Devil May Care - Deckerstar

Chapter 1: Memories of a happy yesterday

One hundred and ninety-two days.

That was the time that needed to pass before Lucifer could see Chloe again. Well... if you counted the three days he was left unconscious in the desert, then it was one hundred and ninety-five.

The last memory he could recall of her was secured under lock and key inside his heart. Like a mirage, he was almost able to completely conjure the silhouette of her perfect features, those he had come to learn over the years. The dry and hostile environment he would later learn was California's desert had no effect on his eidetic memory. A creeping, cold fear of it all being a hallucination had wounded its way into his mind, but only days later he would find out she was nothing but the truth. Knowing that his mind didn't create the image of her out of sheer desperation was the epitome of bittersweet.

The six and a half months that followed were nothing short of torture. And he knew torture.

He would then learn the reason why Chloe had erased herself from the map, the reason why she was no longer part of his life as she had once been.

After he left her a voicemail telling her he'd explain everything about him, he went missing. Someone knocked him out and the next thing he knew, he was lying on the hot sand in California's desert, inexplicably in possession of the first sunburn of his very long existence. As weird as waking up all groggy and disoriented in the middle of nowhere might have been, what angered him the most was the pair of white, heavenly, fluffy, angel wings that were sticking out of his back. Something he had never asked for, something he surely didn't want, and something he would be cutting off as soon as he got back to civilization.

Except that things, as always, didn't work out the way he wanted them to.

Upon arrival at the precinct, he saw that Chloe was nowhere to be found. She had taken weeks upon weeks of unused vacation that had piled up over the years and fled the country. Where to? Lucifer couldn't possibly know, no one would tell him. The only one who knew was Daniel —because the urchin had gone with Chloe, too—, and the only thing Daniel had in store for the devil was a shower of crap about what he might have done to scare Chloe away for good.

Having that newly found pressure of being the sole reason why Chloe ran away made him rush into something he otherwise would have never done: showing Daniel proof of the truth.

Even if Dan's reaction to him being the devil had been rather harsh and worthy of regret, a couple of weeks later Lucifer found himself at ease with his rushed decision. After all, the poor man deserved a reasonable explanation why his ex-wife and daughter fled the country, and Lucifer had been able to give it to him. While his life without Chloe was as awful as it could possibly get, having Dan on his side —eventually— made things a lot better.

Lucifer could say he had been taken aback by Daniel's reaction to the existence of divinity. While it did take him a couple of weeks to get himself to interact with Lucifer and Amenadiel the way he used to, once he got over it things went sort of back to normal. He had countless questions about everything and, had they been in any other situation, Lucifer would just have told him to shut up or something. However, since Daniel was the only human he had on his side, he had learnt to treat him with patience.

Their relationship did nothing but evolve from then on. They became partners, as Lucifer's only way to keep working for the LAPD was to have a detective on his side, and together they solved crimes all around LA. And he wouldn't lie, he wouldn't have been able to live through those tough times without Daniel by his side. That, and the knowledge that Chloe would eventually have to come back, as her life and her daughter's life was in Los Angeles.

Over those six months, Lucifer's emotions went for a ride in the most merciless rollercoaster, one that went through all kinds of stages and varietals except for happiness. Or any positive emotion, really. Lucifer's 'good days' might as well be his neutral days. The best he could hope for was neutrality, and if things didn't go the way he wanted them to, then they would just go downhill. Anger, disappointment, sadness, longing, just to mention a few.