Lucifer pressed his lips together into a thin line, his fingers rubbed roughly against each other, grace's dust falling from the tips as it turned everything it touched into hot searing ice. Wanting nothing more than to return to the hospital to search intently in all the souls that were in there, and then to do the same in the whole city. To not stop until he had someone ─something─ to destroy; but that flicker of fear he had sensed deep inside Aaron's soul, the one that had started sparkling since he turned to look out of the window and saw the storm forming above after he transported them back to his room.
"You need to control yourself," he had said. Lucifer's feathers bristled, remembering hearing the same words in another context. "Go to a place where there are no humans and calm yourself."
It had been an impulse that time, so far from his careful nature, that made him lean to kiss him, to soothe his scared light, hungry to feel his love again. Aaron, unlike his soul, didn't recoil away from his touch, instead, he deepened it as if he knew and wanted to reassure him. Though, it quickly morphed into a fight of wills, of who was right. No one wanted to recede, but then lightning cracked outside and Aaron won.
A palm moved between their bodies, pushing gently against his chest for him to move away. He looked up at him; there was a hint of doubt and desire in his eyes but it was accompanied with steel determination as he whispered, "Go, and calm yourself, Lucifer."
Perhaps Lucifer could have convinced him of staying if he had held him tighter, breathed against his neck, left more pecks on his mouth ─he sighed─ but he did not want Aaron to have to fight against his own morals, to have to choose between them and him. Besides, one of the things he had learned to love and admire about Aaron had been his selflessness and care, even if sometimes bothered him.
Lucifer sent specks of dust of grace towards a tree and saw how it demolished itself. He did not know why he had chosen that place, after leaving one more kiss on Aaron's lips he only wanted to be alone, and at that moment, a dessert in Africa secluded from society seemed like the perfect place; a fallen trunk looked like the ideal spot to sit.
He glanced up at the teary sky; his mood was already altering the weather, engulfing the previous silence it had had when he came. Big, heavy drops fell from the sky nonstop, making it hard to see anything but his nose. He was lucky that the sound of such display deafened the anguished cries of animals and humans from afar, as they did the same, shouting at the sky as they blamed the anger of gods for punishing them.
They were irritating.
He closed his eyes, his mind sharp as it calculated every way to destroy them. How easy it would be to poke the earth's center and see how everything erupted, or to press a feather against a plaque and then from above see how all trembled until it destroyed. He wanted to bath himself in the cries of those souls.
He wondered if that would be enough to calm him.
His Father once accused him of having too much anger, of not possessing control. That his voraciousness, jealousy, pride, ─his urge to destroy─ would only end with nothing but himself.
That time he had flared his wings at his Father, sneered at the accusations, ready to accept the bet, to prove to him that he could and would obliterate every one of...
And that perhaps was not the best way to relax.
Lucifer opened his eyes. He could still feel the electric sensation of his power singing through his vessel with blinding pressure, as if it were Hell's fire spreading through his veins, burning cold as it built and built deep inside him. It made his skin feel too tight to retain his grace. It felt as if only one tug was needed for him to finally explode.
He blinked when he sensed a familiar energy approaching; the storm above him parted in two like the red sea as it came closer. Lucifer could have easily flown the intruder away, send thunders with tendrils of his grace to give a warning. He didn't though. Instead, he pressed his wings tight against his back, drew his fractured grace together, not wanting to give anything away, Lucifer waited, breathing through his nose when he recognized the energy seconds before it appeared a few steps away from him wearing a female vessel.
"Lucifer," Raphael greeted him. Like him, the drops that fell did not touch her; it merely formed a shield around her, making her dark skin shine in an ethereal way.
She would have looked astounding, but her posture was too frigid and her eyes gleamed with indifference. Lucifer's throat went tight. He remembered her being curious, always was close to dying stars, watching as they imploded; sometimes near recently created ones, enjoying their creation; or simply behind Michael, wanting to learn more from the eldest. She could literally spend years marveling at one rock.
Raphael had always been the most gentle of them. The one whose grace emanated understanding, compassion, trust. She was Father's Healer.
But now though?
He could barely see ─ feel ─ his sister in the angel standing in front of him. There were some rigidity and dejection he had never felt in Raphael before. Some sort of heartlessness. Her wings no longer crystalline and calm, but flickering, as if they were made of thunders, collating between one and another in constant ferocity.
Lucifer, once again, faced the consequences of his acts, of his pride. Not only Gabriel, their youngest, had crumbled because of the war.