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2011
You can live decades before your heart starts beating. That’s the dreadful cruelty of it.
Lux is not an easy place to be for those less living. Even on a more subdued weeknight like tonight, it’s taxing for the humans so pale and waifish they look like they could tear as a piece of cellophane does. It isn’t their fault the world isn’t built for them. Painfully ironic, really, when in order to ascend from their deep weariness, they must partake.
So they’re here. And they’re hunting.
Perhaps tonight will be the night for one of them. Lucifer hopes so. His Father’s cruel design doesn’t get much worse than this. So if the ghosts of West Hollywood are here to tempt fate, the least he can do is welcome them. Perhaps watch, with distant interest, as they hunger through the crowd night after night. Any moment could be the moment; the incidental crossing of paths that kicks off that first flutter. A heartbeat. And all the life that comes with it.
Lazy plumes rise from a half-smoked cigarette, wasting in the ashtray on the lid of the piano. Two discarded cufflinks gleam in the light beside it, his sleeves long since rolled back. It’s well after midnight, and the bass had stopped pounding hours ago. It’s in the wee hours when Lux becomes more piano bar than nightclub that Lucifer indulges himself — and his guests, of course. His fingers twinkle along the keys, improvising a loose melody.
“Lucifer.” A too-pale brunette slinks against the edge of his piano, seeping across it like syrup. Her body clings to its last scraps of energy, but her eyes sparkle, defiant of their weariness. “Play my favorite?”
A fond smile curls around Lucifer’s lips like smoke tendrils. He plucks his flagging cigarette from the ashtray. “And what’s your favorite this week, darling?”
“Katy Perry.” She leans her head in the crook of her arm on the polished rosewood lid, a little debauched in just the way Lucifer relishes. “You know, the one that’s like… you! make! me! Feel like I’m living a—”
“Sadly I do, yes.” An amused grimace crosses his face, and he leans his forearms on the lid. “Dearie me, when are you going to listen to some Bowie, eh? Instead you’d have me sing about being a bloody teenager?”
She hums, lounging. “It’s not about being a teenager. It’s about feeling that way. You know? Bright, and… excited…”
“Alive,” Lucifer murmurs.
A quiet smile purses her lips. “Yeah.”
She sways on her feet, the lid of the piano providing the bulk of her support. Not drunk — not very, anyway. Just a person with blood as still as a lake, muscles weak and body tired — yet still standing, still smiling, still wanting to hear a song that reminds her of a better way things could be.
Lucifer can’t help but hold a deep respect for that, so he concedes with the barest nod of his head, stubbing out his cigarette in the glass ashtray. “Very well.”
He strokes a key, finding his starting note. It drops out heavy, too low for his tenor-leaning vocals, so he works his way up. The woman hovers, watching him expectantly until he has to laugh.
“You’ll need to indulge me while I do a little reverse engineering,” he explains. “Astonishingly, this one’s not in my usual repertoire.”
She rests her face in her cupped hands, happy to drift. “Oh. That’s fine.”
“You think…” Lucifer croons quietly, testing out the key he’s chosen. “You think I’m… hmm.”
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, watching him pluck his way up the octave, finding the range of the song.
Lucifer flashes her a brief, distracted smile. “You know I don’t get tired, darling.”
“Yeah. I dunno how you do it,” she sighs. “You’ve got a lotta energy for a ghost.”
“I’m not a ghost—”
“Oh, right,” she smiles that same wry smile they all do, when they think they’re in on the joke. “‘The Devil’. Well, then the Devil doesn’t have a heartbeat either.”
“Indeed I do not,” he agrees. “And I don’t need one. Besides, isn’t ‘ghost’ derogatory? It was in the sixties.”
She slides against the heel of her hand, eyes half-open, and grins at him. “It’s been re-claimed.”
“Has it now?” Lucifer reaches for his glass, satisfied with the rough arrangement he’s just pieced together. He savors a long sip, enjoying the way her eyes cling to him. “Well, good on you.”
“You sing well too. Your voice has so much…”
“Soul?” Lucifer preens. “Well, of course it does; who do you think inspired the blues?”
“I was gonna say heart.” The woman’s head dips playfully beneath the shine of the spotlight, catching its halo. “Almost like there’s something beating in there. Gimme your wrist. I wanna check for a pulse.”
“I’ll tell you what, darling, if you can stay awake to the end of your song, perhaps I’ll offer you a different appendage,” he says. “And I can assure you that one pulses just fine.”
“Oh.” Teeth drag on her lower lip. “Deal.”
“Lovely.”
It’s not the most shining example of pop music, but it’s light and it’s fun, and his arrangement is slower, a little more soulful, which renders it almost acceptable. The woman hums happily against the lid, then slides away to one of the booths to listen from the comfortable shadows.
And then, without warning, Lucifer feels like the whole world’s crashed into his chest.
He loses his breath, then his voice breaks — all sound forced out of him by the impact. For a moment he thinks he’s been struck by lightning. Though impossible in a basement nightclub, it’s the first thing that comes close to explaining the rod of raw electricity which runs him through until he buckles over the piano, nearly breaking his nose on the lid.
His hand slips off the keys, palm flattening five of them into an atonal thunk as the other one slams against his chest and feels…
Something.
The gasp he drags in stings like Arctic air.
Something, where for more than thirteen billion years there had been nothing. A comfortable absence. He’d always had fire and whimsy, the energetic vigor that half-alive humans so tragically lacked. He’d watched Earth’s first sunrise with stillness in his veins like glaciers, but now…
One, two. One, two. One, two.
Lucifer’s eyes water from the shine of the spotlight, from forgetting to blink. He sits rigid on the piano bench until the dissonant hum of his last bashed chord fades to nothing, and then he can almost hear it. One, two. One, two.
“This isn’t possible.”
Sharp whispers spread around the room like spot fires as people begin to realize what’s happened. Not a breath amongst them, they pull towards him like iron shards seeking out a magnet. His eyes sweep, unseeing. Hazy lights wash out their features, but Lucifer can feel their ravenous attention.
Everyone knows what it looks like when somebody gets their heartbeat.
His fingers fumble to the side of his throat, searching clumsily from the crook of his neck to beneath his jaw, until he finds it. A steady pulse, throbbing under the skin, frightening and strange.
“This is not possible!”
The whispers knit into a hushed net of voices, encircling him, rising to crescendo as his head spins and his virgin heartbeat hammers faster and faster — until a squeal of delight erupts behind him, shrill in the thick air.
“Oh my God! Oh my God, oh m… I can feel it! I’ve… I’ve got it!”
Lucifer’s head snaps around.
He’d been so preoccupied with the impossibility of the what, he’d entirely neglected to consider there was a second part.
The who.
Lucifer turns on the piano stool, eyes scanning, gazing into the hungry crowd and the crowd gazes into him also. He’s met with a haze of pale blue, but he finds the one who’d shouted quickly — her excited gestures visible even through the spotlights. The skin around his eyes twitches.
What human could possibly expect to have a soul to match the Devil?
Lucifer rises, and lets his feet carry him.
The girl’s babbling slows, and she beams as he approaches. Then his feet settle to a stop before her, the glare winks out of his periphery, and he can finally see her clearly.
She’s short, Korean, with glittery press-on stars at the corners of her huge eyes and her hair gathered into twin buns atop her head. She looks young — not too young, but a little outside Lucifer’s usual demographic. A novelty Hello Kitty purse sits at her hip, squashed flat beneath her hand bracing on the bench.
Lucifer frowns, taking her in.
“Oh my God,” she cries out, breathless and giddy. Her eyes flick around the room. “I never thought it would actually happen!”
“You...?”
“Lucifer!” she gasps, laughing, beaming up at him. “Isn’t this perfect? You and me!”
It doesn’t add up. She feels wrong. Instead of yearning closer, Lucifer’s blood recoils from her sharply. “But… you’ve been here for hours. I saw you come in. You’ve been in here before. Why hasn’t it..?”
“Oh, um…” she glances around, catching the eyes of onlookers, and Lucifer feels her relishing the attention. “Yeah, so weird! I guess we just, um—”
Lucifer holds out his hand. “Give me your wrist.”
Her joyful smile wilts at the edges. When it returns, it’s strained. “...can’t we just enjoy this moment?”
“Don’t you want me to feel it?” Lucifer asks, face already setting into stone. He grits his teeth. “Our… ‘shared heartbeat’?”
“Um… well yeah, but…”
“Liar,” Lucifer hisses, already turning away. “It isn’t you.”
The girl makes a woeful sound that he ignores as he begins to scan the mezzanine, the exits, the shadows. Dozens of pairs of eyes watch him stride in the laden silence to peer out into the lobby. Empty. Lux is never quiet enough to hear his shoes click on the polished floor, or the hum of the air conditioner. Or the new blood throbbing against his eardrums.
“Oh, it’s me!” another voice gasps, drawing Lucifer’s attention quickly. Far too quickly. His eyes pick her out easily — platinum blonde and bodycon. But when his gaze drops to her hand, smeared in body glitter and pressed over the wrong side of her chest, he scowls at his own foolishness and moves past her.
Another woman tries to come forward, then a man, then another woman, each less convincing than the last. Soon he’s pushing through chaos, the size of the crowd seeming to grow by its desperation. Everybody wants him. By the way they shriek and claw, they need him. There’s only one person who doesn’t, it seems, and their chest echoes with the same new rhythm as his.
They’re the one who’s supposed to want him.
Embarrassment slows his movements to a stop. He feels a fool to be chasing somebody who doesn’t wish to be found. He won’t supplicate himself. He won’t beg to be loved.
He gave up on doing that an eternity ago.
So Lucifer lets the maelstrom of desire swallow him. Desperate touches on his body feel good. He’s never longed for anything softer than that, or sweeter than that, or more lingering. He needn’t start now. Though even as he eases back into relishing the hands that grip his biceps, caress his jaw, Lucifer can’t keep his eyes from clinging up the bannister. Deeply aware that the one chance to find this… this somebody, is ephemeral. If it hasn’t already passed, it’s about to.
Good, his bitterness spits. Rejection is a well-worn overcoat. And heartbeats are for humans. He never wanted it, and he doesn’t need it. Lucifer had always been whole.
But now he’s something more than that.
—
Chloe’s lungs burn like they’re about to tear apart.
Pavement rushes beneath her feet far too fast. If she focuses on anything other than the flapping steel-blue jacket of the man fleeing in front of her, she’ll fall on her face. Graze the skin off her cheek like she did last time, or run until she passes out and wake up with a drip in her arm, being reminded by an unsympathetic nurse that she’s not supposed to run at all.
Her body’s not built for that. Not yet, anyway.
Chloe’s gotten used to ignoring the limits of her body. No one says it outright, but she knows that being one of the few remaining ghosts in her department isn’t helping her career. And with Hot Tub High School, and now Palmetto, it’s just one more black mark against her that she can’t afford. So she burns, and gasps, and wrings every last drop of capability out of her incapable body.
The man makes a hard right down a side street, and Chloe follows, praying for a dead end — but instead the street on one side melts away into an underground parking building, and he hurls himself down the entrance ramp. Chloe doubles for a quick breath — one in, one out, no time for anything more, though she desperately needs it — then pursues.
“LAPD, freeze!”
Her voice comes out in ragged gasps, sounding anything but compelling. The man glances behind him, and for a split second Chloe thinks he might obey, but it’s only to judge distance. He faces forward again and bolts. With her already meager strength waning fast, it leaves only one option. She uses the last of her energy to burst forward, closing the distance while her body screams and strains, then when she’s almost in touching distance, she launches, tackling them both to the ground. The thump when they hit the concrete, even with his body as a buffer, is nearly enough to knock her out.
But the second thump wakes her up again.
Chloe sucks a sharp gasp through her teeth, as all the nerves and vessels in her body arch back and then burst into life.
Beneath her ribs, a strange yet unmistakable rhythm begins to beat.
One, two. One, two. One, two.
“Oh no.”
“Huh?”
She fumbles for her wrist, feeling around until she’s got it. Steady. Strong. The stagnant blood in her veins finally begins to move. “No, no it can’t be you!”
“What?” he asks again, face pressed against the oil-stained ground. “What’s going..?”
Chloe scrambles off and lets him flip over, ready to spring in case he tries to take off again. His eyes are steel-blue like his jacket. A little wild, and a little confused, until a look of recognition spreads across his face.
“Ohh.”
Chloe looks around the parking lot for somebody else — anybody else who could have been the one to set her heart in motion — but there’s no one. The building signage looks like the place is a nightclub, and this late on a weeknight, the lot is dotted with barely more than ten vehicles, all empty.
“This has got to be a mistake,” Chloe reasons, though it’s starting to feel like nothing will ever be reasonable again. “I mean, you can’t be my… my…”
She can’t even say the word anymore.
The guy on the ground shifts, gaze falling to the dirty concrete. “Well, er… why not?”
“Oh!” The question sounds hilarious under the circumstances and Chloe throws her hands up with a strained laugh. “Well okay, for one, you’re about to be detained on suspicion of murder, and—”
“Woah, woah, hey, I didn’t kill anybody!”
“Then why did you run?”
His faded denim scrapes across the ground, and Chloe lets him back up until he’s leaning against a concrete pillar.
“I thought you saw me lift that wallet outside the Radio Shack.” He fumbles his words, drawing in deep breaths to replace the air that had been knocked out of him. “That’s it, that’s all I did. I’m not a bad guy.”
“Good guys steal wallets, huh?”
“No.” He grimaces. “I’m a… medium guy.”
“Great,” Chloe says flatly. “Just what I always dreamed of.”
Silence settles between them, and Chloe stares into his eyes, trying to see how they can possibly be the eyes that she’ll be looking into forever. They’re light, like hers. His hair is light, like hers. Chloe had always imagined her match might be more like a puzzle piece. A moon to her sun. She runs a stressed hand through her hair.
“Give me your wrist,” Chloe demands. There has to be some mistake.
“Yeah, sure.” He rolls up his sleeve. Too ready, too eager. “Anything.”
She snatches it and presses her fingers to his radial artery, finding the strong beat of blood almost instantly. “Crap,” she breathes. She drops his wrist and turns away. “Crap!”
The empty parking building echoes it back — Crap! Crap. Crap… — and then silence. Her brand new pulse throbs in her ears. She’s already beginning to feel more alert, energized in a way she’s never experienced before, but it doesn’t make her feel better.
“There’s… there’s supposed to be something, though. Isn’t there?” she asks. “Some… some feeling, right? When the two are together?” Chloe’s heard all about the way the beats are supposed to synchronize and bloom in intensity until you feel them through your whole body.
“Sometimes.” The man wets his lips and slides a little further up the pillar. His hands fidget. “I, um… well, I heard that doesn't always, er… happen?”
She slams her hands onto her hips and paces away, shoulders heaving. Just her luck. Just her damn luck. Only when fury begins to give way to resignation does she turn back, eyeing the man with her best attempt at an open mind. “Well… what’s your name, anyway?”
“Daniel.” He clears his throat. “Dan. Espinoza.”
Chloe rolls it silently around her tongue, trying it out. Her eyes narrow, and she takes a pair of cuffs from her belt. “Well, I’m still bringing you in.”
“Oh.” Dan’s face falls. “But—”
“And I’m keeping my last name.”
—
The sun must be rising. Though Lux’s windowless ground floor remains dark, Lucifer always knows its position in the sky. Right now, he can feel the rays breaking over the buildings, skimming the highways, soaking the ocean. The club is empty, heavy with smoke haze. But he isn’t tired.
He’s not sure he’ll ever be tired again.
Shortly after it had happened, his body had begun to react — flooding with the symptoms of coming alive about an hour after the first beat. Hunger, thirst, nausea, pins and needles, butterflies in his stomach. He’d taken a bottle to the bar and curled in on himself as the club had slowly emptied.
Leather squeaks on the staircase, and he raises his head from where it’s half-buried in a lowball. Mazikeen’s scarred eyebrow twitches, taking in the sight. He’s suddenly aware of how he’s melting from the barstool like one of Dali’s clocks, his jacket flung away somewhere, shirt unbuttoned down to the waistcoat and standing open from where he’d been slipping his hand inside over and over, feeling the unnerving beating. Feeling the new warmth.
“Ah,” Lucifer straightens his back, urging his face to not betray him. “And what bacchanalian sex party did you just roll in from, then?”
“Some underground place off Vine. Hosted by, uh…” Decorative chain links jingle as she makes her slow, well-fucked saunter down the stairs. “Well, I dunno. I got a lot of things last night, but names weren’t one of them.”
Lucifer’s face pinches, approximating a smile. This is when he and Maze would usually finish off a bottle together, trading graphic gossip from the night before — the filthier the better. But now, as he sweeps his thumb along the vein that runs down the inside of his ring finger, he can’t think of anything to say.
Maze’s leather boots pause on the bottom step.
“The hell’s the matter with you?” she asks, noticing his posture, his haggard face, his too-bright eyes.
Lucifer’s gaze drops to his glass so she won’t see his answer before he speaks it. “The matter?”
She crosses to him, heels tapping at the floor still tacky with sweat and spilled drink, as he turns away and leans over the bar, pretending to hunt for a second glass. Her scrutiny is hot on the side of his face. The brand new thunder inside him roars louder than ever.
“You look different.”
A bitter grimace turns self conscious. “No I don’t.”
She’s only a demon, after all. Perceptive, yes, but limited in ways he is not. It’s highly unlikely he’s showing any real signs yet, even if he can feel the rush of blood beginning to soak his skin with a richer hue. Lucifer was never like the ghosts, pallid and creeping in the shadows, barely upright. He never thought he needed more fire in his veins, but apparently there was more to be had.
“You do.” She says it so matter-of-factly that Lucifer doesn’t know how to argue. “What happened?”
“Would you believe I got a haircut?”
Maze’s eyes narrow, and she leans in, breathing deep. “You smell different, too.”
He scoffs, shifting away. “Well, give a Devil a chance to take a shower, Maze! It’s been a long night.”
But Lucifer knows what she’s smelling. Maze has always had a keen sense for blood. “Like Hell it has. Something happened to you.”
When he finally makes himself look at her, Maze’s eyes are like slits gazing down the bridge of her nose, and the answer sits half-formed on her parted lips already. She knows. Or if she doesn’t, she’s halfway towards working it out.
“Yes,” Lucifer admits.
“What?” she demands. She’s tenacious. He may be King, but she has her own way of giving orders. Lucifer hunches over his elbows.
“It appears I’m…” he grimaces around his first choice of words, not liking them. Not liking the next four or five he thinks of either. “I’ve…”
He can’t say it. So instead he pushes his loose sleeve back up his forearm, exposing his wrist, and silently offers it to her.
Recognition flickers across her face at the unmistakable gesture, but it’s quickly chased away by disbelief. True disbelief. Not shock or surprise — the honest disbelief of not believing. She knows it isn’t possible.
Well, he had known it too.
Lucifer waits until Maze has no choice but to move forward and take his wrist, fingers pressing into the side of the blue highway of veins just beneath his skin. She’s humoring him. At least partly, the part that isn’t heavy with dreadful intrigue. At least at first, until she feels the first pump of blood and drops his wrist like a scalding iron.
“You’re beating?” she spits.
Lucifer’s mouth forms into a hard line, and he shoves his sleeve back down. “So it would appear.”
“How?”
He pinches a false smile, and raises his glass in a false toast. “It’s a mystery.”
Lucifer takes a long sip, which becomes longer as he waits for Maze to take the horrified scowl off her face and say something.
“I knew we shouldn’t have cut off your wings,” she says finally, voice surprisingly venomous. “I knew that was a bad idea, Lucifer.”
“What’s that bloody well got to do with anything?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You visit Earth for thousands of years, no problem. Then three weeks ago I cut off your wings and now all of a sudden you have a heartbeat?”
“Your point?”
“You’re becoming human!”
“I’m becoming nothing of the sort.” Lucifer’s lips draw back over a furious snarl and his eyes erupt in hellfire as he turns on her, slamming his glass on the bar. Whiskey splashes over his hand. “And you will remember your place, Mazikeen.”
She does, though her face makes clear she’s not happy about it. Maze’s mouth shuts tightly but her eyes are loud. Lucifer lets her stew for a moment while he gathers his thoughts. He isn’t used to being the voice of reason. “We’ve done a lot of things already in our short stay. Had contact with a lot of people, haven’t we? There’s only one thing that causes this”—he jabs a finger at his heart—“and it isn’t a bloody beachfront amputation.”
Her silence doesn’t help. It makes him twitchy. So does the Glenmorangie beginning to soak into his sleeve. Lucifer lets a slow breath out his nose, then reaches behind the bar for a stack of black napkins, and busies himself drying his hand.
“So who is she?” Maze asks flatly.
“I don’t know.”
Lucifer can see the scowl on her face without even needing to look over.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“There were too many people, I didn’t find her,” he says. “Or — perhaps him, for that matter. Or… ‘it’! Perhaps the Devil’s soul bond is with a bloody waffle truck that was driving by. I mean it could have been anything, couldn’t it? We can’t know, because this has never bloody happened before!”
He hadn’t meant to yell, and yet, he’s yelling. He remembers himself a moment after he slams the wad of damp napkins down on the bar hard enough to rattle the glassware, and silently coaches himself through an unwillingly slow breath in and out.
Lucifer turns on the bar stool, swinging away from her to face the mirrored backsplash that he can’t quite bring himself to look into. “...Perhaps it’s nobody.”
“Do you want it to be nobody?”
His lips pinch. The answer resists.
“I’m just saying,” he replies with a careful, terse edge, “heartbeat or not, there’s hardly a whole raft of evidence to suggest there’s actually anyone on the other end. It may well have been a… a fluke.”
“You’d better hope it was a fluke,” Maze says, the bitterness not leaving her voice. “Because the Devil doesn’t ‘settle down’.”
He tops up his glass — a double, this time. “Now that, we can agree on.”
—
Chloe wrenches the glove compartment open the moment she slides into the driver’s seat. The new furnace inside her burns hot, and it demands fuel. The old granola bar she finds beneath her sunglasses case can’t get unwrapped fast enough.
“Do I really have to sit in the back?” Dan asks from behind the wire screen.
“Y—” Chloe covers her mouth until she’s finished chewing, then shoves the empty wrapper into the center console. “Yes. We’re going to deal with this one thing at a time.”
Dan makes a sound like he wants to say something, but keeps quiet. Chloe’s stomach still yawns and her body sparks with a thousand new impulses. Her fingers burn with new blood, and she flexes them on the steering wheel as they pull out onto the silent boulevard. She hadn’t realized it would be so uncomfortable.
“Are you okay?” she calls into the back seat.
“Hm?” He raises his head from watching the white lines zip past. “Yeah.”
Chloe squints at him in the rearview mirror, taking stock of her own turbulent state. “Aren’t you starving? Sick? Tell me if I need to pull over.”
Dan’s head jerks minutely and his eyes focus — it’s the smallest movement and one Chloe almost misses. “Oh… yeah.” He clears his throat. “Yeah, starving.”
“Okay, we’ll get you something to eat at the station,” she says. “Just sit tight.”
Green lights hang above them at every intersection, a bleary halo clinging around them in the midnight gloom. The empty roads let them make good time. Just as well, too. Chloe’s legs are beginning to cramp and she can hardly sit still.
“So, what are the hours like as a petty thief?” she asks into the rearview mirror, and her attempt at humor comes out more biting than intended. “Late nights, early mornings? You get overtime—?”
“I’m not a thief,” Dan insists, hands clasped between his knees, “...usually”
“Yeah? What are you then?”
He gives her a strange look, something a little complicated and melancholy, then looks away. “An… opportunist, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.” She swings them into the underground parking. “Yeah, I actually meant what do you do as a job? Since, I guess, stuff like that’s gonna matter now.”
“I’m kind of… between jobs,” Dan admits. “At the moment.”
Chloe sighs. “Why am I not surprised?”
Dan looks up as the LAPD crest rolls past them, emblazoned on the glass front doors and lit from the inside. “Hey, you hiring?”
He looks like he’s joking, and he’d better be. “Hilarious,” Chloe deadpans as she guides them into her parking space.
Then she shuts off the engine, and all around them is silence in the easing dark of pre-dawn. Cold, gray light lifts the black from the sky enough to see the suggestion of birds winding outside the ramp behind them. Chloe listens, and she can hear them. She can hear a truck reversing, a roller door juddering open. But when she listens for the synchronized beat she’d always been promised once she was finally sitting alone with the one who was hers, she hears nothing. She feels nothing. Just her new one, two, one, two, one, two.
Dan’s voice pitches from the back again. “You were really a ghost when you were chasing me just now?”
“Yeah.” She’s used to being underestimated. It barely registers anymore. “Why? Surprised I caught you?”
“Yeah, honestly” he admits, and has the good sense to sound impressed.
Chloe releases her seatbelt and it rolls back. “Well, so were you.”
Dan licks his lips for a slow moment. “...right! Yeah, right, I just thought… well I was winded, so…”
“Tell me about it,” Chloe breathes, and gets out of the car.
—
2016
She looks familiar, but that isn’t the only reason she fascinates him.
Someone so fiery she almost reminds him of himself, yet so by-the-book she could hardly be any more different. He’d let her arrest him for fun and for pleasure, but he’d almost missed the handcuffs as he slipped them off his wrists and handed them back to her. Five years with a heartbeat had done little to change him. He’d become a touch stronger, perhaps a tad more alert, but for the most part the beating in his chest was something he did his best to ignore. Though for just a moment as she’d led him out of a boring mansion in the hills, he hadn’t been able to. The thought is too slippery to even hold onto, let alone explain, but…
She feels familiar, too.
And then her resistance to answering the question that always gets answered had piqued his already craning interest, and he found himself clearing his schedule and solving a murder for the afternoon.
The double shot from the espresso machine in the therapist’s waiting room is bitter — not dreadful, but Lucifer takes a sip then discards it on the coffee table, turning in his seat instead to study the Detective.
“Speaking of dicks…” he pivots. “Why was your ex-husband pressuring you to close the case?”
“No reason.”
She’s closed tighter than a nun’s crossed ankles. “Strange.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, it’s just…” Lucifer leans back, baffled and making no effort to conceal it. “Well, ‘ex’.”
The Detective purses her lips and expels a terse breath. It’s clear from the set of her shoulders that she’s ready for a fight she’s had a dozen times before. “Yep. Ex. It does happen, you know.”
“Yes, of course,” Lucifer frowns, leaning back to take her all in like a detailed painting. “But my understanding was you humans found it quite taboo to separate from your mate, no?”
“Well,” Chloe scoffs, “I’m actually starting to think the whole soul bond thing is a load of baloney, so…”
He catches himself looking. Staring, perhaps. Someone so boring shouldn’t be so fascinating. “I just didn’t take you for one to buck the system.”
“Okay, look, mister whatever your real name is.” She releases a sharp huff and turns on him. “I’m not gonna be lectured on loyalty by someone who’s been spending the whole day making bedroom eyes at anything that walks.”
Lucifer gives her a bemused smile. “And why might that be a problem?”
“Well, you definitely don’t look like a ghost.”
“Oh, I’m not,” he confirms cheerfully. “And for the record, I happen to think it’s a ‘whole load of baloney’, as well.”
“You do?”
“Oh, yes.” Lucifer agrees, “It’s absurd, really. I mean, forever bound to one person, and you don’t even get to choose who it is? Having no agency in the matter, it’s… it’s not right. You should be allowed to make the choice for yourselves, not assigned a life partner like they’re a bloody valet ticket.”
“Valet..? Wow.” Chloe makes a judgmental sound, confusing Lucifer further, and turns her head away. “You and I live very different lives.”
He takes in her plain jacket, plain shirt, plain shoes. “One can only hope.”
She doesn’t retort, and the waiting room suddenly feels incredibly quiet. Cars swish by on the freeway and birds chatter in the trees. Lucifer’s fingers drum impatiently on his thighs. Curiosity isn’t a new trait of his, but she certainly seems to bring it out of him.
“So this ex of yours,” he finally asks. “What did he do? It must have been something. I mean, it’s not hard to see why you don’t fancy the glassy-eyed prick, but what specifically?”
The noise she makes sounds like a cough, if a cough could be both offended and amused. “Well, that’s definitely none of your business.”
“Did he cheat?” Lucifer pursues, like she hadn’t said anything. “Forget your anniversary one too many times? He’s got that vacant look, so….”
The Detective releases a small, surprised laugh. It comes with a small smile, despite her best attempts. A little of the ice melts.
“No, nothing like that.” She lets out a tired sigh, leaning a little further into the gray upholstery. “We just… never clicked.”
“Oh?”
She shoots him a look, full of suspicion, and yet he can see the walls cautiously lowering, just a little, like she’s about to give him a wary, reluctant chance.
“We never had that… spark that everyone always says is supposed to happen. You know? I thought it would come if we just kept trying, but it didn’t. When we touched, our pulses never synchronized. Not in a way I could feel, and…” She stops herself, like she’s just played back over what she’d said and decided she’s said enough. “Anyway. I don’t know.”
Lucifer tilts his head. The answer seems quite obvious. “Well, perhaps he’s not actually your mate.”
Chloe chews her lip, an uncomfortable edge to her voice when she admits, “I’ve… wondered.”
Lucifer finds himself leaning in, the deceits of man always a favorite topic. “Have you, now?”
“But if it’s not him… then I guess I’ll never know, right?” Chloe shakes her head, staring hard at the slices of lemon floating in the water dispenser across the room. “I already have my heartbeat. If I did ever meet the real one, there’d be no way to tell.”
“No,” Lucifer agrees with distant, detached interest. “I suppose not.”
She purses her lips into a tight smile and turns to inspect a magazine in the bamboo rack against the side of her chair. It leaves his chest with an inexplicable ache, and he finds himself wishing he could offer her greater reassurance.
Lucifer’s brow twitches at the impulse.
How… strange.
“Perhaps it’s better not to know,” Lucifer finds himself saying in the quiet room to the wall in front of them. “Perhaps that’s the only way to truly make the choice yourself.”
The magazine falls closed, and Chloe turns her head, holding a hint of intrigue he hadn’t been able to draw in return until now. It’s guarded, but it’s there. Her hands fold on her crossed knee and she considers him for a moment. “Hm. Maybe.”
The air in the room gets a little heavy. He feels better, and also worse — so his oral fixation barrels forward to save him from feeling too much about that just yet. Lucifer shifts forward, going for the coffee cup again with a harsh clearing of his throat.
The air lightens.
“In any case, you’re right. Baloney of the highest order.” On the second try, the coffee’s perhaps not so underwhelming after all. He takes another sip, then places it aside. “I mean, who bloody even knows how any of it works?
“Uh-huh.” She’s back to regarding him with that wry skepticism, but it’s a little warmer. “And what does your mate think?”
Then the office door opens, and a woman leans out. With her glasses, pencil skirt, and pumps, she couldn’t look more like a therapist if she was stroking a Freudian beard. Sun slants into the dim waiting room. “Okay, Detectives. I’ll see you now.”
“Well,” Lucifer unfolds from the chair and stands, “I’ll let you know when I meet her.”
end