Do not ask where the title came from, I could not tell you. As with an alarmingly growing number of my stories, this one kind of spans all of the seasons, so there are some spoilers there. There are technically also some spoilers regarding the dawn of time, so be wary of that as well, I suppose (though I do take quite a few creative liberties in that retelling. Then again, none of us were there sooo...).
Changing the Hands of an Infinite Clock
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Once there was an angel born in Heaven and raised amongst infinite, sweeping clouds with his many brothers and sisters. Perhaps you have heard his story before, or a few others just like it, but you have never heard it told like this. You know only what you hear and what you hear is not all that there is. This is the way of most stories, as it were, but for now we will only tell this one, the one about the angel who lived inside the clouds he was made from.
This angel was among the first of his kind, a unification of the puffs of nothingness and everythingness formed and reshaped and molded together inside the giant palms of his Father's hands. He emerged, shining and new and filled with light. They called him Lucifer after that light, and him and his brothers were all that God had ever wanted. For a time.
And then God grew lonely despite all that lay around Him, and He created Adam in much the same way as He had made His angels, though the materials were different this time. Adam was made of the red earth grown glorious beneath his feet, and he wandered through it and he was not lost, for all had been made for him. It was all he ever needed. For a time.
When Adam grew bored, restless and dumb, God made him a wife.
"Ah yes, that was Eve," you might mumble; for you believe the stories you were told. But you are wrong. There in the dirt, in the same place Adam was made, Lilith emerged. She was lovely in the way humans can sometimes be, smooth edges and eyes like two moons with craters carved deep into them. And Lilith was happy and Adam was happy, and life thrived inside the Garden. But soon, Lilith grew bored because the Garden was small and Adam was unvaried in his ways, unmoving in his routines and Lilith still had those craters in her eyes that ached to be filled up and so she left, tumbled purposefully into the unknown and was damned.
So God tried again.
This is perhaps the story you know, for this time God plucked a rib from Adam's own chest and here came Eve. And you know then what happened next. But perhaps you were not told why. Why it is that Eve tasted that apple. Why it is that she damned the rest of us. I will tell you:
It is because the Garden, the place where life originated, was not made for Lilith, and it most certainly was not made for Eve, a woman not even born to her own form, carved instead from a piece of someone else's bone. The Garden was made for Adam and so Adam was happy there, never needing to search for anything more than everything that was given to him. But for Lilith and Eve, it was not enough.
Lucifer understood Eve and he understood Lilith, but Lucifer watched, and he could never understand the rest of humanity. Wandering and ugly and weak, barely daring to shift the amount of earth it took to create the first of them. And God came to him and his brothers and sisters, and He asked them to love those creatures, those fools with the tiny hearts, and Lucifer could not, could never love them more than he loved his Father.
"I can't," Lucifer said, and God just smiled and said, "You will."
And this is perhaps another part of the story that has grown hazy over the years, because I imagine that most of you would say: "No wait, that's not right. God couldn't forgive Lucifer for not loving the humans, so he cast him out and that is how the Devil was born." But you were not there, so you do not know. God was not so unforgiving then, and He loved His son. Needed His son. Needed him to help protect the world He had created from the sister He still loved.
Lucifer did not love mankind and he did not really even love Amara, but he loved his Father more than anything and so when God asked, Lucifer simply nodded. He was not afraid.
Perhaps he should have been.
The fight was long, ugly, cruel. Brothers and sisters fell, but in the end, God's sister, Amara, was vanquished from the Earth. And here was Cain's Mark, now branded onto Lucifer's soul where the Darkness would forever rest. Her influence was still very much alive, and it coiled around Lucifer's limbs and corrupted, quick and far from painless. Red hot, a fire with a name and a new purpose, raging up against forests dead and alive. Lucifer changed. He moved swift and calm and dangerous, licking up oxygen, feeding the flames in his belly. He found Lilith in the depths of her damnation and he took her beneath his giant wings, told her she could have all of everything not given to her. And so was born the first demon, with craters forever in her eyes and blood around her lips. This then, is when they began to call him 'The Devil,' and he smiled with a thousand different faces because he knew the truth. He knew whose fault it was.
Once his Father's favorite, he had became something new, all coiled edges and ashen bones. Ruined, perhaps. Lucifer remembered the day Father came to him with eyes of sorrow, lines of age worn into His forever face.
"I wish there was another way, son," He had said. It was the closest thing to an apology Lucifer ever got.
And as the walls of Lucifer's Cage were sealed around him, he did his best not to beg, but Father would not meet his eyes so the plea escaped his lips anyway, became a scream that went unanswered. So did the next hundred. Thousand.
After a while, Lucifer gave up. Gave in completely to the ugly scar inside his skin. He was The Devil, and he would no longer be ignored. He watched the world from below and he waited for freedom, planting vengeance like the first seed in a new Garden, one of his own making this time, not Father's.
That freedom arrived a long time later from the depths of a young man's transgression, and Lucifer liked this Sam Winchester before he ever met him face to face. Demon blood or Darkness's Markâthey were the same, and he knew that would be true in more ways than one. If only he was patient. If only he pushed one inch at a time, watched as terror and distance grew between two brothers, leaving just enough room for the Devil to slip into place.
Sam Winchester's skin felt like Heaven never had. It felt like home.
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In all his endless scenarios, of ripping apart his Father's greatest love, Lucifer never dreamed he'd be beaten. He never dreamed he'd fall back into his prison, alongside the man he had underestimated and the brother he found he still loved. So he destroyed them both, because they had destroyed everything for him. Decades upon decades with Sam and Michael, and pain was pain, so Lucifer pushed it all onto them, watched them squirm beneath his unyielding thumb. This Cage had been his curse, and now it was time to pass it on to someone else, so Lucifer did with vengeful glee until the day Death's long fingers reached inside and stole Sam Winchester away from him.
Years, decades, centuries again. Doomed to rot, left with one thing left to destroy. So he did, until Michael dripped with agony and ugly sobs. Until he was unrecognizable.
And Lucifer laughed because that made two of them.
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A scorching flame.
It came within the span of one of infinity's days, sliced across skin, burrowing, and Lucifer knew that Darkness had again been cast out into the world. The curdling scream that carried her back to Earth left a crack along impenetrable bars, just one small sliver of an opening. Lucifer wondered if she had done it on purpose. After all, The Devil had been born of her in most ways. But he didn't think about it for long, because no matter how it had happened, it was enough. Enough to send a message to Sam Winchester, masked in the face of God.
The foolish boy answered, of course he answered, a connection never to be severed, no matter how badly Sam detested it. The youngest Winchester walked with long strides to stand at the base of Lucifer's newest cage and the Devil smiled because he thought he saw it there. Saw that even the Boy Wonder could be convinced to say 'Yes' again, if he knew it was for the greater good. The only way, you see. The only way.
He did not expect Castiel.
He did not expect the sensation of new skin, of sliding along beneath the radar like an undertow, waiting for a chance to drown it all. The Winchesters were not the main concern anymore, now that he was out, though he delighted in the self-whispered eventually of their destruction at his hands, doled out by the fists of their ever-faithful angel. He would enjoy that, when the time came, but it was not why he was here. He was here because Darkness once again reigned, and that meant that Father would come. He had to come, and when he did, Lucifer would be ready to destroy Him, too. He would show God what the years of exile had created, and he knew, delighted in the fact that Father would not be proud. Lucifer hoped He would be afraid.
But God was not afraid.
They stared at one another, Lucifer through half-shut eyes, Castiel's borrowed skin littered by Amara's handiwork until God blinked and made it otherwise. Lucifer felt the pull of Castiel's skin as he was made whole in body only, a Band-Aid in exchange for forgiveness. But Lucifer would not, would never give such forgiveness because years, decades, centuries and not a word, not a murmur or a whisper or a hint of his Father's presence or remorse. And he saw it, the disappointment in God's eyes. It was not as satisfying as he had hoped it to be, dug deeper than he believed he would ever allow it to, and suddenly he was young again and Father was patting him on the head and telling him of the wondrous creatures He had created, these tiny, insignificant things called "humans" that needed protecting, needed someone to watch over them. Lucifer stared into the eyes of his Father and wondered who was supposed to have been protecting him.
He knew God saw the question, watched his Father shrug away from it between sidebar comments from the ever-present Winchesters, the ugly, foolish breadth of Dad's creation sitting side by side together on the floor. Lucifer saw them there and thought of Michael, then stopped. Lucifer thought of forgiving, and told himself he wouldn't. This was too much. Too many lifetimes behind bars and stuffed into a rotting corner so far beneath the rest of the world that he could never watch it grow, never had the chance to fall in love with it the way his Father said he would get to, and how was this fair, how was any of this fair now that they were all looking at him and begging him to save it all for them? This great, big, glorious thing he'd never even gotten to see.
He had thought of revenge every single day. He had harbored it close to a heart gone black and dead many centuries ago because it was a fuel to light the flames still licking apart the inside of him, and he was The Devil after all, so he enjoyed every fantasy of torn skin, ravaged flesh, incessant screaming.
But.
All those years, it was always God's face, the faces of his creations, that screamed. Always his Father who begged for a mercy never shown to his favorite son, and maybe that was the wrong face all along. Because it hadn't started with God. It had all begun with her. Lucifer had hated humanity, but Amara had sought to destroy it, and that was how The Devil was born. That was why the Cain's Mark sat within him, even now when its origin walked the world.
So maybe he would do this, then.
Maybe he would fight alongside his Father once again. Not because he wanted or even needed to. Not because he'd yet forgiven the days, years, centuries of imprisonment spent forgotten and erased by a Father he had only ever dared to love. Lucifer watched his Father's eyes as He spoke the words long awaited, the raw "I am so sorry" that echoed out in the air between them like a prayer answered after so many billions of years. And still, it was not for God that he nodded, nodded the same way he had all that time ago when Father had asked him then, too.
This time, it was all for himself. Because revenge smelled so sweet to his nostrils, a long-harbored dream and the only one he had left, and he had to unleash it on someone. And who better than dear, old Darkness? For she was the keeper of all sin, not the Devil. She was the true harborer of destruction, the one who had dared to tear apart the upright apes of God's new world long before the force of her had led Lucifer to try the same.
So it began (with her, only with her), and so it would end (with her, only with her). Lucifer smiled.
He was going to enjoy the taste of her screams.
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Tell me what you thought in the comments, and as is always true, thank you so very much for reading!