Chapter Text
Alastor levers the tip of his blade—Carmine-made, well-balanced and strong enough to carve through bone—away from the indentation that one antler has left behind in the flaming surface of Maestro’s skull.
“You’re making it awfully difficult to focus on the performance, chum,” Alastor says conversationally. Maestro’s screams are hardly operatic, nor do they so much as pretend to harmonize with the visibly trembling ensemble on stage. Unlike Maestro, those demons possess the sort of grit and dedication required to keep singing. An old friend of his might even call that sort of thing inspiring! When all of this is done, Alastor has every intention of providing a positive review.
He likely has some obligation to do so, anyway, seeing as his little interruption drove the remainder of the troupe’s audience out each and every door in droves. Alastor is not a kind demon, but he isn’t the sort of maniac that would make an unwilling audience sit through a classical performance, if they aren’t so inclined.
A protest of some kind, garbled and gurgled, attempts to emit from Maestro’s skull. Not that it’s coherent. He would have to have a tongue to communicate coherently, and Alastor found himself just a bit overexcited to find anything resembling flesh on his prey to resist cutting it out at the earliest opportunity. Whether the thing is edible remains to be seen; even now, it’s still flaming.
Alastor shushes Maestro with his best approximation of chiding patience, and sets one fine black antler beside a cleanly dismembered set of forearm bones.
“I don’t think this sort of thing calls for audience participation,” he whispers, to keep his voice from carrying to the stage. There’s no need to raise it; it will broadcast quite clearly through his staff. And that gleaming, perfect thing is propped between two vacant box seats. It’s having a much easier time remaining upright than Maestro, at this point.
The primadonna reaches a ringing pitch.
Alastor has to admit: he doesn’t really understand the appeal of this sort of thing. Oh, sure, the art of live performance always deserves a certain baseline of admiration—he doesn’t doubt the talent of this troupe—but opera has always struck him as the sort of thing at which men only feign enjoyment to be seen enjoying it. It’s the spectacle of the thing. Prohibitive ticket prices, black-tie dress codes, and complexity to the point of absurdity abounds—which isn’t even to touch the matter of how a second language is weaponized to further bar the unwashed masses from participating.
It’s almost as if exclusivity is the point. All the better, Alastor supposes, that his broadcast has made such a stubborn art form more accessible!
He carves off the second antler, silently considering its heft. Less of a loss than the first one, apparently, or else Maestro is beginning to go mute with agony.
And that really won’t do.
“I’m not going to kill you until you put on a satisfying performance, you know,” he says, prodding at the man’s exposed shoulder joint with one tip of a long antler until he moans. The whole of Maestro’s left arm is stacked beside the other antler and his right forearm; in Alastor’s defense, Maestro had the impossible gall to try raising it to him. “Do you really want your last show to be a disappointment?”
The hotel lobby is almost silent. It’s well into quiet hours—late enough that Charlie would be in her pajamas, on any other day, if she weren’t wide awake and worried sick—but there is a totally different reason for the atmosphere.
Husk has only just switched off the radio behind his bar. And he just... he’s just gone right back to cleaning up, rinsing glasses and capping bottles and wiping down the countertop as if that awful, pitchless screaming weren’t still ringing between Charlie’s ears.
That, and the... orchestra, she guesses. A whole string section. And she thinks she heard a flute. And it didn’t sound like a recording, and neither did the singing, but that can’t mean that Alastor really—
And one thing that Charlie isn’t going to do about it? One thing she’s definitely learned her lesson on?
She is not checking the news to find out more.
“You don’t think that Alastor really,” she says, sliding onto a barstool to hide the tremor in her knees.
“Yep,” Husk says, before she can even phrase it right.
“No, I mean—” Charlie’s leg bounces on the barstool. She’s still working on public presentation; she’s trying to come across as more in control. But at a time like this?
“I know what you mean.”
“But at a show?” Charlie presses. And—look. She’s been in Hell for her whole life, she’s not naive. She knows about the stuff that demons do down here, and she’s heard the stories about Alastor.
She might not have actually, exactly seen what he used to do firsthand. She was just a kid when he first got here, and Hell is Hell but her mom didn’t want her to see certain kinds of things. But still. She knows that Alastor isn’t a nice demon.
She knows that he’s killed Overlords before.
But there’s knowing it, and then there’s hearing what sounded a lot like Alastor taking an entire theater captive. And hearing the moment that Maestro stopped talking back completely and started making awful choking sounds, and—she doesn’t know if there was still an audience stuck in there with them. She couldn’t tell if it was real people she was hearing, or just the silly sound effects that she’s heard Alastor’s staff make before.
(Because Alastor is silly! He’s not a nice demon, she knows that, but he—)
“Look, Princess,” Husk begins—but Charlie is already halfway out of her seat when she hears the doorknob turn.
“Oh my gosh, Alastor,” she says, before he’s made it all the way inside. “I’m so glad that you’re back.”
And then Alastor gets inside, and closes the door behind himself, and Charlie becomes very suddenly and very uncomfortably aware that the red on his sleeves—up to the elbows??—is not the same color as the rest of his suit.
And that he’s carrying a similarly-stained brown paper bag.
And that the bag is dripping, leaving little red inkblots on the lobby’s tile floor as Alastor strolls jauntily towards the bar.
“And I’m glad to be back, my dear!” Alastor says, grinning with what probably isn’t just menacing delight. Of course it isn’t—Alastor is the one that told her about smiles, and he’s just been through…
Well, Charlie doesn’t exactly know what he’s been through, actually, because he hasn’t said a word about Vox since he got back. He just walked back through the doors, chucked the TV in the lobby out a window (which is super fair), and started picking up hotel duties again.
And that’s probably because he’s traumatized!
“I haven’t missed any new guests, have I?” Alastor asks, catching Charlie by both hands—and she’s touching the bag now, holy shit—and spinning them both in a cheerful little half-circle on his way over to the bar.
“Um, no,” she says, following dizzily after Alastor, “it’s been pretty quiet, but.”
Husk doesn’t even pretend to glare at Alastor, which is a little odd. And he slides a glass of something over before Alastor can even tap a hand onto the bartop like he likes to do. It’s like they have an understanding, now, and she completely missed it.
(Did she miss it? There’s been a lot going on.)
“But, Alastor,” Charlie starts again, putting both hands on the barstool beside Alastor’s. She doesn’t sit down again. This feels like a standing conversation. “I was actually wondering about your night.”
His smile doesn’t change a bit. But that’s fine. Charlie soldiers on.
“So-o-o,” she says. “What’s in the bag?”
“Takeout!” Alastor beams. “I would offer to share, but I’m not sure it’s to your taste.”
“That’s, um, thoughtful.” And definitely not something that Charlie is going to say anything about, because she’s pretty sure it’s a—dietary restriction? Sort of? “What is it?”
The bag drips steadily onto the bartop. And Niffty has made it to the lobby already; she’s mopping blood up off the floor.
“You know, I’m not quite sure,” Alastor says, conversational as he swirls the short, neat cocktail that Husk gave to him. When he sets it down, he leaves dark red clawprints on the glass. “Deer are typically a bit smaller. I think he may have been an elk.”
So it really was…
She just saw that guy. He was one of the Overlords at Vox’s table—but he was also one of the ones that stopped the bomb.
“Right.” Charlie shifts. And then she does pull out the barstool, perching anxiously in the spot beside Alastor as more lobby activity starts up.
(Cherri has come downstairs, for some reason. And Vaggie’s at the top of the staircase, washed up and with her hair in a loose scrunchy to sleep.)
“So, that actually reminds me of what I wanted to talk to you about, Alastor.”
Some ways down the bar, Husk hands Cherri a pint of something frothy.
“I know that you haven’t really said anything about everything that happened last month—which is totally fine,” Charlie rushes to add. “Because I’m sure it’s really personal, and I want to make sure that you know that I—well, we, everyone at the hotel, really!—respect your boundaries.”
Alastor has propped one gore-streaked hand under his chin. And his smile has gone softer, maybe even warm, as Charlie rambles through her talking points.
“And I don’t think anyone would blame you at all for having a lot of really complicated feelings about what happened then.”
“Oh, I don’t know about complicated,” Alastor interjects, with a warm and easy crackle of static, “but it does mean quite a lot to me, Charlie, that I have your full support.”
Charlie tries not to let her face do anything, at that. Because it’s not, exactly—
“That’s right!” She says. “I want you to feel like you’re supported here. Which is why I was just wondering if you’ve thought about, well. If you’ve really let yourself take the time to think about what you’re doing.”
Alastor blinks at her, slow and unconcerned.
“You’re right, of course,” he says after a moment. Charlie’s heart does a backflip. “I did have some reservations about going so far afield of my usual genres—but there is some value to trying out new forms of entertainment even if we don’t wind up enjoying them, isn’t there?”
…okay, nope, he’s talking about going to the opera. Charlie doesn’t even know why she’s surprised.
“Well—it’s interesting that you didn’t like it, isn’t it?” Charlie presses. “Do you think maybe there’s a deeper reason for that?”
Vaggie comes to sit beside her at the bar. And that’s probably not going to make Alastor open up any more—he barely even wants to when Charlie is alone—but she can’t just stop trying!
“Absolutely,” Alastor agrees. “It isn’t only that the singing hurts my ears; it’s a terribly elitist form of melodrama. Exclusive for exclusion’s sake.”
Well, that doesn’t seem fair. And they aren’t even close to getting anywhere, either.
Charlie leans in.
“Are you sure that this is the best way to channel the feelings that you’re having?” She tries, more directly. “Or even to send the message that you want to send?”
Alastor looks at her with a skeptical quirk of one eyebrow. But he isn’t the first one to respond.
“Uh, yeah?” Cherri says, setting her glass down on the bar. “Fascists eat shit. Super clear message.” She lifts her glass up again, apparently just to tilt it in Alastor’s direction. “Love your work, man.”
“Okay,” Charlie says quickly, “I think maybe we’re jumping too quickly to a label.”
Alastor says nothing, just grinning as Cherri squints across the bar in disbelief.
“Vox literally called himself the führer.”
“Well—yeah, but he might have meant, like, ‘fury’—and anyway, that doesn’t say anything about Maestro.”
“Sure it does,” Husk chimes in. “It’s like Nuremberg, right?”
Charlie feels herself cringe.
“Well—No, in the sense that that was a trial and this is Alastor just killing and eating people—”
“I hate to be critical, Charlie,” Alastor interrupts, “but it’s not as though there are courts and judges to attend to this, are there?”
Alastor does not hate to be critical. Alastor is extremely critical, all the time, and the smile on his face is extremely sarcastic.
“I don’t think I can get behind you being judge, jury, and executioner,” Charlie presses.
“…do we have to get in front of him, though?” Vaggie says quietly, just to Charlie’s ear.
And no, she can’t keep the hurt off her face. She’s using all of her energy to be supportive-but-firm towards Alastor, how is she supposed to react when her own girlfriend—
“Sweetie, you know I believe in what we’re doing here,” Vaggie backpedals, “I agree with you. But.
“What Alastor is doing isn’t really about the hotel.”
“But Alastor’s our host, and that’s not what we’re doing here,” Charlie says. “I mean—I hear you guys, I really do, but if there’s anything that we’ve learned in the past year it’s that anyone can be redeemed.”
Alastor breaks his silence with a chirpy, teasing tone.
“Should they, though?” He says.
“What?”
“For argument’s sake!” Alastor grins. “Say that, with time and effort, even the most wretched demon in Hell can be redeemed. Should they be?”
Charlie blinks.
“Well—of course. Yes, absolutely, anyone who wants to put in the work and takes those steps deserves a chance and our support.”
Alastor swirls the contents of his glass.
“So if Vox came to the door?” He says. “He did try to decimate half the Pentagram in a jealous fit, but I suppose he’s earned free room and board?”
Charlie purses her lips. And—she tries not to, she really does, but she can’t help but look at the awful little nub of regrowth, where the tip of Alastor’s ear should be.
She doesn’t want to hurt him. And he deserves to feel safe here, but—
“If Vox came here and wanted to do better, I wouldn’t stop him.”
(She knows she’s losing the room. She knows that Cherri is rolling her eye and she sees that Husk has turned his back to pretend to be busy with nothing behind the bar, but—these are her beliefs! And she’s proven that they work!)
Alastor’s smile widens.
“You would like Angel to return, wouldn’t you?”
Charlie feels herself curling smaller, hurt.
“We all would.”
“Then what if Valentino came to the door?”
It isn’t fair, the way he’s spinning this.
(And why does he have to bring up Angel, Charlie can’t help but think. Why does it feel so much like he’s fishing for a better—)
She can’t think about Alastor like that. He’d hate it.
Charlie holds firm.
“Everyone means everyone, Alastor.”
“Adolf Hitler?”
“Everyone!”
“Pol Pot?”
“Alastor—”
“What if that little angel fell? The one that took your paramour’s eye?”
Charlie cringes. And Vaggie is right there, right behind her, but she doesn’t want to look.
“Yeah, we’re literally more likely to get Vox as a new guest, Al,” Vaggie interjects. “We get it. You think some people don’t deserve a second chance.”
“Oh, no, that isn’t quite right,” Alastor replies, waving one filthy hand. “As I’m sure I’ve said before, I don’t think anyone does. I was just curious to know where the line is for you all!”
Cherri raises her hand like they’re in a therapy circle.
“I think if somebody tries to kill us all, they shouldn’t get to stay at the hotel. Just my opinion.”
“How about no Overlords?” Husk says, and carries on the second that Charlie starts to open her mouth. “Hey—listen, Princess, I can say that.”
“No Overlords sounds like a very reasonable proposal,” Alastor agrees, which is almost definitely not about anything that Overlords do on a moral scale and almost definitely is about his favorite menu items.
A stubborn instinct hardens in Charlie’s heart.
“But what if staying at the hotel makes them turn over a new leaf and free their souls?” She says.
“Charlie,” Alastor says, visibly holding in a laugh. “If an Overlord earnestly comes to our door, checks in, participates in your adorable trust exercises, and destroys all of their contracts in search of redemption, I will personally give you Husker’s soul.”
Charlie’s eyes pop out of her head. And then swing wildly to Husk, who is—
Dragging a hand down his face like this is silly ribbing.
“Well—I’ll take you up on that!” Charlie says. “And when we get our first Overlord, I expect you to keep your side of the bet.”
Alastor tilts his head to one side.
“You do realize, you’ve just given me ample motivation to kill the rest of them,” he says.
Which is a joke. Obviously. He can’t be serious.
“You wouldn’t do that,” Charlie says.
“Because they’ve been so kind to me?” Alastor retorts.
She looks towards Husk. To Cherri. To Vaggie.
No one helps.
“Because some of you are friends,” Charlie dares.
Alastor laughs, then—abrupt and ringing. There’s something there, something she doesn’t understand at all, in the wobbly smile on his face.
“You’re right, my dear,” Alastor says kindly, “I wouldn’t kill them all. And certainly not just to keep my favorite bartender on payroll.”
“Pretty sure I’m not getting paid,” Husk grumbles.
“Oh! I can probably start doing that,” Charlie says, and keeps her back straight—confident, she keeps telling herself, be confident—even when Alastor’s brows lift in amused condescension. “Vaggie, you were keeping up the books, right?”
Alastor’s grin broadens, and Vaggie tries to work up a smile that looks more like a shield.
“Uh, actually, Alastor took over the accounting when he got back,” she says, which. Is fine, obviously, and probably a good thing, because Vaggie has really been doing too much—
But it does also put Charlie in the very awkward position of sort of telling Alastor to pay his not-employees.
And he’s also been through so much, recently, and she doesn’t want him to think that she’s ganging up on him with Husk, and—
“Oh, I’m sure Husker and I can sort that out,” Alastor says. Charlie thinks—she’s almost positive—that he’s in too good of a mood for it to mean anything bad.
She has literally no idea if it means that Husk is going to start getting a salary.
Alastor wakes to the faraway white noise of a successful hotel, in a room that no one else can enter without an invitation, and upon a bed that is all his own.
He stretches his arms up to the headboard, and no one comments on the uninhibited scratch of static that comes with it, whether to assign him an adjective wildly unbecoming of an Overlord or to comment on his age. And then he rolls over and lays there for another fifteen minutes just because no one can stop him, until the faint throbbing of the wreckage of his dominant forearm reaches a distracting enough fervor to prompt him to get moving for the day.
His analog clock reads 10:00am.
Alastor opens his bedroom door a crack to find that Niffty has left the prior evening’s outfit on a set of hangers, cleaned and pressed. As always, his darling Niffty has left behind not a trace of blood or muck, nevermind that he’d returned literally dripping with the stuff.
He doesn’t rush through changing, because he doesn’t have to. There is no skin-crawling sensation of a camera. Nor is there an entire second person to intrude on the process of his dressing, whether to leer openly—as though that’s ever worked—or to beg to help with his tie or cufflinks. He casts a comb through his hair, which is still holding, stubborn, to the curls that Velvette chemically applied. He’s not sure that he minds them, all told. It’s a little like having a part of his old self back again; it makes him feel pleasantly younger.
It’s a nice counter, in that way, to the chewed-through surface of his forearm and the sluggishly healing angelic wound across his chest, both of which are working overtime to make Alastor feel impossibly old. He’ll have Niffty check the stitches, later. There’s not much to do about either issue than to eat well and to wait.
No one interrupts him on his way down to the kitchen. In all likelihood, Charlie has most of the residents in some sort of fruitless exercise at this hour.
“Hey, uh, good morning.”
In an equally unexpected and charming twist of fate, Hell’s Greatest Ingrates have also begun to turn a corner regarding Alastor. For example: the fallen exorcist he finds in the kitchen is actually trying to be polite!
“It is, isn’t it?” Alastor croons, pleased to discover that someone else has filled the coffee pot. Possibly it was Charlie, in which case it’s bound to be completely unpalatable—but still, it’s so nice that they’ve learned to try.
“Thanks for figuring that thing out with the fuse box,” Vaggie says, propping the fridge door open with one heel as she pours cream into a coffee mug. “I know it was already kind of a long night.”
‘Kind of a long night:’ As though the opera had been another chore. She’s hilarious.
“We do have a shocking number of electrical problems, considering that the Lightbringer himself is in residence,” Alastor remarks, pulling a mug down from the cabinet and filling it most of the way.
Vaggie looks over one shoulder.
“That might have something to do with it,” she says—lowering her voice almost conspiratorially. “This place is like ninety percent magic by volume.”
Ninety percent Lucifer’s magic, more to the point: it’s as inconsistent and unpredictable as the man himself, no less so because Lucifer frequently delights in the ‘surprise’ of adding features where they do not belong. For all that Alastor can tell, the new hotel is half-building, half-biome.
It would be a fascinating point of study if the decor weren’t too tacky to be tolerated for that long.
“Have we considered asking Lucifer to make the lighting system less sentient?” Alastor proposes, crossing to the fridge to pluck the cream out of Vaggie’s hand.
Vaggie huffs through her nose.
“Yeah, we had a whole thing about that with the plumbing, weeks ago.” ‘While you were gone,’ she does not say. Everyone has been on their very best behavior with respect to referencing Alastor’s term of absence; it’s adorable. “Apparently that’s like… murder. Which would make it filicide, if Lucifer does it.”
That’s completely absurd. And therefore most likely entirely accurate as Vaggie recounts it.
“It would be too much to ask him to take the half-measure of a lobotomy, I suppose,” Alastor says dryly, and Vaggie appears to startle herself a little by snorting at the joke.
“Probably,” Vaggie agrees. “…but I won’t tell him if you do it anyway.”
She’s even become a bit conniving, hasn’t she! What a treat.
“I’ll see about looking into it,” Alastor agrees, and watches with intrigue as Vaggie retreats from his orbit—giving him space—as he replaces the cream into the fridge.
The best part is, Alastor did not even have to ruthlessly slaughter another Overlord during a live broadcast to be afforded such treatment; this started much earlier. He only had to blare static once or twice in the days immediately following his return to the hotel before its staff and residents wizened up to the tyrannical enforcement of his personal bubble.
It isn’t that he’s traumatized, of course, although he’s sure Charlie has assigned that sort of piteous sentiment to him already. It’s just that if anyone so much as tries to touch his arm without warning, he feels compelled to throw them out a window. And he does not actually want to cause the hotel’s staff or residents grievous harm, so such impulses are counterproductive.
“Oh, and Charlie wanted me to tell you she has time after the sharing circle, if you wanted to talk.”
Another charming bit of scheming! Alastor beams.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Alastor says pleasantly. “And please tell Charlie that it will take a more clever scheme than that to trick me into attending therapy.”
Vaggie hesitates, loitering just by the kitchen door. It’s a good effort, really, but Alastor wrote the book on plotting. He isn’t going to be taken in by the sort of farce that would be covered in chapter two.
“You know, it’s not, like—a trick, or something,” Vaggie says. “She’s really worried.”
Alastor tilts his head.
“I’m sure the feeling is mutual,” he lies, delighting in the consternated pull of Vaggie’s eyebrows. “Charlie has had an awful turn these past few weeks. Has she been talking through her feelings on the matter?”
He doesn’t actually need to see the truth of it on Vaggie’s face.
“I get it, Al,” Vaggie says, sighing as she pushes open the door. “You don’t want to talk about it yet.”
‘It.’
They don’t even know what ‘it’ is, for Heaven’s sake. Alastor knows that they don’t, because he doesn’t.
It’s no matter, anyhow. Vaggie leaves, and Alastor plucks the paper bag containing the last remaining vestiges of Maestro’s flesh—which have finally stopped flaming, thank Hell, or else this was about to be a beguiling culinary exercise—and a few other items from the fridge with which to make an omelette.
There’s a low-hanging joke about breaking a few eggs, here, somewhere. While puttering about the kitchen, he ponders it. And sets some music playing on the radio, slow and soft and crooning for the early time of day.
I don’t want to set the world on fire
I just want to start
A flame in your heart
He’s standing by the stove, minding the eggs with lazy precision, when another late-riser pads in.
“Any chance that isn’t Maestro?” Husker asks, stretching one arm over his head and one wing far to the side.
“If it were someone else, would you want a bite?” Alastor teases, grinning at Husker’s open consternation at the joke. The silence that follows is nearly companionable—and that cannot be a matter of concern, not from Husker. When he’s concerned, he gets terribly annoying.
“So, that makes two. Who’s next?” Husker says, pouring coffee with his back turned in a fine show of nonchalance.
Alastor grins.
“That is for me to know,” he says, turning from the stove on the off-chance that he might catch a glimpse of Husker’s reaction. No such luck; the man is actually trying to put on a poker face, as though Alastor doesn’t already know all of his tells.
He wants something. And he knows Alastor too well to ask for it, but that doesn’t change the greed in his heart.
“I could style myself a man of the people and take calls for the audience to choose,” Alastor jokes, sliding his omelette from the pan and onto a waiting plate. “Then again, one populist might be more than enough for the next century!”
Husker snorts, which proves Alastor’s theory definitively. He hates to acknowledge that Alastor is ever funny—and more’s the pity, because he’s frequently hilarious!
“So you’re clearing the board,” Husker intuits. It’s clever of him, really. In theory, if he presupposes that every Overlord is on the table, then it will give nothing away about which one he wants to see Alastor eat.
In practice, however, it’s been decades since Husker has nursed a grudge against any Overlords but Alastor. Whereas it’s only been a few short weeks since Alastor last saw him mooning over Angel Dust.
“Oh, I wouldn’t assume that,” Alastor says, finding himself a fork and then a napkin on his way to leave Husker in the lurch. “Zestial sent a nice letter just the other day.”
It’s a perfectly factual answer. It’s also one that provides Husker with absolutely no new information, as it happens—because if Alastor were keen to do what Husker is suggesting, he might not take issue with any Overlord that refused Vox on their own.
Husker wisely doesn’t attempt to stop him from leaving. So Alastor makes it to a balcony uninterrupted, where he settles in to watch for any newcomers and to take in the dry heat of a relatively temperate day in Hell. He expects to see a few new hopefuls, but likely not a crowd. Charlie’s venture may have proven factually plausible, but even proof from Heaven won’t do much to change the nature of sinners at large. In brief—there are simply more of them that are unrepentant and awful than those that are willing to weather the humiliation of trying to be better.
What Alastor does not expect to see is what actually appears before him.
A little doll is coming to the door.