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The problem with younger brothers is that Dad will never let you annihilate them with celestial fire. No matter what kinds of jackasses they're being. This remains true for angels as well as mortals.
It's the blue hour - the sun has set in glory in the west, but the streaks of crimson and gold are still glowing there. Lucian's up in the high ether, the clear thin air above the shroud of pollution. But he is not the highest. For as he's there, surveying the glittering spires so far below…..something hits him from above like a peregrine trying to knock a pigeon right out of the air, then slashes on past. It's trailing laughter behind it like a contrail, and faintly, Lucian can hear, "You're IT!"
The skies over Manhattan carry so much less interest than the bright city lights before. Streets delineate the grid laid out in ye olde English times, imagined from a nexus divided around Central Park and the descent of Manhattan Island into the Atlantic Ocean. Those who might look up grow more used to the unusual visages of flying creatures zipping about, but then they could also be terrorized by the same. No one's judging here.
The blue hour promises so much for a young man — or one who was there to awaken the first night. He swings around in tight gyres that do not have any feel of aimlessness to them. They're too purposeful for that, cutting and bisecting the main arteries of the borough and working their way eventually westward. There are rushes.
Then there's damn bombardment from above. Once, his senses stretched over solar systems and with the slightest adjustment, in any spectrum known to being. Now he's near to mortal as one of their kind can be. A vibration of risk thrums along the leading edge of the Morningstar's wing, and treated to that disruption of the pigeon-king sends him toppling into the ether. Lucifer snaps his wings shut and flips over as the speed knocks him down, down to earth. It's unnecessary for him to breathe but he snarls invectives. Wings sharply snap in ways that don't obey physics and then the bastard is rising.
He's pulled out of his dive with the gull-winged grace that the engineers at Supermarine could only dream of, and pauses just at the apex of his climb, beating his wings like an enormous hummingbird. His grin is very nearly a light of its own, though at least Michael's stopped laughing, as he beams down at Lucian. "You've gotten slack," he accuses, teasingly.
Supermarine doesn't even know possibilities. Extraterrestrial designers can but weep for the G-Forces flung off by someone whose body cannot break or rearrange in confetti vapors on the air. His wings barely visible, Lucifer is hardly descending like a comet or ascending as a Saturn rocket. He snaps those appendages far too languidly to match the fast rise. The incipient glow in those eyes smarts with a sharp, focused brilliance that few see head-on before their imminent end. Power rages through those veins, pulled together, and potentially unleashed.
Ooh, Lucian's mad. And Michael's all aglow with laughter. Cooler, fainter, like false dawn and not the Star of the morning. He knows what might well be coming, and even the pain of temporary physical annihilation is worth the childish pleasure of having gotten the drop on Lucian.
The star of the morning does not claps his hand so much as open them. A thin lancet of wheat-gold light shapes off his fingertips and takes utterly unerring aim just off the feathery appendage of his near twin brother. "Not tonight," he needn't snarl, but he does, the better of the bright fury burning a hole through the depths of his breast and feeding down the lines of the soul.
He snaps his wings at that, and tumbles like a stone, ending up a ways beneath Lucian before stopping the dive by spreading his wings. He doesn't climb up to the Morningstar's level, though, but remains beneath, looking up. All levity's banished, and now there's that mild, abiding curiosity. "What is it?" he says, simply.
Another simmering torch flame erupts where went the first, something once so hot it could vaporize atoms with a needle fineness. Now, perhaps, not so much is changed. Lucifer stands in midair, the effortless encroachment on gravity's domain spurned, denied by a man on his toes. "Since when am I your concern, Michael? Isn't that?" A gesture encompasses the world. It might also be a single pigeon roost near the Chrysler Building.
"Since we were made," Michael replies, mildly. Back to his usual curious, quiet self. "That is, too," he concedes, with a lazy glance down to take in the entirety of that crawling hive of humanity, good, bad, indifferent. "But you are clearly ….not yourself." Ah, human euphemism.
Lucifer's blind-bright gaze scours below rather than the being in front of him, however familiar in all his diminished splendour. Some would say the approach of mankind and humanity, devoid in their making, suits them better. He would find that person and backhand them until no hint of their very mortal visage remained, pulped from sight. Then he might yell at Galactus for the purposes of saying who and what their global pecking order is.
"Indeed, brother? Praytell what miraculous insight manifests itself to suggest I am other than me." His eyes narrow.
"YOu weren't just waiting, when I hit you," he says, simply. "That was a search pattern. What is it you seek?" he asks, gaze following Lucian's down. "I will help you find it." Oh, sure, that will work beautifully.
Right, Mr. Pigeon.
Lucifer's flaming gaze is not arrested in its categorical divisions of street to alley and points betwixt. Well his efforts might net him something, but not a great deal. "Focus your efforts then," he says with pointed acerbity. "A woman in duress. Brunette. Likely howling and mucking about."
"What's her name?" he says, pragmatically, already drifting down like a leaf, the better to see. "What's she like? A lot of human females have manes in that spectrum."
"Not a knight errant and a soothsayer, Michael?" Lucifer sweeps his wings in a burst that brings him half a mile to the side in a literal leap, trailing the icy fragments of light and luminous shadow in his wake.
"In my time," he replies, sweeping back and forth in easy arcs. Already, his tone is distracted.
"You know her. Frightened little thing not sure of her wingspan." That's all he is willing to say upon that front, considering his wingspan is stretching out and he crashes down in search of his own truth, his own findings. People are loudly calling and ignored, but truth enough, he's going to locate what he seeks. Even if it means using Michael.
"Oh!" he says, pleased, for a moment. "I take her flying, now and again." Then serious again, the blue eyes turned on Lucian. "…..how did she get lost?"
"I know not. She keeps insisting on my attention." He grits his teeth. Lucifer swings back around as the attention spins out in all directions, prayers bombarding the man who rules Hell in all its forms. "Where is she?"
"She likes you," he says, softly. "I am glad you know her. She's fascinating." He doesn't bother to flap, now, only gliding. Listening to them. Seeking for that distinctive mind, the soul that yearns for flight of her own.
Where oh where is Rosemarie,
Where oh where could she be?
Sing louder, sweet chicken,
Tell God where you did flee.
Poetry is hard, okay? One fish, two fish, red fish, dead fish as Lucian's route sweeps around another building and he flips off whomever might be seeking him. He does another circuit, racing for the water. Where oh where is she…