betterthanaplan | American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, Wednesday

"Well, that's..."

Lucifer stared up at the poodle, and considered being tactful.

"...Absolutely hideous."

He chose to be Lucifer, instead.

"I know," Duke said, delighted. "I'm pretty sure it does, too. And it doesn't care at all."

Lucifer snorted and looked at him. "So you actually like this?"

"You don't?" Duke asked. "Come on, look at all this crap." Duke turned in a circle, hands out. "It's like 'this is who I am and fuck you if you don't like it.' That's like . . . life goals, man."

"I'd think I'm proof you can do that just fine without resorting to pink and taffeta," Lucifer muttered.

"That's who you are," Duke said, dismissing that with a wave of his hand. "Not who . . . whoever made this giant pink monstrosity is." He nodded to the door. "Shall we check out the rest of the place?"

"All right, we'll see if the rest of this place is as scorching to the eye as the outside," Lucifer said, adjusting his cuffs for a moment, before striding towards the door.

"When we get back to the hotel tonight, we're totally watching some John Waters. 'Scorching to the eye' is, like, Baltimore's thing."

Duke led the way in, buying them both tickets to the full museum. The lobby was white and circular, with a long ramp running up to the main floor away from the reception desk, lined in windows looking out over the harbor. It was a bit of peace for the eyes before they got to the riot of color that made up most of the place's permanent collection.

Lucifer snorted. "Been soaking up Baltimore culture, have we?" he asked, tossing Duke a teasing glance as he walked towards the ramp.

"Maybe a little," Duke said. "Spent a lot of time checking things out over here when I first got to Fandom. Pays to know the locals when you're a smuggler."

"Did that ever actually lead to more work?" Lucifer asked.

"Not this time. Got distracted by Fandom being Fandom pretty fast."

Lucifer chuckled softly. "I suppose I can't blame you for that," he said. "It is... rather Fandom, as recent events have once again borne out."

"So very Fandom, yes," Duke said. "These days, this kind of stuff?" Duke gestured to a mosaic made of glittering beetle wings. "Almost makes this stuff look normal."

Lucifer looked up at the mosaic. "Also ugly," he said, "But many points for effort."

"Pretty sure nothing in here is going to fit your particular aesthetic," Duke said. "I look forward to hearing all about how ugly everything is, though."

Lucifer snorted. "I once had to buy a painting of a clown mermaid for a case," he said. "As long as nothing here will hit quite those depths..."

"Wow." Duke looked impressed. "I really hope not. How did that help with a murder case?"

"It wasn't a murder case," Lucifer said, "It was-- a poisoning."

Duke had seen a bit of those memories. He wasn't going to get into those details further.

"We were trying to get information out of this criminal who used his art gallery for money laundering," he said. "He wouldn't give us information about the antidote until I bought the bloody thing."

"Ah, yes. Money laundering. People deal in the weirdest shit when they're money laundering."

"The thing is, the man really believed in his art," Lucifer said, gesturing at the beetle... thing. "Like, he was desperate for people to buy it for what it was, and not to launder money with."

"His . . . mermaid clowns." Duke nodded slowly. "Well. Takes all sorts."

"Yes, let's just say that's one keepsake I didn't take with me from LA," Lucifer muttered. He looked at Duke. "So where to next?"

Should he bring up the phone call to Octavia? Hm.

"What did you end up doing with it?" Duke asked. He looked around, and led the way over to a particularly cluttered room displaying art from Salvation Mountain.

He was not going to bring up anything about Octavia on his own right now, so if Lucifer wanted to talk about her at all, he was going to have to do it.

"I currently have it stashed in a depot somewhere in one of my homes in LA," Lucifer said. "Say, so I talked to-- oh for Father's sake, not Christian hippies."

Edited 2021-04-07 20:10 (UTC)

"You talked to Christian hippies?" Duke said. He knew that wasn't what Lucifer was going to say.

"Please, I'd rather kill myself," Lucifer muttered, glaring at the everything in this room.

He drew his attention away from the-- everything after a few moments. "I talked to Octavia," he said.

“Oh yeah?” Duke said, very carefully neutral. “How’s the preserve treating her?”

"She's not in the preserve. Actually, she was bartending last night," Lucifer said, and held up a hand before Duke could respond to that. "Turns out this whole thing had little to do with the preserve and everything to do with her boat."

There was no longer anything neutral in Duke’s tone or expression. His face went rapidly from surprise to hurt to anger to confusion before he turned very resolutely back to the art in front of them.

“What do you think drives someone to make stuff like this?”

"Deluded religious fervor, not worth wasting our time on," Lucifer said dismissively. "Either way, apparently she finally found something that let her be stable for all of five minutes, and it involves being on that boat, so she was scared to leave it."

Not exactly what Octavia had said, but the general gist he'd gotten from it.

"Right, yeah, I get that," Duke said, nodding and staring much more intently at a photo of a sign reading "God is love" than said photo deserved. "I've had days like that myself."

He shifted abruptly on his heel and headed to a different part of the exhibit.

Lucifer sighed and stalked after him. "Duke--" he called.

"What, Luce?" Duke asked, sounding tired. "What do you want me to say? It's a boat. It travels. Kind of the point of living on a boat."

"I know. And I told her she should have just said that in the first place, I could've just-- gotten her a parking spot near our hotel."

He reached for Duke's shoulder. "I just," he started.

Settled on, "I'm sorry," instead.

"Yeah." Duke found himself staring at another art piece, this one a complex landscape done in pencil and crayon. "That's what she said, too."

Lucifer sighed.

His hand slid down Duke's shoulder and tried to reach for Duke's hand, instead. "We can go back to looking at the terrible art."

Duke kept staring at the piece in front of him, lacing his fingers with Lucifer's almost absently as he did. It was full of reaching, tentacle-like branches, with strange, flat looking thatches of green. They covered what looked like the ruins of a castle, or maybe a train station.

It was a strange looking place, fantastical and off-putting at the same time. A world taken over by alien plants.

It was, he realized, a lot like how he pictured the Ground must have looked. Before praimfaya part two.

"I've spent a year and a half trying to be anything she needed me to be."

"I know."

Lucifer didn't bother looking at the artwork. Oh, his face was aimed that way, but his eyes had slid to their corners to watch Duke.

"I keep thinking --" He cut himself off and shook his head. "It's stupid."

"No, tell me," Lucifer said, watching his face.

Duke closed his eyes. Took a long breath. Braced himself to feel small.

“I keep thinking —“ His throat locked down. He swallowed and forced himself to say it, even as his voice cracked. “‘How is that not enough.’”

A small shudder ran through him as he lost the battle not to keep couching his feelings in excuses or denials.

“Like I said: it’s stupid. Like she’d stay on the island because I haven’t earned her or something.”

Lucifer gave Duke's fingers a firm squeeze. And-- actually looked at the artwork, this time.

"I think," he said slowly, "that Octavia's never had a partner before and she's having a devil of a time learning how to."

Well. At least this thing wasn't ugly as sin.

"That sometimes you have to find ways to let people know that you choose them, even when it's difficult for you. You do it all the time, you can't help yourself. It's not-- strange feeling like something's off if you don't have it returned. Like it's your fault."

A pause. "It's not, obviously."

Duke huffed softly. “You know, I actually managed to stop for awhile. Turn off the part of me that wants to do anything to make someone else happy. Trick was, not to let anyone in.”

He opened his eyes and flicked a glance at Lucifer, squeezing his hand, then went back to studying the art.

“Then I got to Fandom. Where everyone wears their everything on their sleeve. Sometimes whether we like it or not.”

"Well, everything is debatable," Lucifer said, "But I see your point. Got you on the hook with freebies, did it."

“Guess so, yeah.” Duke sucked in a breath through his teeth. “And then I met her.”

"Heard fragments of that story," Lucifer said, mostly to fill the space while Duke worked his way to-- wherever.

“Thought she was too young for me at first,” Duke said. “I tried really hard to think of her as, like, a little sister or something. But she kept showing up, especially when I was feeling down, and the spark was so clearly there.”

"She has always been persistent, to say the least," Lucifer said, mouth curving. "Honestly, I'd have expected you two to jump each other in week one."

“She’d just turned 21,” Duke said. “And I work very hard not to be creepy.”

He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand.

“I know this isn’t her fault. I know she’s depressed. And working on getting better. But since she came back this summer — it’s like I don’t get anything from her. And I know love isn’t, like, some barter system of even exchanges or anything. I know that.”

No one had ever offered him as much back as he gave them, after all. Not his parents, not Nathan or Evi, not Audrey.

No one but Octavia, when she convinced him love was real.

Duke’s breath shook on his next inhale, and the hand on his neck started picking at the short hairs below his ponytail.

“But — man, I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

Any comments pointing out that the age difference between Lucifer and literally anyone else he'd ever slept with was vastly greater than that died about midway into the rest of what Duke was saying.

Curiously, the rest of it made him feel something almost like fear. He didn't understand that at all. Coupled with it was an impulse to let go of Duke's hand, but he stopped himself from doing so just in time.

The rest of him felt deeply out of his depth, and he was silent as he stared at the picture and groped for anything he'd ever been through that might be helpful.

Duke would not have interpreted Lucifer letting his hand go well just now, no.

“I feel like an asshole saying that,” he said, once it was clear Lucifer wasn’t going to speak yet. “You don’t just break up with someone because they’re depressed.”

And he loved her, and didn’t want to lose her.

The silence lasted just a bit longer.

"You know," Lucifer said at last, sounding unsure, as if he was figuring out every word right before he said it. "You wouldn't have liked me five years ago."

He wasn't sure where he was going with this, yet. Just-- thinking.

Duke looked over at him, surprised.

It was his turn to silently wait, to see where this was going.

"When I decided to stay on Earth, I thought I had it all figured out," Lucifer said. "I would cast off the chains my Father had put on my heart and soul, disdainfully wave my angelic nature out the door, and in doing so, I would be free. Not just of Hell, but of everything--"

He sucked in a breath.

"Of all that everyt-- of all that trauma," he said, switching to-- a more honest word. "So I partied for years and while sometimes one of you humans couldn't help but tug at my heartstrings, most of the time, I didn't care if it hurt anyone. Whatever I wanted to do seemed magnitudes greater than what other people might need from me."

Duke didn't think that sounded so much like someone he wouldn't like. It did sound like someone he'd have just slept with on occasion without worrying about any closer attachments, though.

"So . . . what changed?" he asked, rather than say that out loud. (He didn't like thinking about not feeling . . . attached . . . to Lucifer.) "Was it Chloe?"

Lucifer made a soft noise of affirmation. "Something about her made me want to care more," he said. "See, I hadn't freed myself from my pain, all this-- running around chasing things I wanted, that felt like I needed them, that-- was actually a part of it. Of pain. And self-loathing, obviously, as we found out last year."

He cleared his throat.

"But wanting to care doesn't make you better at it," he said. "I had to learn to see past my pain so I could be a good partner to the Detective. A better friend to-- an alarmingly increasing amount of people. And while I was learning, I hurt them. Quite a bit."

"So . . . I need to be patient with Octavia, because she's still learning." Duke nodded. "Yeah, kinda been doing that for awhile now."

Lucifer sighed. "No," he said. That word came quick.

The rest of it, less so.

"I mean, ideally, you would be patient with her," he said. "But times are never ideal, and it's right to say it when it's unfair to you, no matter how big and sad her eyes might get. You know--" His eyes darted to Duke, then back to the art, "You are an incredible human being. It's like every time someone inflicts pain on you, you come back determined to care more. And you already know I worry-- I worry you're going to snuff yourself out doing it."

"Not every time," Duke said softly. "Not every person."

He watched Lucifer for a very long time, debating whether or not to finish voicing his thoughts out loud. Debating how Lucifer would take it.

If he'd end up scaring the man off. Or revealing more than he meant to.

Finally, he took a deep breath and thought fuck it. If this burned everything down he'd just -- have to deal.

"Just. With the people I love."

"Yes, well. Those can hurt you the worst," Lucifer said quietly.

Perhaps whatever implications laid in Duke's words had simply bounced off of his dense head. Or perhaps they'd gone where they did whenever Octavia was explicit about it, that tiny place deep inside of himself labeled unworthy where pretty declarations went to die.

Whichever it was, he didn't seem rattled. Just thoughtful.

"I'm not saying you should break up with her, to be clear," he said. "Just that I understand, I suppose. Why something like this makes you feel that way."

Edited 2021-04-08 16:33 (UTC)

Well. At least Duke hadn't scared him off.

He looked at the art again.

"What do you think I should do?"

"In case you didn't realize from my prior monologue, I'm generally more on the Octavia end of these kinds of problems," Lucifer pointed out. "But... I do know she knows she did wrong, here. So you should at least talk to her, and..."

And what?

Could he think of anything else that might be helpful?

"And focus more on the things that make you happy that don't revolve around her, I suppose."

Duke huffed softly through his nose. "Saying stuff like that is how you'll end up dragged out on a fishing boat later."

"You know what the really irritating thing is about years of therapy and personal growth?" Lucifer said. "That I would let you. Which is perverse, objectively speaking."

"We could rent a skipjack," Duke said, cheering up with the teasing. "Go oystering."

"Oystering, he says," Lucifer groaned. "Of course I saved us both from a week of hormonal torment on the island only to run straight into your genuine bizarre kinks."

Duke laughed, full-bellied and loud.

(That was good, Lucifer registered in the back of his head. Laughing. And not the desperate kind Duke sometimes fell into.)

"Was this museum not enough for you to get your rocks off?" Lucifer asked him, fighting his mouth's desire to twitch into a smile.

He was unsuccesful.

"Nope," Duke said cheerfully. "Think of this as . . . foreplay."

"Well, you're not getting Jesus's sandy love mountain anywhere near my parsnip," Lucifer informed him.

"There are just so many levels of innuendo to unpack there," Duke said, chuckling. "Okay, we'll move further away from the Christian hippies. Check out the gift shop, maybe."

It was sure to be tacky as all hell.

"You're going to buy things, aren't you," Lucifer said, no question mark involved. "Go on, let's see what you're going to be torturing me with."

And with that, Duke got a playful shove towards next section.

Duke laughed again, less heartily but just as honest, and headed down the hall. Veering playfully over to shove Lucifer back.

American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, Wednesday

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