fandomtownies | The duck pond in the park, Friday afternoon

The boat was back, by joint force of Lucifer and one miss Summer Smith. It was not the biggest problem about this past nightmare to be solved (well, besides in terms of actual square feet), but it was a problem solved.

Octavia didn't want to leave the boat. Lucifer had desperately needed to. Not all day, just... for a bit. So he stopped feeling trapped. So he could spend the day at the Nest, drinking. He'd head back after his shift, and they'd just-- settle back into waiting.

He got about as far as the park.

"What on Earth?" he said, stopping in his tracks at the sight - and sound, so much noise of too many flamingoes flailing in a pond.

"Audrey!" Duke shouted again. As one might recall from when Octavia went missing last summer, repeatedly shouting the name of the person he was looking for was his standard practice.

The flamingoes flapped and squawked at him in return, put out that their peaceful afternoon had been so very rudely interrupted.

It was an utterly useless strategy, but at least it was recognizable.

"Duke?!" Lucifer bellowed. ~~Please let it be Duke.~~

And now he was stalking towards a bunch of angry flamingoes and a madman in a pond. Lovely.

A madman who was slowly realizing he was fucking freezing, but was still determined to search for a woman who simply was not there.

"Audrey! Where are you?!"

It was Duke.

... In a freezing pond, which Lucifer - and his suit - were not jumping in after him.

"Duke!" he yelled sharply. And then-- what? Where to start? ~~'Thank Father you're not dead?'~~ He was silent for five seconds before he settled on, "There's no one else in the park!"

Duke took a deep breath and dunked himself under water for one more look (it wasn't a great look, all that thrashing around he was doing had stirred up a lot of silt, and there wasn't much by way of visibility).

He surfaced again and sagged into the mud at the edge of the pond. "Audrey." It was quieter this time. Faintly despairing. "Where the fuck are you?"

You ever have one of those moments where your heart sinks and you have no idea why, but you also have no bloody idea what to do next?

Lucifer rubbed his forehead and attempted to tap back into the past week or so's worth of proactive steamrolling he was generally so good at.

He stuck his hands in his pockets.

"Not here," he repeated, in the vain hope Duke would actually hear him this time (and the slightly less vain hope he hadn't mysteriously teleported into a Fandom where he was invisible, or something). "What on Earth are you doing? Octavia's going to bloody murder you if you die of a cold after all this."

"The barn was collapsing," Duke said distantly, still slumped in the mud. "I had to get her out. . . ."

He suddenly sat up straight and started patting his pockets. He dug out his phone, but of course it was waterlogged and inoperable. He finally looked back at Lucifer.

"Give me your phone!"

"Not until you get away from the phone-murdering water and the mud, I won't," Lucifer snapped.

Duke twisted in his seat with a faint snarl. "Dammit, Lucifer --"

He cut himself off with a blink. He was yelling at Lucifer. Who he had spent the last two months hoping desperately to get back to, alive and in one piece. And now that he had, all he wanted was to find Audrey and get them both back to Haven, and make sure everyone there was okay. . . .

He barked out a laugh, then curled over himself as the laughter kept coming. It was more than a little tinged with hysteria.

What the fuck even was his life?

"Oh, good, you've broken again," Lucifer said, with a despairing roll of his eyes to the heavens.

He was going to wind up having to carry Duke out of the bloody pond area, wasn't he.

It seemed likely, yes.

Duke dug his hands into his hair, curling in over his knees, still laughing. And starting to shiver.

"Right," Lucifer muttered, rubbed his forehead.

Then the rest of his face for good measure. "Duke, get out of the pond, please."

One more try.

It was worth a shot. But it really only made Duke laugh harder.

His boyfriend was now having to politely request that he stop sitting in the mud.

He'd give it a go in a moment, really he would. First he just had to sit here and marvel in despair a little longer.

His boyfriend had spent two weeks cosplaying as the functional one, and right when the end of that had seemed in sight, well. This.

It was fine.

"Because if you don't, I'm going to have to carry you," Lucifer said, "Since you're not the only one Octavia is going to be murdering if you die of pond scum. Come on."

Octavia.

"Is she okay?!"

Duke scrambled to get up, and slipped, landing on his hands and knees. The flamingoes squawked again, put out at having this human invading their space. One of them pecked at his hair, and he took an angry swipe at it.

"Oh, for the love of--" Lucifer finally deigned to step forward into the mud, reaching for Duke with full intention of lifting the man squarely onto his feet. "She's as fine as she was going to be under the circumstances," he said, "We just finally managed to portal back an hour ago."

"Portal," Duke repeated, like an idiot. His boat was gone, wasn't it. His boat was gone, and Audrey was gone, and Nathan was shot and meteors were landing on Haven, and he was here, moping in a mud puddle like a useless asshole. He made it to his feet and slipped, ending up leaning heavily against Lucifer. "How -- how long --"

He was shivering in earnest now.

Well, his suit was going to wind up the least thing Lucifer sacrificed to this entire debacle, he supposed, as he slipped an arm around Duke's waist to keep him steady.

"Two weeks," he said, "More or less. We spent about a week and a half hoping you'd just turn back up so we wouldn't have to find another sailor, but, well..."

Duke was on enough of a spiral that his first thought at "find another sailor" was they replaced me. He jerked away from Lucifer, then followed the impulse, stomping away pretty much at random. So long as it wasn't into the pond, he could work out an actual plan later.

What...?

Lucifer shoved away the unfortunate flashback to Octavia in those first few days. "Oh, now you can walk?" he called after him. ... and then after he hurried after Duke. "After you ruined my suit?"

Look, he really had been running on fumes for days, and at this point was composed of about 87% of such fumes, or whatever quantity of fumes a star had as it teetered back and forth between going nova.

Suit-bitching fumes, it was.

What a coincidence! Duke was also running on fumes, and from his perspective had just spent an entire day running around trying to prevent a lot of people, including himself, from dying horribly.

The day before that he'd been a teenager, and the day before that he'd spent in a coma thanks to a trouble. And that was all at the end of a very long and trying two months full of madcap and death.

As for his ability to walk, well. He had his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders somewhere in the vicinity of his ears, as he wobbled like a drunk and tried not to shiver himself to pieces. He stopped not terribly far away, squinting at the buildings, and tried to figure out where he could go if he didn't have a boat in the port.

"Duke!" Lucifer called.

Not that he'd needed to. Since Duke appeared to have stopped.

He reached for the man's shoulder. "Where are you going?" he said. "The Rouge is that way."

He pointed helpfully behind him. "In case you'd forgotten where port is."

Duke frowned. “But. Portal. Sailor. You lost her at sea.”

Lucifer eyed him. "No," he said impatiently, "We spent three days looking for a sailor who could take her back to Maryland, and then miss Smith used her portal gun to make a portal big enough that he could just drive or sail or whatever her straight through to Fandom. Honestly."

Luce, some day you'd have to come to terms with your own communication skills.

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