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daytaker · 1 year ago

Text

The Adversary

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What the hell happened?!” But I was Wrath, and Wrath doesn’t speak with words.

AN: This is a modified chapter from a longer fic of mine called "Let's All Be Shadows". (Link leads to ao3.) There are references to events from that story, but this can be understood without reading the long-fic.

POV: Satan Nightbringer Timeline Word Count: ~ 4500 Synopsis: Satan recalls his earliest months in the Devildom and a new revelation that hit him just recently. CW: violence, rage, blood, manual choking

Most of the fic is below the cut.

----

Nominative determinism.

That’s a philosophical theory that argues that people gravitate towards interests, careers, or behaviors that align with their name. Nominative—named. Determinism—fate.

The name Satan comes from an ancient human language; the Hebrew word הַשָּׂטָן (hasattan), which means “accuser” or “adversary”. So, following nominative determinism, that is my role. I am the opposition. I am the adversary.

And, following this human theme, if you asked the average human today, they’d probably tell you that Satan and Lucifer are both names for the same entity.

They wouldn’t be completely wrong.

----

The first thing I knew was a white hot pain. It exploded through me, starting at my core and bursting outwards. I was on fire. I was dying.

It’s ironic that birth and death must feel so similar.

I was in a fugue, then, for what felt like a long time. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. I could only rage. Everything that approached me, I tore to shreds. I was feral. I was out of my mind. Flashes of memories are all I have of the beginning. There’s the taste of copper in my mouth and blood smeared over my face, on my hands, in my hair. I’m tearing at something that used to be alive. Then oblivion, and the next thing I recall is writhing on the floor in a dark room, the rough masonry scraping my bare back. I bled all over the Demon Lord’s dungeon, and I never stopped screaming.

I screamed until my throat bled, and after that, I screamed in choked, gargled bursts of sticky blood and saliva.

After the rage, the blinding heat, the blood, the broken nails and torn hair and shattered restraints… After that, there was him.

I hated him.

I knew who he was; what he was to me. It was instinct, the way a baby knows its mother. Lucifer was my mother.

I’ll never forgive him for that. I’ll never forgive him for making me.

Because he did. He made me. He put me here, a struggling, suffering, raging mess of tissue and blood and bile and hate.

I don’t think I can effectively put into words how badly I wanted to die. There’s no way to say it without sounding pathetic. But I wanted death in a way I can barely understand now. Everything hurt, and now he was here, and every nerve ending in my body seared with a sort of fuming hatred that I couldn’t understand. I still don’t understand it. The idea that I could end my own existence never crossed my mind, though. That didn’t feel like an option. He made me. I was his responsibility. He should be the one to liberate me.

Instead, he tied me up, cast enchantments, and put me into bondage; he prevented me from moving. 'For my own good,' he said. And there, where I couldn’t lash out with my body, when I couldn’t strike and bite and rip, when I could no longer express myself physically; that’s when I spoke my first coherent words. They were like pebbles on my tongue, awkward and slathered in saliva, garbled, but intelligible.

"Traitor," I growled in a strange voice; a voice I'd never heard before. "Look at the mess you made."

I used those words to remind him what he was. That was my violence. Words like:

Coward. Failure. Hypocrite. Pathetic. Weak. The worst thing to ever happen to the people who trusted you.

It was a chorus of insults designed to burn him. Babies nurse on their mothers. So did I. I nursed on his pain. I wanted so badly to hurt him the way he hurt me. And maybe, possibly, he’d do what he should have done the instant I was born into this world. Maybe he would lose his temper. Maybe he would kill me.

He didn’t. Obviously. He never even responded to what I said, in those early days. He’d just look me over, examining my body, treating the rash of scabs on my back and shoulders. He’d put this cooling salve on the sores, and it burned like ice on my skin. I screamed and I bit at him and I tried to show him what words, still so new and ineffective, refused to do for me. “I hate you. I will kill you.”

Sometimes he’d get this look on his face… This awful, sick… sad… sour look. Pity. It was just pity.

And it enraged me. How dare he pity me when this was his fault? I told him as much.

I told him everything back then, in those earliest days. Every thought that entered my head. I only knew three things: pain, hate, and Lucifer. And only one of those things could understand me.

My memories from then are fuzzy. Rather than a narrative, I recall a tapestry of impressions and sensations; reds and whites and blacks, flashes of green, and long stretches of gray. But some incidents stand out in my mind, clearer than all the others. In one, I was bound and naked—I wouldn’t wear clothes then, in the earliest days; I just shredded them when I had my hands free, and I screamed and tensed and scraped my body on the walls when I didn’t. I hated how they felt, hot fibers rubbing against nerve endings that were so raw I could barely think. But I was naked, and I was bound to a bed or a chair or something in the Demon Lord’s castle, and I was screaming, and tears and blood stung my eyes, and I told him:

“This was inside you all along, Lucifer! Look at me! I was inside you! This is you! I am you!”

And he sighed. He looked so tired, so pathetic. He ruffled my hair with a gentleness that ignited the rage inside me to a maddening level. And he said to me:

“I am me. You are you.”

I told him to eat shit, and he shrugged and cleaned me up.

I wonder if he was punishing himself, the way he always took care of me on his own. Or maybe it was just one of his self-imposed responsibilities; another thing he could do to convince himself he didn’t deserve to be miserable.

Back then, in those early days, he treated me like I was his child. I was his child. It always makes me sick to think about it that way, but he was my parent. He gave birth to me. He nursed me. He raised me. And just like so many parents since the dawn of time, he made me into a miserable facsimile of himself. I was Lucifer, but worse. I was Lucifer, but broken and ashamed and out of control. I was Lucifer, if Lucifer hated Lucifer. I didn’t want to be Lucifer.

“I am me. You are you.”

That’s easy enough to say when you’re the original. What about when you’re the parasitic thing that exploded from someone’s wounded body and heart? What then, Lucifer?

----

In spite of everything, I somehow made progress. I learned to dress myself, and to wear clothes without tearing them to shreds. I learned how to walk without erupting into an inferno of fury. I learned to speak without screaming. And that awful mother of mine was always with me, it seemed; always by my side. “Remember to breathe,” he’d say, or “Focus on what’s in front of you.” And I’d mutter curses at him, and I’d try; I’d try to do what he told me to do, and I’d feel so ashamed . But when I did what I was told, he’d give me things. Books, mainly, but also different foods, changes of scenery… So I did what I was told.

In some ways, I was as naive as a child. I remember the mystery of my first snowfall, touching it and putting it to my lips and staring at the impression of my handprint in the white blanket on the ground. But there were also plenty of things I never had to learn. I knew how to read and write; I understood, conceptually, that there was a Celestial Realm and a Devildom, and which one I was in. I knew that Lucifer had brothers and a sister, and I knew the sister was gone.

I knew about Lilith.

Lucifer says I often talked about Lilith in my early days. I don’t remember it myself, but he says I seemed fixated on her. I would sob and rage at him for letting her go, letting her die, twisting what was left of her and warping it into something ugly.

Lucifer said he thought it was because he was so heavily focused on Lilith when I was ‘born’; he supposes he must have imparted some strange impressions on me in his grief. I don’t remember any of that though, like I said, so I had to take his word for it.

I don't think that's the real reason anymore, though.

----

I remember meeting my brothers. Tch. My ‘brothers’....

“This is Satan,” Lucifer said to them. “He is your brother. I expect you to treat him as such.” They all stared at me as I sat bound and chained to a chair, gritting my teeth, and then they glanced at each other. They didn’t know what to say. And then they stared at me again, and I knew they were told how I’d erupted from Lucifer’s body, and I knew they had heard me screaming in the dungeon and down the otherwise quiet corridor of unused rooms, and I knew they were afraid. I knew.

But I was just six weeks old, and I was terrified too. And being terrified made me so angry. I struggled to swallow the rage, but it was only a matter of seconds before I choked out the first coherent thing that entered my mind, the words crescendoing into a grating scream by the end.

“They’re not my brothers!”

My vision wobbled, my head ached, and my muscles burned with an energy that could only be expelled with violence. I broke free from the chains around my wrists, and soon I was throwing things. Whatever I could get my hands on. A table. A painting. A priceless vase. Levi and Asmo and the twins scattered, and Mammon looked like he wanted to join them, but he didn’t. He stood uselessly in the middle of the hall as Lucifer grappled with me.

“O-oi, whadda you need?” he asked Lucifer, who responded by flapping his wings in irritation and grabbing onto my throat.

I grinned at him. I wanted to show him the worst, most sickening face he could possibly imagine. Lucifer’s expression hardly changed, but he squeezed, and I knew I’d succeeded. “Kill me,” I spat. I was crazy. I had lost my mind. It was empty of everything besides the hate. “Kill me, you scum. Kill me like you killed her.”

For a short while, I thought he might really do it. His fingers dug into my throat, his jaw clenched, and there was a rage in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before as I used some of my last stores of strength to strike him with my tail. Yes. He fed off my rage, and I fed off of his, and it was an infinite feedback loop. The border of my vision started to grow hazy, and my pulse was pounding in my ears, and…

He released me far too soon. Far, far too soon. I didn’t even fully lose consciousness; didn’t even get to enjoy a moment of oblivion. I’d just let myself go limp. I surrendered so easily. And that second of lowered resistance was all he needed to cast some binding enchantment on me and leave me irate and screaming, wheezing for breath, my pulse pounding in my face as my blood resumed circulating, and I wriggled on the floor like a worm. I felt like a worm.

Time was still so new back then. I couldn’t follow how it passed, and it seemed to dilate, stretching and squeezing, becoming longer and shorter based on my moods. And now, it all feels so long ago.

It was a lifetime ago, I suppose. From then to now, for me.

I wasn’t kept under lock and key. Not normally, at least. I was allowed to wander the Demon King’s castle. While Cerberus stalked the labyrinth below, I was treading the hallways above. I wonder how Lucifer convinced Diavolo to agree to that…

It never got better, though.

The rage.

I just learned to manage it. Slowly. Bit by bit. I’m still learning to manage it. Sometimes I slip.

I slip a lot, actually.

Books were my main solace in the Demon King’s castle, just as they are now in the House of Lamentation. Because I understand how little I know, and how valuable books are as resources.

But funny enough, that wasn’t why I became so interested in books at the start. I was far less interested in nonfiction than I was with novels. Reading a good novel…a really good novel… It can feel like a possession. Like you’ve entered someone else’s body and attuned yourself to someone else’s mind.

I wonder if others understand what a relief that is? I wonder if anybody can have any idea what others actually feel, and how it compares to yourself? It’s a question I sometimes get stuck on. The question alone takes me out of myself. I like that.

I didn’t care much about the real world when I was new. Why should I? The only things in it were Lucifer and his brothers, and I got enough of that already. I would rather be Azaz the Summoner, the demon who forged pacts with other demons in defiance of all natural laws. Or a young human boy living in the wilderness with wolves. I like stories like that.

No, what piqued my interest in the world outside was the butler.

I don’t know where he got the time, or why he cared enough to be bothered with it, but he told me about his own life. Only in the vaguest terms, of course; never touching on anything that felt truly personal. He talked of how ancient he was, and how he’d walked in the human world before humans ever did. And he told me about his room. He even let me look inside once. It’s shocking. Doors and stairs all over the place, leading to different places and times…

There’s no way for me to know if he was being honest with his stories, but he knew so much, it seemed insane to believe he was making it all up. He knew about the way the Devildom smelled when it was first inhabited by demons; he knew about the sulfur mines that shut down millennia ago, and the infrastructure that transformed the place into somewhere livable…

So I read some books about the ancient history of the Devildom. From what I could tell, his descriptions were accurate, and though he could have learned those things the same way I had, I didn’t feel he did. It felt more as if he was speaking from experience.

But when I read about the early Devildom, I wanted to learn about the fae. And when I read about the fae, I wanted to learn more about magic. And when I learned about magic, I wanted to learn more about curses, and magicians from all three realms, and soon I was no longer reading about fictional worlds, but my own. And I wanted so badly to see it.

----

When we moved into the House of Lamentation, Lucifer gave me the scroll. It was shiny and strange, and he told me it belonged to me, and that I should look it over when I was ready. He told me it had information about my birth. He made it sound like some sort of legal document, and it seemed to me that he wanted me to look at the thing sooner rather than later. So I tossed it on a high shelf and ignored it. I ignored it until you came to my room and started asking questions.

Lucifer came into my room the night I had you over. No knocking. He just burst in, arms crossed, wearing that disgusting look of beleaguered disappointment on his face. Like I’d let him down again. Like I owed him the consideration of trying to do anything else…

“You had a guest today, I heard.”

I was sitting on my bed, reading a book about who-knows-what. I’ve forgotten. He made me forget. And I was suspicious. Why was he speaking like that? Why wouldn’t he just say what he meant? I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an answer, so I glared at the page of my book without seeing a single word.

Lucifer continued. “Did you become angry? Or were you cruel out of some new, cold sadistic streak?”

I threw my book at him and he dodged it with ease. Then he continued as if I hadn’t tried to smash his face in. “Or perhaps it was unintentional. But it seems you left our attendant in a state of deep distress. What did you discuss?”

“Get out of my room, bastard.”

I turned and lied on my side, back to him, and I dragged my tail over the bedspread. I was working away at it, slowly turning it to ribbons as the threads hooked onto and snapped over the sharp spines. I knew he hated it when I did things like that. And he knew I knew, so he pretended not to notice.

Irritating.

For about three minutes, I laid there, and he stood there, and neither of us said a word.

“Why does it matter?!” I finally snapped. I found myself tugging at my hair in irritation. Every part of my body feels so unnecessary when I’m agitated, from my hair to my horns to my skin. “Why won’t you leave?”

“You should be more careful with whom you share family matters.”

I actually spat out a laugh. Was he serious? I rolled back over and sneered at him. “Why’s that? Anyway, isn’t this all more or less a matter of public record? The entire Devildom knows how I came into the world.”

“Hm. So that’s what you discussed.” He nodded, and there was something supremely cocky in his mannerisms that made me want to strangle him. But I couldn’t strangle him. So I did the next best thing.

“Lilith came up.”

I stared at him, and I saw the flicker of emotion on his face when he heard that name. That name… Lilith… It’s a name I could use to hurt him. That’s all I was thinking when I sharpened it like a knife.

“I don’t understand why anyone would be cautious talking about Lilith with me,” I said nonchalantly. “But I guess my ‘guest’ thought I would be bothered. Tiptoeing around the fact that she died. As if I would be devastated over it.” I laughed, but it was hollow, and I wasn’t getting the reactions I wanted.

I doubled down.

“Really, I’m glad I never had to deal with her. She sounds infuriating. When you get down to it, the entire war was her fault. All because she couldn’t stand some human dying ten or twenty years before he would have ended up dying anyway.”

I could sense his rising annoyance, but it was too tempered. He knew I was trying to get a rise out of him, so he wasn’t as angry as he might have been otherwise.

“She was your sister,” Lucifer said. He had a strange voice when he said it.

I laughed again. “Right. Like they’re my ‘brothers’. But I never even met her. She’s just some idiot who threw away her life and all your lives for a single stupid human. She’s a stranger. She means nothing to me. She has nothing to do with me. And she deserves what she got.”

Lucifer was quiet for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell if I’d struck a nerve or not. He wasn’t so upset that he reacted, though, which annoyed me.

“She has nothing to do with you?” he echoed.

“Nothing whatsoever.”

His eyes roamed around the room, and they quickly fixed on that damn scroll, as if it was a homing beacon.

“You haven’t read that yet, have you.” It wasn't a question.

I felt another sharp jab of annoyance. “It doesn’t interest me.”

“Don’t be pointlessly stubborn, Satan.”

“What do you care?” I snapped. “Did your attendant come crying to you? Did that break your heart? You just can’t stand seeing someone in pain, is that it?”

“It’s not like you to be intentionally ignorant.”

“Didn’t you say it’s just a record about my birth? I don’t want to know anything else about how I was born. I hate what I already do know.” I jumped out of bed and stalked towards him. If he wasn’t going to walk out the door on his own, I’d gladly help him get there. “And it’s completely like you to dodge a question.”

“You weren’t asking that to hear the answer.”

Again, irritating.

“Why does it matter if I read that thing?”

“Because it concerns you. You should understand how you came to be.”

“I know how I came to be,” I growled. “You pulled your wings off and bled all over and cried. Am I wrong?”

Lucifer lowered his arms to his sides and frowned deeply at me, but he didn’t say anything. Something about that...scared me. Something about that filled me with dread, like I’d suddenly found myself on the edge of a precipice. But dread can’t exist inside me for long. Soon, it had churned through my body and hardened into something more familiar.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I growled. He didn’t say a thing, and he didn’t move. My stomach roiled in my gut. The frustration and disappointment were no longer evident on his face. Instead, I felt like I was a newborn again, “Stop looking at me like you’re worried about me! Like you pity me! It makes me want to vomit!”

I lunged at him. He reacted with the strength and dexterity I’d come to expect. I could never land a blow on Lucifer. If I hadn’t been so damn angry I wouldn’t have even tried. But my entire being ached with rage, and I acted without thinking. I felt so weak. I felt so helpless. I stood there, struggling to free myself, and he stood over me, my fists in his hands, that same, awful, pitying look on his face that he used to have back at the Demon King’s castle. Seeing that look…

“Why do you look at me like that?!” Hot, angry tears blurred my vision and burned my eyes. “Your face always makes me sick, but I can’t stand it when you look at me like that! Why can’t you hate me?!”

And before I could do anything else, I was bound up. Again. Just like I used to be, back in Diavolo’s place. I screamed, and I sobbed, and I felt like I had felt when I was first born. Like nothing but wrath, poisonous wrath, was coursing through my veins. And I felt arms around me—his arms, and I couldn’t push him away, so I just screamed as he embraced me. Like he had any right to embrace me! Why couldn’t I make him leave?! How dare he touch me?! I’d kill him. One day, I’d kill him!

It had been a long time since I’d been that angry. I think it took a toll on my body, because I slipped off to sleep without realizing I'd ever slowed down, and when I woke up, I was in bed, unbound and alone.

My body was sore from straining all my muscles the night before, and I felt groggy and unwell, like I’d been drunk on rage and woke with a hangover. I stepped out of bed and looked around the room. I felt I was searching for something.

Again, like a homing beacon. The celestial glow drew my eyes.

My fingers twitched.

I took the scroll from the shelf and untied it. I hated that I was giving in to him so easily. But what choice did I have? I had half a mind to burn the thing unread, but it slipped open and the words appeared before my eyes in a language I barely recognized. A human language, bizarrely. It appeared to be Latin. It used Latin characters, at least.

ANNO MMCDXCI REGNI GARDONI MAGNI A SANGUINE LUCIFERI ET CORPORE LILITHAE IN REGNO QUOD INTER REGNA EST CREATURA NOVA E PACTIONE SANGUINE CONSIGNATA APPARET. EX AMATO AD AMATUM IN ACERBISSIMO MORTIS DOLORE CORPUS CORPUS ITERUM FIT ET SANGUIS SANGUIS ITERUM FIT. HAEC PACTIO IN TERRA NEUTRIUS PARTIS CONCELEBRATUR AB INFERNO CONFIRMATA NEQUE A CAELO RECUSATA. SATANUS, ADVERSARIUS, NATUS EST.

TESTATUM PER DIAVOLUM, GARDONI MAGNI FILIUS NATURALIS TESTATUM PER BARBATOS, DAEMONUS TESTATUM PER LUCIFERUM, ANGELUS LAPSUS

----

I wandered to Lucifer’s study. It was empty. It took awhile to find the right sort of dictionary, but eventually, I had what I needed. And I got to work.

Within the hour, I was rampaging around the house. Mammon tried to get me under control, but he was never able to contain me. Only Lucifer ever did that.

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What the hell happened?!” But I was Wrath, and Wrath doesn’t speak with words.

----

Playing the adversary is hard work. It’s exhausting. It makes me miserable. But I have to do it. It’s my role. It’s my name. And I’m made out of Lucifer’s wrath. He must feel so much lighter without all that anger weighing him down. How nice for him. But when I learned about what else I was…

I’m Lilith, you know? I’m made out of her.

For some reason, that made me crazy.

----

IN THE 2491st YEAR OF THE REIGN OF THE GREAT GARDONUS, FROM THE BLOOD OF LUCIFER AND THE BODY OF LILITH, IN THE REALM BETWEEN REALMS, A CONTRACT SEALED WITH BLOOD BRINGS FORTH A NEW ESSENCE. OF BELOVED, BY BELOVED MADE, IN THE AGONY OF DEATH, BODY AGAIN BECOMES BODY AND BLOOD BECOMES BLOOD ANEW. THIS DOCUMENT BEING LEGALLY SOLEMNIZED ON NEUTRAL GROUND, SANCTIFIED BY HELL, UNCONTESTED BY HEAVEN. SATAN, THE ADVERSARY, IS BORN.

WITNESSED BY DIAVOLO, NATURAL SON OF THE GREAT GARDONUS WITNESSED BY BARBATOS, DEMON WITNESSED BY LUCIFER, FALLEN ANGEL

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