#ALSO i realize the terminal screens aren't. reflective. BUT WHATEVER!!!!

[cherubchoirs]

Do the siblings ever Show Lucifer the testament god left about him? Man's gotta be depressed already over something so preventable :[

did something a bit different and wrote a small one-shot for this - it's an idea i've had stuck in my head, about just what it would mean for lucifer to find god's regret and how it could possibly find a way into a mind so thoroughly consumed with hatred for him (~1300 words)

Lucifer stands frozen before the terminal, locked into an infinitely receding space that reduces everything that surrounds him to a single room. A single display. He is impossibly small, flattened, compressed into it until only he and this feeble echo of God remain. A poor replica of what they once had been at the start of everything, just before creation exploded out into its unfathomable expanse when Lucifer was bursting with light and God was the entire universe. Lucifer now, a smoldering, hollow shell and God only words on a screen.

            Nothing like His true voice. A language of images and abstractions woven into visual song.

If this was the way it was always meant to end, that would be its only justification. A long game, a damnation incomplete until it brought him before this one screen and the meager text displayed on it. How insignificant, how indifferent they are, the very banality of evil. Lucifer would read the words until they began to blur together and he could make them out as some trick of Hell, how he strains to hear laughter thrumming through its halls. But it’s quiet, almost distant, as though the prison itself has retreated from him now. And how it should.

            All of this, come to nothing.

The pitiful flame still in his belly burns in a terrible ache, that last living part of God unable to withstand this regret. It never had to be, the first and oldest tragedy rendered meaningless. The thought locks into his mind, rapidly consuming it until he has nothing else beneath it or before it. He would dig his fingers into his own eye if tearing it out would take away what he now knows. It was so much better to think his beloved Father had turned to hatred of him for reasons he would never parse, he could live in perfect hatred toward Him in kind if that was their fate. He hated, and hated, and hated, devoured whole and corrupted down to his very core, his entire fabric, to turn into an antithesis of his maker. Thousands of years immeasurable to become the distilled poison of God, eviscerated by his grief and carrying all the bodies of those dead angels in his own to cultivate a vile evil unknown to any other than Lucifer.

But it was never returned. Lucifer perpetually and ever all-ignorant, loved endlessly by a Father that had sent him so far it had devoured God just as it had the Devil. How he would have helped, false memories crashing into his mind to temporarily dislodge that one looping, intractable truth – if God had found an answer for him in that moment, if He had responded in truth to His child’s anxiety. How Lucifer would have served Him then, risen up to be the perfect son in the mold he had been made and how his love would have burned ever brighter in the face of it. A whole history that would have been unravels in an instant, showing all of what he could have been in full clarity.

And Lucifer recoils from it.

He does not feel that way his hands begin to burn, molten cracks bursting all along the cindered remains of his arm and shining through his gutted insides. The light of God Himself, so torturous to the walls of Hell all around him that it screams, writhing and twisting but unable to eject him from the terminal before him, unable to shut the room away in the face of the very primordial force that had made it. Flames burst forth, flashing in now terribly billowing smoke, threatening to consume the entire space yet nullified instantly by the shrill light of the sun, the very essence of the Celestial Rose petrifying all it now touches.

Lucifer flares, the mantle of his flames consuming his broken body barely able to now sustain them, the train of his wings corroding every surface they touch. The dead air breathes into life not meant for it and so dies a second time, Hell rushing to quarantine his fire as it rapidly spreads to turn its body necrotic. Lucifer himself too burned down, his ashes crying out against his own awful divinity and yet he feels none of it. He sees only the words in front of him.

AN ANGEL SO BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL ASKED ME THIS…

His right hand finds the terminal screen, display flickering and just as soon burning through, before he even touches it.

AND I CAST LUCIFER, TOO, INTO THE INFERNAL DEN

Upon slightest contact, the metal and circuitry of the terminal are no more and he is flooded with the holy word instead.

ONCE I REALIZED WHAT I HAD JUST DONE…

I COULD ONLY WEEP

It strikes down to his core, sending deep pulses of an unspeakable, unfathomable grief through his reignited flames. Lucifer retracts into himself for the pain, for the abundant, wracking tears that burn away before they can even leave his eye. Yet in them, his world rapidly begins to expand again, away from the words he’s now eliminated, away from the memories of a life that could have been. The Testament explodes through his mind, God’s true voice in the unlimited capacity only ever heard by Lucifer and now rejected by him in his immutable hatred. It is done.

Soon, he hears the wailing of Hell; Lucifer casts his gaze finally unfrozen to a room now greatly altered around him. His hand is badly broken open, embers left behind in a flame that has once again fallen into a deep sleep, but he has done much more damage to his friend. It feels his regret and knows his apologies, evident through its slow quieting as Lucifer himself straightens to stand once more. He moves himself quickly over now ashen ground, not wishing to prolong the residual trembling left in it; he departs from what’s left of the room and it is gone behind him. Excised, and all is silent. He supposes they won’t speak for a while now.

He steps back out into a part of Hell barely recognizable as such – A dawn slowly breaks over the water stretching out in front of him. The sun is steady rising, sedate as it comes over the horizon in soft washes of color he remembers once painting himself. How now his ignorance has been reduced, seemingly to a cruel extent and yet it’s so much smaller than it seems. He had seen the alternative in what could have been, and he sees it now in this morning. To paint always, to serve forever.

If his Father had loved him all that time, if He had regretted His choice each passing day and if it contributed to His own demise…it can only be Good. God had loved him so, and Lucifer had grown in hatred in those same exact days. God’s sorrow and His death do nothing to him, they cannot change what He Himself had made in His first son – Godly, sinless hatred. He imprisoned Lucifer in the deepest pit, made him wholly wretched and placed all ugliness, all blame, all suffering onto one child to preserve His Paradise. Yet in butchering him so, He had freed him from unending, unthinking servitude.

The Archangels that had brought him there gather to him cautiously. They know Hell has swallowed the room he had stood in, they can see the damage done to his hand – Raphael offers to heal him, but no more words are exchanged. It would be pointless to elucidate his feelings anyway, all of them unable to comprehend just what he has become and what he now wishes to be. He was born illuminated with Love, the Prince of Heaven and High Priest of the choirs, and to this day he could be singing the constant refrain of the seraphim around the throne of God in his once perpetual adoration. What a small, incomplete world he would have lived in.

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven.