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They’re crowded around the body, just Chloe, Ella and Dan. Ella is half-way through her spiel concerning how the victim died, when she breaks off and gasps. Her face turns a shade paler, and somehow, before he even begins to speak, Chloe knows.
“Don’t mind me, Miss Lopez,” says Lucifer. “What you were saying was fascinating. Death by ping-pong ball! I’m relieved to hear the murderers of LA haven’t let their creative standards drop.”
Chloe has stopped breathing. She senses the heat of his body, where he’s standing close behind her. She doesn’t want to turn, because maybe it’s not real? She’s trembling; he’s so close, she perceives him trembling too. But how can she feel that? How can it be real? She’ll turn, and he’ll be gone, and her heart will splinter into a million icy shards yet again, and it will hurt even more.
On the other hand, if he is real, and she doesn’t turn now, she’s going to miss her moment. Because Ella has already circumnavigated the body, arms thrown wide. Dan gives a cry of surprise, and looks like he’s moving to join the forthcoming shared hug.
So, she turns. And he’s real. And she’s enveloped him in her arms in the nick of time. Ella’s jostling against them, and also possibly Dan, but she scarce feels her other colleagues. Lucifer is real and he’s solid—so very solid—and he’s holding her tight. She pulls back, cupping his face, and he looks just the same. If anything, even more breathtakingly handsome.
But his eyes… She inhales sharply. So often they’ve brimmed with pent-up emotion, as they do now; with harrowing memories, unhealed scars and untold horrors, which bombard her anew. There’s so much for them to confront, and they will, they must, together. He’s been through so much…
Yet in that split second, she sees something new. A reflection of her soul, her deepest yearnings. The pain of two halves of a whole who’ve been torn asunder. Which neither could’ve felt without having known the love they’d shared, and that she’d admitted too late.
Or perhaps not too late.
“You’re here.” Her broken words sound strange, distant and foreign even to her own hearing. “You’re real.”
He sinks his forehead down to meet hers. Ella realises what’s happening. Dan steps away too. Ella mutters, “This is a Deckerstar moment, dude. Let’s go join the spare wheels' club.”
Chloe steers Lucifer off farther, from the others, from the dead body for proprieties’ sake, and because this… This is private. This is theirs.
She drinks in the sight of him. Again, and again. He looks tired; relieved. His suit is immaculate, but his hair a little rumpled. Did she do that? Did she run her fingers through it as she stared at him before, because she’d longed to do that a thousand times when she’d believed she never again would. Words don’t seem to matter, but she utters them all the same. “You came back.”
“I did,” he says simply, and he smiles a brittle smile.
“And you’ll stay?”
His breath hitches then his brow furrows, as if it’s a challenging question. His vow is firm enough. “I will.”
He doesn’t lie. He can’t lie.
They kiss, and they dissolve into each other. She balls her fists in the back of his jacket, he crushes her so close, and their bodies meld disarmingly naturally as one. Her whole being subsumes to the places their bodies touch, and his kiss… it unhinges her, so utterly, so wonderfully, and so torturously too. She can taste his feral power, forged in the soaring towers of Heaven and in the basest pits of Hell, in depths of time that she can never truly comprehend. More potent that even this, she senses his need for her, a need she reciprocates now exactly. The kiss grows wet, ravenous, slightly messy; she senses him sigh into her, and perhaps even quake with a joyful laugh.
When they break apart, they’re both breathless. He catches his breath first, and grins, a bolder smile than previously. So reassuringly Lucifer, despite the tears that glisten in his eyes. He strokes her hair. “I see you didn’t miss me then?” he says.
“Barely noticed you were gone.”
He chuckles, and she buries her tear-soaked face in his shoulder and hugs him again, circling her hands soothingly in the small of his back. The moment will pass; things will happen. Everything changes.
But right now, he’s here. Safe in her arms. And never, ever, in her life thus far has she been so entirely happy.