That word – ruination. Tumbling so freely from Lucifer's lips, like an offering.
Like a prayer.
The King of Hell, the former favorite of the eternal Creator – Lucifer Morningstar – the Lightbringer – asking a sinner whom he loathes for ruination.
Alastor's radio crackles, switching to a station with nary a thought – something suitable for the occasion. Trombones, tubas and bassoons make a thunderous entrance before dissolving into the gentlest sound of flutes and piccolos. The violins begin to weep as Alastor reaches out and pulls Lucifer down, into the muck where the rest of the sinners dwell; onto his obscenely bared lap he can barely feel as his fingers pull at silken crimson feathers, Lucifer not offering the slightest amount of resistance.
He pulls Lucifer fully onto himself and buries his face into his sinfully soft neck – a swan ready for the abbatoir. Alastor's heart thunders in his chest as he kisses the pearly-white skin, leaving gasping, open-mouthed kisses against it, feeling the moisture of his own breath reflected back at him.
"Feed, you beast," Lucifer incites him, cruel in his mockery.
Alastor isn't a beast. He is not. He has worked his entire life to only be a beast to those who deserved it, and if he applies his at times flexible moral code to the situation, Lucifer falls short of the cut-off mark. Sure, he isn't weak and forgettable, nor is he the kind of monster Alastor would have spent months learning everything about so he could ambush them in the middle of the night and drag them to the Bayou to be disposed of by the ravenous wildlife, never to be seen again.
Lucifer falls somewhere in-between, an unintentional sinner, one much like Alastor himself, or rather, less so. He could be exactly like Alastor and exercise his vast powers to destroy the hordes of literal monsters propagating in Hell, but instead, he would rather self-destruct.
It makes Alastor so angry.
"Hesitation?" Lucifer croons sweetly. "From you?"
Alastor licks a long stripe along Lucifer's exposed neck, eliciting an involuntary shiver.
"Self-restraint, Alastor?" Lucifer laughs, high-pitched and with a desperate twang. "Or is this simply you being contrary to a fault, as usual?"
Alastor grasps Lucifer by the hip, his other hand still tangled in one of Lucifer's wings, keeping him trapped.
"You don't know me," Alastor growls against the thrumming flesh, the blood beneath calling out to him like a church bell to mass.
"Have you ever let anyone know you, Alastor?" Lucifer asks, entirely too incisively for Alastor's tastes.
"Why would I?" Alastor answers, sucking a bruise into Lucifer's pale neck.
"Because then you wouldn't be so miserably hollow, perhaps?" Lucifer whispers into his hair. Alastor's ear twitches.
"It's more honest than failing everyone you claim to love," Alastor growls out and nips at Lucifer's throat, grazing the skin without breaking it.
Lucifer laughs over his lap. "You are only perceptive when you're going for the kill, aren't you? Have you ever tried using that insight on your broken psyche, hmm?"
Alastor snaps and bites into Lucifer's neck, sinking his teeth as deep as they can go.
Lucifer hisses, but the sound dies and is renewed as a low, filthy moan.
Why? Why does it sound like he's enjoying himself while Alastor is, for all intents and purposes, devouring him?
The blood – the sweet, golden nectar of the gods, pools in his mouth like a well-spring. Alastor gulps, long greedy swallows cascading down his throat, a braying deer call echoing in the room, amplified a dozen times. His eyes roll to the back of his head as the scent of ripe apples tickles his nose. All at once, he can see tectonic plates shifting, crawling along the ocean floor, the planet's crust crackling in large, immeasurable fissures as boiling magma spills from the bowels of the Earth to be quelled by the vast, impossibly oppressive crush of the ocean – hissing in the unknowable and desolate depths – never to be seen by the human eye.
He senses life there, miles and miles under the ocean's surface, feeding off of sulfur just like demonic creatures do – except more primitive – and entirely devoid of thought or feeling. The simplicity of such a life-form's existence fills him with something he cannot grasp, an emotion so unbearable he pulls away from the gaping wound he has torn in Lucifer's immaculate flesh.
Blood gushes out of the wound like a golden waterfall, cascading down the perfect contours of Lucifer's angelic form. Within the span of two of Alastor's heartbeats, it's run all the way down to Lucifer's thigh, and splattered all over Alastor's front.
For a terrifying moment, he panics that it's a mortal wound – that all this blood will go to waste; that he will KILL Lucifer and have a feast in his quarters that will end up killing him when the daughter invariably finds out, and besides – it's too soon; the timing not right – if he slays Lucifer, who will provide him with the power to release his shackles?
Eyes wide with fear, Alastor clamps down his hand over Lucifer's neck.
"Heal it!" He cries out, insensate.
Lucifer offers a gurgling, choked up laugh, his eyes crimson and gold, and utterly without mercy.
"I thought this was what you wanted?" Lucifer croons.
Alastor shakes his head, because it isn't. It isn't what he wants at all–
"I thought you wanted my blood? My crown?"
"I want you alive!" Alastor commands, knowing his words have no power whatsoever over the King of Hell.
"You could rid me of this pesky life I couldn't take by myself." Lucifer offers, handing Alastor carte blanche for his own murder.
"And leave your daughter destroyed like you were?!" Alastor snarls, attempting to shake some sense into Lucifer.
"Think of the childreeeen–" Lucifer sing-songs, a grotesque, wet sound bubbling up from his torn throat.
"You want to be punished so badly?" Alastor asks in disgust. "Then live and do a better job of it! Why do I have to be the one to tell you this?!"
Lucifer's expression grows tender in a deeply disturbing manner. "Because you don't give a shit whether I live or die?"
"I don't want you to die!" Alastor screams through the static.
In the distance, Alastor's clock strikes midnight, each resounding chime a grim countdown to something he dares not contemplate fully.
"Ask me again," Alastor implores him. "It's past midnight – I can't lie to you!"
"What if I don't want to?" Lucifer says simply. "You can fuck me while I bleed out… Would you like that?"
Alastor looks at the golden deluge covering them both and feels every ounce of ardor vanish from his body like a bad dream.
"No!" Alastor says with revulsion.
"Why not?"
"Because I need you alive."
"Why?"
"Because…because–" Alastor stares at the massive golden smear down both of their fronts and wants to vomit. For this last question, he isn't allowed to lie. The truth is ripped out of him, kicking and screaming as it goes, unable to be taken back: "Because you're too beautiful to kill."
"That makes all three." Lucifer coughs, golden spittle spilling out of the corners of his mouth.
"Please, Lucifer–" Alastor entreats. "Heal yourself."
"Even now, your eyes burn with addiction to my blood," Lucifer says wetly.
"You can rip it out of me later – you can put me in chains – you can disintegrate me on a molecular level, just–"
"Is that concern I hear, Alastor?"
"Death is final." Alastor says like a death knell. "You have all the time in the world to fix your mistakes."
Lucifer smiles. "I had all the time in the world and I didn't."
The prickling in Alastor eyes becomes unbearable and a trickling stream of tears pours out, trailing down his gaunt face, burning along the stitches of his irrepressible smile. He swallows the traitorous sound down, but the tears don't stop coming.
"Are you crying for me, dear?" Lucifer asks tenderly, and places a hand on Alastor's soaked cheek.
"I– I need you." Alastor whines out, forced to admit something he never would, not unless under a soul-binding compulsion. "There can never be another."
"Another what?"
"Another that deserves to stand above me."
"You're so fucking vain," Lucifer remarks, eyes half-lidded and somehow devoid of their usual luster. When he moves, Alastor cannot stop him.
Lucifer's bloodied lips press against his, and Alastor kisses back, willing to give most anything to change his mind.
Alastor has never met his match, never thought he would, people were puzzles to be assembled and disassembled at his will, nothing more – but Lucifer? He was everything Alastor wished he could have known before consigning his soul to the devil – a master who wasn't full of deceit while offering freedom, but someone who had given that freedom to humanity, not once, but twice – as above, so below.
"I was wrong," Alastor admits when the kiss finally breaks.
Lucifer gives him a very tired look, the red fading from his eyes. "I'm cold…"
Alastor wraps himself around Lucifer as best as he is able, while keeping the ghastly wound on his neck covered. The blood has congealed slightly, sticking to the palm of his hand like flypaper.
"You're not weak – you're not a waste of life – I was wrong." Alastor cradles Lucifer close and cries into his soft golden hair. "I am sorry," Alastor confesses, unburdening himself for the only time since his first communion. "There, I said it – just like you wanted!"
Lucifer laughs, weakly, flagging in his arms, his wings drooping completely; limp as they hang off his back as if broken.
"Lucifer, please–" Alastor outright begs. "I'll do anything–!"
"No deals," Lucifer murmurs.
"No deals," Alastor reaffirms. "I give you my word – just tell me what you want."
"Hold me–" Lucifer mutters so faintly that every atom in Alastor's body is screaming. "–accountable."
"Hold you…accountable?" Alastor asks.
Lucifer groans.
"I will. I swear." Alastor makes a promise that feels like eternal damnation. "I swear to it – on what's left of my soul."
Golden sparkles, faint and half-translucent, coalesce around his hand and sink into Lucifer's skin. With a shaky exhale, Lucifer goes limp in his grasp.
In a moment of blind panic, Alastor takes Lucifer's head in his hands and unpeels his hand from his neck, the gold brilliance of it stark and horrifying against the dark skin of his palm. He trembles as he dares look upon Lucifer's thoroughly bloodied neck, but what he fears the most–
–Alastor doesn't find it. The bloody smear obscures his view, but the maiming injury he's inflicted is gone, Lucifer's skin unbroken once more. His tendrils wrap up around Lucifer's unconscious body and Alastor staggers across the room, doing his best to carry it to his bed without jostling him too much. Lucifer's arms hang limply and lifelessly as Alastor makes his macabre pilgrimage – and the image of him, awash with gold as pure as dawn, roils in Alastor's gut.
As soon as Lucifer is laid out comfortably upon his bedcovers, body limp and beautiful like a white marble headstone covering a stone casket, Alastor turns around, unable to look upon the grisly scene any longer – and retches in the middle of his room, expelling as much of the golden blood he's gorged himself on earlier as he is able. It burns on the way out, and he notes, mutely, that he is bathed in Lucifer's blood, from chest to groin, from the palm of his hand to shoulder. It looks like a decorative gauntlet. It looks like viscera.
It looks wrong.
Alastor trembles, bent forward, unable to stop.
He has sinned.
For the first time since falling into the pit, he has sinned.
He retches until there's only bile left and collapses on the floor in a sprawl of naked, entirely uncoordinated limbs, his legs giving out on him like a newborn fawn's.
He has almost killed Lucifer.
This time – the radio only broadcasts whimpers, unfiltered and heart-wrenching, just like the ones he remembers making in the cellar after one of his father's frequent punishments, his mother not allowed to let him out.
Alastor buries his hands in his palms and weeps.