The rain was cold, biting into Lucifer's skin as he walked aimlessly through the city streets. He didn't care that his uniform was drenched or that people were staring. Nancy's voice kept echoing in his head—"Grand Architect." Those two words were a key to a room in his heart he had locked and thrown away the key to years ago.
He found himself standing in front of a rusted iron gate. He hadn't planned to come here. His feet had simply remembered the way.
It was the old neighborhood park.
The playground was a skeleton of its former self. The swings were rusted, creaking mournfully in the wind, and the sandbox—once their kingdom—was now overgrown with weeds and littered with autumn leaves.
Lucifer stepped into the center of the sandbox. He looked at his hands, now large and calloused, so different from the small hands that had built sandcastles here fifteen years ago.
"I told you I'd come back," he whispered, his voice lost in the rhythmic drumming of the rain. "But I didn't tell you I'd come back broken."
He remembered the day he left. He had watched Nancy through the rear window of his father's car until she was just a tiny speck in the distance. He had spent his first year in America waiting for a letter that never came, not realizing his father had intercepted them to help him "adjust" to his new life. By the time he found out, the silence had already become a habit.
A shadow moved near the park entrance. Lucifer tensed, wiping the rain from his eyes.
Standing under a yellow umbrella, her breath hitching in the cold air, was Nancy. She had followed him. She stood there, her eyes red from crying, looking at the boy standing in the middle of their ruined kingdom.
"You remembered the way," she said, her voice trembling.
Lucifer didn't look away this time. The icy mask was gone, washed away by the rain. "I never forgot, Nancy. I just hated myself for remembering."