"I have no idea what to say. What should I say?" Luci held the letter, all five precious double-sided pages of it, as if he were afraid it would puff into dust if he looked away for an instant.
Amenadiel, already impatient although he felt a little guilty about that, stood before him in the wide antechamber of his little brother's private quarters. Demons occasionally peeked in and skittered away, frightened by either or both of the angels they saw. Luci perched on the edge of an elaborately carved ebony and leather divan meant for reclining, jittery with energy. "I don't know, Luci. It's up to you. Isn't that your whole thing?"
"Oh, ha ha, brother, helpful as always. But what should I say?" he persisted. He looked at the letter again, this time as if he wanted to devour it in juicy chunks, even though he'd already read it enough times he had to have committed every word to memory.
Amenadiel sighed. His little brother had many gifts, among which neither stability nor consistency had ever played a notable part. "Linda is waiting for me. Charlie is waiting for me," Amenadiel said (which was a bit of an exaggeration – Linda kept assuring him that Charlie, in following a human path thus far, was too young to do much more than accept the world as it was). He just wanted Luci to compose something for Chloe and let him go so he could get back to his family and reassure everyone that Luci was, if not happy, getting by. But he knew his words were a mistake the moment they left his lips.
Uncharacteristically, Luci let it slide. He didn't say there were people waiting for him too, people he'd never see again – or certainly hoped he wouldn't. He didn't make some snide remark about how pleasant it must be to come and go as you please, or even refer to that years-ago moment when he'd told Amenadiel to take Hell's throne himself, if the throne needed to be held. Maybe Luci had forgotten that. Amenadiel hadn't.
He just looked a little sadder and gave a short nod, and Amenadiel felt his impatience drain away. He sat next to his little brother, silently communicating that he could take his time. Luci glanced at him cautiously. "I didn't read it, you know," Amenadiel said. "But a good place to start might be to reply to whatever she said to you."
Luci brightened. "Paper and ink!" he shouted absently, and there was the scrabbling of demon claws against the stone floor, fading rapidly into the distance. "Ugh. Velerek, are you there?"
"Yes, my king." A deep, scratchy voice came from the shadows beyond the open arch that led to the rest of Hell. Amenadiel tried not to shudder.
"Well, go after Chuz and tell him not the blood ink, as usual he ran off without waiting for the full instructions, didn't he, and we know how he loves to get things wrong so I have to ask him over and over again."
"He only wishes to hear your commands more times so he can obey you more times, master."
"Just run and catch him, Velerek. No blood ink. Ink ink."
"We have some fine beetle squeezings, my king."
"Good. Fine. Go." He returned his attention to Amenadiel. "What she said was – well, it was very like her. The first part, that's –" He hesitated.
"Personal. You don't have to tell me, Luci."
"Personal, yes. And the rest, most of it, it's the sort of maddening pile-up of minutiae with which she ordinarily fills her days and it's exactly what I wanted to hear, it's like being next to her again, almost, watching her go through it all and somehow pay attention to it all, but that's not quite me, brother, is it? I mean, it's what I want, I want her to keep doing the same. I want every letter from her to be just like this as long as she's willing to send them, but I can't precisely respond in kind." He picked up the letter, treating it as fragile as spider-silk again. "Here, for example, she's talking about the specifics of a sleepover she hosted for three school friends of the spawn. I acknowledge the existence of s'mores created on a stovetop but am at something of a loss as to how to build on this observation conversationally, and I do not mean that disparagingly, brother, you know how much I don't, but it is genuinely beyond me. In the moment, I could find something to say. At a distance, in the abstract?"
"Hm." Amenadiel conceded the point.
"Yes, well, chime in whenever you like. All right, and there's quite a bit about her last case, because you know how punctilious she is even about the simple, obvious ones, which this one could hardly have been more of. The villain even helpfully offed himself after –" Luci fell silent, frowning.
"Well, she was solving cases a long time before your partnership."
Luci was alive with energy again. "No! I mean yes, but no. This, how could I have missed it?" He stabbed a finger at the letter. "Jessup, he said his name was Jessup. She's talking about Moe. And that's not how it happened. Moe was genuinely surprised. That isn't something he could fake."
"I don't know which part of that you don't think is gibberish."
Luci seized his hand and pulled him to his feet. "Field trip, brother! Wings out, it's a bit of a distance."
It had always been easier to go along with Luci than to fight him when he got this way, but when he landed them in a narrow alley and then moved to open a door to one of Hell's self-torture chambers, Amenadiel had to put his foot down, hard. "What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?"
"What?" Luci looked at him blankly. "Oh, the – it's fine, brother, I've been in here before."
"It's the opposite of fine, Luci! You almost got trapped in one of these, and our Mother isn't even in this entire universe any more to get you out again!"
"Yes yes, that was before, and it's funny, you know, I was just recently thinking how nice it was not to be nagged about trying new things every now and then, but anyway, I respect your feelings even if I do not share them – there's something you can tell Linda! – and I don't have to show you directly, I'll just pop in and ask the questions myself, back in a sec."
"What? No, you –" But it was too late. Luci was already through the door.
It was a hard ten minutes of waiting, while Amenadiel wrestled with himself as to whether he needed to try to rescue his little brother now, or give him a few moments longer. He really, really didn't want to go through that door. He had no reason to believe he'd have any better luck getting out again than Luci did, and who would be left to go after Amenadiel if he were lost too? "How do you put me in this situation every time," he muttered angrily as worry won the internal battle and he reached for the door, only to have Luci come stomping back through it, scowling.
"Luci!"
"Not a setback, exactly. Just not quite progress," Luci said, oblivious to anything but his own train of thought, of course. "Moe isn't talking to me. I think he's rather low in spirits."
Amenadiel closed his eyes and breathed out. Fine. It was a close call, but he supposed he was more relieved that Luci was out of the self-torture chamber than he was angry at the thoughtlessness and recklessness of it all, and he wasn't sure he had the energy or time right now to try, and inevitably fail, to get Luci to see anything other than he wanted to see. "All right. Aren't you the king here? Couldn't you threaten him or something?"
"Threaten him with what, exactly, at this point in his existence? No, I'll have to make do with what I have. Which is more than enough, I would think!"
*x*x*x*
Chloe hadn't known that she was expecting anything when she unfolded the thick pieces of parchment with shaking hands until: DETECTIVE! It is of GREATEST URGENCY that you revisit your opinion of Moe at once – he is not what you think he is, although he is definitely something, but I can't quite tell what, because he won't talk to me any more was definitely not it.
"I am guessing from the look on your face that Luci was writing more or less the way he was talking – he got extremely excited over the recent case of yours you were telling him about, someone named Jessup? Luci calls him Moe; I did not try to fathom why."
"Thank you so much for this, Amenadiel. Lucifer sounds – he sounds the same, is he, though? Is he okay?"
"He's sad. He had some moments of thoughtfulness I've rarely seen from him before, until he went full-blown manic over this chance to work with you again on a case. He misses you terribly, and I hope he managed to say so. But yes, Chloe, he's okay enough." It should have made her feel better, and in a way it did. But in another way it made the ache worse.
"Oh, you think that's all it is, this stuff about Moe? He just wants to feel like part of an investigation again?" She tried to keep her voice noncommittal.
Amenadiel grimaced. "I don't know how much there is to it, but I do think at least he thought there was something there. He wasn't just going through the motions."
"I'll look into it."
"I know you will, and so did Luci."
He left her alone to read the rest, for which she was grateful. Even if it was only more disconnected observations and speculation about the case, she missed that too, and she wanted to savor it.
Chloe curled her legs under her on the sofa and read the remainder of the letter written in his sprawling, elaborate handwriting in some brownish ink that had more of an old-fashioned than an otherworldly feel. Lucifer did go on at length – although via a thousand different tangents – about the case, mixing in useful information (I assure you, Moe clearly and explicitly anticipated that bullet between his own eyes and no one else's) that she wasn't sure exactly how she could incorporate, less useful information (if someone has ever invented a sad clown lawn ornament, this is the neighborhood it was meant for), and general exhortation (THERE IS A GUILTY PARTY NOT BEING PUNISHED, while whatever Moe did can't be half as bad, and he's stuck down here, isn't he? Forever. He's down here for all time, and the person whose actual fault this travesty is is walking around under clear blue skies eating ice cream for breakfast. Can we have that?).
On the last page, though, the tone changed.
Chloe – not Detective for a moment – you have asked me for very little since we've known each other, and I suppose I've said no to almost all of it and not thought much of it, because I always wanted to give you something else, something even better, which is a fool's errand, really, isn't it, for someone who does not endure but truly loves your sensible brown shoes and quiet nights reading to the urchin and feeding stovetop s'mores to the urchin and the lesser, subordinate urchins she chooses to entertain, and even more of a fool's errand beyond that because who knows better than I that when people ask for what they truly desire, that is what they want, and not another thing? The last thing you asked of me was vast, and although you have not asked for and do not need further explanation, I wish I could describe how wretched and how weak I feel that it was beyond my power to give it to you. Even regardless that it was everything I wanted too: you wanted me to be there. And yet I could not and cannot offer that. All I can offer is my love, but you had that already, didn't you? I don't want to tell you what it's like here, my day-to-day, although I will if you ask. It isn't terrible, not most of it. I can spend a lot of time alone, or creating (even non-violent, sometimes!) amusements for the demons. I have never had to be involved in the hardest parts of Hell, other than knowing they're there. But your day-to-day is infinitely dear to me, and as long as you want to tell me about it, I want to hear.
Then came his signature, Yr. Svt. L. Morningstar, and then nothing. She trailed her fingertips over the ink that his hand had directed.
Oh God, Chloe realized. I don't just resent Hell. I'm jealous of it.
