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The noise carried long before the dust settled - an ugly, jubilant cheer rolling across the ring as if the city hadn’t nearly been split in half.
Fireworks burst overhead in lurid colour, masking the stink of burnt ozone and angelic residue.
Somewhere nearby, Charlie shrieked with joy and folded Emily into her arms.
Alastor stood a short distance away, bare hooves scratching on stone, shoulders loose and posture impeccable despite the fact that every bone in his body still hummed from the last blast Vox had thrown at him. His static was patchy, unreliable; the hum beneath his skin dipped and rose like a faulty transmission.
But none of that mattered.
He had won. He’d done it. By any sensible metric, he should have been euphorically pleased with himself.
He’d broken Rosie’s deal, more than returned the humiliations Vox had forced on him, regained his staff, and demonstrated - publicly, and unequivocally - that he was stronger than ever.
Strong enough to cut Vox in half. Strong enough to take down the so-called Strongest Sinner in Hell. Strong enough to reclaim his reputation with a flourish.
He should have been revelling in it.
And yet… he was unsettled.
Because Lucifer was standing - barely - on the edge of the crater.
Not in the centre of the crowd, or held by his daughter. He was barely even acknowledged.
The being of such power that it had taken almost every Overlord, Rosie, a seraphim, and the Princess of Hell simply to contain and subdue a part of that force - the magic that had been stripped, gutted, and burned out of the pathetic-looking man now standing alone on a leaning slab of rubble.
Lucifer braced one trembling hand against his thigh, breath hitching like each inhale hurt. His coat hung scorched and lopsided, edges still smoking faintly. Light flickered beneath the skin of his throat.
Alastor could smell the blood from where he stood.
Too much blood for a creature meant to be untouchable. Far too much for Lucifer Morningstar.
It was the moment their eyes met - brief, sharp, unmistakable - that cut clean through Alastor’s instinct to simply slip into shadow and consider his business concluded.
A single second of red meeting gold.
Lucifer swayed as he looked away. His mouth shaped a name - Charlie, most likely - but she was lost in the crush of celebration, dizzy with relief, deaf to anything outside her own triumph. No one noticed him. No one heard him.
Alastor did.
His jaw tightened.
Lucifer had freed him. Had cut through the cables without hesitation. Had healed him with a precision and gentleness Alastor had not expected, let alone earned. And worse, Lucifer had seen his pitiful little episode.
When that was over, when he'd thought that day couldn't possibly get more humiliating, he’d sagged straight into Lucifer’s lap. And he had shown Alastor no judgement for it - no mocking remark, no smug little jibe, no attempt to twist it into leverage. Instead, he’d stood there in infuriating silence, keeping vigil through the worst of Alastor’s unravelling as if it were nothing more than some acid rain he meant to wait out.
Then he'd held Alastor steady while healing: one hand in his hair, the other pressed to his chest as though calming a feral thing. His power had been warm and deliberate, maddeningly gentle.
The memory shivered through him like a faulty fuse: the weight of exhaustion dragging him down, the solid brace of an arm around his shoulders, the humiliating safeness of it - disgusting, absurd, entirely unacceptable - and how it had left him breathing easier when he finally returned to that damned chair.
He loathed it. He loathed the way his mind returned to it now, unwanted, unbidden.
Alastor owed him, and debt was unacceptable.
So when Lucifer finally tipped - knees buckling as the last of his power guttered out - Alastor did not move toward the crowd, or the celebration, or Charlie. Instead, he slipped backwards into the nearest patch of darkness and stepped out beside Lucifer’s collapsing body before it hit the ground.
His eyes fluttered - unfocused, and pained - and in the split-second before unconsciousness took him, he recognised the shape crouching over him.
“You,” Lucifer breathed, confused. “Why…?”
“Settling accounts,” Alastor murmured, as the shadows took them both.
The world folded away not with the clean snap of a portal nor the zap of electricity, but with the low, swallowing pull of shadow - a depthless darkness Alastor had loved long before he had names for the things he could do.
The ruined city vanished underfoot, replaced first by blackness, then by the wet, layered hush of his favoured place.
The bayou welcomed him like a creature returning to the wild.
Warm, damp air pressed against his skin; thick reeds whispered in the dark; somewhere in the murk, a bullfrog croaked, low and resonant. The scent of swampwater and rot curled beneath his nose.
He stepped lightly onto the half-submerged wooden planks that formed a crooked walkway over the black water, Lucifer’s weight suspended effortlessly in the curl of his shadow.
“Come along,” Alastor muttered more to himself than his passenger.
The path twisted, never the same twice, but he knew its rhythm - knew where the fog would billow, where the cypress roots would bow, where the branches hung heavy with bones that clattered faintly as they passed. Lucifer’s limp form bobbed behind him, held aloft by tendrils of darkness that behaved nothing like hands, yet obeyed his will all the same.
Eventually the swamp peeled away to reveal the other space beneath it: the hotel suite that was supposed to be here, warm lamplight pooling over aged timber, patterned wallpaper blooming faintly behind shelves of radio parts and books and carefully arranged bones.
A plush rug stretched in front of the crackling fireplace. Two armchairs faced one another - well-worn, velvet-tufted, in a shade of red he’d claimed as his long before the hotel adopted it. A low table sat between them, cluttered with half-smoked cigarettes, a bottle or two of good bourbon, the ingredients for a classic Sazerac, and a brass ashtray shaped like a grinning skull. The radio in the corner hummed softly, tuning itself to something warm and crackling, as if sensing the mood of its master.
The shadows lowered Lucifer with care he would deny until the end of time. They eased him into the deeper of the two armchairs - the one Alastor preferred for guests, or prey, or anyone he needed a better vantage on.
Lucifer slumped sideways for a moment before gravity righted him, his head lolling against the cushioned backrest, one arm dangling gracelessly over the side.
Alastor stepped back, surveying the sight with clinical detachment.
Lucifer Morningstar, looking as though someone had dropped him from a great height and forgotten to see where he landed.
Again.
The scorch marks were worse in proper light. The wounds, too - angry burns spiralling under the torn fabric, veins lit faintly gold where angelic energy had overflooded his system. His eyelashes were clumped with soot. The skin was split in places. Dried blood stained his white clothing in golden patches.
Alastor clicked his tongue.
“Tch. You look a fright.”
Lucifer didn’t stir.
Alastor moved around him, slow and deliberate, like a man approaching a wild beast he wasn’t sure would lash out or simply lie down and die. He knelt beside the armchair, studying the burns, the ragged edges of charred fabric, the faint tremor still running through the man’s fingers.
Ridiculous.
This was Lucifer. The First Temptation. The Devil. The creature whose very name made millions of humans flinch.
But it was also Lu - absurdly duck-obsessed, theatrically dramatic, infuriatingly stubborn, and one of the few souls in the hotel capable of matching Alastor word for word without immediately boring him. Powerless against him, apparently, but still… interesting.
And here he was: slouched in Alastor’s armchair, barely breathing, smelling faintly of the sweetest blood and burnt feathers and electricity.
Alastor huffed under his breath, “You do make a spectacular mess of yourself,” he said quietly, fingers tapping the arm of the chair as he assessed where to begin.
Lucifer’s head lolled slightly toward the sound of Alastor’s voice - unconscious, instinctive.
Alastor’s expression sharpened, a hair too precise.
“Don’t do that,” he muttered.
The radio crackled. The swamp sighed.
And Alastor, at last, reached forward to unbutton what remained of Lucifer’s coat.
The first button crumbled between his fingers, half-melted. The second held, barely, and came away with a faint snap. Beneath the coat, Lucifer’s shirt had fused in places to the burns beneath it; fabric charred into flesh in pairs of thin black cuts that made Alastor’s upper lip curl.
“Sloppy work,” he murmured.
The coat peeled back in crumbling pieces, scorched fabric ripping from scorched skin. Thin lines of dried blood cracked as the cloth lifted. Lucifer winced in his sleep - barely a twitch at the corner of his mouth - but it was enough to make Alastor’s shadows twitch, agitated by pain they did not appreciate witnessing.
“Really,” he drawled, “one would think a being of your calibre would avoid being used as a glorified battery.”
Lucifer didn’t answer - naturally - but his brow creased, faint as a hairline fracture.
The shirt he dispatched more efficiently. A razor-thin ribbon of shadow sliced cleanly up the seams, the garment falling away in soft ash-like strips.
Beneath-
Ah.
The burns were worse up close. Angelic magic had spiderwebbed across Lucifer’s chest: bright around the wounds, then splintering outward into unstable filaments. Some glowed hot; some pulsed; Some flickered with a dangerous, stuttering light. Cracks ran through him like his skin was shattered porcelain.
“If you die in my chair,” Alastor said flatly, “I'll bring you back just to kill you myself.”
Lucifer breathed shallowly, not waking.
Alastor flexed his fingers once. The room steadied around him - the swamp-hush beyond the walls, the crackle of fire, the hum of his radio tuning itself low. Familiar. Controlled. His.
He pressed two fingers against Lucifer’s sternum.
Angel-light flared instinctively, meeting his touch with a chaotic surge. It shoved against his power - bright, holy, wrong - forcing a sharp pulse of heat through his palm. Lucifer’s eyelids fluttered; gold prickled at the edges.
Alastor withdrew immediately.
“No,” he snapped. “Stay unconscious. You’re intolerable enough asleep.”
Lucifer subsided with a faint exhale.
Alastor’s shadows gathered, sliding around the worst burns, testing the unstable lines of gold. His magic was not meant to heal - its nature bent toward tearing, consuming, hollowing - but stabilising was possible. Painfully inefficient, extremely irritating, but possible.
He placed his hand over Lucifer’s heart.
This time his power rose in full. Black, neon-green static bled from his fingers, threading into the glowing fractures beneath Lucifer’s skin. The angelic energy pushed back - bright gold shoving against shadow, crackling like two incompatible signals forced onto the same wavelength.
It looked wrong. It felt worse.
Lucifer’s breath hitched, the pain obvious even unconscious.
Alastor scowled, the line of his smile twisting.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he muttered.
He forced the energies to settle, siphoning the excess light before it could rupture anything vital. The glow beneath Lucifer’s skin dimmed slowly - from frantic gold to trembling amber, then to a muted, manageable glimmer.
The process hurt. Alastor could see it in every slight twist of Lucifer’s brow, in the tension of his jaw. It displeased him. Pain was a tool to be used, not inflicted by incompetents like Vox. Certainly not on a creature who didn’t deserve it - at least not tonight.
When the last of the dangerous flickering dissolved into stillness, Alastor sat back, shadows receding in a slow ripple.
Lucifer woke moments later with a sharp, choking inhale that made every burned nerve seize at once. His gaze jerked around wildly, unfocused, as if expecting wires, VoxTek restraints, the blinding hum of the weapon around him.
For the briefest moment, he looked frightened, and Alastor felt something in his chest pull tight - annoyingly, traitorously tight.
No. Absolutely not.
He let his voice cut through the room, low and command-sharp:
“Eyes on me, Lu.”
Lucifer’s golden gaze dragged upward, sluggish, dazed, but obedient. Recognition flickered, then confusion, then - damn him - relief.
The devil sagged back into the armchair like a puppet with cut strings.
“Oh,” he croaked. “Bambi.”
Alastor bared his teeth in a smile that felt too close to real.
“Yes, me. The one whose name I know you know.”
Lucifer tried - and failed - to sit straighter. His muscles seized instantly, pain lancing across his chest in bright lines. His jaw locked. His eyes went sharp with humiliation.
Good. That, at least, was familiar.
He glanced down at the web of cracks across his torso. His breath caught as he finally took in the damage: the gold spidering, the odd burns, the lingering hum of angelic energy fried into uselessness. When he swallowed, it was audible.
“What… what did he do?” Lucifer rasped.
“Plugged you into a machine and wrung you dry,” Alastor said lightly. “Criminal workmanship, a pathetically obvious set-up. Honestly, sweetheart, if you're gon’ let someone torture you, at least pick a craftsman.”
Lucifer barked a laugh that cracked mid-breath and turned into a grimace.
“You… stabilised it?” His voice was thin, hoarse. “Me?”
Alastor clicked his tongue. “Don’t flatter yourself. I stabilised the mess. You just happened to be attached.”
Lucifer’s eyes softened at that - an infuriating, unguarded look that made Alastor want to tear up the rug beneath them.
He hated this.
The tug in his gut at seeing Lucifer so emptied, so stripped-down, how it echoed the moment he himself had broken two nights ago - tearing at shadows, static in his teeth, sinking into the devil’s lap like some wounded beast, sobbing out laughter he didn’t understand.
Lucifer shifted again, breath hissing sharply through his teeth. The pain was obvious, ugly, wrong on him in a way Alastor found personally offensive.
He moved closer before he realised he’d done it.
Lucifer blinked up at him, pupils blown wide. “This is the first pain I’ve felt,” he whispered, “since I fell.”
Alastor’s fingers stilled against the armrest.
For a fraction of a second - quick, private, unallowable - something cold dropped through his stomach.
The first pain he’s felt since he fell.
He could have worked that out, if he'd really thought about it. He’d watched Lucifer fight, get hit, get tossed, get cut, and shrug it off with that infuriating, radiant smugness.
But knowing a thing and hearing Lucifer Morningstar say it, voice cracked and thin and barely holding, were different beasts entirely.
Alastor schooled his expression into something cool and unimpressed.
“I see Vox has achieved the impossible,” he said lightly. “He’s made you mortal adjacent. Tragic.”
Lucifer huffed out the ghost of a laugh - but the movement jarred his ribs, and his breath caught on a rough, strangled sound he tried (and failed) to swallow.
Alastor’s shadows bristled.
He placed a hand on the back of the armchair, not touching Lucifer - but close enough to steady the space around him. Close enough that Lucifer felt it, because his eyes fluttered briefly, unfocused but… responding.
“Hurts,” Lucifer whispered, as if confessing treason.
Alastor clicked his tongue. “Yes, that is the point of nerves. Most organisms have them.”
Lucifer winced again.
Not humour. Not embarrassment.
Pain.
Real pain.
And Alastor - against all better judgement, against sense and pride and the entire foundation of his nature - felt something ugly and hot twist in his chest.
“It will pass,” he said, too curt. “I handled the worst of it. Your body is simply adjusting to the comical incompetence of being electrocuted by an overgrown television.”
Lucifer blinked slowly, struggling to stay tethered. “Feels… different.”
“It would,” Alastor agreed. “It’s a wonder you didn’t explode. Though that might’ve been entertaining.”
Lucifer managed a faint smile. “You’re… terrible.”
“Consistently.”
Another spasm of pain dragged through him - sharp enough to make his breath snag again. His hand flew instinctively to his chest but lacked the strength to get there. It dropped uselessly to his lap.
Alastor watched the whole thing with an expression that, to anyone else, might have looked bored.
Internally, the static behind his teeth snapped.
“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” he said quietly.
Lucifer coughed a laugh. “Can’t help it. Feels like… like everything’s burning.”
“It is not,” Alastor snapped, shadows tightening around the chair legs. “It’s residual charge. You will not die.”
Lucifer’s head tipped back against the cushion, sweat slicking his fringe to his brow. “Feels like dying. Is this what it feels like to die?”
Alastor leaned in before he realised he’d moved.
“Listen carefully,” he said, voice low enough to shake the air. “If you were dying, I would know. I am not in the business of misreading the obvious.”
Lucifer’s eyes cracked open. Gold met red again - hazy, shimmering, but there. “Why… do you care?”
A fair question.
A stupid question.
An infuriating question.
Alastor’s smile sharpened to something thin, humourless, deeply unpleasant.
“I don’t,” he said.
Lucifer breathed out, a strained little scoff that said he didn’t believe a word of it.
Alastor ignored the way that landed.
He reached for the bottle of bourbon on the table, not for drinking, but because it was heavy and cold and something to do with his hands. He uncorked it with unnecessary precision.
Lucifer’s gaze tracked him sluggishly. “Are you… offering me a drink?”
“I am considering pouring it over your face to see if you wake faster.”
A weak chuckle. “Don’t… think that would help.”
“No,” Alastor agreed. “But it would be entertaining.”
Something trembling and fragile flickered across Lucifer’s expression again. Something that belonged nowhere near him.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said sharply.
“Like what?” Lucifer asked, genuinely lost.
“Like I’m-” He cut himself off, disgust searing through him. “Never mind.”
Lucifer’s head lolled sideways. Exhaustion weighed down every line of him. “I feel… strange.”
“Yes,” Alastor said. “You would.”
“You’re not… angry with me?”
“I am always angry with you,” Alastor said honestly. “But not for this.”
Lucifer blinked slowly, fighting the pull of unconsciousness. His voice was a scrape of sound. “Why… did you bring me here?”
A dangerous moment. An exposed wire.
A question Alastor had planned to avoid indefinitely.
“Because,” Alastor said, drawing himself up, tucking the bourbon away with a decisive clink, “this clears my debt with you.”
"Debt?" Lucifer frowned faintly. “Why… because I healed you?”
“Yes,” Alastor said mildly. “I am returning the courtesy, inconvenient as that may be.”
Lucifer stared at him, the truth dawning sluggishly, painfully. “You’re… keeping me safe.”
Alastor’s smile froze, brittle as glass.
“No,” he said. “I am keeping you functional.”
And then - because the universe loathes him - Lucifer gave him a soft, disbelieving, unbearably gentle smile.
“Alastor… thank you.”
Something inside the Radio Demon shorted out.
His static snapped. His shadows twitched. His throat tightened with a pressure so foreign he almost mistook it for the lingering aftershock of battle.
He tore his gaze away first.
“Drink your drink,” Alastor said sharply, thrusting a glass toward him with far more force than necessary.
Lucifer blinked wearily at it, then at Alastor, then back at the drink as if trying to recall what one did with glasses. Eventually, he lifted it. His hand shook violently. A few drops sloshed over the rim and onto the plush armchair.
Alastor pretended not to notice.
“Small sips,” he said, tone clipped. “Do not die choking on good bourbon. That truly would be pathetic.”
Lucifer’s lips twitched. He obeyed - taking a tentative sip, then another. The alcohol clearly burned, but he forced down a swallow with a faint tremor of effort.
Halfway through the third sip, his eyelids drooped dangerously.
“Lu.” Alastor snapped his fingers once. “Stay awake long enough not to asphyxiate.”
“’M awake,” Lucifer mumbled, then immediately began tipping sideways.
Alastor caught the glass before it could fall, shadow curling neatly around it. Lucifer sagged fully back into the chair, breath softening into something even and unconscious.
Gone.
Just like that.
Alastor stared at him.
Then at the glass.
Then at the absolute absurdity of the situation.
He poured a second drink into the remaining glass - his own - and crossed the space to sink into the opposite armchair. The springs sighed under his weight. His shadows slithered into place by the fire. The bayou murmured faintly beyond the walls.
Alastor lit a cigarette with a flick of green flames.
The first drag steadied something in him he refused to name.
He exhaled slowly, watching the smoke rise, curl, dissolve into the dim glow of the lamplight.
Lucifer Morningstar - untouchable, infuriating, insufferably radiant Lucifer - was unconscious in his armchair. In his bayou. Wearing nothing but his ruined pants, boots, and what was left of his shirt hanging open over his chest. Covered in burns and gold fractures Alastor had personally stabilised. Breathing softly, faintly, like some wounded animal that had staggered its way into the wrong trap.
Alastor took another drag.
“This,” he muttered to the empty room, “is utterly ridiculous.”
The radio hummed sympathetically.
He sipped his bourbon. Smoked. Watched Lucifer breathe. Tried very hard not to think about anything except his victories today. It didn't work.
Alastor glared at the fire.
“Ridiculous,” he repeated.
But he didn’t move.
He sat there - bourbon in hand, cigarette burning steady, shadows curled protectively around the room - and kept vigil over the Devil.