"The worst part about waking up was remembering exactly what you were waking up from."
897 Words
POV: Lucifer
He came back to himself slowly.
That was new too. In Heaven, consciousness was simply present, immediate and complete, no gradient between sleeping and waking because sleep in the celestial sense was not really sleep at all, just a dimming, a temporary reduction of awareness that snapped back to full brightness the moment it was done. There was no in-between. There was no groggy, heavy, warmth-soaked middle space where you were half somewhere else and half here.
He lay in that middle space for a long time and did not rush it.
His chambers were exactly as he had left them. Of course they were. Heaven did not shift or change or surprise you. The silk beneath him was cool and impossibly smooth, every thread perfect, the kind of perfect that had stopped registering as anything at all centuries ago because when everything is perfect nothing is. The light was the same eternal gold it always was. The distant sound of the celestial choir moved through the walls like it always did, those flawless harmonies that used to mean something and now just meant the same thing they always meant, which was nothing.
He stared at the ceiling and felt the Dreamveil on his skin like a fever.
She was still there. That was the thing he was not prepared for, how present she remained even after the connection snapped, how thoroughly she had gotten into him in the space of a single almost-touch. Her scent clung to something deeper than his physical form, that particular blend of earth and warmth and something sweet underneath it all that did not exist anywhere in Heaven because Heaven did not do warmth like that, did not do that specific human-real sweetness that made his chest ache just remembering it.
His body was not subtle about how it felt.
He was hard before he was fully conscious, the want carrying over from the Dreamveil with no apparent regard for the change in location, and he lay there in his perfect celestial bed and breathed through it and thought about her fingers extended toward him, trembling, the courage of that small tremor, the way she had not tried to hide it.
He pressed the heel of his hand low against his stomach and held it there, a pressure that was not relief but was at least acknowledgment. His whole body felt like a live wire, every nerve still tuned to a frequency that Heaven could not receive, still reaching for a signal that had cut out when the Dreamveil shattered and left him here.
He replayed it.
Her voice first. You've been watching me. Direct and certain and not an accusation, more like a door opening, like she was telling him that she knew and she had decided to know out loud and now they were both standing in that knowledge together. The sound of it had moved through him like the Dreamveil's winds, touching everything.
Then her eyes. Those dark knowing eyes that looked at him without the deference, without the careful management of expression that every other being in creation deployed in his presence. She had looked at him like he was a person. Specifically a person she was interested in, and the specificity of it, the fact that it was him she was looking at and not the role, had undone something in him that he suspected was not going back together the way it had been.
Then her hand. Reaching. Shaking slightly. The heat of her skin from three inches away, warm and real and so far from anything Heaven had ever offered him that the contrast was almost painful.
He closed his eyes and chased the memory of that warmth and found it fading slightly at the edges the way dreams do, and the fading felt like loss in a way that genuinely alarmed him. He did not want to lose a single detail. He wanted to hold every second of it in perfect preservation, the way Heaven preserved everything, except he wanted to do it because it mattered, not because preservation was the rule.
He thought about her smile. The slow sunrise of it. The way it had been real, not performed, not the divine grace of a being executing beauty as a function but actual joy, moving across her face because she let it.
He pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth and held it there.
The ache was enormous. Not just physical, though the physical was considerable and persistent and increasingly difficult to think around. It was deeper than that, the specific pain of having touched the edges of something true and been snapped back before you could get your hands fully around it. Like being shown a door and then finding yourself on the wrong side of it with no handle.
He knew the way back.
He had been to the Dreamveil before tonight, in the months when she had haunted the edges of his awareness and he had told himself he was not looking for her. He knew the way the threshold felt, that particular thinning of the boundary between realms, that shift in the air that meant the Dreamveil was accessible. He could go back. He had gone back before.
He could go back now.
The thought sat in the center of his chest and burned.
- Writer
