Chapter Text
When they first return to the hotel—Lucifer dragged there with one arm flung across each of Vaggie and Charlie’s shoulders, Husk and Cherri huddled to each other’s sides, and Niffty and Baxter buzzing excitedly together at the back of their sad little procession—Alastor flings open the doors to their grand parlor, gestures whole-heartedly with his staff, and watches as the fine, golden entertainment center that Lucifer conjured so many months ago, up to and especially the television at its core, sails merrily through the nearest window.
Then Alastor makes his way up ten flights of stairs and a ladder, and does not emerge of his own volition for forty-eight hours straight.
Oh, he is, of course, not uninterrupted. It’s hardly twelve hours before Charlie has made her way up the ladder to his studio, knocking with a nervous and all too animated pitch against the trapdoor for want of doorbell.
“Alastor?” she calls, in a voice overladen with anxiety. “Um—I know you’re probably super busy, since you just got back, and all, but we were just wondering if you’re…”
Alastor sincerely considers unbolting the door to put an end to the thrice-cursed, thoroughly unsettling sentence that he’s sure Charlie has started. The unspoken ‘okay’ hangs in the air like an executioner’s blade.
But Charlie loses her nerve for a moment too long.
“Absolutely mired in the creative process?” Alastor completes the call and response. “Of course! Why, what will our public do without a reliable source of information about the chaos of these past few days!”
There is a beat, and the low creak of wood and a poorly-oiled hinge give away Charlie’s attempt to enter uninvited. He has always admired her intrepid spirit—but it’s not quite what Alastor needs just now.
“Alastor, are you sure,” Charlie begins again, halting as she sets down the same path a second time.
There’s nothing for it, then. With one flick to a control board, and the soft click of a microphone switched on, Alastor smiles for the Pentagram.
“Good evening, everyone—I hope you all abhorred our commercial break!”
Several hours after his broadcast ends, Alastor takes a stab at sleeping it off. Unfortunately, that makes it several hours after the rest of the hotel has decided to rise for a new day.
Alastor is woken from the first fully horizontal rest he’s achieved in weeks at least two days too early and to a series of military-precise raps to his trapdoor. Worse than that, his neck still aches.
He presses himself up from the loveseat with a slow, bone-cracking stretch. It’s at least possible that he ought to have returned to the hotel proper in order to occupy a bed—but doing so would have almost certainly involved direct contact with the hotel’s residents. And Alastor has yet to reconstruct the lifetime of patience that Vox’s continued attention depleted over the past few weeks.
“Hey, uh—” The trapdoor begins, in a voice that suspiciously resembles that of a repentant former exorcist. “Charlie wanted to let you know that we made brunch. If you want any.”
This feels close to the most ridiculous thing Alastor has ever heard, barring only ‘are you okay.’ He stares at the trapdoor in offense and disbelief.
“I’m perfectly equipped to fend for myself, Vagatha!” As he plainly and excruciatingly demonstrated, not one full day past. As if with flashcards, for the slower members of the Pentagram.
“…that actually doesn’t sound half-bad,” Vaggie mumbles to herself, beyond the door. But then, like a blessing Alastor has never claimed to deserve, the ladder creaks with Vaggie’s departure.
He can’t get back to sleep.
On the second day, Alastor begins to feel less like the presence of another soul in his same mile radius is a mortal insult. It’s for that reason, and that reason alone, that he opens the trapdoor when said other soul knocks.
“Thought you might need this,” Husk says, and extends—with just one hand on the ladder, immediately begging the question of how he managed to scale it—the most overladen Bloody Mary that Alastor has ever seen. Nevermind the celery stick, the thing is topped with a skewer of bacon and deep-fried human tongues.
Alastor narrows his eyes.
“What are you after?” he demands, and takes the offer anyway. He’s four for four on deals these days; it’s a fine time to keep playing. As Husk completes his climb up the ladder, Alastor takes a fortifying sip.
“The kids are worried.”
“Hmm.” Alastor considers this. “Our youngest resident is eighty years old.”
What’s stranger, Husk doesn’t immediately grow snappish and rude. Alastor withdraws the skewer, pops a tongue into his mouth, and feels remarkably better than he has these past two days.
“I know you’ve got shit to do up here,” is that a lie he detects in Husk’s tone? And for what possible purpose? “But I think the Princess would at least appreciate some proof of life. If you can spare it.”
Alastor laughs.
“Well, you know I don’t excel at sparing lives, Husker! But oh, I suppose I’ll take the thought under advisement.”
Husk does bristle then, to Alastor’s great delight, and must decide that he’s achieved what he came for. All the better, because just being asked for anything has peculiarly grated on Alastor’s nerves!
On the third day, some fucking idiot decides that Alastor must not be serious and knows that Lucifer is no threat at all, and determines to attack the hotel. Alastor’s is the perfect vantage point to watch the group of suicidal ideologues march forward, and can only be disappointed—not surprised—that at their helm is one of the poor excuses for an Overlord that Vox had cowed to his side.
There’s really something to be said about quitting while one is behind.
What does surprise Alastor is that he finds himself halfway willing to watch this little confrontation play out. It wouldn’t be difficult to kill the band of losers, and god knows he could still use an outlet. But he can’t help but think—what would become of the hotel if he just stayed upstairs? How long would a pacifist and her bodyguard, a drunk and an anarchist, a bloodthirsty maid and a glorified lab assistant stand against the forces of Hell if they came? How would Lucifer fare in the fray? Would he perhaps fly into a wall if a tunnel were painted on it, to complete his Looney Tunes series of failures and humiliations?
Alastor watches the first shot ring out, and decides that it won’t do to let this sort of disrespect pass without comment so soon after his convalescence. For good measure, he starts a broadcast before descending to the fray.
“First caller—you’re live!” Alastor calls out, landing with a creak of concrete and the crackle of a live wire. “Please do tell our audience: What did it feel like to swear fealty to an upstart entertainment system?”
Prick—it would be, wouldn’t it. The name tells all—spins his revolver around one overconfident fingertip.
“I don’t know,” he says gruffly, “how’d it feel to eat shit?”
The studio audience overlays Alastor’s laughter, and he overlays the last word with a loud blip.
“Perhaps you can tell me in a moment.”
It barely feels like a moment at all. Prick is only reckless, but his goons are sloppy, the sort of useless fodder that Alastor sends sweeping with a shadow and a twirl of his staff. The guns aren’t even firing angelic bullets—it’s been seven years, sure, but this is what passes for an Overlord now? It’s almost boring. It would be boring, if Alastor didn’t make a point of ripping Prick’s men away from him in gratuitous waves, or standing in front of him—there for a moment, melted to shadow in the next, and towering above him by ten feet as Prick pulls the trigger of his empty revolver again and again, backpedaling as Alastor reaches down to pluck him from the ground.
“You want to kill me, you bastard?!” Prick shouts, with apparently renewed courage in the grip of one enormous claw. “Do it! I dare you!”
That, at least, will be entertaining, when it comes down to it. Alastor is at his best when the crying and begging takes some working towards.
“Oh, not just yet, my impatient fellow,” he says jauntily, grinning with an open maw. “But do tune in for tonight’s program!”
The infernal microphone clicks off, and in a single swift motion, the shadows swallow Prick whole. And Alastor feels perfectly pleasant and unchanged until he’s shrunk himself down to an appropriate size.
It’s only then that he notices his live audience.
“Alastor, are you alright?”
A loud crackle of static rings out when Charlie extends her hand. She didn’t even touch him—not yet. Her fingertips stretch just clear of the tattered fabric of Alastor’s tailcoat as he sweeps backward in one neat square-step to avoid her.
“Right as rain, my dear!” Alastor says, as if Charlie hasn’t just watched his smile go tighter with the quick movement, strained along the edges of his gums. “And how are you, this fine morning?”
“I’m fine,” she says. Alastor’s head quirks to one side, as though he can’t imagine why she stressed the first word. “Alastor…”
Surely he’s done enough to convey how little he wants this. Alastor raises one eyebrow with deliberate intention to convey it again. He is not a child, reaching out for something soft to hang onto at any sign of dismay. He is not Lucifer, hanging between the young girls who very well should be his burden as though it’s their duty to lift him from some piteous pit of despair.
He is fine!
“Alastor, you’re bleeding!”
Charlie grabs him by the arm, and it’s all Alastor can do not to fling her clear across the city block. And he assumes it’s his forearm that’s started up again—given the row of teeth that embedded in it some days ago—until Charlie lays her hand on his chest.
Fuck.
“Now, now, dear, this sort of scene would do well without an audience,” Alastor says hastily, and all but drags Charlie into the lobby behind him.
The doors click shut with disturbing finality.
“Alastor—why wouldn’t you say anything!” She rounds on him again, and Alastor—for all that he doesn’t intend to—takes a half-step back. “We’ve all been worried sick about you for days, and I had half the business district in and out of here getting first aid from Vaggie and I and stitches from Niffty and—you’ve been up there still hurt this whole time??”
He’s not sure what he’s meant to say to any of that. And blood continues to pool through his dress shirt.
“My dear, I’ve taken only a three week sabbatical, and you start converting the hotel into an emergency room?”
“And that’s the other thing!” Charlie exclaims, completing a full frustrated circle that ends with a finger pointed towards Alastor’s chest. “You were gone! For three! Weeks! And Vox could have been doing anything to you and Husk said that you made the deal to protect me and I couldn’t pull it all together to come help and he—and you—”
Each breath Charlie sucks in to continue is more reedy than the last. By the time she cuts off, it’s to press a full fist to her mouth, tears flooding her high cheekbones as she stamps a foot on the lobby’s ostentatious tile floor in righteous indignation to her body’s own response.
“And I hate that I do this,” she squeaks out, “I shouldn’t be crying, you should be crying!”
For some unknown reason, Alastor’s dead heart hammers ferociously against his ribs. The blood loss, perhaps. And he doesn’t have even the beginning of an idea what to do with that.
“That’s alright,” he says, a shot in the dark.
“It’s not alright,” Charlie whines through her hands.
He should have anticipated this sort of thing when he adopted a Morningstar. However informally or driven by impulse.
Alastor has been quite sure, these past days, that he would be content not to touch another soul ever again, but a contrary impulse now stirs. He reaches out to take Charlie’s hands down from her face, guiding her like a doll to stand with better posture. And it’s too sentimental by half, but damn them all. He strokes a tear from her cheek.
“What would make it alright?” Alastor ventures, scrutinizing the dangerous wobble of Charlie’s lower lip.
“Can you let my dad heal you?” She asks, and Alastor physically recoils.
Charlie sniffles through an inappropriate laugh.
“I know you hate him, just—please?”
Alastor considers her with quiet contemplation.
“Perhaps,” he says. “Would you do me a favor?"