There is a library in the darkness. Not many know this. Silence as in all libraries, though sometimes the air is heavier with potential, as though to mock that silence. The absence of music is louder than the music itself could be. On those days the angel cannot read as fast as he would like, he will stare at a page and read the same paragraph over and over, returning to it with a measured beat and reading again and then saccading to the top, a regular cycle of numb incomprehension. On those days Hell is quiet and Lucifer is difficult to find, for those with nerve to look.
Lucifer says, "You should go back to heaven then, to earn human love and learn nothing."
The angel says, "I followed him to finish hearing what he had to say."
The Voice says -
- but the angel cannot hear because the Voice has gone from his ears and Lucifer sees the loss in his eyes, dark blue shocked mourning eyes, and he kneels and is furious and pulls down the angel's hands, by the wrists, but the deafness is still there. The absence of music.
"Why the darkness?" the angel asks one day, and, absently, "This one you will like, I think."
"Why rosemary?" Lucifer says, taking the proffered book from his hand.
The angel thinks of a garden within black glass walls, of burnt roses and bleached pale violets, and knows the answer.
"For what?" he says next time, daring.
"A greater darkness," and Lucifer is not looking at him but at the table, at the books, at the soaring black curves of stone that seem never to meet in a ceiling above their heads, "filled with more questions than those that fill these shelves."
The angel does not understand anything but the foolishness of pressing further.
Lucifer stands up and does not brush the dirt from his legs. And then he breaks, lightly, like a flicked twig, and does not have to say all the words he wants to say because the Voice knows them already and that is what hurts, the shared nature of the knowledge that: this one I could have loved. Given time.
But You knew that, didn't You.
My pleasure.
You bastard.
Somehow the books smell of leather cut with brimstone and yes rosemary and their pages are thin but concrete under the sure fingers of the Fallen. The angel Xas does not look up but he follows the progress of a head as dark as his; through the piles, between the shelves, brown fingers trailing along unbroken spines as though to stroke music from the words within.
~
Am I adopting this canon? Fuck yes, I am adopting this canon.
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( She's got a ticket for a world where she belongs )
