A/N: Tried to fix my dramatic paragraph breaks in chapter 1. As usual formatting is killing me.

CONTENT NOTE: Graphic violence, implied violent death of non-show characters

Chapter 2

The Lord is my light

The Lord is my light and the one who saves me.
So why should I fear anyone?
The Lord protects my life.
So why should I be afraid?
(Psalm 27, ICB)

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Lucifer crept through the hallway like a panther: silent and deadly. His eyes were burning crimson. He passed a classroom whose door stood slightly ajar. There was no sound at all coming from inside. Lucifer hesitated a moment before he gingerly opened the door, afraid of what he might find.

In Hell, Lucifer had seen blood and carnage almost 24/7, torture of all kinds, any single atrocity humanity managed to come up with and here, in L.A., corpses were an almost daily occurrence for him. He still felt sick to his stomach when he closed the door again.

Another shot followed by children screaming caught his attention. He broke into a run.

please lucifer

Lucifer swung around a corner and there was another door, closed like the others but he could hear a boy's voice coming from the room.

"Who wants to go next? Come on, y'all gonna die anyway. What about you, you little shit, huh? You want me to shoot you next?"

"Kevin, don't do this, please, they're only children, please-", pleaded a woman's voice, her speech punctured with sobs.

He kicked in the door.

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The shooter startled and whirled around. It was a scrawny boy with dirty blond hair, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. His face sporting pimples, a few hairs were growing on his upper lip. The rifle in his hands was pointing at Lucifer.

The boy stood before the teacher's desk. Slumped in the chair behind him was the teacher, a middle-aged woman wearing a white blouse. It was drenched in blood. She was holding her shoulder while she tried to focus her eyes on Lucifer. The children meanwhile were cowering at the far end of the room, crouching under desks and near the wall with their arms wrapped around their heads, feebly trying to shield themselves. Some were crying, their eyes squeezed shut. Others were dead silent, frozen in fear, wide-eyed and terrified.

"How the fuck did you get in here?", the boy shouted angrily and then apparently decided that it didn't matter. He pulled the trigger, emptying several rounds into Lucifer's chest.

"Lucifer!", cried someone.

The voice rang through the classroom even over the gunshots. Several children gasped. Lucifer merely grinned maliciously and walked through the door, nonchalantly brushing off his suit.

"Too bad. I'm immortal. You can't kill me", he growled.

The boys' eyes widened, but he recovered remarkably fast, raising the rifle to aim at Lucifer's head instead. He shot again and again, each and every bullet hitting Lucifer's skull without so much as leaving a dent.

"What… what the hell are you? Why aren't you dead?! Stop! Keep away from me!", shrieked the boy, his voice breaking. He tumbled back until his back hit a wall, the hands holding the weapon trembling with fear.

"Oh no, you don't get to ask me to stop, Kevin, not after what you've done", said Lucifer in a dangerously low voice as he was approaching the boy with slow, measured steps. His eyes were ablaze with hellfire.

Kevin's mouth dropped open and his pupils dilated in abject terror, when he looked into the infernal depths, when he saw. He did the only thing he could think of: Kevin swung the rifle around, wavering like a madman, and pointed it at the children; his finger twitching at the trigger.

"I'll shoot them!", he blurted out. "If you come any closer, I'll shoot them!"

"HOW DARE YOU!"

It was as if the whole room had suddenly been filled with Lucifer's presence; his voice booming through the room, deep and dark and not from this world. A voice that made even the strongest demons bow down before their Lord, a voice having sinners quake in fear of things to come.

A pair of brilliant white wings burst from Lucifer's back, slicing through a table and towering over a terrified Kevin. A shot cracked.

"HOW DARE YOU!"

The bullet bounced off the glowing feathers and fell to the floor, harmless. Lucifer's hand shot out and closed around the boy's neck, his other one grabbing the rifle from unresisting hands.

"YOU WILL NOT. HURT THEM!", he roared and lifted Kevin off his feet as if he weighed nothing more than a ball of cotton. A wingtip had shot to his throat, the razor-sharp feathers spread threateningly.

Lucifer wrapped his fingers around the barrel of the rifle and effortlessly crunched it between them, before tossing the weapon to the ground. He forcefully pressed Kevin against the wall, the boy's feet dangling several feet in the air, and squeezed. Kevin's face started to turn red, his hands clawing feebly at the one around his neck but to no avail.

"Tell me, Kevin", whispered Lucifer in a honeyed voice. "Why? Was this what you wanted? What did you desire? Tell me"

The boy's eyes glazed over as he looked at Lucifer.

"I wanted to hurt them like they hurt me. They deserved to die", he said. "Should have killed them right away, when I still had the chance."

Lucifer felt a burst of wrath well up. His face flickered like a stroboscope and Kevin screamed and screamed and screamed. He didn't know when or how or why his Devil Face had come back now, of all times, but he couldn't have cared less. He relishedit. Lucifer snarled and pulled his screaming victim away from the wall.

"THEY WERE CHILDREN!", he roared, pulled back and violently smashed him against it, hard enough to draw blood and knock the boy out cold.

Staring at the pale, bloodied face Lucifer felt sickened all of a sudden.

"People like you make me wish I was still in Hell", he said quietly. He let the body fall to the ground abruptly. No matter how much he craved it right now, this was not the time for punishment. The adrenaline leaving him, Lucifer vanished his wings and opened a window instead.

"I've got him!", he shouted down to the commotion below and, disgusted, picked up the unconscious body once more to hold him up for the cops to see. "I've apprehended the shooter, feel free to break in! And we'll need a doctor!", he added, remembering about the teacher.

"Lucifer!"

There had been just enough time to drop Kevin and turn around, when a small body propelled into his own and a crying Trixie wrapped her arms around him in a death grip.

"I knew you'd come", she whispered against his stomach.

"Child", he said, putting his arms around her uncertainly. "It's alright", he said, but Trixie kept sobbing. She wasn't the only one he realized. The sounds and smells he had pushed out of his mind before were rushing back all at once.

Children were crying.

The whole classroom was smelling of blood.

Lucifer looked at the teacher briefly, ascertaining that she had only been shot in the shoulder. From his experience the blood loss did not seem too severe. It was most certainly painful, but it would not be lethal.

"Is it over?", asked a pale redheaded boy with glasses in between sniffles. "Is Mrs. Graham okay?"

Lucifer looked at the teacher, who was blinking at him owlishly with an open mouth. Her eyes were going in and out of focus.

"Are you an angel?", she asked weakly.

"No", said Lucifer simply, then turned back to the redheaded boy.

"Your teacher will be alright", he said softly. "Yes, it's over." The children, though still shaken, were slowly starting to lift their heads and lower their arms. The tension had left the room.

"It's alright, Child", Lucifer said to Trixie, who was still sniffling into his shirt. He didn't know what to do, but he'd seen Chloe comfort Trixie before, so he mimicked her; carefully tightening the hug and putting a hand on Trixie's head. It seemed to help.

Then somebody screamed.

"Daisy!"

They both startled. Trixie whipped her head around, letting go of Lucifer momentarily.

"Daisy is hurt!", cried the boy from before and Lucifer suddenly noticed the cluster of children, crouched in obvious distress around something he couldn't see.

With Trixie in his wake, he rushed over and dropped to his knees. His stomach lurched when he saw what the other children had been looking at. A tiny girl was lying in a pool of red on the floor, curled up and hidden behind glittery backpacks in a corner of the room, her braids spread out around her head like a halo. She was bleeding to death.

One of her hands was clenched around the flesh wound in her abdomen, a fruitless attempt to stop the blood flow. It kept gushing out of her small body in rhythmic scarlet spurts, drenching the pink My Little Pony sweatshirt and Lucifer's hands.

"Alright", he mumbled. "Back off, give her some space", he said and gestured for the other children to retreat, then put his own, bigger hand on hers apace to apply more pressure. The spurting receded, but Daisy had barely whimpered at something that must have caused her enormous pain. This was not a good sign.

Trixie looked at him with a tear-stained face. She hadn't left her unconscious friend's side, kneeling next to her in a pool of drying blood.

"You have to do something, Lucifer", she pleaded. "Please. She'll die."

She was right, Lucifer realized. It was too late. Daisy had lost too much blood. Already he could feel her soul start to detach itself from her body; in a minute it would be gone altogether. Even if paramedics were to appear right this second – only a miracle would be able to save her.

A miracle.

Lucifer swallowed and closed his eyes.

"Child", he said. "There… might be something I can do. But you must not tell anyone, not even your mother. Can you promise me that?"

Trixie nodded.

"I promise", she said earnestly, choking down the last of her tears.

Lucifer nodded. He glanced around. The other children were watching them apprehensively. The room had gone completely silent.

He exhaled and slowly unfurled his wings one last time. Desks tumbled and the children gasped in awe.

Like in trance Lucifer lifted a bloodied hand and reached over his shoulder. He grasped one of the smallest flight feathers from his left wing and plucked it, suppressing a reflexive wince.

His vision had shrunk down to nothing but the little girl's hand on the wound.

Lucifer carefully moved it aside and placed the feather on the gaping hole in Daisy's body. For a dreadful second he feared it had been too late, but then the feather glowed brightly and sank into her dark skin. The blood flow stopped at once and slowly, the wound started to heal.

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They watched silently as the bullet buried in her flesh emerged bit by bit, until it fell to the floor with a metallic ping resonating through the quiet room. Still faintly glowing, the skin closed itself until it looked like there had never been any injury at all.

Daisy's chest started to visibly rise and fall, her breathing changing from a barely audible panting to the slow, even breaths of a deep sleep.

Lucifer let out a sigh of relief of his own and vowed to never tell Amenadiel about this.