“That was decidedly harsh,” he said, voice soft but steady.
Luce flinched, long fingers tightening on the jar he had just summoned from a cabinet across the room.
“You speak out of turn,” he said at last, voice taut with an emotion Uriel couldn’t name. It was somewhere between anger and anxiety, and it gave him pause.
“You’re right.” He tried to shrug, and gave a little gasp at the pain that lanced his arm.
“Try not to break yourself more, when I’m about to try and fix you?” Luce asked drily, and Uriel offered a weak grin.
“Apologies,” he chuckled. “Camiel gave me a potion that almost had me forgetting it was broken.”
“Ah, that would be one of mine.” Luce beamed with pride. “I made it for battlefield surgery, when we needed to alleviate the shock to get the wounded to safety quickly. It’s essentially a sedative that targets and numbs injuries.”
“If only we’d had that one back when I nearly lost my wing at Babel, eh?”
“That was actually what inspired me to start developing it,” Luce admitted with a sly grin. “You were crying like a child then, if I recall?”
“I essentiallywasa child,” Uriel said, a bitter cast to his tone, and then sighed. “Ah well, that’s the past. Sometimes it’s best to let go of the past, right Luce?”
“Nice try.” Luce frowned, giving him a stern look as he poured a measure of ruby liquid from the jar to a glass and passed it to Uriel. “You know very well that this isn’t nearly that cut and dry. Drink this, it’s more of what you had earlier.”
Uriel accepted the glass and tossed the contents down in a single swallow. “I think you need to talk to each other,” he tried again, stubbornly.
“Uriel, I still consider you a friend,” when he answered, Luce’s tone was hard and cool, “but if you press this subject with me, it will not be a pleasant conversation for either of us.”
“He just wants a chance to make amends and try to...understand.”
“He has had several millennia in which to try!” A cool wind swept the room, sending the curtains fluttering and the glass cabinets rattling. Luce turned away sharply, swapping the jar of sedative potion for a metal tin of salve to occupy his hands.
Uriel waited, gazing at Luce with something close to sympathy. When the wind settled and the curtains drifted back into place, he reached out with his good hand and touched the King lightly on the arm. “Luce...you hurt him too.”
“I did no such thing,” Luce snapped, turning away from the bed and pacing across the room to rummage through a cabinet.“Heis the one who refused my requests to speak then, so why should I entertain his now?”
Uriel said nothing. The slow spread of warmth along his damaged limb was distracting and soothing, and he allowed his mind to wander while the other man burned off his emotions. A gentle tug on his damaged arm pulled him back to attention, and he looked over to see Luce gently slicing around the shoulder of his jacket. He looked conflicted but determined.
“You’re going to lose this sleeve, I’m afraid,” he murmured, and Uriel nodded distantly.
“’Sokay,” he slurred, the stronger dose of tonic lulling him into a dreamlike fog. “I borrowedit from Jophi…”
He dipped into darkness to the sound of Lucifer chuckling, and when he bobbed back into consciousness, his sleeve was gone, and his dark skin split like paper under Luce’s steady and careful blade.
“Ow.”
Luce froze. “You can feel that?”
“No,” Uriel muttered. “Just looks painful.”
He slipped back under, and this time he stayed there.
Michael was lost in more than one sense of the word. He wandered through the halls restlessly, without noting anything specific enough to orient himself, essentially just following his feet wherever they were heading. He would’ve reprimanded his soldiers for acting this way—blindly wandering around alone in enemy territory? Unacceptable.
But Luce wasn’t really his enemy, was he? Even now the King himself tended to Uriel’s wounds. It was hard to imagine Jehovah doing the same for one of Lucifer’s people.
What you do for the least of these, you do for me…Michael thought bitterly.
It was a credo he had done his best to honor for centuries, and yet his King considered himself above such things. The nature of goodness was fickle in Heaven. It came with the added weight of rules and qualifications.
Zaj’s words at the welcome center came back to gnaw at him.You guys have some pretty strict policies…Wasn’t thatthe truth? He was so distracted by his thoughts that he almost toppled into a fountain.
