She feels warm. Comfortable. Cosy even. She nestles in deeper, content. But something just doesn't feel like this is right –
It all comes back to her in a flash.
She sits bolt upright, breathing wildly, with a feeling horribly like panic constricting her chest. Her hair tumbles around her shoulders in mad frizzy curls, the way it does when she lets it air dry without attempting to tame it in any way first. She's wearing one of her old shirts and a pair of baggy sweats and she feels grateful, not for the first time, that Lucifer let her go back to her old apartment to pick up some of her stuff – like much needed clothes – that night on Halloween.
She's in the bedroom of the tiny house she's been living in with Meg, and Lucifer is perched awkwardly on the back of the rickety wooden chair across the room.
She raises an eyebrow. "You sit really weird, you know that?"
"You're incredibly stupid, you know that?" he replies, mimicking her tone. He looks pissed. His vessel's face is starting to peel again, like it does when he exerts his full power, and it doesn't exactly soften his overall expression.
She ignores the scathing comment as she swings her legs out of the bed to sit facing him. She swallows; her throat feels raw. "The bridge…"
"You were half-drowned. Almost dead by the time I got to you," he remarks pointedly, his eyes still angry. "You interrupted my work."
"Christ, sorry for dying," she mutters darkly. "I didn't ask you to save me." He frowns at that, because she knows as well as he does that his plans are fucked if she bites the dust. "How did you even find me?"
He cocks his head, still frowning, like she should know. "You prayed for me."
"No I di –" she cuts off, remembering the thoughts of him that flashed through her mind before she blacked out. "Wait. You can hear it when I think your name?"
"And any associated thoughts."
Well, that's really freakin' creepy, Kayla thinks, feeling suddenly self-conscious. She doesn't really think she's ever thought anything that bad about him, except –
"I think you need to stop drinking so much," he adds coolly, one eyebrow raised. She flushes.
Oh. Well. That's kinda embarrassing.
She scrambles to change the subject. "Yeah, well, you can take your pissy face off now. I'm clearly fine." She stands and stretches, her muscles still feeling a bit achy from being soaked through with icy cold water.
He stands too and moves closer to her, pissy face still very much on. "You defied me," he says in a dangerous tone. "I demanded you stay inside with Meg."
She rolls her eyes, because no matter how often he tries this I'm-big-scary-Satan routine on her he doesn't seem to realise that he can't scare her. It's like a physical impossibility. "Dude, you can't keep me caged in here like some kind of pet," she retorts, not missing the way he grimaces at the word caged. "I need to go out sometimes." He shakes his head, like she's asking for the impossible. She feels like she may as well. "Take me with you. When you go."
His face hardens. "No."
"But –"
"You have literally just proven that you can't even go out for ten minutes without dying."
Kayla scowls, because that's not fair, but she hadn't expected much more. "Fine. Whatever. Go back to work." She reaches out to touch his arm and heal his vessel, but he shrugs her off.
"I just had to use most of my grace to heal you; believe me, you are in no state to heal. Anyway, I have to have a little chat with Meg first." His tone is frosty. When Kayla gives him a questioning look, he returns a hard stare. "She's supposed to keep you safe. That's her job. She failed."
Kayla's very much aware of how Lucifer disciplines his demons. "No," she says, feeling rage rising up inside her. Meg's been the only friend she's had in this new life and in her old one, and she's the only company she's got when Lucifer pisses off, and he wants to take that away from her? When he raises his eyebrows, she goes on, "I won't let you."
He laughs at that. He leans in towards her, his voice a whisper. "You really think you can stop me from doing anything?"
Yeah, she thinks, I'm kinda your powerhouse. But she's just so incredulous that she doesn't even get a say in any of this, when she's practically the reason any of this is happening at all, that her immediate reaction is to swing for him. Hard.
The punch doesn't do anything, except maybe break half of the bones in her hand, but he still looks comically stunned for a split second, before she finds herself pinned against the bedroom wall by her shoulders.
"Let me go," she snarls, as she squirms in his firm grasp. He just looks at her, angry but with a tiny spark of amusement in his eyes.
"You are absolutely infuriating, you know that?" he growls, his face mere millimetres from hers, before he disappears in a flurry of air.
Kayla is left alone, frozen against the wall, with the sound of her heart beating too hard, because honestly, that was kind of thrilling.
She shakes her head and snaps out of it; she is not going there. She crosses the room and curls up on the bed, cradling her sore hand. She worries about Meg.
A waste of emotion apparently, as the demon bursts angrily through the door not ten minutes later. Kayla sits up in surprise. "You're okay?"
"Well, no thanks to you, princess. Thanks for putting my ass on the line." Kayla looks down and she guesses she deserves that, but when she looks back up Meg is smiling. "No, seriously, I mean you're a total bitch for fucking off like that, but –" she pauses, struggling to get the words out, "– I know you said something, did something, I don't know, or I wouldn't be here talking to you. So uh, yeah. Thanks."
Kayla looks at her in disbelief. Meg scuffs the floor with her boot, looking almost bashful. "Meg," she begins carefully, "are you going soft on me?"
Meg grins. "Tell anyone and I'll kill you myself, Lucifer or no Lucifer."
When Lucifer comes back from his various Apocalypse-incurring missions, he usually checks in with his head demons first, organises new plans, sends teams to clear out new towns. Seeing Kayla is last on his list.
Which is why she's stunned when he appears in the bedroom a few hours later, clearly seeing her first.
Their earlier fight is forgotten as she takes in his appearance. He's clutching a silver sword like his life depends on it; his eyes are unfocused. His vessel is wearing even thinner than it had been the night they'd met, and one side of his shirt is drenched in blood. His right arm is scarlet with congealing blood from fingertips to elbow. It's not his.
His expression would be enough alone to tell her something had gone horribly wrong. He looks lost, broken; like he's not entirely sure what just happened or how he got here.
"The blood?" she asks, because she knows he could be pristine with a snap of his fingers if he wanted. He glances down at himself as if he hadn't even noticed it before.
"Gatecrashed a Pagan dinner party," he says in a poor attempt at his usual snarky humour, his entire voice wrapped in disbelief and she knows that's not the full story. She moves closer to him and sees how badly damaged his vessel is: the skin is peeling off his arms and neck as well as his face and the dark circles around his eyes are pitch black. She reaches out to gently touch his arm, not bothered about the blood, intending to heal his vessel. She feels kind of guilty that he had to charge off weakened after healing her, after all. But he twitches away from her knowingly. "No," he mouths hoarsely, that glazed look still in his eyes. He shakes his head and repeats it, stronger this time. "No. Don't."
Kayla knows some bad shit has definitely gone down now, and she's not sure what to do exactly. But the demons can't see him like this, and he came to her for a reason.
She takes a deep breath and ever so gently reaches for his arm again. "I won't," she says, and his arm is like cold marble under her fingers. But after a second he relaxes and his skin becomes pliant; human-feeling, and he allows her to pry the blade out of his clenched fist and slowly guide him towards the bed where he sits down. She places the sword safely on the nightstand.
His eyes still have that distant look as she gently pushes his bloodied shirt off his shoulders and down his arms. She bundles it unceremoniously on the floor. She tugs on the hem of his undershirt, also soaked through with blood, and he's still not looking at her as she pulls his arms above his head so she can remove the garment. His arms are like dead weights as they flop back to his side.
His bare torso is even worse condition than his face; angry welts have broken out right across his chest. There's not much of his vessel left.
She frowns. "Stay here," she instructs, although really she knows he's not in any kind of state to be flying off anywhere. She heads to the bathroom and grabs the basin from under the sink, filling it with water. It's cold, because there's no heating system and there's a blizzard raging outside, but she knows it won't bother him. She slings a couple of towels over her arm and carries the basin of water back to the bedroom where Lucifer hasn't moved from his frozen position.
She sits beside him and places the basin at her feet. She dips the towel into the water and wrings it out, and begins to ever so gently clean the blood from his arm. It's thick and congealed and beginning to dry stubbornly in places, but she persists determinedly, only stopping occasionally to rinse the towel.
She hisses when she sees the condition of his vessel's arm under the blood. Whole chunks of his skin and flesh are missing, and she can see the bone shining through in some places. She tries to ignore it and moves down to his hand, where the blood has begun to cake in between his fingers and around his fingernails.
Lucifer is completely out of it now, not even registering what Kayla's doing. When she takes his palm to turn his hand around, she sends tiny currents of healing energy through her fingertips, wondering if he'll notice. By the time she's washed off all the blood and gently dabbed him dry with the other towel, his vessel is half healed.
Suddenly he jerks, as though waking up suddenly. "Gabriel," he says clearly but with a dark tone. Kayla looks up at his face, surprised. He often talks about his younger brother fondly, reminiscing about memories from eons ago; before he was cast out of Heaven, before the cage. Gabriel is his favourite, the one he misses the most.
"You saw him?" Kayla ventures.
He looks down at her, his eyes clear for the first time since he appeared. "I killed him."
"Oh." Shit, she adds mentally, because she knows he would never do that unless he had another choice, which means whatever happened must've been awful. She can't say anything else, doesn't know what she could possibly even say, so they sit in silence for a long time. She traces circles on his palm, continuing to heal him.
He glances down, taking in what she's doing for the first time. "You didn't have to do that," he says, gesturing to his now blood-free arm and the basin of crimson-tinted water on the floor. Kayla shrugs. Lucifer looks down at his chest and then back to her, eyebrows raised. "I'm half-naked," he remarks, sounding considerably more himself.
Kayla refuses to blush as she meets his gaze. "You stank of Pagan," she retorts, wrinkling her nose. He chuckles at that, and something feels different; there's been a shift in their relationship, and she decides to push it. "Take me with you next time?"
Lucifer contemplates that for a long moment. "Yeah," he says, and he actually smiles, a real smile, not his usual smirk. "Yeah, okay."
