AN: i don't own lucifer or any characters therein (unfortunately). This ends in a weird place, so I hope that works? also s/o to any one of you that gets the middle english titles. the title of this fic is from the Wife of Bath's Tale. please feed the hungry author by R&Ring. have fun kids!
Chapter 1: sche awede wold
Chloe wakes, groaning. For a moment she is disoriented, vision blurred, on the edges between sleeping and waking. The light streaming in through the bedroom windows pushes her over the edge in the land of the waking. Her vision clears and she realises that she is not in her own home, in her own bed. It takes her a moment, two, to realise where she is. The bright light streaming in from the large window and opulent furniture, soft, soft silk sheets add up to a single place in her mind: Lucifer's.
The problem is, she doesn't remember going over to his place last night; they had parted ways at the station, he to his home and she to hers, and yet, somehow she is here.
"Lucifer?" she calls out. The voice that comes out is not her own - she hears her words in Lucifer's distinctive accent.
She suddenly finds herself thinking about Freaky Friday, and all of Lucifer's claims of the truth of the supernatural, the things about her partner that don't add up. It's a silly notion, but it's beginning to feel more real by the second: somehow she is inhabiting Lucifer's body. She looks down at her fingers only to see Lucifer's large hands and distinctive ring. She gets up and pads across the room to his ensuite bathroom. (and what does it say about the number of times she's been to his place that she knows where his personal bathroom is?) When she looks in the mirror, she sees her partner's face looking back at her. Now that she feels more awake, she's beginning to feel different, his body carrying unfamiliar weight and height; as she walks back into his room from the bathroom she nearly falls twice.
What can she do? Is she dreaming? How is this real? Question after question swirl around in her head, and she can't give a clear, useful answer to any of them; Chloe is just confused. If this is like Freaky Friday she muses, then reason stands that Lucifer is inhabiting her own body. Chloe is grateful for two things at the moment:
It's Saturday, and she doesn't have to come in to the station unless the weekend crew make some major break in her case.
It's Dan's week with Trixie, so she has the house to herself until next Saturday. This every week switch is a new arrangement that she and Dan are working through at the moment. It's not ideal, Trixie is almost living out of a suitcase for the time being, but it's getting there.
She calls Lucifer, or, rather, she calls herself from Lucifer's phone. She's glad that he has touch ID enabled, because she's not certain she knows enough about her partner to guess his phone password correctly. The phone rings through twice, three times, four.
"Detective!" Lucifer says. Even though it's her own voice she's hearing, the enunciation of her title is enough to convince her it's him.
"Lucifer," she says. She's not sure what to say next, this whole situation is so crazy, so beyond her experience, so...
Luckily, she doesn't have to come up with anything to say, because Lucifer is already plodding on ahead.
"It seems we might be under some kind of charm," he says, and God, what does it say about her life that this no longer sounds implausible?
When she doesn't say anything he continues, "either that or one of my unfortunate siblings is having a laugh at my expense. When I find this ... miscreant," he says, his voice lowering almost to a growl by the end of the thought. It sounds as though miscreant isn't word he really wants to be using. Lucifer's trademark growl sounds funny coming out of her mouth, and distorted by the phone. "This ... miscreant ... will wish I could kill them," he can't manage to sound as terrifying and otherworldly as he normally does when he threatens people. She almost laughs.
"Okay," she says, trying to collect herself, "We need to walk through our day yesterday to try and figure out where this came from." She hopes that she sounds calm and collected about this, because, because, she needs to be. Nothing is making sense right now and the only thing she can do is keep her wits about her.
"I'll be over at Lux then," he says, interrupting her thoughts.
She wants to object, to offer to drive over to her own home, meet him there. Then, she remembers that he drives classic cars, all of which are stick-shift. The only car's she's driven in the last fifteen years are all police issue, and mostly Crown Vics, all of which are automatic. She is fairly certain that she couldn't drive stick well at all now.
"Try not to-" she starts, but he hangs up before she can finish, "get a speeding ticket," she says to herself.
She sits there on his bed, googling different variants on body-swap for twenty minutes, not entirely willing to get up and do anything yet. Her internet searches yield nothing and she lays on her back groaning in frustration. Then, she hears her own voice coming from outside the room.
"Honey, I'm home!" Lucifer says.
She rolls her eyes in fond indignation.
She doesn't respond, instead waiting quietly for him to figure out where she is; it doesn't take him long.
"Detective!" he says, and God, it's weird seeing his grin on her own face; it's weird seeing her own face outside of a mirror or a camera app, "you look lovely."
"Gee, Thanks," she deadpans.
His grin drops.
"You smell different," she says. She's not sure why she says this, where the thought comes from, but it's there, nagging at her. It's not just that she's picking up her own scent from him, there's something else there that she can't put a finger on.
"Yes," he says, slowly, "I suppose I must." He's opted out of making some kind of innuendo, instead there is only weary knowing.
She has no idea what to ask him, so she stays quiet, hoping that he'll start talking again. But he doesn't. Instead he just looks nervous.
"I-" he says, open and closing his mouth "There -" he starts again, pausing to swallow down his anxieties, "There are a great deal of things that you don't know about me," he says finally.
She stares at him, trying to will him into continuing. "I've been meaning to tell you, to show you," he says, "but," and this must be difficult for him to say, "I have been afraid. I have been afraid of you, of what you would think," he's looking at her now, deep and intense, "I want - I don't want you to leave," he says, his voice soft and earnest.
"I know you," she says, sure of this, sure, sure, "whatever it is you want to tell me can't be that bad, can it?"
His only response is a small pained sound, and then, "You have no idea," he says softly. He's speaking to her, looking at her as though she is an innocent child, "You stubbornly refuse to believe me about who I am."
His eyes are watery, "Most of the time," he says, "I can tell myself that I am ok with that. It's better after all, safer for you and your spawn if you aren't involved - aware of everything; the mortal and the divine don't mix after all," he sniffs, "but then you say you know me."
He lets out another pained sound, seemingly unable to articulate his thoughts any further. He closes the distance between them, and before she knows what he's doing, he reaches behind her and places a hand between her shoulder blades, pushing in gently. There's something in her back moving, like something trying to escape from under her skin. He slips back as quickly as he'd closed in on her moments earlier.
"I'm sorry," he says. She's almost certain now that he's on the brink of tears.
Then. Wings. She feels them, rather than sees them, but somehow, she knows, knows that they are there. The wings are a heavy and unfamiliar weight, a third pair of appendages, quivering, and larger than the other two pairs.
It's true. It's all true, everything that Lucifer has been telling her for months, a year now. Lucifer. Shit, fuck, g- fuck. Lucifer. The worst part, is that she can't run away from him, even though her buried human instincts want to. In this moment she is herself and him all at once. There is no running, no hiding. The only option is being, knowing.
He's standing there too, rooted to the spot, waiting, for what, she can't tell. He looks and smells tense. She flaps one of the wings on accident, knocking over the side table and gouging the wall. Lucifer winces.
"I should have warned you about that," he says, apologetic.
"How..." she says, unsure exactly what she wants to ask, how to ask.
"We angels were warriors first," he says softly, "Father, a god of armies."
When she doesn't respond he plods on, "There are other universes," he says, "with other beings like Mother and Father. They created this universe, created their children, and we populated this universe."
These are things no human is meant to know, but she Knows now and there's no taking it back.
"In the beginning," Lucifer says wryly, "there was darkness. Then, my Father bade me to create light - so I did."
It really hits her then, what he is. He is older than time, older than light, an immensely powerful being. Compared to him, she is tiny, insignificant. What does he want with her? Why her? However, her questions get caught in her throat and do not manage to escape.
Lucifer seems to take no notice of her existential crisis, instead plodding forward. "Father bade me to create Light everywhere and I did. I was loyal, faithful and unquestioning. Like all of my siblings a perfect being, a perfect warrior, weapon and tool."
He laughs now and it is filled with a deep kind of pain; she can see it in his face and she can somehow smell it on him.
"I spun stars out of nothing and lit their new universe. When Father created your kind I gave them Joy and Creativity as I was bade."
The wings on her back quiver, his body responding to his pained recollections. Her world is still spinning on its axis and the strength of his strange and indescribable senses is beginning to overwhelm her. Her head hurts and her vision blurs. The last thing she sees before she loses consciousness is him trying to catch her, and keep her from hitting the floor.
She dreams. Her dreams are more vivid and horrifying than she has ever before experienced. Even from within the dreams she wonders if they are Lucifer's dreams. The places in them are completely alien to her and there are voices. So many voices. They whisper and rage and scream and sing at her in a million tongues, all overlapping. They are all praying, postulating themselves before her, begging to her as though she is a god of something.
My Lord. My Lord. My Lord. voices rasp.
She wants to tell them that they have coming looking for the wrong person ... being? She isn't entirely clear on the terminology now.
For a moment, two she wonders if this is all some kind of fever dream, if this is Lucifer managing to somehow drown her in his elaborate delusions. But, even unconscious, dreaming and drowning she is aware of the weight of the wings on her back. This is her new reality. She is small, nothing and there is God and angels, and ... Goddess? She tries to collect her thoughts into something coherent but the more she grabs for them, the more she tries to find herself the more her thoughts slip through her hands and are washed away down a long stream that she is now drowning in.
Chloe is flailing arms and legs and wings, sinking in water that is more like sludge, voices screaming around her, praying, murmuring.
Lord we pray of you. My Lord. My Lord.
She wants to scream but when she opens her mouth not a sound escapes and then the black, sludgy water fills it, falling down into her lungs, settling there. She splutters, chokes.
Then. She gives in, letting her body go limp and sink below the waves of the river, and the voices quiet. Her consciousness fades.
Now. She wakes, just as she had this morning, laying on Lucifer's bed. Her back feels lighter. The wings are gone, but when she looks down at her hands they are still Lucifer's hands, his long piano player's fingers and black obsidian ring. His perfect, gleaming fingernails that often make her jealous. Jealousy is one of the seven deadly sins, she suddenly thinks. She wonders how much that matters, how much of it is real.
Her head still feels heavy, cottony and her ears feel as though they are stuffed with wax. She still hears the undertow of millions of whispering voices, but it is smothered enough that she can clearly find her own thoughts and memories. Her lips are chapped and she wonders idly how long she's been out, how long her drowning dreams lasted. Outside the penthouse, many floors below her, emergency vehicles blare by and she can hear them.
"Lucifer?" she calls out, voice cracked and low, and still Lucifer's.
Light streams through the windows and she remembers him saying, "In the beginning there was darkness and my Father bade me to create light so I did."
Lucifer does not have children (she thinks), not like she has Trixie, but he has created before, and on a far greater scale than she can conceive with her puny human mind. The sun that shines through the windows into this bedroom is one of his creations, his children. For a moment she thinks of Yvaine the star who was a woman, from Neil Gaiman's Stardust, remembering reading that book to Trixie. She wonders if Lucifer's stars are people too.
"Lucifer?" she calls out again.
This time she hears something shuffling and clanking around outside of the room. Moments later she sees her own frame standing in the doorway of the room. The look on her face is all Lucifer though. His face is twisted into his classic Manly Angst Face. She almost has to laugh, at that thought, at the absurdity of this situation and at her own irrelevance in the greater universe. But she doesn't. Lucifer smells and feels apprehensive. Is he afraid? She wonders, and she reaches for the thread of it and finds that he is writhing with fear.
Lucifer does not say anything and does not move to come closer to her. He stands, looking at her, silent in the doorway, waiting for her to make the first move. Chloe stands up and walks towards him, still unsure of what to say.
Finally, she settles on something fairly neutral. This is a fact finding mission, she tells herself; framing it this way is the only thing staving off another panic. "How long was I out for?" she asks him.
He gives her a sad smile and says, "Ten hours."
"Oh," she wishes that she had something more insightful, more ... something, to add to the conversation.
Lucifer is usually terrible at picking up human social and emotional cues. In her mind she has now firmly created a divide between Before and After her recent paradigm shift. In Before she had assumed that his lack of understanding social and emotional cues was because of whatever profound abuse he had endured that led him to create his elaborate devils and angels delusion. In After and Now, she knows that his lack of understanding is because he is not human. She still can't discount the idea of Lucifer having suffered some kind of profound abuse or trauma in his past though.
But today, Lucifer seems to be able to read cues far better, somehow silently knowing that she does not know what to do, what to say, so he plows forwards with his own words and thoughts.
"I have yet to find anything conclusive on the origin, nature or solution of our little problem," he says. The way he says our little problem makes her think more of a lost package or a cooking error, something mundane and easily fixable or forgettable. But this. This is neither of those things.
I cannot panic, she thinks, straightening her spine, breathing deeply. In. Out. In. Out.
"But," Lucifer says, somehow imbuing her voice with his bright, clueless joie de vivre, "That does not mean that one won't present itself soon."
He is not human. He likely has a very different concept of soon than she does. Again she remembers that he is older than time, light, Earth. He is pure divine energy created spinning in the Aether.
Finally, she gathers the courage to walk over to him, still getting a feel for his height and strange distribution of weight.
"Finding a solution for this is something we can do together," she says, proud that her voice barely shakes, "After you make me something to eat."
For a moment she wants to take back her last statement, the demand for him to cook her something. Is it wrong for her to demand anything of him? If he takes offence at her demand he doesn't show it. In fact, he is remarkably obedient and quiet. He walks out of the doorway and into the hall, down towards the kitchen. She follows him, listening to the hardwood floors of the penthouse creak under her every step.
It seems that Lucifer had already begun dinner prep. All of the counters in his rather opulent kitchen are covered in dishes, and food, lined and ready for prep. The tabletop of the breakfast bar is covered in books that look positively ancient and several empty cheese puffs bags. A fancy pen and notebook also sit among the books. Lucifer is standing over by the sink, cleaning some vegetables not paying particularly close attention to what she is doing.
Satan is making her an Italian dinner - which should sound completely crazy, but now just feels mundane. She's only been in the loop for less than two conscious hours but it's already folded deep in her and the, Oh my god Satan is my partner, type of thoughts already feel dated.
Again, Chloe is struck by the urge to laugh uncontrollably, though she isn't sure exactly what the joke is, or who is playing it on her.
She takes a look at the notebook, but it is for the large part, indecipherable. The handwriting is unmistakably Lucifer's but the contents are in multiple languages she doesn't know or recognise. She picks up one of the books from the table, a book that is older and closer to manuscript or folio than anything else. The text is in Italian, a language she does not understand at all.
Chloe sits down at the table and wishes that she could figure out what questions she wants to ask. Instead she gets lost in her own thoughts, still doing her very best to pick them out of the whole pile of thoughts, outside voices that simultaneously occupy her mind now. She is dimly aware of Lucifer beginning to sing a Beatles song as he works his way through meal prep, doing his best to mask his own fears. In no time at all she is served a plate of chicken alfredo and vegetables, all of which smell wonderful. Lucifer sits down on one of the other stools and begins to eat his dinner.
"I keep hearing these voices in my head," she says. Chloe decides that this is the most pressing issue for her, this multitude of voices she doesn't understand and can't pick out anything from, "They never stop."
Lucifer makes an inscrutable face, sighs and look up at the ceiling for a moment, hissing something that sounds suspiciously like a curse word, though it's certainly not in english. He meets her gaze then, and says in a completely flat voice, so devoid of character that it might as well be an automated voice, "They're prayers. You're hearing prayers."
The thought of prayers makes him pull of face of disgust, as though the concept of it is completely and utterly distasteful to him. She wonders if his distaste is part of the devil shtick. Even knowing for certain that Lucifer's devil shtick is all true now doesn't keep her from thinking about it in that way in After and Now.
"I'm truly sorry you have to bear witness to those prayers, curses and invocations. The kind of things some people ask the devil for are truly heinous," he says, and a shiver runs through his whole body, shaking it in an almost cartoony manner.
"I can't really understand them," she says, trying to at least offer him some comfort; he obviously feels incredibly guilty about this whole situation.
He gives her a smile that is more pained than anything else, "I'm glad. There are some voices that one should be able to live their whole lives without," he murmurs.
There is a depth of grief in this statement, and Chloe feels for him.
Then. He abruptly changes moods and topics, and says, "Much as it pains me to say it: I believe we may in fact have to consult some priest or other about this situation.
The urge to laugh returns, but she suppresses it again, this situation won't be bettered by any kind of levity. Instead she pulls her focus back on her dinner.
As always, Lucifer's cooking is beyond amazing. Now, she supposes it's only natural that he is as talented of chef as he is: he has lived through the entire history of cooking. She wonders what other skills he has that are completely unknown to her, not sure whether she wants answers or not. In this moment, she thinks she might know too much; her head still feels as though it might burst.
Lucifer sits across from her silently eating his dinner, and the look on his face suggests that he is deep in contemplation, miles away. She decides that it's best to leave him to it. Where before, Lucifer was her eccentric partner-slash-friend, he is now an unknown and dangerous quantity. She swallows down another bite of chicken, considering.