Chapter Text
The Cage had no seasons.
No passage of time. No heartbeat to mark its rhythm.
Just dark.
The kind of dark that wasn’t absence but presence—alive, endless, swallowing everything it touched. A cold that wasn’t just temperature, but a force: the opposite of warmth.
It wasn’t punishment.
It wasn’t even prison.
It was erasure.
Lucifer had long ago stopped fighting the dark. The first few centuries—if centuries even meant anything here—he had raged, shredded the silence with angelic hymns turned to screams. He had clawed at the unseen walls until his fingers bled grace, had built whole worlds out of thought just to watch them burn.
But eventually, even that had gone quiet.
There were only so many prayers you could whisper to a God who no longer listened.
At first, the dreams had felt like cracks in his prison.
A mercy? No. That wasn’t how mercy worked. More like… an echo of what had been. He hadn’t dreamed since before the Fall. Real dreaming—innocent, aimless, the way it used to be when he and his brothers slept curled near their Father’s light, letting grace hum like a lullaby.
And then the boy appeared.
Barefoot. Radiant. Soft, like grace used to be before it hardened into weapons.
The first time Lucifer saw him, he thought it was a hallucination. A trick. His own mind, trying to comfort him the way Gabriel used to in the quiet hours.
But the boy kept coming.
And now…
Lucifer wasn’t sure the Cage was entirely the same anymore.
This dream was different.
There was no battlefield. No walls. No endless void.
Just a field of pale gold grass swaying under a sky that wasn’t Heaven, but something older. A sky the way Lucifer remembered it from the first days of creation: raw and unfiltered, painted with colors only grace could name.
And in the center of it all sat the boy.
Lucifer stopped several feet away. Not because he feared him—fear wasn’t the right word. It was because every part of him ached.
The way your muscles ache when you’ve been holding too much for too long.
The way your heart aches when you’ve been empty for eons and someone suddenly dares to fill it.
“Lucifer,” the boy said, as though he’d always known his name.
Lucifer didn’t ask who he was.
He couldn’t.
He just staggered forward and collapsed to his knees.
And then, like it was the most natural thing in the universe, he lowered himself to the boy’s lap.
It was instinct. Primal.
Archangels didn’t kneel. Not like this. They bowed to their Father, yes, but this—this was something older than worship.
Lucifer’s head rested against the boy’s thigh, and he closed his eyes, bracing for the familiar sting of rejection, of judgment, of being called monster.
It never came.
Instead, the boy placed his hands—warm hands—on Lucifer’s head. Fingers threading through his hair, light brushing against the base of his skull like the faintest hum of grace.
Lucifer froze.
The warmth startled him. He’d forgotten what it felt like.
And that realization split him open.
He didn’t mean to cry.
He wasn’t even sure he still could.
But as soon as those hands began to stroke through his hair, something in him buckled.
Lucifer had always been the proud one. The defiant one. The Morningstar who would never grovel.
But now—
Now he wept.
Hot, silent sobs tore from him, grace flickering weakly with every shudder. His tears weren’t beautiful like they once had been. They were jagged. Messy. They left tracks that burned his skin.
And the boy didn’t flinch.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t speak, not until Lucifer was half-broken against him.
“You were always loved,” the boy said softly.
Lucifer went still.
He couldn’t breathe.
The boy said it like it was the simplest thing in the world. Like it was truth.
But truth had been a weapon in his life. Used to trap him. To condemn him. To tell him he was no longer a son but a monster in a cage.
Always loved.
His Father had told him once, hadn’t He? That He loved him?
Even as He placed the Mark on his arm.
Even as He demanded obedience that would hollow him out.
Even as He cast him down.
“Don’t lie to me,” Lucifer rasped. His voice sounded like rust, like broken strings.
“I’m not,” the boy said.
“You don’t know what I did.”
“I do.”
Lucifer choked on a bitter laugh. “Then you can’t mean that.”
“I do,” the boy repeated, calm as still water.
“You weren’t there,” Lucifer snapped, his tears drying into rawness. “You didn’t see what I became. The things I—”
“I did.”
Lucifer twisted his head to look up at him.
The boy’s expression didn’t change. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t horror. It wasn’t even forgiveness.
It was recognition.
Lucifer had been bathed in God’s light before.
It was blinding. All-consuming. Perfect.
This wasn’t that.
The boy’s light wasn’t overwhelming. It didn’t burn.
It wrapped around him like a cloak, like the sun on a cold morning. It didn’t demand that he worship, though every part of him wanted to.
It didn’t demand anything at all.
And for an angel who had spent his existence as soldier, as weapon, as symbol—
That was almost worse than punishment.
Because it gave him the unbearable gift of being.
It came back in flashes as the boy stroked his hair.
The warmth.
The throne room, long before the Fall, when he and his brothers used to lay curled at their Father’s feet, wings draped over one another like blankets. The smell of Michael’s grace, steady and grounding. Gabriel’s laughter echoing off marble pillars. Raphael humming hymns under their breath as if the music alone could hold the universe together.
Lucifer used to bask in that light. He used to think it would last forever.
Until the Mark.
Until it hollowed him out and replaced that light with something gnawing and endless.
Until his Father turned away.
Until his brothers did.
Lucifer hadn’t realized until now that he didn’t miss the throne.
He missed this.
The warmth.
The touch.
The simple knowing that he belonged.
“You were always loved,” the boy said again, as if repeating it would make it easier to believe.
Lucifer closed his eyes.
“I don’t deserve it.”
“That was never the point.”
Lucifer let out a ragged laugh. “You sound like Him.”
The boy tilted his head, still petting his hair. “Do I?”
Lucifer didn’t answer.
Because he wasn’t sure what scared him more: that the boy reminded him of his Father—
Or that he didn’t.
Lucifer could have stayed like that forever.
Head in the boy’s lap. The Cage melting into something softer, something bearable.
No battles.
No screaming silence.
No chains.
Just this.
A flicker of what it felt like to be a son again.
And maybe that was the cruelest part—
That it was a dream.
That the boy would vanish as soon as he woke.
That this warmth wasn’t his to keep.
But oh, how he wanted it.
The boy didn’t speak again for a long time. He just sat there, hand moving gently over Lucifer’s scalp, thumb brushing against the ragged edges of his broken grace.
Lucifer didn’t ask for anything.
Didn’t beg.
Didn’t demand.
He simply let himself rest.
And for the first time since the Fall, his mind didn’t feel like a battlefield.
It felt… quiet.
Whole.
And maybe that was the closest thing to forgiveness he would ever know.
When he woke, the Cage felt colder than it ever had.
But there was a glimmer now.
A spark.
Lucifer pressed a hand to his chest and felt it there—a faint, impossible warmth.
It wouldn’t last.
He knew that.
But for the first time in eons, he believed—
He was still loved.