It’s always been there.
When Lucifer is five, Michael tries to ignore it. He does his best not to wake up for the night terrors that send Lucifer crawling into his bed night after night, not to hear the sobbing of the children he bullies into submission on the playground, not to see the corpses of the little animals scattered wherever he goes or smell the burning… things he smells that night in the motel bathroom.
It’s easy. Michael is ten and Lucifer is five and they are troubled children. He ignores it.
At seven, it’s harder. At seven, Michael is twelve and he knows what the word ‘psychopathic’ means but he pretends he doesn’t, because he doesn’t want to think those things about his little brother. It’s a sin, he knows, to harbor that tiny seed of hatred and fear for the angelic child that lights up his days. Michael comes home from school every afternoon and holds Lucifer in his arms, burying his face in his soft blond hair and pretending he can’t smell the smoke.
It gets harder, especially on the nights when Michael is tired and Gabriel is fussy and Father is angry at everyone in the house except Lucifer, or is he only angry at Michael?
(Is Michael being unfair?)
On Lucifer’s twelfth birthday, Michael pulls his father aside.
“There’s something wrong with Lucifer.”
“What do you mean?” His father hasn’t been here the past few months; he has no way of knowing the kind of hell Michael’s been living.
“I mean he’s been in and out of detention for harassing the other kids since the start of this year. He got suspended last week for punching a seven-year-old. His grades are dropping, he’s moody, he’s not telling me where he’s going or who with. I need help,” Michael begs, whispering over the sound of shitty cartoons playing on a shittier TV and Lucifer and Raphael fighting over stale birthday cake.
“He’s a teenager. Who knows, maybe it’s time to think about pulling him out of school if he’s not doing well. You were, what, eleven and a half when I took you out? Might be about time.”
His father pulled him from school because he stopped having a good excuse for the absences and the bruises and the knife in his backpack, the one he’d pulled on the kid that startled him.
Michael closes his eyes and prays.
At thirteen, the tantrums start. At thirteen, Michael holds Lucifer as he cries, hoping he won’t throw up from the force of his own misery. Lucifer whispers terror and destruction and Godless, Biblical sins in his ear with all the sweetness of the child Michael had sworn to protect as Michael looks on at the war zone that was a motel room.
There is no way to ignore whatever this is now, not when it’s settled down and made its home and started to eat away at all the bits that made Lucifer his brother.
Michael loves him. Michael would die for him. That does nothing to ease the hatred burning its way up his throat.
Michael is twenty-five and it had been him or Lucifer. It had been him or Lucifer and for the first time in twenty years, Michael had not wanted to die. Not like that. Not with a knife to his throat and Lucifer crying and Raphael watching. He’d had to. He’d had to. He’d had to.