Chapter Text
“Well that’s not good.”
An understatement if there ever was one, but the Vox firing the massive laser cannon indiscriminately through the city was not on Desmond’s bingo card for the day. Honestly, very little of this had been on Desmond’s bingo card, but fuck him for thinking the hostile takeover of Heaven would be the big problem, he guesses.
He’s close enough to the machine to hear Carmilla shouting over the whine of struggling machinery that the weapon will blow, and Vox’s homicidal—suicidal?—response that he doesn’t care. Which, not to sound like a broken record, but, not good.
Killing Vox still needs doing. But even if the weapon’s blast radius doesn’t extend past Pentagram City, and even if Desmond weren’t in said blast radius, he can’t ignore the deaths of so many people, whatever the Brotherhood would say about it.
This is going to suck so fucking much.
That angel, the smaller one, is channeling her energy at the glowing weapon, and it draws everyone’s attention enough that no one notices Desmond slipping into an opening at the weapon’s base on the other side, a metal panel peeled off and discarded nearby. One of those things he clocked and filed away earlier without really noticing, and glows helpfully gold now that he needs it.
He twists on the way down, liquid form slimming then flaring out to his normal shape again as his feet impact metal flooring. He looks around to see what he’s working with, and immediately lets out a yelp as he finds a fucking angel staring right at him.
Well. Staring is a little generous. The angel’s gaze is hazy, looking at him through half-lidded eyes from the other side of a transparent bubble, hanging limply from metal cuffs encasing his hands, wires haphazardly attached to his chest crackling with energy. Golden blood trickles from his wounds, staining the pinstripe vest underneath. A very familiar pinstripe vest.
“Lucifer?” he absolutely does not squeak.
“Oh, hey, youuuuu...guy.” His voice echoes through the glass barrier, words spoken with a loose slur rounding the edges. “Who’re you?”
“I bar-tend at the hotel,” he says, then shakes his head, trying to dispel the shock and focus on what he’s here for. Seems like the room is the control center for the weapon above. Buncha panels, buttons, wires—ugh, it looks like Becs’ engineering corner. What he’d give for her right now.
“Uh, no, that guy has wings. I make a habit of tracking people with wings, and you don’t have wings. Or ears. Or a face.”
“I’m the backup bartender,” Desmond says, gold eyes appearing on his face just long enough to give Lucifer a glowing gold wink, before they disappear again into the inky black of his silhouette. He raps his knuckles against the glass. “Do you know how to get out of this thing?”
“Pff, no,” Lucifer says, face scrunching up. “I’m not in here for fun! If I could get out—Yeowch!” The mild exclamation is completely at odds with the way his body jerks from a sudden surge of energy dancing across his skin, pulling against the restraints so hard Desmond thinks a sinner would have broken something. Desmond looks around, grabs a roller chair that’s in there for some reason, and hits it against the glass as hard as he can.
The chair breaks. The glass doesn’t have a scratch.
Lucifer comes down from the arc he’d been pulled into, head hanging for a moment as he pants for breath, sparks fizzling out. There’s a rougher quality to his voice, but if Desmond hadn’t seen it, he’d have no idea the guy just channeled enough energy to level the city. “No, I don’t know how to get out of this stupid box. Uh. Why? What’s happening?”
“This whole thing is going to blow,” Desmond tells him, turning his gaze to the machinery up above the glass chamber. Something up there is Important.
“Well that’s not good,” Lucifer says. Desmond snorts. “Where’s Charlie?”
“Fine,” Desmond says. That’s probably a lie. He’d rather not lie to the Prince of them. King. Whatever. “Will be, I mean,” Desmond corrects, then scrunches down in a deep squat, legs going long and thin as a grasshopper’s before launching up to the top of the glass egg, snaking his arm through a metal strut to secure his perch. “Just gotta fix this.”
“Whoa, okay—” Grunting from below, and Desmond can imagine the angel squirming to try to keep an eye on him. He grabs the cable that lit important-gold at the last surge, prodding at his extrasensory perception to try to figure out how it works in tandem with the rest of the machinery. The overclocked whine is even louder up here in the guts of it, and he can barely hear Lucifer continuing below, “Great confidence guy, love it, totally unfounded. You need to get Charlie out of here.” A pause where Desmond feels the cable humming to life in his hand, another surge cutting Lucifer’s words off in favor of a pained hiss.
Got it.
“And her friends, I guess,” Lucifer continues when it passes, voice a little more ragged. “If they’re already there. They’re there. Theeeeeere.”
“Hey,” Desmond says, hanging his head over the edge of the metal cap so Lucifer can see him again, neck snaking long and unnatural. “If this kills me, could you do me a favor?”
“You’re seriously just ignoring me.”
“There’s this sinner, Sixteen—Clay, his name was Clay Kaczmarek when he was alive. Could you keep an eye out for him?”
“No!”
“Thanks,” Desmond says, his head retreating as his neck shrinks back to its normal length with a disturbing schlurp.
He doesn’t know how the weapon or the machinery powering it works. Sixteen probably could’ve figured it out, he was always good at pulling other people’s engineering apart. He probably could’ve designed something better, given enough time and caffeine. But he’s not here anymore, so all Desmond has is the thin lines of intention spread over everything like a net, built things carrying a whisper of their creator’s purpose that he can tap into and read.
The weapon’s been pushed past its limits, firing with more power, more rapidly, than it was designed for, Vox bypassing the safeties the Carmines built in. It’ll come apart at the seams if it fires again, but it can’t contain what it pulled from Lucifer, is still somehow pulling from Lucifer.
It’ll blow if it fires. It’ll blow if it doesn’t.
(He really doesn’t want to do this.)
(He doesn’t see any other option.)
Desmond flexes his right arm, releasing his hidden blade. With a steady hand, he uses the angelic steel to cut through the thick cable connecting the cage to the weapon and plunges both live-sparking ends into his body.
(There is exactly one place in this entire ring capable of safely containing a supernova of angelic power.)
Desmond grabs divinity and pulls.
It’s not meant to reverse. The machinery isn’t built for this, and it screams and rattles around him as he burns channels open, current raging as it crashes into him, angry to be denied its destructive intent. But Desmond has done this before, channeled something ancient and powerful tainted with angelic hate into something to protect. He wrangles it, weaves a net of his intent into its foundations, tells it to move, move, move. This is where you go, this is where you belong, clawing and yanking and fighting against its inclination. Making himself part of the machine was only the first step, now he has to convince it that his will is its will.
It turns on him, roaring, an avalanche of fire that lights him up along facets of his existence he wasn’t even aware of. He screams, the sensation raw and familiar, body steaming as he struggles to hold it together, hold it inside himself, enticements and promises spilling with his blood. He snakes his way down the cable, the thinnest thread of water between wires, inside the cabling, stretched too thin for consciousness but carrying back sensation when it encounters something. Fire, the same divine fire eating him, boiling him, only this is alive. He stabs into it, no room for gentleness. The energy he’s pulled from the weapon, coaxed along this thinnest thread, connects.
Light.
Searing, a physical presence. He can feel himself down to the molecules, down to the atoms, the space between nucleus and electrons all blazing with glorious, horrifying light.
Earth’s sun has nothing on the Morningstar.
All of Desmond’s focus, every ounce of consciousness he can scrape together, is on maintaining the connection from one pool of power to another. Now that he’s shown it where to go, now that it knows the glory of home, home, home, it moves without his having to pull at it, screaming joy through the path of his body. He doesn’t know how much energy is left in the weapon above, he doesn’t know if it’s still overclocking or already blown, gone supernova with him at the epicenter. He is a line of single, focused intent, of pain beyond existence, of pure creation moving through him, hollow of everything but this one purpose, the one he was made for.
Without warning, the pool of power he’s drawing from disappears. Desmond has a moment for the dregs of his awareness to process that the momentum of energy is still going, swirling down the cabling into sublime light, before he feels it tug at him and everything goes dark.