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“You got your homework?” Chloe asks as she finishes packing Trixie’s lunch. She ignores Lucifer’s smirk when he sees she’s included one of the double chocolate chip cookies he broke into their apartment to bake this morning for some unknown, Lucifer reason. She’d thought the munchies at first, but that wasn't consistent with the fact that he appeared sober or why he would do so in her house instead of his own in the first place.
Trixie nods over her open backpack.
“Your folders? Your pencil case?”
“Yes, Mom,” Trixie says, a roll to her eyes and enough exasperation in her voice that Lucifer laughs. Chloe almost flushes at the reflection of herself in her daughter. “I just need my lunch.”
Chloe pushes the lunchbox across the counter, “Just checking, monkey. Here you go.”
“Thanks, Mommy,” Trixie says as she sticks it in the bag, tossing a smile to where Lucifer lounges behind Chloe. “Thanks, Lucifer.” Of course, she’d seen the cookie too.
Chloe cranes her neck to glance out the window and make sure Ryan and his mom are already out waiting for the bus, before coming around the counter. “Alright, have a good day at school.”
Trixie’s already leaning up for the hug Chloe gives her, although she’s twisting around as she tries to get her backpack on at the same time. “Thanks! I will!”
Chloe straightens, and Trixie’s already got the door open to run to the bus stop as Chloe calls after her, “Love you!”
“You too, Mommy!” Chloe winces as the door slams behind her whirlwind of a daughter, but the smile stays on her face as she turns back to her partner in the kitchen. Her thoughts are already half turning to work and half wondering if it’s worth it to give Lucifer yet another lecture on breaking into her apartment. They didn’t seem to have done much good so far. His inability to understand why it was a problem was almost entertaining at this point. All he’d managed to glean from her lectures about safety was that he should lock the door behind him once he’d let himself in, which was something, she supposed.
Lucifer seemed particularly distracted this morning, if the way he’s staring at her front door without a word is any indication. Maybe it would be best to try to encourage this quiet mood for as long as it suited him. Maybe she’d be able to get through her morning kitchen clean up routine on time. At least he’d cleaned up from his own baking, for all the dishwasher would have to be run now rather than after dinner tonight.
She uses a kitchen towel to clean the counter, unclear as always as to how Trixie at eight still managed to make a mess with cereal. She’s reaching to turn on the faucet in the sink to rinse their dishes when Lucifer’s voice breaks the silence
“How do you do it?” Lucifer asks, his eyes still on the closed front door.
Chloe’s brow furrows as she turns to look at him. “Do what?”
He starts at the sound of her voice. His gaze lands on her as if he’s only just realizing the words had actually made it out of his mouth and she heard them. She can see a brief internal debate play out across his expression, before he commits to his question. “How do you make it not a burden—when you say you love her?”
“A bur-” Chloe starts to repeat, frowning. Her brain almost skips, like a record scratch, at his words because they don’t make sense. How could she make her love for her daughter a burden?
She feels something well up in her at the thought. Something like fury at the very idea. Something like hurt that Lucifer could think she would ever...
His eyes met her own and the feeling vanishes because there is an open wound in his depths of his gaze. There is pain and a sort of helpless confusion mixed with something that looks too close to naked awe for her comfort. Because he doesn’t think that of her, no. He thinks the opposite, like it’s a miracle she’s managed not to make her love for her daughter a weight for her to carry.
It’s all wrong. He shouldn’t …
It’s on the tip of her tongue to say it’s a given that her love for her daughter isn’t like that. To say that’s just how parental love works and if he had a child he would understand. That they’re not ‘terrible, taxing burdens’. And then she remembers the question he just asked and a thousand other off hand remarks, small and large, he’s made since they met. She remembers other cases at work, the ones that had always broken her heart. And she is the one who remembers that it’s not a given. That some parents give their children conditional love, or none at all.
That’s where he starts.
Her hands tighten their grip on the counter’s edge, and it digs into her palms as her partner looks at her with the same eyes as the children from those cases. Her heart almost breaks all over again.
“When I tell Trixie I love her,” Chloe says slowly, because she wants to help him understand, but she doesn’t want to hurt him. “It’s a gift, freely given. It’s not, not…” Chloe reaches for words to even articulate how it isn’t whatever he thinks parental love should be. “It’s not an obligation or anything like that. I’m not saying it to make her say it back or…” She trails off in frustration again.
Lucifer’s deep brown eyes are staring into her own, like she’s managing to unveil a mystery of the universe but she doesn’t know what to say. Chloe shrugs helplessly, “She’s my daughter and I love her. It’s a fact. I tell her so she remembers I’m on her side, in her corner, no matter what. To remind her she doesn’t need to do anything to earn it. She has it, my love—always.
“It’s—it’s a blanket,” Chloe settles on. “To comfort her, keep her warm, but ultimately, for her to do what she wants with—not a stone or a yoke around her neck.”
Chloe still feels frustrated, unsure if she managed to articulate anything worthwhile, but Lucifer nods slowly, like he’s found something of value in her words. His eyes dart to the door again as he says, “That must be nice.”
The wistful tone is so fragile even if his voice is otherwise perfectly even keeled. It makes her hope that she was wrong about what his tone implied. “Your—” Chloe starts to ask before realizing he’s already given her his answer. She’s not sure she can stand to hear him say confirm her suspicions out loud.
Still, he barks out a laugh--or what’s supposed to be one. “My parents were not like you, or even Daniel. My love was owed to them because they created me,” he states plainly, still staring into the distance. “Of course it was. My being was for them, that’s why I was brought into existence in the first place. They built owing into our very names. It wasn’t a question, if we existed for them. Not until, well, I questioned.”
Chloe holds her breath, both at the stark reality he paints of his younger years and at how much he’s sharing. He always so deft at keeping everything about him glittery and shallow—she used to outbursts of information during cases, not her kitchen in the early morning light. Not offered up so plainly, unmasked by projection and confrontation.
“My mother gave her love like a prize to be earned and won, when we did something to please her,” he says, eyes on the view outside the window, fingers twitching like his mother’s love is something he can grasp at. “And she took it away just as easily when we disappointed her. It was a flickering, transitory bauble. Capricious. Ephemeral. Fleeting. Characteristic of Mum’s fluctuating regard for us. Her wandering attention. Her presence, or more often, lack thereof, in our lives.”
“My father…” His eyes shutter as they flicker back to the walls around them instead of the nonexistent view out the window to places she can’t see. “He bestowed his love,” Lucifer’s sneers, face twisting in remembrance. “And we had to live up to the expectations that came with it. We had to prove ourselves worthy of it.
“It was a responsibility,” Lucifer clarifies, some of the derision leaving his voice. The flatness was almost worse. “To love him. An assumption, a payment upfront, a debt you could never work off.” His fingers twitch and he shifts his weight, as if he wants to move, but has been told to keep still enough times that he suppresses the urge without realizing it.
Chloe reels from the intense turn this conversation has taken, so heavy for a simple morning. A bolt of realization hits her. What had happened the previous night to make all of this so close to the surface and raw that he was sharing this about his past? Likely whatever happened had prompted his visit and baking this morning in the first place. Her eyes catch on the scratch by his hairline, the shadow under his eyes suddenly more of a bruise than evidence of a late night. The clothes that she assumed were mildly disheveled due to partying, suddenly remind her more of the way he had looked when his brother had given him a black eye.
His family always makes Lucifer come unspooled—and no wonder given what he’s just shared. “Lucifer, I…” Chloe wants to make it better, but she doesn’t know how.
Lucifer barely seems to notice that she’s said anything, for all his head turns at the sound of his name. “Did you know it was built into our language? Into what we called him?” His eyes are desperate as they bore into her own. As if he suddenly needs someone to understand. As though the fact that he’s being heard is finally getting through to him and he needs the validation that comes from sharing such things with others. Needs to not feel so alone with his emotions and memories.
She shakes her head in answer to his question, trying to brace herself for whatever comes next.
“It meant ‘father’, but it… It wasn’t…” he cuts himself off, frustrated with his own inability to explain.
When all Chloe does is wait, looking back at him patiently, he manages to take a deep breath. “There was more meaning attached. It was a deferential title, laced with gratitude and obligation, for being created. Every time we spoke to him or spoke of him, that truth was embedded in it. A reminder of everything that came with him and our relationship.
“’Dad’ is better,” Lucifer says, his voice saying the English word in such a way that she can almost hear another accent come through. “I prefer that it’s more casual. That it doesn’t mean more than it ought to. I can’t even speak it, what I used to call him.
“Praise and glory dripped from our lips when we spoke to him because he was our father and he taught us how to speak. Respect. Affirmations and supplications. Prayers.”
Chloe’s long suspected Lucifer might have been raised by a religious cult. She’s sure of it now. Everything he’s describing makes her sick to her stomach.
“Professions of adoration and gratitude and love. Some many different words to say it. None of them mean what you seem to.
“I’ve not told anyone that since I last said it to him,” Lucifer admits. Chloe knows his dad kicked him out. She wonders if Lucifer had tried to protest his expulsion by saying he loved him. She hopes he hadn’t, that his last memory of telling his family he loved them wasn’t followed by his abandonment by them.
“I don’t know if I ever can, even in this language. Even knowing what it means here. Even if the words are different and the sentiment too.” Lucifer looks tired and older than she’s ever seen him as he leans wearily against her fridge. “If it will always be too close to what it was in the beginning.”
His jaw clenches before he continues, “I wonder if all my siblings still have to speak to him like that. Judging by Amenadiel, they do.”
Chloe’s pretty sure this is all as close to validation as her theory is going to get, but the confirmation is bereft of any satisfaction. Because she hadn’t even thought of the implications of his siblings still being part of the family, whatever that means.
“Thinking about where I come from, picturing my family home makes me feel sick.” That derisive sneer from the beginning is back, “The scraping and bowing and ego stroking—the groveling. It makes me wish the rest knew there were other ways of being. It makes me wish I’d won.
“Because I’d do it all again, go against him, even knowing what happens to me,” Lucifer says and his words seem to almost ring out in her small kitchen, soft morning light a strange contrast to the gravity of his sentiment. “Being thrown out, the pain and suffering, the isolation and loneliness, the torture and the—. It was worth it. Because I’m out.”
The triumph in his voice fades. “My siblings aren’t though and I pity them. Because they’re still trapped. Blissful in their ignorance of what doesn’t have to be. In the way I never could be.
"And I’ve never been able to figure out why I was built like I am. What he intended in making me this way.” Lucifer’s hand absentmindedly rubs against his chest. “You’d think he would have anticipated my inability to fall in line. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s why he called me his venom from the start. Maybe he just thought he could control me. That if he held me by the neck, I’d never be able bite him. That I could never deny him, if he never gave us the word ‘no’.”
Chloe moves toward him without thinking and his eyes track hers warily. “But I found it anyway,” the corners of his mouth lift sadly. “And I told him ‘no’. Because I’ve never loved anyone the way he made me love him. I don’t want to.” His voice finally breaks on that last admission, “Never again.”
Lucifer seems startled when Chloe cups his cheeks, brushing away tears she can tell he hadn’t realized were falling. His hand covers her own as he tells her solemnly, “He never meant it right when he said it to us anyways.”
Chloe can’t take it anymore and wraps her arms around his neck, one hand cradling his head as she pulls him down to nestle against her shoulder. He freezes against her, for all he doesn’t resist. She’s trying to slow her own tears and beginning to wonder if she’s making him feel worse, more uncomfortable, when his arms wrap around her. The bastard probably never hugged him enough either, she thinks with the coldest fury she’s ever felt. She’s almost numb with rage that had filled her as Lucifer spoke.
Chloe tries to calm down as Lucifer holds on to her, a few tears soaking the shoulder of her pajama top as he holds her silently. No one deserved to be raised that way and she’s never wanted to hurt someone more than right now. “If I ever meet that man,” because he didn’t deserve any parental title as far as she was concerned, “I’m going to shoot him.”
It startles a laugh from Lucifer. He pulls back from her, his eyes dryer than she expected although she’d never doubted his eyeliner would still be perfect. “That would be a sight I’d pay anything to see, Detective.”
Chloe smiles indulgently up at him. “I mean it.” Enjoying the lighter moment and the chance to breath it affords them both.
He smiles back. “I know.”
The smile fades from her face, the gravity of the moment taking hold of her once more. “He was wrong, Lucifer,” Chloe says, needing him to know that more than she needed to break them from this mood. He blinks at her in surprise. “So, so, so wrong. He should have been so proud of the privilege it is, to love his kid. To love you.”
Lucifer shakes his head, more in wonder than disagreement as he leans back from her. Chloe lets it go, for now. She knows she’ll need to do more than say those words to convince him. But she’ll get him to believe her. One day. Until then…
She glances at the clock over the stove and grimaces. “I better get changed now or we’re gonna be late.”
Lucifer almost looks embarrassed when he sees that dark mark on her shirt before he easily pulls on his usual bravado. “I’d be happy to lend my assistance since it is my fault. Really, I insist.”
When he starts heading for her room, she hastily makes her way to the stairs, sliding over to block him. “Hey! You stay right here, mister. It’s bad enough you’ve made yourself welcome in my house; you’re not allowed in my bedroom.”
“Oh, a challenge, Detective,” Lucifer coos back, grinning at her from the foot of the stairs. “I accept.”
Chloe rolls her eyes, “Stay Lucifer. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Very well,” Lucifer acquiesces—it seems he does understand some boundaries as he’s never come upstairs.
She turns to head up before he changes his mind when his hand snags her forearm. She pauses in surprise, her brow furrowed as she looks back at him. The steps bring their eyes to almost the same level and his are particularly sincere as he says, “Thank you. For—no one’s ever—.” He shakes his head and simply repeats, “thank you.”
Chloe’s eyes soften and she squeezes his hand, “You’re welcome, Lucifer.”