Chapter Text
Pierce snarls at her and the barrel of a gun fills Chloe’s vision. She has half a second to think, oh, this is it, after all of this, he’s still going kill me when a blurry white shape slams into Peirce, knocking him over. Another gunshot sings through the air, and Chloe feels it graze her hair.
Lucifer rolls on top of Peirce and wraps his hands around his throat. The gun goes flying, landing somewhere outside their circle of light. His bloody wings are haloed by the headlights, flaring with danger, each feather razor sharp and precise. He growls at Pierce, a wild dangerous sound that speaks to eons of Lucifer being able to survive somewhere like Hell.
Pierce drives his fist into Lucifer’s side, and it comes away bloody. Lucifer yelps like a kicked dog, and they roll in a tangle across the road. One of his wings slams into Chloe and she goes flying, crashing into the low sand bank at the edge of the road. She lays there for a moment, stunned, as the angel and the man pummel each other.
They roll so that Pierce is on top, his knees pinning the wings down, and even over the ringing in her ears from the gun, Chloe can hear the delicate bones in them cracking and breaking. She rolls onto her side, dizziness swimming over her in waves, and winces as a fist sized rock jabs her in the ribs.
“I will not be some weak mortal!” Peirce screams as his fist slams the side of Lucifer’s jaw. “I will have them!”
Chloe rolls to her feet, clutching the rock. Pierce has lost his mind; the wings, the raw exposure to divinity has driven him mad. Maybe they’ve driven her mad too, because she has no plan, no course of action to follow, except for the black hole of rage tearing through her body, ambulating her limbs as she lunges forwards and smashes the rock into Pierce’s temple with all her might.
He rolls off Lucifer, stunned, and Chloe’s momentum carries her with him. For a moment, she’s slumped over his body, and it’s like they’re together again, after a night together where he was just a little too demanding, a little too rough with her, and without thinking, she brings the rock down on his skull again. It connects with a crack that reverberates through her entire skeleton, slicing through the calm night air like lightning.
Peirce groans, and when she winds up for a third hit, he shoots his arm forwards and grabs the loose end of the handcuffs dangling between them. He twists, sharp and hard, and Chloe’s wrist snaps under the sudden change in pressure and speed. The rock tumbles from her numb fingers.
Chloe screams as a bolt of white-hot pain lances up her arm, but she can’t stop, can’t let him win, can’t let him hurt Lucifer anymore. She forces her arm to move, to grab Pierce’s face and pull it close, almost like she means to kiss him. “Go to Hell.” The words are almost unintelligible with pain and fear and rage, leaving her body in a screech like tearing metal, and she slams the back of his head down onto the asphalt, over and over, still screaming. She can’t stop screaming or slamming his skull into the ground because he has to die. If he doesn’t die, she isn’t safe, and Lucifer and Trixie and Dan and Ella aren’t safe and she can’t let that happen, she has to protect them, has to-
An arm snakes around her middle, and she thrashes as Lucifer hauls her up, away from the body. Chloe sobs as he pulls her in and cradles her close, deep, racking sobs that wind their way through her core like a glittery ribbon of broken glass.
Lucifer whispers into her hair, keeping her pressed against his body. So much of his bare skin pressed against her makes her sick to her stomach, not because its him, just because she feels so raw and vulnerable, like an exposed nerve being grated down to a little nub.
Something feels hot and wet against her abdomen, and she peels herself away from Lucifer, looking down. He’s bleeding, little gulps of red bursting out from a new bullet wound a few inches to the left of his navel. The blood almost looks black in the stark light as it spills down his pelvis and across his thigh. “You’re hurt.” Her voice is strangled by her sobbing.
“It would seem so.” Lucifer drops one hand down to press on the wound, swaying woozily in place.
Chloe presses her hand on top of his, trying to keep his blood inside of him where it belongs. Her vision is blurry, making it hard to focus. Her wrist throbs like static, almost numb with pain from the elbow down.
The truck is still running. “Can you walk?”
Lucifer takes one half-hearted step forwards and nearly collapses, but Chloe is there to support him, and together they limp towards the truck. She maneuvers him to the back seat and helps him up, as much as she is able to with one functioning arm. Lucifer folds his tall frame into the seat and wriggles around until he’s half laying down, his bloody wings splayed awkwardly around him. Chloe digs through the glove compartment, hoping to find something she can patch him up with, but there isn’t anything. It’s clearly a vehicle that’s able to be abandoned at a moment’s notice post-crime, devoid of tools or personal possessions. Pierce, the sick fuck, is still finding a way to screw them from beyond the grave.
Chloe slams door viciously and teeters into the driver’s seat. It’s an older truck, so there’s no built in nav, but there is a mostly full tank of gas. More than enough to get them back to Los Angles. She thinks. She hopes.
“Are we leaving Cain here to rot?” Lucifer’s voice winds through the air towards her like a drunken snake, slurred and vague.
Chloe throws the truck into gear and makes a wide U-turn. She doesn’t comment on Cain. She can ask later, when they are both out of mortal danger. It means something, but she’s so tired she honestly can’t remember why it’s important. “Keep pressure on the wound,” she commands instead. She keeps her broken wrist cradled against her chest, the other hand white-knuckling the steering wheel. She stares at her hand, at the way her bloody, scarped knuckles look like they belong to someone else. It doesn’t look like her hand. She hasn’t worn her wedding ring for a few years now, but oddly she finds herself missing it. Not the connection the ring implies, just the steadiness of seeing it rest in the same place when she closed her eyes to sleep at night, and still having it be there when she woke in the morning. She misses its weight.
Chloe cranks the heat in the truck as high as it will go, hoping that it will stop the shivers wracking Lucifer’s body.
Soon, she’s sweating, and he’s gone quiet.
Their little two-lane road eventually meets up with the 14, and Chloe turns south, heading towards Los Angeles, her mind blank as Lucifer’s breathing grows raspy and the needle on the speedometer creeps past seventy, eighty, ninety.
She hates to admit it, but now that safety is within her grasp, she’s absolutely petrified. She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t take Lucifer to a hospital, with his wings the way they are, but she can’t not. He’s bleeding out in this shitty truck, on the verge of death. She doesn’t know what to do, and it’s completely paralyzing her.
A few other cars flash past, heading north, but she doesn’t think to stop and ask for help. There isn’t any point, because she has an injured archangel in the back seat with a twenty-foot wingspan of bloody, glow in the dark feathers. She may be half out of her mind as she speeds down this desert highway, but inflicting that sight on a random passerby is out of the question. That much she knows.
Lucifer has been quiet for a while, too long, and Chloe throws a glance at him in the rearview mirror. His eyes have the sort of loose and heavy-lidded look of the heavily medicated. “Hey! Lucifer!”
His eyes focus and he stares blearily up at her.
“You have to stay awake, okay? Keep pressure on the bullet wound.”
He nods. It’s small enough to be a trick of the jostling in the truck, but Chloe decides to think it’s not.
“Help me plan,” she finds herself babbling. White-hot shoots of pain lance through her right arm with every twitch, every bump on the road. “I don’t know what to do, Lucifer. I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do, please, tell me what I need to do…” she trails off. Little flashing lights keep dancing across her vision. Not the gold of headlights or scarlet of tail lights, but some warbling, unsteady color in between. She’s starting to hallucinate, she thinks. She’s been awake for so long at this point (seventy-two hours? Longer, she thinks, by honestly, she’s lost track) that each blink seems to suck up hours, the road flashing by in stuttering gasps.
Her words turn into nonsense, and Lucifer stays quiet, and without warning, they’re back amongst the neon glow of Los Angeles. Chloe isn’t sure when it happens, exactly, because one moment they’re in the mountains, passing through darkness, and the next there are cars around. Not a ton, it’s late, or early, she isn’t sure- the little green numbers on the digital read out won’t stand still long enough for her to wrangle them in her brain into something legible. The streets are quiet, or as quiet as they ever are in downtown. Not many cars, not a lot of traffic, which is good for her since she’s a cop and just this once maybe it’s okay if she speeds, just a little bit.
She blinks again, and the truck is idling crookedly on the street in front of LUX. Chloe throws herself out the driver’s seat and somehow manages to drag Lucifer out of the back one-handed. He perks up a little, not really conscious, but able to be shifted with some help. Chloe pulls his arm over her shoulder, so his body is pressed in a firm line against hers and steps forwards, one foot at a time, into the club.
The doors are unlocked, and the building is empty and dark.
For some reason, that surprises her, but she isn’t sure why. She doesn’t really know why she came here, really, other than this place, his penthouse, always feels safe in a way that she can’t define. It’s a place where the rules don’t really apply. Lucifer can be the Devil there, and it doesn’t feel so strange.
They reach the elevator, and she blinks again, and then they’re spilling out into the penthouse.
It’s empty.
Chloe wants Maze to be here. She wants Dan, or Ella, or even Amenadiel. Someone who can help her fix Lucifer. Who can stop the bleeding and make his wings not do that terrible, pained fluttering thing they’ve been doing for the past few hours. She needs help, because she’s only human, and the only thing that’s kept her from blacking out for the last twelve hours or so is the knowledge that her partners life is one hundred percent dependent on her staying alive and conscious and moving.
Chloe wants nothing more for this all to be over. Now that this is a race instead of a marathon, and the finish line is in sight, so tantalizingly close. If Lucifer were to ask her, now, what her deepest desire was, she wouldn’t need his mojo to answer.
Peirce is dead.
All she needs to do is survive.
Hard, when all she wants to do is sink onto the cold, black marble of his floor and pass out. But she can’t do that. Lucifer needs her. So instead of collapsing, Chloe lurches forwards, hauling her broken archangel with her on unsteady legs that shake like she’s trying to hold up the world.
She gets as far as Lucifer’s bedroom, and he falls with a groan face-first onto the ocean of black silk. Chloe’s side feels awfully cold without him, and she stands there, swaying, staring at the long lines of his body splayed out before. Of his wings, bloody and fearsome hanging loose on either side, long enough for the last joint of each to brush against the floor.
He groans again, and like a moth to flame, Chloe is drawn in to the sound of his suffering.
“Lucifer?” Her voice warbles in the heavy silence of the penthouse.
“’hould go, D’tectiv,” he mumbles.
Chloe shakes her head, and immediately regrets it when everything begins to spin even faster. She can’t just leave him here, bleeding from a gunshot wound, he’ll-
“You make me mortal. When you leave, I’ll get better.” He twists his head around to look at her. His eyes are fuzzy with pain, but intent.
Chloe sinks into a crouch next to the bed and plants her unbroken arm on his shoulder. His skin is clammy and painted in blood from the gunshot wound on his hip, smears of it marring his pale chest and abdomen and thigs like body paint. It’s all over her too. They match.
“I can’t leave you here.” There’s a reason why she should listen to him, but she’s having a hard time summoning it back to the top of her cluttered mind.
Lucifer’s hand finds its way to her face, and his thumb caresses a gentle line down her cheekbone. “Please, Detective.”
Don’t. Please.
Another day, another life.
Chloe stands, her vision swimming like she’s underwater. “Promise me you won’t die.”
“Have you ever known me to lie?”
Point of pride for me, Detective.
Chloe wobbles towards the elevator, trying to ignore the little nagging voice in the back of her skull that’s yelping at her, the same voice that tells her when she leaves home without her sunglasses, but everything hurts and she’s so tired, and the little voice is silenced by a thousand alarms screaming through the rest of her body.
She gets in the elevator and goes down, moving on autopilot. With each passing second, her wrist aches more and more. The shock is wearing off, she thinks, and it’s taking its comforting blanket of numbness with it as it withdraws.
Somehow, she gets back in the truck and drives, following lights that make little sense, patterns that glow red and green, white and amber, soft and amorphous in the passing darkness until there’s a big red EMERGENCY sign blaring rudely against the back of her retinas. Chloe narrows her eyes against the glare and stops the stolen truck under it, throwing on the parking brake out of habit.
The truck dings at her as she staggers out of the driver’s seat, reminding her that the keys are still in the ignition. It doesn’t matter. It’s not her car. Chloe stumbles towards the sliding glass doors, and they part before her, washing her with a blast of recycled air that smells like plastic and cleaning solution.
There aren’t many people in the waiting room. They’re nothing more than half a dozen fuzzy shapes to her as she walks towards the intake desk. The nurse sitting there glances up, and does a double take when she sees Chloe, bruised and dirty and covered in blood, standing before her in shock.
She yells for help, and Chloe finally lets herself collapse. Someone is at her back, holding her arm, keeping her to her feet and they brush against her broken wrist, jostling it. Chloe whimpers as screaming pain whites out her vision, rising up around her like a boiling sea, rising and rising, until she can’t hold on anymore, and she sinks.
There is a flurry of activity that she isn’t really present for. Voices call back and forth over her as doctors run out and maneuver her onto a stretcher, shifting her limbs around without her permission. Chloe howls internally at being touched by all these strangers, overstimulated and panicking, but she’s so tired and protesting takes so much work. Instead, she starts to cry, tears pouring silently down her face. Sobbing just takes too much energy, so the tears flow with no drama, no noise, just the last of her resistance seeping from a broken tap.
A doctor shines a pen light into her eyes and asks her a question. Chloe blinks up at her, trying in vain to string the words together in a way that makes sense, but she’s so tired, and it’s so much easier just to float away into the light.
She drifts somewhere for a while, until she feels a pinch at the crook of her left elbow, and cold fluid sinks into her veins. For a moment she panics, thinking of Pierce and the heroin.
“It’s just fluids and pain medication,” a disembodied voice tells her from somewhere close. Never in her life has she felt something so euphoric, so alleviating. The last of heat of baking in the sun is chased away, leaving her floating in a sea of cool, pleasant water. She cracks open her eyes, but the overhead lights render the voice’s owner into a formless shadow.
“You can sleep. You’re safe here, honey. It’s okay.”
Chloe doesn’t know if she can trust the voice, but the drugs are tugging her gently towards the twilight of sleep, and she doesn’t want to fight any longer.
She floats away in the river.
∞∞∞
An irritating, repetitive beeping tugs Chloe from the bliss of sleep, and she surfaces from a narcotic haze with a low moan that vibrates through the cracked ribs in her chest. Every part of her aches, from the top of her skull all the way down to her toes. It’s… better, though. Carefully, she rolls her ankles, experimenting with the range of motion. They feel sore, not injured, which is good. On her adrenaline high in the desert, she stepped on a lot of rocks and sand hot enough to burn.
She doesn’t know if it’s the drugs or if she genuinely is feeling better, but Chloe chances prying her eyes open. She blinks against the glare a few times as her eyes adjust, and frowns. For some reason, she expected to wake up in Lucifer’s penthouse. Why is she not in the penthouse?
Her memory comes back in ripples. Lucifer collapsing. The blood. Him telling her to go. The elevator doors closing in a river of gold.
Have you ever known me to lie, Detective?
It’s what he said, but it’s… wrong, somehow.
Promise me you won’t die.
Have you ever known me to lie? Only it wasn’t a promise at all. Lucifer doesn’t lie, but does evade and obfuscate.
Lucifer.
Lucifer, who is the actual, Biblical Devil. Wings and all.
Chloe presses her hand to her forehead and moans. Somehow, in the light of day when she’s no longer dying, it’s all… it feels like some sort of crazy fever dream. The only reason she knows it’s not is the ache in her bones, the sharp pinging of her broken wrist and the razor-sharp memory of the wings, beautiful and broken and bloody and very, very real. She knows that if she’s lucky enough to get old, to reach an age where her memories start to fade, that that will be the last one to go. It will remain imprinted on her hippocampus until the day she dies, and even then… who’s to say what happens after?
Well.
Lucifer knows.
Lucifer knows, because it’s all real, Heaven, Hell, all of it, and he’s part of it.
He’s the Devil.
Chloe’s weird, floundering thoughts are interrupted by a doctor knocking on the doorframe and letting herself in without ceremony.
“Hey there, how are we doing this morning?”
Chloe swallows the desert in her throat and manages to turn her head, wincing as her arm is jostled. It isn’t so bad, now. Manageable. She actually feels… okay, somehow. “Okay, I guess. How long was I out?”
The doctor picks up the clipboard at the end of the bed and flips through a few sheets of paper clamped to it. “You came in a little past four am on Sunday. It is currently…” she checks her watch, squinting down at the readout, the same way Chloe’s mom does when she has to read small font on her phone. “Nine thirty-two, Monday morning.”
Chloe blinks. “I slept for twenty-nine hours?”
The doctor smiles reassuringly at her and moves to Chloe’s side. “That’s quick math. How’s your head feeling? I noticed some signs of head trauma, bruising around your scalp, and jaw. Can you tell me what happened?” she gently prods along the bruising, and Chloe tries to sit still for it, not cringe away from this strangers hand brushing over her bare, tender skin.
What can she say? What can she possibly tell them? That she and Lucifer were abducted by an immortal psychopath (as Lucifer had so aptly called him during one his hissy fits a few months ago) because he wanted to amputate and steal her partners angel wings? The truth would get her locked up in a loony bin so fast her head would spin.
The doctor pulls back, eyes gentle. “I understand that what you went through must have been incredibly traumatic, but it is important that I know at least the broad strokes, so that we can give you the medical care you need.”
Chloe relents, nodding, trying to formulate an answer. “I don’t… it was… I… we were investigating a murder. I’m a cop.”
“Yes, your emergency contact, Daniel Espinoza, filled us in on your medical history and filled out some forms.” The doctor gestures to the cast adorning Chloe’s right arm from the elbow down. “He told us what he knew, and mentioned that a crime boss of some sort was involved. He is very worried about you.”
“We used to be married.” The vague, platitudinal nature of the statement pulls Chloe back on solid ground. She has to lie. No one can know Lucifer was there, not until they get the chance to dress the truth with an appropriate lie.
The sounds from the heart rate monitor pick up in intensity. How can they compare stories? Lucifer is a fallen angel. What does he care what some pesky humans think of his activities? They’re nothing but specks of dust of him.
“I know it’s scary, but this is important.”
Chloe is frozen, heart swelling in her throat. She can’t talk about it, because no one can know what really happened. They can’t-
“Here, what if we go backwards? I ask you about the injuries, and you can tell me if you think we missed anything. Sound good?”
Chloe manages a nod in response.
“Well, your second and third ribs on your left side are fractured, with significant muscular bruising around it. You have bruising on you jaw and scalp, as well as some on your wrists, but that shouldn’t get much worse than it is now. You also were severely dehydrated when you came in, but your fluids are back at normal levels. That cut on your left arm had to be debrided, but it’s clean and there isn’t any sign of infection, so that should be all good.”
None of that sounds like a surprise to her.
“You were missing for almost two days. Were you given anything to eat or drink in that time?”
Chloe shakes her head no.
“Were you given any illicit substances?”
Another quick shake of her head as she deliberately doesn’t think of needles and heroin in the basement in the desert.
The doctor checks something off on the form. “Now, you don’t need to disclose any details at this time, but do you need a rape kit?”
Something dark and broken threatens to rear to life in her. Chloe is hyper aware of how this looks, her turning up in a stolen car in front of the ER, bruised and covered blood, in a dirty bra and panties, eyes wild and a pair of broken handcuffs hanging from her wrist after being missing for two days. Especially since Lucifer isn’t here. It looks like she was taken alone and moved to a secondary location. She’s a cop, and if she didn’t know, then she knows exactly what she would think, given the situation.
But she does know.
None of this was about her. She’s just collateral damage.
I will not be some weak mortal.
“I don’t need a rape kit.”
“Okay.” The doctor asks more questions, and Chloe answers in monosyllabic burps of sound that don’t mean anything to her.
The rest of the conversation passes in a fuzz of static.
The doctor leaves, and Chloe watches a patch of sun from the window traverse the green and while floor tiles. The fuzzy feeling in her head has gone from pleasantly vague to worryingly occluding, and she doesn’t care for it. She’s never been like Lucifer, never understood his desire to bury himself in drugs and sex and alcohol. Not until now, at least. He’s the kind of person that, up until two days ago, she had been able rationalize, behavior wise. He had been abused as a child by a crazy, controlling family (and really, that was still true, wasn’t it?) and surrounded himself with delusions of invulnerability and immortality as a way of self-comfort. It was the same thing with the sex, Linda had confided in her, one Tribe night when she was six or seven shots in, and drunk enough for the lines between friend and therapist to blur. That Lucifer craved emotional intimacy and made up for the lack of it throughout his life by seeking it out in meaningless sexual encounters with men and women who had nothing deeper to offer him. Chloe has never been able to forget that, although it has only reinforced her decision that not sleeping with him was the right call. That he needed something different from her.
That he still needs something different from her.
“Chloe?”
She tilts her head towards the door, and smiles when the motion doesn’t send another domino-tipping of pain cascading though her body. “Hey, Dan.”
Dan eases into the room, an uneasy smile twisting his face. He rakes over her body with his eyes. “It’s really good to see you with your eyes open, Chlo. I was really worried there for a minute.” He drops into the visitor chair and scoots it closer to her bed side before gently taking her hand, like it’s made of glass. “What the hell happened?”
Chloe smiles at him, because it is so, so good to see a friendly face after all of this. “I’m glad you’re okay, too.” It had been at the back of her mind, in the slower moments, the worry that Pierce would somehow get Dan and Ella like he got Charlotte.
“What happened?” he asks again.
Chloe’s eyes slide back to the window, to the patch of sun pooling in on the floor, golden and bright. That light is coming from a star that Lucifer, the fallen angel, her best friend, created ten-gazillion-some-odd years ago. “Pierce tried to kill us. He shot me. He shot-“ she stops. He shot Lucifer, but she can’t tell Dan that. Can she?
Dan takes the decision out of her hands. He is many things, but he’s not an idiot. “He shot Lucifer? Is he okay?” Chloe can see the worry and anger swirling in his eyes. Lucifer isn’t in the hospital, and Chloe is positive that he’s still sprawled out in the penthouse, hopefully alive, but alone. For all Dan knows, Lucifer is bound, gagged, unconscious and in Peru or something with Pierce. Or his body is tied to a cement block at the bottom of the Pacific.
“I think so. Peirce tried to kill us, and then he took us to a cabin in the middle of the desert, and we got away, but he hurt Lucifer, and-“ she falters. What can she tell him that will keep him from worrying too much but still sound believable?
Nothing comes to mind.
“Chloe, where is Lucifer?”
“Dan, please, he’s- he’s gonna be okay, but- you can’t- he just needs some space, after what happened.”
“Chloe-“
“Please, Dan. Please just trust me. I won’t let anything else happen to him. You know I wouldn’t.” She implores him with her eyes to trust her, wishing she had some angel mojo of her own to give him a little push, to make him believe it.
Dan shakes his head. “Chloe, where is he? Is he at the penthouse?”
She has to lie.
“No. Listen, Dan, after what happened- Pierce did some bad shit to him, okay? Really bad, but he’s tough. He can make it through this, he just needs a little space, yeah?” And that isn’t a lie, not really. Lucifer’s already really weird about his wings, and Chloe is sure that this whole shit show is only going to make his issues ten times worse than they already are. After all, what can be more traumatizing than someone dislocating two major limbs, drugging you, and threatening to cut you into little pieces, after shooting you a hundred times?
She can see the gears spinning in Dan’s head, and she can see when a terrible sort of understanding dawns in his eyes. “Shit.”
He doesn’t know, but he is a police officer. Conjecture can take him a long way, Chloe knows, especially considering the state she wandered in looking like, and she doesn’t disabuse him of the notion. That’s going into the file for sure. Too many witnesses to pretend otherwise.
Shit.
“We need to…” she trails off and tugs insistently at Dan’s sleeve. “Who’s leading the investigation? What do they know?”
He stares at her, confusion and horror visibly bouncing around inside his skull like a screensaver. Chloe can see, even from here, that he’s freaking out at the litany of awful possibilities the two of them may have suffered at Pierce’s hands. It’s bad enough that half the precinct, Dan included, already thinks Lucifer’s sluttiness is a defense mechanism for past sexual trauma, and that’s only going to get worse now. “Uh… well, after the shootout downtown, everyone knows that Pierce is the Sinnerman, so the FBI took over. Some guy named, uh, Hawkes, I think. We had a BOLO out for the three of you -you, Pierce, and Lucifer- but no one got a hit until you, yesterday morning.”
“Pierce is dead,” Chloe says dispassionately with an edge of curtness, then adds, with venom, “That fucker had it coming.”
The sensation of his skull caving under her hands trembles through her veins like fire for a heartbeat, then dissipates like smoke.
If she had to do it again, she would. No hesitation.
Dan takes a moment to absorb that, bobbing his head slowly, looking like he’s been wacked over the head with a frying pan. “What happened?”
Chloe breathes, forces herself to stay calm. To compartmentalize. “Peirce took us. I don’t know why, dispose of witnesses maybe. He held us in a little house in the desert.” She frowns, trying to remember the harried drive back to the city. “North, I think. Past Lancaster.”
Dan slips a notepad out of his jacket pocket and jots all that down. “Hawkes will want to talk to you.”
“Yeah, well, he can wait.” Chloe waves her cast in front of him. “Speaking of, when can I get out of here?”
“I’ll go talk to a nurse.” Dan stands and pats her leg. “I’m really glad you guys made it out.” Normally it bothers her when Dan treats her like a delicate flower, but now she finds herself appreciating his pliability.
Chloe sinks back into the bed and drifts off. Despite the drugged sleep, she’s still tired. She has a funny feeling that she’s going to feel tired for a while after this.
It takes a few hours, but eventually the same doctor from before comes and clears her for discharge. Dan helps her fill out the last of the paperwork, and Chloe dresses in street clothes, a comfy sweater and lounge pants that Dan brought for her. It feels good, like slipping back into her old skin. As they walk through the hospital, Chloe tries not let her mind get tugged in the million directions that it wants to scatter.
She knows that, once she leaves, this little snowglobe of plausible deniability vanishes like the flame of a snuffed candle.
The thing is, she doesn’t want to deny it, not exactly. She cares about Lucifer, she has for a long time, and that hasn’t changed, not in any way that matters.
It’s just…
Once she goes, she can’t creep back in and slam the doors on this new vision of reality. They can never go back to how things used to be, and she is terrified that it might be gone. That she might go to LUX and find his penthouse empty, furniture covered in sheets again, with him gone and vanished with an entirely new set of possible places for him to have fallen into.
That she might go to LUX and find him dead in his bed because she left him and saved herself, and he was less okay that he made it out to be.
That she might go to LUX, and Lucifer will be there, awake and alive, and… and she’ll have to step off the elevator and talk to him, and somehow, that is the scariest possibility of all. Because how can it be the same between them, after what happened? Lucifer is the Devil. He is, by all accounts, immortal, the great adversary, the punisher who awaits the worst of the worst once they die.
And yet, he’s spent the last few years helping her solve homicides. Her, a nobody. Just some cop who, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter, not considering just how big her fucking universe has just become. Why would he even bother with her?
Why does he bother with her? Chloe wants to know, and deep down, deep in a tiny, buried little part of her soul that scares her to examine, she wants him to keep bothering. To stay with her, to continue being her partner. To have a shoulder to cry on when the nightmares come, as they always do after something so harrowing. To be a shoulder when he begins to unravel, because she knows him, and she knows he will.
Her life is separated into many befores and afters. Before her dad died. After she became a police officer. Before she had Trixie. After she and Dan divorced.
Before Lucifer and after Lucifer
Before Lucifer, and after Lucifer.
Chloe’s head pounds faintly as she walks across the parking lot and climbs into the passenger seat of Dan’s cruiser.
This after has a sense of weight to it. As though it is an ending, but also a beginning.
A beginning of what, though, she doesn’t know. But she wants to. “Can you drop me at LUX?”
Dan gives a cautious look but doesn’t argue.
The club is empty and quiet, which doesn’t surprise Chloe, considering that it’s a weekday afternoon and the owner has been, to her knowledge, rather indisposed.
The elevator ride to the penthouse feels like it takes both years and seconds. The ding of it arriving sends her heart rate skittering wildly behind her cracked ribs. This is it. this is her last chance to cut and run.
She doesn’t.
The diffuse, amber glow from the bar washes the penthouse in a warm light. Everything is still, heavy with the kind of silence that only comes from abandonment, and for a moment, Chloe’s stomach lurches with the fear that Lucifer has, once again, vanished.
“Lucifer?” His name seems to sound once and die on her lips in the heavy air.
She steps further into the apartment, treading lightly. Nothing in the living room or bar area appears to have been touched since she was last here. Out past the walls of glass, the late afternoon light bathes the city in gold. As she walks past the piano, keys uncovered and gleaming white in the soft light, she catches the pervasive scent of old blood, like pennies, saturating the air with notes of metal.
“Lucifer?” She calls again, and this time, she hears a little shuffling from the darkness of his bedroom. The curtains have been drawn, draping the room in shadow. Chloe slinks closer, senses on high alert for danger, wishing she had her gun. She climbs the steps to his bedroom and lingers in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust.
Lucifer is right where he left him, sprawled on his belly, pale and dirty, covered in blood. The wings are still stretched out on either side of him, but their light has dimmed, and now they just look like… feathers. Mortal and bloody.
That can’t be good.
Chloe drops to the floor near his head and paws at his face with her good arm, willing him to wake. Willing for her not to have made a terrible mistake in leaving him here.
His eyes blink open, languid and unfocused. His stubble has grown into a short beard and there are violet bags bruising the skin under his eyes.
“Hey. Hey, you.” Chloe runs her fingers along his face again, through his hair, just trying to communicate with his animal-self that she is here, that she hasn’t left him. That somehow, everything is going to be okay.
“Detective?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
He manages a smile. “You look better.”
Chloe bobs her head in a nod. “I feel better. They gave me the good stuff at the hospital.” She can feel her bottom lip wobbling, like she’s about to cry. Chloe had managed to forget, to glaze it over in her memory, just how awful he looked, but here and now, it’s impossible to ignore.
“I’m green with envy, Detective.”
She laughs, but there’s no heart behind it. His voice is still thick with pain. “How are you?”
Lucifer manages to raise his hand and wobble it in a so-so gesture that actually does get a real laugh out her. “I’ve been better.”
Leave it to Lucifer, drama queen extraordinaire, to downplay possibly life-threatening injuries. “Can you sit up?”
He does, and with Chloe’s assistance, they manage to get him perched unsteadily on the side of bed with his feet planted on the floor, wings half folded on either side of him.
Chloe takes a step back to get a good look at him. In the thirty-six hours or so he’s been passed out here, he’s healed a remarkable amount. His lower leg is still mottled with bruising, but they’ve faded to the patchy-yellow green of a week’s old injury. The leg itself is straight, and he seems to have no pain from moving it. Cautiously, Chloe touches his ankle and picks at the scraggly remains of duct tape that had hold her homemade splint in place. The heat of the desert flashes across her skin, the coarse sand under her nails and reek of dust and blood and fear in her mouth, and her fingers spasm around his ankle. Lucifer twitches under her touch but doesn’t flinch away.
“Do you have scissors?”
“There is a small toolkit under the bar. There should be a set in there.”
Chloe rises to her feet and trots to the bar, taking a moment to catch her breath. Seeing him awake and alive and… well, not unharmed, but okay, has calmed the disquieting panic bells that can’t seem to leave her alone these days.
Chloe roots out the tool kit, a little red bag, from the corner of the bar and brings it back to the bedroom. Inside, she finds a few different screwdrivers, a box cutter, the scissors, and-
She freezes, her heart leaping to her mouth, as her fingers close around the handle of a pair of pliers.
Pliers and bolt cutters and a saw and men who wanted to cut off his wings and kill them and –
“Detective?”
She snaps up, finding Lucifer’s dark eyes, letting them pool around her. He reaches out and brushes the side of her face with his hand, rubbing a comforting little circle over her cheekbone.
“I’m okay.” And she is okay, because they’re here, alive. They made it out. They won.
Chloe slides the pliers across the floor, out of her line of sight, and carefully uses the scissors to cut away the remains of the splint. It comes off in chunks, crusty with sand and dried blood. She prods gently around the bruising, trying to see if anything feels weird, but stops when she sees a muscle jumping at the corner of Lucifer’s mouth. His I’m upset but trying to stay cool tic, one she is plenty familiar with, after years of working with him. After years of being friends with him, of arguments and sitting next to him in the interrogation room across from a frustrating suspect.
So she moves up his leg to the bullet wound on his hip. Under the dried blood, there is no sign of a wound. Chloe isn’t a doctor, but she’s pretty sure a bullet embedded in muscle tissue isn’t terribly dangerous. Dan has one in his thigh from about eight years ago being shot by a drug dealer. She has a fragment in her shoulder from being shot by Jimmy Barnes. Lucifer can live with a bullet in his hip. There isn’t even a sign of an entry wound, just more bruising, a little red splotch of irritated skin the size of a golf ball.
“How do you heal so fast? Is that an angel thing?”
“I am not an angel, Detective.” His voice is sharp and clipped, but there’s no malice in it.
Chloe throws a pointed glance at his wings, still unfurled on either side of him, and goes back to prodding around the bruise. If she presses hard enough, she can feel a little, hard lump in there that might be the bullet.
Lucifer doesn’t even wince, even though she knows it has to be a little tender, at the very least. “I am the Devil, Detective. Don’t let the feathery burdens foisted upon me by my Father fool you. I am-“
“Don’t try and tell me that you’re evil or bad or whatever, because we both know that isn’t true.” Chloe glares at him and braces her hand on his thigh. “I still meant what I said, back at Forest Clay’s house. You aren’t the Devil, not to me. I will never see you that way, no matter what you think about yourself,” she talks louder as he opens his stupid, beautiful mouth to protest. “No matter what you think you are, I know that you, Lucifer Morningstar, are a good man.” Unbidden, hot tears press against the back of her eyes, and she digs her fingers tighter into the muscle of his thigh, as if that can make him understand what she is trying to say.
Lucifer’s jaw opens and closes as he chews on words that don’t make it far enough to be voiced. He gapes at her wordlessly for several long seconds, before snapping his mouth shut hard enough to make his teeth click, and nods slowly. Chloe doesn’t know if it’s a signal that he understands her, or if he merely means for her to continue to play doctor.
Both, she hopes.
All evidence of the stab wound on his abdomen from Pierce has vanished completely and save for the rusty swirls of dried blood on his chest and stomach, there is no sign that it ever existed. His sunburn has gone as well. Chloe is still a nice shade of tomato red on her face and shoulders, and little bits of it have started to peel. Lucifer, however, thanks to his stupid immortality that is totally and completely real, has skin that’s as pale and soft as it always is.
Chloe lets her hand linger on his chest for perhaps a moment too long before pulling away to look at the stab wounds on his lower back, which have been reduced to thin red lines, that, given another few hours, she thinks, will also vanish.
Lucifer obediently extends his wings, so they are out of her way, and she hears the creak of strained tendons as they move, the ragged edge to his breathing as the stiffness is forced out of them.
As crazy and insane and utterly mind-blowing the last few days have been, nothing quite knocks it all home for Chloe as the sight of the wings shifting as Lucifer rearranges them. As she kneels behind him on the bed, something about the sight of his spine and scapula and secondary shoulder blades all shifting to compensate for the weight and movement just… it’s surreal past the point of comprehension for her tiny human mind. That they’re part of him, part of his body, bone and flesh and feather.
Without thinking, Chloe raises her good hand and lets it come to rest between the wings, over the little knobs of his spine. He’s hot the touch. Feverish, almost. It’s like she’s touching a stature, a piece of marble that’s been baking under the sun for hours, except for the gentle give of his skin.
Lucifer freezes so absolutely under her hand that for a moment, she think’s he’s stopped breathing.
Don’t, please.
But that was another life.
That was before.
“Detective.” It’s a plea of a different nature.
Gently, moving slowly and cautiously so she doesn’t frighten him away, Chloe shifts until her stomach is almost touching his back. She doesn’t close the rest of the distance, because his wings are still ragged, and the sling holding her broken wrist is in the way, but she can lean close enough to drop her chin into his shoulder, so she does. She presses the side of her face to his scruffy one, and carefully slings her good arm around his neck so he’s trapped in a hug. Not the anaconda variety often imparted forcefully by Ella, but something gentler and more open, that says my love is here for you to take, if you want it.
She thinks he does want to take it.
She wants him to.
“Why are you- why? You’re here, with me still. Even though it- even though it was my fault, Cain, Charlotte, all of it. I don’t- I don’t understand.” Lucifer’s voice is shaky with weakly controlled emotion, as though he’s barely keeping it all in.
Chloe places a whisper soft kiss above his left ear. “Because I want to be.”
He shudders, and the wings flutter in agitation. Lucifer groans, the sound sharp and raspy, and that breaks Chloe out of the moment. He’s still injured. The rest of him is okay, but wings, it seems, heal slower than broken bones and gunshots on other parts of angel anatomy.
An interesting factoid to stuff into her ever-expanding mental filling cabinet she’s decided to name ‘Celestial Bullshit’. “Lay down,” Chloe commands, tenderness all but vanished from her voice. Lucifer doesn’t need tender right now. He needs someone who can fix whatever is still hurting him.
He is surprisingly obedient, all things considered. For one brief moment, Chloe’s thoughts snap to something filthy and perverted as he sprawls supine below her on the bed at her orders, still naked. It stirs something in her that she slams into the bottom drawer of her mental filing cabinet to examine later, in private, when he isn’t hurt.
Not when the wings are still…around. Materialized. Whatever. It’s not like they just fold up on his back, do they? She’s seen him naked plenty, and she’s never seen hide nor feather of them, aside from those two monstrous, crescent shaped scars from where he had cut them off the first time. Logic leads her to believe that he has some way of making them go away, and Chloe knows from his endless maniacal ranting about his father and his wings and being controlled and manipulated that the only reason that he’s even still tolerating them being on the same plane of existence as the rest of him is because he absolutely has to.
“Can you put them away?” she asks, just to check that box. She is a detective, after all. Everything has a procedure, and things tend to go more smoothly when one follows said procedure.
Even something as weird as this.
“Oh, yes, I just though they looked nice with the decorations,” Lucifer snaps peevishly.
Chloe pinches his calf. “Be serious. I thought you were just some crazy guy until, like three days ago, remember? Cut me a little slack.”
Lucifer grumbles into his pillow, and nods.
“Okay, good.” That weird thrill again, low in her belly. Why is he never this cooperative when they’re working on a case? He must be tired. “So, what’s wrong, then?” It could be anything really. The memory of Pierce wrenching the wing out of its socket plays in her mental theater with a disgusting squelch, and Chloe shudders.
Lucifer takes a long time to answer. “They just hurt,” he finally says. His voice is hoarse and low. “Being shot didn’t get things off to a great start. Everything that followed was certainly not a walk in the park either. But, at the end there, when we were fighting, Cain got a good lick in and broke something, I think.” He winces, then adds quickly, “It’s still healing, but it will be fine.”
Chloe takes a few minutes to really look at the wings, to study them not as his friend or as a human awed by divinity, but as a cop. As a detective.
There are dozens of bullet wounds, but they are clustered primarily around the top edge of the wing, along the bone, and the forwards part that some vague memory tells her is called the flight feathers. She reconstructs the gallery and the gunmen in her mind, the position the wings must have been in, and slowly it slots together, until…
“Lucifer? Did you… did you use your wings to shield us from the gun fire?” It isn’t really a question. The evidence is right in front of her.
Lucifer tilts his head so he can see her, one dark eye tracking her in the low light. “I wasn’t about to let them shoot you, Detective.” His tone is defensive, like he expects her to reprimand him.
Chloe chokes down the lump in her throat, unsure of how to reply.
“And I would do it again, and again, Detective. They’re good for that much, I suppose.”
Chloe doesn’t know what to say to that. What the hell can she say to that? Nothing comes to mind, so she goes back to inspecting the wings, her heart glowing. The bullet wounds here aren’t nearly as healed as the one on his hip. Below the feathers, they’re still red and puckered and angry, and when she prods at one, a little burp of blood oozes from the wound. With dawning horror, she realizes what’s going to have to happen.
Bullets left in masses of muscle tissue is one thing.
Bullets left in a delicate appendage like a wing is an entire other animal. Especially when it’s dozens, or even hundreds, of bullets. How can Lucifer possibly function with them like this? He can’t, clearly. He isn’t. There’s a reason he’s spent the last day and a half in an unmoving heap while she was in the hospital.
“Lucifer, we need to get the bullets out.”
Lucifer doesn’t protest right away, which tells her all she needs to know about just how dire the situation is.
Chloe climbs off the bed, considering her options. Lucifer watches her pace, his face unreadable. He offers no suggestion, but she knows without having to ask that cutting them off is not a course of action he is willing to take. Friends can read one another like that. He doesn’t want to, and even if he did, there is no way in a million years that Chloe would ever let him mutilate himself like that again. Not on her watch. Not when she can help him.
As she paces, she catches sight of the pliers halfway under the bed, and her gut clenches. “Oh, no.” But there really isn’t another way, is there?
She picks them like she’s handling a tarantula. Lucifer, to his credit, only flinches a little at the sight of them, and Chloe pointedly ignores that. This has to get done, one way or another. It’s the lesser of two evils. “I should disinfect these,” she says instead.
Lucifer nods towards the bar. “Grab something for me too, would you?”
It’s a fair request. Lucifer drinks like a bucket with a hole at the bottom on a good day, so Chloe brings an entire bottle of something old and expensive over after tipping a little across the pinchy bits of the pliers. It’s not great but considering that there isn’t a surgeon and a sterile environment on hand, it will just have to do.
She makes Lucifer shuffle around again, so his head is at the very corner of the bed and the wings are easily accessible to her on the floor. He would probably be more comfortable in the middle of the bed, but she doesn’t want to have to crawl all over him and jostle the wings.
Chloe hands him the bottle and takes her pliers and glass from the bar. “All right, here we go.” Her hand is shaking around the grip, and she takes a moment to silently curse Pierce in whatever circle of Hell he’s currently roasting in for breaking her dominate arm. This is going to be even harder with her left than it would otherwise.
Chloe is aware that she’s stalling, but she really doesn’t want to do this.
Lucifer’s back muscles have been clenching tighter and tighter, and she can see that he’s right on the verge of snapping at her to get a move on, so she just does it, plunges into the nearest bullet hole and jams the tip of the pliers in there.
Lucifer hollers and rips the wing away from her, knocking her back on her ass. A scattering of fresh blood drips across the feathers, ruby against white and rust.
Chloe stares at him in shock, her mind carefully blank. Holy shit, she can’t do this. She can’t just sit here in silence as Lucifer writhes and screams under her hands. She’s not cold enough for that, not in a million fucking years. “Lucifer, I-“
“No, Detective, please, just do it please, I need-“ his words are almost sobs.
He is coming undone.
Chloe wants to pet his face, to soothe him and tell him it’s almost over, but she can’t lie to him like that. Quietly, she says, “Lucifer, you need to stay still. I can’t do this if you can’t stay still.”
There is a long moment of awful, prickly stillness, then Lucifer slowly brings the wing back into arm’s reach. He takes a swig from his bottle, chugging its contents like a Gatorade, and Chloe gets back to work. She doesn’t let herself think about it. She just does.
The pliers go it and immediately touch something hard. Lucifer winces, and the feathers on the wing prickle out like needles on a pine tree. He doesn’t move, but Chloe can hear a whine grinding in his throat. Slowly she pulls on the little lump of metal, trying not to damage anything, and the second it’s out and she flings it into the empty whiskey glass.
Lucifer smushes his face into the bed and says nothing.
Chloe finds another bullet hole, and pokes in as gently as she can. “You’re doing so well, Lucifer. So well. I’m so proud of you, you know, you’re doing great, keeping it together for me,” she begins to mindlessly babble as the second bullet finds a home in the glass, spewing praise just so he can hear something other than the pings of metal hitting glass or his own flesh being scraped open. “I’m so happy you’re okay, because I love you and you’re the best partner I’ve ever had, and you’re my best friend, like, ever. Not even just now, but in my whole life, you know?” A third bullet joins its compatriots. “I’ve never had a friend I cared about as much as I care about you, in my entire life. Not even as like a kid when you meet people and you think you’re gonna be together forever.” A fourth.
She keeps it up, pausing to stroke the parts of the wing that aren’t flecked with blood, few as they, just so he can feel something nice, in between it all.
It feels like hours, but probably isn’t, and Chloe finally pops the final bullet out. The glass has long overflowed and the bullets are scattered around her feet in a silver puddle. She feels numb and worn down, like she just ran a marathon, and her neck is cramping to the point of pain. None of that matters, though. Lucifer is what matters. His eyes have taken on that glassy, distant look again, but the lines of pain around them have eased.
Chloe tosses the pliers aside and leans against the side of the bed. She rests close so her forehead touches his. “Better?”
It takes a few minutes to gather the words, but then Lucifer makes a tiny noise of affirmation deep in his throat. They sit like that in silence, just breathing, until Lucifer sort of shakes himself back to the present. “Thank you, Detective.” He audibly swallows, and Chloe can see his pupils have blown wide, a circle of true black against his slightly lighter irises.
“Are you actually drunk?” The question takes both of them by surprise.
Lucifer snorts. “I wouldn’t say drunk, Detective, although you do have a considerable dampening effect on my supernatural constitution.”
Chloe kicks one of the stray bullets away across the floor. “I’ve noticed.”
Lucifer doesn’t look himself, with the scuff that’s far past its usual artful stubble and dark bags under his eyes. And he’s still covered in blood and grit from the desert. A wild idea pops in to Chloe’s brain, and before she can talk herself out of it, she rises to her feet, gripping his shoulder for support. “Let’s get you cleaned up, yeah?”
Lucifer manages to sit up alone, and Chloe can feel his eyes on her as she walks back towards the bar. “What are you doing?” he calls as she roots around under it.
There. She peels a garbage bag off the roll and slips her sling off her shoulder with a well-practiced motion. At least the Jimmy Barnes shooting was worth something. With that whole mess came two lessons: how to plastic wrap and injured arm, and to never get splints and casts wet unless you want to walk around smelling like dirty socks for two weeks.
Lucifer emerges from his cave and stares at her blearily, swaying gently from side to side. “What on earth are you doing?” he asks again.
Chloe neatly tucks the bag around her cast and knots in place. “I’m wrapping my cast so it doesn’t get wet in the shower.” She’s careful to keep her voice as matter-of-fact as possible, so he doesn’t get any funny ideas.
Lucifer tilts his head in confusion, as he does when he is confounded by something rather ordinary. Chloe has to image that that’s been happening a lot more since he met her. He’s an ageless immortal being, but sometimes he’s just so… clueless. “Well, you’re certainly welcome to it, Detective, but I have to say, I’m disappointed. I always thought the first time you used my shower, I’d be in there with you, making you scream in pleasure.”
There he is, her old Lucifer, the one who always makes jokes and can’t let the possibility of an innuendo pass him by without comment. It makes her smile. He really must be feeling at least a little better if he can make jokes now.
“Well, yeah,” Choe says as she kicks off her shoes. “That’s the idea.”
Lucifer gapes at her, at a loss for words.
“I mean, not the ‘screaming in pleasure’ thing, because I honestly don’t think either of us are up for that at the moment,” she continues as she shucks her sweats, wriggling them down over her feet in a movement that is decidedly un-sexy. She only hesitates for a moment before yanking her sweater over her head. Lucifer has seen her naked, and he’s seen her in her underwear. He’s naked right now, on full display. There are no secrets between them, really, not when it comes to this. “You need to get cleaned up, and I’m not letting you shower alone, not like this. You’ll fall and crack your head and then where would we be?”
He just blinks at her, like she’s shocked the ability of speech right out of him. That never happens, so, even considering the circumstances, Chloe decides to count that as a win.
Well. No wasting time then. She doesn’t want to give herself a chance to overthink it and talk herself out of doing this, so she ambles towards his bathroom, leaving it up to him if he chooses to follow or not.
His bathroom is the size of the bedroom at her apartment, but Chloe strides forwards with purpose, not pausing to gape. It’s clean and sparse, just like the rest of his place, and done up in the same shiny black stone. His shower is ginormous, and she turns it on and fiddles with the knob, listening for the sound of footsteps meaning he’s choosing to join her.
She hadn’t even considered the possibility that he won’t. That he’ll turn back around and go to sleep. Or that he’ll leave. Or-
He steps into the bathroom, wings furled closely along his back. They’re still puffed up on the bits that she can see, the parts that frame him like some sort of weird feathered backdrop. His eyes are narrowed in suspicion, like she’s playing some kind of mean-spirited joke on him. With the rather spectacular bedhead he has going on paired with his wild eyes, he looks like a drug addict emerging from a week-long bender. He looks like the time he was the drug addict coming off a bender, back when he was being all paranoid and not sleeping.
Chloe stares at him, letting her gaze linger for a moment longer than she means it to, thinking of things she doesn’t want to contemplate, before turning back and stripping out of her underwear and stepping into the spray in one quick motion. She sticks her face under the water, hoping the heat disguises the flames creeping up her cheeks, and her sunburn screeches at her indignantly. Ouch.
She senses Lucifer step in behind her and shifts back so her spine is pressed flush against his chest. His shower is actually big enough that they can both be under the water, so there’s none of the usual nonsense of one partner shivering and dripping while the other rinses up. Lucifer nuzzles her wet hair, and Chloe breathes out a little pent-up sigh of relief.
Without asking, she grabs a washcloth and soaps it up, then turns and begins sloughing all the dried blood off his chest and stomach. It paints his skin in orangey rivulets, and she has to wring out the cloth twice before his front is all clean. “Turn around.”
He turns, and she notices that he isn’t swaying as much anymore. Like the water has sobered him up some. She starts on the wings this time, since they cover most of his backside. She’s gentle, barely touching at first, afraid of causing him any more pain, but when he doesn’t wince, she dares to press a little harder. The wings take a long time, and they both stand in silence as he unfolds them and moves around, until eventually they are a field of pearlescent brilliance once again, even soaking wet and marred by broken feathers and little missing clumps that show skin underneath.
Despite all that, they’re still the most beautiful thing Chloe has ever seen.
She strokes the outer edge of his left wing in one long, slow motion, and Lucifer’s eyes close like a cat getting scritches behind the ear. “Better?”
“Very much, Detective.” He steps closer, the wings pressed in tight so they don’t bump her, and says, “Now, will you allow me to return the favor? It seems that cast might be cumbersome.”
Chloe nods, and lets him tilt her shoulders so her back is to him once again. Lucifer shampoos her hair, and massages it against her scalp with his deft pianist fingers, and Chloe can’t quite bite down on a moan of pleasure. Lucifer chuckles in her ear and guides her head back under the spray. To her surprise, he doesn’t make some perverted joke about making her moan. He likes to be unpredictable; she has to give him that.
Chloe goes for a second round of shampoo just because the first felt so good, and because she thinks it will be four or five showers down the line before she feels properly clean again, but it’s nice to see the last their excursion in the desert wash away into the Los Angeles sewer system.
She tries to return the favor to Lucifer and soap up his hair one-handed, but he’s so tall and she’s injured, so it just ends with him bent double so she can reach, and they both wind up leaning into each other in paroxysms of laugher at the sight of it, the Devil trying to crouch down so she can shampoo his hair for him.
When did her life get this ridiculous?
And when did she realize that she wouldn’t trade it for anything?
Chloe leans close and buries her face in Lucifer’s collarbone, ignoring the press of his naked skin against hers. It’s intimacy in a totally-nonsexual way, and because of that, it doesn’t feel weird in the slightest, them being here together. It feels right.
She feels Lucifer press a kiss to her scalp, and then he murmurs, “You can go, if you’re finished, Detective. I need to deal with forest growing out of my chin.”
She laughs and slips past him out of the shower leaving him to it. She grabs a towel and wraps herself in it, not bothering to get dressed yet, wanting to linger in the sense of peace that she’s found, in the calm that’s finally begun to overtake the panic from the whole kidnapping ordeal.
Out of the shower, the world rudely reasserts itself. The bedroom is a mess. Bullets are scattered across the floor like rain drops, and Lucifer’s sheets are stained with blood and sand. It’s impossible to pretend that everything is totally fine with that mess around, so Chloe drops to her knees and gathers up the bullets, pliers, and few scattered feathers, and throws them in the trash. The tool kit goes back under the bar, and she wipes up all the blood and dirt she can find, until the black floors are shiny and clean once again. She strips down Lucifer’s enormous bed and hauls the pile of dirty sheets into his closet, where she finds a hamper.
While she’s in there, she steals one of his dress shirts and buttons it over her bare chest, then slides on a pair of his silk boxer shorts. The clothes smell like him, like vanilla and smoke and a just a touch of sulphur.
That’s Hell, she muses as she breathes it in. That’s the little bit of Hell that’s part of him, and always will be.
Because Lucifer is not an angel, despite the wings. He’s always told her so. That he is the Devil and nothing less.
And… that’s okay.
He’s still Lucifer, Devil with a capital D or not. The man, not the myth, is what matters to her.
Chloe finds some clean linins in a cupboard in the closet and goes to remake the bed.
Lucifer finds her there, struggling to get the corner of the sheet around his continental mattress with one arm in a sling, and silently moves to help her, getting the sheets tucked around and smoothed over in quick, practiced motions.
Chloe stands back and watches as he finishes. He’s put on a pair of boxer shorts, but nothing else. The wings are still out, a damp silvery white against his back. Now that they’re clean and almost dry, some of their divine glow has begun to return. He’s shaved down to his usual stubble, and she finds that the returning sense of normalcy settling back around her like a blanket is comfort rather than smothering.
As she’s watching, Lucifer does a sort of shoulder-roll, and the wings snap out of existence with a sharp flap that stirs Chloe’s wet hair and brushes through the black silk curtains that line the windows, making them ripple like a desert mirage.
“Guh,” comes out of her mouth in a monosyllabic cough of shock, followed by a much more articulate, “What the Hell?”
Lucifer turns over one shoulder, his back stiff, eyeing her with apprehension. “My apologies, Detective, that was… inconsiderate of me.”
Chloe’s head tilts to the side and all she can do is stare at him because really, when has Lucifer ever behaved in a way that makes sense? It’s not like he’s going to start after she’s figured out the reason that he doesn’t act human in so many ways is because he… isn’t.
“No, it’s… just surprised me, is all. I’m fine. Really, Lucifer, I’m fine.” Chloe steps closer, into his space. She is fine, really. The weirdness that he brought into her life when he swanned through her door is completely worth it if it means she gets to keep him.
So really, she’s more than fine. She’s… happy. Happier than she can remember being in a long time.
Lucifer shifts away from her and flops unceremoniously onto the bed, long limbs folding under his body, and he sighs, a low sound that’s more exhaustion than pain. Chloe doesn’t imagine that he’s gotten any decent sleep for at least as long as she has. Being drugged into unconsciousness is a far cry from restful.
Chloe watches him breath for a moment, considering, twisting her toes against the floor, then says fuck it, and crawls into bed, nudging his arm out of the way so she can lay on her side next to him. She cuddles up next to him, soaking in his heat. Lucifer has always been like a furnace, hot to the touch, like a well-sunned reptile. She plants the palm of her hand in the center of his lean chest, and under it, the steady thunder of his heartbeat rolls.
After all this, after everything, he is still alive. They are still alive.
It really is some kind of miracle.
“Did you mean what you said before?” Lucifer’s voice is soft and quiet and tremulous, like he’s afraid to speak too loudly. Like he’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop and Chloe is suddenly going to come to her senses and run away screaming, and if he only whispers it will keep the spell from breaking for a little while longer.
Chloe makes a questioning noise low in her throat.
“That you love me?”
When had she said it? A vague pulse of sound in her ears as she tore bullets from his shredded wings, something she had blurted out the heat of the moment.
But…
It’s true, isn’t it? There’s no one in the entire universe she’s closer to, who she loves more, with the exception of Trixie, but Trixie is her child, so does that even count? Lucifer may be an immortal being older than the universe itself, but he also likes to make groan-worthy puns and has a sweet tooth and can never sit still for more than a few seconds and plays the piano with so much emotion and beauty that it makes her heart ache. Somewhere in the middle, he wove himself in the fabric of Chloe’s life, and now she can’t imagine it without him by her side.
“Of course it’s true, Lucifer.” Chloe moves her hand up to the side of his face and catches his eyes with hers, trying to communicate through touch what she can’t find the words to say. “I meant every word I said. You are the best partner I’ve ever had, and my best friend. Of course, I love you, Lucifer.”
She watches his throat bob, and finally, understanding washes over her like the light of the sun.
Oh.
Of course, a man who calls himself the Devil, who has been called Evil with a capital E, would see himself as unworthy of anything but hatred and mistrust and disgust. He is the very personification of low self-esteem covered with humor and sex. Chloe knows this about him, but it’s never occurred to her that, yes, she needs to spell it out for him so blatantly. That maybe, even after all this time, he’s had his doubts that she could ever care about him the way she knows he cares about her.
Chloe thinks then of their kiss, both the one on the beach when he insisted that he wasn’t worthy of her, and of the one on Forest Clay’s balcony the night Charlotte was killed, when he told her over and over that he was the Devil.
It’s always been about his self-hatred, hasn’t it?
His feelings for her were never the issue. Those, she’s pretty sure, haven’t changed in a long time.
It’s always been his feelings about himself.
Chloe wants to smack him on the back of his head. If only he’d figured all this out before, back when they had first tried to give this whole relationship thing a go.
She wants to smack herself for not reaching out and pushing more, trying harder.
Lucifer swallows, hunting for the right words, Chloe thinks. That’s okay. He doesn’t need to say them right now, because she knows that he is willing to snap his own leg like a twig in order to try and protect her, and really, that tells her everything she needs to know, doesn’t it?
Lucifer is still staring at her in wonder, as though Chloe is something that he, even in his long, long life, has never quite seen before. The luminous glow of the setting sun makes his bare skin shine, lends his obsidian eyes an otherworldly black glow. A tiny smile curls at the corner of Lucifer’s mouth, and the lines of exhaustion around his eyes soften, finally. “Then… that’s all that matters, Detective.” His forehead comes to rest against hers. “Chloe.”
Chloe’s heart swells. Her name is a sweet song on his lips, so rare to hear and so full of promise.
There is a long comfortable silence, and then Lucifer whispers in a voice thick with emotion, “I love you, Chloe. I- there are things I’ve done that I never thought I would do. Things I’ve felt that I never thought possible, and it’s you. It’s always been you. Being around you has changed me.”
Chloe nuzzles closer into him, breathing his scent into her lungs, reveling in having him here, safe and whole. “Tell me everything.”
And he does.