It was five o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and Lucifer — slumped over his piano stool, cigarette slowly burning to a stub between two fingers — had already been up since late last night, all thoughts of bed and rest and sleep-inducing multicolored pills abandoned when Dr. Linda sent a large package to his door.

He was expecting some food, maybe. Or perhaps a nice bottle of wine. Whatever it was that normal people sent to their friends. Instead, in a move that seemed to surprise no one but himself (he called Maze about it, and the woman had the audacity to laugh at his face before rudely hanging up — "Get lost, I have a shit ton of blood to clean up"), all he got was a big box of parenting books, topped with an angry-looking sharpie note that said:

Educate yourself. Please. Hold your questions till you've read them all, and trust me, I'll know if you did.

P.S. Really. I'll know.

Looking back, it was probably wrong of him to call the doctor at odd hours every time he had a Sabrina-related question. Something told him that phoning her at 3 am yesterday just to ask about teenage alcohol options was the final straw.

("Are you being serious right now?"

"Yes! Why else would I call? It's just that I'm trying to ease Sabrina off of whiskey and towards some of the softer liquors, you know, like cognac and vermouth, but then she starts pouting at me like a kicked little dog — hello, doctor? Doctor, are you there?")

Lucifer took a long drag on his cigarette and flipped to another page.

"Well, this feels very deja vu-ish."

The devil looked up and saw the hellspawn standing over his shoulder, voice still thick with sleep and two steaming mugs of coffee in hand. She appeared rather un-antichristic, he thought, with cartoon frogs on her pajamas and a nest of messy platinum curls. Even the demon cat circling her feet seemed a little worse for wear.

"I was under the impression that witches weren't morning people," Lucifer noted, sliding over to make room for her on the piano stool. She plopped down next to him with all the grace of someone half-awake, but still managed to fit there so easily as if she belonged no place else. "Why, pray tell, are you haunting these halls so early like some pasty Victorian ghost?"

"You know, I've met actual Victorian ghosts at the academy, and I would much rather deal with them at this hour than you," Sabrina mumbled, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

"Really? Weird 1800's outfits and all?"

"Weird 1800's outfits and all."

"Do you think the clothes have anything to do with it, then, or…" At his daughter's dry, unimpressed look, Lucifer smiled and cleared his throat. "So why are you up so early, hellspawn? Has the witching hour been moved to a new timeslot?"

Sabrina, to her credit, instead of hexing him six ways to Sunday, just snorted and pressed one of the mugs into his hands.

"You play when you think," she answered, tilting her head towards the piano.

"I do?"

"Yeah." She tried — and failed — to hold back a yawn as she pushed delicately at one of the keys.

Watching her then, idly sounding out the notes to an unfamiliar melody, Lucifer realized she had pianist's fingers. All long and elegant. A part of him wondered if he might teach her to play properly one day, if she let him. The most she ever shared was that she was part of the satanic church choir back home (because of course she was; those Greendale satanists were just knock-off Catholics in disguise), but she very firmly put down her foot before he could coerce her into singing some ironically-named devil songs for a duet at Lux.

"I think I recognized the tune from one of Ambrose's old records. ABBA, was it?" She squinted, trying hard to remember. When a few seconds passed and she still couldn't place it, she just shrugged her shoulders and moved on. "In any case. Very hard to sleep when there's disco music drifting through the living room."

Lucifer glanced at the topmost book in his pile. Mamma Mia: Raising Motherless Daughters Without Completely Screwing it Up. He must've gotten the song stuck in his head and subconsciously played it out.

"Right," he grimaced. "I blame the doctor and her poorly-titled reading selections. Brightside, at least we'll have something to throw at her the next time she chews us out for missing an appointment."

"You know, the only reason we miss appointments is because you have the attention span of a goldfish and keep driving us off to heaven knows where before we even reach the clinic."

"I didn't hear you complaining when we ditched therapy the other day to go to Madame Tussauds," he pointed out.

The teenager kept her lips pursed at that. She was all preachy and judgmental about skipping out on Dr. Linda their whole way to the museum. That was, until they actually arrived, and she promptly dropped the whole bleeding heart act and demanded twenty pictures next to Hannibal Lecter.

("Holy Hecate, you're terrible at this. How is your finger in every shot? Do it again.")

"Alright, fine. Point to you," she conceded, hair swaying like a moonlit curtain as she shook her head from side to side. "Still, you've got to stop pissing off the only therapist that can work with us in this city. "

"She gave me homework," he deadpanned. "Me. A timeless celestial being. And I don't know why you're not worked up about this. Didn't said homework inadvertently destroy your sleep schedule? Like I said, we're blaming her for the disco music."

The hellspawn seemed thoughtful at that. "Between seances at midnight and blood rituals at dawn, I never really had much of a sleep schedule to begin with."

"That's very concerning."

"I grew up in a mortuary. Concerning's sort of a running theme where I'm from," she said, something fond in her eyes. "Like, this one time, I got up 'cos there was this really bad smell coming from the kitchen. Turns out the aunties were just pickling some long pig for the Feast of Feasts."

He gave her a confused look that begat further elaboration.

"Aunt Zelda wanted to one-up Sister Shirley, so she brought appetizers to the church potluck," Sabrina explained.

Lucifer could almost picture it. The Spellmans, marching into their weird little cult parties, armed with deviled eggs and devil's food cake and some particularly choice meats he was rather glad not to have his name on. It almost made his stomach turn. But then that made him think of stomachs, and intestines, and long pig, and…

"You know, I'm not quite sure how I feel about our conversations always taking a turn towards cannibalism," Lucifer frowned, taking another puff from his cigarette. It had already burned well past the filter, and he was debating whether to get up from his very comfortable perch next to his daughter just to walk across the room and get a new one.

(She smiled at him. He stayed right where he was.)

"Don't worry. You get used to it," the witchling laughed.

There were a lot of things he was getting used to now that Sabrina's been with him in L.A. for about a week now. Not that he was complaining, of course. His daughter was tidy and quiet as far as housemates went, save for the times she would loudly try out incantations from the ancient tomes in his library. He already told her that none of them would work — he'd never allow them to work, where her reckless, hellbound plans were concerned — but she was nothing if not persistent, and at some point, he just let her be. Everything she could do, he could undo later, anyway.

(They already had an incident involving a mistakenly-summoned hellhound that Sabrina swears wasn't her fault. He got to see her atrocious cat get chased around the penthouse, at least, so the whole experience wasn't a total waste.)

Since then, they've learned to fill their days with mundane things that, in retrospect, neither one of them got to enjoy much in their lives. He took her to places like Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. She snuck in red pocket squares (deep and blood-colored) to his suits so they'd match whenever they went out. They still didn't talk — not about the big things, at least, but maybe she wasn't ready for it, and maybe that was okay. Either way, between her hour-long rants about horror movies and his colorful commentary on her cooking skills ("How is it that for a master of hellfire, you manage to burn our breakfast every single time?"), they settled into something warm and comfortable and familiar, that while not entirely perfect, was theirs and theirs alone.

"So what do you want to do today, witchling?" Lucifer asked, taking a sip from the mug that she gave him. For all her god-awful kitchen attempts, the hellspawn was surprisingly good at brewing coffee.

"I don't know. You choose," Sabrina shrugged. "Just make sure we won't stay out too late. I mean, I still have to catch an early flight tomorrow. Aunt Zelda said she's sticking me with Ambrose's undertaker duties if I don't get home after a week like I promised."

"Have you packed your passport?"

"Yes."

"Clothes?"

"Yes."

"Did you upgrade your seat to first-class like I asked?"

"Also yes," she sighed. "I still wish you hadn't made me do that, though. I got here perfectly fine in coach."

Lucifer wrinkled his nose. "Nonsense. If you had your wings already, you wouldn't even need to fly in that giant metal bird. The least you could do is do it in style."

"For the last time, I'm not getting wings," she groaned, rubbing her forehead. "I don't want them, I don't need them, and despite your very insistent claims, no, I will not self-actualize myself into a flying angel witch princess. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?"

"Ridiculous?" He asked, raising his brows. "Or awesome? Hmm?"

"Ridiculous," Sabrina answered with a straight face.

"See, you say that now, but when you suddenly wake up one day in a pile of feathers-"

"I'll cry myself a river, build a bridge, and get over it," she assured him.

Lucifer huffed at that (every nephilim in history had wings; there was no use fighting the inevitable), but for his own peace of mind, some part of him hoped she'd get them sooner rather than later. Wings meant more than just flight. They were weapons, protection. And with her leaving for Greendale again, with her on one side of the country and him on the other, he wanted her to have every safeguard available just in case the same unspoken things happened and he couldn't get there in time to save her.

(Just once, he needed to know that he could save her.)

"Hey, Lucifer," Sabrina said, halting his train of thought. He glanced up from his coffee and looked back at her. "When all this is over. When I'm done…taking care…of the stuff I have to at Greendale, I can come back here, right? Or you can come to me?" She seemed timid, almost, voice small and thumbs twiddling. "You're not just gonna disappear again?"

He felt something in his chest cave in.

"I — Of course not, darling. What brought this on?"

"I just needed to know."

A few minutes back, Sabrina was the same as she always was; confident, carefree, maybe even a little caustic (though he could hardly fault her for it; not when she did it so well). But the person in front of him now was someone different. Perhaps someone he even recognized from a lifetime ago.

In the hunch of her shoulders and the uncertainty in her eyes, Lucifer saw a younger version of himself, standing scared in front of his Father. But he wasn't scared of what Father would do. No, he was scared of what Father would say . Father, whose love hung by a tether. Who turned His back once you lost your resplendence. Father who giveth and just as easily taketh away.

Lucifer's gaze softened.

(When she was born, he swore he'd love her differently than the way God loved him. And by Crowley's Claws, he swore he'd do it right.)

"I won't disappear again," he promised. "You have my word, hellspawn. And my word is my bond. This — us," he gestured between them. "This is for life. Be it Greendale, Los Angeles, or the nine bloody circles of hell. Alright?"

Sabrina met his eyes then, searching. He didn't know what she was trying to find. But she must've found it quickly enough, because finally:

"Alright," she said. The witchling took a deep breath, shook out her already messy hair. "Alright. I believe you. And for reasons I barely understand, I think I trust you."

"Is that meant to be a compliment, or…?"

"I think it's about time I told you some things," she said abruptly, the words spilling one after the other as if they were lodged in her throat for too long and were only now finding a way out.

All at once, the air around them was overcome with a sudden thickness, like it had grown as coiled and fretful as his daughter as she gauged his face for a response. Lucifer had no idea where this was headed. But judging by the way her leg shook restlessly under the piano, the way her pulse beat so loud he could see it through the skin of her wrist, feel it from where her arm pressed against his, it was something important to her. Therefore, it was important to him.

(I'll do this right, I'll do this right, I'll do this right.)

With an encouraging nod, he urged her to go on.

Sabrina steeled herself like a child about to pull off a bandaid. "Greendale was…well I thought it was my safe place. It was home, you know? But then something happened a few weeks ago and—"

"Lucifer!"

Both their attentions snapped to the elevator where loud, impatient fists pounded against the closed doors.

"Lucifer, I think your elevator's broken!" Said the voice inside.

(He didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that he could recognize that self-righteous timbre anywhere.)

"Hold that thought, darling," Lucifer sighed, patting her hand reassuringly as he pushed himself up from the piano stool. "I just have to deal with…whatever fresh hell this is…and we'll talk later, yes?"

Sabrina didn't answer. Just kept her gaze trained on the elevator with something dark and foreboding written plain across her face.

Lucifer stopped in front of the sealed metal doors. "What is it now, brother?"

It was times like this that he deeply regretted some of his earlier architectural choices. To anyone visiting Lux (and pompous older siblings who had no regard for personal space), all it took was one ride up the lift and the penthouse was basically just a boozy, free-for-all gift shop.

"I can't get in," Amenadiel said.

"Well, yes, I can see that," Lucifer replied tersely, arms pressed tight against his chest. "Have you tried, I don't know, pushing a button? Any button, for that matter?"

"Don't patronize me, Luci. I know how to use an elevator."

"Considering our present circumstances, I'm not inclined to agree."

"Look, will you help me or not?"

Truth be told, the devil was very tempted to just say 'no' and be done with it.

Of all the things he could be doing right now (having a much-needed talk with his daughter, for one; getting back to his mountain-high homework pile, for another), he never imagined he'd be teaching his insufferable, soldier-of-God brother how to do something that the average pizza delivery man could accomplish with his eyes closed. It was almost funny if it wasn't so dreadfully annoying.

"What are you doing darkening my doorstep at this hour, anyway?" Lucifer demanded, exasperation clear in his voice. Still, he ran his hands over the smooth metal panes, trying to find any evidence that the elevator was, in fact, broken, and God's Greatest Warrior wasn't just a few bricks shy of a load.

"Need I remind you, you're the one who called me."

"Yes! A full four days ago! When you didn't show up, I figured you'd been roped into one of Detective Douche's traveling improv shows again, and seeing as those things are punishment enough, I didn't bother checking in."

He heard his brother exhale through the doors. "I wanted to look into some stuff before coming here. You know, those names you gave me."

"And?" Lucifer said impatiently.

Pulling his fingers back, he noticed they'd come away with some chalk. The scratchy blackboard kind that Sabrina seemed to have an endless supply of as she practiced her sigil-making all over the apartment.

"Sabrina," he sighed, in the way of every parent who'd been left with the aftermath of their spawn's mess. "What did I tell you about your little witch drawings? You can practice your spellwork all you want, just make sure to clean up afterwards. I thought we already established this with the hellhound incident—" He looked over his shoulder, only just registering that the witchling was gone from his sight. "Sabrina?"

"What's going on? Have you figured it out?" Amenadiel asked.

Lucifer stared pensively at the markings on his doors. "Almost."

He stepped closer and looked at the sigils inscribed along the edges of the elevator; Theban reinforced with Malachim reinforced with figures from the Lesser Key of Solomon that were rather impressive, if not a touch too outdated for his taste.

It's been a while since he'd had to decipher some proper rune marks again. Los Angeles wasn't exactly a hotspot for occult activity, and in the rare instance that it was, pentagrams and healing crystals were a far cry from whatever rigorous education Sabrina had received from her coven. Not to mention all the forbidden texts she'd been privy to these past few days alone.

"These are protective wards," Lucifer frowned, tracing the slope of every symbol, every curve. "Meant to keep out…demons?" He tilted his head to the side. "No. Angels. But why—"

"I think I can answer that," his brother said evenly. "Just deactivate the ward, Luci, and let me through."

"I don't understand." He shook his head. "I'm an angel as much as you are, and yet I've never…"

Lucifer paused. Glanced at the inscriptions again.

There, in the heart of her sacred geometry, she'd written his name right beside her own. Lucifer, Satan, Samael. Every incarnation of him from the Ars Goetia to the Agrippa texts, she'd sealed with layer after layer of protective magic that shielded him from outside harm as much as it did herself.

("I believe you," she told him earlier. "I trust you.")

And if her words weren't proof enough on their own, she'd gone ahead and transformed the penthouse into a fortress — able to withstand the presence of God's mightiest, even if said mightiest was actually just a billion-year-old Daddy's Boy who had a penchant for therapists and hipster-inclined fashion choices.

But a gnawing feeling in his bones told him there was something larger at play here. Something headier, graver. The magic was too meticulous, the drawings too paranoid and overlined, and no, this wasn't meant for just Amenadiel. This was meant for things that terrified his daughter so much she had no choice but to put it into witchery instead of words.

"Brother," Lucifer asked slowly, fingers twitching at his side. "what did you find?"

"Aren't you going to open the doors first—"

"Please," he said. "What did you find?"

The devil didn't beg. But Sabrina did. Like clockwork, he heard her every night. Jerathmiel. Mehitable. Tears on her pillowcase, and the awful, gut-wrenching sound of someone being tortured in their sleep.

Lucifer had been away from her for too long, and that was on him. But he'll be damned if all the pieces were laid out in front of him and he still couldn't put it together. The wards, the nightmares, whatever happened in Greendale, the obsession with hell…they all fit into one cruel, twisted picture and he just needed to figure out how so he could make the worst of it go away.

Amenadiel grew silent for a moment, and he could imagine the angel gathering his words, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He'd spent enough time — way before time was even a concept, in fact — with his brother to know how he acted when he was on edge.

"You were right," Amenadiel began cautiously, like treading water before starting to swim. "I thought those names sounded familiar, too, when you first called about them. Like something that would come from home. But I couldn't go up there to ask our siblings, what with my wings being gone. And even if I did have them back…" A breath. Tired, heavy. "Well, you know how our siblings are. A touch too pious towards anyone who's ever fallen."

Lucifer hummed in response.

(He knew. He knew all too well.)

"So I had to wait for one of them to come to earth."

"Let me guess. Azrael?" He quirked a brow.

"Azrael," Amenadiel said. "I borrowed Dan's police scanner and waited for reports. Shootings, accidents, anything that might beckon the angel of death. But if you can remember, she's always worked the quickest out of all of us. A lot of souls to collect in the world. It took a couple of days, but I managed to catch up with her at a car collision at 10th and Swanson."

"How is she?" Lucifer asked despite himself.

It had been centuries since he'd last seen his sister, but even after everything, she was still little Rae-Rae. All bright eyes and big hugs and cries he'd heard all the way down in hell when she weeped for the exile of her favorite brother.

Amenadiel smiled behind the doors. Lucifer could hear it in his voice. "She's good. Really good. Changed her hair again, if you can believe it."

The devil snorted. "I can believe it."

Azrael used to run around the Silver City, long dark hair brushing her ankles. Every season (back when seasons were still a working project; before summer was called summer and rain dropped instead of leaves during fall) she'd find a new way to reinvent herself. Flowers that Lucifer braided into her hair. Deep purple dye that Gabriel bled from Father's new plants. Fringes and pins and quick, precise cuts from the celestial blade she was just learning to use.

She was a restless creature, his sister. Lucifer thinks she and her niece (Azrael was an aunt; it was almost as jarring a thought as Lucifer being a father) would've gotten along quite well had things been different with their family.

"Anyway," Amenadiel ploughed on, and the devil felt the sudden shift of it; that slight hitch in his voice that said he was bothered by the next thing he was about to say. "She said she recognized the names. She said…"

His brother suddenly paused, either out of hesitation or anticipation, and in that moment, something a lot like dread slithered up Lucifer's throat.

"What did she say, Amenadiel?"

"Nevermind. Maybe this was a bad idea—"

"What did she say?" Lucifer demanded, low and terrible.

It was the same way he spoke in the Pit. The clear, irrefutable command of someone who shall not and will not be denied. Amenadiel must have felt this too, because he could sense his older brother warring with himself on the other side of the wall.

"She said," the angel exhaled sharply. "Please don't do anything rash, Luci, but…she said they were part of the host."

"The host?"

"Yes! But not in the way that you think, alright? They're not…they're not our siblings. Just regular angels. Foot soldiers. The ones Dad made to carry out his bidding on earth."

(Ah. There it was. Dad, dad. All the torment he — and now his hellspawn — had gone through, and in the end, it always came back to dad.)

"And what of these," Lucifer worked through a swallow, the word coming out like poison dripping from his mouth, "angels?"

"I'm not sure. Azrael said it was the oddest thing. She was supposed to collect their souls, but by the time she got to Greendale, both of them were already gone—"

With a flick of the wrist and a rush of Enochian, the elevator doors suddenly flew open as the wards deactivated and Lucifer made his way through. He grabbed his older brother by the shirt collar and held him up against the wall.

"Brother, tell me, what were two angels, two celestial foot soldiers, doing in Greendale?"

"Trust me, Luci, I wouldn't know. Even Azrael only had their names to go by—"

"What. were. they. doing there?" Lucifer repeated, eyes alit with the fires of hell.

Amenadiel didn't even flinch. In fact, he barely seemed fazed at all. He just met his brother word for word, stare for stare, with the earnest calm of someone who had absolutely nothing to hide. "You're angry. I understand that. But you're focusing on the wrong thing."

"Oh, really? And what should I focus on, then?" The devil challenged, tightening his grip. "That angels are suddenly popping up in Greendale, a place touched by nothing holy save for my daughter's presence? That Dad is a puppet master, and you, his leading marionette, most certainly have something to do with this? Please, by all means, brother, tell me what to focus on!"

"That two of our kind are dead, Lucifer!" Amenadiel shot back, temper flaring to match his own. "Angels don't die unless it's by each other's hand! You of all people should know that! And there was no other angel in Greendale at that time except—"

The rest of his words fell away like dust scattering in the wind.

Lucifer followed his brother's gaze and saw Sabrina standing outside the elevator, chin raised in defiance, fingers slightly shaking, but held up in a defensive spellcasting sign all the same.

"Go on," she said, tipping her head at her uncle. "Finish what you were about to say."

Lucifer set Amenadiel back on his feet. "Sabrina…"

"No, no. He was about to say something. Come on." Her voice was surprisingly steady for how much her hands trembled in front of her. "Say it."

"Sabrina, I didn't mean it like that," Amenadiel began.

"Call me a murderer. Better yet, call me evil. That's all I am to you people, isn't it?" She stepped closer to them, and Lucifer saw the tears threatening to spill from her (his) soft brown eyes. "The sadistic, unrepentant antichrist."

The youngest angel stopped in front of the oldest. "Are you here to kill me, too?"

In one breath, it felt like all air had been knocked out of Lucifer's lungs. The world seemed to tilt on its axis, and he was dangerously, perilously close to falling off the immaterial edge.

"Darling, what…what are you talking about?"

"Remember what I said at Disneyland the other day?" His daughter tried to smile at him — the same bright, light-spilling kind she inherited from Diana — but it only came off as more sad than anything else. "When we were in line for that big ride?"

("I don't think we make very good choices," she said to him then.

They'd just stuffed themselves silly with corndogs, and were now in line for the highest, loopiest rollercoaster the theme park had to offer. Just looking at it made him feel sick.

"No," he agreed, stepping to the front of the queue with her regardless. "No, we don't.")

Her face crumpled.

"I made a bad choice," she said, barely a whisper even in the quiet of the room.

"Sabrina—"

"But I don't regret it," she kept going. "Not even a little bit. Not at all."

"Sabrina, if you could just tell me what happened. I promise, I will make everything okay—"

"I don't think you can."

She peered up at him, cheeks wet, lips quivering, and in that moment, Lucifer wanted nothing more than to hold her close and shield her from every possible pain. She walked around with a weight draped across her shoulders all her life. Once, just this once, he wanted her to feel safe enough to put it down.

"I killed those angels," she said finally, simply, as if peering into his mind and giving him what he wanted.

(Dad, this is me putting it down.)

"I killed those angels," Sabrina said again. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, raised her head.

She met him right in the eyes.

"...Because they killed me first."

All at once, Lucifer's blood ran cold in his veins. Behind him, Amenadiel started speaking, but the devil heard no words; nothing but the clear drumbeat of fury pounding loud and unmistakable in his ears.

(It's not right, it's not right, it's not right.)

It was six o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and Lucifer Morningstar's whole world had just come to a crashing halt.