Some Back Alley, Chicago, Wednesday Night
Aug. 7th, 2024 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
napkingRaiden and Gray had decided that they should at least do a sweep for demonic activity while they were in a new city, but eventually, Raiden had gotten hungry and decided to go get burgers, while Gray had kept patrolling while he was wide awake to do so. He was somehow unsurprised when he heard a rather distinctive heavy landing behind him not five minutes after Raiden left. He was still shoving all the fear down into a box when Lazarus said, "You are not where you are supposed to be." And then, baffled, "The entire island is not where it is supposed to be."
"Yeah," Gray agreed as he made himself turn around to face Lazarus. "I dunno. Yesterday we were in West Virginia."
Lazarus opted not to touch that. "Pride said you wanted to see me?" Lazarus's extremely dubious tone helped a little. At least he knew that Gray never actually wanted to see him.
He didn't want to do this. He didn't. But he had to. For Alastair.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and said, "The island's nexus did a thing a few weeks ago. A different thing, not the 'we're in Chicago' thing."
"Like when the dead came to call?" Lazarus asked, wary.
"Sort of. For a couple of days I was...me, but from a possible twenty years from now. How much stuck with people seems to vary. Ray doesn't remember much of it." He leaned forward slightly before telling Lazarus, "I remember everything." Lazarus didn't look the least bit concerned, and why should he? Twenty years was a drop in the bucket. But he should know that things could change on a dime. "A couple of years from now, Lucifer is going to escape. I don't know how." Lazarus made a dubious sound, but waited. "But I know how we kill him."
Lazarus went very, very still. "Do you?"
"I don't remember all of the details, but I had a conversation about it with a friend of mine. I remember what I said, and what I was thinking while I said it. There's a sword. I don't know where it came from, just that it's...special. With that sword, and the eight of us...I know how to kill him."
"Eight," Lazarus repeated. "Kallias is long dead."
"Well, apparently he better not stay that way, because we're fucked without him." He thought of pointing out that it wasn't like Kal was resting easy in Elysium, but he saved that. He might need it yet. "I know something else, too. In that future, my brothers and I, we'd all met our fated mates." Lazarus froze, and Gray had to admit that, "Oh, I was really hoping you weren't gonna have a clue."
"You don't understand."
"I really, really do not," Gray agreed.
"Whatever you think--"
"I think that we were children!" It came out, quite without his meaning it to, as a shout, and it hung between them for a long, horrid moment, the terror clawing out of the box and up Gray's throat--they didn't yell at Lazarus, that wasn't a thing they could do--before Lazarus said quietly, his impeccable shoulders slumping just a hair,
"I know."
Gray shoved the fear back down and glared at him. "Did you know then? When you were beating him bloody because--because Daman smarted off, or Raiden cried, or I was a spoiled brat?" He doubted it, and not because he thought even that much of Lazarus. From what he knew of that kind of bond, it rarely showed in children. Kallias hadn't even known it of Elasus, and they had grown up together. He had been merely a dear friend until they met again as adults.
"No. Not that it makes any of it a single iota better, but...no. I did not know then. What I did would have been abomination, if I had known."
"It was anyway," Gray scoffed, and Lazarus shocked him again by saying very softly,
"Yes."
Well. That was...Gray didn't know what to do with that, so he just wasn't going to unpack it right now. "When did you know?"
"Does it matter?"
Gray shrugged. "It might."
"After you sealed Lucifer away," Lazarus said. "When you were near death. I knew then. Alastair does not know. He has never known."
"Because he was almost dead."
There was something in Lazarus's eyes that might have been grief, and Gray hated it. He wanted the mask back. "Yes. The bond is sealed, from my end, by the command of the archangels. It cannot be unsealed. He cannot know." It was, Gray thought, the closest Lazarus could come to pleading.
"I'm not gonna tell him," Gray said. "Ew. But he's gonna find out. And soon, in the overall scheme of things."
"They will not accept it."
"In the future I saw, they did. I don't know why, or how, but they did. But they should be the least of your concerns, because I still don't understand why we accepted it. I don't accept it." He leaned forward, keeping direct eye contact with Lazarus, and told him with every ounce of force he could put into the words, "You don't deserve him."
And Lazarus surprised him once again by saying, "I know."
"Do you? Do you really? Because you turned your soulmate into a whipping boy." Lazarus flinched, and Gray thought, savage, Good. "That's the worst thing I can think of. And you look at him--at all of us--like you'd like to scrape us off the bottom of your shoe."
Lazarus opened his mouth, then closed it, then finally said, "Everything I have done for thousands of years has been for you boys. To keep you alive. I cannot even manage safe, but at least you are alive. If I show you so much as an ounce of favor, those who consider you a threat will pounce upon it as a sign that I have been suborned. And most of you hate me, and are quite right to do so, and that is one thing...but another is that if I look at him for too long, happy in the arms of another, I will go insane."
"He deserves to be happy," Gray defended his brother. It couldn't be Alastair's fault, not when he wasn't allowed to know. It wasn't like he was cheating. He wondered suddenly if, somewhere deep down, Alastair did feel it. If his vulnerability to emotional attachment to mortals, despite all the risks and reasons the rest of them tried to hold themselves back from it, wasn't just Pride telling him this time will be different, nothing will go wrong, but something like...subconsciously putting sticking plasters on a psychic wound. Fuck. His poor brother.
"I know that. I know. And I know that he does not know. But it is...difficult. Please allow me to find it difficult, at the least."
Gray...didn't know what to say to that, and ended up, after an awkward moment of silence, with, "If it makes you feel any better, Joseph isn't going to last much longer."
Gray really hoped it didn't make Lazarus feel any better, but was still kind of surprised when Lazarus protested, "He's not so old for a human in this time. He may have decades in him yet."
"He was long gone in the future I saw. He's been having some tests. Al says it'll be fine. Galen thinks it's cancer. We both know how it's gonna go." Al would fight to save Joseph to the bitter end, blaming himself every step of the way for his failure to do so. It was what he did. Gray tilted his head to the side and asked Lazarus, "And what are you gonna do while he's ripping himself apart?" Lazarus didn't answer, but there was...something there, something Gray didn't know how to read in his eyes. "Take your time figuring it out, but please know...there's a reason we all found our matches when we did. It's necessary."
"I assume it is the only reason I was not greeted with a knife in my back at some point in the not so distant future, rather than a request for this meeting."
Gray bared his teeth at Lazarus, who after all knew what he was capable of. Who had made him this way. "It can still be that. You may be the only thing standing between us and the archangels, but we're the only thing standing between them and Lucifer. You, and they, would be smart not to forget that. And you would do really well to remember that you're running out of time to fix what you did."
"You know as well as I that it's not the sort of thing that can be fixed."
It really wasn't. It was a long time ago, and it wasn't that long of a time. Ten years was a drop in the bucket. There were stretches of time longer than that Gray didn't really remember, in which nothing particularly important stitched itself a permanent place in his mind. But ten years was forever when you were a child, and when it was spent building a foundation. Gray had not thought, before today, that Lazarus understood that. "Then I guess you'd better hope Al is a lot more willing than I ever could be to move on from it."
Lazarus studied him for a long moment, then said, "Alastair is a good man."
"No thanks to you," popped out of Gray's mouth practically before he could think.
Lazarus shocked him again with, "I know. You are all good men, and it is because you chose to be. I raised weapons, not men. I was short-sighted, and frightened, and saw nothing but the war. Not even the boys in front of me. The best that can be said of me is that I made great warriors of you, and that hardly signifies. For one thing, there should never have been a sword in Raiden's hands in the first place." Well. At least he knew that much. "I know what I am. I know what I did. I know that I do not and cannot deserve him, or forgiveness. I promise you that."
"But he's gonna find out," Gray told him. "He's gonna find out, or that seal is gonna crack, and then...I don't understand how he can accept you, but he will. Maybe it's just the damn magic." It would explain Bell, too.
Shit. Bell. He wonders if he should tell Lazarus about that, too, or if the angel would just go kill Phoenix right now and create a new and different mess.
"Maybe," Lazarus agreed. "But if it makes him happy...can either of us fault it?" Gray didn't know what to say to that. He didn't see how it could make Alastair happy, but--he had been, in that future he'd seen. After a moment Lazarus said, "Thank you. For this...notification. I will take all you have said under advisement." Gray supposed it was all he was going to get. It was impossible to deny that if Lazarus appreciably thawed toward them Uriel, for one, would love to snap all their heads off. "Now tell me everything you remember about this sword, and about Lucifer's return."
"Are you going to wipe my memory when I'm done?" Gray halfway wished he would, even as he knew he needed to know, to hold him accountable.
"No. Michael could, I think, but we would lose any nuance you might miss now, anything you might remember later that could help us in the coming trials. And if each of you finding your matches matters as much as you say it does, then removing only the memory of Alastair's would leave a hole you would be unable not to pick at. You have always been too curious for your own good." Gray couldn't argue with it. "Michael can put up barriers, though, so that nothing your brothers should not learn seeps through. I will ask if he will help."
"Yeah, that would probably be a good idea." He'd been able to keep it from Raiden thus far, but also, Raiden had begun to notice that he was avoiding spending too much time around him.
Lazarus nodded and said, "Now, the sword."
"It's really weird," Gray warned him.
"Just so," Lazarus agreed. "Quickly, before Gluttony returns. I cannot help you if I do not know what to look for."
Several minutes later, Lazarus, looking even more gobsmacked than he had when Gray had dropped his 'fated mates' bomb on him, winged off back toward the heavens mere seconds before Raiden turned the corner, holding a giant soda in one hand and swinging a McDonald's bag in the other. "Got you some fries."
"Did you eat 'em all already?" Gray asked as he stole the soda from Raiden and took a sip.
"Nah. Maybe half of 'em."
Gray would take it. He swapped him for the bag and, around a mouthful of potato, told Ray, "We should call it a night soon."
"That Sloth talking, or...?"
Gray swallowed and shook his head. "I just don't wanna get left if the island moves again."
"Oh, yeah, good point," Raiden said, and pulled off his shirt to release his wings. "Race you."
(NFI/NFB. Content warning for mention of cancer and discussion of child abuse.)
"Yeah," Gray agreed as he made himself turn around to face Lazarus. "I dunno. Yesterday we were in West Virginia."
Lazarus opted not to touch that. "Pride said you wanted to see me?" Lazarus's extremely dubious tone helped a little. At least he knew that Gray never actually wanted to see him.
He didn't want to do this. He didn't. But he had to. For Alastair.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and said, "The island's nexus did a thing a few weeks ago. A different thing, not the 'we're in Chicago' thing."
"Like when the dead came to call?" Lazarus asked, wary.
"Sort of. For a couple of days I was...me, but from a possible twenty years from now. How much stuck with people seems to vary. Ray doesn't remember much of it." He leaned forward slightly before telling Lazarus, "I remember everything." Lazarus didn't look the least bit concerned, and why should he? Twenty years was a drop in the bucket. But he should know that things could change on a dime. "A couple of years from now, Lucifer is going to escape. I don't know how." Lazarus made a dubious sound, but waited. "But I know how we kill him."
Lazarus went very, very still. "Do you?"
"I don't remember all of the details, but I had a conversation about it with a friend of mine. I remember what I said, and what I was thinking while I said it. There's a sword. I don't know where it came from, just that it's...special. With that sword, and the eight of us...I know how to kill him."
"Eight," Lazarus repeated. "Kallias is long dead."
"Well, apparently he better not stay that way, because we're fucked without him." He thought of pointing out that it wasn't like Kal was resting easy in Elysium, but he saved that. He might need it yet. "I know something else, too. In that future, my brothers and I, we'd all met our fated mates." Lazarus froze, and Gray had to admit that, "Oh, I was really hoping you weren't gonna have a clue."
"You don't understand."
"I really, really do not," Gray agreed.
"Whatever you think--"
"I think that we were children!" It came out, quite without his meaning it to, as a shout, and it hung between them for a long, horrid moment, the terror clawing out of the box and up Gray's throat--they didn't yell at Lazarus, that wasn't a thing they could do--before Lazarus said quietly, his impeccable shoulders slumping just a hair,
"I know."
Gray shoved the fear back down and glared at him. "Did you know then? When you were beating him bloody because--because Daman smarted off, or Raiden cried, or I was a spoiled brat?" He doubted it, and not because he thought even that much of Lazarus. From what he knew of that kind of bond, it rarely showed in children. Kallias hadn't even known it of Elasus, and they had grown up together. He had been merely a dear friend until they met again as adults.
"No. Not that it makes any of it a single iota better, but...no. I did not know then. What I did would have been abomination, if I had known."
"It was anyway," Gray scoffed, and Lazarus shocked him again by saying very softly,
"Yes."
Well. That was...Gray didn't know what to do with that, so he just wasn't going to unpack it right now. "When did you know?"
"Does it matter?"
Gray shrugged. "It might."
"After you sealed Lucifer away," Lazarus said. "When you were near death. I knew then. Alastair does not know. He has never known."
"Because he was almost dead."
There was something in Lazarus's eyes that might have been grief, and Gray hated it. He wanted the mask back. "Yes. The bond is sealed, from my end, by the command of the archangels. It cannot be unsealed. He cannot know." It was, Gray thought, the closest Lazarus could come to pleading.
"I'm not gonna tell him," Gray said. "Ew. But he's gonna find out. And soon, in the overall scheme of things."
"They will not accept it."
"In the future I saw, they did. I don't know why, or how, but they did. But they should be the least of your concerns, because I still don't understand why we accepted it. I don't accept it." He leaned forward, keeping direct eye contact with Lazarus, and told him with every ounce of force he could put into the words, "You don't deserve him."
And Lazarus surprised him once again by saying, "I know."
"Do you? Do you really? Because you turned your soulmate into a whipping boy." Lazarus flinched, and Gray thought, savage, Good. "That's the worst thing I can think of. And you look at him--at all of us--like you'd like to scrape us off the bottom of your shoe."
Lazarus opened his mouth, then closed it, then finally said, "Everything I have done for thousands of years has been for you boys. To keep you alive. I cannot even manage safe, but at least you are alive. If I show you so much as an ounce of favor, those who consider you a threat will pounce upon it as a sign that I have been suborned. And most of you hate me, and are quite right to do so, and that is one thing...but another is that if I look at him for too long, happy in the arms of another, I will go insane."
"He deserves to be happy," Gray defended his brother. It couldn't be Alastair's fault, not when he wasn't allowed to know. It wasn't like he was cheating. He wondered suddenly if, somewhere deep down, Alastair did feel it. If his vulnerability to emotional attachment to mortals, despite all the risks and reasons the rest of them tried to hold themselves back from it, wasn't just Pride telling him this time will be different, nothing will go wrong, but something like...subconsciously putting sticking plasters on a psychic wound. Fuck. His poor brother.
"I know that. I know. And I know that he does not know. But it is...difficult. Please allow me to find it difficult, at the least."
Gray...didn't know what to say to that, and ended up, after an awkward moment of silence, with, "If it makes you feel any better, Joseph isn't going to last much longer."
Gray really hoped it didn't make Lazarus feel any better, but was still kind of surprised when Lazarus protested, "He's not so old for a human in this time. He may have decades in him yet."
"He was long gone in the future I saw. He's been having some tests. Al says it'll be fine. Galen thinks it's cancer. We both know how it's gonna go." Al would fight to save Joseph to the bitter end, blaming himself every step of the way for his failure to do so. It was what he did. Gray tilted his head to the side and asked Lazarus, "And what are you gonna do while he's ripping himself apart?" Lazarus didn't answer, but there was...something there, something Gray didn't know how to read in his eyes. "Take your time figuring it out, but please know...there's a reason we all found our matches when we did. It's necessary."
"I assume it is the only reason I was not greeted with a knife in my back at some point in the not so distant future, rather than a request for this meeting."
Gray bared his teeth at Lazarus, who after all knew what he was capable of. Who had made him this way. "It can still be that. You may be the only thing standing between us and the archangels, but we're the only thing standing between them and Lucifer. You, and they, would be smart not to forget that. And you would do really well to remember that you're running out of time to fix what you did."
"You know as well as I that it's not the sort of thing that can be fixed."
It really wasn't. It was a long time ago, and it wasn't that long of a time. Ten years was a drop in the bucket. There were stretches of time longer than that Gray didn't really remember, in which nothing particularly important stitched itself a permanent place in his mind. But ten years was forever when you were a child, and when it was spent building a foundation. Gray had not thought, before today, that Lazarus understood that. "Then I guess you'd better hope Al is a lot more willing than I ever could be to move on from it."
Lazarus studied him for a long moment, then said, "Alastair is a good man."
"No thanks to you," popped out of Gray's mouth practically before he could think.
Lazarus shocked him again with, "I know. You are all good men, and it is because you chose to be. I raised weapons, not men. I was short-sighted, and frightened, and saw nothing but the war. Not even the boys in front of me. The best that can be said of me is that I made great warriors of you, and that hardly signifies. For one thing, there should never have been a sword in Raiden's hands in the first place." Well. At least he knew that much. "I know what I am. I know what I did. I know that I do not and cannot deserve him, or forgiveness. I promise you that."
"But he's gonna find out," Gray told him. "He's gonna find out, or that seal is gonna crack, and then...I don't understand how he can accept you, but he will. Maybe it's just the damn magic." It would explain Bell, too.
Shit. Bell. He wonders if he should tell Lazarus about that, too, or if the angel would just go kill Phoenix right now and create a new and different mess.
"Maybe," Lazarus agreed. "But if it makes him happy...can either of us fault it?" Gray didn't know what to say to that. He didn't see how it could make Alastair happy, but--he had been, in that future he'd seen. After a moment Lazarus said, "Thank you. For this...notification. I will take all you have said under advisement." Gray supposed it was all he was going to get. It was impossible to deny that if Lazarus appreciably thawed toward them Uriel, for one, would love to snap all their heads off. "Now tell me everything you remember about this sword, and about Lucifer's return."
"Are you going to wipe my memory when I'm done?" Gray halfway wished he would, even as he knew he needed to know, to hold him accountable.
"No. Michael could, I think, but we would lose any nuance you might miss now, anything you might remember later that could help us in the coming trials. And if each of you finding your matches matters as much as you say it does, then removing only the memory of Alastair's would leave a hole you would be unable not to pick at. You have always been too curious for your own good." Gray couldn't argue with it. "Michael can put up barriers, though, so that nothing your brothers should not learn seeps through. I will ask if he will help."
"Yeah, that would probably be a good idea." He'd been able to keep it from Raiden thus far, but also, Raiden had begun to notice that he was avoiding spending too much time around him.
Lazarus nodded and said, "Now, the sword."
"It's really weird," Gray warned him.
"Just so," Lazarus agreed. "Quickly, before Gluttony returns. I cannot help you if I do not know what to look for."
Several minutes later, Lazarus, looking even more gobsmacked than he had when Gray had dropped his 'fated mates' bomb on him, winged off back toward the heavens mere seconds before Raiden turned the corner, holding a giant soda in one hand and swinging a McDonald's bag in the other. "Got you some fries."
"Did you eat 'em all already?" Gray asked as he stole the soda from Raiden and took a sip.
"Nah. Maybe half of 'em."
Gray would take it. He swapped him for the bag and, around a mouthful of potato, told Ray, "We should call it a night soon."
"That Sloth talking, or...?"
Gray swallowed and shook his head. "I just don't wanna get left if the island moves again."
"Oh, yeah, good point," Raiden said, and pulled off his shirt to release his wings. "Race you."
(NFI/NFB. Content warning for mention of cancer and discussion of child abuse.)
