Musics:

'Come Save Me' (Jay Price)

'Blood On Your Hands' (Veda, Adam Arcadia)

'Breathe' (Power-Haus, Christian Reindl, Lloren)

\\\

Surprising, I know, but what can I say? I got motivated to translate lately! Let's hope it keeps going that way!

Last time, I left you all on a pretty angsty cliffhanger.

Well… (*evil laugh)


'WINGED' PUMP CHUMP

21


Such a dream comes in everyone's sleep eventually.

Rather a nightmare than a dream, it soon changes any ethereal notions of sleep into a physical sensation and, out of control, it wouldn't take long to invade the surroundings. This is chaos, to have a dream – a bad one – about falling into the void.

Chaos always seems to rise from the same, sudden feeling: a step forward, although it wouldn't touch a solid, linear ground like the previous one. The foot would sink forward, the person losing balance for good.

Either you fall head first or not, the void never feels as you expect it to.

The void shouldn't have winds as those that are blowing against Chloe's face, gagging her cry and squeezing her heart too hard in her chest. Its density pushes her further away, further down.

Harder.

Chaos.

This is too much chaos to contain in one dream.

Beside the warm – 'scorching hot' – wind that had just blinded her, a dreadful noise had risen from it and around her. The ground had shifted beneath her feet. The void… she had felt both pressed against it and away from it.

And through this nightmarish storm of winds and sounds, she can't move. She manages to catch a glimpse of even more dizzying colors. How stupid it would be, to shut her eyes, right in the middle of a nightmare like this. Still, though, throwing up whatever her stomach is willing to release doesn't seem as stupid.

Somebody cries, or rather howls in pain. Chloe knows that it isn't hers; she tried to scream, many times, and she never succeeded.

The howl cuts chaos in half, her body falling into the void faster than the second before. She can't tell which one is the loudest around her: the chaos or the void as ear-splitting as a nearby car alarm would sound.

Beyond any reasonable doubt, the void ends first with the first collision with her backside and a second with the back of her skull. At least, the second fall sets her surroundings back in coherent place. She could have cried with relief if her heart hadn't been bouncing like a scary cat in her ribcage.

One of her hands flinches, a multitude of peaks jabbing her palm, back and legs in response. Chloe feels her chest rise and fall, rise higher and higher; yet, she can't catch her breath, not once. Her raging thoughts – scorched bits of distress – hold onto the stinging bite in her hand as she opens her eyes, expelling the air out of her chest. Her gaze falls instantly on her hand, flat on the dark horizon sparkling with hundreds of stars. Blinking on her palm turning upwards, Chloe frowns by seeing those stars staying unexpectedly attached to her skin.

She stares at the cut beneath her thumb, for what seems an eternity to her.

Until she understands.

The blood, red thick around the biggest star in the middle of her palm, helps her a lot in that.

These aren't stars.

This is glass. Shards and shards of it.

If so, the dark floor shouldn't move. It shouldn't lean over her upper body like that.

"Chloe!" It backfires a few inches from her face, jerking her next breath out of her chest.

Fire. She can see it if she turns her head, spit flames from under a long, unclear shape with wheels. If Hell would have opened right under this thing, she wouldn't have been surprised. Does Hell spit flames, though?

The part of the floor above her, more a shadow than a floor, lifts her up. From an inch of ascension, the surroundings change and she sees for the first time the car in the 'long shape with wheels'. The 'detective' part of her mind can't help but notice that all the windows must have exploded from the inside. It is a gigantic mouth, the mouth of a monster, burning tongue, fangs and all.

"CHLOE!"

The air in her lungs rushes through the jolt around her shoulders; it cries, quiet with a blink for the furnace. Then for the shadow, the man's worried sick expression, she blinks once more. "L'ifer?"

Her eyes shut on his face and open on the fabric of his shirt, her cheek pressed against his chest with a sigh of relief. "You're okay, you're okay…." Lucifer repeats unsteadily, kissing her temple more than she can count.

She counts his tremors with her hands in his back, she follows them, tense lines of ants vanishing into something else. Something wet. As her fingertips reach for it, Lucifer releases her from his tight embrace, his hands cupping her face. She reaches for his left one, not all alabaster but splattered with blood, the biggest stains hidden beneath his torn cuff. She sees the button fall, hanging over a thread before that and rocking with Lucifer's hand movements along her cheeks. His strokes go down her neck as she keeps watching the button hit the floor between two shards of glass and roll beneath the car next to them. She stares at the window from the driver seat; broken, crying glass, crying for its smashed body.

Whatever had hit the car and bent its door inward… it must have been something big. Something strong.

Chloe reaches for Lucifer's wrist. "You're bleeding?"

He moves his hand away from her touch, towards her hair and the few locks entangled in the chain of her necklace. "Just a graze. You're ok—"

"No, it's—" Chloe looks around her.

Squeezing his other hand awakens the fire through hers. The heat around her doesn't decrease; it cracks, breaks. Her hand pulls on the fabric of his shirt around his forearm, her next breath blocked in her throat.

"My god…. Your car!"

Lucifer's arm wraps around her shoulders, pushing her once more into an embrace on the road, which, scattered with glass from his car on fire, couldn't have looked more like the night sky above them.

Cries of people rise seconds later, asking to call for help, running out of the buildings. Lucifer's embrace is tight and unbreakable around her tremors. "He's not that devious," he whispers in her hair.

-xXx-


It isn't a crazy belief.

Actually, the more Chloe stares at the mess the car had turned into, the less she has doubts about hellish flames looking like those ones, barely extinguished by liters of water now meandering on the asphalt between footsteps, car remains and the wheels of the ambulance.

As Hell sounds like eternity, why wouldn't it be?

A dying spark dances in the air and rises above two police cruisers. Fleeting eternity.

"Too tight?"

Chloe looks down at her hand, only half bandaged between those of the paramedic smiling at her. Pain dances through her nerves and muscles, but her hand doesn't hurt as much as the rest. She smiles back at him, barely. The bandage has just been turned once more around her palm that she is already looking at Lucifer.

His bright smile is hard to miss, even from that far. Hers is faltering.

Car explosions encourage closeness. He couldn't have been that close to her after that one, he didn't even let her stand up and walk on her own, nor had he complained about her fingernails almost piercing his shirt all along their way to the ambulance, on the corner of the restaurant. He had disappeared from her sight when paramedics had harassed her with too many questions meant to challenge her level of lucidity, back minutes after with his suit jacket back on his shoulders as well — never too far away nor too close from her. But god, she misses how this shirt feels against her cheek.

Maybe it is stupid thought, but after a near-death experience, finding a suit jacket wouldn't be her first priority. She lost her shoes, so why did he leave her for a jacket?

Because he is Lucifer.

As obvious as the reason is, it doesn't make her feel better.

Paramedics had to insist on making him step aside, his arm almost making one with her shoulders then. From that moment and that breeze of void along her back, the one between them hadn't stopped growing.

Assaulted with questions (Can you tell me what's today's date? How many fingers?), Chloe had mumbled anything requested without taking her eyes off Lucifer, quiet if not for refusing a closer inspection of himself. And how he refused, it had twisted something inside her belly, something far more uncomfortable than actual physical pain.

He smiled.

Hers never lasts since that moment, since the adrenaline had left her alone, stiffer tension weighing on her limbs; growing, minute by minute. If she wouldn't have been squeezing the seat with her unwounded hand right now, it would have gotten the best of her.

"Better be tight if we wanna stop the bleeding," the paramedic apologizes. "I can give you something if it's too much though. Once we arrive at the hospital—"

"It won't be necessary."

"You look like it might be," he points out with another smile.

She pulls on the darkened edge of her dress, not even covering the upper part of her skinned knees, and winces. "That wasn't the plan…."

"Tell me about it."

Lucifer's voice rising right next to them didn't surprise Chloe, but the paramedic jumps, hiding most of his surprise by offering to examine Lucifer again. As authoritarian as the man might sound, it doesn't falter Lucifer's smile and polite refusal. It nearly persuades Chloe that he is fine.

Nearly.

The first-aid kit closing increases her heartbeats, her heart about to explode with anxiety while watching the paramedic walking away from them and Lucifer's smile flattening, just the time for him to push it upwards with a deep breath. He looks much taller, all of a sudden; more tense and standing straighter than usual. Probably because his exhalations are so discreet, so pressed by control, that there isn't the slightest fold in his shirt or suit jacket.

Clothes don't make the man.

These red and blue flashing lights moving on his soot-stained face and neck then plunged back into darkness; it looks like a damn fake picture.

He eventually sighs the air out of his tense chest, still the tallest one around. "This place seems sadly preordained to flames."

"That and unexpected rescue," Chloe whispers.

"Detective Decker?"

Breaking eye contact with Lucifer, Chloe frowns at the uniformed police officer's hand extended towards her, which he lowers a second later, his whole body language crying a mix of excitation and awkwardness that she can't explain.

"I…uhm… Sergeant Griffin," he says, squeezing his notepad with both hands. "I'm the one in…. I- Well, you know how things go, obviously!" he chuckles nervously.

"We've met already, haven't we?" Chloe wonders. "Jolins' new partner, right?"

Griffin's chest sticks out with her guess. "Yes, Ma'am. I mean-... Detective. Sorry, but you're… Jolins and many others, they told me everything about you and what you achieved for the department so—!"

"For the department?"

"Taking down the Spider's drug cartel, Palmetto case, the Sinneman, Pierce, it's… Woah!" Griffin exclaims.

Lucifer's 'relaxed' expression has been slightly shaken by hearing her former Lieutenant's name out loud, she notices, even though he does his best to sound as friendly as before the next moment, "Best time ever for groupies, isn't it, Detective?"

"If I knew I'd question you tonight! This is—"

"Explosive?" Lucifer finishes for Griffin who frowns at him.

Chloe pulls on Lucifer's sleeve. "Speaking of, any leads about what happened? It can't be just an accident or coming from defective maintenance."

"Why not?"

In response to Lucifer's contemptuous laugh, Chloe pulls harder on his sleeve and scratches his palm with her fingernail. The strong tremor she feels against her thumb is quite unexpected, although Lucifer is looking anything but relaxed when she looks up at his face. Relaxed contempt.

"You clearly don't know how my partner here can be… meticulous when it comes to his stuff." She shrugs a shoulder.

"My 1962 Corvette C1 with a 327 cubic inch V8 motor and chrome borders was hardly a 'stuff'!" Lucifer complains instantly.

"See?" Chloe says to Griffin.

With another huff of contempt, Lucifer releases his wrist from her hold and shoves his hands in his pockets. Again, she notices how the fabric shakes from the inside then freezes, squeezed shut in his fist. His jaw muscles look even more tense around his next deep breath.

"It sucks, man," Griffin sympathizes with him, drawing Chloe's attention back to his questions that are long to come. "If it ever happened to my new car, I'd—"

"Sorry, but… could we focus on the 'statement' part?" Chloe pulls the blanket placed on the seat towards her.

The shock has slowly started to constrict her limbs like modeling clay and to feel the weight of the blanket covering her never-ending tremors; this feels great. More than great. She pulls on the edges around her heart and over her shoulders, stroking with one hand the back of her neck and brushing a lock of hair smelling like burnt metal off her face.

She gives a careful glance at Lucifer. "I… We'd like to go home."

"Of course, I… Okay," Griffin opens his notepad and takes his pen from his pocket, stroking his cheek twice with it. "Okay, so… this was your car, correct?" he asks Lucifer, who arches an eyebrow.

"A Corvette C1. Did you even listen to what the Detective just said? What do they teach you at the academy?"

"Correct," Chloe answers, thus drawing Griffin's attention back to her, although as surprised as the newbie by Lucifer's sudden change of mood. "We were just leaving the restaurant. The owner, Javier, can confirm. We were—"

Before we go, there's something I'd like to talk to you about. I….

She swallows the metallic taste stuck in her throat. "We were heading for the car. That's when…."

She watches the firemen take a step back around one of the car doors that has just hit the asphalt, removing the mostly burnt leather off the seats. She should have been seated on this leather.

"How far were you from the car when it happened?"

Chloe takes a deep breath, her heartbeats as frantic as before. "I-It's hard to tell…."

"I'm asking you this because, in the case it's criminal, the person who did this would have gotten better results by making sure you were close enough. I mean… I would have waited for you to get in the car," Griffin says.

"A threesome newbie in crime, law and fan service," Lucifer quotes. "This sounds promising!"

"So it might be criminal?" Chloe insists.

Griffin looks around him and taps his pen on his notepad, clearly uncomfortable. "At this stage of the investigation, it could be anything."

"Oh, no no no," Lucifer sighs. "Your face tells far too much, newbie. How about I arrange a meeting for you with the best bluffer in the precinct? After the Detective, of course. Cacuza wouldn't mind me giving up my seat for our next poker game. Such a bad loser when it comes to cocaine…." He smiles at the speechless sergeant, lifting his hand. "No need to thank me. Can we go now?"

Chloe gives a tense smile at Griffin, either speechless or mouthing yet still muted questions. "Could we postpone this to tomorrow morning? At the precinct?"

Griffin taps his pen on his notepad one more time, then nods. "Sure. Tomorrow. Glad to see you're okay," he says, starting to step back. "From what I've heard from the firemen, it could've been really messy so… you can thank your guardian angel!"

The sergeant disappears behind one of the fire trucks and Chloe's heartbeats fasten in her chest, like a butterfly— light and steady. The tension steadily burns her throat. Her blink on the car is light, so is the next one, following the stains left by Hell, darker than the road. A giant black star where she and Lucifer were standing, of that she is certain.

It could have been really messy.

She blinks, exhaling on her memories: the car facing the Corvette, at the other side of the road. She and Lucifer being rescued right there, both covered in soot, shards of glass. Both pretty shaken, yet…

'Okay'.

Her gut feeling is pushing on her belly, growing another feeling, the feeling of missing something important. Something obvious bleeding through Lucifer's demeanor these last minutes. Lucifer is looking taller, more 'okay' than he is supposed to be in these circumstances.

This isn't a surprise for her to see such a guardian angel (though, he would prefer 'devil' to 'angel' by far) walking away from her on the pretext of 'stealing one of Javier's cars', his back as straight as a bow.

"I will," she whispers.

-xXx-


As a matter of fact, and even though she pretends to be so at work, Chloe is far from being the patient type.

However, she did wait a reasonable time before smashing Lucifer's pretenses into pieces. Focusing on the pain that thickens her muscles little by little helped her a lot in that. Her smell – a subtle mix of scorched hair and motor oil – had also distracted her, a bit. She almost lost it when he suggested driving her back to her place, just in time for "the urchin's bedtime ritual". She needed to hold Trixie in her arms until the next morning, to forget the flames, the chaos, even for a moment. She was about to forget why she had been struggling with patience and accept his offer when he braked at the intersection. Too abruptly. His back pressed a bit longer and firmer against his seat, causing Lucifer to become uncommonly quiet, their driving speed had been then reduced to the slowest allowed in town.

Knowing him and given the little trafic at this time of night, he should have been much more challenging with legal speed limits in her presence. For a second, she had thought that his overly careful driving was a strategy, buying time until she would change her mind about their next, final stop. The thought weakened her very thin patience. He didn't want her to stay.

But she did, so she waited for him to stop this nonsense of 'I'm perfectly fine' attitude.

How he didn't take his eyes off the road since they left the restaurant area, it is far from 'fine'. She isn't fine while hearing his labored breathing when he wasn't fast enough turning on the radio to hide it. It has been a good indication of his level of pain, in a way. For the last city block before Lux, the smooth melodies had roared wild hard rock until she turned it off, her patience as thin as air.

"Lucifer…" she starts, gazing at his hands slightly shaking around the wheel.

His tremors vanish in the second. "Changed your mind, did you?" He nods, still not looking at her once. "All right, I—"

"—I'll turn the car around?" She points at the road behind them. "You just passed your club."

He blinks and moves his hands on the wheel, his back as far away as it can be from his seat without looking too tense. "Right, I…." He breathes out, too long to sound natural. "I'll park at the back. It's the only reasonable choice with this car."

Chloe lets him keep the pretense all along. Even when he nearly bumps into his other cars parked at the back, as when he gets out of the car, moving in slow motion with a smile on his face. She doesn't comment how straight his back is on their 'over-slow' walk to the elevator, nor his balance leaning from one wall to the other during the vertical ascension to his penthouse. Just frequent glances at his smile lowered to a straight line on his color-drained 'poker' face.

Her wire-thin patience breaks as soon as they enter the penthouse. "Show me."

Lucifer turns around, staring at her. She doesn't miss the slight flinch around his shoulders. "Show? I don't—"

"You're hurt. Show me."

He frowns, his even paler complexion calling his not yet spoken bluff. "Come now, Detective," he snorts, one hand reaching for the bar, not that this looks like the only way for him to stay upright. "If I was hurt on human levels, as you say, those paramedics would have noticed."

Chloe pinches her lips. "I never said that."

"Right, then! How about one last drink before I'll drive you b—"

"We should be dead by now."

"Detective, this—" but Chloe cuts him off, even more annoyed to see his arm stretched on the bar giving ground to the incoming fall.

"Lucifer, drop the act, okay? Stop it!"

No matter how much he tries to pretend being able to stand upright, his arm keeps bending, the bar counter closer and closer to his sleeve. He is about to collapse, a few more seconds and he will; they both know it.

Chloe watches him squeeze the back of the chair between them with his free hand. A complete waste, so is his next, even deeper breath. "Really, it's fine."

"You know, it's easy to evaluate how far the explosion extended. The marks on the road and the other car, it's—" She covers the tremors of his hand with hers, drawing his gaze back to her with a slight pressure. "It's not fine. So please, show me."

The silence stretches between each other's obstinacy until at last….

Chloe doesn't know what she expected to see, or how she would see it, before this very moment. Close certainties, a vague memory and imagination don't even come closer to reality. But Lucifer keeping hiding things from her, it is another reality reeling painfully within her chest. She couldn't help but gasp and jump backwards, her hand stretched towards him and the fall of too many bottles to count from the shelf behind the bar.

"That's bloody marvelous…" Lucifer groans with an eyeroll and presses his chest to the chair, his left wing smashing even more alcohol throughout his shelves.

It grows bigger with seconds of wild unfurling, which is the complete opposite of the right one that hangs limply on the floor.

Chloe covers her mouth with her hands. "Oh Lucifer…."

She can't help but think that nothing else but air is allowed to brush such… perfection. The dark floor, the piano; any other touch is blasphemous. These are nothing compared to the thin red lines zigzagging through the feathers. She looks up from the lowest and biggest rows, the trail of blood getting thicker and thicker up to its 'forearm', only blinking when the wing eventually moves; a weak, slow flexion behind Lucifer's shoulder. She assumes that he barely is in control of any movements at this point.

It is a certainty as she sees him wince.

"Why didn't you tell me anything? Let me see!" She stretches her hand, nearly touching his jacket before he catches it.

He starts leaning to his heaviest, wounded-wing side, his other hand clinging on the back of the chair for dear life. Inch by inch, his fingers slide from the leather and his breathing quickens. His eyes closed for too long to be mistaken with blinking, Lucifer shakes his head.

"First of all, I-I'd…" he says before leaning an inch too many to his weakest side.

He opens his eyes on a gasp, trying to regain his balance, the chair balanced between them and crashed to the floor. Chloe reaches for his jacket as Lucifer's fingers slip from her other hand. Too late. Lucifer's left arm brushes backwards on the bar and the shards of glass scattered there. He tries to slow down his fall by holding onto the metallic tube beneath the counter, making even more chairs fall in his wake. Chloe has stayed near the first one, her 'watch out' comment muted in her throat as his backside hits the floor, finally.

Speechless, she can't take her wide eyes off the 'devil'; off his wings either busy smashing more bottles above his head and hair, soon-to-be alcohol-soaked, or flapping through chair legs to free itself; off his hand still holding onto this metallic tube like it would change something to his current situation.

What makes her blink and move eventually is his unchanging daze when more rivulets of alcohol weave their way through his shirt collar. It is his voice, how it sounds… off. "—I'd better sit down."

It is that piece of glass that has just fallen from his back. It is a thick one, anything but finely crafted like these from his bottles behind the bar. It is stained with blood. Dried blood.

Chloe remembers the car where they had been found, meters away from Lucifer's. She remembers its window, the door bent inward by something. Something big.

She kneels beside him, pulling him forward by the arm despite his groans of protest and takes a look at what she has been suspected for quite a while now. The wide amount of blood from the front side of the wing is the tip of the iceberg, its biggest part deeply embedded on the other side. Well, not as deeply as she feared; there is no exit wound on the front side, of which she is certain after brushing the feathers where the blood looks the thickest. Still… the blow must have been—

She knows, she remembers bits of sensations. The blow had been such that his blood loss had extended to the unwounded side of his wing. And what is left of the glass that had cut through his flesh is enough to split her thoughts in a chaotic maelstrom. It is as big as her hand, which she moves towards the wound. Most of the feathers around it have been torn off and the burned skin along the joint looks like it could tear as well, with just another spasm.

The full knowledge of his state turns her stomach. "Why didn't you say anything?"

He scoffs, the next shiver spreading through his feathers."In case you haven't noticed, we've already shattered enough illusions tonight. No need to shatter anyone's sanity as well."

"To me, Lucifer," Chloe sighs. "You could have told me."

His silence puts more fuel on the fire raging inside her. It makes her sick to her stomach, looking that close to his pain. Even when she lowers her hand to his wrist, she is welcomed by the flames that dance in his eyes. She looks away, then to the pool of alcohol spreading on the floor and that starts soaking the edge of her dress. It is a cool sensation, yet not as much as the weariness weighing on her shoulders.

She pulls on his arm again. "Come on. Get up."

After complaining about how difficult his latest fall has been and his reluctance to walk away from the only part of his penthouse he needed assistance from, Lucifer eventually considers Chloe's alternative – his couch is, if not provided with as much alcohol, far more comfortable to sit on and she can hardly pull him there on her own, wings and all – and nods. Ten minutes later and as many ornaments smashed in his wake or about to, his backside reaches its goal.

"Can you not bump into… everything?" Chloe asks, standing between the other armchairs, pushed off their place by half a meter. "Maybe if you… make the good one disappear?" she adds to his frown.

She feels stupid not to be able to call it by its name. These are just wings, wings she had already seen before. Once.

That one time.

As before, she doesn't catch the trick that makes it vanish from her sight. But it is gone. In a blink, or rather in the wind blowing her hair from her neck. There is that sound again, the one she heard when they were near the bar counter.

A snap.

Her gasp pulls a smile on her face, the first one since their peaceful walk out of the restaurant. She makes eye contact with Lucifer and her delighted response snaps.

He doesn't want her to be here.

He keeps hiding primordial things from her; how he is staring at her, how his lips squeeze his moan shut after the wing has vanished, leaving him breathless on the couch— this is all she is allowed to witness.

"Right, I-I… Be right back," she says with a sharp nod.

Fortunately, her visits at the penthouse these last months hadn't only brought bad memories; she finds everything she needs to take care of his wound in no time, returning quickly to Lucifer who is pressing his cheek on the back of the couch, leaning even more forward when she starts cutting the back of his suit and shirt with a pair of scissors found in the first-aid kit behind the bar.

Complaints mix with his groans. Sure, it is a waste but there is no need to waste them furthermore, as he mutters.

No kidding.

Chloe stays quiet and focused, helping the black fabric of his jacket to slide along his arms.

The smell of blood assaults her nostrils even before she sees the darkest spots on the back of his shirt. Her gaze slides from the stains on his right shoulder to the wing. It is rising through the blue fabric and the one of his suit jacket, yet neither of them have been ripped by its unfurling.

How is that even physically possible? How did he manage to hide the extent of his injuries in plain sight for so long?

She can't help but think of how the blood must have been soaking his clothes, inch by inch. She can't stop her hands from shaking, for all the time it takes to slide new waves of ruined shirt and suit jacket hanging around his hands. His right one that he had placed before him on the couch, disappears with the very last wave.

She won't stop the sigh, not while watching at the bloody froth on half of his back.

Placing the pair of scissors back on the coffee table, she takes the first towel of the pile next to it, his wing spread across the table and further. "So… why didn't you tell me?"

Of telling anything now, Lucifer doesn't seem willing to.

She has to admit, a part of herself is pleased to see him flinch as the towel brushes the least damaged feathers around the wound. The blood turns pink in the bucket of lukewarm water at her feet and the towel moves towards him once more before Lucifer's voice makes the silence heavier.

At first. His tone breaks it, surprisingly soft. "You shouldn't have seen this. All of it."

"Well, too late for that."

"No, it shouldn't-... tonight, it—" He groans and she lets the towel rest on the feathers, just the time for him to catch his breath. The feathers shiver (or something feeling as such) beneath her palm, so strongly that she almost let go of the towel. "It shouldn't have gone this way, not after… you wanted a 'peaceful' date, for once!" he rages. "The Devil's car going up in smoke is hardly relatable in the matter…."

"Oh please!" she exclaims and he turns his head as far as he can without causing additional discomfort, staring at her. "Your 1962 Corvette C1 with a 327 cubic inch V8 motor and chrome borders was hardly 'a car'," she adds, smiling.

His expression frozen thus far in surprise and well-deserved blame from her, starts to melt around his grin, yet gone with the next strokes of the towel along the wing. Still, Chloe breathes a bit easier now that they both reach for each other, for something to endure together. She felt alone for too long tonight.

Wiping off all the blood from his wing will take as much time.

"Plus, the date isn't technically over," she says.

He looks at her once more over wing and shoulder. "Sunrise takes over any date night."

"Not on my schedule. It'll end when we'll both say it does."

For all the time that Chloe is busy cleaning the edges of the wound, she feels his gaze on her, the same vibrancy easing the tension around them. It is not as deep as she first thought; there is more blood in the water than flowing out of the wound, which reveals itself to be half less wide as she feared. With another towel, she dabs at the edges of the 'boomerang'-like hole. The highest, tightest row of feathers spread in her wake to reveal more of his skin, submissive in a 'too self-conscious' body response.

"We could pick it up where we left off."

He moans, louder, his hand balls in a fist on the back of the couch. "And… where's that?"

"Where did 'Lightbringer' come from? You haven't told me."

"You really want to— Ow!"

The shard of glass she just removed from the wound is as big as her middle finger yet looks much smaller in the water now, dancing in circles down to the pit of the bucket. The crimson tornado spreading around it has similarities with ethereal smoke.

Lucifer takes a deep breath, his hand letting go of the leather. "I was about to say 'rub it in', but… on second thought, i-it's… bloody too close to reality."

Chloe wipes the aforesaid blood from the tweezers onto the towel now placed across her knees. "It suits you. That name."

His skepticism arches his eyebrows in her direction, although the fear of another 'rub it in' torture widens his eyes for a second, if he ever would dare to frankly disagree with her.

She shrugs. "It sounds… positive in its way, whether we get its meaning or not."

Like the one that had been close to suffocating her at Javier's restaurant, the following silence covers them both, stretching and stretching again.

Too close to sensitive topics.

Well, she doesn't care at this point.

She cares to trample the silence, to shake it to complete annihilation.

So she waits, more relaxed than she had been for hours, even before a wound that is her fault. Every shard of glass, every bit of burned skin reminds her what he sacrifices for her sake, which choice he was taking away from her.

There is nothing bad about switching roles. Only positive.

"So my siblings told me," he whispers, looking away.

Her chest releases the air stuck in her lungs waiting for him to reply. The tweezers turned several times in her hand, she leans them once more towards the wound. Piddling shadows over so much light. The next shard of glass is more difficult to catch. It's no larger than a fingernail. She must have touched a vein — or the equivalent in angel wings — because fresh blood keeps flowing out the wound and on her fingers.
The third time she cleans it off, Lucifer answers questions she hasn't yet asked him.

"So they wanted to convince themselves. It was better than facing the truth, I guess. That I wasn't… that I'm not like them. Nor will I ever be." His hand slides from the back of the couch, his head leaning to his forearm. "I told you that Michael and I were meant to work as one, but… it's not entirely true. It didn't last, long before my banishment. I-... I did something. It changed everything."

"Eve?"

His laugh is bitter, as anyone would laugh about an old joke heard too often to remember why it was funny in the first place.

"Our relationship didn't help, but no. I-I created. On my own, without his… without anyone's assistance."

By the time that Chloe applies enough pressure to stop the bleeding and lets the tiny shard of glass fall on the folds of her dress, he has stopped talking, his forehead pressed against his arm. His supernatural strength has turned into natural, human weakness: through his eyelids tightly shut, the body hair bristled with tremors, little by little.

She looks at his face, colorless pain beneath dark, disheveled hair. "I thought you were just 'left-handing' God?"

Lucifer opens his eyes, his nose brushing his arm. "He thought the same. Everyone did."

"What did you create? How did you do it?" she asks him, happy to see that the bleeding has stopped.

"I… acted on an impulse," he says, elusive. "Earlier that day, Michael… he couldn't stop harping on about his rank to me, how his task was far more important than mine. The shameful prick's same old speech, but..."

"You felt jealous?"

"They all came to the same conclusion. No, I— Fucking bollocks! That hurts!"

"Sorry. This one is wedged deep. You 'what'?"

The rows of feathers around the wing's middle joint drop their guard with Lucifer's deep breath. "Michael had been put in charge of another creation. A major project. The last one had been the foundations of our hom— of the Silver City."

"Was that the Earth?"

"The constellations. No matter how often they had banged the Big Cosmos, my parents never found it filled enough. As expected, Michael boasted about it: chosen to draw God's plans, it was quite the promotion! For me, it was nothing new. It shouldn't have been." He shakes his head, stopped by another pull of shards out of his skin. "The more I was listening to him, about how he was planning things, about how and when he would make me intervene, the less I felt… confident about it. I had serious doubts. That never happened before; I never questioned anything before that day, but— He was taking the creation the wrong way! He couldn't possibly think that the shape should be created first.

That is not how light works; she can't shine if you don't create her heart before anything else. She needs void — not a bloody prefabricated cell; the void will both surround her and feed her core, helping to build her final shape. Lock it up and the electromagnetic waves won't be able to spread past their source. Not to mention that the core would burn out without getting the chance to see the slightest flash of light from it! Of course, Michael listened to none of that, as you can imagine."

"What did he do?"

"The usual: making a good laugh at my speech; then he was gone. It happened just after."

"What's that?"

"I don't know. I still can't put words to it. I just remembered having felt… something go up in flames within me." He squirms on the couch and she thinks she hurt him with the tweezers until his shoulders drop with his next exhalation. "I didn't lose consciousness, but it felt as such. Anyway, when I… was capable of thinking again, she was right there, in my hands."

"'She'?" Chloe repeats.

"My light."

Lucifer moves his hand on the back of the couch, his palm up to the ceiling and to the artificial light, unwavering from one finger to the other.

"It was perfect. Impossible, but perfect nonetheless. Permanent. You should have seen Michael's face! 'How dare you playing God?!'" he mimics his brother, closing his fist.

So much hate and anger resonates in Lucife's voice, apparently remembering how Michael always sounded while speaking with him.

"What did it have to do with your dad?" Chloe asks, dropping the last shard in the bucket.

"God creates from nothing, He needs no one's support for that. I disobeyed, although no one ever told me not to create on my own. It never occured to anyone that it might… happen. That things could change."

"Not even to God?"

As he falls silent again, she tries to bandage the wound as best she could without hurting the unscathed feathers around it. After a few attempts, she manages to keep everything tightly attached with, she hopes, the lesser discomfort for him. Not a sound has come out of Lucifer for a while, not even following her steps back to the bar counter and the sink behind it where she empties the bucket, filling it once more with lukewarm water.

The bucket splashed with clear liquid, Chloe looks in Lucifer's direction.

He hasn't moved from the couch, his expression hard to read, but somehow out of place, out of all these towels soaked with his blood, on the floor and the back of the couch. His palm has his full attention, again up to the ceiling. His fingers are moving, flexed against piano keys she can neither see nor hear.

This is the kind of vision that pulls rude curiosity out of anyone's boundaries.

"Lucifer?"

He blinks out of his daze and closes his fist, meeting her gaze eventually.

"How did your Da— the rest of your family react?"

Naming God out loud seems too much, not that she could explain it. Maybe because Lucifer's gaze is still looking a bit through her. Or because his torso hasn't risen or fallen for breathable air ever since.

"By saddling me with this radiant nickname, of course," he says, smiling at Chloe as she takes the bucket from the sink.

"It sounds more like a compliment than a 'nickname'."

Lucifer doesn't seem to share her opinion about it, but she doesn't insist. Back on the couch and facing him this time, she soaks the last clean towel with water, rolling it into a ball pressed against the pool of blood on the unwounded side of the wing. Feathers start moving apart, revealing the skin underneath. At this point of the night (or early morning), Chloe still can't tell if this phenomenon is just an extension of Lucifer's reactions to her touch or an individual response from the wing itself. Maybe she better not think too much about it.

Keeping stroking the blood, she sees the tension spreading in his neck nonetheless. "Almost done," she tells him.

The end of the wing slides from the coffee table. It bends towards her bare feet and the bucket. Slowly, Chloe moves the towel along the shaft of one feather.

Lucifer's right hand moves on the couch as well, his little finger brushing the ripped fabric of her dress. "So is our date, I guess."

The towel's course slows down between pink feathers. Chloe smiles at him, wringing the blood in the bucket. "It appears so. I can find many more nicknames for you, though."

He arches an eyebrow at her. "Can you now?"

She folds the towel, nodding. "'Luci' is at the top of my list."

"Amenadiel, you bloody bastard…." he growls. "How dare h—"

"Touchy," Chloe continues with a bright smile, stroking the wide, red line on the lowest feathers.

"Now that's hardly a nick— Ow!"

By pulling the towel back, Chloe has inadvertently pulled off a handful of feathers, their base bent, nearly broken, most likely by the explosion's blow.

Her touch killed them.

But she can't help but brush their dying light with her fingertips, even now. "Guardian angel…."

These were Griffin's words, stupid ones.

She closes her fist on the remains of the so nicknamed angel. No matter how much pressure she applies, to the point of shaking from head to toe, she doesn't feel it.

Death.

He had stood in its way. As he always would for her, even though he is—

"Vulnerable," she croaks, the watery burn in the corner of her eyes quickly blurring Lucifer's concerned expression.

Chloe's smile welcomes more tears than it can carry and breaks around a sob. Her chest rises and falls, from the highest to the lowest point; an empty one, that none of her next breaths could fill.

Empty.

She- she nearly…. He nearly died, because of her. For her.

Once guardian, always guardian, Lucifer closes the gap between them, letting the tears flow on his bruised, yet still solid armor. Chloe nuzzles against his chest, she hugs him back. Or did he hug first? Either way, even after the few scratches on his shoulders following her tremors, Lucifer keeps whispering soothing words to her, his breath as soft as a breeze in her ear.

Like he had been filling void with substance in the beginning of times, he covers hers with the remains of his suit still hanging around his wrists.

He digs the void deeper within her, every time his lips brush her temple.

With one deep breath, Chloe brushes the heat spreading from his skin. By bringing her hands back on his chest, she can weigh the extent of his breathing. Deep, deeper than hers. Fast. She can hold onto his presence.

In the palm of her hand.

She is so close to Lucifer that she can see every stain left by her tears on him. A glimmering path, onto which her lips move, right in the middle of his chest. She tastes the restraints around his throat muscles with the tip of her tongue, squeezed tight and relaxing on her command.

Nothing she can taste or touch seems enough to fill the void, but Lucifer's tongue meets hers without hesitation, challenging the emptiness like never before. Like the word itself wouldn't even exist. It doesn't exist in their tight embrace, between each other's touches.

She pinches his upper lip, breathing in his moan to its fullest, and scratches his skull. It is hard to tell if she climbs on Lucifer's lap on her own initiative or if he pulls her forward and the closest to him, but this is perfect as it should be.

Perfect creation.

His arm encloses her waist, his mouth pressing 'that' spot, right beneath her ear. She rubs her pelvis against his, her movements met with his hard response, still enclosed in tight pants and belt. Chloe pulls on his hair, her face tilted back then forward for another kiss. The base of his neck, his jaw, his lips, parted for her.

For her.

She reaches for his hand, which is close to tearing the fabric of her dress above her thighs; such a thin, vulnerable armor to their eagerness for each other. With one slight pull from her, he fills her silent request, spreading her thighs as she starts unbuckling his belt. Her hand pressed against his navel, she moves it downward, the base of his shaft warm and firm.

A far less warm tidal wave splashes her ankles the next moment. She scratches Lucifer's belly, moving her feet off the floor, staring at the end of the wing that had just knocked the bucket down.

She flinches with Lucifer's annoyed sigh in her neck.

He tilts his head back, eyes tightly shut beneath his frown. "This… 'winged' pump chump is not indicative of my skills, I swear."

Chloe bursts out laughing, even more so when he glares at the wing, flapping a few times to get rid of as much cold water as it can, but only succeeding in creating more chaos around. She gulps, looking at the contents of the first-aid kit on the floor.

Only once she blinks away from the mess, does she realize that she is still on Lucifer's lap. Then, the cold, sharp reality substitutes for the past, ethereal moment.

Looking down, straight to Lucifer's hand cupping the bruise above her right knee, hers leaves his skin. She then looks at his face that has lost its usual complexion through fire and glass; through many details. Here, with the as pale-blue hues turning the night into another morning outside, he looks like he is about to fade as well.

Hands back on the couch, Chloe averts her gaze. "We- You should rest." Seeing him frown, she adds, "We're supposed to meet Griffin in a few hours, and you… you lost a lot of blood."

He stares at her, keeping at doing so even when she leaves his lap. "All right. Join me?" he asks nonetheless.

"I'm good, I-I…." She takes a look at the mess around them. "I'll clean up and… Trixie, she'll wake up in a few hours. And I need to—" She points at her clothes, the pink bandage around her hand. "I mean, look at me…."

Before she can get up, Lucifer catches her by the arm. "Chloe."

She meets his gaze.

"You don't have to go. Just… two more hours? We decide when tonight's over, right?" he adds as she is about to decline his request.

Lips pinched, her eyes are drawn to the wing, still brushing the floor with slow back and forth movements. "Okay."

-xXx-


The hearth's fire sways for a bit, back to voracious combustive waves around the pile of broken feathers Chloe has just thrown into it. She closed the glass door before they all turned dark, her palm covering their death, yet not those embers escaping away from Lucifer's balcony.

She would never have thought that angel wings, a part of them, could be so easily destroyed. But tonight's events had turned her certainties upside down, to say the least.

Still, this looks too easy. God's power looks too piddling from here.

Fragile. Vulnerable.

This is the best way, the only way, to hide what had happened from the rest of the world, first and foremost from Lucifer's staff. Burning these feathers leaves her with an unpleasant feeling, though; she hadn't felt the same about the corpses inside the Mayan temple.

She turns to the bed, to Lucifer's bare back and bandaged wing.

All will be fine now, that is what he said. But she hadn't been far from dragging him to his bedroom, if it wouldn't have been for his stubbornness to walk on his own. But he could lose more blood in the meantime; if not from the wounds, from internal injury. She can't tell how badly injured he has been by the blow, nor how much time he needs alone to fully recover.

She would have already called Amenadiel or Maze if she hadn't lost her phone in the explosion. Both could have kept an eye on him and she could have gone home, to Trixie. She could give him the space and time he needs to heal. Just an hour and she would be back.

She could then look at another Lucifer, far from this too-vulnerable, almost fetal positioned one in ochre sheets, covered by a wrecked wing.

His wing.

She would no longer stare at the cushions pressed against his back, so that he wouldn't roll on the wrong side. She wouldn't be in need of checking his pulse like she is right now.

"Sti'l breathing, Detective," he whispers.

She lowers her hand, rolling her eyes. Crossing her arms on her chest, she flinches with his next words. "Playing doctor is more of a face-to-face game, if you ask me."

"I'm not playing."

"From where I am, you're not lying down either."

Sighing, Chloe walks around the bed, aware of Lucifer's gaze on her when she passed his wing. Once she is facing him, his eyes are closed again. A few seconds later, after which she is still conflicted about what she should or shouldn't do given his state, his mouth twitches.

"The stethoscope is in the last drawer."

"Lucifer—"

"—or you can open my wardrobe and pick a shirt," he keeps whispering in the same tone.

She stares at his shut eyelids for a moment, then sighs at her defeat.

Two hours.

She needs to rest, too. The exhaustion she has kept at bay thus far encircles her muscles as soon as she thinks about lying down with him. It is an invisible snake, weighing down her limbs as she walks to his dressing room, next to the bathroom.

She brushes through the perfectly aligned shirts, her hand stopping on a grey one, then around the black collar of another one. The white ones are the most numerous. She can't tell if the shirt she picks is Armani or Prada, not that it will make any difference. The days, weeks and months she had passed here alone, she never cared about that. She only cared about the color, about touching the same white collar, the same way she did when she had begged him to stay.

Please.

She plays with the buttons, first drawing an invisible line from the first to the last one of them. She had never buttoned up the last one. She had never slept in these shirts. She never slept in his penthouse.

Alone, until the early hours.

No nocturnal gusts of wind ever lulled to sleep the void he had left.

You surely are the only person I know who can bring light into darkness.

It's gonna be months from now.

Chloe throws the shirt on the floor, her chest rising and falling with rapid breaths. With a fast kick, it disappears in the darkest spot of Lucifer's closet. Turning around, it takes her a long minute to reach for the zipper in the back of her dress, her hands still shaking. But she eventually succeeds at it, the purple fabric falling around her bare feet.

Picking up one of his common, black tee-shirts on the upper shelf takes a matter of seconds.

A neutral cotton, without promise.

This will do.

She walks back to the bedroom, looking instantly for Lucifer, welcomed with the cutest sight. Half of his face is trying to 'melt' into the pillow, although she still sees his partly open mouth, his breathing closer to snorings than quiet exhalations at this point.

Chloe lies beside him, closing the gap so as to only leave a tiny space between both their faces. His wing moves towards her, brushing her ankle. Holding her breath, she gazes at its next move: up to her calf, soft and heavy, rising and falling around her legs with Lucifer's steady breathing.

The feathers are warm; she never noticed. Not even when she had been removing shards of glass from them.

It is more than that. This doesn't feel like any sort of heat she had ever felt before. Human skin doesn't spread the same heat, nor do flames.

They feel like the sun. Like the very first rays of the morning pushed through an open window.

These feel like the sun right after Lucifer created it.

My Light.

Digging her toes through the wing, Chloe lifts one hand to another kind of heat, between Lucifer's ribs. She guides his next breath, her palm against his chest, his heart within her reach.

The first snore wins her smile, going wider with the next and the curl falling before his shut eyes. "You groan as you snore."

His eyelashes flutter at the insult: brown, unfocused annoyance staring back at her. "Don't turn'the tables on me…."

"Touchy devil."

His peaceful expression changes with his chuckle, the tip of his nose lost in the pillow. "If tha'would be the case, I'd wond'r what's wrong withmy'shirts."

Chloe reaches for the collar of the tee-shirt, her index finger hooping its edge as she keeps staring at his drowsy profile. "Lucifer?" she eventually asks, his snorings petering out for a few minutes.

A very slight shiver tenses the skin between his eyebrows. "-mhm?"

"What John told you, about being positive… Maybe we shouldn't stop it at small talks. We could try to…." She takes a deep breath, her fingernails scratching the inside of the collar. "…—to make a list?"

His frown is so discreet that she thinks she imagined it until his confusion bows his slow breathing on her cheek. "L'st?"

"Focused on the positive parts, yes. It could help."

With her left hand, she looks for his, her thumb moving back and forth against his palm.

"It could help me…" she whispers.

As an answer, Lucifer swallows a snore, his nod imperceptible.

Their hands intertwined, Chloe's heartbeats intertwine with his as well.

She closes her eyes on the weight of his arm around her waist; a solid substance fixed in the moment and one that wouldn't disappear as soon as she would open them again. They will survive to the void, the one within her mind digging more space in her train of thoughts until the very last one of the list.

A pleasant thought that one.

He snores twice as much louder than she ever will.


NOTES :

Well, obviously I'm not specialized in physics and all, but I do my research so that Lucifer's first creation sounds… realistic. I hope it sounds as such for you all, too :)
This chapter had been a pain in the ass to write as the two previous ones, but I don't regret a-ny-thing!

A big thank you for my yoda-shadow-support Lilli & Kathleen's super quick corrections on this translation. You both rock! Lots of hugs :3

As always,
A review is highly appreciated if you had a good time reading the ff thus far.

Next chapter asap! (don't hesitate to follow me on twitter for further updates news - and snippets : bebec_rebecca)