If I may play the me's advocate for a moment...

It wasn't a great idea to keep sticking to old traditions to the letter, Lucifer and Octavia had found last weekend. And so Lucifer had suggested something else for this Sunday night.

Samsara.

It was a place where she felt safe. And it could-- go somewhere else, for a nice change of scenery. "Should we take her to the back of the preserve? Or head further along the coast?" Lucifer asked, as he hopped aboard, basket of food in hand.

[[ for her ]]

Duke and Octavia had had their chance to talk yesterday, but Lucifer hadn't caught her alone since-- well, since Friday night, if you could call the Nest 'alone'.

He was worried about her. And the whole situation. (Felt like all he was doing at the moment was running around trying to fix things, like he'd turned into Duke overnight.) And... so on Wednesday afternoon, he found it in him to go strolling down the boardwalk to her ship. He'd bought it for her, an eternity ago, and part of him was glad it had turned out to be such an important thing for her.

But the distance between the Rouge and Samsara felt quite large indeed.

Perhaps the papayas he'd brought would help bridge it a bit more.

He set one foot down on Samsara, feeling the ship bob beneath it, and called, "Octavia?"

[[ for her ]]

Right, so he'd clearly failed some kind of understanding test on Octavia's mystifying thing about tiny Duke. Lucifer had spent some time last night attempting to wrap his mind around it and failing.

But, well. Octavia stalking out of the Nest in a disappointed huff was not exactly how he wanted to go into this Duke-and-Octavia-free long weekend. And clearly he'd made a mistake. So.

There he was, standing on the boardwalk just outside of Samsara, holding a fruit basket. (It had lychees in it, besides the usual suspects. And dragonfruit. An apology basket had to be properly extravagant, right? It had worked for Miss Smith, at any rate.)

"Octavia?" he called.

[[ nsfw ahead ]]