Chapter Text
Lucifer didn't spare a glance toward the six demons trailing behind him in an anxious line like ducklings following their mother. The rocky road was annoying enough but, while flying over the currents would be far faster, he would not know what to look for. The only demon who actually dared to open her mouth to him before this little field trip walked a step in front of him, her booming voice tinged with fear.
And, for the first time since his return to Hell after Charlie's kidnapping to ruthlessly quash the blooming rebellion, it was not a fear of him.
“Monster”, Anuka had said. Enormous. Breathing inside the mountain of monumental granite blocks. Black, scaled and loud.
He was not sure if any of those claims were true, but he had doubted that it could really be that loud if nobody heard it till now. As he trudged the ash-covered path, roughly carved by demons brave enough to walk this shortcut instead of swimming across the vast waters of Lethe, he started to suspect that the monster could very well be singing An die Freude (Ode to Joy)1 at the top of its lungs accompanied by the entire London Symphony Chorus (or three hundred cats spun around by their tails) and still be
unheard.
Cocytus - The River of Wailing - was the most aptly named of the rivers of Hell. (And here he gave himself a pat on the back, as he was the one to name them. So what if their names were 'borrowed’?). It flowed as a lazy stream through a large swath of empty plains that would one day become corridors full of prison cells.
The geography of Hell was constantly shifting, and the serpentine river beds shifted to match it.
Once past the plains, Cocytus ate its way through the stone and ran underground, hiding there for kilometres, only to transform itself into a dangerous swirling mass of yellow-tinged water that thundered from the cracks inside its stone tomb as it struck the bottom far, far below. Even from where he stood, its echo bouncing off the high towers of granite was deafening, terrible and exhausting.
He did not like the way the hair stood up on the nape of his neck.
Hell was the home of monsters. They were thrown here by his Father before Time, before Hell gained its name, long before Lucifer had gained his own.
They spawned here. Crawled from under the ground, fully formed or as amorphous collections of parts hastily slapped together, blind and deaf and ravenously hungry.
They hunted. Alone or in packs.
And they listened to no one, not even their King.
Demons born of Hell weren't built to be afraid, not truly.
For most of them it was just an instinctive wariness against a larger predator
encroaching on their territory. The simple instinct for self-preservation of a lion trapped in a circle of hyenas.
Lilim were different. Maze had surprised him with that.
Just human enough to understand humour and grief.
Enough to construct community, exchange tales, feel pleasure beyond the physical.
Enough to love.
Enough to know real fear.
Hell had only a handful of the Fallen. It needed an angel as its ruler, any angel at all, but to succeed, they'd have to have wings. And when Lucifer Fell, all who followed him down burned just as he did. But he kept his wings, trapped in his cage and chains, watching his brethren tear the still smoking remains off their backs, and scavengers making off with claws full, to feast on the marrow of bones, ash-filled feathers and scraps of fried, crispy skin.
He doesn't know where the Fallen went. Who they had been or what they were now. They'd melted into the general population, indistinguishable from the rest, except ever-silent Duma and Azazel who frequently kept Lucifer company.
Azazel was as mad as a bag of cats and twice as entertaining, but those rare bouts of sanity when he ventured out were short and left Lucifer filled with pity and creeping tendrils of guilt. It took something out of him every time he would wind his arm around his insensate friend, to return him to the best-padded room available in Hell and abandon him there to bounce off the walls like a pinball until he came to himself again.
Duma never came out when Azazel was around, but on the other hand, Duma rarely left his space.
Hell wasn't a popular holiday spot.
There was so little in here for an angel to truly fear.
And too much that could go wrong at any given time.
Dad, he hated this place.
He was so trapped in his thoughts he had not noticed Anuka stopping and nearly walked right into her back. He saved himself at the last moment and squinted over her head to where she pointed, her small clawed hand outstretched.
The hole was no bigger than his fist. Now that he focused, he could hear the rumbling sound, like thousands of rocks rolling down the mountain, multi-toned cacophony combining the rattlesnake clatter of pebbles, the rumble of boulders scraping against each other and booming sound of metric tons of stone hurling over steep heights. The rest of the demons huddled unusually close to each other and, at his simple gesture, Anuka joined the crowd.
He crept forward. He had to duck his head a little, but with a proper bit of manoeuvring he managed to peer through the hole. It was... black. He saw precisely nothing. He threw an irritated glare over his shoulder, but frowned when Anuka urgently waved at him to look again. He turned, not without a sharp sting of suspicion making him set his hand on the hilt of his blade as he forced himself to gaze into the darkness.
Except it wasn't as dark as it had been seconds prior.
A miniscule sliver of murky light showed in the topmost corner and torturously, slowly expanded until it revealed… little.
Nothing more really than a path of light curling around an expanse of glimmering scales. Only something truly enormous could possess scales that size, each as broad as his entire wingspan. The light in the funnel-shaped hole where he pressed his face to the warm rock started to fade once again. Lucifer finally grasped that whatever was in there was inhaling, covering that peep-hole with its own body.
"Back to Dis with you." They didn't have to be told twice, demons scattered. Any temporary unity dissolved like a fog as they scrambled down the path, yipping and growling at each other.
Lucifer waited till they were far away before spreading his wings. There had to be an opening, hopefully one big enough to fit him. He took flight, letting himself soar on the unpredictable winds, circling the mountain-top.
Spotting an entrance from the air was like doing one of those optical illusion puzzles with two near-identical pictures, except designed for adults: tedious, monochrome, and deadly serious. It took him twenty long minutes to find the fissure between two slabs of uneven stone.
He would be able to squeeze in...
Without wings.
Predictably. Of course, it’s Hell. Why had he expected anything to go his way?
He hovered, calculating whether to just dive in, fold his wings for a second and snap them open on the other side, when it occurred to him that he would be just like a tasty moth trying to greet the spider by tangling in its web.
He hadn’t seen much, and the more he thought of it, it was possible that whatever light he had seen from the ground was reflected by some polished piece of Dad-knows-what that hung stretched over the hole. He decided to climb in. Wings winched at the last second as he threw himself onto the slab, grunting at the impact. He clung to it by his fingertips and after finding a toehold, he heaved himself up. He climbed face first, arms grappling at the sides of the narrow opening until his body hung three-fourths in and he
could finally look at whatever unknown new abomination had invaded his kingdom.
Again.
The other patches of light were smaller but enough to take in the whole interior. And the monster filled it well. It was startlingly magnificent. Hell was known for its ugliness in all forms. Everything trapped here for any length of time became in some way corrupted, disfigured or blemished. The monsters most of all. But this one, this looked like what humans would call Jörmungandr... once they stopped screaming. A serpent coiled in a seemingly endless rope of opalescent black with hints of garnet at its belly. Hard bony spikes lay at rest along the length of its back and, when he risked a closer look, he saw that swathes of its hide were patterned like billions of feathers. They left him the impression that should he scratch the outer layer, wings would erupt from its back in multitude.
He was nearly sorry he had to kill it. He slid closer, trying to find a good position to open his wings and dive down.
Like some movie cliché, one of the stones he was leaning on turned under the weight of his hand and hit the creature's spine. The monster stopped breathing.
It unspooled.
Expanded.
The sound it made, the scratch of its scales on the ancient polished walls, was loud enough to be heard for miles. Lucifer could finally see its head.
Triangular, horned, with a maw filled with a thousand bleach-white teeth. Its forked tongue tasted the air.
There was something pulling at his memory, something that made the sight achingly familiar.
Lucifer prepared himself to jump.
The tip of its gargantuan snout hung less than ten meters from him, he could see his own silhouette reflected in the sea of the golden eyes. It blinked at him slowly and when the serpent opened its maw, the booming hiss reverberated one word:
“Bossssss?"
He was looking at the Serpent of Eden.
@@@
The restaurant they dined in was nearly empty, except for the skeleton staff, all of whom decided to practice that professional selective deafness waiters use to protect the last dregs of their sanity. Except the server, who sat unobtrusively in a corner, listening to every word. It was the most interesting shit that happened this week, or frankly, ever, and call her crazy, but somehow she believed that every word said at the only occupied table was truth.
Something about how one guy's eyes were completely yellow, how the reservation was made under the name of 'Lucifer Morningstar' and the non-ironically vintage clothing on the beaming man lovingly addressed as 'Angel'. And she was pretty sure that the sign above the counter hadn't been touched for years. In her memory, before 5 pm it was 'borscht’ - but now it reads 'wine' as a 'soup of the day'.
"I think you are exaggerating, my dear,” Aziraphale chided Lucifer softly and patted his husband’s knee when Crowley made an offended sound. It was nice to get together with other supernatural beings after the long radio silence. The way that Crowley had simply disappeared from his life for months with no explanation had roused a potent mixture of
fear, worry and, oddly enough, boredom. Life was remarkably dull without his wily serpent's company.
And him resurfacing again, but with Satan himself - of all beings! - at his side was slightly nerve-wracking, but it did turn out all right. It truly calmed him down that he and Crowley were no longer alone in their love for humanity. Even if Lucifer took the 'love' part and ran with it, ending up head over wings in love with one single example of the species.
"You should know better. I do not lie." Lucifer raised his chin, equally offended at the comment. Chloe hid her smile behind a napkin and brushed her shoulder against his. Her phone pinged at her side and she caught his glance before reading the message. It looked like Linda had made it through the traffic. Good. She could distract the angels with little Charlie while she zipped to the ladies’ room without missing anything.
She wished that Lucifer could be less stingy with the details, but it looked like the only way to make him open up and talk about Hell was poking at Crowley's own visceral hate of it.
"Oh, so there isn't any 'artistic license' involved?" She watched as Lucifer momentarily got lost in his thoughts. Shaking his head he focused on her, his long fingers tapping on the glass he held loosely in one hand.
"If anything, that is an understatement. When he got out he took down that mountain right to the roots. Shook himself like a spiny, scaly dog and then writhed for a few minutes in the debris until he ground it to dust and …poof! from under those scales popped all those black wings." He leaned forward to show all his teeth to Crowley who rolled his eyes so hard he probably saw the inside of his head. "You looked like a flock of startled parrots!”
"Slept too long, everything itched like crazy,” explained Crowley with a half shrug. His mouth pulled into an unhappy line. "It took months to change myself back."
Aziraphale threw him a sympathetic look, knowing well how much Crowley disliked changing form. He once explained that he feared not remembering how to turn back, but there was a sneaking suspicion forming, that it was more about the fact that Crowley was simply more comfortable as a snake than as a man-shaped being. Then his mind caught up with Lucifer's words and he put the fork with a perfectly roasted baby potato speared on it back on his plate. He stared at his husband.
"Mountain." He breathed out, "My word, darling, the last time I saw you, you were a mere forty five feet!"
Chloe rolled the words silently over her tongue hoping that this way they would make more sense.
How could forty five feet of snake can be called anything but 'too much'? She thought about dinosaurs. Then reminded herself that the blue whale is bigger than any dinosaur, and things still didn't fit together any better, because she was also thinking about mountains. What makes a mountain. How high does it need to be to stop being a very steep hill? How big are mountains in Hell? How much bigger than a good, proper earthly, gigantic blue whale did the Serpent of Eden have to be to hollow out and crush a freaking geological feature like a mountain? How to hold onto her sanity trying to imagine it? Should she hold onto her sanity and try NOT to imagine it?
Lucifer chuckled as Crowley scratched the back of his neck. Like it was normal. Any of it.
Including, possibly kilometres-long snakes.
"Snakes grow through the entirety of their lives - even if those are immortal lives. Like lobsters. And I had been in Hell for what felt like eternity before I was discovered. Besides angel, the last time you saw me like that was in Eden and that was a stupidly long time ago."
Aziraphale nodded to himself, the potato finally making its way to his lips. He still appeared to be in a little shock. Crowley helpfully filled his angel’s glass with wine, before he stole a sip, eyes alight with mischief. He got a pouting angel face for his trouble, which lost nothing of its effectiveness even when Aziraphale's cheeks were full of potato. He kissed one unashamedly and washed down the taste of wine with his scotch.
"Oh, I remember when I saw him for the first time! He was all of forty centimetres long and looked like a braided shoelace!” crowed Lucifer, his hands showing how long exactly he thought Crowley had been, coming closer until only a miniscule space was left between his palms.
"Ngk." Disagreed Crowley. He had most certainly been larger than that.
(He hadn’t.)
"Oh, do tell."
"In a moment, Lucifer,” Chloe interrupted Aziraphale's inquiry, “I’d like to know how you even figured out the way to get back to Earth. You know, without all the demons crawling out from Hell for some Apocalypse re-enactment. Or a child-stealing trip."
“The whole time I was thinking of celestial solutions, but in the end it turned to be a purely physical one that worked best."
"What did you do?"
Crowley smiled over his glass, before answering for both of them.
"We used math."
"Math." Aziraphale and Chloe exchanged the look of shared pain at having to keep up with this side of madness.
"Don't look like that, Detective. We were just as surprised as you."
"I don't understand, darling. How is it even possible? Or even applicable?" Aziraphale frowned at his husband.
"See, I had just regained bipedal form and wasn't going to leave Lucifer alone in Hell, was I? One beautiful day when the harpies were screeching, the Damned were moaning and demons were getting their kicks out of kicking each other, we got tired of the constant literally God-damned noise. So we sat down and gaped at those fucking Hell Gates and decided that we might as well get shitfaced while we were at it. We got wasted on some hellaciously awful whiskey nicked from the closest Loop, griping about how much we hated Hell, ash, and especially that stone over there."
“I’d mentioned Cain and his stone obsession," piped up Lucifer, proud as a soccer mom, "and Crowley mentioned his little hellspawn Warlock and how weirdly good at math he was, so I asked..."
"...If math could solve some real life problems, and I said..." continued
Crowley in pretty good impression of Lucifer.
"...What if it did? I mean look at this fucking stone. You know how hard is to chip that fucking stone?"
"He didn't know”, explained Crowley, as if any part of this conversation had actually made some sense.
"I didn’t”, admitted Lucifer. " But I soon found out. We used Crowley's venom."
"And pickaxes."
"And hammers”, added Lucifer." Then we equipped our free demon labour with them. And this way using math we calculated how long it would take one demon to go through that stone using one tool or another," his eyes gleamed at the memory.
"And how long with many demons possessing all the tools!”, chipped in Crowley.
"Then we came up with plenty other ways to demolish those rocks, ways that demons would never come up with at all. As they say, better safe than sorry." They shared truly terrifying looks of pure unholy glee.
"In the end it took fifty years for the group to make a four inch hole, So..."
"You see, there are only three ways in or out of Hell. One was my pentacostal coin but I no longer have it, second is by flying. Third is walking through the Gates. A demon can't leave any other way but through them. Souls are immaterial, so they don't give a hoot about whatever something is or isn't in their way until they solidify in their Loops, so they just swoop in no problem. We figured out that what we needed to do was to bury the Gates in enough rubble that nothing could get out! We used some curses to make holes around the nearest stone blocks, put venom in the pockets to weaken the structures and then used Crowley's massive length to topple them down..." Crowley snorted at the innuendo and the wiggling eyebrows, before continuing Lucifer's chain of thought.
"And ended with no less than sixty cubic meters of rubble in any direction - height included - between any demon and the thoroughly entombed Gates, which will would them take roughly..."
"Twenty seven thousand years to get through...if they try to tunnel directly through solid stone."
"But since it's now a mountain of unstable stone shards, taking collapses into account we thought it will take closer to fifty. We didn't want to stay long enough to check, skedaddled right out of that flaming shithole the moment we were done. But, taking our calculated guess, it made…”
"...About six hundred ninety two days on Earth."
"And, with the time fluctuations between dimensions and the growing singularity somewhere close enough to warp things up taken into consideration, it makes…”
"One year, nine months, six days, twenty nine minutes and some seconds before we have to play Bob the Builder again!”, finished Lucifer with a flourish.
Chloe didn't pretend that she caught any of the math or that she could calculate things on the spot. Or that she knew when Lucifer got exposed to calamity that was Bob the Builder. She just looked between them, massaged the bridge of her nose and nodded to herself.
Finally she rose from her chair and pronounced, “You were both drunk and bored out of your minds”, and, motioning toward the door on the far left, she stepped away from the table.
"You have no idea...," moaned Lucifer at her retreating back before he brightened up and called after her, "Want to hear about how I met a pocket-size snake?"
Crowley finished his whiskey in one gulp and put his glass down, letting Lucifer top him up.
"I need more alcohol for that."
@@@
There was no way to count the days. He counted seconds, once. Just after his Fall, when still mad from pain, he got swallowed by the Most Horrible of Tortures - boredom.
He counted seconds, and when he'd lost track too many times in a row, he counted bars of his cage, links of the chains - those that were
visible, others obscured by the pool of liquid fire and blue gleam of sulphur. Then he counted ash flakes, their never-ending multitude was mind-numbing.
He tried to sing. Just once.
But before the first note of angelic voice echoed in the thick fumes of Hell, the sound was distorted, corrupted, and turned fundamentally wrong.
It was long past the time he'd stopped screaming for and at his Father, begging and pleading and then raging like a beast. It was fitting that a monster like him was given his own cage, impenetrable and half sunken in the lake. That he was tied like a disobedient dog in its immovable confines, slumped kneeling in the shallows with just his face and shoulders above the bubbling surface.
@@@
"No, darling. Just no”, interrupted Chloe, her hand grasping his in comfort. She ignored for a second the ping of the incoming message on her phone and focused on Lucifer.
"I'm setting the mood, Detective!"
"You're not setting shit, Boss”, interjected Crowley with a shake of his head. His smirk was a tad too honest to fully earn its name, but his eyes shone with understanding. "And I know the guy you are talking about, so I'd appreciate if you don't call my friend a monster."
Lucifer rolled his eyes, but underneath the table he tapped the side of his Louboutins against Crowley's foot. He smiled when Crowley's snakeskin boots thumped back.
@@@
He didn’t know how much time had passed. Every day was the same as he struggled against his bonds. But then he registered movement. He stared at the vast bubbling lake, blinking hard, trying to guess what exactly he was seeing - a ribbon wiggling on the surface? Black and delicate, it headed his way. As it came closer he realized it was alive and looked like a piece of bicoloured rope with stardust eyes. In its tiny maw was a jagged shard of stone. Unhesitatingly it slid through the bars his cage then onto his shoulder. Its smooth, soft body weighed nothing. Lucifer turned his head to look at it.
The little thing rose up and gently “booped” his chin with its forehead. It was the first contact he had had with any living being since his Fall.
It was jarring.
It was wonderful.
It was the only comforting thing that had happened to him since his skin burned and thickened enough that the pain no longer drove him into incoherency. The rope-like animal rested there, tucked in close. Its tail, no thicker than his smallest finger, barely wound around his neck.
He didn’t speak, didn't move. The creature panted softly around the shard of stone still clamped between its sharp teeth, burning sulphur bathed everything in eerie blue. He was tempted to nuzzle the little thing to see if it would feel as soft against his scarred cheek, but the animal started unspooling from its place. Within the blink of an eye it disappeared behind his back. He turned, or tried anyway, to see where it went, but it was gone from his sight. Was he abandoned again so soon?
And then he felt it. Underneath the surface of the lake - a light brush against his left elbow, the slim long body sliding down, wrapping around his wrist and weaving between his fingers. And a shard of wickedly sharp stone, no bigger than his thumb, pressed into his hand. An inch from the keyhole.
He nearly dropped it then and there, breath seizing in his lungs.
He squeezed the shard so hard he felt its rough edges digging into his skin.
The hope was even sharper.
The animal surfaced close to his chest, breathing hard, then climbed up his shoulder onto his head. It coiled there for a moment, then he felt its supple muscles working and the negligible weight was gone once again. He tilted his head back as far as it could go and saw the black scales circled around the lock on top of the cage.
One drop of clear liquid fell from the sharp-toothed jaw and Lucifer knew that he didn’t imagine the tiny acid hiss of corrosive venom hitting the lock.
@@@
"He burned through the lock. It took so long that he grew to the size of an anaconda. He opened the top and that's the last I saw him. Not even a tail wave for goodbye.
Once I got out of the chains I climbed through the top. Maze fished me out. The rest is, as they say, history," Lucifer finished.
Suddenly he turned towards Crowley, eyes alight with realization, "That's how you knew how long it takes to chip that hellstone! You'd done it before!"
"Ngk."Crowley went pale under his tan, subtly inching away from the table. Aziraphale stopped him with one look before the thought of running away fully crystalized.
“One thing I don't understand, why would you save him?" Chloe put down her glass to look back and forth between her Devil and his unlikely rescuer, finally focusing on the latter. “Wait! Sorry, that came out really wrong. I mean, you've said that taking even one inch off that stone takes literal ages. You had to get that chip, swim with it through the lake of liquid fire and then spend months? years? OK, years dripping venom on the locks... and then you hid. If you wanted protection it would have been the perfect excuse to ask for it, but you hid. You never admitted to saving him until Lucifer recognized you just now, you never took the credit. So why did you do it if you never planned to tell him?"
"Not important”, Crowley hedged, his eyes on the plate as he speared food onto his fork, terribly interested in not speaking about it.
"It is. It is to me." Lucifer leaned over, knowing very well that he had the best puppy eyes in creation and not an ounce of shame about using that devastating weapon.
He had wondered.
For decades that turned into centuries and then millennia. In all the years it took to free Lucifer, the snake had not said a single word. Not even when Lucifer kept talking at him to the point of growing hoarse in fear that the tiny thing would disappear, that he would blink his eyes and it would have been an illusion, a hallucination born of his failing mind.
But he stayed.
He nudged him every now and then, slept around his neck - a living, breathing reminder that freedom was possible. He stayed. Right down to the moment it was over, when he coiled on Lucifer's shoulders, bumped him lightly on the head, opened the cage to leave and never came back.
He knew Crowley to be The Serpent, but he had never seen him in that form and there were plenty of other snake-shaped demons. It just never clicked. He should have known sooner though, there are only so many demons with golden eyes.
“I never got to thank you. Thank you Crowley. You saved me from unimaginable torment and it's a debt I will never be able to repay. But I would like to know why. Please."
He could see him break under the combined power of Lucifer and the clear curiosity on Aziraphale's face coupled with Question. Crowley rarely refused those.
"You were kind to me," came a mumbled response, muffled by the piece of carrot he was defensively chewing through.
"What?"
"You…were…kind,”gritted out Crowley through clenched teeth, eyes boring holes in the cream-coloured tablecloth. "To me. Sixty million years in the Silver City, millions of those feathered pricks - and still you were one of the only two who ever gave me five fucking minutes of your time now and then - even with the masses begging for your attention. You and Raphael were the only angels who didn't treat me like I was an inconvenient pebble stuck in your sandal, so I figured ...I followed you. You didn't do anything wrong and neither did I, but we still paid for it. Didn't owe you anything after that. But, I thought of you as my friend and if I could do one thing and one thing only to both piss off Him Above and repay you for all the times you didn't turn me away when I was just an annoying Virtue which no department ever wanted, then I'd free you."
"Darling...."
“Angel. Let's not pretend that you were any less lonely in that place." Crowley jabbed his fork savagely through a piece of meat, his fingers white around the handle, then let it fall back on his plate. He sighed, picked up the glass and stared at it listlessly. His other hand travelled to meet Aziraphale's where it rested on his thigh, filling it with warmth when their fingers tangled together.
"Sorry, Dove. Didn't mean to snap at you."
They exchanged a look that spoke volumes, bodies unconsciously leaning towards each other. Crowley turned until his yellow eyes bored into Lucifer's.
"I was under no illusion that I would be any better liked in Hell than I was in Heaven, so after I helped you, I hid. There was no need to set myself up for disappointment."
"So you escaped and became the best demon who ever demoned." And in Lucifer's opinion that was the Dad's honest truth. Crowley gave humans the choice and that was something he could fully stand behind. It hurt a bit that Crowley hadn't believed in him back then, that he'd run away instead of reaching out.
It was humbling, this kind of selfless act.
Lucifer thought of a snake shorter than his forearm, no thicker than his thumb braving the vast width of the turbulent burning lake with a shard of stone patiently worried off from the living rock.
He thought about the gigantic creature, still covered in mountain dust and loose feathers, that let him ride on his back, winding about Pandemonium
in a lazy spiral, scaring the demons into gibbering hysterics.
(One thing was certain - the demons who weren't scared of 'Holy Water Incident' Crowley, sure as hell were scared now.)
Crowley skipped a few details in his explanation. Like how many months (fifty) it took him to be able to take his first short walk on his own legs instead of slithering. The essence of Hell fought his change all the way until four full decades in, Crowley stumbled exhausted into Lucifer's rooms, no longer scaled head-to-toe and with no desire to wear his other skin again any time soon. Sadly he didn't get his wish, once the solution to the 'Get the Hell out of Hell' plan became clear.
It was easier the second time, days instead of years, but it didn't stop him from grumbling, buried under blankets in Lucifer's chambers, waiting for the scales to fade.
On top of everything else it was embarrassing how much they moped after their partners on Earth. A short reassuring message would have helped - if they could have trusted anyone to deliver it. Though Lucifer had put down the rebellion and once again assured his position, even demons who had done their jobs had come dangerously close to joining the coup. Hell was sealed until they found their solution, putting them between a rock and a lava lake.
It would have been been an utter nightmare without Crowley.
Once Lucifer passed judgement and set punishment on the mutineers, the day-to-day maintenance of Hell left him with too much time to think thoughts he didn't want to entertain. Without Maze as his confidante Lucifer was drowning in loneliness and holding his rage too close. He knew it wasn't good for him, none of it, but there seemed no way out and he had been spinning around in circles until the day an enormous serpent eye blinked at him.
Something in his mind pinged with familiarity. Something about him felt safe.
It got easier after that. Like taking up the threads of an old friendship.
It helped that everyone and their spotty hellhound knew that The Serpent never once inserted himself in Hell's politics and after the Apocanope was thwarted he claimed Earth as his home.
He gave no loyalty that wasn't earned and someway, somehow, Lucifer still got it. (If not as a King, then as a friend.)
A demon who didn't know that he was supposed to bow.
Who nicknamed him 'Boss' in the same affectionate way Lucifer called Ella 'Miss Lopez'.
Who put his feet on the furniture, had no sense of personal space and kept referring to Beelzebub as ‘Bub'.
Who, in the end, opened his swallow-black wings, driving Lucifer into short moment of absolute speechlessness- and settled himself casually on the arm of The Throne like a bored gargoyle, whispering inappropriate commentary at the worst possible moments.
Whatever fear of Lucifer Crowley once had, he was well and truly over it.
Lucifer shook his head once the subject of his thoughts started speaking.
"…to counter the worst angel who ever angeled”, quipped Crowley, a shadow of a smile on his face as he took Aziraphale's hand to his lips.
"Oh, this is what we are calling it now? Are we doing a re-creation of your statue?"
"What statue?”, asked Linda from the door, manoeuvring between the tables with a bag over one shoulder and a baby carrier in the other hand.
Aziraphale courteously stood up and pulled out a chair so she could put her things down. She accepted the wave of greetings, letting the carrier face them. Charlie lay within, sprawled like a starfish with lips pulled into perfect 'o'. She took off his hat and opened his light sweater before she asked again.
"What statue?"
"Oh, let's order some dessert and I will have a story for you." Crowley raised his eyes toward the ceiling and scowled at it fiercely before his head thumped down next to his plate. Aziraphale dabbed his mouth with a napkin.
"The story of Good And Evil Wrestling with Evil Triumphing. It involves two sheep, a horse named Steve, three kilograms of peanuts, a pocket watch and one pair of glue-on atrocious side whiskers..."