"Lucifer, I'd like to try something," Chloe ran a hand through his rumpled curls, letting her other hand explore his taught muscles, stretched a little against the silk bindings which kept him spreadeagled on the bed.

"Anything, Darling," he breathed.

"You... you've told me you don't want me to use the cane..." she trailed off as his dark chocolate eyes darted to her face in what she could only interpret as panic, "but I was wondering if you'd let me try," her voice sounded rushed, higher than normal.

"Why?" Lucifer felt his heart beat irregularly.

"Well, it's my favourite. And I know you said you didn't want it, but maybe it'll be different with me? I won't really hurt you, you know that. Even though I can." She still looked shocked at that newest revelation, and had been shocked every time he allowed her to tie him up.

"I... I know you won't try to hurt me..." he let his voice fade out at he looked into her face. "If it is something you truly desire, then who am I to refuse you?" He nodded his permission, but Chloe didn't miss the fact that he didn't look her in the eye, or that his muscles got tighter, or that his face had set too long in that come-hither leer he had attempted. But she wanted to show him how fun her favourite instrument could be. How the sting could be joyous release, so much more so than the thud of his usual favourites.

"Thank you, Lucifer. I promise, this will be fun," Chloe ran a hand down his abdomen and rubbed his belly, just how she knew he loved it, and his eyes slid closed in relaxation. The second she removed her hand, though, his eyes sprang open, his muscles clenched again, and his previously slack mouth slammed shut, his jaw clenching. "We don't have to," she whispered.

"Go ahead, Detective, I am yours to command," his voice lacked the sarcastic bite he used outside of their bedroom, but she could still hear the layers behind it. And he had called her Detective. He hardly ever did that anymore.

"Let's turn you over, okay?" She reached over his head and untied his wrists, then slowly ran her hands down his whole body to his ankles, untying them too. He shuddered under her hands, and his body responded to her touch. Once he was released, she saw the moment of decision in his eyes, where he knew he could stand up, knew he could end it, and chose not to. He rolled over and spread his limbs for her to retie, and she did so gently, never allowing her hand to leave his skin.

Lucifer buried his face in the pillow. Usually, faced with the prospect of getting hit with almost anything else, he would be making lewd comments, or arching his back to get closer to her and to her instrument, or twisting his head around to see what she was doing. Today, he lay still, and took some of the pillow into his mouth, biting down hard in preparation.

For the first time in minutes, her hand left his skin, and he felt her absence in every cell of his body. It wasn't long before she was back, her hand finding his lower back and rubbing it slowly.

"I have it," she said quietly, and he felt the cane gently touch to his back as she dragged the tip over his skin. He flinched, and his breath hitched in anticipation. "I'll be gentle, I promise," she whispered in his ear before she stepped away from him.

There was a moment of agonising silence as he waited, his eyes squeezed tight shut, his jaw clenching down so hard on the pillow he could feel his teeth ready to cut right through. And then he heard the whoosh of the cane flying through the air, and felt the white hot line of pain appear, not on his butt as he had expected, but across the left side of his upper back, just at the bottom of his wing scars.

Horror flooded through him as the searing pain spread out from the strike point, and before he could speak or move, the cane swooshed down again, on his other side, just under the symmetrical scar.

He felt the familiar sting and stopped breathing, the panic tightening in his chest as he desperately tried to block the voices from his head. A third stroke was half an inch higher on his left side, the middle of the line of pain dulled by numb scar tissue. Bile rose in his throat, and the voices swarmed in, louder and closer and just as clear as they had been that day.

The forth swoosh landed in a solid line at the top of the scars, at his shoulders, where his muscles were so tense that Chloe had been able to avoid hitting his spine.

He buried his face deeper into the pillow, trying to pretend he wasn't crying, trying not to pull off his restraints and run from her. The fifth stroke hit just below the forth, two perfect lines a few centimetres apart. The sting from that was almost worse, blending with the rush of blood back to the forth strike, the two sensations at odds with each other.

"You did such a good job," Chloe put down the cane and touched a hand to his shoulder. Usually, having her hands on him steadied him. But in that moment, she felt his body tense and tremble under her touch.

"Get off," he growled, his face still buried in the pillow, his voice hoarse.

"Lucifer, are you okay?" His body curled in on itself, pulling the restrains off the bed posts as he curled up.

"Leave me," he croaked as his shoulders started to shake.

"I'm not leaving," Chloe insisted, climbing up onto the bed beside him, ready to scoop him into her arms as she so often did after these sessions, but he shied away, flinching so hard he tumbled off the bed onto the floor.

He hit the ground with a thud, and he was lost. The voices surged forward, and he put his arms over his head in a cowardly attempt to protect himself from further blows.

"Please! Stop!" His voice was so pain filled, so heart broken, that Chloe's chest tightened and tears came to her eyes.

"Lucifer!" She squeaked, leaning over the bed to touch his back. The five red lines bisected his scars, and she wondered in a rush of panic if it had been a good idea to hit him there. It wasn't a place they routinely avoided, but with an instrument he wasn't familiar with... perhaps this had been a disaster waiting to happen. He cowered away from her before she even touched him, and he withdrew her hand sharply.

"Please... make it stop," he whisper begged into the floor.

"It's okay, it's over. It's over," she intoned, biting down hard on her lip to stop herself reacting rashly. Slowly, he raised his head. His face was covered in sweat and tears, his eyes red rimmed and his pupils blown wide with anxiety. Blood trickled out of his mouth from where he had bitten down so hard he had broken skin. He was pale, panicked, and looked as though he had felt a lifetime of pain in the last few minutes.

"Lucifer? Can I touch you?"

"N-not from u-up there," he stuttered. She had never heard him stutter like that, so unsure, so broken. She lowered herself down onto the ground, sat against the bed and opened her arms to him. Slowly, like an injured animal, she cajoled him into resting his head on her lap, and she carded her fingers through his soft hair.

"What happened?" She asked softly, "I'm so sorry."

"Not you," he whispered, "memory..."

"You had a flashback?" Concern rose in her. She had thought it was at least mostly about not liking the cane. But if five light strokes had pushed him into a flashback, then it was much much more than she'd thought.

"The... the day I Fell," he whispered, and she strained to hear him, "I... I was brought up from the cells before Father."

"Cells?" Horror and fascination filled Chloe. He had never gone into detail about this before. He nodded against her leg.

"First time I'd seen daylight in weeks. They... they set me down on the ground at his feet. The whole court was there. My brothers and sisters forming an inner circle," he shuddered suddenly, and gripped her tight, "they all wore their robes, and I was naked. I had wounds from the battle which had not healed. Wounds from celestial blades. Gabriel read the sentence. A commoners punishment for the Prince of Light. And then banishment. Eternal banishment."

"Lucifer..." Chloe whispered, cupping his head in her hand. But he didn't stop, didn't seem to hear her. His voice got higher as he recounted the memory.

"Humans assume that Heaven is not a place of punishment. But at least in Hell it is punishment of your own making, of your own deserving. Father decided my fate before I was even brought to the court. Uriel bound me, and I struggled against him. I had been weakened by my time in the cells, by my battle injuries... by my shame. I lost, and I was chained on my knees, bent forward so that I couldn't look up at any of them. Micheal cut off my hair. I... my hair..." his voice hitched harshly, and Chloe felt him tense again.

"It's okay, it's okay, it grew back," Chloe stroked his curls and he sobbed once. He sniffed and continued, as though in a trance, wanting her to know, to understand.

"Micheal cut my hair. And then it began... I had led a rebellion. I had corrupted almost a third of Heaven's forces to my desire. I... they... the sentence was one... one lash for each corrupted soul, and one for each deceased. They used Micheal's whip."

Chloe gasped in horror. How many times had they hit him? It must have been hundreds. And a whip held such a similar sensation to the cane. Lucifer shivered again, and Chloe pulled the blanket off the bed and wrapped him up in it, holding his head on her lap as she worked.

"An angel's most sensitive limbs are their wings, and by the time my brothers had delivered my sentence, the hall was covered in... feathers... and blood. I tried to look up at Father, to show him I was hurt, to tell him I was sorry. But he had already gone. He didn't even watch his sentence carried out. Micheal and Rafael bound my wings in tight rope. They led me to the centre of the room. And Micheal cut a hole in the ground with his sword. It was blackness and fire. Far away, deep, deep down. I... I didn't want them to push me. I wanted to go home, to apologise, to beg Father's forgiveness. But Micheal started herding me towards the hole, and everyone in the room was stamping their feet and screaming their pleasure at my punishment. I believe I begged my brother. I didn't want to go."

Chloe felt his shoulders start to shake violently under the blanket, even as she stroked his head.

"They pushed me... and I fell," he chocked, "endless falling. I couldn't use my wings. I fell faster and faster until the flames balled up around me," his skin pulsed between perfect white, marred with the lines of Chloe's cane, and vicious red, as though all of his skin had been burned and flayed away, "I had been on fire for minutes before I even landed in Hell. I made a crater as large as Los Angeles when I hit the ground."

"And... that was it? You didn't have a chance to state your case? Or ask for... ask for mercy?" Chloe's eyes were filled with tears at the thought of the lost, beaten boy forcibly thrown from everyone and everything he knew, into a desolate, terrifying, foreign land.

"Father wouldn't even allow me to pray. None of my siblings could hear me. Or at least, none replied. I... I was where I belonged."

"You weren't! You didn't deserve that. No one deserves that."

"You forget, Detective. I am the Devil. Evil personified. Anything good left in me was burned away by my Fall." He didn't raise his head from her lap, but his body stiffened.

"You're wrong. They were wrong. Your father especially."

"It was punishment!" He roared, his skin settling on red and raw, pushing away from her. She saw the tears in his bright red eyes, filled with more than Hellfire.

"How old were you?" She asked calmly, trying to get him to come back and sit with her. He was shaking.

"Hundreds of thousands of years old," he scoffed, "I had lit the sun and the stars, and pulled together the fabric of the universe thousands of years before my Fall."

"I mean comparatively. To a human."

"I..." his human face settled back in, "perhaps fourteen." Chloe chocked.

"Lucifer, nothing we do when we're fourteen is worth that kind of punishment."

"I rebelled," his fists clenched tight, "I led an army against my father. I deserved..."

"What would you do," she interrupted, "if Dan and I did that to Trixie? If we brought her in front of a group of other kids, stripped her and cut off her hair, whipped her dozens, hundreds of times, and then threw her out?" The thought was disgusting. Abhorrent. And she saw it on his face too.

"I would rip you limb from limb," he said quietly, "no matter what you meant to me."

"Because she couldn't deserve it. No matter what she did."

"No... no, she couldn't. But she's not-"

"Not what? The Devil? You weren't, either," Chloe stood up and went to him, pulling him close. "You weren't the Devil then. That came after. You were just like your brothers."

"I... I deserved it..." he choked into her shoulder.

"Is that why you let me use the cane, even though you didn't want me to?"

"S'not your fault I'm b-broken," he shuddered, "if you enjoy..."

"No!" Chloe snapped a little too loudly. Lucifer sprang away, out of her arms, and backed up against the wall. "No, you are not broken. You don't have to do things you don't want, just because you think I'd enjoy them! Do you think I'm enjoying this, right now? Think I'm enjoying you telling me about your psycho family after I hurt you?"

"No, I'm sorry, I'll stop. Let me make it up to you," Lucifer visibly shrank away from her words like they were physical blows, hurt clear in his eyes, but now he straightened up and went to her, caressing her hips as he knelt to kiss her nakedness.

"That's not what I meant," she said quietly, entwining her hand in his hair and pulling him back. "I didn't mean that I didn't want to have this talk. I didn't mean I wanted you to stop feeling. I meant that I wish you'd told me you didn't want me to use the cane. Then I wouldn't have used it, and you wouldn't have had to go through this today."

"But..." Lucifer didn't want to say what he was thinking. He knew it would only upset her.

"What?"

"I..." he took a deep breath, still kneeling in front of her, her hands in his hair. "I did tell you."

Chloe's fingers tightened in his hair, and he closed his eyes, waiting for the blow. Not that he thought she would hit him right now. But blows could always be expected.

"Fuck," she said simply, closing her own eyes in regret. He had told her. Several times. He had given her a list of things he didn't want months before, and she had teased him about how some of the specifics must have been mined from thousands of sexual exploits. The cane had been near the top of that list, right under whips. He had told her, less explicitly, this evening. 'If it's something you truly desire, who am I to refuse you?' He had looked frightened. He hadn't put up any of their usual pretence of playful fighting and sexual innuendo. He had called her Detective, always a clear warning sign. But she hadn't noticed, and then he had just laid down, stiff as a board, and let her do something he didn't want.

"Lucifer, fuck, I'm so sorry. You did tell me."

"I... I want you to be happy," he whispered.

"I can't be happy if you're not happy," she whispered back, stroking the back of his head with her thumb. "It's not your... it's not your responsibly to fulfil my every desire, Lucifer. Not ones you don't want too."

"But..." his voice broke again, and she gathered him up in her arms.

"You don't have to do that anymore," she whispered, holding him tight.

It was a long time before they moved. Lucifer looked lost as she led him back to bed. He curved into her touch as she rubbed his favourite bruising cream into his back. He nestled his pale, tear stained face tight under her neck when she climbed in next to him and pulled the blankets over them. His breathing evened out into sleep after a few minutes of feeling her hand combing through his short curls.

It was only when she was sure he was out that she started to really cry. To really imagine the horrors he had suffered. To truly understand what so many people had asked of him, taken from him. What she had taken from him.