[Log; Complete]

[halffaced.livejournal.com]

When; Pre-dawn, Sunday 23rd September.
Rating; PG?
Characters; Lucifer fallen_samael and Mazikeen Morningstar halffaced
Summary; One of them had to make the first move.
Log;



She didn't know why it bothered her, but it did. Standing outside Lux, this incarnation of Lux, which held no memories for her but brought back so many -- it felt wrong. It felt like wearing the wrong face.

The piano bar had been busy that evening, but its customers were long gone by the time Mazikeen made her approach, the last dregs of drunken revellers lingered only in the darkest of alleys or lay sprawled across benches around the fountain. The doors were locked and the windows dark. The piano, silent. Someone remained inside, though, she was certain of that. She had always had a sense for him.

He would feel her too, of course, but she did not intend to linger. It was only the sign that she had business with, one plain sheet of paper, stuck to the door. Staff wanted? He could dismiss her, he could leave her, he could parody the past all he liked, but she would not be replaced. The edges of the paper blackened and started to smoke, curling in on themselves as she watched. Lucifer had left her with a gift, after all, it would have been churlish not to use it.

Mazikeen turned away before the flames really took hold, leaving the little blaze to fan further or burn out as it chose. She'd heard the City had gardens, and after wasting the daylight in the grime of the underground, she intended to reach them before dawn.


Like sun rise he’d known she would come. Stealthily, like dawn, such that no one but him would've noticed. The traces she left, these were not necessary, for he knew and had not forgotten how her presence felt. Mazikeen. Morningstar.

He had waited in the dark. She came to him twice before. But he knew just as he recognized the footsteps that walked away in the dark, this time, she would not cross over the threshold. It would not be as it was before. Her pride would not allow itself to be wounded, not again.

He stepped outside into the pre-dawn air as the last of the flimsy piece of paper burned to ash. When they parted, he had said that he'd go by whatever light he might find. Outside was nothing but black. Still in his mind's eye she burned like a flare. And thus he followed her.


And maybe she should have gone to Dream of the Endless with her questions about this place. She'd dismissed the notion, he owed her no favours for the first part, and what use could the Dreaming be to her if its own master were trapped? But Xanadu, the garden, it felt very much like part of the reverie-realm. She could feel it changing shape, at the edges of things, beyond where her sight dimmed. Things were stretching and lurching, adapting around her.

This was no Eden Garden, but even those green places at the beginning of the world when everything was fertile and engaged in the business of growth and reproduction (her mother not least among them), even there she had not seen such a collection of the strange and the beautiful. Most of the flowers hung their heads and waited for daybreak, but the night-blooms sent heady scents out across her path. Mazikeen barely noticed.

All these wonders were periphery to something else of far greater import. Someone else, who was tailing her like a shadow; an ironic twist in roles.

Eventually, after passing over the options of fight or flight, Mazikeen Morningstar chose to wait for him. She stepped off the path and leant against a tree, it's heavy, discoloured fruit too pungent to be forbidden. She waited until she could hear his approach, insomuch as any could profess to hear the steps that angels took.

"If you were aiming for stealth, you have underestimated me."


The garden again, it certainly brought back memories. Not just of the sakura and recent sacrifice, and the reconciliation in the aftermath. It was as Elaine Belloc had noticed similar to the garden that he had created. The making of his own Creation -- it felt like a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago, a different one altogether.

He paid no mind to the path Mazikeen took. He had his beacon. He kept his pace.

He saw her stop and step off the path. Moonlight struck her, framed her lithe movements. The mask glinted in the half-light, and showed the silhouette of her face. The smooth surface was unreadable.

Her ghostly voice called out from the dark, taunting.

No, he never was one to work in the shadows. Direct and up-front was always his way.

"We're a little too old to be playing hide and seek don't you think."


"I've made no attempt to hide." She spoke softly, voice muted further by the silver half-mask which hid the disfigured side of her face, sparing mortal onlookers the loss of both wits and composure. Mazikeen was seldom kind, but she was always practical.

"I announced my presence here. I marked my dwelling with blood and old magics. Anyone could have found me, with little effort." The measured nonchalance of her reply was a different kind of concealment, a best attempt at disguising the tumult beneath the surface of her. In the depths of what others might have called a soul.

His nearness was a kind of torture, the only thing left with the power to burn. As he spoke she had debated between trying to tear his throat out, or stop his lips with her own. Between raising her sword against him again, or laying it at his feet and begging to once more be called his soldier. He had told her often enough that he had no need of anyone to fight for him. He had always been proven wrong before.

Though the blade stayed sheathed, habit called her hand to rest on its hilt, testing the weight against her palm. Faithful. Briadach had given it to her with the suggestion that she might one day face Lucifer as an equal, but she had not expected it to feel like this. Turning toward him, the exposed side of her face was as blank as that behind metal. "Tell me what you seek, then, and the game is ended."


"I know." There was no point in concealing the fact. "Just as I know you had found me, with little effort."

What she said was true. He knew the moment she arrived, blood magic or none. He did not seek her out then, not because it was not his way. There was a far simpler reason. He did not now how to act on the knowledge that she was here in the City.

Before he went into the void, he said his goodbye with full intention to never return. He thought it the last time they were to see each other. It was a choice he made. And seeing her here, now, felt much like a slap in the face. Thwarted again by destiny it seemed, fate that he could not escape regardless of how he chose to live his life.

But whether he should feel elated or angry was moot. The fact of the matter was that she was there. And though he would not admit it to Elaine, he knew well enough that she was right. There was no point in prolonging the inevitable. True, he and Mazikeen could dance around each other until one or both managed to find a means of egress from the City. But why should he unnecessarily suffer, when there was merit in having her by his side again. The decision to seek her out was not so difficult to make.

"You." Lucifer said as he stepped closer.



Mazikeen's mouth twisted into a grin, a hint of teeth behind painted lips. He must have expected her to laugh, surely, she could still hear the dull finality of his excuse for a goodbye. "The last time I saw you, you were leaving me. Perhaps this place has disoriented you, away is in the other direction."

Things changed, different situations lead to different outcomes, different futures, she knew that more than most. But more than most she also knew that the past was not so easily altered. Not so simply swept under the carpet and forgotten about. Her people had devoted millennia to avenging themselves on their own history, but this affront had not been to a nation. Lucifer had walked out on an entire creation, but to her it had been personal.

She had loved him, would always love him. Still, she had some pride. The empty space he'd left her with merely made room for questions, and Mazikeen hated secondguessing herself.

"Have you come for your powers back?" she asked, letting her arms fall to her sides, an offering. "Take them."


"At that time, it was the only option left to take. The explanation does not bear repeating."

Lucifer closed the distance between them and stood in front of Mazikeen. He gazed into her face for the first time since he left. Time that passed between then and now was not long. But he itched to take that mask off her face and see her again.

"Right now, away is not where I wish to be."

It was the best he could do to couch in words the call for a truce. He expected Mazikeen to not react favorably to his departure. How much was something he had yet to gauge.

"The fire was a gift. I meant for you to keep it."


He would soon find out that the fire was all she would give up so easily, whatever he wished for. She was used to his wishes, having spent long enough fulfilling them, and gladly. Now, though, it was becoming too much. He wished to leave and had accomplished it with aplomb, wiping himself from the face of existence. He wished her to bear the light he grew weary of carrying, and here she stood, inflamed with it. Now his wishes had changed again -- a magic lamp would have had trouble keeping up.

"And what would you think of me if I acquiesced, Lucifer? In the time since you left I have often wondered what you must have thought of me, so happy to serve when all you ever wanted was to rule. That was my freedom, the freedom to follow who I chose to, and you took it from me." she spat the words at him, a low growl from gritted, lipless teeth.

"I never expected you to think of me first. Your choices were mine and I was content with that. But what choice did you leave for me then? I'd have happier met oblivion with you than faced the non-existence you sentenced me to." Mazikeen's eyes lit with borrowed fire, the light of the Morningstar having gone largely untested in her possession.

"Perhaps you did not owe me anything. But I deserved better."


The intensity with which the fire burned in Mazikeen's eyes was almost too much to look at. Lucifer saw it was not hate that fueled it, but the realization only served to make things much worse, to see as Mazikeen did.

Lucifer knew well enough how it was to not be given a choice, to be handed a mandate he cared not for.

Perhaps he erred when he disregarded Mazikeen and inadvertently became that which he most despised. But it was his fight and leaving everything behind was the means for finishing it.

"Perhaps you did." He said in an even voice.

"It's already in the past. Brooding will not undo what has already been done."


Oh, she understood his reasons. She had heard many different excuses for surrender, and none of them made it a more acceptable option, to her mind. While Mazikeen lived, she fought. In choosing his own exit Lucifer may have claimed a little victory, but the end result was still defeat. He had given in, accepted that as a product of his creator the only true and complete escape came by choosing his own unmaking.

It was still the coward's way out. Had Lucifer ever stepped back from his own introspection and seen himself through her eyes, he might know that she had always believed him to be a builder. His mistake was in measuring his own footprints by the indentations of his Father's. It didn't take a bound book to tell him that there were always untrodden paths.

"Brooding? I am angry, or would you rather take away that right as well? The past may be set in stone but the present is not, and if history is of so little import to you, then tell me why you insist on gathering it around you like a comforter? Lux, Lucifer? Here you really are the prisoner of someone else's will, and I arrive to find you mild as a lamb? Or is this the great escape that you longed to find, a theatre where they let you paint the sets after places you once knew, and rehash old scripts for a new audience?"

The sweeping gesture that accompanied this last statement contained a little more power than she had intended, and without the channel of a sword in her hand, some other type of energy escaped. At the same time that the mask of composure she had forced onto the exposed side of her face cracked and fell away, the tree behind her shot up like a torch, its branches turned to kindling in an instant.

"Are you happier now?"


He could've dealt with it better had it been him she set fire to. Instead, the blows that came from her words alone were harder to deflect. For they hit him at his very core.

He convinced himself that he was only biding his time. That his time in the City is only a brief respite, a pit stop on his way in search of something beyond Creation. But he knew he had nothing to show for it. He had not found a means of exit for it was governed more by chance than it was choice, and fate was never something he trusted.

In truth, he had been in Creation and out of it, and found that both palled. There was nothing else. Or, perhaps, he had simply failed.

And now, Mazikeen was calling him a coward for it. The bitter taste that thought left in his mouth, he found not to his liking at all.

Lucifer grabbed Mazikeen by the arm -- the hand that set the tree to burn where it stood.

"You ask if this is happiness when you so clearly see what a mockery it is I am forced to play out."

"And what would you have me do then, seeing as you clearly see fit to judge what I have done as wrong and lacking?"


His touch shocked her into calm, and though she pulled at his grip on her wrist she did not break free from it's restraint. "Not judgement, observation." she told him, her voice softened now that he had been stirred to speak just a little of his mind. It disturbed her to see him so trodden underfoot. "Your decisions remain only yours to make. I will, however, say that the Lord I followed never let anyone force his hand."

Finally tugging her arm from his grasp, she raised her hand to her face, let her fingers graze the edges of the mask. "For myself, I want nothing more than to be your soldier again, but that is not possible for me. Not yet." Were she given to making requests, the one unspoken here would be for him to be again someone whose shadow could be as assured of its position as it was proud.

Leaving the mask in place, she turned her attention to the burning tree and frowned. While destruction came quite naturally to her, restoring what had been was another matter entirely.


"Losing a battle does not mean you lose the war."

It was the briefest of touches but it had a cathartic effect. Lucifer reluctantly let go of her hand and watched instead as her fingers traced the edges of the mask. The desire to have her take it off was still there, but he stilled his hand and his tongue. He already said more than enough.

It was not how he wanted the meeting to end, but he could not, would not, force her to make a choice.

He simply stood beside her as she watched the tree burn and frowned in concentration. It occurred to him then that perhaps she hadn't learned enough of her function. Creating fire was one thing. Shaping it to your will another.

"Here, let me show you."

It was, as he told Elaine Belloc, a learning by doing thing. But Mazikeen had time enough to learn. Time, after all, is all they have these days.