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cecevolume · 4 years

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On The List (Part One)

Prompt from @halfbloodfox: I’m looking for something where Lucifer has to take care of Trixie. Maybe, Decker is stuck at court testifying on a case, Dan is whothefuckknowswhere, Maze is on a hunt and at school Trixie gets hurt or sick. Surprise, Lucifer gets the call. He’s on The List? Since when? During Season 2 or 3, pre 4 nonsense at least. What do you think?

This was...unexpected. And perhaps a little unprecedented.

Just a half hour before, it had been a semi-normal day for he and the detective, dressed in their best--well, not him, but the respect for the court was there--as Chloe waited to be called to testify. Per usual, he tagged along, a charming ace in the hole, just in case.

But then his shirt had started buzzing outside the large double doors; to be more exact, his phone was ringing.

“Lucifer,” Chloe hissed as a clerk eyed them while they passed by, “turn it off vibrate!”

Smiling winningly, he reached for his chest pocket, purring, “An honest mistake, Detective; I assure you, I know proper procedure for the courtroom.” He glanced at the screen, eyebrow raising as a bell of familiarity rang in his head. “Should I know this number?” he asked, turning the screen towards Chloe.

She frowned, taking the phone from him as she murmured, “That’s Trixie’s school.”

“But why--”

Holding up a hand to stop him, she answered, “Hello? Yes, Ms. Hendersen, I’m being brought to testify today. Uh huh. Oh, no, did you try Dan? Of course not. No, no, it’s not a problem; I’ll send Lucifer to pick her up.” She paused for a long time, a muscle ticking in her brow. “That’s a question for him at another time, don’t you think? Uh huh. Yeah, goodbye.”

Tilting his head, Lucifer asked, “Was that Trixie’s lovely school administrator--”

“Don’t. Even. Star,” Chloe growled, handing him back his phone. The door beside them opened just a crack and the DA motioned for her to join them. With a nod, she didn’t spare Lucifer a glance as she moved to the doors. “I need you to pick up Trixie; she threw up in math class. I’ll leave here as soon as I get the okay.” Before she squeezed in the door, she muttered quickly, “Ginger ale--she likes Canada Dry best--for her stomach, some toast or crackers to have in her system. Make sure she takes little sips. This should be done in a couple hours and then I’ll be home.”

“Detective--” he said in alarm, reaching towards her, but the door was already closed. For a moment, he just stood there, wondering two things simultaneously: did Chloe really trust him with her sick offspring and why did the school call his phone?

It hardly mattered now, however, what made sense. Sitting in his Corvette outside an elementary school, he found that he was...uncomfortable. It wasn’t often there was a situation he found himself unable to figure out--in fact, the first hadn’t been until he’d met the detective two years before--yet here he was. Sure, he’d learned how to occupy Trixie, but this was new territory.

How did one pick up a sick child from their school and adequately take care of them?

Taking a deep breath, he got out of his car, striding towards the doors. How hard can it truly be? he wondered, confidence growing the closer he got to the building. If Daniel can do it, of course I’ll be able to.

Following the signs to the “office”--a large, gray room with children’s paintings hanging everywhere, most of the space taken up by a quadruple desk with five women squished side by side at their computers--Lucifer idly took out his handkerchief, wiping his hands as he eyed several of the drawings.

Surprisingly, there were a few that showed a real talent, should they continue honing the craft.

“Hello?” one of the women greeted hesitantly to his back. “Can I help you?”

He turned with a charming grin, noting the immediate softening of all the secretaries’ faces. “Hello, ladies,” he answered, strolling to the desk with his hands in his pockets. “I actually received a call from Debra--Ms. Hendersen, asking that I pick up Beatrice Decker-Espinoza. I know I’m not her parent--”

“Oh, you’re the infamous Lucifer Morningstar!” the first woman cried, nearly tipping her chair backwards as she stood. Holding out a hand, she added, “Trixie is through that door, in the nurse’s office. Karen will go and grab her while you sign her out.” She shoved a clipboard with an attached pen under his nose. “Just her name, your name, why you’re picking her up, and the time.”

Holding the pen, he raised an eyebrow at the woman. That was certainly easy. Did she already know to expect a deal? Or was this her idea of flirting? The memory of Malcolm Graham flashed through his mind and his gaze turned foreboding. “Is it truly that easy to just pluck a child from your facilities?” he demanded, anger burning in his belly.

“Oh, my, you’re right! I do need your picture ID to compare your information to what we have in the system,” she answered quickly, blushing wildly. “I’m so sorry, it’s just that Debra gave such a...thorough description of you, I completely forgot!”

He slowly reached for his wallet, pulling out his license and handing it to her. “Why would a primary school have my information?”

“Well, after the...kidnapping,” she said slowly, peeking a quick glance at one of the other women, who dropped her head, “Ms. Decker updated the people on Trixie’s approved list. We aren’t supposed to release her to anyone other than her parents, her grandparents, or you. There is a Mazikeen Smith on here, too, but that’s on a call ahead basis. But if Ms. Decker and Mr. Espinoza aren’t available, we’re to contact you first.”

Blinking in shock, he made a noncommittal noise in his throat, taking back his ID and signing out the urchin. “I, uh, thank you for your diligence,” he murmured, spinning on his foot to stride towards the chairs lining the windowed walls. He was allowed to just come to the school and pick up Chloe’s child whenever he felt like? No permission, no questions, no call aheads necessary?

Chloe Decker trusted the life of her offspring in the hands of the Devil?

“Lucifer?” a small voice whined from behind him, making him turn back around.

Straightening his jacket and cuffs, he answered, “Your mother has been held up in court today, Spawn. So she sent me with clear instructions.” He’d already called Patrick at LUX to provide the Canada Dry and crackers. “I’ll be taking care of you this afternoon, until she is finished. Is that all right?”

The little girl nodded her head slowly, face pale as she reached for his hand. When he didn’t immediately take it, tears started to fill her eyes and he panicked.

Taking her hand gingerly, he raised the other to wave at the women. “Thank you very much for your help.”

Then they were off.

-.-

If she hadn’t felt so gross, Trixie might have giggled at the scene before her.

Lucifer had brought her back to his penthouse, explaining that it was closer to both the courthouse and school, that her mother wouldn’t be too much longer. She’d thrown up during the elevator ride, only half-listening as he tried desperately to comfort her in the weirdest ways--“I’ll have the cleaners come straight away; you don’t have to worry about cleaning it yourself”--when he’d picked her up, rushing her through the doors to the bathroom.

He’d waited there, awkwardly patting her back until she was finished. He’d then ushered her through to the couch, saying, “Don’t worry, urchin; I’m sure I have a bowl somewhere, or at least something similar.”

And there he’d left her, bringing them to now. His suit jacket was gone, the sleeves of his white undershirt rolled up. He held a fuzzy black blanket in one hand, a paint bucket in the other, holding them out to her. “I’m sorry it took so long; I had to go into LUX’s storage to find a...vomit receptacle.” When she didn’t take it from him, he placed it directly beside her face on the floor, gripping both edges of the blanket to lay it over her. “I don’t know if you have a fever or not, but I’ve noticed you and your mother enjoy your ‘snuggle blankets’, as it were. This is the softest one I could find; I hope it’s...snuggly enough for you.”

She giggled a bit, sniffling. “Thank you, Lucifer,” she murmured. “Can I have some ginger ale? And something to eat?”

Nodding curtly, he turned towards the hallway that led to his mysterious kitchen. “I have a variety of crackers, from wheat to sesame to pepper; do you have a preference in this state?” he called from the other room, the sound of cabinets closing echoing his words.

“Do you have saltines? Or the Ritz circle ones?” she asked.

He was silent for a long time before she saw him come back around the corner. “Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” he sighed striding back in to the room. Brandishing a crystal plate that held at least half a box of both saltines and Ritz crackers, he set it on the coffee table. “And Patrick will be bringing your ginger ale up; I assume a case should be adequate for just a few hours?”

Smiling, she said, “That’s actually way too much.” He started to open his mouth, but Trixie knew better than to push the teasing with him. “Will you turn on the TV and watch with me? My mom usually rubs my back when I’m sick.”

After a moment, he nodded, crossing to the mantle to grab the remote. He sat on the opposite side of the couch, pressing some buttons as a projection screen rolled out from the ceiling, a projector starting to whirl from behind them. “Is there a particular show or movie that you prefer?”

“Can we watch Secret Life of Pets? It’s funny and it’s on Netflix,” she added when his jaw clenched. “It’ll help me fall asleep.”

He perked up at that. “Is sleep good for you at this point? At some of my...parties, you’re supposed to keep the humans awake until they have finished vomiting.”

Nodding, she answered, “As long as you help me if I wake up and have to puke again, I should be fine.”

“Then I suppose I’ll just sit here and keep watch.”

She smiled as he pulled up the movie, though she really missed her parents. Lucifer was doing a great job, but he didn’t know what he was doing. Her mom knew right when she needed snuggles and gave them to her without her asking. She might be nine years old, but that didn’t mean being sick wasn’t scary. Especially when her stomach was still roiling and her throat and mouth burned....

“Are you all right, spawn?” he asked immediately, making her realize that she had started to silently cry. “Are you going to be sick again?”

She shook her head, but that’s when the sobs started. “I miss my mom,” she whispered between savage breaths. “She always strokes my hair so I can fall asleep.”

While she got control of herself, Trixie felt him leave the couch for a minute, making her feel even more alone. He was really trying, but he didn’t know what to do, and her mom didn’t have to ask her how to take care of her, and she wasn’t left alone to cry--

Hands gently pulled her off the throw pillow she’d been using, only to deposit her head on sweatpants-clad thighs. She tilted her head back to see Lucifer wearing a bright green T-shirt and gray sweatpants (they still had a tag on them). “I needed to change in case you don’t make it to the bucket,” he explained easily, reaching over for the remote once again. “Now, lay back; I’ll attempt to stroke your hair, but you may need to direct me.”

Shocked, Trixie did as he said without a word, feeling his hand gently rest on her head.

She fell asleep to the sound of the elevator dinging.

This will be getting a part two shortly because it is getting very long! That will be Deckerstar though. :)

#halfbloodfox #trixie decker & lucifer morningstar #family fluff #trixie espinoza #trixie decker #lucifer morningstar #lucifer on netflix #step devil fanfiction #lucifer prompts

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angelofberlin2000 · 5 years

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By Naomi Fry 2:58 P.M.

Last week, I read a report in the Times about the current conditions on Mt. Everest, where climbers have taken to shoving one another out of the way in order to take selfies at the peak, creating a disastrous human pileup. It struck me as a cogent metaphor for how we live today: constantly teetering on the precipice to grasp at the latest popular thing. The story, like many stories these days, provoked anxiety, dread, and a kind of awe at the foolishness of fellow human beings. Luckily, the Internet has recently provided us with an unlikely antidote to everything wrong with the news cycle: the actor Keanu Reeves.

Take, for instance, a moment, a few weeks ago, when Reeves appeared on “The Late Show” to promote “John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum,” the latest installment in his action-movie franchise. Near the end of the interview, Stephen Colbert asked the actor what he thought happens after we die. Reeves was wearing a dark suit and tie, in the vein of a sensitive mafioso who is considering leaving it all behind to enter the priesthood. He paused for a moment, then answered, with some care, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” It was a response so wise, so genuinely thoughtful, that it seemed like a rebuke to the usual canned blather of late-night television. The clip was retweeted more than a hundred thousand times, but, when I watched it, I felt like I was standing alone in a rock garden, having a koan whispered into my ear.

Reeves, who is fifty-four, has had a thirty-five-year career in Hollywood. He was a moody teen stoner in “River’s Edge” and a sunny teen stoner in the “Bill & Ted” franchise; he was the tortured sci-fi action hero in the “Matrix” movies and the can-do hunky action hero in “Speed”; he was the slumming rent boy in “My Own Private Idaho,” the scheming Don John in “Much Ado About Nothing,” and the eligible middle-aged rom-com lead in “Destination Wedding.” Early in his career, his acting was often mocked for exhibiting a perceived skater-dude fuzziness; still, today, on YouTube, you can find several gleeful compilations of Reeves “acting badly.” (“I am an F.B.I. agent,” he shouts, not so convincingly, to Patrick Swayze in “Point Break.”) But over the years the peculiarities of Reeves’s acting style have come to be seen more generously. Though he possesses a classic leading-man beauty, he is no run-of-the-mill Hollywood stud; he is too aloof, too cipher-like, too mysterious. There is something a bit “Man Who Fell to Earth” about him, an otherworldliness that comes across in all of his performances, which tend to have a slightly uncanny, declamatory quality. No matter what role he plays, he is always himself. He is also clearly aware of the impression he makes. In the new Netflix comedy “Always Be My Maybe,” starring the standup comedian Ali Wong, he makes a cameo as a darkly handsome, black-clad, self-serious Keanu, speaking in huskily theatrical, quasi-spiritual sound bites that either baffle or arouse those around him. “I’ve missed your spirit,” he gasps at Wong, while kissing her, open-mouthed.

Though we’ve spent more than three decades with Reeves, we still know little about him. We know that he was born in Beirut, and that he is of English and Chinese-Hawaiian ancestry. (Ali Wong has said that she cast him in “Always Be My Maybe” in part because he’s Asian-American, even if many people forget it.) His father, who did a spell in jail for drug dealing, left home when Keanu was a young boy. His childhood was itinerant, as his mother remarried several times and moved the family from Sydney to New York and, finally, Toronto. We know that he used to play hockey, and that he is a motorcycle buff, and that he has experienced unthinkable tragedy: in the late nineties, his girlfriend, Jennifer Syme, gave birth to their child, who was stillborn; two years later, Syme died in a car accident. Otherwise, Reeves’s life is a closed book. Who is he friends with? What is his relationship with his family like? As Alex Pappademas wrote, for a cover story about the actor in GQ, in May, Reeves has somehow managed to “pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.”

This inscrutability makes each new detail we learn about Reeves’s life seem like a revelatory gift. On a recent appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” the actor admitted, twenty-five years after the fact, that he had a crush on Sandra Bullock when the two were filming “Speed.” Last week, a Malaysian Web site claimed that, in an interview, Reeves confessed to being lonely. “I don’t have anyone in my life,” he supposedly said, adding, “Hopefully it’ll happen for me.” The Internet responded with a collective shriek of longing. When it was reported, on Saturday, that, according to Reeves’s rep, the quotes had been fabricated, it almost didn’t matter. The Internet’s desire to plumb the hidden depths of this gorgeous puzzle of a man, and to serve as a balm to his perceived hurt, had been so strong that it willed this bit of news into existence.

The outpouring of horny sympathy recalled an earlier episode, in 2010, when paparazzi pictures appeared showing the actor sitting on a New York City park bench and eating a sandwich, looking scruffy and in low spirits. So emerged the “Sad Keanu” meme; June 15th was even declared, by fans, “Cheer Up Keanu Day.” But, unlike the “Sad Ben Affleck” meme, which came in response to a swaggery alpha male’s public descent, Sad Keanu was not animated by Schadenfreude. It simply brought to the fore the retiring, not-long-for-this-world sensitivity that we had always intuited was there.

Recently, a slew of people have come forward to share their real-life “Keanu Stories.” (A bizarrely large number seem to have encountered him at one time or another, perhaps owing to the fact that he often travels alone and without handlers.) The image of him that emerges from these anecdotes is of a considerate man who is aware of his status as a celebrity but doesn’t take advantage of it, and who is generous but careful with his presence. After a flight he was on from San Francisco to L.A. had to make an emergency landing in Bakersfield, Reeves helped passengers recruit a van to transport them the remaining way; en route, he read facts about Bakersfield aloud and played country tunes on his phone for the group. He signed an autograph for a sixteen-year-old ticket seller at a movie theatre after intuiting that the teen was too shy to ask him for one directly. He called an indie bookstore in advance, once a week, before arriving, on his motorcycle, to pick up new books. He was a wallflower at a party, asking another actor on the outskirts of the gathering if she would show him pictures of her dog in costume.

My colleague Jessica Winter was involved in a well-known Keanu Story, though she didn’t know it at the time. In a minute-long viral video taken on a New York City subway car, in 2011, Reeves is seen getting up and offering his seat to a woman who is carrying a large bag. Winter happened to be sitting next to Reeves when the video was shot—she is the strawberry-blonde woman absorbed in reading a magazine, initially unaware of her famous fellow-passenger. Watching the clip today, Winter recalled the courtly way in which Reeves reacted to being filmed: “He was calm and beatific and ever so slightly puzzled, like, Why are you doing this? I am not upset, and perhaps it is not my business.” If only more of us could learn to adopt Reeves’s attitude in our own lives. It’s O.K. to take a pause sometimes, to not engage, to let the world separate from you a little bit, he assures us. Just watch me.

I have two Keanu Stories of my own, both brief but sweet. In 2006, at a performance by the dancer Pina Bausch, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I saw Reeves seated a couple of rows away from me—in the cheap seats—his gangly legs crammed into the small space in front of him. Three years later, at Film Forum, I spotted him emerging alone from a Kurosawa movie, carrying a large tub of popcorn. These moments aren’t much, but I keep them close, picking them up every once in a while, the way you would a crystal or an amulet.

#keanu reeves #the newyorker #too good for this world

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alittlelife · 5 years

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By Naomi Fry. June 3, 2019.

#keanu reeves #**

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fizzyhibiscusteainapoptabsodacan · 5 years

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rooookieeee

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

nuanced

“The utopian ideal of the internet—unregulated access to information, pure connectivity—now feels antiquated. Also antiquated: trying to determine if the internet is simply good or bad. Possible and necessary: thinking more deeply about how it’s rewiring our brains and warping our experience of time, about the vistas of reality it’s revealing and creating, and what to do with our positions therein, so that we do not go mad from it all nor flee altogether.When the internet was less mobile, the distinction between online and offline was perhaps more defined. There was real life, and then there was the place that hosted our reflections on it. Now we are experiencing a collision between underbaked thought and tangible experience so great and rapid and omnipresent that it��s less of a crash, more in the water supply. Those who use the internet as an escape are thought of as outliers (Catfishers, video game addicts, radicalized young men), but its increasing presence throughout our daily lives has made a state of unreality not only more accessible, but very hard to resist.Rather than providing a shadow of reality, these platforms shape reality. They’re not pure outlets for our feelings and experiences; they are catalysts for what we feel and experience, how we feel and experience, and our shrinking capacity to process any of it. What we share on social media platforms does not disappear into a void, but increase their engagement and make them more profitable—even criticism is additive to the forces we seek to counteract. (Donald Trump: “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here.”) What we share also tells people how to sell us more stuff, so that the CEO of Netflix can stand before his peers and declare that their number-one competitor is sleep—“And we’re winning!”The internet feels chaotic, but it is not out of control. The internet is not one giant, democratic forum where opinions rise to the top by their own merit; it is a very deliberate structure, carefully calibrated to convince its users that visibility is the same as power.“

suspended in mid air

PALIMPSEST is the word

The above is a photo of a photo of my aura. I had it read in Chinatown a few weeks ago and nodded adamantly as the woman told me I was “removed, observant, in [my] own castle.” It is very likely that other parts of her reading were far less accurate and that I seized only on what resonated with me, but that itself is an innate part of being removed/observant/in your own castle: picking and choosing what you’ll remember later, curating moments, architecting your own narrative, as opposed to being open to the possibility that she could’ve been telling me something that did not already fit my idea of who I am. She said, “There is something between you and the rest of the world,” and gestured as though to indicate a screen in front of her face.

This year, I graduated from high school and moved out of my parents’ Midwestern home into a New York City apartment and started acting in a play every day, wondering, constantly, what it feels like to bring down that screen. This was for the sake of being onstage but also because I was trying to start my life: How does it feel to exist in a moment, connected to another human being and to the world, without thinking about what it signifies, what it’ll look like in memory?

To be able to consider these questions at all is not only a privilege afforded by a life with time to think about HOW EXACTLY to FULLY APPRECIATE all these MAGICAL MOMENTS I am #blessed with CoNsTaNtLy!, but also just how my brain works. I started a blog when I was 11, and every day after school, I came home and took photos of my outfits for it. I was very picky about the setting and the colors and the lighting, not out of any interest in photography, so much as a desire to draw connections between things and delight at the order of it all. I didn’t feel like they were self-portraits, although I’m in every picture. They felt similar, instead, to doing plays at camp and community theater, or sitting at our family’s piano going through a Bible-thick Broadway songbook and shifting among my favorite characters.

When I stopped writing my blog halfway through high school, I began keeping journals just for myself, each one cycling through a different personality as I had with fashion and with acting. For the duration of each journal, my handwriting would change, I’d dye my hair, I’d hang new posters on my wall, I stuck to a narrow selection of my wardrobe and my music, I chose a new route for the walk to school. I am similarly strict about the monthly Rookie themes, dictating to our illustrators and photographers which colors, motifs, and types of lighting to use in their work for us. My friends get annoyed with me for how often I try to art direct our hangouts instead of seeing where the night takes us—Can we all wear these colors, walk down this street, listen to this song? That cohesion frames the moment and turns it into a scene from a movie. I don’t quite know how to let experiences just unfold and be surprised by how they affect me; I want to know that I’ll write down the aesthetic details of an event later and be pleased at how they fit together: We wore fur coats and wool cloaks, walked down Lafayette, listened to Blonde on Blonde.

Sometimes this quality veers into the realm of vampiric hubris. Like: I sat on my roof on opening night of the play with a perfectly nice fellow who put on “Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison and his arm around me. Why did I let the lovey part of the song go over my head, but hear “to be born again, to be born again,” over and over, marveling before the skyline at my own personal reinvention over the course of the past few months—at how perfect it was that I was wearing my fuzzy pink moving-to-New-Yorkjacket—instead of returning the embrace of a person I liked?

There is a terrible YA novel cliché of a girl who lives her life looking for movie moments, and I recently defended her/myself in my journal:

1. Why worship a life that is movie-esque? 2. Why should something be significant for feeling movie-esque? 3. Isn’t life the real thing itself?

No. Movies are what make life real to us, because they pay attention to and crystallize emotions, colors, movement, human behavior, etc. (When I say movies, I also mean TV, I also also mean plays—even though a play is not recorded, it’s crystallized in that it lives on in the minds and memories of its audience). Movies are like “LIFE: The Best Of.” “LIFE: The Essential Collection.” “LIFE: Not Dead Yet!” So saying a moment is like a movie is how we can comprehend its beauty and grant it significance.

I can defend the art direction and the obsessive documentation, but I also know that there are different answers to the above questions. I know there are infinite moments that could take place and affect me in ways I can’t conceive of, if I could only put down my notebook every once in a while and actually live my life instead of trying to immortalize everything.

“We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. […] And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? […] To be absolutely free! […] To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! […] let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

The above is from the novel The Secret History. It summarizes why I like acting, and why I was so eager to listen and learn from all the times our playwright said to me, “You know the play. You know the character. Why are you still watching yourself perform, telling the audience how to feel about her, dictating the moment? Just be in it.” I’m paraphrasing, from my castle. But that was the gist. And, to throw a wrench in all of this, the characters in The Secret History do end up losing control and being totally present…and MURDERING someone in their state of freedom!!!! But for now, this is where this month’s theme starts: the combined beauty and danger of inventing yourself, owning your experiences, putting yourself on record.

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