Chloe, on waking, felt the ambiguous worry that is the burden of a parent who's gotten enough sleep: the concern that her feeling of rejuvenation and calm meant that she'd slept through something important.

Disoriented, she raised her head from the pillow and swatted her hair inaccurately away from her eyes. No, she was off today, and Trixie was at Dan's . . . she was sore and languid, and warm California sunshine was streaming through the enormous windows of Lucifer's loft.

Last night came back to her, making her smile. It was not their first night together, nor yet the second, but everything still felt new and delightful.

The bed was empty beside her, but she could hear water running. It had stopped by the time she'd slid out from between the sheets and found her panties and t-shirt. The bra she ignored; it was suspended on a catch in the stonework that decorated his room, so high that she'd probably need to stand on a chair to get it down.

She wandered into the bathroom, combing her tousled hair back off her face, and let herself stand smiling in the doorway. Lucifer, still steaming, stood at the vanity brushing his teeth. He had a towel hooked around his hips, and his snowy white wings stood out resplendent from his back as beads of water slipped down the feathers to the floor.

Here she was, in his home, in the hazy sweet hours of the morning, and Lucifer could walk about unashamed with his wings exposed for her to stare at. The vulnerability, the trust, made her feel giddy and a little drunk. He felt that safe with her. And she felt . . . almost that safe with him. It was like being on a roller coaster, having complete faith in the track and the harness, but still getting a thrill out of the dangerous rush of movement as it dropped. She was sleeping with the devil. She was sleeping with her partner. It was odd, how she could feel simultaneously completely out of her depth and totally secure in her decisions.

She stole up behind him and fitted her body against his back, slinging her arms around his neck and enjoying the warm press of his wings against her sides. The smooth curve of the wing bases, where the scars had once lain like reversed parentheses across his back, now cradled her perfectly from armpit to hip. In the mirror, she saw Lucifer grin around his toothbrush. He closed the wings against his back, cocooning her in feathers and a warm, familiar, heady smell of expensive cologne and some kind of sweet smoke-somewhere between campfire, pipe tobacco, and nag champa incense.

"Do you have to switch faces," she inquired, "to brush your devil teeth?"

She couldn't seem to stop asking him stupid questions. Everything from "How did the Garden of Eden thing go down, really?" to "Do your feathers need preening?" But Lucifer answered every one, despite periodic grumbling about her insatiable curiosity.

He bent over, pulling a little out of her grasp, to spit into the sink so he could talk. "I never really eat anything with them. And they're tougher than human teeth."

"Do they have devil dentists?"

"Oh, first I get a devil therapist, and now I need a devil dentist?"

"Just worried about your oral health, that's all."

He rinsed the toothbrush and set it back in its holder, then wrapped a hand around her forearm where it rested on his chest. "I promise I will brush them, to make you happy. But later. I know my face makes you uncomfortable."

Chloe winced a little. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be, Detective. Unsettling humans is rather what that face was designed for. And it doesn't come very easily anyway, on mornings like these. I find it . . . difficult . . . to be my worst self when you're here."

The admission was tender and hesitant, and Chloe couldn't think of a response. Instead, she changed the subject. She combed her free hand through his still-wet hair, enjoying the feel of the strands between her fingers and the way his body slumped with pleasure at her touch.

"Got a couple of grays now," she observed. "Police work will do that to you."

"I have WHAT?"

Lucifer lunged for the mirror, jerking out of her embrace and yanking his wings back into invisibility. His hands went to his head, combing frantically where she'd been petting him.

Chloe laughed, entertained by his childish display of vanity but also a little unsettled by the force of his reaction. "Lucifer, calm down! We all get them. They look distinguished. They're beautiful."

"We don't all get them, Detective. I don't get them. I'm immortal! If I were going to go gray, I'd have done so long before . . ." He trailed off as he found the few silver strands, still only visible to a very close observer. "I'm going gray," he muttered, thunderstruck.

"Welcome to the club," Chloe informed him.

He turned to face her, one hand still tangled in the offending hair. "I'm . . . I'm aging."

Chloe raised her eyebrows, her arms crossed over her chest to telegraph her annoyance. "You're having a midlife crisis now? Right now?"

"This is not a midlife crisis, Detective. This is a mortality crisis! Don't you see? Thousands and thousands of years, and now . . ."

He trailed off, looking her up and down, his mouth slightly open in horror.

"And now you," he finished. "Good grief, Detective. I knew you made me bleed, but I never really thought about . . " He ran a hand over his face, as though to check it was still there. "I'm going to die," he choked out at last. "Not just I might die, bullets and whatnot . . . as long as I'm with you, I'm aging, which means I don't just might die, I will die! In, what? I don't know. How old does Time think I am now? I can't have more than . . . fifty years, maybe?"

Chloe, who had been opening her mouth to take another jab at him, caught herself. The panic in his eyes was genuine. That wasn't too unusual; Lucifer had a tendency to overreaction, even on those occasions when what he thought was going on actually was what was going on. The pair of them had faced death together on more than one occasion, and she knew she could trust him to stay calm when staring down the muzzle of a gun. But maybe death by old age was different. Particularly when you'd lived thousands and thousands of years and never had to contemplate the idea that life was finite. Or, at least, that it might be finite. As long as he was within a city block of her.

There were no ticking clocks in Lucifer's loft, but she felt that she could almost hear one. Or, rather, she could see Lucifer hearing one as he looked at her.

She took a hesitant step forward, wanting to touch him, to soothe and tease him out of it, but he flinched back against the vanity.

It was his flinch that really made her get it. As long as she stood in the same room, she was killing him, second by irretrieveable second, and he was terrified.

Chloe turned and retreated, in the long-legged, urgent, determined walk that she had learned as a beat cop. Where were her pants? She stumbled into them, then grabbed her jacket, zipping it closed over her chest and giving her bra up for lost. She vaguely remembered losing her shoes as they'd come out of the elevator . . . there was one by the bar, next to her overturned purse, and the other had slid under the piano. She had to go on hands and knees to retrieve it. When she bobbed up, Lucifer was standing in the bedroom doorway, still staring at her, one hand holding the towel that was threatening to slide free. "Detective . . ." he started, then stopped, unable to decide if he wanted to tell her to stay or go.

Chloe dropped the sandal and toed it around until she could stuff her foot in it. "You can call me," she told him, pulling her hair out of her coat collar and mashing the elevator button.

"Chloe . . ."

Chloe swallowed the unidentified wave of emotion that was trying to force its way up her throat. "Thank you for everything," she told him. Just in case it was the last thing she got to say to him. Just in case their partnership was done because her very presence was slowly poisoning him.

The elevator doors finally opened, and she escaped behind them.

She could breathe. She was still breathing. What should she do? Who should she call? Not Maze, Dan, or Ella . . . Linda. Linda would know what to do. She fished out her phone and struggled to dig the therapist's number out of it.

She was halfway across the club floor when Linda finally picked up. "Chloe, can it wait?"

Chloe started to laugh, found she was going to cry instead, and choked it all back. "Lucifer already called, didn't he?"

"You know I can't tell you that."

"Well, tell him to put some pants on."

"I'll take that under advisement."

Chloe hung up and headed out of the building to her car. She couldn't think right now. It was a bad idea to try thinking about this without Linda to help her sort them out. She had to do something else, something useful. She headed for the precinct.

It was only minimally active on a Sunday morning, and Chloe mostly escaped notice with her tousled hair and braless wardrobe. She settled in with reports and documentation and lost herself in it.

She only looked up when someone perched on the edge of her desk.

"Your phone's dead," said Linda.

Chloe blinked, dragging her thoughts out of the DV murder-suicide they'd been buried in, and reached in confusion for her phone. It was indeed dead as a doornail. She hadn't plugged it in last night, what with . . . well, she hadn't, and her deliberately ignoring it had let it die in silence.

"Oh, gosh . . . I'm sorry! You didn't have to come all the way out here . . ."

Linda shrugged. "Well, a client kept me on the phone for three hours, so my weekend was pretty much shot."

Chloe half-smiled in sympathy. "Sounds like he's pretty freaked out."

"It does sound like that, doesn't it?"

"What did he say?"

"Chloe, for God's sake, I am trying to take my job seriously . . ."

"Sorry, sorry."

Linda snagged a chair from a nearby desk and sat down. "So let's talk about you. Are you freaked out?"

Chloe sat back from her desk while she fished for her charger and plugged it into her phone. "I really don't even know. I mean, I'm a cop. I'm a homicide detective. I get that I'm mortal. I get that I'll die an old lady if I'm lucky. And I've discharged my weapon in the line of duty, so I know what it is to take responsibility for someone else's death. But is it the same thing?"

"Do you think it is?" asked Linda, settling her glasses more comfortably on her nose.

Chloe leaned her elbows on her desk, tenting her fingers and leaning her forehead against them. "Say I kill a man," she proposed. "Might be manslaughter, might be murder, might be self-defense, whatever. I kill him. But he would have died anyway. Eventually."

"M-hm," said Linda noncommittally.

"And that's enough of a crime. But what if I killed an immortal being? One that would never, never die if not for me. Isn't that worse? A life that would have gone on forever, and I just . . ." Her fingers clenched involuntarily in response to the thought of the violence of it.

"But in this case, you wouldn't actually be killing him," Linda offered. "You'd just be changing an immortal existence to a mortal one. Something else would eventually kill him-If you exercised restraint, that is. So does that change the question?"

"You're asking me? You're the therapist!"

Linda rolled her eyes and took off her glasses. "Chloe, you may find this hard to believe, but they didn't offer a course on the ethics of immortality in my doctoral program. I am making this up as I go along. So you tell me: is transforming an immortal existence into a mortal existence the same thing killing? And whether it is or not, are there circumstances, like the killing of a mortal person, where that action might be justified?"

Chloe flopped back in her chair and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to organize her thoughts, trying to stay objective, failing. "I feel so selfish," she admitted. "I was so happy. I woke up this morning and I thought, this is perfect, this is so good, this is what life is supposed to be like . . ."

"Mmm," said Linda, a small smile teasing at the corner of her mouth. Chloe laughed; she had forgotten that Linda had experienced that feeling long before she had.

"And I just want to keep that feeling, but if I do, every time he looks at me he'll see the Grim Reaper coming for him. And I don't want to care, because we're all gonna die, we suck it up and deal with it and live happy lives and do our jobs and . . ." She threw her hands haphazardly out, taking in the empty precinct and, metonymously, her whole life. "But is it even fair for me to ask that of him? Nobody's asking it of me. I don't have a choice. He does."

"Yes, he does," Linda agreed. "And you neither have a say in, nor any responsibility for, that choice. All you have to decide is what you are going to do, what you can live with. Can you stand being the Grim Reaper for the rest of your life, if that's the cost of continuing this relationship?"

Chloe stopped, thought, took a deep breath. "Trixie's going to die," she observed. It sounded like a nonsequiteur, but Linda followed the logic.

"Yes, someday she will."

"I brought her to life. Dan and I. She wouldn't exist if it wasn't for us. We gave her a life, we created her out of nothing but our own bodies, and someday . . . someday, none of that will matter. Someday she'll just stop being alive, no matter how much I love her." She laughed a little at herself. "That bothers me so much more than thinking about it happening to me."

"That's understandable. You're a mother. You've participated in the creation of human life. It stands to reason that you'd be uncomfortable with the thought of that life being destroyed, particularly after all the work you put in."

Chloe chuckled. "So much work. I wonder if Lucifer's mother feels the same way."

"Lucifer's mother is a very . . . odd . . . woman. Best to leave her out of this." Linda leaned in. "Chloe, you gave Trixie something invaluable. You gave her mortality. You provided the chance for her to experience this world, and learn, and grow, and love, and yes, someday die. That was a good gift. And in a way, that's what you're offering Lucifer as well. A mortal life, and a good one, surrounded by people who love him and opportunities to grow. I don't know if that's necessarily a better thing than immortality, but it is a good thing. You don't have to be ashamed of offering it to him, or of wanting him to take it. That kind of life is the best life you know, and the greatest gift you have to offer."

Chloe nodded, acknowledging that Linda's clear, deliberate, well-trained mind had argued her panicked one into submission. Breathing felt a little easier.

Linda reached out and gripped her knee in friendly solidarity. "Hey, Chloe. I can't tell you what his choices will be. But keep your phone charged, okay?"

"Okay," Chloe agreed. "Thanks, Linda."

"Just doing my job," Linda quipped as she stood up. "My weird, weird job."

After Linda left, Chloe wrapped up what she'd been working on and went home. The place was quiet with Trixie at Dan's, but she could stand the quiet now. She showered and changed, threw in some laundry and sat down to pay bills. Normal work. Needful work. Life.

Maybe not the life that Lucifer wanted, but a good life nonetheless. Nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to fear.

Her phone buzzed just as the last traces of sunset were fading away outside.

Come to me, Detective. Please?

She came to him.

Downstairs, the club was its usual weekend madhouse, but Lucifer wasn't anywhere in the throng. She maneuvered between dancers to the elevator, returning the nod of the security guard who had known her by sight for many years now.

Upstairs in the loft, everything was dim and calm. The only sound was the piano.

Lucifer sat at the keys, his long fingers teasing across them with an intricacy that made her non-musician's mind spin. He looked up as she walked in, but his hands never faltered, changing the tune and the key with smooth grace that belied the improvisation. She recognized the new melody: They Can't Take That Away From Me. Romantic, but ambiguous.

He was dying. She'd walked into the same room with him and now his clock was ticking again, restarted by her presence.

She went to stand behind him on the piano bench, watching his hands coax the melancholy, jazzy tune out of the strings.

"This was one of the first things I did when I got here," he informed her. "Sign up for piano lessons."

"What, devils don't just instinctively know how to play?"

"Not a bit of it. Lessons every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, from Mrs. Rodriguez in Montebello."

She imagined him surrendering his dignity enough to awkwardly fumble through scales and finger exercises and Chopsticks, and smiled. She took a seat next to him on the bench, so that he had to lean over her a little to reach the low notes.

Chloe combed through her memory to drag out the lyrics. She'd heard this song before, but never really paid attention. Hesitantly, she joined in at the bridge. "We may never, never meet again, on the bumpy road to love . . ."

Lucifer joined her, his voice steadying hers, then took over when she lost track of the words on the last verse. The piano chimed out a final flourish, then fell silent.

Chloe found she couldn't look at him. Or at the piano, which felt like the same thing.

Lucifer sighed, his fingers still resting on the last chord. "I am quite terrified, Detective," he admitted carefully.

"Of what?"

"Of so many things. Age, and disease, and pain, and finally having to be judged for my deeds . . ."

"You don't have to experience any of those things. I don't have any right to ask you to."

"And then I thought, well, I can live forever, if I want. Here, in this penthouse apartment above a nightclub. And I can play the piano until the keys rot under my fingers. I can do whatever I like. All those things I wanted to do when I came here. All I have to do is not call Chloe. Not go over to the precinct to see what cases are on order. Not be there for her when she's in danger. Not find her underthings hanging off my bedroom wall."

That got a laugh.

Her laugh coaxed an answering smile out of him; he didn't seem to be able to help it. "That terrifies me more," he admitted. "I find myself quite unable to bear the thought of my bedroom wall without your brassiere hanging off it. My pillows without strands of your hair caught in the fabric. My days without cases to solve. My phone without a text from you. I can't bear it. I won't. Living forever in this apartment, knowing I could be with you and I'm not, that I'm squandering not just my limitless time, but the little time that you have? That's hell. Trust me. And so I figured, if I am someday going to die, and be judged like a mortal and punished for all eternity, well, I've got no reason to give Dad a head-start. I won't torture myself like that. Not when I've got a chance at fifty or so years of happiness first."

"Fifty or so years," she repeated, contemplating what a starkly limited window that was. "Think that'll be enough?"

"Not remotely."

"We'd better not waste any of it, then."

Lucifer grinned, the familiar joyful wickedness filling his face again, and Chloe kissed him, and with admirable alacrity she found herself laid out across the top of the piano, not wasting a moment.