a/n: Also, if this chapter doesn't make it crystal clear, this is not a case-oriented fic : )
Day 26
"Strangers in the night," Lucifer sang quietly as he sidestepped out of the elevator. "Exchanging glances," he continued as he danced through a half circle. "Wondering in the night what were the chances." He adjusted his cuff links as he all but bounced down the staircase towards the main floor of Lux. "We'd be sharing…" His voice trailed off as he spotted a woman with reddish-brown hair sitting on the bar. Her back was to him and he could not see the profile of her face from his position, but as he neared, he had a feeling he knew the woman.
"Don't stop singing on my account," the woman said as she turned to face him.
"Penelope," he greeted with a wide smile. "What a lovely surprise." She returned his smile as he moved to her side and placed a gentle kiss on her cheek. "Welcome to Lux."
"Thank you, Lucifer."
"New movie?" he asked, smiling as he pointed to her hair. She nodded. "Lovely. I look forward to it. May I offer you a drink?" She tipped her head.
"Isn't it a little early for anything stronger than coffee?"
"Oh, it's never too early," he said with a gentle laugh.
"Well, either way, I will pass. Thank you."
"Very well. The detective didn't tell me you were in town," he said as he took residence on the stool next to her.
"It was a surprise," she said with a wink. "I had some unexpected time off. But even if she had known, I don't suppose she would have told you since neither of you are talking to the other." Lucifer's smile fell.
"Heard about that, did you?"
"Every bit of it." Penelope shifted to face him fully as she crossed her arms in front of her chest. "You saved my daughter's life, Lucifer. And I am forever thankful to you for that. But, you hurt my little girl, and that makes me not your biggest fan."
"Right," he said with a nod.
"What you said about Chloe during Perry Smith's trial…did you mean that?"
"Every word."
"And what about what you said on the beach?" She smiled at Lucifer's surprised expression. "I told you, I heard every bit of this story." She rested an elbow on the top of the bar and leaned her temple against her fist. "Chloe told me that you guessed her middle name."
"I did."
"And that you teased her relentlessly."
"Yes," he admitted.
"Because it's, oh, what did she say? Impossibly boring?" He nodded. "Jane was my mother's name."
"I meant no disrespect," he said quickly. "I was just—"
"It's okay, Lucifer," she laughed lightly. "Chloe also said that you thought her name was perfect." He offered a gentle smile as he thought about the conversation regarding the detective's middle name. It had started innocently enough; he had been simply bored during a stakeout and in need of a way to entertain himself. As the uneventful evening had stretched on, he had found his boredom chased away by the genuine laughter and smiles he had pulled from his partner over his inaccurate guesses. He had taken every quiet moment during the remainder of that week to make a guess, reveling in the eye rolls and the laughter and the gentle slaps to his arm. Yet through all of the amusement, the most important moment had come that Friday, during a late evening session of reviewing case notes at his penthouse, when he revealed a surprise he had held all week.
"I know it's not Gwendolyn," Lucifer started as he handed Chloe a glass of wine. She accepted the glass with a smile and then shook her head.
"Definitely not Gwendolyn."
"Or Carina," he said as he sat beside her.
"Nope," she laughed lightly. "You'll never guess it." He shrugged as he leaned forward to place his wine glass on the coffee table.
"Detective," he started quietly. "I have a confession to make." He shifted a little closer to her and settled his arm along the back of the sofa behind her shoulders.
"Do you?"
"I do." Chloe took a drink of her wine and nodded slowly as she studied him.
"Okay," she said. "Lay it on me."
"I've been purposely guessing the wrong name all week," he admitted. "I guessed your middle name first try."
"You did not." She shook her head emphatically. "I'm pretty sure your first guess was Bertha. My middle name is not Bertha."
"That was my second guess," he said around a low chuckle. "Do you still have that piece of paper I gave you during our incredible waste of time you called a stakeout?"
"Yes," she answered slowly.
"You didn't peak at it, did you?" he asked with mock sternness.
"I promised not to." She handed him her glass and shifted to dig a folded piece of green paper from her front jean pocket. "I kept it on me, just like you asked."
"Good. Open it." She narrowed her eyes at him and he tapped his finger on her shoulder. "Just open it."
"Fine." She unfolded each of the three creases in turn and read the word written across the middle. "Lucifer," she breathed as her smile fell. "How did you…" She lifted her eyes to his. "You had to have asked someone."
"I swear I asked no one. I hadn't even given it thought until the stakeout." She looked at the paper again, the disbelief still showing across her features. "Jane," he scoffed lightly. "Impossibly boring," he said before taking a drink of her wine. She tipped her head and raised an eyebrow. "Fitting for you, though," he quickly stated.
"Are you saying I'm boring?"
"Not at all. You are quite the opposite, darling." He pulled his hand from the back of the sofa to brush a stray lock of hair from her face. "It's simply perfectly yours."
"Because it is," he stated.
"Tell me, Lucifer," Penelope started, "how do you go from thinking and saying something so sweet to being such a dick?"
Lucifer
"She's angry with me," Lucifer started as he stared absently at the floor. "Mama Decker, angry with the devil."
"You hurt he daughter, Lucifer," Linda stated. "Anger is a very normal and relevant reaction."
"Yes," he said with a slow nod. She watched him carefully, studied the confusion and the sadness that floated in turn over his features. He struggled with each, the moment of understanding so far from his reach. She felt some empathy for him, knowing he was new to the emotions he experienced. Yet she knew he was one to learn the hard way and that she could not break him of that deeply ingrained part of his personality.
"That's not what's bothering you, is it?" she asked knowingly.
"No." He shifted his position on the sofa, his eyes still transfixed to the spot on the floor. "Penelope told me a story," he replied. "About when she first met the detective's father."
"John, right?"
"Yes. She said that neither she nor John had not been looking for love or a significant other, or even a fling," he said, gesturing with a roll of his wrist. "They were simply enjoying their newly established careers. Yet when she met John…" He looked at Linda. "She said the first time she saw him, she knew they were meant to be together, made for each other; that they would have something special. Which they did." He frowned. "They found out early in their marriage that they couldn't have children and when she discovered she was pregnant with Chloe…" A wry smile hit his face. "She called the detective a gift from God. If she only knew how spot on she was," he muttered as he looked away. "She said life is too short for regrets." He lifted his eyes to the doctor again. "Then she slapped me, Mama Decker slapped me and told me I would do myself good to remember that." Linda roughly bit the inside of her cheek to keep the smile from her face.
"Interesting," she said with a nod. "What meaning does her story hold for you?"
"Well, it's proof of just how far my father's manipulations reach."
"I'm sorry." Her eyebrows lifted. "What?"
"Chloe was placed in my path. She's the product of a blessing Father bestowed upon a couple who could not conceive. Yet He didn't bless just any two humans. No." He waved his index finger in the air. "He blessed two humans who were 'made for each other'. He placed Penelope and John in each other's paths purposely as to have means to create Chloe and have her cross my path."
"Lucifer," Linda sighed. "Doesn't that seem….really far-fetched?"
"You don't know Father," he said with a shake of his head. "Who knows how many generations of humans He's coupled to create the detective."
"I think you've missed the point of Penelope's story. Entirely."
"Really?" He sat back into the sofa's cushions and folded his hands over his lap. "Please," he started. "Enlighten me."
"I will," she said with a curt nod. "Most humans don't dwell on the fact that our lives are finite. The death of a loved one often times brings out the things we regret. Maybe we said something we shouldn't have said or did something we shouldn't have done, and didn't apologize for the pain it caused. Maybe there were things we didn't say that we wished our loved one knew. Or maybe we wished we would have or could have spent more time with that loved one. Chloe's dad was, what, in his early forties when he died?" He nodded. "That's really young, Lucifer. He had a lot of years left, a lot of years that he and Chloe's mom could have spent together." He features sobered.
"Things we didn't say," he repeated. Linda nodded. "Things such as…well, maybe agreeing to a break-up that neither party wanted?"
"Yes." Finally, she thought. "That is a very good example."
"I understand now," he said.
"Just to be clear, what, exactly, do you understand?"
"How to get Miss Reed to confess." He stood and started towards the door.
"Lucifer!" she called as he left the room. She scoffed a sigh and threw her hands in the air. "Who the hell is Miss Reed?"
Lucifer
"Lucifer," Dan greeted with a cheery smile as he stopped on the main landing of the staircase. "I was just going to call you." Lucifer met the detective and took the offered file folder. "Mark Taylor's phone records," he explained as Lucifer read over the first of several pages. "A few phone calls to his wife's number, but a lot of texts to someone else's."
"May I assume this someone else is Miss Reed?" he asked hopefully.
"You may," he answered. Dan reached towards the folder and flipped to the next page. Lucifer's eyes roamed over the information, a very long, very explicit texted conversation between Mark and Miss Reed, wherein both parties spoke of the sexual fantasies they wanted to share with one another. "It isn't enough to prove she killed Mark and Anna, but it's a great excuse to question her again." He flipped to another page. "And then there's this."
"Oh." Lucifer's eyebrows rose as he read a rough draft of a contract. "Well, this is interesting."
"It sure is." Lucifer closed the folder and handed it back to Dan.
"I learned something this morning, Daniel," he began as they started down the second set of stairs. "Something I believe we can use to get Miss Reed to tell us the truth."
"Great," Dan replied with a nod. "You can tell me on the way."
Lucifer
"Miss Reed," Dan started, "I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us again." She nodded as she placed a full coffee mug in front of him and Lucifer.
"Of course," she started, moving to the other side of the table to take her seat. "Anything I can do to help you find the person that murdered Mark and Anna."
"We came across a large number of texts from Anna's phone to a number we can't trace," Dan began. "The conversations were very straight forward. She was having an affair." Miss Reed nodded slowly.
"I always suspected," she said quietly. Lucifer shifted in his chair.
"Did you ever confront Mark with your suspicions?"
"Once," she replied. "He brushed it off but he and Anna didn't speak for three days after that. I never asked, but assumed he had asked her about it." Dan nodded slowly and turned to Lucifer. The devil gave the detective a pointed look, neither needing to speak to agree they believed she was lying.
"Did Anna know about you and Mark?" Dan asked. She cleared her throat as her finger traced the rim of her coffee mug.
"If she did, she never said anything about it."
"Okay, so Anna's having an affair with…someone," he said. "And Mark's having an affair with you. And no one really seems to care."
"I guess not." She shrugged lightly and took a sip of her coffee.
"That's not entirely the truth, though," Lucifer chimed in. "Is it?"
"What do you mean?"
"Maybe no one cared at first," he replied, "but something happened, something changed, and all of a sudden you cared. A lot." Miss Reed offered a small, quiet chuckle.
"I don't know what you're talking about." Dan opened the folder sitting on the table in front of him and pushed it towards her.
"Mark and Anna wanted to buy out your part of the business," Dan said. "Then they were going to sell it and move." Her eyes roamed over the contract Dan supplied her.
"They were considering it," she said. "Nothing was set in stone."
"Another incomplete story," Lucifer said. Miss Reed rolled her eyes and pinned him with an unamused glare. He smiled and placed his forearms on the table. "Tell me, my dear," he started lowly as he leaned forward, "what do you desire?" Her head tipped to the side, her eyes narrowed slightly in thought. "What have you always wanted that you regret not going after?"
"Mark," she answered. "All I've ever wanted was to have Mark all to myself."
"The break-up," he pushed, "so long ago…"
"Yes," she whispered. "I regret breaking up. We would have been fine, would have survived whatever came our way."
"But you couldn't survive Anna, could you?" She shook the fog from her head and turned her attention to Dan.
"Mark was happy; that's all that mattered," she replied. "I stayed out of the way." She looked down at her hands. "Until Mark came to me about a year ago, saying he missed me, missed us."
"And then you told him you thought Anna was having an affair," Dan supplied. She nodded.
"I thought if he knew about her affair then he would leave her and we could be together. He stopped talking to me after that." She pushed the folder back towards Dan. "Then he came to me with this. Mark always said the sweetest things to me. He said we were meant to be together, made for each other." Lucifer's seated posture stiffened. "We were going to get married. Until Mark decided our 'meant to be together' meant as business partners." She stood and moved to the counter, her back towards the men. "And this last year," she continued as she opened a drawer and removed a spoon. "Well…I do regret agreeing to break up with Mark way back then. But I regret one thing more than that." Miss Reed turned quickly towards Dan and Lucifer, gun in hand, switching her aim between both of them.
"Whoa," Dan said as he pushed his chair back and drew his own weapon.
"All these years later," she started as Lucifer slowly stood, raising his hands to shoulder level. "I thought he really cared about me, loved me. But I never mattered to him. I regret that I let him use me. I regret that I let him hurt me again."
"We all have regrets, Miss Reed," he said carefully. "Murder doesn't make them go away."
"Murder would have made Anna go away," she countered. "But Mark got in the way." Lucifer slowly moved to his right, drawing Miss Reed's attention as Dan moved to the left. "He stood there, pleading for her life, and all I could think about was how much he hurt me, how he took away everything I loved when we broke up. I wanted him to feel that pain, too. I wanted to take away what he loved most. He jumped in front of Anna just as I started shooting." Lucifer carefully shifted his eyes over her shoulder as Dan slowly moved into place behind her. "Oh God," she started with a cry as she lowered the gun. "I killed him. I killed Mark." Dan holstered his firearm and quickly wrapped his arm around Miss Reed as she began her breakdown and quickly pulled the gun from her hands. He secured the weapon just inside the waist of his pants and pulled a set of handcuffs from his back pocket. "What have I done?" she whispered as tears filled her eyes.
"Well," Lucifer said as he dropped his hands. "You'll have plenty of time to think about that once you're behind bars."
Lucifer
"One more nicely solved case under your belt," Lucifer started as he reached across the bar and handed Dan a tumbler of brandy. "No refusing," he quickly stated as Dan opened his mouth to speak. "A job well done deserves celebration," he smiled.
"Thanks." Dan returned the smile and took the proffered drink. "Also, you didn't die of boredom from sticking around for the paperwork and processing."
"Very true," he smiled. "I honestly never thought that would be the case."
"Well, now you know better."
"Indeed."
"You know," Dan stated, "today was…a lot of fun."
"Oh? Having a gun pointed at you is your idea of fun?" Lucifer conceded with a tip of his head. "To each his own, I suppose. I certainly won't judge," he said as he lifted his glass to his lips.
"No," Dan laughed with a wave of his hand. "That's not what I meant. Since my demotion…I've been involved in a lot of investigations, handled a lot of interrogations, but it's been a long time since I've taken down a perp as lead detective. It feels good to be…to be back." He took a drink. "Well, for as long as it lasts, at least. We did a good job, man."
"Yes, we did," Lucifer agreed with a smile. Dan lifted his glass, slightly tipping it in Lucifer's direction.
"To Douchifer," he toasted around a chuckle.
"To Douchifer." They shared a quiet laugh as they tapped the edges of their glasses and took a drink to complete the toast.
"I'm going to level with you, Lucifer." He placed his glass on the bar top and kept his eyes focused on the liquid inside. "I'm not as oblivious as everyone seems to think. I know you have a thing for Chloe. And I'm pretty sure she has a thing for you." He looked up at Lucifer. "But it's more than that, more than a thing, isn't it?" Lucifer looked away.
"You needn't worry about that," he said. "There's nothing between the detective and myself to get in the way of the two of you reviving your relationship."
"Reviving our…what are you talking about?"
"You and Detective Decker seem to have grown rather close this last month," he explained. "Having dinner dates once a week. Who knows what else," he said, bringing his glass to his mouth for a rather long sip of brandy.
"Lucifer," Dan laughed lightly. "Okay. I'm always going to love Chloe, Lucifer. We didn't divorce because we hated each other. We're not together because that's not who we are, not who we were meant to be. But we're still friends, and she is the mother of my child, so yeah, I love her. But these dinner dates?" He laughed again. "Planned family time. For Trixie," he clarified. "It helped during the separation, and Chloe and I agreed to continue for a little while longer." Lucifer nodded slowly.
"So you're not…"
"No, we're not." He shook his head gently as he regarded Lucifer. "I know you know we do that for Trixie. You've said several times that you don't understand why we have to 'keep the hellion appeased'."
"Yes," Lucifer nodded. "I did know that and I did say that."
"So what gave you the impression that, uh, that Chloe and I were…"
"Oh." He cleared his throat and looked away. "The detective," he said with a shrug. "She may have…hinted at it."
"Hmm. Was that before or after Candy Morningstar?"
"After," he answered after a moment of thought.
"Okay. I don't know what happened between you and Chloe," Dan started, "but this back and forth between the two of you is ridiculous." He held up a hand, preventing Lucifer from speaking. "I buy your story about Witness Protection."
"As you should," he said pointedly. "I don't lie."
"Right. But Witness Protection isn't the whole story, is it? I mean, you wouldn't have needed to marry Candy to get her out of Vegas or even to help her hide until the agents could relocate her. So why would you, the very face of everything non-committal, marry Candy? It was all show for Chloe, right?" Lucifer said nothing. "Answer me, Lucifer." He still offered no response. Dan dropped his gaze and tapped his fingers on the bar top. "I'm trying really hard not to be incredibly pissed at you, Lucifer, because I can't be an impartial friend to Chloe if I'm angry at you." He looked up and met Lucifer's eyes. "I can't be a friend to you."
"Friend to me?" he questioned.
"We haven't always seen eye to eye, and I'm sure that won't change, but we've developed…a decent friendship. Haven't we?"
"I suppose we have."
"Then tell me why you've pushed Chloe away."
"There's a reason I did what I did, Daniel. And before you ask, it goes well beyond anything you would understand."
"Today, you saw first-hand just how destructive regrets can be. As your friend, I'm telling you to think about your own list. Before it consumes you."
"Oh, Lucifer." He and Dan turned towards the trio of young women approaching the bar.
"Ah," Lucifer sighed with a smile. "The Brittanys. Did the bouncer let you in early? Again?"
"Yes," they giggled in unison.
"Lucifer," the blond Brittany started, "who's your friend?"
"My friend," he smiled as he regarded Dan. "Ladies, this is Daniel. He's a detective," he said with a rise of his eyebrows.
"Really?" The three woman circled Dan, one to each side, one behind him, their hands finding places to rest along his arms and shoulders. "Do you have a badge?"
"Um, yes," he responded with a nervous smile. "Yes, I do."
"Can we turn on the music, Lucifer?"
"Why of course, Ladies." He smiled as the women pulled Dan from his barstool.
"Come dance with us, Detective Daniel."
"Oh. Uh, no. I should really get going," he said, trying to detach himself from their soft grips.
"Nonsense," Lucifer stated. "Stay for a bit. Dance with the girls."
"It's late," he stated. Lucifer leaned an elbow on to the bar and rested his chin in his hand.
"What's it like having a stick shoved up your ass all the time?" he asked.
"Right." Dan offered a curt nod. "Point taken."
"Daniel?" he called as the group started towards the dance floor. The detective turned around and watched Lucifer open his mouth to speak. Instead of words, he closed his mouth around a sigh. Lucifer shrugged and slowly shook his head. Dan offered a gentle smile and nodded.
"I'm here. Anytime you need me," he said. "Just talk to Chloe."
