Luke's favorite thing to do with his father was exploring the planet they lived on and hearing his father tell him how it was all made. He didn't always understand the explanations but just hearing the words was enough for him because it was something they shared only between them. His mother and brother had different fasciations.
Luke chose Great Basin National Park to investigate today. It was a smaller park but it had caves that he wanted to see. As a little test he asked Lucifer if they could just go on the regular tour and while his father looked at him strangely, he agreed.
"I will have to ask you not to touch the walls of the cave because human cells and oils will damage the cave. Now does any one know what these limestone formations are called?" the park ranger leading them on the tour asked in a voice that was meant for the younger people in the group but he included the youthful looking Luke in his questioning gaze. Luke smiled to himself as some teenager answered that they were stalagmites and stalactites.
"When did this all form?" he whispered to his father who was inspecting the formations as a scientist might.
"Mmm," he said just loud enough for those few closest to him to hear, "I don't know when you call it in your terms." Lucifer was refering to the periods and eras we use to describe timeframes so long ago that we cannot pinpoint even the exact year something happened in.
"Okaaaay, when do you call it?" Luke responded more quietly hoping his father would take the hint.
"606 million years, 3 months and 25 days ago."
"Approximately?" Luke asked with a twinkle in his eyes and received a self-important scowl from his father. Of course, he knew exactly when the first nub of the first formation started to grow.
"How did these round formations form?" one of the other visitors asked Lucifer assuming that he was a geology professor or something and was just teasing his son.
Well," Lucifer started and then proceeded to take over as the tour director and managed, with some thoughtful effort, to give just the right amount of information while still blowing everyone's socks off. Luke loved it.
When they left and they were alone Luke asked him, "Have we really damaged the cave?"
"Yes," was the matter of fact reply.
"And could you fix it?"
Lucifer shrugged, "Yes," not catching the request in his son's words.
"Would you?" Luke in a low voice.
Lucifer regarded his son quietly for a moment and then said, "For you I will," and then waived a hand casually towards the direction of the caves they had just visited.
When Lucifer and Luke returned in the early afternoon, Elizabeth was happy for the break in tension that their arrival provided. Daemon and Lucivar were on edge and were acting strangely towards herself and Cassie.
Luke's amusing description of how his father and taken over the cave tour made her smile broadly. She smiled even more brightly when Luke tol her that his father had healed the cave from the human interaction with it. Then Luke left them, knowing all to well what his mother being pleased with his father would lead to without even having to look at the expression on his father's face.
No sooner had he left than Azazeal barged in and walked right up to them. Elizabeth acknowledged him with a quick smile but Lucifer did not.
Azazeal allowed himself to be annoyed with the take-me-I'm-yours look on Lucifer's face as his friend gazed at his lover. And it was very irritating because it made Azazeal want to give himself too, to go to Cassie and offer himself, and he didn't appreciate that urge coming upon him when he wasn't ready for it no matter how natural it was becoming again for everyone to follow Lucifer's lead.
"Keep it in your pants, loverboy," Azazeal spat with surprising bitterness.
After a second, Lucifer turned to him and in nasty tone said, "Oh, no, you have it all wrong. I'm the witty one. You're the whore."
Azazeal's eyes narrowed in real rage. Lucifer had been the one who had sent him here to impregnate a human woman to bring about the end of days. Azazeal had done what he had done, seducing woman after woman, for Lucifer and all of the fallen angels, and now what he had left to offer Cassie was soiled. She knew it and despised the part of him that was capable of such things. She had shown her displeasure the other day and while she had forgiven him, it did not change the fact that he had nothing pure to give to her.
He felt jealous and angry that Lucifer had found his way to his place with Elizabeth first and dragged him kicking and screaming along the way. He was sure Cassie resented that too. And now that he had given so much, it was just as he had feared. He was still a whore, no matter how lovingly he gave himself to Cassie, and she would never let him take his rightful place with her. Not that Cassie knew how much her little fit had hurt him. She had thought she had handled it when she had apologized but everything with Azazeal was subtly complicated. His place was not kneeling at his lover's feet like Lucifer, but standing proudly at her side with her leaning on him with deliberate trust. That was a more difficult place to get to and Azazeal had never had the patience that Lucifer and others exhibited when it came to teaching their lovers about angelic needs.
He wished now with human envy and twisted angelic cunning that there was some way he could infect Elizabeth with disgust over Lucifer's prior evil state, but he knew all too well that Elizabeth had accepted that long ago. Azazeal would suffer alone but though he may never be worthy at least Cassie kept him and let him serve.
Azazeal made a concerted effort to calm himself. Lucifer really knew how to push his buttons but he generally refrained from doing so. Azazeal knew better than to interrupt Lucifer when he was that focused on Elizabeth but they had bigger problems to deal with right now.
"Daemon and Lucivar are being….well….very male today," Elizabeth said, hoping to ease the tension a bit and explain Azazeal's shortness. It wasn't like Azazeal to snap at Lucifer and it wasn't like Lucifer to deliver such a low blow to Azazeal.
Lucifer's eyes half closed and he seemed to take in the atmosphere in the house. Then he growled in a low rumble and they were all rushing after him through the hallways to the drawing room where Daemon and Lucivar were being silly.
"I TOLD YOU TO KEEP AWAY," Lucivar roared at Azazeal and therefore Lucifer as well. He was pacing territorially in front of Marian and Cassie who were seated next to each other on a couch. Cassie had gotten herself in this predicament about a hour before Lucifer's return and Azazeal had spent that hour prowling the edges of the room and trying to extract his lover from this warrior's grasp without starting a mini-war. Elizabeth had learned from Cassie's mistake and had been trying to negotiate her release but nothing she said got through to the Warlord Princes who instead tried to coax her over to sit with the other ladies.
Jaenelle snarled at Lucivar, jerked out of Daemon's grasp and started muttering curses to herself before saying, "It's my moontime and Marian's will start tomorrow and that's apparently too much for our faithful caretakers to handle with the appropriate decorum."
She said faithful caretakers as if it were a curse, but Daemon, undaunted, purred nastily, "Well, if you women wouldn't synchronize your most vulnerable time, we wouldn't have to be so protective, but having every female here…."
As Daemon spoke, Lucivar, not able to stand it any more, stormed over to Elizabeth and made as if her snatch her away from Lucifer. Janelle had failed to mention that Elizabeth and Cassie were also in a stage of their moontime but she was far too irritated to be accurate.
Lucifer moved quickly in front of him and Lucivar let out frustrated growl, "If you don't take care of her, I will," but as he went to move around Lucifer, he found himself shoved roughly to the ground.
When he leap up, Lucifer rumbled, "Na Ar Otahila," Lucifer said, I defend the throne.
His eyes flashed fire and the air crackled with power. Brilliant patches of light then appeared in formation behind Lucifer and thrummed with menace. Azazeal smiled wickedly to himself. If things escalated, other angels would come and would make themselves known. He would really love a good fight right about now.
Lucivar and Daemon gave Azazeal a questioning look which was returned by a my-big-brother's-going-to-beat-you-up smirk from Azazeal.
"I think now might be the appropriate time to let you know that while I'm the leader on the mortal plane, Lucifer is the true spiritual leader, and he has apparently remembered that little fact."
It was true, of course. Lucifer did genuinely hate directing the angels after the fall and in our world but that was because he had spend the majority of his time essentially with his back to them as he contemplated and worshiped God. When he was ordered to act, the appropriate angelic legions had followed him and worked with him, but never under the kind of command that Azazeal represented. It was just the way the angelic host worked. When he had fallen, they were suddenly all in front of him, looking to him, getting under his feet and in his way. He still snapped at them sometimes but they understood, as they always had, where his anger came from.
He was not a leader in the same way Azazeal was. His primary duty as it related to them was to filter the light of the divine so that it touched them only as much has they could accept. He let the light engulf him and he gave himself to it completely. And he gave himself so completely so that they didn't have to, so that they could function in ways that he could not.
Here, where everything was not as it should be, they still respected him for this duty because the more he had given himself to Elizabeth and the more calm and lovey-dovey he was with her, the more relaxed they became and the more easily they could function on this plane of existance. They were all still very interconnected though Azazeal was not above resenting Lucifer for being involved in his angelic relationship with Cassie and his growing friendship with other lower angels.
Azazeal resented that after Lucivar's admonishments and Elizabeth's fall from the mountain top, Lucifer had gone to mere guardian angels to have it explained to him despite his insistence that he was a servant and should not overstep his position; a mortal woman couldn't help but expect a certain level of protection and concern for her well being. Azazeal could have told him that, anyone could have told him that, but Lucifer usually needed to hear things in a certain way for them to make sense to him.
"So," Azazeal said full of wounded anger, "are we going to play?"
Cassie was the only one who realized suddenly that her normally crafty Azazeal was looking for a fight and not entirely out of frustration that the Warlord Princes wouldn't let him near her.