Cain's face — square jaw, light eyes, thin, tight-lipped grimace — is so frighteningly convincing that it's becoming increasingly difficult even for Lucifer to remind himself that it's his sister behind the chiseled features. Whatever confounding effect had followed on the heels of her trademark blur that night at Lux — and again at the house in the hills — had certainly translated to her manifestation of Marcus Pierce: it takes mere moments for the gathered crowd to accept his identity as reality in the haze of battered confusion.
Cain — Rory? — harrumphs in muted thought. Lucifer's mind is bending against the mental gymnastics, and he relents to the new reality before him as his focus shifts back to Chloe. Cain flexes his fingers in the dim light, folding heavy arms across his chest as he turns to face Lucifer.
"Bet you weren't expecting this, huh?" Cain smiles, folding the corner of his lip to his teeth like a dog-eared page. Lucifer stares back at him. The last time they'd locked eyes like this Lucifer had plunged a blade into his heart, eyes flashing red as he'd knelt with unbridled pleasure beside the man who now stands fully drawn before him. His eyes are utterly subdued where they'd once burnt and flared with venomous rage, robbed of their crimson fury and painted in impenetrable darkness. He's not angry, now.
He's scared.
He's terrified, actually — trapped like a nervous dog by the knife against Chloe's throat and flung into quivering darkness by the sudden presence of the man who now approaches her with a wry smile. In the furthest corner of the room, obscured by long, jagged shadows, Dan attempts to drag himself forward with a bruised arm.
"Get out," Chloe spits, writhing against the demons on her either side as Cain approaches. "You're not real," she murmurs, the affirmation vanishing on the breath of the words.
"Is this real?" He asks, his voice deceptively gentle. His hands unfurl from their anchored spot across his chest and he tucks a stray strand of hair behind Chloe's ear, lingering with a calloused finger against her cheek. She surges against the arms that hold her, wrenching his hand away with a concerted nudge of her neck and a heated hiss.
"Don't," Lucifer warns. His voice is ice.
Cain ignores him, his broad back nearly blocking Chloe entirely from Lucifer's view. "You know, when I took a look upstairs—" he motions with the blackened staff to her head, stopping the point just before it connects with her temple once more, "I wondered why I was still taking up so much space up there." He laughs; that heavy, hollow laugh that never reaches his eyes. "I get it now."
"Why'd you do it, Chloe?" He sets his jaw with cool expectance. "Why'd you say yes? Why did you tell me you loved me?" His empty smile warps to a snarl, peeling his upper lip off of dulled, white teeth. "Because you didn't, did you? You never did. So why lie?"
The words stall whatever refutation had lain just beyond Chloe's lips. She looks at him in determined silence, dragging her gaze to meet his in an icy standoff. Cain jerks his head back toward Lucifer, his eyes never leaving her own.
"He doesn't know, does he?" He shrugs, and his teeth flash in a rare show of self-satisfaction. "You never told him. All those times you wished I was him. All those nights with Trixie right downstairs. How you closed your eyes and pretended it was him, touching you. How you let me in your bed anyway. I bet he doesn't even know he wasn't the first in that evidence room."
Chloe breaks her silence, finally.
"Stop," she warns. There's not much credence to her threat, given her relatively compromised position and the waver that trembles across the word. Lucifer hangs his head.
"Tell him." Cain growls. "Tell him why you lied to me."
"I didn't lie," she whispers, fresh tears tumbling over the ridge of her chin. "I didn't mean to, I was confused—"
"You weren't confused. You were never confused. Come on, Chloe. This is your chance to be honest. Tell him why you lied to me. Why you said yes to me."
This time Cain does turn to look at Lucifer — if only for the span of a brief, fleeting glance. Lucifer's eyes are cast down to the cement at his feet, glaring pointedly at a puddle of black, standing water lapping at his shoes. His reflection stares back, rippling with a pathetic tremor.
"You knew it would hurt him, didn't you?" He turns back to Chloe, unsatisfied by Lucifer's limp response. She shakes her head.
"Is that why you did it, Chloe? To hurt him? To hurt him like he hurt you?"
"No." She sags against the arms that hold her in place. She's trying to see past him; to catch Lucifer's eye — but Cain is blocking him from view, and his taunting, upturned brow is the only thing to focus on between the searing pain at her temple and the rolling nausea his interrogation has invoked. "No," she repeats, stuck on the word. "I didn't want to hurt him, I never wanted to hurt him, I was just upset, I—"
"You used me to punish him," Cain intones. The expression on his face is unreadable; masked by stone features. "Come on. You're a detective, Chloe. You read people for a living. You knew how he felt about you. You knew what the two of us, together, did to him. And you wanted him to hurt."
Finally, finally, he shifts slightly to the side, allowing Chloe a clear view of Lucifer for the first time. Lucifer seems to sense the movement and his eyes lift immediately, matching her stare with electric fever. There's a black shame burrowing its way into her heart; digging at the bit of golden light that still pulses weakly through her veins. It darkens when she meets his gaze, stalling the dregs of heat within her and anchoring her weight to the floor. If she hadn't been suspended by forces outside of her control, she's certain she would have crumpled to the ground as the last remnants of comforting light kneel to his wounded stare.
"I didn't," she whispers. It's growing harder to refuse Cain: the darkness that's gnawing away at her heart is urging her to relent to his insistence — to give in and simply accept the overwhelming blackness of his words as truth. She looks at Lucifer instead; wills the remaining bit of light within her to illuminate the private path between them. "I never wanted to hurt you," she says, softly.
"I know," he smiles. His look is gentle; marred with a hurt that's throbbing in response to her own. "I know, Detective."
Cain huffs in unchecked frustration. He whirls back to Chloe, and she strains against the demons in an attempt to keep Lucifer in her sights. "I'm sorry," she sobs, her nose tinged red where the tears carve out a raw route. The light flickers weakly within her, fanned into near-nothingness by the persistent, blackening wind sweeping through her. "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have let it get that far, I—I didn't know how badly you were hurting, or maybe I did, and I just didn't want to see, I —"
"No," he's shaking his head, hanging his neck against shivering wings. "It wasn't your fault, Detective. None of it was. I hurt you. I drove you away. It was me, Chloe. None of it — none of this — was ever your fault."
Cain steps forward, masking the distance between them once more with a broad shadow.
There's the scrape of blunt nails on cement as Dan pulls himself across the damp ground. "Don't let him get in your head, Chlo," he winces, "He's always been a dickhead."
Her gaze flicks to Dan, just as one of the demons lands a kick against his jaw and sends him reeling back into stunned silence. She draws in a sharp breath and tears her eyes away, looking determinedly past Cain's blazing stare as he looms closer.
"Look at me," Cain mutters.
She lifts her head with some reluctance, fixing him with scrunched, frigid eyes.
"This is real," he assures her: that false tenderness that clashes so violently with his hulking form. "Right here. Right now. You can admit it. You liked making Lucifer beg for you. You liked the way we made him hurt, together."
She wriggles with reaffirmed fervor; so violently this time that it nearly yanks one of her arms free of the demons' grasp. Cain steps forward. Behind him, Lucifer is straining against the restraint which freezes him in place — the knife pressed to Chloe's heart — and shaking his head in fevered insistence.
"Chloe," he pants, "I love you."
Cain frowns, intercepting the words between barred shoulders. "Maybe you need a reminder," he scowls. "Make him beg."
He reaches a rough hand to trace along her collarbone. Real Marcus Pierce or not, his hands are the same ones she remembers — calloused and hard and free of all the reverential worship that flows from Lucifer's touch — and the feeling of them threatens to extinguish the last, flickering fragment of golden light that struggles against her core.
The blackened spark of their contact is all the motivation she needs to wrench the rest of her right arm free. She swings at him with as much force as her current state can muster, connecting with the square side of his jaw in an explosive crunch. Lucifer surges forward at precisely the same moment: the split second of demonic inattention has provided him a much-anticipated opening, though the fact is hardly relevant — the sight of Cain's hand grazing the hollow of her neck has cast his last shred of self-control to the wind.
Chloe's wrist slams against the side of Cain's face with such force — or perhaps he's just so shocked at the violent motion — that for a brief, hanging moment in time the illusion crumbles. There's a low, keening whine as his features evaporate and Rory's face, lined in obvious surprise, makes a quivering resurgence.
A moment is all it takes for the concerted effort of her conjuration to fall apart: Rory stamps the staff on the ground with a frustrated grunt as her usual form reappears in the trembling air. Chloe collapses fully to the ground just as Rory's face replaces Cain's, clutching her wrist to her chest with a broken cry.
Lucifer is on her in record time, crashing to the ground beside her with a tattered gasp. He scoops her between his legs, wrapping his arms around her and leaning her head against his chest. She's half-awake, eyes hazy against the searing pain in her wrist. He presses a ginger finger to her right forearm, just above the space where her wrist lies limp and crooked, and pulls it away when the touch incites a heated wince. "Chloe," he murmurs.
The demons who had held her growl in displeasure and shake the momentary surprise of her evasion. They approach Chloe without so much as a look toward Rory, still recovering in her own right from her untimely reappearance.
Where they had previously kept Lucifer at bay with a hooked blade pressed to Chloe's chest they now find him hunched over her, clutching her to his own heart with frantic urgency. He looks up as they near her once more, eyes blazing crimson as blackened, blood-stained wings curl around her crumpled form.
Lucifer's composure has been replaced by a distinct ferality, but the raging glint in his eyes and the growing tremor of his wings does little to stop the demons' imminent approach. They're too intent on their target, egged on by the glimmer of warmth still searing the jagged tips of Chloe's scar. In fact, they're so entranced by the altogether foreign prospect of Heavenly light — lured to the scent of purity like sharks to fresh blood — that they don't see Lucifer stand to greet them until it's too late. He deposits Chloe to the ground with a gentle hand and rises, brushing the dust from his pants and facing them with a tilted snarl.
"Oh, I don't think so."
Whatever restraint he'd been compelled to exercise for the entirety of Rory's agonizing torture snaps, now. Regardless of his lack of godly powers, he looks more imposing than ever before — looming with venomous derision over the two demons who now face him.
The first one — short and measly and sporting a bloody mess of tangled tendons where his jaw might once have existed — swings at Lucifer with a ringing hiss of curved steel. The second lunges for Chloe, clearly intending to monopolize upon the distraction his companion has created. Lucifer dodges the first with a lazy sidestep, wrapping an iron fist around the wrist that wields the blade and twisting until a mottled scream fills the air. The knife clatters to the ground and Lucifer bends to retrieve it with an easy, twisted smile, rapping the flat of the blade against his knuckles before he hurtles it into the heart of the demon approaching Chloe. He collapses without so much as a scream, draping the room in shocked silence as Lucifer bats his wings and sends the first demon crashing into the furthest wall of the warehouse.
"Right," he says, nudging the lifeless corpse beside Chloe with the point of his shoe. He glances up, locking eyes with his younger sister as she settles back into her body and stares at the mess of demonic carnage before her. "Anyone else?"
Rory lifts a hand to stall the demons still lurking in the shadows behind her, but it seems whatever tenuous authority she's held over them has broken on the back of Lucifer's attack. They ignore her flimsy gesture and flood forth in a disfigured mass, lunging for Chloe with groping hands and swinging blades. Lucifer drops to his knees and yanks Chloe into his grasp, wrapping her in the shield of his ashen wings.
There are too many — far too many for him to fend off alone without leaving her unarmed and unguarded. And so he stays, crouched with wings curled around her as the demons rake curved blades through his feathers. Chloe comes to when he yelps in pain, blinking blue eyes open as a hooked knife slices through the vein of a pristine feather and pokes through the shield of his wings. She stares at it for a moment in petrified silence, before Lucifer grabs the blade with a bare hand and shoves it back through the outside of his own wing.
"Lucifer," she says, softly, tugging on his arm with her left hand as she cradles her right to her breast.
"Ah, Detective," he drawls, dripping in feigned casualty as he glances down at her. He grimaces as another blade rips through his wings and lands inches from his neck. "You're awake."
"What are you doing?" She winces as blood splatters to the ground, dripping from the shredded holes in his wings. She sits up with sudden urgency as she takes in the scene before her, forgetting for a moment the throbbing pain that shoots through her arm as she straightens against his grasp. "You're bleeding," she blurts, as if he can't see for himself.
"It's nothing," he grunts, forcing his grimace into a tight-lipped smile as he meets her gaze. "Just a flesh wound."
"No, Lucifer, it's—" she leans forward, reaching instinctively for the ripped, gaping cut in his white feathers. He yanks her back just as another blade slices through, widening the jagged opening with a sickening crunch and grazing just past her fingers. She whips back to face him, eyes wide. "Can't you do something?" She asks, the words slightly panicked as she listens to him swallow a whimper.
He looks at her again, studying her with dark, seeking eyes, and she has her answer. Of course he could. He's stronger than the demons: smarter, more powerful — but he won't. He won't drag his wings away from her, won't relinquish his hold on her when he's the only thing between her and the white ash that lines the base of Hell. He won't let her go, even as the blades carve feathered chunks from his wings and threaten to pierce his chest.
She's brought him to his knees, and he won't rise without her.
"Lucifer, I know what you're doing," she gasps, in muted urgency, "But you have to get up. You can't stay here. I'm fine. I'm—" A demon blade hurtles towards one of the bloodied openings in Lucifer's wings and rips through the parted feathers, slowed in its menacing pursuit as it tears through a fresh layer of untarnished white. It clatters weakly to the hollow space by Chloe's leg, and she grabs at the curved handle.
"See?" She says, wrapping her left hand around the steel. She shrugs. "Now you don't have to worry about me. I can fight them off."
Lucifer takes a brief moment to tear himself from his current, agonizing pursuit so that he might stare at her in unqualified disbelief.
"Fight them off," He repeats, wincing as he bats away a piercing blade with the flat of his hand.
"Yeah," she says, struggling to free herself from the arm still fastened securely across her chest. "We can argue about it later. But you—" she clamps down on her lip as she moves away from the safety of his grasp, dragging her crooked wrist along with her. "Are not helpful if you're dead. And I, personally, do not want to die here. So," she motions to his wings, as if to shoo them away, "Go, and at least give us a chance."
She doesn't plead, or beg with him to leave her so that he might fulfill a nobler pursuit. Her tone is cool, and calm, and matter-of-fact — here, even in the depths of Hell, she's commanding him with all the authority of the Detective. He bows to the order; allows her to guide him as he had without question for so many years. She's right, after all.
But then, she's always right.
"Very well," he says, his voice low. He shifts, so that he's crouched on the balls of his feet, and flexes his shoulders. He meets her gaze for a fleeting second, burning white-hot where she matches him with cool resolution.
"Detective," he murmurs, "Duck."
—
This time, it's she who follows his lead without question — a rarer occurrence than the reverse, but she deems the concession a necessary one. She hits the ground without so much as a second glance, her cheek pressed to the cement as she curls around her newly-procured demon blade.
There's a quaking, shuddering rumble — like a plane taking off inches above her bowed head — and she can see the bloodied tips of Lucifer's wings searing past her as they unfurl and thrash against the gathered demons. The movement leaves her exposed; unguarded by the curved shield of feathers, but he forces them back with such intensity that it leaves the demons closest to her stunned and struggling to their feet. She seizes the opportunity, rolling onto her back and slicing up at the nearest demon — a lanky, skeletal shadow of a man — with a clumsy, left-handed slash of her blade. He falls with a strangled cry, and Chloe can't help herself — she looks back to Lucifer in an arched mixture of shocked smugness. He meets her gaze for a fraction of a second and shoots her the flicker of a grin, sweeping a wing through the air like a sickle as he cuts down another two with practiced ease.
She winces when he draws his wings back once more — not for the aching pain that sears her own wrist and burns her temple — but for him: for the broken roar he chokes on as wind whips through the ragged holes in his feathers. Every surging thrash of his wings is sending a shower of splattered blood to the ground, wringing the life from them with each concerted effort to push the demons back.
She's still on the ground, pressed against the floor to avoid the sharpened slaps of air he's shoving forth. Her vision is obscured: by the dim light, by the fog of discomfort clouding her thoughts, by the low vantage point of her current position — but she can see well enough to understand that he's fading — that the damage to his wings is making each blow against the demons more taxing than the last.
He stumbles back as a handful of demons manage to withstand the brunt of his latest, weakest strike. One of them — faster than the rest — lunges toward him with dual blades raised, swinging with a speed that would have set even Maze on her toes. For the first time since she'd ordered him to go — to fight — a cold, impenetrable fear anchors Chloe's heart to the pit of her stomach.
She acts without thinking — without so much as a warning word — and hurls her own blade with all the strength that her non-dominant hand can muster. Whether it's a stroke of pure luck, or divine intervention — though she's pretty positive it's the former, as the harbinger of divine intervention is currently preoccupied with a swarm of demons — the blade lands directly between the shoulder blades of the demon bearing down on Lucifer. It sinks in with a twisting, lethal hiss, and the very tip of the knife pokes through the front of his chest, peering at Lucifer with a teasing glint. He stares in marked surprise as the demon grunts, softly, and crumples at his feet.
"Do they teach you that at police school?" Lucifer asks, tossing a glance to Chloe as he regains his footing.
"I'm full of surprises," she barks back, still blinking back the haze of equal surprise.
"Apparently."
The flitting awe that accompanies Chloe's well-timed intervention is just that: short-lived. The remaining demons approach him nearly as quickly as their companion falls, backing him further into a corner as he fights back with slowing, leaden swings. His wings hang limply by his sides, having exhausted their usefulness as blood pools at his feet and leaks from delicate feathers. The solitary demon that doesn't approach Lucifer heads for Chloe, now unarmed and struggling to rise to her feet as he nears.
Behind them all, Rory looses a cracked scream and slams the hilt of the staff against the cement. This clearly wasn't a part of her plan — she's staring with mounting anxiety as the demon approaches Chloe with a lethal glimmer in his eye. The motion does nothing to stop them: if anything, Rory shrinks back with a slight whimper as they turn on her with a warning snarl.
Chloe seizes the distraction and rises shakily to her feet, staggering toward the corner where Lucifer stands fighting in a blackened puddle of his own blood.
"Chloe," he cautions, holding out a hand to stop her as he dodges a jab, "Stay back."
"I have an idea," she says, the words thick in her mouth.
His eyes flash to her: there's no time to scold her; to tell her to get away — and, as a single, miserable look around the room would confirm — there's really no point. Not this time. They're surrounded, trapped in Dan's Hell loop by four concrete walls and a pack of untamed demons. His lips part in a capitulatory sigh, and he beckons her forward as he shoves the demons back with a reserved ounce of strength.
She slips through the opening he creates and sidles to his shoulder. They're pressed into the corner: his tattered feathers are the only thing between her back and the ashen cement of the wall. The remaining three demons circle them like hyenas; chittering with foreign malice as they cast wide, gleaming eyes upon her. She can feel the light — those last, fluttering dregs that Cain had failed to snuff out — coursing through her, heated by the intensity of the demonic stares affixed to her.
"Do it again," she whispers. The words are so soft she's not even sure if she speaks them; or if she merely wills him to hear her.
He's not looking at her — he's staring at the demons, eyes black with fear as he bars an instinctive arm across her chest.
"Lucifer," she says, louder this time. "Do it again."
He tears his gaze away, and when he looks at her she's motioning to his wings with an insistent brow. There are tears pricking his eyes; tears he refuses to let fall so long as he still stands beside her.
He flicks his shoulders back with a grimace. His wings respond weakly, shuddering against the movement and sending fresh blood rattling from the gaping holes between feathers. A slight gust of pointed air gasps forth and shatters before it can even reach the monsters before them. "I can't," he murmurs.
She closes her eyes and wills the solitary flame within her to expand, to flow along the jagged valley of her scar and thaw the frozen dread that seizes her insides. She focuses on the blackened staff in Rory's hands — and on the still-golden piece within her that longs to set it free. She shoves the thoughts of Cain aside: pushes away the insidious guilt he'd tried so hard to sow as Lucifer's ringing declaration of love feeds the scraps of light within her.
When she's on fire: when the warmth within her has unfrozen her heart from her chest and is singing her core with familiar, concentrated light, she opens her eyes. The demons stare at her, mouths hanging open in a warped display of lust as the sliver of Heaven they'd sensed in her flares to a searing peak. They abandon their tentative, predatory dance and rush toward her without restraint. She grabs Lucifer's hand as they lurch forward, threading her fingers between his with heated urgency.
He'd never shied from the warmth of her touch — even before she'd learned to control it, he'd never recoiled from the bit of God's light that had burnt her from the inside out. She wasn't sure it was his invulnerability that prevented her from scorching him as she had with Eve; and again with Dan — or if he simply didn't care, and clung to her regardless. Whatever the truth, this time is no different — he grasps the hand she folds into his with fevered desperation.
The light inside her — the light that flows through the scored line on her stomach and sets her fingertips on fire — courses through their shared touch with the same ease as she'd willed it through herself.
"Yes," she breathes, blinking up at him, "You can."
Maybe he hadn't inherited any powers. Maybe dear old Dad hadn't left him anything but a title and the burden of responsibility. But maybe — maybe — he'd left her with something: given her the piece of Heaven Lucifer had willed so fiercely to appear to him.
He gets it, now. It's almost enough to summon a laugh in the darkest depths of Hell. He does have the power — the power he'd given up on; the power he'd resigned himself to never see. It's here, now, with him. Left where it would be safest — in the one place his Father knew he would always keep close. In her.
She's the power — his power.
Maybe all of this was His plan, after all.
—
The instant she grabs his hand, he's on fire. She lights him up like a live wire, sending a flare through the fingers that lay limp and pale against her own and inviting color back into the hollow of his cheeks. His wings, now a lackluster grey, seem to unfold with the heat that pulses from her to him; a twisting, pulsing light travels across the veins of his tangled feathers and douses them in blinding, golden light.
Her words hang light and undisturbed in the electrified space between them.
Yes, you can.
He pulls her into him, careful not to relinquish his grip on her hand as he draws her back against his chest — away from the path of his wings.
And then he slams them forward, sending a beacon of blazing, burning light arcing through the air, and through the gaping holes between his feathers, and reducing the demons before them to smoking piles of ash.
When the demons fall Chloe allows her focus to slide, and the blinding light that surrounds them fades with a muted sigh. Her hand slips from Lucifer's in the gasping aftermath of her intense concentration, and he collapses the moment the warmth of her fingers leaves his.
"Lucifer," she breathes, dropping to her knees as he lays with his head propped weakly against the concrete wall. The golden brilliance she'd helped to imbue his wings with has slipped from him as quickly as her hand had, leaving them bleeding and broken and wilting at his back. But it's more than that — more than the torn, rasping wings and the pale exhaustion that had seized him just before she'd gifted him a second wind. He's gasping, grinning weakly at her as if to reassure her of some unspoken truth, and there's blood leaking from the corner of his mouth, staining the white collar of his shirt. She follows his gaze down: past his reddened collar, past the undone buttons on his dress shirt that had burst with the force of his attack — and she sees it. There, tangled in his pocket square, buried to the hilt and turning the cherry silk crimson.
The demons hadn't been close enough to attack — not before Lucifer had knocked them into ashen oblivion — but it's with a sinking, cloying dread that she recalls her own stroke of knife-throwing genius. She hadn't seen any blades hurtle past them in their last, blinding moments — hadn't heard the unmistakable hiss of steel amidst the thrumming hum of his wings — but she had felt Lucifer's hand shove her roughly aside, pulling her to the other side of his chest with an iron grip.
He must have seen it; must have drawn her away even in the midst of light-fueled chaos from the knife aimed with deadly precision at her own heart.
And it had landed in his, instead.
Everything goes dark. Rory, Dan, the mangled corpses of the demons that hadn't been reduced to ash — they all disappear as she sinks further to the ground.
"Oh my god," she whispers, hovering trembling fingers above the knife's hilt. He smiles feebly at her, dark eyes glassy.
"Ha, ha," he grins, laughing weakly. His teeth are stained red. "Very funny, Detective."
"Why did you do that?" She says, her voice rising and breaking like a wayward tide. She wants to shake him; to pound her fists against the chest that's panting out shallow breaths beneath her. "Why did you do that?" She repeats, without so much as an attempt to stop the tears from falling and mingling with the blood pooling beneath his jacket.
He furrows a brow. Even the tiny movement seems to exhaust him: he slips further from his propped position against the wall, and she moves forward to allow his head to slide into her lap, instead. Far across the room — it seems like an eternity, away, now — Rory leans heavily against the staff, staring with wide eyes at the scene of carnage before her. Nothing — nothing — had gone according to plan: that much is certain, but she makes no move to intervene now as Chloe cradles Lucifer in her lap.
"Same reason…I do anything," he mutters, nestled against the dark denim of her jeans. "For you."
She chokes on a sob, lowering her head until her forehead is brushing against his. "Please don't go," she whimpers — and now she's begging; begging the way she'd refused to when they'd faced death together. "Please. Please don't."
He tilts his head with some effort, until his ear is pressed to her knee and he's staring out at the miserable darkness. "Daniel," he croaks, willing the words to travel.
Dan is laying by the door; curled around himself where the last demon had landed a savage blow to his head. He looks in bad shape — he's only a few feet from Rory, but even she makes no move to ensure his continued silence. He stirs, though, at Lucifer's summons — if only imperceptibly.
"Dan," Lucifer says again, wrenching his lips around the sound. This time Dan's eyes flicker open: two dull, white lights in the suffocating blackness. Rory is too focused on her brother to notice — too rapt in Lucifer's rumbling breaths and labored words to see Dan pull himself onto all fours. Chloe rakes a gentle hand through Lucifer's hair, urging him into silence, but he forces the rest of his thought to go free. "Now or never."
So he goes. Slowly, at first, dragging himself along the cement — and then quickly, as if seized by a raw, animalistic fervor. He ignores the pain; ignores the surprised grunt from Rory as she finally takes notice of him crawling to Heaven. She's too late — he's faster than her, this time, and he grasps at the threshold with aching palms.
Dan turns back for a single, fleeting moment, hanging with his fingers touching Heaven and his feet still planted firmly in Hell. Chloe and Lucifer both meet his gaze and he shakes his head in a hushed appeal.
"Take care of her, man," he says, his voice wavering ever so slightly. "You promised."
And then he's gone; grasping for the light that had evaded him for so long.
As soon as Dan vanishes from view Lucifer's head drops back to Chloe's lap, robbed of his final ounce of stamina. The gentle touch she'd worked through his curls turns desperate, now, as he pales beneath her fingertips. She runs both hands over his face, memorizing the shape of his nose and the curve of his lips with frenetic urgency even as her crooked wrist yelps with the motion.
"You can't," she's crying, dropping a hand to his breast as if to staunch the flow of blood. "Not like this." She pulls at him, dragging him further into her grasp, but he's too heavy — too stubborn even as his eyes droop shut. "You have to take me home," she whispers. Bargaining. She's burning through the five stages of grief, it would seem, though she's pretty sure acceptance will remain untapped.
"Don't need me," he murmurs. "Power's…with you."
"I do," she says, pressing a kiss to his temple when her fingers can no longer keep his eyes from slipping shut. "I do need you."
"Lucifer," she says, breaking from a whisper as he grows heavier in her lap. His eyes are closed, now — fully closed, without so much as a brightened glint to light the weak smile that still remains on his lips. "Lucifer, stop. Stop. Please. Please don't leave me. I can't—I can't do it without you." She's not sure what it is. If it is going home, or if it is something else entirely — if it is everything that awaits after she makes it back, alone. She's not sure it even matters.
He opens his eyes — just barely; just for a flashing, blinding second, and takes her in with all the reverence he'd vowed to fix to her every gaze. And when he speaks they're her words; her insistence, stripped of their urgency and spoken now with gentle assurance.
"Yes, you can."
He reaches for her, and lets her steal her own name from his lips as he bows to the darkness.