A Broken Record On Repeat In A Crowded Bar

by Eliza Farrow

After almost dying in the abstract and absurd name of betterment, Alastor is left mortally injured and enraged, his life in everyone's hands but his own. Too deeply entangled in his own games to walk away, too proud to ask for help, he returns to centre stage of the repaired hotel to carry on playing his role, even though the spotlights burn and his costume is getting bloody.

2. You Scrubbed Away The Bloodstains

The old tower's interior reeked of blood, stained red by more than just the light, the air heavy with iron. Resonant drips pattered against a raspy patina of gasps staining what would otherwise be silence, the blood pooling on the desk falling heavily to the equally wet floor. It was an airless place, like a prison or tomb, a place a person was not expected to leave.

Alastor, shirtless and inexpertly bandaged, knelt by his control desk, before the transmitter. He had had to tear the wires out to shut the place down completely, and he still wasn't certain it had been enough to stop the unintentional broadcast airing. He could still feel the Pentagram's radios, like a cloak of spiderweb on his shoulders, pulling at him. Shudders wracked him, a feverish glisten glazing his pallid, greyish skin in the low light. His bones shifted loosely beneath flimsy strings of muscle, his whole body lingering on the verge of falling apart and peering apprehensively over the edge of oblivion. It was a worrying possibility that he might collapse into strings of gore and be gone altogether.

And he had done it for them.

That was the worst thing, eating at him more than the hole in his side. Perhaps it was the blood loss, or the pain making him cloudy-headed, or the onset of illness from spending a night bleeding in a cold radio tower, but he couldn't understand what he had done. He had gone to war with the angels under the banner of justice and redemption... he could scarcely comprehend it. He wanted almost desperately for someone to tell him it wasn't true but his audience, blessedly receded, was, for once, mute.

It was Charlie's fault, he was convinced of it. Being in such close proximity to her noxious optimism, her hope, her unflinching belief in his better nature. It was like fatal radiation—it was punching a million tiny holes in reliable armour he had thought ironclad, making him soft. She made people want to prove her right—not about change, or redemption, but smaller, selfish things. Things like mattering. The rest of Hell had turned cold and disdainful after his... absence. Charlie alone, in her power and infinite potential, looked at Alastor and his parlour tricks like they were impressive and, in a moment of laxity, he had grown addicted to the glow of wonderment in her eyes. It was impossible to doubt her sincerity, and the smiles she doled out so freely said she admired him, even if she didn't fear him... even if she was stupid enough to want to keep him close enough to bite.

Certainly it was sentimental... but Alastor couldn't deny he had started to covert it, a dragon with its gold. He would do almost anything to keep her smiling up at him like he was brilliant, almost anything at all... and it had made him stupid. Reckless. It had almost gotten him killed.

(Quietly, under layers of denial embarrassment was heaping atop it, Alastor was aware of his original certainty in the plan, the pragmatism he had been fully willing to commit to. It was a plain fact that the others were feeble. Even Husker—still an Overlord in technicality—would have barely posed a distraction to Adam. Pentious with his silly machines, Vaggie and her old spear, Anthony with his guns, Niffty with a dagger little better than a needle... they would have been killed in seconds, and he refused to examine the twist of emotion that thought sparked. The only other person who had stood a chance was Charlie herself, and she couldn't have struck a killing blow if her life depended on it—which it had. All their lives had. Perhaps more horrifying and unacceptable to Alastor than anything else was the dim recognition that fighting Adam himself had not been the wrong choice.)

'Alastor, altruist... died for his friends.' There was nothing in his stomach, but he fought a retch anyway, eyes swimming.

After so many years of the dark, and the cold, and the dreadful quiet, it had been bracing to be placed in something that felt close to a home, with people who quickly stopped flinching when he spoke. A hole his Master had torn in him was patched over, inexpertly and inadequately, by clumsy, well-meaning, oblivious hands. It had felt good to be treated like a person again, like those early days in cannibal town when he gadded about on Rosie's arm and the world was full of smiles that came easily. Oh, they were stupid—all of them, so stupid—and he knew they didn't necessarily like him, but they held their hands out to him in a fashion almost willing, and it had been so achingly long since anyone had been so bold... He had gotten used to it; he'd gotten fond.

But a corpse doesn't know if it's loved, doesn't care if people look fondly at its headstones, or count the flowers laid on its grave. And he had almost been killed for their sake—for fools and a cause he had no faith in. Nothing was worth that. He had sold his soul and shared his strength to prevent his own death, and that was a sacrifice he would not allow to be undone by some half-wits with a dream, no matter how sincerely good it felt to have those cancerous growths filling up that dark pit in his heart.

All that effort, all his brilliance, and it had left him here; abandoned, unlovely and unloved.

Feeling watched despite his solitude—unclean, small, acridly ashamed—Alastor struggled to put his shirt back on. The fabric was clammy where it lay against his skin and smelled of rotting metal. Every movement found a way to pull at his chest, no matter how careful or minor it was, and the sharp shocks spasmed through his nerves. His hands felt numb and clumsy, dead things on the ends of his wrists, loosely attached. The world spun and dipped in a nauseous, funhouse fashion, reflected back at him from puddles of distortion. Blood oozed coldly down his belly, slower now but persistent, stroking shivers down his spine, and his head throbbed with pulses that came and went like bloody tides. It took five minutes for him to recover his breath after the small exertion for which he felt no warmer, no less vulnerable or filthy; he couldn't stand the thought of doing up his buttons. Fear fluttered through his veins.

More troubling than the thought of being tangled in the hotel's web was the fact that he should be getting better.

That deal he made had not been undertaken lightly and he had never been proud of it, but once there had been some satisfaction in it, some ease. When his bonds lay light and ephemeral in his spirit and his ego was wrapped up in the thrill of his own cleverness, it had seemed entirely worth it. The loan of his immense power in exchange for a way to mend himself from anything. An infallible little ball of black thread in exchange for a thin wisp of sin-stained soul; a perfectly fair trade in his well-kept ledger.

Seven years. Seven years of being bled dry of his every ounce of strength, pulled back into the amniotic void where he stored his shadows to protect a physical body too weak to move, hardly able to breathe... it was less worth it now.

But he couldn't pretend the thread wasn't useful. It never ran out. It never broke. His stitched smile never faltered. The limbs torn off in fights were seamlessly returned to the proper places and remained strong and dexterous. His head had been reattached without issue, though it was permanently loose on his neck due to a misplaced bit of cervical vertebrae. Every dreadful injury, every broken bone, all perfectly mended in far less time than they should with the careful application of a little thread; as far as Hell was concerned, he was unstoppable, beyond their ability to command or put down. After so many years of being as ruthless with himself as he was with everyone else, he should have been crippled, and such would certainly have been his fate if not for his deal. Before this, he had never needed longer than a day to heal.

Yet here he was; almost two days had elapsed in bits and pieces since he stitched himself up, and he still hadn't regained his feet. The wound, while stitched closed, was not healing.

More than a touch hysterical, Alastor turned over the stories he had heard about angelic steel, hoping some scrap of explanation might fall out. Nothing came of it—everyone he had ever heard of who had been struck by angelic blade had died, either immediately or shortly afterwards, torn apart in a moment of vulnerability by their fellow demons.

Neither was a fate Alastor aspired to, and so neither could be remotely considered as options. It wasn't going to happen. He would devote no more thought to it than that.

Another shudder wracked him, cold rolling his bones between its jaws like sweets it might dissolve; in a dismal bid to preserve some warmth, Alastor crawled on his hands and knees into his old studio chair and curled up as best he could bear. It's suede was greasy and worn, it's stuffing bursting through in hard, damp lumps, moss sprouting in the creases. His blood had turned the floor wine dark and sticky, and the tips of his fingers had a dull, bruised colour creeping from his nail beds. The room was icy, but he had a lurking suspicion it was not all to do with temperature.

Now more than ever, he needed his full strength. Not simply for a war with Heaven, but to go back to the Hotel at all; they wouldn't tolerate him like this. A useful monster could be respected, but he could all too easily imagine Charlie's easy affection going dim in the face of him failing to rise from the floor. Humiliation would kill him if Vaggie didn't.

(He thought, unwillingly, of the ex-exterminator's suspicious eye, always following him and going cold when he got too close; Husk's claws and teeth, both sharp and readily at the disposal of someone who had no reason to want him alive; the King of Hell himself... it had seemed so much fun making that man an enemy, at the time. Helplessness chafed like too small clothes, another pair of shackles. After all he had done for it, the hotel had the gall to be unsafe for him. Beneath the lament there was a sting of genuine hurt, but spite had far warmer fires to sit by.)

Tentatively, Alastor plucked at his magic, directing what little was left towards the wet tear in his chest before pulling a little harder at his stolen reserves. Lights popped behind his eyes, balloons of brightness and heat... when he came back to consciousness, the daylight was gone, the sky outside the red windows heavy with gloom. He could smell the fresh blood under his nose, the raw meat and red warmth of an open wound. He could feel the clammy grip of metal at his neck. Chastised, sick of his own insignificance, Alastor sunk into his shadow's eager embrace and allowed his body to collapse. He would have to settle with what little he could eek from between the leech's jaws and wait for the rest to regenerate.

Just a little rest... he would be absolutely fine after a little bit of rest. Then he could return to his place at the hotel and start untangling himself from their hopeless little knot of affection, excising them from the walls of his blackened heart. The next time they needed a knight in shining armour, it wouldn't be him; he was never putting himself in this position again.

One day he would be free of this—all of this—and then nothing would be able to stop him. Not his contract, not some angel, not Charlie...

He just needed some sleep. Things would look better by morning.

𖤐

Charlie and Lucifer took the debris to an abandoned quarry hollowing out the earth in inland Envy, a scrap of land in the long process of becoming smaller, eating itself. Tufts of tough, teal grasses gave way to mint green mud and lavender stone still shot through in places with silver metal; old equipment, like the curious skeletons of malformed birds, perched around the edge of the pit, mechanical blueprints on robin's egg paper, the sky too flat and still to be alive. Walkways zigzagged their way to the bottom.

For the fifth time that day, Charlie made her way down, carrying a box full of shattered crockery. There were faster ways to dispose of everything—her father, a transformed Razzle, and a hoard of hired imp hands were doing precisely that—but there needed to be something personal about it. She was bringing parts of her home here so that she would never see it again. She needed to say goodbye. If that meant taking the slower path, so be it. Her footsteps rang loudly on the rusted grating, the sound caught by the stone and reflected, refracted, repeated, so that there seemed to be a hundred Charlies making that solemn pilgrimage to a hole at the bottom of Hell.

Far above her, a team of imps emptied a skip over the edge, sending a waterfall of masonry and timber cascading past the walkway. Small stones skittered off the metal railing. The cloudy choke of dust replaced the slightly bitter scent of thyme and salt that filled the air. Cradling her box of erstwhile plates, Charlie walked on through smoke.

Eventually, after too many steps and yet not quite enough, she reached the end of the walkway, half-swallowed by mist made from a thousand shattered memories, and began a mindless trek through a land of disorganised mountains. They were far from the first to use the old mines on Envy to dispose of unwanted things. Heaped in the heart of that old industry were whole lives reduced to detritus, outgrown and unloved, sprawling on top of each other in unconscionable indignity like bodies in a mass grave—old sofas with lamps and rolled up rugs reclining across them; a fridge full of computer mice and keyboards; a bookshelf with all its volumes still sat upon its shelves, their bindings cracked, their pages bloated with damp; towers of chairs; wardrobes full of clothes; bicycles, and cars, and prams, all immobilised by age. Everything and anything that could come to the end of its usefulness. Whole cities' worth of stuff abandoned.

A person could get lost down there.

Dust buried the sound of her footsteps. Charlie walked a channel she had traced four times before and felt as though she were part of a dream that didn't belong to her. There were hallmarks she recognised—nonsensical things: a coat rack bedecked with necklaces, the ground below littered with earrings and rings; a beaded curtain made from porcelain cups; a massive fragment of carved relief displaying part of a house interior, with stairs and a door, with children's shadows graffitied across the white stone—and she wondered, as she wandered, what stories they had anchored with their weight to the bottom of this sea. Who had left them here and why? What had they been when they were useful, when they were loved? She supposed she would never find out.

She supposed someone would one day wonder much the same of what remained of her hotel.

It took a small eternity for Charlie to come to the place she had designated as the final resting place for her plates; a large table, its surface stained and scored from years of work in what must have been a palatial kitchen, surrounded by a medley of mismatched chairs. It was one of many pockets she had encountered, a little area amid the mountains where, for reasons best known to the makers—or perhaps no reason at all—a tableau of sorts had been formed. Maybe a gang had held a conference here under the cover of darkness and decay. Maybe children had once come to the scrapyard to play house.

Or maybe, much like her, there were strangers out there who had, one by one, come all the way down to the bottom of the pit only to decide it would be too sad to put them away without any care at all.

Whatever the reason, there was a table and chairs set out, bare and expectant. Charlie went from place setting to place setting, tenderly laying out the shards of plates, nudging them back into being vaguely circular. She laid folded knives and bent forks either side, a series of dented spoons set above. Their drinking glasses had been reduced to biting crumbles of crystal that she portioned out in handfuls of glitter.

Quietly, Charlie surveyed her work. There they were, all together again. Their ghosts were having breakfast, the only meal they had universally shared, and they could stay that way forever. Shutting her eyes, she summoned a memory of early mornings, the smell of French toast and bacon, the playful bickering, the plans for a new day, and she held on to it; she did not open her eyes as she turned and walked away, her arms empty.

She wasn't ready to let go. Having to do so anyway was a wretch.

It took less time to return to the top. The open sky felt pitiless and unreal; she might become untethered from the long grasses, which surely the only thing tying her down, and rise up, and be gone altogether. She wondered where she would go if that happened.

The sixth box was filled with torn clothes, and Charlie stared into it for a long minute, listening to the roar of another skip full of rubble being emptied. She had already picked out a spot for them. It was a thing of pity, those clothes, so simultaneously mundane and emblematic of the people who had worn them. There was a dress on top, one she had bought for Vaggie early on in their relationship, a silvery thing with a corset top and beaded florals. The lack of blood on it was tragic, somehow, a pretty lie; she could believe it had gotten damaged a hundred different ways that weren't a war.

The coldness of the pit claimed her eager as a mouth. Her retraced footsteps sunk deeper into the dust. Those peculiarities peering at her from the fog were almost familiar. The air was hard to breathe, chalky and viscous with dust, but it was hard to want to leave. It was hard to want anything. She arrived at the intended tomb without comment or fanfare.

Feeling lost and sorry for herself, Charlie began dressing the crowd of mannequins she had found on a path forking left from a claw-footed bathtub full of glass bottles, treating them tenderly as she would children. There was no resistance in the waxy limbs and, though the torn clothes were ill-fitting, she soon came to stand in a crowd populated by a hundred iterations of her friends.

They felt like corpses, cold and heavy. They stood surrounding her, jurors in a court with a judge yet to arrive.

Charlie took particular care with a Victorian shirt, struggling with dented cuff links and anticipating, with a certain, horrified eagerness, the moment they fell apart under the rigours; they never did. As she walked away, she felt the red stones staring after her, unblinking, unflinching, reflecting gold. It shouldn't have made her feel like her guts were gone, but it did.

It shouldn't have made her miss Alastor, but it did.

In the thick of it—in the blood, and the fire, and the carnage—it had seemed the most necessary thing in the world to hold her head up above the tide and promise a continuance, a defiance. Carrying on had seemed so simple a premise purely because to not do so was unthinkable and giving up was not a weight she could bear. And yet, it seemed moving on came with its own cost; Charlie felt it dragging at her, every step she took, corpses tied to her shoelaces.

After everything, her soul was a bucket she had filled topfull with all the strident hope she could muster and it was only now, when she was reaching into its depths to have something to hold, that she realised it had a hole in the bottom. She had been wounded without recognising it's significance and it was healing so much more slowly than she could ever have wished. That indefatigable well of optimism had been her reliable constant, steadfast at her side before even Vaggie. To find it running dry was to have the sun go out.

It felt silly, now, to imagine blood as a spot that couldn't be scrubbed off. It was a sea. It was drowning her. Her world was a thing of malevolent liquids, of blood, and hope, and tears, and none of it was in the right place. Putting any of it back in its proper place felt like idiocy more than valour, one doubtful step at a time down a winding and untraveled road where the pebbles bit and the trees laughed.

With a shiver of a breath, Charlie returned to wishing that Vaggie had been able to transgress the Rings and come with them, a notion she had already made herself put down several times before. Between her own sense of loss and picking up Charlie's slack, her angel, her rock, had so much to deal with already.

(Vaggie could pet her hair and promise her that it would be better in the morning—or, failing that, promise that she would still be there in the morning, whatever the world threw at them. She could, would, and did carry the weight of Hell itself on her back to give Charlie what she wanted, and that frightened the princess as much as it aided her, enthralled her. And it made her feel sick with herself in those rare and detested times where Vaggie's absolute devotion wasn't enough.)

One foot in front of the other; she should be able to do this. She shouldn't need help to walk a path traced, unaided, five times before.

There was something lying in the centre of the trail, between towers of tires. It was perfectly upright, as though specially placed, as though it had been waiting for her to come back for it; its air of expectation broke her heart all over again.

Picking it up was not an optional matter. Charlie thought the world itself might crack apart if she let it go a second time.

.
"Okay guys! Today we're gonna go around the circle and say what we like about each other!" Faces, almost all of them, crowded the room, skeptical but no longer laden heavy with disdain. It had only taken three months.

"Is this 'cause of the fight ring?" Groused Husk. "Told ya, it was friendly. And we used spoons not knives."

"Still fighting! Still not okay!" But they had all stopped and stood to be chastised when she found them, and they were making no attempt to leave now. "I'll go first!" And she went along the line. It was easy to find things she loved about them—big things, small things, things they were improving on day by day. She wished there were a mirror she could hold up that would show them the versions of themselves the way she could see so clearly.

"—and I think your top hat is a super cool accessory!" She concluded, having come full circle to Sir Pentious. "It's amazing that you can get the eye to react so realistically, and it looks so much like... all your other ones." Those many, many eyes were staring at her, huge and full of wavering shimmers; they were warm, soft and plush as a bouquet of velvet hearts.

"Thank you, Charlie, And... and I like your sssuit." With a playfully conspiring grin, he snapped his bow tie, carrying on the game without prompting. "You're a very ssstylish young lady. I have no doubt you'll prove memorable as time marchesss on."

.
Open air was violence. She could taste the liveliness in the wind, the haste of something vast that had places to be, the muscular heaving of the sea; there was so much life in this world, so much potential. The bottom of the pit had none of that, and there was comfort in its sobriety, its introspective myopia, the way it had cocooned her with the impersonal and yet complete acceptance of a grave. How easy, how serene would it be, to go back and lie there until everything... stopped. A particular breed of jealousy sighed through her, a resentment for the simple vitality of the world that was so omnipotent even in this desolate place, and she understood then that envy was cruel.

Moments later, she felt horrible for such desolate thoughts, but that didn't ease the fact that she'd had them. Charlie let herself crumple into the ground. In her lap she cradled a brown leather top hat, badly dented, it's stitching torn, it's glass eye closed; the artificial eyelid was the only thing keeping the shards in place and, if she thought about it for too long, Charlie suspected she might understand how that felt.

Doomsday devices aside, Pen had been an artist; the eye was perfect, precisely like his own, even with the tiny gears spilling out from the tear duct. The glimpse of red was almost too much.

With a vast, leathery thud like a thousand tons of dropped velvet, Razzle landed beside Charlie in the grass, managing his size with the clumsy, concentrated delicacy of something used to taking up far less space. Every inch her adoring pet, he carefully pushed his face into her hands, warm bone resonant with concerned chirruping sounds. Despite herself, Charlie smiled; he was her baby, no matter how frightful he could grow to be. Mindful of the teeth, she nuzzled her forehead into his snout, buried her face into his neck under the jut of his jawbone where his heart beat warmly against her skin.

Somewhere nearby, her father dropped out of the sky, the familiar half-skip of his feet returning to ground having remained untouched by centuries; it had an angel's lightness, the sort of endless energy that years in Hell translated as agitation. The sort of energy that was half hers, her celestial inheritance. He was talking but the sentences never actually seemed to conclude, the thoughts in them seamlessly blurring together. He sounded happy. Another skipfull of gravel rattle-roared itself into oblivion.

Pulling her face out of Razzle's fur with every intention of listening, Charlie instead found herself studying her dad. He looked young, but that was only because time couldn't touch him, because his flesh was a construct, because he had been designed perfect and, even in disgrace, he could not be permitted to stray too far. If there were a way to pluck him back into the sky and set him back in place beside his brothers, Lucifer would still look like a piece of china from a set.

The same face that had fallen from Heaven and smiled out of her photo albums stared back at her now. It was a piece of permanence, a constant; it was something she would always have,

"Dad, do we still have the guy who did our family portraits on retainer?" Ram fur was a rough warmth under her cheek.

"Hm?" There was a second before he could pull his thoughts out of their rabbit holes. Another before what she'd said registered. A third to understand. Charlie counted them out to the tune of her pet's heartbeat, still pressed against her ear. "Oh! The painter guy! Yeah, the one with some sort of herb for a name... thyme? Rosemary? Chives?"

"Basil, dad," Charlie corrected gently. This was a fairly common occurrence. "Basil Hallward."

"Him," Lucifer confirmed. "Good guy—well, no, actually, not really, but a great painter. What were you thinking? Something to commemorate the battle—Heaven's final extermination, the angels' defeated, the first man taken down once and for all. It was one hell of a day for the history books, that's for sure."

Charlie blinked slowly, head dipping beneath the waterline. How trite those incredible triumphs felt, how petty; she felt as though she were in the slow and careful process of cobbling a broken vase together only to have someone start helpfully offering her shards of plate.

"I want a painting of Pen." What else could be so important to want a painting of? Her father looked at her with innocent, owlish blankness. "Sir Pentious. And his Egg Boys."

"Right! He was... he was the snake one, yeah?"

She knew her father didn't mean to. It wasn't his fault he had only met her collection of sinners once. She could have asked him to visit sooner, could have been clearer when she told him about her friends, could have done a lot of things to bridge the gulch that spanned between them. Certainly she wasn't surprised to hear him identify Sir Pentious that way. It wasn't uncommon to identify sinners by their animal characteristics—epithets were just something people used, never precisely complimentary but not an insult either; a banality of a loose social contract which said, in the bluntest possible terms, they were all stuck with some zoomorphised bullshit.

But Lucifer was above such commonalities and Pen was dead. He was never going to get the chance to prove himself as anything more than a cobra in a top hat. Without meaning to, her father had open a door through which a hundred impersonal eyes, blank as a doll's, stared down at a gravestone lovelessly inscribed 'The Snake One.' That was her beloved father's lasting impression of a dear friend and suddenly Charlie couldn't stand it.

"He was an inventor—a really good one. He fixed up the whole boiler and heating system for the hotel in just a week—nobody else would even touch it. He made airships, and laser cannons, and automatons. His Egg Boys, I mean... God, he'd moan about them being dumb, but he picked up after then like they were his children." A damp scrap of laughter caught in her throat and she spat it out. "And he was a coward with women—Cherri especially; Angel did his best to give him advice and, man, was that a mess. I actually think Pen was better off before—he had a sort of old fashioned charm, you know? With his fancy suits and awful poetry...

"He was sweet. One of the smartest, sweetest, bravest people I've ever met. I loved him. I love him." Charlie paused for breath, heart squeezing like a fist. "But yeah, he was the snake one."

Arms enveloped her, warm and strong as they had been in her youth, but suddenly terribly insufficient; Charlie was seized by a need to shake him, to make him understand. All her attempts to twist out of Lucifer's embrace were gently rejected, and she eventually became aware of the apologies being hushed into her hair, and she couldn't sustain any ire against them.

"I'm sorry, sweetie, I'm so sorry," her father whispered, and he sounded like he meant it, like he'd claw the world to flinders and paste to fill the cracks in her heart. He sounded like he'd like nothing more than to put the words back on some shelf to gather dust far from the light of day, where they couldn't hurt her. "I'll talk to Halstead, okay?"

It had been a poor choice, an inconsiderate choice, and the tender tension in his voice said he would do anything to unmake it... but he couldn't. This was the best he could offer. The most he could do. 'If you had just been there at the beginning,' whispered something stony stuck in Charlie's heart, but it's blame was wafer-frail. 'If I had just called for you earlier...' And that one was sharper. That one dug deep.

"You think we can get a painting done?" Her voice was small, young. Charlie wormed her fingers about until they were buried in the layers of Lucifer's suit, anchoring him to her. "A good one?"

"The best." The arms squeezed, warm silk and velvet, safe and secure as a promise. Her father's determination was that of a king's. She missed heavy cloth, body-warm metal, and leather, the smell of old gunpowder and coal. "It'll be like he's looking through a window at you."

Behind them, another ton of her smashed home thundered to a faraway ground, a destroyed sandcastle being smoothed out one teaspoon at a time.

On their return, the first thing he did, before their feet had even touched the ground, was create a marble statue of Dazzle in his draconian glory on the flat ground before the newly empty rise of hill. That night, Charlie stayed with Vaggie outside the tent in the pitiless night air, holding each other, protected from the wind by Dazzle's outstretched wings. Above them, the sky unspooled, endless, the wretched stairway to Heaven she would never be able to climb; if there were stars up there she couldn't see them.

𖤐

If he was still screaming, it couldn't be heard above the roar of agonised feedback.

Rest, albeit of the concerningly comatose sort, had done enough good work to restore a little of his depleted magic, and Alastor had instinctively pushed it towards his staff. And, for the first time in seven decades, it failed him. It felt like missing a step going down, his stomach swooping away through his feet. Vertigo wobbled up his spine.

All that carefully cultivated magic drained through his fingers like broth through a sieve, washing mistakenly down a drain. Alastor stared after it, aggrieved and bereft.

Dedicating his efforts to fixing the staff was part practicality and part retribution for that one failure. Now that he was conscious again, he hated looking at it, this extension of his wounded body split in half, the manifestation of his carefully curated strength neatly and succinctly destroyed. The rending pain in his chest, the grinding of broken bones, the ache of organs all had a subtle familiarity, the ghost of old fights, a tolerable nuisance, but this? This could not be excused. His crown in two pieces. His massive power beholden to nothing but a body which could sicken, bleed, die. The Radio Demon with no radio. Ridiculous. The bleeding hole disgorging his innards could wait; repairing his cane was imperative.

(Nobody could see those innards. His body, damaged and frail as it may be, could be wrapped up in a three piece suit as impenetrable as armour for as long as it took to mend. Exhaustion and illness could be plastered over with a little magic and a showman's smile. But, under the microscope of a million eyes, his microphone—in its damage or absence—would be noted, and that was not something that could be allowed. If he and Vox had ever agreed on anything, it was that there was nothing more important than how things looked and he could not stand to look weak. He could not appear incomplete, no matter how true it was or how much he had lost.)

So he pulled together every lingering vestige of his strength over the course of that day, rearing them tenderly until the strands were thick enough to weave with, and he spent the whole, endless night forcing those nascent powers into knitting his cane back together.

And it hurt. It hurt in ways the mind had no ability to comprehend because it wasn't sensible, straightforward pain of the flesh. This was something other, something separate. It was his body but not. It was watching an obscure two-hundred-and-seventh bone he hadn't known he had be grated into wet powder while it was still bloody and the hole it was taken from still gaping. It was having his nerves turned into the strings of a harp and playing the most beautiful music to an adoring crowd even as every pluck of the strings sang through him in ice and fire. It was plaiting his guts into a braid and feeling the tugging ache first in his stomach, then his chest, and finally and increasingly in his neck as he inevitably ran out of length, and he was left so empty. It was all of it at once and the exertion was killing.

Then it was nothing at all, because it was over, and his staff lay across his lap, complete and whole.

Something deeper than flesh felt bruised; Alastor rasped in a breath, lungs wet. The world felt... different. Quiet. Like it was waiting for something. There was something ticklish and warm running down his jaw. Blood. Blood and heavy silence. He swallowed thickly; he hadn't realised he could burst his own ear drums. Other peoples', certainly, but… never his own. Almost frightened, Alastor went to direct healing magic to them, only to double over as claws raked the hollow space inside him.

Completely deaf, Alastor watched droplets of blood splatter the metal floor. It was coming from his chest...

The stitches had held—strained, but held. The relief of that was humiliating. They always held; that was the point of them. More blood dribbled from his nose.

(He could feel the eyes on him, that cold, pensive gaze. He hadn't crossed any lines, not quite, not yet, but he could sense the fingers on his chain ready to tug. You're taking more than is owed, said the voice without letters or tone, and he could feel the frantic, animal apology clawing his insides to make him bow his head. How craven. How weak. Fortunate, really, that such reactions were tucked deep into the secretive folds of the brain where no one but him could see.)

For the second time in three days, Alastor wilted and collapsed indelicately on to his side, huddling into the pool of shadow under the desk. The need for sleep was physical, brutal as a blow to the head, but losing another sense would feel like death, like an admittance of defeat. Closing his eyes would be the end of him. Wrapping his arms around himself as though that would hold him together, cane pinned against the fresh bleeding wound, Alastor dug his nails into the tattered crepe of his consciousness and clung grimly on even as the sight of his ruined radio tower tunnelled like it was burrowing away from him. He counted the drops of blood as they fell, lost count and started over. The world felt unreal, and distant, and dreadfully unsafe.

Small centuries later, when the work was done and he could once again hear himself sobbing for breath, he let himself close his eyes. The abyss took him soon after, gentle as a mother.

𖤐

A few days had passed since the extermination, and the bodies had all been cleared like children's toys being put away after playtime. The rubble had been less easy but, with a little divine assistance, the makeshift construction crew stood upon the clean-slate cliffside of their brand new start...

They hadn't the faintest fucking clue what to do with it.

With all the abundant enthusiasm of someone starting a new project, Lucifer had fabricated a wealth of supplies—all the wood, metal, and brick a new building could possibly require; Charlie had had to gently encourage him to ease off after he magicked reams of wallpaper into existence for the walls they did not yet have. Among their numbers they had a king, a princess, a former soldier, a sex worker, a bomber, a bartender, and a maid. To nobody's surprise (and yet everyone's affronted dismay) this did not amount materially to much construction experience. They stood on the windswept cliff, surrounded by pallets of bricks, struggling to come up with a basic floor plan, and that was the way of things for quite some time.

If Alastor had been present, he would have conjured a shadow bound building crew into existence with a jaunty snap of his fingers and danced with her through their ranks until they were stood in the lobby of a freshly completed building. The lack of him was an ache, but behind it, like a bubble of blood beneath a bruise, Charlie felt indignant; for six months, the Radio Demon had been one of the pillars in her corner holding up the sky and now, when she needed him more than ever, he had vanished without a trace. She wanted him back more than she had expected...

Wiping sweat off her brow and stretching her hands to ease the cramps, Charlie reflected that, at the very least, it would have been far easier to move these beams if she could sprout tentacles and grow to fifty feet.

"Hey, warn a girl before you abandon her to one of these fucking things," Cherri Bomb complained without any heat, letting her own end of the massive wooden timber fall to the ground with the weight of a felled tree.

Their current engagement was the third attempt at marking out the boundaries of what would—with luck, sweat, and very likely blood by the end—become their new hotel. At no point had this endeavour gone well, given the propensity for things set on a slope to roll down. The beams were heavy and unwieldy, unmerciful to healing bodies, and Niffty had already had to unwillingly tap out with two shattered feet. It was a Sisyphean labour, something which Charlie refused to contemplate in any detail lest it sink into the foundations she was laying and colour the building which would rise from earth a massacre had turned to mud.

Charlie looked down the length of the beam she and Cherri had painstakingly carried to the edge of the cliff; it was crooked. For what felt like the millionth time, she seized it wearily by one end and heaved it to the side before examining it again. The rebellious thing was now crooked in the other direction.

"Don't suppose you have any contacts we could use, being a gang leader and all?" Charlie asked a little sheepishly. "Any favours I could beg you to call in?"

Cherri shook her head, using the movement as an excuse to fan out her hair, which glistened faintly at the scalp.

"Sorry babe, but everyone I know specialises fucking things up, not fixing them. They'd have loved what we had going on before... Damn, I should have taken more photos for cred."

"I'm sure there's footage from Vox's channel; he sees everything." Charlie frowned at the wobbly shapes of rooms laid out across the grass; they seemed to grow more crooked the longer she stared. "I was thinking of asking Pen to—"

Scissors of loss cut off the end of that sentence, and Charlie fell abruptly silent, more surprised than anything else; feeling somehow quite young and unprepared, she watched her budding plans die and wither on the branch as a winter's ghost swept through them. She wouldn't be asking Sir Pentious anything at all. Sir Pentious was dead.

Part of Charlie—the social part which knew she had made a mistake—wanted more than anything to somehow laugh the matter off and carry the conversation on as normal, but her throat had turned thick without permission and try as she might she couldn't force words through it. She opened and closed her mouth a few times anyway, a ventriloquist dummy whose puppeteer had turned mute. Blinking back tears—and where had tears come from? Hadn't she cried enough to drown an exorcist army already?—Charlie stared at Cherri, who had frozen, her face still caught in a half-smile that didn't match her eyes.

'He liked you,' wailed her thoughts in hand-wringing helplessness, all notion of hotels, and bricks, and mortar discarded. 'He liked you so much.'

Slowly, carefully, Cherri Bomb turned away to look out over the cliffside, her hair blowing in the faint breeze and obscuring her expression. Feeling like she had been kindly spared an audience, Charlie took the opportunity to gulp down air and unstick her tongue; she didn't know Cherri well enough to hug her, but wondered if the other woman would be okay if she asked.

The bomber spoke before she could try.

"He wouldn't have known how to build you a hotel anyway," she said, with older-sister softness and a brusque, practical kindness like calloused hands wiping away tears. "He'd have made you some sort of crazy, ancient, over-complicated flying thing instead."

And then she walked away and left Charlie alone on the edge of the cliff, with the jigsaw puzzle of her hotel spread lopsidedly out behind her. Later, having retreated back inside the tent for a break, Charlie held a torn, dusty top hat on her lap and stroked it like a living thing; a crazy, ancient, over-complicated flying thing, she reflected with the watery end of a smile, sounded exactly like the sort of thing that might have cheered her up.

"Yo, everythin' good in here? Cherri said you might be—" Angel walked in without knocking—he had never knocked, even when there were doors. "Sad. Yikes. Want me to go get Heavenly V?"

A damp flutter of a laugh was all she could muster, more like a cough than anything else. Angel's mischievous smile broadened anyway, his mismatched eyes soft despite their curse; there were plasters on nearly every finger, like rings in every shade of pink, the jewellery of splinters and misfired hammers. The sounds of Outside followed him, riotous, the clatter-clash of rebuilding like a horse on cobbles, the call of familiar voices blotted wordless with distance but happy. There was so much happiness waiting for her outside; it felt selfish to sit inside, in the dark, holding this hat, alone. Charlie forced a smile for Angel's sake... it didn't come as easily for her as it seemed to for Alastor.

"She'll kill you if she hears you calling her that," she croaked, then coughed in an attempt to loosen a throat she hadn't noticed tightening again. Vaggie was in a similar, sheltered boat to her; she had dealt with so much death in her life, but none of it had been personal. None of them had been people the angel cared about.

"Eh, maybe. Got you out your head though, didn't it?" With every aspect of ease, Angel crossed the plush living room, threw himself down on the beanbag sofa next to her, and flung two arms around her to stop her from sliding off the other end. "What's up blondie?"

The weak smile, barely risen on shaky legs, died, and Charlie felt her face collapse into the mournful contours it had occupied before. With the best will in the world she couldn't summon it back. The crumpled hat in her lap felt suddenly shameful, evidence of her ghosts. Everyone outside sounded so happy... she couldn't convince her fingers to let go

"It's Sir Pentious. Angel, it's still about Pen." Would there ever again be a time when it wasn't?

"Oh." Angel didn't sound surprised and that made Charlie feel smaller. "Come on then, let's talk about it."

It sounded so simple and commonplace when he said it like that—'let's talk about it': as though she were struggling with a maths problem, or a scheduling conflict, or a sinner who wouldn't take her seriously. He said it like her feelings were something which could be translated and shared, like a problem shared was a problem halved; it was what she had taught him, and it was the rush of deep affection spurred by that realisation more than a desire to chat which loosened Charlie's tongue.

(Beneath her cheek, Angel's chest was warm and solid, filled with the soothing patter of a calm heartbeat. Her head rose and fell subtly with perfectly even breaths. If she had said no, refused to talk, she knew he would have accepted it; they would have sat there like that for as long as it took for her mind to settle. There was no expectation here. This was another reason it was so easy to talk.)

"I keep thinking I've done it, you know? I've accepted what happened, and I can start... feeling better. And then I say something, or hear something, and it's right there, Angel." All the grief and the loss, as real and raw as ever, despite all her attempts to assuage it, to bury it. "I remember a good thing for a few seconds, and then it's gone and he's still dead. And I feel terrible because a lot of people die on Extermination Days and I've dealt with that okay for years, and this shouldn't be so different, but… I just... I've always wanted to help people, but you guys are the first sinners I've actually gotten close to... It feels so much worse."

"Well, yeah. It is different. He was our friend. Doesn't mean you don't care 'bout those other fuckups, just means Pentious was special."

It would have been childish for Charlie to tell him that 'special' translating through grief to 'agonising' was the most unhelpful thing she could think of, and so she swallowed that sentiment carefully.

"I need it to get better," she whispered, staring down the enormity of her own feelings. "I can't help people like this."

'I can't drag this ghost with me forever, I can't keep crying at hats, and cogs, and broken shells. But I can't put him down. I don't want to let him go. I don't know how to let him go.'

"I get it, baby, I really do," Angel murmured into the top of her head. He seemed to understand the things she hadn't said, intuitive in ways he never advertised. "I'm not sayin' I've ever had a ton of friends down here, but there have been a couple who got close, and oh boy did it fucking suck when they bit it. And it hurt. For a long time. And sometimes I remember them and it still sucks, still fucking hurts." That arm around her shoulder squeezed, pulling her deeper into velvet fur. "But you know something?

"It's worth it. In the end, it's worth it."

"I didn't know..." Charlie didn't finish the sentence; 'I didn't know you had people you miss,' was too callous to admit to. "You never talk about them."

"I don't like to. Those weren't good days. And a lot of the time they weren't good people for me to be with, and I get that now; it makes thinking about them harder. But at the time? They got me through a lot of bad days, and I'm grateful for that even if it hurt to lose 'em, and even though I feel weird about it a lot of the time now.

"See, when I look back on those friends," Angel continued, warming to an idea he seemed to have had. "It's really hard to find good memories—actually good ones, not just ones that were fun at the time but there was other stuff goin' on in the background that ruined it later. We were blitzed out of our minds so often it's sometimes hard to remember what we were doing at all. That's what's different about Pen." It had the blunt certainty of something he had told himself a hundred times. "It takes time, but one day I'll be able to think of the fun stuff without feelin' bad, or weird, or ashamed of myself."

Charlie listened with the fervour of a student, the note-taking attendance of someone who knows they will be tested later. They were all younger than her, her sinners, even the eldest two, Sir Pentious and Alastor; when the former arrived in Hell she was already a toddler, and she had distinct childhood memories of listening to the latter's radio broadcast. But they had so much life inside them, so many experiences that hadn't touched her yet.

Sometimes they felt more real than she did. Other times, they felt like sets of footsteps in the sand, stretching out in front of her instead of behind.

"When someone dies, you take bits with you. And yeah it's gonna hurt for a while, and I can't tell you how to make that stop 'cause I never learned, but it's not gonna suck forever, okay? One day, we're gonna get reminded of him, and we're gonna be able to feel happy about it. Until then, you've got us; you can talk about him to me whenever you want."

Silence followed, feeling a little as though it were in the wrong room, as though it would leave gently when asked. In soft curiosity, something like wonder, Charlie ran her fingers over the words, fascinated by the tender shape of them. Perhaps understanding was a simple thing to be offered. Perhaps support was basic and expected. But this was Hell. It felt novel, and vital; it felt like her friend had just handed her a shard of heart to replace what she was missing, and she could feel from the contours, from the foreign colours that it was part of his own.

Angel was long and lean, extruded limbs and muscles covered in long, feathery fur that was never fully scrubbed clean of the scent of old perfume and sex. He was warm and soft like a cake fresh from the oven. It was a matter of puzzle pieces to slot her arms around his second set of shoulders, turn her body into his so that their chests pressed together and she could bury her head in his clavicle, the chemical smell of dead roses and musk.

"Thank you." Charlie expected it to come out as a croak or a whisper, but it didn't. Her voice was simply very quiet. Some of the sadness crammed into her chest eased; it didn't fade or vanish, but the way it stopped bristling was important. It allowed her to remember that her grief had once been love.

"Don't sweat it, sweetie."

"No, seriously." Wriggling out of the embrace just a little, Charlie pressed a kiss to his freckled cheek, before resting her forehead against his collarbone again. "And I am so proud of you. You would never have been able to have these conversations with me when you first got here." He had listened to her. Under the bluster, and the sneering, and the levity, he had actually listened all along. "You're really good at this, Angel. You are so, so clever."

She couldn't see him, but she could hear the cocky grin in his voice—not the practiced, pornstar playfulness, but the one that said they were almost family.

"What can I say? You bring out people's good side, kid. And me? I got nothin' but good sides—ask any camera guy in Pentagram City."

"This is a great side," Charlie affirmed with a squeeze. "Thank you."

Angel made a pleased humming noise and, for a while, that was the end of the matter; they sat together, each tangled up in their own memories, anchored to each other's heartbeat. Abstractly, Charlie wondered if this was what having a sibling would have been like.

"What did Cherri say to kick all this off, anyway?" Angel asked after the comfortable quiet had settled, the sweet moment patting them kindly on the head and slipping out the door. "She wanted to say she's sorry for walking off, so I figure it must be her fault."

"No! No, Cherri was lovely—is lovely! It wasn't anything to do with her..." Charlie sighed, watching the patterns across Angel's collarbones ripple. "I... I said... I said I was gonna get Pen to help with the whole construction thing. I wasn't thinking. It was stupid."

"It wasn't stupid, hon," Angel sighed, leaning his head back against the tent wall and staring out through the opening with something that was almost wistfulness. "None of this is stupid."

"Cherri said he'd make me a flying machine hotel," Charlie sniffed, aware of how silly it sounded, aware that Angel wouldn't mind.

"Well, he would," Angel pointed out pragmatically. "It would have been the most badass, steampunk shit you could possibly imagine, and he'd have ruined that by calling it 'The Redemptinator' or something dumb." He shifted slightly. "I heard you asked your daddy about a painting?"

"I was thinking of putting it in the foyer, maybe? Or a library of some kind?" Or somewhere else—in a hundred hypothetical rooms, none of which existed yet. The effort it would take to manifest even one was daunting. "I've not decided yet."

It would be worth it, all the hardship, and the stress, and the broken fingernails, to have a wall to hang a painting on, a place the tribute could call home. Maybe that would be enough to usher in the promised day when her memories didn't burn.

"That's probably the sort of decision that's easier to make when you have, like, an actual hotel to be putting shit in." There was a ponderous moment where she could feel Angel thinking. "Ask ya daddy if this painter guy takes requests."

Images, unasked for, were summoned to the forefront of Charlie's mind; an oil painting rendition of Angel's adverts splattered over a ten-foot canvas, every lewd detail lovingly delineated, his salacious smile eternal and unlike him. She wondered if this were yet another thing Valentino was putting in his mouth.

"Um... What sort of requests were you thinking, Angel?"

"Mind out the gutter, pervy priss." In mock reproach, he thunked his chin down against the top of her head. "Classy shit. A titties-in kinda look. Something with all of us—we never really got that group photo with the old place."

So Charlie asked Lucifer and then, when he failed to pass the message along, Basil himself. In the end, after some negotiation and a considerable amount of discussion, four paintings were made: a ceremonial one of Sir Pentious, his beloved minions, and his airship as it had been in the snake demon's glory days; a new family portrait featuring Lucifer, Charlie, Vaggie, and Razzle, resplendent in ornate regalia; the anticipated one—the hotel surrounded by thick black shadows with its inhabitants frozen in valiant battle positions, angels dying in droves—commemorating a victory the likes of which Hell had never seen; and a fourth one.

In that fourth painting, the old hotel, all its dilapidation made artful, stood proud against the scarlet sky, with its constituents gathered on the lawn before it, straight-backed. It was the sort of grand opening ceremony the real thing never received, made real in retrospect by the application of a clever brush. In the centre, before the grand, old doors which had been depicted flung open in welcome, stood Charlie, Kiki curled regally in her arms, surrounded by her dear friends. As befitted a master craftsman, the work was incredible; they had supplied Hallward with a surfeit of photographs so that he had their likenesses, and the resemblance that resulted was both phenomenal and uncanny.

But it wasn't perfect.

Nobody had any photos of Alastor. All of the composite sketches drawn up from their descriptions of him managed to look... off. Subtly but vitally incorrect. More like his warning posters, a grotesque caricature. The dissonance of it threw off the whole painting, an ugly blemish that was unbecoming of the Overlord. After a number of failed attempts, it was unhappily deemed best to leave him out altogether.

He had never had much appreciation for the visual arts anyway.