The bus lurched to a stop.
"Wake up, we are here!"
The driver's voice cut through the engine's dying rumble like someone had flipped a switch on the world. Lucifer (wait, hold up, was that seriously his name now?) felt his mother's breathing shift against his tiny body. She was out cold. Dead to the world, as they say, except she wasn't dead, just exhausted, and he needed her awake right now because his stomach was doing that weird baby-hunger thing where it felt like a tiny fist clenching.
Time to deploy the nuclear option.
He cried. Not the full air-raid siren treatment, just enough to pierce through whatever dream she was having about beaches or tax returns or whatever adults dreamed about when they weren't being haunted by their credit scores.
"Shhh, Lucifer, that's my boy."
There it was again. Lucifer. His new mother (gorgeous even with those dark circles under her eyes that suggested this trip had been rougher than a cat's tongue) cradled him closer. Her voice had this musical quality, like she'd maybe sung in church choirs or karaoke bars before he came along to complicate her life.
Lucifer? I'm named after the devil? This can't be real.
But nobody else seemed to find it weird. A kid, maybe seven or eight with Spider-Man sneakers that lit up when he walked, grinned at them from across the aisle. "Don't worry, Miss Capone, we know how he is."
Capone. Lucifer Capone.
Christ on a cracker, his name sounded like a mob boss who ran Hell's HR department.
The bus driver, this older guy with hands like baseball mitts, chuckled as they passed. "And how can we get mad at this little devil?" He reached out one of those giant fingers to tickle under Lucifer's chin, and the weird part? The way he said "devil" sounded affectionate. Like calling someone "buddy" or "champ."
Maybe in this world, Lucifer meant something else? Light-bringer, wasn't that the original translation before Christianity went and made it all fire and brimstone?
They stepped off the bus.
Oh.
Oh, this was money. Real money. Stupid money. The kind of money where you probably had a guy whose whole job was just managing your other money.
The house (castle? compound? small nation?) sprawled across what had to be acres of manicured lawn that looked like someone had trimmed each blade with nail scissors. Floor-to-ceiling windows caught the afternoon sun, turning the whole structure into this gleaming monument to architectural flex. Modern, but not that cold, soulless modern you saw in magazines nobody actually read. This had warmth hidden in its angles, like someone had figured out how to make geometry cozy.
"Welcome to our new home, Lucifer."
New home. So they'd just moved here. That explained the bus, the exhaustion, the way she held him like she was afraid he might evaporate if she loosened her grip even slightly.
Inside? Even more ridiculous. The foyer alone could've hosted a decent-sized wedding. Everything whispered expensive without shouting it, the kind of subtle wealth where you knew that random sculpture in the corner probably cost more than most people's cars, but it wasn't, you know, gold-plated or anything tacky like that.
The nursery, though. The nursery was where things got personal.
Someone had gone absolutely ham in here. The crib looked like it had been carved by Swiss artisans who only worked during favorable moon phases. Shelves packed with books (actual books, not just those cardboard things babies chewed on) lined one wall. The closet (walk-in, naturally) already bulged with enough tiny outfits to dress quadruplets for a year.
His mother placed him in the crib with the kind of delicate precision usually reserved for defusing bombs or handling soufflés. "Sleep tight, my little light."
Little light. So maybe she knew what Lucifer actually meant. That was oddly touching.
She left, and he was alone with his thoughts, which, let's be honest, was both a blessing and a curse when you're a fully conscious adult trapped in a body that couldn't even hold its own head up properly.
Mental checklist time:
1. Find a way to see myself in a mirror. He needed to know what he was working with, aesthetically speaking. The wish had included good looks, but "good" was subjective. Was he cute-baby cute or future-heartbreaker cute?
2. Figure out what year it is. This was crucial. If he had knowledge of future events, he needed to know how far in the future they were. Bitcoin might not exist yet. Or maybe it had already crashed and burned. Timeline was everything.
3. Test the limits of this body. The wish specified genius-level everything and limitless potential. Did that kick in immediately or would it develop? Could he already control his limbs better than your average newborn? (Spoiler alert: he could not. He'd been trying to make a fist for five minutes and managed only to drool on himself.)
4. Observe my new family. The Capones, apparently. Rich ones. But rich from what? Old money? New money? Slightly illegal money? The name Capone didn't exactly scream "generations of ethical business practices."
5. Start learning the language. His mother had been speaking English, but was that the only language here? The bus driver's accent had been something. Midwest maybe, but with a twist, like someone had learned English from television shows filmed in different decades.
Sleep tugged at him. Baby bodies, turns out, were basically designed to do three things: eat, expel, and expire into unconsciousness. Fighting it felt like trying to stay awake during a calculus lecture after Thanksgiving dinner.
He lost that fight.
Heat.
Ungodly, suffocating, seventh-circle-of-Hell heat, which was ironic considering his name.
Someone had apparently decided that babies needed to be wrapped like burritos left in a sauna. Blankets upon blankets, and this onesie that felt like it was made from whatever material they used to insulate space shuttles. His tiny body was generating enough heat to power a small city, and he couldn't move, couldn't push anything off, couldn't even properly communicate that he was slowly being braised in his own baby juices.
So he did the only thing he could do.
He screamed.
Not cried. Screamed. The kind of sound that made nearby birds reconsider their life choices.
"Shh, don't cry, Luci. It's grandma, shh."
Grandma. A Black woman who moved with the kind of grace that suggested she'd either been a dancer or had spent years navigating around furniture in the dark without waking anybody. Her hands were soft but strong, lifting him from his terry cloth prison with practiced ease.
Luci. Well, that was better than Lucifer. Marginally.
But she wasn't getting it. She bounced him, made those clicking sounds adults seemed to think babies found soothing, offered him a bottle he didn't want because the problem wasn't hunger, it was that he was being slowly roasted like a supermarket chicken.
More crying. Come on, lady, use those grandma instincts. You've done this before, haven't you?
"Oh, you're burning up, aren't you?"
Finally! Yes! Hallelujah and praise whatever deity handled customer service complaints in this universe!
She started unwrapping him, layer by layer, and each removal felt like ascending from the depths of thermal hell. The cool air hit his skin and...
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
That wasn't just heat making him uncomfortable. His diaper was occupied. Extremely occupied. When had that happened? How had he not noticed? This body just did things without consulting him, like it was on some kind of biological autopilot while his conscious mind was busy planning world domination through basketball excellence.
I can't even control my own bladder. I can't wait till I get older.
Grandma, bless her eternally, handled it like a pro. No disgust, no commentary, just efficient cleanup while humming something that might've been Motown or might've been gospel, hard to tell with his ears still adjusting to processing sound waves in their new configuration.
"There we go, Luci. All better now."
Better was relative. Sure, he was clean and significantly cooler, but he was also acutely aware of just how helpless he was. All those grand plans, all that limitless potential, and right now he couldn't even tell his own grandmother that he preferred the room temperature at 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
This was going to be a long childhood.
But at least, he thought as she settled him back in his crib, this time with a reasonable amount of covering, at least he was rich baby Lucifer instead of poor baby Tre.
That had to count for something.
Even if he did occasionally poop himself without warning.