Chapter Text
Linda had broken the news without any of her usual finesse, simply blurting out Maze, I’m pregnant before the demon so much as sat down on the sofa across from her.
She sat then, hard, like her legs had been kicked clean out from under her (a neat trick, and one she had practiced with Linda just last week when they drilled the eyes-throat-knees-balls list of weaknesses into a perfect rhythm), and silence stretched in a thin line between them.
Linda watched her, and Maze watched Linda’s hands clasp and unclasp around a pen in her lap as if she was trying to restrain them, trying to keep them from doing that tapping thing she always did when she was nervous.
Everything was too quiet—the airless office, Linda holding herself tensed like a very small animal alerted to danger overhead, Maze’s own mouth slack with shock—and, above all else, Maze hated the propensity for stillness that humans had, and so she fished into her pocket for the lollipop snagged from the communal dish on her way into the building, tore the wrapper away with her teeth more viciously than the plastic warranted, and let the sweetness roll over her tongue until some of the nausea that feeling (and she was feeling things) brought up began to settle.
“Continue,” she said, popping the cherry-flavored stick out of her mouth long enough to wave it vaguely at Linda, because it was too much to say anything else.
A tentative “I, well... Maze?” was all the response she got, and that was wrong too.
Linda was the one who liked to talk, who made much of the idea that the baring of one’s soul (for those in possession of one, at least) and innermost thoughts was healthy and not the therapist’s version of torture, but maybe she, like Maze, didn’t have the words to touch this, whatever this revelation was, any deeper than a bare reporting of the facts.
Linda was having a baby. Linda was having a baby with Amenadiel.
No matter how often the loop played itself out in Maze’s head, it never coalesced into something that made the slightest bit of sense.
Not that much in the mortal world had made its logic known to her in the first place: the way life and death hung in equally fragile balance, and how humans were simultaneously so careful and so reckless with themselves and each other; and the existence of cherry candy that neither tasted nor resembled anything like cherries, though Maze found she preferred the mystery of the former; and that pitted feeling that could drop into one’s stomach at seemingly any moment, even when closer examination revealed there were no physical wounds, no bottomless pits to be located under the skin at all.
If she pressed into that feeling (and she did so, reluctantly, and ugh), she found there were others waiting behind it in ambush. Surprise, yes, and a pang of something else sharp and unpleasant—and then she was not surprised at all, but filled to the brim with questions, each one rising from that sunken place below her lungs: the ones that came to her slyly, about Amenadiel and precisely how this child had come to be, and others far more palatable, ones which dealt in violence and misery and remembrances that lightened her temper like the sudden easing of a great knot in her middle.
If the stories that had traveled down to Hell about how mortals incubated and birthed their young were even half-true, Maze was about to get a front-row seat to a process that embodied carnage in the best way possible.
And that, in every sense of the word, would be awesome to behold.
“Is it true,” she asked slowly, leaning forward in anticipation, “that human spawn erupt from their mothers’ bodies in a ceremony of blood and pain?”
The question startled Linda out of her fidgeting. “What? No.”
As quick as the denial had come, there was an undercurrent of disquiet, of misdirection, to it, and Maze smiled with satisfaction—no wonder it had been such an effective form of punishment among women in even the outer circles of Hell.
Linda seemed less-than-eager to dish on the details, though, and after she kicked Maze out of her office, the demon loitered in the waiting room, then in the lobby when she began to draw unwelcome stares, unwilling to stay and to go.
It was strange how one sentence, one unfinished child, could upend the world and yet change nothing at the same time; she didn’t like the idea of a baby (certainly not one that was human and heavenly, and a product of something that still felt like a betrayal from those she had been closest to on earth), but she didn’t exactly hate it, either.
Tired of thinking, and more especially tired of feeling and the tug-of-war it wrought with her chest, Maze thumbed through the most recent list of bounties the precinct had sent her until she found one that suited the precariousness of her mood.
Cold steel in hand and a rush of blood and adrenaline to the head always set her to rights—it was even better when her marks put up a bit of a fight, let her really cut loose—and that was precisely what she needed now. Something that felt right, and fully her own.
Bash in a few faces, bask in the gratification (and monetary reward) of a job well-done, and, if all went according to plan, she might even have time to pick up a gift for the baby.
That was what people did, wasn’t it? Congratulated mothers on their fertility with offerings of clothes and toys that the baby would grow out of almost immediately; a nonsensical ritual, of course, but Maze was willing to honor the custom as long as she could indulge in a more practical gift. She knew a weapons-dealer who owed her a favor and, conveniently, kept an impressive assortment of knives in his inventory. Surely he would have a set or two adapted for smaller hands.
Someone would need to teach the child how to hunt, and if Trixie had taught her anything about little humans, it was that (in rare circumstances) they could prove to be very worthy companions indeed.
Maybe the idea of a fledgling nephilim chasing after his Auntie Maze, learning just where to find the Achilles of his enemies, wasn’t so bad, after all.
.
.
Are you busy? I could use an extra pair of hands.
Maze didn’t need her phone to tell her that the text—perfectly punctuated and laconic, as always—was from Linda, but she had hardly expected to hear from her so soon after the awkwardness of their parting a few days before.
Not to mention that it was half past two in the morning, and, weekend or not, she wasn’t sure she had ever seen Linda awake at this hour, much less received a summons from her that didn’t need to be playfully misconstrued even a bit to be read as suggestive.
She had heard from Lucifer about the “I’m used to doing things on my own” speech the doctor had used to gently turn down Amenadiel’s attempts to help; in fact, she seemed to be keeping everyone at arm’s length in the wake of news about the baby spreading like hellfire among their friends. Linda might not want to talk about what was happening, but the sheer improbability of a half-human, half-angelic child was going to invite commentary from every plane of existence once word got out whether she liked it or not.
I bet you could, Maze replied, adding a smirking, purple devil-horned face to the words for good measure. By the time the answering Please? vibrated across the screen, she was already halfway to Linda’s house, her curiosity spurring her to treat the speed limit on the interchange with even greater disregard than usual.
She didn’t bother to knock when she arrived, and the unlocked door opened easily under her hand, and whatever sight she might have predicted would greet her from the cryptic texts she and Linda had exchanged fell far, far short of the reality.
Bubble wrap was draped over every conceivable surface, from the metal railing of the staircase in front of her to each lampshade and table-edge, and in the center of it all stood Linda, perched on a ladder and struggling to secure another wreath of plastic around the ceiling fan with a roll of duct tape braceleted around her wrist.
Altogether, the room looked not unlike a crime scene, or maybe some sort of makeshift kink club, and Maze was impressed (and naturally a little turned-on) despite herself. This had certainly been worth the drive across the city, and the night was just getting started.
“Is this some weird fetish I don’t know about?” she said, nudging the door shut behind her with her heel.
“Maze, you came!” Linda looked genuinely excited to see her, if a bit taken-aback by the suddenness of her appearance. “Do you think you could get this to stay in place if I gave you some tape? I can’t reach high enough.”
“Ohh, I get it—this is one of those ‘nesting’ things that mothers do, right? I thought that wasn’t supposed to happen until the kid was practically falling out of you.”
Maze peered closely at Linda, searching for any signs of a small head or appendage emerging from unconventional places on her friend’s body, as she moved to hold the ladder.
Linda frowned down at her. “You can stop looking, Maze; the baby is not falling out of me any time soon.” She thought for a moment, a flicker of alarm cutting across her face, and amended, “I hope. How do you know about nesting?”
Maze pouted, her hopes of witnessing the bloodbath of a birth having promptly been dashed, and pointedly avoided answering the question. No one needed to know that she might have ‘borrowed’ a few pregnancy books from Barnes & Noble and might have already read two of them cover-to-cover.
(The writers kept trying to put a positive spin on things like weeks of vomiting in the morning and descriptions of body horror that would not seem out-of-place in Hell, but, honestly, it all sounded just as disturbing as Maze had dreamt it would be.)
“Anyway, I realized that my house wasn’t very prepared for a baby that might, uh, be able to fly. Among other things,” Linda said as she climbed down from the ladder, pausing to give the demon a quick hug when she reached the bottom.
“So you decided to teach the fan a lesson about practicing safe sex?” Maze asked with a grin, reaching around to pop one of the plastic bubbles on the sheet in Linda’s arms, the snap of air jolting through them both like a tiny electrical current.
“No, I decided to babyproof,” she gestured indiscriminately to the space around them, “well, everything.”
“Okay, but why are you doing all of this now? You said there would be months and months to deal with these things.”
“That was before I learned this is all a first in, in the history of the universe, I guess!” Linda said with a small, humorless laugh, letting the rest of the bubble wrap fall in a tangle at their feet. “No one really knows what’s going to happen with this baby, least of all me. I just want to be ready for every possible scenario, every possible what-if because…”
Her eyes touched Maze’s briefly, then dropped away as she continued, so softly it was as if she was afraid of being heard at all. “What if I can’t do this? I don’t think I can do this.”
“What? Linda, no, that’s crazy,” Maze said firmly, stepping closer and taking Linda by the shoulders, wanting to force her to listen to reason. It would have worked better if she wasn’t now standing on the discarded bubble wrap, setting off firecracker-chains of sound with each shifting of her weight, which somewhat ruined the gravity of the moment.
“You’re already doing it.”
Linda shook her head, pulling away from Maze’s hold so that she could return to pacing, worrying a path into the hardwood floor as every misgiving she had been biting back came pouring out.
“No, Maze, this is crazy! This is not supposed to be happening!”
Her voice rose, edged with the kind of deep, desperate emotion—anger, and panic—that never failed to strike Maze to the heart because Linda showed it to her so rarely.
“I mean, who ever heard of an angel baby? It’s absurd, not to mention impossible, except that it’s apparently very much possible because that baby is growing inside of me right now. But, is he even a baby? In the traditional sense? Amenadiel said that angels are created with their adult bodies, not born, so what if he just, you know, bursts out of my stomach fully-formed like that thing from Alien?”
As much as she was distressed by Linda’s distress (she was built to stoke the fires of human suffering, not calm them, and mortals were terrifying when they got all wet-eyed and wobbly with emotion), Maze wanted to laugh at that last piece of imagery, just a little.
But it wasn’t funny at all to watch her friend fall apart like this, looking as small and scared as Maze had ever seen her, and with no one else around to say the right thing or give the doctor the comfort she so clearly needed, Maze was going to have to suck it up and do the job herself, clumsy as she was in these kinds of situations.
Right, making all of Linda’s—extremely valid—concerns seem, well, less apocalyptic and alien; how hard could that be?
“Okay. Okay,” she said, approaching Linda and catching her hands mid-pace before the woman could launch into another litany of what-ifs. Linda let herself be led over to the sofa, seeming to regain some of her composure on the way, and Maze sat her down, taking a place on the coffee table across from her, close-but-not-too-close so that only their knees brushed.
They were, for once, of an equal height: shoulder angled to shoulder, eyeline aligned with eyeline. But Linda’s gaze was resolutely fixed on her lap instead of on Maze, and as much as the demon wanted to reach for her, to touch her in the gentlest way, she feared the contact would be unwelcome.
“It might not feel like it right now, but everything is going to be fine.”
It was one of those things that people said to each other all the time, as if the phrase itself held an alchemy that made everything be as agreeable as promised, but maybe Maze hadn’t gotten the cadence of it right, or the emphasis, because Linda simply scoffed the platitude off.
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Linda, you’re the strongest person I know—”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know that many people,” she said flatly, then sighed, recanted with a pained half-smile. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.”
Maze shrugged off the apology. “No, you’re right, I don’t. But I know you. If anyone can handle this crazy, impossible growing-the-spawn-of-God’s-favorite-son thing, it’s you.”
She hesitated, then slid her hands over both of Linda’s and squeezed warmly, heartened when the woman finally raised her eyes to Maze in response.
“You are going to be a great mother to that baby, even if he comes out with wings. Even if he decides to burst out of your stomach instead of sticking with the usual reproductive channels—from what I saw in Hell, that might actually be a preferable route.”
That won her a chuckle, and Maze was tempted to clarify that she wasn’t kidding; she had seen some shit in her former life that she could safely assume human mothers would find much less pleasurable than she had.
“I know you want to do things on your own, but that doesn’t mean you’re alone in this. Amenadiel will do anything in his power to help you, as soon as you say the word, and so will Lucifer, and I… you know I always have your back, right?”
Linda nodded, and though there were tears skimming her cheeks in earnest now, it didn’t appear to be a reaction to some undisclosed hurt or sorrow but the release of something subtler, beyond Maze’s understanding.
Maybe, she thought, humans just needed to… leak occasionally. Like clouds.
Crying had always set her teeth on edge, one of those human vulnerabilities that made her feel physically ill in the best of times, and so she braced herself before climbing onto the sofa next to Linda and pulling the woman into her with a tender Come here, imagining the next few minutes would be torture—and not the fun kind.
But when Linda rested her head against Maze, fitting just so in the notch between her shoulder and neck, the sensation really wasn't very objectionable at all.
“I wasn’t expecting this to be so overwhelming,” Linda said after her breathing had steadied out again, shifting slightly so she could look up at Maze. “Not right away, at least.”
“What were you expecting?”
Linda hmmed quietly, and the sound reverberated all the way down Maze’s spine, and further. “I think I’ve learned to stop trying to anticipate anything when it comes to the supernatural forces at work in my life.”
“Remember when you first found out about Lucifer and me, about who we really are, and you wigged out, like, how can I be friends with a hideous demon and oh my god I slept with the devil, the literal devil?” Maze asked, putting on her best Linda-voice and trying to mimic the dramatic gestures she so often used when she was in full freak-out mode.
“Oh my god, is that your impression of me? I do not sound like that!” the other woman protested, hitting Maze lightly on the arm. "And I never called you 'hideous'."
“My point is, that felt like a lot, right? More than you thought you could handle? And it took a little time and a little locking-yourself-in-your-office” (Linda smacked her again, and Maze smirked at finding a new point to needle the doctor about) “to get used to it, and then everything was just…” She trailed off, shrugged. “Dealing with all of our celestial nonsense became normal.”
“Yeah, I guess it did. That was…” Linda righted herself a bit more so she could see Maze properly, and there was a vein of admiration in her tone usually reserved for when one of her patients made an important breakthrough. “…actually very reassuring. And provided some much-needed perspective.”
“You don’t need to sound so surprised,” Maze grumbled. “I can be nice.”
The look Linda gave her then was all softness. “You’re more than nice, Maze.”
“Ew, stop,” she whined, curling her arms around her stomach defensively. “You’re gonna make me hurl. You know that stuff makes me nauseous.”
(It did—she was exaggerating the effect feelings-talk had on her only ever-so-slightly—but, then… she supposed she wouldn’t entirely mind if Linda told her what else she was, too.)
They slumped together on the cushions, lapsing into companionable silence for a time, and Maze had just begun to resign herself to the inevitability that Linda was going to fall asleep half on top of her and trap her in a less-than-comfortable position until morning when the other woman stifled a yawn and checked her watch.
“It’s late. Shouldn’t you be getting back?” she asked hazily, making a valiant attempt to sit up and play hostess again. “I didn’t mean to turn this into an all-nighter.”
“I don’t think Decker is very comfortable with me being in the house any more, so I’m not exactly in a rush, here.”
She was square with Trixie, and she knew Chloe was trying her best to act normally around both of them, but that didn’t mean Maze didn’t feel the lick of hurt every time she caught the detective eyeing her from across the room with the same mistrust she afforded to convicted criminals. “I’d rather stay somewhere I’m wanted.”
Well, that sounded pathetic.
And, worse, the confession hung heavy in the air between them, the room suddenly growing very still as Linda—fully alert now, and frowning—parsed the words, picking at the threads of the unspoken question that lingered underneath.
Maze leaned her head all the way back on the sofa, desperate to turn her face away, to outrun the embarrassment coursing through her body, thudding to a stop in that damned pit in her belly. The ceiling fan really did look ominous from this angle, oddly enough, and she wondered if she could take advantage of that, create a distraction long enough to…
“Are you… asking to move in with me?”
Too late.
“No,” Maze said forcefully, and too quickly. She blew out a restless breath, started again, tilting her neck enough to dart a glance at Linda and gauge what her reaction might be. “I’m just saying, you know, the next time you’re overcome with the urge to do some redecorating in the middle of the night, it might be nice to put someone else to work instead of pretending you’re tall enough to reach the rafters yourself.”
She heard Linda snort at that, and pressed on, feeling bolder.
“And when the kid pops out, and you’re still all messed up down there and doing that milking thing with one hand and trying to wrangle your flying baby with the other, hey,” she pointed to herself with both thumbs, waggling them a little, “Auntie Maze to the rescue.”
“Auntie Maze, huh?” Linda repeated thoughtfully, her expression unreadable for an agonizing moment before lighting up with a smile so sincere it made the demon twitch. “I love it.”
“Really?”
“The truth is, I could use the help, as much as I don’t want to admit it.”
Maze had been prepared to lay siege to the doctor to get to this point, or to take matters into her own hands and sneak her belongings in through a window, seeing how long she could escape Linda's notice and simply declining to leave whenever her presence was discovered. Apparently, asking for things was more effective than she had been led to believe, and that opened up a world of intriguing new possibilities.
“How many spare rooms do you have, anyway? Because my knives take up a lot more space than you would think, and that doesn’t even account for my—”
“Nope. Absolutely not.”
“Bounty hunter, remember? There are certain tools required of the trade.”
“Maze.”
“I know, I know, I’ll keep them somewhere safe, somewhere the little hellion won’t be able to get his hands on them.”
That seemed to pacify Linda somewhat, but refraining from stirring up trouble had never been one of Maze's strengths. And it wasn't her intention to start remedying that now.
“Well, not until he’s achieved a reasonable amount of manual dexterity, and then, I’m telling you, you’ll be begging me to—”
“Maze.”
For all that she had spent no more than a handful of hours within these walls, Maze felt none of the displacement that came with moving, with change, with once more having to carve a space out for herself in unfamiliar terrain; no, she fit here, precisely as she was: arguing with her favorite person over the rules of the house, feeling the ebb and flow of Linda’s slender warmth and weight against her side as the negotiations became more heated, and, yes, she could get used to this.
(Her person, and everything that meant. Everything it could mean.)
She was home.