Chapter Text

I

For all his pride, the satisfaction of victory was a taste sweet and rare.

Especially when the foe was his family. Annoyingly formidable, and although you could make an entire forest out of the sticks up all of their arses, they had bested him again and again.

But not this time.

Perhaps he was cleverer, stronger, more capable than they’d allowed him to feel. Perhaps he wasn’t simply the evil little brother, the problem child they kept locked in the basement.

Lucifer leans on his forearms beneath the canopy of bulbs as he feels the weight come off his back for the first time since his Fall. If he isn’t free, he’s the closest thing he ever has been. It’s exhilarating. Possibilities abound.

His eyes sweep the space he’s considering making his own. It’s only fitting. This is the spot he finally cast off his shackles. Something hopeful and right blooms in his chest, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards despite the gash still stinging on his cheek.

“This place could use a piano.”

But… no. He knows he hasn’t quite cast them off. Not yet. But he can do what he wants, be what he wants now. And to that end… 

There’s another weight he needs to get off his back.

—

He leaves a stricken Mazikeen to clean up and store his offcuts. The feathers still had healing properties and would undoubtedly come in useful one day. His own macabre little pharmacy. That's how he’ll think of it anyway, so he doesn’t have to dwell on the other thing it feels like.

Loss.

It isn’t loss. It’s another victory, and he makes sure his father knows it as he grits his teeth skyward.

After an act that had been born from eons of hate, but mere minutes to decide on and seconds to execute, it feels bizarrely pedestrian to pick up a roll of gauze on the way back from Santa Monica and wrap his torso in the hotel bathroom. The demon steel would mean the wounds would heal at a human rate, but he isn’t bothered by that. When in Rome, after all.

Mazikeen would forgive him, sooner or later. 

—

“What’s wrong with this one?” Lucifer asks, leaning forward on the stool, making the canvas backdrop crinkle behind him as he moves. 

He’s been sitting in this dingy back room for what feels like an hour now, with flashbulbs going off in his face and the vague instruction of ‘less, no — less, please sir’. 

“They don’t really like you to smile too much in driver’s license photos,” Neil, the weedy man with frameless glasses explains as he shows him the shots he’s taken so far, all laid out side by side on his computer thingy. 

Lucifer had really thought his first few days as a permanent resident of Earth would be filled with far more wine, women, and song, but so far there’s been a lot more mineral water, men in musty suits, and signing of documents. 

Now that his vacation has become a permanent stay, he’s going to need to get a few things made up.

“It’s not really a smile,” Lucifer protests. “More like a riotous ‘party on, thy will be done, then done twice more’ celebration face.”

Neil stares. “They… don’t like those either.”

Lucifer grimaces at the examples pinned to the walls in plastic card sleeves. “Well, I don’t want to look like them!” He gestures. “I mean, a blank stare? That’d be like having Mozart compose a car insurance jingle.” He twists on the stool. “Perhaps a three quarter angle?”

“No—”

“Perhaps a different suit, then?” he ponders, then lights up with an idea. “Or no suit!”

“You’ll need to be wearing clothes in your driver’s license photo, sir,” Neil advises.

“Well, why am I the only one coming up with any ideas?” Lucifer tosses his hands up in complaint. “If this is my punch card into the slipstream of humanity, then I want it to represent who I am. And who I am not is some mouth-breathing dullard with no personality! It simply won’t do.”

“Sir,” Neil begins, gentle exasperation evident in his voice. “A lot goes into making a false identification document passable. There are a lot of ways to check authenticity these days, and I can replicate most of them, but the best way to avoid detection is not giving anyone a reason to check. You came to me because I’m the best, and my professional advice to you is that you’ll have a much easier time if you just face forward for the photo with a neutral expression. No nudity. No… ‘celebration face’. No props—”

“The sword I brought—?”

“No sword.”

Lucifer’s shoulders slump, and he swivels himself back towards the camera lens. It makes very little sense. Humans get one photograph to represent themselves in the eyes of the law and have absolutely no say in what goes into it? Well, Dad always did say he created humanity in his own image. Seems they were living up to it just fine.

“Alright. Alright, very well.” Lucifer rolls his shoulders and fixes his posture, back straight against the pull-down backdrop. “No smile at all?” 

Neil peers out from behind the camera, eyes narrowed like he looks he might regret conceding. “Small.”

A roguish grin curls around the corners of his lips, and he looks down the lens. “Lovely.”

The flash goes off. Neil seems pleased enough with that one. He drags it onto the template on his screen, then moves on to the other information.

“Alright, I suppose that’ll do. Now, what’s the name we’re putting on it?”

“Lucifer Morningstar.”

Neil hangs his head.

—

Once the boring minutiae is completed, and Lucifer’s as close to a legal citizen on paper as he can be, beginning the rest of the set up is rather fun.

To his dismay, suits as casualwear do seem to have gone out of style, even the more modern one he’d purchased on the advice of the flexible jogger. Lucifer decides that’s no great hurdle. If anyone can single handedly bring formalwear back in fashion, it’s him. And if not, perhaps that’s even better. He hardly minds appearing a cut above the rest. In fact, it’s only right. He’ll be damned if he’s about to go out and purchase a rack of board shorts.

He wanders back towards his hotel after having his measurements taken at a highly recommended tailor nearby. The car he found still goes, though there’s a light that keeps flashing on the bit behind the wheel — all the same, Lucifer feels eager to explore the area around his new home, and the morning is cool and pleasant, inviting him to go on foot.

It’s then that he finds himself stopped outside the glass-walled ground floor of a heritage building end-capping the corner of two streets. Glassy black lettering reading Steinway & Sons marquees the showroom, catching Lucifer’s eye. Nothing but clean white floors stretch from the chrome window frames, and inside, a line of glossy black pianos with their lids raised, courting him.

Recalling his promise to himself, Lucifer turns on his heel and goes inside.

There are pianos in hell, but they’re always out of tune. Persistently, and by design, though certainly not his design. Given an eternity to practice instrument maintenance, Lucifer had done his best with a few of them, but the moment a key started to sound right, the one next to it would slip out of tune. They weren’t even worth playing, trying to tune out the cacophony for the simple joy of just having his fingers spread across keys. He’d tried a few times, imagining he couldn’t hear the atonal mess of dissonant sounds spewing out of the rickety upright console with one leg shorter than the other. His technique was perfect, but that didn’t matter. The keys didn’t work, it all sounded wrong, and the sound he produced hurt worse than not playing at all, so he had abstained. Taking the bench at the outdoor bar a few days ago and caressing keys that made the sound they were supposed to make had restored him. The melody he produced had shivered up through his body, high into his brain like a euphonic opiate, and for the first time in countless eons, something had been within his control that he hadn’t had to fight for.

Come to think of it, perhaps that’s when the idea to stay had first been planted.

So it was only right that he honor the instrument that had saved him from returning to Hell, with one of his own.

Clean white floors dotted with shining black Steinways gleam in the early sunlight as it passes between the buildings in streams of gold. He seems free to wander — unlike a few of the other humans’ stores, where he’d been accosted upon barely crossing the threshold — so he does, winding between the rows of pianos until he settles before one of a comfortable shape and a comfortable size.

With his index finger, he strokes middle C. It sounds just as it should, ringing out with perfect clarity and tonality in the cavernous space of the bright showroom. He closes his eyes and breathes the sound in. The next in the scale shimmers as he walks his hand up the board, a perfect semitone interval.

His spirit unfurls in two short notes.

The sound draws an attendant, as upright as some of the spinets towards the back. “Lovely resonance, isn’t it?” His deep Irish accent is lilting like the gulls that wind above the nearby ocean. Lucifer turns, taking him in from his sharply parted dark hair to his shiny black shoes, and decides that he likes him.

He’s liked most humans so far. They’re so much better before years of tortured damnation mangle their souls.

He extends a hand and introduces himself. “Pleasure to meet you, Eoin Gallagher. Owner.”

“Lucifer Morningstar. Devil.” He grasps the man’s hand and returns the handshake.

Eoin laughs amicably at what he surely assumes is a joke. “Goodness me, I’m going to have to go to confession after this.”

“He’d probably rather you didn’t. Less work for Him,” Lucifer chuckles along.

“Ah now, is that a UK brogue I hear?” The Irishman beams, and Lucifer knows what he’s doing. He gotten to know enough used car salesmen in Hell to learn all about their rapport-building tactics — this is just a far finer setting. But it doesn’t matter. Lucifer’s already intent on making a purchase today. “Not a Londoner, are you?”

“Bit further south than that,” Lucifer responds easily. The man won’t question. They never do.

“Ah, right you are,” he nods predictably. “So, Steinway Model A, Salon Grand. Spectacular instrument. Are you looking for something for the home? School? Live performances?”

“My new club,” Lucifer announces, the sound of it feeling right at home in his mouth. Yes, his. “I just bought Rico’s in Hollywood. Well, as good as. I sign the papers in the morning.”

“A cage-fighting piano bar,” Eoin comments in amusement, clearly having heard of the place. “That’s certainly one way to do LA fusion.”

“Oh no, I’ll be getting rid of the cage. Making a fresh start. Far more finery and twice as much sin”

“So we’re looking for something to suit a mid-sized performance venue, then?” Eoin claps his hands, ready to show Lucifer around. “Did you have anything particular in mind?”

Lucifer sweeps a look around the showroom, an affluence of glossy black lids and stark keys gleaming with starbursts in the early sun. “Yes, which is your finest?”

Eoin tilts his head. “That varies depending on who you ask. These things are a matter of taste.”

“Well, your most exorbitantly expensive, then?” Lucifer clarifies, turning to face the man squarely with a coyote’s smile and slipping his hands into his pockets.

Eoin’s captured for a moment in his magnetic orbit, then titters with uncertainty. “Goodness me, planning on a splurge, are we?”

“Absolutely,” Lucifer enthuses, rocking on the balls of his feet. “I love a good splurge.”

Eoin’s either too professional or too Catholic to catch his little quip.

“Er, in that case…” Eoin begins to lead him doubtfully towards the glass corner at the front of the showroom. Lucifer lopes eagerly behind. “That would be the Model D. Concert Grand. How large a space did you say this was again?”

Lucifer looks down at the piano he’d led him to. An enormous span of keys run wider than he is tall, at least nine feet in width, and although it’s in his very nature to never shy away from excess, it seems a bit impractical even for him. 

“Right, I take your point.” He turns back the way they’d come. “Well, what about that first one, then?”

“Yes, the Model A,” Eoin agrees. “Perfect for mid-sized venues. A wonderfully balanced and versatile instrument. Blame my Irish superstitions, but I do believe the piano chooses us. Our first instincts are usually correct. Often pays to follow them”

“Well, that we can certainly agree on.” Lucifer nods as they wander back to the one he’d been drawn to first. The piano which had ‘chosen’ him, if a superstitious Irishman was to be believed. He smooths his hands along the raised fallboard, feeling the glossy slide of immaculately polished rosewood beneath his fingertips. Something in his heart tugs. 

“Yes…” he murmurs. “Yes, I think you’re absolutely right. This is the one for me.”

“Well, brilliant!” Eoin claps his hands, doing an almost-admirable job of suppressing his euphoria at just a large commission so early in the morning. “That was easy, wasn’t it? Now if you’d like to come with me into the back, we can sort out a payment plan.”

Lucifer looks up with a perplexed squint. “Payment plan? The plan being I give you money and you give me the piano, yes?”

The man’s eyelids flutter as he processes. “You’d… like to pay outright?”

“Well yes, of course.”

A lump visibly works its way down Eoin’s throat, and the thrill of a sale leaves his eyes as he seems to form the conclusion his potential customer is gravely misinformed. “Sir… the cost of this instrument starts at $85,000.”

“Oh, is that all?” Lucifer’s eyes draw back over to the larger model. “Maybe I should ought to go for the larger one, then.”

He looks back to Eoin for advice, but the man’s simply gawping. Lucifer nods in agreement. 

“No, you’re right, best not overwhelm the space.” The piano under his hands feels like it fits him, the size and shape comfortable. It’s his piano, and he feels himself already forming a bond. It chose him, and he chooses it in return. “Yes… this one feels just right.”

Then, for a moment and seemingly out of nowhere, an uncomfortable pressure wells at the base of his skull, distant yet heavy, like laden storm clouds gathering on the horizon. It’s a feeling he knows all too well, unfortunately, but has not felt in a very, very long time. It’s the nauseating pull of Will being exercised on his being. Of Big Daddy trying to collect him from the party when he missed his curfew.

Without language, the pounding at the back of his skull demands he return home.

That is not my home, Lucifer silently defies.

So much for not getting his own omnipresent hands dirty. Truth be told, he’d wondered if after sending Amenadiel packing, the absentee father of the year would deign to make contact — though it is the most abstract form of contact possible, as per usual. But contact it is, the first in millennia. He’d always let Amenadiel take him back in the past. He supposes this amounts to his first real rebellion since the Big One, so it figures the bastard would choose now to give a damn.

Lucifer’s own heart responds with fury. The very instant he dares touch a moment of happiness, his Father must intervene. Well, he can’t . Not unless He wants to materialize Himself a physical form and bloody well march down here and get him Himself. God’s Will may be strong, but no one has had more practice in wanting than Lucifer. 

So he shoves the feeling from the back of his head, from his being, effectively slapping the wrist of the Father of all Creation, and it disappears off him like vapor.

Then the bright showroom reorients around him, the internal domestic feud taking all of the blink of an eye in Earth time.

He turns back to Eoin with a broad smile. “Right, do you take cash?”

—

Leaving the Steinway showroom ever so slightly lighter in the hip pocket, and imbued with the excitement of a delivery date they would send his piano to his new address, Lucifer returns to the hotel. One more night. Of course he always ensured he stayed in the finest of quarters when he visited Earth, wherever on it he might be, but it had never been a place of his own. From tomorrow, that would all change.

He explores Hollywood for the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon, consuming every earthly delight he crosses paths with like a devilish Pac-Man. He doesn’t understand the trepidation that some humans had described to him in the past for being alone in a new city. Los Angeles feels like a playground, built just for him. All doors are open to him. All rooms lift in mood when he walks into them. All heads turn his way with interest. They may not know him now, but they bloody well will.

The air is growing chilly again as Lucifer slowly ambles back to his accommodation, steeped in satisfaction with the echoes of strange cocktails on his tongue and the pleasant nip of a chili which was supposed to be ‘very hot’ and had won him a competition. He’d always enjoyed humans, but something about exploring what was to be his new home rather than a visit to be yanked away any moment had felt quite different. Humanity was wonderful . They valued pleasure, took risks, did things for the hell of it. 

They had freedom, and now he did, too.

In his suite, he watches the sky turn from blue to brilliant orange as he unwraps the gauze around his chest and decides he’s healed enough now to do without. The two large crescent moon shaped scars down his back vex him, but perhaps they’ll still heal to smooth skin. And if not, it’s a meager price to pay for what he has now. Frankly, nothing can blunt his joy. 

The hotel telephone on the sideboard chirps out a buoyant trill, and Lucifer tosses his handful of gauze and raises the phone to his ear. The slow, plummy tone of the ancient night desk attendant rolls down the line. “Mr Morningstar, there are a number of gentlemen in the lobby here to see you. Shall I send them up?”

Lucifer tilts his head, running through who might be calling on him. He’d given his suite number to only two very disparate groups of people so far. “Would you say they’re more gentlemen with briefcases and more sodding papers for me to sign, or gentlemen in mesh tanks with a raging case of disco fever?”

“The latter, sir.”

“Oh!” Lucifer brightens. “Very well then, send them on up.”

And then Lucifer’s entangled in limbs once again. What alcohol can’t do for him, he does quite well all on his own, allowing himself to get swept along until all he cares to notice is pleasure. He’s never had any trouble abandoning his inhibitions, and as the LA men’s competitive roller-disco team pours in through his open door and wraps a feather boa around his neck, he does just that.

The night elevates into pure sin of the finest sort, the kind you’d never find in Hell. The wounds on his back are healing well, and he’ll be damned if he’s keeping a shirt on with this many lads around. None of them seem to notice, and soon he’s so embroiled in ecstasy that neither does he.

The hours pass in a blur, though the moments seem to slow. The landscape outside his hotel window goes from dusk to deep night within a single blink, yet then he watches the shimmering snowfall of a handful of confetti fall around him with enough time to count each individual piece. Perhaps this is what truly getting lost in a moment is. As well as he does loosening up on Earth, in Hell it’s impossible. And on previous Earth visits, he was still far from relaxed, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, the party to end, and his tenure in Hell to resume once more.

It’s in that moment, as he does a line of cocaine up the center of Oskar someone-or-other’s waxed chest,  that Lucifer knows with a deep, resounding certainty that he’ll do anything to ensure the party never ends. Not this time. 

So when the pressure returns at the back of his skull in the quiet some time after 3:00am, his defiant heart is more than ready to fight for his freedom.

Laying in the moonlight, Lucifer gently slips from the tangle of biceps and triceps and cocks, and slides back into his heather gray suit pants. 

He wants to look the bastard in the face when he tells him to sod off for the very last time.

The rooftop would be chilly if he felt the cold. Condensation gathers on the outside of the steel fire-escape door as Lucifer steps with bare feet down onto the frigid concrete ground. Beyond the waist-high brick, Los Angeles is as quiet as it gets. Lucifer’s head still thrums with the bass of disco glam, champagne and other delights still linger on his tongue.

He plans to make this swift.

The stars are out tonight. He’s been told by some humans that LA is too bright to see them, but he can always see them. They, too, are his. 

So he tilts his head upwards, then directs his attention beyond.

“Now hear this, Dad,” he spits to the night sky. “Your intimidation tactics won’t work this time. I know what you want. And I’m ignoring it.”

A frisson of nerves run through his body as he says it. Even the rebellious son had only outright defied just that one time. Hadn’t gone well. But what sense was there in rising again if not to fight for what he couldn’t claim the first time?

“I’m stronger than I was when you threw me away,” he continues, teeth gritted skywards, hands on the low concrete wall. “You tossed me into Hell and I ascended to its throne. I bend to no one’s will now. You want me back in Hell so desperately? You come and get me yourself.”

It’s an offer his Father will never take. For all his grandiosity, the prick wouldn’t get anything done without a band of emissaries to run his errands. Even the stars that fill his field of vision wouldn’t exist if he himself hadn’t been an obedient son once upon a time.

A car with a bassy subwoofer drives past on the street beneath, but otherwise, the night is silent. He has no indication he’s been heard, but for the dull throb still at the back of his head.

Of course He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. But perhaps Lucifer doesn’t need one. After all, he’s not asking for permission.

“It’s high time you learned, Dad, that there is will other than yours.” A northerly breeze ghosts across his body as he steps back. “If you don’t want me, then bloody well let me go.” 

Then he turns away, baring his half-healed wing scars to the night sky.

He gets halfway across the rooftop before an answer comes. Tingling joins the blunted ache, turning something he could ignore into something he wants to scratch.

He won’t turn around. This is done . It is done because he willed it, and he may not have agency over all the domains of the Universe, but the one thing he does control is himself .

He takes another step towards the fire escape door.

The pressure builds. It tears old fury up from inside Lucifer’s chest, fierce and blazing. The sort he’d expressed only ashes of for the eons he’d cursed out Heaven. He’d thought the resentment hadn’t eased with time, but it had. He realizes because he feels it now, burning back in full. The wrath of his unyielding Father, so incensed by curiosity, and by hope.

Lucifer becomes aware he’s bent from the pressure exerted on him, and he begins to straighten. “You will not—”

Pain joins his throbbing skull. 

It rips Lucifer’s words away from him like they’re a child’s toy. The pressure builds, and builds, until he has to close his eyes against it. No longer just pressure and pain, but a visceral pulling. The same as he’d felt in the Steinway showroom, but infinitely stronger. Blood pounds in his ears louder than any bass line, and he feels a fricative mental screech like nerve endings being torn away. He resists the dire need to cry out, to fall to the ground. He won’t give Him the satisfaction of seeing him fall again. He’d been hurt far worse than this, by the very same hand, no less, and he can withstand greater still. But the force of Will keeps building, made manifest as needles through his brainstem, harsher every second and it won’t stop—

Until it does.

Gaping silence fills the rooftop. Lucifer opens his eyes to the concrete ground, bent double but still standing, as shivers of adrenaline wrack his body.

And then in the silence, he hears Him. Spoken words from his Father’s mouth for the first time since he was just a good son with a curious heart.

If you so wish to live amongst humans, my son, then so be it.

Time dilates, and Lucifer hardly breathes. He doesn’t doubt his senses. There is never any doubt when He speaks.

Then, his frozen body reacts, spinning back to the night sky to demand He explain Himself, explain what that means, why the first words He says to him in countless eons have to be so bloody cryptic. 

And as the Los Angeles skyline swings back into view, he has the strangest feeling he’d just been talking to someone.

A cool wind curls around his bare shoulders, making him shiver. It’s late to be outside half dressed, yet he can’t quite recall what his intention had been for coming up here. It sits just outside his reach of awareness before disappearing entirely, like walking into a room and forgetting why you did.

He rolls his neck to abate the lingering echoes of a headache as that, too, drifts away, a swathe of night sky sliding past his view.

The stars are out tonight. Billions of tiny pinpricks, each one individual and radiant.

He has the oddest sense that’s supposed to mean something.