Ever since he could remember, Lucifel had always been the one to find him.
It was only the natural order of things; Michael was God's administrator, the giver of directions, the Shepherd of the Heavenly Flock, and Lucifel was everywhere and nowhere, God's eyes and ears, as omnipresent as God wanted him to be.
They found they could work together that way. In tandem.
Yet as much as their gears seemed to mesh and turn each other in turn, deep in some part of him Michael felt oddly empty, those times Lucifel was away.
His brother was forever flitting from place to place, over years and decades, between time and time. Michael used to think that his brother could have known everything. He could go anywhere, any time, he wanted, slipping through the cracks between an era and an era, like melted snow, like the tides of change. Though he was always never quite there.
Yet Michael thought he could exist, with this. It could work, and it did, like this.
Until it didn't, anymore.
One day, Lucifel stopped coming to find him. He didn't come to find him for a very long time, and though Michael searched, and the rest of Heaven searched, the only hints of his brother's whereabouts were fleeting and most times never clear.
It shouldn't have been that hard; two-thirds of Heaven looking for a band of Fallen…. But their side grew stronger every day. Every moment Lucifel spent truly apart from him and from God was a moment he spent reforging 'Lucifel', and day after day, the line between Michael's brow grew deeper and more furrowed. There were days his finger couldn't curl.
Oh, yes, for a long, long time, Michael was apart from his brother. A great, great number of days spent feeling ever so slightly off-kilter.
Those days came to an end when Lucifel forged his way back into Heaven. The pounding on the gates, like so many storms, like massive drums, the width of giants' palms, they could be the thundering footsteps of the Colossi, the riotous pounding of war.
But even then, Lucifel didn't come to find him.
Enoch did.
Michael remembers feeling slightly… jealous, if that was what humans could call it. He knows that it's unreasonable and ungainly, but he can't help holding that time Enoch spent with his brother against him, infinitesimal as it may be when compared to the time he himself had shared with his brother. The moment passes into his thoughts and he lets it leave as quickly as it came. He doesn't want to think about it. Not in the last moments of the end, not as his Father's words leave their last cool traces between his lips.
Michael thinks back to the start, and the after, and the everything in between, and can almost bring himself to smile. Last time, he could be patient and wait, they had all the time to, time in spades, in shovels, a towering mountain, all the time in the world. But now, now time comes again, and Michael thinks he'll do better this time.
He meant that word of thanks, because Enoch may have just tipped this scale in his favor.
Whatever may happen next, Michael would like to think he's not worried.
Because Lucifel had always been the one to find him.
Which meant that Lucifel had always been the one to come back to him.
They'll meet again, in a not-so-distant future.
After all, every game of hide-and-seek comes to an end.
He'll make sure of it.
This time, this time, Michael will find his brother for sure. He swears to it.