Devil X Details

Lucius sat alone in his office, going through mounds of paperwork as per usual. In theory, most of this was grunt work that would normally be taken on by dedicated departments, but Lucius had never really felt the need to delegate it between others. He could work longer and faster with fewer breaks than any ordinary human, and more importantly, it kept him occupied. More often than not, whenever he wasn't at work, he was alone with his thoughts, and he went out of his way to avoid those as much as possible.
"Sir," Svelte cleared his throat, having suddenly appeared next to his desk. "There is a visitor at the front desk asking to speak with you."
"Who is it?" Lucius tsked, still focusing on his work. Generally speaking, he wouldn't meet with anyone unless they had set up an appointment in advance, so the fact that Svelte had even bothered notifying him of this instead of immediately turning the visitor away indicated that it was likely someone important. "Tennyson again?"
"Not quite." Svelte replied. "It's a family visit."
"Odd." Lucius's brow furrowed. "Normally my brothers just teleport into my office. Why would they bother with the front desk?"
"Not one of your brothers, sir." Svelte clarified. "It's your sister."
Lucius paused for a moment, then finally turned away from his paperwork to look at Svelte. The butler was one of the few entities whose souls he couldn't read, being something much, much older than the concept of the devil; that said, Lucius was still an expert in reading body language, and there were no signs that Svelte was lying. Svelte had never lied to him in the past, so this shouldn't have been surprising, but the claim he just made was so odd that Lucius couldn't help but question it.
"...Did one of my brothers transition without my knowledge?"
"No, sir." Svelte stated. "She has no relation to the Raivent lineage. She's from your mother's side of the family."
The best word for describing Lucius's current state of mind was "gobsmacked", though it was a word he would never use for it himself. He stood up from his desk and walked over to his office window, staring out blankly over the city's downtown.
"...Is there a reason I was never informed of this?" Lucius half-spoke, half-hissed.
"You've never asked, your father never cared, and your mother worried that informing you of it would only fuel your guilt complex." Svelte explained. "Truth be told, I simply assumed it would never come up; your mother's family lives on the other side of the country, after all."
"Then why is she here now?" Lucius turned back towards him with an unreadable expression.
"I'm a butler, sir, not a psychic." Svelte shrugged. "I'm afraid you'll have to ask her that yourself."
----
Lucius took the elevator down from the top floor down to the building's lobby; it would've been faster to simply apparate there, but seeing as he had no idea what kind of person he'd be talking to, he thought it pertinent to avoid his demonic powers being involved in making a first impression.
----
"Svelte, you bastard!" Sephtis swung his blade down towards the butler, who casually parried the incoming blow with a backhanded tap that knocked it to the side. "Thirty-thousand years of serving the Raivent family, and you throw it all away just to side with this little shit?!"
"Thirty-five thousand years, sir," Svelte corrected him, continuing his single-handed parrying of blows as Sephtis swung wildly at him in a blind rage. "And I believe you've misunderstood the situation."
"Misunderstood it how?!" Sephtis roared as he kept slashing. "You're supposed to serve the head of the Raivent family!"
"Which is exactly what I'm doing." Svelte stated. "The very fact that I haven't crumbled away into the sands of time is proof that the contract I made with your ancestors all those years ago is still perfectly intact."
"I'm the head of the Raivent family!"
"That's rather blatantly untrue." Svelte tsked. "You have no siblings, you killed every woman you forced to bear your children, and you've either killed or disowned every single one of said children. With all due respect, sir, you have no family to be the head of."
"What, and Lucius does?"
"Look around you, Sephtis." Svelte gestured to the chaos surrounding them. "Do you think your surviving children are here simply because they had a sudden urge to protect a random family they have no practical relation to?" Svelte laughed. "They're here to help Lucius. They've all separated and gone their own ways in life, but Lucius commands enough of their respect to bring them all together as necessary."
"Let me guess, because being the capital 'D' "Devil" makes him the big boss by default?" Sephtis snarled.
"They have no memories of that dynamic, so no." Svelte shook his head.