Not all pain is alike. This is the first thing you learn in Hell. And this pain was new.
When he had first been cast down, so long ago, Lucifer had hated his throne, but he realized now that he while he'd despised the thing itself, he hadn't minded sitting in it. If anything, he'd liked being removed, visible, immobile. He knew no one was controlling him then. There wasn't anything to control: he wasn't an action, he was just a presence. His feelings – of rage, of abandonment, of fear, of guilt – those were his own, inviolable, perfect. And perfectly on display on his seat high above his wretched domain.
In retrospect, he'd secretly been rather fond of the throne that he'd hated. It had suited him.
It did not suit his pain now. And he knew he had to stop squirming. The whole point of being visible was to be a commanding presence. The demons needed to know the King of Hell was there. The King of Hell did not get restless, and he certainly did not wriggle.
The problem was, Lucifer did. He wasn't sure if he liked what it said about him, that losing Chloe and his home on Earth and his real life, the one that he had made for himself because it was what he wanted – no, he reminded himself fiercely, not losing, giving up, he had chosen this too – had left him empty and gray on his perch for a few days but now just left him itchy. Being fidgety seemed beneath the depth of his loss, and yet it was what he felt. It didn't make him hurt any less.
Lucifer caught himself mid-squirm and froze. Thinking about not wriggling had distracted his attention from acting on not wriggling. He glanced around quickly. He could look more closely at the tiny specks seething across the landscape beneath him to see whether any of the demons had caught him, but why? Of course they'd seen him. They loved to look at him when they could.
He jammed a heel into the notch in the throne's base he knew so well and stood balanced on one leg, his other dangling over the void. His wings unfolded in a rush of ashen air. The specks below scattered. Yes, they'd seen him all right, but they thought he was in a mood and were frightened. That was good, he supposed – terrified demons were obedient demons. Depressing, to be cast in the role of bigger monster again, but good. It was his job, wasn't it? Or, at any rate, what the situation required.
Anyway. He had to move. He just didn't have anywhere to move to, but no one had to know that. He pushed himself off the throne and let himself fall for one exhilarating moment before twisting his body and spiraling lazily over the ugly, broken architecture of chambers and pits and alleys. He tried to make his directionless circles look intentional, which was becoming its own chore (although watching the demons below flee from his slow path wasn't charmless), when he realized there was something he was interested in after all, at least a little. Enough to pass the time, anyway, and enough to give him a destination.
He wanted to see someone who'd just come from Earth – from his Earth, from Los Angeles. He wanted to see through their eyes, while it was still recognizably the world he'd just lost. One of the nice things about being alone was that no one was haranguing him about the risks. He knew the risks perfectly well – it wasn't the risks that had kept him from going through the doors all those millennia. It was that he hadn't been interested in that level of detail if he did not absolutely have to deal with it. Now he was interested, so now he was going. He'd be fine.
Now that he had something to look for, Lucifer opened his senses.
There was a certain thrumming over-ripeness to the freshly arrived that was hard to describe but easy to follow. It was like a whining vibration in the air, or maybe a sharp, too-sweet smell.
And he was spoiled for choice, of course, although it narrowed down a bit when he focused more intently to figure out where the new-fallen had come from. They drifted down like snowflakes, except in greater numbers. But, he needed only one.
They were all the same, really, so Lucifer whispered "Eeny, meeny, miny, MOE," and then broke abruptly into a sharp dive.
He landed lightly on his feet, red soles tapping gently against the hard gray rock, and yanked open the door in front of him.
"Hello, Moe!" Lucifer announced cheerfully. He scanned the scene, drinking in the detail.
It was perhaps not entirely what he had hoped for, although it was recognizably LA – he could tell from the skyline in the distance. The heat was familiar, too, and delicious. It unwound something inside him, in a small way. The heat of the sun was different in kind, not just scale, from the heat of Hell-fires.
On the down side, he was standing on a weedy patch of lawn outside an unprepossessing house crammed in by more of the same. An equally unprepossessing middle-aged man was on his knees, stabbing out a dandelion with a garden knife. There was a pile of uprooted dandelions next to him, most of which had broken roots – they'd be back. The man looked up sharply. There were heavy shadows under his eyes.
"Me?" he said.
"Yes, Moe, you, try to keep up."
"My name is Alan Jessup," Moe said, frowning.
Lucifer smiled and spread a hand against his chest. "And I'm Lucifer, or the Devil, or whatever you like to call me, because there's not a lot I can do about it, just like there's not a lot you can do about what I call you, and I'm going to call you Moe, because I've done it twice now and I've gotten used to it."
Moe blinked. "I don't understand. I've been suffering the worst horror imaginable over and over again, and then suddenly it's interrupted by the Devil himself, who comes in and is – mildly annoying?"
"You might be overreacting to weeding, but all right, to each their own, fair summation, also not what I'm interested in. Just like this tatty little neighborhood! Do you have any deeply shameful and traumatic memories set on a nice drive by the coastline or, I don't know, Totoraku, I had a lovely meal there? I don't suppose I could get lucky enough for Lux. Or a police station, which would doubtless end up being the wrong one anyway. But there's no harm in asking, is there?"
"I – what?"
"This is Hell, Moe. I don't know what your entrance fee was – that's generally up to you – but you don't have to be boring in obsessing over it, although most people are. There are a million things humans feel vile about and serve perfectly well. Switch it up!" Moe looked at him doubtfully. "Oh, come on, Moe, it'll be fun."
"You said deeply shameful and traumatic."
"Well, there are parameters we need to work with, but a change is as good as a rest, yes?" He patted Moe on the back. Moe did not look encouraged.
Abruptly, he stiffened. "You'll want to go now," he said in a tight, leaden voice.
"What? No, I don't think you've answered any of my questions-cum-requests, nor even particularly tried, so that might be a bit premature."
"You'll want to go. I –" Then Moe froze even more completely, as if he weren't in control of himself any more. He went back to his weeding without another word or glance.
An older woman with a pinched face emerged from the neighboring house. She cast a glare of deep significance in Moe's direction, stomped up to what Lucifer supposed had to be the boundary line between their postage-stamp yards, and started spraying something ill-smelling from a plastic bottle.
"That stuff's toxic," Moe said, even though Lucifer could feel him struggling to say something else underneath. The Hell loop had Moe tight in its grip, and he couldn't fight past it any more. Really, Lucifer thought, mildly horrified and, despite himself, somewhat impressed. To Hell, over dandelions.
"If you'd take care of yours in a timely manner, before they flower, they wouldn't keep showing up over here in mine," the woman snapped. She sprayed a lot more than she needed to, clearly making a point. Lucifer stepped back to avoid getting misted. She was ignoring him – unlike Moe, she wasn't real, she was just part of his mental furniture, and so she played only the role he gave her.
"They're an important food source for bees," Moe answered. "The flowers are what they eat. I mean, the nectar."
"I see any bees, they're getting this too." She squeezed the nozzle and spritzed a mist of herbicide into the air.
Moe gritted his teeth and returned to his task. His own front door opened then, and a woman about Moe's age came outside. She wore bland, comfortable weekend clothes – a blocky t-shirt over loose knee-length shorts – and had gray hair cut short, and Lucifer could feel Moe yearn for her in a way that seemed entirely disproportionate to this pudgy, ordinary creature who now said in a puzzled voice, "Alan? There's a call for you on the land line? He said it's from work, and it sounded right, but – the land line?" She huffed a small laugh. Lucifer could feel Moe's heart lacerating at the sound of it.
No no no, no, Moe screamed internally, while his body stood and brushed off his knees and his voice said calmly, "Did he say who he was?"
"Dave something?"
Then things happened very quickly.
The underlying current, the part of Moe that knew, remained unchanged, that anguished scream, but the veneer, the part of Moe that was playing out the role he'd acted in life and over again however many thousands or millions of times in the day or so he'd been in Hell, danced through a more complicated series of emotions.
A car door slammed from the curb further down the block, and a nondescript man in a nondescript suit appeared, somehow covering a lot of ground rapidly without seeming to hurry. Moe looked at him. There was a flash of recognition – not the I know you personally kind, but the I recognize you and was expecting you sort – followed by surprise, and then a kind of relief.
The nondescript man glanced at Moe too, but then he looked past him.
To Moe's wife. And the veneer of Moe that was playing a part was confused for a moment, even when the man pulled out a gun, even when the man fired it, even when the neighbor screamed, even when the man disappeared with the same unhurried and yet terribly fast pace.
Moe looked down at himself, trying to find the wound. It wasn't there.
Then he looked back, towards his wife. And that was when the center of Moe and the veneer playing the part joined together in the same cry, because his wife was lying on the doorstep, empty-eyed, a neat bullet-hole in the center of her head.
Moe screamed out loud.
It went dark, but not for long. The yard and the cheap little neighborhood faded back into being, as if the dark were a layer of ink slowly being washed away. The scene gained color, and then definition. Then Moe was there, kneeling on the grass, weeding again. He looked up at Lucifer, anguish in his eyes. "Are you part of it now?"
"Am I – well, technically, yes, but meaningfully, no. But listen, Moe –"
"Then please just go."
This wasn't giving him what he wanted, and he wasn't doing any good. Lucifer sighed. "All right," he said.
*x*x*x*
"Heyyyy lady, here's your morning pick-me-up, not saying you need to feel anything other than what you're feeling, just saying I care." Ella deposited a paper coffee cup on the last remaining empty space on Chloe's desk. Ella's shirt had a cartoon picture of what looked like a cross between an owl and an octopus on it. Chloe puzzled out the bubble-letter text beneath to try to figure out what was going on. The text read: OWL OCTOPUS.
"Thanks, Ella."
"Signs of life! You sound – okay, kind of. You're not just putting on an act for me? You know you don't have to do that, right? I mean, I get it – Lucifer had to go back to England to deal with that inheritance issue and it's probably permanent and you explained that he had to do it for the rest of his family, even though Amenadiel's still here and totally status quo-ing, and in some kind of not totally specified way also for a lot of other people too even though he's loaded, obviously, and didn't want or need the inheritance himself, and there's terms and stuff so he's not coming back and I don't quite get why you guys aren't flying back and forth but that's probably covered under 'and stuff', and that is just really hard and not fair."
"No, I promise I'm not putting on an act, thanks. And I know you miss him too. You don't have to put on an act for me either."
"All right! Well, good news, and enjoy the cappuccino!" Ella looked like she wanted to say more but didn't want to disturb whatever fragile progress Chloe was making, so she hesitated, turned slowly, and then walked to her lab, casting occasional glances backwards.
Chloe hadn't lied. She did feel better, a little. There was a reason for it, but not really that she was getting over anything. Today was the day Amenadiel was carrying her first letter to Hell. He'd promised to go once a month or so, when he could. She'd thought at first her misery had played more on his sympathy than was fair (how long was the trip to Hell, and how hard? – Amenadiel said shortly that a living human couldn't endure it, but he wouldn't explain more than that), but not enough to reject the favor he offered – Chloe had stammered her thanks, but Amenadiel had silenced her gently with, "Chloe. I need to see how he's doing too."
Now, at work, it was hard for her to think about anything else. Her last case had been an ugly one, but the murderer had left a paper trail of hiring the hitman who had taken out his wife, and then he had killed himself, so there was nothing left to do, really, but paperwork. Paperwork wasn't going to be enough to keep her mind away from where it wanted to go. Chloe picked up the cappuccino and put it down again. She picked up her phone and put it down again. She picked up the Jessup file and put it down again.
Chloe groaned in frustration with herself and dropped her head into her hands. For the ten thousandth time, she went over every line she'd written to him, and none of them were right, except the first. I love you and I miss you and I understand. "I don't care what you say back, Lucifer," she muttered to herself. "Just say something."