His projection visibly stiffens with a quiet flare of hostility, the energy-being-equivalent of bristling in the face of something decidedly unpleasant.

"There's a difference between doing nothing and exercising care," he answers coldly. "Don't paint false dichotomies where there aren't any."

Reasonable. True, Lucifer has made every effort to act deceptively mild-mannered since the bloodbath that was his tumultuous entrance into Manhattan, wreaking the kind of indescribable havoc Daniel only glimpsed. There are still patterns, though, splashed over the composition of his being - patterns of blood and retribution, and Daniel doesn't need to be able to interpret them to know how unquestionably lethal the being to which he's speaking is.

"I think you're being patient here because you have to be." The old defiance creeps into his tone, bright and flinted. Even in this shape, he cannot stop being what he is - the man who challenges gods, who calmly embarked on the genocide of the species that took his wife from him. Too bold, too curious, too machinating, stubborn and resistant to a fault, a perpetual pain in the ass regardless of what plane or dimension he happens to reside on at the time. "Because there are too many here that would stop you. Too much collateral damage. But if you had complete free reign of this universe?"

He doesn't complete the thought.