Chapter Text
Alastor doesn’t remember the last time he felt truly angry, and the irony of reuniting with that emotion in Heaven, of all places, isn't lost on him. He'd been irritated, frustrated, even something bordering on embarrassed here and there during his recent tenure in Hell, but this simmering, unfamiliar anger itches at his palms even now and makes him squint all the harder at the searing blues and whites that burn through every window.
It was so stupid, the thing that landed him here, because of course it was. In life, he'd died at the maws of dumb beasts thanks to his own carelessness, and in the afterlife that same carelessness led him to abandon his moral code: he started caring for others, a glaring weakness he thought he'd sworn off after the death of his dear old mother.
And Lord! It didn't even happen during something showy and energizing like an extermination, but a routine walk through the outskirts of Pentagon City. He supposes it was inevitable that keen-eyed sinners would pick up on the importance of scavenging angelic weaponry after their stand against Adam proved that the angels' tools could be the difference between afterlife and double-death. He curses himself now for not expecting those same tools to be scraped together by unsavory hitmen promised unspeakable riches if they could do away with Lucifer's daughter. After all, who in their right mind would have it out for their ticket to salvation? But as with any political movement, there are naysayers and extremists, and a non negligible number of demons, maybe even Overlords, aren't fond of the idea of losing employees, soul deals, what have you, to the Other Side.
He'd gotten complacent, he supposes now, reflecting on it. The two of them felt unstoppable together, both at their respective peaks of power and influence. All eyes were on them and their hotel ventures, and they wouldn't have it any other way, but the watchful gaze of strangers started to feel ordinary and stopped being something to stay vigilant about. He remembers he was engrossed in something she was explaining, something mundane, something that made her bare her fangs in a wide smile, and it was instinctively rather than consciously that he yanked her into the safety of his shadow, taking her place in the line of an angelic arrow. Its aim was calibrated for her skull, which placed it at his heart, which was still recovering from Adam's near-fatal blow months prior. That bit of idiotic misfortune was the only reason it did him in.
He doesn't remember what happened between that and waking up in an administrative building in Heaven. Just black, black, black, then white, plus the hollowing absence of Charlie at his side. (Since when had her presence become so second nature to him?) He was vicious when he came to and realized where he was, nearly animalistic, forgoing his usual dramaturgy and taunting composure for raw, cornered violence. All he could offer in way of civilized thought was a ghastly, throat-tearing screech of, "Send me back, send me back, SEND ME BACK." The angels scrambled so fast, he would have found it hilarious if he wasn't nearly blinded by his own rage.
He hasn't yearned for Heaven or anything like it since he was a child too naive to know to want otherwise. He didn't yearn for it in adulthood, or as he took a finishing blow between the eyes, or as he sank into the stimulating game of climbing ranks in Hell. To the contrary, everyday he endeavored to dig himself deeper into his comfortable grave, to claw himself as far away from the pearly gates as physically possible. The mere thought of Heaven was so abstract in correlation to him, it was almost laughable. All the more that the Morningstar girl's dream of sending sinners up there tickled his funny bone! He wanted to watch others clamber for a carrot on a stick that didn't even exist. He wanted to taste the Morningstar girl's defeat when she watched her house of cards collapse around her. Then he wanted to pull her body out of the rubble, injured and malleable, and shape her into the perfect ally to his cause. With her on a leash, there'd be nothing between him and crushing all of Hell beneath his thumb.
That was what was on the vision board, anyway. He hadn't accounted for her plan actually working . To his credit, even Charlie's own girlfriend, her number one yesman, seemed stunned by the revelation that what they were doing wasn't just some long-form vanity project. If not even she could delude herself into believing it was possible, how could he?
If ever he'd doubted Pentious' graduation to Heaven, now he has firsthand confirmation beyond a shadow of a doubt that redemption is possible.
Well. Anyway. Once he put two and two together, he pitched a fit so devastating, it leveled an entire wing of Heaven's administrative building. His rampage would have continued if a handful of seraphim hadn't collaboratively chained and tranquilized him like a loose tiger.
It's a little jarring, dying and ending up somewhere new and then being promptly knocked out again, so when he wakes up, the confusion manages to outweigh the rage this time. He sits and listens to high ranking angels discussing what can be done with him. The holy chains around his body are unfathomably heavy, so he doesn't even make an attempt to break free from them. With any luck, the angels will dump him right back where he came from, and then this whole nightmare will be over.
"—just no way we can make that proposition to Lucifer…"
"And why not?? This is the Radio Demon we're talking about!!! There's no fucking way he got here through legitimate means! This has to be a-a-a, a glitch in the system or something… Like, this is all a part of a scheme of his or something, there's just no way…"
"Because. If we set a precedent of trading each other's undesirables back and forth, we're never going to see the end of Lucifer's daughter sending Hell's dredges up here."
"What, do you really think asking to send one sinner back to where he belongs is gonna open the floodgates j-just like that?"
"You know how Lucifer is with his daughter. He's already softening to her cause. If we let him have a foot in the door of thinking it's okay to ferry souls back and forth, it's over. At that point, Heaven and Hell may as well not even exist anymore. They'll become worse than meaningless."
If there's one thing Alastor thought even more impossible than himself ending up in Heaven, it's that a day would come where he hoped Lucifer would bail him out of a situation.
"So, what, then? We let this fucking hurricane loose on our own people??"
"I don't have all the answers yet—"
"Then stop acting like you do!!!"
"...If I may…"
The bickering creatures all whip their heads around at the gravelly sound of his voice. The degree of distortion surprises even himself a little, interference so loud in his tone that it almost sounds like he has no signal at all. Perhaps a result of his fatal injury, or perhaps because he's in a land with no service for his kind.
"...Not that I'm under any delusions that my opinion matters to you lot. But. I'll return willingly to Hell if only you point me in the right direction. I can even petition to Lucifer myself, if that'd speed along this pesky process."
His smile is carefully affixed but lacks energy that he sorely wishes he had at his disposal right now.
The angels exchange pensive expressions. The largest one speaks after a long pause. "Something this unprecedented may be out of our jurisdiction, even as seraphim. I'm going to escalate this case. For safety's sake, we're going to put you on a temporary hold in our corrective facilities. We should have answers for you in five to seven days, not counting Sunday of course."
Great. So there's a Heaven jail, and they're dumping him in it. The opposite of what he wanted to hear.
This couldn't get any worse.
Where did he go so wrong, or rather, right, he wonders as he lies listlessly against the cold marble floor of Heaven Jail. ('It's a corrective facility for guiding those who are starting to stray the path, not a jail,' one of the more annoying seraphim had insisted, like it matters.) Surely it wasn't just a one-off self-sacrifice that balanced his karmic scales? Even for how important Charlie is, there's no way her soul weighs as much as the hundreds of souls he's tormented, tethered, or snuffed out. And to begin with, his sacrifice was made on a reflex, the simple whim of a muscle twitch. No thought went into it, not like Pentious' knowingly ignorant sacrifice.
No thought at all…
…
Then again, reflexes are conditioned responses. So since when has he been trained to take a bullet for anyone, let alone the princess of Hell? How did she have him so whipped without him even realizing it? Not only can she fend for herself, but as far as he's always been concerned, she's just a very, very amusing piece on his chessboard. Well, she was. Is? God, he hopes he can go back to Hell. The sheer amount of unfinished business waiting for him is almost suffocating to think about. He wants to hear the end of the anecdote Charlie had been telling him before his untimely demise, and he remembers now that she was explaining a funny misunderstanding she'd gotten into with Angel Dust, something along the lines of catching him sneaking something into the hotel, thinking he was relapsing, only for him to reveal that he was squirreling his favorite candy up into his room so that no one would beat him to eating it.
Alastor thinks about the animated way she reenacted the encounter, putting on amusing approximations of Angel's mannerisms and exaggerating her own speech quirks when regaling her responses. He recalls the way her eyes wrinkled with affection for her friend's growth, her honey-sweet voice leaping and bounding alongside the smallest nuances of her thoughts, her arm hooked comfortably around his, like she belonged there.
…That. That right there. That was his problem. She made him weak. Or worse, he let himself be weakened by her. A better version of him would have never listened to her rambling beyond skimming the surface for information that might be pertinent to his endgame. A better version of him would have sensed the sniper five blocks sooner and knocked him from his perch with a well-timed tentacle. Instead, he allowed himself to get wholly engrossed by her, and that was his fatal error.
And even as he identifies the problem, his soul aches for lack of her. It catches him off-guard to feel something so strongly yet nestled so deep within him that there’s nothing he can do to soothe it, almost like pinching a nerve. It radiates outwards, icy hot and unrelenting, and he curls into himself in a futile attempt to mitigate it, only to remember that the pain isn't physical.
He hears himself laughing before he actually processes that he's laughing. It's a strange, scraping sound, so muddied that it hardly sounds like him anymore. It echoes cacophonously against the poor acoustics of his cell, amplifying itself until it's a cackle filling the whole space and flooding down the hall to the on-duty guard who bristles in fear.
It's just funny. It's really funny! The notorious Radio Demon, bested by a soft spot for Lucifer's spawn. His literal bleeding heart betrayed him, and now he's suffering a fate far worse than Hell: an eternity apart from the object of his unwanted affections. What a gaffe. His sides split from the brutality of his mirth. Interference hisses from between his teeth in gasping fits. Black projections wring themselves out of him in oozing, pulsating tendrils, pressing against the outer limits of his confinement until the bars creak and groan. The guard yells at him to knock it off, but he doesn't hear it over his fit of giggles.
So this is the despair he'd so longed for! A delicacy he thought he'd only ever witness others tasting, yet here it is, fizzling on his tongue, burning the back of his throat, making his molars ache. His antlers scrape against the ceiling until they break through and expose him to open air. He crawls out of the building with rasping, heaving breaths, like something aquatic washed up on shore, struggling to find life in something actively killing him. The force of his laughter urges his cold, shattered heart to keep beating regardless—a cruel thing. His rampage picks up where it left off days earlier, and lucky for him, it's a Sunday. It takes a good while before someone strong enough to restrain him shows up, so he maims and mangles in peace for a couple of blessed hours.
The closest he's come thus far to experiencing contentment while in Heaven.
In all fairness, his tantrum lands him an expedited meeting with Lucifer, overseen by the High Seraphim, Sera. The corner of Alastor's mouth twitched when she introduced herself by name. Suppose piety doesn't equal creativity around here. The three of them are seated around a small coffee table, this time in a simple meeting room detached from any main buildings, probably to minimize damages if Alastor decides to get destructive again.
Lucifer's bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his face against the backs of his wrists. His expression is stormy and nonspecific, a quiet before the storm. When he speaks, it's all too clear that he has many opinions on recent events and he's trying very hard to keep his cards close to his chest. "Alastor," he enunciates carefully. "I've heard it from Charlie already, but I need to hear your account too. How… did you get here."
Alastor instinctively wants to dangle Lucifer on a string and bullshit with him. The little man is SO delightfully easy to fluster, a quality most unbecoming on a man with as much power and responsibility as him. But Alastor's desire to play with his food is overpowered by his desire to get away from this wretched place as fast as possible, so he cuts to the chase. "Someone made an attempt on her life. I was careless and took the shot instead. Any other questions?"
Lucifer lets out an already-long-suffering sigh and readjusts his hat, leaning back in the white leather loveseat. "Did you do it on purpose?"
"What, die???"
"Well, no, but. Did you mean to take her place like that?"
"Ideally we both would have made it out unscathed and disposed of the rabble-rouser together. Seems either fate or my own clumsy streak had other ideas." A sudden dark thought crosses his mind, and he can't stop himself from blurting an anxious question. "Charlie… is she…?"
The king raises a brow but accepts the concern with surprisingly little resistance. Perhaps he can at least relate to the stress of imagining what could have happened to his little apple. "I'll tell you this much: Charlie more than had that rabble-rouser handled on her own. Let him live, of course, but my baby girl was close to having blood on her hands over the whole thing."
Alastor has to tame his smile into something neutral to bite back the swell of affection and pride he feels upon hearing this. "Pity," he says, purposely vague about which part he's referring to. "...Glad she's unharmed, though."
"So it's true then. The goddamned Radio Demon sacrificed himself to save my daughter." He rubs his face and groans loudly, looking much more like an overworked father than royalty at the moment. "Why did it have to be you of all people…"
Sera remains impartial and quiet, mostly only present to make sure Alastor doesn't try to murder any more angels.
Speaking of. "Speaking of sacrifices. Didn't I do away with a good dozen or so of your tenants, my lady?"
Sera blinks with a noisy flap of her eyelashes, much more akin to the beating of bird wings. "You certainly injured them grievously, but it's not anything they can't recover from. I must ask you to refrain from doing such a thing again, though, or else we'll be forced to move you to a more permanent incarceration facility."
Ah, so there IS a proper Heaven Jail. And he should have figured the damn halo slingers wouldn't die, not without the pierce of angelic weaponry. Another pity. "Are my actions not grievous enough to warrant a fall from grace? Wouldn't it be only fair to send me away from your people, back to the depths of Hell?"
The seraph's stately expression is only slightly marred with irritation. "Would that I could."
"Why can't you?" Alastor hisses, doing his best not to sound distraught at the answer.
"It isn't my decision to make. It's up to Higher Powers. And neither Lucifer nor I are privy to what the exact… qualifiers for that decision are. Loathe as I am to admit."
Alastor pivots to look at Lucifer, and the man's terse expression and slight nod seems to cosign this sentiment. So it's true; not even the top dogs of Heaven or Hell know what separates an angel from a sinner. Their unwillingness to send him back isn't unwillingness at all, but their hands being bound by some unknowable yellow tape. And if he continues to act out in an attempt to re-earn eternal damnation, there's a good chance he'll land himself in an indestructible heavenly cage for the rest of existence. He swallows the first lump of actual terror he's felt in a good long while. Heaven sure is reacquainting him with a lot of unsavory emotions.
"Alastor, I hate your guts and I'm happy you're a million miles away from my daughter, but I have to be honest. She's NOT fucking happy with me over this." Lucifer lets this confession slip like he's actually hoping for advice on the matter. Alastor just tightens his smile and lets the manlet prattle on. "And… I feel like I owe you one, since you were protecting her. I doubted her when she first told me you had her best interest in mind, but you've done a lot to watch out for her ever since you two opened your little… Hogwash Hotel thing together."
Oh, he loathes this pint-sized egoist so much. He does everything in his power to keep that hatred off his face, though.
"Erm. I think… I think I didn't realize just how attached she's gotten to you," he mutters now, clearly begrudging the thought but trying to come to terms with reality. "Don't know why. But. I hate to see her cry so much. So… I'm trying to petition for your condemnation. But it might take a while."
"Hmm." Alastor levels a half-lidded expression at the king. He knows what those words mean: weeks, months, maybe even years of Lucifer dragging his feet through bureaucratic bullshit. He wouldn't be surprised if it culminated in Lucifer 'accidentally' missing a deadline and having to start the process all over. He knows how Hell's politics tend to play out, and they are not a game for impatient men such as himself. "If the petition for condemnation involves recent sins, I'm more than happy to confess the worst of them. How's sexual congress with a princess out of wedlock, for starters?"
Lucifer's expression freezes in place. Sera flaps her lashes again.
"Not to mention dozens of attempts at murdering denizens of Heaven, wanton destruction of private property, extremely vivid thoughts of deicide that I would have acted upon if I was given the opportunity to…"
"Alastor," Sera says warningly.
"...and if we're circling back to the lust-related crimes, indecent thoughts of the princess, unprotected intercourse with the princess, degenerative fetishistic plays with the princess…"
Lucifer howls like he's being splashed with burning water and actually slaps his hands over his ears to block this conversation out. Sera just keeps blinking.
"...all the cannibalism goes without saying, delusions of grandeur, did I mention semi-public sex? With the princess, to be clear. I don't know if specifying that it was with the princess adds any karmic weight to the sin, but it's best to be sure…"
"You… mother… fucker…"
"...Pride, I suppose? I'm quite proud of my sins, don't think I'd take any of them back! What else, I know there's more… Ah! Oh, but that one might be a little too embarrassing to admit, even for me…"
Lucifer is as tight as a coil for a tense moment before he pounces, tackling Alastor with so much forward momentum that it knocks all three of them backwards. Sera leaps to her feet and tries to quell the situation with angelic power, but Lucifer throws up a shield immediately, hellbent on killing Alastor a third time himself, uninterrupted.
Alastor just laughs and laughs and lets it happen. What's he got to lose at this point? His dark blood splatters brilliantly against the marble floors, against the white leather, against the pearlescent walls, splashing Sera's aghast face, soaking Lucifer's suit, dirtying everything it touches, just the way he likes. Now that's what he originally set out to do. To stain and corrupt, to drag the princess into the darkest pits of depravity with him. How he'd dreamed of carving out that hole for both of them! A beautiful little love nest for the two most nefarious demons Hell would have ever seen.
But instead, he let himself get pulled into the light. She dragged him into her orbit and dug her clever, kind claws into him and staked a claim. She peeled back his skin and made a blanket out of him. She hollowed out his marrow to make more room for herself. She gripped his heart without any thought of what it'd do to him. Did she know she was ruining him when she did that? Did she know that she'd turned him into home, and now he can't function without her taking up residence inside of him?
He doubts it.
He blacks out again.