Chapter Text
Angel tried very hard not to deck the Princess of Hell.
“The fuck are you doing in my room?” he demanded, with what he considered a huge amount of goddamn restraint for seven in the morning.
“Good morning~!” she sang cheerfully.
“I swear on all the Nine Rings of Hell, if you start your musical bullshit at this hour—”
“Hey, watch it!” Vaggie—also known as the Princess’ guard dog—barked at him.
He pulled out his reserve set of arms just so he could flip her off with all six of his hands, thus toppling himself back over onto his fluffy pink bed as he was no longer leaning on one of them. “Whatever it is, tell me later. Val kept me at the studio till like three hours ago, so get lost, okay, toots?”
“W-well, we actually found a solution to that!”
Angel opened one eye and gave her a flat, suspicious look. The last time she’d tried to get him out of work had Not Gone Well and she knew that.
“No, no, not like that!” she waved her hands around as she tried to assure him, her blond hair swaying with the movement. “What if there was a way to go back and undo the contract entirely?”
“‘Kay, you have my attention,” he admitted grumblingly, rolling over so he could sit up for real. He was naked under the blankets but didn’t bother covering himself. It wasn’t as if all of Hell hadn’t had a nice long look at him by this point. “But unless ya suddenly invented time travel, ya also have my irritation for waking me up so fuckin’ early,” he warned. With less than two hours of sleep to run on for the last forty-eight hours, he through he was being generous, all things considered.
She gave him a nervous but excited smile, starting to hop up and down in place. “Kind of!” she nodded, blinking hard. She reminded him of the golden, long-haired dog that his brother had when they were kids (before their Pops forced him to shoot the thing’s brains out to teach him some sort of lesson on the dangers of emotional weak points when he was fourteen).
He stood. Vaggie glared, Cha-Cha shrieked, and Angel ignored both of them, walking on his long, stocking-encased legs to his wardrobe and pulling out a dress to slip on over his head. “Well?” he asked once he stood in front of them in a light pink baby-doll number. It was probably one of the more conservative things in his closet, but it did show off a lot of leg. Heh. Lucky them. “Keep talking!”
“Okay, so it’s not quite time travel, but same idea,” she blurted out. “You know how I’ve been working on researching hypnotism?”
He did recall the obscene amount of self-help and new agey books that were stacked high around her office. No one could say she wasn’t dedicated (even if the well-intentioned Princess was a lot naive, totally misguided, and a good bit ignorant). However, he didn’t actually remember if she’d been researching hypnotism or not. He tended to zone out a bit when she got going. “Yeah,” he said anyways.
Vaggie gave him a flat look like she knew what he was thinking, but he didn’t even blink at the lie. The Princess didn’t either, not seeming to notice in the slightest. No harm, no foul.
“Okay, so I was thinking about what would happen if we deep-dived into your Akashic Records to convince your past self not to make the deal with him at all.”
“My what now?”
“Let’s just say it’s your memories!”
Was it, though? He thought. Fuck, he was tired. Running a hand over his face, Angel felt stupid for having believed she was going to say anything remotely important. But he was up now, so he supposed he might as well let her try. “How about this,” he began with a smile that felt more like gritting teeth. “I’ll let you practice your mumbo-jumbo moon crystal bullshit on me, and then you leave me alone for three days?”
Her face fell. “You don’t think it will work?” she asked, sadly.
Hell, she even looked like a kicked puppy. Too bad he didn’t have any extra energy to devote to tact.
“No,” he replied flatly. “I think I’m tired. But if I don’t let you do it now, you’re just going to wake me up at noon to pester me about it again. So do whatever it is you’re wanting to do and then fuck off let me sleep off my shifts.”
Her shoulders slouched for a moment before she straightened them with a determined look. “I’ll just have to show you it’s possible!”
Angel regretted every decision he’d made up until that point when she broke out into a song with bright eyes.
“Even if the chance is low,
what is there to lose,
when there’s everything to gain,
how could you say no?”
He sighed and let her get it over with.
Angel’s mind went blank some point after that.
⋐ ⊚ ⋑
Alastor waltzed into Hazbin Hotel after his outing, cane in his hand and a pleased smile on his mouth that only widened to include his teeth when he saw everyone gathered in the common room. To his delight—and disappointment for not having witnessed it himself—it looked like something rather chaotic had happened in his absence. “My, my, what’s going on here, I wonder?”
Everyone swiveled to face him. Their star (and only) resident sat on the red couch looking sleep-deprived and completely unamused. “Cha-Cha went ahead and used some of her new age bullshit to hypnotize my Akashic Records or somethin’ hoping she could convince my younger self not to sign a soul-contract with Valentino to begin with. It didn’t work and now she’s sad,” he summarized, looking decidedly done with the whole affair.
After a moment of processing from the Radio Demon, Alastor’s eyes shifted to radio dials. Much to Angel’s unease, he scrutinized him with a blank smile on his face, seeing what no other in the room could. All around them, the light seemed to have been sucked from the room and replaced with Alastor’s malevolent shadow, making the deep red of the wallpaper into something much darker than burgundy to the eyes of the room’s occupants. The sudden raucous laughter that followed was a shock because of its unfamiliarity, he was sure. Of course, it was a laugh track, but instead of many different voices, it was all Alastor’s voice in an amalgamation of every laugh he’d ever uttered, all jumbled together into one delightfully eerie soundtrack.
“Oh dear, oh dear, what have you done, you silly little canary,” he chortled. Radio static buzzed around them as he rejoiced in this new bit of chaos she had unknowingly sewn into the fabric of time and space. So full of good intentions and predictably disastrous results. He did so love his job. Where else did he get a front seat to this kind of lunacy? The light slowly returned to the room, making it warm and inviting again, despite the fact that the shadows were a little too stark and his shadow a little too large.
Charlie looked up from where she’d had her head buried in her hands. “What do you mean?”
“To put it simply, you split the timeline to create an entirely new one where his past self is aware of his current memories,” he replied through his fits of laughter. “My dear, you must remember that as the Princess of Hell, you have much more power than you think,” he finally explained once he’d pulled himself together enough to prance around her like he was witnessing some great fun. “In the hands of anyone else, those books would be the entirely useless drivel they were always meant to be. But because of your lineage, you essentially used your imagination to create an entirely new spell that would accomplish what you desired.”
“So I succeeded?” she asked, hopefully.
“Oh, no, of course not!” came the immediate reply. Alastor twirled his cane with a wide grin. “At least, not for this Angel. Whatever his past self does in his own timeline is out of everyone’s control, now. Ha-ha! What a doozy! How fun.”
“Great,” replied the spider, not seeming to care either way. “So does that mean a whore can finally get some fuckin’ beauty rest around here?”