Heaven is a Place on Earth

Living in the Moment

(I'M BACK! Ah, it's been longer than I expected, sorry about that... After I got home from my holiday I had uni work to finish and it took more time than I thought to do. But it's all done and handed in now and I don't go back to classes until the 25th~ And something I'm looking forward to - on Friday, it'll be a full year since I first watched the Devil is a Part Timer anime! I've had a lot of obsessions on shows and books and movies in my life but I've never stayed obsessed with the same thing for a whole year. So Friday is Devil Day, I'll be rewatching the anime start-to-finish and I'm gonna start reading the high school spin-off manga too \^^/)

(Anyway, I finally came up with a new headcanon myself just before I did the Christmas special so this one's from me~ I think I have one more requested headcanon then the last two chapters are my own that I've had stashed away waiting to end this collection on. While I'm writing these next few ficlets, I'll hopefully get to planning the two other Urushihara fics I want to do. I'll keep you updated (Also, btw, this chapter hints at that headcanon I've seen around that Olba abused Lucifer in the time they were working together. It's a brief mention, but it's there))

(Headcanon: Urushihara has been alive for so long now that he has absolutely no concept of time)

Things were different back then.

Heaven was supposed to be a paradise, wasn't it? So why was he getting so bored of it all? With his high position, Lucifer knew the other angels had expectations of him, assumptions about him. But his whole life had run on the same routine, and it was starting to take its toll on him. He could carry out tasks in perfect time and he had every organised instant committed to memory by now. It was easy. But easy wasn't interesting. To be completely honest, Heaven itself wasn't all that interesting either. And the other angels certainly weren't interesting. Eventually, it became too much. He didn't want to stay there any longer. That wasn't his home anymore.

He'd wasted too much time in that place.

Years passed. He didn't bother to count how many. He had fallen. He had joined the demons. He had turned his back on his old home. He let the memories blur together, one instance barely recognisable from another. Who cared where he had been or what had done when it was all in the past? Centuries, all one big mess in his mind. Nothing more. The Archangel was replaced by the Demon General and his old self was virtually forgotten.

There, but not.

He moved in whatever direction his new life took him, moments melding into one. One long moment lasting forever, never ending, the distance between anything significant soon lost all meaning.

The war against the humans waged on, how long did it last? Years? Decades? Centuries? General Lucifer paid no mind. He had work to do. He wasn't concerned with such details, he chose to simply enjoy the death and destruction around him. Caused by him. He was living in the moment.

That's all he did for quite some time. Live in the moment. He was often late to meetings and such. Sometimes he never showed up at all. Then, something happened that he had never expected in all his millennia of existence.

That long, everlasting moment did, in fact, have an end. But even as it ended, Lucifer could not feel the time pass. For how long did he lay bleeding? For how long did he balance between life and death? When did his breath return to him?

When, when... What did "when" even mean? He didn't know anymore.

He didn't know how much time has passed before Olba came to him. He didn't know how long he suffered under the "care" of the priest. And he didn't care to remember. This new life blended into the old one and the moment continued on as if it had never stopped.

Lucifer was soon pulled through a Gate into another world with Olba (how soon he never bothered to ask). One where the king had supposedly fled to and was now living peacefully in with General Alciel. The offer to return to Heaven seemed oddly compelling. His memories of his old home were distant and indistinct, like everything else, but maybe enough time had passed to change things. He wasn't sure, but just maybe. In this new world, on Earth, he tried to focus on the task at hand but he was tempted by the strange things he saw there. He found himself staying there, living as a young human by the name of Hanzo Urushihara. King Satan - Maou - told him that he had listed him as being 18 years old on the official documents he apparently needed to become a citizen of Japan.

How old was he really? He was definitely older than Maou. Much older.

Regardless, his life as Urushihara seemed like it could work out so much better than what he had lived before. He had to stay inside for his own safety, so he didn't need to concern himself with the trivialities of time. That didn't matter when he had nowhere to be. All it meant was sometimes he would go for hours on end just scrolling through some website without realising. Sometimes he wouldn't realise that Maou would be home from work any minute. Sometimes he'd be surprised by how quickly Ashiya seemed to return from shopping. Sometimes he would look up and find them both asleep and the moon peaking between the curtains.

It didn't matter to Urushihara, though. He was just living in the moment.