I Love Luci

Chapter Eighteen: Family Affairs

Lucifer glared daggers at Michael across the table where they both sat, and Jesus Christ was watching the two lob words and hurl insults at one another like volleyballs over a net.

"This is an error of cosmic levels," Michael noted before taking another sip of the scotch in front of him. Glenlivet; Michael was not cheap to drink with, but he was the only one of their brothers with any real taste in that regard, Lucifer reasoned.

"I thought Father didn't make mistakes." Lucifer retorted, taking another sip of his own drink and glancing at Jesus who was drinking some local artisan craft beer that Lucifer didn't give a fuck about. They had opted to meet in the mortal realm because it was neutral territory, all in all.

"Well, He doesn't... that doesn't mean some moron in soul processing is as infallible." Michael reasoned.

"Always the company man. Mikey." Lucifer drawled, raising his glass in a mock salute. "So help correct the mistake of the peons, but do not penalize Gwendolyn and Evangeline for it."

"Are you certainly they even want what you are suggesting?" Jesus asked quietly. "Maybe there is a reason she - they; what is the proper pronoun here? - was born like this. Ever considered that?"

"Well, has anyone asked the old man?" Lucifer asked the two of them, the two most likely to have done so. Both looked askance and a little awkward. "Is he on another one of his sabbaticals?"

Michael shrugged but didn't meet Lucifer's gaze. "You know how He is. He gets frustrated and needs to get away, and we should all be glad that he does. Remember the last time he decided to just 'stick it out' when humanity wasn't working right? He got so fed up —"

"Yeah, yeah, Noah, ark... I recall." Lucifer shook his head. "But my point remains, how can we know? And regardless, why are you punishing them for it?"

"It does seem a little extreme," Jesus said to Michael. "What is the purpose of making Lucifer choose between them? Of never allowing him to see one again?"

Michael's lips twisted a little and his hazel eyes glinted with an almost malicious light. "We ensure that much power is never in his hands at one time again. The woman is a danger. If I had just cause to remove her from this life—"

Michael was prepared for Lucifer's sudden eruption of violence. What he was not prepared for was the sudden flash of anger on the face of their youngest brother, however. Jesus raised a hand and stopped Lucifer's fist from connecting with Michael's chiseled, obnoxiously heroic jaw line without much effort, but the energy that emanated from the Nazarene flung Michael haphazardly back against the wall of the dark little bar located in the backwoods of a small Wyoming town. A century and a half ago, men with names like Wild Bill and the Sundance Kid had drank here. Now, two angels and a messiah were drinking and having an argument.

"You are a dick," Jesus said frankly to Michael. "Have you given no thought to what you are asking of these women?" He leaned across the table and looked a startled Michael dead in the eyes. "My Magda is in there, Michael. Part of her, at any rate."

"An you are fine with him defiling her?" Michael spat, his lip curling as he eyed Lucifer, who still looked less than pleased about not being permitted to hit him. And was seriously considering trying again, if he was honest.

Jesus rubbed his temples as if to expel a headache. "She was never mine to keep, Michael. And I was always happy that she chose to love me. That she also had others never upset or bothered me; I knew where her heart lie."

Lucifer smirked, sat back down and took another swig of his whiskey. "Oh, the sacrilege. If only those celibate monks in the churches could hear you now, baby brother. They'd be appalled."

Jesus shrugged. "Let us not pretend that what is built in my name often reflects what I tried to teach."

Michael stood up, and pulled on the heavy woolen pea coat that was hanging off the back of his chair. His brown hair was tousled a bit from the sudden shove from Jesus, but he ran a rand through the chestnut waves and looked directly at both of his younger siblings. "You want me to do this, you have my terms. Don't like them, find someone else with a blade that can sever souls." He took the final swig of his Glenlivet's and set the tumbler back down. "But hear me on this, both of you: that woman, as she is, whole and in tact is a ticking time bomb. The pagans have known it her whole life and they have tried to keep her because they aren't strong enough to control her. The way she absorbs and transforms with spiritual essence is... dangerous. Don't you imagine for a moment she is controllable if she remains as twin souls locked in a single vessel. And sooner or later, someone will come for her. What I am offering you is the only way you can protect her. So, ask yourself... who are you protecting? Them? Or yourself?"

Without further preamble, there was a shift in the air and Michael was gone. Lucifer didn't even bother to glance at the mortals in the bar. He knew they all registered nothing. He stared into the bottom of his glass and said nothing, torn between wanting to smite something or simply make someone bleed. Michael always had that affect on him. Self-righteous asshole.

"What are you going to do?" Jesus asked, taking a sip of his beer, and he leaned back in his chair, crossing his sandaled feet at the ankles as he reclined, resting his man-bun back on his interlaced fingers behind his head.

Lucifer ran his hand through his own pale waves in frustration and sighed. "Nothing. For right now, I am doing nothing. It isn't my choice to make."

Jesus looked astonished. "That may be the truest thing you ever said, bro." He regarded Lucifer across the table. "She is good for you."

"And that is bad for many." Lucifer tossed a couple bills down on the table. "I got this. Thanks for trying to help with him."

Jesus shrugged and stood up with him. "I will help if I can in any way. I've never given up on Gwen or Evangeline, even if they don't consider me apart of their personal pantheon all the time. Gwen's mother still prays for her."

Lucifer considered. "But... you are. Just... it's this version of you. Curious. It's like she..." It struck him, then. As he looked at his brother closely. This was the only face he had shown around Gwen and Evangeline. Even amongst themselves, it never changed. It was like... he was becoming the version of Christ not as seen by the majority of humanity... rather, the combined will of the women was molding Jesus into *her* image of him.

Was there a Jesus who was there for white supremacists and killers and rapists? Absolutely, because humans *believed* there was. Just as many Muslim had believed into existence an Allah that would condone terrorism. There was baby Jesus, who got prayed to as often as Christ on the Cross (Jesus's least favorite form for obvious reasons). There was Mexican Jesus and black Jesus, and the Jesus marketed by the televangelists. None of them were this one... and all so much more popular with a wider range of people pumping their precious faith into making him real.

Man had the power to create their own heavens and hells. Which was largely why the Gods existed — if men knew this, it would be the beginning of the end of everything. There was a reason humans only used a minuscule portion of their brains. If they used it all? With malcontent?

And this woman - these women - seemed to have the human will power of millions compressed into a single, fragile human body, but a Goddess's ability to shape that will. And they were completely unaware of it.

*THAT* was why all of these Celestials were drawn to her — she knew there was something different about her, she *believed* that her gods would support her and seek her out because of it. And because she believed, it became the Truth.

And what happened if she chose to deny the existence of any of them? Truly believed it, to her core? It could be a killing blow... even to a god.

"Luce?" Jesus put a hand on his arm. "You look like you got hit between the eyes and yet your walls are ten feet high. What's up?"

Lucifer considered lying. He considered lying for the first time in.... how long? Since meeting her. She had... altered him. To his very soul. Many believed him to be the King of Lies. And that Lucifer existed. He wore the face often.... or he used to. The horned demon often confused for Baphomet? Yes. Not lately. The *evil* that humanity blamed all things upon... he had not begun as these things. He had begun an Angel.

But Gwen truly believed he did not tell direct lies. And so... he couldn't. Instead he changed the subject. "Even if Michael's worries bear fruit, I think between those of us that would protect Gwen and Ev, we can ensure that no direct Celestial harm befalls them. It's the smaller dangers of the world we must be wary of — the foot soldiers that we do not see in the shadows that are faceless and nameless. Odin is willing to offer Asgardian support for entree into Gwen's circle. I feel like her damn pimp, but... I cannot argue the wisdom of it."

"Careful with the All Father, Luce. He is old and wily."

Lucifer smiled broadly, hoping to banish all worry from his face and keep his new epiphany to himself. "So am I, little brother. So am I."

———————————

When he returned to Pit, Lucifer walked straight across the Halls of Hell and into the wing that housed the rooms of Salome.

He didn't bother to knock. He simply walked in and found her seated in front of a vanity, running a comb through her long ebony tresses. Her eyes met his in the glass and she arched a brow of inquiry.

"My lord?" She turned and he saw she was clad in only a sheer white gauzy sheath that did nothing to offer modesty and complimented the rich hue of her sun kissed skin elegantly.

"Am I so different, Salome?" He asked her.

Understanding made her features soft and sad. "You are... diminished, in many ways, my Lord." She rose and walked to him, every movement a symphony of eroticism as she came to stand before him. "She wishes you to be... 'good'. What she doesn't understand is you're not."

It almost hurt to hear it, at first. But then the pain felt... right. He met her jewel blue eyes, the deep limpid blue of tropical pools, and brought a hand up around her throat, his nails noticeably longer and sharper than before, and squeezed. The claws dented her amber flesh. There actually was the genuine hint of fear there. And that made him harder than he could remember feeling in awhile.

He could hurt Salome. It was actually his *job* to do so. She wasn't allowed into heaven for what she had done in her mortal life. She had reason to fear him. He had done so much worse than fuck her into unconsciousness. Had he forgotten this part of himself? Or had he just.... been trying so damn hard to live up to how *she* saw him? Gwen. In the end, it was always Gwen. Evangeline white knighted him a bit, too, but not the way that Gwendolyn did. She truly believed him to be... something he wasn't.

Maybe the choice wasn't so hard.

But he could not imagine life without seeing her kneeling before him, looking up with those wide, guileless eyes... her lips parted in awe, her trust radiating off of her in waves as she gave herself to him fearlessly. Never seeing that, touching her like that again... it felt wrong.

He watched his own hand revert back to its more polished, well manicured state on its own as he felt the loss of giving up Gwendolyn in favor of Evangeline truly hit him. It was a gut punch.

"Even now she weakens you," Salome sneered in disgust. "I told you that you could come to me!" She closed her eyes and when she met his gaze again, hers was almost tragic. "Lucifer, Asmodeus is poised to move against you if you continue to display such weakness. If Hell does not fear you, it will not follow you. And this creature gelds you."

His hand once more increased its pressure and then she was being tossed across the room onto the bed. She looked startled but unafraid. That, to be quite honest, enraged him further. "You think I am not strong enough to undo this witchcraft, Salome?" He said almost conversationally. "They both may have been goddesses once, or near enough to, thereafter. But they are not *me*."

"And just who *are* you? Some school girl's foolish, ideological dream of you, or the entity with the power to control one of the largest followings of humans alive today? He who crawls before a mortal who will be dead in a century or commander of the hoards that men fear? Because one of those individuals has worth down here and the other does not."

Lucifer stalked over to her, changing into his most bestial, demonic form, the shape some cultures called "Baphomet" and he towered over the haughty, taunting woman, his horns cruelly shaped and threatening in their sheer size. By Father she knew what she was doing! Wait... was that... his own thought? Or just another stupid quip his television alter ego that Gwen so loved would say?

The sheer dysphoria of self that struck him made him stagger. It cut him to the core, and something snapped.

"Do you remember, Salome, what your hell was?" Her face drained of color and she stopped smiling. He suddenly longed to hurt her almost as badly as he, himself hurt.

"Lucifer-"

""What you were so *terrified* would happen to you? The nightmares that kept you up at night, when you learned how your story was told to the world. What story wrote you, created and shaped you; Not *just* that you were a whore... because you have already been that, haven't you?"

"My Lord, please—" her lips were trembling but her breathing had changed noticeably. He could smell her like the animal he felt himself becoming. Tears clung to her lower lashes, tears of shame because he could smell her arousal at what she knew was coming next, what she dreaded. Her arms and legs were severed from her body at the knees and elbows. In her Hellscapes over the millennia, when she felt the need for self flagellation to atone for her crimes against his father, *how* she had lost the limbs changed for fun and variety, it seemed. Torture. War. Disease... all the best of the Horsemen. But that wasn't the horrifying part for her. It was what followed after that loss. What she became.

"Look at yourself, Salome. What are you now?" It was an old game. An old torture. He would prove to her he was unchanged permanently by these women... this woman...

Salome was trembling head to toe and Lucifer walked to the bedside stand to produce a leather and metal clipped harness that clamped tiny teeth all around her labia and chained the backs of those clips into the harness to widen and gape her nether regions to spread her and expose both pink holes.

She was trembling harder, small whimpers of horror and lust commingling in her throat. Spread as she was, she could not deny the thick creamy moisture beginning to coat the exposed walls of her vulva and the gaping entrance to her greedy cunt. Lucifer smacked her pussy with a wet "slap!" and she squealed as her whole torso bucked in startled response, her abbreviated limbs flailing impotently, but the squeak was soon replaced by a low moan and a rolling of her hips. "You don't have permission to cum, cunt." The look on her face was momentarily tragic as she stared back at him, stricken and so very vulnerable. He slid his fingers into her gaping pussy, two, three, four at a time, twisting and sliding, adoring the sheer amount of lubricant her own body was providing for him to play in, allowing him to give her some deep penetrating pleasure that made her shiver to her core and spray copious amounts of cum as she shuddered. "Did I say you could cum? Did I, slave?"

Tears of shame rolled down her cheeks. "No, my Lord."

"Not 'my Lord'," he corrected in a chill tone, but his eyes betrayed all the fire he felt in this moment. They burned as red as the flames of Hell itself.

"My Master." She quickly corrected herself. "I'm so sor—". He didn't let her finish. He buried his fingers inside her sticky quim, already fluttering with tiny post-orgasmic spasms. He found that little place just behind her pelvic bone and her hips rose inches off the mattress despite the lack of limbs.

"Cum."

It was instantaneous and the second her walls crashed before him, he swept into her brain like a starving cancer, devouring her thoughts and terrors, a plague of locusts on her sanity as he leaned forward, running his tongue seductively over her inner pussy lips and finally flicking like the beating of a bird's wing... no, the beat of a heart... over her clit, until she felt her will shatter under his. She knew, just to be allowed to cum again she would say whatever degrading thing he wanted... just so long as he let her keep cumming!

"What are you right now? I can't even call you by your name. There's not enough of you left to have an identity."

"I'm just... just..." tears rolled down her cheeks. "I'm just three holes and a pair of tits."

He rewarded this truth with a soft kiss and by bringing his thumb inward tightly at her widened entrance, dripping her pleasure steadily on the sheets below her now very wet thighs and ass.

"What do we call a girl who is nothing more than three holes and a pair of udders, my pretty one?"

She swallowed, and her voice the trembling as her eyes met his, so afraid but too aroused to stop now: "A cunt, my Master. An ass. A mouth ... whatever hole my Master wishes it to be. I'm just a body, a hole, a doll to be played with, a slave to be used... I live to serve." It was the last words that were hardest on her, if truth be told. She had served her whole god-damned life, only to serve once more in the most debasing way in the bowels of hell. These words *were* her hell. "I am your property. I am just a doll, a toy, a fuckslut, a party favor, your own personal slave bitch, nothing more than a piece of fuckmeat... only allowed to speak because I make pretty noises." She looked at him as though she hated him, as if she would incinerate him on the spot for reopening these old wounds if she were able.

He had a split second of genuine concern but smothered it by producing a ball gag and placing it in her pretty little mouth. "You do; but no one said they needed to be coherent noises." Rather than helping her breathe through her arousal, the holes in the ball just seemed to make her drool as she squirmed and whimpered and glared.

"Very good," he acknowledged and he began to play with her.. like an instrument at first, relearning what made her moan in pleasure, what made her yelp in surprise, growl in lust, or simply made her cum on the spot? She lost count of how he manipulated her body. And while she wasn't tied down... she was trapped in the detritus of her own mortal shell, unable to fight for or defend herself in anyway. A prisoner in her own, useless flesh... well, almost useless.

Roman Catholics saw her as nothing more than a whore and a murderess, they saw her as the evil female at her most seductive and wicked... an evil, hungry cunt that would devour all.

What she saw of herself... she was helpless, weak. Even her orgasms didn't belong to her any longer. She had no identity other than being a hole to fuck and it destroyed a part of her soul every time. This was her deepest terror; being unmade into nothing more than an orafice for him to use and abuse. Powerless.

He clamped her nipples and made her hold the chain in her teeth after removing the ball gag about ten minutes later. Finding that unsatisfactory, he leaned back and manifested his next tools. "I think we need more... you could be useful in other ways... we would have to make you capable of producing..."

"Lucifer... please, no. Seriously." He leaned forward and squeezed on her nipples firmly until droplets of fluid appeared. He massaged and manipulated the flesh, feeling it stretch and strain under his fingers. Watched as she transformed to his will, helpless as a piece of clay in the hands of an artisan, ready to be molded and shaped into her most basic, essential form.