Devil in the Details
"Isabelle, so good to finally meet you," Dr. Martin greeted as she opened the door.
"Izzy, please," she insisted, walking in and sitting down on the comfy couch. Everything in the office was neutral-toned and warm, sunlight streaming through the large windows. Dust motes lazed about the air around them, settling on the shelves of books at the back, across the frames of the degrees neatly hung above a clean, bare desk. "It's good meet you too, Dr. Martin."
"Linda. Dr. Martin is far too formal for a friend."
"Are we friends already? Wouldn't that get in the way of patient-doctor confidentiality?"
"I'd hope not," Linda said with a laugh, lines crinkling around her eyes as she settled in her chair across the couch. "You're the mother of Lucifer's child. I'm expecting to spend a lot of time with you pretty soon. Maybe in the next couple weeks?"
"That's what the OBGYN told me last time I went," Izzy replied, rubbing her stomach. "Honestly, I'm kind of over being pregnant. I'm ready to see my ankles and not have to carry this bowling ball under my shirt."
As much as she complained, Izzy had mixed feelings about the pregnancy coming to a close. As much as she wanted her old body back - and all of its previous abilities - a small part of her would miss the flutters of kicks that woke her from naps, or just the peace of knowing she was so connected to another human being in such a profound way. But then she thought about the acid reflux, the back aches, the muscle cramps, and wanted to reach down and pull her daughter out with her bare hands.
Linda smiled, full of good humor.
"I was hoping you'd take me up on the offer to speak. Lucifer says you've been through quite a lot."
A lot was an understatement.
Lucifer had assured Izzy that Dr Martin - Linda - could handle anything that Izzy threw at her. Linda was tried and tested, been through plenty of challenges with Lucifer already. Still, Izzy found it hard to put to words exactly the sequence of events that led her to this sofa. Somehow, saying bluntly that she was imprisoned, experimented upon, liberated, and then immediately thrust into battle with a Greater Demon as old as the Earth itself was a little too much, too soon.
"Yeah it's been hard being so far away from my friends and my family. Doing this alone, it's not what I envisioned for my life," Izzy said with a sigh, immediately hearing the wrong in her statement. "I mean, I'm not alone. Lucifer has been great, and everyone in LA has been so gracious to me - "
"It's alright, Izzy," Linda assured her with an easy gentleness that had to have come from years of experience. "I understand what you're trying to say, and you're not selfish for thinking you're alone. Being removed from your family has to be hard."
"Everything changed overnight," Izzy said, letting the knot in her chest unravel. "One minute I was in the Institute, surrounded by everyone I've known my whole life, and the next I have to run for my life. And my parents? The people who were supposed to love and support me no matter what? They're the ones who hurt me the most."
Izzy still had nightmares about getting taken away, about the burn of the portal as Aldertree forced her through, about the look in her mother's eyes - unflinching and mournful - as she watched her only daughter get dragged off to prison.
"Is that why you were so quick to trust Lucifer? Because of his complicated family dynamics?"
"Lucifer never talks about his family, not with me," Izzy said with a shake of her head. "To be honest, my reasons were selfish. He's the only one who's proven himself capable of protecting me. He fought Lilith for me, stopped a hoard of his own demons because they threatened to hurt me."
"Lucifer is very protective about the things he cares about - the people as well."
Linda was leaned forward in her chair, her head cocked sideways, curious. She didn't speak again, letting Izzy digest her words. It wasn't anything new, nothing Izzy couldn't have deduced from a pattern of previous behavior. But to hear it aloud in combination of their dinner date brought out a whole new squirming feeling.
"Lucifer...he says he's developing feelings for me."
"Really?" Linda asked, shocked. "That's big for him."
"Is it? He flirts so easily with everything and anything that moves. That's how we got here in the first place."
"Flirting is different for Lucifer than the rest of us. He sees it as part of his job, his whole Devil thing. Seduction and desire are his bread and butter. He's meant to tempt people into giving into what they want the most," Linda said, explaining what Izzy was pretty sure she'd already figured out through watching Lucifer these past months. "But feelings? Real, genuine connection? That doesn't come easily to him."
Izzy recalled their first meeting, the one where Lucifer suggested distance and silent support. The Devil she'd met then was closed off, cautious, if not overly-self-involved. What a far cry from the man she cohabitated with now.
"I'm pretty sure it's just the baby."
"What makes you think that?"
Izzy shrugged.
There were no words for her justification, just an insane hope that she wasn't overthinking things, reading subtext where there was none. Because the possibility that Lucifer's feelings might have been genuine? That it wasn't the proximity or the child or any number of other traumas binding them together? Well, that was enough to rattle Izzy's very shaky foundation.
"I'll be honest, I didn't see this coming," Linda said with a sigh. "He's been in love with his partner for years now, and I really thought they'd act on that mutual attraction, but Chloe has been...distant recently and Lucifer's clearly had his eye elsewhere."
Izzy wasn't sure what she expected Linda to feel. Judgement, perhaps, that a girl so young would be tempted by a creature so much older than mortal comprehension. Anger at disrupting a dynamic she had clearly been cultivating. Irritation at being dragged into a situation so far outside of her scope of practice.
What Izzy found instead was a show of calm, genuinely happy support.
"Do you find your sessions turning into relationship drama often?" she asked with a pitched laugh, desperate to break the intense swell of emotion threatening to choke her.
"With Lucifer I've come to expect just about anything," Linda replied lightly, going with the flow. "But what about you?"
"What about me?"
"We've talked a lot about how Lucifer feels and why he feels it, but not about how you feel."
"I'm scared," Izzy admitted, her voice cracking. "Not of Lucifer, but about what this means. I've never had a real relationship before, just flings with creatures that I knew would piss my parents off. I've never had to commit my life to another person, and now it's not just a partner but a baby. It's like I'm having to give up so many parts of me, leaving myself empty and vulnerable and - "
"It's alright, Izzy. Just breathe." A hand reached out and touched her knee, rubbing soothing circles into the hub of her kneecap. "Opening yourself up to love is supposed to be scary."
"I'm a Shadowhunter. I'm not supposed to be scared of something as stupid as feelings."
"Your feelings aren't stupid. They're completely valid. You're allowed to feel that fear, embrace it, even," Linda encouraged, as if such things were easy. "Have you ever tried thinking about the good things that could come to opening yourself up, to leaving that part of you vulnerable?"
"Vulnerabilities get you hurt, they get you killed."
"But, they can also let in something incredible. Love." Linda said the word with wonder, her eyes warm and imploring. "You say that you're giving up parts of yourself, but what if you're not giving up anything at all? What if, instead of losing something, you gain something beautiful and new?"
... - ...
The LAPD precinct was Chloe's second home, but today it felt like a battle ground.
All that glass and metal, those open offices and twisting stairs felt like an obstacle course she could not navigate. Around every corner, Chloe found her hands wandering to her hip where she kept her gun, eyes darting around for threats. Well, one threat in particular. One threat she had purposely called here.
It was all her fault, she reminded herself as nerves got the better of her. Hands shook as she splayed them across her desk. No one had been by to dust in a while, a thin layer gathered on all her personal items. Without her presence in the office, nor Lucifer's, there wasn't much of a point in keeping up appearance. Now that she was back, she expected the cleaning crew to be extra diligent to make up for lost time.
Everyone had greeted her as she walked in that morning, offering words of welcome. Some wanted to know about her trip, others about how Trixie was, a spare few about her missing partner and about how quiet the office was without his noisy presence. As loathe as she was to admit it, Chloe did find the silence unnerving. She normally couldn't hear the generators running over the sound of Lucifer's constant chatter.
Just how much of that was a ruse, she wondered? How much of his verbal vomit was to keep her looking the other way, ignorant to wolf dressed in sheep's clothing? Most of the ridiculous shit he spewed had Chloe rolling her eyes, thinking that Lucifer was nothing more than an eccentric nuisance, and an endearing one at that. Harmless.
Chloe wanted to laugh at her past naïvety.
"Detective!"
She cringed, curling in on herself and sucking in a steeling breath. She knew it would be hard, coming back and seeing Lucifer face to face. She knew that her patience and nerves would be tested.
Still, seeing the once-familiar face of her partner as he sauntered up to her desk, grin firmly in place, cut her to the marrow.
"What a sight for sore eyes you are."
"Hi Lucifer," she said, trying her best to sound as normal as possible, like nothing had changed at all. Her smile took more effort, pulling at her cheeks in all the wrong ways. "Dan said you haven't been around much since I've been gone."
"Yes, well, with you traipsing around the world there wasn't much for me to do here," he explained, cocking his hip against the edge of her desk, comfortable as ever. "Everyone else is so dreadfully boring. So, I took a sabbatical of my own."
"Oh," she replied, her voice jumping an octave. She hadn't expected him to be so forthcoming. "What did you get up to?"
"Haven't you heard?" Dan asked as he strolled up to Chloe's desk, his hand clapping down on Lucifer's shoulder. "Lucifer is going to be a dad."
Something must have shown on her face, her mask slipping for just a moment, because Dan laughed.
"Yeah, that was my initial response too," Dan said with a sigh, commiserating with her. Like he already pitied the kid to be related to Lucifer. If only he knew. "But he's really stepped up, done right by the mother and everything."
"Thank you, Daniel," Lucifer said, looking genuinely touched. He reached into his pocket and thrust something at Dan. "That reminds me, here is that book you lent me on child rearing. Not much information that I had not already found on Google, but a strong effort on your part."
Dan took the book back and rolled his eyes with a lot less heat than he would have three months ago. "Hey, you guys finish the nursery?"
"Barely," Lucifer griped, his expression annoyed. "Why wasn't I warned of the perils of IKEA furniture? Such construction is a special form of torture."
"Yeah, I feel ya buddy. Trixie asked for three bookshelves last year. I damn near set the things on fire out of frustration," Dan commiserated, slapping the book against Lucifer's chest. "Well, I've got some papers to file. Chloe, you and Trixie still on for tomorrow evening?"
"Of course," Chloe replied with a smile, feeling it stretch thin like her nerves. "I'll text you when I get off."
Dan left with a wave, making a bee-line for the archives.
Three months ago, Chloe would have taken being left alone with Lucifer in stride. She would have collapsed back into her desk and ignored him until he eventually could no longer take the silence and disrupted her case work. And she would have ignored the warm feeling sparking low in her belly at the impatient edge to his tone, to the juvenile bounce to his foot, to the way his eyes darted around the office looking for mischief.
Now, when left face to face with the Devil himself, Chloe felt flight-or-fight kick in. She wasn't entirely sure if she could trust herself not to bolt out the office. The only thing keeping her feet planted firmly on the ground was her dedication to the plan.
"What's going on tomorrow evening?" Lucifer asked, curious.
"Family dinner with my mom. A few months away and she's acting like it's ten years," Chloe explained, her eyes darting to and away from his face, unable to bear looking for long without searching for fire and blood. "I'm sure you understand what that's like."
Lucifer cocked his head. "What do you mean?"
"Come on, you're having a baby with some random woman and you haven't met her parents?"
Lucifer's laugh was loud and bright, drawing attention from the entire office.
"Miss Lightwood and I aren't particularly close to our parents. Amenadiel, however, has been surprisingly supportive," he explained, leaning back on his heels. He studied her closely, too closely, searching for something. "You should meet her. I think you'd get on."
Chloe's jaw dropped.
"Meet your baby mama?" Chloe choked, incredulous. She wasn't aware her eyebrows could reach so high. "Are you sure that's a good idea, Lucifer?"
"Why wouldn't it be? You're both very important people in my life. It would be good to know you both get along. Besides, Miss Lightwood has a shortage of friends in the area. Perhaps meeting a new, friendly face would do her some good."
Was Chloe having a stroke?
"You want me to be friends with your baby mama?"
Lucifer grimaced. "Please stop calling her that. It feels cheap, and I happen to have exquisite taste in everything, including my daughter's mother."
Chloe stopped short, her heart stuttering.
"You-you're having a girl."
Images flashed before her eyes of a tiny girl with a halo of dark curls and eyes as red as fire. Something sweet and innocent with a peal of laughter so evil it sent shivers down her spine. Somehow, this child looked like Trixie. And wasn't that a horrific thought - all those memories of Lucifer with Trixie...holding her hand, getting her ice cream, sitting in his car. Her own daughter, precious and perfect, in such close proximity with the Devil himself.
Lucifer clapped his hands together.
"Yes, isn't it exciting? This Devil is going to be a girl dad!" he announced chipperly, pleased as punch. "I'm sure Dad is having a laugh at the situation, something about payback for my womanizing ways."
Chloe felt lightheaded.
"You said it, not me."
"Excuse me, Detective. You've only been back a few hours. Pretty soon to be throwing around such insults," he teased, flirtation edging in his tone.
Somehow, despite everything else, that was what gave her the most disgusting feeling. It wasn't that Lucifer was having a baby, nor that he was the Devil, but that he was having a child with another woman and still felt the need to flirt with her.
Men would always be men, no matter what kind. That made him so much easier to manage.
Chloe put on her bravest game face, her most sincere smile.
"I'd love to meet her, your Miss Lightwood. I'm sure she's great."
In great danger, Chloe's brain screamed. Photos of that poor girl bundled under Lucifer's arm haunted her as much as visions of Lucifer's true face.
"Thank you, Detective. I owe you."
Chloe nodded. She would meet Miss Lightwood, and then she would save her.
