Author's notes:

HAPPY BIRTHDAYYYYYYYY TO YOUUUUUUUUUUU-

You figured it out ; this new fic is a gift for my dear friend and big lucifan - Kittendealer -, who asked for a story that would talk about the all new character coming for the 4th season.
Not telling much or I'll spoil all the fun here ;)

There'll have several chapters - don't know how many yet - but it won't be a long-long fic.
I don't know if the show will take that way, but that's "my" way ^^

Not my first language/not beta-read... I hope there's not much faults.

Happy birthday and happy reading!

~ 1 ~

THE SERPENT

"Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman; 'Did God really say – You must not eat from any tree in the garden?"

Genesis 3; 1

"Don't do this."

"Do what?"

"This."

"What's 'this', Detective?"

Only the Devil could feign such innocence without blushing.

Devil.

Blush.

She shuddered imperceptibly in her seat.

"Detective?"

"it's all true…"

Chloe buried deep into her memory the unspeakable dread coming with this combination of words, by this revelation not that much "revealing" if she wanted to be completely honest with herself.

A value already taken in a rather figurative sense by her partner.

Partner... Lucifer... The secret was to focus on these two words; two against two.

"You know what I'm talking about." she said, without looking up from her file.

"Quite the opposite. You're telling me not to do something while I'm not doing anything special, and that's your fault by the way..."

"I'm not the one who decides my schedule. And you're not doing anything because you're allergic to paperwork."

The detective paused in her reading, frowning.

"Has it always been this way?"

Lucifer stared at her, puzzled. And Chloe couldn't look away from his face; human - human, in all probability. His brown eyes, his smooth skin, far from the slightest imperfection, the slightest scar tissue that her eyes had seen for a moment. It took her more and more often; looking at him without blinking, without thinking of the rest... Only focusing her mind on what she knew, what she was sure of.

Lucifer didn't seem to notice that long look she gave him.

"Excuse me?"

"Your habit to avoid any kind of administrative tasks." Chloe said. "Was it also the same... upthere?"

She followed her words with a vague gesture towards the ceiling, almost ashamed, seemingly quite worried to such openly reveal Lucifer's true nature to the rest of the precinct, yet which totally didn't care about their talk. Chloe, however, dropped her hand quickly, looking all around her; that behavior giving birth to a smirk on her partner's lips.

"Careful, Detective... What a shame if your colleagues would suddenly find out that you're working with the Devil himself!" he teased her, intently shouting those two last words to whoever wanted to hear them.

Two words.

Some police officers turned around, intrigued but still not caring about the potential danger of their partnership. Chloe smiled at them, laughing nervously as she shrugged. She then turned quickly to Lucifer, glaring at him.

"Shhhhhhhh ! Are you insane?!"

"That's what most of your kind think of me." Lucifer replied calmly, his smile widening. "I tend to prefer 'eccentric'..."

He shifted slightly to his seat. Chloe's eyes squinted.

"Don't."

"I'm just saying that Humanity insists on giving me a retrogra-…"

"Lucifer."

"Yes, Detective?"

"Stop it. Now." she warned him.

"I don't-"

"They're still very sensitive; I know it, you know it. Stop rubbing your back against the back of your seat... now."

Lucifer's smile turned into a grimace of discomfort. He sat up; being torn between the tempting desire and the reasonable self-control.

"You don't know how much it-it's-…"

He looked for words, and – not able to find better ones than these - finally exclaimed;

"... It's bloody itchy!"

"Maybe, but rubbing your back against every wall or seat of the room won't change anything. In the best case scenario, it'll take more time for your wings to heal properly."

Wings.

Another word.

One more she still didn't know what to do with it.

"That wouldn't be a problem if you'd let me deal with them in my own way, Detective." replied Lucifer, leaning slightly forward.

Chloe looked up from her file.

"I thought we already talked about this."

"We did."

"And we agreed not to cut them off, didn't we?"

He sighed, clearly dissatisfied with their agreement.

"If you'd understand what they really represent, Detective-…"

"I know. I know I can't understand much about your situation, Lucifer. I tried hard, though."

A reproach barely hidden, barely controlled in Chloe's voice. She was angry to bring it again on the table, of course; but-... She couldn't understand, indeed. All this situation, these revelations of these last days; it made no sense. Some things were more beyond understanding than others; lacking rational elements or, at best, "human" ones - so that she can really understand them.

Cain, curse, vulnerability, immortality, Charlotte, Charlotte who was briefly a ship for the Goddess of Creation...

So many things not to know what to do with, not to know how to understand them, how not to misunderstand them; as all men and women had done before her.

There were the other things.

These other simpler things, more complicated between them both, past and present. Things "human" enough into their deep functioning to understand them. Lucifer's global behavior who was staying strangely human, at the furthers limits of any adult behavior. And these feelings that, if not strictly human, were universally understandable.

There was so much to understand.

Still, Chloe couldn't.

All this time, this time spent together, telling things, trusting each other... All this between them; and not trust her enough to tell her the truth?

"They are not metaphors."

Fine.

Fine.

How not to hear the truth from Lucifer's mouth? But saying and showing were two very different things, weren't they?

Unless angels and humans didn't think the same about it. Possibility that was quickly nipped in the bud with that angel's deep caring for the truth - that angel sat grotesquely on his seat a few inches from her.

She had known, had only seen because of the circumstances, a follow of events over which he had had no control.

And never - ever, in her entire life - had she been that mad.

"Detective-…" wanted to start Lucifer, well aware of having something to blame himself.

Well, that's lucky he'd been aware of it.

"I'm just saying..." she interrupted him more gently this time. "...-that your wings saved my life. That I understand that. Isn't it enough to keep them?"

Lucifer was speechless, opening and closing the mouth in such a funny way that Chloe couldn't help but smiling, amused to see the Devil Himself caught off guard.

He finally closed his mouth, frowning, his lips twitching into another grimace of discomfort; clenching his fists on his partner's desk with his back tensed like a bow, far ... so far away from the backseat that was tempting him so much.

"That doesn't change the fact that they're itching in a very uncomfortable way, Detective."

"Keep your mind off it, then."

"How am I supposed to do this?"

"I don't know..."

Chloe pondered.

"Think of what you wanna do tonight, for instance."

This option seemed to the least absurd to the Devil that was suffering of endless itching.

"Why would I think this?"

" I don't know, Lucifer" she repeated, annoyed at not being able to advance in her work. "You can still give me a hand or else."

"Allergic, remember?" he replied with a smirk that she reflexively returned to him.

"It's unusual, an immortal being with allergies..."

"Well, as you so rightly said it before, Detective; there are many things you cannot understand yet."

In the meantime, Chloe's attention was drawn to the rear of the precinct; a sudden brouhaha that shook the inside of the kitchen. Some police officers ran towards that direction with a worried expression on their faces.

"What's going on here?" Lucifer asked, stating her own questioning as they both stood up.

As they approached the source of the tumult, the cries and other noises grew louder and clearer to them. Chloe made her way through the compact crowd of colleagues standing before the entrance of the room, surprised to recognize her ex's voice halfway through; and that right before a chair crashed the table at the other end of the room.

"Dan? What t-?"

"THAT'S BULLSHIT! FUCK ME!" he was screaming, launching things here and there.

She instantly stepped back as soon as a cup smashed in pieces on the glazed wall next to the wide-opened door where she and her colleagues were dumbstruck. One step back and she spotted Ella stuck between two men.

Chloe met her stunned, tearful gaze.

"Ella? What's wrong with him?"

"I-I... I told him that the investigation on Pierce has been opened again and-"

She let out a sigh, a sob afterwards.

"Ay dios mio..." she whispered, mechanically rubbing her cross attached around her wrist instead of her neck. (*Oh my God)

"Tiene una recaida, Miss Lopez." Lucifer answered to her behind Chloe. (*You're relapsing, Miss Lopez.)

And Ella shrugged.

"opened again, you say?" he continued, easily jumping from a language to another and not caring much about the stunned look that Chloe gave him.

"Why would it be?" the detective asked in turn.

"Dunno. I just got the news from Amy; she works with the Inquiry Commission. And-and then Dan just -…"

Unable to continue, Ella pointed the detective with a trembling hand as he was trying to take with both hands the table already heavily damaged by his rage. Alarmed, Chloe rushed inside, Lucifer being faster than she was to firmly grip Daniel's wrist before the furniture feet moved away from the floor.

"Daniel, Daniel, Daniel... Easy there! This is not how a detective of the LAPD should behave."

"Let go of me!" he shouted, pulling on his wrist. "You... Don't touch me!"

Daniel was deeply resentful - not to define more sharply his feeling about it - towards the Devil and his part of responsibility in his girlfriend's premature death. In fact, Lucifer had scrupulously avoided to be near him since Pierce's welcome death, aka Cain, and Charlotte Richards' unhappy one. Him, more than anyone else in the universe, could understand Daniel's feeling here - and he fully accepted it, not even complaining about it.

Lucifer offered him a friendly smile; his hand not even bothered by the fierce rebellion of the wrist it was holding. He didn't even flinch.

"I would willingly consent not to come that close if you could avoid destroying the room. Can you?"

"Son of- !"

"Dan." said Chloe.

He turned to her, gasping for breath and staring madly, mad with a pain she was struggling to watch herself - at her as she put her hand on his free arm, a soft move.

"You have to calm down."

"Tell him to let go of me."

"He will... as soon as you'll calm down a bit, okay?"

She shared a look with her partner who was well aware that another verbal intervention from him would lead them to a disastrous result. And as tempting as he could be sometimes, the Devil could perfectly restrain himself from doing it.

And Chloe was grateful for that.

Nodding, Lucifer waited without a word that Daniel showed temperance. A heavy silence had risen around them, even more unbearable than the previous screams and roar, but Chloe didn't linger over it. She squeezed her palm around her ex-husband's arm, urging him to trust her, to calm down.

Daniel looked at her, begging, trembling with rage... with sorrow.

Like very often since Charlotte's death.

Like too often.

"H-He... We got him, Clo'."

She didn't need more details to understand who he was talking about.

She nodded, giving him a reassuring smile.

"We did, yeah."

"He was going to pay... Give justice to...to..."

Chloe squeezed her hand even more tightly around him arm; understanding his pain.

"I know, I know Dan. But it's not too late. It's just a hitch, okay? We got this."

He listened to her; just a bit, still furious, still upset, still held by Lucifer... But he listened. She could see it in his eyes, where tears began to show up.

Daniel took a noisy breath, then another; before moistening his lips. He nodded; once, and then twice.

"We got this." he repeated, his clenched fingers relaxing on the edge of the table.

"We do. You have my word."

Before Daniel completely let go of his rage; the sharp voice of their new superior resounded behind them.

"Is somebody here can tell me what's going on?!"

The three of them turned around; the three of them intrigued to find an unknown person alongside the Lieutenant Merisson. Although Lucifer easily won against her and Daniel with his spoken rude stupefaction.

"Bloody fucking hell..."

A tinkling laugh answered him and Chloe stared with high interest at the young woman smiling merrily to the Devil who was frozen by stupefaction. Her light brown - almost golden - eyes squinted with exhilarating satisfaction.

"How rude you've become, Sam."

Tbc with... "The woman"

Author's notes:

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