|
  |
He's out of easy sight range for humans, and high enough that he's not screwing with the air traffic control towers at JFK and La Guardia. Which is good, because Michael is playing - looping and diving and rolling like some sort of solitaire dogfight, all for the sheer joy of fighting with gravity and the friction of air. Enjoying the physical body and the limitations of flesh, like a poet writing in the strictest of forms just for fun.
Anger requires the cooling heights to quench its presence. When his veins flow with an irritation deeper than the norms for proximity to humanity, he relies on other outcomes to find a sense of equilibrium not defined by the balance beam of immortality and vengeance. Besides, Lucifer is slower to burn than most. He allows the updrafts to will him upwards, his wings a fine-line a few atoms wide and nothing substantial. Every so often he closes them in a full sweep that propels him upwards for minutes, days.
There is no play in his movements so much as there is surveillance, the slow oscillation through the moist currents of air off a baked asphalt foundation.
That new presence has Michael pausing and drifting down like a feather falling, exertion playing out in the ripple of light through those lines of script. No playful stooping on his brother this time, just that leisurely descent until he's unmistakably at the edge of Lucian's necessary perception. The equivalent of peeping questioningly in at the door, but not intruding…..waiting on a signal.
A feather falling, a feather rising. One of them goes roughly ascendant on a straight enough trajectory, cutting through the centre of his own helix without much consideration for surrounding buildings, possible owls, jet craft, or frankly missiles. It's not as though any of those can do a damn thing against him.
That being said, Michael and Lucifer targeted by a Hellfire from a passing, terrorized Crusader or another F-class plane has possibilities or promise. Mostly, though it might be a bad day for the pilot and his fancy flying machine given it's fully possible for the seraphim to overmatch and outmaneuver him.
"I know you're there."
"I'm hardly trying to hide," Michael acknowledges, pleasantly. "Do you want company?" he wonders, hovering in place like the laziest hummingbird, with only an occasional backwing. They're high enough that last remaining rays of the sun touch them, making wings gleam, playing on bone structure.
Hardly planning to hide and effectively hiding are two separate situations, but neither here nor there. The golden-haired man stretches out his hand to catch some mote of crumbling rock still superheated after its descent through the atmosphere, closing his fingers around the speck. Heat burns through his flesh and doesn't burn at all, since being made of flesh isn't entirely true. Energy recomposes itself. He hisses through his teeth only marginally; pain, less a presence, than a reminder, strikes against his awareness and dissipates.
Better to feel it now and then than throw an irritable blow at the Englishman in New York's lower atmosphere. He does not turn his face to the sun, but rather his back, absorbing the last of its light to fuel the immense energy reserves still required for all manner of things nowadays. Running a bar doesn't make up for solar charges. "You wouldn't have stayed in Heaven if you needed it all the time. I wouldn't have stayed in Hell if I wanted silence to myself."
Up he comes again, abandoning some of the little illusions of ephemerality. Not in full, burning glory - will he ever display that again before that unimaginable last battle? Who knows? Earth turns beneath them, but he's in sync, it seems, the dreaming spires keeping pace with them below. Michael is a shining mote, to the confusion of many a satellite - already the skies are populated, if not as crowded as they will be in years to come. "That's what I missed," he admits. "Silence. And sounds that were not talk or singing. Sometimes I leave this planet and go out enough to listen to the radiation. This is a very talkative star they have here."
The Earth's spin calculates a terribly slow rate of advancement, compared to other celestial fixtures in turn rotating rapidly about the planet. Proximity between the brothers is reason enough for the stars to cease in their peregrinations and the moon in its orbit. Lucifer resists the trek preordained by solar gravity, naturally, defiant as ever to the natural laws and confined to his own damn drumbeat. "Theirs is a perfectly standard midlife star. It's not nearly as fascinating as the hypergiants but, in its way, wiser for the short-lived business. Turn your head to Eta Carinae," he uses their Latin nomenclature, "and hear the perturbations between the dust cloud and the clearer points when it casts off its veils. There's something particularly profound about that."
The contemplation of this pleases him, it's clear. When he's got something as expressive as a face, it transmits his moods like glass. "That's true," he says, nodding. "But this one is so grateful for any intelligent conversation," he adds, as the terminator races on, and the sun, as if abashed by angelic praise, starts to hide herself behind the curve of earth. "So very modest and unassuming. So many of the red giants waste their spectra on mere bragging."
As opposed to an expressive sheet of paper? Lucifer grimaces a little. "You are listening to the radio spectra of stars. Has there been anything else to draw you down here, or merely the enjoyment to do so when not sitting in front of the stairs of the Presence?" His wings flit again, a flex to support his airborne posture or deny the copper-sheen from reaching his face.
"I'm just enjoying watching all the little details," he says, turning so his back is to the advance of night, too. Looking down at the webs of light that become plain as darkness comes. There's a ripple of unease through his back and wings. "I like mortal life. How is the young hybrid?" he asks, as he looks back over his shoulder. "Have you seen her lately?"
Might ask the hound what it thinks of its bone, for such can be worried away or exposed to the flash and fang of dangerous response. Lucian's incandescent gaze melts into something nearer to shadow than sunshine, face frozen along harsh lines hollowing out cheeks and hardening jaw. "It is new to you." He never forgets that. A statement of fact about Michael. Novelty is powerful for beings ageless as they; all said, though, he catches the sunlight one last time in the burnished demise of the dying sun. It licks his back and polished shoes, absorbed into the dark, tailored clothes he favours most days. "Recovering. She hasn't taken well to business."
He clicks his tongue in concern. He rides the bus, oftentimes. And the subway. Not to gain a destination, but to observe, and picks up little gestures the way children pick up shiny stones. "It is new to me, yes," he says. "And that's unfortunate. I should visit her."
"You shall wait until she is suitably prepared for guests. At the moment, her convalescence requires proper rest and few distractions." Lucian's smirk plays for a moment, then fades properly into diminished shadow anew. He scrapes his palm across his hair, guiding the tumble of it back off his brow.
Michael inclines his head to that, with no sign of impatience. His own hair is that brutally short crop, as befits the quintessence of soldiers, in this day and age. "When she is better, I will take her flying again." Not so much announcing it as musing aloud, pleased again.