Chapter Text
Lucifer watches Chloe as she sleeps.
He’s propped up on his side, leaning on his right elbow, the fingers of his left hand toying idly with the hem of the shirt she’s wearing. His shirt. She has a serious case of bed-head and she’s drooling a bit and snoring like an Albanian field wench but still—
She is completely, utterly perfect… and he’s smitten.
He knows the Lucifer from old, the one he’d left behind in Hell, would be horrified by the scene. He would call him pathetic and whipped, drag him kicking and screaming from the bed and toss him into an orgy or two. But he is whipped and when it comes to her, he is a little pathetic, and while he’s certainly not ashamed of the orgies and the debauchery and the many, many sexual escapades he can’t remember… those days are gone.
They’re as much a part of his history as brimstone and ash, and this is where he wants to be—staring at her while she sleeps, like the dullard from that vampire novel Trixie can’t put down.
I need to get a hobby, he thinks desperately.
Just as he realises she’s stopped making that frankly ridiculous noise, the Detective mutters—
“Stop staring at me.”
Her eyes are closed but one corner of her mouth is quirked.
He merely hums in reply, a little rumble that rolls from the back of his throat.
Her voice is thick with sleep as her smile twitches again and she tells him, “go find something better to do.”
There is nothing better to do, his reply burns on the tip of his tongue, you are so beautiful... and you’re finally mine.
He leans in and kisses her instead.
She lets out a little pleased noise, a hum that reverberates against his lips. She’s still sleepy and it takes her a moment to blink into life.
He’s been awake for an hour or so because he always wakes up first; he rarely sleeps through the night. With his mind still aching and fractured from some unspoken trauma, rarely used to be never, and in the mornings when he opens his eyes and realises fire and blood haven’t been searing behind them all night, he knows it’s because she’s lying next to him.
“Merry Christmas, Lucifer,” she husks eventually when they break apart.
Normally, waking up next to someone on Christmas morning was the same to him as any morning. Jesus had been a fine fellow (if a tad boring) but he had never particularly concerned himself with celebrating his birthday.
He’s coming to learn how important Dad’s little science project is to some of these humans, especially the little ones who get showered with gifts for some unknown reason, and so he puts his own reservations aside and croons—
“Merry Christmas, Detective.”
She strokes a hand over his face, the pads of her fingers resting on his mouth.
“We probably have about ten minutes before Trixie barges in here,” she warns.
He smirks, his lips stretching under her fingers and over gleaming white teeth. It’s a wolfish grin, purely predatory, and he registers the way her eyes flicker and darken.
“We can’t,” she reads him like a book, a lovely laugh bubbling from her lips as he leans in and attacks her neck with kisses, his fingers finding that space between her ribs where he knows she’s ticklish, “there’s no time.”
“Oh, I beg to differ, my darling,” he purrs, the grit of his stubble sliding over her throat as he sucks a bloom into her collarbone, “I bet I can get one out of you, at least.”
She rolls her eyes but there’s a smile pulling at her lips because she knows he’s right. He can. There are a great many things he can do with her body and ten minutes. He is the king of desire, after-all.
His deft fingers dance to her shirt and manage to flick two buttons open, but when she laughs again and whispers, “I love you”, he knows there’s something else he needs to do first.
He needs to tell her.
Somehow, bathed in the warm glow of the morning sun and feeling lighter than he’s felt in centuries, saying it back doesn’t seem so scary.
She'd fallen in love with him unconditionally, accepted him when he couldn’t even accept himself, and what is there to be afraid of when someone has that kind of faith?
So he takes a breath, like breathing in shards of glass, and this time, he doesn’t say I know darling or ditto or and me you.
This time, he says—
“I love you too.”
He registers the flicker of surprise that passes over her face, her eyes widening slightly and her lips parting.
“You’ve never said that before,” she whispers and her eyes look a little glassy.
“Forgive me,” he says, “I don’t know what I was so afraid of.”
Her smile is blinding as she leans up and kisses him once more.
“Say it again,” she breathes against his lips.
They curve into a smile against hers.
“I love you, darling.”
She wraps her arms around his neck and pulls him into her.
“That’s the best gift you could ever give me.”
He pulls away at that, his expression turning flat.
“I got you a Mercedes for your birthday."
She gifts him that eyeroll again, shaking her head slightly.
“And I love it,” she says, “as I love the diamond necklace you put in the glove compartment, and the trip to Hawaii for our anniversary. Everything you give me, everything you buy for me, means a lot… but this means everything.”
He frowns, trying to understand, before his attempt is rudely interrupted by one very loud offspring bursting into the room.
“Right on time,” Chloe laughs as Trixie excitedly climbs onto the bed, her arms full of presents she must have swiped from the tree.
Lucifer grunts as her elbow crashes into his side. He shifts so his back is against the headboard and puts some space between them. The movement, as well as the little pinch to his mouth, doesn’t go unnoticed by the Detective and she rolls her eyes again, a smile pulling at her lips.
“Merry Christmas, monkey,” she murmurs with a little ruffle of Trixie's hair.
“Merry Christmas, Mommy!” Trixie chirps happily, wearing frankly ridiculous pyjamas covered in snowmen, “Merry Christmas, Lucifer!”
“Is it?” he replies dryly.
Trixie merely grins, unaffected, and picks up a square box. She turns it over in her hands before she quite literally shoves it into his chest. He accepts it with another grunt, his brow arching.
“What is this?”
“It’s for you, silly,” she says like he’s dumb, “from me. Open it, open it!”
She’s practically bouncing with excitement, making him wonder if she’s gotten into the Christmas cookies her mother did a woeful job of hiding. Or maybe the chocolate cake, he thinks with a shudder, remembering the time he was left alone with her while Chloe had a girls’ night and her spawn bounced off the walls all evening. He’d slumped onto the sofa with an extra-large glass of whiskey after putting her to bed that night.
He thinks of the Detective as his miracle but the Devil tucking in a human child at night? That’s some miracle too.
He has affection for the little urchin—but he also has his limits.
“You got me a gift?” he asks cautiously, a mixture of surprised and bemused.
She’s still beaming at him and holding her hands out so he slowly takes the parcel from her like it’s something precious.
“Why do you sound so shocked?” Chloe laughs, “you got her, like, a hundred.”
He scoffs at the exaggeration, but there are an excessive number of parcels under the tree in the living room. He’d spent far too much time trying to work out what a human child her age would want—and Maze’s suggestion that she was old enough for her own knives wasn’t exactly helpful.
Chloe said she’d wanted a bike for a while, so he got her one of those, and he knew many an acting agent who owed him favours—so meet and greets with the casts of her favourite insufferable CW shows were also in the pipeline.
It still hadn’t seemed like enough so he’d pretty much bought out an entire toy store too.
“You’re a good daddy,” the saleswoman had purred as she punched in some figures on the till. A shudder traced down his spine at the thought.
“Please,” he rolled his eyes, adjusting his cuffs primly, “her father wishes he had my style.”
Of course showing Dan up was an unintended, if very welcome, side effect of his generosity.
“She picked it out herself,” Chloe’s voice interrupts his reverie, light and amused. He glances at her, still a little wary, and then picks at the very poorly wrapped paper.
“Open it!” Trixie squeals again, making him wince, “I promise I’ll go draw in my room and leave you and Mommy alone for a whole hour if you do.”
He raises a brow.
“Quite the negotiator, aren’t we?”
She grins and watches intently as he finally starts to peel the paper off.
“Isn’t this wretched day all about children opening their presents?” he asks the Detective, confused at why her offspring is so eager to give a gift, rather than rip open one of her own like the animals these human spawns are.
Chloe shrugs and smiles, “that’s Trix.”
Selfless to a nauseating degree, he’d once said about her mother, and it appears the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
He can feel the heat of their eyes on him as he finally tears off that dad-awful green wrapping paper and tosses it aside. Chloe predictably picks the scraps up and puts them on the nightstand and then he’s opening a cardboard box and pulling out a… mug.
He holds it out, turning it over in his hands, and Trixie’s started bouncing again. She leans in closer, like she didn’t pick the damn thing out herself, or maybe she’s trying to read his reaction, but he doesn’t know how to react.
There, stamped in bright blue lettering, are the words World’s Best Step-Dad.
Lucifer blinks, totally speechless for perhaps the first time in his very long life.
Trixie must take his silence as a bad thing because she stiffens a little and her voice is sad when she pouts, “you don’t like it.”
“No!” he blurts out because that isn’t the case at all, “no, I like it. I… it’s remarkable…. Wonderful, really.”
Great. Now he’s stammering like an idiot. Once again, he’s a far cry from the Lord of Hell he used to be, and the Detective is smiling warmly next to him.
“Trust me, there were many I thought more fitting for you,” she says and he smirks—he can only imagine, “but she insisted on this one.”
“Yes well, step-devil would be accurate too, I suppose,” he quips and looks at it again, his throat inexplicably dry.
He turns it over in his hands, staring at it like the lettering might slip off the china at any moment and fade away in a cloud of blue smoke. Like it might be taken away from him.
“It’s like Daddy’s,” Trixie elaborates, pointing to it, “so now you both have one.”
She says it like it’s significant he has one too, that he’s as important to her as Daniel is. Maybe he is. Her and her mother have become the most important people in the world to him, after-all.
He still can’t really speak, the words lodging in his throat. He feels a strange warmth pool in his chest, making it ache a little. He’s always thought of children as terrible, taxing burdens, and in many ways, Trixie is. She has the worst timing, always interrupting him and the Detective when he’s between her legs or they’re in the middle of a moment, and she’s always bugging him to help with history projects because he was actually there, and she still contributes nothing to the rent but still—
He can’t stop looking at this bloody mug.
He can’t put it down.
It feels momentous, like he’s holding more than china in his hands. Her trust, her acceptance, her desire to have him in her life—it all moves him… more than he’d care to admit.
Over the years, he’s received every gift under the sun. From sycophantic offerings laced with fire and brimstone when he was King of Hell, to poetry written by a smitten Oscar Wilde, to him and about him. He’s had expensive gifts and thoughtful gifts and even gifts of a sexual nature.
And yet—
This ridiculous mug is somehow his favourite.
Like a lightbulb going off in his head, he suddenly realises why his confession had meant so much to the Detective.
Life isn’t about what you can hold, or what you can buy—it’s about who you choose to spend it with.
“Thank you, Beatrice,” he says sincerely, noticing how surprised she looks at the use of her real name, “I absolutely love it.”
Trixie sends him the most blinding smile he’s ever seen. She looks so pleased, it makes an ache curl through his chest.
Chloe looks happy too, her hand on his arm bringing his attention to her.
“We love you, Lucifer,” she says, her eyes shining like she wants him to know—he is special and he is enough.
Trixie throws her arms around him in a hug and for once, he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t pull away, all that pesky psychological trauma floating to the surface. This time, he puts his arms around her and holds her tight.
He knows he has a place here, with these two girls who mean the world to him, and when Trixie agrees—
“Yeah, we do.”
—he thinks there’s no place he’d rather be.