Prison of the Mind

Through The Devil's Eyes

"Why...why do you want Elizabeth Swann so much, Lucifer?"

He sat in place, very still, and pondered her question.

Hell was a strange place. Humans liked to depict it as dramatic images of fire and brimstone. They wove stories about which misdeeds would send you to an eternal damnation of pain and torture. Murder a man in cold blood, it's to hell with you. Betray a close comrade, it's to hell with you. Condemn an innocent man to a life of exile, it's to hell with you. He had always found the hierarchy of crime to be fascinating. The moral and code system of humans was both intricate and completely foolish. The average human mind surveyed a situation and placed it in a black or white basket. To most, murder was just murder. All of them failed to see exactly how many shades of gray there were. A man could murder someone to avenge another or to avenge himself, or perhaps the other person just deserved death. A person could steal something out of necessity, or out of personal pleasure, or perhaps the item in question belonged to them in the first place. He chose to ignore their definition of who deserved his punishment, and who did not.

In fact, there was no such crime that ever sent anyone to Hell. Sometimes, terrible people were just gone when they died. He found the complete lack of existence would be much worse anyways as punishment. No, Hell, his domain, was reserved for those special terrible people that he found interesting. He supposed it might be a grand statement to say that he fancied himself to be a puppeteer dangling people by strings to make them dance, but that is exactly what he did. He wanted humans that fascinated him. He was a selfish being, and his desire was for humans to accept that they were all inherently selfish.

If one were to look upon the ridiculous idea of gift giving on one's birthday, they might think that the person would be giving a gift because the recipient would feel happy. What the gift-giver fails to understand is that they would not give gifts if it did not make themselves happy.

So, he searched for the special breed of humans that did, in fact, commit terrible deeds, the ones that murdered just because they wanted to. The truly evil. He wanted to see what made them self-aware of their selfishness so that he could perhaps strive to imbue that attitude on the average human.

Why, then, did he want Elizabeth Swann? That was a complicated question. She was in fact very selfish. She abandoned a rich lifestyle for piracy, left her father behind for a life of adventure, left her fiance for a pirate, and did all of these things because she wanted to. However, as much as he attempted to convince Jack Sparrow that she was evil incarnate, this was only a front to convince him to kill her. She was not evil, and that was what was so fascinating about her.

Yes, he spent a good length of time dragging Jack through memories (partly to satiate his own curiosity about Jack's past), masquerading as bar slags, and preening about how Elizabeth wasn't worthy of Jack, but in reality, he did not care about Jack Sparrow's feelings towards her or hers for him. He had been aware that it was going to take a massive amount of convincing to force Jack to remove her from existence, because like Elizabeth, Jack also only did what he wanted to do, and what Lucifer wanted was for Jack to kill her because he desired it.

In the end, he had been unsuccessful. Jack proved to be far more intelligent and stubborn than even he predicted. He often thought lately that if a situation ever arose where he would be removed from his position, Jack might substitute. Now, all he could do was watch from afar and hope that one of them just might drive the other to murder all by themselves, preferably with Jack doing the killing.

He looked up slowly from where he was previously gazing, and finally met her eyes, his obsidian orbs staring into her opal ones.

"I want to study her", he answered.