Work Text:
Lightning lit up her room briefly, menacingly moments after the shaking rumble of thunder directly above woke Trixie. With a small cry, she jumped out of bed, racing out of her room only to stop short in the hallway.
Sometimes, she would forget that Daddy didn’t live with them anymore, especially during storms. She would make her way down to Mommy’s bedroom, remembering only after she’d pushed open the door that Daddy was at his apartment.
It wasn’t that Mommy didn’t make her feel better; she was the best mom in the world! She made the best soup when Trixie was sick and her kisses really did make her pain go away. Whenever she needed comfort for those kinds of things, her mom was all she wanted.
But Daddy was the only one who knew how to chase the storms away, what to say when other kids were making fun of her, made her laugh when she was feeling down.
For the past three years—since her dad had moved out—she had dreaded any storm that came when she wasn’t at his house. It was even worse when they woke her up at night.
Then, when Lucifer disappeared, her mom gave her an idea. One morning, Trixie had gone to the kitchen to get breakfast and saw Chloe in one of his dress shirts, just standing in front of the stove with it pulled up to her nose. When Trixie had asked what she was doing, her mom had jumped away, guiltily murmuring, “Mommy just misses Lucifer, Monkey. And it still smells like him.”
That gave Trixie her best idea: when she was at Daddy’s house, she would grab a shirt or two of his and hide them away, just in case. That way, if she ever missed him, she could just grab one and snuggle it.
So, even with the storm raging outside, she quietly opened the chest at the end of her bed, pulling out one of Dan’s shirts. She kept forgetting to bring them back to his house and there was a sizeable stack beneath a few of her stuffed animals—she didn’t want Chloe to feel bad that she needed Dan instead of her sometimes—but Daddy wouldn’t notice.
Snuggling back into bed, flinching as thunder rolled, Trixie slid her head and arms through the holes in the shirt, feeling instant relief at the familiar smell of her dad’s laundry detergent—he liked the “ocean breeze” scent over her mother’s “lavender mist”. And, though it took some time, she drifted off to sleep, the scent a close second to actually having her dad snuggling her.