"What are you doing to me?"
⚔︎ the space between silence and rupture - accepting.
THE WATER FLOWED IN SILENCE, WARM AS BREATH,
glowing faintly with borrowed grace; it poured from the basin like light distilled into mercy, catching along lucifer's pale collarbone, coiling down his arms like silk unspooling across alabaster; the scent in the air was a quiet blend of myrrh and rain.
michael knelt before him. not out of worship.
(not entirely.)
but because he had always been the one to carry - and now, at least here, in this cloistered place of blessed forgetting, he could tend.
lucifer was compliant, delicate, softened like wax beneath an unseen hand. his hair clung around his neck, laden with water. michael gathered it in careful hands; fingers that had held back the legions of the pit, that had broken worlds and parted seas - moved through lucifer's hair with aching precision, working fine lather into the weight of lucifer's locks - curled around his fingers, warm and heavy, like memory.
michael tilted the silver ewer once more, letting a slow pour of water glide over the crown of that bowed head. he watched rivulets kiss the points of shoulder blades and vanish down his spine, and whispered no prayers.
(not devotion. no, it was something hotter. older. something UNFORGIVABLE; care indistinguishable from torment.)
the question came quietly, a trembling note plucked on a harp missing half its strings from a soft voice, like he'd woken mid-dream; not the voice of the one who once sang STARS into heat, who lit heaven with questions too bright to bear.
something still rang like the lucifer he remembered; not in tone, but in weight.
michael did not answer at first. he took a fine white cloth and dipped it into a basin. his movements were wrought with quiet, painstaking care. he brought it to lucifer's shoulder and began to wash him - slow, reverent circles, the way one might polish an altar. and lucifer - he was BEAUTIFUL in the way marble is - unmoving, sculpted into silence; but for the soft echo of what heaven had chosen to preserve, something he had never stopped loving, (even when he should have.)
"I am cleansing you."
he felt his throat tighten with something that might have been sorrow if he hadn't trained himself to feel only restraint; he dipped the cloth into the basin again, wrung it out, and began to cleanse the hollow of lucifer's throat. michael watched as water clung to his lashes like dew. there was more.
(and he should not say it.)
but his hand - dripping, divine - moved now to lucifer's chest. pressed gently, just over the place where his FIRE had once burned brightest. not long enough to be noticed - but long enough to feel it.
(I am pretending you are still here.)
the cloth slipped from his fingers. he touched bare skin now, not as a lover would, but as one who once watched stars die and knew all of their names.
michael's voice cracked then - just slightly.
(but you are still… you. enough that I keep coming back.)
the light in the basin dimmed, flickering as if ashamed. he then guided lucifer to rest his damp forehead against his shoulder, with the quiet innocence of a child being held; he wrapped one arm around him - slowly, completely. one wing unfurled behind them, a canopy of midnight veined in gold, casting a shadow too holy for this place. it was not to shield either of them from the world - it was so heaven wouldn't see his hands tremble.
(what am I doing to you?)
(I am holding what I destroyed. I am washing the ash from the altar.)
he simply remained in that unbearable closeness, buried in soaked curls and the undone sanctity, his rich and intimate ritualism hidden beneath divine routine; a prayer unspoken, a judgment withheld, a love that heaven had no language for.
(and I do not know how to stop.)
