#human!michael

Lucifer runs himself ragged all week getting the party set up (and despite the fact that he’s done this for Jack every time he needs it since he came back into Michael’s life, it still leaves Michael surprised and wondering what happened to the boy who only knew how to bite the hand that fed when Michael abandoned him, when did he learn to be gentle and reliable, why did Michael waste all this time not seeing him?) to the point that he looks like he might fall asleep in front of the birthday cake before Raphael nudges him with their elbow, and he wakes up to sing.

They sing quietly—loud noises hurt Jack’s ears, one of many little oddities, but they rearrange their lives around his needs: no vacuuming unless he’s out of the house and no yelling from room to room—while Jack looks like he’s about to jump right out of his seat with how much he wants to blow out the candles. Gabriel scoops him up in one arm after, lets Jack’s tiny hand curl around the handle of the (dull!) cake knife while his lays over it to guide him, and helps him to cut pieces for them all himself.

“I spy with my li-”

“It’s corn,” Raphael interrupts, “like the last time and the time before that and the-

“Time before that!” Gabriel finishes for him. “Because there’s been nothing for the past three states except for corn!” He flops against the car door on his side. Michael absently makes sure the doors are all locked, even though he never starts driving without checking at least three times, the same way he looks over all of his siblings to see that they’ve put their seatbelts on.

“It hasn’t been states,” Michael tells his little brother. “We’re haven’t left Iowa yet.”

“It’s been hours!”

“Two hours.”

“Can’t you go faster?” Michael rolls his eyes, but he’s used to this. Gabriel might have been able to keep his mouth shut when Dad was driving them across the country, but he’d always gotten squirmy by the time he’d been locked in for an hour. Michael doesn’t mind hearing him complain. If nothing else, it passes the time.

“I’m going 70,” he says. He’d been going slower until thirty minutes ago when the car he’d been matching had pulled off onto an exit and left them alone on the open road. The road is smooth enough under his tires that Raphael can work in the backseat without any trouble. Michael peeks at him in the rearview mirror. His head is bent over one of the newspapers he picked up before they left the last motel. Michael can catch glimpses of his red marker running through different sections.

His hair is getting longer.

Maybe, more accurately, Michael has allowed it to get longer. He hasn’t offered to cut it because he knows Raphael would say yes and refuse to meet his eyes for the next hour when he was done.

He was happier with it growing out, and if their father would have thoughts about that, well… They’d have to find him first to know.

And they were no closer to that then when they started. Michael will admit that to himself, even if he’ll never tell his siblings about it.

“I spy-“ Raphael starts, the first time Michael’s heard him initiate the game this trip.

“Corn,” Gabriel grumbles.

“No,” Raphael says, and if Michael chances another look back, he can confirm that the note he can hear in his voice is a smirk. Gabriel sits up straighter and peers out the window.

“The road?” Raphael shakes his head, letting a sheet of newspaper slide down into the footwell when he’s done with it. “A bird? The sky? …A billboard?”

Lucifer takes that moment to snore, loudly. Michael resists the urge to poke him in the side and startle him awake. As funny as it might be to watch his brother flail and snort as he drags himself up to consciousness, Lucifer needs the rest. He barely sleeps when Michael isn’t driving, but deep down, he’s still the little kid who conked out at the first notes of a Rolling Stones album. Michael knows how to take care of him, even with their years apart existing as a wound they still haven’t completely stitched up.

He reaches across the bench to adjust the blanket he’d draped over Lucifer at the last rest stop. He draws it up to Lucifer’s collar. Sunlight dusts across his whole body, but the tint of the window will keep him from getting burnt if they drive for longer. One of his legs is scrunched up against the seat while the other sprawls onto the floor among half-empty water bottles. He’s got his arms and face smushed up between the door and the glass of the window in a way that’s going to leave him sore when he wakes up, but there aren’t any comfortable ways to sleep in the truck. At least, not with Raphael right behind him blocking his seat from tilting back too far.

Gabriel groans. “You can’t pick him!”

“I can see him,” Raphael argues. Lucifer snores again, unbothered by the bickering he’s the cause of. Michael adjusts his grip on the wheel and smacks his own cheek a few times to wake his brain back up. He should have drunk more coffee that morning. Raphael got to it first. He tries his best to keep his eyes on the road, but between the wavering illusions of false water scattered across the asphalt and the sound of his siblings sniping at each other in his ear, its difficult to keep himself on track. He has no idea how he used to manage this years back when he didn’t have the experience he does now. Dad didn’t let him take the cross-country hauls until he was eighteen.

Eighteen. Michael remembers being eighteen. He had his whole life ahead of him.

He’s twenty-six now. Raphael and Gabriel make him feel old.

He told Lucifer that once, and Lucifer looked at him like he was crazy. He’ll understand in four years. He’ll regret his wasted youth. Or not. Michael’s scattered thoughts briefly coalesce into something more bitter. Lucifer didn’t seem to regret anything he ever did, no matter how much the rest of them got hurt.

“Anything, or anyone, in the car is off-limits. That’s the whole point.” Michael shakes his head and focuses back in on the argument between his youngest brothers. I Spy is the most common game that’s been played in this truck, followed closely by 21 questions (Lucifer is reigning champion of that one) and everyone’s favorite, I Just Saw A Cow.“Pick something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Not Lucifer and not the corn.” Raphael glances out the window just in time to see what Michael swerves in the lane to avoid.

“There’s some roadkill.”

“Your face looks like roadkill,” Gabriel mutters. Raphael glares at him.

“I don’t have to play with you.” All of a sudden, Michael is sixteen again, and holding back a very irate Gabriel from trying to grab Raphael while Lucifer watched with amusement from the passenger seat and their father very pointedly didn’t interfere. Luckily, feuding ten year olds hadn’t been much of a problem to handle for a boy who’d been going on hunts for the past seven years. They might be older, but they still fight the same.

“Calm down, you two,” Michael says in the sternest voice he can manage. He likes to think he sounds like their father. It never seems to have the same effect, though.

“Or what, you’ll turn this car around?” Raphael huffs a tiny laugh at his brother’s words. Michael taps the steering wheel.

“I have plenty of gas, Gabriel. I can survive driving back through farmland for a few hours. Can you?”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Raphael, have you found any hunts yet?” Michael asks. Raphael kicks another sheet into the footwell.

“Nothing substantial.” With that, Michael smiles at Gabriel in the rearview mirror. His little brother scowls at him, but he settles back down against the car door.

Finally, peace and the thrum of a familiar tape. Michael breathes easy.

At least until Lucifer starts whimpering in his sleep.

Michael nearly swerves into the next lane. That sound is like a gunshot, pure pain and fear strangled out of his brother’s throat. Michael’s been tuned into it since Lucifer was a baby in his arms, and it makes his whole body go cold before he can pull the car back into the right lane and steady his driving out. A quick look in the backseat lets him know that Gabriel — who is not wearing his seatbelt like he should be — took that as an excuse to fall all the way across the seat until his head was in Raphael’s lap, cushioned by newspaper. Raphael doesn’t seem like he’s going to push him away.

Lucifer whimpers again. Michael’s hand shoots out across the bench to shake him awake.

“Lucifer,” he says gently. “Lucifer, shh. You’re alright, brother.”

“Maybe it’s just a wet dream,” Gabriel tries to joke, but his voice is small. He knows what this is. They all do. Michael is dreading what will happen when Lucifer’s eyes open, but he can’t leave his brother trapped in his own dreams. He shakes Lucifer again as the car wobbles to the right of the lane, enough for the wheels to bump along the side loudly and push Michael to fix it.

“Or a nightmare,” Raphael says, as quiet as his brother. He knows that Lucifer has always had his nightmares in dead silence, that fact alone betraying what was happening to him. Lucifer would toss and sniff and grunt in his sleep all unless he was having a bad dream, and then he was like a corpse, cold and still.

Michael shakes him again, and this time, Lucifer jolts and flinches away from Michael’s touch, his hands raising to protect himself from a blow that doesn’t come.

(Michael lifts his hand away, and Lucifer isn’t in the passenger seat but on the ground, eye already bruising and hands up to hide behind, Michael’s knuckles aching from the punch that he already regrets and won’t get a chance to apologize for before Lucifer tears himself out of their lives for years.

All Michael ever asked was for him to stay. Why did he have to fight so hard?

Why did Michael have to fight back?)

“It’s alright,” Michael soothes as the sound of Lucifer’s rapid breathing fills the car. Lucifer squeezes his eyes shut and curls in on himself. He’s trembling, and he would hate that Michael notices that. Once upon a time, it was him being a stubborn kid who wanted to stay up watching horror movies without his older brother bothering him. Then, him in the backseat, furiously scrubbing away tears because he thought that this time, Michael and Dad wouldn’t be coming back. Now, he doesn’t even want to tell Michael when he’s hurt, only take care of all his wounds himself. “What did you see?” Nothing makes Michael’s stomach twist the way that Lucifer’s visions do. They’re wrong in every way that Michael understands. Hunters aren’t supposed to be able to see the future or move things around with their mind when they’re scared or angry enough. If someone else ever found out…

Michael’s known how to hold a gun right since he was nine. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to keep Lucifer safe, even if his brother doesn’t believe that.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He’s sure Lucifer is aiming for standoffish and short, but he just sounds shaken. If Michael wasn’t driving, if Lucifer was someone who could still let him do it, he’d wrap his brother up in a hug and hold on tight until he wasn’t scared anymore.

“You didn’t see someone die again, did-“ Gabriel starts.

“I said, I don’t want to talk about it!” Lucifer snaps, managing to reach something like anger this time but just barely. Gabriel can’t tell the difference like Michael can. He winces and shuts up, turning his head to press his face against Raphael’s stomach. Raphael pats his head automatically. They fit together so well, no one would ever guess they were only half-siblings by blood. Then again, they’ve never really known a world where they weren’t together, not that Michael knows of. They were so little when Dad picked them up. Michael remembers them barely being at his knees.

Lucifer scrubs at his face. He looks up out the window.

“How long was I out?” he asks, taming the tremor in his voice until it’s almost non-existent. “Why is there still corn?”

“You were only asleep for ten minutes,” Raphael lies, the reason why evident in the muffled sound of Gabriel giggling. Apart, they’re fantastic liars. Together, one of them always gives the game away. Lucifer swings his head around to narrow his eyes at them before checking the truck’s internal clock. It’s only fast by about seven minutes. Lucifer huffs and stretches. Michael sees him wince when he pulls his arm the wrong way too quickly, probably yanking on that scar he got during his first hunt. It’s never stopped hurting him.

Lucifer kicks the volume of the cassette deck up a bit. He lets his eyes slide shut as he leans back in his seat, breathing in deeply. He’d almost look like he’s over whatever he saw, but his hand is wrapped so tightly around his own wrist that his knuckles have gone white. His nails dig into his skin, leaving little pink crescents whenever he relaxes them. Michael frowns, but he can’t say anything.

It isn’t until hours later, with the sun a bleeding scratch across the horizon and darkness falling over their sleeping siblings in the backseat, that Lucifer speaks up about it at all. Michael’s feet are almost numb, and his eyes and neck ache. They only stopped for lunch, dinner, and a bathroom break in the woods (that, as usual, devolved into snickering and claims of ‘bet I can shoot farther than you.’ His little brothers were gross. Besides, they could never beat his record.) Michael could have handed the wheel over to Lucifer at any time. He probably should have. He grips the wheel tighter and keeps them on the right road forward.

“You think we’re going to find him?” Lucifer asks. He’s leaning forward against the dashboard, at the edge of his seat with his belt dangling off unused to the side. Michael feels the urge to push him back and buckle him in. The dying sunlight barely lights his face, leaving deep shadows around his eyes that make Michael uncomfortable. He flicks on his headlights. That brightens Lucifer up and scares away the dark red pallor across his features.

“We will,” Michael says, with utmost certainty. “Dad’s out there.”

Lucifer shifts awkwardly. “Right,” he says. He pauses. “I meant the demon.” Michael turns his face to hide the way his mouth twists and only looks back when he’s got his expression back under control.

“We’ll find it, too,” Michael says, “and kill it.” Lucifer digs his nails in against his elbow. “Why?”

“Nothing,” Lucifer says, in a voice that has always meant the exact opposite.

“Lu,” Michael warns. Lucifer curls in on himself more.

“The other… people like me. They get visits from him- from it in their dreams.” Michael’s heart stops. He forces himself to breathe. “It just talks. I know not to listen to what it’s saying, Michael. I’m not stupid.” That last bit comes out sharp, too defensive, like he really thinks Michael would believe he would trust a demon.

“…What does it say?” Lucifer hides his face in his arms and doesn’t respond. Michael swallows.

“You’re going to kill it, right?” Lucifer says.

He sounds small and scared, and Michael can’t do anything else but promise him, “Yes. I’ll give you its head on a platter if you want.” Lucifer breathes out a shaky laugh. When he raises his head again, he keeps it turned away like Michael won’t recognize him wiping his eyes.

There’s a horrible part of him that thinks of Dad’s theories about Lucifer, the ones all scribbled down into his journal that Michael told the rest of them he’d lost. The entries where special turned to cursed, where disobedience and teenage snark became signs of something terrible growing inside his son, where Michael’s actions were dissected down to bone every time he sided with Lucifer. Michael trusts every other scrap of knowledge in that journal. He puts his life, the life of his little siblings, in the hands of the information their Dad gathered over the years.

But he can’t be right about Lucifer. He just can’t be.

Michael tentatively reaches over and touches Lucifer’s shoulder. Lucifer jumps a little in surprise, but when Michael doesn’t pull back, he relaxes again. Accepts it. Michael presses his thumb into his brother’s shoulder, rubbing up to the corner of it that once used to be small and bony and is now layered well under muscle, and then he lets go again. It’s not much, but the way Lucifer stares at him, wide-eyed, confused, like he would beg for more if his pride would let him, before he swallows all of that down and faces forward again, makes Michael’s chest ache.

“Do you want to drive?” Michael asks.