The Apartment Above Lux, Los Angeles, Wednesday Night

[my_own_advocate]

Darkness reigned outside. Inside, the light from Lucifer's private bar cast a yellow pallor across the apartment, glinting off the piano at the center of the room. Normally, Lucifer would have considered it an invitation, a way to dispel the gloom that settled on his shoulders like a shroud.

Not tonight. Tonight, he was alone with his whiskey glass, and he didn't want to get out of this chair.

The elevator doors slid open. "Hi."

Lucifer looked up, eyes dull. The Detective, of course. Her blue sweater hung off of her body like she was trying to hide in it, and her hair looked ragged. Shroud-like, he thought distantly.

"I... arrested Father Kinley, so you don't have to worry about him coming after you anymore," she said, fidgeting with her fingers knotted together.

He sucked in a breath.

Ah. There was a feeling that wasn't dull. "I don't care that he was trying to hurt me," he said, every single word. Deliberate. He looked up at her, trying to keep his expression... steady. "I care that you were."

Her turn to breath in loudly. Her eyes were red, he noticed. And not looking at him. "Lucifer, you have to understand that... after I saw you... saw your face... I had to get away. To process things. You know?"

Something icy and dark sunk down his throat and settled in his stomach, anchored him further to his seat. You know. Yes, of course he knew. How foolish of him, if he hadn't.

The rest of what she was saying just felt like excuses.

"And... somehow, I ended up in Rome. Kinley found me, and obviously I shouldn't have confided in him, but..." She sighed. At least she was looking at him again, every now and again, he supposed. "You know, at the time, it felt like he understood what I was going through."

"He said you found him," he said flatly.

"He's lying."

And suddenly the gravity pinning him to his seat evaporated. He set his whiskey glass down on the table and rose, something sharp, crisp, and barely contained in the line of his body as it moved. "Well, there's a lot of that going around."

He caught her eye. She'd have to look at him now, not with those furtive glances, those easy excuses. They would have made him tired, had they not made him angry.

"Well, yes..." Chloe faltered, and her gaze fell, as if she couldn't look at him too much even like this. "I..." She brought her hands up, gesturing, spreading her fingers out as if she was hoping to make this point without having to use the words. Her voice cracked, but finally she found it in herself to look at him again."I did lie to you, and... for a moment, I was helping him try to send you back to hell..."

Her gaze dropped. Again.

Something in him twisted.

"How could you do that to me?" he asked, that repressed and restrained thing in his stomach lurching out and gripping tightly to the words as they slid out of his throat. "To me?!"

"Because I'm terrified!"

Oh.

She gasped for some air through her tears, and all he could think of as his rage folded back in on itself was: Oh.

"You are the... actual devil...! I mean. Every story of good and bad from throughout history, throughout time, says that you! Are the embodiment of evil!" The sob poured out of her now, her chest heaving, and he could practically hear the mucus and the saliva and the tears as they rushed through her and poured down her face.

Oh.

"And how am I, Chloe Decker, a nobody... supposed to deal with that?"

oh.

The heavy thing in him twisted and squirmed and pushed down until it was all he could do to turn around and walk to the window, seeing nothing. Years, he'd spent on this place, embracing something that had felt all the more important, the more fragile, with every moment he'd spent here. With her.

It had been a nice dream, he thought distantly.

Lies.

"But... but then... Then I came back," she stammered. He could tell she wasn't coming closer. Too scared, no doubt. "And. And I saw you. I really saw you." He could picture the look on her face, tear-stained but bright, as if she thought she was grasping for the words that would make everything all right again. Adorable instinct, but it did nothing to repudiate the whirlwind of realization tearing through him, the tension-- "And I remembered how you made me feel. And I realized, Lucifer, you're not that guy."

"No," he said tightly, unseeing eyes still fixated on the skyline. "And what if I am that guy?"

"You don't have to be. You can change!"

"But what if I can't?"

He let hell slide over him as he turned, twisting his features into his other face. His true face? It certainly felt it. "Can you accept me like this?" he asked, knowing the answer before he even spoke. He could see it on her face as she flinched away from him, as she hid behind those long blonde tresses by instinct.

"I... oh... you have no idea how much I want to," she stammered. Still looking for the right words. Still looking to fix something that was unfixable, because it spun on this-- inescapable truth. "I do. I'm. I'm trying."

"But could you."

She stammered. She sobbed. She gasped for air and she shifted her head and all that pretty hair just went spilling everywhere.

Ah yes. There was truth.

"I don't know!"

She hadn't even needed to say it.

"Then I have my answer," he said, and turned from her. To the window, again, to give himself some space, to look into the vast void that felt like it had suddenly become a part of him, to keep her from seeing all the ways his body and face betrayed him, shaking with restrained... everything.

In these past few years he had almost cultivated a sense of... home, here. As if this space was his, this life was his, and he could live by its rules, its small happinesses.

But none of it was true. And he never lied, did he? Not purposefully.

He waited until Chloe's footsteps faded before his hand fell to the phone, unsteady but certain.

[[ nfb, nfi, taken from Lucifer episode 4x03 'O, Ye of Little Faith, Father'. ]]