A/N Thanks for your patience, everybody!
VII
It was, in Pastor Fury's mind, the perfect prison.
And perfect, of course, was exactly what holding the Devil necessitated. He was nothing short of the single most dreaded creature in the history of humanity; a pinnacle of pure evil, absolute terror, and though he wasn't utterly remarkable to regard in person, at least to Fury—when he wasn't battered and gleaming from his transition through the portal into Holy Shield's basement, he looked like little more than a tired, well-dressed businessman with particularly unruly hair—there was still a faint air to the way Lucifer carried himself that made Fury more than glad that they possessed the defenses they did.
He couldn't describe exactly what it was about the Devil that was so eerie, Fury decided as he took a number of slow steps around the ring of blazing holy fire in which his quarry was imprisoned. Perhaps it was the way that the eyes followed him while every other fiber of the body remained perfectly poised, like a cougar waiting to strike. The eyes were even: green, now, dulled slightly with Lucifer's brief halting of his power, but still with the faintest traces of hungry gold glinting at the corners and around the pupil, occasionally flashing into full realization if only for the space of a single one of Fury's alarmed breaths. Despite his absolute lack of emotion, there was nothing about Lucifer that conveyed placidity. On the contrary, he seemed tense, waiting for something that Fury couldn't possibly think of. A small smirk tilted his thin, pale lips, striking against his cheek in an erratic line that contrasted against his otherwise meticulous appearance; despite having been battered and aggressively handled, in the plane of angel travel and then on the far more substantial yet equally violent terrain of the mountain, Lucifer managed to still appear flawless, not so much as breathing heavily, and the dark circles around his gleaming eyes looking only as if they belonged there.
He looked pleased, almost, in that odd, wicked way of his, and it was perhaps that which disturbed Fury so deeply.
After all—it was the perfect prison. For mortal or seraphim, there was nothing that had been constructed with more care than this. Angel-crafted, of course, by some of the best of God's workers; none of the avenging angels whom Fury currently had working with him now, but other beings, those who directed their energies towards creation rather than destruction. The result was something that couldn't quite be explained by the physics that the human occupants of Holy Shield had been coached in. It was so wildly strange, so impossible, that even Fury, used to sights of angels and demons and everything in-between as he was, still had trouble looking straight towards it with his single eye.
It was a cage, truly—nothing much beyond a cage, but a brilliant cage, for its bars were hewn not of metal, but instead pure flame. Holy fire, as well, rather than the crude orange burn of Earth, so that, rather than being twisted through loops of ash and smoke, the dark-haired Devil was instead caught in a beautifully oscillating tangle of pure white light, dancing around him and churning past so swiftly that it blurred as it tumbled through the air, trailing not-quite-tangible strands of creamy brightness in its wake. There was no true substance to the fire, at least not to humans, and so Fury felt nothing at all from where he stood only a few inches away, at a position where it would be able to char his nose were it the primitive element of Earth rather than this exquisite, heavenly shine. The floor, dull as he, was also untouched, the splintered wooden boards of the angels' ship not troubled by so much as the faintest smoke wisp where the flames danced along them.
Were Lucifer to attempt to cross the sphere—Lucifer, or, for that matter, any of the angels—he would be immediately reduced to nothing. Eons of demented power and twisting resentment, of every dreaded sin compounded into a single being, and it could be vanquished with just the slightest slip-up. For it would take only a tiny lick; Gabriel, as he prepared the ring, had taken the time to inform Fury, Hill, and Coulson just how the holy fire worked. Lucifer, being an angel—albeit a darkened and fallen one—would ignite as though drenched in oil, taking mere seconds to dissolve into nothing more than a raging pearlescent pillar. It wasn't, Fury thought, an altogether unpleasant image—though, of course, he needed Lucifer if he wished to learn of the Tesseract's location; despite whatever temptation may strike him, it would be an utter waste to, say, push past the flames that would be harmless to his own skin and perhaps give Lucifer a light prod on the shoulder. Though, the less childish part of his mind butted in, even if they did have intentions to kill the Devil, that would certainly be the weakest way to go about it. Lucifer was quicker and stronger than any human, and Fury had no doubt that the fallen angel would be able to snap his neck in a thousandth of the time it would take him to push it into the fire.
So, rather than succumbing to his boyish desires for plain revenge, he remained in an even stance, his hands folded behind his back and his chin high, single eye narrowed as he regarded his imprisoned enemy. Lucifer seemed perfectly happy, tilting his head as Fury watched, then folding his arms and turning slightly from side to side as if flexing his torso. His pale fingers wrapped around his dark-clothed elbows, silvery blue veins straining against their creamy backs, and the toe of one boot drummed out an erratic pattern on the splintered floor of the ship. The more Fury watched, the more movements seemed to spring into reality—the occasional steady blink or demure twist of the half-smile; the slip of a thumb or flicker of an eyelash. Enough, some part of him reflected, to make Lucifer seem human—but he wasn't. He wasn't human at all. On the far contrary, he couldn't be more different from Fury, Coulson, Hill, and all whom they protected. Did he so desire, Lucifer would be quite capable of becoming still as stone—or stone itself, for that matter; for an angel as powerful as he, Fury knew, physical manifestation was really no matter so long as his twisted remains of a soul were still contained in some sort of living vessel at their perhaps invisible core. In fact, the small fidgets that he displayed now were quite possibly meant to convey a false representation of the humanity that he lacked; Fury, however, would not fall for it.
"Looks like you've lost this round, Satan," he mused.
A snort, and the golden-green eyes flickered up briefly, exposing, for a brief instant, a wide swath of metallic shine under the irises. "Oh, but what a crude name. Sounds like something a grandmother would say... I do expect more proper addressing from a man as devout as you, Pastor Fury. To think—I wouldn't even get a proper greeting from the one man who believes he's going to destroy me. The one man. I hope you are aware of your special status, Pastor. The others... Phillip Coulson... Maria Hill... their hope is already gone. They won't tell you, of course, or my brothers and sister, for they wish only to impress them. They intend to stay by your side until they die, Pastor, but they will die. Just like the rest of you. And they are very well aware of it."
"You will not be taking any of my priests," Fury replied. He fought to contain his voice into steady syllables, rather than letting it twist or escalate towards near-pleading desperation; it was mandatory that he keep his calm now. He was quite possibly the only one who would be talking to Lucifer for a very long time, until they decided upon a better way to try and extract the Tesseract's location from him. Torture was a possibility, but not one that Fury would resort to, so long as he had any say whatsoever in the proceedings of the angels who had become his own team—he had no intention to fall to Lucifer's own level. Until then, he would suffice to merely leave the Devil in its cage and pray that no further chaos occurred. "In fact, I don't think you'll be doing much of anything for a good, long while. So, get comfortable—and if you ever feel like giving us the Tesseract's information straight-out... well, I can't say we'll let you get off free for it. There are plenty other trials you've got to stand for."
"You can't possibly expect me to flat-out tell you? Why, after you know the location of the Tesseract, you'll have nothing to do but kill me, Pastor Fury. And I simply can't stand for something like that."
Fury struggled not to grind his teeth—it was very true, of course. Though he considered torture to be below his level, a humane killing was not. The Devil was a disease, and the sooner it could be wiped entirely from the face of the Earth, the better it would be for the whole of humanity, as well as angels and every other living species that existed upon or above the planet. It wouldn't be murder, but instead careful eradication. An action, in all ways, for the greater good. And Lucifer, in facing his own unshakable destiny so casually, struck an upsettingly legitimate point: after Fury and the angels knew the location of the Tesseract, there was quite simply no use for him anymore. He gained nothing whatsoever by revealing the information.
"Perhaps not. But it would speed things up for you," Fury pointed out. "Because we will find out where the Tesseract is. And then we'll seal every one of your demons off from Earth, permanently, and then we'll kill you, Lucifer. Once and for all."
"There," the Devil sighed through his whitened lips, and his eyelids briefly drifted shut, milky and translucent over the glittering curve of his eyes. "That's it. That's my proper name. Light-bearer..."
Fury forced himself to snort, the easy movement shaking the slow chill that was beginning to worm its way up his spine. "Of course, sunshine. It's a fine name."
"It is," Lucifer quite suddenly cut across, before Fury could so much as voice another word. "You do know, Pastor... your own name. Well, it is a rather obvious word. English, even. Fury. Anger. Wrath. Sin."
"It's not a name I was given, nor one I chose for myself," the Pastor growled. "You're not going to get anything out of squeezing my family title for every last drop of meaning."
"Nothing, perhaps, but doubt. Perhaps your parents didn't give you that name—Nicholas, instead, victory. Hm... weak. Overused. Nothing near the potency of Fury. But I'm only going off on a tangent now... the point, of course, is that nothing comes by happenstance. The Devil is seen as an evil, yes, a menace. Yet my name bears light. You, viewing yourself as the humans' savior, convey only sin in your title. Nicholas Fury. Victory of madness..."
"You're only wasting both of our time," Fury pushed out, his voice rounding towards a snarl. A soft ha escaped Lucifer's lips, but he relaxed from the lean that the Pastor hadn't even realized him to have sunk into, putting a more comfortable measure of space between himself and the white flames that still rippled between them, never leaving his face fully visible for more than a fragment of a breath, wreathed otherwise as it was in shuddering smoky shadows.
"I have people who need me a whole lot more than you do," Fury continued, "and it's them that I'm going to attend to now. You're not going to be able to leave here. The holy fire can burn for eternity if it needs to, so... well, I hope you get comfortable in the meantime."
"Oh, I will... I will," Lucifer chuckled to himself, but Fury wasn't there for the second repetition; in a swish of the dark coat that he had adopted once out of his pastoral robes, he exited the small room, letting a small, grateful rush of air escape from his lips as he escaped the dark confines of the closet-like space with its low beams and constant eerie illumination from that white, white fire.
He exited into a narrow hallway, in which the creaks and rumbles of the ship were much more audible than they had been inside the prison area. Battered wooden walls, slick with the slightest leafy hints of the dazzling silver-and-white paint that had once thickened them by several layers, tilted in a steeple-like angle towards his head; it rather baffled him how the crooked steepness could result in a perfectly flat floor above him, but, of course, there were a number of things about the externally mundane vessel that didn't quite fit into humanity's laws of physics.
The ship, like the cage, was a gift from the angels—not only those that Fury was working with, but rather the archangels operating high above, who had heard of their cause and chosen to contribute what they could: in this case, a mighty boat, one that the Holy Shield was free to use as they so needed. Though slightly similar in form to an ancient galley ship, it was much more remarkable: the interior hull, for one, was forged solely of substance that resembled gold and marble, and yet was harder and more resilient than diamond, with a forest of graceful, impossibly thin pillars extending towards the ceiling, which was a curving expanse of gold leaf, traced over with faint designs of wings and other indescribable shapes that seemed to twist in and out of existence as one perused them. It was towards this ballroom-like area that Fury headed now, taking other aspects of the vessel into mind for the hundredth time as he paced along—it was what seemed like miles to the central hull room from the prison area, though he always managed to make the journey in a number of minutes; nothing about the ship, including distance from one place to another, seemed definite or unshakable, though nothing save the illustrations along the ceiling appeared to move when regarded with the naked eye.
It was inter-dimensional, in Gabriel's words: it had no physical definition in the reality that Fury was used to, and it did take him some time to adjust to the feeling of traversing its hallways. There was nothing easy to detect about the change in its tangibility, per se—he felt no airsickness or nausea, and the floor was steady enough under his feet, yet there was a faintness at the very edges of his senses that would vanish just as soon as he focused upon it. Oddly enough, his mind was brought back to an optical illusion that he'd long been fascinated by as a child, before his life spiraled into a mess of angels and demons: a clean lattice of white dots and dark lines. Upon closely regarding any single part of the image, hazy black spots would swim into existence in the white spaces scattered upon the rest of it; any attempt to focus on that darkness, however, narrowed them into nonexistence. It was this comparison that continually struck him as he made his way down the corridors of what had been dubbed the Holy Shield ship, endless until the repetition was almost comforting, a solid fragment of his always-known reality to cling onto in this bizarre new plane of existence.
As he moved farther away from Lucifer, one loud step after another, an invisible weight lifted from his shoulders by degrees. Perhaps he was, after all, only imagining that strange knowledgeableness that seemed to cling to the Devil's eyes and posture. After all, this creature was Satan; it was his very purpose to unsettle, to plant lingering seeds of doubt in the minds of all the good creatures who regarded him. In fact, that could have been the whole of his intentions behind the gesture—he could very easily have wished only to put Fury on edge, thereby setting him up for some fatal mistake that would leave freedom open for Lucifer.
The more Fury considered, the more plausible it seemed. Very well, then—there was nothing to worry about, nothing whatsoever. They had successfully captured the Devil, and the only thing left to do now was discover the location of the Tesseract. To do so, his mind—returned to its typical state of cold logic—was beginning to conclude, they would first have to find Selvig and Uriel, the only two definite associates of Lucifer that he could identify the bodies of. Demons could be useful, too, of course, but Fury rather suspected that they, being entities unto themselves rather than mere extensions of the Devil's mind like the possessed human and angel, wouldn't be quite so useful in extrapolating the necessary information.
He'd tell them, then, unless they came up with anything better. Not quite yet—it was safer to make sure there was no pre-existing tension between the angels, Ramiel especially, before he threw them into any more dangerous situations—but as soon as possible. Every second that Selvig and Uriel were loose was another second closer to the demons being released, to the materialization of the Apocalypse itself upon the modern planet. Raziel would certainly be upset. She wouldn't want them to seek out Uriel—not if there was a chance of their methods resulting in harm to him, and Fury wasn't going to deny that there was. As much as he wished hard for a peaceful solution, the plain truth was that the angel could tolerate pain as it was dealt out to him, and he would probably have to, in this case.
In any case, it seemed as he stepped through the gilded double doors of the grand room that there was a good deal at present to keep the angels occupied before he moved on to talk of possibly harming Uriel or Selvig. The five stood in what was a rather unsettling silence, parted only by the soft whisper of invisible wings and the all-too-audible grind of Gabriel's massive mechanical ones, which remained open and parted astride his strong shoulders. Despite all of their still lips, their eyes were flickering between one another, and Fury was well aware that the angels were communicating—not through their crude human voices, but currents of understanding were passing amongst them all the same, eased even beyond their usual simplicity by the metaphysical plane in which they all currently resided.
Ezekiel was the first to notice Fury as he entered, and his eyes—pleasantly dark, but with the same lingering uncertainty of Lucifer's, his in green instead of gold—immediately softened from their previous intent concentration. "Welcome, Pastor," he murmured, his voice confined to nothing beyond a soft murmur that wouldn't have sounded at all out of place emerging solely from his human vessel.
"Good to see that you're all getting along," Fury noted, scanning the others as they each turned to face him. Gabriel seemed by far the most comfortable, the edges of his wings even running along the air in a soft fanning motion, while Raziel and Michael held their chins erect and kept their features cold. Ramiel appeared entirely out of place, with his rough features twisted into something close to disdain, but Fury paid him little heed; it was only natural, of course, that the long-isolated brother would take good time to adjust to his family once more.
"We're managing what is appropriate," Michael agreed. "It has taken little time to bring each other up to date on all aspects of the situation."
"Ramiel, as it turns out, has known a bit more about old Luci than he's been letting on," Gabriel cut across. Like Ezekiel, he reduced his usually pounding tones to a human drawl, and Fury felt a slight surge of gratitude run through his stomach; it was overwhelming enough to be on this bizarre ship without the additional complication of a headache. "Seems that he's been keeping tabs on him, ever the loyal brother—the good news is that it gives us more information about that nasty little Devil."
"If that's the good news, then there's presumably bad news to be had, as well," Fury noted.
Gabriel flipped up a hand in affirmation. "Bingo. Bad news is that most of the information isn't anything new, really—only the fact that lovely Luce has been responsible for a good third of the most violent and massive killings we've seen over the past few centuries. Not directly, of course, just through his demons and cronies. Incidentally, humans seem to blame just about three times as much on him... the Devil made me do it, right..."
"The point is," Michael interjected, his own voice low with power that shook against Fury's skull, "he is a danger, at least as big of one as we previously imagined. He is under our control now, but that means little—he can and will find a way to escape. We are racing against him and against time. We must find the Tesseract as soon as possible, and use it to seal him forever in Hell. We will find a more secure location for it until we can be sure that it will not be opened again, and then, Pastor, if you have no objection, I believe we very well might return it to your own church."
"As soon as Holy Shield is rebuilt, we'll be happy to take it," Fury agreed. Happy was rather objective, of course—at least a few of his priests, he knew, would want nothing to do with the glittering cube after the devastation it caused—but they were no matter. So long as the church as a whole had nothing against possessing the Tesseract, there would be no issue.
"Very well. So it shall be," Michael murmured. "Until then, I believe it would be wisest that we spread ourselves out, allow more time for thought. Raziel, perhaps it would be best if you were to watch Lucifer's movements; we don't want him engaging in even the tiniest activity without our knowledge. He may still have ways of contacting his demons, or at least Uriel and Selvig."
Fury expected Raziel to tense at the mention of Uriel's name, but she stayed perfectly still, only dipping her chin in a quick nod. In a flash of thin, dark wings, she was gone, leaving behind only a faint scent of what Fury couldn't help but liken to burned orange peels, and Michael nodded to himself, as well, apparently satisfied with his soldier's actions.
"Good. The rest, engage in what you will. I believe that Ezekiel has a particular proficiency in locating material objects... it should take little effort to trace the Tesseract, is that so, brother?"
"Quite."
"And Gabriel, you can guide him on the workings of the ship?"
"Oh, I'm happy to." Gabriel flashed a half-grin in Ezekiel's direction. "It's been a long time." The darker angel glanced towards the ground, but a pale smile of his own flickered among the shadows that seemed to constantly coalesce near his lips.
"Very well, then, there is no time to be wasted," Michael declared. He tilted his forehead back, sky-colored eyes briefly regarding the subtle shift of the paintings etched high above them. His gaze was flat—unlike his voice, intentionally masking the depth of knowledge and emotion beneath—yet it was easy to see, even to a human such as Fury, that the archangel was housing great turmoil. "Each of you, to your duties. Ramiel, come with me—we do still have much catching up to do, and there is a good deal about your whereabouts that I still must learn if I wish to clear your name in the eyes of our Father."
"Of course," Ramiel acknowledged, thunder pulsating through the words.
And, without so much as another acknowledgement of their duties, there was a flash and the angels were gone—all at once, evaporating in a single brief twist of multifaceted light, and Pastor Nicholas Fury was left in the massive, glorious room in complete solitude, abandoned with only the contemplation of Lucifer's cutting words to keep him company.