I have a month off from college, and I decided to celebrate with Empire angst.
I see Lucious as a conniving bastard, as I'm sure we all do. I also have the impression that he's a damaged, broken little man, and I wanted to portray more of that side of him in this fic.
Important Note: Because this fic is heavily Lucious-introspective, there is some homophobic language. This absolutely does not reflect my own views! I am a full supporter and member of the LGBT community. It is not my intention to offend anyone, merely to have portrayed Lucious as (mostly) canonical.
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After the Fall
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Lucious has always had the kind of past that comes back to haunt, creeping up on himself and everyone around him. Hell, he's got a ghost locked away at home right now with his eldest son, right along with plenty of skeletons in the closet.
Lucious isn't one for regrets; they're too poisonous in his business and he's enough of a snake as it is.
He always knew his past would get the jump on him one day. It's been his fate since long before he became Lucious Lyon, and everything he's done since hasn't helped one bit.
But he's genuinely shocked, sincerely fucking appalled, when his past runs up and tries to take his life at the ASA's, acting through an angry little girl that he's used for his own gain like he does everybody he takes an interest in.
Lucious had let his guard down that night, content to let Cookie do the talking, to push his sons away while he held his arms wide open for the award he'd always aspired to snag.
Someone else – his family – got hurt because he slipped up.
That's usually how it goes.
It doesn't happen with a boom boom boom boom. It happens with a firm, frantic plea of "Freda, no!" followed by a single shot, that explosive noise wrecking through his eardrums even above the clamor of the party. He and Cookie have enough street smarts to duck down immediately, with her pawing at him like she thinks it's him who got hit, and he's bewildered at the lack of pain himself, reporting that the shot missed.
But Hakeem is shouting just behind them, kneeling down over Jamal's prone body. Jamal is pressing a shaky hand to his side from where he's sprawled out on the floor and there's red seeping into that red carpet at an alarming rate. Cookie dashes over with panic in her eyes, pressing her manicured hands over her son's wound and pleading in a tearful voice.
And Lucious just fucking stands there, staring down at the scene and then back at Freda as she's led away, noting with a bit of vicious satisfaction that she looks wrecked and lost. Jamal really gave a shit about her, and she's betrayed him more than she's betrayed Lucious.
Jamal really cares about a lot of people, and he's always been committed to the music. Even with this ASA competition between them, it took Lucious cutting the boy down to his core before he began to retaliate.
And it hits Lucious like a second bullet to realize that his son saved his life in the midst of all this bullshit, after Lucious had undone miles of progress between them and all but degraded everything Jamal stood for, everything that he is.
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"I'll never be big enough to pay your dues, but I keep trying."
.x.x.x.
"You ain't nothing to me but a disappointment."
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His boy has taken a bullet for him at the worst possible time.
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Cookie is livid with him at the hospital, and Lucious doesn't blame her. He sits away from his family while they wait for news, too lost in his own thoughts to be good for conversation anyway.
Jamal had tried to reassure his mother up until he'd been wheeled into emergency that he was fine, the statements voiced too faintly and shakily for anyone to be able to believe them. But he'd still been more concerned with her well-being than for his own condition.
Cookie would be crushed if Jamal died. They'd been close ever since she came back into all of their lives.
Lucious hates this feeling, despises knowing that he was in the wrong with those things he said to Jamal. He's not even sure why it all came out that day as it had. It's not like Jamal hasn't been out about himself for a long time. Part of Lucious was still hoping that he might have been fixed from his incident with Skylar, and another part was just severely pissed off to see his son playing as someone else's little bitch right under his nose, in his company.
He still doesn't understand his son's so-called sexuality. But he can no longer deny that Jamal is strong – if nothing else, he gave that to the boy – and he knows he was out of line that day in the recording studio.
Some time later, Cookie grants him a temporary sort of forgiveness, and they're sitting side-by-side when they finally get some news.
The news is that Lucious is never going to have a chance to fix this one.
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"I try to show you that I'm strong. Why do I even bother?"
.x.x.x.
"The day you die from AIDS, I'm gonna celebrate."
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His chest hurts even though he wasn't shot, a grimace on his face as he tries to keep it together while Cookie loses it. She starts screaming at the hospital staff, calling them liars and demanding to see their son while Hakeem and Andre hold her back, looking shocked and drained as well.
He keeps himself in the background again, staring down at his hands and swallowing hard.
That's it, then. His boy has gone out with a fucking bang, already moved on.
The final words Lucious said to him are going to haunt him for a long time.
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He wonders if Jamal gave up towards the end, or if he kept fighting until his body simply wasn't able to contain that soul anymore. He wonders if Jamal died to spite him, to flip his world upside down and make him unsteady and volatile like this, all riled up with no one to turn to because he's angry at himself.
It's been a few days since his boy's death. He's sick of hearing about it on the news and radio, nauseated by the Jamal-memorials and Jamal-vigils, Jamal-tributes and one-hour Jamal-TV-specials. Everything just reminds him that people loved his son and accepted what he stood for, that he reached them and they wanted to listen, wanted his music.
Meanwhile, everybody and their fucking brother has been calling him up, asking how he's doing and offering their condolences, but all he really hears is, Why didn't you love him?
There's a point where he finally cracks, throwing his TV remote against the wall so hard that it shatters. He starts trashing everything in his living room, gutteral broken growls escaping his chest. He's always been shit at expressing any emotion other than anger, so he vents through violence, mindless in a haze of rage and hurt.
Cookie is screaming at him to stop; that awful raspy hitch in her voice is apparent, the one that says she's all cried out and still miserable. He's doing that to her now. He's lost track of how many times that's been the case. She still doesn't know what he said to Jamal before the ASA's, and he's too much of a selfish ass to tell her because he can't handle her leaving right now.
Later that night, she sits on his bed and holds her head in his lap, her face drawn with frown lines, looking twenty years older in the wake of their son's death, but always beautiful to him.
He hides his face in her soft warmth, nosing into her belly as she rakes her long nails lightly over his short hair.
He's glad she's there because he can't imagine being alone in this house with his mother right now – not when he's already unstable and frayed, at the end of his rope because he chose to hang himself there and it's finally caught up to him.
"Jamal never meant to hurt nobody, Lucious. He was always a good boy," she murmurs sullenly, and he knows that she still can't process this correctly either. They haven't always been the best parents – himself especially – but they've never wanted to imagine an outcome like this.
There's been so much loss in this family lately. Lucious knows it's at least partially a reflection on him. He hasn't just chosen this life for himself; he's chosen it for all of them.
"All he wanted was for you to accept him, you know that?" Cookie asks, always knowing just how to reach him even without the full story. He doesn't have to look up at her to guess that she's misty-eyed; her tone is tearful and her hands trembles against his scalp. "All he wanted was your approval, Lucious, I swear – ever since he was a little boy, he's been more like you than you ever realized. More like all the good parts, anyway. He looked up to you even when he was mad at your sorry ass."
"I know, baby," Lucious' voice is muffled by Cookie's designer blouse, which is good because it masks how wretched and wrecked his own tone is. "I never wanted this, Cook." His hands curl around her curved hips just to achor himself, shoulders hunching as he takes advantage of the rare vulnerability of the moment between them. He couldn't look her in the eye right now even if she asked him to, still ashamed of himself and reeling from the nature of Jamal's death. "If I could have him back for another day, I'd make it right. I swear that."
"You never should have treated him so wrong in the first place, stupid!" His first love chides, lightly smacking the back of his head before taking her hand away from him to muffle her sobs.
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"I just want you to look at me, and see that I can be worth your love."
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Lucious shuts his eyes and says nothing, because Cookie has no fucking idea, and the time for words to be able to fix anything is over.
He had that chance before the ASA's, and he chose to use his voice to hurt Jamal, instead.
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He's still on edge when D-Major has the nerve to show up at his company. Lucious isn't sure what pisses him off more – the fact that this two-face bastard actually heeded him without incident when he demanded the producer banned from the hospital and Jamal's funeral, or the fact that he's here now wanting to do business like he didn't have some part in what happened between Lucious and Jamal, like he wasn't fucking around with Lucious' son only to be posing with some model while Jamal was bleeding out on that red carpet.
"Get out of my office!" He growls right in the middle of whatever the fuck D-Major is there to say, primal instinct winning out over whatever kind of diplomacy is left in hip-hop these days. He's been drinking ever since he woke up, and he only came in to work to feel like he has some control left, some semblance of power that he doesn't have in that huge house with his unpredictable mother.
"I'm sorry?" The man looks stunned, and how dare he, how dare he stand there and act so innocent after what he did.
If there's one thing that always makes Lucious feel better, it's playing the hypocrite.
He stands up from his chair and stalks up to the other man, getting up real close to that giant freak.
"Your little stunt in the recording studio with Jamal had more consequences than your selfish ass can ever comprehend." He's damn near hissing, using the voice that usually only comes out when he's about to kill a man. "You think I don't know what goes on in my company?" The rhetorical question is a mirror to what he said to Jamal, that opening statement just before the words that he can never take back.
Jamal is dead, and Lucious' last words to him were anger and hatred because this man right here chose to act out of pride and cowardice.
He can see it now – the way realization dawns on D-Major's face as he leans back, something like fear in his expression. "Lucious," he starts with exaggerated calm, probably to ask how much it would take for the Empire legend to keep quiet about his proclivities. "What you saw-"
"You shut your mouth!" He's not in the fucking mood for any of it. "I know what I saw. I saw a man trying to cover his ass after he'd been fucking with my son's." He spits out crudely, getting right up in the other man's lying face. All thoughts of the ASA award have been crushed ever since that night, when neither him or Jamal won anyway because it would have looked too suspicious to give them that attention after the indicent that took his son's life.
He knew it was wrong to blame the man for his own words to Jamal, but being wrong had never stopped Lucious from acting out of rage. So here he is, spewing more hatred because it's still the only way he knows how to deal with these people who insist on their unnatural lifestyles.
"At least my son had the courage to admit what he was, even when I spurned him for it. You ain't even that much of a man." His voice is shaking now, but the words are cutting and vicious, an awful travesty of how he treated Jamal. "You get the hell out of my company and don't come back!"
D-Major's face twists up in rage, but he keeps himself in check, shaking his head with a scowl, throwing out a weak, "You don't know shit, Lucious," as he storms out.
As soon as he's gone, Lucious locks his office door and proceeds to throw another tantrum, tossing stacks of paper to the floor, kicking chairs and shattering his glass decanter against the wall, clear shards and amber liquid seeping into the carpet.
He's shaking all over now. The chest pains are back and there's a tightness at the base of his throat, as if his body is trying to constrict his voice so that he doesn't fuck up anymore with the shit he says to people.
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"I just want you to look at me, and see that I can be good enough."
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"I'm so sorry, son," Lucious chokes out as he sinks down with his back against the wall, strung out on alcohol and pain and regret, all the things that he always falls back into after he's fucked up royally. "I'm so sorry."
Lucious always loved his son. He just hated what he did, what he put himself through time and time again by the way he chose to live.
In a sense, maybe that's the way Jamal felt about him, too.
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End