Chapter Text
Angel Dust is on his back, moaning, as a bear—both literal and metaphorical, thank you!—tugs two of his arms behind his back and shoves him down onto the bed. It’s a very typical scene, which would normally bore him, but the script in question has a twist in about thirty seconds that transitions into him riding the guy, which is—well, not exactly incredibly out there, either, but he’s spent the past four hours in a number of variations of ‘on his back’ so he’s just about ready to start trading out the rug burn on his shoulders for some rug burn on his knees.
Unfortunately, it’s only twenty-five seconds before something that definitely isn’t the bed lurches. He’s ready for Valentino to shout ‘cut!’ and figure out what piece of furniture has given out—but as Angel glances up, searching for his boss’s face, something shudders again.
Between one blink and the next, he’s back at the Hotel, ass on the ground and staring up not at Valentino’s exasperated moue but at the faces of Charlie and Lucifer Morningstar himself.
They’re whispering intensely, and after a second Angel notices Vaggie lurking in the background as well. The whole crowd is at a bit of a distance, but it’s definitely not actually far enough away to stop him from hearing them.
“—care if he’s okay, dad, he’s my friend,” Charlie is whispering, clear as day.
“Okay, and I get that,” Lucifer says, palms out, “and I promise that none of this was on purpose, these rituals are just notoriously unreliable, which I think I definitely said before we got started—”
“What the fuck?” Angel Dust asks, blinking when his voice comes out lower than he means it to. Eugh, getting taken off guard always throws his vocal training habits to shit.
Charlie full-on startles at the words, jumping sharply before whirling around to stare at him. Lucifer’s reaction is less dramatic, though he does stare at Angel’s face, perturbed. Vaggie looks a little like she’s considering reaching for her spear.
Angel frowns, reaching back to push himself up—
And promptly falls over with a yelp when the arms he had been relying on for that motion turn out to be missing.
“What the fuck!” he demands again, shrill. Two arms! Forget having four instead of six, he only has two! “What the fuck happened to my arms!”
“Okay, um!” Charlie is slowly approaching him, hands wrung together like she doesn’t know whether to reach out or give him space. “I—know all this must be really alarming, but, um, Alastor—”
“Alastor?” Angel asks, scrambling to his feet with the clumsy assistance of half of his usual number of manifested upper body extremities—and swaying, awkward, when he realizes that the top of his head barely clears Charlie’s. Something’s really fucked up with his shoes, too, what the hell is—
“What the hell?” Vaggie mutters. “That both looks and sounds so weird.”
“Alastor,” Charlie insists, stepping forward and finally putting a hand on Angel’s arm. “Are you… okay?”
Angel stares at her for a long, long moment. Static crackles in the background. He looks down at his own two—two!—hands. “Oh, no,” he says. The voice that comes out, it turns out, is not his own at all.
“Oh!” Charlie looks more worried. “Okay, I didn’t think you’d—um, be super open about that, but that’s good! The first step to solving a problem—”
“Charlie,” Angel interrupts. “I ain’t fuckin’ Alastor.”
Charlie’s breath hitches.
He waves a hand in front of his face. Pitch black skin that he hadn’t actually realized wasn’t a pair of gloves before now, bright claws just a shade closer to magenta than red, blindingly crimson sleeve. Fuck. Double fuck. Quadrouple fuck.
“Charlie,” he repeats, because maybe if he says her name enough times she will pull herself together and fix this. “Charlie, what did you do?”
“If you’re not Alastor,” Charlie starts, “then who—”
“Angel Dust!” he throws his hands into the air, knocking Charlie’s hand off his shoulder. “Fuckin’—it’s Angel! And, FYI, I was kinda in the middle of somethin’! At work!”
Oh, fuck, Val is going to kill him if he just vanished into thin air, never mind whether Angel did it on purpose or not. Shit, shit, shit—where the hell even is his body right now? He can’t just go back wearing Alastor like an ill-fitting coat, even if Valentino would probably be over the moon at a chance to film a porno using the Radio Demon, so unless Alastor—
Alastor. Angel goes cold. If he’s here, then where is Alastor?
Lucifer snickers in what sounds like HD surround sound to Angel’s borrowed ears. Something on top of his head moves before he even remembers that Alastor has the ears of a deer, which are apparently fully mobile, and now angling towards the king of hell. “At work? They’ve probably traded places. Golly, can you imagine?”
Fuck, are the new deer furry attachments why he can hear everything so well? He’s not sure what they’re doing right now—didn’t know that they even could move without his permission—but he’s too unnerved by the sudden realization of what must be going on in Valentino’s studio at this very moment.
At least he is until the rapidly swiveling satellite dishes on top of his head catch Vaggie snorting quietly, rolling her eyes.
“It’s not funny,” he says, taking a step forward—and promptly trips, falling flat on his face.
“Fuck!” Angel howls as Lucifer starts actually losing it in the background. “What the fuck did Smiles do to his shoes, holy shit—”
He can’t stand this anymore—actually he literally can’t stand, he thought that Alastor had normal feet. Those are easier to walk on than the semi-digitigrade nonsense Angel woke up in hell with, but—he starts yanking off the boots, no longer giving a shit about maintaining Alastor’s privacy in that regard.
The boots turn out to have heel inserts. The inserts turn out to be for the explicit purpose of making it look like Alastor has normal feet, because as it turns out, the guy has fucking hooves. His legs are just as black as his hands, and the hooves themselves are the same pink-red as his claws, and standing on them is so much easier even if it means being fucking barefoot. Whatever. They’re hooves. It’s not like it matters.
“I hate this,” Angel mutters as he clambers to his feet, leaving the boots on the floor. “And shut up! It’s not funny.”
He’s too—angry, the word he’s going to use is angry—to care that he just told the ruler of hell to shut up. Luckily, Lucifer is standing with his face to the wall, shoulders trembling violently as he presses a hand to his face in a very poor attempt at muffling his laughter. Even Vaggie looks a little amused, as she helps pull him up from the floor.
“It’s a little bit funny,” she tells him. “Calm down, Angel, your job is going to be fine. You’re the one always saying how you’re hot shit. I get that this is pretty messed up, but nobody’s going to fire you for something that isn’t your fault.”
As if. Angel would love to get fired. Ever since the hotel’s been rebuilt, it’s like Valentino’s been taking his spite at Angel’s even shinier new digs out on his ass. Literally.
“Don’t you think Alastor might be a little uncomfortable?” Charlie butts in, worrying at her lip. “I mean, you know how he reacted when Angel hit on him. If he’s at the… Angel’s job…”
Vaggie snorts. “Sure. He’s probably going to think it’s hilarious, Charlie. That guy doesn’t take anything seriously. And look! The healing worked!”
She gestures at Angel’s torso, making him blink when Charlie immediately starts frantically patting his chest.
“Uh—?”
“It worked!” Charlie declares. “Dad—dad, look! It worked! No more angelic wound!”
“Oh,” Lucifer says, sounding several degrees less enthusiastic. “That’s great, kid! See, I told ya I knew what I was doing!”
“Yeah, that’s why Angel Dust is standing in front of us while Alastor is—what, in the porn studio?” Vaggie says, making a face.
“How long has it been?” Angel interrupts, wincing when his voice cracks. Jesus fuck, he’s glad that Smiles apparently isn’t bleeding out anymore, even though he’s not sure he even knew Alastor was hurt, but the only thing he cares about right now is making sure whatever this new situation is undoes itself immediately. “Since—since I passed out?”
Also, fuck these unfamiliar vocal chords. He feels like a teenager again. The way that his heart keeps kicking into high gear doesn’t help, the ears on his head swiveling every time anybody so much as shuffles their feet. It’s like being on the verge of a panic attack all of the time. Does Alastor actually fucking live like this, or the ritual just decide that Angel gets to keep the deer instincts and his PTSD?
“Um—maybe a minute or two?” Charlie hazards a guess. “You woke up pretty much right away, there wasn’t a wait or anything!”
“Okay. Okay.” That’s fine! Two minutes is… how much damage could Alastor do in two minutes? “That’s not too bad!”
How much damage could Valentino do in two minutes?
Angel swallows, wispy black magic flickering around his shadow. Whatever Alastor’s freaky powers are, they seem to react to his own emotions—he’s not managed to figure out where the radio filter is, but every time he flinches or twitches, there’s little pops of radio static, so clearly it’s somewhere, just—
“Can ya give me a ride?” he asks, pitchy, wringing his hands together. “To the—the studio?”
It’s going to take so much longer than two minutes to get there. Oh, fuck, he feels a little bit faint. What the hell is wrong with Alastor’s endocrine system? There is no way the guy feels like this all of the time, he’s way too composed and terrifying.
(How much damage could Valentino do in twenty minutes, to another overlord that his kinda-boyfriend publicly opposes, trapped in Angel’s comparatively weak-ass body, in the middle of a fucking porn studio filled with his cronies?)
“Of course!” Charlie says, turning back to her dad as she reaches for the ritual tome they’d apparently been using for this whole thing. “Can you wait, like—half an hour, maybe, so we can figure out what part of the ritual we need to rerun to switch you guys back? It shouldn’t take that long. It was supposed to just be a healing, but we needed something from a redeemed sinner, and heaven kinda-sorta agreed that you counted, so I borrowed your—sorry, I’m rambling! I just mean, you might not even need to get a ride if we can fix it!”
Another half an hour. Angel’s stomach lurches with nausea.
“Charlie,” he says, grabbing her arm roughly. “You have to take me now.”
“Hey!” Vaggie steps forward and slaps his arm away. “Don’t grab her like that!”
“I’m not—” Angel takes a ragged breath, frustrated, and stumbles back as the words crackle on their way out. The world flickers around him, spotting black in places, and—oh, if Alastor’s stupid deer body is about to make him pass out, he swears… “You don’t understand!”
“Just calm down!” Vaggie says. “We’ll take you! Alastor wouldn’t fuck up your work, Angel, I was just joking earlier. He’s probably using the opportunity to mess around a little or something. It’s going to be fine, I promise.”
“I don’t know,” Charlie says, chewing on her lip as shadows swirl around Angel.
“I just need to go there now,” Angel blurts—
And then the shadows surge, overtaking his field of vision entirely.
When Angel next manages to open his eyes, he barely feels like he has any. Everything swims in shades of gray for several long seconds before it comes into focus, and his own body is even worse—looking down at his hands again just nets him flickering darkness, like he’s melded entirely with the shadows. And he is in the shadows—one of the corners of Valentino’s studio, brightly lit in the center and dark along the walls, hovering by a wall as he watches Valentino stalk out of his director’s chair and towards center-stage, looking righteously pissed off at—
Himself. Alastor.
Valentino is looming over Alastor, chittering like an angry moth as he prods what he thinks is Angel Dust’s chest with a pointed finger.
“Hey!” Valentino is saying. “What the fuck are you doing, Angel? I don’t pay you to fucking play starfish! Put some energy into it! Fuck, it’s like every take is worse than the last…”
The poking stops when Alastor catches Valentino’s hand, looking fully unimpressed as his eyes dart around the room. The wicked, narrow-eyed grin looks uncanny on Angel’s face—and even worse, it looks smarmy. Like he’s about to talk back.
Fuck, Angel thinks. Manifest! Move! Why am I still stuck like this?! Smiles usually just teleports around instantly, doesn’t he?
All the thought earns him is a sudden flicker of the world before he reappears, closer to the stage—but still trapped at the edge of the light, unable to cross the barrier. Nobody reacts—it’s like he’s actually become one with the shadows. Nobody can fucking see him, and as he tries to rattle at one of the lights, he realizes he also can’t fucking touch anything.
Shit, fuck, balls.
There’s no way Alastor hasn’t cottoned onto what has happened to him. He’s a canny guy—Angel is sure that he’s adaptable enough to figure out the implications of his situation without giving himself away. To be honest, the most worrisome part that Angel isn’t sure of is how his contract with Valentino would even work right now—whether Valentino has rights to the body that Alastor is inhabiting, or if he now has control over Angel in the body of the Radio Demon.
…Maybe it’s a good thing he has fuck-all of a clue about how to operate this body.
“—take it from the fucking top,” Valentino is saying, waving at the right-hand cameraman. “And make sure you get a close-up of his cunt after the creampie, we have extra of that face wash shit if we need to spruce it up.”
Eugh, Angel Dust hates that stuff. It’s so much colder than the real thing. He used to actually use it on his face, too, and now he really can’t deal with the associations. There is no way that Alastor—
“I think,” Alastor says, gently but firmly removing Valentino’s hand from his person, “that I am going to take a break from filming today.”
Angel winces. Valentino’s eyes widen as he smiles dangerously.
“Oh?” Val asks, leaning in closely and trailing a hand up the side of Alastor’s neck. His voice clicks as he talks, a menacing cue that Angel never noticed before it started making him flinch subconsciously whenever Val got angry. Alastor’s expression visibly twitches at the invasive gesture. Fuck, he’s such a bad actor! “What a surprising decision for you to make unilaterally, Angel Dust! Whyever would that be, my dear?”
“I’m feeling ill,” Alastor says with a tight smile. Val looks at him, and there are about two seconds during which Angel knows he’s going to pay for this later but still has hope that it’s a good day, one of the days when Val thinks his backtalk is endearing, like a cute puppy that’s pissed on the carpet and not just some disobedient mutt—
But then Alastor jerks his head away from Val, moving to get off the bed, and Valentino backhands him across the face.
The filming crew takes that as their cue to start quietly filtering out of the studio. Nobody wants to get caught in the crossfire of whatever is about to happen, and it’s been a long time since Valentino using a heavy hand with Angel Dust was new. Nobody flinches anymore, not even the one squirrely little aide that always clearly has to stop herself. The top of her head barely reaches Valentino’s hip, though, and whatever anxiety overtakes her at these moments doesn’t prevent her from averting her eyes and scampering out of the room ahead of everyone else.
Angel’s body is flung to the side with the force of the blow, and Valentino catches Alastor by the jaw before he can recover himself, yanking him up to his knees with a harsh grip on his face. Alastor is clearly spitting mad despite the new bruise swelling up his cheekbone, and his upper pair of arms twitches like he’s trying to do something—but nothing happens, not even a faint writhing of shadows. Angel Dust isn’t sure what he expects, but it’s not the way that Alastor’s eyes blow wide as he lashes out and tries to hit Valentino, flinging an arm out clumsily like he isn’t sure which of his limbs he’s controlling.
Valentino catches it easily and just looks at him like he’s fucking embarrassed to even be in the same room.
“What are you on today, Angel?” Valentino asks, with that disappointed, condescending fucking tone he uses when he thinks he knows what’s going on and definitely knows he’s already won. He reaches up with another hand to jab at Alastor’s eye, spreading the lid open wide as he tries to squint at the pupil and Alastor claws at his hand. “PCP? Coke? I can’t see your pupils in this fucking lighting.”
“Maybe I just think your script is poorly-written trash,” Alastor offers, like a man who has a death wish but refuses to believe that anything can touch him.
Val’s throat clicks sharply. “Cute,” he says, and hauls Alastor up by his hair. Alastor yelps, snarling through the pain, and all four of his hands fly to his head—but there’s nothing he can do against the likes of Valentino unless he suddenly figures out how to pull Angel’s guns out, which would make this whole situation so much worse. They’re tipped in angelic steel these days, but it’s not like Valentino was stupid enough to leave a ‘feel free to murder me, by the way!’ loophole in Angel’s fucking contract.
(Still, the way that Alastor is able to try to attack Valentino with genuine intent to harm—Val doesn’t seem to have noticed thanks to how ineffective his efforts are, but Angel is pretty sure that Alastor isn't bound by Angel’s chains.)
It’s Angel Dust who should be putting a stop to this. But no matter how hard he throws himself at the two of them, he can’t leave the shadows—and even when they step into him, it’s like he’s a ghost, his violent attempt at tackling Alastor out of Valentino’s arms just discorporating him into so much smoke.
By the time he figures out how to reform, he has to use the last vestiges of his incorporeal nature to slip through the door that Valentino is dragging Alastor through, down the hall and into a side room. He knows exactly where Val is taking Alastor, and that realization more than anything forces him back into solidity, though seemingly only so that his heart can start pounding all the way up into his fucking throat.
“—go of me,” Alastor is snarling, teeth bared. He’s barely smiling anymore, though the obligatory up-tilt at the corners of his lips is clearly unnerving Valentino as much as it’s pissing him off. “You disgusting, degenerate—”
“Yes, keep listing words that start with ‘d,’” Val says, smooth as butter as he flings Alastor onto the four-poster bed he keeps in this particular side room of the studio. It’s Val’s room, sort of. Not the one he usually sleeps in, but he’s pulled enough all-nighters—and fucked Angel Dust at work enough times—that it didn’t take him long to decide that he needed a crash pad on this floor, too. “I’m sure you’ll figure out the right one eventually.”
“Dick!”
Valentino barks a laugh. “And here I thought you only had fluff in that pretty little head of yours! Now…”
Alastor is winding up to spit more vitriol, and Valentino slaps him again, deliberately hitting him on the same side like he often does. The slap lands heavy and Angel winces at the impact of it—and then outright flinches when Val does it again, sending Alastor sprawling across the bed, reeling and discombobulated.
“Be a good little whore,” Valentino finishes, “and spread those long fucking legs of yours, hmm? You were fucking nothing before you met me, Angel Dust, and if don’t want to go back to being nothing—well, if you’re having a hard time filming, then maybe you just need some practice.”
“No,” Angel Dust whispers at the same time as Alastor hisses it. He presses his hands over his mouth, closing his eyes as he realizes the direction this is heading.
“That wasn’t a request,” Val says, and reaches for Alastor.
Angel lunges for Val again, and trips through bed and people both, stumbling to the other side. When he hits the wall, that, for some fucking reason, is tangible—and he presses into the corner, bunching himself into it with his hands over his ears. He can’t do anything. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to see this.
Alastor, though—Alastor fucking bites Valentino. Val is clearly reaching for his throat, and the moment his hand comes anywhere near Alastor’s face, he sinks his teeth into it. The pain of it sends Valentino crying out, grabbing for Alastor with his other hands, and Alastor just about fucking loses it.
Angel Dust is not a bad fighter, if he says so himself. He can hold his own, with or without his guns—and he’s the first to admit that he fights like a street brawler. He’s hardly had formal training, not like the kinds of moves he saw Alastor pull out against Adam. But what Alastor is doing now—
It’s not a fight. It’s a cornered fucking animal facing up against a predator three times its size, no options left except for to bite.
Valentino, on the other hand, is not a skilled hand-to-hand combatant. He does, however, have four arms that he actually knows how to coordinate, a deceptive amount of muscle for someone with such a gangly frame, and multiple feet of height on Angel Dust.
It barely takes a few seconds, really, before Alastor is pinned to the bed by his throat. He claws at Valentino’s sleeves as he tries to kick him away, but Angel doesn’t have the same razor-sharp weapons on his fingertips that Alastor is used to, and Valentino’s reach is too long for Alastor to be able to go for anything sensitive. He yanks Alastor up by the throat and cracks his skull sharply against the headboard, blood blooming through the pink of Angel Dust’s hair. That, finally, is what makes Alastor go limp, dazed.
Throughout it all, Valentino is laughing. “Oh,” he says, “you know I like it when you get feisty, Angie. You should tell me who hooked you up with whatever you’re on, daddy needs to let loose.”
His fingers are too tight on Alastor’s throat for him to do anything other than wheeze, and Alastor kicks weakly against the bed.
“Shh,” Val says, petting a hand through Alastor’s hair. It comes away red, but there isn’t as much blood as Angel initially feared. “Oh, yikes. Angel, you should know better than to make me do this where the cameras will be able to catch it. You’re lucky I hire good stylists.”
Then his hands wander lower.
Angel Dust sinks to the floor and closes his eyes. His hands clamping down over his ears barely block anything out—Alastor’s hearing is just too fucking good—but he can bury his face into his knees and at least not have to watch. He wants to give himself that fucking head wound, wants to wake up and have someone tell him, oh, it turns out he’s been in a coma for three days and—
Alastor’s breath hitches, wet, as something slaps against skin.
—all of this was just a vivid fucking hallucination, haha, isn’t that funny? Sure it is! After all, who the fuck would make a magic spell or whatever for something as weird and dumb as trading bodies with another person, that would be ridiculous—
Valentino moans, half-pleasure and half-laughter, and it doesn’t quite cover the sound of tearing threads as nails scrape over bedding.
—but not as ridiculous as—
The bed thumps against the wall once, then again. Angel knocks his head against his knees, hard, trying to pound the sound out of his own brain.
—as—
More wet sounds. Skin against skin. The type of quiet, helpless noises that get punched out of a person’s throat when they’re in pain but not conscious enough to understand why.
“I don’t want to be here,” Angel whispers to himself, hoping it will stop him from hearing what is happening. It doesn’t help very much.
Valentino murmurs something and then laughs, low, when Alastor makes a sudden, louder pained sound.
“I don’t want to be here.”
There’s a snap and a heave, like Val’s wings are coming out to manifest properly, the bed rocking hard against the floor as he does—something—to Alastor. Angel flinches into the wall and presses his hands down harder, suddenly realizing that he can’t quite breathe.
“I don’t—” He gasps for air, suffocating. “I don’t—want to—”
“Stop—” It’s Angel Dust’s own voice: slurred, cut-off by a hitching sob. “Ss-stop—‘ff—”
There’s another wet noise, followed by a whimper and the familiar click-whirr of a video camera. All that Angel Dust can hear after that is Valentino’s laughter, sweet and low and dark, filling the room and curling around his ears as he pants, every frantic exhale wheezing through his lungs.
“Oh, honey,” Val tells Angel warmly. “Why do you even bother asking? You’re mine. You’re going to be here forever. Now why don't you smile for the camera?”
Alastor is quiet.
Angel Dust gives up on his desperate gasping, and lets himself drown.