hi ilu so much but can i maybe humbly request a pneumonia/bronchitis lucifer with,,, like minimal emeto? i know it’s ur thing & i love ur writing just!!! idkd jfkfjf
Okay, here it is finally! A little late bc I actually spent this week working instead of lounging at home, but here's a short scene with lung infection!Lucifer and caretaking Chloe. Deckerstar, H/C, coughing, light emeto.
Also THANK YOU <3 <3 a;lsdkjf I love you guys.
‘Lucifer,” she breathed, eyes widening as she froze from panic. “What can I do?”
He cast aside the thick quilt and shakily pushed himself upright, still coughing horribly, to lean over the proffered trash can. One trembling hand reached up to grip the rim, and he lurched forward with a wrenching gag, eyes screwed shut as he threw up for the second time that day.
“Oh,” Chloe closed her own eyes, swallowing against sympathy nausea, still holding the can.
He panted wearily in the aftermath, ragged little gasps as wet with phlegm as the sweat that shone on his pale face. No “bollocks”, no “bloody hell”, not even an apology – words were a waste of the precious resource that was air, one which he still currently struggled to reobtain.
Chloe’s heart hammered beneath her ribs, but she took a shaky little breath herself (feeling a bit guilty as she did so) and summoned calm, pushing aside her discomfort and panic to assess the damage and determine what needed to be done next. Classic Mom slash homicide detective slash human-dating-a-celestial-being MO. As she lowered the trash can and reached out to rub his back, hoping the soothing contact would coerce him into fuller breathing, Chloe forced herself to think logically – his fever was still high, if the heat radiating from beneath the fabric of his shirt was any indication, and his cough, while expectorating the unseemly byproducts of bronchoalveolar infection nicely, was clearly causing him more grief than relief. So, his fever needed brought down, he needed rehydrated, and he needed to rest. She could do this.
“Okay,” she began, staring down at his dark hair as his head hung low. “It’s okay. Do you want me to run you a bath? It might help you feel better, loosen up your chest a little.”
Breathing audibly through serrated airways half caulked, Lucifer leaned wearily over to rest his elbows on his knees – tripod position, easier to breathe that way, although all he wanted to do was collapse backwards and submit to Chloe’s tender mothering. “’s plenty loose as is,” he mumbled, dissolving into a rattling round of dogged coughing, weakly raising a loose fist to catch it.
She frowned, continuing to rub his back, and paused only to reach up and feel his forehead. Clammy, with fresh beads of perspiration from his recent emesis, and too warm to the touch. “Your fever’s still high,” she murmured gravely. “And you need to drink something, babe. Can you keep some water down, do you think?”
“’m not a babe,” corrected Lucifer, eyelids drooping with woozy disorientation. “’m a billion.”
His eyes closed, and Chloe’s widened; she just managed to lower him back against the pillows before he collapsed backwards of his own accord, and his lips parted with a cracked, grateful sigh as her hand rested against his forehead once more, fingers stroking back stray pieces of damp dark hair, a gesture of comfort this time.
She knew she ought to get up, dampen a washcloth for his forehead, get some tea brewing, maybe (probably) call Linda since she couldn’t call human paramedics to come retrieve her Devil. But, seeing Lucifer so unguarded, so vulnerable (if sweating and shivering and wracked with pneumonia) rooted her to the spot, and she gently cupped the side of his face with her cool hand, just taking this extra moment and committing it to memory before continuing into action.
“Yeah,” she agreed, softly. “You’re one in a billion, all right.”