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For Lucifer, the rains bring pain with them.
Sometimes it’s just a dull throb, and other days it’s sharp like the blade of a hot knife. Today the scars on his back ache like poison festering under his skin.
It’s been millennia since Lucifer has borne a third pair of wings, and their remnants shouldn’t hurt. Not anymore. But the way Diavolo’s warm hands work on his back, the way his fingers know exactly where to touch and press, remind him that maybe they don’t have to hurt.
“Is that better?” Diavolo sits back on the bed, flexing his wrists.
“Better.” Still lying on his stomach with wings loosely folded, Lucifer rolls a shoulder to get the stiffness out of it. Hands touch him again on the shoulder blades.
“Here, I can do that too. Just relax.”
Diavolo’s touch must be imbued with some sort of healing magic, even though he insists they aren’t every time Lucifer questions him. And they aren’t. They just know what they’re doing from the hundreds of other times they’ve done this before.
A small sigh escapes Lucifer’s lips and his wings flutter slightly, not that Diavolo would ever tell him, mostly out of fear of never getting to see the endearing little habit again.
The tension bleeds from Lucifer’s shoulders, the frown lines in his face smoothed out. He looks unburdened and, even though it’s night, glorious in his quiet beauty.
Thunder from outside breaks into the peaceful silence. Lucifer’s brows knit together, lines appearing on his forehead; he makes an uncomfortable noise and curls in on himself, the fingers of one hand grasping at a pillow.
“It hurts again,” he mumbles, and Diavolo’s gold eyes fall on his back immediately.
“Same place?” he asks.
Lucifer doesn’t reply, but it’s always the same place.
Diavolo taps at the delicate bones of his wings – a wordless request to open them – and all four fully unfold, stretching out until they no longer obscure the two long scars running down the middle of his back. The skin is thick and pink and puckered where his third pair of wings had once been.
Diavolo gets to work with his hands. Gentle circles made with thumbs seem to be most calming, and a tiny bit more pressure in the centre of the scar tissue makes the pain more bearable. There’s a small firmness on the right-hand side that he’s not sure Lucifer knows about. It feels like the remains of bone nut Diavolo lets it slide.
He works deftly and efficiently; pausing every few minutes to kiss the back of Lucifer’s neck in his own brand of reassurance.
A longer sigh from Lucifer this time, accompanied with visible sag in his shoulders. “It’s gone,” he breathes, almost as if he were staring up at stars. Thank you, are the words he doesn’t have to say.
Instead his wings snap shut over his scars as he rolls over, the long primary feathers brushing past Diavolo’s wrists before he can lift them out of the way. Hidden again as if Lucifer hadn’t been gritting his teeth in pain just minutes ago, as if his back was pristine, but Diavolo will always love him the way he is and absolutely no less.
“Tell me if it hurts again,” Diavolo murmurs, but he knows Lucifer would never outright say yes. The tiniest incline of his head is his assent and had anybody else been in the room, they would have never noticed.
Diavolo tucks himself in behind Lucifer’s warm body on the bed, drawing him against his own chest, one arm throwing the covers over them both. The softness of feathers tickling his nose only serves to remind him of how starkly different their forms are. Even their ranks and formal titles, as well as what Lucifer had once been, but it doesn’t matter to him.
Diavolo mouths a series of slow, lingering kisses along the bone structure of Lucifer’s uppermost pair of wings. None of it matters. He feels Lucifer shiver under his ministrations and carries on, nibbling gently at the areas of downy fluff he knows are the most sensitive.
There’s so much of Lucifer he loves, so much he wishes he could touch and hold and worship all at once, but he only has two hands and they’re already occupied with swathes of smooth, alabaster skin.
“I want to have you for a lifetime,” he whispers into hair as black as its owner’s feathers. “All of you, just as you are now.”
“A lifetime is a long time,” Lucifer hums back, twisting his hips slightly as fingers skim over his thighs and lower belly. If Diavolo’s hands are ready on rainy days, he just might have a lifetime to give.