Prompt 7. with Maze and Lucifer, please.
ooooh, you know, this prompt fits in nicely with a scene in chapter three of my fic a softer beginning. Takes place in Hell - pre series. (also ignores some comic canon)
Maze had been flayed down to the bone. Her every breath rattles, blood in her lungs. Every horrible inhale he fears may be her last.
They’ve taken cover in the more fortified section of his stronghold. He will find the demon who did this and rend them, make them scream until he tears their throat out with his bare hands.
There’s nothing he can do right now, though, barricaded with walls and doors and the few demonic forces that have bent the knee. He can only lay here with her in his arms, his blood flecked wings drawn around them in a cocoon of protection.
Mazikeen wheezes painfully. He’s wrapped her with bandages as best he could, but Hell has little in the way of comforts and almost nothing in the manner of healing. His most loyal and first supporter is going to die in the filth and rot of this realm and it’s his fault. He tightens his wings around them, presses a kiss to the top of her head, ignoring the taste of blood. Then he lifts up his voice and sings, the Celestial Tongue sliding smooth and sibilant from his mouth.
It doesn’t sound quite right being sung alone without his brothers and sisters accompanying him, somehow flatter against the heavy stone of his prison. Still, if he can ease Maze’s passing in any way, it will have been worth it. He sings until his voice grows hoarse and further than that. He sings well into the night. He does not sleep. He sings and sings and waits for that final, terrible gasp.
Mazikeen claws at life with the determination of a wild thing, refusing to do anything but survive. He stays with her for days, only leaving to fetch water that he carefully dribbles into her parched mouth, changes her bandages, even if he has to wash them himself. She grows stronger and soon she’s on her feet and thirsting for blood.
“I almost lost you,” he says, half terrified. Without her, he’d be alone. It’s shaken him to the core.
She snorts. “As if a little scratch like that could keep me down.”
Her face, though, will never be the same.
He shows her the results hesitantly, feathers flicking with anxiety. She reaches up and touches the damage with a hand that shakes.
“I kinda like it,” she replies, irreverent.
He barks out a wet laugh. “It suits you,” he says, his voice tender. It’s only with Maze that he can afford such weakness. Here, softness gets you slaughtered. Even so, the moment is brief.
She turns and grins a frightening, rictus grin, face stretching with delight. Her knife catches the light as she twirls it. “Lets go hunt the maggot responsible. He owes me an eye.”
Lucifer smiles back. It’s not an angelic smile. Anything resembling his past has been scoured away, burnt to ash. He smiles like the Devil he is, too full of teeth to ever be mistaken as friendly. The edges of his wings are sharp and deadly.
“My dear, I thought you would never ask.”
