1965-09-30 - No Nice Things
Summary: It starts with an offering of maple leaves and ends up with a frank discussion of someone failing their duties.
Related: None
Theme Song: None
lucifer michael 


The leaves are turning - they lie in scarlet and gold drifts under the trees in the Ramble, like embroidered brocade. Heavily enough that there're piles to scuff with boots - Mike's like a little kid, scooting his feet along the asphalt to make them fly up, or stomping on them to make them crunch and crackle. He's got a bouquet of maple leaves in his hand, that perfect Chinese red - maybe he intends to make an offering to one of his pet mortals. Or just to keep them and look at them until they brown. Simple pleasures for simple minds.


Another roll of the seasons passes him by in their particolour splendour. A lone man staring up into the sky can appreciate the coming chill. Crispness bites the forest to tighten the shades on display, licking bits of crimson where green prevailed. No one prevaricates while hastily rushing down the sidewalks and dreaming of coffee. They show gratitude for sweaters and cozy nooks tucked between the city. Most of the comers to Central Park are out to be dazzled. Lucian is not. He could pretend not to care about the cold, but he has that stylish turtleneck sweater under a brocaded jacket. Hands in his pockets mean he easily looks like an uninterested stroller, one of those hip cats who live at Hip Bagel or the Vanguard, the kind who ought to have ten women at his beck and call. And very possibly he does. Light singes up his brachiated, unseen wings. He absorbs it all without a complaint.


That presence is familiar, burning through the air between them. Mike turns from his contemplation of a particularly splendid oak tree, smiles, and holds out the leaves to Lucian. As if there weren't literally thousands within their radius, for all the world like a preschooler offering his mother a nosegay of dandelions. "Amazing what axial tilt does, isn't it?" he says, pleasantly. A dozen women, several goddesses, and at least one cyborg. Lucian can be catholic in his tastes, after all.


A presence confined and one airy, one breathlessly bold and diffused. This is the making of Lucian whilst he ventures where and how he will. Calling him aimless would be a pointless task. When Michael turns, leaving dendrology to the business of foresters and navel-gazers, he turns those fiery blue eyes to the offered leaves. Up to the man, down to the plants. A snap of his fingers and one of those leaves is rendered into ash, blowing on the wind. "Useful. Though it will deeply disturb them in a few thousand years when the next procession begins and they are under ice here. Several miles as I last recounted."


Michael seems pleased that at least one of his offerings is accepted, smiles that little smile. He lets the ash go. "Indeed," he says, musingly. "I imagine the advance of glaciers is beautiful. I can't remember who it was who was so very proudof the colors water ice turns when there's enough of it," he says, musingly. "What brings you out? A need for radiation?" He looks up to the lowering sun, smiling up at the little star as if to encourage it. Who's the cutest yellow dwarf? Yes, it's you!


Michael is met by that unfathomable gaze. Well, the ash remains but the other sprigs of colourful leaves endure. "The glaciers are beautiful and forbidding. The isostatic rebound brought by their weight invariably will prove satisfying, I imagine, in recorrecting the contours of the shoreline. It always does entertain me when it happens. Now then, where have you been?" A need for radiation? Hardly the case, though he turns his head up to the modest star. "I had a finer time dealing with some of the aurorae at the polar reaches of Saturn. The turbulence there is bracing."


"I'll have to try it," As if Lucian were describing a new amusement park ride out at Coney. He stretches one wing one way, its partner another, like two clock hands describing some impossible hour, for a moment - an angelic shrug. "Out and about. Spending time with mortals I like. Watching squirrels." Of course. "Sitting in trees. The atmosphere on this planet is nicest when I do."


"Something different. Winds are strong, around a thousand kilometers an hour." Or he had something to do with stirring them up to that, methane screaming at a wail that spins around him in countless decadent eddies. Angelic shrug to seraphic shrug indeed. "Squirrels. Never should have tolerated their creation. Mischief and annoyance in one. I should have employed them once. The atmosphere is nicest here when you sit? Don't tell me you're kindling storms."


Michael folds the wings neatly behind him, after a thoroughly unecesssary shaking out of the feathers. He's been spending far too much time among his pigeons. The idea of winds of that speed conjuresup a look of anticipation. "Sounds wonderful," he breathes. "And they are oddlittle creatures. I mean, in the oxygen they breathe out. It's very rich, kind of decadent. No, no need to."


"I see. You're rarely one to just become angry for no apparent reason. I trust there would be one," Lucifer says in a measured tone, though he might be prepared for a random bolt of lightning racing down from the sky out of the literal blue. "Squirrels are what they are." Beneath notice.


"I've had little to trouble me, since I came here," he says, and his voice is gentle. The rapprochement with Lucifer himself being much of that peace, apparently. "Enjoying what I've found, though this is one of the nicer concentrations of humans, I am told." Oh, Mike. How naive can you be? And what a mild facade, considering the destructive power he is. Time and tide, he may be called upon to wipe out this whole system…..but until that day, it's apparently still a holiday.


"You should try Vietnam. You might take a somewhat measured view of what they like to do to one another. I've been hearing and seeing too much. The kind of much that involves incinerating forests and hurling bodies at pointless targets they surrender a day or two later. War is your province, of course. A sea of corpses in the way is ever interesting, especially when they produce countless outcomes that invariably turn out to be the same thing. Artistry in death. This time with technological innovation. You know how irritating it is to hear them invoke me? Constantly?" Lucian smirks.


Michael's brow furrows at that. A moment's thoughtful silence, as if he were consulting some internal manual. "I had…not heard much about that. A peninsula on the other side of the planet…." Silent again. "Yes, they are fighting over there. And that is annoying. I'm sorry. I would stop them, if I could." A little somber, though more at the inconvenience to Lucifer than anything, it seems. Mortals are mortals, after all.


The blond doesn't smirk much wider. His expression without the definition of the lightly mocking curve is far closer to his seraphic antithesis than otherwise. "You hadn't? I find that difficult to believe. Tap into the airwaves. Read the paper, though not the Bugle. Pure garbage, that one. Try out the Times or anything, honestly. They will give you an alloyed version of what's really going on out there. Do you not hear the boys screaming for intervention when their legs are blown off or the next Marine company is shot to pieces by North Vietnamese forces using AK-47s? I don't suppose that ranks high on one's afternoon list of things to do but I'm listening."


"No. Some call for me, and I do hear them. But very few here believe in me as they do in you. The proportions are very different. It isn't the same," he says, gently. "They….they do not expect me. And they don't really think I will come when they call. It's very abstract, now. I've shocked those few I do appear to."


Shoulders rise and fall. "They believe in you enough. There are church spires. The burning monks though, that's a bit of an extensively wrong touch. They don't cry out to anyone in the end other than cursing the white devils or the worst devils that broke their country. Still — it comes through to me. I take umbrage on it, but there you go." Lucian's eyes narrows. "I would /almost/ like the sword back to cleave silence back into that corner, but then that leaves us in the most unpleasant situation again. The creatures can't seem to hekp themselves from trying to tear one another apart. This time, it's not even over the usual. The proxies aren't anything different. Ideas aren't new. But the rest…"


"The reasons get more abstract, as the species ages," he says. And there, at last, is that ancient resonance, if only a hint of it, in his voice. The Destroyer, if not Death, somber and sorrowful, but as innocent of regret as an infant unicorn. A nod at that. Both of them without their weapon - Mike's presumably at the belt of a nervous, preening Gadreel. Angels don't dream as mortals do, but in whatever serves his adjutant as a substitute, there lurks that seed of ambition.


Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License