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It was a triumph.
He makes a note here -- huge success.
Those are the words Cagliostro uses to describe herself. Lucifer would not typically write it down, but she told him to note it verbatim.
She spreads out on the couch in a victorious way when he glances at her. “Some people call what you do and what you give miracles.”
Lucifer clicks his pen. “Some people feel that transition is a miraculous event. A rebirth, if you will.”
Cagliostro scoffs. “Rebirth. Now there’s a funny word.”
Lucifer folds his hands together, a silent gesture that gives the girl her go-ahead.
“I’ve seen a lot of people die,” she says. “And I was supposed to die, too. I just decided I wouldn’t. So if I was going to keep on living, I thought: why not have a cute body?”
“Do you feel you’ve undergone a rebirth?” Lucifer prods.
“I’m still the same as ever. What’s changed is the world.” Cagliostro drums her fingers across her arm. It’s similar to the habits of smokers Lucifer’s sat with, itching for the addiction they’ve tried to overcome. “Alchemy’s turned into medicine. Poultices have turned into drugs. Getting yourself a new body has its own word now!”
She grins. Cagliostro sometimes likes to feed off the shock of others. Lucifer, plain-faced and receptive, is the antithesis to her unproductive behaviours.
“‘Transition,’” sighs Cagliostro. “But who’s doing the transition? I’ve always known what I was. Isn’t it just the world shuffling things around to accept the weight of me?”
“If that’s how you feel, then no one can deny those feelings,” Lucifer says politely.
Cagliostro laughs at him and hops off her rouge seat. She gives him a little slap on the arm as she passes him by on the way to the door. He doesn’t encourage physical contact with his clients, but she’s touched him in the same place where she applies her estrogen patches, and he supposes there’s meaning in that.
“I’m glad I got to know you in this way, Doctor,” she says, hanging herself off the doorway. “And I think I hate it, too.” Before Lucifer can ask--or even confirm her next appointment--she vanishes with the parting words of, “Get a haircut!”
Lucifer touches the ends of his bangs. He casts a look into the mirror, placed just so that if clients wish to avoid it, they can. He has to lean forward to catch a glimpse of himself.
It’s true: the left side of his hair is getting rather long. He sets his pen and paper down, turning his head to observe the sky.
Some of his clients are beyond understanding, but not unfortunately so.
According to all standards of counseling ethics, there is no way a practitioner should be able to date a client. The practitioner, of course, comes to the date anyway, because men like him don’t care what the board of ethics thinks is inappropriate.
Sandalphon, a name he keeps in his files but not in his head, arrives early. He shifts awkwardly from heel to heel, looking unnerved at the prospect of entering Lucifer’s home.
“Are you uncomfortable?” Lucifer asks, and then steps backward out of Sandalphon’s space. Sandalphon quails from the loss of him.
“No, I’m just --” Tongue-tied. Lucifer waits patiently for Sandalphon to rearrange the parts of himself that wish to speak. “I expected your home to be… larger.”
Lucifer is not in the practice of keeping a mansion for others to gawk at. That might have been the tradition of his parents, and his parents’ parents, but no more. “A therapist’s salary could not afford it.” His lips quirk up when Sandalphon quirks. “Come in.”
Sandalphon appears even less ready for the inside of his house than his jokes. He keeps it sparsely decorated. The room to the bedroom, with its king-size bed, is wide open. The dining room is part of the living room, and the living room is part of the entrance, and they have but to take a dozen steps and they have arrived.
“I apologise,” Lucifer says in advance. He dips behind the kitchen island and begins pulling out plates and cups. “I’ll need to check on the oven.”
Sandalphon murmurs something, soft but with heavy weight. He speaks up with, “You cooked for me?”
Lucifer turns back to him, tying the grey, I hope my HUGE KNOCKERS don’t get in the way of grillin’ apron to his front. Sandalphon stares at it. “Should I have not?”
“N-no! I just--”
Lucifer’s smile silences him, and Sandalphon looks as if he’s been slapped in the face.
He wears a similar expression when the meal is served and Lucifer tells him what they’re eating.
“Dove?” Sandalphon repeats, pale.
“Local game,” Lucifer elaborates. “I try to support the local farmers and hunters as much as possible. The vegetables are organic. Do you know Ms. De La Fille from the second quarter?”
“Oh…”
If Sandalphon has any more thoughts about the meal, he doesn’t share them. He nods his head with his mouth full of broccoli when Lucifer asks if he enjoys it, but otherwise…
Otherwise, Sandalphon sits across from him, a veritable black hole of emotional density. There are so many unasked questions in his eyes. When he thinks Lucifer isn’t looking, his gaze takes on the tang of desperate hope.
Lucifer studies it on the edge of his knife. He’s still tucking in to his meal long after Sandalphon has finished. Sandalphon offers no complaint, and he sits there with his hands in his lap, rocking occasionally as if to remind his own body that he is, in fact, alive.
Offered wine, Sandalphon handles his glass clumsily.
“What’s wrong?”
A little water seeps out of the dam. “I thought,” Sandalphon says, and then he shakes his head. “I didn’t think you would agree to see me.”
Lucifer cants his head. “Why is that?”
Sandalphon ripples. “When I met you… when you saw me… you were so detached. I didn’t think you had any interest in me. At all.”
He looks scared of the words that will come next. He’s dense, but fragile. Lucifer could hold him in the palms of his hands. “You booked an appointment with me. As a counselor. And as a counselor, I cannot have romantic or sexual interest in any of my clients.”
Dejected, Sandalphon sinks in his seat.
“Yet, I feel it only natural that the opposite should be true outside of work,” Lucifer resumes. Sandalphon jerks up and looks at him.
“You--”
“Sandalphon.” The name of the young man on his tongue causes a freeze of the world around them. He tastes the power on his lips. “Would you help me finish this bottle? I’m afraid it’s not expensive, but…”
The named young man blinks, and then he nods furiously. “Of course.”
He’s halfway to drunk and Sandalphon is like oil in his arms when he pushes him against the wall to kiss him. The crickets make their presence known outside. The owls hoot. Sandalphon is slippery, as though he’s falling between dimensions every other second.
Sandalphon drags him into his own bed, but he’s begging for the slide of Lucifer inside of him. The black hole goes quasar. Sandalphon cries his name when Lucifer pushes in.
It is not a bad night.
Lucifer wakes to Sandalphon lying in bed next to him. He tries to raise his right hand to scratch at his eyes, but he finds it’s being held. He blearily follows Sandalphon’s gaze, fingers shifting and holding.
“Feathers,” Sandalphon says, instead of good morning.
“Feathers,” Lucifer agrees. He’s got criss-crossing wires strung up on his ceiling like a teenage girl, but instead of cheap lightbulbs, feathers hang from them instead.
Sandalphon shifts on his stomach, looks at Lucifer. Lucifer looks at him. Sandalphon appears intent on studying the etchings of his face. “Did you make it yourself?”
“I did,” Lucifer replies. He doesn’t expect Sandalphon’s smile. He doesn’t expect the needy laugh or the lips that come over to trace his. When Lucifer wrinkles his nose, Sandalphon pulls back, horrified. Lucifer clarifies. “Morning breath.”
Fearful look giving way to something easier, Sandalphon backs up. “I’ll go--” Then he stops himself. “I didn’t bring my toothbrush.” A consternated look strikes his face as he glances to his clothes on the floor. “Is there a corner store nearby? I can--”
“Go home,” says Lucifer, “and bring your things over.”
“... my toothpaste? And my toothbrush?” Sandalphon ventures quietly. Lucifer shakes his head. Sandalphon goes very still.
“Bring your things over.”
Sandalphon pushes onto his hands and then climbs out of the bed. He holds his arms around himself, then presses fingers to his back, as if reminding himself of all the places where Lucifer kissed him. “I’ll,” he says, voice thick, “be right back.”
That is, in essence, how Sandalphon moves in after their first date.
“... I’m home,” says a hesitant voice from the door.
“Welcome back,” Lucifer greets, turning around. Sandalphon looks all at once relieved to see his face, dropping his bag into one of the dining room chairs. He comes close and hops onto the kitchen island, leaning forward to look at the thing in Lucifer’s hands.
It’s a bird.
It’s a dead bird.
“For tonight?” queries Sandalphon, a brow raised. He’s doing his best to look nonchalant or casually curious. He doesn’t notice, but his stiff back shows his reticence.
Lucifer’s plucking the feathers off the bird, one by one, gathering them into two neat piles. One pile is bigger than the other. The pile to the left, the smaller one, hosts sleek brown feathers. Sandalphon picks one up and runs his fingers across it, going with the grain.
Lucifer doesn’t answer, so Sandalphon makes a polite observation. “I thought hunters were supposed to skin and quarter it for you.”
“You’re thinking of a butcher.”
Sandalphon glances up at him, screwing up his face. “What hunters are you buying from?”
“Oh.” Lucifer meets his eyes. Though they’ve been together for weeks at this point, Sandalphon insists on melting every time their gazes come together. “This isn’t from a hunter.”
“What? Was it just on the porch?”
“It’s a mourning dove,” Lucifer explains, employing the tone of infinite patience he uses with his clients. It doesn’t mean he’s out of patience. He just understands this is going to be a process. “While quite abundant, they typically do not die on one’s porch. Such a bird would also be ripe with disease.”
The unspoken question hangs in the air like a balloon, but Lucifer will not pop it. Sandalphon shifts back onto his elbows and blows out a breath. “Where did it come from?”
“A neighbour of ours,”--how heavy that word, ours--”keeps and raises the injured that come his way. Nezahualpilli.”
Sandalphon’s face softens. Nezahualpilli is not an easy man to know, but Sandalphon has taken a liking to the man and his eagle. “So this one didn’t make it…” he muses. “Did he have a name?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“He seems like… I would have named him Lancelot, if he hadn’t…”
Lucifer’s finished plucking feathers, for now. He tips the stiff bird carefully, gently, into a plastic zip bag, and he stores it in the fridge.
When he turns around, Sandalphon is looking at him as if he’s skinned a shark.
“He’s not really dinner.” His partner seems ill-at-ease with the idea, to put it lightly. “Is he?”
“No. But I had plans to finish the plucking later and turn its body out to the birds.”
Sandalphon appears as if he wants to say something more, and that look doesn’t entirely disappear when Lucifer settles in between his spread legs. He reddens under the attention, doubly so when Lucifer removes his gloves and touches his thumb to Sandalphon’s lip. “You’ve just returned. How was your day?”
He’s curling a lock of brown hair around his finger, next, while he awaits the answer. Yet Sandalphon cannot seem to let this gnawing issue go. “Why are you plucking him?” he asks quietly.
“To add feathers to my room,” Lucifer says, like it is so simple. And it is.
Sandalphon turns his head away from Lucifer’s attentions. “He looked so clean. Did Nezahualpilli notice him right away, or --” The air swallows up his conclusion, sinking down in the weight of it.
Lucifer says, “I received it from Nezahualpilli when it was still alive.” But that makes things so much worse. All of a sudden, Sandalphon is seizing him by the hands, rallying on him. Lucifer looks down at his fingers, thinking distantly of how he forgot to remind him to scrub the germs off.
“That makes no sense! We can get fake feathers from the market, or--” he breaks off and charges up again, all at once. He looks dizzied. He’s probably just realised where all the feathers in Lucifer’s room came from. “Why would you kill an innocent bird?”
And Lucifer… genuinely isn’t sure how to answer. His puzzlement increases the worry on Sandalphon’s face. Sandalphon sags between them, and with his head low, he mutters, “You’re not supposed to be like this.”
“Like what, Sandalphon?”
But he’s leaving the embrace. He’s getting on his shoes. He’s grabbing his bag, and he’s shutting the front door with a slam.
Lucifer remains, hands still hovering in the air.
Why? Such an odd question. Why.
He pushes his hands into the fake marble of the kitchen island and eases his weight into it.
Why would he ever disobey an instinct?
Lucifer never specialised in the art of couples’ therapy. He’s not a marriage counselor; he doesn’t have the licence for it. He has a deluge of conflict resolution skills at his disposal, but he’s not sure which ones to choose. How does one problem solve a budding relationship when the other party isn’t in the room?
Sooner or later--sooner, thankfully--the problem softens. Sandalphon returns home after the night away. Lucifer stands up from the sofa when he sees him. Both of them stall, Sandalphon with his bag half-slung off his shoulder, Lucifer weighing himself down into the hardwood.
A stone has to give. A dam must break. He says it first. “You’re back.”
“Of course I’m back,” his lover replies, looking at him strangely, as though appalled by the thought that he wouldn’t return. “Did you think I was gone forever?”
Lucifer had had no idea what to think. He’s still not sure where they stand now. In his silence, Sandalphon analyses him, and then he comes forward, dropping his bag on the carpet.
Sandalphon cups his face in his hands. Their eyes meet and stay a while. Sandalphon runs his finger over the long bridge of Lucifer’s nose. Lucifer says, “I was frightened.”
The comment makes the crease in Sandalphon’s brow go away. He even smiles, cants his head to the side. “I’m through with leaving you.”
Certainly, Lucifer’s glad his instincts won’t rob them of their relationship, but no one can say what the future will hold. He’s quieted by the press of Sandalphon’s lips against his. They come once. They come again. The perihelion orbit they’ve been coasting shatters and they fall into each other.
Sandalphon’s rubbing his hands greedily over Lucifer’s back while Lucifer groans, sliding the condom onto himself. “Did you wash your hands?” he asks.
Sandalphon kisses him, nodding furiously, as though Lucifer’s said something undeniably sexy. He scales back and his eyes shut with confusion. “Did I-- what?”
“Did you wash your hands,” Lucifer repeats. The thought is suspended in animation when he presses inside. The both of them hold their collective breath, then release it in a partnered whoosh of air. “After you left?”
“Ah. Um. I,” says Sandalphon, digging fingers into his ribs, “Yes. Yes, of course I did. Why?”
He gets his answer when Lucifer takes one of his hands and begins to suck his ring finger into his mouth. Sandalphon turns a red that matches the colour of his discarded sweater.
They do not talk about birds. They do not talk much at all. Their mouths are occupied in a continual meeting, and Lucifer’s hips are driving, pushing them into their pleasure.
“Primarch.”
Lucifer glances up. Sandalphon’s staring down at him from his seat on the armrest. He continues: “Does the word mean anything to you?”
“... something that is first?” he wonders, shutting his book. “It sounds like a title.”
In a ruffled voice, Sandalphon replies, “A long time ago, it was said that a primarch ruled over every element in the world. There was one who ruled over them all. He was called the supreme. The supreme primarch.”
Sandalphon continues to watch him with an impressive weight. Lucifer wonders if they’re celebrating their six-month anniversary by revealing Sandalphon’s second life as a new age Horizon’s Witness.
“If the word is meant to stir something in me, I am sorry,” murmurs Lucifer slowly. “I wish I did not have to disappoint you like this.”
His partner gets that hard, stony look on his face he dons now and again. It’s not anger. It looks more like a child attempting not to cry. “What do you think of the idea?” he prods, sliding down into Lucifer’s lap.
“Nothing in particular.”
“Nothing at all?”
Lucifer studies himself for a long few minutes. Sandalphon’s eyes never waver. Come time, he must give a shake of his head. “Nothing.” He runs his fingers over the book of coupons, worrying creases into the fold-out deals.
“You don’t have a fanciful mind, do you?” says Sandalphon with a sigh. He slings his lovely legs in Lucifer’s direction. Lucifer puts a hand on one of his thighs.
“I’m not the boy I was in my youth,” he confesses.
“How old are you?” scoffs Sandalphon.
“I was 34 last April…” he says. Truthfully, age doesn’t mean much to him. He endured seven years of a doctorate and two more in a post-doc, all so he could open his own practice and reach out his hands to as many people as possible. The only thing that matters is how many lives he’s touched -- that, and Sandalphon.
Sandalphon, the young man who whispers, “You have almost ten years on me.”
Lucifer stirs at the doubt in his voice, the insecurity. “If the gap in our age is troublesome to you--”
“No,” Sandalphon rushes. He puts up a hand and then lowers it. “No, no. I-- I just can’t believe how much I missed out on. On your life. I mean.”
“You had your own life to live,” he says to his partner, but his words don’t put a dent in that gravity well of disappointment.
“All that time I was trying to…” Sandalphon’s voice falls into nothingness. He shakes his head, ruefully studies his hands. “I think now I understand how Belial feels.”
“Belial?”
“A snake,” Sandalphon spits, an epithet on his tongue. His expression eases and he meets Lucifer’s eyes, assuaging in the rhythms of his next sentence. “It’s nothing; I’m sorry.”
There’s another topic there, buried beneath the autumn leaves. Lucifer picks it back up. “Are you a devout believer in the idea of primarchs?” he asks.
“Are you asking if it’s my religion?” Sandalphon echoes disbelievingly. He snorts in laughter, covering his mouth. “No. Well-- not really. It’s not like that…
“I’ll show you.” He reaches behind Lucifer and rubs at one of his vertebrae. “I’ll show you real soon. I promise.”
Lucifer’s soft smile makes Sandalphon light up nova.
They’re an isolated, codependent pair who rarely exist outside of each other. Lucifer’s friends have given way to shadow. He’s not sure if Sandalphon ever had any. They spend more time indoors than outside when Lucifer isn’t at work. Lucifer begins to take more appointments for counseling by phone. Some of his regulars even write him long letters, carried in by the eternal tradition of skyfarers and their ships.
It is not at all healthy. Lucifer recognises the signs of poison seeping in through his walls every step they take, every day they spend together. But was he not the one who opened his door to a former client asking for a date? Was he not the man who invited a fresh-faced youth to live with him after they’d shared a bed together?
Lucifer has been a calm, cautious boat on a gentle lope through the skies for the last thirty years of his life. It could be, perhaps, a midlife crisis. It could be his long-neglected hormones reigniting with a vengeance and dictating important interpersonal decisions for him. His mind could be failing him, or his heart, or his spine.
He eases with a long sigh into Sandalphon’s slick hands, rubbing out the stiffness in his back.
“I’ve never seen you hunch,” Sandalphon remarks as he works. He doesn’t seem entirely sure of where his hands should go, guiding himself by delight and curiosity. Whatever he does, it feels good. Lucifer has been wearing his stress for weeks. “You sit straight as an arrow even when you’re meeting patients over the phone. How do you do it?”
“I’m not sure how to stop,” Lucifer answers into his hands. His fingers flex and clutch intermittently.
“I must be the only one who’s seen you like this,” teases Sandalphon. He’s trying to be teasing. Lucifer hears it in his tone. He hears, also, the sheer desperation that is Sandalphon wanting that little joke to be true.
He inclines his head with the slightest of nods. “When I was seven,” he remarks into the past, “my guardian received a report card stating that they were recommending me for therapy due to my stiffness.”
Sandalphon laughs. “Just from your back?”
“I believe they meant emotionally.” Lucifer looks up at the ceiling when Sandalphon’s fingers grope at the small of his back. “‘Stunted.’ That was the word they used for me. These days, we are discouraged from using such disparaging lexicon for our clients.”
The silence is soft and malleable. He is pushed back, chest opening and lungs expanded. He lets himself be guided.
“You’ve always been like that,” Sandalphon says. It is not a question.
“You would know,” he replies. It lilts up at the end. It is a question.
“I would,” agrees Sandalphon. He pushes in hard with his thumbs. Lucifer bends at the waist, accommodating his pressure. It feels like he’s being pulled apart and spread wide. “I really would. I’m the only one who would.”
“If you feel your daily life is suffering from emotional issues,” Lucifer says--who is he kidding, he thinks, knowing Sandalphon’s daily life is him and only him--”pursuing again the option of therapy would be a good idea.”
“Is that your professional opinion, Doctor Lucifer?”
“It’s my personal opinion, as your partner.”
Sandalphon’s fingers stop. He’s got Lucifer oiled, warm, and ready. He wonders if this next silence is supposed to be the one that slips them into the heat of sex. He wouldn’t be opposed to letting himself be stripped down and taken. He shuts his eyes, imagining the idea.
Sandalphon pressing in. Sandalphon looking elated and choked on top of him. Sandalphon arching his back just as Lucifer arches his. Sandalphon kissing him and not being able to stop. All the words Lucifer would beg. All the words Sandalphon would promise. Codependency at its blistering height.
The voice right next to his ear comes as a surprise.
“You have your dead doves,” Sandalphon chuckles, “and I have my eagles.”
The explanation comes quickly, for Sandalphon has never been patient.
Sandalphon thumbs carefully at his skin. The feathers that are supposed to decorate Lucifer’s room are buried at his feet. The wires have been stripped down and re-purposed.
“Am I just supposed to wait until you remember yourself?” he asks. “Just like I was supposed to wait for eternity and longer in that stupid dungeon? It crumbled… and I forgave you… but I was just emerging into a different kind of prison.”
Lucifer’s eyes follow his right-to-left path across the feathers. It is not unlike a dance.
“I thought I could do it without you. If I had six wings at my back, it was possible. I just had to think of you and you were beside me. Now you’re right in front of me. The you I want isn’t.”
Is there a method to this madness? Sandalphon has never liked to hear himself talk at length. Lucifer has never used his words much, either. Somehow, still, they found a space in between for conversation. Now it is just onesided.
“I can take being your stand-in. I just… I don’t have that snake’s patience. I don’t want to have to throw the dice every fifty years to see if you and I are born at the same time, or if you remember me, or if I forget you.” Sandalphon laughs dryly. “Not that I would ever forget you.”
He approaches, pressing his forehead to Lucifer’s. The motion sways Lucifer the tiniest bit. It makes him this side of motion sick.
“I don’t have some master plan to trick you into remembering me, and I’m not going to destroy the skies both you and she asked me to protect.” Sandalphon looks off and to the side. He lasts a second before he connects their eyes again. He grasps the back of Lucifer’s neck to steady him. “So I’m-- hah. The best I can do is keep you here for as long as possible. And…”
He reaches out to stroke the skin of Lucifer’s back that expands outward from him. Lucifer winces. Sandalphon pets his hair in apology. It hurts like a hot knife, like the very literal weapon that had carved him up an hour-month-lifetime-second ago.
“I wanted to give you back your wings.” He looks beyond Lucifer, but also at him, at the ribs that pierce outward, detached from his spine, at the inhaling-exhaling sacks of pink that are supposed to be his lungs. “I put as many white feathers on them as I could, but you didn’t have that many. All of it’s brown.”
Sandalphon keeps up a mess of bloody feathers at his feet. Either way, he continues to stroke Lucifer’s hair. He wears a hard expression, not so much like a child trying to keep himself from crying -- more like a man, trying not to smile at a work of art he’s created.
“I think a part of you remembered me,” he whispers, “and I swear I’m going to pull it out of you, one way or another. I love you, Lucifer.”
Lucifer, lips parted, does not have the ability to do much more than breathe.
Even still--
--no, because of that very reason, for all of the reasons adding up to this--
He gives the barest nod of his chin.
A reply in kind.
A family can be a man, his eviscerated lover, and the tacky remains of dead doves at their feet.