They say the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. The war ended with a squelch, as a housekeeper, singleminded and practical, thrust a dagger through the back of the first man to ever live and, just like that, Heaven became a dragon with its head neatly lopped off. Just like that, they won.
For the last few hours, adrenaline, fear and, more laterally, rage had been the puppet-strings holding Charlie aloft and, the second the portal closed they shut off and she was finally able to acknowledge the flimsiness of her joints, the quivering of her muscles. Exhaustion's swift-moving shadow stole her away from her body and, for a second, she could see the scene as a bird might, as a god might; seven little dolls grouped together in an ocean of red, gold, and rubble, a little bastion of helpless, hopeless humanity adrift in seas of suffering... a world she, with well-meaning hands, had created.
Distantly, she watched her body—golden haired like something sacred, gold splattered like something sacrilegious—stagger towards the King of Hell, six wings extending from his back, the broken shards of his halo a ghostly coronet. He looked magnificent. He looked every inch the angel he should have been.
He looked like a memory dredged from those bygone days when she had assumed him endlessly capable, a fragment of God given to her specially to keep the shadows away. In those fire-edged memories, eternally warm, he was untouchable; he never left her, never let her down. In some distant, hopeful recess of her heart, Charlie supposed she'd never truly abandoned that impression of him, those sunlit recollections, half-remembered, carefully folded and put away. They were being shaken out of their drawers now. It scarcely mattered that, these days, he had to raise his chin to meet her eyes; he opened his arms to her, and every muscle in her throat drew tight.
In the dying red light, Charlie collapsed into her father's arms, where he held her as he hadn't since she was a little girl, like nothing bad would ever happen to her again.
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Angel blood had a very distinctive smell to it, something acrid and sherberty like a lemon full of battery acid. The potent stink of it was enough to make Charlie lightheaded as she limped through the battleground which had been her beloved hotel mere hours ago, the grim, gold light of it searing scarlet whenever she closed her eyes. It was nothing like the dismally familiar reek of ruined demon flesh, though there was plenty of that too. Bodies lay everywhere, both those of the angels and her subjects—her people, who she had summoned to fight and die. Congealed red, black, and purple mixed with the gold and curdled it, steam rising from the pools in vast enough quantities that the air felt hot and humid as a summer's day, and the whole battleground wore a gauzy cloak of mystery, the dead tucked neatly into its folds.
She had only spent a few minutes pressed into the secure realm of her father's shoulder and already the war-torn hillside felt foreign to her, the ruined topography of some unfamiliar land she was but a visitor to; she waded through the aftermath of Heaven's wrath, wide eyed, ankle deep in mud and glass, searching...
They all knew what they were looking for—who they were looking for. None of them had spoken about it, but they knew.
Nothing moved in the wasteland. The wind, like the hot breath of some sighing creature, blew across the rubble, carrying the ghosts of the fallen back to her, a pet bringing her scraps of dead animal with innocent cruelty. Every sip of air she took was so densely saturated with the smell of death it was hard to want to breathe at all.
There was something so deeply surreal about the world at that moment, like it had all stopped working so she could walk through it unhindered, a shut-down fairground ride opening up its hidden heart for her inspection. It felt tight and dry like a nightmare. It tasted wet and briny as a fever sweat. From time to time, Charlie was seized by the mad certainty that, if she took a deep breath and held it for just long enough, the dream might pop like a bubble, and she would wake up in bed with Vaggie, in soft sheets that smelled of them, with everyone she loved alive and well in their own rooms just down the corridor.
She held her breath. Her lungs strained in a bruised chest. Her head swam. The corpses under the rubble stayed dead—truly dead, not the benign sort where they might get up again later. Tears tracked through the grime coating her cheeks. Without her permission, her mouth burst open again, death flooding down her throat, and she reluctantly breathed the world back into focus. She wondered if perhaps she had simply not tried hard enough.
Charlie clambered over another ridge, the wall of what used to be the kitchen; she fit her hands into the cracks in the masonry, the gouges in the wood, then shuddered as her fingers closed around something cold, something dead... something that fit perfectly in her palm and held firm long enough for her to pull herself up. She sat at the top of the wall, death weighing heavy in her lungs, and stared helplessly at the torso of a young cannibal woman mulched into the brickwork. Her lower body was mangled, flinders of bone poking out of torn twists of meat and concrete, her spine disorganised and oozing where it spilled from her guts. An angel's spear jutted from between bony shoulder blades and her eyes were wide open.
With quivering, bloodstained fingers, Charlie brushed the woman's forehead, unsticking her hair from her brow; she still wore a crown of dead flowers, as though someone had loved her unlined face and hollowed-out eye sockets enough to ask her to a dance later. Charlie didn't recognise her. She wouldn't have been able to tell anyone her name. She didn't know who to ask to find out.
They would have to bury them at some point. She, Vaggie, and whoever else was left... they would have to bury the many, many dead.
Grief closed its hand upon her, too unutterably vast to describe or assign meaning to; it wasn't directed at a single person or the condition of her cause, and it had no name—no singular name, that is—but was instead a grotesque, patchwork amalgamation of everything she had loved and watched burn. It sent convulsions down through her every nerve, an ache more terribly potent than any of her own injuries. It was a ravaging sort of pain, a heaving, sickened burn, a wish to have spared them their fates so fervent she felt she might die of it. None of her afflictions compared to this, this smashed open corpse who had come to give Hell a fighting shot at a second chance; nothing could be so consummately monstrous as this, the gutting of her every hope and dream, the rend and tear of her home, her friends...
Tenderly, Charlie eased the girl's lolling head from its jagged pillow and cradled it in her lap, curling protectively over it as a terrible paroxysm of grief drew her inwards. Dead flowers crackled against her nose, the foulness of blood briefly replaced by a smell of dry summers and old mourning.
The denizens of Cannibal town, the Egg Boys, her poor Dazzle... Alastor... God, Sir Pentious... all dead.
It was too much. Crushingly too much to bear. It was all gone—everything she had worked for, strived for, dreamed of—all shattered by holy light. She had stared at the stars until they scorched out her eyes, and now they were dribbling in rivulets down her cheeks. She had held out her hands, palms upturned, and told them to give her their trust, and then she had frittered it away down war's ravening throat. What was left of her grand enterprise? A broken young woman buckling under the weight of well-meant mistakes, sobbing into the body of a girl she didn't know.
Nobody had told her there was a price to be paid for dreaming. Nobody told her the price for a better world would be a thousand pounds of flesh. At what point should she have stopped to spare everyone this decimation?
(Her father had. He had tried to warn her. Was changing his mind worth so many lives? She couldn't answer and, in many ways, that was more terrible than having to ask the question.)
Another surge of devastation heaved through Charlie, her insides revolting against the constrictions of her very membranes, worse than bile or a seizure. The pride was the hardest thing to swallow, that golden thread under the raw wound of the guilt and loss and rage. Pride; she was so damn proud of them all. Of how they had stood, regardless of reason, against angelic annihilation as no demons before them had ever dared to. For how they had rallied to her cause with patriotic fortitude. For standing on the front lines at her request, their sword and shield combined. For the unthinkable courage of staring a glorious, golden death in the eye and meeting it unflinchingly, unasked.
She could choke on it, and indeed she did—what was a person supposed to do with something as jubilant and misplaced as pride here of all places? It felt like molten gold, like something sacred, and she wanted nothing to do with either of those things; they were heralds of senseless, permanent slaughter.
Charlie didn't know for how long she sat there and shook herself apart. Those were lost hours and, like many lost things, they could not be regained; her eyes burned, her throat ached, her heart felt light like it didn't exist anymore.
The girl's slack face was wet with tears, all the blood rinsed kindly away, the watered flowers in her hair still dead. Searching the clouds for her lost composure, Charlie watched slothful billows of smoke heave themselves through the sky. Her eyes tangled loose threads around the place where her hotel's silhouette should have taken a jagged bite of the skyline; every soft, rounded swell of cinder and dust took, for taunting seconds, the appearance of a gold tipped airship sailing ever onwards. She wondered how much of his ash she had inhaled, how much of her dear friend was coating the inside of her throat and making it hard to breathe.
What use was her adulation of them now? It was a gold coin, cold and shiny, her hands weighed down with a wealth worth millions, and she couldn't buy even one of their lives back. What good were pieces of a broken dream, the centre shattered and hollowed out?
Gently—as gentle as she could be which, given the activity, was not very—Charlie dislodged the corpse from the rubble of the kitchen chimney. The girl didn't weigh much in her arms—only half of her was left to be carried. There was even less of her after Charlie slipped and stumbled, spilling pieces as she walked.
The land that lay in front of the shattered hotel was still mostly level, it's gentle slope still familiar enough to spell out the way home; Charlie laid the body on the grass tenderly like she was putting the girl to bed. Vaggie's eyes weighed heavy on her as she turned back into the building, came out with another corpse which she laid with the first. By the time she emerged with a third, Vaggie was gone. From around the gnarled, half-melted scar of the far wall came Angel, extra arms put to use holding together the remains of a man split into seven.
Charlie remembered the beaches of Envy she had visited as a child, searching through shores of endless pebbles to find beads of glass and pretty shells, and the discordance of the association chilled her nerves, a bittersweet ache.
They worked in silence. Their hands were wet with fluids that didn't bear consideration, their nails broken, their tired muscles aching dully with the regular intervals of sustained strain, but there was never a voiced complaint or an attempt to stop. Silence reigned in leaden potency, heavy and persistent as the battleground dust which was falling like snow, but it was not miserable; contemplative, yes, and certainly exhausted, but as close to peace as one was likely to come on Extermination Day. Retrieving bodies, once adrenaline surrendered to numbness and the mind shuttered itself to the grimness in self-preservation, was quite a meditative chore. There was satisfaction in plucking the faces from where they stared accusingly out from their shattered home and laying them out to look at the sky. There was a fragile stirring of nascent relief which grew with each venture as the number of accusing eyes grew fewer.
None of the people hauled from the wreckage were familiar. Charlie didn't know whether that made her feel sick at her ignorance or grateful.
When at long last they were done, the seven survivors sat upon the summit of the slope, the edge of the cliff, and surveyed their work. Wind hushed across the Pentagram, pulling back the cloud of charr and blood and replacing it with the cold familiarity of Hell without holy war; brimstone, grey, urban suffering, and some omnipresent sourness with no apparent source. The day was turning to dusk, a slate smeared clean. Thirty eight lines of ten bodies columned the hillside, remaining arms arranged at their sides, feet pointing away from the hotel as the undiscussed result of an antique superstition stolen from Earth.
Three hundred and eighty six lives. Eighty eight if she counted the two fallen demons she knew they might never find. Likely more had been boiled away into patches of light, but even considering that it was one of the lightest exterminations she had witnessed in her two hundred years.
Breathing became no easier for this knowledge.
When she was a child, Charlie would sneak stories of the human world as a mortal child might sneak sweets, cuddled in a blanket fort reading stolen tales peddled to her by sinners and imps; her youth had been spent watching the transcontinental railway race itself across America, skulls piling up behind it. She had seen the pharaohs of Egypt discovered lying in state, the morbid solemnity of Victorian death photography, the mass graves of too many wars; she had seen the horrors of the human world, yes, but this was Hell. There were horrors here too, ten times as dreadful as anything on offer in the world above. Their tragedies had been her pacifier just as their beauties had been her lullaby. A bad thing didn't have to be the end.
Uniform ranks of strangers in old-fashioned clothes stretched out under a crimson sky; tiredly, self-soothingly, Charlie started to flick through her stories, like fingers running through hair. The suicidal selflessness of the liquidators at Chernobyl. The football match at Christmas in the heart of the First World War. From each one, she stole a kernel of old resolve, borrowed wistfulness from a younger version of herself.
If the human world could survive such things and rebuild, carry on dreaming, so could she. This lake of blood, this vat of pain, this terrible field of death—this sacrifice—would be the foundation of something better, something brilliant. She would pay them back tenfold. She would stick her hand back into the mires of Hell and drag sinner after sinner out into the light even with this tragedy stuck permanently beneath her nails.
Even if her hands would never be clean again.
Charlie stared until her eyes seared, until the image of those fallen soldiers were still there when she blinked, tucked behind her eyelids like a photograph into the recess of a locket. Then, she hefted the weight of her hope like a shield upon her arm, where it trembled but held in the way a sunbeam is permanent.
They would be okay, the six of them—seven if her dad stuck around this time. Eventually this day would turn numb and shiny as scar tissue, smoothed over by the years. Eventually she would grow used to the weight of these tombstones in her heart.
Now though? For now it could bleed. All the hope in the world didn't stop that bleeding.
Conceding to exhaustion, she stopped thinking, folded the little fortitude she had left and cashing it for another stormy day. She tucked her head into the recess of Vaggie's shoulder, the warm nook clammy with blood and sweat but soothing, and let her girlfriend pull her in tight. The world reduced itself to the comfortable corner of a lover's arms and the warm smell of hair and fading perfume.
(To the left of them, Angel slung a faux-casual arm around Husk's shoulders and let Cherri Bomb bury her face in his chest. Husk finally succeeded in plucking the angelic dagger from Niffty's eager grip and hauled her into the group; the frantic skittering sound of her running back and forth, the only sound in the dying battlefield, ceased, leaving behind only the quiet.)
For a long time they remained like that. It was long enough for the sediment of the mind to settle, for practicalities to poke their heads back into the room like cowardly advisors. With the angels dead, there came the far more mundane issues of bodies and buildings, all things Hell was structurally well equipped to deal with but seemed absurdly trite in the face of what had happened; Charlie didn't want to focus on who would have to go get milk tomorrow, not just yet. Pentious and Alastor squabbled over shopping trips—they were both overly picky in different ways, and the lack of their bickering would be too big a hole to cross. She didn't want to think about where she would sleep tonight; it wouldn't be in her own bed, and that was truly all that mattered.
Despite all this, Vaggie's voice, when she spoke up, was professional and absolute, a good soldier offering her report; a warm flicker of admiration ran through Charlie's bruised heart. Practical, sensible, stalwart Vaggie, heaving the world back on to its axis like Atlas.
"Pentious and his Egg Boys didn't leave anything behind—" he was vaporised, he is less than dust, he is sunbeams on the wind spirited far away, "—and none of us found Alastor." If Adam got him the same way he did Pentious, there's probably nothing left to find, all his shadows finally burned away. "Your dad's taking care of Dazzle now... so that just leaves these guys." Her tone was gentle, respectful; the cadence of almost affection surrounding 'these guys' was the sort reserved for distant friends; battleground camaraderie was the permanent sort. "What do you think we should do with them?"
With another sigh, Charlie dragged her head upright again and stared at the world as the blood in her skull swayed. The orderly corpses, laid out rank and file, wavered and multiplied, forcing her to batter them back into lines with blinks hard enough to send more tears down her cheeks.
How ungrateful it was, to feel inconvenienced by an After people had given their lives for.
"I suppose we just... send them home with the survivors to Rosie," she answered eventually, voice raw from hours of raising it above screams. "I know what she'll do with them, and that feels really weird, but... they were her people. A month here doesn't change that."
'She'll eat them,' said the unspoken, breathed down their necks, hot, damp words that made them shiver. None of them particularly felt like poking the idea further, the prospect of having incidentally arranged an appetising display fit for a butcher's window too ghastly to bear.
"You really want to give fresh meat to a cannibal?" Vaggie asked anyway, after a pause, because such a thing deserves to be voiced. Charlie shrugged against the arm still encircling her and pretended it was the reason her shoulders felt heavy.
"I don't but it's not my call to make." Distantly, Charlie thought of that charmingly antique town of smiles, lips pulled into crescents over sharp teeth; the whole place reminded her of Alastor. "I think they probably knew that's how it would go before they came out to fight. I think that's just how things work over there."
'Maybe it's brutal. Maybe it's vicious, and uncomfortable, and ugly. But it's their choice... or it was. I can't make them think it's wrong any more than I can fix the whole of Hell at once. They gave their lives for me—I'll not ask anything else of them.'
"Yeah I guess... Feels kinda grim, though." Vaggie ran her eyes over her impromptu soldiers, the fondness turning sad. "We should do something for them here. Some sort of memorial."
And the painful heart in Charlie's chest, which had felt so light as to not exist, so rinsed clean with emotion it had turned clear and cold as glass, swelled with such love she started to cry again. These tears tasted of laughter, warmth, and borrowed strength. Vaggie—sweet, strong, perfect Vaggie.
"Yeah," she agreed, smearing her shaky smile with ash and ichor as she tried to wipe the wet off her cheeks. "A commemoration. For everyone who died here today: Dazzle, Sir Pentious, the Egg Boys... Alastor. If rebuilding is gonna mean anything, they have to be part of it. Thanks to them, we have a second chance at being better."
"A second chance at a second chance," Vaggie murmured and it wasn't quite a joke but Charlie smiled anyway.
Up until this point, the other group had been feigning oblivion to give the couple some illusion of privacy, but Husk had far sharper ears than most would credit him for, and one word had caught his attention, the way a splinter catches in gauze. It had been the first thing he checked when the battle ended, and he had toyed with the knowledge since without quite knowing how to feel.
"You know Alastor ain't dead, right?" He had to lean around Angel's pointy shoulder and repeat himself before the meaning of the words sunk through.
Having not known this at all, and having suffered what was (in an understatement) a very trying day, Charlie felt compelled to weep again. It was not a compulsion she resisted, even though her eyes felt like they were bleeding.
"Wait, he's not?" Vaggie demanded, sharp with a surprise that was almost urgency.
"No! You see me dancing? If he were dead, you would." Husk grumbled, his malcontent coloured by reluctant admiration. He shook his shaggy head, blood drying his fur into spikes. "Bastard's tough as dragon leather."
Relief was as sudden and rough as grief had been, seizing Charlie directly by her lungs, by the wall of muscle in her stomach that let her breathe. Alive! There had never been such a beautiful world. Suddenly the world did not seem so bleak, and instead looked like something she might smile through—and wouldn't that be exactly what Alastor would have wanted? 'Never fully dressed without one!' He would have laughed himself hoarse at her tears, a mean smile twisting his lips, eyes fever bright with merriment; Charlie felt her own mouth pulling upwards, laughter spilling out. Reprieve tasted of cold, clean water.
(Unworthily, she felt a brief stab of regret that Alastor—cruel, sadistic, amoral Overlord—had survived to run and fight another day and Pentious—who had tried so hard and done so well—hadn't. Guilt followed immediately on the thought's heels, almost sickening in its intensity, and Charlie forced the whole mess of thoughts out of her mind.)
"Well, what the fuck then!" Angel demanded, relief giving his words an energy post-war fatigue should not have permitted. "Why'd he let Adam slip the net?! He decide to take a fucking coffee break?!"
The black and gold painted scribble of limbs in Husk's lap cackled; Niffty was still full of energy, a vicious liveliness more effervescent and violent than angel blood.
"Of course not silly!" She waved her stick-thin arms, face contorted around something which was trying very hard to be a smile but was too frightened to fully manage. "Alastor just got stabbed! Stab! Stabstabstab stab!"
"He's off the air for now, as it were," Husk interjected diplomatically with an admonishing wince in Niffty's direction. He took those thin wrists and held them. "Fucker took a nasty hit. Felt it through the chains just before the original dick came back to the fight. Not dead, though. God knows we couldn't get that lucky."
"Where is he?" Angel asked, making to stand, scanning the wreckage as though a bright red deer demon might crawl out of his hiding place and rejoin them. "He's not buried under this crap is he? Cause if he is we probably oughta carry on searching before he suffocates to death a couple dozen times. Ya know he'll hold it against us, and God is he annoying when he's got a grudge."
Pensive, almost absentmindedly, Husk took Angel by the hand and tugged him back down to the floor; he didn't let go, even after Angel had settled back beside him.
"Wouldn't worry 'bout him," Husk said grimly, eyes focused on something none of the rest of them could see. "He's far away now. Licking his wounds. He'll be back when he's straightened himself out again."
'Nasty hit... Licking his wounds'. Charlie stilled, happiness cooling back into fear. That meant there were wounds to lick, cuts to put lips to and kiss better; unbidden, horrified, her mind fiddled with the taste of blood, the textures beneath her tongue, the layers of skin, flesh, and muscle. Gold had dried on her face in thick layers like lacquer and, from the way it pulled when she moved, she could feel that blood was not all that decorated her, liquid joined by viscera and chips of bone. She was encased in the slowly drying remains of God's servants, bedecked with their mortality.
Alastor did not feel mortal. He didn't act like the sort of person who could be hurt. It was like suggesting a storm might catch a cold, a hurricane might fall over; the Radio Demon was a force of nature, a performer's perfect smile pasted across a scythe. It was absurd to imagine him injured... just as it was absurd to think they had beaten the exterminators and killed their leader. Today was a day where the impossible happened.
It was her fault he had faced Adam at all.
.
"Adam's going to be tough. He's the original exterminator, the leader of all of them; we're gonna have to hit him hard and fast. The earlier he's taken down, the better things are gonna go for us in the long run."
For the last few hours, Vaggie had been fulfilling her promise to take them through what she knew of the exorcist army that would soon tear apart the sky. Charlie had started this lecture with the very best of intentions, but her sense of severity had been corroded, the pressure cracking into something like delirium. None of it felt real—not really real, the sort that could hurt.
"You want to take a crack at him, Alastor?" She asked the ever-smiling demon stood over her shoulder.
There was a giddiness to being so battle-ready, a sense that they could accomplish anything tying them together like a shared joke. The way Alastor looked at her, as though she had presented him with some magnificent gift, was stamped into Charlie's mind. As though she weren't handing him death on a platter with a sweet: 'I saw this and thought of you!' His eyes were garnets, bloody and hard-edged.
"The strongest of the angels, hm? Oh yes—I think he and I shall get along famously!"
Vaggie's mouth turned down at its corners—Alastor tutted, long fingers reaching out to pinch her cheek—and she frowned through both of them like she wanted to knock their heads together.
"You sure you wanna take him?"
Alastor grinned, gold like angel blood, like pride.
"Oh, my dear, I absolutely insist!"
.
The monolithic lie of the Radio Demon... she had believed it. Trusted that self-proposed strength, the mythic capability, the serene madness of his smile—she had trusted Alastor.
"How bad is it?" She asked, and Husk shrugged, face all poker-perfected calm.
"Can't tell." And then he leant back against the slope, apparently done with the matter.
"Is he going to be okay?" Charlie wished he were close enough to look in the eye, wished she knew what laying down in this circumstance meant. If he answered, she didn't hear, but Vaggie laughed, bright and reassured in her ear. The arm around her shoulders, warm and heavy, squeezed, encouraging her back to rest against her girlfriend's chest.
"He's Alastor, Charlie," Vaggie murmured into her hair. "He's always okay."
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Fire spilled down his front, dribbled from between his lips and heaved from the crater in his chest as though his heart were bailing magma from a sinking ship. Here were the guts of his world, splattered hot and awful over his hands. Dimly, behind the smile, and the panic, and the pain, he was surprised by the warmth; it felt so much like human blood, though it was discoloured, and smelled sourly of stillness. In other, simpler times, he might have been offended by how ordinary it felt... in that moment, however, the reminder of his long gone humanity only made him feel sick.
Alastor's grin stretched until it ached like a cut. Blood continued to gush from between fingers he couldn't feel despite all efforts made to stem it. It covered the floor of his old radio tower, red on endless red—
Too much red. Bastard. Fucking bastard.
The Radio Demon doubled over with a retch, metal racing up the channel of his throat, chokingly warm as it poured from his mouth and nose. Sticky strands of something internal hung from his lips, yet more blood falling from them in resonant droplets like water off a stalactite.
Thinking was impossible, the agony battering rationality into clouds of smoke like seed pods huffing spores. Between surges of pain, he tried to remember what happened, but his grasp on the world was... fractured. Incomplete.
Flashes peppered him like bits of glass. Golden light searing all the strength out of him the way a too-hot pan sears all the red out of a piece of meat. Stone punching the air out of him, his lungs turning stiff and painful. His staff—the throne of his power—breaking with a crack like a popped joint, spreading numbness, helplessness. There was a shadow looming over him, vast and dense, exuding power like choking smoke, like coal dust from the ice-cold depths of a mine. It was laughing.
'I can't have lost. I don't lose. I can't have lost.'
Alastor wrestled his way out of the thorny thicket of shock, forcing himself back into the painful confines of his body, wrapped in shadows and comfortless static. His flesh was hard to stay attached to, like trying to read fragile letters behind a beam of blinding sun. He tried anyway, an act of gritted teeth, eyes melting out of their sockets, full of tears. The wound ate his attention span, swallowing down everything that wasn't a survival instinct, reducing him down to that ruinous pain. No thought, no pride, no courage; all that remained was an acute awareness of the ways in which he was hurt and a panicked conviction that it was killing him.
Beating him.
Something moth-frail and textureless patted his cheek; his shadow, it's unshackled face twisted in concern, it's hands fixed on its master's chest, doing its level best to hold the two halves together. From every corner of the room loomed worried faces, neon scribbles on black; Alastor lacked the strength to send them away, a fact which briefly inspired rage hot enough to ease the chill of blood loss. His beloved audience—captive to him, captivated by him—but nobody should see this, not even them; especially not them, his subjects, his soldiers, now the sole attendants to his execution.
Urgently, the shadow took ahold of Alastor's wrist, removed his hand from where it had been tearing at one of his flattened ears, and pressed his palm to the front of his chest. Behind a thin, slimy barrier and strands of torn muscle, Alastor could feel the jagged labouring of his exposed lungs. Clarity swam back into him and it tasted of clean, sensible terror.
'No... Not lungs—too far down, ribs should be in the way. Diaphragm. It's my diaphragm.'
Whatever it was, that squirming piece of meat, it was slipping; he could feel the threads pulling lose, the tack tack tack of slowly tearing meat. Another heave. The thickly pulsing vein under his palm fluttered, feeding a terrified heart from a dwindling supply of blood. The shadow clasped at him, impotent and terrified. It was but a construct, fettered by the bounds of its own existence; it couldn't save him.
It could only implore him to save himself.
Buried deep in the cavernous ache were tiny, sharper points of sting. With fingers he couldn't feel, he clawed at them, finding more wetness, more evidence of his weakening pulse. Veins. Arteries. Torn open, bleeding, failing him. His own body failing him. Clumsily, blindly, Alastor tried to pinch them closed.
It was futile; the second he moved his hands, those holes gaped open again like the hungry mouths of fledgling birds, hollowing him out. His cracked open chest yawned wider, innards steaming in the cold air.
'This is not how it ends—I can't die like this. I'm not dying, I didn't lose... I'm perfect. This cannot be happening to me.'
(Later, there would be time to lament the fact that he had done this for the sake of the hotel, that he had been carved open in the name of protecting others, but he was keeping his head above those thoughts for now. Anything that wouldn't close the wound could be put aside for later. If there was to be a later, such was the only way.)
(Later, he would wonder if any of them survived his absence and he would scrape his mind raw trying to stop.)
It had been so long since anything he felt had hurt so much. The novelty was almost ecstasy—it would have been fascinating if it were happening to any body but his. But it was his and, wound aside, that fact alone was making it hard to breathe.
It wasn't the first time, though—far from it, in fact... What had he done then?
The past clawed at him with ragged, sickly nails that broke off in his mind, and he scrabbled at them in pursuit of the shard sharp enough to kill the hurt. For over eight decades, his reputation had protected him from all but the most determined assailants, his powers enough of a weapon to fell almost anything without contest. He hadn't needed a crutch for so long.
But before that... before that he had to fight. He had clawed his way to the top of Hell's wretched hierarchy, and he had killed anything big enough to pose a challenge. He had not always walked away unscathed. Nothing he couldn't handle—never anything he couldn't handle—but... he hadn't enjoyed the feeling of his own blood staining his hands. There was a time in those early days when he would have done anything—promised anything—to scrape that disgrace back inside him where no one could see, to make his mask so perfect nobody would ever have any idea of the ugly failure crammed behind it.
Overlord after Overlord fell to his broadcast, each one fighting a little more fiercely, each one gouging him a little deeper when they landed blows that became harder and harder to heal from. He had built his empire in flesh and bone. He had nearly destroyed himself doing it.
But he hadn't. He'd survived—he always survived. That's what he had been promised, what he was owed.
'I just need to... I have to... I just need... One more time, one last time... I just...'
(It was always one last time. He never expected to end up back on the floor. He had made that deal, young and foolish, never expecting to need it so much as he did. And maybe he would have died without it, and maybe that would have been better, so much better; such was too much for him to contemplate.)
Shakily, Alastor groped under the desk, towards a sickly, green glow which hadn't been there before. Something in the universe breached, and he crossed an ill-defined boundary no force of nature had ever thought necessary to make clear, and then he was holding it. The light spread across the floor, over the over, over him, like something physical; it moved like moss growing on a statue or a tomb, claiming the room inch by inch as Alastor withdrew, from a place which didn't exist, a ball of black thread speared by a needle. On his arms, across his back, in scrawls over his face and hands, stitches, clumsily done and horrific in their quantity, lit up neon green and alive.
𖤐
Lucifer had conjured a tent for them all to sleep in, a temporary arrangement but one vastly superior to any sleazy motel or vaguely comfortable configuration of gravel they might have rustled up otherwise. It was a striped, circular affair, all heavy canvas and improbable interior dimensions. Inside, the air smelled of pancakes, chopped fruit, and warm syrup, and the plush, pillowed rooms were lit by rosy fairy lights; Charlie had revived herself to gush over seeing it again, this apparent relic from her childhood, lighting up with endearing innocence as easily as a bonfire soaked in kerosene. That more than anything else made the place feel cosy, safe.
Niffty had been similarly enamoured—candy-coloured nooks and crevices to explore, unfamiliar spaces between the walls, a dazzling array of silks and satins which might require cleaning—but her enthusiasm had fizzled after a little investigation; Lucifer had manifested this place to be perfect, and so there was nothing for her to do. Post-battle fatigue had yet to settle over her, and her nerves were still fraying quite beyond hope for her ability to knit them back together. She had shredded three pillows attempting to plump them.
Eventually, Angel had been kind enough to give her his and Cherri's clothes to clean to keep her and her jitteriness out of everyone else's evening.
Now, it was late, and she had coaxed all the bloodstains from the fabric, blotted out the mud, repaired seams, patched tears, and replaced buttons, and she still felt wide awake. The canvas had been created with some form of mystical soundproofing which had crushed all the sounds of the city outside into little more than a dusty whisper; Niffty sat by the opening, idly tidying away her sewing kit, a cold wind toying lightly with her hair as though to coax her back outside. In one ear, she could hear the gentle snores and sleepy mumbles of her dear companions; in the other, the very faint susurrations of an evil city at rest. It was comforting. It was almost perfect.
Nothing, however, was enough to make up for the fact that not everyone she loved was with her inside the tent.
"You alright, Niff?" Asked Husk softly, his deep voice like a pat from a friendly hand.
"Mr Alastor isn't back yet." Her needles smiled up at her, silver, sliver-thin teeth all perfect in their rows. Reluctantly, Niffty buttoned the case closed.
"No. He's not." The cat demon sighed, rough with something like frustration and concern, it's recipient faceless. "You're better off getting some rest. He's not gonna show just 'cause you waited up for him."
"I know." She didn't move back to her shredded-pillow nest. The stars shining in the patches of night sky where the hotel used to be looked so wrong; she almost wanted to tidy them away, sweep them up like breadcrumbs. It would take more than a broom to make things better this time, and she was suddenly aware of how small she was. "I'm not gonna stay up long, I just can't sleep yet. We have so many messes to clean up tomorrow."
"We sure fucking do." Husk's hand was large enough to fully engulf one of Niffty's narrow shoulders, and the rasp of paw pad and fur was wonderfully warming, even if the gesture itself was clumsy with drink and slightly too rough. "Goodnight kid."
Without taking her eyes off the sky, Niffty turned her head just enough to press a closed-lip kiss to Husk's knuckles.
"Night kitty."
The weight of Husk's presence at her back receded and disappeared, and then his pattern of breathing joined the rest, a granular, rumbling purr. Last woman left awake, Niffty fiddled with the pinned back flap of tent opening, unwilling to commit to closing it and losing the little comfort of the familiar city. It was almost domestic—the sound of sleep, the sound of traffic, the neon smell of club signs and dust, the warmth of the tent... she missed the static that should be sitting like a weight on every inch of skin, the crescent-moon red glow of closed eyes.
It was a bitter set of circumstances to find herself missing him again, but Alastor was like that; he carved out his place in the world's fabric so confidently that, whether you liked him or not, when he wasn't around you couldn't help but feel the hole he left behind. And Niffty did like him. She loved the bastard like family. How cruel it was, to finally have a place in the world and people to live alongside, only to have the first of them torn away again.
She would always remember how he came back into her life after the Seven Year Sabbatical more than she remembered the seven years themselves—those were an unremarkable blur, characterised by emptiness, by monotony. On the day the world came to life again, she had opened the door to her apartment—a sparse, neatly kept little place just off the edge of Cannibal Town—and, instead of the comforting smell of bleach, her sharp nose had been greeted by the raw iron of blood, the pleasant burn of spices, the animal scent of wet fur. Lively swing music was playing from her sitting room, a song she had once loved dearly until it stopped. She didn't remember dropping her shopping bags, but she did recall having to go fetch her jar of olives from where they'd rolled down the corridor, so she supposed she must have. Alastor had been sitting in her living room, legs crossed, hands clasped across his knee, humming along to the music with his old liveliness; he had surged to his feet amid a rapture of applause from his invisible audience the second he saw her enter, eyes bright, smile as genuine as she had ever seen it. Gallant as ever, he had offered to take her coat, the first thing he'd said to her in almost a decade.
Niffty had burst out laughing, tears pouring down her face. She had rushed to him, screaming things she did not remember but which had felt very important and necessary at the time, and she had beat her fists against what little of his legs she could reach. After so many years of nothing, all the feeling rushed back into her like blood to a dead limb—painful, deliciously so.
Alastor had let her. Then, with every aspect of good humour, he had taken her gently by the wrists and eased her away from him, fondly stroking her hair. He had taken her coat and offered her tea to replace her tears. Later, when she had calmed, she asked him if it was good to be back, and he assured her it was, the red of his eyes vibrant as a heart.
And now he was gone again. With as little word or warning as there had been last time; she could only hope to a God who had never listened that it wouldn't be for so long. That he was still out there, somewhere... beyond the city, beyond the skyline. Beyond that tent with its sounds of slumber and patchwork family all stitched together through circumstance and struggle... those people who accepted her as though she had always belonged among them.
Tiredly, Niffty shook her head. She knew she ought to get some rest, and yet the promises of outside were hard to abandon. Dithering, she scraped a nail down the grain of the curtain and—
—snapped it shut, heart pounding.
Outside, the city came dreadfully alive. Even with the divine sound-proofing, a thread of the noise wove its way through the button holes, and Niffty's usually nimble fingers struggled with the closures as though the sound itself were working against her. Even when she had it fastened closed she could sense it, just beyond the cloth, a creature testing its claws against the walls of their sanctuary. There were voices raised in confusion, city goers and night owls perplexed and terrified, but they were frail, insignificant. They were nothing compared to the long, ruined, undulating wail, sharp and bloody as a blade, louder than the splitting of the very ground beneath their feet, from a hundred throats and a million angles. It sounded like the end of the world.
Inside the tent, nobody stirred. Husk coughed, grumbled, rolled over, and continued snoring. Charlie and Vaggie, secure in each other's arms, remained peacefully asleep. Heart pounding, Niffty crawled away from the tent opening as if it had burned her.
She knew that voice. Maybe it was distorted, multiplied by a hundredfold, stricken beyond anything she could believe... but she knew that voice.
"... Whazzat...?" Mumbled Lucifer. There were dark pink lines on his face from pillow creases.
"Nothing," Niffty answered in a ghostly whisper. "Nothing at all. Go back to sleep."
He did so without argument. Niffty continued her backwards crawl until she reached Husk, fumbled her way blindly into the slack crook of his arm, and lay staring at the ceiling for the rest of the night. All traces of outside had been quashed, she was surrounded by whiskey breath, and sweat, and a slow, heavy heartbeat, but it didn't matter—she could still hear it. The noise was in her bones. Shivers wracked her. She knew what that sound was. She would recognise his voice anywhere.
It was the radios. Every single one of them, all across Hell, screaming like they had hearts that could break.