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He’s fluffy after the shower, a quick blast from his keratin hair dryer sending a tumble of curls pluming from the top of his head like black smoke.
It’s such a relief to see him like this, after all the peacocking he did to draw her attention from Pierce. Cain, she has to remind herself, even months later. But whoever he really was, he’d sent Lucifer into a tailspin of far too much hairspray and ludicrously expensive cologne and a fair bit of make-up, too, she’s pretty sure. There’d been times his look had been verging on plastic, so there’s something brand new and incredibly special about the privilege of seeing Lucifer Morningstar without all the bells and whistles. With his guard down. Still sleepy and boneless with relaxation from the shower they’d shared on a sun-drenched Saturday morning. No eyeliner, no hair product, and no manic energy.
She knows exactly what it means, even if he doesn’t.
It means that he trusts her, with what’s beneath.
“Alright, you,” she points him to the smooth black comforter, already warming for him in the pool of sunlight spilling through the sheer curtains. He ambles from the bathroom, golden skin scrubbed and flushed from the hot water. “Come here. Wings out.”
He obeys without a word, eyes half-lidded and a dopey, cozy smile across his face as he crawls onto the bedspread like a lizard on his belly to warm in the sun. He waits until Chloe’s stepped back, then two feathered geysers of brilliant white erupt from his back, and settle gently on either side of him, like giant white tablecloths draping down to brush at the stone floor.
Chloe always tries to catch the moment they appear. She’s asked him to do it slowly, but he couldn’t, so now she just watches with every ounce of attention she has as the smooth skin of his very human-looking back becomes endowed with two decidedly non-human limbs. But it’s like reality skips that second. Like her eyes stop seeing, or time stops running, just for that slippery fraction of a moment and the more closely she looks, the more completely she misses it.
“It’s like… I don’t know,” he’d hummed when she asked, trying to think of a comparable example. “Like straightening your arm.”
She hadn’t been satisfied with that answer. “But your arm is always there.”
“As are my wings.” Lucifer had tilted his head. “Whether or not you can see them hardly matters.”
Now, she climbs atop the bed and he brings his legs together to make it easier for her to straddle him. His ass gets a playful little slap, and she hears an amused rumble from the pillow he rests his head on. It hadn’t taken them long to get here — this place of comfort in their relationship. It had hardly felt like a new place at all.
“Coffee?” she asks him, before she gets too comfortable.
“After,” he murmurs into the pillow, and that works for her just fine.
His muscles relax slowly beneath her hands, already supple from the steam of the shower, but one by one they disengage as she kisses up his back, thumbs working gently into the line of his spine.
She loves to care for him. After Pierce, and after Rome, and then longer still after that, they had talked. Talked with a capital T. He’d given her explanations, once she was ready to hear them, and a fair bit more besides. Like all the things he’d done for her that she hadn’t even known about. Chloe can still feel the guilt creep up her throat and threaten to choke her up when she looks back on their first few years through the lens of full context. But it isn’t guilt that motivates her tenderness, and it’s certainly not obligation.
Chloe loves to care for him because he lets her.
It’s a rare treat she always takes full advantage of. Soon, he’ll be sleek and sharp-eyed again, manic in his energy and wild in his spirit. And she adores her spitfire Devil, but it makes these sleepy mornings that much more precious, when he lets her tend to him, and see him without a veneer. Not Lucifer the entertainer. Not Lucifer the vengeance seeker. Not Lucifer the sex god. Just Lucifer the man… even if she finally knows for sure that he’s no such thing.
Moving from his back, she gently tickles a downy bit of fluff at the base of his shoulder joint to let him know she’s about to get to work. His wing twitches in what looks like an involuntary and very animal response, but he chuckles, stretches, and gets comfy.
Chloe gently works her hands into the swathe of white feathers, submerging herself in pristine, gentle warmth. Feeling their light between her fingers, their hum through the base of her sternum. A sigh relaxes out of him, and he ruffles happily. The wings beneath her hands are so… alive. They really are a part of him. His bone, his skin, his muscle, his… feathers. She’s still getting used to the reality of that.
Preening him had proven much too large for a midweek task, dispensing with any such satisfying alliteration as Wing Wednesday. Feather Friday had seemed a decent enough compromise, but even monogamous and somewhat domestic Lucifer was far more interested in sex and whiskey on a Friday night. So wing grooming had been pushed to the next morning, relegating Sit On My Face Saturday to the Holy Day, just as God intended.
As much as Lucifer’s wings are literally Glory Incarnate, they also behave like, well, wings. They molt, they grow new feathers, they get dry and dirty, they shed keratin. Her first glimpse of them had left her with a head full of television static, but when she’d finally gotten a closer look, she’d noticed how they were just… wings, not burdened by unimaginable perfection like she’d thought at first. And Lucifer was prideful enough to be bothered by their sorry state, but stubborn enough not to tell her that he couldn’t manage the preening himself until she’d dragged it out of him.
She runs her hands down the joint to find the oil gland at the base of each wing — a strange, slightly disconcerting discovery the first few times she’d felt the odd protrusion. The wings themselves had been grand, mystical, almost too conceptual to fully process. But the discovery of his preen glands — just like the one her childhood parakeet had — was so biological that it really drove it home, that he is something else. Although, it also humanized him in a strange, backwards sort of way. Of course his feathers didn’t just magically maintain themselves. He wasn’t a cartoon, he was real. And as much as he would squawk his protest if she ever implied it aloud, he was also sort of… avian. At least partly. Of course he would have the necessary biology.
He can reach the glands himself, just barely, but not enough of his wings to get much done.
“Angels are social creatures,” he’d explained once, and it had scraped her heart out. “It was simply never intended to be a one-person job.”
So her fingertips brush each gland, gathering the preen oil and then smoothing it through the nearest feathers at the base of his shoulder joint. He still shivers when she does this, sinking further into bone-deep relaxation, and it means everything to Chloe that she can give him this. This peace. This care. It’s so simple for her to offer and yet he receives it like it’s the one remaining gift for the man who has everything.
“Didn’t Maze ever do this for you?” Chloe had asked once.
“Preening in Hell?” he’d responded with a lazy chuckle. “I might as well have asked for a pedicure.”
And he’s never said so, but Chloe thinks she understands the other implication — that he hadn’t wanted Maze or any of the other demons to see him like this. Relaxed. Happy. He’d needed to present a ruthless image, and keep what little joy he still had protected lest someone try to take it from him. She knows he’s spent his life gathering up tiny scraps of happiness only to have them ripped from his hands over and over, so every time she does this for him, she moves slowly. Cherishing each feather, refusing to rush, so that he knows this is his time. Their time, and it’s not going to be taken away from him.
She works outwards from the base of each wing, smoothing any barbs that have separated, leaving gleaming healthy-looking whispers of perfect white in her wake. As she starts on the row of median coverts, her finger catches on an askew feather, twisted the wrong way. She tests it, feeling the looseness that means it's ready to come out.
“Hmm. This one here.” She wiggles it gently so he can feel which one she means. “Tug, clip, or leave?”
“Mm. Clip,” he murmurs, and she takes the nail scissors she’d brought with her, gently trimming the feather low on the hollow shaft. It comes away in her hand, and she puts it aside, then carries on working.
They’re as fascinating as they are beautiful, and they seem to change in accordance with his needs. She’s seen his wings used as a weapon, but when he unfurls them for her, they’re soft as goosedown. And each time she’s finished cleaning and smoothing them, he’s as fluffed as a baby bird sheltering from a rain storm.
“I’m so glad I know everything now,” she whispers softly, gently working the oil down one of his long, elegant secondaries until it’s gleaming. “All I wanted was to know all of you. Thank you, Lucifer.”
It’s only against the canvas of his baby-fluffed feathers and his puddle of a body that Chloe even notices the change. And it’s small, but certain — the way his shoulder muscles re-engage slightly, drawing the faintest thread of tension down the line of his back. And when she goes for the next feather, it’s a little less downy. Slightly stiffer, and when she takes a peek down at his primaries, they scrape the floor rather than brush, gleaming like white steel.
“You alright?” she asks gently, rubbing his back.
And just like that, the tension evaporates.
“Mm,” he hums, sinking back into the mattress. The way her touch seems to soothe him makes her melt, so she forgets about his minor reaction and moves on.
It takes over an hour to finish the rest of his wings, but when she’s done, they’re iridescent — supple and oiled, all laying flat and neat. A small pile of broken and molted feathers sits next to her alongside the nail scissors. She’s still at a loss for how best to dispose of them. Lucifer always insists they’re fine to go in the trash but she can feel their power when she runs a hand over them, a field of strength like two poles of a magnet, and it seems like a risk to just put them out into the world.
“It’s fine! I’ve tossed entire wings in the bin,” he’d protested once, making Chloe gape.
So on the whole, she’s glad that all he has to get rid of these days are a few loose feathers which were falling out anyway. It makes her feel better about just duct taping them inside a trash bag and hoping for the best.
“All done,” she tells him, scooting down his body and off the bed to let him get up. His arms reach towards the leather headboard in a satisfying stretch that reaches all the way down to his toes, then his wings do the same. At their full span, one pokes into the short hallway that leads to the bathroom, and the other brushes the window on the far side of his bedroom. His primaries flare dramatically and a deep yawn rumbles into the pillow. And then when his body collapses back into looseness and his wings contract, there’s a shift in his energy so tangible Chloe can see it.
He fluffs and ruffles happily, giving his wings a little flap that makes her heart overflow, then folds them back to climb off the bed. The dopey relaxation is gone now. He’s always invigorated after a preen, calling back adorable memories of the family dog after a bath.
He glows as he approaches, towering over her and gently tilting her chin up. “Thank you, darling. You’re awfully good to me.”
He tastes like whiskey and sunshine, and she can trace the ornate paisley pattern of his bedspread pressed into his skin from laying on it so long. ”Coffee now?” she asks.
His clean, fresh wings flutter once more, then vanish from sight, and he offers her another quick kiss even as the rest of his body’s pulling away to trot down the bedroom steps. “And some.”
For someone that doesn’t need to eat, and who could certainly afford to eat every meal at a five star restaurant anyway, Lucifer’s a marvelous cook. Perhaps that’s exactly the reason why. He values the art of it. He’s never needed to slap together a microwave grilled cheese at the end of a long day just to get something in his stomach. There’s no point in doing it badly, so he never has.
Scents of brewed coffee and browning butter drift up from the lower floor while Chloe wraps the clipped feathers up in an inconspicuous little package of black plastic and tape. And when she makes her way down to the kitchen, he’s whistling a tune that fills her up with sunlight. Her songbird. She stands in the doorway, watching him flit between the kitchen island and the stove, bare ass hanging out the back of an apron. The precaution makes her smile as butter spits and pops on the pan. Safety first.
He silently delivers her a steaming mug and a kiss, and she settles herself on one of the stools at the kitchen island to watch him expertly spin the water of a boiling pot and drop in two eggs.
Strips of bacon crackle when they hit the butter. She watches him make the hollandaise from scratch and sautée mushrooms. She’s pretty sure he at least hasn’t made the bread himself, but she does watch him cut four thick slices from a loaf of fresh sourdough as he begins to plate it all up.
“When did you have time to get that?” she asks, watching how the bread springs back in the way only a loaf straight from the oven can do.
“Before we got in the shower,” he says, laying a thick spread of soft butter which soaks the bread instantly, turning it a golden yellow that makes Chloe’s stomach cry out.
“From where? I didn’t see you leave.”
“Lovely village just outside of Leipzig.“
Ah.
He says it with the accent, too — not over-pronounced, the way some casual traveler with boat shoes and an overburdened Amex might try to say it with the accent. He says it like one of the locals. It rolls off his tongue like a native speaker which, she supposes, he is.
“English isn’t even your first language, is it?” she asks as the thought occurs to her.
“Goodness no, hardly makes the top ten.” It’s an odd thing to hear him confirm in his prim English accent. He leans forward, filling her field of view with quirked lips and thick, dark lashes, and taps her nose as the egg timer goes off. “Don’t worry, I don’t mind.”
“So, you went to Germany this morning.” She says it just to help herself process that this is their normal, now. It’s always been his normal. He may as well have popped to the corner store. It doesn’t make her head spin anymore, not really, but it does go down easier with a joke. “That explains the pretzels I found in your wings.”
Bless him, for a moment he looks like he believes her.
“Oh, very funny, Detective,” he turns to fuss over the two plates, and Chloe lets herself be distracted by what the apron refuses to cover as she sips her coffee. “Look, that was one isolated incident, it’s not as if I’m rolling around in the antipasto. Now, you may not have feathers but I refuse to believe you’ve never found a piece of cheese in your hair or, far more likely, your offspring’s hair.”
The blush she imagines must be spreading to his ears warms her from the inside out. “Lucifer—”
“Besides, it was a very good raclette and still entirely fresh—”
He turns, holding their plates — two steaming works of culinary art with all the indulgence of a gourmet creation. She sinks into his warm, obsidian eyes, and he sinks into hers, and they both decide to leave it for now. Cheesegate will have to wait.
“Now, balcony or living room?”
They sit across from each other at his glass coffee table, cross legged on the floor in their underwear like she isn’t a responsible single mother in her late 30s and he isn’t an endless being of light who ignited the stars and just made her Eggs Benedict. He always makes her feel relaxed like that. Like anything goes. For someone with such commitment to an aesthetic, he’s amazingly flexible in what he can enjoy. She’s groaned into her food and told him ‘this is so good’ about five times already, but all he does is smile like she’s the one giving him the gift. She can feel the way happiness pours from him these days. His smiles burn brighter, ring more true and feel more whole, and this one’s just as luminescent. It’s a dazzling smile, the kind that would devastate her if he wasn’t hers. Wide and disarming.
Strange, he has more teeth than she remembers.
And then his smile grows wider. And then wider.
Too wide.
And then Chloe’s stomach lurches like she’s falling in a dream, the cogs of reality suddenly screeching against each other. There’s an abrupt shift in the texture of the air. The next breath she takes turns oily, and something’s not right.
Lucifer’s warm smile stretches until it engulfs his entire face, warping and wrong, with ten times too many teeth both inside and out of his gaping mouth, a grin that could swallow worlds. The sight sloughs off her brain, refusing to be processed, and for a moment Chloe Decker is nothing — no thinking, sentient thing — and she’s in the presence of something that should not be. Alarms hail madly in an empty space, and Chloe can’t move, because she doesn’t know how to. The rules of what is have all been shifted around, and they’ve moved the rest of the world with them.
Her lungs lock up, a freeze response that overrides everything, even the certainty of her trust in him, and cuts straight to the gooey center of her primal instincts. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
‘Lucifer?’ she wants to ask, but speech is something she now only used to know. She wants to grasp for the man that always makes her feel safe, but he’s nowhere to be seen. His smile lines crinkle like crepe paper and multiply into the thousands, more wrinkles and more eyes to branch from, until he’s no longer handsome, but nor is he ugly. He’s not anything that language has evolved enough to describe.
WRONG!!
“Detective? What is it?”
It all goes away as quickly as the sun emerging from behind a cloud. The air clears, the warm breeze from the open balcony doors gusts lightly against her skin again, and there he is. Sitting just like he had been, his elegant face put back together and watching her, with gentle stress in the set of his shoulders and a concertina of bacon slowly unraveling off his fork. It’s so sudden, like being pulled from flames and dunked into an ice bath, and she can feel herself start to tremble from the shock, all the more unsettling for the quiet, ordinary moment in which it came. She wants to sob, but it wouldn’t make sense. He’s exactly himself, and nothing had changed back, exactly — or she’d missed the moment it had, like how she can never catch the appearance of his wings. It makes her doubt she’d seen anything at all, despite the visceral reaction still curled around her bones so tight it’s making them shake.
“Detective?”
“Sorry.” She shakes her head, a little too vigorously, trying to free herself from the unease still gripping her by the nape of the neck. “Um… nothing, I guess.”
“...alright.”
He watches her warily for a few moments more, but doesn’t press. He usually would — she knows that in the back of her mind but doesn’t want to dwell on it. And she knows that whatever she saw wasn’t a trick of the light, but she’d rather imagine that it was. For now, anyway.
It had been such a perfect day.
—
She saw.
She bloody saw, and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Lucifer runs the garment steamer up the front of his two tone silk shirt, heat plate far too close to the fabric, but stress can make a Devil do crazy things.
Millennia, without an incident. Decades without so much as a minuscule slip. His Devil face was one thing, and he’d always used that to great effect. It had been enough to let him almost forget what else lay beneath. She certainly didn’t need to know. She couldn’t, not if she wanted to keep her sanity. And things were finally so good, better than he ever could have hoped for, and he’d actually been feeling incredibly normal for once, so why then?
It makes his spine tremble with the need to grow splinters — a problem he hasn’t dealt with since the Dark Ages. It seems one little taste had released the latch, and things weren’t staying in place quite so easily anymore. He couldn’t even go to Linda. He’d have to somehow explain it all to her. So he’d taken his best guess at what she would say. He wants normal? Well, then he’ll be normal, and this morning he’s just a man very normally steam cleaning every single garment he owns.
Perhaps a sharper box pleat would help.
It had already been asking too much for her to accept him as a fearsome, burned creature — and yet she had. He was used to his furrowed skull, his rotting teeth, and his black-and-blood-red eyes, but humans were supposed to lose their faculties when faced with it. He’d known she was special, but accepting him while knowing what he was went beyond anything he could have imagined her capable of. He had already pushed his luck so very, very far.
So he’d pretended that was the worst of it.
Because there’s a part of himself that even he isn’t used to. The fabric of his body hadn’t warped beneath the force exerted by his will since before the Earth began turning. He’d made sure of that once he began mixing with humans. Because although he flayed minds quite easily with his Devil face, the greatest lie ever told about him was that the Devil was more frightening than Angels.
It’s a matter of capacity as much as it is awareness, really. Fear of the unknown and so forth. It turns out there really is no such thing as bad press. As much as humans fear the thought of the Devil, at least they think they understand him. And yet, Angels… there are all sorts of ludicrously inaccurate depictions of what Angels are, and even those who have it close still couldn’t possibly comprehend the extent of it.
And as the brightest of all God’s Angels, Lucifer counts himself as thoroughly incomprehensible.
He was the spark which lit the fuse that burst forth all life — and it takes after him. It can’t be contained, and neither can he. Not, it seems, any longer. He has always been Light.
But in Hell, there is no light. So he was just Lucifer.
In name, if not in nature. And he’d stayed that way for a long, long time.
But even 1% of infinity is still an awful lot. He’d been satisfied enough with himself even without bursting at the seams. Humans didn’t tend to like that. He didn’t think of it as muting who he was. More… adapting. And within the context of Earth, living amongst humans, even a fraction of himself turned out to be more than enough. It suited his purpose. He passed as human, or human-ish. A wild, lively, magnetic, and utterly captivating one, and he didn’t need more than that. Not here on Earth, and certainly not in Hell. Who needs it? Divinity didn’t want him, why should he desire it in return? So all his strangest parts stayed tucked away behind his pleasing veneer — first, for safekeeping, and then to atrophy. He’d thought so, anyway. And now, Lucifer hadn’t been an Angel in so long, he’d forgotten where the edges of himself even were.
But then he’d met her.
And even after he met her, there’d been a long time that his depth of feeling could still fit inside his Earthly body.
But there’s no denying anymore that there’s something about her that makes him long for the freedom to feel his elation with no limits. Lately, it’s been making him remember how it felt back when his skin had been made of refracted light, glancing coloured beams and particles about him like a prism. A time when his ferocious heart had been both the flint and the pyrite, one strike away from igniting the universe. His spirit was incandescent. When he raged, the sharpness of his fury burst through his skin with jagged bone and knives and gnashing teeth, blood turning to acid. When he mourned, the anguish stretched him across dimensions, twisting him over and over on himself until it wrung him out. And when he rejoiced, the explosion of delight was so impossible to contain, he tore himself open so that every nerve could jump and dance without confinement.
So when she’d stood in the haze of his cigarette smoke, and looked down at all of Creation’s immutable fervor packed into a silly little button-up shirt and asked ‘Lucifer Morningstar, is that a stage name or something?’, she’d almost been right. There’s no part of his true self she could even comprehend, let alone recover from.
At least, that’s what he’d thought.
But then yesterday, over breakfast, with her. She’d been comfortable enough with him to lounge around in nothing but lace, and he could feel the warm breeze that kissed her skin against his own. He’d never been all that interested in simple moments until he’d begun to share them with Chloe Decker. This seemingly simple human who created a whole raft of not-so-simple feelings within him, so radiant that it was hard to tell where her golden hair ended and the sunshine began. She liked his cooking. She liked his smile. The beast of the pit got to live in the light after all, and he got to do it with her. It was too much for him to bear. Too magnificent to contain. He remembers thinking he’d felt full to the brim, and the brim was where he’d always ensured he stopped. But he couldn’t this time.
And it was wonderful. And it was dangerous.
He’d felt it, when his face had begun to stretch.
It would have been immediate panic if he wasn’t already overcome. Joy is a difficult emotion to stamp down. Unlike sorrow and anger, it wants to be felt. Though panic did follow soon after, and his little indiscretion ended up being only a mere shadow of his true elation. It only lasted a second or two before he’d been able to slam the lid down on it. But to her, it may have felt like much longer. True impossibility can have strange effects on the perception of time.
But it didn’t matter. He’d lost control of himself, let his carefully maintained, human-ish body fall away beneath effervescent, willful, uncontainable him.
And she’d seen.
The only way to ensure it wouldn’t happen again would be to not feel. He, who has enough life in him to set the skies ablaze. It’s a laughable expectation. And with Chloe Decker by his side, impossible. Purely, simply, impossible.
But to let her see would be devastation, for both of them. So as much as containment seems doomed to fail, it still becomes the goal. And he does succeed in holding himself together for a while. Weeks, without another slip up. It’s easy at times, and agony at others, but he manages.
Until the night a cop gets killed.
Trapped beneath a pile of oil drums and briefly stunned, Lucifer hears the sound of the gunshot ricochet through the empty dockhouse. Cold fear threatens to turn his skin to freezing fog and shatter. It sounds like a killshot — no shouts or scuffles afterwards. And he knows who fired it. A little shit with a chin as weak as his backbone, and enough of daddy’s money to make him stupid and reckless.
A little shit he’d just let go.
He hadn’t even seen him go for the loft release button. So preoccupied with ensuring his rage didn’t manifest into a thousand fangs, he’d let someone as mediocre as Julian McCaffrey get the better of him.
And now the better of someone else, too.
Lucifer hurls the top drum off himself and bolts towards the entrance, tearing designer tread from his shoes. Julian’s gone. One figure lays in a dark pool that spreads across the concrete, looking like black ink in the moonlight.
He hadn’t known her well, but he’d liked her. Young. Full of life. And crucially, innocent.
He runs to her, though it’s clear she’s dead. No soul resides in the casing left behind. He can feel its emptiness from here. But it’s his instinct — not one he’s always had, but one of the many he’s picked up. One of those drives that persist in making him human-ish, and it moves him now. On his knees, he cradles her head, brushing back hair because he doesn’t know what else to do.
It isn’t lost on him that the woman usually two steps behind him with a gun is not rookie cop Joan Reyes, but someone far more dear to him.
It could have so easily been her.
And when she floods in with backup, it’s too much to bear. He may look like the mourner tending the dead, but he feels like the beast hulking over its prey. Chloe hides her pain so well at work but she can never hide it from him. The bare second they make eye contact feels like a knife in the gut, and it’s all he can do to keep from manifesting the gaping hole himself. He can’t comfort her. He can’t even help, because he’s a tangled ball of screaming mouths and writhing snakes and collapsing stars barely held in the shape of a man. He steps away, excusing himself, and lets the real people do the work.
The world moves like slowly rolling mist. Holding himself together stitch by stitch, Lucifer can only stand, useless, and watch Joan’s face disappear behind the zipper of a body bag. Chloe follows them out, sparing him nothing but an upset glance, and Lucifer looks on through a wet blur, silently taking his lashings as Daniel finally says something right for a change.
“You're a wrecking ball, and everything you touch turns to shit.”
He doesn’t protest. He can’t. If he even tries to speak at this point, all that’ll come out is the grating screech of tectonic plates, but that’s not why he can't protest.
It’s because he’s right.
Dan jams a finger in his face. “You're not one of the good guys.”
Then he turns and leaves him, disappearing into the wash of red and blue as the coroners wheel out the gurney and the rest of the cops leave as well.
Lucifer’s far from alone, the rigmarole outside will continue well into the night, but the sudden pressure of the cavernous emptiness in the warehouse threatens to crush him.
Though it’s nothing compared to the pressure from inside.
And one by one, the stitches of himself begin to pop open like rivets off a swollen dam. It had been hard enough, keeping his teeth and hair and sinew all in the right place when he’d been dealing with one emotion at a time, but all of them at once is unendurable. Guilt, anguish, relief, hatred, fury, terror. Even joy. By a tiny improbable stroke of chance, Chloe is safe — but she mightn’t have been. Even then, an innocent girl is dead. Evil prevails. And it’s all his fault. There’s too much to feel.
He’s going to burst.
Lucifer throws himself around the side of the warehouse and out into the moonlit shipyard just as a row of spines burst up from the rigid line of his shoulders, punching through his suit. His face pulls into a silent howl, stretching downwards like taffy, and the only thing he can manage to accomplish is getting himself concealed behind a shipping container so he doesn’t ruin more lives tonight. The front of the warehouse is well lit and spills across the concrete, but the side of the building has only one orange floodlight, muted by midnight fog and swallowed up by the blackness of the sea off the side of the pier. He throws himself down in the shadow, back against the corrugated steel.
And then Lucifer is havoc.
Claws burst from his fingertips and rake the ground, shaving into the concrete like soap. Sheet lightning flares beneath his skin, and he can’t roar enough with one mouth, so he tries it with a thousand, emanating a world-rending screech so devastating it can only be felt and not heard. He wants to hold Chloe to him and never let her go, so his chest hollows out a space for her. He wants to slice Julian into ribbons, so daggers of bone burst through his skin, and rows of teeth line his mouths in a needle-like rictus. He’d felt useless when he should have been capable, so skeletal wings explode from his back, no good for flight. Too many arms reach and retract, desperate for something now finally within his grasp — the full depth of feeling he's denied himself for eons upon eons. His spine rolls like thunder, and the breaths from all his gasping throats crash together like oceans colliding at the cape.
But it doesn’t get the turmoil out. It only makes him feel it more.
And as much as it hurts — as much as it is agony — it fills a yearning he’s harbored silently for millennia. Not since he built his body into a towering pillar of light to express his righteous fury at his father had he been so unbound. Not since he grew ten thousand pairs of uselessly flapping wings when that pillar was struck down had he let it all go without restraint. He’d thought he hadn’t been muting himself. He’d been wrong. The life of constant Earthly delights was nothing compared to evolving by the second to grasp what his heart reached for. He was a twisting kaleidoscope, his body and his spirit limitless, and to deny that had been a torture of its own. He hadn’t wanted to admit it lest resistance become even harder, but the slip over breakfast had only made things worse. So perhaps it’s not just tonight that’s turning him inside out, mashing and rebuilding him on the oil-stained concrete of the dockyard, but everything.
He loses all sense of his body, and it’s both his poison and his antidote, swirling him deeper until he’s a tangle of cells and light and sound, memory and bone, until he’s all things. Vanity had been an indulgence he’d picked up only in the last few thousand years, but Lucifer’s importance had never resided on the physical plane. He writhes like a mad spider and blooms like a supernova, and everything that grows and collapses is a feeling left un-felt for far too long.
No wonder he’d needed therapy.
Nor is it any wonder that, through the chaos of himself, he doesn’t notice the emergency lights retreating and darkness swallowing up the front of the warehouse. And he doesn’t notice the small tap of ankle boots down the concrete pier, until he hears her voice.
“Lucifer? Are you okay?”
It’s the only thing that could have made his chaos freeze.
The softness, the sweet humanity of her voice is all the more striking as he is now. With a titanic exertion of will, he gathers all the strewn parts of himself into some form of order. Not the Lucifer she knows, but at least a creature of skin and blood rather than of texture and light. A creature that can form words, that won’t turn her mad on the spot. If he did, even he wouldn’t have the means to express that anguish.
“De—tective—” It takes everything to produce a voice she’ll be able to process, though it doesn’t sound much like him. It’s a voice that cracks like Atlas holding up the world.
With his senses laid bare, he can feel her drawing closer around the side of the container as she asks, “What are you doing back h—”
“DON’T!”
Her boots scuff the ground like she’d almost fallen. He wouldn’t blame her if she turned and ran. He’d voiced the word with the howl of a black hole, and it had cracked through the Earth and clapped like thunder overhead.
She’s silent and still for so long that he’d have thought she did run, if not for the fact that he can still sense her there. He can feel her pulse in his own veins, his heartbeat falling in line with hers.
She’d recovered from his slip up over breakfast, as far as he could tell, but this is far more than a slip up. This cannot be weakly rationalized by a trick of the light. Now, he’s not even human-ish. He’s barely even comprehensible. Even pulled back together, he’s a mess of spines and teeth and exposed bone, his ruined face hanging like an Edvard Munch painting and light crackling beneath his skin. She can’t see what a horror he is. It would break her, and if it doesn’t, it would most certainly break them.
“Is it your Devil face?” she asks softly, right there on the other side of the metal. He feels blasphemous listening to such a gentle voice with the ears of an abomination. “Lucifer, I’ve seen it before. It’s okay. I can handle it.”
“That’s not…” he grinds out, “...what this is.”
“Then what?”
He sounds frightful, even to himself. There’s a hint of his accent, just a suggestion of his own rich tones, but mostly it’s a mayhem of grinding teeth and tearing tissue. It’s a wonder she’s still standing there. Wonder that grips him so tightly that it reaches fibrous tendrils out to brush softly at the side of the container that separates them. A lovesick predator aching for gentleness.
His throats work, and he tries to use just one, but the chorus of horrible hisses grinds out from dozens as he finally admits, “There’s more of me you haven’t seen.”
Suggesting a mystery in the presence of Chloe Decker was like tempting a bear with a steak. He’s well aware that he may be dooming them both by not at least trying to haul his uncooperative body deeper into the shadows, scuttle up the wall of the dockhouse and refuse to see her until he can present her with the face that she knows. The one she deserves to see.
“Last month?” The breath in her voice sounds sparse. He realizes he’s been holding his as well, and lets it go, hissing from between combs of serrated fangs. He’d known she’d seen him that day, but the fact they hadn’t talked about it had given him a foolish, vain hope that perhaps she somehow hadn’t.
But something had changed when they’d stopped being just work partners, and started being something more. The trust she openly placed in him had started to make things like evasion feel just like the lies to which they were adjacent, and he couldn’t do it anymore. It had suffused the gap which denial couldn’t fill on its own and allowed her to keep living her life alongside him, somehow. But there was something else her trust had done.
It had inspired some of his own in return.
“Yes,” he admits. “And worse. Much worse.”
Tension gathers on the other side of the steel crate until he can hardly stand it. He’d rather not feel her apprehension, or expose himself to the thought of what she’d seen when a reckless moment of joy had split his face open. That she still thinks about it. That she knows what she’d seen and tries to tell herself she doesn’t. Tries to salvage them, just as he’s trying to salvage them right now.
He loses his nerve.
“But you mustn’t look,” he insists, not sure if he’s backpedaling or simply stating what had always been the obvious. “Just go. I’ll sort mysel—”
Senses all exposed, he hears and feels and tastes her moving before he sees her appear around the side of the container, and despite all of that, there’s nothing he can do to stop her. Tendrils snap back, the misshapen shoulders draw up, spikes lengthening and receding in time with his terrified heartbeat. He tries to turn his face away, but he’s so out of sorts that he isn’t sure which way is away anymore. But it wouldn’t matter. He’d see her anyway.
And she sees him.
This is worse than the loft. Even knowing what he is now, even having caught an accidental glimpse. To human eyes, his form is lunacy. So that’s it. They’re over. Even once he cobbles himself back into the shape everyone seems to like so much, the damage is done. If she’s not sleeping in a padded cell from now on, she certainly won’t be sleeping in his bed.
He can’t fathom what he must look like to her. Guilt and scrutiny collapses him in on himself like foil in the microwave, and he thinks of how he’d fooled her for so long into believing he was a man with a nice smile and warm dark eyes. Even after she’d seen him burned, seen the Devil, there was so much more to tell, but he hadn’t. As much as it makes his skin writhe, perhaps it's right that she finally sees him for all that he is. To call them Beauty and the Beast now would be an insult to beasts everywhere. But despite the pain of what he might see in her face, he looks and looks and looks, because it might be the last chance he gets.
How could she want him after this?
So eyes open on his chest, down his arms, and across the limbs that have no name, enough for him to take in a lifetime’s worth of her. No reason not to, now. A few more eyes can hardly be the worst thing she’s seen at this point, and he’s not sure he could stop it from happening anyway. She stiffens as she sees them blink into existence, and he builds a picture of her vivid enough to take with him into eternity.
And then he waits for her to leave.
But then Lucifer’s looking at something that he can’t comprehend. Chloe’s drained, dangerously pale and swaying on numb legs, but she puts her trembling hand out and grips the side of the container to hold herself upright. Fragmented gasps catch in her chest over and over, but she clamps her mouth shut and forces the air in and out of her nose until she can manage a whole breath.
She’s terrified.
And she’s staying.
He knows the effect he has on humans at his most… unsheathed. Her brain may as well be melting out her ears, and yet she seems to be ignoring every single one of her most primal survival instincts to root herself to the spot and stay with him.
It makes no sense. Tendrils quiver madly, his heart inelegantly on his sleeve. “Detective…”
“Say something?” she asks, the strain in her voice proving she’s not out of the woods, but looking for the tree line. “I know that’s you, Lucifer, but I just… just need to get my brain to catch up. Can you just say something to me? Please. If you can.”
Curious quills shiver up his back, and all of a sudden Lucifer feels that it’s not he who’s the unfathomable one. How is she withstanding him like this? But it appears he has an unexpected chance to avert a breakdown, and time may be of the essence, so he racks his brain to give her what she needs. A reminder, it seems, of who he is. A bridge between this thing and the Lucifer she knows.
His eyes catch on tatters of dark fabric strewn across the ground, more shreds of it hanging from the stalagmites of bone that flank his heaving shoulders. Somewhere amongst it, there’s a tag that reads ‘PRADA — 42’. It’s jarring, the bittersweet taste of the normalcy he’d embodied for so long. He feels like he’s looking at it from worlds away. How quaint that he had dressed his silly little body up in silly little outfits. Playing human like a game of pretend. It feels unbelievable now, that he had cared about such things.
And if she hadn’t been there, perhaps that version of Lucifer Morningstar would have ended with that thought. But because she is, it breathes life into a quiet voice in the back of his mind that whispers, “No.”
He does care about those things.
Because he is all things, and that includes the small delights. He may be the blaze of new life and the white hot heat of forging matter, but he’s also a friend. A lover. A pianist. He likes to dance and drink and sing, and groom himself nicely and enjoy being looked at.
Then suddenly he begins to remember how he’d handled living in humanity all this time. It wasn’t so limiting after all.
And then he knows what to say to her.
“I… ruined my… bloody suit.”
A wet, disbelieving sound chokes out of her. Maybe a laugh, maybe a sob. Probably both. Her free hand goes to her chest, affection and sorrow pouring from her in waves that Lucifer can taste. “You did.”
And inexplicably, she takes a step forward.
Lucifer watches in amazement as she swipes aside a few scraps of shredded Prada with her boot, and carefully kneels down. Still keeping her distance, or maybe just giving him space. But she’s looking at him, and that’s already… well…
A miracle.
The silence stretches until she finally asks, “What… is..?”
Now that the terror of sending her mad is no longer his prime concern, discomfort takes its place, burrowing deep into his bones. Limbs and appendages twitch, too short and too long and bent the wrong way, and it would be hard enough to know where to look with two eyes, let alone fifty. “That’s a fair question.”
He tries to speak softly, but the sound he makes scrapes at the air. He sees her flinch and try not to. Every grueling word he’d croaked out so far had given him a shred more control over his vocal cords, but they’re still numerous, and his voice still howls with the terrifying pressure of the vacuum of space.
“Does that hurt?” she whispers, eyes searching across the mangled wreck of his body. “It looks so painful.”
Lucifer’s never been looked at like this before. Not by human eyes. Not for more than a second. He wonders what it is she’s actually seeing. He’d always felt he’s half concept, like this. Clumps of flesh and hair mixed with gesture and thought, ever-shifting and changing. But he knows his frame looks twisted and broken, his skin pierced with a thousand shards of bone.
“It’s not,” he assures her. “Not really. It’s actually quite… cathartic.”
Cell by cell, he’s been gradually sinking back into something vaguely more humanoid, but he can’t get all the way. He’s still too raw, and Chloe seeing him like this doesn’t solve the problem, only redirects it. The deadly spikes of bone give way to susurrus quills, rounded like an anemone, purring along his back and his too-many angles. Just as strange, but perhaps a little less threatening, at least.
She notices the change, curiosity burning behind her eyes. “When does it happen?”
“When I… feel.”
“But you always—”
“When I feel a lot.” His head tips down, and something loosely resembling a smile stretches grotesquely across his dozens of lips. “Never realized how restrained I was being until now, did you?”
And somehow, she laughs.
“Oh, Lucifer.” Her pupils are still contracted pinpricks, and he can see the goosebumps on her chest that have nothing to do with the cold, but he — an incomprehensible monster from beyond reality’s narrow mind — had made her laugh. With a joke.
Still, with his true form laid so bare like this, the scrutiny is anguish. He’d thought he couldn’t possibly have more admiration for her, but it seems as though they’re both having their paradigms shifted tonight. But however strong she is, however brave she’s being, it’s clearly hard for her to look at him, and it’s hard for him to be looked at.
“Right.” He tries for his usual clipped tone, and doesn’t land anywhere close. “Well, now you’ve seen. Now you really do know everything. If you still want to see me after this, I’ll attempt to be in a better state.”
“...okay?”
“So you’re free to go, I won’t take offense.”
Her nose scrunches. “Why would I go?”
“Well, you’re not getting me in the car like this,” he tells her. His voice sounds like the crushing emptiness of silence if it could make a sound, and yet within that, there’s still a hint of his brisk humor. The bitter laugh which he doesn’t voice. “And I’m afraid I’m still a bit too… raw to manage a more convenient shape just yet. Go on. I’ll make my way back when I’m able.”
“Lucifer…” Tendrils of hair whip as her head shakes like the idea appalls her. “I’m not leaving you here.”
He doesn’t bother trying to convince her. One look at the set of her jaw and the ferocious will in her eyes is all he needs to know that her mind’s made up.
“I see,” Lucifer hums. He shifts a few limbs beneath him on the ground, trying to get a better sense of himself. “Well… perhaps if you don’t mind waiting a few moments, I could at least attempt to, ah… contain myself somewhat.”
It’s a foolishly optimistic suggestion. He’s still burst wide open. Agitation still zips through his nerves like dragonflies. The thought of forming ten fingers and ten toes after all he’s gone through tonight feels like summiting Mount Everest then whipping out a telly and a folding chair.
Then, as he’s trying to take stock of his senseless form, unsure where to even begin in the task of pulling it back together, something truly unthinkable happens.
She reaches out, and touches him.
A carousel of phosphorescent sparks ricochet through his veins as he reels from the sudden contact. His tentacle-like quills flail madly, and his spikes of bone and steel retract just a little. The thing she touches isn’t a knee — it isn’t anything, really — but the position of it and the way her thumb glides slowly back and forth makes clear that’s what she’s meaning to use it as. And what she’s meaning to do.
To comfort.
To comfort him. When, by all accounts, she should be halfway to the psychiatric unit by now.
“You don’t have to,” she says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t have to change back right now, if you don’t want to.” Her soft voice makes him ache. “If you still need to feel… you can feel.”
Lucifer doesn’t know how to respond for a long, long moment. Her touch is a balm, her voice a warm embrace against his bloodless skin, and in a form made of pure expression, he can’t hide what that means to him. “Are you quite sure?”
Her nod is immediate, with no hesitation. “Sometimes strong feelings aren’t pretty. It doesn’t mean you should force them away.”
“But it’s, erm… isn’t it rather disturbing?” The understatement is so absurd that he wouldn’t be able to deliver it with a straight face if his face didn’t already have much bigger problems.
“That’s okay,” Chloe promises. “Maybe we can do it together. After tonight, Joan, everything… I’m feeling a lot too.”
And that’s when he realizes it.
She never lets herself cry, either.
So even at his most exposed and vulnerable, he needs not a word more convincing. She’s strong. But she needn’t be, not all the time. And neither does he. And now that he’s like this, his body and his heart flayed open with nerves exposed to the biting chill, it’s that much harder to deny.
He has a lot more feeling to do.
—
In the morning, it’s quiet. Quiet enough to hear the gentle lap of the water against the dock. Light slices between the building and the container, waking them up together, and Lucifer blinks his dozens of eyes against the blazing beams just beginning to pierce above the horizon
The sunrise saturates the shipyard with brilliant orange, and above them gulls wind beneath pink smudges of cloud in a pale blue sky. He’s never slept in this form before. Sleep is not something that his metaphysical body requires, although perhaps it's no surprise that finally releasing thousands of years of emotional build-up had left him in need of a nap.
Chloe unfolds from her slumped sleeping posture against the side of the building, jacket bunched up around her shoulders, and releases a stretch and a yawn. They’d fallen asleep with a few feet of space between them, both silently agreeing that was safest. Even if she’s somehow not utterly repulsed by him, he’s still a bit too prickly for cuddles.
Lucifer sees the tiny jump she almost manages to conceal when she looks over and sees him in the harsh light of dawn. There’s, incredibly, still no fear he can sense from her. Not anymore, not since last night when she’d coached her own breathing and sat down with him. But there is a little surprise, like she’d expected he’d make like Disney and transform back into a prince overnight.
She scoots closer, and even now his thousands of teeth grimace as he watches her jeans scrape along the rough concrete. Perhaps there’s more of himself left than he thought.
“Good morning, Lucifer.”
It’s like nothing’s changed. Like they’re swathed in golden sheets and he’s swathed in golden skin, and she’s brushing her gentle fingers across his single set of lips, and he’s pulling her against himself with his single pair of arms.
He misses that. Even like this, she makes him feel human like it's not a dirty word.
“Good morning, Detective.”
Chloe leans her back against the building next to him, eyes drifting up and down, and she gently traces a wiggling quill, making him shiver.
“Are you stuck like this?” she whispers into one of his lopsided ears.
“No,” he promises her quickly. Although her tone of voice hadn’t betrayed any horror at the thought, he knows she’s just being kind. She’s back to being strong for him. “No. I just need to remember where everything goes. It’s been some time since I’ve been quite so… undone.”
“Alright,” she says, withdrawing her hand and settling back.
“You… ought not watch,” he warns her. She’s been incredible, but Lucifer still fears the only possible way they can come out the other side of this is if she can somehow separate the abomination before her with the man who shares her bed.
“It’s okay.” She shifts to lean against the shipping container, giving him his space in the crook of the building.
“Truly, Detective, you needn’t subject yourself to—”
“I meant what I said, Lucifer.” She cuts in, certainty ringing clear in her voice like a tuning fork. “What I’ve always said. I want to know all of you. Not just the easy parts.”
His fibrous matter stiffens, and dozens of eyes give her a quick, dubious once-over. Trust hasn’t come easily to him in a long, long time, but if there’s anyone to start with, it’s her. “...okay.”
So he has an audience of one as his skin warps and his skeleton shifts and cracks. It’s a laborious process, far more methodical and far less impulsive than what it had taken to get this way. He gradually finds himself among the chaos, like shaping a bonsai tree, or excavating a buried relic, and if she’s strong enough to watch the entire process, then he’s strong enough to let her. She doesn’t try to hide the fact she finds parts of it alarming, but he respects her all the more for that. And she doesn’t look away.
And when he’s finally left crouching on two long legs, with a gentle curve to his back and a symmetry to his figure, Lucifer feels like he’s crawled through the desert. He lets himself collapse back against the building, reknitted lungs drawing in great gasps of air.
A glint of silver and onyx catches his eye in the scraps of debris along the base of the building’s wall, and he picks it up with dexterous, human fingers, brushes off the dirt, and slips his ring back on his hand.
It’s surprisingly hard to make himself turn his head and meet her eyes, but when he does, she outshines the rising sun behind her. “There he is.”
“Here I am,” he agrees, hands falling to rest on his chest as it rises and falls, and his heart rate gently slows. How to even begin? “Detective, I am so, so very sorr—”
“Don’t.” She doesn’t even let him complete the word. “I never want you to have to water yourself down for me. Please.”
He’s once again taken by a moment of speechlessness. It’s difficult to imagine letting that side of himself creep into their life together. But because he is loath to ever deny her anything, Lucifer inclines his head. A smooth, easy movement. Strangely, he relishes the structure. The neat, compact muscle of his neck, the scaffolding of his ligaments. The release he’d had was sorely needed, the freedom always cherished, but perhaps he can find a balance now. If she’s willing to bear it, then maybe he needn’t be all or nothing anymore.
“Well then, you have my word,” Lucifer agrees, and beams of light warm her face as the peaks of gentle waves catch fire in the rising sun.
“Come on,” she gestures, offering her hand and sweeping an amused flick of her eyes down his naked body. “I have a blanket in the back seat.”
—
“Wings out.”
He obeys, sinking into the warm mattress to let Chloe begin their weekly tradition, the ritual that’s actually becoming very dear to him. Even a whole week after releasing the pressure valve, Lucifer still finds himself more able to relax. The build-up had been tearing him apart from the inside out, and he hadn’t even realized until it was gone.
When she touches him, there’s none of the hesitation he was afraid there might be now. She goes in hands-first, just like she always has. She’s getting good at it, smoothing and oiling his wings, zipping the barbs back together. With her nails, she gently helps a new pinfeather open, and he shivers as the plume unfurls and the itch of it dissipates.
So when she’s almost done, and her fingers slow, Lucifer’s far too relaxed to expect the hesitant question which drifts cautiously from her lips.
“You know… the other night,” she begins. “At the shipyard.”
His shoulders tense. Eyes open, his head comes a fraction of an inch off the pillow to hover. “Yes?”
“Those, um… I’m not sure what to call them.” He doesn’t turn his head, but he can imagine her waving her hands in vague gestures to grasp for the words. “The spikes. And the… all the other things.”
“...what about them?”
Chloe’s hands settle on his lower back where she’s sitting, and she clears her throat. “Do… do they need preening too?”
A disbelieving laugh coughs out of him, and his tension melts.
“Ah — no.” Lucifer assures her, trying not to imagine in too much detail how such an endeavor would even go. “No, they’re a bit too metaphysical for that.”
“Oh.” The smile in her voice is evident, and he feels her shift and duck her face bashfully like she does when she asks a question about his nature which winds up sounding silly. “Right, of course.”
“But you’re incredible for asking,” he tells her, pushing himself up as she moves off him and carefully holds his fresh fluffed wings out of the way as he turns on the bed to sit with her. She still looks at him the same way — like he’s still just Lucifer, and that means the world to him. “To be willing to see that again. To even still be here at all, knowing that I’m just as much that thing as I am, well…” he gestures “...this. Perhaps even more so. I mean, don’t you think about it?”
She nods, loaded silence behind her pursed lips as she watches him, considering her words. He searches for trauma flashbacks behind her eyes and finds none. “I do,” she says. “I think about… how you trusted me to see you at your most vulnerable. And I think about how long you were out there in the shipyard by yourself, hurting. That part…” She draws in her bottom lip, biting down hard, and her eyes pinch at the corners. “I hate that part. It must have been horrible for you. I wish I’d found you sooner.”
And once again, Lucifer’s at a loss. “You know, Detective, I’m starting to think that you’re even more indescribable than I. How you can be so accepting of me is beyond, well, everything.”
Chloe nods, her small hand working its way across the bedspread to brush her fingertips against his. She draws in a breath that sounds strangely significant.
“Well, I think that’s just… what love does,” she says. “You know?”
The admission comes like all other unimaginable things — in the wake of an ordinary moment. Sparks shoot up his arm from where their hands touch, and he snaps his eyes to her. She gleams back like glimmers off of crystal — and he would know. Because first, he was Light. And then, he was an unloveable thing, a twisted monstrosity. And now…
She loves him.
And for a brief second, Lucifer lets a ripple of sparkling scales shimmer up his body, flashing through him like a shooting star. Light and color shines through the gaps as his cells pull apart to let his blooming heart breathe. He couldn’t have held it in if he tried. But he doesn’t try, because he trusts her with all of him.
“Oh yes,” he replies, as phosphorescent galaxies burst to life beneath his skin. “I know love.”
— • —