Chapter Text
Dan woke with a jolt, alarm blaring.
He rolled to a seated position, head pounding, ears ringing, poisoned feeling: terrific hangover, check. A quick scan of his shitty little apartment showed he hadn’t cleared all the beer bottles away before passing out last night. A quick sniff told him he hadn’t showered.
Maybe in a few days, actually; he smelled like stale sweat and beer.
Work had given him a mandatory short leave after Charlotte. He’d taken it and then some. Without Trixie to structure his weeks, Dan could admit he was… slipping. A little.
It’d be fine, he told himself. He just needed a little time. Just a little more time and he’d catch himself, pull himself up out of this downward slide.
He slapped the alarm off, palming his face in his hands.
He wasn’t sure why it was still on these days, except that it seemed like too much of a bother to reprogram the bedside clock.
The blare had been annoying.
The silence was somehow worse.
Dan got up. He let his mind drift, thinking about nothing at all as he wandered from the bedroom to the sitting room to the kitchen—the only rooms his crappy one-bedroom apartment had, actually—straightening up. Bottles in recycling, like Chlo had always reminded him to do when they were married. He’d thought of it as nagging at the time, joked about it with some of the other detectives. He’d been a little shit, then, not knowing what he had in Chloe.
He was a little shit, now. A few more wrinkles around his eyes, a little silver creeping into the hair at his temple, but the same, old asshole.
This was the problem with letting your mind wander, Dan thought. He’d never been any good at science in school, but he still remembered the thing about objects in motion staying in motion, heading in the same direction. And when Dan didn’t work hard at it, didn’t fight the tide with every ounce of strength, he kept moving in the same, downward spiral.
Focus, Dan.
He couldn’t quite make himself face the dishes in the sink, so he tried hard to let his gaze sweep past them. He knew, at a semi-conscious level, if he found himself staring at them, unable to clean them and put them away, he wouldn’t be able to do anything useful. So for now, he let his gaze skitter past, like the mess was an oil slick. Instead, he redirected to the mess-at-large, a car changing lanes before it could crash.
After some mindless labor, the bottles were in the recycling; the throw was folded over the back of the couch again. The sweater he’d tossed over his shoulders last night was at least back in the bedroom. The bed wasn’t made, but the blankets were yanked up. Dan stood in the middle of the living room like a program that had run out of code, but then he took a deep breath, which reminded him that he still smelled.
Go to the shower, then, he told himself. Don’t think, don’t think, just do.
If he thought, he’d think about how Charlotte was dead, and then he’d work himself into another, useless fury at Lucifer. The rage lasted a few hours at least, a day or two at most. It revved him up awhile, brought his blood pressure back to something like normal, heightened the world into the adrenalized, crystalline clarity lent by righteous fury. But no matter what he told himself when he was flying high, when the wrath ran down it left him feeling empty and uncertain. He’d cry, too, without fail, and then he’d feel guilty about blaming the eccentric nightclub owner. Daniel was growing to distrust rage’s gifts, so he flinched away from those thoughts, now, when he felt them coming on.
Shower, right. Dan had been standing naked in front of the dry spigot for a minute or two, now, thinking about thinking, or thinking about not-thinking. He reached for the faucet to turn on the hot water, grabbed a towel—his last clean one, and if Dan shied away from the full sink, the thought of going to the laundromat made him actively nauseated—and waited for the water to heat.
Stepping in made him feel instantly just a little better, and he congratulated himself: good job, dude, smart move, A+. He scrubbed everywhere, and when he got out he even shaved. Dan imagined he was a video game character; energy bar dangerously low, but no longer at zero.
He opened the fridge: gross takeout containers. He tossed them in the trash. Some eggs left. Okay. Eggs were good; eggs were real food. They didn’t take much to make. They had nutrients.
But once Dan pulled them out, still mostly phased out, he found himself pulling out some old rosemary (dried, all its moisture vacuum-sucked by the fridge, still okay) and a single, sad-looking tomato that was nonetheless edible, and making an actual omelette and a side of toast.
Good. Good, he thought, you’re really on the ball today, Espinoza.
He took a bite.
Real food!
Dan made himself eat slowly. He wondered when he’d last cooked anything for real; he thought it’d been awhile, but he didn’t think back too closely.
Thinking back was bad.
The egg and toast gone, Dan walked to the sink and began scrubbing the plate and the pan. And once he already was, scrubbing a few other things in the sink didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore, and as long as he just didn’t think too hard—about anything—his hands just kept moving and the work kept getting done, which was good.
Good job, Espinoza.
The apartment wasn’t scrubbed or anything, but it passed the glance test and the sniff test, and so did Dan himself. He had food in his stomach; his teeth were brushed, his hair was smoothed, his face was shaven.
Now. The rest of the day yawned out before him like a terrible maw.
He wondered if he could stomach a marathon of The Weaponizer or the Body Bags franchise, just put it on and let himself drift, but both made him think of Lucifer, now, Lucifer’s manic gaze lighting up as they quoted the series back and forth, and then a sudden wrench:
He hadn’t just lost Charlotte. He’d lost Lucifer, too.
He’d never thought that Lucifer would have kept something about the Sinnerman to himself. But he should have. Lucifer had always been secretive, always thought he was so far above it all. Dan had tried to explain it to Chloe, more than once, that Lucifer was—that there was something about Lucifer—
Oh, no. Oh, shit.
A little corner of Dan’s brain knew another wave of helpless rage was coming.
Batten down the hatches, he thought, and reminded himself firmly to stay away from anything breakable.
Dan startled awake.
No alarm; there was pitch-dark outside his window, and the utter silence of no one moving around even in an apartment complex. That meant it had to be at least 1 am. Blinking, he hauled himself up, realizing his fucking phone was ringing.
Christ.
Dan groped for it on the nighttable, knocking over a beer bottle, which clattered noisily to the floor, hopefully unbroken. He put the phone to his ear.
“H’llo?”
“Daddy.”
Dan was suddenly awake. Dan was suddenly more awake than he’d ever been in his whole, miserable existence. “Trixie?” he said, sitting up straighter, all the hair at the back of his neck standing on end. “Baby?”
A sigh on the other end of the line, a wordless moment which seemed to stretch on forever. Dan could hear the sounds of a bustling, wakeful city: voices, the ring of a bicycle bell, the sound of cars. Then, “Daddy,” again, sounding just as before.
Something—something bad, something very bad was happening. Dan could hear it in every tremor of his daughter’s voice. He suddenly recognized his own habit in Trixie: she wasn’t saying anything more because she was trying to master herself first, so she came across cold and clear.
Dan felt like the top of his head was about to blow off.
“Okay, Trix,” he said calmly. “First thing’s first. Where are you?”
“Rome,” was the immediate response.
“Rome?” Dan echoed, blankly. “Rome, I mean—”
“Daddy, you have to come,” Trixie said, tremor in her voice. “You have to come with Lucifer, he’ll pay for the tickets.”
Dan’s brain skipped, like a needle yanked across a record.
“We’re at the Colony Hotel,” Trixie said, voice still thrumming with tension. “I need you and Lucifer to come and get me.”
“Why Lucifer?” Dan demanded. “Sweetie, I can come and get you—”
“It has to be Lucifer,” she said firmly.
“Why didn’t you call him, then?” Dan shot back, his anger briefly eclipsing his common sense.
Trixie didn’t shy away, didn’t even take the time to be upset. “If I’d asked Lucifer to come and bring you, he wouldn’t be able to convince you. But if you went to Lucifer and told him I was in trouble, you’d both come. I think I need you both to come,” she said, and her voice was so small and brave that Dan knew he’d do it. If Dan lost his shit on Lucifer, the idiot would just have to take it. He’d just—apologize, after. “Okay, Daddy? Okay?” Her voice sounded a little hysterical, now, pulling Dan back to attention.
“Yes. Yeah, I’ll—if you really want. God knows he’s got enough money to throw around, he can afford to drop everything and fly to Rome…”
“Tell Lucifer,” Trixie said, “that I’m calling in all my chips. He’ll know what that means.”
“Trixie! You haven’t been making deals with that lowlife, criminal—!”
“All my chips,” she said, and she sounded much, much older than nine, giving Dan a sudden picture of the kind of woman she’d be someday.
Dan’s beleaguered, still half-drunk and sleep-deprived mind finally spat out the right questions. “Is your mom there, Monkey?” he asked. “Are you all alone? Are you safe?”
A pause. Dan could hear the same sounds of the busy city in the background.
“Daddy, don’t try and call me, okay? Mommy took my phone. Just come.”
Dan frowned. “Your mom—took your phone—”
“Daddy,” she said plaintively, “if you and Lucifer don’t come.” Another pause. “I’m not sure I’ll see you again.”
Dan felt himself go cold. “…Baby? Where’s your mom? I want to talk to Chloe.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Trixie said, all in a rush. “She only talks to the priest, now. She says I have to stay in the room, but I snuck out. I have to go back, now, before she gets back. Please come. You remember what to tell Lucifer?”
Dan could feel his jaw drop.
“Daddy, what will you tell Lucifer?”
“That,” said Dan, as if in a dream, “you’re calling in all your chips and—and he and I have to come get you. In Rome. At…”
“The Colony Hotel.”
“The Colony Hotel,” Dan echoed.
“I have to go back now,” Trixie said again. “I love you, Daddy. Tell Lucifer I love him, too. No matter what,” she tacked on, fierce.
Dial tone.
Dan stared at the phone in his hand.
Unknown number.
His daughter just called from a payphone on the street.
His daughter had been kidnapped.
By his ex-wife.
That part didn’t compute, of course. All the while Dan stuffed random things in his duffel—he couldn’t have said afterwards, what he’d packed—it ran through his mind: Chloe? But Chloe? Not Chloe.
Dan still half-expected that, when he arrived, it would have all been some kind of terrible misunderstanding. A nightmare Trixie had woken thinking was real.
At mid-morning.
In Rome.
Luckily, the passport Chloe had insisted they get in the death throes of their marriage hadn’t expired.
Come to think, maybe that was how she’d been able to leave the country so fast.
He called an Uber and then vibrated in place; no rideshare was rushing to the barely-acceptable part of town at 2am on a weekday, that was for sure. In the time he waited, he realized that Trix might need some things, too, and grabbed two changes of clothes for her. At least those weren’t dirty; he’d washed them assuming Trixie was coming by last weekend, or the weekend, before, which she hadn’t. Because she’d been in Rome.
He ordered the driver to take him to Lux, and when he got a judgmental side-eye, added, “Yeah, I am going to a nightclub at 2am on a Tuesday—what’s it to ya?” which earned him a head-shake from a man who could’ve been Dan’s father and a slow pull from the curb.
A thousand terrible thoughts spun through Dan’s head. Could he have hallucinated that whole call? Was he the one having the nightmare? Had there been something in his beer? Was he actually hospitalized and none of this was real? All of that seemed so much more likely than Chloe Decker, of all people, going off the rails.
“Can’t you go a little faster?” Dan pressed. “This is kind of an emergency!”
The same, slow head-shake in the rear-view mirror, but the car’s speed did tick up five whole miles per hour past the speed limit.
Dan huffed, flopping back in his seat.
The ride to Lux was interminable, but finally the Uber disgorged Dan and he ran to the front door.
It was all dark; of course it was. Lux closed at 1 am Monday through Wednesday, a fact Dan somehow knew by heart. Dan dug his phone out and found the contact called Lucifer, King of Hell, entered by the man himself, and pressed it for the first time in at least a month.
“Hello, Detective?”
Dan blinked. “Uh. That was fast. I’m outside. Can you let me up?”
The front door buzzed immediately, and Dan scrambled inside the building.
“Daniel, is everything all right?” emitted from the phone in his hand; Dan realized he hadn’t hung up.
“Yeah—I mean, no. I mean, I’m coming up,” Dan stammered, feeling wrong-footed at the concerned tone of the Devil’s voice. “I, I need to talk to you.”
A pause. “Gun at home, I hope?”
Dan felt icy cold all over. “I’m, I’m not here to shoot you, I just,” said Dan, but then the elevator doors closed around him and he lost the signal. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit,” Dan chanted to himself, bouncing in place until the elevator doors opened, and he could spring into Lucifer’s ridiculous, opulent apartment.
The man himself was seated at his piano, an instrument that was beautiful even to Dan’s untrained eye.
Lucifer looked wary, and he stood up warily and eyed Dan warily. Hell, he held his fucking ever-present shot of liquor warily. But then he seemed to see something on Dan’s face and he stood, making his way over to Dan in haste.
Good old Lucifer, Dan surprised himself by thinking, he’ll fix this.
Because hadn’t Lucifer always? Over and over? Just sort of—snapped his fingers and fixed things?
Wait, was that why he’d been blaming Lucifer for—?
No. Stop. Abort.
“What is it, Daniel?” Lucifer was saying. “You look like you’ve seen a, well, me.”
Cute, but shut up, Dan thought. “Trixie called me.”
Lucifer blinked, but he didn’t seem to find this the non-sequitur it seemed to Dan. “Ah,” Lucifer said, wariness returning to every line of his body. He picked up the drink again. “And she told you…?”
Dan shook himself. Lucifer-weirdness later, emergency now! “She said she was in Rome.”
“In Rome,” Lucifer repeated, frowning. But apart from gesturing, he didn’t babble on, letting Dan get it all out.
“She said she needs us to come get her. That. Something’s wrong with her mom, with Chloe. She said,” and here Dan had to pause, lick his lips, because he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “She took Trixie’s phone? She, uh, won’t let her out of the hotel? Lucifer, Trix sounded terrified out of her mind.”
“Ah,” Lucifer said again, meaningfully. He sipped at his liquor.
“Ah?!” Dan echoed, shoving him with an open hand; it felt good. “Screw you, my daugher’s a thousand miles away, freaking out, asking for you, and that’s what you’ve got for me?! ‘Ah’?”
“Yes, well, it hardly sounds as though she’s in danger,” Lucifer said. “She’s with her—her mother,” he tacked on, and Dan caught him stammering around the word. And then he muttered something that sounded like, “and far away from me.”
Dan saw red. “It’s her mother who’s keeping her locked up, Lucifer!” Dan raged. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be locked away by people who’re supposed to look after you?”
Lucifer twitched.
“Or, right, you’re a stranger to empathy, aren’t you?” he spat. “It only matters when it’s you, right?”
“Did the Urchin truly sound distressed?” Lucifer said quietly. “But she’s in the care of her mother… What else did she say?”
“That she’s at the Colony Hotel,” Dan blurted, horrified with himself for not writing it down, but it didn’t appear to have mattered: every little tremble of Trixie’s voice lived in his mind, possibly forever.
“The Colony Hotel,” Lucifer repeated, frown deepening.
“And,” Dan suddenly recalled, “that Trixie wants to cash in all of her chips? Whatever that means.”
And just like that, Lucifer suddenly looked like Dan felt. It came over him in a flash, like lightning. If Dan had ever wondered if Lucifer had ever really felt for anyone, his answer was written across the man’s face now.
“I see,” he said. Lucifer’s eyes had gone all dark in his face, like black holes, and his skin was white.
“What does that mean?”
“That I’m to fulfill three… failsafe requests as it were…” Lucifer’s face went through a second transformation, this one more shocking than the last. His gaze went hard, his fists clenched, but with a tremor, and Lucifer went from careless playboy to righteous rage in an eyeblink. In some trick of the lights of the city out the penthouse windows, his eyes seemed to flash red.
He withdrew his cell from his pocket. “Hello? Yes, Joanna. I’m afraid no time for pleasantries just now, my dear. I do, right away. Rome. For two. Yes, the usual if you please. As close to this instant as possible. As I said, darling, no time to waste. Thank you, as always, and as always, the faster we can make it happen… yes. Yes. Thank you.” He hung up.
“What was that?” Dan asked, though he thought he knew.
“Two tickets from LAX to Rome,” Lucifer said. He seemed to note Dan’s bag for the first time. “You prepared; allow me to do the same.”
“Yeah,” said Dan, terror draining from him like a lanced wound now that things were moving again. He should’ve remembered what Trixie told him; she was a smart girl, she must’ve worked out some kind of code with Lucifer in case she was ever in real trouble.
He wondered why she hadn’t done the same with him.
Dan heard drawers opening and closing and rolled his eyes. They could be here all night.
But then he was surprised when Lucifer emerged ten minutes later with what could only be described as a go bag. Lucifer’s cell rang.
“Yes? Joanna, darling. Knew I could count on you. Your usual fee, doubled. Buy your daughter something nice.” He hung up, turning to Dan. “Let’s get going.”
“Going?”
“Flight leaves in an hour,” Lucifer said, and strode for the door, Dan hot on his heels. “I assume you have a passport?”
“Yeah,” Dan said as they exited into the elevator. “Why, what were you gonna do if I didn’t?”
“Forge one for you; go on the next flight,” Lucifer replied.
“I’m a detective, man!”
“Whose daughter is in danger,” Lucifer said, tightly.
Dan shut up. It was true; he’d do whatever it took to get to Trixie’s side as fast as humanly possible, including things that weren’t exactly legal.
They headed out of Lux and to one of Lucifer’s ridiculous my-dick-is-the-biggest cars, a shiny red convertible that would normally have Dan issuing a low whistle, but for now Dan didn’t give a single fuck about anything but how fast it could get them to LAX.
Pretty quickly, as it turned out.
Lucifer wove through the scant traffic, not quite pedal to the metal, but with a speed and surety that felt a little relieving, like Dan was rocketing to his destination but if they crashed and burned, it wouldn’t be his fault.
Unfortunately, sitting in the passenger side left Dan’s mind with nothing to do. The inertia of his thoughts wanted to spin him into hating Lucifer Morningstar, but he couldn’t afford it. Suppose Lucifer got so angry at Dan that he rescinded his offer? Or went after Trix himself, leaving Dan behind?
So rage was right out.
Dan didn’t have a lot of other well-worn paths in his head but grief: why was this all happening to him? He didn’t understand what it was about him that had made him lose a wonderful woman like Chloe Decker. What had made him be such an asshole that he lost his family, his whole life, with Palmetto? How had he fallen for and somehow won the affection of another beautiful woman, only to lose her when he was just barely ready to give love a chance, again—?
“What else did you hear?” Lucifer barked.
“…what? What?”
“Could you hear anything else on the phone,” Lucifer clarified. “Do pay attention.”
“It was definitely the middle of the day where she was,” Dan reported. “I could hear a bicycle bell at one point—uhh, people talking, a sort of buzz of speech, like you hear on a streetcorner? Some car horns.” Listing the facts centered him, grounded him.
Lucifer probably knew that.
“What sort of deals are you making with my daughter, now, huh?”
Lucifer stiffened. “It was simply little favors she did for me, Detective, like agreeing to change the channel to something less cloying, or agreeing not to tell her mother I’d let her have a piece of chocolate cake before dinner; once ‘putting in a good word’ for me with the Detective.” He sighed. “A few months ago, she informed me she was thirty favors ahead.”
Dan snorted, caught between a laugh and a sob.
“Clever little Urchin,” Lucifer went on, taking a hairpin turn at speed. “So she made me promise three big favors in return for thirty small ones. I found her requests… upsetting… but I promised her I would fulfill them when she called in her chips. And next she asked, suppose she were to call in all her chips at once? And I said, that should only be in direst emergency, Spawn, I should hope not!” He frowned.
“What were the three favors?” Dan asked. Anything but the silence and company of his own thoughts about what might have been happening to their daughter, what Chloe might be thinking.
“Well, the first was to show her parents who I really am, in such a way that my nature is impossible to deny. Not how she put it precisely, but I knew what she meant when I agreed, and I am a Devil of my word.”
“You’ve told us who you are hundreds of times,” Dan returned, curious in spite of himself.
“Yes, but not in such a way that my nature is impossible to deny,” Lucifer filled in. “We had a serious conversation about grown-ups’ brains and how that might liquify them, and she promised to only ask that of me if an emergency required it. Otherwise, she promised to release me from my contract if I told you both in my own time, in my own way.”
Dan was too tired and heartsick to do battle with Lucifer’s metaphors tonight. “So that’s how you knew it was serious.”
Lucifer looked over at him, his dark hair blowing in the wind; Dan knew he probably looked a mess, but somehow the top-down dashing through the streets only made Lucifer look more debonair. “Yes, Daniel,” he said. “And that’s also how I knew that the Urchin’s trouble boiled down to an issue with my identity. And her mother having had that incontrovertible evidence placed before her in such a way that she could not deny it.”
Dan suddenly recalled something else Trixie had said: Mommy only talks to the priest.
She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.
Oh, god.
But her fiancé had just been killed in front of her.
And Lucifer had a hand in it?
Chloe was a strong, sensible woman.
But everyone had their limits. Dan was dancing on the line, day to day, so why not Chloe?
“Chloe thinks you’re the Devil,” Dan said, slowly. “For real.”
“Yes,” said Lucifer.
“She took our daughter to Rome. To the Vatican?!”
“So it would appear.”
“And she’s locked Trix away so she can’t, what—warn you? me? Us?!”
“I do believe so,” Lucifer said. “Although I can’t be sure.”
Dan reeled. “This is all your goddamned fault!” he shouted. “You, with your Devil schtick! So, what? I have to be ‘in the know’ too, so I can understand Chloe’s freak-out?”
“That is what your daughter seems to believe,” Lucifer said flatly.
“Does Trixie believe you’re the Devil?!” Dan shouted.
“…I’m not certain,” said Lucifer.
“But if Chloe believes you are, she could have convinced Trixie,” Dan deduced. “Jesus. Jesus Christ, Lucifer!”
Lucifer said nothing.
“Don’t you think this game has gone on long enough?!”
“Yes,” Lucifer said quietly. “I do, rather.”
Well. There wasn’t much Dan could say to that kind of admission. Maybe Lucifer would really talk to him, now. Maybe Lucifer had an ordinary name: Michael, or Justin, or Steve. Maybe he was born in Spokane and the accent was fake. Maybe everything about him was fake, from the tips of his gelled hair to the bottoms of his Louis Vuittons.
Dan looked up to see the giant L-A-X metal letters that marked their exit. Lucifer swerved off the highway and took a side road Dan hadn’t ever seen before; they wove quickly through the near-empty one-laner around LAX until they were perilously close to a terminal. Then Lucifer hopped out, tossed his keys to an attendant and walked ahead of the startled Dan, who scrambled to catch up.