Revenge is a Dish Best Served Muy Caliente

Ella wasn't sure what she was doing.

Ostensibly, she was going to Lux, and she'd been there way too many times during her trials and loss of faith, taking advantage of the unlimited tab that Lucifer had set up for her. That hadn't exactly been a blessing, after all, and maybe in some ways her friend was the Devil on her shoulder or, okay, being all about the verdad, access to an open tab was never a great idea. For tribe nights, they'd stayed away from Lux because it hurt Chloe too much to come. But Ella had spent the better part of a year here dancing her cares away and burying her heart in Tequila, one night stands when it suited her, and even the occasional Molly.

And none of it had come close to healing the hole in her heart that her temporary loss of faith in the Big Guy had torn open.

Yet, she had only been to Lucifer's penthouse twice since she'd known him, and both under the bleakest of circumstances. First had been the weird stabby conga line murders and learning more about the blade before even the LAPD had connected the dots to his big, creepy murder hole. Then, of course, while reeling from Charlotte's murder and the revelation of Pierce's betrayal.

His apartment had never been a place she'd come to for relaxing. If she saw Lucifer socially, then she'd see him on the club floor either after his sets or at the bar. But this was different. Everything was different since he'd left, and once he returned, she knew she'd be mad and hurt, that she'd give him as cold a shoulder as she'd been given. That she could do or understand. But then, nothing about him had seemed right.

She'd noticed the distance in Deckerstar, sure, despite Chloe trying so hard. She'd even seen the weirdness in Lucifer, from his new pains with his still-not-explained injured right arm to his aloofness. Oh, not always, but he was quieter now.

And Ella had no idea what to make of that or why she'd felt so compelled to make him feel better in her lab the other day, when he'd been the one to stomp on her heart and their friendship and cast her aside as if she were nothing. If she hadn't seen him struggle, she probably wouldn't be here at all, but whatever had happened to Lucifer-or, she supposed, actually Michael now that he was dropping the method with her (or possibly adapting for a new character after the better part of a decade)-had been brutal. The injuries obviously pained him and embarrassed him, and she knew.

The precinct all knew.

They just chocked it up to whatever weird stuff came with Lucifer being able to get the truth out of anyone, the same thing. Lucifer was a strong dude. He'd been wiry for a while but seemed bigger even before his return from wherever he'd gone. He wasn't someone who was easy to get the drop on at crime scenes. More than one uni had mentioned it since it seemed so out of place for a guy in a three-piece-suit and a certain fussiness to be a secret badass.

So if something had beaten the shit out of Lucifer enough to leave him permanently injured…wherever he'd been had been bad.

And that struck her heart. He was still her friend, and she knew what it was like to feel someone had truly turned their back on you, even now that she was reconciled with the Big Guy.

Worse, she knew what it was to struggle to move like everyone else, to feel keen eyes on her and pitying stares. Ella had outgrown her crushed leg eventually and with too many surgeries that left her breathless and crying for days at nine, but she had. Lucifer had always been proud, and that clearly hadn't changed.

She understood that much.

Still, he was gonna pay for having left without saying goodbye at all.

Ella just wasn't used to taking the elevator all the way to the penthouse, that was all. She was going to ignore the way her heart was beating too hard and her palms were sweating. It was just Lucifer. Okay, a different, more bitter, totally American (possibly New York?) version, but this was fine.

It wasn't weird.

Not at all.

When the elevator doors slid back, Ella blinked and barely kept herself from dropping her jaw. She expected Lucifer, well, she would have expected the one she'd known, to be sitting at either his bar or his piano or to kill two birds with one stone by drinking at his piano. But the Steinway was covered with a sheet and clearly hadn't been touched in Lucifer's month back.

That made a modicum of sense if his right arm hurt as badly as it seemed like it did. How frustrating must it have been to be a headliner level of talent and now struggle to keep his right arm working just around the station, and she had to get him to talk to Chloe. Chloe would understand. She'd been nice to her about the ghost-thing. She'd understand that wherever Lucifer had been, some big abuse or pain or trouble had knocked the method acting right out of him. But Lucifer was not at his piano or bar.

Instead, as she walked deeper into his penthouse, she found him instead on the balcony and sitting in one of the chairs there, thumbing through a Raymond Chandler paperback with his good hand (now) while speakers secreted somewhere on the veranda played jazz. Which, okay, not Ella's thing, and she had known the Lucifer before to love a good Sinatra tune or something Rat Pack inspired to sing. Dude, had loved Vegas too, after all. But this was more a rapid succession of scales and freeform stuff that must have sounded nice to some but so wasn't her thing.

Hadn't been Lucifer's either.

But she was getting that was a pattern of things now.

The Lucifer before, who had clung to his character, and the Michael now, who seemed broken by horrors he was too scared to share with any of them.

She smiled at him and tried not to look sad, but she was worried. Okay, still pissed about the total disappearing act, but also sad for him. But he wouldn't want that. So cheery, great. Totally her specialty.

Revenge served with a bubbly smile, coming right up.

"Hey you!"

Lucifer-wait would he prefer "Michael" if no one else was around-set his book on his lap and offered a small up turn of his lips as his concession to a smile. It wasn't the beaming smirk he used to have, more like the expression of someone who had forgotten how smiles worked at all, but he was trying, and he was being honest with her (she thought at least), so Ella would take what she could get.

"Ella," he started, and it was going to take a while to get used to her first name coming from his lips. Even longer to acclimate to his flat, American accent. It was just so jarringly raro. "I think it's good to see you."

He stood and she noted at home he was still dressed nicely, but the three-piece-suit had been abandoned in favor of slacks and a cashmere turtleneck, of all things, even if it was still warm in mid-October in L.A.

"Hi, uh," she blanched, and her hand played with her crucifix as a nervous habit. "I should ask which name you prefer, right? I am here to torture you, sure, but I also want you to feel you don't have to put up a front with me if you don't want to. If you do want to do the whole 'Lucifer' thing you can, but 'Michael's' good too."

She shook her head, thinking of how so many hours of reading the Star Wars extended novels and playing Magick: The Gathering had gotten her through being in the hospital. That eventually as an outpatient the ghost who wouldn't leave had brought her comfort too. Whatever helped with the coping was key, and she was hardly one to judge. It wasn't like he was the one cuckoo for cocoa puffs and talking to the dead (well one dead).

He considered her then, and when he regarded her with such dark, unblinking eyes, that much was familiar. "I prefer Michael since you know. It takes a lot more than I thought to make it work at the station. I just…here it's easier not to pretend."

Ella couldn't help but frown at little, even as she dropped her hand from her crucifix. This wasn't good. Whatever had happened to Michael, and she was going to need so much clarification on who he'd been before he'd even come to L.A. in 2011 to start Lux at all, he was clearly invested in keeping up the Lucifer front at work and with Dan and with Chloe. Was he done with it in front of Linda? Surely his own therapist had to know now, not that he'd seen her (tribe night laments had told Ella that much), especially since she was basically an in-law.

It was so freaking confusing.

But she'd figure out how to get him to be honest with Chloe soon. If she showed him that people would still like him as Michael, maybe he could stop putting up fronts at all. Okay so like him after she got even.

"That's good," she said. "Hey, so you can dress down if you want too, wasn't sure. I mean not t that the turtleneck isn't nice and all. Where we are going is casual so I mean, that's why I'm just in jeans and a tee."

Michael glanced down at her shirt and frowned. "Yes, well, how cute then that vampire declaring that 'Mornings suck.' Guess he isn't wrong."

"Are you dissing my wardrobe?"

"Do you hate mine?"

"No, but I mean, it's kind of warm, dude. I figured do you even own jeans even now?"

"Nope," he said, shrugging. "That said, the cartoon t-shirts are kind of fun. I mean, I don't see how anyone higher up at work can take you seriously, but they're amusing enough."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I'm going to add onto my revenge if you keep up. Besides, better festive in cartoons than all in beige. Are you trying to blend into the Assyrian marble with the neutrals?"

Michael frowned and then a stony front fell over him. His eyes narrowed and he held his right up arm as if nothing were bothering him, even though she could see the hint of tremors in his shoulder anyway. Took a faker to know one.

If anyone understood how to pretend everything was just fine when it was utterly jodido, it was Ella.

"Sorry, I-"

Michael shrugged, although his right arm didn't reach as high as his left arm when he did it. "I do."

She blinked, confused. "What?"

"It's deliberate. I have enough eyes on me at the precinct and when I'm at the club trying to keep up appearances. Here, I can just be quiet, and I like that. The beige suits."

"Well," she said, winking up at him. "Vampires and unicorns suit me. Um, not at the same time, unless there are vampire unicorns."

Michael surprised her by laughing, and she'd rarely heard him do it in the last four weeks. "No, there really aren't. Honestly, vampires don't exist. Unicorns used to but they only got one on the ark. Way I heard it, that was Crowley's fault somehow and…"

Ella shook her head ruefully but kept her smile kind and patient. "I get it, after a decade or whatever, I guess the schtick is hard to leave behind all the time. Just do whatever, dude. I…you were always nice when I went off on a nerd rant, even if I knew you had no idea what I was talking about. You can go on a religious one still. I'll get it." Her eyes widened and she snapped her fingers. "Wait, were you like a priest who decided not to get the collar and then went way opposite? That would explain a lot!"

Michael laughed and that startled her too. He laughed so hard that he doubled over and, after a few minutes, stood to face her with tears in the corner of his eyes. "No, Ella, I've been a lot of things in my life, but a priest was never one of them. I guess you could say that when I still had faith in Him, I did serve him in my own way though, so it's not completely out of nowhere to think that."

"Any hints?"

"I defended Him," Michael said, sighing. "I don't do that anymore."

He was unsure if Ella understood how revenge actually worked. Not that his plan was that great so far. It wasn't netting him any damn pleasure, that was for sure. However, Michael had no idea how going to a delightful lecture on the intricacies of forensic accounting and then to a Mexican place that served damn good chile rellenos and a salsa that almost scalded an angelic mouth. Apparently, Ella was too perky for her own good.

As far as revenge plans went, this one had been lacking.

Ella was sipping on a margarita from a glass roughly the size of her head and digging into some fajitas as well as taking her fair share of the extra caliente salsa and chips appetizer. And she was looking at him like his wings were actually out and he was obviously inhuman before her. The forensic scientist was clearly that confused.

And this was why his own revenge plan was terrible. The exhaustion of lying all the time when he'd never done it before was bad enough, but there was something somehow harder about watching Ella catalogue him, while knowing the whole time that she was doing mental math to compare how he was now with how Lucifer had been.

It almost made him feel worse than Chloe Decker's silent suffering or Linda Martin's endless emails and voicemails reminding him to "start sessions again."

As if he'd be as self-indulgent to go through therapy. That was Samael's deal. He just needed…

Well, he wasn't sure yet, but he'd figure it out.

Right now, he bit into his second relleno with gusto and frowned a hint with cheesed dripped onto the cashmere. Ella, ever helpful, grabbed napkins and started rubbing at him. Michael was about to point out that it was blot-not-rub but dropped it. He'd already made her mad about the tee shirt comments, and he honestly did find them endearing if unprofessional, and Ella was obviously upset he'd been engrossed by the lecture. He figured three strikes and he was out, so he let Ella ruin his sweater.

It was all on Samael's black AmEx anyway. He could buy a hundred more tomorrow. Michael was quickly learning after insulting Ella on the patio that he'd prefer to skip the part where she acted like a wounded, kick puppy in front of him.

Eventually, Ella seemed…satisfied was not the word…but at least confident that her rubbing was not going to fix his sweater and sat back in her seat. "I'm sorry. That didn't work at all."

Michael shrugged. "I have others. I…are you okay?"

"My plan failed. I know how to get to, um, Lucifer." She blinked at him and her cheeks flushed. "Sorry, that's no bueno to keep comparing you to you but I'm trying to figure everything out."

"Unfortunately, perfectly natural, and now you know why I don't want to…it's easier trying to explain this one-on-one, I guess. I don't want a million but 'you used to's' or 'why not nows.' It's more than I thought it would be when I came to Los Angeles again."

"Yeah, true, but okay, the you before couldn't concentrate for crap most of the time when I was explaining COD at crime scenes and fidgeted with ADD and I should have known that with how good you've gotten at paperwork this last month that the case study of how the feds took Capone down with his tax returns was going to end up backfiring."

He nodded and sipped his water. There was little point to drinking since he couldn't really feel it. His twin had left him with an excellent collection of top shelf liquor that would have been shame to waste, but the habit was only so comforting. Not being able to actually grow buzzed as a human would mostly defeated trying.

"It was interesting. You know, if we had the time and resources at the LAPD, there's a lot more we could track down on gangs like Los Exes than just buy trying to hit up informants. Money has to get laundered somewhere."

"Does Lux launder?"

Michael laughed. "No, we just charge ridiculous amounts for the wannabe famous and the tourists. You still think I might have been in witness protection or a mafia? Perhaps something from the five burroughs?"

"You sound a little New York, maybe? I can't quite place the accent. It's so not you. Or, well, I guess it is." And that blush was back again, and Michael smiled at that.

Wait, why was he smiling?

It was just Ella being flustered she was often that when she babbled on at work. That was the norm. It wasn't captivating. It just was.

"Not mafia, not cult, and I was not someone's launderer either." He took another chip and dipped it deep in the salsa. The tang of more habaneros and the tiniest trace of ghost peppers hit him like a freight train. He loved it. "What?"

"You used to be a cool ranch guy."

Michael rolled his eyes. "It might help if you keep a score card, there."

She looked down at her lap, and there he'd done it again, kicked a puppy anyway. Actually, he'd have felt better if he'd done that. "Sorry, it's just so much is new."

Michael sighed and reaching out with his good arm, patted her shoulder. "I was being shitty."

"I think I was shitty first. I am trying not to go all investigator on you, but it's hard. It just so night and day, and I guess…I'll try not to make it about before and now. You're here. I'm with Michael, and if you've dropped character, I'm gonna do better. Te lo prometo."

Michael nodded, but languages escaped him. He spoke English and Enochian, but had never traveled widely for obvious reasons nor gifted with desire as his twin had. No. The Voice of the Presence worked in a very different way, and Commands had been something he distinctly refused to draw out in front of Detective Decker at interrogations. It was more powerful than just desiring, came with more consequences. But Spanish, no. Michael had no real experience with it outside of any American or watching movies and TV.

But of course Samael, gifted on top of gifted, had spoken everything.

"You're trying. I just like having a place I can be me." Michael snorted ruefully at that. "Whoever that is." He bit back into his relleno, being careful this time not to drop more cheese on himself, even if his poor sweater was toast. He could maybe keep the blazer safe. "I'll give you something for your devious efforts, though. I was an accountant, for a very long time. If there's an expert in balancing ledgers and judging accounts, trust me, I'm it."

Ella laughed. "Dude really?"

"From my lips to God's ears," he said, his voice tight. Not that Father had listened to him in eons. "What did you think? Everyone at the precinct from the unis to the lieutenant I'm sure have bets going on who I really am. What was yours?"

"You heard it. I did think either you and Amenadiel came from a really bad cult with a dad who corrupted how Christianity is supposed to be or possibly you'd tried seminary and it hadn't stuck for you." Ella giggled madly then, and Michael did not feel his heart stutter then. He did not. "I did not call accountant. What? So you're Michael Demiurgos, accountant from Pittsburgh?"

"I lived once in Philly for a while. Definitely passed through Manhattan. No Pittsburgh though, a guy has to have standards. But yup, just good with numbers. Keeping track of things was what I did for a very long time."

"Then you decided to give it all up, become the Devil, open a night club, and solve crime?"

"I tried to reinvent myself. It doesn't seem to be sticking like it should be," Michael admitted. That much was true and easy to keep track of.

"Well, you certainly got too good a set of pipes to waste on math."

Michael grinned at that. Both of them could sing, as all angels could. Well, perhaps Castiel somehow tended to run flat, but most of them were gifted with angelic pitch and tone. A clarion call that was best for bestowing worship on Father. Michael could have performed had he chosen to, but he didn't want the spotlight on him. Had never wanted that, and he'd had multiple life times' worth of stares from his siblings.

No, blending in was best.

It worked for him.

"Thank you. Honestly, Ella, you have no idea."

She sipped her margarita again and he noted she was almost done with the fishbowl's worth of ounces. "So no hint where you were for six months?"

"It was totally Hell," Michael remarked. Also, true both in Samael's case and in his own. It was just his own personal Hell had not involved endless ash if the rumors were true. Instead, it had just sprung from self-imposed exile…anything to avoid endless stares of curious and pitying eyes. "It's better now, kind of. That's about all there is to say."

Ella pushed her drink away and scowled at him. "Someone hurt you."

Michael sighed and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. "No one ever hurt me as badly as I hurt myself."

"I…so like we could do that."

"Huh?" he asked, genuinely confused about where Ella had jumped track in the conversation.

"Set up a better database. A side project on weekends. You're right that a lot of the crime families and mobs have to funnel their money. We really up the LAPD's database for that, and we could get them where it hurts. See old Al! Technicalities so don't stick when Uncle Sam is looking to collect the Benjamins. I can do the coding but I'm not really a money person. I can do some basic stuff, but if you really were an accountant-"

He ignored the slight dig in her words. Of course, he had a long way to go to establish any trust with Ella, and to be fair, he was still lying to her about both his full identity and well, his species, but it still stung. "I was. Trust, it feels like I've been balancing ledgers just this side of forever."

Ella rolled her eyes. "You can take the man out of the method, but sometimes you just can't take the method out of the man."

"Maybe," he said, noncommittally. "But that might be at least useful. The way you all do things…it could be improved."

"Great, then you can come to my place next weekend. I have a good desktop set up there, tons of monitors for gaming, but it could work for a joint project," she enthused.

Michael beamed back at her, at her utter spirit and spunk. It was infectious. Besides, he was no Samael. He did not bring that extra edge to interrogations-could not-so perhaps if he were to make this increasingly idiotic plan of his work, he needed to find a better way to be of use to the department. "Sounds doable." He sipped his water and smirked. "So, instead of revenge, you managed to come up with a way for us to fight crime as a dynamic duo. Lopez, you fail at vengeance."

"First, if we do that. I'm the Batman and you're the Robin." She stopped and her eyes widened. "Wait, no! You could be Nightwing. I'll concede that much. Anyhoo, why do you think I'm bad at revenge?"

"Because I loved the Capone talk."

Ella grinned even as a loud mariachi band rang out behind him. Michael turned to find most of the wait staff behind him with sparklers stuck in a slice of tres leches cake roughly the size of Ella's head. The staff clapped and feigned as much enthusiasm as 11 dollar an hour before taxes could afford and sang him happy birthday.

Before handing him his cake and settling a very large, very loud sombrero on his head.

"What the fuck?"

Ella laughed and pulled out her cell. "Don't you dare remove it, Michael. This? This is so going viral."

He scowled at her but did as he was told, but only because he still felt bad about the t-shirt remarks and snapping at her earlier. To be fair between his rudeness and Samael's idiocy, they both owed her.

It didn't mean he liked the ambush.

He poked his fork at the cake and frowned at the sparklers. "How am I supposed to eat this? It's going to burn down the restaurant!"

Ella thumbed the bottom of her phone and kept it up close and personal to his humiliation-the cheese glopped sweater, the giant black and silver sparkle sombrero, and the ridiculous flaming desert. "Blow it out maybe?"

"Sparklers?"

"Well, I wouldn't dump water on it!"

Michael huffed and rolled his eyes. Then he took in a deep breath and blew. Perhaps, well, he'd underestimated the strength of Celestial lungs. The sparklers definitely went out, but the force of the blast from his lungs sent icing flying everywhere, including on Ella. She squealed an shoved the errant icing from her eyes and her bangs.

"How did you?" she stumbled and then shook her head. "Never mind, pendejo," and then she reached for a hunk of the cake with her hand. "That was so on purpose and this means war!"

Michael only laughed until the tres leches cake hit him in the cheek, and the food fight was truly on.