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The wind buffets Alastor from every side- and it is an effort to stand still ,to not go crashing against the cliff face and into the waves below. He grips the reins tighter and squeezes his legs to stabilize himself.
“I used to come here to think, after you left, you know.”
Alastor glances at the Prince at his side. Lucifer’s eyes are dim as the sun ducks behind the clouds, but his voice is more melancholy than accusatory. His pale knuckles are lax against the horn of his saddle and his mare tosses her head against the wind.
Alastor looks away. Before them stretches the Northern Sea- so far that the demarcation of the water and sky is lost to some distant fog.
“Did it help?”
From the corner of his eye, Lucifer smiles, a sad thing. Down the cliffside to the east is a small set of docks – private, only really for emergencies or receiving guests that the palace does not want parading through the main harbour town further south. Lucifer told Alastor that it was there that he’d watched Lilith leave, years ago.
“Sometimes.”
Alastor isn’t sure what to say. He doesn’t have anything to apologize for. He would not have been able to rest if he had not done something. It still hurts somewhere inside of him — a place that he does not have a name for — to think of Lucifer here alone and so very far out of reach.
Alastor wakes in the night sometimes, his skin slicked with sweat and bitter, mismatched eyes — sunken strangely into the face of every man he has ever run through with a sword —- stamped into the backs of his eyelids. He breathes heavily into the canopy above him until Lucifer shifts closer and presses his mouth to the curve of Alastor’s shoulder. Sometimes the dream lingers, and Lucifer swipes a hand over his chest as if he is unbothered by the fear-grime of Alastor’s guilt.
But he is not sorry.
“...Why did you want to stop here?”
Lucifer shrugs. They’d had a lovely day before this sudden detour. A picnic at an outcropping along the eastern edge of the city that played host to a small fruited grove. Alastor can still feel the agitating ache of strawberry seeds stuck between his back teeth.
“It's beautiful. And a bit creepy. I just thought you’d like it.”
Alastor believes him. Ulterior motives are not his strong suit. And he’s right, it is beautiful, the land wild and ragged in a way that tugs at Alastor's chest. Although the landscape could not be more different, its bones are familiar feral in a way that reminds Alastor of the deep woods down south - the ancient ones.
He’d like to take Lucifer there one day, he thinks.
The dry rasp of the salt air sifts his curls to and fro and numbs the tips of his ears. It’s summer in the capital, and yet the air here, just a short ride to the north where the crown’s lands meet the sea in a violent clash of stone, is refreshingly cool.
“I’ll race you home?”
Home. No matter how many times Alastor says the word in his own mind it feels awkward and strange. When Lucifer breathes it out it casts his exhalation in something warmer, something for Alastor to wrap around himself. He cannot recreate it.
Lucifer doesn't wait for him because he’s a dirty cheater. Alastor glances once more at the ocean, at the salt and the past, and then steers his horse around to gallop after the man who drives him ever forward.
Ahead of him Lucifer laughs and laughs and when it reaches Alastor the wind has distorted the sunshine of his voice into something colder and freer.
Living has never felt like this past month has felt.
Joy instead of dread. Looking forward to the mystery of the next day instead of plotting how best to survive it.
Alastor’s time on the road had been harder on his body than he’d cared to admit, his wrists thinned and the muscles of his legs whittled into hard shapes by unpredictable meals and long days of walking. His body has changed yet again, since Lucifer had come for him; since Lucifer had brought him home. The knight’s arms had filled out again,
The wind whistles through his hair, whips tears into his eyes that spill down his cheeks.
The wind is his mothers voice. It urges him to slow down, to be softer.
Alastor had so rarely disobeyed his mother, but he’d never known how to do those things in particular, whatever was born jagged inside of him was not dulled by their station, nor his childhood resentments. When she died, Alastor had simply stopped trying.
“Out of practice?”
Lucifer’s voice falls back to him with the wind. The summer sea air has twisted it around her finger, but she cannot obscure its obvious glee.
Yes, he supposes he is.
Not for long.
Alastor urges his mount faster, and leans into the wind, determined to catch Lucifer before he makes it past the palace gates.
He doesn’t catch him until after dinner as it turns out, until after baths and heated looks from the corner of their eyes over wine.
“You’re tight tonight.”
Lucifer squirms beneath him, the effect being that he nearly twists Alastor’s knuckles off of his hand.
The prince drags a hand down his reddened face.
“Don’t say that.”
Alastor blinks, settles a hand on his thigh to push it down against the sheets, to spread Lucifer open so he can keep working.
Lucifer turns his head and presses his cheek into the sheets- hiding his cracked glass moan. The rocking of his hips gives him away nonetheless, and Alastor does not ask to see his face. Let him pretend, let him feel. There is no one else here, no denying the way Lucifer’s body yields for him, the way his chest flutters and his breath catches.
Alastor presses upwards, feeling for the spot that makes –
Lucifer gasps, his knees jerking, knocking against Alastor’s ribs hard enough to bruise.
With his free arm, Alastor hooks a wrist around Lucifer’s left knee and turns his face to push his mouth to the swell of bone and then presses his fingers harder, deeper, riding the wave of Lucifer’s bucking hips.
“Alastor, “ Lucifer whines, “ – don’t make me wait. We don’t have all night.”
Alastor lets his eyes flutter shut, feels the press of them over Lucifer’s pale skin, parchment and blood and the smell of his sweat.
“On the contrary darling, isn’t the point of tomorrow that we have the rest of our lives?”
It’s meant to be teasing, but the limb in his grasp goes slack, and when Alastor opens his eyes to find Lucifer’s face, the prince is looking at him with a heaviness that betrays the way his body trembles around his fingers.
Lucifer opens his mouth a few times, but the words appear to be sticking in his throat. Honey like the taste of his body lingering on Alastor’s teeth. The memory of it makes Alastor’s gums water.
“Alastor, fuck me already.”
He can’t resist the tease, “Yes, your majesty” because of the way it forces Lucifer’s lips into an angry pinched shape.
It is erased when Alastor sinks inside of him, all velvet heat and sweat. The bottle of oil that Lucifer had pressed into his hands after dinner is lost to the ocean of opulent bed sheets.
There is a strangeness here, and Alastor cannot understand why men die for this. None of them have Lucifer. Slitting throats and chasing wars for anything less is madness, sheer animalistic desperation. They know nothing of the smear of sunlight across sheets and the heat that reminds Alastor of summer. He is chained here- shackles of his own making- petal kisses along his wrists in the quiet mornings. Lucifer kisses him there a lot, and it had taken Alastor an embarrassingly long time to remember that Lucifer has wielded a sword his entire life, that he is familiar with the way one's forearms ache after a day in the yard or, god forbid, locked in combat. He nearly forgets somehow, that Lucifer knows exactly where the hurts are, the things that desire soothing, the jagged edges that Alastor does not know how to stitch together on his own. It always comes as a shock, how much easier moving, eating, living is with Lucifer pouring himself into the cracks in Alastor’s bones. Spidersilk threads of gold that work their way through the blackened places inside of him.
Lucifer clings to him when he begins to move, slow rocking motions that remind Alastor of the waves on the horizon, and nothing like the ones that had crashed and shorn themselves apart across the cliffs beneath their feet that morning.
Oh, he can move like that,too, he knows that Lucifer seems to like that just as much.
But there is a part of Alastor that is afraid of the morning in a way that he has never been before.
What will change, once they are bound by law? Will anything? Does he want something to change? He doesn’t think so, now, looking down at the pleasure slack lines of Lucifer’s face, his golden hair curled with sweat, and the molten honey look in his eyes when he says Alastor’s name like this.
“Alastor, more.”
How does it feel? To have one’s body pushed apart and broken into? Alastor had always imagined it to be painful, thought it must be like being strapped to that table in that godsforsaken crumbling monastery and having his fingernails prised apart from his flesh. He’d thought of those false priests, and the way they had torn his childhood hovel asunder without ever stepping foot past the threshold.
But Lucifer, undulating above him, had not seemed afraid. He did not look violated or fearful. Blasphemous, maybe, ethereal even, but afraid? Never.
He looks relieved, each time Alastor sinks inside of him, each time Alastor pulls him stretched across his cock. He looks happy.
Perhaps his body is the prison he’d feared it to be. Is it like seeing your rescuer? Is it like being joined inside the cage that you had accepted you would die alone in so long ago? Only to be visited by someone who sees you cowering there and has decided to stay? How had it felt, Alastor lies awake trying to remember, when Lucifer had walked through that door instead of his captor?
The memory is blurred by firelight and cooling fear sweat. It is being washed out by the rhythm of his days now, by late mornings and high arched corridors and the way Lucifer’s bored face lights up when Alastor walks into the room.
“Alastor-” Lucifer’s voice cracks in the middle of the middle of his name, and Alastor can forgive him for it when he arches so prettily.
“Come on darling, you know this part,” Alastor mouths the words into the exertion-salted bowl of Lucifer’s collarbone, the satisfying swoop of marble white white flesh pebbling red and blue beneath his teeth.
When Lucifer comes it is a storm, his muscles clenching and unclenching around him, beneath him, his breath a gust of wind that Alastor can hear swirling in his chest because he has sucked it all from the room. After all, how could Alastor dare to breathe in proximity to the star he seems to have pulled down by his ankles and into his bed? Lucifer’s cum is hot where it spills between them, his need pulsing with twitch of his hips as he gasps through it. His arms are tight around Alastor’s neck, pulling him so close that each breath they breathe in synch is painful, forcing their ribs to creak together.
Alastor’s hands tighten around Lucifer’s hips, aware of the soft hairs there, the tackiness of his sweat and the way pleasure feels shuddering through his muscles.
“Can I – inside you?”
“Please, Alastor- “
That's all it really takes. Lucifer need only ask Alastor to come apart at the seams and he does, lightning shocking up and down his spine when he releases into the hot clench of Lucifer’s body with a few desperate grinds that are as beastly as they are deep, each one forcing a stuttering little “ah” from Lucifer’s throat. Alastor wonders if he can feel it - feel the way Alastor tries to force his body to keep him, to hold onto the filthy dregs of himself in the only way he really knows how.
When their heartbeats have slowed and Alastor has cleaned them clumsily with the rag he’d brought to bed with them, Lucifer drags himself halfway across Alastor’s body between the sheets that are still far too soft for Alastor to fall readily asleep in. Alastor drapes an arm around the Prince's shoulders, dragging the pads of his fingertips through the cooling sweat there, glistening in the sputtering candlelight.
It’s strange, knowing he could request a servant to run them a bath, even now in the middle of the night. It makes his skin itch a little bit, although he’s never seen the staff treated less than kindly by the royal family. There are no laws preventing Lucifer from being with him, and although there have been plenty of whispers and a few suspicious, lingering looks at his hands or his skin, no one dares object to the regent outright.
Alastor had assumed, perhaps naively, that he would simply continue being Lucifer’s guard. To his surprise, upon returning to the capital, Lucifer had insisted on changing out his livery for something finer, something befitting of his new status.
“Which is..?” Alastor had asked offhandedly, fingering the edge of a sleeve of a tunic Lucifer had lain out for him. The fabric was too fine to catch on his callouses, it slipped through his hands like water.
“My fiance?”
Alastor is not sure how long he stared at the man before his golden eyes had sprung wide, his cheeks flushing rose pink in that humiliating realization.
“I..I didn’t –!”
“Propose? You did not.”
Alastor’s own eyes had stung with how dry his expression must have been, right before Lucifer grabbed him by the hand and fell to his knees. The memory has already taken on a surreal quality in his mind; Lucifer’s flustered face, the grip of his palm. Alastor thinks he may have laughed so hard that his own hands shook in the cradle of Lucifer’s. Did he even say yes? He hopes he did. He must have.
Now, he presses his mouth to the ridge of Lucifer’s left middle knuckle, just to the right of where he really wants to.
“Don’t worry about tomorrow now, it will come tomorrow.”
Alastor had hated when his mother said those words. They’d still be hungry the next day, after all. But Lucifer relaxes at the sound of his voice, and pulls Alastor closer by his waist.
“Nothing can go wrong. Now get some sleep.”
“WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU SAY THAT?!”
Alastor feels the strongest urge to smash his skull through the stone column that he's dragged them both behind for a moment to catch his bearings.
“‘Nothing can go wrong!’ Who the hell says that to someone before their wedding day?”
“You had no problem with it last night, so please cease your screeching."
Alastor might wince at that, the dismissiveness of his tone, at the brief flicker of hurt across Lucifer's golden gaze. But he’s a little preoccupied as his eyes dart around the room for a possible weapon. The clanging grows louder and someone else screams. It is impossible to distinguish the screams of their people from those of their attackers, and for a terrifying second Alastor is not sure if he would recognize anyone’s scream: Husker? Charlie? Lucifer’s screams had always been pleasurable – Alastor shakes his head and his glasses slip a little ways down his nose.
There’s candelabras on the altar, waiting to be lit when the sun sets, before the feasting. There are heavy, ceremonial bowls as well, but Alastor quickly dismisses them.
“Your sword – ,” Lucifer insists.
A drop of sweat tickles Alastor’s nape. He’d forgotten about the goddamn sword at his belt. It’s ceremonial of course, smaller than the one he is used to cleaving with, but it is far better than nothing. There will be time to curse his own scattered thoughts later, if they live.
Alastor twists, and something in his wrist pulls painfully taut.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, my sweet, but you’re going to have to let go of my hand.”
“..I literally can’t.”
Alastor glances again at the familiar crimson fabric that binds their hands. He thought the red was quite a fitting color for the ceremony. If he hadn’t known just where that fabric had been, it might have reminded him of something beautiful, like the rose petals that littered the aisle or of the blood of an enemy that had decorated Lucifer’s skin so prettily on the battlefield.
The red looks a lot less pretty now, where the tangled knot lies twisted around their wrists and as unfinished as their wedding vows.
You have got to be fucking kidding him. The gods are laughing, Alastor can practically hear it echoing off of the stone ceiling. Unless that's just the sound of ringing metal. He can’t fight properly with one hand tied behind his – to Lucifer.
"As a symbol of your joining, we present-"
Lucifer had been so pleased with himself when the attendant had appeared with the fabric that Husker would use to tie the wedding knot across their knuckles.
“No, turn around - let me grab it– Yes – no – like –”
It takes longer than it should, and Alastor swears he can hear their intruders coming closer. His quick count had given him seven bodies, and while of course there were palace guards at the door, but they would have been caught unawares. He quickly tunes out the clang of metal and thier garbled shouts.
A small ceremony had been the order of the day: Lucifer had not wanted everyone looking at him while he stuttered through his vows and probably dropped the ring, he’d said. So they'd decided to hold it in a close, disused chapel. It had been a part of the original structure, a relic of a time before Lucifer’s siblings had expanded the palace.
At first, when Lucifer had showed it to him, the Prince had been embarrassed, appalled by the state of it- the original altar was crumbling under the weight of its age, and every crevice was thick with dust and river-green moss.
“I apologize- I didn’t realize the groundskeepers had let it go- this is not-”
“It’s lovely.”
Alastor hadn’t even had to lie.
It was..quaint. It reminded Alastor of the local chapel his mother had taken him to in the evenings as a boy. Before it had come to represent something else entirely it had been one of the only places his mother had seemed… relaxed isn’t the right word. Comforted, maybe? Less drawn looking, at the very least.
Although the stones were cold, damp, even, the small windows along the far wall let in plenty of evening light, turning the entire room a soft glowing orange, like tangerine rinds. He’d thought his mother would have liked it, is all.
Lucifer had blinked at him with wide honey eyes, but Alastor had thought that perhaps that detail about his mother was a story for another time.
He wishes he’d just told him, now that they might die.
Of course, not everyone had approved of the transfer of the realms regency to Lucifer’s care. The people love him, always have, and the ones that don’t, still love his daughter, the Princess-Knight Charlie. The church is the exception, and several of the noble class had been more than reluctant to fall into line after Raphael had been banished by his brothers.
Alastor can only assume that the men crashing his wedding day are loyal to the exiled Prince.
Which means they’re not here to kill their guests, not just to make a scene. They’re here to kill Lucifer.
“Charlie – !”
Even as Alastor hears Lucifer shout- he can see the Princess being dragged behind the altar by her paramour. There is another way out- a side door to the gardens in the south transept.
“If we draw their attention Charlie has time to run without being pursued.”
He’s glad that his voice comes out much calmer than he feels, and when he looks at Lucifer there is understanding in his golden eyes.
“This is my job.”
“I know how to use a sword, too, you know," Alastor huff.
“That's great, sweetheart.” Rich, smarmy bastard.
“..Why are you like this?”
There is no time to really begin their lovingly hewn ritual of bickering before their attackers are on them.
Alastor raises his hand, but Lucifer steps around him to raise the sword above his head and parry the first blow.
The first swordsman to reach them is heavy-footed and slow under bronze chain armor. He fumbles when his victims do not immediately cower.
Swung behind the Prince, Alastor just has time to glimpse the blood splashed across the stone aisle, and his heart twists horribly in his chest. Anger, disgust; a brand new concoction of indignation that threatens to choke him. It is his wedding day. It is Lucifer’s wedding day. How dare they? Lucifer steps aside to dodge the next swing of their attacker’s blade and the movement wrenches Alastor’s shoulder agonizingly in the wrong direction. Lucifer elbows him in the stomach as he pulls the sword back and levels it to stab into the soft, vulnerable space beneath the man’s arm. Alastor's weight nearly throws him off, but the knight is quick to grab his shoulder and correct his aim so that the blade sinks in, in with a satisfying shucking sound. The man screams and stumbles to the side, his own blade clattering to the ground. The weight of his body yanks Lucifer’s sword out of his hand.
This is…excuciating, being wrenched around like a puppet on strings while his fiance fends off a man twice his size. Not that it's saying much- everyone is twice Lucifer’s size.
Two more soldiers are making their way up the aisle,and Alastor is briefly struck by the fury in their eyes. It feels so sharp, a blade of its own, and not for the first time he recognizes how little he understands of the castle politics. It had all seemed so petty to him, so bogged down by tradition and noble grudges about land and coffers and so completely out of touch with the things that had haunted him his entire life: real struggles like an empty stomach and fever and the feeling of his own blood slipping through his fingers.
That those “petty” squabbles are marching up the cathedral aisles with blades in their hands nearly unbalances him, but then Lucifer tugs at his hand, his pale fingers curling around Alastor’s under the fabric, and he comes back to himself.
“This isn’t working.”
“Well, we don’t have a shit ton of choice here, Alas-”
“No, listen to me - remember the dancing lessons?”
“Is now really the time to complain about that ?”
Hours spent in the empty banquet hall ,the tables and chairs cleared away so that one of the councilwomen might guide them through the steps of the traditional first dance.
Alastor had never had formal lessons, the dancing done in his home village many miles away was very different from the odd twirling and kicking that this new style demanded of him, and although he was a quick learner, Lucifer had been less than enthusiastic, unable to look away from Alastor’s feet as he fretted about being stepped on. Excruciating is how Alastor might describe the experience.
“Lucifer. It’s just another fight.”
Lucifer had rolled his eyes, a lock of hair clinging to his temple with sweat.
“Don't be so crude. It's a dance, Al. Our wedding dance, and we’re fucking it up– “
“You’re just overthinking it. Imagine you have a sword in your hand–”
“Excuse me–”
“And you have to predict where your opponent will go next. You know how it feels, when your body doesn't even need instructions to listen to your eyes - to what your heart knows will happen next. And you always know what I’ll do next.”
The words had felt silly at the time, too poetic, but it had finally seemed to click - some disconnected piece falling into place when the music began again, a bit slower as the lute player they’d brought in had seemed to lose both motivation and hope throughout the evening. Lucifer’s body felt less stiff, his grip surer, drier as they made their first successful pass across the room.
“A fight is just a dance, remember. And you always know what I’ll do next.”
Lucifer’s brows lower over his amber-chipped gaze. He nods. Alastor moves forward with him, a little less haltingly, to retrieve his sword. The steel comes back crimson. Traitor's blood.
It is with a clattering stutter that they fall together now- into step- into time, right as they run out of any other options.
Lucifer twirls Alastor out of the way and then back as Alastor shoulders the first man off balance and onto Lucifer’s blade. It’s almost laughably easy after that. Could Alastor have predicted this somehow, that he and Lucifer together in a fight, quite literally tied together and forced to work in step, would be a formidable force? They disarm the third man, and Alastor brings his boot down hard on his windpipe. Red hot pain slices across his cheek where he is too slow to dodge something smaller, a dagger that had been harder to see in the commotion, but Alastor catches the next raised arm and Lucifer darts in close. The spray of blood that the man coughs across Alastor’s cheek is hot and tastes like pressed coins between his teeth.
It’s over as fast as it began. Alastor looks up just in time to see one of the entrance guards pulling an arrow from one of the attackers chests. Another is pulling his companion from the floor. One of the palace guards clutches his side, fingers red, but he only sways a little on his feet.
They are…miraculously all intact.
Alastor counts seven bodies on the floor, all in the same clunky, burnished bronze chainmail.
A gasp, and then – “Charlie!” A yank on his arm nearly takes Alastor off his feet as he is dragged backwards. All of their parallel rhythm from moments before is discarded as Lucifer races to the altar, where a stone-faced Vaggi has her arms wrapped tight around Charlie’s struggling form. It takes them several moments to separate as they emerge from their hiding spot, Vaggi refuses to let go of the princess until she seems satisfied that no more assailants will be rushing down the aisle to meet them with iron.
“You should have run!” Lucifer’s voice has gone all high pitched in the manner it does when he is truly distraught. It makes Alastor’s ears hurt, but his chest clenches at the angry tears he can spot clinging to Lucifer’s lash line.
“You underestimate her, your majesty." Vaggi huffs, and Alastor notices that the edge of her jaw is reddened and her hair has come loose from its celebratory ribbons. Charlotte's eyes are wide and terrified as she looks them over, pressing her hands to her father’s ruined tunic, fingering a tear in the sleeve.
“We- we’re ok?”
“We’re fine,” Lucifer assures her, his voice descending now that he has a task in front of him, a daughter to soothe.
Charlie glances behind them, at the way their guests trickle slowly back into the room or peek their heads up from behind the pews where they’d cowered.
“Is this…Uncle R-”
Lucifer cuts her off with a sigh, “Probably.”
The silence lingers for a moment, and Alastor’s shoulder aches something fierce now that the excitement of the fight is leeching out of his limbs.
“I need some wine,” Lucifer makes the tired face that he always makes before he rubs at his own temples, and sure enough his fingers twitch against Alastor’s in an aborted movement.
“Oh- let me-” Lucifer turns to him then, pulling their joined hands up and reaching for the knot. The words are out of Alastor’s mouth before he has really thought them.
“Absolutely not.”
Lucifer blinks, and Charlie and Vaggi eye Alastor warily.
“It's..” Alastor finds Husker’s face in the crowd- uncaring of what he might look like for once. He waits for the man to raise one bushy eyebrow at him in acquiescence before he looks back at Lucifer’s- his fiance's – face.
“It’s still our wedding day. The drinking comes after the ceremony.”
Lucifer's face melts like snow under the bright winter sun.
“Lets try this again,” Husker pauses in his speech a short while later, and from the corner of his eye Alastor sees his dark eyes darting to the chapel doors, and then the windows. In spite of himself, Alastor feels his entire body tense. But the moment passes, and Husker asks them to raise their joined hands. He pinches the end of the scarf between his thumb and forefinger and finishes looping the fabric around their wrists. Lucifer’s fingers tighten around his own; they’re sweaty, and Alastor savors the clammy, comforting strength of them.
Lucifer smiles at him. His hair is loose from the way he had brushed it back this morning. Tufts of it frame his temples better than any finely bejeweled veil.
Alastor won’t admit it, how nervous he’d been this morning.
“A solstice wedding is a good omen, sir.”
That's what the squire had said this morning, the pale light glinting off of the fancy buttons at his wrists. Alastor had glanced at him, but hadn’t been able to summon a response. His mouth was too dry, and he didn’t believe in such things anyways. But courtesy demanded that he nod, that he smile, and the squire had always been respectful of him, so Alastor had muttered, “Indeed.”
He’d felt ridiculous, trussed up in an outfit that chaffed at his neck with its high collar and trousers that hugged his thighs too tightly. He had barely looked at himself in the mirror after the servants had gone, but as soon as he’d stepped into the chapel he’d wished sorely that he had. Alastor had never worn such fine clothes in his life, and he had the fleeting, horrible thought that Lucifer wouldn’t like him like this. That it wasn’t really him, and Lucifer’s eyes would slide over him just like they did the rest of his court. Instead Lucifer had seen him and grinned. Sunlight. But then the Prince had taken his hand at the altar and the anxiety simmering in Alastor’s gut had shifted, taking new form - the eyes on him had felt like insects crawling over his shoulders, and he hadn’t been able to look away from Lucifer’s face through Husker's entire droning speech and formalities.
Lucifer had squeezed his hands, cheeks bunching up. His face had been painted, lovingly, obviously, in the traditional fashion. There were rosy circles over his cheeks and smudges of lavender in the creases of his eyelids.
“You look like a child’s doll,” Alastor muttered, so quietly that the words hardly left impressions in the air. Lucifer's fingers tightened around his hard enough for pain to flicker up his wrist. The gazes of their congregation had faded into dull background noise under the rush of his own heartbeat. Until Husker had produced that goddamn scarf, of course, and Alastor had nearly choked at the flash of Lucifer’s smug grin. The Prince had smothered it long enough to begin repeating his vows.
Damn him.
He had to know the images this simple piece of cloth evoked in Alastor: the scent of Lucifer’s skin strong in the memory folds of bloody cotton.
But Husker had opened his damn mouth before Alastor could decide whether or not it was worth it to strangle the man in front of him now, when everyone would see him murder the regent prince or later, in their marriage bed. At least the latter held the potential for a more pleasant evening for him.
“Alastor Ha-”
“Just Alastor.”
The old man’s cheek twitched.
“Alastor. Do you-”
And then all hell had broken loose.
So no, Alastor hadn’t really had the presence of mind to appreciate the enormity of this moment until just now. It’s almost relaxing: arms are sore and the rush of the attack has drained away all of his previous nervous energy. He looks at Lucifer’s beautiful, torn clothes, the places where his skin peeks through, soft and tempting in the fading light. At his flushed face – sweat tracking lines through the rouge on his cheeks – and the splatter of blood across his chest.
Adoration.
That's the name of this spindly root system in his lungs, is it not?
“Well?”
Alastor blinks, licks his lips. They still taste like copper. Had he not been listening?
Lucifer’s smile cracks his beautiful face like the sun splits the dawn. The signature petals of blood on his cheeks flare to life.
“Do you take me?”
Alastor has the wherewithal to whisper “Always,” against Lucifer’s lips before the crowd erupts into cheers.
Lucifer leads him through the gardens.
They were able to limit those in attendance for the actual ceremony in the chapel. In hindsight, perhaps that was for the best- fewer unintended casualties. The thought makes his stomach turn a little, and he pushes it down for later.
The guards are a little on edge - there are more of them on the fringes of the lawn than Alastor is happy with, but he’s glad for them nonetheless. Nothing else will come between him and this night.
And?
Nothing does. Lucifer twirls him under candlelights in the thick summer heat and when he stumbles, Lucifer whispers into his neck, “would it help if I gave you a sword?” and Alastor pinches his side hard enough to bruise as he shoots back “try it and see how long your wedding night lasts, your majesty.”
Lucifer’s laugh tickles his jaw and spirals into the tent draped far above their heads.
There is wine and music from a band that seems to keep changing position, or moving in and among the crowd. Although, maybe that's just all of the kicking and spinning. Alastor catches flashes of Charlie and Vaggi on the other side of the trampled grass in the center of the festivities where the crowded dances, rolling and parting in waves just for them. There is wine sweet enough to make his teeth ache, and a long feast table full of meats and cheeses and perfectly ripe fruit; but Alastor prefers to be dancing, even in the strange manner of the capital. As long as Lucifer is by his side, it is impossible to keep track of the hours, especially after the sun sets and the world outside the perfect part underneath the tent ceases to exist.
His glasses keep fogging from the heat and Lucifer pulls them off his face to clean them in between dances. Alastor wants to kiss him, remembers that he can, does.
“Can we do this again?” Alastor asks dazedly, thinking about pulling Lucifer out of the heat and into the night- back to the water where he first tasted the shape of the Prince's mouth.
“Every single night, love,” and Lucifer is whispering, so Alastor has no idea how he even hears him over the music of the crowd, but he does. Hears it in his chest, in the beating thing there.
When he collapses into their bed later, he is flushed from head to toe, but Lucifer pulls off his boots and only undoes the first three buttons of his shirt before he climbs over Alastor to kiss him once, quietly, on the lips.
“Tired, sweetheart?”
“We did kill several people today.”
Lucifer’s lips twist – he doesn’t like being reminded of his prowess as a soldier the way so many men do; the way Alastor does – but he doesn’t seem upset.
“But we did also get married,” Alastor continues, resting his hands on his own chest, fingertips just grazing the jut of his collarbone. Sure enough, Lucifer’s eyes are drawn there, though his soft smile remains.
“Don’t we get to consummate it?”
The last of Lucifer’s curls falls out of order when he laughs, hanging his head against Alastor’s chest.
“I hate to break it to you, Alastor, but I think we’ve skipped a few steps there.”
“Mmm, I think it's still the law.”
“What would you know about the law?” Lucifer huffs a laugh. It tickles.
Lust is not something that sidles in under Alastor’s skin when he sits still too long ,the way it seems to with Lucifer. But he thinks that the only thing that could make this night more perfect, is the feeling of Lucifer’s bare skin - the familiarity it evokes, the soothing effect it has on the snapping, needy thing in Alastor’s chest.
“I know that you can make it whatever you want it to be,” Alastor lowers his voice, takes Lucifer’s hand between his and sets it against the fastenings of his trousers. He delights in the violent shudder it sends through the smaller man’s frame.
“Whatever you wish.” Lucifer’s words are yielding, but his voice is deeper, a cool flat surface on a very deep well. There’s that feather weight of command in his tone that makes Alastor’s eyelids flutter closed.
Lucifer squeezes him once, softly. Warmth, languid and easy, seeps down the line of Alastor’s spine.
The prince removes his hand however, and lifts himself over Alastor again.
“Can I take these?” Lucifer’s fingers are so light on his temple that Alastor is only aware of their heat. He nods, and Lucifer lifts the device from his face. The world softens slightly as the Prince reaches over him to place his glasses somewhere on the small table next to the headboard.
Alastor suspects that his eyes will get worse with age, and one day the little glass pieces that Lucifer had made for him will not help. In darker moments, he imagines a world reduced to colors and noise and the breeze on his face without being able to see how it sifts the leaves on the trees.
In lighter moments, he thinks about how he will still recognize the gold of Lucifer’s eyes even in the mud of such a world. He will know the swallow-titter's tone of his laugh and the touch of his small, rounded knuckles.
“Better?”
“I suppose.”
When Lucifer kisses him, his breath seeps into Alastor's skin, his nose pressed alongside his own and his lips slipping together and apart like so much oil and water. He does not feel different. He is just Lucifer. After everything that has transpired today, he only feels like home and laughter and summer songs around the fire. Alastor drags his thumbs down his cheeks until the remainder of the ridiculous paint is smeared across his chin. Better. He looks even more alive. Their clothes come off in a burst of energy that fizzles out as soon as Lucifer grinds their bare hips together.
The candlelight catches his eyes and it looks like lightning bugs brightening up the shadows of a summer festival. Lucifer’s fingers brush his lips and his mouth drops open without his permission, ready this time, inviting. Lucifer blinks at him, wide and wondrous as his fingers slip over Alastor’s tongue. His skin tastes like salt and wine and Alastor wraps his lips around the swell of his knuckles, trying to suck the memories down. His eyelids flutter shut, a thin barrier against the heat that has stolen through Lucifer’s gaze.
“There you go, that's beautiful.” There are more fingers on his face, stroking his cheek, and Lucifer’s voice sounds like stones breaking, like the sea against the cliffs. Alastor will throw himself if this is the darkness that catches him.
It isn’t until Lucifer pulls away that Alastor recognizes he may have lost himself there for a moment. When he opens his eyes his skin feels flushed, and Lucifer smears the wetness of his mouth across his jaw when he pulls Alastor close.
“How do you want me, husband?” Lucifer speaks the endearment with far too much sweetness, syrup sugar that sticks to the roof of Alastor’s mouth. Alastor wants to strangle him as he kisses him breathless. It is a feeling that he has come to accept will never not be itching just under his skin.
“Hands and knees?” Lucifer continues, his voice curling around the shell of Alastor’s ear, “Over the pillows? –”
“Inside of me.”
Lucifer’s bright amber eyes blink once, then twice. He searches Alastor’s face for a long moment, and the knight fights to keep his expression from twitching. He’s sure. He wants the cage broken open, the forced surrender and the pulsing of his seed. He wants to be the vessel that Lucifer is always so happy to serve as for him. Love in the physical sense, as the priests would say. He thinks of the blood on his face today, the scent of death strong in his nose and Lucifer’s hands clasped so tightly in his. Alastor remembers a more distant version of himself; hungrier, lonelier, and miserable without the use of his voice. He thinks of the way Lucifer had coaxed it from him with his tongue between his legs. The stabbing, insistent heat of it. Alastor wants it again, he’s somewhat startled to realize. He thinks that he knows how he might get it.
When Lucifer pushes his fingers into his body he tenses, thighs quaking, and Lucifer bends in half to kiss up the curve of his cock until the awful fluttering in his stomach is all that Alastor can feel, even as Lucifer digs into his body in search of him.
When Lucifer snubs the head of his cock red hot into the secret fold of him, Alastor takes a very deep breath, lets it out in the broken breeze sound of Lucifer’s name when he splits him open.
Lucifer’s cock moving inside of him feels strange, invasive, but he was right about one thing: It does not feel painful. It is inevitable, it is sunrise, it is the way their first kiss had felt, so long ago.
Alastor will have him like this again, he decides.
He will have him in any way that he wants. Beneath him, his pale hands sliding across his hips as he rides him in the morning light. Behind the dais of the council chamber, his body sucking Alastor’s fingers in until he cries, minutes before the rest of the council arrives for session. Alastor will have his mouth in the dead of night, until his pink lips drip with pearls befitting of his crown. He will have Lucifer above him, calling his name and spreading his flesh until they are one. Alastor will have Lucifer rending the sheets beneath him, pink nipples chaffed from his mouth. He will have him next to him in the great hall and inside of his memory and tucked into every vision of his future.
There is a poet in the castle library somewhere who had once described the death of a star.
A flash of warmth, so faint that it’s probably not even real. All consuming light shifting into the darkest night so quickly that you’re not sure if it existed at all, but you know that it did. You know that it did because the searing of your bones has yet to fade and there are flakes of who you were before this moment still floating down like dust in the morning light.
Alastor feels his hips tremble, feels whatever he is made up of move apart to make room for Lucifer’s cock, for the way he forces the sound of Alastor’s name back down his own throat. Alastor thinks of stars and sharp fires and jubilantly mourning whatever Lucifer’s mouth has extinguished within him when it presses salt slick and demanding to his own.
Lucifer’s voice when he spills himself into the cradle of his hips is the absence of sound, it is a night sky forever changed, and invisible to any who were not there to witness the moment of passing of its brightest son.
Lucifer’s palm wraps around his cock and drags him through the heat of his orgasm. As desperate as Alastor feels to join him in that burned-out place, he dreads the drop, the moment between deciding to swing a sword and the breaking of flesh under the blade. It is made bearable only by Lucifer’s hand on his thigh, on the hinge of his jaw, urging Alastor to –
“Alastor look at me - I want to see you - your eyes.”
Alastor is transported back in time to a tent as far from this palace as it had been from his first home. Lucifer’s moans muffled by the heavy drapery that trapped the heat of them in close. Except Lucifer looms over him now, his touch gentle as his thumb pulls at Alastor’s bottom lip. The beginnings of lines at the corner of his golden eyes are strange - Alastor does not think he has ever seen such topography carved by love before.
“Please? Let me feel you break for me.”
He almost tells him that break is the wrong word. This is not breaking. This is remaking.
When he comes it is with his fingers buried in the gold tresses of Lucifer’s hair, his teeth in his throat and the Prince’s softening cock still leaking inside of him.
Mountain towns and mud slicked battle fields and manacles. A carving knife and fever-mint and a false priest's head coming away under his hand, crown jewels glittering through a gray dusk. Feasts and ledgers and windswept cliffs. Assasination attempts and dancing lessons and Lucifer’s mouth and Alastor is in love.
From solstice to solstice, what remains of that version of himself who wandered away from a party in foreign kingdom just one year ago? How many new things can break inside of you in the span of a fortnight, a month, another line drawn into your brow? How many miles can you run and how many things can you mend? Alastor breathes through the aftershocks of his love, through the waves of Lucifer’s breath and simply…loses count.
“How does it feel?" Lucifer asks later, cheek pressed into the down pillow and breath fanning over Alastor’s throat.
Alastor wrinkles his nose as he’s reminded of the slickness between his thighs. It sort of feels like being left out in the rain - the way the sky’s fingers find their way into every crevice of your clothes and skin.
Lucifer’s voice is too full of wonder, with something dark slinking just beneath its surface, for Alastor to ruin it.
“..Perfect.” He says, lethargy making his voice woozy. Lucifer huffs a laugh against him and folds himself closer into the cradle of Alastor’s arms. Alastor’s eyes flicker to the shadows that dance along the walls. The candles are getting low, and the night stretches out along the stone, but it does not feel threatening or heavy. On his hand, curled softly around Lucifer’s nape, is a strip of gold that draws Alastor’s eye each time he almost forgets its presence. Alastor watches the final flame flicker the table next to the bed, counting the embers cast on Lucifer’s hair as the breaths of his prince -regent?- his king even out with sleep. The fading light sinks into the waves of the bedsheets and into the wood grain of the figures bracketing the thick iron candlestick holder. The little waterfowl with its smoothed edges and wide dark eyes. The grooves of its wings are just visible from this angle. The deer on the candle’s other side has a new set of antlers- whatever glue fastening Charlie had used to fix it reflects the firelight more than the dark wood underneath, a lovingly mismatched creature.
The candle flickers out, but Alastor closes his eyes to the image of those two battle-whittled idols standing watch over their bed.
