Chapter Text
When the Detective told him she needed his help on a Thursday afternoon, this was certainly not what he had in mind.
Lucifer stares at the little urchin while the elevator doors close behind him, taking the smirking Detective along with them. Her babysitter, Detective Douche, and every other conceivable childcare option apparently failed, and the Detective has an afternoon departmental meeting Lucifer regretfully already said he would rather go back to Hell than attend. More fool him.
Now, the Detective’s spawn is standing next to his piano with a knapsack full of Dad-knows-what and a sneaky grin. That absolutely can’t bode well.
But he won’t be brought down by a seven-year-old human. He’s the Lord of Hell. He can handle her. He thinks.
“All right. You heard your mother. Homework and then…educational television,” he says, trying to sound both commanding and aloof.
The little thing just stares at him for a moment before looking around. “Two pieces of homework for a tour.”
Lucifer feels his eyebrows go up. “Into making deals, are you?”
“You are,” she says.
“Indeed I am,” he agrees, surprised. “All right, urchin. Maths and…whatever else you hate most, and then we’ll do a walk-about. Pop to it.” He points to the coffee table and watches with trepidation as she spins on her heel and nearly sprints into his sitting room.
She drops to the ground in a way that looks painful, but clearly doesn’t bother her, dumping her knapsack out on his expensive rug to rifle through the papers and find her assignments.
He watches her, fascinated despite himself, and then turns to make himself a drink, cataloguing what he can show the spawn that will be…relatively child appropriate. Not that he cares, but he supposes the Detective would be displeased to hear he taught her daughter how to throw knives or showed her his collection of antique torture devices. Though the urchin probably would enjoy the swords. He thinks he has plastic-tipped fencing foils around somewhere.
“Can I have a drink?”
He looks up from scowling into his whiskey to find the girl looking hopefully over at him. He nods without thought, reaching out to pour her a finger. Then blinks. Children don’t…drink alcohol, he doesn’t think. Human adults barely handle it.
But he has limited non-alcoholic options up here. He turns and rummages in the cabinets below the shelves. Orange juice for the screwdrivers, cranberry juice for the very boring vodka/cranberries preferred by his more basic of overnight guests.
“Juice?” he asks, popping up to find the little urchin scrambling up onto one of the stools at the bar. “You’re not supposed to be up here.”
“That’s a lot of alcohol,” she says.
“It is,” he agrees, shaking his head as he reaches for one of his more hated glass tumbler sets. He’s hardly going to give the sticky thing one of his favorites. He holds up the two bottles of juice and waits for her to point to the orange juice.
"Why do you need that much?” she asks, taking her orange juice with a grin.
He watches her take an exaggerated slurp. Humans are so visceral. “Alcohol doesn’t have much effect on me. I need a larger supply than your average human.”
The urchin cocks her head, staring up at him, a bit like a small, confused bird. He supposes she is. “Why not?”
“It metabolizes too quickly in my system for much enjoyment,” he says.
“So you don’t get really drunk, like Daddy?”
Well, there’s an interesting fact about Detective Douche to ponder later. “Not usually, no.”
“How many drinks would it take?” she asks, eyes wide, staring up at him in seeming fascination.
“About six,” he says easily.
“Like that?” She points at his glass.
“Oh, not glasses, child, bottles.” Her little mouth drops open. “What?”
“Mommy says a whole bottle of wine could make Daddy go to the hospital.”
“Mm, perhaps it could,” he says. “But not me.”
“Mom says it’s bad for your liver,” the urchin says, her wide-eyed surprise melting into a look of disapproval that’s so familiar he can’t help but chuckle. “What?”
“I’m sure she did,” he says. “Don’t you have school torture to finish?”
She sighs gustily and slides down from the stool, reaching up, tipping her glass of juice precariously while trying to retrieve it. “Yeah.”
He rolls his eyes and plucks the glass up, walking around the bar to shoo the little thing back to the coffee table. He places the juice down by her mostly completed maths equations sheet and settles himself in the opposite armchair. Thus far, this hasn’t been…abhorrent, as far as houseguests go. She’s a bit like a talkative puppy.
“Did you have to learn math in Heaven?”
He blinks down at the child, her head still tilted down, pencil scribbling away.
“I beg your pardon?”
"In Heaven. That’s where you said you grew up, right?” She looks up to meet his eyes.
“It is,” he says slowly.
“Mommy says we should play into your ‘lusions, but I don’t think they’re ‘lusions, are they?”
“What are these ‘lusion—oh, my ‘delusions.’ Your mother asked you to placate me, did she?” he asks. He will not be charmed by the mispronunciation. He really won’t.
“She said you believe you’re the devil, and it’s easiest to just…let you. But I don’t think you just believe you are, right?”
“I don’t just believe I am, I simply am,” he agrees. Because why not? The Detective clearly doesn’t believe the truth staring her in the face. Why should her urchin?
"Okay,” the child says, shrugging those little shoulders. “Did you learn math up there?”
He sits for a moment, rather gobsmacked. She might actually believe him. Just like that. No proof. No further questions. Just…taking him at his word, the way he never expects humans actually will.
Well, some questions, apparently. “I was tutored, yes, but much more quickly than your current educational system. Seems to take a dreadfully long time for humans to know enough to properly human.”
“Yeah,” she agrees with a put upon sigh. “Daddy says he’s never used the pytha-gorey theorem—whatever that is—and that math is mostly useless, but Mommy says I hafta do my best anyway.”
Detective Douche isn’t wrong, but he also thinks the Detective has the better outlook. “Studying hard is a worthwhile practice, even if it will take ages for you to become interesting,” he says.
The little girl doesn’t so much as frown. “Mommy says you have a lot of growing up to do still. Maybe someday you’ll be interesting too.”
And there’s the cheeky little smile. “Touche, urchin,” he says with a snort.
“Done!” she says, slapping the maths homework down on the table next to her. “Just science left.” Her tone is far less enthusiastic.
“What are they teaching you?” he wonders. He’s always found human science to be…limited at best. And at the same time, rather stupendous.
He didn’t know how magnificent his stars really were until he sat in on particle physics lectures and visited NASA. He’s even prouder of them now. Not that he allows himself much time to contemplate his creations. It makes his insides squirm to think on them. He refuses to call it pain.
“We’re learning ‘bout the planets. I feel bad for Pluto.”
“Whatever for? It’s a great dwarf planet,” he says.
“But it used to be a real planet,” the girl says. “It’s no fun when you’re one thing, all whole and part of a family, and then suddenly you aren’t,” she mumbles, quieter.
Ah. Feelings. Family feelings.
He rather thinks the Detective is good to be rid of Detective Douche, and he’s certainly heard about him letting the urchin down often enough. But he…supposes the change has been difficult on the child.
Certainly his siblings didn’t react well, as far as he knows, when his parents broke up. Though Detective Douche hasn’t been sentenced to eternity in Hell and cast out of the world. He’s getting off rather easy.
“Pluto may not be part of the planet family anymore, but he’s joined a rather robust family of dwarf planets,” he hears himself say.
The girl looks up at him, a small smile on her face. Missing those two front teeth, with those big brown eyes, she’s clearly genetically engineered to tug at the heart strings. Were he a lesser devil, it might even work on him.
“We have to name all the moons today,” she says. “You wouldn’t happen to…know them all, would you?”
It isn’t working, he promises himself, even as he scoots forward on his chair. “How fast can you write, and in what order do you want them, urchin?”
Her brilliant smile and excited wiggle doesn’t make him smile in return at all. Not at all.
(...)
He’s not entirely clear on how it happens, but the following Thursday, the Detective drops the urchin off at his penthouse for the afternoon, again. Another departmental meeting, apparently.
“If a door is locked, you may not go in, but otherwise, I do suppose have at it,” he says, watching the child turn around in the hallway, staring wide-eyed at the many doors off the corridor from his bedroom.
She’s wearing an entirely denim outfit today that really should get the Douche thrown in jail. The Detective, at least, had the dignity to insist the child’s father dressed her today. She may not have much fashion sense herself, but she’s hardly this bad.
“Did you have an apartment down in Hell?” the urchin asks as she finally picks a door, reaching up to turn the doorknob and push into the den. “Wow! That’s a huge TV.”
“It is,” he agrees, standing in the doorway as she circles the coffee table, peering around. “And no, I had a throne, but no apartment.”
“Where did you sleep?” she wonders, coming back toward him, apparently unimpressed by his 100” flatscreen.
He follows her back into the hallway. “I didn’t, really,” he replies, watching her skip down the hall to open another door, this time to his guest bathroom.
“You didn’t sleep?” the girl asks, poking her head out of the bathroom to stare back at him, incredulous.
“I didn’t,” he agrees. Maybe time would have passed more quickly had he slept.
He rather likes sleep here in the human world, not that he’s ever able to get more than a few hours at a time. He doesn’t need more than that on the mortal plane. But it’s still…nice.
“Mommy says if you stay awake for more than three days, you die,” she says, hopping across the hall to push into his gym. “Wow! A trampoline.”
Ah, didn’t think of that.
He finds himself rushing down the hall to follow her into the home gym, which is outfitted better than most commercial gyms he’s ever entered. The floor has a springy wood finish with rubber mats under the various weights machines. The walls are a burnt rust, with one wall entirely made up of mirrors. For form, of course.
And sometimes other activities.
None of which are appropriate to consider with the urchin underfoot.
Speaking of, he turns to the corner with the trampoline and sighs. He likes to experiment with all forms of human exercise, the trampoline having been an impulse buy during his brief jazzercise phase. And now the urchin is hopping to her little delight in the corner on the dusty trampoline, all manner of sharp corners waiting to strike her dead should she fall off. Which, given the energetic bouncing, seems a distinct possibility.
He didn’t think you needed to baby-proof an apartment for a seven-year-old. He may have been wrong. He finds himself hovering like some kind of bloody mother hen. The urchin just grins up at him, clearly enjoying his discomfort.
“Did you go insane in Hell, because you didn’t sleep?” she asks, voice warbling with each bounce.
“I certainly did not,” he says stiffly.
“Did you not sleep in Heaven too?” she wonders.
It makes him pause for a moment. He did. They all did, together, in one large feathered pile, especially when they were young—celestially young, at least. He remembers curling up beside his mother for over a week after he lit the stars, exhausted and depleted. Sometimes he still wakes up at night, the phantom feeling of her fingers carding through his wings hovering over his back.
“We slept there,” he says, and his voice feels as far away as his thoughts.
It doesn’t last. The urchin bounces too high and goes careening off the trampoline. He only just manages to snag her around the middle and spin them to land her on her feet.
“Enough bouncing for you,” he says, his voice tight.
The girl doesn’t seem perturbed, grabbing his hand to pull him out of the gym. He shakes his hand, trying to dislodge her, but goodness, the tiny child has a firm grip.
She drags him down the hall and back into the front room before pushing him onto the couch. He watches, bemused, as she gathers one of the throw blankets and attempts to spread it out over him.
“Whatever are you doing?” he demands.
“Tucking you in, duh,” she says brightly.
“For what?”
“A nap, silly,” she says, tossing the partially unfurled blanket on top of him. It lands in a gray heathered heap on his lap.
“I do not need a nap, but perhaps you do. You are far too excitable.”
“I don’t take naps anymore,” she says, hands moving to her hips.
“Make an exception.”
"No,” she says firmly.
"Well, I certainly won’t take one if you aren’t going to,” he says, gathering the blanket and sitting up with his haughtiest air.
The urchin’s face twitches. Ah, a loophole.
“If I lie down, then you’ll nap?” she asks, eyes narrowed.
“I shall lie down as well,” he hedges. If she’ll just lie down, perhaps he’ll have a moment’s peace.
“Will you tell me a story?”
He blinks. That is a…strange negotiating tactic. “I suppose.”
She stares at him in challenge for a moment, before her face breaks in a grin. Then she’s clambering up onto his expensive leather couch, far too close to where he’s sitting.
“All right, all right, go down there,” he directs, pushing her toward the corner of the couch, where she can lie down, head on one of the throw cushions.
She narrows her eyes, but does as she’s told. “Where aren’t you lying down?”
He hesitates. Right, well, there’s not entirely room for him with her there. “All right, about face and worm your way over here,” he says with a sigh.
He stands and then plops himself along the longer lounger section, placing a pillow by his hip. The urchin crawls across his couch—still wearing her shoes—and flops down onto the pillow on her back so she can stare up at him.
He deposits the blanket onto her face and she giggles. It is not adorable, nor charming.
He watches her squirm around to get the blanket situated over her tiny frame. She’s a small little thing, which doesn’t help with the big doe eyes and wide little smile. The whole effect is far too childish and innocent and pure for an urchin with such a devious streak.
“Story,” she demands.
A bossy cute little thing. “What kind of story?”
“Did you play games in Heaven?” she asks, blinking up at him. “The internet says you had lots of brothers and sisters. I always wanted a little sister.”
There is an uncomfortable lump in his throat. The same one he feels sometimes looking at the Detective. Made of some kind of feeling Dr. Martin might want to discuss. He dislikes it immensely.
But when he glances down at the urchin, he finds he can’t quite refuse either. Tiny humans aren’t meant to have compulsion powers. Then again, he doesn’t feel entirely compelled to answer. It’s almost like he wants to.
He looks out toward the Hills out the windows to his balcony, cast in a golden glow from the slowly setting sun. How arch, Dad.
“I suppose we played the same games siblings have played since time immemorial,” he offers. Hardly immemorial. He remembers every second of every eon he’s lived—a curse whenever he closes his eyes.
“Did you play hide and seek?”
“We did,” he murmurs.
“I’m the best at hide and seek,” she says.
“Are you?” he asks, tearing his eyes away from that familiar golden hue to look back down at the urchin. “Better than me?”
“Way better,” she says, blinking a little more slowly up at him. “Unless you have a story where you were better.”
He huffs. Clever little thing. “There was perhaps, one afternoon, early on, before Dad began the whole humanity experiment, but after he’d created the world, where we all spread out across the globe and Mother came to seek us.”
She stares up at him as he talks, his mind far away, hiding in the canyons that eventually became Grand not so far from here. He flew low to the ground for hours and hours so his mother might not see him, evading her each time she came to check. His siblings were found one by one, but not he, not the lightbringer.
Dad had to call him back. He can still hear his mother’s laughter, can see Amenadiel’s proud little smirk, Michael’s jealous sneer.
“After that, we didn’t play as much, banished back to the Silver City. Well, most of us, once dear old Dad began the experiment in earnest,” he says, looking back down at the urchin, only to find her sleeping peacefully, one of her little hands wound into his pant leg.
The spell of remembrance breaks and he sits, his chest heaving slightly. He hasn’t thought on those memories in such a very long time. They don’t hurt as much as he imagined they would. He’s more winded than beaten.
He should get up, though—make something productive of his afternoon until the Detective returns. Do something other than watch her inquisitive spawn sleep. There’s not much of interest to her placid little face like this.
And yet he doesn’t get up. The Detective finds them still there on his couch an hour later, when the faded sunlight has all but disappeared into darkness.
The Detective doesn’t seem as pleased as he is to find the urchin asleep.
“She’ll never get to sleep now, Lucifer,” she says on a sigh, coming to sit across from him on the coffee table.
“She wanted a story, who was I to refuse?” he argues.
She rolls her eyes, but her face is soft, staring at her daughter, and a little bit at him.
“Try and keep her up next week, would you?”
He’s nodding before he really thinks about it, watching as she leans forward to wake the little urchin. “Wait, next week?”
(...)
The following week finds him driving the urchin back to her house after their afternoon. Something something getting held behind by the lieutenant, something something “Please, Lucifer, just this once?”
Just this once his arse. Clearly, the Detective intends to stick him with the urchin every Thursday from now until the end of time.
"This is awesome!”
He glances at the child where she’s strapped tightly into the bucket seat of his Corvette next to him. Her arms are thrown in the air, the wind sweeping her hair back, her face bright and eyes a little wild.
“A speed demon, are you?” he calls back.
“Faster!”
He’s all too happy to oblige. “All right, let’s show this Toyota who’s boss.”
Her high pitched giggle is a certain kind of music, he decides.
The afternoon itself wasn’t terrible, all things considered. The urchin did her usual assignments, and then rather than let her wander the penthouse, he sat her down and demanded she choose a game to learn.
She took the challenge with gusto, and he taught her to play chess. While she’s no strategist, she’s a bold player, he’ll give her that. It’ll take her a few millennia, but she might best him one day. She demanded a rematch next week, at any rate.
“Move your butt!” the urchin yells as they approach the Wilshire/Santa Monica intersection behind an older Mazda that’s slowed far too soon for the yellow light.
He sees the older gentleman behind the wheel glance back at them, scowling. Sees his hand go for the door. He flashes his eyes, and even through the rear view, it’s obviously effective. The man straightens his spine and his hand falls from the door handle.
“We really must improve your road rage vocabulary,” Lucifer says.
“Mommy mostly says, “come ON,” in the mornings. And Daddy just mutters bad words he thinks I don’t hear.”
“No surprises there,” Lucifer says, withholding a smile as the girl laughs. “You might consider something more along the lines of, “were you born with concrete feet, or did they grow while you waited for this light?””
She laughs louder. “Do another one!”
He does smile then, creeping up against the bumper of the Mean Mazda Man’s car. “We’re nowhere near the La Brea Tar Pits, so why are you so stuck in the mud?” It’s far from his best, but it does make the urchin erupt with more laughter.
The light turns green and he tailgates the unfortunate man for a few blocks before swinging them to the left to glide down toward Venice. The child whoops through the turn.
“You try one,” he suggests.
“Were you born in a bog?!” she shrieks.
His laugh carries on the wind as they speed through the city, tossing ridiculous insults back and forth until they’re both breathless with laughter when they pull up to the Detective’s house.
The Detective’s waiting at the door and the urchin bounces out of his car, skipping up to throw her arms around her mother’s waist with abandon. The Detective takes the assault with far more grace than he ever manages.
“Did you have fun with Lucifer, baby?” he hears her ask as he follows the girl up to the door, holding her backpack in one hand.
The child has proved less sticky than anticipated, but her accoutrements certainly haven’t.
“He taught me to play chess, Mommy,” the urchin says.
“Did he?” the Detective asks, glancing up at him. “How surprising.”
“What, were you expecting lessons on proper guillotine technique?” he tosses back, holding out the offending backpack.
The Detective takes it with a put upon sigh.
“What’s a guillotine?” the child asks.
“That’s on you,” the Detective says, turning to let them into the house.
Lucifer lingers on the doorstep, staring into the house while the two troop inside. He could escape right now, return to Lux, drown himself in liquor and women, or in silence up in his penthouse, or all three. It would be easy enough to turn down the walkway and head back to his normal life.
“Lucifer!” the child calls. “What’s a guillotine?”
Somehow, he finds himself walking forward instead, closing the door behind himself. The urchin is flopped on her bed upside down, staring at him in question. He looks to the left and finds the Detective removing the child’s lunchbox with a disgusted frown. It’s leaking something blue, somehow.
“You wanna handle this, or give her a lesson on Marie Antoinette?” the Detective asks, like it’s perfectly average for him to be in her house for their after school routine.
Now there’s an easy choice. “A guillotine, you blood-thirsty thing, is a great big murder machine that cuts off heads using an angled blade,” he says walking forward to lean against the doorway to the urchin’s room.
He hears the Detective snort, but keeps his eyes on her spawn. Surely she’ll be—
“Cool!”
“Cool?” he repeats, glancing back at the Detective.
She nods at him. “All things knives.”
“Fascinating,” he says, looking back at the child. “Well, if decapitation excites you, perhaps we should have had a look through my collection on Henry VIII.”
“He had all the wives!” she says, flipping over to scramble off her bed. “I wanna see that next week.”
She trots over to him and grabs his hand, yanking him out of her room and over toward the couch. He hardly agreed to another week of babysitting, nor did he agree to be pushed onto the Detective’s rather lumpy sofa and forced into watching… oh dear Dad, is that a Disney film from the 1960s, on VHS?
“You have a VHS player?” he asks toward the Detective.
“My mom still has some of her reels on VHS, so she kept it.” The Detective is closer than he anticipated, standing at the end of the couch while toweling off the offending lunchbox. “Oh, good choice, Monkey. I bet Lucifer hasn’t seen this one.”
He didn’t agree to stay for a film. Certainly not—wait.
“I in fact haven’t,” he says, shocked.
Not that he got up here to see everything that came out, but he made a damned good effort. Somehow he missed the King Aurther retelling? There’s a true shocker.
“You wanna order Chinese, Trix?” the Detective asks.
“Yes!” the spawn says, taking a running leap to land next to Lucifer on the couch. Far too close for comfort, but it’s not like he has the expanse of his own sofa here.
“Kung Pao, Lucifer?” the Detective asks.
He glances up at her and finds her looking down at them with soft eyes. The urchin is currently burrowing into his side, as if he’s consented to a movie-long cuddle. He would rebuff her, but there’s something in the look the Detective’s giving him, like this is some sort of test. As if the afternoon babysitting wasn’t enough.
He looks down at the urchin, whose face is trained on the television, one of her little hands wrapped into the cuff of his Armani where she’s resting against the arm he hasn’t moved.
There are…worse ways to spend an evening, he supposes.
“Kung Pao would be sufficient,” he says, looking back up at the Detective.
Her smile widens and she nods, turning to head back to the kitchen.
And if he moves his arm around the little parasite twenty minutes later, it’s only because his forearm was going numb, and nothing at all to do with the child’s snarky commentary on the movie.