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He finds himself visiting the rose garden more often than he’d expected.
There are many other, more beautiful places to spend eternity (or rather, the space between the End of the Earth and the End of himself). Canyons, valleys, mountains the humans have underwhelmingly named in an arrogant attempt to tame. Oceans, vast expanses of sky-blue waterways. He had almost forgotten what it was like, to see no walls. It’s dazzling, like he might get lost in the stars he once helped build.
Yet he still somehow lands amid the roses, in that grey little nature-square that cemented the world as it is now. Dean’s corpse has long decomposed, withered into the mud for the maggots to feast on. The corrupted humans know better than to venture in here – Lucifer keeps his garden pristine and free of cockroaches. He paces through the paths; the shrubbery has started to spread over it, and Lucifer occasionally encourages the roots, gently nudging them forwards. Running his fingers through the leaves, he closes his vessel’s eyes and listens: without humans, this planet is loud and unafraid of it. Chirping birds. Worms, writhing under the crumbled cement. One universe, interconnected, holding intricate conversations with itself; it reminds him of home.
Fingers hover above another rose, carefully caressing the interwoven petals. They trail downwards, along the curves of the flower’s sepals and down its stem. His index nail clicks against a thorn. And then –
A rustle from behind – like displaced air and crackling ozone.
A breath of wind brushes his cheek.
His hand stops.
The presence is more familiar than anything on Earth – it screams of storms and wings that span the entire world cradling him like a precious gem. It fills Lucifer with a longing he thought he had crushed along with Dean’s windpipe.
Finally, he thinks, and turns around.
No one is there. Just the roses, the insects and the rot, and that stinging resonance inside his vessel’s chest.
In his short time interacting with humanity, before they lost themselves to the madness of their disease and their own survival, he learned several important facts.
Among them, is this: even after centuries, they still believe Heaven is in the sky.
They pretend not to – they rage against their instincts, those little beings pumped full of hormones and hubris. Yet even the stubbornly unfaithful sometimes tilt their heads upwards in terror, in one last, desperate supplication before succumbing to their mortal nature. He knows for a fact that the Earth sky hides no Heaven. He has been up there – has raced among the supernovas, filled the empty chaos with iridescent stardust. It was once his playground; but it is not his home.
Yet he still finds himself glancing up on stormy days. He watches the clouds gather round like vultures above a parched land, and thinks of the electrons, furiously dancing around each other, clashing in deafening symphonies that resonate across the plains. He thinks of times before the stars, in the primeval creation-storm, unsullied and perfect. He thinks of the one who shared it all with him.
The first raindrops land on his forehead; they seep into the fabric of his white sleeves. And as the peals of thunder shudder down the valley, he feels it again. That electric, spine-straightening presence prodding at his senses.
This time he whirls around immediately, eyes wide and muscles tight, ready to face him –
And again there is nothing. The wind whistles through the mountain ridges, sweeping away the darkened clouds. The complete, sublime expanse of his Father’s creation at his fingertips, and the one he most wants to see is nowhere to be found.
He watches a few hundred humans die that day. None of them look up. Perhaps they, too, finally sense the emptiness of Heaven. Perhaps even instinct has been lost to them.
The day Michael finally shows, Lucifer’s hands are bloody: the thick, gloopy substance dripping along his wrists. He has just wrenched it through a diseased human’s chest – their last breath a sigh of relief, as their suffering eased. He only kills them when they ask for it, when their rotten hands reach to him as he wanders through the towns; the humans can well enough do the heavy work of extinction for themselves.
He clenches his fist and listens to the resulting bubbling squelch as the liquid trickles through the space between his knuckles. His suit is stained crimson, but it doesn’t matter now, the immaculate white. There is only him to bear witness.
Until there isn’t.
“Brother!” He yells. The voice booms through the narrow street. Sharp gusts of wind rake against his face. “It isn’t like you to hide away,” he says.
He almost smiles when the presence flares up at his words. It is a small relief, that he still knows his brother better than anyone.
“One might start to think you were afraid.”
Like a summoning spell, the wind doubles – it screams through the buildings, tossing up ripped plastic and soggy ash against the boarded-up windows.
With one final heave and a deafening thunder-roar, the air stills, and Lucifer knows that the moment he turns, his brother will stand before him.
There is a moment, there, where neither of them moves. With his back to Michael, he can imagine a thousand paths, a billion Ends, criss-crossing through the universe. Michael could be smiling. He could be soft, his wings like butterflies resting over his cheek. He could be the way Lucifer had sometimes imagined him in the Cage, a childish attempt at self-soothing: tenderly wrapped around Lucifer’s grace, caressing his wounds and whispering in his ear.
Or he could be like he had been in Lucifer’s worst visions: painful, agonising in his wrath and fatal with his words. His eyes could be glowing with power, his arms holding a lance or a sword that sparks with holy fire. This very moment, he could be plunging it in his back, and Lucifer would be none the wiser.
He would have enjoyed it, he thinks. An unforeseen End. A death like the mortals, one that hadn’t been inscribed in the stars since the creation of the world, publicly available to anyone who could read.
When he turns, it is with intent. First his shoes, pivoting to the side, then his body. Controlled and resigned.
“Michael,” he breathes, and cements his brother into being.
With his back to the dirty sunlight of the alleyway, Michael’s shadows are accentuated – they creep along his nose, his cheeks, pool under his chin and spider down his neck. He looks almost cramped in the narrow space, like he folded himself further than necessary for his vessel to house him. He banishes the thought; Michael has never once made himself small. Even now, he occupies the air – his eyes flash with lightning; his shoulders draw back, a lion preparing to roar. Unthinking, Lucifer leans forward in anticipation of his voice.
But he says nothing.
He just stares at Lucifer, still and pale. None of the Michaels Lucifer conjured up seconds ago have worn this careful neutrality, these slightly-pinched lips and eyes that never leave his own.
No matter. He has rehearsed his speech enough; he has always expected to open their last dance.
“You’re late,” he says.
Michael’s jaw twitches. But he stays stubbornly quiet.
Lucifer continues. “It’s good to see you, brother.”
Wrong. Something is not giving the way it should – Michael is not responding to his prods. Since when has he been so hard to read?
Off-balance, Lucifer steps forward.
Only then does Michael move.
And it is not towards Lucifer.
He jerks backwards, eyes finally breaking their lightning-grip on Lucifer’s features. They dart left, right, exactly once, before they land back on him, and Lucifer can’t think past the betrayal that spikes through his core like a lance. Past the realisation that this Michael is foreign.
In the Cage, stewing in bile and resentment, he had felt himself change, melt into the horrific mould of his surroundings and solidify into something new. He had mourned, of course. Added himself to the ever-growing list of what he’d lost. Had wondered if his siblings would recognise him when he emerged again.
But he had never once thought Michael would change, too.
Michael does not look afraid, because despite Lucifer’s taunts, afraid is not an emotion Michael has ever felt. But he looks… shifting. Guarded. Ungrounded. Like the next thunder-strike would take him away.
When he notices Lucifer won’t attempt to close the gap he has created, Michael’s shoulders lower, and the dangerous ozone starts to lessen. His gaze travels up and down Lucifer’s body. Settles on his bloody hands.
“You’ve been busy,” he says: his brother’s first words to him in millennia. That infuriating, judgmental tone is exactly how he remembers it – his nails crease moon-prints across his palms as he clenches his fists.
“No one seemed to mind much,” he replies, and raises a brow. “There hasn’t been a single angel on Earth since the day my vessel said yes.”
These are new accusations, uncharted conversations – so far from how he’d imagined them a thousand times over. Michael, of all entities, was the one to throw a wrench in the well-oiled Apocalypse machine. Complete radio silence – no angel interference, no demon smiting, no omens. Lucifer would be impressed, if he wasn’t so infuriated.
“What are you playing at, Michael?” He throws at him through narrowed lips.
Michael bristles, and static plays between Lucifer’s fingertips.
“This isn’t a game,” he says, voice low. “Despite how much fun you seem to be having destroying our Father’s works.”
Lucifer nearly bursts out laughing. Oh, the sweet tangs of Michael’s hypocrisy.
“They will die either way,” he smiles wryly, shaking his head. The pavement glistens with human blood. “Pulverised by Judgment Day.”
And then he looks back up. Fixes his eyes on the storm, with the sad smile he practiced.
“Today.”
And Michael flinches.
It’s not a full-body start. It’s primaries quivering in the wind, a sharp intake of air. But Lucifer has been categorising each of his movements, and the sight of any involuntary moves on Michael disturbs him more than any wrath.
“I have to leave,” Michael says, and lifts up his wings.
Lucifer’s eyes widen. “What?”
“I’ve stayed too long.” Michael will not meet his eyes. “Goodbye, Lucifer.”
Before Lucifer can flare his own wings in response – can yell out a furious reply, beg him to stay, or do anything but blink – Michael is gone, stormy wind blowing once more through the alleyway. And Lucifer cannot follow.
“MICHAEL!” He screams at the sky. “Don’t you dare leave again, don’t you dare!”
Thunder rolls, distantly.
Lucifer lowers his head, slow. He lets the hurt roll over him in waves. Grits his teeth so hard they creak. Blood still drips from his trembling fingertips, the mangled corpse at his feet bearing witness to his undoing.
This was supposed to be the End, and Michael has robbed him even of that.
More drifting; dead towns, thriving ecosystems of sap and rot. Until, somehow, his wings take him to Lawrence, in what was once Kansas. Perhaps something is left of Sam, remnants of his dread and nostalgia and homesickness and grief mingling with Lucifer’s. Or perhaps he just wants to be left alone, drifting through the ghost house.
There, too, has creation run its course. Poison ivy crawls up through cracks in the crumbling floorboards, feeding off the peeling wallpaper. A lizard peeps through the shattered windows. With the tip of his toe he pushes away debris – bricks, rotting paper, a small plastic truck. All is quiet.
The sun has set five times since Michael denied Lucifer his death. The days are long, thick and tedious, like a summer haze, unreal and pointless. Fury has turned to despair, and despair to something worse: lassitude, nothing-crested boredom shaped like the Cage. A heaviness in his arms, his chest, his ever-wandering feet.
He has spent the past three millennia yearning for freedom. And now that he is out, he wants nothing more than to stop. It’s an irony he knows his Father would appreciate.
It’s one he thinks his brother might never grasp.
“Why are you here?” He bites out. He does not turn this time – forces Michael to hang loose, unimagined and undefined, behind his back.
“I could ask you the same,” comes the answer. Cool and smooth, like the flat side of a blade.
Lucifer snarls. “I’m not some pet you can visit as you please. I won’t hang by your doorstep waiting for you to show your face.”
He feels Michael’s stare right between his shoulder blades. His answer floats in the air, cruel and unspoken. What else could you possibly do?
The house sits heavy on his shoulders. Heat prickles up from the broken concrete outside.
Lucifer sighs, and the breath feels much deeper than his lungs.
If Michael is stubbornly refusing to act anything like Michael, he himself cannot let go of Lucifer. It is the one thing he has left, this changed shell of an identity.
“You left,” he says. Resentment and doubt – venom and water. “Again.”
Michael deflates, echoes his sigh; his shoulders slump.
“Yes.”
Lucifer lets his gaze wander across the walls. The dust. The toys.
“All this preparation. This maintenance, tending to the bloodlines. The gathering of souls. And then – the moment I break free – you leave.”
Michael holds his gaze. “Yes.”
“Why?”
His voice wavers as he asks the eternal, unanswered question. Michael evidently doesn’t break the streak – instead of answering he drifts forward, towards the chimney place. His index finger leaves a trail through the dust of the mantelpiece.
Something awful is creeping up Lucifer’s throat. It burns his tongue, sandy and luminous and heart-stirring.
“Dean had not said yes – and now he can’t anymore. It’s not right.”
Lucifer narrows his eyes. “So it’s my fault. For killing the vessel you never wanted in the first place.”
“Yes.”
Lucifer regards him for a long while. “I think this is the first time I heard you lie. You’re not very good at it.”
Anger, then, a familiar one. All-consuming and directed fire. “Do not presume to know me, brother.”
And for some reason only their Father could ever know, this is what sets Lucifer off. The rage explodes out of him, responding to Michael’s ire, and suddenly he’s gripping his brother’s jacket and thrusting him against the crumbling floor of the former Winchester home. The resulting thud reverberates through the world – he feels it morph in storms and earthquakes, feels the spread of his predestined rage. It is the only feeling that has made sense since this world dissolved into decay.
Michael is warm under his touch. His knees brush against Lucifer’s thighs. It is a physicality he has not yet felt in this body, perfect as it is; nerve endings firing into the brain, informing him of atoms pressing against each other for the first time in millennia.
“And don’t you presume to blame me for your own cowardice!”
Right after the last word, an ear-shattering thunderstrike rattles the house, and Michael’s face – that impassive, blue-eyed slate – is contorted under the electric light. His form does not move a muscle against Lucifer’s knuckle-white grip.
“This was a mistake,” Michael says with a forced quietness that chills Lucifer’s already freezing heart.
“Not this time,” he growls, and tightens his grip on Michael’s shirt. His grace branches out and presses its weight onto his brother’s, coiling tight around his essence. He isn’t sure it will actually work, if Michael decides to leave. The other archangel has always been stronger, wings pulsing with raw power that predate light itself.
Michael stirs, and Lucifer’s fingers dig into him tighter. “You don’t get to leave this time,” he continues. “I did everything right. I came back, and I played the bad guy. I killed and destroyed and transformed this Earth into what it is supposed to be – and then I waited for you at Stull for weeks on end. I stayed until the snow covered the graves, and the flowers sprouted up again. And you,” he pushed Michael further into the rotting floor – “ never,” and again – “came.”
Smite me, he wants to scream. Do something, anything, to get me off of you.
Another roll of thunder. Loud enough to rattle the walls, but not enough to convince Lucifer to back off. He realises he’s panting, his breath on the verge of breaking.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he pleads. The few shutters that survived the non-Apocalypse thump against the windows, echoing the electric booms with remarkable force. His shaking fists loosen. “To kill me, once and for all? Do it, Michael. Fight me.”
There was a time, in the many-rooted scenarios he had imagined, where he would have pleaded the exact opposite. One last appeal, one last attempt to persuade Michael of the pointlessness of his anger, to get him to see through any prism that wasn’t their Father’s will. But that time has passed, melted away like the snow on the graveyard’s stones. Michael had given his answer – a terrible, silent one, void of voice and care for what they used to be – when he’d refused to give Lucifer the barest hint of his presence. Now anything is better than this solitude – this wandering, this preening around for someone who, even trapped underneath his body, still looks at him with implacable, unbearable silence. Now Lucifer wants nothing more than for it to End.
“Do it!” he says, and bows his head, ready for the silence that would inevitably follow. If he doesn’t see Michael, he can imagine his sword raising above him, ready to slice through his neck and collapse the world into the proper Apocalypse, not this shambling shell of a ruined Earth. And as he stills his breath, he listens to the storm, to the last thunderstrike he’ll ever hear –
“I can’t,” he hears instead. It’s quiet, torn from his brother’s lungs, and it makes Lucifer look at him again, half-thinking he imagined it.
Michael’s hands have settled at his sides, supporting them both against the decrepit floor. He regards Lucifer with the same intense impassivity, but something flickers in his eyes in between two lighting strikes.
“What?” says Lucifer in the silence that follows.
“I can’t,” Michael repeats.
Lucifer flounders.
“Because it’s wrong,” Michael continues.
Lucifer’s eyes narrow. “Because I killed Dean Winchester?”
Michael shakes his head. “Somewhere down the line, something broke. Something broke, Lucifer. And now nothing is right.”
Lucifer doesn’t understand him – a new feeling, one that unsettles him to his core. “What broke?”
Michael doesn’t respond.
Lucifer shakes him. “What broke?”
“I don’t know!”
And that stuns Lucifer enough for his grip to slacken completely. Michael chooses this moment to claw his way backwards, out of Lucifer’s reach. They stare at each other from either side of the carpet. Lucifer crouches on his heels; Michael balances on his elbows.
Michael has never, ever, uttered these three words.
For a few seconds, his brother’s expression looks just as shocked as Lucifer feels. And then he schools himself back into distance, back into stormy clouds.
“We tried to find out, Raphael and I.”
Lucifer bristles at the mention of Raphael. Raphael, who watched from afar and never interceded. Raphael, who has never once visited Lucifer, as he meandered the Earth alone. Raphael, the first angel Lucifer raised.
“All we know is – this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”
Lucifer frowns. “Supposed to be,” he repeats.
Michael nods. “It’s wrong,” he says, like a man hanging off a cliff.
“And you wanted to fix it.”
Another beat. Then: “Yes.”
Michael’s body is too far now to feel the heat of his essence, and Lucifer wonders how he ever managed to survive without it. He supposes, then, that he hasn’t.
Lucifer looks down at the floor, his smile colder than the Cage and twice as hopeless.
“How will you fix this, brother? Enlighten me – what’s your master plan? What is there possibly left to salvage in all this?”
And he doesn’t gesture at the ruined house. Not the crumbling walls, nor the dusty ripped curtains, not even the foul, stagnant water that drips through the failing ceiling beams. He doesn’t care about the world that was, that cockroach society he helped reach its inevitable conclusion. The people that died in it now reside in a place he’ll never know again.
When he gestures, he wraps an arm around himself, and stares at Michael with desperation, which is all that he has left.
Michael watches him in return. Slowly, he crosses his legs, curls his fingers into fists, and speaks the next three words with a voice that lacks anything remotely close to a storm.
“I left Heaven.”
Lucifer’s breath cuts short. The lightning had stopped, and Michael’s face rests small in the twilight. His skin, perfect in the blue electric light, now looks ashy and human.
“Nothing was working – we tried going back, changing the dates, the circumstances. Nothing could get us back to the right time. Nothing could fix what broke.”
Lucifer doesn’t know what to make of this conversation. It feels loose, detached from time, from the script that has been set for them since the dawn of this world.
“So I went to find the only solution I could think of.”
The realisation drips down to Lucifer’s awareness like the rain that’s starting to hit the leaky roof.
“You tried to find Dad.”
Silence, then. Like everything ended the second Michael had confessed. His shoulders slump, and his hand goes to fist around his knee, squeezing the worn fabric of his vessel’s trousers.
“Oh, Michael.”
Lucifer pushes himself to his feet. Quietly, carefully, he crosses the distance, and crouches back down until his face is level with his brother’s. His blood-stained sleeve brushes against Michael’s leg as his hand hovers.
Michael’s starlight-eyes follow him, halfway between bird of prey and prey itself.
“I thought if I could find Him…” Michael’s eyes leave, settle on the chimney. Then they flicker back to him, like a compass magnet snapping back to true North. “If He could tell me what to do…”
His throat – that cartilaginous bump humans strangely dubbed an apple – quivers, and kills the words that follow. Lucifer drinks of him; gulps in Michael’s choked confessions like the sun on winter leaves. With a bravery he hasn’t had in a long while, he brings his hand close to Michael’s face, fingers drifting towards his temple.
Say it, he wants to push. Tell me I was right. Tell me you were wrong. Make all of this filthy, rotten existence worth a single thing.
But he feels empty, emptier than when he had waited at Stull, with nothing but snow and rotting carcasses. There is no glee in watching his brother break – there never, ever was.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” says Michael, quiet and grieving.
And Lucifer’s hand lands on Michael’s neck, like a raindrop finding the earth. He feels the pores under his fingertips, the brush of the other angel’s hair falling soft against his fingernail.
“He’s gone, Lucifer, and I don’t know…”
Against his shattered thoughts – make him explain himself, let him grovel, let him use the words he refused you all this time, let him fall like you did and crash in the muddy ground – Lucifer shifts closer and wraps both arms around Michael. His body is frigid against his brother’s chest.
Michael stiffens, shivers, stops breathing between the resuming thunder strikes. For a moment Lucifer thinks he has walked into a trap, or perhaps he has set one for himself; for a moment the Michael that strikes him down, the sword that haunts his imagination, manifests again, and his back will be home to angelic steel.
It could have happened. Lucifer has become the one thing in the world Michael can control anymore – if he killed him, it would be the only scripted event left in this ruin of a world. In another lifetime, the one that had unrelentingly circled in Lucifer’s mind during his imprisonment, Michael would tell him with unflinching eyes that his death was the only thing that could make Father come back home.
But this Michael is wrong, too. He has done the impossible, and strayed from the book. This Michael left Heaven, just like his Father had, but then – then, he had come back.
His fingers curl into a fist behind Michael’s back, and he grips his brother. He wraps his wings around him, the way Michael had at Lucifer’s birth, shelter from the terrifying, primordial storm.
Shoulders quiver underneath him. Distantly, he feels moisture pool onto his shirt. Michael repeats his confession, over and over, and now he’s clutching Lucifer’s forearms and collapses into him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. He left me. I don’t know.”
Lucifer holds him. He says nothing, continues rubbing circles against his brother’s back, catching his sobs against his chest. Heat seeps slowly back into his palms, and he welcomes it like dawn after a winter night.
And as the house shakes around them, as the storm violently shatters the foundations of everything Michael has ever known – as the wrongness imposes itself on the landscape, inescapable and strange – Lucifer thinks, perhaps, that their embrace is the only thing that has ever felt completely right.