Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alastor hurts. 

He has never hurt this badly since his death. Never. He’s been cut, shot, electrocuted, attacked with all varieties of magic, even tortured, but nothing has ever hurt so badly as Adam’s wicked holy axe. It cuts through his staff, the focus for his power and virtually indestructible in its own right, like a toothpick. And it cuts through him, the Radio Demon, holder of hundreds of souls, warded with dozens of spells and tricks, like a knife through hot butter.

He can’t help himself. He screams when the strike connects, and he gasps when he slams into the raised edge of the roof before crashing to the stone flooring.

The wound doesn’t stop hurting. It gets worse. It burns, holy magic eating through him like acid, feeding on his own wards, his power, his energy. With his staff broken he has nothing to supplement with, and that radiant magic burrows into him greedily, picking him apart thread by thread. Blood dribbles out of the wound at an alarming rate, dripping to the ground beneath him in red smears. It’s all energy and resources he can’t afford to lose with that holy magic tearing deeper.

He hurts. He hurts, he hurts, he hurts, and yet the battle isn’t over yet, and he can’t afford to lose himself now.

His shadow is still there. Most of his magic is beyond him, but his shadow is still connected, and it swarms to him frantically, screeching silent alerts. Danger is coming. Beware. Beware! 

His limbs shaking, Alastor manages to haul himself to his hands and knees. It’s frighteningly difficult. The wound, that magic, is draining his strength away at an alarming rate, and his arms tremble with the exertion of just holding him up. Moving sends agony up and down his chest, like red-hot knives digging ever deeper.

Adam is approaching. He glances at the bastard even as he reaches shakily for the broken remnants of his staff, dragging them close. He can barely lift each piece; they feel so heavy in his hands, when the full staff used to be light as a feather to his touch. 

Adam grins down at him, golden radiance and smug braggadocio. His guitar axe is still dripping with Alastor’s blood, to match the blood spattering out onto the roof from Alastor’s wound, from Alastor’s lips. His fingers tighten on the radiant weapon, and begin to lift it for the fatal blow. 

This is no longer a fight Alastor can win. He’s barely holding himself together. Damn it. 

He hadn’t meant to flee so early. He hadn’t meant to flee at all. The cause isn’t important to Alastor so much as proving his strength and superiority, and he’d been soundly and unquestionably thrashed. His pride is injured just as much as his body, and he’s loath to leave—but if he doesn’t now, he never will. 

They’ll manage, he tells himself stiffly. They had angelic weapons and an army. Charlie had angels of her own she could call on. They don’t need him.

Even if they did—he doesn’t want to die. 

He’s barely coherent as he calls for his shadow to pull him deeper into the void. He’s vaguely aware that he manages a parting line, something about radio not being dead. He does it nearly on autopilot, mostly because he’s aware that Vox and the rest of Hell by proxy are almost certainly watching, and he has to salvage what he can of his reputation.

But mostly, he’s just desperate to escape, because he hurts, he burns, and it’s only getting worse.

“Bye, bitch!” Adam cackles, as he slithers into the shadows. The exorcist sniggers to himself for a few moments more, bragging to himself about how amazing he is and how he’d killed radio. Alastor would tear his tongue and throat out if he could for such blatant heresy. But then there’s a flapping of wings, and Adam’s voice grows distant, presumably to join the rest of the fight.

This is unfortunate for Alastor’s allies, but very fortunate for him, because he hadn’t really fled at all. 

He doesn’t have the strength to retreat somewhere farther than the shadows cast by the raised partitions of the roofs, or the ones cast by the Hazbin Hotel sign. His shadow had slithered them snugly into the natural ones, and if they don’t move, they look like they belong there. But if Adam had any attention span greater than a gnat, or more interest in pursuing his prey to the death, Alastor would be dead already.

He may very well still be finished. He’s in agony, even with his body disassembled and thinned into pure shadow. He might not exist in the physical sense, but that radiant magic doesn’t seem to care. It burns him alive in every other sense of the word, mentally and magically, roasting the very essence of who he is. If he’d still owned his own soul, it might very well burn that alive too. Perhaps it is, and the owner of his chain is watching in bewilderment as the links superheat and grow brittle and crack.

If he had the lungs, the vocal cords, and the mouth for it, he might be screaming. He’s almost glad he doesn’t. It would be a rather unbecoming look for him on Vox’s drones, and he’s rapidly losing the ability to care about anything outside his own agony. Best he doesn’t have the chance to ruin his reputation when he’s blinded by pain.

Hide. Hide. Hide! Alastor is a thing of shadow and now more than ever, at his weakest, at his most vulnerable, he doesn’t want to be perceived. He wants to vanish, lick his wounds, recover himself where no one can see him, and put himself together enough to appear as he must. In control. Dangerous. Important.

But there’s nowhere to hide beyond the tiny shadows on the roof, because there’s nowhere he can go. He doesn’t have the strength to slip fully into the void, not with his staff broken and the radiant energy feeding on him like a parasite. He’s so weak. He’s in so much pain. A vulnerable little shadow, and if he leaves the safety of the Hazbin Hotel sign, even the simplest of angels can spear him and tear him apart.

He’s so weak. He hurts. He burns. 

He needs resources. Magic. Something to stave off the angry wound shredding him to pieces. But he’s so limited now, and he’s in so much pain. It’s harder and harder to think. Where can he go? What can he do? He just wants to stop hurting. 

Building, his shadow prompts.

Yes. Yes. If he were able, Alastor would take a shaky breath, dig his claws into the rooftop, and clench his teeth in a desperate attempt to ward off the pangs of agony that flow through his very being long enough to think properly. As it is, he struggles to mentally hold onto the prompt from his shadow.

The building. The very hotel beneath him. He’d invested so much of himself in the building for his work with Charlie. Wards and warnings, tricks and defenses, magical struts and supports every time he repaired things or decorated or made things like new. The entire building contained a piece of him, worked into the bones and bricks of the hotel. 

He could take it back. Siphon it free, feed himself, feed the burning magic long enough to flee somewhere safer. 

Feed me, he nearly begs the rooftop beneath him. I hurt. I need. Please. 

It responds, but it’s slow to answer. So much magic had already been used up in that attempt to shield the hotel and its soldiers; that great bubble of shadow and magic had already fed off of a great deal of what the hotel had to offer. But there are dregs of magic left. Alastor greedily drinks up what he can, absorbing it into the essence of himself and using it to stave off the radiant burning a little longer.

Distantly, he can feel the hotel falling into disrepair every time he takes, takes, takes. His shadow picks at the threads of magic left in the hotel and claws them close, close, closer still, for him to feed on. He unravels the wards around his room, devours his bayou, shreds the bar apart. Things prettied up crack and wither and return to a desiccated, uncared for state; the parlor becomes junk, the windows cracked and broken, the wallpaper torn and molding. 

He doesn’t care. The whole damn place can burn to the ground so long as he lives. 

There isn’t much, but he takes what he can. It isn’t enough to let him flee, because while he’s hungry, that holy magic is hungrier still, desperate to tear him into oblivion. He struggles to hold off the wound, even in an incorporeal state. 

And still, he hurts, he hurts, he hurts. 

He’s barely aware of the battle continuing beneath him, at the foot of the hotel, in the air around it. In this form Alastor has no body, no ears, no eyes, no real way to interact with the substantive world for long. His shadow can translate vibrations into sound and movement, or olfactory sensations. It has a dim understanding of light and shadow, for obvious reasons, although nothing as complicated as color. 

But none of that matters, because Alastor’s shadow, like Alastor himself, is too busy trying to hold itself together to focus on anything else but them. His shadow keeps them hidden in the lee of the Hazbin Hotel sign, in the natural shadows, away from eyes that don’t look too closely. And Alastor drags at any magic he can access and tries desperately to keep himself in one piece long enough to find a solution to his own demise.

Which is why it comes as a great shock when the battle comes to him again. 

It starts with a spike of alarm from his shadow, as the shade cast by the Hazbin Hotel sign flickers unnaturally. His shadow inwardly shrieks to him and drags them both further into the safety of the darkness against the risen edge of the roof, trying to find shade that’s less ephemeral.

They move just in time. With a heavy thud and a shriek, something lands precisely where their little pool of shade had been moments before. 

Alastor can barely focus outside of his own immediate pain and fear, but this is a development he can’t ignore. Through the agonizing burn of holy magic that tears at his mind and his very existence, he hisses, show me. 

His shadow complies, diverting its attention after tucking them safely into a corner. It gathers up the sounds and scents and shades it can translate most effectively despite its own suffering, and passes the information along to him as best as it can. 

Smell comes first. The scent of blood is always familiar, but this scent is especially well known to him. He recognizes that strange smell of mixed blood, angel and demon, that is Charlie Morningstar. Vibration comes next, and his shadow is able to piece together that the thing that nearly fell on them is the princess herself, straining to right herself after what felt like quite a tumble.

Alastor’s mind struggles to comprehend what Charlie Morningstar could possibly be doing on the roof. How did she even get there, much less fall there? 

But he’s too tormented by agony to be able to think further, or to try to pick apart puzzles, and the question slips away from him more easily than he’d like.

More importantly, Charlie is here. Now that he’s more aware, he can feel the thrum of the Deal between them, waiting for him to call for it. A favor. A favor. He’d planned to use it later, but there won’t be a later if he dies. 

He can’t care about his plans now. He’s hurting. He’s afraid. He’s dying. He wants to live. Fuck the grand plans, he wants to live, and Charlie is his ticket to surviving another day.

A favor. 

A favor. 

A favor for magic, he hungers, he’s starving, he’s dying. She’s so full of it, so much energy, so much potential. Angel and demon mixed, she has more power than she’s ever realized or knows what to do with. Surely siphoning a little to him won’t hurt, and he’s starving, he’s dying, he needs, he hurts, and a bleeding heart like her wouldn’t want him to hurt—

A favor. She owes him. Now’s the time. Feed him, save him—

He and his shadow surge forward, reaching for her, already planning to pull taut on the bounds of the Deal. A favor to harm no one, a favor to save him, feed him, fix him, save him, he’s hurting, hurting, hurting—

But even as Alastor and his shadow slither forward, desperate and starving and needing, his shade manages to overcome his frenzy to give him the next set of senses. Vibrations become sound become meaning, just in time to pick apart the sounds of Charlie panting in pain and exhaustion as she struggles to push herself upright. 

She gasps. 

Alastor can’t see, but the flap of wings suggests an enemy is approaching. A moment later, an unfortunately familiar voice proves him right.

“Risking your immortal life for Sinners?” Adam jeers. “That’s some crazy shit, even for Lucifer’s brat!” A gentle thump, and based on the vibrations, Alastor can only assume Adam has landed on the roof again.

“These Sinners are my family,” Charlie snarls back, with more forthright anger than Alastor had honestly ever given her credit for. 

Something slams on the ground—based on the impact and vibrations, possibly her fist or foot. He can’t be sure, and he hurts too much to pay much attention to detail. He can barely focus at all over his desire to feed, to not hurt, to haul in his favor and use her to keep him alive.

“These Sinners are my family,” Adam mocks in a disgusting baby voice, before sneering. “Do you even hear yourself? You shoulda stayed in your place, girlie—”

A shriek of anger, a howl that sounds like Charlie only because it is her voice; Alastor has never heard a noise like that before from her since he’s known the princess. A meaty thud, a yowl of pain from Adam, and the scent of something absolutely mouth-watering, blood but not-blood, fresh and hot. The shattering of glass and a sharp thud of something heavy hitting the ground, reverberating beneath Alastor and his shadow.

“That’s Princess of Hell to you, pig!” Charlie snarls, and just like her howl, Alastor only knows it’s her because he knows her voice. He’s never heard her speak that way before. Not throwing insults. Not demanding the use of her title. Never with such a guttural growl. 

Even in his agony, there’s a distant thrum of pride in Alastor’s cold, dead heart. He knew she had potential. 

“The fuck? That hurt!” Adam snarls. The scent of fresh, hot, not-quite-blood grows stronger, and if Alastor weren’t already in a frenzy of agony from the holy wound this very man had inflicted, he’d be driven mad from sheer bloodlust at the scent of an angel’s insides. 

But then Adam laughs, a harsh, snarling thing, and growls, “Okay then. You wanna play, bitch? Let’s go!” 

The input from Alastor’s shadow becomes a mess of confusion. There are too many vibrations and sounds to really understand the details of what’s happening in full, and he’s hurting too badly to put any effort into decoding it. Screams and snarls. Thuds and crashes and the clash of weapons. The scent of blood, mixed and holy. 

Alastor doesn’t know the details. But he knows enough to get the idea. Charlie is fighting Adam.

A favor! He shrieks. My favor! I want to live! 

He can make her help him. He can call in his favor. He’s dying, he can feel that holy magic tearing him apart, and he needs her. He needs in a way he hasn’t needed in a long, long time, and the solution is right there, and he’s desperate, and he’s hungry, and he hurts —

And he can’t. 

One favor at a time of my choosing where you harm no one. That had been the stipulation, and he never had needed her to harm anyone. He was skilled enough at that himself. But dragging the deal taut, forcing the favor now, while she fought against Adam—

It would kill her. She would be hurt. It might save his life, but it would harm her because it would distract her against Adam’s onslaught, and that isn’t permissible by the bounds of the Deal. 

More sickeningly still, he doesn’t want Charlie to hurt. He wants to live, but he doesn’t want Charlie to be dead and he doesn’t want her to be broken. It’s a vile paradox that he can’t stand. He shouldn’t care, he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, not if it comes to him surviving. Not when it’s down to him or her.

But he does.

If he wasn’t shadow, he would scream. Anguish, frustration, pain, fury, all of it would be there in his voice, in his shrieks. So close. He’s so damn close to a solution and yet the furthest he’s ever been. He’s dying, he needs, and yet there’s nothing he can do to save himself. 

Not from his imminent death and not from his own miserable, pathetic, growing conscience. 

So all he can do is curl in the shadows and stay hidden from Adam’s cruelty and observe through blacks and whites and vibrations and smells. All he can do is wait, and die, and hope for a miracle.

Alastor knows better than to expect one. Miracles don’t happen in Hell. 

And sure enough, it’s clear in just a few minutes that Charlie is utterly outmatched when it comes to Adam. She has the raw power, certainly; her heritage guarantees her nothing less. But Adam has eons of experience and sadistic cruelty, and Charlie is Charlie. Naive, empathetic, loving Charlie, who hates the thought of hurting anyone and has barely any experience in a fight besides getting into fisticuffs once with a television reporter. 

She’s losing. Badly, if the increasing stench of mixed blood and the sharp cries of pain are anything to go by. Adam is laughing and swearing, and from the sounds of it, he’s taking things seriously now that he’s been injured. 

Charlie hasn’t a prayer.

Where in the Seven Rings are the others? 

It’s a struggle to think clearly—Alastor hurts, he needs so badly, he barely has a thought in his head for anything else. But he’s certain Charlie isn’t supposed to be alone. Why isn’t her sweetheart protecting her? Where the Hell are the others? Even the cannibals would provide suitable distraction.

Anything, anything at all, to get Charlie out of the fight long enough for her to not die and to save him. 

But no one comes. Charlie shrieks in pain, and the thump-crash of vibrations paints a picture of her being thrown to the ground. A clatter of metal and a laugh from Adam suggests she’s been disarmed. 

Charlie is at his mercy.

Charlie is at his mercy and no one is coming to save her. 

Charlie is going to die. And Alastor will follow not long after. The holy magic burns him alive from the inside, his numerous sins fuel for a roaring bonfire that will consume him all too soon. 

It’s infuriating. To fight so hard for something and fail. It’s hilarious to watch, but Alastor hates failing, and now…now…

It’s over. It’s done. He’d tried. He’d failed. So has Charlie. Both of them will go to oblivion this day. Perhaps the others will follow.

No. 

It’s a tiny little thought. So tiny he can barely hear it over the agonized screaming in his head and the bitterness of defeat. But Alastor is not the type to give up so blindly. He isn’t helpless. He reaches for that tiny little thought with everything he has.

No, his exhausted but furious little scheming thought whispers. There isn’t much thinking left to him, not in the face of so much pain and loss, but what is left is furiously insistent. No. We won’t win. But we won’t lose. Spit in the face of Heaven. If you must die, die efficiently. Die spitefully.

Save Charlie. 

He doesn’t want Charlie to die. He doesn’t. He wouldn’t force her to save him if it cost her life. Not even if the rules of the Deal didn’t insist on it. 

He wants her to live. Live and keep working on her ridiculous hotel. Everything it stands for is impossible, and yet…and yet…

…he’d liked it here. While he had the time. 

But acting…acting has consequences now. He’s barely holding himself together. He can’t win against Adam. If he bides his time, he may still find an opportunity to live, if radiance doesn’t destroy him from the inside first. If he intervenes, even to buy Charlie time, he will die. 

He won’t survive Adam’s wrath again.

It’s stupid. It’s foolish. It’s suicidal. Alastor has fought and bled and clawed his way to power, dragged himself forward against his owner’s leash, done everything to keep living. He has plans. He has a purpose. He isn’t a goddamned hero. He’s in Hell for a reason. He isn’t the type to throw his life away for others. 

Not even if, perhaps, he’s grown to care for them.

He doesn’t want to die. He wants to live. 

But there’s no point to both of them dying, and he can’t bear to see Charlie brutalized like this. She has potential. She can’t go like this.

And she’d given him a chance. 

And he’s so, so damn tired now. Thinking hurts. Planning hurts. Everything about existing hurts, and he doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t want to see Charlie die, and deep in his cold, dead heart, he finds just enough strength, despite his suffering, to do one last thing. 

For once in his life, for once in his afterlife, Alastor abandons his calculated plans and manipulations and acts with his heart and his instincts alone.

He doesn’t have much strength left. Virtually no magic, with his staff broken and holy light burning him alive from the inside. But he has his shadow, and he’d never needed magic to kill when he was alive. He just needs to be clever.

Circle around him, he orders his shadow. We come from behind, while he’s distracted. 

They do, crawling along the edge of the wall in the natural shadows, slithering from space to space between the stonework of the roof. Hurting shouldn’t be possible in the void, but moving is agony all the same, even without a physical form. It takes mental effort, and a little magical endurance, and the radiance is rapidly stealing both from him.

A little longer. Just a little bit longer. That’s all he needs to last.

Adam doesn’t notice. A thump and a flutter of wing-noises suggests he’s landed on the roof, which suits Alastor’s purpose fine. But he’s laughing and congratulating himself as he preens over Charlie’s fallen body. Too distracted to notice one itty-bitty shadow acting unnaturally, or crawling up behind him. 

“This fight was cute and all,” Adam practically cackles, “but it’s time to die.” 

Adam takes a step forward towards Charlie.

And Alastor, hiding in Adam’s own shadow, bubbles out of the ground with the assistance of his own, and strikes. 

Even free of the shadows, he has no magic, no shadow tendrils, no minions. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need them. 

His teeth and claws have always been serviceable enough. 

He snarls as he seizes one of Adam’s horns, dragging it to the left, hauling his jaw away from the high spiked collar of his robes. His right hand claws drag the collar down further, exposing the bastard’s throat. And with an animal bellow, he opens his maw wide, tendons and bones snapping and contorting, and sinks his fangs deep into Adam’s neck.

He instinctively bites for the jugular. His teeth don’t really do damage; they aren’t made of angelic steel, and they can’t bite deep. No blood wells up for his tongue to lap at, even though he can smell it, sweet and flavorful, not too far from his nose. But despite his deer attributes, his jaws are more akin to an alligator: once he’s bitten down, he doesn’t let go easily.

Adam screeches in surprise, reeling back as Alastor drags his head to the side and bites deep. He tries to turn his head to see what’s attacking him, and his jaw and cheek knock against Alastor’s forehead. Alastor doesn’t let go. If anything, he bites down harder.

“You fucking red piece of shit fucker!” Adam howls angrily, and tries to pull away, flailing violently. “What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking red freak? Are you biting me? Are you fucking biting me like a fucking vampire?” 

Alastor’s mouth is a little full, so he can’t exactly answer. He bites down harder still, flesh grinding between his jaws even if he can’t penetrate beneath the skin. When Adam moves, his claws scrabble for purchase to hang on, refusing to let himself be cast off. His left claws scratch and flail away from the horns on Adam’s head, clawing at the faceplate of his mask and trying to dig into the eyes. If he can blind the bastard, or even block his vision, so much the better. 

His right claws dig into the fabric of Adam’s robes, which are not nearly as impervious as his skin, and scratch and scratch until they find a wound. A glorious, bleeding wound, and oh, Charlie does have potential. He might not have been able to make the cut himself, but his sharp claws dig in deep, burrowing into the bloody gash. He can’t make the wound worse, but from the way Adam screeches in genuine pain right in his ear, this hurts like Hell all the same. 

Good. 

Adam snarls, beating his wings and trying to fly so he can shake Alastor off. Alastor refuses to let him. The movement sends jarring waves of pain through his chest and stomach from the cruel, radiant wound Adam had inflicted, but instead of letting himself scream in agony, he clenches his jaw harder and digs his claws deeper, causing Adam to howl. His legs begin to hang as they rise, but he wraps them viciously around Adam’s waist so that he can’t be dislodged so easily, ignoring the way his wound screams again when he shifts his hips. 

“You motherfucking red vampire motherfucker!” Adam howls in his ear. He zigzags violently in the air, trying to shake Alastor loose. 

Alastor has always been stubborn. He doesn’t let go.

“That is it!” Adam shrieks. He raises his finger and tries to shoot a blast of radiant light at Alastor. But Alastor flails blindly at his eyes, and between that and the frantic movement his aim is off. He doesn’t manage to incinerate Alastor’s head. He does manage to burn his own spiked collar and shoulder, aiming so close to his own body.

He also, unfortunately, burns away Alastor’s right ear. The burn of radiant magic roars anew inside of him and Alastor shrieks into Adam’s neck, his jaws and claws spasming at the new influx of raw, holy pain. 

But he still doesn’t let go.

His shadow, weak though it is, surges and slithers over his body and forms a thin shield across his skin. It wriggles inside him and adds strength to his weakening limbs, forcing his jaws and claws to remain clenched, his legs to remain locked. Their only hope is to hang on now. They have a tiger by the tail; let it go and they die.

“Let me the fuck go!” Adam howls. His hands are no demon claws, but his gauntlets are sharp and the knuckles are reinforced, and he’s no stranger to punching things. He reaches up and slams his fist into Alastor’s forehead, into his nose, scratches wildly at Alastor’s face. 

The left side of Alastor’s face and head is buried against Adam’s neck and jaw, but his right side is terribly exposed. The iron tang of his own blood fills the air as his forehead splits, as Adam’s metal fingers dig into his right eye and scratch violently until his eyelid is a shredded mess and the eyeball is popped and oozing. The cartilage in his nose cracks with a sharp sting of pain as it snaps out of alignment. The flesh of his face tears, exposing bone, and what’s left of his right ear becomes a ruined, bloody mess of sticky matted fur. There are gashes along his scalp and hair torn out and fractures rapidly forming in his skull from each and every blow. Adam seizes his right antler and yanks hard enough that it tears from his head. His fingers and arms are scratched at and punched, and bones snap under the pressure.

Every single wound burns with holy radiance, his shadow slithers away from every wound as it’s caused, and that’s how Alastor knows the gauntlets are forged from angelic steel, too.

He still doesn’t let go.

It’s getting harder to hold on, now. Every wound inflicted saps his strength. Holy radiance is burning through every part of him—his chest and stomach, his arms, his head. He’s blind now, his right eye torn away and seeing only unending holy light, his left eye squeezed shut and pressed against Adam’s neck as he bites, bites, bites. He’s mostly deaf, his burned-away right ear largely useless, his left ear folded back under Adam’s jaw against his head. 

Everything hurts. Everything. He hurts and he’s dying and he wants it to stop.

But he has to hold on. That little, insistent, scheming voice swears it, over and over, in the back of his head. Hold on as long as possible. Hold on as long as possible. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. 

He holds on. With tooth and claw and bloodthirsty, stubborn determination, he holds on. 

“Get off, you motherfucker!” Adam screeches. “Haven’t you had enough already?”

They move, a dizzying feeling when Alastor is blind. He’s distantly aware of someone screaming his name, seconds before he’s shoved violently backward. Adam slams himself back into a hard surface, and with Alastor clinging to his back, he takes the brunt of the blow. Adam’s back grinds into the wound across his chest and stomach from earlier, and it lights up with lightning crackles of agony, like he’s being stabbed a second time.

His shadow struggles wildly to stay with him, but his magic and his endurance are gone with that last blow. With a soft shushing noise it vanishes, slithering out of his limbs and away from his skin. The pain doubles without his shadow to interfere, without it to give him strength and let him endure.

He screams. He screams and screams and screams, barely drawing breath through his bloody, broken nose to get more air to scream. He finally loses the strength in his legs, and they slither away from Adam’s waist, hanging uselessly in the air off the bastard’s back.

You have to hold on. Hold on for as long as possible. Hold on, hold on, hold on!

He screams, but he keeps his jaw fastened around skin he can’t pierce. He spasms, but he keeps his claws dug into fabric, into blood and flesh. 

He holds on.

He holds on, but it’s a struggle now. His fingers scrabble to keep their grip, to stay clenched. His jaw aches, a minor ache compared to the raw, radiant agony the rest of him is in, but an ache nonetheless. 

He’s burning through his strength. He can’t hang on much longer.

But he has to. He has to hang on. He has to. 

Why did he have to? He can’t remember…there’s nothing left but pain, and burning, bright light, and the urgent need to hang on. 

Through a filter, a million miles away, he hears his name again. Calling. Pleading. Louder, closer, he hears noises that are anger. He’s too tired to make them out. In too much pain to make his brain understand the noises. His shadow can’t translate. It’s gone.

Hold on. Hold on. 

I can’t. I’m tired. I hurt. I can’t. 

Hold on! 

Something beats around his ears. Soft and feathery, but the impact is violent, and the touch burns. 

Hold on! 

Something claws at his face again. He can’t see it, but its touch burns too. He squeezes his eye and his jaw shut against it and tries to protect his neck as best as possible.

Hold on.

Something digs into his wrists, finally drags them away from the warmth and dripping blood and flesh they’d dug into. No, this is how he holds on, and he fights against it, but the force is too strong now and he doesn’t have strength left. The burning light inside him is incinerating it all. It’s going up in smoke. He’s so weak, it’s taking everything he has…

Hold on…

He scratches weakly. Tries to find a new hold for his claws. But something wraps around his neck, presses over his throat. It pulls. He tries to hold on, he does, he clenches with his jaws and tries to burrow his teeth deep, deep into flesh and tendon and bone.

But his fangs find no purchase. They grind and pinch but can’t find their way into flesh. He tries to hold on, but he’s so weak, and his jaws ache, and he doesn’t have the strength anymore. They slide free, just enough for the offending force to drag him away from the skin.

Hold…on…

But there’s nothing to hold onto anymore. He’s vaguely aware he’s dangling from his neck, like the condemned in a noose. But there’s no gallows, when he blinks his blood-slick left eye open. Only gold, red, and something vaguely like a face, and angry noises he can’t understand anymore.

He can’t understand much at all anymore, other than he hurts, he hurts everywhere, and he can’t remember why or how he got here anymore.

The grip on his throat is gone. He still can’t really breathe, he still chokes on thick iron in his mouth, dribbling down his throat. At least the crushing is gone, even if it comes with the dizzying sensation of movement, flitting past his bloodied eye too fast and—

Crack. 

Every part of him lights up in an agonizing wash of pure, unending agony. Every wound burns anew with radiant punishment, feasting on sins upon sins upon sins. Surely they’ll run out soon. There can’t be much left of him to burn. He’s hurt for so long. Forever. Why won’t it stop. Why won’t it…

Ho…old…

The blinding light in his burst right eye finally goes black, and so, blessedly, does the pain, and he thinks he can stop listening to that little voice in his head at last.

He stops holding on.

Chapter Text

Charlie slams into the ground hard enough to knock the wind, and the yelp of pain, clear out of her.

She blinks spots out of her eyes as she tries hard to regain her breath. Her right hand is still clenched around her trident, thank goodness; she hasn’t lost it yet. 

It’s about the only good thing she has right now. Charlie hurts everywhere. She’s only been fighting Adam for a few minutes, but he’s been absolutely kicking her ass. 

Charlie’s no good in a fight and she knows it. Vaggie’s been trying to teach her the basics for the past month that they’ve been training the cannibals and preparing their defenses, but it’s been slow going. That was why Vaggie settled on shield-training her instead, so she could at least defend herself. 

Vaggie. She wishes Vaggie were here. She wishes she knew if Vaggie was even still alive, or okay. Last she’d seen, Vaggie and that other angel—Lute, Vaggie had called her—had been brawling it out in the lobby of the hotel. And Dazzle—Dazzle had…

No, no, no. She can’t get distracted like this. She can’t afford to. Vaggie kept yelling at her to focus earlier. She has to focus now. 

But it’s so hard. Vaggie had been protecting her earlier, and it’s hard to fight without her. It’s hard to have the confidence that she can survive this. She could face anyone, even Adam, if Vaggie was next to her. 

But alone, it’s so difficult. She’s so bad at fighting, and she hates hurting people. Even people who are trying to kill her. She’d spent more time deflecting attacks in the battlefield below than trying to go on the offensive.

And yet, Charlie can’t afford to hold back anymore. She can’t be squeamish, or weak, or afraid of hurting and killing. Her inability to take on Adam, her unwillingness to really put herself in the fight—it’s already cost lives. It’s the reason Pentious had tried to take that position, and died for it. It’s the reason Alastor is probably dead too. 

Because Charlie is too weak to fight her own battles, too unwilling to hurt and kill to protect her dreams.

She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, trying to blink away tears. No. No! She doesn’t want to lose any more of her friends, her family. She won’t let herself be the weak link that leads to any of the others dying. 

She has to get up. She has to keep fighting. 

So although it hurts, although she aches throughout her entire body, although there’s blood dripping into her eye and staining her clothes, she gets up again. She uses her trident to pull herself to her feet, plants her hooves, clamps both sets of claws around it, and glares at Adam. Waiting.

Adam laughs at her. “Bitch, are you for real? You know you can’t take me, right? You look fuckin’ pathetic.” 

“I won’t let you hurt my family anymore,” Charlie snarls back, trying to make her voice sound less exhausted than it is. 

He laughs at her. And although Charlie hates admitting it, he has good reason to. She’s no good at this. She’d gotten one good strike in at the beginning, stabbing him in the shoulder, when he wasn’t expecting it. That’s all she’s managed to do to him since.

Because, as much as she hates to admit an asshole like Adam is good at anything, he knows what he’s doing when it comes to fighting. And now he’s on his guard, because he knows she can hurt him with her trident. 

He’s been playing with her. She knows just enough about fighting to know he’s been teasing her relentlessly. He’s been dodging around her attacks, slapping her trident strikes aside with lazy backhands against his gauntlets, or grabbing it and using her own weapon to slam her to the ground. He slips around her stabs and sweeps and punches her in the shoulders, chest, stomach, or uses his wings to sweep her legs out from underneath her. She’s been thrown to the ground at least a dozen times. 

He hasn’t even drawn a weapon yet.

And the whole time he mocks her. Swearing, laughing, using that obnoxious baby voice to make fun of her dedication to her family. He gleefully talks about how he’ll personally kill each of her friends that are left, if Lute hasn’t gotten to them already. He grins and tells her Vaggie—and he pronounces it wrong on purpose, va-jee, just the way Vaggie hates it—is probably already dead at Lute’s hands, because she’d always been pathetic and weak, the worst of the exorcists.

Charlie hates it. He’s not just an asshole, he’s cruel in a way she sees in Sinners and never Saints. The people in her hotel have been sentenced to Hell for a reason and yet she’s seen more kindness and genuine care in them than in the First Man. 

But Charlie also hates it, hates him, because he isn’t wrong. She’s weak. She can’t fight him. He’s toying with her for the entertainment value, and once she’s no fun to mess around with, he’ll probably kill her and go down to kill the others. And then move on the Pentagram itself. 

Just keep fighting, she urges herself. Maybe, if she can stall for long enough, Vaggie can finish off Lute and come to help. Maybe Adam will get careless and leave an opening.

Maybe a miracle will happen.

She waits, standing at the ready, preparing for Adam’s attack. He doesn’t seem interested in going on the offensive, because he yawns, fanning a hand in front of his face, before he finally says, “So, are we done here? Are you gonna fuckin’ attack or something? ‘Cause I got other things I could be doing with my time.” He grins savagely. “Like your girlfriend.”

“Sexist pig,” Charlie snaps at him, raising her trident to aim in the general direction of his face.

“Wah wah wah, you bitches are all the same,” Adam says, with a roll of his eyes. “All freedom and equality and no sex jokes ever again. Fucking losers.” He waves a hand at her dismissively. “Whatever, bitch. If you’re not gonna play, I’ll just go back to killing the freaks on the ground floor.”

“No!” Charlie snarls, and launches at him angrily, stabbing out with her trident at Adam’s chest.

Too late, she realizes this was precisely his goal. He’d baited her into a trap and she fell for it. Even as she thrusts outward with her weapon, Adam flaps his wings, zipping into the air over her attack. He cackles as he dives down directly at her from above, gauntleted, sharp hands outstretched, straight for her face.

Adam is fast, and Charlie doesn’t have enough time to bring her trident around to guard. It’s too long and she’s already off balance from the thrust. She tries to let go of the trident with one hand to guard her face, but she’s too late.

Adam seizes her by the horns and, using his full momentum and weight, power-slams her straight back down into the stone of the roof.

Stars dance before Charlie’s vision, exploding wildly, bright and painful. She shrieks in pain as the back of her skull collides with the roof, pile-driven into the ground. The rest of her body slams to the ground just as painfully, electric, agonizing sparks of pain running all up and down her spine, her hips, her tail, her legs and arms. She hears the distant clatter of metal long before she realizes she’d let go of her weapon, and her claws are empty.

When Adam lets go of her horns, one of them snaps away in his palm halfway up from the base, and that sends a new spike of pain through her. Her head spins, and her vision swims above her, a bewildering mix of Hell-red and Heaven-gold. She feels nauseated, like she might throw up at any minute. She smells blood. A lot of it.

The flapping of wings catches her attention. Adam. Adam is still around and she’s vulnerable. She grimaces, rolling onto her side, but even that sends waves of dizziness and nausea through her, and she needs to take a minute to try and breathe. She blinks her eyes painfully—there are tears running down her cheeks from the pain—and squints, trying to focus.

Adam lands in front of her with a thump. She can barely tilt her head to look up past the hems of his gold and gray and white robes towards his face, which is blurry and indistinct in her rolling vision. She moans.

“This fight was cute and all,” Adam says with a cackle, as he starts to step towards her. “But it’s time to die.” 

And Charlie tries to get to her feet. She does. But everything hurts and everything is spinning and it’s taking most of her concentration to not throw up on Adam’s robes, much less get up to fight back. She doesn’t even know where her weapon has gone. 

It’s not fair. If she just had a few more minutes, if she could just get this stupid dizziness and nausea under control, she might have a chance. But she’s so weak, so useless…

She doesn’t say it out loud. She’s not going to beg for mercy or let Adam think she’s apologizing to him. But inside, in her mind, she mentally reaches out to all of them.

I’m so sorry, Pentious, Dazzle. You died for nothing. I’m so sorry, Alastor, that I asked you to fight this guy and probably got you killed too. Vaggie, I’m sorry I wasn’t good at learning combat from you and I have to leave you like this. Angel, Husk, Niffty, Cherri Bomb, Razzle…I’m sorry I got you all wrapped up in this mess. Dad…I’m sorry we didn’t get more time together.

I’m so, so sorry. 

She looks up, head and vision spinning, but determined to face her end with strength. Adam leers down at her, still laughing, one hand raising and golden energy sparking at his fingertips for the killing blow.

And—

And—

And her spinning, star-struck vision must be playing tricks on her, because something dark is bubbling up behind Adam. It’s pitch black, void itself, with long elongated arms and gleaming red eyes, and it’s familiar in a way her dizzy mind can’t begin to believe, because Alastor is dead but this looks like Alastor’s shadow, and then—

—and then Alastor himself slithers out of the shadow like a striking snake. One hand wraps around Adam’s long-horned hood, the second tears his spiked collar away, and with a wrench, Adam’s head is dragged to the left with a shocked yelp. Alastor’s mouth grows impossibly wide, his red eyes turn black, his pupils become dials, and with an animal noise and a screech of feedback, he bites down on the side of Adam’s throat.

Even as Adam screeches in surprise, Charlie’s heart wells with relief and exhilaration. Alastor! Alastor is alive! She hadn’t condemned him to death by asking him to fight Adam. He’d even come to help her when she was in trouble—she knew Alastor cared, deep down, even if he never wanted to admit it. Her tears of pain rapidly mix with tears of sobbing relief, and she’s so glad he’s okay. 

“You fucking red piece of shit fucker!” Adam yowls, trying to turn to glare at Alastor. He can’t, because Alastor’s face is buried in the side of his neck, his gleaming yellow teeth casting a sickly glow against Adam’s shining gold and solemn gray. Adam tries to step away, but Alastor is dragged after him like a bulldog with its jaws locked, hissing and spitting static as he goes. “What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking red freak? Are you biting me? Are you fucking biting me like a fucking vampire?” 

Alastor doesn’t answer. He probably can’t, with his mouth locked around Adam’s throat like that. But as Adam tries to shake himself free, Alastor entangles himself further. One of his elongated, eerily proportioned arms comes up to wrap around Adam’s head and facemask, blocking his vision. The other skitters like a spider until it finds the single wound Charlie had managed to put in his shoulder, and digs into it violently, twisting and tearing to inflict as much pain as possible.

Adam screeches, flailing and shaking frantically as he tries to dislodge Alastor. But Alastor’s gangly, wiry limbs are impossible to dislodge once those long, sharp fingers have found a hold, once those gleaming jaws have found something to bite down on. He hangs on grimly, like the world’s most violent cannibal backpack.

And yet, as terrified as the display is, that’s when Charlie begins to realize Alastor isn’t nearly as okay as she first thought.

Because Alastor might be frightening even now, a shadowy creature with unnatural proportions and a too-big mouth, screeching static and doing his best to consume a living angel. But for as long as Charlie’s known him, this isn’t really Alastor’s style when it comes to fights. 

Where are all the shadowy tendrils and little shade minions? The crackling, electric green energy, or the whirling symbols? Why hasn’t he grown so big he could swat Adam aside, or eat him whole? 

Even now, as Adam rises into the air, flapping his wings frantically and zigzagging and looping in a wild attempt to shake Alastor off, Alastor isn’t really fighting. He’s wrapped his over-long legs and split hooves around Adam’s waist, cinching the robe tight, in order to hold on better. But he hasn’t done anything else to attack. He just holds on, digging his teeth and claws deep, refusing to be shaken loose.

Something’s wrong. 

Something’s very wrong. Alastor must have abandoned his fight with Adam for a reason. Maybe it was the same reason he isn’t using his magic. 

Charlie doesn’t have time to wallow on the ground in pain. She has to get up. She has to help. 

The nausea is still there, but it’s settled a little—she feels sick to her stomach, but not enough to throw up. The dizziness is definitely still there and makes her whole head spin as she drags herself to her hands and knees, and she digs her fingers into the stone roof hard enough to crack it as she wills her vision to stop swimming. 

She doesn’t have time for this! Alastor needs help! 

“That is it!” Adam shrieks. His finger sparks as he tries to raise it to point at Alastor, wielding the same deadly beam of holy energy that had eradicated Sir Pentious in a matter of seconds.

“No!” Charlie shrieks, tears pouring down her face. She’s still on her hands and knees—there’s no way to stop this—no, no, no! “Alastor, please!” 

But Alastor gets lucky. Adam is flinging himself around like a madman, in pain and agitated from Alastor clinging to him and digging into his wound, and he’s blinded from Alastor’s claws over his facemask. It throws off his aim, which is already not great, since if he aims too low he risks hitting himself. A savage flap of wings at the same time that he fires throws his shot off, burning away the flattened high collar of his robes and part of his ornate shoulder spikes, but also taking his aim away from Alastor’s face.

But not all of Alastor. Charlie feels the resonance of his agonized shriek in her chest as the whole building vibrates from the static frequencies of his cry of pain. When the burning beam of light ends and Charlie blinks bright spots out of her vision, she’s horrified to see Alastor’s right ear burned away to a bloody stump. It dribbles with blood and glimmering gold, streaking down his face.

And yet, to Charlie’s amazement, Alastor doesn’t let go. His one visible eye squeezes shut, hiding away his red dial eye. But his claws dig in deep and his jaws stay locked around Adam’s throat, and he doesn’t move.

He’s still fighting. He’s hurting, bad, and yet he’s still here trying to help her stay alive.

She has to try, too, before he gets himself killed or can’t fight anymore.

She’s still dizzy, still on her hands and knees, but she forces herself to look around and ignores the way her head spins. She needs her trident. She’d lost it when Adam slammed her into the ground, but it can’t have gone far—

There! 

It’s only about ten feet away. She can reach it. She grits her teeth, tries to force back her pain and discomfort, and starts crawling on hands and knees over to her weapon.

“Let me the fuck go!” Adam howls above. He’s still flapping around wildly, but he seems to have given up on using holy energy to try and remove Alastor. He’d burned himself in the attempt, so Charlie isn’t surprised.

But when she risks a glance up at the two of them in the air, grimacing at how it makes her head ache and her vision spin, she’s horrified to realize this is because Adam’s picked a new tactic. He can’t turn his head very well, but he can still raise his arms. Both of his gauntleted hands are striking at Alastor any way they can—punching, clawing, pulling. The wounds hiss and gleam, which means the gauntlets must be made of angelic steel.

Charlie can’t help but sob at how awful Alastor looks after just a few seconds of assault. Adam tears out his eye, cuts gouges in his face, breaks his nose, rips out his hair. There’s a horrible crack when Adam snaps one of Alastor’s antlers, twisted and spiked from his partial demonic form, fully from his head and flings it off the roof. Blood runs down Alastor’s face, over his teeth, dribbles down onto the white and gold and gray of Adam’s robes. His arms snap at odd angles, even for him, when Adam punches and tears savagely at them to try and free himself from the Radio Demon’s grip.

Charlie forces herself to look away before she throws up, this time from horror. “I’m sorry,” she sobs miserably, as she forces herself to try and crawl faster towards her trident. “I’m sorry, Alastor, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m trying, I’m sorry—”

Her fingers touch metal. Angelic steel, cool even in Hell’s eternal heat. Staff carved with sigils and her father’s serpent likeness wrapped protectively around it, headed with the fruit of knowledge and three deadly blades. She’d managed to hit Adam with it once; its bite had cut angel flesh and drained angel blood.

She wraps her fingers around it and drags it close. Jams the butt end into the ground, and uses it as a lever to push herself up. Her legs are wobbly at first, but she forces them to be steady, to take her weight.

Her people need her. Alastor needs her. She can’t afford to be weak right now. 

She has to be ready to fight. 

“Get off, you motherfucker!” Adam screeches. “Haven’t you had enough already?”

Charlie finds them up above. Adam has wandered closer to the Hazbin Hotel sign. He spins around, putting his back to the struts and supports, and raises his wings back.

Charlie recognizes the backdraft move from watching her own father’s flight, and knows what Adam’s about to try. “Alastor, let go!” she yells, trying to warn him.

But Alastor doesn’t listen. Or maybe, with his face torn up and his ear burned away, he doesn’t hear or see her. Whatever the case, when Adam sweeps his wings forward and propels himself backwards into the Hazbin Hotel support struts, slamming his back—and Alastor, still clinging to it—directly into the metal, Alastor takes the full force of the blow.

Charlie had felt Alastor’s scream of pain before. It’s nothing to his suffering now. The feedback screech is like a knife straight into her brain, and she instinctively claps a hand over her ears in pain. And she can hear him screaming now, even muffled in Adam’s neck as it is; a strange mix of animal bugling and human shrieks of agony.

Charlie has never, ever heard Alastor make a noise like that before. He makes other people make that kind of noise. 

She’s terrified.

When Adam flaps away from the Hazbin Hotel support struts, it’s clear Alastor is starting to lose the fight between them. His legs slip free from where they had been wrapped around Adam’s waist to keep him secure. He dangles from his jaws and the grip of his claws alone, several feet in the air, dripping blood down to the roof below. 

And from the way he scrabbles, struggling to keep his grip, arms shaking, jaws working, even that is becoming difficult.

“Alastor!” Charlie yells to him, pleading. “Let go! It’s okay, you’ve done enough, please —” The fall might hurt him, but if he keeps fighting Adam, he will die at this rate.

Charlie can’t bear to see any more of her friends die.

But there’s nothing else she can really do to help. She can’t fly, and Adam is still hovering above, still trying to dislodge Alastor. She doesn’t know what happened to Razzle after she was thrown free of his back, and Vaggie must still be held up by Lute. She doesn’t trust herself to try throwing her trident—even if her aim was good, which it isn’t, she’s afraid to hit Alastor.

All she can do is stand on the ground, holding her weapon, watching uselessly as Adam flutters above and beats the hell out of one of her friends. 

Alastor is definitely weaker now. His more demonic features, like his too-long limbs and split hooves, have melted away. The one antler he has left has reduced to its little crescent shape. She’s not sure if his eyes have changed back, since one is torn out and the other is hidden—but if she had to bet on it, she’s sure they’re red once more, and the dial is gone.

 Adam’s wings buffet his face and body, knocking him about. Adam finally manages to get one of his hands around Alastor’s wrist, the one digging into Adam’s shoulder wound, and drags it loose. Alastor struggles to free himself from the grip, to claw at Adam’s body, but he’s too weak now to pull his wrist free. 

“Stop,” Charlie pleads. She’s not sure who she’s pleading to. Alastor, to stop struggling and hurting himself more. Adam, to stop hurting her family. 

The plea falls on deaf ears anyway. 

“Haha, red piece of shit motherfucker, getting tired? Yeah, didn’t think you could fucking play with the original dick! I told you, radio is fucking dead!” 

Sensing victory, Adam reaches up with his left arm and works his fingers behind Alastor’s head. Alastor makes a choked, pained noise, and Adam cackles. He pulls, and Alastor struggles vainly, worrying his jaws like a dog. He fails. Adam rips Alastor free from his throat—perfectly undamaged, beyond the indentation of tooth marks on unpierced skin—and drags him over his own shoulder. 

Alastor is buffeted by those massive golden wings for a moment. But then Adam holds him aloft by his neck, his gauntleted left hand wrapped around Alastor’s own skinny throat. His flight regains some semblance of control when he’s no longer dealing with an unwanted passenger. He snickers.

“Hah, look at you! Stupid red vampire motherfucker, did you really think you could take me? Once wasn’t good enough, I gotta fuck you up twice, is that what you’re saying? You’re real twisted, huh?”

“Leave him alone!” Charlie snarls up at him, angry but helpless to do anything. Alastor’s not even trying to free himself. His arms dangle uselessly at his sides. There are choked noises coming from his mouth and throat, and buzzing, frantic static coming from everywhere else, but he’s too weak to defend himself. His head sags sideways at an alarming angle, and normally Charlie would say it’s just that thing he does, but now…now his neck just looks broken, sitting on Adam’s fist, while Alastor suffers.

“Oh come on,” Adam scowls, as he flutters down to land on the ground, holding Alastor up in front of him like a prize. Adam is one of the rare few taller than even Alastor, and the Radio Demon’s toes hang inches above the ground as his head lolls. “You care about this fucker? This guy is family? This red vampire piece of shit? He tried to eat me!”

“He tried to protect me,” Charlie snarls at him, raising her trident. Alastor is between her and Adam, and she can’t risk hurting him. If he gets hit by angelic steel, as bad off as he is, he will die. But if she gets the chance, now that Adam is on the ground…she just needs one chance. “Put him down.” 

Adam snickers at her. “Well, you fucking asked!” 

And he turns, and hurls Alastor across the roof. 

Charlie screams in horror as Alastor is flung through the air. He slams hard into the raised edges of the roof with a sickening crack from deep inside him, bounces off, and thuds hard to the stone of the roof. His back is to her, his form boneless, his long arms and legs sprawled and motionless. He doesn’t get up again.

And an ominous silence spreads across the rooftop. It takes Charlie only one thudding heartbeat to recognize the absence of white noise static for what it is. 

Alastor is silent. 

Charlie is not.

She screams, a violent, Hellish noise that’s never come out of her before. Emotions well up inside of her that she’s never tried to entertain, but she welcomes them now. Raw, Hellish fury fueled by a burning desire for justice. A powerful need to protect, to defend, in any way necessary. A hungry, intense need for vengeance. 

These things wash over her, and while the dizziness and the nausea and the weakness are still there, they don’t matter. Something else rolls through her instead and gives her strength, agility, drive. It wells up from deep inside and slithers through her flesh and blood like magic, making her skin gleam red. Distantly, she can feel her demonic attributes growing bigger, stronger—her tail gets longer, her horns sharper, her claws around the trident more pronounced. 

No more forgiveness. No more talk. Adam has crossed lines. 

And Charlie—she has her people to protect.

She launches forward, and she’s amazed even at herself at how fast she manages to cross the distance to Adam. She’s never been this fast before, this alive, this hyper-aware of the world around her and the movements in front of her. Adam’s only just starting to turn around to face her again when she leaps forward. By the time he’s facing her, by the time his eyes can only just start to widen in surprise, her trident—burning with red flames and golden sparks—is level with his heart.

She slams all three blades into Adam’s chest. Right up to the apple-shaped hilt.

Adam screams. He tries to pull away, shoving at the weapon buried in his chest. But his hands pull back with another screech as they touch the red flames and golden sparks dancing along the blade, and his fingers smoke when he raises them.

He tries to use his wings to propel him off the end of the blade instead. But Charlie twists, like Vaggie had shown her, and the tines at the end of the blades lock like hooks. Before Adam realizes he can’t get away, Charlie roars, pivots, and uses the leverage of the trident to slam Adam to the ground on his back.

Adam screeches again, a primal noise of pain and suffering. “S-stop,” he pants, golden blood dribbling from his lips. “That…that hurts… stoppit—”

Charlie doesn’t stop. She leans over Adam, using her whole body as a force to shove the trident deeper into him, to pin him into place on the roof.

Charlie’s killed a few times today. Exorcists had gotten close enough to get stunned by her shield, or blinded by her firework spell. Vaggie had done the brunt of the actual killing, but Charlie knows she helped. 

She felt bad about it. Even then, even when they were trying to kill her family. She’d apologized every time she defended herself, protected Vaggie, fought back.

She doesn’t apologize now. 

She doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like killing. Taking a life, even the life of an asshole like Adam, it hurts. Her trident is angelic steel. Adam won’t get a second chance. He has no hope for redemption. This is it for him, forever, after eons of existence, and it’s the end because of her. 

It’s a powerful and horrible feeling.

“Pl…please,” Adam whines, and more blood bubbles from his lips. Slamming him to the ground had knocked his face mask loose, and she can see one golden, human eye. It’s wide and terrified with the growing realization of dying. He raises a trembling, gauntleted hand towards her, open and pleading. “St-stop…please. We can…we can work out a new deal…I’ll go away… please…” 

Charlie keeps driving the trident deep.

“I got family!” Adam chokes. “Please…family’s imp…portant to you…I got it too…Heaven…please, st-stop…” His trembling hand grabs at the edge of her skirt, tugging in a desperate bid to grab her attention. 

Charlie’s vision is growing blurry. She squeezes her eyes shut, allowing hot tears to spill over her cheeks as she listens to his pleading. 

But she doesn’t let go. 

Because he’s right. Her family is important to her. Her people are important to her. More than anything, what she wants is to protect them, to save them. 

She doesn’t like killing. But if it comes down to her own morals and feelings, or protecting her loved ones, her family— if she has to choose between Adam’s life, and Alastor’s—

She picks her family. She picks Al. 

She’s already in Hell, anyway. Sovereign Princess, Heir to the Throne. What does it matter if Thou Shalt Not Kill stains her heart? 

She’s already where she needs to be.

So she doesn’t let go. She drives that trident deep, and she keeps it in place with firm hands and burning magic. 

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Adam stops begging and pleading. He starts thrashing instead, violent and wild in his death throes, desperate to escape the weapon burrowing into his chest and pinning him to the ground. His wings buffet Charlie angrily, his sharp gauntlets claw at her legs, he kicks and struggles and screams. 

He doesn’t free himself. And slowly, so slowly, his struggles grow weaker and his strength fades. He stops thrashing. His breaths come in struggling, gurgling pants now, and golden blood dribbles in bubbles from his mouth.

Charlie can feel the moment he dies. His whole body shudders, and she swears she can feel a light dimming somewhere. Adam gasps one last time. “Fuck,” he whimpers. “Hurts.” And then, feebly, pathetically, terrified, he slurs, “Lute…help…”

The light is snuffed out. He stops moving. And Charlie knows, instinctively, somewhere deep inside of her, that this isn’t a trick. He’s gone.

She tears the trident out of his body. The golden sparks and burning red flames fade away, and she suddenly feels exhausted again as the red sheen to her skin evaporates. She swallows, wipes her eyes with her free hand not holding the trident, and looks down at Adam’s sprawled form.

Her first instinct is to say sorry, from years and years of always apologizing for everything.

She doesn’t. Instead, she says, “I had to. You wanted to kill my family.”

And he might still, if she doesn’t hurry. She abandons Adam’s body, turning on her heel to rush to Alastor’s side across the roof.

Alastor is terrifyingly still when she reaches him. He doesn’t react at all as she drops her trident with a loud clatter and slams to her knees next to him. He’s flopped on his left side with his back to her, his arms and legs limp and sprawled like a broken puppet. There’s a steadily forming pool of blood underneath him, blending with his red coat, mixed with flecks of metallic gold. The knees of her high stockings are sticky and coated with it the moment she crashes down next to him.

“Alastor?” she calls, voice shaking. 

He doesn’t respond. No voice, no movement. No crackle of static to even let her know he’s listening.

She raises her hands hesitantly over him, but he’s hurt almost everywhere that she can see on his right side. Which makes sense. His right side had been exposed to Adam’s attacks, and Adam had not been kind when attacking. She’s afraid to touch him, for fear of making anything else worse.

“Alastor,” she pleads, “Please, let me know if you can hear me. Al?”

He doesn’t answer.

Hands shaking, she nevertheless decides to touch him. She has to know if he’s okay. If he’s even alive. If there’s any way she can help.

Her hands cautiously explore his throat first, searching for a pulse. The high neck of his shirt collar makes it difficult, but Adam’s gauntlets had torn holes in the fabric when he’d grabbed Alastor by the throat. She’s able to tear the holes wider and feel around until she finds movement fluttering beneath her fingers. His heart is beating, but it’s weak and thready, struggling badly.

“It’s okay, Alastor,” she tries to reassure. “It’s okay, I’m here. I’m going to help. You’re alive, and I’m going to help.” 

His neck doesn’t feel any more broken than usual—at least, for him. It’s always been oddly bendy and had at least one extra joint, she’s pretty sure, but she thinks she could move him if she needed to. A hand along his back suggests his spine is intact too, so she won’t paralyze him if she moves him. That’s a relief. His arms look broken, but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a splint and a little time.

His face and head look awful, and she feels so sorry looking at it, because he has to be hurting so bad. His right eyelid is torn and the eyeball beneath had been punctured, leaving everything a soggy, bloody mess. When she cautiously brushes hair away from his face, it only exposes the deep gashes in his forehead, cheekbones and jaw, and the broken alignment of his nose. A few of his teeth look loose, probably from being punched. There are gashes in his skull that cut furrows in his hair, and a few melted bits of metal fused to the strands that it takes her a minute to realize are the remains of his monocle chain. The lens frame is nowhere to be found, and there are shattered bits of red glass buried in the torn skin of his cheekbone. And his poor ear—it’s completely gone, the hole into the skull fully exposed and oozing blood. 

It’s a lot of damage. And it worries Charlie that the wounds aren’t closing, and that the ear especially has golden flecks in the dark red blood pooling out of it. It stinks like magic, the same incense-and-iron smell of Adam’s blasts of holy light. That can’t be healthy for a demon.

But she thinks, maybe, if she acts now, she can help with all of this. It’ll be an awful recovery, but if she can patch Alastor up now, at least he won’t lose any more blood. If he can hold together long enough for them to finish the battle, they can take him to a doctor, or maybe her father could even help with healing. 

Yes. That’s it. Charlie can do this. Alastor came back to help her, and now she can help him. She just needs to bind up his wounds and stop the bleeding long enough to get help. And hey–she even has experience with missing eyes already! She’d helped Vaggie with her own recovery. She knows what to do even better this time.

Of course, she doesn’t have a first aid kit on her. But her skirt has double layers, and the long tail of Alastor’s coat is mostly unharmed. She knows he gets upset when that coat is damaged, but if it comes down to his coat or his life, he’d better pick his life. She’ll buy him a dozen others when he feels better. In every color of the rainbow, if he wants it.

“It’s okay, Alastor,” she says, with more confidence than before. “It’s okay. I’m going to take care of you. I can fix this, just hang on.”

Very carefully, so she doesn’t hurt him more than she has to, she slips her hands around his shoulders and head and gently helps him roll over onto his back. She shifts his hips and legs just as carefully, taking care to make him as comfortable as possible. She wishes she had a pillow or something to help, but for now, the roof is just going to have to do.

Then she gets her first good look at all of Alastor, and her heart drops into her stomach as she realizes—no, Alastor can’t hang on, and she cannot fix this.

There’s an enormous gash cutting across Alastor’s chest, from his left shoulder to his right hip. It goes straight through his many layers, through skin, through bone, and it goes deep. His entire front is already soaked crimson. Worse, even. Like his ear, there are rivulets of gold oozing from the wound and staining his front as well, gold that smells like magic. The white of bone peeks out from beneath the torn clothes, a snapped rib levered upright. Charlie suddenly knows what the crack had been when he’d been flung into the wall. 

Most of the blood pooling beneath them, Charlie shakily comes to understand, is from this wound. Not the others.

He hadn’t gotten this when he came back to rescue Charlie. He’d been pressed against Adam’s back the whole time—Adam never could have reached.

With sick horror, Charlie suddenly knows why Alastor had vanished when he was supposed to be fighting Adam. He’d been hurt. He’d been badly hurt. This is bad enough that it might have killed him on its own. 

And yet…

And yet, he’d come back. 

Knowing full well that he was injured, possibly fatally, he’d come back just to help her. He’d been wounded badly enough that he had almost no magic, no tricks, no demonic forms. And he’d still chosen a second round against Adam, when she was inches from dying herself.

Alastor had saved her.

Alastor had saved her. And it probably cost him his life.

Charlie can’t help it. She bursts into tears, hot, wretched things that run down her cheeks and drip into the pooling blood beneath her. She sobs, and she takes one of Alastor’s broken hands, bending down to press her forehead against his knuckles gently.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpers. “I’m sorry I’m so weak. I’m sorry you had to come and save me. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

“Char…lie?” 

Her eyes fly open, and she gazes with astonishment at Alastor’s face. His missing right eye is useless, but his left eye is slitted open, blinking slowly against the blood dripping into it from his forehead. He makes a soft, barely perceptible whining noise in the back of his throat, one that burbles wetly. 

“Alastor?” She gently squeezes his hand, and then sets it down and leans forward to—again, very carefully—wipe the blood out of his eye. He makes that wet noise of discomfort in the back of his throat again, but with her help, he’s able to open his bruised left eye halfway. 

His eye is glazed and his pupil blown wide, and he’s obviously struggling to focus. But he does manage to look at her after a long, painful moment, and he sighs wearily. “Charlie,” he murmurs, mostly to himself.

His radio filter is gone. She’s never heard his natural voice before. 

She sniffles, but nods. “Hi, Alastor,” she says, her voice trembling. “I’m here. I promise, I…I’m here…”

Even now, his toothy maw is smiling, but it’s thin and weak. His glazed eye is confused above his smile, and he frowns at her in bewilderment. After a moment of staring, he coughs, and says with difficulty, “Are you crying…dear? Don’t cry…what did I tell you about smiling…”

Charlie thinks this might be an attempt to cheer her up. It has the opposite effect, and her sobs come harder, faster, burning her eyes and clogging her throat.

“Why did you do that, Alastor?” She’s not sure if she’s crying or yelling, or maybe both. She rubs at her eyes frantically, because if she’s going to be the last thing Alastor sees she doesn’t want to be yelling at him, and yet…and yet…!

“Do?” Alastor asks weakly, confusion clear on his face. He’s struggling to focus. His good eye can barely stay on her.

“Why did you come back,” she sobs helplessly. “You were hurt! I didn’t know you were hurt! No wonder you left, and I thought you were dead—and I was glad you came back, but—you couldn’t…you couldn’t…” She sniffles, and finishes weakly, “Why did you come back if you knew you couldn’t win?”

Alastor’s breaths are reedy. His sides heave with the effort of taking in each breath and exhaling it, and based on the way he twitches and whines in the back of his throat, each breath is agonizing, too. It’s taking him so much focus that Charlie almost thinks he’s lost the question.

But then…

“I don’t know,” he says wetly. 

She doesn’t expect that. Alastor is…is Alastor. He’s got plans on top of plans, clever responses and witty retorts to everything. She half expects him to say he’d had a plan, but it had gone badly. She never expected him to try and save her on a whim. Or to admit to it.

But he’s suffering, and exhausted, and maybe he doesn’t have the strength left in him to lie or bend truths anymore.

He isn’t done surprising her. His torso lurches, and for a moment, she’s afraid he’s going to throw up. She’s getting ready to roll him onto her side so he doesn’t choke, or at least try to turn his head—

But he doesn’t cough up blood or bile. Instead, a manic, hysterical sort of giggle, wet and weak, escapes him. After a moment, he rasps weakly, “Great Alastor, Altruist, died for his friends…” His voice lilts, like he’s trying to sing, but he doesn’t have the strength or the breath to. Another manic giggle. “What a…a fine joke.” 

And Charlie can’t keep herself from sobbing at that. Because her friend is so weak. And because he knows he’s dying, too.

Alastor spasms suddenly, gasping and clenching his teeth, glazed eye snapping closed in pain. The whining noise from before turns into a low moan, and his claws drag uselessly against the stone of the roof. Charlie takes his hand again and lets him squeeze her own, ignoring the way his sharp claws bite into her flesh. His grip is so feeble it barely hurts.

When his eye opens again, he looks around wearily. “Charlie?” he gasps, and there’s a note of panic in his voice. 

Charlie has never heard Alastor frightened before.

“I’m here,” Charlie says again, squeezing his hand gently once before setting it down. She circles around to his other side, on his left with his good eye, to make it easier for him to spot her. He’s so confused and dazed, she doesn’t want to make things more difficult on him.

“Charlie,” he stammers weakly. “F…favor.”

She feels a strange tug at her heart, and understanding dawns. He’s calling in his half of the Deal they made a month ago. One favor, at the time of his choosing, where she was not compelled to harm anyone.

But to call it in now, she can only guess what he’s after…and she can’t help him, or she would. “I’m sorry, Alastor,” she sobs. “I can’t fix this—I don’t know how. I can’t heal like Dad can, and I don’t have any supplies, and—”

“No,” he murmurs. It’s so soft, and yet he manages to cut through her helpless rambling with a single word. “No, I…just…stay. With me. Please…”

Charlie feels sick to her stomach. His voice is so small and weak, so vulnerable and afraid. He knows he’s dying, but he doesn’t want to die alone. And he’s certain he will, or he wouldn’t have tried to compel her to stay. 

She wishes she could make him understand that she never would have left him to this alone. She didn’t need to be compelled with a Deal. This is all she can do for Alastor, and so she will. 

But she supposes she’ll never have the chance to teach him that anymore. 

Fresh tears spill over her cheeks, but she tries not to start sobbing again. Alastor doesn’t have long, that much is clear. She doesn’t want to make herself a problem for him in his last few minutes. 

“Of course I will,” she promises. “I’ll be right here with you the whole time.” She picks up his left hand, rubs her thumb over the split knuckles as gently as she can to offer some form of comfort.

He sighs weakly, and gold-flecked blood bubbles between his teeth. “Good,” he murmurs. “Going alone…it’s awful, Charlie. Not again. Not again…” He sags. His smile is still there—Charlie is starting to think, given how much pain he’s in, he can’t not smile—but it’s thin, barely held together.

She swallows. “I won’t let you be alone,” Charlie promises. “I’ll be right here with you. I promise.” And, biting her lip, she adds softly, “Is…is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

“Think I’m…beyond comfort, dear,” he murmurs, and then gasps as he spasms in pain again. She holds his hand through the worst of it, talking to him gently, until he sags with exhaustion. “S’there a storm coming…my dear? Awful cold for…for Hell…”

It’s as hot and humid as it had been at the start of the battle, but Charlie doesn’t tell him that. Instead she carefully, so, so carefully, slips her arms beneath his head and back and shifts him upright. He gasps in pain and whimpers, a pitiful, wretched sound that’s wrong coming from him. 

But a moment later she settles him gently against her chest, cradling his body close. His head rests on her shoulder, and the wounds on his right side face out instead of pressing against her. When she carefully wraps her arms around his torso and tucks him close, she can support him without putting too much strain on his injuries. 

She ignores the way that awful chest wound begins to leak onto her dress, making it wet and sticky.

“Is that warmer?” she asks. “Does that help at all?”

She can’t really see Alastor’s face all that well from this angle. But after a moment, he hums wearily, and murmurs, “Better. Tell…tell your father to stop…m-messing with the weather…”

She doesn’t tell Alastor that Dad isn’t even here, or that he’s never had that kind of power over the Pride Ring, or that it still isn’t cold. All she says is, “I’ll let him know.”

“Good,” Alastor murmurs, and falls silent.

For a moment or two, it’s quiet. Well, not completely quiet. There are still sounds of battle below, and fuck, Charlie can’t believe it’s really only been a few minutes since she launched herself into the air on Razzle. The others below—Angel Dust, Husk, Niffty, Vaggie —they don’t even know that Alastor is slipping away from them. And Rosie. What will she tell Rosie? Or Mimzy? They'd had that disagreement but surely she deserved to know?

Charlie squeezes her eyes shut, trying to keep more tears from flowing. Not now. Not now! Alastor needs you now, you have to be strong for him, stop going farther into your own head—

“Charlie,” Alastor gasps faintly. 

“I’m here,” Charlie says immediately, snapping out of her spiraling thoughts. “I’m still here, Alastor, I’m here. I promised.”

Alastor’s sides heave against her as he struggles to get enough breath to speak. After a moment, he barely manages to whisper, “Can you…sing for me…my dear?”

And Charlie can’t help the tears that prickle at her eyes at that, because it’s so…it’s so Alastor. He’d loved her singing from the beginning, from the first day she’d tried to explain her hotel through song and dance on Katie Killjoy’s news segment. He’d always loved not just that she was good at singing, but that she used it to communicate, even when everyone else thought it was stupid. Alastor had never once agreed with her dreams, but her ways of talking about them? He’d gladly joined in from day one, and he’d never once told her that part was stupid.

The thought that he might never join her in an impromptu duet again…oh, it hurts. It’s like taking up her own trident and putting it through her heart. 

But she can do this. For Alastor, she can definitely do this.

“Of course I can,” she says. “Anything in particular?”

Alastor only hums in answer. She decides to take this as a nod to sing whatever she pleases, and not a specific request.

So she does. If there’s one thing she’s always been good at, it’s taking her emotions, her thoughts and dreams, and putting them into song. 

There’s no music to accompany her, and no magic. Alastor is too weak to join her in a duet. But she sings from the heart anyway, weaving her feelings into lyrics, trying to convey her emotions to Alastor even if he’s too confused and too far gone to understand the words.

She sings to him about how glad she was to have met him, even if he scared her at first. How helpful he’d been with her hotel and her dream, even if he never believed in it. Thanks him for protecting the hotel time and time again. For pulling her out of her own fear and misery to make a stand like he’d known she could. For protecting them all that day, against the exorcists. For fighting until he couldn’t, and then coming back to fight more.

She sings to him about how much she’ll miss him. How he might not have thought they were friends, but she’s considered him a friend for a long time, and losing him will hurt her. Will hurt the others too, even if they don’t realize it. She thanks him, over and over, for saving her life, for protecting her. For teaching her. For helping her. For being like a second father to her, in the six months she’s known him. She tells him she loves him, and she always will, and she’ll never forget him. 

Charlie doesn’t know if he hears her. If he understands. He’s so weak and so far gone, so confused. But his body does sag in her arms, a little more relaxed, a little less tense and afraid. Once or twice, she thinks he’s trying to hum along with the melody she’s created, even if he’s off time and struggling to keep up. 

He’s still in pain. He can’t not be. But at least he seems comfortable. As comfortable as he can be.

She won’t let him go suffering and afraid. She’ll keep up her song until he’s beyond help, because it’s all she has left that she can do for him.

So Charlie cradles him close, and feels each struggling breath in and out of his body in her arms. She sings, and sings, and sings, and waits for the inevitable last breath to come.

She won’t leave him alone. Even if he’s too far gone to be aware if she’s there or not.

She’d promised, and it’s a promise she intends to keep, Deal-bound favor or not.

Chapter Text

Lucifer paces restlessly in his workroom, waiting for the First Deal to break.

He’d felt it start to snap ten minutes ago, shuddering in its foundations. But this Deal is ancient, and not so easily felled as a simple Sinner’s Deal. Breaking a lesser demon’s Deal is like kicking over a sapling. A pact between Heaven and Hell is much more akin to a storm buffeting a massive tree until it slowly falls, roots snapped and dug out of the ground one by one.

The first root had buckled, and Lucifer can feel the Deal straining to hold itself together under the weight of its own failure. It will break, of that he has no doubt. Heaven crossed a line this day with its exorcists.

He just hopes it’s fast enough for him to intervene and save this mess. Until it’s well and truly broken and irreparable, he can’t leave the palace while the Extermination takes place.

He’s terrified. Lucifer doesn’t know who died. Only that his half of the terms and conditions—no Hellborn, including Charlie, could be targeted—had been discarded. Injuries could be mistakes, but for the pact to be uprooted so badly, a Hellborn had to have died.

Please, he begs the universe. Please don’t let it have been Charlie. Please. I’ll give anything I have left. Just not my baby girl.

The universe doesn’t answer. Just like it hasn’t answered the past ten times he begged it, since he first felt that little snap in his heart.

So he paces, and waits, and pleads inside his head, and waits a little more.

The moment he feels the weight of that enormous Deal groan, crash, and shatter to pieces, he’s moving. A snap of his fingers and he opens a portal to the front entrance of the Hazbin Hotel. He steps through it, relieved and thankful for his newfound freedom and ability to move on this day outside his palace.

He walks into sheer chaos.

The hotel grounds are a literal war zone. Exorcist angels soar above, diving down to strike at Charlie’s army—a horde of cannibals, to judge by their black eyes and sharp teeth. But this is no helpless slaughter. The cannibals give as good as they get, pulling down angels with long lances and halberds and fighting back with both weapons and teeth. The hotel is awash with blood, red and gold, and stinks of iron and gunpowder.

Even as he steps onto the hotel grounds, one of the exorcists roars a battle cry and dives at him with a wicked angelic steel scythe. Lucifer isn’t sure if she recognizes him, or if she doesn’t and is attacking anything not outfitted with a halo.

Either way, it doesn’t matter, and he’s no longer bound by the Deal. He casually slaps her weapon out of her hand as she swings at him, and backhands her on the rebound, cracking her face mask. He pulls his punch enough to only stun her, but it’s still enough to send her crashing to the ground at the foot of three of the cannibals.

That’s all it takes. With hungry screeches, the cannibals fall upon the exorcist with gleaming angelic weapons, and golden blood splashes high.

Lucifer can’t bring himself to care. He’s too anxious about Charlie. What Hellborn died to free him? He has to find out. Now.

The cannibals give him a wide berth. Despite their clear hunger for angel blood—many of them have abandoned their fight to feast on angel corpses, ravenous slaves to their own hunger—they know better than to attack Lucifer specifically. So he isn’t especially worried about being attacked from that direction.

But down on the ground level is still too messy. Too dense. Smoke hangs in the air, and he’s surrounded by gnashing teeth and buffeting feathers. There are too many sounds to keep track of what’s happening—explosions, screams, the clash of steel, shrieks of hunger and battle prayers. He’ll never find Charlie this way.

He unfurls his own three sets of wings and takes to the air, soaring higher.

His six wings make it much clearer that he’s different from the exorcists, as well as the army below. To his relief, this mostly works in his favor. Exorcists know enough to identify an angel that outranks them, even without the markers of a halo, even if they know he isn’t one of them. They steer clear of him, obviously unwilling to strike at someone of his caliber when there’s easier pickings on the ground. His ascension into the sky goes uncontested.

This is good. While Lucifer can, and will, kill every single exorcist here if he has to in order to protect Charlie, he’d rather not until he actually knows where Charlie even is.

He loops around the battleground, searching through the hordes of cannibals and exorcists for a hint of Charlie. He doesn’t see her up and fighting; there’s no familiar flash of her long gold hair in the mess. The longer he goes without seeing her, the more terrified he becomes that she’s the death that liberated him. T hat he’ll find her body sprawled in a bloody mess in front of her beloved hotel somewhere, run through with an exorcist’s blade.

If the cannibals try to feed on her, he’ll incinerate every one of them.

“ C’mon, Charlie,” Lucifer begs. “Charlie, please. Where are you?”

On the second pass, he still doesn’t see Charlie. He does, however, spot a pair of her friends she’d introduced him to when he visited last time. The tall one that hit on Lucifer almost right away, and the bartender that wasn’t crazy—the one with the poker wings. They’re with some pink-haired cyclops Lucifer doesn’t know, surrounded by half a dozen advancing exorcists and clearly backed into a corner.

Lucifer swears under his breath. He doesn’t want to waste time hunting for Charlie—but she’d be so upset if he let some of the people she’d made friends with die.

So he propels himself forward on six wings, faster than any of the exorcists could possibly manage, and slams into the back of the closest one. She shrieks in surprise, and the impact is fast enough to make one of her wings crack and fold unnaturally. Lucifer catches her by the wrist as she drops her sword, whirls once in midair, and hurls her into two of her fellow soldiers. All three crash to the ground in an ungainly heap, and are immediately set upon by howling cannibals with gleaming bright weapons.

Charlie’s friends are smart enough to take advantage of the distraction. They’re shocked for only a moment, before each one takes one of the remaining three exorcists and dispatches them effectively with guns, bombs, and what appear to be…angelic-steel reinforced playing cards?

Huh.

“Thanks, Short King!” the tallest one yells up to him, throwing a salute with one of his four arms. “We were fucked without ya!”

“ That’s the king?” the cyclops says, staring up at Lucifer with shock. “Not…what I expected, honestly.”

He never is, but that’s a rant for another day. “Where’s Charlie?” Lucifer says, dropping a few feet and hovering in the air with his six wings so he’s close enough to talk. “I can’t find her anywhere!”

“Roof!” the bartender says, pointing up towards the top of the hotel. “Last we saw she was fighting Adam!”

Adam? Oh, no. That asshole was already a piece of work on a good day, and today isn’t. Charlie’s come a long way, and she’s more powerful than she gives herself credit for. But she’s not ready to fight somebody like Adam.

“Don’t die!” He yells at Charlie’s friends, before pushing his wings as fast as he can, zipping up towards the rooftop.

He strains all his senses as he soars high, listening and looking for any signs of battle. Maybe b lasts of holy light, or Adam’s filthy mouth, or the rumbling of the hotel in the throes of destruction. Or h is own daughter’s voice, and he’s begging the universe once again to please not let her be hurting or in pain or…or dead —

But when he closes in on the top level, he’s shocked to realize he does hear Charlie’s voice. And not the way he expects. There’s no cries of pain, no shouts of anger, no sounds of battle. Instead she’s… singing.

Singing?

Charlie’s been a musical little thing for as long as she’s been alive. Lucifer likes to think she got that from him, and from her angelic roots. He’d sung to her the day she was born, in his arms, in her cradle, on good days and bad days, and music was in her blood just as much as her demonic and angelic heritages were.

But even Charlie knows better than to sing in the middle of combat. And this song, this isn’t a battle hymn. It’s slow, calm, and sad.

A mourning song.

“ Oh, no,” Lucifer whispers. “Char-Char, what happened?”

He crests the rise, his momentum carrying him up over the roof by several feet, and gazes down anxiously. He spots several things all at once.

First, and most important: Charlie, his Charlie, blessedly alive, her voice wavering with sorrow but strong all the same. She’s sitting in a thick, tacky pool of blood, but it doesn’t look like it’s coming from her. No, he’s almost certain it belongs to the bellhop that pissed Lucifer off so much last time he was here; the man is cradled in her arms, limbs sprawled akimbo, and the song Charlie is singing is clearly meant for him.

Shit.

Second, stunningly, is Adam. Not loud, constantly moving, and generally obnoxious, like Lucifer has seen him every other time. No, those gold and white and gray robes and brilliant shining wings are undoubtedly Adam’s, but there’s three thick holes oozing golden blood pierced through his chest. Lucifer reaches out tentatively with his senses, but there’s no soul or life in that body. Adam’s gone forever.

Lucifer’s not sorry to see him go, but it’s a strange thought all the same, after all their history.

Lastly, and most immediately urgent, is the fight going on between two angels on the other side of the roof.

One of them, Lucifer recognizes after a moment, is Charlie’s girlfriend—Maggie, maybe, but he’s always been awful with names. He almost doesn’t recognize her with her hair tied back, but the red bow stands out, and while her clothes are similar to an exorcist’s they aren’t identical. That’s pretty obvious, since she contrasts sharply with the angel she’s fighting. This woman is dressed in black and gray, with short pale hair and a missing left arm. Lucifer recognizes the halo insignia over her head—Adam’s right-hand exorcist, Flute or something. He remembers it had to do with music.

The two are brawling wildly, both bruised and dripping pale golden blood. “ Adam!” the exorcist shrieks. “ Sir! You and your stupid demon bitch will die for killing him!”

“ Not on my watch,” Maggie snaps. “I spared you once, Lute. Take your chance and go. You’re beaten!”

“ No!” Flute—no, Lute— howls. She feints and dodges, claws and punches, doing her best to get past Maggie to have a go at Charlie. Maggie takes the hits and refuses to let her past, or let Charlie’s mourning be interrupted.

No more of this. Anyone who wants to hurt his baby girl has got another fucking thing coming.

Lucifer drops like a stone when the two angels fall apart, trying to get the measure of each other while catching their breaths. He slams to the stone roof, six wings wreathed around him like robes, right as Lute tries to launch herself forward with an outstretched fist.

Lucifer draws to his full height, flares all six wings around him like a shield to hide Maggie and Charlie from view, and catches Lute’s wrist easily in one hand. She’s forced to a painful stop as he halts her forward movement effortlessly, and gasps in pain when it nearly dislocates her shoulder.

“ Enough,” Lucifer snarls in her face. His voice gains a gravelly edge as his Hellform takes precedence, and he can feel his horns slipping free, his tail snaking out to flick warningly around his ankles. “ Your commander is dead. Half your army down there is, too. You lost. Take your friends, take his body if you want to put it to rest, and get the fuck out of my realm, before I stop being nice about it.”

Lute looks furious. She also looks terrified, and based on the way her eyes flick up above his head, at the eternal hellflame between his horns and the unholy halo of serpent and knowledge unique to him, he can guess why. Angel or demon, any way she looks at it, she’s outclassed—and she knows it.

She pulls at her wrist once. Just to prove a point, he doesn’t let go; just to make it clear that he’s far stronger than he physically appears, and he’s the one in charge here. She doesn’t even manage to budge his wrist.

“ Understood?” he growls, looking her right in the eyes.

She shudders, but hisses, “Yes.” And this time, when she tugs at her wrist, he lets it go.

She wastes no time rushing for Adam’s side, but by then Lucifer barely cares. He folds his wings and his demonic features away as he whirls around. Maggie is still there, and he says sharply, “Make sure they actually leave and don’t try any funny business. If they do—call me.”

“Yes, sir,” Maggie says. And, bless her, she immediately puts herself between Charlie and Lute again, as the first line of defense if something really does happen. She’s a good one. Charlie picked well with her.

And speaking of Charlie—Lucifer wastes no more time. He rushes to her side, kneeling down next to her. “Charlie! Are you all right?”

This close, she certainly doesn’t look good. She’s bruised and battered in a number of places, her clothes and hair are soaked with blood, and one of her pupils looks a little blown, which most likely means a concussion. But if she’s able to sing like this, she must at least be well enough not to need immediate attention. He hopes, anyway.

And sure enough, when her song falters mid-note, she doesn’t collapse or anything like that. She hasn’t been pushing herself too hard. But her eyes are full of tears when she turns to look at him in astonishment, and oh, she’s still so alive and precious and he’s so, so glad she’s still mostly okay.

“Dad!” she gasps. “You’re here? How—!”

“The First Deal broke,” he says shortly. If she’s not the Hellborn that died this day, he’s not going to bring it to her attention right now. Not when she looks so awful. He can figure out who it is later. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here sooner. I came as soon as I could.”

Her eyes spill over with fresh tears. But then she looks down at the bellhop she’s cradling close and back up to him, before begging, “Dad—can you heal him? Please! Anything, anything at all…”

Lucifer blinks, and glances down at the Sinner she’s holding.

He’d guessed from above that the pool of blood Charlie was sitting in belonged to the bellhop. He’s certain of it now, but from the air, he hadn’t realized how bad the damage was.

The busboy looks awful. The right side of his face is completely savaged until it’s unrecognizable: eye torn out, ear gone, nose broken, flesh and skull cut and torn until there isn’t a bit that hasn’t been harmed in some way. The man’s right arm drapes down to the stone, flopped uselessly and broken in at least two places. The worst wound by far is the deep slash across his chest down to his hip, exposing broken rib bones. And laced through most of it, Lucifer can smell and feel the incense-and-iron stink of holy weapons and holy magic, and he can see it glimmering in the gold-flecked blood dribbling from the Sinner’s wounds.

He’s in a bad way. A real bad way. Unconscious by now, which is probably the only mercy left for him, because even breathing would be a new form of torture with those injuries.

Still…Lucifer’s not so certain about the request. This man might look helpless now, but Lucifer knows he can be dangerous. Not only that, but there’s a tether binding Charlie to his side now, and it stinks of a Deal, and he loathes the thought of this bastard owning his daughter in any form.

“I…don’t know, Charlie,” Lucifer says slowly.

But Charlie is insistent. Tears run down her cheeks, cutting tracks through the blood smeared there, as she cradles the Sinner protectively close and begs. “ Please,” she says. “ Please. He saved my life. Adam would have killed me if he didn’t come back! He didn’t have to. He was already hurt. He shouldn’t have come back, but he chose to save my life, and it’s killing him. Please! Doesn’t he deserve a second chance, Dad?”

And that comes as a surprise. Lucifer had never expected this asshole to come back and save his daughter. Lucifer has been surrounded by Sinners for so long, abusing the free will he gave them to do horrible things. I t comes as a pleasant shock to hear any Sinner, much less this one, had used his gift of choice to save and preserve.

Still, that tether holding Charlie to his side concerns him. “ He has you bound with a Deal,” Lucifer says warily . “ I can feel it. You’re tethered to his side now—what’s he taking from you?”

“Nothing!” Charlie says. “He asked for a favor. He just didn’t want to be alone again when he died!” She doesn’t have her hands free—they’re so carefully wrapped around that Sinner to support him as painlessly as possible—so she squeezes her eyes shut for a moment instead to try and blink them clear.

“ Please,” she says pitifully. “I thought I was going to die. I thought Adam…” she shudders. “He stopped it. He gave me a second chance. I just want to give him one too…”

His daughter is too good for this entire damn plane of existence and everything in it. Lucifer feels his resolve crumbling as he reaches out to gently wipe her tears away for her, turning her face to him.

“ I can’t promise it will work,” he tells her seriously. Her eyes widen, but she doesn’t interrupt him. “I can only promise that I will try. But he’s already so far gone, Sweetie. You’re literally asking for a miracle, and miracles and Sinners…they don’t mix so good.”

“We at least have to try,” Charlie says. “Please. I don’t want him to die like this.” She gestures to the broken, battered, thankfully unconscious form of her bellhop—first to the savage wound across his chest, then to the brutal wounds around his face. “He got this first one trying to fight Adam for us, alone…and the others, he was protecting me. He couldn’t even fight back, he just kept getting hit, over and over…” She sniffles.

“Okay. Okay, Sweetheart. We’re gonna try.” If this bastard had really taken a head on beating from Adam just to keep him away from Charlie, then however Lucifer feels about him, he still owes him that much.

“ Thank you, Dad,” she sobs. “Thank you so much.”

“ Don’t thank me until we know how this turns out,” Lucifer says. “But I’m going to need your help with this, because I’m not exactly going to be here.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll explain in a minute. Help me lay him down, first.”

Lucifer snaps away the tacky pool of blood they’re kneeling in and creates a soft pillow to support the Sinner’s head. Between the two of them, they manage to carefully lower him to the ground without jarring his injuries much further. His wounds don’t ooze much more blood, but in Lucifer’s grim opinion, that’s mostly because the bellhop doesn’t have a lot of blood left to lose.

If these were simple wounds, it might have been kinder to just kill him. Lucifer could even do it painlessly; send him off to sleep without ever being aware of his death. A Sinner would respawn eventually, and it would be easier than patching up so many wounds. Even if he survives this healing, his recovery would likely be more brutal than it was worth.

But these aren’t simple wounds. Lucifer can smell the holy magic in them, and the cuts are too fine for anything less than angelic steel. Sinners don’t come back from those wounds, and this one—this one is especially vicious, if the golden ash in his blood is anything to go by. He won’t be coming back if he slips away.

Lucifer will do his best to prevent it. For Charlie’s sake, if nothing else.

He kneels at Alastor’s head as he starts explaining. “I know this is going to be hard to hear, Sweetie, but this is going to be rough on him. Really rough. He’s probably going to be scared, he’s definitely going to be in pain, and he’ll probably try to get away. I promise, I’m not doing it on purpose, okay? Mortal souls and angels don’t mix well…and like I said, neither do miracles and Sinners.”

She bites her lip. “Okay…you promise you’re not going to mess with him? I know you don’t get along, but…”

Lucifer shakes his head. “You said he saved your life. I don’t like him, but he saved the one thing that’s more precious to me than anything in the whole world. I promise I’m going to do what I can to help him. It’s just…going to be hard to watch.”

Charlie swallows nervously. “If there’s no other way…”

“ There isn’t. Or I promise I’d take it, Char-Char,” he says, taking her hand and squeezing it reassuringly. “But that means I have a job for you in all this.”

“Anything!”

“You need to keep him still, and try to keep him calm. If he starts fighting too much, you might have to hold him down.”

She looks shocked. “Would it get that bad?”

“I don’t know. He seems like a fighter, so maybe.” Lucifer shakes his head. “It’s hard to predict how mortal souls react to things like this. I know it’ll seem mean, but just keep in mind you’re helping him, okay?”

“Okay,” she says slowly. “But if I’m doing that, what are you doing?”

“I’ll be here,” he says, gesturing at where he’s kneeling at Alastor’s head. “But I’ll also be somewhere else. Metaphysically. It’s hard to explain, and he doesn’t have the time for that. Can I trust you?”

She nods, grimly determined. “I can do it, if it saves Alastor.”

Alastor. That was the bellhop’s name. Right.

“Good. Then let’s get started…”

Lucifer begins cautiously, reaching out a hand to press his fingertips to Alastor’s forehead, ignoring the squelch of blood but trying to at least avoid pressing his fingers into the gashes and bruises. He digs a little, hunting for information, and is immediately assailed by a number of senses. The emptiness where a soul should be (elsewhere—owned), the lack of surface thoughts and emotions (unconscious—too deep to dream), an ashy, charred-out sense of being (holy fire, burning thick and hot, carving out the insides), the barest sparks of circulating energy (dregs, barely anything left to live by).

“ Shit,” Lucifer says. The bellhop’s closer to slipping away than he’d realized. That holy magic has been tearing through the essence of him for too long, and there’s almost nothing left.

“Dad?”

“It’s worse than I thought. Don’t let anyone bother me, got it?” And before she can even answer, Lucifer lowers his forehead to the bellhop’s, closes his eyes, and summons his power.

It’s been a long, long time since he’s intentionally let himself slip back to his real form, or spread his focus across multiple planes of existence, and he’s a little out of practice easing into it. He’s always been afraid that if he let himself go back on purpose, he’d never want to return. But he can’t work a miracle purely in the Physical, and if he’s going to save this Sinner, he has to be more than mortal. So he stretches up and out and over into his true self, spilling across the planes of existence, opening his eyes to every one of them.

Planes of existence are complicated. Most people just think of the three: Earth, Heaven, Hell. The more knowledgeable know of it’s split further than that: the seven rings of Hell and the seven celestial spheres of Heaven.

Only the strongest, Lucifer among them, know that it’s so much more complex than that. There are layers stacked on layers surrounding mortals every day, that they’re part of across multiple levels, that they’re never even conscious of. Spirit, cognition, emotion, soul, physical, mental, magic, memory, and countless more—everything is packed together flat into one being, existing in different places but inherently tied together.

Someone like Lucifer—well, he can pull those layers apart like an accordion, and start messing with them on an individual level, and he can see and exist in every single one while he does it.

He’s what modern writers refer to in the modern era as something ‘eldritch,’ after all, and he can see farther and into more aspects of existence than most mortal souls can even fathom.

So when he touches his very existence to Alastor’s, he intertwines his magic and his power with this broken Sinner, and cracks him into his various components, and starts digging to find the problem. He is entirely unsurprised to find the Sinner is not thrilled by this, because it’s at the edge of his comprehension, and one step away from driving him mad as he dies.

In the physical world, Alastor’s remaining eye snaps open with a start, and he begins screaming.

Damn. Okay, he might have been a little too heavy handed with pulling the Sinner apart by the threads of his existence and the planes he’s stretched apart. Lucifer tries to use a gentler touch, reminding himself how fragile mortals are, but it’s difficult when he can see how quickly Alastor is slipping across multiple aspects of his existence.

It’s a terrible paradox. He has to hurry to save this Sinner, but if he hurries too much, he could fundamentally break him at points of existence no one can even fathom.

Fine, then. It just means this’ll be a juggling act. That’s always been one of his favorite acts in the circus. The only real difference is he’ll be juggling metaphysical pieces of a broken Sinner’s spirit, rather than knives or flaming torches.

Same difference.

He stretches himself across those dozens of planes, a part of himself in each, wholly present in every one, a paradox that can only exist with something as powerful as him. In the physical world, he’s aware that he’s beginning to glow, that his wings are unfolding from his back and stretching tall, tall, tall, curling and mantling around himself and Charlie and the Sinner. That his many eyes are opening, all to stare at different points of existence and time. That the Sinner is still screaming, that Charlie’s calling Alastor’s name and trying to calm him, and that Lucifer’s own claws are curling on either side of the Sinner’s head to pin it in place so that he can’t break the forehead-to-forehead contact allowing Lucifer’s magic to infuse him.

Everywhere else, he exists. Bodiless if needed, a massive mental and spiritual presence; or with whatever limbs or meta physical parts he requires, if he has need to manipulate things. He’s a creature that spans across space, time, and existence, and a physical form is just a thing that limits him unless it creates some form of convenience.

He reaches out with ephemeral features and, first things first, captures the fleeing aspects of consciousness, sense of self, cognition, spirit, everything that makes this Sinner who he is. He catches each piece in the cage of his massive metaphysical fingers, ties tethers around them to bind them in place, bind them to him, prevent them from running. If they flee, if they manage to slip away, Alastor is dead. Lucifer can’t prevent it from happening forever; not even he can prevent Death. But he can slow the process, hold him in place long enough to fix the damage elsewhere.

The Sinner doesn’t like this.

Lucifer isn’t really surprised. Alastor doesn’t strike him as a thing that likes to be contained or bound. Every part of this tethered Sinner fights like a mad thing, thrashing and biting and screaming and hurtling itself at the cage of Lucifer’s metaphysical fingers, pulling and straining at the mental restraints.

Lucifer wishes he could be angry. He’s seen what a contrary bastard this particular Sinner can be. He gets the feeling Alastor would spit in the eye of his savior just to prove he could survive alone.

But Lucifer can’t feel angry because he mostly just feels pity. This doesn’t feel like an intelligent creature fighting back so much as a wounded animal trapped in a cage. It hisses and bites and screams and hurls itself at the walls of its prison and injures itself further because it doesn’t understand that someone is trying to help it, not hurt it.

Beneath the bravado, this Sinner is terrified to his core.

Lucifer had expected it. That’s why he’d told Charlie that angels and mortal souls don’t mix.

“It’s okay,” Lucifer says. Out loud, in the physical world, soothing and reassuring. Across the dozen aspects of Alastor’s meager, slipping existence, using Alastor’s own dwindling thoughts and emotions to communicate the message and circle it back to him as painlessly as possible; metaphysical angel voices tended to be deafeningly loud and counterproductive otherwise. “Ssssh, it’s okay. Everything is alright. Ssh, don’t be afraid. I’m trying to help.”

The Sinner is barely coherent, and despite Lucifer using his own mind to communicate with him, probably too far gone to really understand. He makes a gurgling, raw animal noise of fear that turns into a pained, frightened whine, and tries to pull his head away. Lucifer keeps him pinned firmly in place.

“It’s okay, Alastor!” Charlie says, taking one of his broken hands and holding it. “It’s okay, Dad’s trying to help you, I promise—”

Lucifer turns his attention from her reassuring murmurs to the work at hand. He leaves a part of himself repeating the same message— do not be afraid, everything is safe, I’m helping— and delves deeper into other aspects of the Sinner now that he’s pinned in place.

Alastor is frighteningly weak. He has no energy left to fight for himself; the magic and the wounds had burned it all away. Those sparks of energy and life are nearly all depleted, destroyed by the holy fire ravaging through him.

So Lucifer siphons off the tiniest drops of his own life energy and carefully, so carefully, feeds it to the Sinner. He has to be so gentle, so cognizant of how weak and fragile this wretched Sinner is, carefully feeding him one drop at a time so it isn’t overwhelming to be suffused with cosmic power. And it’s still too much, too powerful; Lucifer is far too big a thing for even the smallest conduit of his power to be befitting of a mortal. Alastor thrashes and whimpers across nearly every aspect of his being, and it’s the equivalent of drip feeding him molten plasma from the stars, too much and too painful and burning every other part of him even as it extends his life a little longer.

But Alastor has something to keep feeding on, to keep going, while Lucifer delves into the real work.

Before he can do anything close to healing or repairing, he has to get rid of the holy magic burning this Sinner alive from the inside. It’s scattered across his consciousness and his existence, burrowing through from the physical aspects of the Sinner into the metaphysical ones. Holy fire finds sins to be the best kindling, and most of Alastor’s many, grievous sins have proved to be excellent fuel, gutting him from the inside. But now it’s spreading—through memory, thought, emotion, cognitive function, and yes, back through the physical body, burning anything it can find. It doesn’t matter anymore if it’s good or bad, sin or good intention or saintly action, whatever it finds, it destroys.

Lucifer seeks it out, and destroys it in turn.

He slithers through every crack and crevice, through each plane of existence, spirit-cognition-emotion-physical-mental-magic-memory-action, hunting for holy flames and holy magic. Where he finds it, he consumes it, draining its power into himself and smothering the sparks. Crushes the embers and little wisps that might catch alight again if he leaves them untended. Destroys and consumes and cleanses, hunting through this Sinner’s mind and body like a ravenous serpent.

He tries to be kind, as gentle as he can. But there’s no way to do this painlessly, and he’s an immense thing inside this tiny Sinner’s head, grappling with immense magic in this tiny Sinner’s body and spirit. Alastor thrashes and screeches, struggles to get away mentally and physically. His back arches in the physical plane, and Charlie has to throw herself over him to pin him to the ground, frantically calling for him to calm.

“ Bright,” the Sinner gasps in a pained, gurgling sob. “Too bright—burns— hurts— ”

Lucifer is aware that he’s glowing quite brightly by now. Physically, in the Pride Ring; metaphysically across a dozen different aspects of Alastor’s existence. It’s more than a mere mortal can handle, especially in this state; he’d been given the name Morningstar for a reason. There’s not much he can do about it, not and do what he needs to.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs distantly, as he smothers and feeds on the flames and extinguishes them before they can extinguish this Sinner. “I know it hurts. Don’t be afraid. I’m trying to save you. Ssshh.”

His hunt in the metaphysical planes takes hours and yet it only takes minutes; such is time for a timeless thing like Lucifer. Eventually the flames are put out and the burn of holy magic is gone.

But it leaves behind a gutted, burned-out husk, and his task isn’t over yet. Left like this, the Sinner will still die. There isn’t much left of him to live. He might, if he’s very lucky, manage to respawn like a normal Sinner with his wounds cleansed of holy touch, but it isn’t a risk Lucifer is going to take.

Not when this man saved his daughter’s life at the cost of his own.

So he turns his attention to the tapestry of this Sinner’s life and death. So many of the threads of this Sinner’s existence have been burned away, and it isn’t so much a woven story of his life so much as a tattered, patchy mess with more holes than whole sections. Lucifer isn’t sure if there’s even enough left to restore. He can’t rebuild a spirit or a life from nothing, only fix what exists.

But as he runs his metaphysical fingers over the remaining threads, he can see this man’s last minutes. His suffering, his fear, his desperation to be saved, even his willingness to use his favor to feed on Charlie’s magic to save himself. And Lucifer sees the moment when he knew it wasn’t possible, too; when he turned and threw himself onto the pyre to save Charlie, because it was better that one died than two.

She hadn’t been lying. This Sinner’s cruelty and wrongdoings are numerous and vast, but in his own strange way he cared, deep down in that wretched heart of his. Even if he didn’t understand what he felt or why, he loved Charlie in his own way, and he’d been willing to die for her, and he is the reason Charlie is still standing.

Lucifer steels himself, and decides he will do anything he can to restore this broken spirit.

He burns brighter as he digs deeper into his own power, his own creative capacities, and he starts to rebuild a life. Sins are the most immediate, and the most pressing. S ins are the metaphysical skeleton of a demon and what makes them what they are here in Hell, what gives them their powers and unique looks and punishments and needs. They have to be rebuilt exactly in order to restore this Sinner as he is.

But such things can be found in memory, and in emotion, and in spirit, and in action. Lucifer traces threads from other planes of Alastor’s existence and re-spins them exactly. He plays cat’s cradle with infinite fingers and finite threads of the Sinner’s existence, twisting and turning and weaving them into new shapes, plucking and rearranging and always keeping a careful grip so nothing falls apart. And when he has enough, he binds them into the fabric of Alastor’s life and death, filling the charred holes in that tapestry and repairing and tying every part of him off neatly.

Sins are a specialty of Lucifer’s, after all. If he can remake anything, he can remake those, for anyone that comes to his realm.

It’s tricky. Juggling thousands of threads from the life records across multiple planes, figuring out how to match them and bind them together, digging through the Sinner’s life and death stories over and over, plucking and choosing and weaving.

It becomes more difficult when his work strengthens Alastor, allows those tethered parts of his existence more awareness, more strength, more understanding. Because gradually, that little mind broken across a dozen planes starts to realize what’s happening to him. At the edge of his consciousness, he recognizes something too big for him to comprehend combing through his mind, his spirit, his life, his death, his sins, his secrets, his failures and mistakes.

It drives him mad.

His screaming grows harsher, more frantic, more terrified. “ No!” he howls, his one remaining eye opened wide, pupil blown vast. “ No, no, no, don’t—don’t look at me, don’t look at me, DON’T LOOK AT ME—”

And despite the fact that he’s still bleeding out, still injured and weak, his arms and fingers are still broken and he barely has the strength to move, the Sinner drags his hands up towards his face and tries to claw his own eyes out. Internally, metaphysically, his individual parts scream and thrash and tear against the cage of Lucifer’s infinite ephemeral fingers, dashing themselves apart in a maddened frenzy, desperate and terrified not to be perceived.

“ Alastor!” Charlie shrieks in the physical plane, terrified. “Wait, no, stop that—you’re hurting yourself— Al— Vaggie, help!”

Distantly, Lucifer is aware of someone brushing past the physical wall of his wings; of two figures trying to pin the thrashing Sinner’s arms in place; of sharp claws glancing against his own skull before being pulled away.

“No,” Alastor says—it’s a pleading, pathetic noise, so unlike this Sinner, but then, this is the sort of thing that happens in the face of something so all-encompassing as an angel. He fights against his restraints like a mad thing, and something in his body cracks unpleasantly as he breaks himself. “No, no, no, it sees me—it sees everything! No, no, please…”

Too much. This Sinner is under far too much strain, and the full weight of an angel’s eyes on it, all its sins laid bare for judgment, its life and death records being combed through so effortlessly by something too bright and shining for it to comprehend—it’s crushing. It’s frightening. This Sinner will tear himself apart under that weight out of sheer awe and terror unless Lucifer does something.

It’s almost funny, how Sinners boast about their lives and their transgressions, until their actions fall under the scrutiny of something far more than they can comprehend. It’s only then that they really discover how tiny and insignificant and broken they really are.

Lucifer used to be disgusted by it. For now, he still feels pity. This broken little creature is a dark and cruel and sick thing, but it had saved his little girl, and it didn’t ask for this, and it’s too small and human and fragile to understand, its mind too easily shattered.

So Lucifer wraps Alastor up inside his own mind. Gently, so gently, treating him like a terrified animal hurt and bleeding in a trap, hurting itself worse out of sheer terror. He wraps up all those fragmented, slipping, thrashing, terrified pieces in a blanket of his own soft memories and calm emotions, keeping him bound tight so he can’t hurt himself further. He sings, a gentle little galdr to try and soothe him, even as he holds him tight.

He can feel this Sinner’s raw terror at being pinned so easily in place. Feel that frenzied panic like a rushing heartbeat, too fast. But he rocks him and sings to him and keeps him still, and in the physical world his fingers slither up to cover the Sinner’s eyes and block away the frightening, too-bright light.

And all along, even as he does, even as he soothes this terrified Sinner and keeps him from hurting himself across the vast aspects of his existence, pins him still and covers his eyes to keep him from staring into the edge of madness, he continues to weave him back together. Juggling a thousand thousand threads of life and death and meaning, putting each one back into place, copying and spinning and threading and binding. There’s only one, single thread that he cuts: one binding itself to the soul of Charlie Morningstar, cutting that favor loose.

She won’t need to stay with him much longer, anyway.

The Sinner starts to pull together now, faster and faster, the more parts of his existence Lucifer rebuilds. And at last, at last, he can deal with the physical wounds, now that there’s enough of Alastor the Radio Demon to exist to be healed.

First with the most dangerous of the injuries, pulling that terrible gash across his chest together and sealing it tight, encouraging cells to reproduce and heal and chasing infection away the moment it tries to slither its way in, insidious and cruel. Then rebuilding the bone structure in his skull so that the ear and eye can be rebuilt from scratch, using the sins and DNA in his physical memory as a baseline. The Sinner had snapped his own spine in three places when struggling to escape in a blind, animal panic, and Lucifer gently, so gently snaps them back into place, repairing the shredded nerves so the rest of his body will work properly. He straightens the nose, rebuilds the broken, delicate cheekbones, regrows the shattered teeth, gently draws a new antler out of the broken nub next to its partner. He resets the bones in the shoulders and arms and fingers, smoothes over the rest of the injuries, and last but not least, replenishes the blood in the Sinner’s body that he can’t afford to lose.

Last of all, before he parts from this Sinner’s mind for good, he stops the oh so careful process of drip-feeding the tiniest drops of his own life force to this creature to keep him alive. The Sinner’s body sags with a shuddering gasp and a relieved moan, finally spared from more power than he’s capable of handling. But his own body and mind has enough strength now that it’s been rebuilt to start building its own life force again, and Alastor doesn’t need him anymore.

And finally, as Lucifer begins to retreat from the Sinner’s existence, he releases those tethered parts of him—spirit, cognizance, emotion, thought, mind—from the metaphysical cages he’d created to hold him in place. Alastor flees from him in raw terror, not unlike a deer released into the woods, fearful of the too-big thing beyond his comprehension and what it might do if it got its claws into him again.

But he doesn’t flee in the direction of Death, he doesn’t slip away into non-existence. That’s more than enough, so Lucifer doesn’t take it personally.

He takes a deep breath, and sighs, and retreats back into himself once more, and opens his eyes.

It takes a moment for Lucifer to adjust to just being this self, this smaller thing. This physical form is the easiest way to interact with almost anything alive or dead. It ’s easier for things to comprehend, to interact with, and it masks how enormous and terrifying he can be, and honestly, sometimes it’s just nice to have thumbs. But crushing himself back into this condensed form after existing across the universe is always difficult, and it makes his skin itch uncomfortably, because he feels much, much too small and too cramped for what he really is.

It will pass with time. It always does.

He lifts himself away from the Sinner’s forehead, gently slipping his hands free from over the Sinner’s eyes. Alastor has stopped screaming since Lucifer released him, and his eyes are closed; he’s still and silent. Carefully, Lucifer slides his fingers underneath the busboy’s jawline, feeling for a pulse.

It’s there, thankfully. Still weak and struggling, just like the Sinner’s breath. But there. Lucifer hadn’t shattered him to pieces in the act of saving him. He breathes out in relief.

“Is he…?”

Lucifer glances over at his daughter. At some point, both she and Maggie had pulled back from their efforts to pin Alastor to the stone, probably once he’d stopped hurting himself. But Charlie had taken Alastor’s hand in her own again, anxiously running her thumb over his knuckles, trying to offer comfort in any small way she could.

That was his daughter. Such a sweet thing, so kind, so caring. She was far too precious for Hell. These Sinners didn’t know what they had in her.

“He’s alive,” Lucifer says tiredly. “It was close—he nearly slipped away. And he’s going to be weak for a long time. His body’s been through more than a Sinner should be able to handle, and it’s going to take him time to rebuild his strength.” He smiles at her. “But he should live. As long as he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

Charlie’s eyes widen. She gently sets Alastor’s hand down over his stomach, and then throws herself at Lucifer with a sob, wrapping her arms around his neck.

“ Thank you, Dad,” she cries into his shoulder. “Thank you so much—for all of it—I was so scared with Adam, I thought more people were going to die because of me—and then Alastor, he—and I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t do anything and he knew it, he just asked me to stay with him and sing to him until he—”

Her words dissolve into helpless sobs. Every part of Lucifer’s heart aches for her, for his precious daughter who fought so hard to protect people that probably didn’t deserve near as much care and love and affection as she gave them. Or maybe they did, if it could drive a monster like the Sinner he’d just spared to try and die for her—

It doesn’t matter. She’s hurting and he’ll do anything to make it better. He wraps his arms around her and squeezes her close, mantles his six wings around her like a shield, and rocks her gently back and forth. “You did such an amazing job, little lady,” he murmurs into her ear. “An amazing job. It was already taken care of by the time I got here. That’s all you, Charlie. You did so good.”

“But Pentious died—and Dazzle—and Alastor, he almost—”

Dazzle. That stings, but suddenly he understands which death broke the Deal and let him arrive in time. He’d made Razzle and Dazzle to protect Charlie and, in a way, they had. Lucifer wouldn’t call it a worthy sacrifice, but at least his death wasn’t meaningless.

As for the others… “They believed in your cause, Charlie. They believed in you. Dazzle always wanted to protect you. I’m sure this Pentious fellow did everything he could to help you and protect you too. And Alastor…he knew what he was doing. He wanted you to live. If he had died, it never would have been your fault.”

He can say that for certainty. He’s been in the man’s head, now. He knows it for truth in the way no other can—perhaps not even Alastor himself.

Charlie sniffles into his shoulder. “It’s hard to believe it,” she says miserably.

“ I know, S weetie,” Lucifer says, rubbing her back. “It’ll take time. I know. But you did everything you could, and today’s victory is because of you.”

He holds her for as long as it takes for her to burn through her tears, for her high-strung emotions to run dry. He holds her and strokes her hair and rubs her back, and he gently smoothes away her injuries while he does.

Healing his living, reasonably healthy daughter is so much easier than healing a nearly-dead Sinner gutted by holy fire; he only has to reconstruct her physical form, encourage cell growth and gently pull things back to the way they were. He soothes away her concussion and cracked skull, regrows her currently recessed broken horn, eases away the bruises and the cuts and the scrapes that doubtless came from Adam. She’s still covered in blood—red and golden—when he finishes, but at least she’s not broken and hurting anymore. He couldn’t bear to see her like that much longer.

Lucifer wishes, badly, that he’d had the opportunity to put Adam in his place for daring to harm his little girl. But it seems like Charlie had defended herself well enough, in the end. If anyone deserved to take him down, after everything Adam had done—it’s Charlie.

He’s so incredibly proud of his wonderful, amazing, loving little girl, and the person she’s growing up to be.

He holds Charlie until her sobs quiet. Eventually Maggie speaks up. She’d been patient and polite, waiting outside the circle of Lucifer’s wings next to the unconscious Alastor, but now that Charlie is calmer she coughs once.

“We should probably get down below,” Maggie says. “I made sure the rest of the exorcists left, and they took Adam’s body with them. But people down below are probably wondering what happened, and if you’re okay.”

Lucifer folds his wings back and slips them away, allowing Charlie to pull back from the safety of his arms. “Maggie’s right, Char-Char—”

“ Uh, Vaggie, sir.”

“ Really? Shit, sorry, I’m awful with names,” Lucifer says sheepishly. “You hear a few billion and they all run together.”

In truth, it’s a lot more complicated than even that. Names that exist purely in the Physical are almost worthless to Lucifer. Not when he can identify people with so much more accuracy by the map of their souls and sins and good deeds and choices. What’s a simple sound in comparison?

But they mean a lot to mortals, so he does his best to correct as he adds, “Uh, Vaggie is right, though. Besides, I think it’d be a smart idea to get off the hotel roof—I don’t want anyone in it until I can make sure it’s safe.”

Charlie blinks at him in bewilderment. “Safe?”

“ It took some structural damage.” He gestures up at the missing H in ‘Hazbin.’ “And at least half of the stability wards are gone. The place is completely drained. Until I can give it a once over, best for everyone to stay safe outside…and not on the roof.”

Vaggie frowns. “I didn’t know the exorcists could drain wards…”

“Maybe they damaged something when they broke Alastor’s shield?” Charlie asks, biting her lip.

Lucifer knows the truth—he’d been inside Alastor’s head. He’d touched the man’s desperation, his fear of dying, the way he’d hungrily clawed up any shred of magic to delay the inevitable just a few seconds longer, in all of the threads of memory and failure and existence that made the man while putting him back together. Alastor had damaged the place, trying to survive, ripping his magic out of the foundation to reinforce himself.

Lucifer can’t exactly complain. It let Alastor survive as long as he did, and that meant Charlie survived, too. He can fix a building. He can’t fix death.

He doesn’t bother to mention any of it, because there’s no sense worrying his daughter further. Instead, he says, “It doesn’t matter, I can fix it up good as new! But let’s get your army all taken care of, first, hmm?”

He snaps, and a portal appears behind them, leading from the roof to a safe distance from the hotel down the hill. Vaggie helps Charlie to her feet and puts an arm around her as she leads her to the portal.

But Charlie hesitates, glancing back. “What about Alastor?”

“I’ve got him, Sweetie, don’t worry.” Lucifer’s physical form, although smaller than average, is much stronger than it looks. Alastor isn’t too much taller than Charlie, either, and she’s easy enough to carry. It’s simple enough to slip a hand under the bellhop’s knees and another around his shoulders and heft him up, especially when the spindly bastard barely weighs anything to begin with.

Charlie, bless her heart, takes the time to arrange Alastor’s arms and hands comfortably over his stomach so they don’t hang. Lucifer is less thrilled about her readjusting the bellhop’s head to rest on his own shoulder, because those little antlers are sharp and one is digging right into his neck; it’s like the bastard has to be an irritant even when he’s unconscious. It can’t hurt him, of course, since he’s an angel, but it’s still annoying. But at least he’s not hanging like a corpse.

As expected, when they step through the portal to the ground below, the place is bustling. The cannibals are already butchering the angel corpses with a practiced sort of practicality; some are feasting now, and some are storing away parts for later. Their own losses are undergoing the same fate, which Lucifer finds a little horrifying. But he figures if you’re part of a cannibal army, you can probably predict your own fate if you die. They always had been grimly efficient.

The rest of Charlie’s friends are thankfully spared the fate of being on someone else’s dinner plate. They come rushing over with shouts and cheers as soon as Charlie steps through the portal, wrapping her and Vaggie up in enormous, tight hugs and slapping each other on the back. Besides the tall spider, the winged cat, and the pink-haired cyclops Lucifer had seen earlier, there’s also the tiny crazy housekeeper, a weird stick-legged living egg, and Razzle, all of whom crowd close to Charlie with relief and happiness.

Vaguely, Lucifer recalls on his tour that there had been a snake demon. He remembers that mostly because he’d always had a fondness for snakes—not as good as ducks, but they’re sort of special to him by association. So that one had stuck out to him a little more than usual in the sea of endless demons and demonic forms. He isn’t here now, though.

Lucifer has a gut feeling he knows which one ‘Pentious’ was, now.

They hug each other fiercely while Lucifer stands awkwardly off to one side with a half-dead Sinner hanging in his arms. But eventually, the white spider demon looks up over the rest in Lucifer’s direction, and hisses softly.

“ Oh, shit,” he gasps. “Please tell me he ain’t—not like Pentious…”

Lucifer glances down at the still-unconscious Alastor, and has to admit, he can see where the impression he might be dead comes from. Besides the fact that he’s perfectly still, he’s still coated in red and gold blood leftover from all his injuries, even if the wounds themselves are healed.

“He’s alive,” Lucifer promises. “Tried real hard to not be, but I dragged him back anyway.”

“Thank fuck,” the spider demon says, hugging himself with all four arms. “I don’t think I could handle losin’ anyone else today…”

“Boss is too damn stubborn to die,” the winged cat says, but there’s definitely some sort of grudging relief in his tone even as he grumbles.

“ Will he sleep long?” the little housekeeper asks, scuttling over and promptly climbing up Lucifer’s back onto his other shoulder. Lucifer can’t do much to dislodge her, since his hands are occupied, so all he can do is give her an alarmed look and a please help expression in Charlie’s direction.

Thankfully, Charlie takes pity on him and collects the housekeeper from his shoulder, setting her back on the ground.

“He’ll need a lot of rest,” Lucifer tells them quietly. “He’s very weak right now. But as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid, or push himself too hard, he should eventually make a full recovery.”

“ So it’ll take twice as long as expected, because he’ll push himself as soon as he’s able to,” Maggie—no wait, Vaggie— sums up, crossing her arms. Everyone nods in agreement almost immediately.

It’s almost comforting, to know that the busboy is apparently a complete bastard with everyone else, too.

“For now,” Lucifer sums up, “you’re all staying out here. I’ll conjure up some temporary housing and anything you need, but the hotel is off limits until I can give it a full once over.” He explains about the instability and missing magical support, finishing with, “last thing we need is the hotel coming down on everyone’s heads after a victory like that!”

Thankfully, there’s no real argument from most of them. They’re too exhausted after the battle to really protest, and most of them just want to rest, have their injuries taken care of, and get clean.

The tall four-armed demon offers to take Alastor for him so that Lucifer can work, and he gladly hands the bellhop over, thankful to at last be rid of him and his pointy antlers-to-the-neck. Alastor doesn’t make so much as a peep as he’s handed over, too deeply unconscious to recognize he’s being moved, but the tall demon is careful to rearrange him for as much comfort as possible regardless.

With his arms free, Lucifer gets to work. In short order he’s created a small circus tent on the hotel grounds in the hotel’s main colors. The exterior doesn’t look like much, but the cloth walls are as sturdy as angelic steel and will easily repel any attacks from demons or exorcists trying to take advantage of a moment of respite between battles.

And the interior is much larger than the outside would imply, since Lucifer carves into a pocket dimension to provide as much luxury as possible. Piles of pillows and blankets and soft mattresses for sleeping in one corner, a whole camp kitchen setup in another, and a range of showers and tubs in various sizes for cleaning off a hard day’s fight. Not to mention his own able assistance for triage and healing, free of charge.

With accommodations taken care of, Lucifer pops briefly into the hotel to retrieve the items people had asked for. This mostly consists of fresh clothes or food, but he’s delighted to return with KeeKee and an adorable little hellboar piglet, which runs squealing to the tall white spider demon when Lucifer sets it down.

He’s surprised to find, on his return, that most of the little group has collected over by the sleeping quarters rather than taking the chance to get clean or tend to their injuries. He’s even more surprised to find the lot of them trying to figure out how they can settle Alastor comfortably while he’s still unconscious and coated in blood. The little housekeeper is throwing an absolute fit, claiming that Alastor would hate to sleep while covered in so much filth.

“I can take care of that,” Lucifer offers, as he sets down everyone’s requested items on a table. He snaps, and instantly the bellhop is squeaky clean—bath not needed!—and dressed in a set of soft red pajamas.

“Thanks, Dad,” Charlie says with relief.

The lot of them work together to assemble a little nest of blankets and pillows and tuck the bellhop into it comfortably but securely. It’d be almost funny if it weren’t so sad, how gentle and protective they’re being with him in this vulnerable state, and how much he’d hate it if he were conscious. There’s muttering between them about ‘Vees’ and ‘attack’ and ‘protection’ and ‘stand guard’ and ‘idiot,’ and eventually while most of them head off to get themselves clean and take care of their injuries, Charlie stays behind to sit next to Alastor and hold his hand.

“Hey, Sweetie,” Lucifer says. “You can go clean off too, if you want, you know. He’ll be safe enough in here.”

But Charlie shakes her head, and runs a thumb over the back of Alastor’s knuckles gently. “I want to stay for a little while,” she says softly. “Just until I feel a little better. We do need to protect him if he’s going to be as weak as you said, people definitely will want to take advantage of it, but I just…I want to see for myself that he’s going to be okay. If that makes sense.”

“It does,” Lucifer says. He’s not really insulted by her unease, even if he’s the one that did the healing work. Even after Lucifer had hauled him back from death, the bellhop still looks pretty awful—wan and pale, too thin and terribly exhausted even in his sleep.

“But he’ll make it,” Lucifer adds, taking her free hand as he sits next to her. “With someone like you looking after him, he’ll bounce back faster than ever.”

“I hope so.” Charlie squeezes his hand. Her eyes are a little watery, but she doesn’t sob this time. “Thanks again, Dad. For everything. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“There’s no place I’d rather be,” Lucifer says with a smile, and it’s every bit the truth.

His wonderful daughter has brought a new dawn, and things are going to change, and he won’t miss seeing it for the world.

Chapter Text

Alastor hurts. 

He’d let go. He’d stopped holding on. He’d felt himself slipping into the blackness and he knew he wasn’t coming back. 

He hurts. He’s been here once before, and he knows what comes next. And this time, the end is permanent. Oblivion awaits. 

He doesn’t want to admit it, not even to himself, not even at the end. But truth always comes out, at the end, and it’s impossible to lie to oneself at death’s door. 

He’s terrified. 

He’d fought so hard not to come to this point. Fought so hard to keep holding on, keep dragging himself forward one more day. To exist can be miserable and painful, but to exist means finding a way out of it if one is clever and strong enough.

Alastor had thought he’d be clever and strong enough. He’d talked his way around or destroyed any and every obstacle in his path. 

He’d never once, not for a moment, thought he might be the thing to stop himself. But he’d sabotaged decades of work for one simple moment, one little gut instinct, one ridiculous, sentimental, foolish need to protect and nurture something outside of himself and his own plans.

He’s terrified that he’s become broken enough to fall so far.

He’s even more terrified that he doesn’t regret doing so. Even if it comes with oblivion.

She’d lived, after all. 

And he might go to oblivion, he might be in agonizing pain ripping him apart inside and out, but he’s not alone for it. Not like last time. Everyone dies alone, except for the part when they don’t, and Alastor hadn’t thought it would make a difference, but—

—but that soothing melody, that warmth, that last bit of closeness, knowing he’d succeeded, it was…

It was better. It was better than the last time.

He’s terrified, but he can grit his teeth and bear it until he’s gone, because it’s better than last time.

So he settles into the warmth, slips into the blackness. Everything slips away, bit by bit—his vision dark, the scent of iron fading, his body goes numb. All that’s left is that holy fire eating him alive inside, that unimaginable pain, his own mangled, weakening thoughts, and that one sweet, mournful melody to guide him towards a painless end.

The song stops.

And for a moment, Alastor is frightened anew. Because without that sound, he’s truly alone. Alone but not gone yet; floating in the blackness, sinking down and down further and further, cold and numb and abandoned, and he can’t help but wonder—

— where did the song go? Please, come back. Help me. Comfort me. Stay with me. I don’t want to die alone—

And even further down, in the muddy, frigid terror of his dying thoughts—

—did I deserve this? To be abandoned, at the end? Is this what Hell really is?—

—But I thought I…I thought I did something…something worth…worth…kind…ness—

And then, all at once, the darkness blooms with light.

It isn’t a soft, kind light, like the fanciful stories about death and dying. This light is so blinding he can’t see, so searing it burns, so powerful that being encased in it is agonizing. It’s like being next to the sun, or a star, floating in the void of space and suffering its relentless onslaught.

It hurts so badly that it takes a moment for Alastor’s awareness to fight past his final moments of sheer agony and vulnerability to register it.

The Presence. 

It’s in the light, hidden in those blinding cast-off displays of power, shining too strongly for Alastor to see it. Or maybe it is the light, and Alastor can’t be sure. But something is there with him now, and he isn’t alone. 

He wishes more than anything that he was. Dying alone, Alastor realizes very quickly, is infinitely preferable to the Presence.

He can feel it, at the edge of his senses, but he can’t quite wrap his mind around it. There’s a mind, and an understanding, something sentient hidden in that light and power. Alastor knows because he can feel it watching him, a thousand-thousand burning, brilliant, shining eyes like a thousand-thousand stars, every one turned on a part of him. 

They don’t just look at him. He can feel it. They’re looking through him, about him, back through the trails of his life and death and up through his future, turning him inside and out and back again. The Presence behind them is immense, a thing too broad and vast in mind and body and power and existence for Alastor to even begin to understand a fraction of it, but in seconds it knows him intimately. 

The Presence reaches out, bodiless, formless, but with unimaginable strength and power, and takes him apart. Like a coroner over a corpse, and Alastor is just as helpless as this thing picks through him, investigates every part of him, watching with those terrible, awe-inspiring eyes. 

It finds everything, everything. Everything is laid bare. His insides, his strengths, his weaknesses, his fears, his obsessions, his secrets, his successes, his failures, his life, his death, his purpose, his sins, his goals. Everything, everything on display, nothing hidden, nothing tucked away. This thing, this Presence, it can’t be lied to. It knows him very literally inside and out.

Alastor has never been more terrified in his life. He’s never felt more naked, more exposed, more vulnerable. 

He screams, and screams, and screams. Raw, animal terror, mindless and formless, in the face of this massive, terrifying, burning Presence. 

There are no thoughts about reputation or shows of strength. There’s no point against something like this, this Presence that is too vast and too grand for unimportant, petty Hellish squabbles. It’s too powerful and he’s too small, too weak, too useless against it.

No point against something that can see his terror and his weakness and sin from inside him. Posturing means nothing. 

This thing knows the lie for what it is before Alastor can even think about making it, and he’s too filled with raw fear to even start thinking it.

Death. Oh, Heaven, Hell, Universe, Stars, whatever is out there, let him die. Death is the only way he can escape this thing. He isn’t sure if this Presence can follow him to oblivion, but he’ll take anything, anything at all, to get away from its burning, brilliant existence. 

It’s too much, too much. He can’t stop screaming, inside and out. 

But when he scrabbles for that oblivion, tries to find the darkness again, the Presence doesn’t let him go. It has no body that Alastor can sense, but it grips him tightly anyway, wraps him up in a cage of light and willpower and intent even as it continues to shred him apart and turn him inside out. Its touch against his mind, his body, his thoughts, is maddening kindness that burns and soft cruelty that’s icy cold, and he can’t understand it, he only knows it could break him so easy, it’s too big too much too powerful help him help him help him help him—

He doesn’t realize he’s fighting until his own thoughts tell him to calm, but they aren’t his, and the Presence is there too, taking his own mind, his own words before he even thinks them, and even then its voice is so massive behind his own thoughts it hurts. He thrashes, claws, cries and throws himself against those mental restraints, desperate for oblivion—

— let me go let me go let me die let me go please please please let me go let me die let me escape—

—but the Presence is too big, infinitely big. Too strong, infinitely strong. A thousand-thousand starry eyes watch him at all times; no chance to sneak away. Deception is impossible, the Presence can’t be fooled. 

What does this creature want with him? Is this real Hell? Is this his punishment now that he’s had his fun in the afterlife? 

He sobs. Those eyes, they see everything. Everything. He was never once ashamed of what he did when he was living. Even less after death. He’s killed, hunted, tortured, manipulated, lied, cheated, dealt in unholy magics and partaken of human flesh and never once, not ever, has he regretted his choices. 

But this thing, this Presence, it Sees everything, and its Presence is brilliant and powerful and judging, and for the first time ever, the weight of his sins is crushing and insurmountable. This thing Seeing him, Seeing what he’s done, watching with those thousand-thousand brilliant starlike eyes, it’s more than he can bear. He’s a lowly thing, a broken, disgusting, sickly, blackened little thing, and it’s vast and beautiful and terrifying and he’s desperate for it to turn its eyes away.

Let me go, he begs it, screaming into the void and the brilliance. Let me go, let me go, don’t look at me, don’t see me, let me die, please, please, pleasepleaseplease—

He would make a deal with anything, anyone, he would do whatever it took for it to stop looking at him.

But it doesn’t look away. It speaks to him with his own mind and keeps him bound tight, no matter how hard Alastor thrashes and screams and pleads and begs to just die, to be let go, to stop looking at him.

It ignores him, and it holds him, and it hurts him.

Oh, it hurts him.

It breaks him apart and fills inside his thoughts and his existence, and that brilliant light is agonizing and the Presence too big and too powerful for his pitiful mortal existence to contain even a fraction of. Its very Presence hunts inside of every part of Alastor that has ever existed, feasting on holy flames, and every movement brings indescribable agony. 

He has never suffered like this. Not in his whole life. Not his first death. Never once in Hell, not even those seven years. Even the flames consuming him from the inside, from Adam, they hurt less than this, it’s torture, it’s cruelty and kindness and pleasure and pain all wrapped into one, and all along that thing watches him, watches and waits and hunts and he doesn’t know what it wants with him—

— let me go, he begs the Presence, as he struggles in its infinitely strong grip on his mind. Please, please, please, just let me go, let me go, let me go—

But it doesn’t let him go, and by the time it stops hurting him there’s barely anything of Alastor left. Just a broken, empty husk, a shell that a too-big, brilliant thing had slithered through and burned out by virtue of existing there.

It isn’t death. It isn’t oblivion. It’s empty existence, and Alastor whimpers in his own head and mind and heart and body because this isn’t better, it’s worse, please, he just wants to die, doesn’t he deserve it? Didn’t he do something that deserves kindness? It’s punished him enough for his sins, this Presence, he’s never suffered more, just one little reward for saving a life at the expense of his own, let him stop this broken existence, let him go—

It doesn’t let him go.

If anything, it holds him tighter as it starts digging through the little broken parts that are left of him. Its touch slithers over his final moments, his last memories before the darkness and the song and the Presence. Alastor relives it again, as real and whole and full of sense and sensation as he had before: trying to save his own life, knowing Charlie was doomed, throwing his own sense and self preservation to the dogs as he leapt upon Adam and held on, held on, held on. 

The Presence hesitates over this. That such a vast being could be entranced by a singular memory is strange enough as it is, and just odd and off-key enough that it feels distantly, vaguely, familiar. 

Then the familiarity is gone, and the Presence delves deeper into Alastor’s broken husk of an existence. And it’s too much, too much; this thing knows him too much, it’s watching him and it’s tearing him apart and it can unmake him and remake him with ease, he’s a vulnerable, exhausted, terrified little plaything, utterly powerless, and he can’t stand it—

—and for a moment, despite its brilliance, despite its thousand-thousand brilliantly gleaming eyes, as it reaches out with formless, ephemeral fingers and scrapes together the shattered pieces of Alastor’s being and starts twisting things back together, and as it moves Alastor gains strength, and as he gains strength he can see past the brilliance into—

—into—

—iNtO—

— i n To—

—he’s screaming. He didn’t realize. He’s screaming and tearing at himself, because he’d seen it, he’d seen the face behind the eyes, infinite and terrible and beautiful and horrifying and endlessendlessendlessendless

Take his own eyes out, take them out, it can see him but he can’t see it he can’t he can’t he can’tcantcantcant

Help help him help help HeLp heLP mE HElp MeeeeeeeeEEEEeEeEEeeeE

Shhhh…it’s alright. Everything is all right. Don’t be afraid. 

And slowly, things are—better.

He’s distantly aware of something awful and terrible and beautiful and awe-inspiring but it’s a muffled memory, smothered by careful hands wrapped around it. He smells his mother’s jambalaya. There’s the taste of New Orleans spices and good rye on his tongue. Something is pulled across his eyes, but it feels soft, and he can see gentle candlelight. There’s a comfortable blanket around him, warm and heavy and pressing, and his mother hums and sings as she holds him and rocks him to sleep, a gentle rain outside a beautiful accompaniment, and he’s small and safe and comfortable and happy and there’s nothing dangerous, nothing at all.

Distantly, very distantly now, he’s aware of something beyond this comfortable mix of happy memories and sensations. The Presence is still there, but somehow it’s dulled itself to him. Alastor can feel its handiwork in these sensations, feel it pulling them to the forefront and making them important, but everything is so warm and hazy and comfortable. That the Presence has him wrapped up as well, that its enormous form is rocking him and thousand-thousand eyes are still watching gently, that it is singing alongside his mother. That it has him pinned tightly to keep him from thrashing, from dashing himself apart and fleeing towards death, but that it’s trying to be kind.

He’s aware of pain, too. Distant as well, dulled because of the Presence; the pain of things being snapped back into place, pushed together, regrown, revitalized. It feeds him drops of life and energy that burn and helps him use them and keeps him from breaking himself when he doesn’t know how and it hurts so badly.

Alastor is still terrified. This thing has him pinned so easily. It could break him so easily. He doesn’t understand why something with so much raw power and infinite potential would care about a wretched, tiny, broken thing like him, and it frightens him badly to not know this Presence’s purpose for him. 

It could make him do anything. Anything. 

It knows everything. Everything. 

He can’t—he’s not strong enough—he can’t —

But it puts him back together, and does its best to soothe him, holds him still and wraps him in the kindest memories it can find and tries to hide itself and its brilliance from him. And Alastor is terrified, his heart is beating wildly and he’s so tired and sick at heart and vulnerable, and yet—and yet—

—and yet, as it puts him back together, it continues to play those gentle sensations for him. The rain, his mother’s song and warmth as she holds him, the heaviness of the blanket, the taste and sent of things he loves. And Alastor gets the impression that there’s a message here, somehow. 

Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe. 

He’s so tired. He’s so scared. But he’s not…hurting, anymore. And as the Presence finally lets him go, and he crawls away into the dark sobbing and frightened, he’s alive. Alive, alive, alive, and he takes those comforting sensations of safe with him into the dark.

It isn’t oblivion. For a moment, it’s warmth, and safety, and home. 

Chapter Text

Charlie had figured the hardest, scariest part of saving Alastor’s life would be actually saving his life.

Charlie thought wrong.

Even explaining what had happened on the rooftop to everyone else is more difficult than Charlie anticipates. Angel had taken over carrying Alastor so her dad could build them a temporary shelter and bring them whatever they needed from the hotel until he could fix it properly. But the fact that Alastor doesn’t so much as stir when he’s manhandled leads to immediate questions, and her friends surround her the moment Dad dashes off to start setting up what looks like a circus tent on the hotel grounds.

“ What the Hell happened up there?” Husk asks, gesturing up towards the top of the hotel immediately. “Last we saw Adam slapped you onto the roof, and then…” He gestures at Charlie’s and Vaggie’s blood-coated forms, the spears Vaggie is holding for both of them, Charlie’s retreating dad, and Alastor’s limp form in Angel’s arms.

“Yeah,” Angel agrees. “And what’s with Smiles here?” He gestures with his free set of arms to Alastor, still limp in his grasp. “I thought when Adam went on the rampage he musta died or abandoned us—”

“He didn’t abandon us!” Charlie interrupts loudly.

Angel Dust looks surprised, taking a step back from her. It takes Charlie that long to realize her horns started sliding out. She takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “I’m sorry, Angel. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I just don’t want people thinking the wrong thing about Alastor. He didn’t abandon us. He…he got hurt, really bad. And even after that, when Adam was about to kill me…even after that, he came back and saved my life. And it almost got him killed.”

Vaggie puts her free arm around Charlie and gives her a gentle side-hug, understanding. Razzle, in his smaller form again, nuzzles against Charlie’s other side.

“ He was hurt?” Cherri Bomb asks, after a moment. She glances at Alastor. “The Radio Demon got wrecked that badly by Adam? But then…Pent…”

Charlie takes a deep breath again. She’d cried herself out in her father’s arms up on the roof, and there aren’t tears left in her, but her eyes still sting painfully. “Pentious’ death isn’t Alastor’s fault. Adam is the one responsible for Pentious, and that’s it. I don’t think Al could have intervened in that case if he wanted to. But he saved me when he could. I just…don’t want people to be mad at him, after everything…”

There’s a somber silence in their little group, interrupted only by the cheerful hacking and munching of the cannibals busily cleaning up the battlefield around them.

“How about you tell us what happened from the beginning,” Husk says. “We’re gonna be stuck here for a bit anyway until your dad’s got a place for us.”

So Charlie does. She explains from the moment she’d split off from the rest of the group. How Adam had thrown her to the roof. How she’d fought back as best she could, but Adam was just better. How he’d thrown her to the ground, stunned her, how she could barely stand.

And how Alastor had loomed up behind him to stop him taking Charlie’s life just in time. How he’d hung on, unable to do any real damage, just buying her time. How Adam had hurt him and hurt him and hurt him and still Alastor hadn’t let go. Not until he’d been injured so badly he didn’t have the strength to hold on anymore, and had been tossed aside like one of his own marionette shadow minions.

“ And then what?” Niffty asks, eye wide. “Did you stab the Bad Angel that hurt Master Alastor?”

“It…I…Adam isn’t a problem anymore,” Charlie says.

In truth, she doesn’t want to talk about that part at all. She doesn’t even want to think about it. She did what she had to, when it came down to Adam or Alastor, but…but there’s golden blood on her hands and it’s never going to come off and she just—

She can’t think about it right now. Not right now, not with everything else going on.

Vaggie, thank goodness, moves the story past that point before the others can ask too many questions. “By the time I got to the roof chasing Lute, Adam was down and Charlie was trying to help Alastor. I managed to fend Lute off until Charlie’s dad got here, and that’s when he sent Lute and the rest of the exorcists packing. They took Adam’s body with them.”

“That explains why they all just got up and left all at once,” Cherri Bomb notes. “Thought that was weird.”

“Smiles isn’t lookin’ so beat up now, so I’m guessin’ Short King healed him?” Angel Dust asks, as he gives Alastor, still in his arms, a once-over. Alastor is still covered in blood, and he still looks awful—pale, too thin, exhausted, his eternal smile barely there. But the wounds are gone, especially the obvious ones.

Charlie is relieved to skip to that part. As much as telling them about Alastor’s last favor-enhanced request might endear him to them further, that seems deeply personal and private. They might distrust him less if they could see the humanity in him from something like not wanting to be alone when he died, or taking comfort in his final moments in a song. But that feels like a betrayal, to explain that much.

Alastor had almost died for her. She can at least protect his final moments when he was fully himself, no masks or motives included. At least until he’s ready to share that himself.

“Yes,” Charlie says shortly. “Dad…Dad healed him.”

“I’m impressed he could fix up old Smiley here if he was that bad off,” Cherri Bomb says, poking the unconscious Alastor lightly in the shoulder. “Not a bad guy to have on-side.”

“It wasn’t easy, but he did it,” Charlie says. “Dad’s stronger than he looks.”

In truth, that’s another thing Charlie doesn’t want to think about too hard right now.

When she’d asked Dad to heal Alastor, to give him a second chance…she’d envisioned it would be like how her dad always healed her, in the past. He’d patch up her bruises and scrapes from climbing brimstone and running around too fast with just a touch and a smile. Fix her burns with a gentle rub of his thumb and reassuring little hum. Once she’d broken her arm when trying to slide down the banister in the palace and falling from the second floor, bad enough that it cut through flesh and made a mess, and it had hurt so bad, but he’d fixed it in minutes while singing to her the whole time. He’d even fixed her dress for her, because she’d been so upset that it had been torn.

Healing was safe and warm and good to Charlie.

But what happened on the roof…

She believes her father. She knows her dad takes healing seriously, and despite his rivalry with Alastor, he would never go out of his way to intentionally torture him or mess with him in such a serious situation. He’d promised her, and Charlie knew he hadn’t lied.

But that healing had been almost as terrifying as her fight against Adam. Her father had looked so different, gleaming with a radiant light that almost hurt even her to look at. His wings had grown the largest she’d ever seen, at least five times his size, mantling around them enough to create a large bubble of enclosed space. Charlie swears she’d seen stars in the spaces between, if only for a moment.

The way he’d knelt at Alastor’s head, bent forehead to forehead—the way he’d pinned Al’s head firmly in place, covered his eyes to protect him from the glow, hummed and spoken in words in a musical language Charlie didn’t recognize—

— she’s never seen her father like that before. Dad has always been Dad, awkward and silly and scatterbrained and terrible at communicating, easily bored and lazy, quick to fixate on a project or little details, obsessed with ducks, and willing to spend days in bed without moving. She knows, logically, that he’s also the same thing in the biblical stories that people call The Devil. She knows the stories about him and her mother. But somehow they had never quite clicked as being the same person.

When he’d been healing Alastor, for the first time it really hit Charlie that her father is from almost the beginning of creation, and he is so much more than he appears.

And Alastor…

Charlie’s known Alastor personally for six months now. Known his reputation in Hell for much longer. The Radio Demon, the terror of the radio waves, a creature that appeared in Hell and made a name for himself almost instantly. A creature not to be trifled with, a monster among monsters, a dealer and a manipulator and an unholy terror.

Charlie has never, not once, not even when he was fighting Adam, ever heard Alastor scream like that.

He’d screamed and screamed and screamed like he didn’t need to breathe, until his face and lips were blue from the lack of air. It had been a noise full of the rawest, purest form of terror and agony and sorrow and shame, something that came from the depths of the beginning of humanity. Something that belonged in Hell and yet Charlie hated it immediately, because it made her heart ache, made her want to wrap Al up and hold him tight and hug him and promise him that everything would be alright, that he’s safe and loved and forgiven and never has to hurt again.

She’d tried, of course. She’d tried to comfort him as best as she could, just like Dad asked for. He’d warned her Alastor might react strangely, and oh, he had. Charlie couldn’t move him when her dad was in the middle of healing him, but she could hold Al’s hand and talk to him and try to reassure him that they were helping and everything would be okay soon—

— but it hadn’t worked. Alastor hadn’t heard her. Not once. She’s not even sure he knew she was there, and that makes her heart ache for a whole new reason, because she’d promised to stay by his side through the worst of it, and he was terrified and hurting and didn’t even know he wasn’t alone.

She’d thought the screaming was bad enough. The words were worse, when Alastor had enough breath to speak them. He’d bounced between gurgling, choked sobs and shrieking like the Sinners in the Doomsday District.

He’d sounded like a madman, and those words will be burned into Charlie’s ears for the rest of her life.

“Too bright—it burns—it hurts—”

“ No! No, no, no, no, don’t look at me, don’t look at me, DON’T LOOK AT ME—”

“ No, no, no—please—it sees me — it sees everything! No, no, please—”

“ Please! Just let me go! Don’t look at me, don’t look at me, LET ME DIE— ”

Charlie had tried. She’d tried to comfort him. She’d been terrified when he begged to die, not to be seen, tried to shrink away from her Dad’s brilliant light.

But Alastor never heard her.

He’d been so scared. So helpless. Alastor wasn’t supposed to be scared or helpless. That alone made it all the more terrifying.

But Charlie still could have dealt with the words alone, if that was the worst of it.

No, the thing that will really haunt Charlie is the way Alastor had hurt himself to try and get away from the healing.

Charlie’s not sure what her father had to do to fix Alastor, but he’d warned her that Sinners and miracles don’t mix. Charlie hadn’t understood, until she’d seen it in action. None of Alastor’s cleverness or intelligence had been left. He’d fought like a wild animal in a trap, thrashing and snapping and struggling and desperate to escape Dad’s hands on his face.

He hadn’t understood they were helping him. Charlie knows, because she’d been sobbing while trying to hold his hand and tell him so over and over. “ It’s okay, it’s all okay Alastor, Dad’s trying to help you, he’s not hurting you, you’ll feel better in just a little bit—”

It hadn’t mattered. Alastor hadn’t understood they were helping him. He was terrified and suffering and he’d fought. A nd when he didn’t have the strength to resist, and the madness was at its most frenzied, he’d broken himself instead.

The thought still terrifies Charlie. The way Alastor’s sharp claws had turned on his own body , trying to cut his eyes out as he shrieked about a face and eyes and the Presence. Charlie had been forced to pin his arms to the ground, and when insanity gave him strength, she’d thrown herself across his chest and begged Vaggie for help. Vaggie had to fight her way through the wall of Dad’s massive, star-encrusted wings within the circle of healing, and even with her help they’d barely kept Alastor still enough for Dad to work. Even then, his madness had driven him to terrifying limits.

Charlie still remembers the snap-crack of his spine breaking beneath her, as she pinned him with her own body, when he twisted and contorted and shrieked about thousands of eyes.

Alastor had grown still eventually. Charlie isn’t sure if he ran out of madness-induced strength to fight, or if Dad had done something in his head to calm him. He’d grown still beneath her eventually, panting harshly like a wounded animal, eye half-lidded and unseeing, tongue hanging out of his sharp-toothed mouth like a sick dog. He looked like he’d been tranquilized, or like he was high on some of Angel’s stash. He didn’t look like himself.

That had almost been the most frightening thing of all.

By the end, he’d passed out, and Charlie considered it a mercy. She hopes, desperately, that he won’t remember any of this. Charlie had wanted to save him. She hadn’t intended to make him suffer.

Dad had healed him. Charlie’s grateful Alastor is still with them. But she’s pretty sure she’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of her life.

The rest of her newfound family look like they want to ask more. But they must see the haunted look in Charlie’s eyes, one that’s reflected in Vaggie’s grim expression, because most of them are tactful enough not to ask. And when Niffty and Frank look like they’re about to, Husk puts a hand on Niffty’s head and Cherri Bomb shakes her head firmly at Frank, and they thankfully fall silent.

Charlie’s glad, because she’s not sure she could explain further than that.

By then, Dad has the circus tent erected and is waving them over. He explains some of the features, and Charlie is relieved they’ll at least have a safe, comfortable place to stay until the hotel is fully renovated and declared safe again. Dad takes notes on any immediate items people want from their rooms—mostly clothes, food and toiletries, along with KeeKee and Fat Nuggets—and leaves them with a few moments to settle in.

“Guess we should take care of Smiles first, huh?” Angel Dust asks, glancing down at the demon still cradled carefully in his upper set of arms. Knowing Alastor had risked his life to save Charlie’s seems to have improved his reputation with the rest of Charlie’s friends; they seem much more determined to care for him now.

“ Probably a good idea,” Vaggie says, taking charge of the logistics. Charlie is so grateful to have her, because after everything that’s happened, she’s feeling a little…struggle-y. She’s not sure how else to put it. “Let’s get him set up in a place he can rest. His Majesty said he’ll be weak for a long time, and he’ll need time to rebuild his strength.”

“We should make it private,” Husk says. “Not like we can put rooms in this place, but the Boss’ll be pissed if he’s just laying out in the open.”

“I can ask Dad to make us some privacy screens when he gets back,” Charlie offers.

“ We’ll want to set a guard, too,” Angel Dust says. “I know I saw VoxTek drones in the area. We know Vox especially’s got beef with Smiles here. If he’s gonna be that weak, and Vox saw it, somebody’ll try somethin’ while they can.”

“They’d have to be stupid to try it with the King around,” Cherri Bomb says.

“ So they pick a time when he’s not around,” Angel Dust says. “He can’t be everywhere. ‘Specially if he’s also gotta fix up the hotel. All it’ll take is one stab with an angelic blade, and there’s a lot of it around here right now. Al can’t protect himself like this.” He gestures dramatically with Alastor himself, who wobbles like a doll in his arms and makes not a peep of protest.

“ If anyone tries to stab Alastor, I’ll stab them first,” Niffty says savagely. Her little angelic steel needle-dagger is still in her hand, coated in pale gold blood, and she waves it about warningly.

“ Watch where you’re putting that thing!” Husk snaps. “Don’t stab us, we’re on his side too!” He grimaces, then adds, “But Angel’s right. Boss is too tempting a target right now like this. They’ll probably try something if we don’t keep an eye out.”

“Then we’ll set a watch,” Vaggie says. “At least one person will be on guard at all times to keep an eye on him and make sure nobody tries to hurt him when he’s down.” She gives Alastor a look. “He’s not my favorite person, but he saved Charlie, and we protect our own.”

Charlie can’t help but sniffle again, even out of tears, and wraps her arms around Vaggie. Then the others, one by one. “Oh, thank you so much,” she tells them all. “I’m so glad you’re all okay—and that we’re all protecting each other—this is all I ever wanted.”

“Don’t sweat it, Toots,” Angel Dust says, patting her with one of his free arms. “You looked out for us. We got your back.”

“ Now can we put this asshole to bed so I can take a shower?” Cherri Bomb adds. “Turns out angel blood stinks.”

“ Alastor would hate to go to bed so messy!” Niffty frets. “Look at him! He’s covered in blood and his clothes are all torn and it’ll make his ears and hair all matted and he hates that!”

For a moment, they flounder over how to deal with the situation. A bath or shower would be ideal, but Alastor doesn’t look like he’s going to wake any time soon to deal with it himself. Husk or Angel Dust would need to clean him, but both are equally disgusting, messy, and exhausted after the battle, and it’s hardly fair to ask that of them. They don’t have anything fresh or clean to dress him in, and Husk lets them know bluntly that if Alastor wakes up in bed naked—even under a blanket—he probably will go on a rampage and tear the circus tent down around their heads.

In the end, Dad returns with their things and takes the problem out of their hands. “I can take care of that,” he offers, and with a snap, Alastor is clean and dressed in a set of soft red pajamas.

“Thanks, Dad,” Charlie says in relief.

From there, things are a little easier. The lot of them are coated in blood and gore, but Charlie and Vaggie are able to wash their hands and Niffty rolls around in one of the sinks until she’s sopping wet but blood free. Between the three of them, they’re able to take a number of soft mattresses, blankets and pillows from the pile Dad had provided and assemble a makeshift bed for Alastor. Angel Dust lowers him into it carefully, supporting Al’s head with his extra pair of hands so it settles comfortably onto the pillow. Charlie draws up one of the soft blankets over his body and gently tucks him in, nice and secure and safe.

If you don’t look too closely at his face, Charlie reflects, he almost just looks like he’s sleeping peacefully. Of course, that’s only if you don’t look close. In the circus tent lighting, his right ear glimmers, and for the first time she notices gold hairs in the red and black that hadn’t been there before. But the rest of him is s till so pale. His face looks thin and drawn, and his smile is too small. It also looks off-balance, and it takes Charlie a minute to realize it’s because his monocle is missing.

Look too close and Alastor looks wrong. But hopefully, that won’t last. He’s safe. The worst of it is over. Now he just needs a chance to rest. To get better.

To come back to them.

“Who’s takin’ first watch?” Angel Dust asks.

“You guys go ahead and get cleaned up,” Charlie says. “I’ll stay with him for a bit.”

Vaggie frowns. “Are you sure, H un?” she asks, worried. “You were in a pretty nasty fight with Adam. You deserve a chance to get cleaned up and taken care of too.”

“Dad already healed me on the roof,” Charlie says. “I want you all to be taken care of, first. I don’t…I don’t want to lose anyone else today. I don’t want anyone else to come close.”

“We’re gonna be fine, kid,” Husk says. “The rest of us got some bruises and scrapes, but we’re alright.”

“I know, I know, I just…take care of yourselves? Please? For me? Plus…” Charlie glances at Alastor. “I kind of want to stay with him for a bit anyway. Now that it’s calmer. Just to be sure he’ll be alright.”

“Boss ain’t easy to kill,” Husk says, patting her on the shoulder. “If he pulled through this far, he’ll be fine.”

“But if you need some time, take some time, Hun,” Vaggie adds. “You know where to find any of us if you need us.”

“Thanks everyone. Now go, take care of yourselves.”

The rest of them trudge off towards the restrooms Dad built into the pocket dimension of the circus tent, some after collecting toiletries from the supplies Dad brought back. Charlie stays where she is, pulling over a comfortable looking, thick pillow, so she can sit next to Alastor and get off her feet. The pillow rapidly gets sticky with blood and grime from her own clothes, but she’s careful not to get any on Alastor’s blankets. Dad can clean up the rest later.

Gently, she works Alastor’s hand out from beneath his blanket, wrapping it carefully in her own. His fingers are loose, claws hanging limp, unaware she’s there and not gripping back. She’s seen Alastor gleefully tear apart Sinners with these same claws, these same hands, but now it seems so…fragile in her grasp.

He doesn’t even know she’s here. His breaths are rough from all his screaming, his pulse weak and fluttering in his wrist under her fingertips. He couldn’t protect himself if he wanted to. He’s helpless. Completely reliant on them to keep him safe, after he kept her safe.

She isn’t going to fail him.

Dad tries to convince her to go get clean, to take a rest. Charlie shakes her head and refuses. It isn’t that she distrusts her Dad’s healing skills; she can see for herself that Alastor’s face is rebuilt, that no wound is bleeding through his pajama shirt. That he’s still breathing and his heart is still beating.

But that healing had still scared her. She just wants to sit with Alastor for a bit, now that it’s all over. To know that he’s weak, but he’s going to be okay. To listen to him breathing and to feel his heart beating for just a little longer. To know the worst is passed.

To remind herself that this had happened because of her.

“It’s going to be okay, Al,” Charlie whispers to him. She squeezes his hand, rubs her thumb gently over the back of his knuckles. He doesn’t squeeze back, or respond in any way. But he does keep breathing—rough, slow, but each breath comes one after another.

“Everything’s going to be okay. The hard part is over. We’ll take care of you, I promise. Everything is going to be okay.”

The hard part isn’t over, and things are not okay.

Charlie learns this the hard way when a screech fills the tent, waking her from a dead sleep where she’d been cuddled against Vaggie. Moments later, a panicky yell for help follows, and Charlie struggles out of her nest of blankets and pillows, trying to rub sleep out of her eyes even as she pulls herself to her feet.

She’s not sure how long she’s been sleeping. Dad had relieved her guard duties eventually when she’d all but fallen asleep sitting up next to Alastor, promising her that everyone was safe while he was on watch. She’d barely had the energy to take a shower by then; Vaggie had helped her get all the blood out of her hair before she passed out completely. She’d stumbled to a section of bedding Vaggie had prepared already, curled up next to her girlfriend, and fallen asleep almost immediately.

Her last fleeting thought, with Vaggie snuggled next to her and the rest of her little found family crashed around her on piles of pillows and blankets, was that it was almost like a sleepover if she didn’t think too hard.

But the thought is dashed when she stumbles over and around piles of pillows and discarded bedding, following the yelps of surprise and panicked screeches. It’s coming from Alastor’s little space, now privatized with tall screen curtains creating a makeshift bedroom.

For a moment, Charlie’s not sure what she’s seeing. Angel Dust is crouched over Alastor in bed, and her knee-jerk reaction is to apologize and rush out, afraid she’s walked in on something private. Except Angel looks up in alarm when she staggers in, and yelps, “ Help!”

That’s when Charlie’s sleep-addled mind catches up with the rest of her, and she puts the rest of the scene together.

This is no romantic moment. Alastor’s eyes are blown wide, but they’re glazed and unseeing. He’s thrashing in place, twisting and fighting like a madman, jaws wide and panting harshly. There’s blood on his face, and blood on the blankets, and his red claws are dripping with red liquid.

“ It’s here,” Alastor rasps, eyes wide, twitching back and forth, seeing yet not. Charlie is shocked to realize one of his previously red irises is a brilliant gold, and currently glowing pale yellow. Alastor’s eyes glow often, but it’s usually red, and his still-red left eye isn’t doing anything odd. “ It’s—the eyes—they see— stop, stop, stop, d-don’t see me, I didn’t see it, I didn’t, don’t look at me— ”

“I don’t know what the Hell’s going on!” Angel Dust yelps frantically. He’s using his full body to pin Alastor down, all four of his arms keeping Al’s shoulders and wrists pushed to the bedding, his long legs hooking expertly around Al’s own to keep him from kicking. “He started muttering and twisting and I thought he was having a nightmare—” he grunts mid sentence as Alastor thrashes beneath him again, and he has to adjust his weight to re-pin him, “—and then he started trying to claw his own face off!”

“ Al! Alastor! It’s okay! Everything is okay!” Charlie staggers forward immediately, falling to her knees at Alastor’s side and reaching out to do something, anything. She tries stroking his hair, his ears, anything that might calm him. “It’s okay! It’s okay. It’s all over. Everything is safe Alastor. Everything is safe.”

But Alastor doesn’t seem to hear her. In fact, Charlie’s not even entirely sure he’s awake. His eyes are glazed and distant, and he doesn’t seem to know Charlie or Angel are even here.

“What the Hell’s going on?” Vaggie says, staggering in behind Charlie. Her spear is in her hand, which probably explains why she hadn’t been right behind Charlie—perimeter check, just in case the screaming was for something else.

“ Smiles is going crazy is what!” Angel says, grunting again when Alastor makes a particularly nasty twisting motion with one arm and his claws cut Angel’s wrist. “Ow, fuck!”

“ No more,” Alastor begs, actually begs, in a horse, terrified voice, still staring blankly. “ No more—stop looking—please—I can’t look away—take them out and I won’t look, I won’t!”

“ Vaggie, I think it’s like—before,” Charlie says urgently. “Go find my dad. Hurry.”

Vaggie swallows, but nods. “You sure you’re okay here?”

“ We’ll handle it, but we need my dad. Hurry!”

“Right.” Vaggie takes off, vanishing around the corner of the nearest privacy screen in a flash.

“Angel, do you need help restraining him?” Charlie asks, worried. Angel is much taller and has the advantage of limbs, but Alastor is fighting like a wild animal, and she doesn’t want Angel to get hurt more than he already has been.

“ Well, he ain’t the worst I’ve had in bed,” Angel says. He pauses, twisting his entire core to pin Alastor’s shoulders back to the mattress. “Though usually it’s less horror movie than this,” he admits with a grimace, as Alastor thrashes and screams again about eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Charlie says. “I don’t know what’s happening—Can you handle it a little more if I try to calm him?”

“ Better if you can calm him,” Angel says, and this time he looks worried. “I’m not the problem. He’s gonna hurt himself if he keeps this up. I think he mighta already dislocated a shoulder.”

Charlie bites her lip helplessly, before returning to Alastor’s face. There are several nasty scratches in his cheekbones and lips from where he’d tried to claw at his face, splitting wider every time he shrieks. Angel might have stopped him from cutting himself more, but even now he’s still hurting himself, whether he realizes it or not.

Stroking his ears and hair doesn’t seem to be helping; he doesn’t seem to recognize it. His eyes keep searching sightlessly though, and he keeps screaming about seeing things and being seen—

Dad had covered Alastor’s eyes when healing him, hadn’t he? On impulse, Charlie moves from stroking Al’s ears to covering his eyes, trying to ignore the sticky, hot blood on his face. The effect is shockingly immediate: Al freezes, and his deranged screaming turns to shaking, ragged pants. After a moment, a terrified little whine escapes the back of Alastor’s throat, and the softest, most pained, “ Help me…”

Charlie and Angel exchange horrified looks. That is not a sound Alastor should ever make. Charlie would love for him to learn he can ask for help, but not like this… never like this, so small and pitiful.

“It’s okay, Al,” Charlie says soothingly. “Sssh, it’s okay. Everything is okay. It’s just a bad dream. Sssh, it’s just a bad dream.”

After a long moment, Al starts fighting again. But this time it’s weaker, more hesitant. He’s not fighting like a madman with deranged levels of strength. This is more exhausted, more helpless, like an animal that’s hurting in a trap and desperate to make it stop and doesn’t know how.

Not knowing what else to do, Charlie tries singing. She’s tired and scared and it’s hard to come up with anything special to get her thoughts across to Alastor that he’s safe. So she just sings old lullabies, things Dad used to sing to her when she was scared of the dark at night, or afraid of angels coming out of her closet to get her when she went to sleep. They’d made her feel safe and protected.

Charlie isn’t sure if it works. Between her and Angel Dust, they manage to keep Alastor from hurting himself further, and he’s stopped screaming about things he can see. But he’s shaking like a leaf, and still keeps trying to pull his hands free from Angel’s grip, and Charlie can feel warm tears beneath her hands.

It’s a relief when Dad arrives, with Vaggie trailing behind him. He takes one look at the scene, mutters, “Aw, Hell,” and kneels down next to Charlie.

“Dad,” Charlie stammers, cutting off mid-lullaby. “He’s—he’s acting like—”

“I know, Char-Char,” Dad says. “I know. I was afraid something like this might happen, but I’ll take care of it, I promise.” He puts an arm around her shoulders for a moment in a reassuring squeeze, before reaching out with both hands and placing them on either side of Alastor’s head, fingers resting on his temples.

Dad glows briefly, closing his eyes. Alastor jerks once, makes a gasping noise like he’s been dunked in cold water, and then slowly the tension starts to leave his body. His eyes slide closed under Charlie’s hands, and he stops fighting against Angel Dust’s grip.

Charlie shakily removes her hands, surreptitiously wiping away the tear tracks from Alastor’s face for him. Angel is more cautious about finally climbing off of Alastor, carefully removing one set of arms at a time and making sure he doesn’t try to cut himself. When Alastor doesn’t move, Angel finally unhooks his legs from Alastor’s and rolls off the bed, wincing and rubbing at several slashes along his arms.

“Think he dislocated his shoulder, Short King,” Angel says.

“I feel it,” Dad says in response. His eyes are still closed and his hands are still on Alastor’s temples. “I’ll get it in a moment once I’m done with this.”

He doesn’t elaborate on what ‘this’ is, but Charlie has a feeling it has to do with whatever’s going on in Alastor’s head.

But at last, the external injuries start to mend themselves. There’s a soft click as Alastor’s shoulder rights itself. The cuts on his face melt away. His breathing grows less raspy as Dad fixes the rawness of his throat.

When Dad finally takes his hands away, Alastor looks good as new, and fast asleep. Even the blood spattering the blankets and mattress and his claws are gone, cleaned away with Dad’s magic.

“Angel’s hurt too, Dad,” Charlie says. “Can you…?”

“Uh-huh,” Dad says. He reaches out his hands, and Angel places his cut arms in them with a wince. Dad glows again as he mends the cuts, and adds, “Geez, that’s a new bruise—what’d he do, kick you?”

“Before I could pin him all the way, yeah,” Angel says. One of his free hands rubs his side. “His hooves are sharp, turns out.”

“I’m sorry he hurt you, Angel,” Charlie says fretfully.

But Angel only waves it off with a free hand. “Don’t worry about it, Toots. I’ve had worse on a day at the studio. And Smiles obviously wasn’t tryin’ ta hurt me or he’d’a done a lot worse than a couple scratches and bruises.”

“ W ell, what was he doing then? W hat even happened?” Vaggie asks, voicing the question that’s on absolutely everyone’s minds.

Dad sighs. “I said it before: Sinners and miracles don’t mix well. I was hoping I’d smoothed out the wrinkles, but it looks like he’s gonna make things difficult.”

“ I’m sure he’s not doing it on purpose,” Charlie defends. She knows Dad and Alastor don’t get along, but she can’t imagine Alastor would willingly put himself through… that… just to irritate Dad. Especially when Dad doesn’t seem irritated so much as sad and tired about it.

“He isn’t,” Dad says quietly. “It’s not really his fault. We’ll have to keep an eye on it—this might happen again. I’ll try to figure out how to fix it, but it might take me a bit of time.”

Angel Dust winces. “Shit. If this could happen again…we gotta figure out a better way to keep him from hurtin’ himself, no matter who’s on watch.”

Charlie can’t help but agree. If it had been Niffty on watch, Alastor could have hurt her badly without even knowing it, and injured himself even worse without anyone stopping him.

Vaggie looks grim. “Alright. So now we have two objectives. Protect Alastor from everyone else out there.” She gestures with her spear. “And protect him from himself.”

Charlie feels so helpless. Alastor is out cold again, but she can’t help but reach out and stroke his ears back soothingly, like she can offer some kind of comfort. “For now, until we figure something out, I…I’ll stay on watch with you, Angel.”

“You barely got any sleep, Hun—” Vaggie protests.

“I couldn’t go back to sleep if I wanted to,” Charlie admits honestly. “Not after that.”

“ Can’t blame ya, Toots,” Angel Dust says. “And I wouldn’t say no to the company after that.” He smiles weakly, but it’s obviously forced, as is the joke that follows. “Not quite how I like to get rough in bed, if ya know what I mean.”

“If you’re sure…” Vaggie looks grim. “Then I’ll start trying to think about security options. And, Sir—” she looks to Lucifer. “Given the circumstances, it’s probably best that you fix the hotel as soon as you can. The faster we can get Alastor back into his own room, the better our options are.”

“Yeah. Alright. I’ll keep my phone with me if you need an emergency heal like that again,” Lucifer says.

The group disperses. Angel returns to the chair he must have gotten from somewhere, sitting strategically to keep an eye on both Al and one of the entrances in case of attack. Charlie settles on a pillow next to Al instead, taking his hand once more, not that he responds.

“It’s okay, Alastor,” she promises him. “We’re going to make everything better. We will.”

She wishes it didn’t feel so much like a lie.

Chapter Text

Alastor wakes.

This comes as a shock. He had never expected to wake up again.

But he’s aware of his mind resurfacing from the darkness. Aware of the distant sensations of noise. He’s warm, wrapped in softness, comfortable but close. He crawls back to awareness, but his mind is foggy and slow. Everything feels dull and far away.

He registers, slowly, that this should frighten him. He’s vulnerable. He can’t stay like this. He needs to come back to himself, be in control of himself. Be ready.

He has to. There’s something dangerous at hand, but he can’t quite remember it, through the fog. Like a dream slipping away—but he knows in his heart, in his gut, it’s not a dream. Eyes like stars, something vast—

He shudders when his mind brushes up against even a faint impression in his memory, and makes a soft, mewling little whine of fear.

“ Oh, shit! Charlie! I think he’s waking up!”

A voice nearby, familiar. The sound of footsteps moving around him and away.

No. No. No one can know—no one can be near him—he’s vulnerable —

But when he cracks his eyes open, he’s met with a dizzying display of lights and color. And when he tries to push himself up, he finds he can’t, and not just because of weakness. His arms are bound down, and he’s wrapped up tightly, like—

—like—

— he can’t remember, exactly, but it’s enough to send his heart thumping in a panic, to make him start fighting, to emit a warning screech of static that he’s dangerous and to stay away—

“ Alastor! Alastor, it’s okay! Everything is okay, everything is safe!”

Charlie appears above him, pressing her hands against his shoulders to hold him down. He hisses and bares his teeth at her, but rather than fright, she looks startled for only one moment before expression shifts to relief. That’s enough to check his aggression, replacing it with confusion, and she’s able to gently push him down against a soft surface.

Alastor blinks at her blearily. For a moment, he swears he’s seeing triple; there’s multiple Charlies stacked on top of each other and slightly out of focus. The explosion of color and light wherever they are makes them look strange, like auras during a migraine, and his head immediately hurts. But he blinks again and his vision swims back into focus. There are tears in Charlie’s eyes, but although she looks tired, she appears to be otherwise unharmed.

She’d lived. He’d been successful.

He relaxes a little further.

“Everything is okay, Alastor,” Charlie repeats, patting him on the shoulders gently before finally letting him go. She settles down next to him on what appears to be a nest of pillows and blankets, currently supporting him. “Everyone is safe. The battle is over.”

Oh. Well. Something must have gone right then, after he’d…he’d…

He doesn’t quite remember what happened after he’d attacked Adam again for the second time. It’s all such a blur. He remembers pain, and a song, and—

—and—

— and—

“ Did you see it?” Alastor rasps harshly. His throat is dry and warped and painful. He can’t imagine why, unless Adam had cut his throat. “It was here—it came after—it S ees— the eyes—”

“Al! Alastor, it’s okay. Everything’s okay. Sssh, those are just bad dreams.”

Alastor should hate Charlie attempting to coddle him like this. He should detest the way she raises a hand to stroke his bangs back and gently pet at his ears, like she’s trying to calm him. Like he’s a damned child.

But he’s exhausted, and that gentle voice and that gentle touch seem to soothe away the memory of that—that thing — and he has a hard time holding onto it.

No. No. He can’t be complacent. He can’t remember why, but he can’t let himself forget. That power—that vastness—it’s dangerous, and aimed at the hotel and he doesn’t know why—he doesn’t even know how to defend against it, only that preparedness is key—

“Alastor! Come on, Al, you’ve got to calm down, please. Breathe. Everything is okay.”

But it isn’t. And when he tries to grasp her wrist to make her stop petting him and listen to his warning, he finds he can’t. His arms are still bound, he can’t move them—no, no, no—

He must make a distressed noise as he starts to struggle. Charlie puts her hands back on his shoulders and says, “Easy! Easy, Al. It’s okay.”

“ Can’t move— bound— ”

“ No, no, it’s just the blanket, see?” Charlie pats him once on the chest to indicate where to look, and he finds he’s been all but swaddled like an infant in a warm, heavy blanket, his arms loosely bound across his stomach by the fabric like a damned straitjacket. “I can help you unwrap it, but we had to do this when you were asleep. You kept having bad dreams and hurting yourself, but I don’t think you understood what you were doing.”

“ Out,” Alastor rasps, because everything feels too tight, and breathing is suddenly a struggle . Charlie finds the edge of the blanket—tucked under his own body-weight to pin him—and helps him fold it back. He can breathe again when it’s off and his arms are free, unwrapping them from himself and digging his claws into the nearest soft pillow as proof of sensation of touch again.

He shakily drags himself upright, and is distraught at how difficult sitting up is. He’s exhausted from that alone, and his arms shake from the effort of pushing himself up. Charlie tucks a few larger pillows behind him to provide support, and he reclines back into them with disgust, appalled at how much he needs them.

“Do you want some water?” Charlie asks. “Your throat sounds pretty painful…”

Alastor nods, unwilling to answer with his voice and too weak to even summon the rudimentary power to speak through the radio waves. Which makes him realize his voice filter isn’t on—and his staff, where is his staff—

He looks around anxiously, and eventually spots the broken halves of his staff, set on a nearby pillow like some sort of display. That was right—Adam had broken it, which explained why his power was so weak. He loathes seeing it shattered and he detests that it’s on full display for others to see, but at least it’s here.

“We found it on the roof, when we were looking the hotel over for renovations,” Charlie says, and Alastor looks back to her. She offers him a weak smile. “We might be able to fix it for you, but I thought we should wait and see what you wanted to do. It’s yours, after all.”

The thought anyone getting their hands on Alastor’s staff and messing with either its mechanics or its power is enough to send a cold shiver down Alastor’s spine. “Thank you, dear,” he says, his voice unfiltered and raspy. Oh, he hates that.

Charlie offers him the glass of water. He tries to take it, but his hands shake too badly to hold even that little thing, and Charlie has to pluck it from his hands before he can drop it in his lap and soak himself. He’s glad for the intervention, because the thought of climbing out of his makeshift bed sounds exhausting. But he’s disgusted and embarrassed at his weakness.

The Radio Demon, terror of the Pentagram, unable to lift a glass of water. Unacceptable.

“It’s okay,” Charlie says patiently. “I can help you drink it, here—”

Alastor looks away from her and turns his head when she tries to bring the glass to his lips for him. His ears flatten against his will—he’s too tired to maintain any degree of control over his emotions and his tells. It’s petty, but he refuses to be treated like an invalid. He isn’t weak. He isn’t.

“Nobody’s watching, Al,” Charlie says. “Look, we set up some screens for privacy—we wanted you to be able to rest without anyone watching. We knew you wouldn’t like it. Please let me help you? You could really use the water, your poor throat sounds awful.”

Alastor grits his teeth. He doesn’t want to have assistance. If he can’t do it himself, he’d rather not do it at all. But his tongue is sandpapery and dry, and his throat aches, and he’s desperately thirsty.

“ Tell no one,” Alastor hisses.

“Our secret,” Charlie agrees immediately. “Here.”

She tilts the glass of water for him. He drinks like a man dying of thirst, and the embarrassment of needing help with something as simple as drinking is at least somewhat offset by the cool water on his tongue and throat.

Once he’s finished with the glass, he settles back against the pillows at his back, exhausted from the basic act of drinking. Absurd and ridiculous. He must remedy this as soon as possible.

For now, he takes stock of his situation. He appears to be dressed in a pair of soft, red, long-sleeved pajamas, which he had certainly not been wearing before and doesn’t remember being changed into. That he had been vulnerable enough to be moved and changed without knowing it is alarming, but at least some thought seems to have been put into making him comfortable.

He is not in his room. He has no idea where he is, actually. It appears to be the inside of some kind of enormous, striped tent, with strings of soft lights hanging from the fabric ceiling and littered around the walls. The fabric is patterned with obnoxiously bright, colorful stripes, and the lighting only makes it worse.

He can’t see much further than that, because Charlie had not been wrong. A large number of folded screens appear to have been set up around himself and his makeshift bed to afford him at least a little privacy. He can hear voices, music and movement beyond the screens, but currently the only ones inside his little partitioned area are Charlie and himself.

“Where…?”

“It’s our temporary home away from hotel,” Charlie says, watching him look around. “We made it so we have a safe place to stay until he okays the hotel again.”

Alastor frowns over his eternal grin. “What’s wrong with it?”

“We’re little worried about its structural integrity,” Charlie says slowly. “Some parts got pretty badly destroyed, although it’s still standing at least. And most of the wards and magic are gone, so a lot of your repair work reverted back to how it was before.” She looks deeply apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Alastor, I don’t even know how the angels did that.”

They hadn’t. Distantly, like from a terrible nightmare, Alastor remembers pain. He remembers holy fire burning him alive from the inside, taking his magic and his existence with it. He remembers clawing through the bones of the hotel, the residual magic, the wards, the corrections, and draining everything, anything, he could get his claws on. Anything to let him last a few more seconds, to feed the holy flames in place of himself.

“It’s quite all right, dear,” Alastor says tiredly. “It can be fixed…I’ll take care of it as soon as I’m able.”

But Charlie shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she says insistently. “ We’re taking care of fixing everything up so we can move back in. You just worry about getting better.”

He blinks at her slowly. “Better?”

“ Better,” Charlie repeats. “It’s…you…you almost died, Alastor.” She swallows softly. “You protected me from Adam and he hurt you really, really badly. And I couldn’t do anything about it. I was so scared we were going to lose you…”

It feels very hazy and very far away, but slowly, Alastor remembers bits and pieces. “You sang for me,” he murmurs.

“You asked me to,” Charlie says. There are tears in her eyes again. “I hope it was okay, I just…I wanted to make you comfortable, in case…”

“It was lovely, Charlie,” Alastor says, and that isn’t a lie at all. He hardly remembers the words, or the melody, but he remembers the emotion and the impression. She’d stayed with him and comforted him, guided him gently towards the end in a way he hadn’t experienced the first time.

But he doesn’t know how to explain that without making her cry, and he can’t handle that right now when he’s so tired and confused. So he just says again, “It was lovely. It was…warm.”

She sniffles and wipes her eyes, but tries hard to smile when she pulls her hands away from her face. “I’m so, so happy you’re okay, Alastor,” she says, with so much emotion that it’s almost tangibl e . “I was so scared we were going to lose you, but I’m so happy you’re alive and here with us. And don’t worry, I know you’re going to be recovering, but I promise, we will protect you and take care of you, okay? You’re safe here.”

“ Ah,” Alastor says, because that’s so much all at once, too much emotion and too much dependence and too much vulnerability, and he’s simply not capable of handling it all.

He’s so tired, suddenly. It’s disgusting, weak, and yet he can already feel his body and his mind pulling him downward again. His head aches, and his eye is throbbing.

“That is…kind of you, my dear,” Alastor says awkwardly. “I apologize for being unable to help with the renovations—I think I may be a bit under the weather.”

“That’s alright, nobody expects you to, especially after I explained what happened,” Charlie says.

“I see,” Alastor says, dazed. So the others know he’d nearly gotten himself killed as well, and by what means. How…unfortunate. “I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m feeling a little…”

“Oh! You must be tired,” Charlie says. “You’ve been asleep for almost two days, but I’m sure you could use more rest. Here, let me help you lay down again!”

It’s embarrassing, but he does indeed need Charlie’s help to remove the pillows holding him up, and her hand at his shoulder to keep him from thudding backwards uncomfortably into t he little makeshift bed. He’s so disgustingly weak, he hates it. Even that slight movement leaves him dizzy, and his head aches harder, and he’s seeing triple of dear Charlie again, awash in the irritable bright colors of this wretched circus tent.

“ Don’t worry about anything, Alastor,” Charlie says, taking his hand and squeezing it gently. “We’ll take care of everything. You just work on getting better. We’ll be here if you need anything. I know you don’t like to ask, but we will help, okay?”

“ Hmm,” he grumbles, already half under again. Part of him wants Charlie to let go of his hand, but he doesn’t have the strength to shake her off. Part of her wants her to stay as a lifeline, just so he has some external proof that he isn’t sinking into death.

“It’ll be okay,” Charlie says. “Love you, Alastor.”

She sounds tired. Alastor wonders how much she’s been worrying over him.

His last thought is that he forgot to take off his monocle before falling asleep. He raises his free hand to reach for his face, unhook the chain from his ear and pluck the lens free to set aside. But his claws brush against nothing before Charlie gently takes this hand too and guides it away from his face, murmuring, “No, Al—it’s okay, shh, please stop trying to hurt yourself, everything is safe, I promise.”

Why in Heaven’s name would removing my monocle hurt me? Alastor thinks muzzily. And a moment later, even more bewildered, How could I see without it?

But sleep overtakes him, and he falls back down into an exhausted blackness.

Thus begins the newest stage of his life.

He isn’t sure how much time he loses—only that he spends most of it sleeping, interspersed by a few short moments of waking. He isn’t fond of either stage, eager to leave it and just as quick to wish to escape to it again.

Sleep happens the most often. Alastor loathes being so vulnerable in such an open space, and he doubts he’s slept this much in the last century, but his body won’t let him avoid rest. If he’s very lucky, his rest is quiet and unbothered, dark and warm and comfortable, and he’ll wake feeling at least a little more energetic than before.

More often than not, he is not lucky. His safe darkness is infested with things hiding in the corners of his vision, never there when he looks, but always there somewhere. He’ll blink in his sleep, and for a fraction of a moment see impressions of things that are great and terrible: a thousand eyes like stars that blink closed and vanish in the gloom, a thousand not-quite-hands that hover above him and threaten to pin him in place or take him apart, but pull away into the dark the moment he looks directly at them. He can feel something watching, lurking, listening, a vast P resence too big for him to understand. Something broaching infinity just at the edge of his mind.

It drives him mad. He can’t find it, he knows it’s there, he knows it can destroy him, it’s playing with him and he doesn’t know why.

The intensity of these dreams vary. If they are too profound, too strong—if those hands dig into his mind, if those eyes stare through his very existence—the raw terror is too much for even a creature like Alastor. He can never escape the damn thing, whatever it is. But sometimes those images are soothed away, replaced by calm things, pleasant dreams, old welcome memories. The change feels strange, unnatural. He swears the thing is hiding, but then the memories envelope him and draw him away into safety, and he forgets it exists for another rest.

Inevitably, calm or terrifying or terrifyingly calm, Alastor wakes.

There’s always someone with him when he wakes. Alastor finds it voyeuristic, at first, detests the thought of people watching him while he sleeps. He’s so vulnerable when unconscious, and to think someone is right there— they could so easily plunge a dagger into his heart, cut his throat, put a bullet in his skull. Heavens know there’s plenty of angelic steel about to make it permanent. He can’t protect himself, not in this state.

But he slowly, gradually, comes to realize that’s why people are with him. Because he is vulnerable, and they’re not watching him so much as watching for threats against him. It’s not always the same person, and there seems to be a rotating schedule—he’s woken to nearly everyone in the hotel at his side by now—but each one seems to be posted there for the express purpose of protecting him.