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She’s about to delete the voicemail, the very same day he comes back.
Because her name is Chloe Decker and this is her fucking lot in life.
Of course, by about to delete, she actually means momentarily forgetting how the numbers on her phone work, and which she presses to resave or delete, and the tinny recorded voice that tells her every time, every goddamned time blurs and fades because his voice keeps resonating over the message she knows by heart and can recite from memory but his voice is starting to dim too fast, so she has to listen. She has to listen so she can see where the digital echo of him deviates from the way he sounds in person, where the translation errors stand out so that she won’t forget, because she can’t forget.
She can’t forget.
But right, yes. She’s at that point she gets to where she’s clutching her phone close enough to her cheek that it’ll leave an imprint; close enough to her ear that she can hear her blood pumping like the sea, the sea where she found him last time, before she lost him, and she’s always finding him by the water before she loses him, god—
But she almost presses ‘7’. She almost presses ‘7’ instead of ‘9’.
And she fumbles her goddamn phone to the floor like the world’s ending. And she’s got steady hands under pressure, steadier than most but this. This.
This isn’t pressure. This is heartbreak. And they didn’t, they weren’t, they weren’t even—
But what they weren’t doesn’t matter. What they were—friends, partners—was enough to snake into her skin and wrap around her bones and plant seeds that took root without her notice and as soon as the heat and the want had started blooming, the tightness in her chest heavier every day for the effort to contain: as soon as it started to become undeniable, what it was, what maybe, maybe it could be, against all odds?
As soon as it became too true to ignore, to decry, he was gone.
And the what ifs were lost causes. The possibilities were dead in the water. She’d forgotten the world looked grey before; she wonders, idly, what it would be without Trixie to shine light, without Dan to stand as some solace in his own strange mourning—without her ragtag Tribe, knocking back drinks that burn hardest while Ella tries to lift the mood with something unbearably bright and cloying, even if she ends up with a whiskey sour by the end of the night, and Chloe doesn’t even like scotch, but.
There were too many thoughts—ghosts of them, now: haunting her relentless—about what he’d tasted like, in those brief moments. What he could have tasted like, rich and real and more than just a blink and a handful of heartbeats—but never.
Never, now. Never again.
She doesn’t like scotch, but she’s fairly fucking certain that’s the point.
She wonders if she’d mourn any other friend—not that there are many; and she knows that she would, and deeply. Because she feels deeply, always has, regardless of the stone she’d long learned to build around her body, around her soul to hold in the blood, so yes: she’d mourn. He was her friend, and it makes sense that she mourns, and yet.
And yet, for anyone else, any friend, or even colleague, or hell—most of her family, save for her core: she wouldn’t. Not like this.
She tries not to dwell on everything that may or may not mean. She tries not to think too much on it at all. It hurts enough already without sobbing, without willfully making her own salt for the wounds, for the places where she’d seen the stone in her cracking, crumbling away and hadn’t bothered building back after a while, because even for every hurt, she didn’t want to shut him out. She was a fool, maybe.
She was made more of heart than most, maybe.
Or maybe, maybe: maybe she’d just been blind.
Some nights, she sneaks into the penthouse. Remembers going there the day after she assumed he’d reneged on the promise playing on her phone, thought better of the deep, dark secret he’d kept hidden all this time—remembers texting Maze, who was still at the hospital, frowning when she hadn’t seen him. Remembers calling Amenadiel to see if he knew where Lucifer’d gone, but there’d been no answer. She remembers calling out, and the chilling echo of her voice into emptiness, into the void, and she remembers the moment her heart started beating faster, staring out toward the balcony and breathing in the lingering scent of his cologne and turning on her heel and running, trying to sort her thoughts as she reached the station and pulled every string she’d ever heard of, let alone could reach, and when the GPS on his phone had led to the desert, she’d vomited on her shoes for everything that implied, and realized that since she stood in his deserted apartment, days before, her heart had never stopped pounding, and yet here. Here.
Here, she remembers: here, her heart just fucking stops.
She maybe screams. She maybe cries. She maybe runs through rock and sand, desperate and hurting in every muscle, down to the bone. She can’t fathom to prospect of a body: what a body would have been reduced to in the heat, after so many hours, days. And she remembers Maze on her knees, staring blankly, utterly lost—if they could knock him down, they were only after one thing, she’d said, grim and hollow, and if she’s not running to hunt whatever’s out there of him, whatever hope might be left then Chloe knows it’s gone, he’s gone, and Chloe cannot breathe.
So some nights, she sneaks into the penthouse. She knows that Maze sees her, but never stops her. Sometimes, she curls in his bed like he always teased at and thinks of missed opportunities at the heat of his touch in passing; what it could have felt like against her entire body: otherwordly. Transcendental.
She thinks she just wants to look at him, study the line of his profile. She wants to touch his scars with the soft curves of her lips and listen to his heartbeat as she falls asleep. She wants to save the scent of him, just him against the sheets forever, and she wants to stop being so afraid of what will happen when it inevitably fades because she wants him back, so that it never does, she wants—
She wants.
And she sobs, sometimes, into silk bedding. Sometimes, when she can’t bear the solitude, she sobs into cheap cotton in her own bed that feels wrong, for no good reason: it’s not the bed she’d shared with Dan, it’s not a bed she’s shared with anyone but there’s a piece that’s missing from it. Though maybe it’s just a piece that missing from her.
She dreams, sometimes. Of red, and skinless limbs, of pain and eyes that burn. The dreams take hold in her chest and fill it full with want, somehow—the want to touch, the want to soothe, the want to embrace and never let go because no matter the color those eyes still look at her like she’s the gravity that holds the world, and no matter the texture that face still holds terror just the same and she’s never done well, seeing that look on his features. She’s never been able to stand it for long.
Eventually, she thinks she believes in the things she can’t name. She never asks, but Maze watches her with a different gleam in her eyes: knows, somehow. The gleam is sad.
Chloe hopes, sometimes, that she’s done enough wrong in her life to fix this, in the end.
Trixie takes it hard, and Chloe doesn’t know how to help, which makes it worse. But Chloe’s broken, too, and even if she weren’t she’s not sure how to fix the look of complete despondence on her monkey’s face, or the way Trix stares out windows like she’s looking for something she won’t ever find. Chloe doesn’t know how to fix any of that.
Chloe’s used to know what to do when the world cracks open. Chloe is the one who knows the glue that’ll hold tightest, or bridge the places where fragments got lost.
But Chloe doesn’t fucking know what to do with all these pieces, left behind.
She refuses a partner, but Dan ends up tagging along unbidden more times than Chloe can account for. She doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t protest. It’s probably for the best, anyway: she’s grown reckless. Not for the thrill, or the rush, or the wish: no, she has her daughter to think of, to breathe at the very least for, as best she can against the constant weight on her chest. But she's grown reckless, because she saw what it got them, how many people it helped when he did it, and something short-circuits in her brain between that fact and the very real possibility that Lucifer hadn't been quite as bound by the laws of physics, of life and death as she was—but he'd bled like her, he'd died and come back, yes, but he wasn't invincible, and she was trained for this, that had to count for something, had to even some stretch of the score. And maybe she'd also gotten sloppy, careless in her own right, knowing in the back of her mind, no; no, somewhere deeper than that, that Lucifer had her back, wouldn't let her come to real harm, not at the end of the day.
She trusts Dan, or else: she trusts him to try.
She misses Lucifer like a limb; like the pulse at a wrist.
The fact that it will happen is inevitable—honestly, it always was, long before Lucifer, but maybe not-so-long, after; maybe that was a given. But Chloe is her father’s daughter, and she went into this life with her eyes open.
And Dan does try; he tries, manages to get the gun out of their suspect’s hands before he goes down, and Chloe is relieved when she sees the wound it isn’t lethal, just takes weight-bearing and makes it a fever dream. His expression is conflicted as she meets his eyes, but she isn’t. She keeps running.
The standoff itself is generally anticlimactic. She disarms and incapacitates their suspect—she rushes him, and he expects her to wait, to call him out and deescalate, and there was a time she would have expected that, too. In fact, she still expects it from her best self, but she’s not that woman anymore. They know the evidence will out, now: this man is their killer, and she’s learned a thing or two about punishment and justice that she didn’t quite grasp before, and yes. Yes, in her own mind, she can admit it, though she’ll never say it aloud: wherever he is, if he’s anywhere at all?
She wants to make Lucifer proud, and make herself proud along the footsteps he swaggered into the ground at her side.
So she rushes, and he doesn’t expect it. She disarms him, takes the knife from him by leaving about 20 openings for him to completely ruin her in exchange for the only opening she needs to get the blade in her hands. She cuffs him, and immobilizes him, and then she’s heading back to Dan to wait for backup.
Which is when that anticlimax she mentioned? Catches up and knocks her straight on her ass.
She’s not sure how it happens. Or who makes it happen, either, because one of the last clear glances she gets before the pain whites out her vision is her perp still immobile. The bullet, or the blade, or the lightening bolt of agony that tears through her like a shot moves from the bottom up, so maybe it’s a leg wound, whatever it happens to be. She can feel her center of gravity abandon her by millimeters as the world slows, as her knees give and her ankle twists, and it’s only in those too-slow moments that she registers they’re not on the ground floor. And that she’s very close to a window as she loses her balance and not just fine motor skills, but gross ones too and she feels the pull of it before it makes sense in her head: she’s going to fall.
She’s going to fall, that’s how she’s going to go out, and that’s both disappointing and terrifying and suddenly it doesn’t matter that she can’t see beyond the pain and the rush in it, because all that swims behind her eyelids is her daughter’s face. It doesn’t matter that she nearly deleted a voicemail just hours before and the world felt like it was ending, and her heart felt like it would stop, because both are coming and all she can hear is his voice, now.
The glass shatters under her weight, and the descent is imminent. She feels warm, even though the air is cool and getting colder, playing at beads of sweat that come from nowhere and slick her skin and she remembers hearing, reading, knowing that falling from great heights is a fairly merciful death, like falling in a dream: you wake up before you make impact, and you pass out before you hit land. Her heart’s pounding, but she can only feel it at her neck. She can’t swallow around it, and she can’t breathe in because the wind’s rushing up too quick. The white of the pain turns to the black of release and she isn’t ready, but her life’s been a study in the things she’s not ready for coming at her anyway, so she’s prepared, at the very least, and feels the moment her bones go slack, the very instead she releases everything she has, and she fights the urge to pray because there’s that soft whisper again that everything was true, that Lucifer never lied, and that his father was an asshole anyway, but she asks the universe to take care of her baby, and then—
And then—
The warmth isn’t just warmth, now. Her heart’s not just pounding, but shaking, and the ground is so close, so close she can feel it, the pull of it almost a tangible thing, but then it’s arrested, and her limbs fold in of their own accord, except no, no they don’t.
There’s soft air behind her ear, and there’s a heavy rhythm around her, resonating out from the arch of her spine and shuddering everywhere, at odds with her own pulse but insistent, taking hold and pulling her harder, more forceful than the ground does, conducting her blood to its siren call and she doesn’t know what’s happening. She thinks maybe this is the other side, the thing that’s after that she never believed in, because there’s a scent on the air that’s like an embrace, more so than the feeling of arms, real or imagined, around her in midair; more even than the wind at her neck that’s a breath in her dreams, her last few moments—that isn’t a howl or a screech but a murmur, and she didn’t need to keep the voicemail to remind her what was wrong with the recording. She could have pressed ‘7’ and the world would have spun nonetheless.
Because it’s his voice on the wind, just then, and it trembles through her being like nothing else ever could, and the feeling of it now, where she surrenders the resistance to it, to him that stood between them before: the feeling of it now is what she imagined Heaven would be like if were real—before someone taught her better.
“You know, Detective,” the wind, his voice, it purrs: but it’s not a seduction, or a temptation so much as an exhale, a relief, and the rhythm at the line of her back feels more like a heartbeat, and there’s softness at her sides like she’s never known before—the white in her peripheral vision has nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the illusion of some joy in an end.
“For all my fruitless efforts to the figurative, I wasn’t hoping you’d fall for me quite like this.”
She finds that she can breathe enough, just then—some reversal of the air, racing upward; some mercy at the last, in the fragments of her mind—she finds that she can breathe enough to huff a strangled laugh and she doesn’t know what kind of real this is, whatever this is, and she doesn’t care: she doesn’t care because at the very end, at the very last, in whatever’s left—he came back.
The last thing she knows is warmth, and his voice, and a heartbeat not her own that can maybe guide her way down, or up, or onward, and that’s enough.
The white at the edges of her vision fades, and then it’s dark, then it’s done.
And yet: still she’s warm.