Work Text:
Chloe checked herself for crumbs in the rear-view mirror and debated going back inside. On the one hand, Lucifer might sort out his clothes, hair and guyliner a little faster if she was there conspicuously tapping her foot; on the other hand, no force on Earth could make him pick an outfit faster and she definitely didn’t want to make small talk with any of his weird Devil-groupies as they left. Bad enough that she’d seen what she’d seen, without having faces to match to the tattoos and skin tones.
At least the muffin she’d snatched off the snack table had been good, although the aftertaste had been a little off. Probably gluten-free or sweetened with stevia or something. She didn’t even know why she’d taken it. She was starving, and… well. It had been a gesture of protest, or some reassurance to herself as she’d left that she wasn’t a sexually repressed prude, she could take snacks off an orgy refreshment table, she just believed people should lock their elevators before getting naked with seven other people.
While Chloe was still deconstructing her breakfast decisions, Lucifer opened the passenger-side door, slid into the seat, gave her a shameless smile. “Good morning to you, Detective,” he said, cheerful, conversational, like he hadn’t been buried ten minutes ago in a heap of writhing, sweating, moaning...
Chloe squeezed her eyes shut, trying to banish the mental image, but she might as well have had it tattooed on her retinas. It was going to be a long time before she would be able to forget stepping off the elevator and seeing… all that. “I still can’t believe you were in the middle of an orgy,” she said, “on a Tuesday morning.”
“Be fair, Detective, it was clearly the end of an orgy. And when would you schedule one?” Lucifer asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Evenings tend to be full up for me. And it really sets a positive tone for the rest of the day when you can start things off with ten hands on your...”
“Please, no,” Chloe said quickly, starting the car. “I can’t cope with details right now, we’ve got a case. And put your seatbelt on,” she added, before Lucifer could say anything about mandatory safety features creasing his suit. “Ugh, my mouth feels super dry, maybe we can stop for coffee somewhere.”
+++
The coffee didn’t help. If anything, it made the taste in her mouth worse, although some of that was probably this crime scene. The smell of patchouli was an assault, all on its own.
“Pet psychic and independent homeopathic incense artisan? That’s a very Southern California career path,” Lucifer observed, standing a bit awkwardly amidst the clutter as he read from a stack of business cards. Drying incense sticks hung from the ceiling in batches and Lucifer had to tilt his head and scrunch so as not to disturb them as he moved around. “Hard to imagine there’s enough money in that to employ two people,” he observed.
“Probably why they only work two days a week,” Ella said, from her usual position next to the deceased. She stood up, dusting off her gloved palms. “According to the schedule, today’s one of the days, but it looks like ‘R.J.’ didn’t show up.”
“Or did show up, with a grudge to resolve.” Lucifer prodded a cylinder of incense dough with his finger.
“Put some gloves on, Lucifer,” Chloe reminded him. He ignored her, as expected, so she turned her attention to Ella rather than argue. “So, what happened to this guy?”
“Desmond Tortilo, age 44, neighbor called it in, said she ‘heard shots’ this morning,” Ella said.
“So he was shot?” Lucifer asked, batting incense out of his eyes.
“Nah, that’s the totally crazy thing!” Ella said, walking easily under the racks of bundled incense sticks. “Check this out,” as she picked up an evidence-bagged metal object, a bracketed plate with neat rows of holes in it and a sharp corner on both ends. And blood all over it. “He was stabbed. In his neck! With this. Uniforms found it in the garden. It’s one of the the plates from the big extruder machine out back.”
Chloe glanced out the window, shielding her eyes from the glare with her hand. “Hmm. Hidden from the street by those bougainvilleas,” she said thoughtfully, before turning her attention back to the murder weapon. “Nothing to grip, and all the edges are sharp. Not exactly easy to do without cutting yourself,” she said.
“Yeah, we’re hoping the killer’s blood will be on those wicked sharp edges, along with our vic's. Doesn’t explain what the neighbor lady heard, though.”
“I’ll want to talk to the neighbor, find out what she heard exactly. And maybe she knows who R.J. is. We should get a statement from whoever's across the street, see if they can corroborate hearing a sound...” Chloe trailed off as Ella leaned in close suddenly, staring into her eyes. “What?” Chloe asked.
“Huh. Did you have an eye exam this morning, or something?”
“No,” Chloe said, realizing that Ella must have noticed her squinting. “The lights are just really bright in here. Um. Aren’t they?”
“Not really. Never mind,” Ella said. “Anyway, I’ll finish up here and get started on the lab work, see you back at the precinct.”
Chloe rubbed her eyes. “Uh, yeah. Don’t forget to get samples of whatever he was working on today, in case it’s related.”
“Already on it,” Ella replied, rolling her eyes as she turned away. Chloe dabbed at her forehead with her sleeve. Was she getting sick? This is what happens to people who eat orgy muffins, Penelope Decker’s voice said in her mind. What did I tell you, a hundred times?
You never once said a thing to me about orgy muffins, Mom, Chloe pointed out firmly, before she realized she was arguing with a voice in her head, never a good sign. She let Lucifer drive her car without protest, and answered his questions about the case with non-committal, monosyllabic responses.
Her faint sense of anxiety worsened. Too much caffeine, she thought. Jittery. But it felt worse than that, a burgeoning sense of unreality that lasted the entire drive back to the precinct, all the way through the double doors of the building and halfway down the stairs to the bullpen, where she finally had to stop in her tracks.
“Something wrong, Detective?” Lucifer said, half a step behind her, as usual.
Chloe put her palm on the handrail to steady herself. She felt… deeply strange. Peculiarly, so did the handrail: a perfectly mundane object that she had touched a thousand times, but how had she never noticed the lacquered smoothness, the faint oiliness where hands had polished it, the warmth of the wood contrasted with the chill of the sleek brass fittings? The transition between the two textures, that was an amazing thing to have taken for granted all these… wait, hang on.
“Lucifer,” she said, carefully, a little too aware of the way her mouth shaped the syllables, “were there recreational drugs at your party?”
“Oh, yes, a few. Cannabis, salvia, poppers of course, a bit of MDMA floating around, some acid,” Lucifer admitted, far too readily, given his surroundings. “I lose track. Why, do you…?” He gave her the same scrutinizing look that Ella had, looking into her eyes. “Wait. You didn’t eat anything, did you?”
The jolt of panic was enough to distract Chloe from her communion with the handrail. “It was just a muffin!” she hissed. “In a bakery box! Muffins are safe, who puts illicit substances in a muffin, I skipped breakfast and you were taking so long to put some freaking clothes on…”
“Ah,” Lucifer said, grabbing her by the elbow and steering her back the way they had come. “Looks like your very important reports will have to wait, the middle of a police station is no place to come up on X; believe me, I’ve tried it.”
She had to half-jog to match his long strides as he guided her back out to parking, and that felt odd, too; floaty and dreamlike, as though the hard asphalt was shifting slightly under her shoes like sand. “I am,” Chloe pronounced shakily, “in so much trouble… I’m definitely going to lose my job… and I’m setting a terrible example for Trixie...”
“No, you won’t,” Lucifer said calmly, as they reached her car. He opened the back door, waving her in. “And no, you’re not, your spawn will have completely different drugs to experiment with when she’s old enough, don’t worry.”
That was less than reassuring and it failed to address the deeper issue. Chloe balked. “No, I can’t go home, I can’t be around Trixie like this…”
Lucifer held up his phone. She hadn’t seen him take it out. “I texted Detective Douche, he’s getting an overnight bag from your place and he’ll pick your offspring up from school,” Lucifer said. Which… didn’t sound like a thing Dan would just go along with, even if he’d been weirdly agreeable around Lucifer lately. Not for the first time, Chloe wondered what exactly had gone down between those two when she’d been in the hospital.
“What did you tell him,” Chloe demanded. “And… why are you trying to put me in the backseat?” she added, although she complied even as she voiced her objection, sliding into the back like a suspect. Lucifer shut the door and got into the driver’s seat as the engine started with a jolt. Wait, aren’t my keys still in my pocket? Chloe thought, a thought which immediately drowned in the sensation of movement as the car reversed.
“You’re going to want some room to stretch out,” Lucifer said. “For the fun part.”
“The fun part?” All Chloe could feel was a horrible internal tension, like she was getting heavier and also bursting with energy at the same time. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold it together. “I feel awful. I might need to go to the hospital, actually,” she said suddenly, intensely aware of her heartbeat. “Something’s definitely wrong. I… I’m…”
“Chloe,” Lucifer said, and she met his eyes in the mirror. “Can you trust me?”
Such was her sense of distortion that Chloe found she had plenty of time to consider the question. The answer to Do you trust me? from Lucifer was an obvious No, of course not, how could I, you’ve let me down more times than I can count and the stupid metaphors you insist on clinging to make you impossible to connect with on a personal level, and as for Candy Morningstar… but that wasn’t what he had asked. Lucifer, who was always so careful and precise with his words, had said, Can you trust me? which was different. “I want to,” she said, adding in a panicked rush, “Lucifer, I really want to trust you, but this sucks and I’m scared.” The awful, tense sense of energy was building up like impending doom. It hadn’t been that long since she’d been poisoned; this was different but it was similar enough to that feeling of being chemically altered and not in control. She was certain something terrible was about to happen.
“Get comfortable,” Lucifer said, “however you can. Lean back or lie down on the seat. It’ll hit you in waves. Stop fighting them, try to enjoy it, this part won’t last long, you’ll be fine after and we’ll talk then. Okay?” Chloe nodded, although she wasn’t quite sure what she was responding to; Lucifer’s voice was getting harder and harder to pick out of the road noise and the rush of air moving past the car, all the million sounds of a busy street in L.A. “Oh, and don’t clench your teeth,” she thought she heard him say, and then the world compressed.
Chloe clenched her teeth as a warm rush of… sensation? Emotion? Rolled over her like a wave, and kept rolling. She sighed and let the gentle curve of the 710 on-ramp spill her over onto the seat. What followed was a timeless, indescribable interlude of… well, the only reason Chloe couldn’t call it “orgasmic” was because her genitals didn’t seem to be involved. She hasn't even known it was possible to climax with… what, her feelings instead of her body? Except that it just went on and on, pulsing and receding and pulsing again, a rush of wordless chemistry.
As her conscious awareness throbbed back into her body, she discovered that the car was no longer moving and that she’d twisted around on the seat, pressing her face into the upholstery with enough force to mark the thread pattern into her cheekbone. She rubbed at it, astonished by the texture of her own skin. Everything was still… really, really weird, definitely not normal, but she wasn’t completely incapacitated. She felt… okay, actually. Pretty good. Very relaxed. “What,” Chloe said, sitting up slowly, “the hell was that?”
“Rolling,” Lucifer said. “That’s why it’s called ‘ecstasy’, Detective. Really, all those years in Hollywood and you never experimented before now?”
“This isn’t an experiment,” Chloe said. “This is a disaster.” She looked around, taking in the immediately familiar side street with the valet parking attendants waiting patiently for them to leave the car. “Wait, Lucifer, no, we can’t be at your club, this is the worst idea…” although she couldn’t actually think of a better one.
“We can’t go back to your place, Maze will be there. You don’t want to be around Maze in your condition, trust me,” Lucifer said, echoing Chloe’s own immediate thought.
She still looked sceptical. “What about your… er… guests?”
“They’ll all have cleared out by now, and the cleaning crew has been through. Should be nice and quiet, club won’t be open for hours… and while I would recommend the club to some people in your situation, you definitely seem like the cool-drinks-soft-music-and-privacy type, more than the hours-of-dancing-sweatily type. So: penthouse it is.”
That reasoning seemed sound to Chloe. Part of the reason she had never tried E, which had certainly been available in her social circle in the 90s, was because she didn’t much care for the rave scene it was usually associated with. But... “Before I go upstairs,” Chloe said, “Lucifer, seriously, promise me you aren’t going to try to make this into a weird freaky sex thing. You can call me a cab right now if that’s where you’re going with this.”
Lucifer looked somewhat wounded by the suggestion, but didn’t argue. “I promise, Detective, you’re completely safe with me.”
“That’s really not what I asked.” She let him help her out of the car, with minimal coaching. Seatbelt off first, Decker, then exit.
“No sex at all of any kind tonight, then, I swear. Devil’s honor.” Chloe caught the “tonight” but that was probably good enough.
“Okay,” she said, ‘but I get to shoot you if you break that promise.”
“I never break my promises,” he replied, opening LUX’s door.
There was a brief oh god everyone can see how high you are moment when they walked across the club, which was nearly empty, but not totally desolate, even this early on a weekday. Some private party, or an employee thing, she guessed. No one paid them any attention, even though Chloe was having trouble remembering how many legs she had. Sensory hyper-awareness was interesting but it was a lot of information to keep track of and everything felt weirdly raw and new. She let herself lean on Lucifer as they rode the elevator to the penthouse. Being able to feel all the tiny adjustments the muscles in her legs made constantly was interesting but it was increasingly hard to keep her balance.
The penthouse was as tidy as if the regularly-scheduled Tuesday morning orgy had never happened. The mattress that had been spread out on the floor was gone; the pillows and rugs were still there, though, the armchairs still pushed aside to make room. The “refreshments” table was also conspicuously absent.
“The muffins,” Chloe said, remembering. “They were in a bakery box, that’s why I figured they were safe to eat. What was up with that? Is there a… an illegal bakery somewhere? How many people do I actually need to arrest?”
Lucifer gave her a hard look, like he wasn’t sure she was joking. “I think Remedy brought those in. Lovely girl, brilliant masseuse, I keep telling her she should go pro. She works at a bakery. Very health-conscious. She brings her ‘special’ party favors in those boxes for convenience, I suppose.” He straightened his shirt cuffs thoughtfully. “Hopefully she never mixes them up with the regular ones, although now that I think about it, some of her bakery regulars are very loyal.”
More information to process, and Chloe was having difficulty thinking clearly. Additionally, her layered, business-casual outfit, which had been perfectly comfortable when she’d put it on this morning, was chafing her in places she didn’t like to be chafed. She rubbed at the band of her bra irritably.
Lucifer noticed, because of course he did. “If I offer you the chance to slip into something a little more comfortable,” he said with exaggerated caution, “am I going to catch a bullet?” Chloe gave him a Look, but elected not to go for her weapon. “I have plenty of dressing gowns. Bathrobes,” he amended. “Much nicer to have against your skin at a time like this than”--he plucked at her sleeve--”rayon.”
Chloe snorted. Lucifer said “rayon” the way anyone else would say “a dead possum”. “All right, I’ll have a look,” she said, and followed him across his penthouse.
She knew Lucifer was a clothes horse, but she had underestimated the scope by several orders of magnitude. His walk-in closet--well, no, she couldn’t even call it a closet, if it had a window it would be a bedroom--was bigger than Trixie’s room. It was bigger than her first apartment. Even more ridiculous, since, to Chloe’s eye, Lucifer wore basically the same thing every day. Who on Earth needed this many suits?
She reached out and brushed her hand over a hanging sleeve, then fingered the cloth, wonderingly. Fabric was fabric, as far as Chloe was concerned, largely distinguishable by color, pattern, and price. How had she never really touched one of Lucifer’s suits before?
Lucifer broke into a sudden smile. “Having one of those trips, are you? Here,” he said, taking two apparently identical suit jackets down and holding them out to her. “Pet these.”
She did so, one after the other and then both at once, with each hand. “They feel so different.”
“One’s Italian worsted and cashmere, the other’s Australian merino. And here’s linen,” he said, adding a light blue. “For the contrast.”
Compared to the wool fabric, the linen was crisp, but also rougher to her fingertips, it didn’t have that animal-fur polished sleekness. “Oh. Wow. Do you have anything made of silk?” Chloe had had a friend in high school who’d loved to smoke weed and twine her silk scarf through her hands.
“Do I,” Lucifer said, amused, and pulled a shirt off a different rack. It was a deep, bloody crimson and supple in her hands, although the way the silk fibers caught the rough skin on her palms wasn’t entirely pleasant. It felt wonderful against her face, though, as she rubbed it on her cheek like a cat. “You can wear that, if you like,” Lucifer said. “It’s long enough, it will cover you.”
“Oh, right,” Chloe said, remembering the mission, and handing the shirt back with a little twinge of regret. She was pretty certain her current mechanical aptitude level was somewhere below buttons. “No, I think you were onto something with the bathrobe idea, show me what you have.”
“Over here,” Lucifer said, moving back to the doorway and pushing a sliding rack aside, revealing several robes of various materials and weights. And sizes, which was unsurprising, given Lucifer’s rota of guests.
One was even a gold silk; she brushed her hands over it but she wanted something heavier. She’d feel naked in a silk robe. The one she ended up choosing was clearly one of Lucifer’s personal dressing gowns: it probably would have hit him around mid-shin but it was nearly ankle-length on her, thick and soft and dark with enough satin trim to play with. “A little privacy while I change?” she suggested. “Geez, this place needs some doors,” she muttered.
“No, it doesn’t,” Lucifer said evenly, putting the gold silk back up and smoothing it before turning to leave. “I’ll be right outside if you need help with… anything.”
Chloe did figure out the correct sequence to escape her trousers, eventually, without assistance. “So what happens now?” she asked, unable to suppress a happy sigh as the thick bathrobe engulfed her from shoulders to ankles and she stepped out of Lucifer’s closet.
“That’s pretty much it,” Lucifer said. “How you feel right now is how you’re going to feel for the rest of the day. Kick back, touch things, stay hydrated, try not to grind your teeth or you’ll have a sore jaw tomorrow.” He shrugged as they strolled back to the pillow nest on the floor. Chloe eyed an armchair, but flopped on the floor like Trixie often did after school. Lucifer went on: “There’s nothing to worry about. Unless you ate the muffin wrapper as well.”
Chloe’s eyes widened. “Why, what happens if I ate the muffin wrapper?”
“...Um.”
“Lucifer!”
Lucifer looked mildly appalled. “Do you... normally eat muffin wrappers? Like a goat? What a terrible thing to know about you, that’s even worse than your middle name.”
“It’s a perfectly normal thing to do! It’s more delicious muffin! If I don’t eat it I have to put it in my pocket and remember to throw it away later! What was in the muffin wrapper,” she said, her voice rising to a squeak.
“LSD,” Lucifer said, weakly. “You really didn’t notice the little devil sticker? Gah, remind me never to get between you and baked goods.”
“Oh. Well. Damn it,” Chloe said, but she relaxed back onto the pillows. “Ugh. At least I’ve dropped acid before,” she admitted. “Back during Hot Tub High School with some friends on the crew. It wasn’t a good time, but it was okay, I guess.”
“Oh, I do love hearing about your sordid past,” Lucifer said, with what sounded like a relieved sigh. “I hope candy-flipping is a better experience overall, although typically you take the acid first and then pop the E when you’re coming down, not devour them both at once like a starving muffin shark.”
Chloe snorted. “Actually, that reminds me. Flippin’ Candy,” she said. “Were you ever going to explain what happened there?”
Lucifer groaned. “I wish Remedy had left me some muffins, it’s terribly unfair to have this conversation with you high and me sober.” Lucifer started to get up. “Actually, around here somewhere I think I might have some…”
Chloe hooked his elbow with her foot. “Hold up, please don’t admit to possessing anything I’d have to book you for, I feel like enough of a hypocrite as it is,” she interrupted, although Lucifer noted, with some relief, that she was smiling.
“Fine,” he sighed, “let’s talk about Candy. Where to start?”
“How about with why you married that bimbo in the first place?”
“There was more than one reason,” Lucifer said, cagily.
Chloe pretended to consider this. “Hmm. Let me guess. Were there exactly two reasons? Two full, round, bouncy reasons?”
“My dear Detective, I had no idea you appreciated Candy’s… attributes in that way. But no, alas, Candy and I never slept together, and I never saw her sweater puppies, it was purely a business arrangement.”
Chloe couldn’t help giggling over the way Lucifer said “sweater puppies”. “What kind of business?”
“Ah, well. Candy needed some cash up front and a mysterious spouse to keep her family’s property in her hands, and I needed some information from my mum that she wouldn’t give me willingly. I thought she might let it slip to someone she perceived as harmless and not very bright.”
“Candy certainly gave off that impression,” Chloe said.
“Yes, and an impression was all it was. She’s a very good and clever woman, Candy is. I owe her a great deal, and I’m sorry you didn’t see her best side. You would have liked her, I think, had you met in better circumstances. Don’t clench your teeth,” he reminded her.
Chloe, who hadn’t noticed she was doing that, stopped. “So, wait, what about your... mum? You mean your stepmother? Charlotte? What was she doing?”
“Trying to manipulate me into doing something I didn’t want to do. No matter,” he said dismissively, “I didn’t do it and now she can’t leverage that against me any more. Just family stuff, you know how it is.”
“Families,” Chloe agreed. “God. Trixie. I hope she knows I’m okay. What did you say to Dan?”
“That we were working a case, and that you wouldn’t be able to come home tonight,” Lucifer said. “Both of which are true, or were true at the time. He said he’d tend to the offspring, anyway.”
Chloe winced. “You know, it really bothers me that you won’t say my daughter’s name,” Chloe said. “She’s a person, not a pet.” Lucifer didn’t respond, and Chloe continued her thought. “Although… you don’t really like to use anyone’s name, do you? Detective, Doctor,” she giggled, “‘Douche’. What’s up with that?”
“Names are formal, titles are casual,” Lucifer said, brusquely. “And ‘President of Mars’ is a mouthful.”
“Well. You do pay attention,” Chloe said, idly stroking the nap of the bathrobe she was wearing. “Still, ‘Spawn’?”
“Beatrice,” Lucifer said carefully, “thinks it’s funny.”
“I suppose,” Chloe conceded, running one hand over the back of her knuckles. “Hey, can you take your shirt off?”
“Detective…?”
“I dunno, my skin feels really strange right now, I want to see if yours does too.” Lucifer gave her a look of mild concern. “Oh come on, usually I have to convince you to keep your clothing on. Just lose the shirt, it’s not a violation of your sworn oath or whatever.” She paused, thoughtfully. “Also I think I left my sidearm in your dressing room. Wow, that’s not good. Maybe I deserve to get fired,” she muttered, although it was hard to feel the dread that thought should produce right now.
Lucifer raised his eyebrows at her but he shrugged out of his jacket and tugged his shirt out of his waistband without standing up, unbuttoning it neatly. Chloe waited impatiently while he carefully folded the clothes, fussing with the jacket creases, but eventually he settled back down, topless, his skin oddly luminous to her eyes in their dim surroundings. Chloe scooted a little closer and ran her hand over his arm, from his shoulder to the bend of his elbow. “Oh, wow,” she said. “You’re so warm,” but that wasn’t the half of it, she could feel the way his skin shifted over muscle and the pulse of blood underneath, the difference between the way the thick skin over his back rolled over tendon and bone compared to the more delicate skin at the crease of his elbow.
“That tickles,” he said mildly.
“Sorry,” she replied, yanking her hand away before replacing it and stroking more gently.
“I didn’t say ‘stop’,” he said. Chloe smiled and ran her hands over the flat planes of his back, feeling the way the different muscle groups gathered and fanned out in their intricately layered patterns. More than that, she was keenly aware of the tension and flex of bone and tendon in her own hands, in a way she never had been before. She spread her fingers out, then brought them together as she stroked Lucifer between the shoulder blades, feeling the knobs of bone along his spine.
“Can I touch the scars?” she blurted out. He flinched, and she immediately felt contrite. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I know you don’t like it, but they look very soft and I thought… anyway, it’s… never mind. I’ll leave them alone. I… I apologize. For, um, reminding you.”
Lucifer held very still, and Chloe worried she’d really offended him. But: “You can touch them,” he said, after a moment. “If you like.”
She carefully traced a single finger over the edge of the nearest one of the pair of matched crescent scars on his back. He shivered, but didn’t resist. For the thousandth time, she wondered what could have done that to him, but she knew better than to ask him again. She traced the blade of her finger through the center of the healed wound, noting the inelasticity of the rugged tissue, the way it tacked to the muscle beneath in places. It was eerie and awesome and sad. “Can you feel that?” she asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “Not unless you press down a lot harder. But I don’t… I don’t want to talk about them,” he said. “Not right now.”
Chloe ran her hands once more through the center of the scars, the whorls of ragged flesh smoothing under her fingertips, then returned both hands to the more neutral territory of Lucifer’s shoulders. She felt, more than heard, him sigh. “Thank you,” she said. “That was… weirdly intimate. Thank you.”
“Mmm. It was, wasn’t it?”
Impulsively, she reached across him, groping for his belt. He gently caught her hand, enfolded her fingers with his own. “No,” Lucifer said, quietly. “I’m sorry, Detective, that’s what the Doctor would call a ‘boundary’. I did make you a promise, as you’ll recall.”
“I’m an adult, I can change my mind if I want to,” Chloe said, sounding a little petulant even to herself. “You just feel so amazing right now,” and it was true, the amount of tactile information her fingertips were able to process was staggering, she couldn’t even begin to imagine how other parts would feel to be touched. “I bet sex would be incredible.”
“It would,” Lucifer affirmed. “And in the morning you’d resent me for taking advantage of you in this state and feel guilty and ashamed and punish me for it.”
“I would not,” Chloe retorted immediately, then sighed, pulling her hands away. “No, you’re right. I totally would. Why is that so easy to admit?”
“Wonderful stuff, X. They used to use it in couples’ therapy, makes you more empathetic and open about your feelings. Harder to lie, to yourself or anyone. Very useful for sorting out conflicts. And for having mind-blowing sex, of course, which is something a lot of struggling marriages can benefit from.”
Chloe scoffed. “I can think of a marriage or two that communication and mind-blowing sex couldn’t save,” she said. “So… is this how other people feel around you all the time? With your mojo thing?”
“Huh. Never really thought of it that way. Perhaps,” Lucifer said thoughtfully. “Feeling the acid yet? You’ve done that part before, you’ll know it’s working when the walls melt.”
Chloe giggled. “Maybe a little bit,” she said. She had noticed the patterns on the floor and blankets beginning to pulse and flex, and the weird way Lucifer’s scar tissue had seemed to writhe. She was carefully not looking at Lucifer’s face; her last acid trip had gone south when she realized how unsettling human faces were to look at while it was going on. She sat up, and her vestibular sense seemed to lag a little behind the movement, giving her mild vertigo. “Yeah, definitely feeling something.”
She risked a glance at Lucifer, and gasped involuntarily, even though she was half-expecting to see something disorienting and strange. Yeah, the LSD was kicking in for sure.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. She looked away, blinking, like that would clear her vision. Maybe the scene kids were onto something; with the MDMA in her system, it was easier to remember that the LSD weirdness wasn’t real and to sort of enjoy the effect.
“Ugh, it’s fine. The acid hit me like this last time. Your face looks really weird right now, all scarred and discolored. With, like, crazy glowing eyes.” She laughed, although Lucifer didn’t seem to think it was funny.
“What?” he said, a note of genuine panic in his voice as he patted his face with his hands. “No, I… I can’t possibly have… not without noticing,” he said, reaching back onto the chair behind him for the flask in his jacket pocket. She thought he was going for a swig but he was just looking at himself in the mirrored surface, like he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Weird thing to do, even for someone as vain as he was.
“Lucifer, no, it’s fine, your face is fine. I’m just on drugs,” she reminded him. But he still looked genuinely shaken. “Come on,” she said, standing up and re-cinching her robe, offering him her hand. “Let’s go outside for a bit, I want some fresh air and I feel like I’m gonna need to lie down soon.” Lucifer took her hand, although he didn’t abandon his flask, and let Chloe brace herself against his weight as he pulled himself upright.
The walk out to the balcony seemed longer than usual, and also uphill, but they made it. The LSD was more obvious out here, with the plants twisting sinuously in their pots, the buildings wavering as if in a heat shimmer, and the traffic on the freeway below appearing to rise up into the air. “Wow,” she said. “Yikes.” She looked back at Lucifer; the ridges of his scalp and the discoloration of his skin were also trippy but at least it was familiar, and nothing was squirming.
He eyed her askance. “Do I still look... strange to you?”
“Yeah,” Chloe admitted. “But... strange in a normal way, if that makes any sense.” She sighed, and rested her hand on Lucifer’s shoulder, feeling the soft, smooth, normal texture of his skin and not the hard ridges that her eyes kept trying to insist was there. “Drugs are weird.”
“Right,” Lucifer said, glancing at the back of his flask again. “Weird.”
Chloe shrugged out of the bathrobe a little bit, let the sun and the breeze touch her shoulders. “Mmm.”
“Enjoy the breeze, if you want. I won’t judge.” Chloe opened the robe a little bit, let the air in, then shrugged out of it entirely. Lucifer caught it before it hit the floor. “Oh, that’s nice. But can’t anyone just… look up and see me?”
“Only if they’re looking,” Lucifer said. “With a telescope. In which case, they’ve earned their eyeful and should make the most of the opportunity.”
Chloe took the robe from Lucifer and put it back on hastily. “Guess I’m not that adventurous,” she said. “At least I don’t want to have sex any more. Everything’s gone… uh… a bit wobbly.”
Lucifer smiled. “There are plenty of things we can do that will feel amazing and which you won’t punish yourself for when you’re sober. Want to lay on the piano while I play it?”
Chloe’s eyes widened. “Oh my God, that sounds incredible.”
It was. Lucifer knew a ridiculous amount of music, and although Chloe’s ability to follow or identify a melody was somewhat compromised, she could revel in the way the notes seemed to chime in her bones through the piano lid. It didn’t matter that they didn’t make sense. Or, well, mostly didn’t make sense. “Is that Britney Spears?”
Lucifer plinked the melody line to “Baby One More Time”. “Might be.”
Chloe giggled and attempted to dismount the piano, which resulted in a near-tangle of legs as she misjudged the distance and Lucifer lunged to catch her, but it ended with both of them upright. “Lying down, I need to,” she tried to explain, and he carried her to his stupid, enormous bed.
The bed was too soft and the bedding was too complicated, she couldn’t understand the layers and she sank into them, feeling like she was adrift on the ocean, making vague swimming motions with her hands and feet to stay afloat. And then everything just got entirely weird for a while. The room got darker and the lights turned red and blue, oscillating like the top lights on a squad car, which was fine, Chloe thought, but then the red started to dominate, flickering around her with a crackle of heat.
“The building isn’t on fire, is it,” she murmured, not sure if Lucifer was still in the room.
“It’s not,” he affirmed.
“Good,” Chloe said. “We should leave, if there’s a fire.”
Lucifer made an agreeable noise and she heard a page turn. No, it wasn’t a page, it was the flywheel of an incense machine, forcing the dough out through the holes in the plate, where it could be straightened and dried into sticks… force… fire… explosion... vacuum… Chloe gasped. “The plate!” she yelled.
Lucifer dropped his book. “What?”
Words were rough and confusing things, made of sludge, like aromatic wood pulp. Chloe tried to mix them into a dough and extrude them, but she kept saying things in the wrong order. And also Lucifer’s eyes were still glowing, which was incredibly distracting when she was trying to talk to him. Eventually, with a combination of babbling, gestures, and at one point, drawing on a napkin, she was able to explain that the vacuum seal that kept air bubbles out of the incense had failed catastrophically and the plate must have been incorrectly bolted down. It exploded at the only point it could explode, and the ballistic plate had caught Tortilo in the back of the head.
“So our gruesome homicide was an accident?” Lucifer said. “That’s disappointing.”
“The employee--R.J.--still ran instead of calling the cops,” Chloe said slowly. “And he must have been operating the machine, that could be a manslaughter charge.”
“Oh, well, manslaughter,” Lucifer said dismissively. “Hardly worth punishing anyone for. Still, it’s very… ‘you’ to solve a case while barely able to string sentences together. I’ll send Ella a text, make sure she’s on the same page.”
“Use words, not emojis!” Chloe reminded him, sinking back into semi-consciousness.
“Don’t clench your teeth!” he retorted.
+++
Chloe stared at the ceiling, which was awash in brilliant, unforgiving sunlight. Her jaw ached and she couldn’t recall ever having been more tired in her life. Not after college all-nighters, not after a nineteen-hour shoot, not on a stakeout. Maybe after giving birth to Trixie, but that particular transcendental full-body-and-soul exhaustion at least hadn’t come with a hangover. “Oh, God,” she muttered.
“Not even close,” said Lucifer, beside her. “I’m told there’s not much of a family resemblance.”
Also unlike a normal hangover, she could remember everything she said and thought and did the previous night. Every little thing. Candy Morningstar. Petting Lucifer’s back scars. Nearly falling off the piano. Mooning the entire Los Angeles strip. Not having to wonder about where her clothes had ended up was a mixed blessing. “Oh, God,” Chloe repeated.
“Nope, still the Devil, I’m afraid. How are you feeling?” Chloe groaned in response and dragged a pillow over her head. Lucifer grinned. She could hear him grin. “That good? It’ll be better after some food and a shower, not necessarily in that order. I’ve cleared your schedule for today.”
Chloe peeled one eye open and glared from under her pillow-shield. “How,” she croaked.
“You never take personal days. Or sick days. Or vacations. Honestly, you could stand to slack off a bit more, it’s not healthy to be this devoted to your work,” Lucifer was saying. “Anyway, the lieutenant owes me several favors, so I cashed one in.”
“Huh. That’s… kind of you, I suppose, but I’m still definitely going to get fired if there’s a drug screening this week and they find out what’s hanging around my system,” Chloe said, despondently.
“Who’s going to tell them? You and I both know your department can’t afford to do random drug tests.” Now that Chloe thought about it, she’d only ever been called in for a “random” screening within days after discharging her weapon. “Try not to shoot anyone for a week or two and you’ll be fine.”
“Lucifer…”
“Well, of course, if you really need to shoot someone, I understand. I can certainly get you some clean pee, no questions asked. We should have a code phrase if you need me to slip you the stuff. Oh! I know: ‘monkeybottoms’. That's easy to remember, and easy to casually work into a sentence.”
“Lucifer!”
“What?” he asked, innocently.
She sighed. “I should probably be concerned with how willing you are to circumvent the law for me, shouldn’t I,” Chloe said, nestling back into the decadent Egyptian cotton sheets.
“Probably,” he said. “What are you going to do instead?”
“Hmm. Go back to sleep until there’s food,” she decided.
“I could order up some muffins from the bakery down the street,” Lucifer suggested, apparently just to see the look on her face.
“Bring me my gun,” Chloe growled. “It’s not too late to shoot you.”
He laughed. “That’s my Detective. I’ll fix some eggs.”