"You know, you have a wonderful daughter," I said, taking a sip of hot, fragrant tea with lemon, lazily gazing at the intricate patterns carved into the ceiling of this office. "A truly kind girl. Devoted to her friends and her goal, even if that goal seems naive as all hell to me."
"Yes, Charlie… I'm proud of her…" Lucifer looked down into his cup, and in that gesture, in his dimmed gaze, in every barely noticeable movement, there was such boundless fatherly love that for a second I even felt a little… envious? Yes, he sincerely, madly loved his daughter. Loved her more than life, more than anything in the world. "I… I'm very ashamed that I couldn't be there for her when she was still just a child…" Lucifer forced out with a choked sigh, undisguised sadness in his voice.
I looked at the fallen Seraph in surprise, nearly choking on my tea. Why such sudden frankness? Why the hell did he decide to confide his emotional torment and fatherly complexes to me of all people? His enemy, supposedly?
"You… You can still fix everything…" Suppressing the sarcastic remark that suddenly rose in my throat, I replied, struggling to maintain a mask of imperturbability and catching an equally surprised look from him. "You have an eternity, Lucifer. A whole, fucking, eternity. You've almost managed to mend your relationship with your daughter. All that's left is to be a normal father to her, not a depressive clown, and to show your real feelings for her from time to time…" I looked away, sighing heavily. Could any of you, my dear, imaginary friends, have ever, for fuck's sake, imagined that a conversation like this would ever take place in this universe? I, for one, never fucking expected to be sitting here, in a dusty office, teaching Lucifer himself, the King of Hell, how to behave with his own children! This is some kind of surrealism!
"And… Do you think she'll forgive me?" Lucifer finally asked, with hope in his voice.
"Forgive you?" I chuckled. "She's not mad at you for anything." I take another sip, enjoying the taste of the tea. "You think you're a bad father because you couldn't be with your daughter all this time, right?" Receiving a hesitant nod in response, I continued, trying to speak as convincingly as possible: "You've been in a shitty state yourself for the last few hundred years, Luci. Charlie is a good girl, albeit naive to the point of absurdity, but she's kind. So kind and understanding that sometimes I myself feel embarrassed for all of Heaven and its 'righteousness.' It's not that she doesn't blame you for anything; she doesn't even see anything wrong with your asshole behavior. She just… loves you. Charlie loves you for who you are, no matter what a whiny little bitch you are. Remember that."
"Thank you," he looked at me with a slightly guilty, but no longer so lost gaze, picked up his mug of tea, and took a big gulp. "So, what did you want to discuss with me? I hope it's not just my fatherly qualities?"
Yeah, I never thought a conversation like this could ever take place, especially between us: the Lord of Hell and the Commander-in-Chief of Heaven. Especially considering all the "glorious" deeds of this "Lord of Hell" and our long-standing issues. What the fuck.
"A lot of things," I leaned back in my chair. "First of all, I'd like to finally ask an infantile idiot about his past actions and the responsibility he never took for them." I looked intently at Lucifer.
"Ahem, should I call this idiot for you?" he said jokingly, with a nervous chuckle, his whole demeanor suggesting that he didn't want any shouting, arguments, or mutual accusations right now… I sigh. Alright, it seems I'll have to approach this from a slightly different angle.
"No, some other time… Then can you at least explain what the fuck was up with you feeding Eve that fucking apple?!" My gaze filled with cold steel and the heavy weight of millennia lived. Yes, Adam had sincerely, truly loved her, and as I said before, many of Adam's strong feelings and memories had influenced me as well. So now I was speaking not only for myself, but for him too. "The very fact that Lilith was able to refuse the role you Seraphim assigned her and leave Heaven already proves that humans had free will even without your damn 'fruit of knowledge'! So why?! What was the point?"
"We… I… I made a mistake back then," Lucifer sighed sadly. It was clear that this topic of conversation saddened him greatly, but, apparently, in gratitude for my recent support or in the hope of finally ending our thousand-year conflict, he decided to be frank. "You were right that Lilith, like you, had free will, and you could have even disagreed with… Heaven's orders, if you had wanted to. But you, apparently, don't know the whole truth about Eve."
I nod. I really don't know shit about how she and I were created. All this information was new to me.
"Lilith was created in our image and likeness, just as you, Adam, were created in God's image and likeness," Lucifer continued.
"Wait, wait," I straightened up sharply in my chair, "was I created in God's image and likeness?" This, to put it mildly, fucking fact knocked me for a loop. "Wasn't it in the image and likeness of the Seraphim? Like Lilith?"
"No," Lucifer shook his head, taking another sip of tea. "You should have noticed one very remarkable feature: when Lilith became a demon, her appearance changed quite a bit. The same thing happened with Eve, even though you didn't see the end of that… confrontation… But you, Adam, you came to Heaven just as you were in life, hardly changing at all, neither externally nor internally. Except that the Light in you became stronger…" Here Lucifer himself fell into thought, while I was still trying to digest the fact that I, it turns out, am a fucking copy of the local God! No, I mean, I'm irresistible, sexy, smart, strong, and blah-blah-blah, but I really didn't expect this! Another plus from our dialogue with Lucifer.
"Let's continue…" he cleared his throat. "I didn't participate in your and Lilith's creation, my ideas back then were too…" he awkwardly averted his gaze, "…unsuitable for such an 'important' project… But I did help in the creation of Eve, and I know everything about her down to the last detail. She was created specifically as 'Adam's wife.' Not as a full-fledged, independent person, but as… an appendage to you. As a creature that was supposed to stay with you, no matter what. No, don't get me wrong, you really had improved a lot by then. You became softer, more attentive, and, I'm afraid, if you had been like that from the beginning, Lilith wouldn't have run away from you from the Garden of Eden…" And he gives me such an expressive, meaningful look, as if to say "explain your asshole behavior."
"When I was 'born,' I didn't understand many things about the relationship between a man and a woman," I decided to be as frank with him as he was with me. "Not only was I created as an adult being, with already formed instincts and desires, but I was also given no life experience, not a single gram! So I simply didn't understand what behavior in a relationship was considered right and what was not." I finish my cooled tea. "I just didn't understand why she didn't want to do what we were, essentially, created for!" I spread my hands, showing the absurdity of that situation.
"I thought as much," Lucifer nodded sympathetically, lowering his gaze. "Lilith, when she found out about this feature of Eve's 'birth,' that she, in essence, had no will of her own… she decided that she needed to be 'saved.' And I, back then, was… offended by my brothers and sisters, for not even wanting to try to bring my ideas to life, which I then sincerely considered right and the only true ones… You know the result yourself. Eve tasted that damned fruit of knowledge, after which, as it seemed to me then, everything only got better: she gained free will, became a full-fledged person, and even stayed with you, which, in theory, also spoke of your positive changes. And then…"
"And then my wife turned into some unknown fucking thing with tentacles, and my home, Eden, was completely destroyed and consumed by the Darkness…" Old resentment cut through my voice again.
"I… I understand why you hate me. I myself… When I look at the sky, when I see Heaven and Earth… I only start to hate myself more. I understand that I am to blame for all of this, it's just… I don't know how to fix it!" Lucifer abruptly rose from his chair, walked over to the huge panoramic window, and stared at the two huge, glowing orbs hanging in the black sky of Hell—Heaven and Earth, sealed and closed to demons… As it recently turned out, not as reliably as was intended when the seal was created. "I used to think I could fix my mistakes, but now…"
"..." I silently stood up, walked over to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. "We all make mistakes, Lucifer. No one is perfect. Not even God. If he were perfection itself, he wouldn't have allowed all this bullshit to happen. He would have found the right words to convince you that his fucking fruits were too dangerous." I walked away from him, pouring tea into our empty mugs from the teapot, which I, taking advantage of the moment, had discreetly teleported from the hotel kitchen. I think I heard an indignant cry from Sir Pentious from there, but I had other things on my mind.
"We all make mistakes, we all regret our actions, we constantly think: 'what if I had done something differently back then?…'" I sat back down in the chair, taking a big gulp of hot tea. "But our past mistakes shouldn't make us give up in the present. No matter how many times your attempts to fix everything fail, no matter how many times you make mistakes again and again, you can't give up. Especially when you have someone worth continuing to try for," I gave Lucifer a meaningful look. "A daughter, for example."
"..." Walking back to his chair and sitting down, also taking a sip of tea, Lucifer looked me straight in the eye. "You're right, Adam. You're damn right. I'm just… a weakling. An ordinary, pathetic weakling who couldn't handle all of this and just gave up… But now… Now, knowing that my daughter needs me, I'm sure I can change. I'm sure that this time, I'll succeed… Thank you."
"Hit me up if you need your brain put back in place again," I saluted with my teacup, looking at a more cheerful Lucifer. "By the way, I have a few more questions…"
The result of our very productive and, surprisingly, heartfelt conversation was a promise to go to a bar together sometime soon…
Yes, I think I really "befriended" Lucifer. And yes, I'm still in complete fucking shock about it myself.
If I were to shorten our further, very lengthy dialogue, it would go something like this: Luci helps me with obtaining my "combat" form (more precisely, with its integration), and will back me up just in case. In the event of a clash, he will side with Heaven against Eve. He will also help Charlie much more and spend more time with her. And finally, he will take up his direct duties and bring order to Hell, because it's not right—to be an absolute monarch and churn out rubber ducks all day while some Satan is quietly seizing power. And I also signed up for some small lessons in magic, including conceptual magic, with him.
And yes, I trusted him. Whatever threw me into this world, it remained the same cartoon in which, essentially, there was no absolute evil. Lucifer here was just a "kind, but slightly naive reformer who made a very big mistake." I've been living here for some time now and I can clearly see that despite all the Darkness that sits inside him, his soul is still filled with Light. A dim, weak Light, ready to be extinguished at any moment by the drops of his sadness, but if you take away that sadness, if you give him a real chance to fix everything, he can fully become that Seraph, the Light-Bringer, that he once was. Yes, he is not evil, not a traitor, and not an enemy. He is just a stumbled ally who, in a desperate attempt to help, made such a mess that now he himself doesn't know how to clean it all up. In that respect, he's even better than my past self, because back then I only wanted revenge, not thinking about others at all…
We also discussed family, children, and stuff like that a little. Luci complained to me about school and that after his fight with Lilith, he couldn't see Charlie often precisely because of his work and because he was afraid of offending or disappointing her. I explained to him why he shouldn't be afraid of that, told him a little about my granddaughters (which made him somewhat sad, and he said that he's "not ready" for that yet), and he, in turn, admitted that he really wants to make up with Lilith, so I promised to think about his temporary admission to Heaven for "family negotiations," for which I was almost kissed. Yep, it seems our Luci really misses Heaven.
We also talked a bit about the Seraphim. It turned out that he also considered himself an outsider in their company; they were too different mentally: the Seraphim were very rigid, conservative, and simply couldn't imagine their life any other way. For them, there was only service to the Light, only hardcore. But Luci, by his own admission, was a hyperactive kid who didn't want to just blindly follow the Light, but to understand it, to study it, to get to know it better. You know the result. In short, he came up with a whole bunch of anecdotes and jokes about Sera and her "dictatorial tendencies" over these thousands of years, although most of them sounded like some childish teasing-jokes, but I pretended that it was also very funny.
Alright, I'm getting a bit carried away here, aren't I? In short, we parted quite pleased with each other and, at the very least, as pals.
What the fuck prevented these two idiots from just getting together like this and having a heart-to-heart talk before?! No, seriously! Thousands of years of mutual, fucking, hatred, resolved thanks to one, fucking, heart-to-heart talk over a cup of tea! Absurd! Complete, fucking, absurdity!
Okay, we've discussed that matter, so now I'll tell you a little more about why there are two worlds hanging in the sky of Hell: the world of humans and Heaven.
Well, in general, back in the days of Eden, Heaven hung directly above it so that the Seraphim could constantly watch over their creation and its inhabitants, and they, in turn, knew that their patrons were always nearby and ready to help. After the transformation of Eden into Hell and its division into seven separate circles, this became a kind of eternal reminder for all sinners and demons that they could be there now, in Heaven, if they hadn't succumbed to Darkness and Chaos back in the day. So there you have it.
And yes, the human world, as I've already said, was specially fenced off by a huge, almost impenetrable barrier, similar in principle to what now covers Pentagram City—sinners could go there, but they couldn't come back out (only on Earth it was the other way around). By law, they were not supposed to leave their circle of Pride, and those who still managed to escape were caught at the first opportunity and forcibly shoved back into Pentagram City so they couldn't escape the next Exterminations. So there you have it.
Tomorrow I'll have a small but very important walk to Earth. I'll take two asocial but very cute girls out and try to make them become good friends. We'll see what comes of this idea ;)