The Milton family had always ruled in Eden. It was likely that the Miltons were the first family to be able to survive the euphoric highs and disastrous lows of the country. Fire would leap and storms would rage, but the Miltons lived on as though they had won a generous divine favor.
Charles Milton took this divine favor to an extreme.
He married Princess Jacqueline Avereaux of Lightiershire, a small kingdom to the West, expecting her utter devotion. His scheming was unknown to her until their first son was born.
The boy favored Jacqueline more than Charles, but Charles was obsessed. "His name will be Michael, for his patron angel."
An angel could never bond correctly with the child's blood, and this drove Charles mad attempting to mend his ritual.
The second son was an accident, Charles would later tell his advisors. As soon as the king picked up this infant and caught a cold gaze of blue, Charles took him from the room and refused to let Jacqueline be alone with him. The baby's blonde hair could not be explained. At least, Charles wouldn't explain it.
Charles named this son for the traitor angel, Samael the fallen, and called the boy Lucifer.
"Your father hated you for being born?" Sam hugged Lucifer tightly.
The blonde shrugged. "He would've found another reason to hate me if that wasn't it."
When the boy was four, a twin brother and sister were born, and Charles was pleased with their appearances. Annael, the girl, had red hair, and Raphael, the boy, favored Jacqueline in features once more.
The blonde second son lived on the fringe of his own family, finding solace in music hidden from Charles. His mother had a piano in her study, and he wrote entire symphonies in his head to play for her.
When Charles found out, he put a swift stop to the music by sending the second son to train with knights. "Your brother will need a skilled general when he is king." Charles chastised. "And he will need your absolute loyalty."
The fifth child was the spitting image of Charles, a spirited baby that the king christened Gabriel. The bond settled in every corner of the baby, and Charles was happy.
The second son began to have nightmares. A tall man with blonde hair, not unlike the child's, and a long-suffering scowl took the boy everywhere in his dreamscape: to the highest of mountains, where the child was afraid of heights, to the calmest of seas, where the boy would dip his toe in the water and ask why the ocean burned.
"The whole world burns." The tall man said, night after night, settling a heavy hand on the boy's shoulder. "One day you'll control the fire. For now, you can only watch the ashes of Eden fall."
"He told you that your whole world was ending? Every night?" Sam whispered, horrified. "How old were you?"
Lucifer shrugged. "Six."
Gabriel followed the second son every chance he got, despite Charles' distaste for his more artistic son. When the second son was seven, another child was born. The youngest child had the same unnerving blue eyes as the second son, and Charles hastily bound the boy to his patron angel.
The patron angel revealed himself to Charles and demanded to know why the king attempted to bind a soul without the form to hold an angel.
Charles didn't understand what the angel had said to him, and pushed young Castiel through the ritual anyway. The baby wouldn't speak until he was almost seven.
Lucifer wriggled a hand free to wipe tears from his eyes. "I hated my father for what he did to Castiel."
Sam wasn't sure what to do, or where the story was going, so he pressed reassuring lips to Lucifer's sternum. "Do you need a break?"
"No."
The second son toted the baby everywhere. When Castiel wasn't crying with their mother, the blonde son would carry him outside and describe the small details of the world to the baby.
The poetry was a natural progression, one Jacqueline Avereaux-Milton encouraged but hid from Charles. At first all of the poems were for Castiel, to teach him flowers or the way a river whispered in the dead of night. The second son lost himself in the words, a music he could keep inside his own head.
At fifteen, Charles insisted that the boys he wanted to lead armies learn Ancient Enochian. The second son could pick the words up by fitting them into the song in his head, but Gabriel couldn't keep up.
Gabriel was never a fighter.
At sixteen, Charles found the poetry. The second son remembered the words said more than the punches thrown. Only one of them left scars that wouldn't heal.
Around this time, Charles learned that the children that failed to bond correctly with the angels were not, in fact, his children. Jacqueline Avereaux-Milton succumbed to an illness soon after.
"Honestly, knowing some things I know now, and thinking about it, I don't think my mother was sick." Lucifer bit his lip. "She seemed to be getting better. I fell asleep in her room one night and woke up in my bed, and my mother was dead."
"Luc." Sam's voice cracked. "That's...awful."
"That's how life works sometimes, Sam."
Three nights after Jacqueline's death, Charles dragged the second son out of bed at three in the morning. The dungeons were cold and the second son had bruises on his wrist from Charles' grip.
A silver knife and a polished bronze bowl was pushed at him.
"Your blood, Lucifer." Charles wasn't asking.
The boy made to slash his forearm, but the king stopped him.
"From your throat."
"That'll kill me." The boy didn't want to die.
Charles was colder still. "If you're really my son, you won't die."
The boy held his breath and poignant notes sang in his ear. He slashed his own throat.
"That's… that's fucked up." Sam impulsively twitched his fingers across the skin of Lucifer's throat, which was smooth and unscarred.
Lucifer shook his head. "That's not the fucked up part."
The first thing the boy noticed was the silence. His music was gone. The tall man from all those years ago pressed his fingers into the boy's throat.
"It was always you." The angel whispered, his breath cold and burning at the same time. "You were always the one he needed to sacrifice."
The boy was scared because his ears rang in the silence. "The music. Where's the music?"
The angel removed his fingers from the boy's neck, then stroked them lightly across the boy's cheek. He flinched. "You'll get the music back when you fulfill your destiny, son."
When the boy came back to reality, Charles demanded to know what he saw. The boy shook his head and refused to speak.
If Charles could have beaten the boy into submission, it would've been done that night, the night he stole the music.
Sam was speechless. Lucifer hugged Sam tighter, and the brunette couldn't help but notice how the king shivered beneath him.
After Charles' death, the second son was made a too-early king with a too-angry court. As advisors died off, they were simply never replaced. The king trusted no one but the Court Wizard, trusted by his mother.
His brothers were his only solace and hope. Raphael and Annael, however, refused to speak to him since the poisoning. Castiel, Michael, and Gabriel pulled as much weight as they could handle while the second son found his footing.
When he was approached by the Winchester King, he knew he couldn't ignore the world forever.
It was the demon blood that started fire, the demon blood that the blonde angel with the permanent scowl begged for, and the demon blood that would break the world into fire.
And the demon blood was a beacon to every Black Mage in the area.
The Winchester King had no choice, and neither did the Milton King. For the safety of the demon's chosen and for the safety of the world, the traitor angel had to execute a bond.
But bonds were never easy, and rituals never without sacrifice.
Lucifer's breathing was uneven, like he was scared of how Sam was going to react.
Sam was just as surprised as Lucifer when he crawled up to put his face level with the blonde's. "So do it."
"What?" Lucifer shook his head, the tip of his nose feathering against Sam's. "No."
"Why not?" Sam cupped the back of Lucifer's neck with a warm hand.
Lucifer closed his eyes and shook his head. "Because that's not how it works."
"Then tell me how it works." Sam bit his lip. "We stop the Black Mages from getting the demon blood in me, everybody lives."
"Sam." Lucifer's voice was hard, stern like he'd never been before. "I'm not going to trap you that way." He shook his head and turned his back to face away from Sam.
"Luc…" Sam pulled the smaller man into his body, despite grouchy protests from the blonde.
"No." Lucifer shook his head. "And I'm done talking about that."
Sam sighed. "I'm sorry."
"We have to go see your brother because there's a Knight of Hell in his castle somewhere and I can't leave you alone." Lucifer tried to keep his voice even and emotionless, but Sam could still hear his irritation.
"Dean is in danger?" Sam gasped.
Lucifer shrugged. "He's fine, for now. Castiel is aware of the situation and I'm sure he can handle himself for another couple of days."
Sam locked his wrists together around Lucifer's chest as if he could protect the blonde from the world.
Lucifer let his breath gush out of his nose when Sam tightened his grip and didn't complain.
"How long has it been?" Sam whispered.
"Since what?" Lucifer fidgeted his left foot until he got comfortable.
Sam laid his chin on the blonde's shoulder. "Since somebody sang to you."
Lucifer shrugged. "I don't remember. Maybe when I was drunk once."
Sam's heart wrenched in his chest. He was the last person to sing to Lucifer, and the blonde didn't even remember. "Does it make you happy?"
"Music? Yeah. More than anything." Lucifer pulled a pillow into his arms and hugged it. He didn't seem to do very well with keeping his arms still with Sam holding him.
The lullaby that Dean used to sing him floated through his mind. "Dean used to sing me a song." Sam licked his lips. "I think I remember most of it."
"You don't have to do that."
"Maybe I want to."
Lucifer didn't seem to have a returning quip. Instead he covered one of Sam's hands with his fingers and pressed his other hand over his eyes.
Sam pressed his lips to the back of Lucifer's head, golden hair tickling his nose. "Let me do something nice for you."
"You already do too much for me." Lucifer attempted to prize himself out of Sam's grip. "I need to take a walk."
"I'm coming with you." Sam didn't ask.
Lucifer made a dissatisfied noise in the back of his throat. "Seriously. Don't feel obligated."
Sam reluctantly let Lucifer go and touched his feet to the floor. "Do you really want to go alone?" Or do you hate asking for someone to go with you?
"I'll be fine." Lucifer's words were short and clipped. He forewent a shirt and slipped on his boots over blue pajama pants. The blonde knelt to tie the laces.
Sam huffed a sigh. "It's not a crime to admit you want someone to listen to you." He crossed his arms.
"I'm done talking about it." Lucifer twisted the laces into an elaborate, rather impressive knot. "Don't wait up."
"Dammit, Luc, don't do that." Sam beat the king to the door and stood in his way. "You do the whole self-sacrificing carry-the-world alone thing and it's going to break you. It breaks everyone, every time." Sam bit the inside of his cheek to kill his next sentence before it ever lived beyond his thoughts. It broke Dean.
Lucifer seemed far shorter than he was, arms crossed and glowering up at Sam. "Just… I can't take it anymore, okay? Stop pretending, because that's just as confusing as being lied to."
Sam frowned, but in his shock Lucifer pushed him aside and stalked into the darkness of the hallway.
"Luc!" Sam hissed from the door.
The sound of the blonde's footfalls stopped for a moment. "Just because there's Grace in my blood does not mean I'm an angel, Sam."
Before Sam could even come up with words to reply, Lucifer set a brisk pace down the hall and out of earshot.
The cold helped him focus. Lucifer pushed open the door to a balcony, lingering with his hand on the wood before letting the door fall shut with a soft click. A section of the stone fencing on this balcony had crumbled away. The king balanced himself on the platform and let his feet dangle over the edge.
It would be so easy to jump from here.
"You were extremely close tonight." The king didn't have to look up to know that Samael spoke. He could feel the quiet frost of the angel's presence on his back.
Lucifer shrugged. "The closer I get, the more I realize how much I can't do it."
"I do not understand you." Samael settled onto the platform next to him, mechanically copying the human's movements and letting his feet hang over the side.
"I don't think you ever did." Lucifer remarked, letting his tongue rest on the ridge of his teeth like he wanted to say something else. "You shouldn't have taken away my chance to distance myself from him."
"And why is that?" Samael looked remarkably like Sam Winchester again, brown hair swept back and tamed.
"Because that's our curse." Lucifer decided, looking from the angel to the dizzying fall to the ground below. "Everything we ever care about comes back to stab us in the back."
Samael frowned. "That's one way to see it." He agreed.
"I don't understand why you want to save a world as sucky as this one." Lucifer flung his arm out to gesture at everything.
Samael was silent for several breaths. Lucifer let his arm fall back to his side. The angel's answer came in a quiet whisper, hardly above the brushing wind. "You don't take the pain to save the world. You take the pain to save the one thing you love most."
"And what do you love?" Lucifer looked down at his feet again. His boots dangling over the edge made his head swim with heavy thoughts of falling.
Samael's hand on his shoulder was warm, for the first time in Lucifer's life. "It's not about loving any one thing. You don't save the world for everything in it; you save the world for the one person that you can't see a world without."
Despite being told not to wait for the stubborn blonde, Sam, equally stubborn, waited.
He sat balanced on the windowsill, watching the lazy paths of wispy clouds trace across the sky.
Sam wanted to understand why people like Lucifer and Dean took the world's problems on themselves and then decided that they weren't worthy of being treated like people. They acted like they weren't worthy of being loved.
The younger Winchester knew how to make his brother slow down and listen, but he had no idea what Lucifer would do. The thing that puzzled Sam the most about the king was that he reacted differently to everything.
One hug would be met with broken sobs, another with anger and storming out of the room. Sometimes Sam heard an edge of sadness to his voice when Lucifer talked about his day, and sometimes he heard a brush of happiness when the blonde responded to Sam's observations about the creases in the pages of books.
Every time Sam noticed an earmark on a piece of paper, Lucifer would ask why Sam thought that page was marked. Sam would list a quote or two from the page, and Lucifer would smile and shake his head. "Those are my books, and that's why I bookmarked that page."
Sam turned over the leatherbound book in his hand. It was a dull red, with the brown of the leather more prominent than the red dye. In the bottom-right of the front cover, the word Avereaux was stamped in gold foil. Lucifer left the book on the nightstand on Sam's side, but hadn't said a word about it.
The book had poetry in it with a feminine edge to every curled letter of the script. Some poems praised flowers, springtime. Many of them, however, featured a cherubic angel that Sam saw too many traits of Lucifer in to be a coincidence. He felt like he shouldn't have read the book at all; he'd intruded on something deep and intimate.
He jumped when the door opened and Lucifer tip-toed back into the room. His blonde hair was windswept and his cheeks were flushed with the cold. The king knelt and unlaced his boots.
Sam adjusted his posture to touch his feet to the floor.
"You were supposed to be asleep by now." Lucifer didn't look at him.
Sam laid the book on the cushion. "I don't like going to bed with unresolved issues."
"You act like I matter." Lucifer shook his head. "I'll just take my pillow and go sleep in Jack's room."
"The hell you aren't." Sam jumped off the windowsill and took Lucifer's pillow hostage. "You're gonna lay down in this bed and I'm going to keep you here until the sun comes up."
Lucifer rolled his eyes as he stood up to stretch and toe his boots off of his feet. "Give it a rest, Sam. I know you're sick of me."
"Goddammit, Lucifer!" Sam huffed a sigh. "Get in this fucking bed before I make you."
Lucifer didn't even try to stop his hollow chuckle. "Oh, now you want to make me."
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn't remember doing that much when he was frustrated until lately. Where had he learned that? "What's your problem?"
Lucifer crossed his arms, the gentle firelight sharpening the shadows on his body. He looked like an ominous marble statue, but his hair was liquid fire. "You really gotta stop with this pretending, saving-face crap. I don't care."
Sam pulled the pillow away from Lucifer as the king reached for it. "Who said I was pretending to do anything?"
"I'm not stupid, Sam." Lucifer set his jaw, the tension down his body inches from snapping. "Just… give me that and I'll go."
Sam shook his head. "I might actually be stupid, then. I can't figure out what you're so mad about."
Lucifer made a grab for the pillow, his cold skin sliding against Sam's arm. "Just give me that."
"No." Sam used his hips to push Lucifer away from the pillow as he raised it up higher. "Tell me why you're so mad and where the self-loathing came from."
"Sam!" Lucifer hissed.
"Seriously." Sam used his free arm to push the blonde back. "We were doing fine until you suddenly got into this mood where you hate yourself."
"My esteem is none of your damn business." The king growled, swiping for his pillow again.
Sam frowned and adjusted his keep-away stance. "Seriously?"
Lucifer backed away, seething in his frustration. "What do you want from me?" He demanded.
"Like, now, or in general?" Sam pulled the pillow to his chest.
Lucifer shot him an icy dagger glare.
"Right now." Sam let his voice drop back to a normal tone. "I want you to get in bed and forget that you want to sleep somewhere else tonight."
"Fine." Lucifer snatched his pillow and pushed past the taller man to crawl into bed. "And in general?"
Sam clambered over the blonde's feet to settle on his side of the bed. "I'd love it if you stopped pushing me away."
Lucifer growled and turned his back to Sam. "Am I supposed to apologize?"
"Do you feel guilty?" Sam quipped, lightly tracing his fingers up the king's back.
Lucifer was quiet for a long breath. "I'm sorry for yelling at you." He decided.
"I forgive you." Sam wrapped an arm around Lucifer's waist and pulled him close. "I'm sorry for confusing you."
"I forgive you." Lucifer sounded unsure of himself.
"Was that so hard?" Sam couldn't help the small laugh that eased past his lips. It seemed so ridiculous, really, making Lucifer apologize for being emotionally… well, what was he?
Lucifer growled in his throat. "I'm considering strangulation."
Sam propped himself up on his elbow and kissed Lucifer's temple. "I don't think you would. You'd miss me if I was gone."
That was the wrong thing to say.
The blonde's voice was thick with unspoken words. "Yeah, I would."