, but Alastor shakes his head. “It burns.”

Lucifer reaches beneath the curve of Alastor’s belly with searching fingers. A second later, a grin splits his face. He guides one of Alastor’s hands to where his had been, and Alastor’s eyes widen as his fingers brush something wet and soft nestled just between the lips of his private parts. He looks at Lucifer, stunned, and Lucifer can’t help but laugh. 

“That’s your baby,” he says against his tears, pressing a kiss to Alastor’s temple. 

“Our,” Alastor corrects and then he is pushing with another contraction. 

The next few hours are torturously long and yet are somehow over in the blink of an eye. Alastor delivers the head with a whimper and the shoulders with a roar, and then their child—their child —slides into Lucifer’s waiting hands. She—she she she another beautiful daughter his second baby girl—is fussing and bleating before Lucifer can even lay her on Alastor’s belly. Her golden, black-tipped ears flick and her button noses wrinkles as though she is not entirely sold on this new world in which she so suddenly finds herself.

Alastor reaches for her with wide eyes and trembling hands. “Vins chez ta maman,” he says. “Come to your maman.”  

In a moment, there will be much work to do: the cutting of the umbilical cord and the delivery of the afterbirth; a bath for mother and child and fresh linens to be put on the bed; and of course they’ll need to inform the others at the hotel of the arrival of their newest guest. But for now, just for a moment, Lucifer sits with his arms wrapped around his lover, pressing kiss after kiss to his temple, as he looks down through his tears at his precious daughter, delivered safely as the dawn breaks.