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"Where are you going?" Lilith asked. She'd just seen Lucifer purposefully walk by the office door. He was wearing his red breeches with the white embroidery. Lilith knew those breeches. Those were the dad breeches. He was about to do some intense dadding.
Sure enough, when Lucifer backtracked enough to see Lilith through the doorway, he said, "It's high time that Charlie gets The Talk," with the gleeful severity of a human child playacting at an adult job.
It was the same attitude with which he approached all his parenting duties—zealously, but almost as though it was a game. Childrearing was something foreign to him, foreign to his very nature, something artificial and abstract; and like any other game he could learn the rules of parenting and play by them (or, more true to his nature, break them when he could get away with it and find loopholes when he couldn't); but it was still very much a human thing to him, fascinating and quaint and distant.
But he was nevertheless eager to play the game as well as possible, and genuinely loved their child, so Lilith chalked his attitude down as a plus rather than a minus and let him have his fun. "Charlie's hardly a toddler." Probably, maybe. Too small for one but talking like one. It was anyone's guess what the growth rate of a cross between a fallen angel and a human-turned-demon would be. "You don't think that's too early?"
Lucifer stopped mid-stride, halfway out of view of the doorway again. After a moment, he conceded, "Maybe." He shrugged. "But would you rather our little angel know too early or too late?"
Fair point. "Just keep it age appropriate."
Lucifer stood there for a moment, gaze somewhere far away as he thought hard.
"Can you do that?" Did he have any idea what was age appropriate for a toddler. There were very few children in hell—and most mortal arrivals had their poor little eyes seared with things that could never be unseen within a day of arrival—so maybe he'd never had to learn... "I could help—"
"No no!" Lucifer waved her off with renewed determination. "I can handle it. Age appropriate. Aaage appropriate. No problem." He gave her two thumbs up and strode off toward Charlie's playroom.
"Just yell if you need backup," Lilith called after him.
###
Charlie was playing with a pile of black wooden toy building blocks—and occasionally leaving sharp little teeth marks in them—when Lucifer leaned around the open doorway to the playroom. "Baby!"
"Daddy!" Charlie bounced in place on the floor, arms stretched up to be picked up.
Lucifer obliging scooped Charlie up high and spun around a couple of times, to peals of laughter, before plopping down in a nearby heavily cushioned wingback chair with baby in lap. "You're getting big! Pretty soon I'm not going to be able to help you fly around, my little angel." (Charlie's excited ruddy-cheeked smile slowly faded.) "You're going to be flying yourself around soon." (And immediately returned.)
Glancing around, as though making sure no one was listening in, Lucifer leaned in and said, "In fact, because you're getting so big, I think you're ready to hear a big secret."
Charlie's eyes widened and jaw dropped.
"Do you wanna hear it?"
Nod nod nod.
"Okay!" Lucifer wrapped an arm around Charlie's soft little back. "I'll tell you." Little kids, he mused, were great audiences. Hard to get their attention, but once you did, you were the most important person in the universe. Loved that. "So you know about girls and boys, right? How Mommy's a girl and Daddy's usually a boy?"
"Yeah!" Charlie said, leaning forward a little with the force of an emphatic nod. "And I've seen lots of—and—and the humans are, too! Lots of them are."
"Very good," Lucifer said, bending in to smooch Charlie's cheek. "You're right, most humans are girls and boys too. A few of them aren't. Some of them are both. But most of them are one or the other."
Charlie thought about that. "Like a skeleton."
"A—a skeleton?"
All in one excited breath, Charlie said, "A skeleton said 'I'm not a man ooor a woman, I don't have skin' and he said, he said, 'But what were you when you were alive' and the skeleton said so loud, 'NO!'" Charlie pointed very firmly at the imaginary "he" that this apocryphal skeleton had been speaking to, frowning fiercely. "'No!'"
Lucifer tried not to laugh. He hadn't heard about this mysterious skeleton; he'd have to ask Lilith later if she'd been there when Charlie had witnessed this exchange. "That's right," he said, "some humans are like that skeleton." He lifted Charlie up to stand atop his knees. "But you and me, baby, we're a bit different than humans!"
Charlie's eyes widened in eager curiosity.
"Because we're angels," Lucifer went on, taking Charlie's hands. "When we're made, we're not boys or girls at all. Just like that skeleton—except we have skin." He chuckled. "But we can pick which we want to be. Or not pick, or pick both, or change back and forth, or be a hundred different things."
"Oh!" Charlie bounced back and forth from foot to foot in excitement, like running in place. Lucifer held Charlie's hands tight to keep his little angel from falling. "I can be anything?"
"Anything," Lucifer agreed, nodding. "You don't have to choose now. It's just like changing clothes. You can wear your favorite clothes every day, or change every morning, or someday pick a new outfit like nothing anyone's ever seen before—"
"A girl," Charlie said firmly.
Lucifer blinked. "Oh?"
"A girl like Mommy!"
"O-oh." It was like a spear straight through his heart. "You—you don't wanna be like Daddy, too?"
Bouncing with her knees, Charlie declared, "A girl like Mommy and an angel like Daddy."
And just like that, the wound was mended. He pulled Charlie into a hug, making her squeal with laughter. "Then you'll be a girl as long as you want."
###
Lucifer was humming cheerily when he came back into the office.
"The Talk went well?" Lilith asked.
"Very well!" Lucifer said.
"Kept it age appropriate?"
"I made zero mentions of genitalia," Lucifer assured her. "I wouldn't even know where to start if I had! What would I say, 'This part usually means that gender, except when it doesn't, which is a lot, so forget I even mentioned it'? It's going to be centuries before Charlie's using those parts for anything but peeing, it can wait!"
Lilith fought back something between a smile and a grimace. "Good."
Lucifer scooted over the office bookcase's stepladder so he could reach a high shelf. "Charlie mentioned having overheard a skeleton that's neither man nor woman getting in an argument, do you know when that was?"
"Oh, yes, at one of those balls. I didn't catch their name. Stolas was trying to hit on them and made something of a scene."
"Ugh, Stolas. At the same ball as our daughter. He's no fit company for a baby."
"Nobody we know is fit company for a baby, dear." Lilith blinked. "'Daughter'?"
"She was very confident about it!" He pulled down a thick book. There were so few births in Hell that they could keep them all recorded in a single birth registry that was kept safe in the royal residence. He turned it open to the last used page, flipped back a couple, and skimmed the list. "A-ha!" He set the book down on Lilith's desk and pointed to their own baby's line, written in cursive: Charl— Magne. With a snap of his fingers, the dash for the unfinished name twisted and curled like an ink snake, at last completing it: Charlotte Magne.
They regarded the name for a moment.
"She made the decision in a few minutes," Lilith pointed out. "What do you do if she changes her mind tomorrow?"
Lucifer shrugged. "Pull the book back out and change it to Charles," he said. "If she makes a habit of it, we can leave it out and teach her to change it herself, let us check it whenever we're not sure what to call her."
"Mm." Lilith nodded, satisfied.
They regarded the name a moment longer.
Lilith grimaced. "I got used to Charlie."
"So did I," Lucifer admitted.
Lilith threw her hands up. "Well, Charlie works for a girl, too." That was why they'd picked the nickname, cover all their bases until they found out if their child had a more strongly gendered preference.
"Y'know what, let's stick with Charlie," Lucifer said. "We can ask her if she wants to go by her full name later."
"Agreed."
He climbed back up the stepladder and slid the birth registry back in place.