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Everything started out just fine — back to working cases together, trying to mend everything between them — but then someone just had to go and provoke him.
“Do you have any air conditioning?” Jason, their suspect, complained, fanning his shirt. “It’s hot as Hell in here.”
Lucifer snorted and adjusted his cufflinks as if to draw attention to his three-piece suit and how unaffected he was by the heat of Los Angeles in the summer. “Hell is much hotter than this,” he announced. “You can have my word on it, as the Devil, of course.” He said it nonchalantly, assuming that everyone around him would take him at face value.
Jason furrowed his brow and gave him a strange look. “Um, you’re what?”
It wasn’t such an unusual reaction — pretty much par for the course for anyone who happened to encounter Lucifer being, well, Lucifer. Before, Chloe would have probably ignored him, or if she were feeling particularly favourable that day, she would have rolled her eyes.
But that was before — well, Before. And the thought of someone questioning Lucifer too deeply, probing too hard and uncovering the truth, made a little bubble of panic rise up in Chloe’s stomach. What would the world do with truth of the divine? How would people react if they knew that the Devil, that angels, were walking among them? There would be worldwide outrage. Panic in the streets. People would come after Lucifer, try to hurt him or capture him or send him back to Hell, and it could all come unravelling right now with some blue-eyed murder suspect who happened to be on the receiving end of Lucifer’s declaration, and he’d tell somebody who’d tell somebody else and then —
“He’s joking!” she blurted out. She hoped her laugh didn’t sound too fake. She gestured at Lucifer like can you believe this guy? “He’s such a jokester, all day long, telling people he’s the Devil. It’s funny because, you know, his name is Lucifer, and that’s the Devil’s name, so —”
Lucifer’s entire body had turned towards her, but she didn’t dare look over at him. Jason was staring at her with his jaw slightly open, but his eyes started narrowing in renewed suspicion. Maybe her explanation had been too weird? Maybe she should have gone for something that didn’t make him out to be a crazy person?
“He’s rehearsing for a play,” Chloe tried. “He’s playing the Devil. He’s a bit of a method actor. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” She cleared her throat and shuffled the papers around in front of her unnecessarily. “Where were you on Friday night between six and seven PM?”
Jason kept staring at her for a moment longer, then blinked and seemed to shake himself out of it. Crisis averted.
When they were done, Chloe stood up and marched out of the room, Lucifer ambling along behind her. She sat at her desk, resolutely ignoring him, but he appeared to be in a rare patient mood, content to sit and stare at her.
Finally she snapped. “Yes?” she hissed, making eye contact at last. He was grinning.
“Nothing,” he said, trying for innocent and failing miserably. She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m just so relieved that you’re here to be the last line of defence between me and the entire world finding out the truth of divinity.”
She huffed. There was a slight possibility that she had over-reacted a bit, but she wasn’t about to tell Lucifer that and risk puffing up his ego any further. “I mean, do you have to tell every single person you meet?” she said.
He waved her off. “Oh, they never believe me,” he said. “It’s quite fun. You should try it sometime.”
“No way in —” She stopped herself.
Lucifer leaned forward. “You were going to say ‘no way in Hell,’ weren’t you?” He was positively gleeful.
She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t. “Just — no way,” she said, turning back to her computer.
His laughter was sharp and bright.