AN: i dont own lucifer and characters thereon blah blah blah. title is from Chapter V of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, specifically the 1901 Grace Warrack edit/translation of the 1373 text. can u tell im a lit major? this is also kinda sloppy and i might re-work it. PLEASE R&R, the bread and butter of the humble fanfic writer
Chloe is just a bit stronger, faster, more perceptive than her peers, her cuts, scrapes and bruises heal over just a little bit too fast. Ever since she was a child she's had horrible nightmares that are visions from the past or the future. When she touches someone she suddenly sees one of their memories, feels their feelings, and hears their prayers. When she walks into a church for the first time in her life, right before she marries dan, she is accosted by the sounds of prayers, hundreds of voices calling out, praying, begging, demanding at god and all his angels and saints, continually assailed with the sound of it all. She's only too quick to leave. When she is near a sleeping person she can touch them and see their dreams, take their nightmares from them. Her whole life, chloe has kept her mouth shut about this nonsense because she knows that no one would believe her, that they'd think she was crazy, and because she doesn't always believe herself.
Chloe Decker has her First Nightmare on her fifth birthday. In her dream she is a man who murders his brother, beating him with a rock. His brother's blood is flecked on his face; the brother's face is unrecognizable. Then, horrified at what he has done, he cradles his brother's body pleading. He speaks a tongue she has never heard before, one she cannot understand. Chloe wakes when there is a rumble in the sky, a louder, darker more dangerous voice beginning to speak, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. She doesn't scream, but she has broken her wooden footboard and her wall in her nocturnal panic. She isn't able to fall back asleep, mostly because she is afraid that she will go straight back into that terrible, awful dream. In the morning she tells her mother that she couldn't sleep because she had had a nightmare.
Her mother shakes her head softly saying, "It's all those movies your father lets you watch with him. I told him something like this was going to happen."
Chloe's throat is dry, and something in her Knows that this is not where her dream came from. She doesn't tell her mother anything else, that same ancient thing holding her tongue hostage. She has another nightmare the next night, and the next and the next.
One of the worst things about her "gift" is that she can never fully enjoy touch. She can't hold the hand of a boy without potentially also experiencing the memory of the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to him, or his wet dreams, both of which are equally terrible coming from teenage boys. Sixteen year old Chloe decker learns this lesson well on her first ever date. When he reaches out to hold her hand as they walk through the farmers market she braces herself, and lets him take her hand. She is hit with his memory of his disastrous third grade science fair. When he kisses her at the end of their date his lips taste like fear and anxiety; she is filled with the memory of him kissing his ex-girlfriend, which is more than off-putting, so she ends the kiss quickly, pulling away until there is no contact between them.
"I had a nice night," she tells him shyly, sending him off.
She doesn't tell him that she thinks that his ex-girlfriend is a better kisser than he is. They don't go out for much longer.
When she first has sex, it's both pleasurable and not. She sleeps with her Hot Tub High School co-star Jared, a boy who is a whole year older than her. He is sweet and earnest, which convinces her above all. The first time she holds his hand, during an early shoot, she experiences the memory of his first acting gig, a paper towel commercial; the memory is sweet and mercifully short. In each of the next four takes she experiences: his first kiss, first movie, his first audition and his mother's death. The last one is the worst, leaving full of swooping grief she has to hide for the rest of the day. Most nights they go back to her trailer and talk about their film star parents, mortifying advertisements they've been in, their respective high school experiences, their hopes and dreams. The night after the wrap party, they are both feeling invincible, reckless.
"I really like you Chloe," Jared says, soft and reverential.
She feels weightless, and for a moment, she forgets herself.
She scoots closer to him on the bed and says, "I like you too."
She doesn't know who moves first, but suddenly they are kissing, his warm lips sliding against her own. His memory of seeing her for the first time fills her. He has always, always liked her, and this more than anything he does with his hands and lips is what convinces her to stay. The whole time she is in two places. She is here in her trailer, on her bed with Jared, his strong arms holding her, his lips against hers, her body filled with his lust and attraction. She is also deep in his memories and aware of his soft unspoken prayer, asking, hoping that he will be good at this. They don't sleep together again.
Her and her mother have always both slowly spinning out of control, and it's only her father, strong, solid, dependable John Decker who can keep them in check. She confessed her nightmares to him when she was thirteen years old; he hadn't believed, but he listened, and that Chloe had decided was the more important thing anyways. Five days after the wrap party, her father is killed and her whole world is thrown upside down. Chloe Decker attacks a pap at her father's funeral, and when her fist collides with his face she feels his naked ambition and greed, and she wants to vomit. The memory she takes of his is one of the ones she'd rather never have seen. She destroys his camera for good measure.
After the funeral her mother is even more lost than usual, and she nearly drowns herself in alcohol. Nineteen year old Chloe Decker nearly gives in and joins her mother. Their house feels empty, quiet and wrong without her father in it. Penelope spends more time away from home than in it, spending her money on things she doesn't need and acting in increasingly terrible films. Chloe feels like she's suffocating inside their home and so, she leaves for college and later for the police academy. Her way of dealing with this kind of grief is two-fold. One: she will always be in control of her life, she will be just like her steady, sure father. Two: she steals the warmth of other people's joy, going to parties, staying wholly sober and brushing her bare skin against as many people as she can, unnoticed. Some of their memories are unpleasant, but even then she knows that what she is feeling does not belong to her, and that, somehow comforts her.
When she graduates from the academy and becomes a police officer, she looks out into the crowd for her father, even as she knows that he will not be there. She wonders if he would have been proud of her. Her errant mother is not in attendance at either of her graduations that summer.
Dan is sweet, earnest and eager. Even more appealing, he has nothing terrible in his past, and he hasn't ever even heard of Hot Tub High School. Those two factors alone make it easy for her to chose Dan. Even then, there were fault lines between them, though neither of them wanted to look directly at them. Starting a relationship based on what the other party does not have is not the best way to go about things Chloe later realises. Dan believes in God, goes to church with his parents and says his prayers - Chloe has never believed in God, has never had any kind of faith, though she sometimes wonders if someone else was having her experiences would they have turned to faith to cope. Dan is ambitious; she knows that he wants to be a captain someday, wants to make something of himself. This is initially an appealing thing, but when his ambitions overshadow her, leave him pulling away from her, from their daughter all the time, she can't take them anymore.
Trixie Decker is five-and-a-half years old when she has her First Nightmare. She wakes, screaming in the middle of the night, having ripped through her bed clothes, dented her metal bed frame and kicked a hole in the wall in her room. Dan has no idea what is happening, but oh, Chloe does. She feels a sinking knot of fear deep inside herself, her madness is real and she has passed it down to her child. She sends Dan away and sits in Trixie's bed with her, holding her daughter, rocking her back and forth, asking nothing until she stops crying. She tells her secret to her daughter that night, unburdening so that trixie will not feel the same, clammy emptiness and loneliness that she has her whole life. They take off work and school the next day and go out to have a mommy daughter day.
"I wish I could tell you that this gets better, that it will be over with one day," Chloe says, heart heavy, tears threatening to fall from her eyes, "But that would be a lie, and I promised you when you were born that I would never lie to you, not about something this important."
Beatrice is, of course, quite the wise thing, and, as children are, adaptable.
"What can I do?" she asks her mother. She's so so afraid, because in her entire five-and-a-half years of life she has never experienced anything so scary, even with her mommy and daddy being police officers.
Chloe wishes that she had some advice for her terrified daughter, but she has nothing, but a profound grief, "There's nothing you can do babe," she says, "Eso si que es," she adds softly, wishing desperately that she could change the facts of this.
"Ok," Trixie says, doing her best to sit up and look very grown up.
She tells Trixie about the other things, the voices, the memories, the painful, painful touch.
Chloe and Dan had been drifting apart for a longer than either of them would ever admit; Dan is too ambitious, not attentive enough. But, in the end it is still Palmetto that drives the final wedge between them. for weeks afterwards, all of his kisses taste of anxiety, fear and guilt. Touching him just brings her grief, knowing that he feels terribly about something and more than refuses to talk with her about - he pretends that his feelings do not exist. When they sleep next to each other, she lies awake, kept that way by his dreams.
Finally, Chloe has had enough and she demands that Dan tell her what is going on with him. In her anger she almost confesses her secrets. She slips up a bit just long enough to be noticable.
"I'm right here Dan," she says, holding back tears. She cannot, must not, should not cry right now, "There's something bothering you and you won't even acknowledge it, won't talk to me. and it hurts Dan! We're supposed to be a team, to trust one another and it feels like you don't trust me at all. You keep dreaming about a shooting, you taste anxious and guilty all the time!" she shouts
(Though taste is not entirely the right way to describe the feeling of feeling someone else's feelings inside you when you touch them, it is, the closest she can get to adequately describing the sensation.)
Dan tells her that she's not well, that she's going nuts, obsessing over Palmetto and Malcolm and is going to ruin everything in the process of this obsession. She kicks him out, and later, they begin their divorce filings, the distance and the fighting too much for both of them to handle.
Sometimes Chloe wonders if she's really just been crazy this entire time.
She discovers one day, after a particularly bad nightmare of Trixie's that her memory stealing gift works both ways when it's with Trixie. Trixie sends Chloe the memory of her dream unconsciously, and Chloe tries the trick herself, sending Trixie one of the warmest visions she ever had in a dream.
"It's not fair," Trixie says, "Nobody else has awful dreams like us."
Trixie is just eight years old. Chloe's heart aches for her daughter, knowing it's her fault that Trixie suffers like this, it's her blood.
"Yeah baby, I know," Chloe says with a bittersweet smile.
Mother and daughter embrace and pass a flutter of warm summer picnics, shiny new toys and happy, happy Christmases on to each other.
When Chloe meets Lucifer for the first time, interviewing him about the shooting of Delilah there is something about him that strikes her. When he spews his bit about being literal Satan, she almost wants to believe him. Within his context, her entire life makes some kind of strange sense. But, her old fears, that this whole thing is simply some sign of her being severely mentally ill return, stronger than ever, whispering to her that Lucifer is crazy too, and he's just bringing her down with him.
When she touches Lucifer for the first time, it's an accident. She normally keeps her skin covered with long sleeves and jackets, those latex gloves at crime scenes. Her left sleeve had rolled up some, and she walked straight by him, just brushing up against his own arm. He is louder and brighter than anyone she has ever met, in a way she cannot fully account for. She finds herself deep in a memory of endless, terrifying falling in darkness, the only light in the memory comes from the great, big white wings on his back that are of no use to him because they are painfully broken. Nonetheless, they are attempting to flare out and catch him, failing miserably and hurting him more. The fall seems endless. Chloe is filled with his pain and fear for the rest of the day, and is quite proud of the way she'd been able to hide it from him all day.
When she's laying on the ground in the recording studio, bleeding out he touches her this time. She is hit with a memory of a scene where he is on his knees in a dark cavern, lit only by those great big wings. He is crying, tears running down his face and he is praying, screaming and then, singing. She doesn't understand a word of what he's saying; he speaks in some ancient tongue in his memories, both haunting a beautiful. But Chloe does know what begging sounds like, tastes like. His feelings of sheer grief and hopeless from the memory and from their present moment, merge and fill her, and she feels like drowning. Mixing with the memory of him singing from his raw, parched throat is the sound of his voice in the now.
"Detective," he says, voice filled with panic, "don't you dare die on me."
When his touch finally ends she is vaulted back into herself, her vision swimming in and out of focus. She doesn't see him get shot, but she is dimly aware of the sound; she is too lost in his memory and his agony to be fully aware in the moment. She has no choice but to believe.
The thing is, Chloe Jane Decker has never believed in God, but God believes in her.