Splitting at the Seams (RadioApple)

Part 8

Alrighty then. It feels like he has to sit himself down mentally to confront it, but it's a fact Lucifer can deny no longer.

Alastor isn't all that bad.

In fact, and it does truly hurt to go this far, Lucifer might kind of like the guy.

It's terrible, awful, ghastly! The devil wanted soooo bad to just hate this dude forever and have that be the end of it. Things felt so much more cut and dry when the best he wanted from their situation was for Alastor to die somewhere he wouldn't see it where it wouldn't be his problem or fault. Albeit he'd only felt that way on the very first day... and even then not really, if he's honest with himself. Maybe he should work on this whole 'lord of evil plunderer of the dark' thing. It'll be hard to fake it til he makes it now though even if he tried - forced proximity is one hell of a drug. (However 'forced' it can be when you condemn yourself to it of your own accord, but that's besides the point!)

It all boils down ultimately to Alastor just being a decent conversation. Lucifer knows himself and he knows how others view him, and it's historically been fairly anxiety inducing. A blabbermouth. An anxious verbal wreck. The kind of guy that makes a completely unremarkable gaffe while conversing and then immediately makes it ten times worse by overexplaining his intentions. The beings he talks most consistently to even now, the Sins, make the burden of dealing with this readily apparent. Even the friendlier of them such as Ozzie and Beelz look like they've drained their respective impressive social batteries at the end of a 5 minute phone call with him.

Alastor shows nothing of the sort.

Part of that must be the sheer scope of his boredom - one will find themself with a far greater endurance for interminable discussions when the alternative is doing absolute eff all - and yet the sinner sometimes seems legitimately invested in what Lucifer has to say, particularly memories relating to history that the devil had observed first hand. Offhand mentions of wars waged down below centuries before the man's time will engender question after question beckoning him to elaborate, and by the time he's come to enough to realize how long they've wasted on the subject, it's not unusual for more than an hour to have passed.

It's really nice. He gave up his plan to just skulk around in Alastor's quarters right after he'd coined it, acknowledging the idiocy, but that space remained the only one where he felt like he could just slowly exude his social battery without it instead being bloated with anxiety and self consciousness.

Again, he loved Charlie more than life itself and would gladly plunge all of the dimensions into darkness if it meant sparing her another second of pain, but her presence also brought guilt abound that he still wasn't totally ready to unpack in full. Her little girlfriend was no better, being a fallen angel and all. If there were a few things that Lucifer didn't like to think about in his day to day, it was his former home and subsequent banishment. Because those thoughts were aptly capable of spiralling. And that woman... Vagatha? Valeria? She was a walking reminder. That little gremlin lady who buffed the windows and shone the floors and counters was still yet to grant him more than a word in passing, and the bartender-

Husk, Lucifer corrected himself sourly. The feline's name was Husk.

At first, the king had been all too eager to spend the few hours he did on the ground floor at the bar. Not an incorrigible drinker himself but still partial to the taste, and even more partial to getting drunk off of the other's voice, he'd started a few idle conversations. It was great, very chill, and he DEFINITELY wasn't being embarassingly obvious when he shivered when something had caught Husk's attention and he'd growled. There'd been interesting things to learn about the other, like his former status as an overlord that had been brought down under via his Hubris by Alastor, or his military tenure back in his previous life. But then the cat had pressed Lucifer for details about himself, affecting as though he didn't care yet affixing him with a gaze of molten gold, and Lucifer-