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Lucifer barely remembered the drive back to Lux.
His mind was a battered fog that matched the aching bruises he carried.
“I spent thousands of years in Hell imagining our reunion. Getting my partner back. Getting you back. And now, I… I just thought it would go differently.”
“Yeah. Me too. I thought what we had was real.”
The past-tense was a knife in his heart.
“I was already dealing with the fact that I was in love with the Devil, and then! - ” the brutal slap of her hand on the counter a negation of the words that had come before it.
She had loved him. She had loved him, and then.
What a horrible, loaded word that was. And then Michael. And then truths revealed in the cruelest way. And then she didn’t.
Lucifer stumbled from the garage to his elevator. His body felt heavy and strange.
The penthouse was a mess. He picked his way across the rubble. Lucifer sat on the couch by his balcony and let blind eyes rove over the bits and pieces that had once been a piano. His ribs and shoulders and face throbbed with pain where Michael had beaten him. His hands held the tight ache of the blows he’d delivered in return.
Lucifer couldn’t have cared less about the physical pain.
Light glinted off metal in the wreckage, and he tilted his head, trying to understand what part of his piano he was looking at. One of the hinges, maybe? A bolt for the wires?
He couldn’t figure it out and he sighed, annoyed, forcing his body up off the couch to shamble over and pick the thing up, wanting to know. Wanting something else to focus on.
It was a spent bullet.
“If you didn’t understand the first four times I shot you, I will gladly shoot you again, Michael.”
Lucifer swallowed, hard, and started scanning the ruin for the other three crumpled bullets that must be here somewhere.
His hands shook as he picked up and discarded piece after piece of the fallboard, the body, the keys.
There was blood splattered on the floor from where Michael had stumbled away from him. There had really been… quite a lot of blood.
It was mostly dried, now, but still tacky. It got on Lucifer’s fingers as he moved splintered bits of wood. He wiped them off on his pants.
“Where are you?” he muttered, frustrated as the search turned up nothing. He raked a hand back through his hair and threw a piece of the fallboard over towards the bar in frustration.
He expanded his search; moving over towards the couches, towards the balcony.
There they were. Michael must have been standing in front of the piano when she’d shot him.
Lucifer imagined it. Michael could play that trick well when he wanted to – force his bunched shoulders flat; add silk to his voice. He was an exceptional liar, and Lucifer couldn’t help but wonder how long Chloe had believed him.
He wondered what Chloe had confessed to him, when she’d thought he was Lucifer. What she had said to him when they’d "reunited," and if it had been at all like the hundreds of scenarios Lucifer had imagined when he’d been in Hell. If she had spent those soft and tender moments he’d fantasized about on him.
Venomous anger tore through Lucifer and he clenched his hand, flattening the bullets even further.
Bullets. Like these mattered. They were proof of Chloe’s rejection of Michael, and that was all. They didn’t mean she accepted Lucifer.
Lucifer dropped himself back onto the couch, exhausted. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand and grimaced, smelling the blood on them. He tipped his head back and stared at his reflection on the ceiling. He looked as tired as he felt. His hair in disarray, his shirt stained with his brother’s blood, untucked and torn.
He remembered the way Michael had screamed as Lucifer had mutilated his face.
There was a hollow, aching place inside him where regret should be. Lucifer didn’t feel guilty about doing it, but suspected that he should. He suspected that he would, if he were a better person.
He remembered Amenadiel telling him Michael had been on Earth for days, pretending to be him. Days.
Quite a lot could happen with that much time.
Lucifer turned towards the back of the couch. He curled up his long, long legs and burrowed, hiding in the leather. He rolled the bullets in his fingers, over and over again.
What had Chloe said to him, when she’d thought Michael was Lucifer?
Had she kissed him, told him she loved him?
Days.
What else had Michael taken from him, from her?
Michael hated Lucifer in ways that went beyond restraint. He would take the lie as far as he possibly could, sparing no one. Sparing nothing.
Lucifer would never ask Chloe what she’d done with Michael.
He couldn’t know.
Lucifer buried his face into the crease of a cushion and knew, deep down, that Michael would wield that knowledge like a blade and tell him if he’d… if he’d…
Lucifer swallowed, and hardened his heart against that future blow.
The bullets click, click, clicked in his hand. His bruises echoed his pulse. He could feel each heavy drag of his heart in his tight throat.
Lucifer curled a hand up and thumbed at his eyes, ridding them of the moisture that had accumulated quite against his will.
“I thought what we had was real.”
He wondered, with a bitter kind of humor, if Chloe would run away to Vegas and marry the first distraction she could get her hands on. It’d been his method-of-choice for dealing with that grievous existential bomb.
Lucifer remembered how it had felt, having that rug ripped out from under him.
He’d’ve preferred to Fall again. He imagined it would have hurt less.
Lucifer sighed. The tight press of expensive Italian leather against his face warmed with his breath. It hurt, knowing that Chloe was out there, now, suffering like Lucifer had suffered. He wanted to be with her. He knew he couldn’t.
It had surely been one of Michael’s goals to drive a wedge between him and Chloe, and Lucifer had to admit that his twin had done a rather fantastic job of achieving it.
Lucifer turned onto his back again and regarded his un-marred reflection in the mirrored ceiling above.
He dragged a thumbnail from his forehead across the bridge of his nose, down his other cheek. An echo of the path his knife had taken on his brother’s face.
For a moment, the scratched line showed up on his skin – a small, red imperfection, before he healed.
The knife would scar Michael. There was no taking back what either of them had done.
Lucifer hoped the scar was ugly.
He forced himself up and off of the couch. He striped off his torn, bloodied shirt and let it fall onto the broken piano as he walked by; dropped the bullets off on the bar counter with four small, pleasant sounds.
Piece by piece, he stripped off his clothes as he walked through his penthouse, until he stood naked in the bathroom.
More mirrors. More thoughts to be avoided. He turned on the shower.
The hot water stung his scratched, bruised skin. He winced and, by degrees, relaxed into the spray.
There was a shelf on either side of the shower head, and Lucifer reached for the right-side shelf where he kept his soap. His fingers encountered empty space and he blinked his eyes back open.
The bar of soap was on the left-side shelf, now. It confused him, until he realized it had almost certainly been put there by someone with a weakened right arm.
Lucifer snarled and grabbed it. The familiar, expensive smell of the soap wasn’t comforting now, knowing that Michael had probably used that scent as part of his Lucifer-costume. Knowing that his twin had helped himself to -
Had helped himself to –
Lucifer washed away the salt clinging to the corners of his eyes and the blood clinging to his skin. He lathered and rinsed, working the clumps of dried blood out his hair, working to get his breathing back under control.
He stayed under the hot spray for quite a long time, staring at the tiles while months passed below in Hell.
He wondered if Amenadiel appreciated the hard work Lucifer had put in to get the realm back to running smoothly. He wondered if Amenadiel even noticed, or if he simply took it for granted that Hell had been restored to order.
Lucifer sighed and scrubbed his mouth, knowing that he would have to go back, sooner rather than later. A demonic rebellion was still a threat. Hell still needed a king to keep the people on Earth safe. To keep her safe.
He clenched his hands, hating the need. Hating his circumstances, and knowing there wasn’t an escape from them. Only a reprieve.
Lucifer bit his lip, and swallowed, and nodded, letting the weight of it settle on his shoulders.
He would do what he could to fix what Michael had done to Chloe. His dear Detective. This wasn’t fair to her at all. Not one bit of it fair.
Dimly, he wished that Eve were still around. If anyone could understand what Chloe was going through – being created as a gift for someone else - it was her.
He had no idea where Eve had run off to, though, and the idea of asking Maze to track her down was… unthinkably unkind.
Lucifer switched off the shower. He stood, dripping, for a moment, and then slicked his hands through his hair, casting off some of the excess water. He watched it swirl down the drain with an unexpected sort of empathy.
Lucifer toweled off. He walked through a home that he had spent thousands of years apart from; every step familiar and strange.
He brought a bottle of whiskey and a glass with him to bed, and settled, sitting, against the headboard. Legs crossed before him on his gold sheets, whiskey creating a warm path down his throat as he swallowed, he turned his thoughts to Chloe and the mess Michael had made.
He would do what he could to set things right. Maybe, he could soothe that hurt and get her to see that her origin didn’t matter. It didn’t need to be a manipulation – it could just be… them.
And maybe, if he was lucky, their next reunion – thousands upon thousands of years from now, when he could trust Hell enough to slip topside for a day or two…
Maybe, it could be a second chance.