Chapter 124 Sera Awaken
Sera woke up slowly.
Lilith watched it happen from the chair she had pulled close to the bed and not left since the healer departed. First the small changes, the slight shift in breathing, the fingers moving against the covers, and then her eyes opening, unfocused at first and then finding the ceiling and then finding Lilith.
They looked at each other.
Sera’s mouth opened and nothing came out for a moment.
“Hi,” Lilith said.
Sera closed her eyes and opened them again like she was checking. “You’re actually here.”
“I’m actually here.”
“I’m not in the cell.”
“You’re not in the cell. You’re in your room. You’ve been back for about six hours.”
Sera looked at the ceiling and breathed carefully, the particular breathing of someone taking stock of their own body after a long time of not being able to trust it. The healer had done what she could overnight, fluids and warmth and something for the exhaustion that went deeper than sleep could reach, and Sera already looked marginally less frightening than she had in the courtyard, some color returning, the sharp hollows of her face softening slightly.
She turned her head and looked at Lilith properly.
“You’ve been crying,” she said.
“Earlier. Not recently.”
Sera looked at her for a long moment with the specific expression she used when she was deciding whether to push something. She let it go.
“How long was I gone,” she said.
“Almost two months.”
Sera was quiet for a moment. “It felt longer.”
“I know.”
“Morpheus,” she said, and her voice changed on the word, something careful happening in it.
Lilith looked at her steadily. “I know. I’m so sorry, Sera.”
Sera pressed her lips together and nodded once and looked back at the ceiling, and Lilith watched her hold it the way she held difficult things, gathering it in and finding somewhere inside herself to put it that wasn’t the surface. She didn’t push it. Sera would come back to it when she was ready.
“Tell me everything,” Sera said finally. “Everything I missed, from the beginning.”
So Lilith told her.
She started with the Devil’s death, Malachi and Infernus and the last words, and Sera listened with her eyes on the ceiling and her hands still on the covers. Then the funeral pyre and the brothers fracturing and the High Council arriving and threatening to step in, and Sera’s brow furrowed at that.
Then Azrael standing up in the session room and declaring himself caretaker king and dismissing the binding plan entirely, and Sera turned her head and looked at Lilith.
“He declared himself king,” she said.
“Caretaker king. His word.”
“And dismissed the binding.”
“In front of everyone.”
Sera looked at her with the expression of someone building a picture piece by piece and not entirely liking the shape it was taking. “Keep going.”
Lilith kept going.
The eighth throne room and the candles lighting themselves, and Sera sat up slightly at that, her eyes wide. Lucian coming to her strategically. Cain in the garden finally apologizing. Beelzebub and his single condition. The scrying breaking through and finding the underground facility and the rescue, and Sera looked at the ceiling again when Lilith described Belphegor going through the door first and carrying her out without putting her down once.
She was quiet for a long moment after that.
“He grew flowers,” Lilith said quietly. “Outside, under the moonvine tree. Human ones, White. He said you mentioned missing ordinary flowers.”
Sera pressed her hand over her eyes briefly and said nothing.
Lilith waited.
“Okay,” Sera said eventually, in the voice she used when she had felt something completely and was putting it somewhere safe. “What else.”
Lilith looked at her hands.
“There’s one more thing,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“After everything with the declaration and the brother war and all the weeks of him looking through me like I wasn’t there,” Lilith said carefully, “Azrael came to my room one evening. He had a necklace made for me, for my birthday, gold with diamonds and my name engraved on it. He put it on for me himself.”
She paused.
“We talked for a long time. About home, about growing up, about things neither of us had said to anyone else in this palace. And then.”
Another pause.
“We slept together.”
The room was completely still.
Sera turned her head and looked at her with an expression cycling through several things at considerable speed.
“Azrael,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The one who just declared himself king.”
“Yes.”
“Who spent weeks dismissing you in front of everyone.”
“He apologized for that.”
“And then you slept with him.”
“That’s a very simplified version of events but yes.”
Sera stared at her. "Lilith".
“I know.”
“That’s.” She stopped. “Does Cain know.”
“Cain called me a sneaky bitch in front of four people and I slapped her.”
Sera sat up so fast she had to grab the headboard. “You slapped Cain.”
“She called me a sneaky bitch.”
“You slapped Cain.” She said it again like repetition would help her process it. “You, Lilith, the girl who apologized to a door she walked into, slapped a demon princess who can generate fire.”
“She deserved it.”
“I’m not saying she didn’t.”
Sera pressed her hand over her mouth and her shoulders started shaking and Lilith realized after a second that she was laughing, the kind that had no business existing after two months in an underground cell but was happening anyway, genuine and unstoppable and completely Sera.
It was the best sound Lilith had heard since arriving in the demon realm.
She started laughing too, and the two of them sat there in the early morning light with everything that had happened pressing in from all sides and laughed until Sera had to lie back down because her body wasn’t quite ready for that much of anything yet.
When it subsided Sera was looking at the ceiling with wet eyes and a smile she wasn’t trying to hide.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you every single day,” Lilith said.
Sera reached out her hand without looking and Lilith took it and they stayed like that in the quiet of the room while the palace woke up around them and the morning came in properly through the window, and outside somewhere the brother war was remembering itself and Armageddon was moving and the binding was still waiting, and in here there was just this, two hands and a window and the particular relief of something found that had been lost for a very long time.