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Eve walks away.
Maze lets her.
Which really is progress when you think about it, because Maze has been getting hurt her entire cursed life and has almost uniformly responded with knives. But she’s been practicing just feeling things -- being angry and sad and living with it. It’s a tall order for a creature of action, and even more so for someone without a soul. As it turns out, you don’t need one to fall in love. Or to have your heart broken.
She goes to see Linda first.
Linda, who almost lost her baby to the hordes of hell. Who is so shaken up it takes her a full five minutes before she glances away from Charlie, takes in Maze’s face with a frown, and asks what happened.
“Something’s wrong.”
Maze rolls her eyes. “No shit. I just fought a bunch of hell zombies for your angel baby.”
Linda just gives her a knowing look, like Maze is a favorite book she’s already read.
“That’s not it.”
She goes to Lucifer second and finds Chloe.
“He’s gone,” Chloe says, seeming even worse off than Maze.
Maze is pretty new to heartbreak, but from what she’s learned it might be the most powerful torture she’s ever encountered. She gets Chloe home and sits next to her on the couch in the house they used to share, staring straight ahead, not saying a word, until the first weak signs of morning filter through the blinds.
Trixie finds them there. She’s gotten so much taller in the last year, but this is the first time Maze can tell that she’s also older. Her initial delight at seeing Maze fades quickly into concern as she assesses her mother. Maze stands, announcing she’s making breakfast. From the kitchen she watches as Trixie puts an arm around Chloe, pulling her into a hug, and Chloe starts to cry.
Maze doesn’t cry.
Even so, she feels unmoored. For thousands of years Lucifer has been home. In hell, on earth, he was always the place she came back to. Sometimes they’d fight, and one of them would storm off, or get married in Vegas, but they always found their way back to each other.
A while ago it had seemed like Lucifer was going to return to Heaven and leave her behind. When she accused him, he’d seemed shocked at the prospect. “I would never do that,” he promised. They were in this together, raising hell on earth.
It’s a promise he broke.
What is a demon on earth without the devil anyway? Is she Mazikeen, daughter of Lilith? Mazikeen Smith, bounty hunter of humans? Or just Maze… who visits her godson on the weekends to give his mom some much needed rest. Who stops by the station to help out on Chloe’s cases and make sure someone regularly antagonizes Dan. Who hugs Ella. Once. Never again. And lets the cross around her neck burn against her skin.
Eve leaves and Lucifer leaves but Maze stays.
“You used to go on a lot more trips.” Trixie says as Maze teaches her how to flick a throwing star just right, hitting the target they drew behind one of the paintings on Chloe’s wall.
“You trying to get rid of me?” Maze asks, voice flat, but Trixie grins, knowing she’s teasing.
“Nah. I liked the presents, but I like having you here more.”
Still, Maze runs out of local bail jumpers eventually and even Linda encourages her to “get back out there.”
“Charlie and I will be fine,” Linda says, holding the baby to her breast and letting the little sucker go to town, “You’ve got to live your life.”
Maze can almost hear Lucifer making a crack about Linda’s generous “display” and demanding that Charlie share the wealth. She thinks Linda can too because she rolls her eyes before covering back up, then looks down, suddenly melancholy.
Living her life… Living for herself… is at once tremendously exciting and very boring. She misses the constant distraction of Lucifer’s celestial drama, but on the other hand she picks up hobbies. Interests she never knew she had. Or maybe just desperate attempts to fill the void.
She starts rock climbing, scaling boulders to start, then small cliffs. She’s always been strong, a fighter, proving herself in battle century after century, but she’s never really used that strength for herself. On a clear morning, just before dawn, she paddles a kayak off the coast of Donegal and steadily inches herself up Cnoc na Mara with nothing but her hands, a chalk bag, and a pair of shoes she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a little more than a year ago. At the top, mist from the Irish clouds clinging to her skin, she feels like she can breathe.
The thing about being quite possibly the best bounty hunter in the world is that it’s very hard to lose people.
Eve has been gone for one year and eight months. Her first few months were spent travelling Europe, but she seemed to tire of museums and clubs fairly quickly and went on to spend an extensive amount of time in Africa. Last Maze checked she was working with children in Tanzania.
Despite knowing where she is, Maze never goes looking for her. They had a near miss once in Prague, but Maze kept her distance. She wonders how long it takes for a person to figure themself out. Maze is still learning new things about herself every day, like the fact that she apparently has patience.
Charlie is two years old and running circles around Linda and Amenadiel. She facetimes him as she sneaks across the boarder into Canada, a country that can never seem to keep her out, no matter how many times they ban her. As she hangs up, at the front of the line at a Tim Horton’s about to order a disgustingly delicious maple donut, her phone rings again.
“What do you want Decker?” she asks, pointing aggressively at the pastry behind the glass.
“Maze…” Chloe’s voice trails off, as if at a loss for words, “…he’s back.”
Maze hijacks a prop plane and abandons it at the Burbank airport. She’s at Lux in under an hour. She hears the piano before she sees him. Phil Collins, “Against All Odds.” She almost appreciates the irony, but not enough to stop her from punching him in the face as he turns to greet her. He slams against the keys, making a discordant BANG as Chloe and Amenadiel yell her name, pulling her away.
“No,” he says, looking at Maze with eyes still glowing with the red ember fire of the pit, “I deserved that.”
And then, to their immense shock, Maze is hugging him. Lucifer gently wraps his arms around her back, as if she is something breakable.
“I missed you Mazikeen,” he whispers, like it’s a secret, and she clutches him tighter.
She barely lets Lucifer out of her sight for the first two weeks, but eventually he and Decker are gonna bone, with or without her in the room, and as much as she’d like to see that, Linda has her working on “boundaries.” Maze retreats back to her apartment; with her knives and Charlie’s scribbles on the fridge and Trixie’s favorite take-out menu by the phone. If anyone tried to call Eve, she hasn’t heard about it. Maybe it still hurts too much seeing him be in love with somebody else. Maze knows the feeling.
It’s late in the summer. Lucifer and Chloe are on a case with Dan and Ella chipping in. Trixie is at sleep away camp learning to ride horses. Linda and Amenadiel are visiting her mother with the baby who’s nearing three and won’t shut up even when Maze threatens to cut out his tongue. And Maze… Maze is halfway up Half Dome in Yosemite – with ropes this time.
She climbs quickly, at a strong steady pace, muscled back expanding and contracting as she finds each hold and levers herself up. A little winded, she finally pulls herself up over the peak and lies back on the dome, relishing the feel of the cool rock beneath her.
CLICK
The sound of a camera shutter cuts through her tranquility like a knife.
“You delete that, or you take the short way down, asshole.”
“Shoot,” says a high voice that sends a shiver down Maze’s spine, “I can never figure out how to turn the sound off…”
Maze sits up, suddenly buzzing with energy. It can’t be… it’s not…
“Hey Maze.”
Eve stands over her, dark hair haloed in the light from the rising sun. She has freckles Maze doesn’t remember spanning the bridge of her nose, dusting her shoulders. Combined with the spandex shorts and loose-fitting tank top Maze could almost imagine mistaking her for someone else.
Maze gapes, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Eve shrugs, taking a seat next to her, “Getting some perspective.”
They look out on the valley below them. Sequoias and pine.
“It’s beautiful.” Eve says, in that voice that lets you know she means it. That lights her up inside, and everyone else fortunate enough to be around her.
Right now that’s just Maze, and she feels a familiar clench in her chest.
“So you’re just passing through?” Maze asks, warily.
Eve glances over at her, wide brown eyes a little sly.
“Actually I was thinking I might stick around.”
Maze doesn’t react, but she gets the feeling Eve’s got a read on her anyway.
“I’m different, you know,” Maze tells her, not wanting to give in that easily, “I’m not the person I was when you left.”
Eve nods slowly, seriously, “Neither am I.”
Maze turns back to the view. Craggy granite. Sequoias. Pine.
“Good.”
Out of the corner of her eye she catches Eve’s smile, more blinding than the sun over her shoulder. She slips her hand into Maze’s, threading their fingers together.
“Good.”
Eve comes home.
So does Maze.