Chapter Text
Chloe wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened. Her brain hadn’t finished processing.
One minute, she’d been unstrapping a drugged and definitely fully human Lucifer from the gurney, and then she was sprawled on the floor, having been knocked away from her partner by a pair of fluffy white wings.
Wings that had unfurled, with no warning… directly from his back.
Chloe clambered to her feet, filed all the revelations bubbling in her chest as things to freak out about later, and stepped around the spread wings.
“Lucifer?” Chloe said, in her measured cop voice. “You have wings.”
Lucifer looked at her, then at his wings. “Oh.” He flapped them experimentally, blowing Chloe’s hair across her face and almost knocking her back a step.
They were massive. Six or seven feet each, easily. The feathers gave off a faint glow, and Chloe knew immediately that there was no way they were anything but real, and part of him.
She was not going to freak out. But someone else might, if they saw those things.
As if to spite her, at that exact moment, Dan walked in, with Ella right behind him. They both stopped dead, glancing between Lucifer’s face and the wings spread on either side of him.
“Are those real?” Dan asked, employing the same ‘actively compartmentalizing’ tone that Chloe had used a moment before.
Lucifer beamed at him. “Daniel! Yes, they’re real. As real as me. If I am real.”
Ella made a high-pitched sound, somewhere between shock and delight. Chloe winced, but Ella just threw her arms around Lucifer, bouncing on her toes.
Lucifer blinked, swayed slightly, and hugged her back, his eyes suddenly and suspiciously shiny.
Chloe grabbed Dan by the arm. “Grab some shock blankets, and don’t let anyone else in here.”
Dan blinked once, swallowed hard, and nodded. “Shock blankets. Right. To hide the… the wings. Lucifer’s wings. Oh God, Lucifer is the—”
Chloe punched him in the shoulder. Hard. She would forever deny how much satisfaction it gave her. “Head in the game, Espinoza,” she ordered, pulling out her long-disused command voice. “Shock blankets. Now.”
“You’d make a great lieutenant,” Ella said, one arm still wrapped around Lucifer’s waist.
“Never. I hate the amount of paperwork I have already, I couldn’t stand working a desk job.” Chloe answered, swiftly. She rested her hand on Lucifer’s shoulder. “Can you put them away?”
Lucifer tensed his shoulders, tucking the wings against his back. They stayed out. He smiled at her anyway. “There!”
“They’re not… um. Okay.” Chloe patted his shoulder. “Thanks. Ella, are you okay?”
Ella nodded, grinning. “I’ll probably freak out later, but I’m pretty happy right now. Nothing better than learning that something you had faith in is actually true!”
Chloe, an atheist up until two minutes ago, tried to smile back.
Dan came back with an armful of shock blankets. Chloe took them from him and tucked one over Lucifer’s shoulders, and one over Dan’s. “Ella, could you make sure Dan doesn’t faint?”
Ella untangled herself from Lucifer and wrapped an arm around Dan’s waist. Lucifer whined at the loss of contact, reaching out to Ella and employing his best puppy-dog eyes.
Chloe’s brain screeched to a halt. For some reason, this was something she couldn’t comprehend. Lucifer, who flinched away when Trixie or Ella embraced him and visibly buffering when he was touched with any gentleness, who leaned away from kisses and into slaps, whimpering, acting like a kicked puppy when he was denied a continued embrace.
He had never lied to her, after all. He was the Devil on vacation. She could process that, could let her memories of what he had said fill in the blanks she had previously taped over with assumptions about his mental health. She was a homicide detective. She’d seen stranger things.
But this rammed up against everything she thought she knew. Not the wings pinned under a shock blanket, but the loneliness in his eyes.
Abruptly, she understood. He was lonely. It was as simple as that. He had more sex partners than anyone could count, but he had barely any friends, and he’d met all of them accidentally, through work or other... ventures.
It hit her harder than his unfurling wings had. No wonder he clung to her side, no wonder her rejection hurt him so much.
In eons, literal eons, he hadn’t ever experienced tenderness, or kindness, or friendship. His loneliness was older than the planet.
Chloe should’ve been terrified. She wasn’t. She just felt sad, really, and a little guilty. How had she not noticed?
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, resting her hand on Lucifer’s lower back (he gasped, sucking in a breath as though she’d stabbed him), guiding him toward the door, making sure the shock blanket was wrapped tightly over his wings.
“Whatever for, detective?”
Chloe couldn’t even begin. “Not believing you,” she said eventually, swallowing hard.
“I could have shown you. Early. Earlier. I didn’t… want you to. Believe me.” Lucifer slurred, struggling to put a sentence together. He leaned on her.
“Why?” Chloe asked, crossing her fingers. They were stepping out the door now, into a room crowded with police officers. She kept her voice low, kept a grip on him.
Twenty feet across the room, then through the dark to her car, and then they’d be safe.
Chloe could hear Dan and Ella behind them, murmuring to each other.
“Why?” Lucifer repeated. Chloe startled. She’d forgotten that she’d asked. “Because I’m a monster. And… and I didn’t want you to leave me.”
“I won’t leave you.”
Lucifer bristled. Literally bristled, she could feel his wings rising under the blanket. Dan hissed a warning, stepping forward. Chloe shot him a glare, feeling strangely possessive. She stepped in front of Lucifer, lifting her head to meet his eyes.
“Don’t lie to me,” Lucifer whispered, something close to desperation in his voice. Chloe grabbed the edges of the blankets and tugged them down, keeping the wings pinned and out of sight.
“I’m not lying.”
One of the nurses paused beside them. “Is everything alright?”
“I’m a detective with the LAPD and this is my partner,” Chloe informed him, pulling Lucifer along. “He was working undercover here, and he was drugged. I’m taking him home.”
“Home?” Lucifer murmured. His eyes glazed over. Chloe slid her hand up, pressing down on his folded wings.
“Home,” she answered, guiding him along.
They made it out, but just barely. Lucifer crumpled to his knees on the pavement, wings surging up.
This time, Chloe let Dan and Ella help, pinning the wings down before they emerged from under the blanket.
“Where are you taking me?” Lucifer asked, plaintively, and… shit, he was crying. He was actually crying, staring at the three of them with desperate, begging eyes. “Don’t take me back down again, please.”
“We’re going to my apartment,” Chloe said, evenly. “Where I live. My home.”
Lucifer nodded, and let them help him into the car, wings tucked around him defensively.
“You two go back to precinct,” Chloe told Ella and Dan. “Tell them Lucifer was drugged, and that he’ll give a report when he’s recovered, and I’ll file all the paperwork tomorrow.”
Dan looked like he was getting over his shock. Ella looked like she was dropping into it. Chloe bit her lip, worried, but there was nothing else she could do.
***
Chloe drove back to her apartment. It was dark, and no one was out, but she still wrapped both of the shock blankets over Lucifer’s wings before she took him inside.
He stared around her living room like he’d never seen it before. “Why is there a hole in the ceiling?”
“Maze hung up a sex swing.”
“Maze is here?” The blankets fell to the floor as Lucifer’s wings spread. “Don’t let her take me back.”
“Back where?” Chloe asked, but she knew. Hell. Hell, which was a real place. That Lucifer really used to rule.
“Home,” Lucifer whimpered.
“This is her home,” Chloe gestured. “No one’s taking you anywhere, except to bed.”
She winced as soon as the words were out of her mouth, expecting him to make some kind of of awful innuendo, but he said nothing.
Chloe carefully undressed him, guiding him out of his pants. (What he would call trousers, not what he would call pants. Why did he call underwear pants anyway? Was he really British, or did he just like the dialect?)
Chloe caught herself before her brain derailed. Lucifer was pointedly out of it, so she went ahead and stripped them both down to their underclothes.
Lucifer still said nothing as she settled him into her bed. She considered leaving for a moment, but then he turned those soulful eyes on her, and she couldn’t.
He had always seemed to run warm, but his bare skin was almost uncomfortably hot to the touch. She pressed against him anyway, resting her head on his chest.
She woke up the next morning wrapped in white feathers.