Chapter Text
Chloe Decker hopped out of her car and joined the other policemen around the body. It was a young man, dressed in white pants soaked with blood. There were several wounds on the upper body, including what looked like letters burnt into the man and bruising across the chest. Some of it must have been there for quite some time before he died.
Not only had the victim been killed, but had probably been tortured and abused beforehand. She knelt down to get a better look at the man's face. No visible wounds except for some slight swelling, probably a result from the marks on his neck.
“This looks pretty personal”, and grotesque and inhuman. The only one who could see a body like this and remain unaffected was probably Lucifer.
“Oh, it definitely was. See this puncture here”, Ella carefully lifted up the man's left hand to show off its state. In the palm of the hand was a singular, clean hole straight through. A quick glance confirmed that the right hand had the same exact wound.
“Whoever did this knew what they were doing, plus do you see the way the fingers curl up? This man must have been hanging from these wounds, like some reversed crucifixion."
"So not cool. Anyway, want to help me turn him? Need to get a look at his back”, the forensic scientist was already ready, standing with her hands on the man's knees.
“Sure, on three?” Ella nodded, “One, two -” Chloe grabbed one of the shoulders as she started counting. He was heavier than he looked, would have been easier if Lucifer had been on time for once in his life .
“Miss Lopez, Detective! What do we have here?” Three, and they were done. When you talk about the devil.
She turned around, ignoring how pale Ella looked out of the corner of her eye. She’d be fine. “Don’t know, Lucifer What do we have here?”, she pointed to the body, and froze.
The victim's back was all but shredded. Most of the cuts were more than deep enough to kill, but that was not what had drawn her focus. The main injury, and the one that she'd bet a chocolate cake on had been what killed him, was two symmetrical cuts next to one another on the top of the back.
Calling it ‘cuts’ was barely even truthful at all. It looked like chunks of meat had been carved out, one by one in such neat rows that they overlapped in and out of each other. The blood there was black, and so thick that they barely could see where the wound ended and the skin next to it began.
Chloe Decker couldn’t imagine anyone living through, much less surviving whatever that was. However, if she had to guess, she would say that the scars left behind would be almost identical to the ones she had seen on Lucifer's back.
“I do indeed know this one, detective”, Lucifer walked slowly forward, before his knees gave up and he crashed beside the body. “Oh, brother. What did you do now?”, he stretched out an arm to the man’s face, before it fell limply next to his side again.
There were a lot of things left to do at the crime scene, but Lucifer remained on his knees until the second it was time for the body to be brought to autopsy.
He moved stiffly into the detective's car. His fingers tapped the door handle in a steady rhythm. Finally, he looked at her, “His name was Bezaliel.” Lucifer looked straight ahead, into the road as he spoke, but never broke the rhythm of his tapping.
“He preferred ‘Zal.”
“Alright, I am sitting here with Lucifer Morningstar, the brother of the victim”, Chloe stated in a low voice. They were sitting in an interrogation room for some needed privacy. They had searched the whole crime scene top to bottom, but there were no clues or other means to identify the body, which made a formal statement from Lucifer necessary.
Chloe had almost never seen Lucifer like this. His hair was disheveled and reveal some natural curls. His suit didn't have a button out of place, yet it looked like he had slept in it. Or maybe he hadn't slept, she considered. After all, they found his brother murdered and mutilated.
No matter how gruesome the scene had been for her, she couldn't imagine how it was for Lucifer. She had tried to the entire night, but she had no idea what was going on in his head. It made this formal meeting extremely uncomfortable. However, it was also rather obvious that out of her and Lucifer, it was Lucifer who was the most uncomfortable.
“Please, let’s just skip the formalities and get on with it”, Lucifer said, rubbing the sides of his head. He had his feet up on the table, but just this once she wouldn't say anything. She cpuld see his normally smooth pants had a lot of stains and dirt on them. He had definitely slept in them.
Chloe sat up a bit straighter, and tapped the bottom of the case file on the table. She really hated this part of the work.
“When was the last time you saw the victim?”
Lucifer sighed, “Maybe ten years ago, or so. He was older than me by about a year.”
Chloe looked at the photos on the table to Lucifer, sitting hunched down.
“I'm sorry to ask this, but are you sure this is your brother? A lot of time has passed, and you two are... very different.”
Lucifer looked quickly at the picture of his brother, and looked back at the detective. It was definitely his brother, he had known that ever since he saw the body. They might have been as similar as he and Amenadiel, but they had grown up together.
“Yes, Detective. I believe you’ve met my older brother, Amenadiel?" Chloe nodded absent mindedly, so he continued:
"Pretty much everyone from my family is adopted, me and ‘Zal included.”
“...Right. Sorry" She straightened the papers in front of her again, trying to shake off the weirdness of the situation.
“Again, sorry. What other information do you have about the victim?”
Lucifer leaned further back and thought for a second. He hadn't seen his brother in ten years. He didn't really remember the night he left. Zal mght have been there, or he could have been somewhere else.
Almost everything Lucifer knew about him consisted of childhood-stories, and he was sure as hell not gonna start talking about that, so he went with the most basic information.
“He should be about 25 or 26 years old. His legal name is not Bezaliel, none of our names are what we are called. I doubt anyone even cared to remember what name he was listed under, so you won’t find much if you search for him.“
“Thanks for the heads up. Do you have any idea what his legal name was? Or aftername?"
Lucifer scoffed at that. "Angels don't have afternames". It was fairly obvious. They might have had, but that was a long time ago.
"Come on Lucifer, you have to be serious here-", Lucifer stood up from his chair and slammed his hands down on the table.
"I am bloody serious! He doesn't- Didn't have a lastname. Everyone just called him 'Zal". His voice lost in valume until nearly the end, and he sat back down.
His moodswinngs were usually a bit turbulent, so it wasn't unexpected. Most family members of victims were a bit... Intense, during questioning.
She continued on with the investigation, wanting to get Lucifer out of there as quickly as possible. "Do you know anyone who disliked him? Or had a reason to take some more extreme measures?”
She had expected him to say something directly, but the seconds ticked away and he just sat there, firmly looking at his clasped hands.
"Lucifer?"
“...I believe you’ve seen the scars on my back?”
Whatever she expected it wasn't that, but it was a good thing he brought it up.
“Yeah, I have… Did the person who did that to you, do that to your brother?”
“It’s complicated, but yes, I believe so. The exact executer might have been different, but the principals are the same. They took away his wings. He fell.”
“What do you mean ‘fell’?”, Chloe tried to push together the puzzle pieces in her head. She wanted to be annoyed, that even now Lucifer held onto his story about being the devil.
She couldn’t be though. Nothing made sense about this. But possibly, all his talk about being the devil, and heaven and hell had more to it than just some method-acting.
Lucifer took a deep breath, and looked her straight in the eyes. “It means he failed to be what our father wanted him to be. Each mistake probably led to him losing one feather, and to lose that many at once means he did something so entirely unseemly to God, that he was banished to hell.”
“...Your father is God?”
Lucifer shook his head. “He is God the same way I am the devil. If you convince enough people of it, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. You get caught in your lies.” Lucifer paused, and for a second became the person she knew all too well.
“You know how much I hate lies, detective.”