my_own_advocate | A Nice Lunch Place in Baltimore, Monday, Lunchtime

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A Nice Lunch Place in Baltimore, Monday, Lunchtime

Linda and Amenadiel were stopping by to 'check' on Lucifer. If Lucifer knew the good doctor - and thought of the screaming little parasite she now had at home - he could only imagine she was using it as an excuse to get away from nursing a mewling infant or something.

Well, she probably also wanted to see him. He was her most interesting patient, after all.

He wasn't necessarily looking forward to seeing his sainted older brother this time, however. And so it seemed logical to segue from the lunch into something more fun, like... taking money from strangers in gambling dens or or something, so it made perfect sense to drag ~~a security blanket~~ Duke with him while he was going. It was just efficient. (He was also wearing the camel suit with the blue shirt because classic was not boring, Duke.)

"There they are," he said, walking towards a table at the back. "Dr. Linda! Radiant as always!"

[[ I'm awake anyway, might as well put this up. for one and some ocd ]]

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"That they do."

And she really liked it, hush.

Linda shot him a wry look. "And if we're lucky, things will actually say nice and quiet with Lucifer out of LA."

"In LA, at least," Duke said. "Dude's kind of a big danger magnet, isn't he."

Said the pot about the kettle.

"I'd say it's less that than an innate talent for making things worse on himself," Linda said. She was already feeling nicely tipsy, and it was a kind of Zen-like feeling she was intent on sticking with today. "Way worse. Like, cataclysmically worse. Then add in all the celestial stuff."

Duke hugged a little laugh. "Explains why we get along so well."

Linda gave him a thoughtful look, idly stirring her mimosa with the straw. And drinking some more, because that was the main reason she was here.

"He did mention you were a 'seafaring disaster'," she said, "But coming from Lucifer, I'm not sure what that means."

"It means I live on a boat and I have terrible luck," Duke said. "For instance: my girlfriend, who may or may not still be my girlfriend, is currently a raccoon."

"The girlfriend Lucifer left LA with?" Linda checked.

A beat.

"I can't believe I just didn't even blink at 'raccoon'," she said.

"That's impressive," Duke agreed. "And yeah, that's her. My, uh, hometown's kind of . . . horrifyingly weird. And hers is a dystopian nightmare. So we kind of got caught up in something that, uh. Changed the way I looked at her. Took me awhile to process." He shook his head. "Still processing it, honestly. And now she's a raccoon, so I can't even, like, talk it out with her."

Linda sighed the sigh of a woman who had long since given up on people not using her for free therapy, and waved her glass at the waiter. It wasn't empty yet, but it soon would be.

"Maybe that's good," she offered, looking back at him. "Sometimes it takes time to figure out where you stand, and that's not always easy to do when the problem is standing right there in front of you."

Edited 2020-10-26 16:40 (UTC)

"Yeah, maybe." Duke shrugged. "Mostly it just kind of seems like my luck. I finally drag my ass back from Haven, escaping by the skin of my teeth, and one of my best friends is a basket case and my girlfriend's trying to exchange candy wrappers for donuts because her brain's the size of a walnut."

The resignation to therapizing this man briefly fell away from her. "Basket case?" she echoed. "Please tell me Lucifer isn't having another meltdown."

The previous one might have been two thousand years for him, but definitely not for her.

"I don't know about meltdown, but he's definitely something." Duke shook his head. "I mean, I'm not the best at reading him any damned day of the week." That was an understatement. "But I'd swear he's . . . hovering."

"Ah," Linda said.

... and snickered.

Look, she was definitely moving past tipsy right now.

Snickered all the way into her mimosa, in fact.

Duke watched her with a faint, slightly confused smile. "Yeah, he'd probably object strenuously to me saying so."

"I'm very proud of him," Linda said tactfully, after she'd swallowed back a whole mouthful of orange juice and champagne, "for doing the mature thing and not staying in LA and hovering over Chloe until she speeds up her processing because he happens to feel lonely and sad."

She lifted her drink in a little salute. "But he came here for a reason, and you and your girlfriend are it. And she's a raccoon now."

Duke snorted. "Octavia, sure. I'm pretty sure I just come along with the Octavia package."

He could be kind of dense sometimes. In his defense, Lucifer was also very repressed.

"He brought you in to meet his therapist and his brother and called you a 'good cook' without a backhanded insult," said Linda, who knew Lucifer's repression extremely well, yes. "He brought you up in therapy multiple times. And now he's hovering."

She sipped her drink. "He really likes you. I think he just finds your girlfriend less scary because she's less verbal."

"You might be the only person who's ever called Octavia the less frightening one," Duke said. "He really talks about me in therapy?"

"Less frightening to him," Linda clarified. "And yeah. He had this whole freak-out about how you and Octavia didn't freak out about him being the Devil and--"

She waved her glass. "...That's probably confidential stuff." She snorted, took a sip, and eyed him. "Look," she said, "that man is perpetually terrified of bonding with other people and he will literally go to the ends of the Earth just to avoid admitting to it when it happens. Right now he's reaching out to you because he's had a horrible time, and he's freaking out about it. You just--"

Another wave.

"Either let that one run its course, or tell him to leave you alone."

Okay, but that was still Duke and Octavia. Which didn't count.

Right?

"Nah, I don't mind it. I like hanging out with him. His family life is even more fucked up than mine is, and he's had a really rough time of it the last. . . ." He trailed off with a wince. "Two millenia. I still can't quite wrap my head around that bit."

"And apparently he spent most of it demon-stalking you," Linda said, nodding along.

"Well . . . a lot of people in Haven die. And end up in Hell."

Also hard to get his head around.

"Yes, the disaster part you mentioned," Linda said. She stirred her drink. "Do you go to therapy?"

She was starting to get the suspicion he could use therapy.

"I do," Duke said. "I frustrate Dr. Callahan on a regular basis. Though . . . I haven't been able to get ahold of her since I got back to Fandom. I don't know, maybe she's taking a break."

"Well, if you speak to her again," Linda said lightly, "You might want to discuss why you're so desperate to disbelieve that your friend cares about you."

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