Chapter Text
Alastor looks at the clock on his wall. It’s a quarter after two in the morning, and Lucifer is still out cold.
He wrings out the towel in the basin; water stained the palest gold, and takes another gentle swipe across Lucifer’s cold skin. His shadow has already emptied out and replaced three basins, and Lucifer is still smeared with blood from hip to knee. Any mortal would have bled out and died, but the subtlest rising of Lucifer’s chest serves as the only indication that he’s still alive. He hasn’t stirred, not even once in the past two hours. Alastor shudders, still nude from Lucifer having disintegrated his clothing, and contemplates taking a shower once he’s done cleaning Lucifer up.
After picking himself up off the floor and killing the radio a while ago, he’d intended to purge himself of the blood clinging to him like a sticky second skin, but the second his gaze fell on Lucifer – just lying on his bed, helpless and near-dead – wrenched something inside him. He remembered how carefully Lucifer had cleaned his wounds, and how gently his maman would soothe him when Alastor had a fever, and felt a stirring of something that might have been guilt, or maybe even pity.
Lucifer was so drenched in blood that it looked like a golden curtain, draped over him – like a statue with a carved veil over all its contours. His wings lay limp, as if broken, and bent at an odd angle that Alastor presumed would be painful were he awake. Lucifer’s face was slack but not restful, the smallest of frowns etched onto his brow, his golden hair fanned out around his head like an extinguished halo.
The smell of vomit reached his nostrils and made Alastor’s guts churn all over again. He threw his most powerful magic at the massive, ugly golden-green stain and it only succeeded in removing about ten percent of the mess. At least the stench was gone, for the most part. Perhaps his powers couldn’t purge angelic essence. A problem for a later time.
He turned back towards Lucifer and couldn’t bear the sight any longer. On shaky legs, Alastor staggered to his bathroom and let the water run in the sink, plunging his hands under the scalding, sulfurous spray (most water in hell smelled of sulfur, he’d stopped noticing after the first few months down here). He scrubbed and scrubbed, trying to wash his forearms clean, when he caught his own reflection in the mirror.
He looked like Hell – swollen eyes, salted tear tracks down his cheeks, and a smile that was unambiguously a grimace. His shadow lashed out and smashed the mirror, leaving it fractured like a kaleidoscopic spider web. Thousands of his red eyes observed him with reproach.
“It wasn’t on purpose.” Alastor addressed his warped reflection. “He just made me so livid.”
The smile was mocking, reflected a thousand-fold back at him.
What you lookin’ at me like that for, boy?
“He provoked me!”
You’re weak, boy. You gotta show ‘em what’s what. Every bitch needs a cane.
“Shut up!!” Alastor screams, his shadow ripping the damned mirror off the wall and smashing it into the opposite corner of the bathroom where it crash-lands on the floor in a crooked, vaguely rectangular heap.
Alastor splashes hot water into his face repeatedly, drenching his hair in the process. He leans against the sink with both hands and attempts to calm his breathing. The water runs pale gold in a swirl around the drain, and a full-body shudder wracks his frame.
Be kind, cheri. Most people are kind.
“No, they’re not, maman.” Alastor mutters to himself, staring at the clear water running endlessly down the drain.
People were not terribly kind. Especially not in Hell. Back in New Orleans, there were plenty of good folks. Plenty of funny, endearing and deeply broken ones too, Mimzy being one of them. That girl was a trouble magnet, always chasing rich dandies, but somehow always ones who were up to no good – gangsters and smugglers and bookies. They would all inevitably turn violent, or ugly, and Alastor had somehow managed to become her refuge when the fellows would come-a-knockin’.
When he killed one of the pests in her defense, he’d expected her to scream and run to the police, but she’d just looked up at him with her wide doe eyes and asked what they were going to do. Alastor suggested they feed the guy to the gators, and she put on her coat without a word and handed him his.
Good ol’ Mimzy. Heart of gold, permanent hole in her purse, and an iron stomach. She could drink men thrice her size under the table, bless her.
And Lucifer?
First among the angels. The first devil.
The liberator of mankind.
Suicidal and sweet as apple pie.
And laid out on his bed like a murder victim.
Like his maman, staring unseeing at the wall as the bed creaks and creaks and creaks, his father’s disgusting grunts filling the corridor, with Alastor huddled outside, fingers itching to grasp a broken bottle and lodge it into his father’s hairy neck.
He dry heaved, spitting up a glob of bile that landed in the sink like the embodiment of sin.
His father’s or his – it mattered little.
Lucifer wasn’t a monster to be slain. He wasn’t an illiterate drunkard beating on his wife and children. He wasn’t a local loan shark extorting widows for sexual favors. He was not the priest touching young boys and leaving them with bloodied breeches.
He didn’t deserve death. At least not the kind Alastor provided.
To be perfectly fair, Lucifer didn’t deserve to be in Hell at all. His crime was rebellion against authority, not some depraved horror that one would associate as deserving of eternal torment.
To not truly be a sinner and be stuck in Hell…
Alastor washed his face a final time and rinsed out his mouth thoroughly; gurgling and spitting out water about a dozen times until his throat and mouth were marginally less on fire.
He grabbed a washbasin from under his sink and filled it with warm water. Then he plunged his bar of hard soap into it and worked up a very mild lather, then removed the bar, letting it slide wetly back into the glass soap dish, and had one of his shadows grab a clean hand towel.
Thus armed, he headed back to his room and sat down on the bed next to Lucifer’s unresponsive body. He bade shadows to pick up a chair and leave it next to the bed, where he used it as a makeshift table to place the washbasin on.
Would Lucifer mind being touched like this, Alastor wondered. He was always so concerned with the most nonsensical things. Perhaps it was selfish of him to do it anyways, since he couldn’t bear to look at all that blood any longer. (Alastor couldn’t even bear to look at his own body, which was drenched only marginally less than Lucifer’s.)
Alastor soaked one corner into the soapy water and with a deep inhale, brought the warm, wet cloth to Lucifer’s neck. At first he attempted a few dabs, but they weren’t very effective. It took him over ten minutes to find a technique that worked, the blood having congealed somewhat. Angelic blood was less prone to drying out in gross clumps, unlike the human kind. (For all that, there was still gold under Alastor’s fingernails.)
So this is where he finds himself at 2:20 in the morning, dragging the fourth towel (and fourth basin of clear water) across Lucifer’s pale hip. It feels worse than cleaning after his crime scenes did.
Mortal blood felt cleansing. They had deserved to die. After each kill, Alastor felt vindicated. He knew he wasn’t doing good, but he was doing a fair deal better by humanity than any deity he’d come across –the lying entity he was enslaved to included. Lucifer, by consequence, has never been allowed to do…whatever it was that good and proper angels were supposed to. His rebellion cost him significantly more than Alastor’s plunging into Hell ever did.
Alastor knows he has escaped punishment. It felt good to unintentionally cheat the system, but as he looks at Lucifer’s pale and lifeless body, he feels…
His hand halts midway down Lucifer’s thigh and he becomes acutely aware of his pruned fingertips and the suffocating humidity in his rooms. The emotion he’s feeling eludes him. He gazes at Lucifer’s unchanged expression, and his fingers twitch with the urge to brush the golden hair away from his face.
To tidy his sprawled, skewed wings and put them to rights.
To cover his body with something warm so he can…
Alastor blinks, frowning.
His rooms are so cold.
Unable to put his finger on it, Alastor resumes his efforts to clean Lucifer up. A long swipe of towel – rinse in the water – wring the towel – repeat. It’s almost meditative, provided he doesn’t think about the implications too much.
What’s going to happen when Lucifer comes to? And when can he expect that to happen? Should he take Lucifer to his rooms in the dead of night, to allow him to rest (and prevent anyone discovering Lucifer in his rooms, naked and unconscious). Alastor knows he can be persuasive, but this would be a hard sell, even for him.
‘Charlie, dear girl! I only ravished your father into unconsciousness, ha ha! He’s sleeping it off; you can come pick him up in a few hours – ta ta, now!’ That would go down well, he bets.
So he focuses on wiping Lucifer’s left knee clean. The less blood there’s left on his pale skin, the less Alastor feels like a murderer.
His hand halts mid-motion and his eyes go wide. He brings his left hand to his face and the touch of his own fingers is surprising, almost as if he has never connected with the sensation before. He covers his mouth and smothers a noise that attempts to rise unbidden from his throat.
Is this… regret?
Alastor swallows, panic rising in his limbs like tiny pinpricks, millions of them stabbing into his every nerve.
He’s not felt regret–
–or anything even remotely similar to regret, in–
Possibly ever?
Alastor forces himself to breathe. He must breathe. He is safe here. He had found his father in Hell, a decade after he arrived, and he painted the walls of an alley in Wrath with his guts. Patricide felt even more satisfying the second time around.
Alastor realizes that he has felt regret before.
Regret that he wasn’t strong enough to murder his father earlier; that he had to wait to grow as tall as him, and ambush him from behind.
He still remembers that first, unintended taste of blood as it sprayed across his face.
The memory is overwritten with the image of Lucifer choking on his own blood, his throat half-ripped out, and Alastor wants to hurl again. The warring sensations of delicious power and all-encompassing disgust engage in battle in his mind, unable to be reconciled. As he looks down into his lap, he finds himself mercifully unresponsive, as is his custom. Still, the sight of blood splatter across his flaccid length makes him feel sick. Disgust wins, vanquishing – at least temporarily – the part of his brain that would ordinarily want to lap up all of the blood still remaining like a starved animal, licking at his bicep, his elbow, anywhere he could reach.
Right now, he’d rather peel his own skin off than touch any of it.
He rinses the sodden towel once more, water sloshing in the basin as the wet fabric smacks against the rim. He pulls it up, watches as water drains out in rivulets, and squeezes both ends together, ignoring the gradual yellowing of the water below as the trick-trick-trickle of it cascades into the basin.
He brings the wet towel to Lucifer’s other thigh, and begins to wipe the last of the glistening blood off. He ignores, assiduously, the area in between. In his periphery, he can tell it’s shining with golden blood, but he avoids a direct confrontation with it. It makes him uncomfortable, and he cannot quite puzzle out why.
Was he any better than his father?
Of course he was, Alastor comforts himself. He wasn’t married to Lucifer, hadn’t made a commitment before God and the civil authorities to protect him, was under no obligation to provide him with anything – neither shelter, nor sustenance.
He didn’t owe Lucifer anything.
Except your free will, his mind whispers insidiously.
Alastor fights another wave of nausea as he swipes the towel down Lucifer’s pale thigh, hands shaking uncontrollably.
He doesn’t owe the King of Hell anything.
Except the deal you made and failed to uphold?
Deals were made to be exploited, broken, or leveraged. None of it was ever supposed to be fair. Fairness didn’t exist, not on Earth and not in Hell either. Alastor heavily suspects Heaven to be equally corrupt, albeit more complacent and full of self-righteous imbeciles such as Adam.
And before him, like an exquisite broken puppet, lies Lucifer Morningstar.
The dawn of human consciousness itself.
Alastor’s breath hitches, stitches in his face cutting viciously into his flesh that rejects the smile for the first time in well over a century. The smile is irrepressible, however, and it stays on despite the sensation that his cheeks are being ripped apart.
Did Lucifer plan this? Did he actually want to die in Alastor’s arms?
The image of Lucifer going slack in his grasp rises like a phantasm out of a grave and grips Alastor around the throat.
He abandons the wet towel across Lucifer’s thigh and folds in on himself, face buried in the messy, damp covers of his bed. He grips the fabric, crumpling it in his trembling fists, and shivers freely, unable to stop. “I’m sorry…” He murmurs into the fabric, infinitely relieved that Lucifer is out for the count and cannot see any of this. “I didn’t mean it.”
Lucifer’s shallow breathing remains the same, as steady as a gentle tide.
He doesn’t want Lucifer dead.
If Lucifer died…
Alastor looks up through his messy, damp fringe and stares at Lucifer’s pale visage. He would be damned if he let Lucifer squander his power this way. He promised to keep Lucifer accountable and that’s precisely what he intends to do.
But before he can do that, he will take responsibility for his own crime.
Alastor takes hold of the towel and rinses it once more – twice – thrice. He then turns and stares at the crux of Lucifer’s thighs, and at his bloodied genitalia. It looks more gruesome than anything Alastor has ever seen in his life, and he’s seen plenty. It looks somehow worse than disembowelment.
Probably because Lucifer is actually pure, or as pure as a sinless fallen angel stuck in Hell can be.
So, Alastor takes the accursed responsibility he feels and proceeds to wipe the blood off in gentle swipes. He hopes Lucifer won’t wake, as the sight would probably disturb him and Alastor would rather he get some rest.
Sprawled out like this, wings akimbo, Lucifer looks so vulnerable, like one of the many crying women Alastor has had to comfort. Would his visceral dislike for the man at first sight have been quite as acute had Lucifer been female? Alastor doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know, and that worries him.
Sure, he could freely admit that he was territorial. The Hotel was his base of operations, albeit a temporary one. Having the strongest being in Hell drop by and mess up his carefully laid out plans for swindling Charlotte Morningstar put him on high alert. The rest had been pure antipathy, plain and simple. The Ruler of Hell who was incapable of actually ruling.
Except, Alastor now knew it to be untrue – Lucifer wasn’t incapable, merely unwilling.
What could Alastor accomplish if he installed Lucifer on the throne proper? If he feigned support to uplift him, and then used Lucifer to purge Hell of its undesirable elements? They could cut across Hell like the ten plagues of Egypt, smiting every one of those disgusting Overlords who keep thousands or millions enslaved only to have them degrade themselves for eternity. Alastor uses his thralls strategically, employing them where they are best suited, and keeping them on a long and loose leash when not needed. That way, they are less likely to foster deadly resentment against him.
He liked the idea of unspecified favors to be cashed in at a later date. They tormented the one with the obligation with nasty possibilities considerably more than explicitly specific deals ever could.
Alastor refocuses on the task at hand. Lucifer’s genitals remain entirely unresponsive under his careful ministrations, which is a relief. He would hate to have to explain himself to Lucifer should he wake up – what could Alastor even say? ‘Good morning, your Majesty, oh I am just engaging in some palliative care, nothing to be bothered about, now could you kindly go back to your nap?’
Alastor rinses this towel for the last time and has his shadow fetch a fresh one, along with a basin of clear, tepid water. He will do one last careful pass over Lucifer’s skin and bathe him until there’s no trace of what had transpired between them at midnight. He’s not a man given to prayer, but he prays now that Lucifer remains blissfully unaware of what’s transpiring, as Alastor has no wish to be seen in flagrante delicto, bloodied from chest to groin, like a crazed murderer taking a bath in their victim’s blood. Alastor may be as un-saintly as possible, but he was no Elizabeth Bathory.
His blood still sings on your tongue…
Curse his tongue, Alastor thinks. It always got him in trouble. Just like Mimzy couldn’t help being drawn to the worst kind of men, Alastor couldn’t help but exercise his wit, even when it would be to his own detriment. (With his father, it always was – the brute was incapable of higher brain functions.)
The basin of fresh water gets deposited onto the chair and he accepts the clean towel out of his shadow’s hand.
One last time, he drenches the towel in the water and squeezes out the excess. The water runs clear, soothing his mind. Alastor scoots closer to wipe Lucifer’s face, keeping his touch especially gentle as he runs the towel over Lucifer’s closed eyelids. He brushes the errant strands of silken hair off of Lucifer’s forehead and swipes it back.
The rest of the Hotel slumbers, peaceful and undisturbed, as Alastor performs his penance in the dark.
His red-tipped fingers drag the towel down Lucifer’s shoulders and arms. Alastor washes his chest, his legs – his feet.
He has the macabre urge to spill his own blood and anoint Lucifer’s forehead with it – leaving a smear, an imprint of his thumb there.
Before him lies the only piece of divinity that Alastor has ever recognized as legitimate.
“We have work to do, my King.” Alastor murmurs, inspecting his pious endeavor.
He bids his shadow to remove the soiled towels and toss the water down the drain.
Lucifer’s holy blood will be coursing down the rivers of Hell tonight, trickling from Pride on top, all the way down to Sloth, like a benediction none of the sinners or hell-born are worthy of.
Alastor reaches for the crimson feathers with reverence and attempts, to the best of his abilities, to fold them into a more natural configuration. He smoothes the ruffled feathers as he goes and they turn to glossy silk between his fingers in a caress he can feel all the way down to his hooves.
Lucifer wasn’t simply beautiful, he was arresting. He was as fair as the Hell that surrounded him was foul; like an untainted well-spring protected by a wall of briars trying to fend off a horde of monsters trying to sully its pristine waters with their muddied, clawed feet.
And Alastor had come and bathed in the spring; shedding the blood of every sinner he has ever torn apart with his own hands to pollute it. Rather than a mindless beast, Alastor would much rather be the impenetrable briar wall.
His shadow hands him a clean blanket from his dresser, and he covers Lucifer’s immaculate form in dark crimson fabric. It looks uncomfortably like a burial shroud, save for Lucifer’s uncovered face.
Alastor rises and turns out his bedside lamp.
It’s finally time to get himself clean.
