A/N: Hello! This chapter turned out quite long so I've split it into two. Also thank you to you guys who are following this story, you're all awesome *throws cookies*

Kansas burns. Florida floods. The president declares the drought in Arizona a state of emergency.

Every few weeks, Lucifer leaves for a new city, a new state, a new target, and devastation ensues.

Kayla misses it all. She's left behind because apparently it's all "too dangerous" for her "weak human form" and that is not something she takes well. At all.

In between sieges, Lucifer takes her to various desolate towns under demon control. They'll spend a week there, maybe two, and then Lucifer leaves. When he returns, they move again.

While he's gone, Meg is Kayla's bodyguard of sorts, but neither of them is happy about it. Kayla is extremely vocal about the fact that she doesn't need a fucking babysitter, while Meg glowers over missing the action despite being second-in-command.

Lucifer rolls his eyes, and leaves anyway.

This time, they're in a tiny town in north Minnesota. It's the middle of December and when Kayla glances out the window of the kitchen in the tiny house her and Meg have been occupying for the past fortnight, she sees the beginnings of a blizzard coming on. There's already four feet of snow on the ground and the midday temperature is below freezing.

There's no heating system and no firewood, but Kayla doesn't mind. She's become even more accustomed to the cold in the recent weeks.

When Lucifer's around, they concentrate on unlocking the grace inside her. They sit opposite each other, cross-legged, fingers interlinked, just like the first night they met, and she forces the energy to flow into him for hours until she tires out. The first time it happened, Lucifer had frowned at her. "I thought you only slept every few days."

Kayla had yawned in response, curling up on the bed in the motel room of the town they'd been staying in. "That was before you started literally pulling all my energy out of me." Lucifer had started to complain about the pointlessness of human needs or something, and she'd promptly fell asleep while he was mid-sentence.

She'd noticed he was easier on her after that. As the intensity of the sessions has increased, her body has learned to cope. She still needs more sleep than before, but less than the average human.

Lucifer had talked in those first few weeks, talked a lot, about everything and nothing in particular, and Kayla had wondered how long it had been since he'd just talked and someone had listened.

Connecting their grace is easy now, simple. They don't need to think about it. They have a bond now, he says.

That means he doesn't have to stay for long when he comes back. Sometimes he'll just appear, grab her hand, charge up and vanish again. Kayla feels like a fucking battery those days.

During the day when he's gone, she has self-defence training with Meg; gun training and hand-to-hand combat sessions. Guns are pretty new to her, and she'd rather have a knife, but Lucifer insists she be able to deal damage from a distance. She's picking it up reasonably well; faster than Meg expected, but she had pretty low expectations to start with. In Lucifer's absence, though, she finds it difficult to concentrate. She knows she can do better, but it's like her mind is foggy; her body slow and sluggish. She feels like she needs their bond, like some kind of sick addiction, and that's terrifying.

At nights while he's away she doesn't need to sleep so she drinks a lot, partly to pass the time but mostly because she wants to hide from this feeling, to be numb again. Meg often joins her, because there's not much else to do and usually she's the one supplying the whiskey. They either talk about unimportant things or sit in silence, because once when she'd been looking for answers in the bottom of a whiskey bottle Meg had said, "What's the matter Princess? I bet you wanna talk about all your precious little feelings," and Kayla had decided that she definitely didn't.

The alcohol doesn't help, not really. She still feels tired and slow and downright needy; the whiskey just blurs it out. Sometimes it's enough to forget; sometimes it tricks her into thinking it's Lucifer she needs, not the feeling of their connection, and that's worse. It makes her feel trapped and a whole other load of stuff that she very determinedly refuses to think about.

She's just plain sick of it all; this life isn't what she imagined, to put it loosely. She's sick of being left behind. She's sick of demons. She's sick of being watched constantly like they're expecting her to spontaneously combust. She can only hope that if she has to spend all her time training, she has to be training for something right? It would all be meaningless otherwise.

Kayla brings herself back to the present, rubbing her temples where a slight hangover has taken hold. She pulls herself away from the kitchen window and rakes the cupboards for anything edible the previous occupants might have left behind. Meg and Lucifer share the irritating habit of forgetting Kayla actually needs to eat.

Meg strides in as Kayla turns away from the cupboard with a handful of protein bars. It's not much, but it'll do, she supposes, as she unwraps one and sits down at the rickety wooden table. Meg sits opposite her. "Why the long face, princess?" she drawls, and Kayla gives her a tiny smile in response. She's grown to like the demon, even if it means putting up with the teasing nickname.

"I'm fucking bored. When was the last time we actually went anywhere? We're pretty much always trapped inside four walls." Lucifer tends to just do his angelic zappy thing to get them to new places and Kayla's horribly bitter about it. It's quicker, yeah, but she misses the road, the travelling. Worse, he commands – fucking commands, like who made him king of the castle? He did, she supposes, but still – that she and Meg stay inside, for "safety" or some shit. The only time they're ever outside, regardless of what town they're in, is for shooting practice, and she's too busy then to fully appreciate it. She's been going stir crazy the past few weeks. "I don't know how you cope, seriously."

"Oh I don't know, it's always a different four walls," Meg smirks, but Kayla's had enough. She pushes her chair back from the table and crosses the room to throw the remains of her protein bar in the trashcan by the back door.

"Whatever, I'm going out." She slides out the door without further preamble as Meg starts to protest, and runs into the blizzard, thankful for the low visibility. She has a half-formed plan in her mind: if she can hotwire a car – and she can, it's one of those things she had to pick up when hitchhiking with creepy truck drivers had gotten extremely irritating – she can drive to the next town and get some air, maybe stop at a diner and get some real food. She'll be back before nightfall, and Lucifer doesn't need to know a thing. Simple. Of course, Meg won't like it, but she can deal with Meg. It's worth it if she can get a few moments of freedom.

She knows she's not really thinking straight, but she's hoping that some time on her own without a town full of demons watching her will help clear her head. Maybe it's what she needs; alcohol clearly isn't working.

Later, when she's behind the wheel of an old Honda with half a tank of gas, her mind wanders back to how road-tripping with the Devil isn't what she expected. She's safe, she supposes, but it isn't enough. She needs to be out there with Lucifer. She feels his absence so strongly now, and it gnaws at her like some twisted version of loneliness.

Kayla squints at the dark road as she leaves the town. She picks a small unobvious road, practically a dirt track, but all roads gotta go somewhere right? It's covered in snow and ice, but the main roads are too risky; Meg will search them first. It's barely afternoon but the snowstorm blocks out most of the daylight; it could be late evening for all she knows. She accelerates, not too concerned about the lack of visibility; she knows no one else will be on the road.

She glimpses a sign for the next town through the flurry of snowflakes. Twelve miles ahead. She can just make out the vague shape of a narrow bridge in front of her; the town will be a few miles ahead on the other side and –

Bridge. Why does she feel like she should be remembering something?

Shit. She brakes but the tires scramble for purchase on the ice-covered ground and it's not enough. Godfuckingdammit. Stupid. Stupid –

It's standard procedure. When the demons clear out a town, they destroy any transport links surrounding it. If the town is tiny enough and unknown enough, it can be enough to wipe it off the map and prevent any untoward interruptions. Cut through railway lines. Block main roads. Burn bridges.

The brakes are screaming in protest as she spins the wheel, trying desperately to slow down.

It doesn't work.

The car skids sideways and thuds hood first against the now-pointless crash barriers at the side of the bridge. Her head slams against the wheel, hard, on impact and she vaguely thinks Lucifer, fuck, as she loses consciousness and the car slides sideways off the end broken bridge into the icy watery depths below.