sixthiterationlogs | won't let the waves wash me away

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won't let the waves wash me away

WHO: Chloe Decker
WHERE: South Villiage Fountain | Town Hall | Hot Springs
WHEN: Beginning February 10th, from the day she arrives to a couple days later
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Nothing, will update if needed

I. THE FOUNTAIN

It's a blessing she long ago learned how to swim in the unpredictable waves of the ocean, because Chloe isn't convinced she wouldn't have drowned just on account of the shock it was to wake up submerged in water. Most of it is a blur now, with clarity arriving only when she is finally pulling herself out, her fingers desperately clinging to the lip of the fountain even as she alternates between gasping for breath and gagging as she forces water out of her lungs. Eventually, she's prone on the ground, eyes staring up into the sky as she tries to force herself to breathe normally, but by then, the fountain-created trauma is now being quickly obscured by general panic, because she has no idea where the hell she is.

Finally finding the strength to push herself onto her knees, she palms wet hair from her face and takes in the uniqueness of her surrounding. This definitely isn't Los Angeles. With her adrenaline waning, she's starting to feel the cold, and the common sense part of her brain is telling her that she needs to get up and get inside, but that small voice is overshadowed by her shock and confusion. Finally, she forces herself to stand up, a bit more wobbly on her feet than she'd like but it's a step in the right direction.

It's then that she feels the weight on her back and she stares down at her shoulder, her forehead wrinkling in confusion as she slips it off of her. "Wha... Why am I wearing a fricking backpack?"

Because that is, of course, the most important question at the moment.

II. TOWN HALL

She's (sort of) clean and dry, and she swapped out her wet creepy scrubs for the equally offensive overalls and undershirt, with the provided coat as an additional layer. Chloe hasn't stayed down for the count long, though; she's already poking around, trying to orient herself to her new surroundings.

Eventually, she finds her way into the town hall, her still somewhat waterlogged hiking boots sucking pathetically against the floor as she rounds into the main room. She's moving slowly, slow enough that her demeanor could be considered timid, but her sharp and narrowed eyes speak to a more confident wariness as she examines the room around her.

"Hello?" Oh, yeah, she's also holding a giant stick she found in the woods, you know, just in case.

III. HOT SPRINGS

Just because she has no idea what's going on doesn't mean she can't take a break. After she's had a little time to settle in and get some more information about the settlement and the surrounding area, Chloe decides to pay a visit to the hot springs. She's been constantly cold, and she feels gross, and a dip in some warm water seems like the least she could do for herself while she tries to grasp what she's going to do next.

Blissfully, it looks like there isn't anyone there when she arrives, especially since she realizes she didn't entirely think through what she was going to wear when she got in the water. Her internal monologue starts a fight between paranoid modesty and practicality and the latter finally wins over, resulting in Chloe depositing everything but her cotton bra and underwear on the rocks before she wades into the water.

She's already starting to feel better once she settles in, letting out a breath as she rests her head against a rock and closes her eyes. This is precisely the kind of respite she needed, although her peace probably is not destined to last for long.

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"I'm here to punish you? Wow."

She takes that entirely the wrong way, of course, crossing her arms in the water and shooting him a cold look. His words are about as far away from assurance as they could possibly get.

"This isn't purgatory. That's ridiculous. Why would purgatory have these?" She raises her arm from the water, gesturing to the band on her wrist. "And supposedly we have powers? I really don't think your dad is behind this."

"That's not what I meant," he huffs out, frustrated that the Detective clearly is jumping to the worst possible explanation when Lucifer is just trying to say that as a result of how important she is, Dad is going out of his way to make sure that he reaps the consequences of that.

Obviously, it's not working.

"He took away my powers. Why wouldn't he distribute them equally to people, in a place where no matter how they use them, they can't escape?" Give them the appearance of free will, with no control or power to get out. It seems plenty obvious to him.

"Then what did you mean, Lucifer? Believe me, I want to be here about as much as you apparently want me here."

And while he's never been particularly good at communicating, she isn't always particularly good at hearing what he's trying to say.

His following explanations are just as unfulfilling, but if he's determined to think his father is behind this, Chloe already knows from experience that there won't be much dissuading him on that fact.

"Fine. He took away all your powers and gave you a new, useless one. That still doesn't explain how he's behind all of this."

"It's a punishment because you're here and not home with your little child and your job that you enjoy so much. Father knows how much I care about you, which means he's punishing me by taking you away from those things and placing you here with me in a place that you clearly don't want to be in," he says, making assumptions, but he is rather good at leaping to them.

As to him being behind it all, he scoffs in disbelief. "He's God," he reminds Chloe. "There's truly nothing that he can't do, if you recall."

Chloe sighs, resisting an exasperated roll of her eyes. Lucifer is frustrating to no end, but any amount of stubborn vulnerability cannot go unrewarded at the risk of him withdrawing all over again.

Especially when it comes to how he feels about her. It is validating, sure, but it helps sometimes to be reminded that he sees her as more than just her partner. She is his friend.

Which is probably something he needs right now, anyway.

"You're right, I don't want to be here." She shifts in the water, moving a little closer to him. Not too close, but enough so he can see the understanding look of compassion on her face. "Obviously neither of us want to be here. But it does mean something to me that I'm not alone."

His fixation on whatever trauma his father imparted on him obviously means he's not going to let this go anytime soon, and while Chloe's priority is getting home to Trixie, she knows Lucifer won't be much help as long as he's obsessing over his father being behind all of it. She has to give him time to let it play out so he can actually be useful in exploring other avenues.

"If your dad is behind this, then we just need a way to outsmart him and find a way home."

Lucifer gives a wry laugh, but it's not as if it hasn't happened before. "I'm afraid that attempting to outsmart Dad is likely what landed me here in the first place," is his momentarily self-aware confession, because he thinks that helping Cain to break his curse isn't exactly sitting well with dear old Dad up there.

That said, didn't he and Mum manage? To a degree, of course, because it seemed like Dad was barely paying attention.

"Though I do believe that if anyone is going to figure out a way to fight back against the almighty, it would be you," he admits, seeing as she does have a tenacity that the blessing probably helped along. It would be very poetic if his father was done in by his own meddling, now wouldn't it?

"I'm not sure if I should take that as a compliment, but okay." Chloe knows she got a good enough head on her shoulders to get them out of some tight corners when need be, but Lucifer really thinks she could outsmart God, he's got another thing coming as far as she's concerned.

Granted, she also doesn't believe in God, so that doesn't help her belief in his apparent faith in her, either.

"Lucifer, what could you have possibly done that would piss your dad off enough that he would do something like this?"

He's not going to go into details about how this wouldn't be the first time that the Detective has been used as a pawn by his father in Lucifer's life, that he'd backed away before because of it. Free will does have a tendency to flee the equation when you consider what his father has done to put the Detective in his path.

Not to mention, how she'd almost been taken out of it to punish him.

"You don't believe me when I tell you the truth and this one isn't entirely my secret to tell," he admits, "let's just say that Dad made a decision years and years ago and I'm trying to undo it."

She nods stiffly, her gaze casting down at the water between them for a moment. Although Chloe has never really grasped Lucifer's complicated relationship with his father, she does understand the damage it can do to try to live up to a parent's impossibly high standards. Although, if the markings on his back were any indication, the similarities between his father and her mother came to a dead halt pretty quickly.

"You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to," she says, looking back up at him. It wasn't so much that she didn't believe him as that it was she didn't entirely understand his metaphors. Nor did she think, even if he never lied to her, he wasn't above bending the truth, either. "But if you think fixing whatever mistake your dad made might help get us out of here, I'm willing to help."

"I think that if I stop trying to fix it and fall in line, we might escape," he says, but the trouble in this is that Lucifer rarely likes to do what he's told in any event and when his father is involved, it only ramps up. Any of his family, really, seeing as he's not about to take orders from Amenadiel so keenly, either.

He lets out a mild huff, beginning to wish that he'd never agreed to help Pierce. "Besides, the person I was trying to help isn't here, so it's all rather moot. I suppose serving out the punishment is all that's left."

"Wait, so you're saying the way you want to retaliate against your father and get us out of here is... By doing exactly what he wants you to?"

Sometimes, she just does not understand his thought process. Well, most of the time, actually. He swings back and forth so often that sometimes she feels like she's getting whiplash, and it's impossible to keep up with him. Somehow, though, she keeps hanging on, and Chloe isn't even sure why. Or, at least, she's not anywhere near the point she needs to be in order to accept it.

He opens his mouth to counter with a witty, well-put together argument as to why the Detective is so absolutely wrong, but the trouble is that when she puts it like that...

"You don't have to make it sound so defeatist," he complains, making a face, because what choice does he have? If he rebels against Dad, then he's surely in for more punishment, but if he simply goes along and withstands his punishment, then he's nothing more than a plaything.

"What do you suggest, then? How do I fight Dad's wrath without earning more of it?"

"You're asking me? How to fight against your dad's wrath?"

There is a long list of reasons why she's the worst person to pose such a question to, the primary of those reasons being she honestly does not understand why he's chosen to hold so tightly to this metaphor for so long. Chloe has her own daddy issues, but they are nowhere near what Lucifer has to deal with. She adored her dad.

"You know, maybe you are just looking at this all wrong. If your dad is behind this--and I'm not saying he is, but--maybe he thinks you'll take something from all of this. Maybe there's a lesson in it, somewhere." She frowns, unsure as to why she's going along with any of this, but balancing Lucifer's bizarre familial drama while puzzling a way through a mystery has kind of become her standard way of life since he came along. "If we find out more about this place, maybe you'll figure it out. And then maybe we'll find a way home."

"He did send you directly into my path!" Lucifer's heated response seems plenty logical when he puts it that way. "Perhaps he means for me to listen to you on this subject." Only on this, of course, because for Lucifer to confess that he somehow needs advice in others simply doesn't happen.

After all, that would imply that he needs other help.

It's a ridiculous notion and he won't have any of it. Still, the Detective doesn't sound like she's completely off the mark. "A lesson, you say?" he muses. "I suppose there is a certain logic in that."

"Right."

She does her best not to roll her eyes and decides against questioning what on Earth he means by her being put in his path. Somehow she always ends up on the weird side of Lucifer's family drama, and she really, really doesn't want to be.

"Maybe we should look around together. You know, bounce some ideas around, see if we can figure it out now that we've met up." At the end of the day, he does make her a better detective, and having him on her side is always better than not. Plus, it means she's not alone, which helps lift a weight off her heart.

"That does mean getting up from the hot springs," he points out, and that would be a terrible shame, yet the Detective's suggestion that they begin looking around is a rather good one. After all, why sit there and be useless when he can be so very productive?

He pushes at the rocks to get out, letting the water stream down his body, feeling rather delighted about getting to show off as well, taking his time to fetch his clothing. "Shall we?"

Chloe does watch him stand up and hate every part of herself for doing it, so she makes sure to tack on a theatrical roll of her eyes before standing up to join him.

"I guess we shall," she says, mimicking his accent playfully as she grabs her clothes and pulls them on as quickly as humanly possible. Even though she's soaking wet and she's pretty sure she's going to live to regret it. "Any suggestions on where to start?"

Well, well, well, it seems the Detective isn't immune to quite all of his charms, which does have the benefit of making Lucifer extra smug. He doesn't milk it, though, both because that would be terribly crass and because he wants to ensure he doesn't appear like he's deliberately seeking out validation.

"Well, I always find a search is best with a drink in hand, so perhaps back to mine for a nip of something?" he suggests.

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won't let the waves wash me away

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