Characters not mine.
(Originally written for a "bad guys" challenge on comment_fic. Prompt was "He never wanted to be the bad guy in this story.")
He was falling to pieces.
It wasn't just Nick's body that had been breaking down, under the pressure of trying to hold in a spirit like Lucifer's, who had once been Heaven's first amongst equals.
He was cracking and breaking under the pressure, too, the pressure of being confined like this, in a fleshy prison so different and at the same time so similar to the cage that had held him recently. It didn't work. He was an angel, a being of air and fire and Grace, even in this diminished state. Breaths the human body needed came a little too quickly, pupils he thought he had perfect control over widened a little too much, every movement and normal function like the greased gears of a car without breaks. His normally single minded concentration was broken into a thousand pieces just to keep control.
Sliding into Sam's skin, a meatsuit that had been custom-ordered and hand-finished - and oh, Azazael was good at what he did - was like releasing the pressure valve on a gauge that was about to blow anyway. It solved a little of the problem, certainly, but only a little. It allowed him to see which breaks and kinks had been Nick's and which were his own.
These new breakages weren't Sam Winchester, but he could feel the human scrabbling at them. There would be fingernails digging in and ripping them open if souls had hands, or if angels could bleed. The fight to hold this body together had been replaced with the fight for control. Nick had been beaten, but Lucifer didn't have time to break Sam's body in.
He was still breathing just a little too hard. It was nothing anyone else would notice, but it clawed at the back of his mind. How would this vessel getting more oxygen help him?
He was starting to hate this mudball every bit as much as everything it stood for, and Dad was vindictive enough that he'd probably even planned it that way.
Almost as much as he wanted this to be over, to win this thousands of years of pointless, stupid war all because his hidebound brothers were idiots, he wanted the pressure to stop.
Michael was out there, not in the vessel he wanted, but in one that had been christened an Adam. The irony and poetic justice of it all was perfect. Both enemies in one place.
Michael was out there, and Gabriel was dead. At Lucifer's hand. That clawed at the back of the Devil's mind, too, with more hurt and precision than Sam. Gabriel was the sane one, the one who had run from this familial charade after Dad had left. He had wanted no part in it, until he had finally chosen a side. And it wasn't Lucifer's or Michael's. It was Dad's. The one who had left, not the one who had been cast out, or the one Gabe could go crawling back to.
Killing Gabriel hadn't been on his to do list when he left the Pit.
Killing Michael was, and it would be a lot easier if he weren't in the habit of being honest with himself. Michael would be a lot easier to kill if Lucifer could think of him as simply the last thing in the way, not the brother that had betrayed him, that had cast him down when Dad had turned away.
This carnage? Wasn't supposed to be him. He was the Light Bringer. The fucking Morningstar. Just like everything else on this whole damned earth, it was messed up that enlightenment came with becoming some kind of a monster. That finally dealing with the betrayers came with playing the villain.
He wasn't that interested in being a hero, either, because that was as stupid as being a villain. But maybe he'd have time, at some point, to be a brother and an idealist again. Maybe he'd have the means to try and resurrect the young thing he once was.
After the world burned.