It has been a few days since she's seen him. With everything that happened--Pierce's death, the following investigation, Charlotte's impending funeral, not to mention Lucifer--Chloe was completely overwhelmed. It hadn't been easy to turn her back on Lucifer's real face, but she had, long enough to find him gone when she came back to herself. He hasn't reached out, either, which is for the best, really, because she isn't sure if she'd have the guts to pick up the phone.
The reality of everything still hasn't sunk in, but Charlotte's funeral is planned for the next day and as much as Chloe has on her plate between trying to be supportive of Dan and consoling a heartbroken Trixie, Lucifer is never far from her mind. There is a lot left unresolved, so much left unsaid, and Chloe isn't one to let sleeping dogs lie.
Her foremost fear is, strangely, that he will disappear again. That he will up and leave like he did the last time, that he will run away from his problems instead of confronting them. Seeing her partner as the devil he truly is didn't feel real, but none of what happened over the last few days has. In a way, as much as Chloe needs to find some resolution with him, she also needs to prove it to herself - that it isn't all in her mind.
Coming into Lux again knowing what she does, it seems changed. Everything is exactly the same, but there is something more to it now, something almost existential, like that feeling you get when you stare into the stars for too long. She makes her way up to the penthouse, trying to mentally prepare herself to find it abandoned, but when the door opens it seems the same. She steps in, as she has a million times before but, again, it all feels new. Bigger, maybe. More complex than she remembers it.
"Lucifer?" Her voice comes out in a near squeak and she grits her teeth, already annoyed with herself for sounding so unsure. After clearing her throat, she tries again. "Lucifer? Are you here?"
He had wanted to show her his true self on his own terms, had even tried it twice without success. So while he hadn't cared that she had seen his devil face, that wasn't the way he had wanted to it to happen. Remembering how Linda had taken the revelation, and the fact that for so long the most important thing had been Chloe's choice, he had left before things got more complicated. The only way to know what her choice is, is to let her make it.
Besides, she doesn't really need his help solving murders. And he has his own business to tend to. Mostly involving avoiding thinking about how Amenadiel had been right.
He's glad to hear her come in to the apartment, and everyone would probably have a thing or two to say about that, too. He had expected that it might take longer than a few days, but then, he also knows that Chloe isn't like other humans.
"Detective." He's coming out of the bedroom, fully dressed save for a jacket, adjusting a cufflink. "Would you care for a drink?" he asks as he crosses to the bar. No doubt she has questions, but until she asks them, he'll act like it's any other day.
Chloe didn't experience quite what Linda did or, at least, she didn't experience it the way she did. Her own revelation on the rooftop had perhaps primed her, or maybe it was the acceptance that she'd known for a long time, somehow. Maybe she hasn't believed it since day one, but Chloe also knows there was a reason she threw away his blood sample. At the time, she justified it by thinking proving him wrong wasn't as important as giving him her faith, but now she wonders if she's just a coward.
She stands near the bar, her hands gripped together, twisting nervously as she watches him appear from the bedroom. He looks the same. He looks normal. It almost makes her wonder if she did imagine it.
"Yeah," she says, a little too quickly. "I mean, no. No, I don't want a drink." She's mixed up enough as it is, there is no point in throwing alcohol in the mix. "Lucifer, we need to talk about this."
He's about to pour himself a drink when he sets the bottle back down instead. With his supernatural metabolism, he doesn't usually have to worry about being anything more than tipsy, but if she makes him vulnerable in other ways, she probably makes him susceptible to alcohol too, and this is not the time to find out for sure.
He motions to the couches. She's welcome to have a seat if she wants to, but he won't if she doesn't. "Where would you like to start?"
She doesn't sit, not yet. Somehow it is easier to hover next to the bar, to watch him from a distance as if being near the door will give her the ability to bolt for safety if need be.
Which is silly, because she's not afraid of him. She's never been afraid of him. Lucifer has made her feel a lot of things--anger, annoyance, disappointment, love--but never fear.
"I..." Any confidence she might have grasped at falls away again, and she shifts to the side, taking a breath before she is able to level her gaze at him once again. "Why didn't you show me before? You could have proved it to me ages ago."
He's always been pretty good at knowing what people want even if they don't tell him in words -- instinct, like she called it -- because how could he punish them with their desires if he doesn't know what they are? But he still can't with her, so he has to settle simple for watching her seem to make some sort of decision.
"I wanted to." For whatever it turns out to be worth, he's never lied to her. "That was what I meant, when I left you that message. I meant to show you, and then I was kidnapped and dumped in the desert and woke up with a my wings and without my devil face." Thanks for that, Cain. You couldn't have picked a worse time. "Which is what I discovered the second time I wanted to show you, and after that I couldn't."
Even as she says it, she knows exactly why he didn't. Although she hasn't entirely made sense of every single "metaphor" he'd shared with her during their time working together, it's all been slotting together somewhere in the back of her mind. The scars on his back, where he'd cut his wings off, when he grabbed her wrist to hold her back from touching him. He hated his wings. Of course he wouldn't show them to her.
"Wait, if you..." She pauses again, trying to think of words for things she's never imagined that don't sound ridiculous, but there isn't any, so she ventures on. "If you lost your devil face, how did you get it back? I saw it."
Clearly, she realizes now, not by his choice. He'd seemed just as baffled as she had been in that defining moment between them. It's only then that she realizes he didn't know he had it back.
Oh. That. He hadn't been as relieved at finally having an answer as he thought he would be, because he hadn't liked the answer.
"Amenadiel had this ridiculous theory." Just because it turned out to be true doesn't mean it's any less ridiculous. "He thought that it wasn't our father's doing that he lost his wings and I gained mine and lost my devil face. He thought that we did it to ourselves. He deserved to lose his wings, so he did." With the opposite meaning for him, as much as he doesn't want to admit it.
"He turned out to be correct." He reaches for some hidden spot behind the bar and pulls out a gray-tinged feather, too large to be from any bird, which he sets in front of her. "I found that at Charlotte's crime scene. Amenadiel got his wings back because he felt that he deserved them again." If he ever sees Amenadiel again, he has a few questions about that night.
"I got my devil face back because it's who I am. It's where I belong."
Only moments before she saw his devil face, she's told him she didn't see him that way. She's never seen him that way. As long as she had known him, he had insisted this is who he was. On the best of days, it made him charismatic, fun, outgoing. On his worst, it made him a monster.
At least, to him. What Chloe said was true - when she looked at him, she didn't see a monster. Even now, somehow, she still doesn't.
"No, you don't." Her voice is quiet and even. She looks down at the feather, her heart jumping in her throat. That meant Amenadiel had been there when Charlotte died. She'll have words about that, but not yet.
"If all of this is true--and believe me, I really wish it wasn't--but if it is..." She had told him they would be having a serious talk about all the things he hid from her. This isn't how she had expected it to go. "You stopped believing that was who you are. Why would you start again?"
She honestly doesn't know. Lucifer has come a long way since she met him. Apparently, a long enough way to believe himself back into being an angel. What would make him change his mind?
He's starting to wish now that he had poured himself a drink, but he's been a bar owner long enough to know that that would be the best way to make this worse than it already is.
"People blame me for a lot of things. 'The Devil made me do it.' When all I really did was let humanity know that they had choices." Which had been his whole point from the start, with his siblings, and the events in Eden had had the added benefit of messing with his father's beloved creations. "Everyone who ends up in Hell does so because of their own choices, and their guilt over those choices. They believe they deserve punishment for their choices, and that's where I come in. Or used to." After millennia he hadn't wanted to stay there anymore, and the inhabitants don't really need him. Their guilt does as good a job at tormenting them as he ever did.
"It is -- was -- my job to punish those who deserve it, and that includes me. I don't lie, I don't steal, I don't take pleasure in punishing people, but killing, that deserves punishment."
She looks completely baffled. Granted, Chloe didn't condone murder and she didn't even particularly like killing, even if she had before. But what happened there was different.
"You did it to protect yourself. And me." Her breath catches as she stares at him, thinking about how just the night before it all happened she had kissed him, so eager to reclaim what they had lost. But they never really lost it, did they? It had always been there, no matter how much they tried to ignore it.
Knowing what she knows now, though... That should change things. It should.
"He said himself you'd never stop until you caught up with him. And he made it clear that he was going to kill me if I stood in the way of it." Whether he loved her or not--and she believed he had, in his own way--he loved himself more. Of course, she used to think that about Lucifer. "He murdered Charlotte, and God knows how many other people. He deserves Hell, he deserves to be punished. But you don't, not for that."
Lucifer had given up on removing the burden from his back, since every time he'd done so, they had grown back. Which he now knows, thanks to Amenadiel's ridiculous theory, was his own fault. But now he's ready to be done with them for good. He has his Devil face back, so he should be able to get rid of the wings for good. Once more be free of who his father wants him to be.
Tonight is as good a time as any. Better, in fact, because Chloe has plans and won't be dropping in. She won't know about it until it's done. No one will, because once again he's not asking Maze for help. He has to do this himself, before he doesn't do it at all.
His wings are healed now, with no evidence that they'd ever sheltered anyone from a hail of bullets. Spread out in his bedroom like this, they take up most of the space from wall to wall. Soon enough that won't be an issue.
He clutches the Hellblade in one hand and reaches behind him, slowly, then presses the edge of the blade against the spot where feathers meet skin. He clenches his other fist and closes his eyes -- against the pain, he tells himself -- and takes a deep breath as he prepares to begin to cut.
She stopped announcing herself after a while. There wasn't really a point; walking in on him half-dressed wasn't exactly an issue nor was she concerned with finding him in a compromising position with another woman. So far, Chloe had made herself quite at home in the penthouse, stopping short of leaving a toothbrush in the bathroom because that might still be a little much for Lucifer to deal with.
After girls night fell through (Ella got tickets to a concert she was dying to go to and Linda had the flu anyway), Chloe figured she'd already lined up the babysitter and might as well use the excuse to drop in on Lucifer with a surprise dinner. With paper bags of burgers and fries in hand, she pops out of the elevator and into the penthouse, moving in to drop the bags onto the bar top. From that vantage point, she can clearly see Lucifer, his wings outstretched in the bedroom, and she pauses for a moment, half hypnotized by them. Understandably, Chloe has never got a decent look at them, and since Lucifer never expressed any interest in showing her, she doesn't ask.
She's about to open her mouth when she sees what is in his hand - one of Maze's blades, hovering over his shoulder and towards the joint where those magnificent wings meet his back. It dawns on her suddenly and she lurches towards the bedroom, nearly tripping over the piano as she goes.
He's used to people just walking into his penthouse by now; his friends (which he's still surprised he even has) have been doing it for awhile now, and it's not like he has a door he can lock to keep them out. Even so, he hadn't been expecting anyone to do it, what with Chloe and Linda having plans with each other and Amenadiel up in Heaven unless he has a reason to come down to Earth. So when he hears his name, it takes him a moment to realize that it's Chloe who said it.
He lowers his hand as his wings droop behind him, but he doesn't drop the blade yet. "I didn't think you were going to be here tonight."
She moves closer to him, her hands raised in front of her. It's an instinctive behavior now, trained into her by encountering too many deranged criminals with weapons, and she lowers them slightly when she realizes how it's probably coming off. She isn't worried Lucifer would do anything to her, but she obviously should have been concerned about what he might do to himself.
"Linda and Ella canceled. I figured I'd come by for dinner." She shifts her weight, her eyes narrow and wary. "Good thing, too, because I am not going to let you do this."
There's a flash of something in his eyes -- not his Devil eyes because those are reserved for those who deserve punishment, but anger. The kind of anger that was behind his rebellion in the first place. Anger that few people have seen since, and only when someone wants him to be something he doesn't want to be.
"You couldn't stop me." Except that she could, because right now he's as vulnerable as she is, and even though his strength isn't diminished, they both know he'd never use it on her.
And of course he can't really be angry at her, and it doesn't last. He loosens his grip on the blade but doesn't let go of it yet.
The watches his hand around the blade, her heartbeat pounding in her ears even as she observes him loosening his grip. She knows the only thing holding him back right now is the fact that he'll bleed out in her presence, but what about when she leaves? She can't stay in his penthouse forever.
He might never hurt her physically, but what he says does hurt. Chloe knows she's risking herself being with him, against odds that she isn't even entirely clear on. Of course this has to do with her.
"Just stop and think about this," she says, keeping her voice even and her eyes on his. "You're with me now, Lucifer. The things you do will have an effect on me, whether you think they will or not. Please... Let's just talk about this."
Talk. What good does talk do? But there's no other way to tell her why this has to be done.
He sits on the edge of the bed, blade still in his hand, wingtips brushing against the mattress. "My whole life, my father expected certain things of me. Same as he did of all of his children. I could never be the son he expected me to be. I tried, until I couldn't try anymore, and I was banished from the only home I'd known up to that point and sent somewhere I never wanted to go in the first place."
He glances back at the wings with a look of disapproval. "He gave me these. Gave them to the son he wanted me to be. The one I can never be. That's not who I am."
She steps towards the bed, her gaze moving over his wings. The idea of him throwing away something so beautiful is baffling enough, but for him to hurt himself to do it? She remembers the scars on his back, the way he grabbed her wrist so tightly to stop her from touching them. That felt like years ago, now.
"But he didn't give them back to you," she points out, taking another step forward. "You have them because you changed, Lucifer. Because you're starting to see yourself the way I do. Your father didn't give you your wings. You gave them to yourself."
She shakes her head, lifting her hand to gesture to him weakly.
"Why would you want them gone again?"
They are the sign of how far he's come. He may not be an angel, but he isn't completely devil anymore, either.
He can't answer that question. Or at least not in any way that she will understand. It's just something that he has to do in order to have some control over his life. Something rooting him to the person he knows he is, because as she's just reminded him, he's becoming less of that person every day, and he doesn't know what to do with that information. If he's not an angel, and he's not the Devil, then who, or what, is he? There's never been anything else.
"Without them, I'm sure of something." He knows, somehow, that she won't accept even that explanation, won't understand it, but it's the only one he has to give.
He stands up from the bed and tucks the wings away, the issue dropped for now, and walks past her and out of the bedroom to the balcony, in search of fresh air, or at least however much of it he can find in the heart of Los Angeles.
He's right. She doesn't understand. Chloe takes a breath and follows him out onto the balcony, her initial anger now replaced with concern. Lucifer is so complex, so deeply broken, sometimes she's not sure they can make this work.
"Sure of what?" She comes up next to him, staring out at the city for a long moment. She finally turns her head to look at him. "Lucifer, please. Don't shut me out again."
He had thought, not that long ago, that telling her the truth about himself, and about how he felt about her, would be the hardest thing he would ever have to do. He hasn't just become physically vulnerable because of her, but emotionally, too, and he never learned how to deal with either of them.
Which makes this even harder than anything he's done before. He doesn't know how to be vulnerable in this way, to deal with the hurt that could come with it.
He can't look at her when he answers. That would make it even harder. "Sure of what I am without them." The Devil. "With them, I don't know what I am." Angel wings and Devil face. What does that make him?
It was a beautiful day, blue skies, white clouds. There appeared to be pedestrians on the streets, workers at their desks, the precinct bustling and busy with the day to day of workings of mid murder investigation. Everything about this looked normal, everything was as it should be, and nothing suggested the truth of what this place really.
Cain's hell loop wasn't a cage of guilt, because he didn't feel guilty over any one particular act in the hundred centuries that he had spent living. He did what he did because he had to, he didn't regret or feel bad about it when he had been punished already for them, so that wasn't why he was here. There was no single torturous loop that played on his emotions of regret and choice not taken, road not walked, missed opportunities. Those were kind of impossible when he lived so many lifetimes and played out every single ending and then some.
No, his hell loop was simply life. The never ending facsimile of the gritty workings of day to day that he had tried so hard to rid himself of, brought on by the inner thought that he had been monstrous enough to deserve this.
Lucifer said it himself, deep down he saw himself as a monster, and perhaps he did enough to think that once again he didn't deserve a chance at an ending. The epilogue was once more out of his reach, and he could only trudge on, crushed by the repetitive bore of life carrying on around him. Without Decker though. He didn't deserve that.
Lucifer, of course, isn't stuck inside any Hell loop. He can leave any of them and pop into another one anytime he wants. Being the immortal Prince of Darkness does have its advantages. (If one doesn't consider the fact that he never wanted to rule over Hell in the first place, and is therefore stuck here anyway.) Today, when he's strolling through what he likes to call backstage, the infinite space between the cells that only he and the demons have access to, he finds himself whistling. Because he's dropping in on an old friend today, and this is a visit he's going to enjoy.
It's just Cain's bad luck that the life he's reliving comes with his own personal Devil. Lucifer opens the door and strolls in, whistling a cheery tune, and he's not surprised at all to find that this Hell loop looks just like the station in LA. He keeps whistling as he walks through the station and into the lieutenant's office, not bothering to knock first, grinning from ear to ear. "Good morning."
Cain never could fully tell if the Lucifer who visited him was Lucifer, or merely the version of him that was created to be part of his Loop because, clearly, it wouldn't be considered Hellish if he didn't have the annoying, irritating devil as a part of it.
He had figured out that it was a loop sometime ago, after the real Lucifer dropped by as a completely different Lucifer as the one who 'worked' for him. For most part, it was the latter, played by a demon who merely tormented him as a pale imitation of the real deal, but every so often something different happened.
Today, Cain looked up with annoyance at the chipper greeting Lucifer greeted him as he walked into his office, without as much as a knock, and made himself comfortable. It was enough to furrow Cain's brows and resulted in an annoyed glare at the offending consultant. "What are you doing here? I thought you were out with Decker." Just because Cain never got to see her didn't mean she didn't exist.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
post season 3 finale~
Date: 2018-12-02 03:00 am (UTC)The reality of everything still hasn't sunk in, but Charlotte's funeral is planned for the next day and as much as Chloe has on her plate between trying to be supportive of Dan and consoling a heartbroken Trixie, Lucifer is never far from her mind. There is a lot left unresolved, so much left unsaid, and Chloe isn't one to let sleeping dogs lie.
Her foremost fear is, strangely, that he will disappear again. That he will up and leave like he did the last time, that he will run away from his problems instead of confronting them. Seeing her partner as the devil he truly is didn't feel real, but none of what happened over the last few days has. In a way, as much as Chloe needs to find some resolution with him, she also needs to prove it to herself - that it isn't all in her mind.
Coming into Lux again knowing what she does, it seems changed. Everything is exactly the same, but there is something more to it now, something almost existential, like that feeling you get when you stare into the stars for too long. She makes her way up to the penthouse, trying to mentally prepare herself to find it abandoned, but when the door opens it seems the same. She steps in, as she has a million times before but, again, it all feels new. Bigger, maybe. More complex than she remembers it.
"Lucifer?" Her voice comes out in a near squeak and she grits her teeth, already annoyed with herself for sounding so unsure. After clearing her throat, she tries again. "Lucifer? Are you here?"
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 04:36 am (UTC)Besides, she doesn't really need his help solving murders. And he has his own business to tend to. Mostly involving avoiding thinking about how Amenadiel had been right.
He's glad to hear her come in to the apartment, and everyone would probably have a thing or two to say about that, too. He had expected that it might take longer than a few days, but then, he also knows that Chloe isn't like other humans.
"Detective." He's coming out of the bedroom, fully dressed save for a jacket, adjusting a cufflink. "Would you care for a drink?" he asks as he crosses to the bar. No doubt she has questions, but until she asks them, he'll act like it's any other day.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 05:19 am (UTC)She stands near the bar, her hands gripped together, twisting nervously as she watches him appear from the bedroom. He looks the same. He looks normal. It almost makes her wonder if she did imagine it.
"Yeah," she says, a little too quickly. "I mean, no. No, I don't want a drink." She's mixed up enough as it is, there is no point in throwing alcohol in the mix. "Lucifer, we need to talk about this."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 05:45 am (UTC)He motions to the couches. She's welcome to have a seat if she wants to, but he won't if she doesn't. "Where would you like to start?"
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 05:50 am (UTC)Which is silly, because she's not afraid of him. She's never been afraid of him. Lucifer has made her feel a lot of things--anger, annoyance, disappointment, love--but never fear.
"I..." Any confidence she might have grasped at falls away again, and she shifts to the side, taking a breath before she is able to level her gaze at him once again. "Why didn't you show me before? You could have proved it to me ages ago."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 06:11 am (UTC)"I wanted to." For whatever it turns out to be worth, he's never lied to her. "That was what I meant, when I left you that message. I meant to show you, and then I was kidnapped and dumped in the desert and woke up with a my wings and without my devil face." Thanks for that, Cain. You couldn't have picked a worse time. "Which is what I discovered the second time I wanted to show you, and after that I couldn't."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 06:38 am (UTC)Even as she says it, she knows exactly why he didn't. Although she hasn't entirely made sense of every single "metaphor" he'd shared with her during their time working together, it's all been slotting together somewhere in the back of her mind. The scars on his back, where he'd cut his wings off, when he grabbed her wrist to hold her back from touching him. He hated his wings. Of course he wouldn't show them to her.
"Wait, if you..." She pauses again, trying to think of words for things she's never imagined that don't sound ridiculous, but there isn't any, so she ventures on. "If you lost your devil face, how did you get it back? I saw it."
Clearly, she realizes now, not by his choice. He'd seemed just as baffled as she had been in that defining moment between them. It's only then that she realizes he didn't know he had it back.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 03:14 pm (UTC)"Amenadiel had this ridiculous theory." Just because it turned out to be true doesn't mean it's any less ridiculous. "He thought that it wasn't our father's doing that he lost his wings and I gained mine and lost my devil face. He thought that we did it to ourselves. He deserved to lose his wings, so he did." With the opposite meaning for him, as much as he doesn't want to admit it.
"He turned out to be correct." He reaches for some hidden spot behind the bar and pulls out a gray-tinged feather, too large to be from any bird, which he sets in front of her. "I found that at Charlotte's crime scene. Amenadiel got his wings back because he felt that he deserved them again." If he ever sees Amenadiel again, he has a few questions about that night.
"I got my devil face back because it's who I am. It's where I belong."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 04:11 pm (UTC)Only moments before she saw his devil face, she's told him she didn't see him that way. She's never seen him that way. As long as she had known him, he had insisted this is who he was. On the best of days, it made him charismatic, fun, outgoing. On his worst, it made him a monster.
At least, to him. What Chloe said was true - when she looked at him, she didn't see a monster. Even now, somehow, she still doesn't.
"No, you don't." Her voice is quiet and even. She looks down at the feather, her heart jumping in her throat. That meant Amenadiel had been there when Charlotte died. She'll have words about that, but not yet.
"If all of this is true--and believe me, I really wish it wasn't--but if it is..." She had told him they would be having a serious talk about all the things he hid from her. This isn't how she had expected it to go. "You stopped believing that was who you are. Why would you start again?"
She honestly doesn't know. Lucifer has come a long way since she met him. Apparently, a long enough way to believe himself back into being an angel. What would make him change his mind?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 05:31 pm (UTC)"People blame me for a lot of things. 'The Devil made me do it.' When all I really did was let humanity know that they had choices." Which had been his whole point from the start, with his siblings, and the events in Eden had had the added benefit of messing with his father's beloved creations. "Everyone who ends up in Hell does so because of their own choices, and their guilt over those choices. They believe they deserve punishment for their choices, and that's where I come in. Or used to." After millennia he hadn't wanted to stay there anymore, and the inhabitants don't really need him. Their guilt does as good a job at tormenting them as he ever did.
"It is -- was -- my job to punish those who deserve it, and that includes me. I don't lie, I don't steal, I don't take pleasure in punishing people, but killing, that deserves punishment."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-02 05:58 pm (UTC)She looks completely baffled. Granted, Chloe didn't condone murder and she didn't even particularly like killing, even if she had before. But what happened there was different.
"You did it to protect yourself. And me." Her breath catches as she stares at him, thinking about how just the night before it all happened she had kissed him, so eager to reclaim what they had lost. But they never really lost it, did they? It had always been there, no matter how much they tried to ignore it.
Knowing what she knows now, though... That should change things. It should.
"He said himself you'd never stop until you caught up with him. And he made it clear that he was going to kill me if I stood in the way of it." Whether he loved her or not--and she believed he had, in his own way--he loved himself more. Of course, she used to think that about Lucifer. "He murdered Charlotte, and God knows how many other people. He deserves Hell, he deserves to be punished. But you don't, not for that."
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:For thevulnerability
Date: 2018-12-25 03:39 pm (UTC)Tonight is as good a time as any. Better, in fact, because Chloe has plans and won't be dropping in. She won't know about it until it's done. No one will, because once again he's not asking Maze for help. He has to do this himself, before he doesn't do it at all.
His wings are healed now, with no evidence that they'd ever sheltered anyone from a hail of bullets. Spread out in his bedroom like this, they take up most of the space from wall to wall. Soon enough that won't be an issue.
He clutches the Hellblade in one hand and reaches behind him, slowly, then presses the edge of the blade against the spot where feathers meet skin. He clenches his other fist and closes his eyes -- against the pain, he tells himself -- and takes a deep breath as he prepares to begin to cut.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-25 09:48 pm (UTC)After girls night fell through (Ella got tickets to a concert she was dying to go to and Linda had the flu anyway), Chloe figured she'd already lined up the babysitter and might as well use the excuse to drop in on Lucifer with a surprise dinner. With paper bags of burgers and fries in hand, she pops out of the elevator and into the penthouse, moving in to drop the bags onto the bar top. From that vantage point, she can clearly see Lucifer, his wings outstretched in the bedroom, and she pauses for a moment, half hypnotized by them. Understandably, Chloe has never got a decent look at them, and since Lucifer never expressed any interest in showing her, she doesn't ask.
She's about to open her mouth when she sees what is in his hand - one of Maze's blades, hovering over his shoulder and towards the joint where those magnificent wings meet his back. It dawns on her suddenly and she lurches towards the bedroom, nearly tripping over the piano as she goes.
"Lucifer!"
no subject
Date: 2018-12-26 02:58 am (UTC)He lowers his hand as his wings droop behind him, but he doesn't drop the blade yet. "I didn't think you were going to be here tonight."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-26 06:29 am (UTC)She moves closer to him, her hands raised in front of her. It's an instinctive behavior now, trained into her by encountering too many deranged criminals with weapons, and she lowers them slightly when she realizes how it's probably coming off. She isn't worried Lucifer would do anything to her, but she obviously should have been concerned about what he might do to himself.
"Linda and Ella canceled. I figured I'd come by for dinner." She shifts her weight, her eyes narrow and wary. "Good thing, too, because I am not going to let you do this."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-26 09:59 pm (UTC)"You couldn't stop me." Except that she could, because right now he's as vulnerable as she is, and even though his strength isn't diminished, they both know he'd never use it on her.
And of course he can't really be angry at her, and it doesn't last. He loosens his grip on the blade but doesn't let go of it yet.
"This has nothing to do with you."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-27 05:39 am (UTC)He might never hurt her physically, but what he says does hurt. Chloe knows she's risking herself being with him, against odds that she isn't even entirely clear on. Of course this has to do with her.
"Just stop and think about this," she says, keeping her voice even and her eyes on his. "You're with me now, Lucifer. The things you do will have an effect on me, whether you think they will or not. Please... Let's just talk about this."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-27 06:04 am (UTC)He sits on the edge of the bed, blade still in his hand, wingtips brushing against the mattress. "My whole life, my father expected certain things of me. Same as he did of all of his children. I could never be the son he expected me to be. I tried, until I couldn't try anymore, and I was banished from the only home I'd known up to that point and sent somewhere I never wanted to go in the first place."
He glances back at the wings with a look of disapproval. "He gave me these. Gave them to the son he wanted me to be. The one I can never be. That's not who I am."
They're angel wings. He's not an angel.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-27 06:14 am (UTC)"But he didn't give them back to you," she points out, taking another step forward. "You have them because you changed, Lucifer. Because you're starting to see yourself the way I do. Your father didn't give you your wings. You gave them to yourself."
She shakes her head, lifting her hand to gesture to him weakly.
"Why would you want them gone again?"
They are the sign of how far he's come. He may not be an angel, but he isn't completely devil anymore, either.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 01:28 am (UTC)"Without them, I'm sure of something." He knows, somehow, that she won't accept even that explanation, won't understand it, but it's the only one he has to give.
He stands up from the bed and tucks the wings away, the issue dropped for now, and walks past her and out of the bedroom to the balcony, in search of fresh air, or at least however much of it he can find in the heart of Los Angeles.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 02:59 am (UTC)"Sure of what?" She comes up next to him, staring out at the city for a long moment. She finally turns her head to look at him. "Lucifer, please. Don't shut me out again."
no subject
Date: 2018-12-28 03:13 am (UTC)Which makes this even harder than anything he's done before. He doesn't know how to be vulnerable in this way, to deal with the hurt that could come with it.
He can't look at her when he answers. That would make it even harder. "Sure of what I am without them." The Devil. "With them, I don't know what I am." Angel wings and Devil face. What does that make him?
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:Hell
Date: 2021-06-17 07:54 am (UTC)Cain's hell loop wasn't a cage of guilt, because he didn't feel guilty over any one particular act in the hundred centuries that he had spent living. He did what he did because he had to, he didn't regret or feel bad about it when he had been punished already for them, so that wasn't why he was here. There was no single torturous loop that played on his emotions of regret and choice not taken, road not walked, missed opportunities. Those were kind of impossible when he lived so many lifetimes and played out every single ending and then some.
No, his hell loop was simply life. The never ending facsimile of the gritty workings of day to day that he had tried so hard to rid himself of, brought on by the inner thought that he had been monstrous enough to deserve this.
Lucifer said it himself, deep down he saw himself as a monster, and perhaps he did enough to think that once again he didn't deserve a chance at an ending. The epilogue was once more out of his reach, and he could only trudge on, crushed by the repetitive bore of life carrying on around him. Without Decker though. He didn't deserve that.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-23 01:15 am (UTC)It's just Cain's bad luck that the life he's reliving comes with his own personal Devil. Lucifer opens the door and strolls in, whistling a cheery tune, and he's not surprised at all to find that this Hell loop looks just like the station in LA. He keeps whistling as he walks through the station and into the lieutenant's office, not bothering to knock first, grinning from ear to ear. "Good morning."
Because he's in charge now.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-23 11:01 am (UTC)He had figured out that it was a loop sometime ago, after the real Lucifer dropped by as a completely different Lucifer as the one who 'worked' for him. For most part, it was the latter, played by a demon who merely tormented him as a pale imitation of the real deal, but every so often something different happened.
Today, Cain looked up with annoyance at the chipper greeting Lucifer greeted him as he walked into his office, without as much as a knock, and made himself comfortable. It was enough to furrow Cain's brows and resulted in an annoyed glare at the offending consultant. "What are you doing here? I thought you were out with Decker." Just because Cain never got to see her didn't mean she didn't exist.