Chapter 1: break your wings
Chapter Text
Vaggie had gotten so used to being unbreakable, she had never stopped to consider that she may not be. Certainly, she never would have guessed that some pitiful demon would be the thing to make her reconsider that stance. More than that, she never would have thought that she would live past her moment of initial failure.
It was an extermination day when she learned that she needed to stop saying ‘never’.
The glory and bloodshed was drawing to an end. Any minute, Adam would be calling the troops back into the sky, to return to heaven and relish in the thrill of another victory. Vaggie remained aware of the time enough to remind herself that she couldn’t get too invested in a new hunt, but did not allow herself to stop or slow down. Quite the contrary; the knowledge that she was running out of time only made it feel that much more important to get a few more good kills in.
The trio of demons did not look like easy prey. That was why Vaggie had chosen them. A white-haired demon with sharply pointed steel shoes and two younger ones with horns, not only did they look like they might flee, but they might be strong enough to stand a chance at succeeding. She did not suspect, however, that they could be strong enough to hurt her. No demon was capable of that.
Although the demons had to be morons to be out in the open during an extermination, they were doubtlessly aware of their mistake. The older one urgently shepherded the younger two down an alley in a desperate attempt to get them to some semblance of safety. Between her protective behavior and the age difference, Vaggie was left with no doubt; she was looking at a mother and her children.
Something odd twitched in the corner of Vaggie’s heart, a wretched sensation that sent a wave of nausea through her stomach and left a bitter taste in her mouth. She banished the feeling without a second thought. The two younger sinners may have been the elder one’s daughters, but they were not children. They were not innocent. They were sinners, Vaggie was an exorcist, and this was extermination day. There was nothing wrong with what she was about to do.
She should enjoy it. Lute would tell her to enjoy it.
Despite the dwindling time, despite the knowledge that she had to move, Vaggie spent a good while silently stalking the demons from the shadows. She didn’t realize her mistake until the trio darted out of the alley and toward a large warehouse. With a quiet curse, Vaggie pulled her wings in and dove down toward the smaller of the sinners, spear brandished and pointed forward with deadly aim.
It should have been a swift, efficient, effortless kill, taking the first out before the other two even noticed her presence.
Something slammed into her side before she could touch a hair on the demon’s head. She didn’t even get a chance to cry out. One second she was flying through the air, the next she was crashing onto the harsh pavement below.
Shimmering golden blood leaked from a cut on her side.
Vaggie didn’t allow herself to dwell on the ache radiating through her body. She did not stop to catch her breath or marvel at the hideous miracle that was a demon successfully harming her. The second she registered that she was on the ground, she was forcing herself to her feet and charging back into battle. The two younger demons no longer mattered; her target was the one standing protectively in front of them, a smear of angelic blood clinging to one of her heels.
Vaggie charged forward, propelled by the flapping of her wings. Her feet lifted off the pavement as she lurched forward to throw her spear at the demon.
It should have been a deadly blow.
It had always been a deadly blow. The demon should have taken a spear to the heart and crumbled like sodden tissue paper.
She caught it instead.
Vaggie barely had a moment to stare at the vermin that was holding onto her spear, the point safely resting inches away from her heart. She didn’t have a chance to wonder what it meant. There was no time for her to identify the cold, sinking feeling welling up within her. In that moment, all that she had were her well-trained instincts telling her to fight, to kill, to end this sinner’s miserable life before she could make a fool out of herself.
She didn’t know how to fight without her spear.
She didn’t know how to get it back.
The demon brandished her own spear at her and raced forward, and Vaggie didn’t know what to do.
Vaggie was fast, but in her moment of fear and confusion, the demon was faster. By the time she thought to fly away and accept Adam and Lute’s inevitable scorn, she was already within the demon’s range.
For all of her existence, Vaggie had figured that nothing could possibly compare to the training of heaven and the raw ferocity of the exorcists.
As a razor-heeled foot came down on her wing, she realized that she shouldn’t have underestimated the raw, primitive draw to survive.
The kick was forceful enough that it was bound to be painful, but it ultimately should have been nothing. She should have been able to take to the sky and make her way to safety. There was no explanation for the way the heel tore through her wing. Agony coursed through her back and into her entire being, too severe to allow for any intelligent thought. The demon was saying something, but as the steel ripped further and further down, Vaggie couldn’t hear anything but tearing flesh and someone’s blood-curdling screams.
Her knees hit the ground a second before her severed wing.
Her own spear tore her other wing free, and Vaggie distantly realized that she was the one screaming.
The point of her spear pressed into the back of her neck, forcing her down into the pavement, and she realized that she was going to die.
She had never thought about dying before.
Time stood still. Vaggie fell silent — because her throat hurt, to hold on to some of her dignity in her final moments, because screaming wouldn’t change anything anyway. The demon hesitated. The hesitation wouldn’t change anything either; the demon would remember what she had to do, just like Vaggie had before, and then it would all be over.
Vaggie was going to be over.
Lute was going to be so ashamed.
Did that even matter anymore?
No. Nothing mattered anymore.
Yes. Everything mattered. There was so much that she hadn’t gotten to do. If only she had — Vaggie wished that she had done more.
She didn’t know what more was.
Everything hurt, a sort of pain that she never could have imagined prior to experiencing it.
Was this how the demons she killed had felt?
A heavy breath above her. The spear pulled back a little bit, likely to prepare for the finishing blow.
Vaggie closed her eyes.
“Wait!” someone screamed with enough desperation to rend the air.
The boot pressing into the small of Vaggie’s back shifted. She hadn’t even realized that the demon was physically pinning her down. “Go inside, princess,” came a firm, commanding voice. “I need to finish this.”
“No, you don’t!” the newcomer insisted. “You already took her weapon and tore her wings off. What can she do to you now!?”
“She’s an angel,” the demon insisted. “If heaven finds out that I was able to harm her—”
“Then don’t let them find out! I’ll take her back home with me, just don’t kill her!”
All went silent. It didn’t last for long. Although she had been able to stop screaming for a little while, the longer the encounter dragged on, the more unbearable the pain in Vaggie’s back became. She tried her best to remain silent, but found a ragged sob tearing free from her throat regardless. Tears rolled free from her cheeks and onto the concrete. She used what little energy she had left to roll her head to the side, but was only able to see the feet of the demons discussing her fate.
The demons weighing the value of her life, as if they weren’t the ones who had already been judged and found wanting.
The demon who had torn her down for heaven and was set to finish her off. The demon who was, presumably, fighting for Vaggie’s life. And the two who lingered in the background, bearing witness to an impossible defeat.
Vaggie registered all of it, but that was the full extent of what she was capable of. Any conclusions that she may have come to were blocked off by the unspeakable, throbbing pain radiating from her back and throughout her entire body, like fire racing through her muscles and making them spasm in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. It was almost enough to make her miss the way that her vision was going black and her head was growing dizzy as bloodlust took its toll.
“Please, Carmilla,” the impossibly kind demon whispered. “I promise I’ll leave you alone after this. Just don’t kill her.”
The demon who had done the impossible sighed. She crouched down over Vaggie; her body wanted to react in preparation for a fatal blow, but was far too beaten down to tense up or flinch.
It was just as well, for such a blow never came. Vaggie noticed it in the back of her mind when Carmilla pulled her helmet off. She felt it when she took her halo. It wasn’t any sort of physical pain or loss, but the absence of a connection, a presence, that had been there all her life. One second, she could vaguely feel that the extermination had ended and her sisters were high in the sky, on the way back to heaven. The next, she had no clue where they were. Before, she theoretically had the chance to return to heaven, even if she would be forever broken and shamed. Now, she was well and truly lost.
Vaggie sobbed. It sounded no different from the cries that she had already been emitting.
“The extermination has ended,” Carmilla said, standing back up and stepping off of Vaggie’s back. “I’ll give you three hours to pull her together and take it away. I don’t want to see it again after that. Or hear any more about your idea.”
“Deal.”
The next thing Vaggie knew, there were hands on her shoulders. They were softer and warmer than should have been possible for any creature in hell. Those hands propped her up, holding onto her for a moment as the demon assessed the mess that had become of her. Then they got to work, pulling back and retrieving… something.
Bandages. Through spinning, spotty vision, Vaggie managed to piece together that the demon had fished a roll of bandages out of her pockets. The demon worked quickly and efficiently, wrapping them around the wounds on her back. They were tight enough to stop the flow of blood, a tightness that was necessary, but also painful. Vaggie wasn’t able to stop herself from crying out anew.
“I’m sorry!” the demon exclaimed. “I’ll try to get you painkillers soon, I promise. Just try to stick with me for a little while longer, okay?”
Vaggie opened her mouth, but couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Instead, she tried to cling to her rapidly-waning consciousness by focusing on the demon’s face.
It was a kind face. Her concern was evident, but she still tried her best to smile at Vaggie. Her skin was white apart from the red dots on her cheeks, matching her unholy red and yellow eyes. She looked more doll-like than monstrous, but she was still obviously a demon.
For one unforgivable moment, as she lingered on the edge of consciousness, Vaggie didn’t think about that. For one traitorous instant, she thought that she looked like an angel.
“Hey,” the angel said, sounding faint and distant. “Can you h—”
The world went black, and Vaggie was saved from her own mind.
Chapter 2: second impressions
Notes:
Forget about winging it, this fic now has a PLAN! All of the chapters have been outlined and the tags have been updated to actually reflect important characters and relationships. Woo!
Thanks Hazel for betaing!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Vaggie woke up to a gentle rocking motion and the feeling of someone petting her hair.
She would never admit that her first impulse was to go back to sleep.
A soft voice pulled her back to her senses. It didn’t matter that it was speaking to her more gently than anyone ever had before. The fact that it was likely connected to the hand that touched her so softly was unimportant. She was disgusted by the fact that, for one fragile moment, she felt like she could get lost in it. Vaggie came back to her senses, and with that, she remembered reality.
Or rather, most of it.
She didn’t stop to consider the wounds on her back before bolting upright. What should have been an attack was stopped by the pain that surged through her at the sudden movement. She lurched to the side as the edges of her vision went white, one hand blindly reaching out to steady herself on the nearest surface — which happened to be someone’s shoulder.
“Be careful!” the soft cried, heedless of the fingers digging tightly into her shoulder. “You’re badly hurt, you need to take it easy.”
Vaggie blinked. Slowly, the spots cleared out of her vision and the blazing agony in her back died down to a tolerable misery, allowing her to see focus on the face of the girl who had saved her life.
The demon who had saved her life.
Vaggie wrenched her hand away from the disgusting thing with a hiss.
The demon didn’t have the common sense to be scared or even offended, staring at her with only worry on her too-kind face. “Are you alright?” she asked.
“What are your plans?” Vaggie asked in turn.
The demon frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb, sinner,” Vaggie said. “What are you planning to do to me?”
“Oooh. Well…” The demon’s lips spread into an awkward smile. “First off, my name is Charlie. And I’m not really planning to do anything to you? I want to help you heal, but that’s about that.”
Vaggie narrowed her eyes into the sharpest glare she could manage.
Somehow, Charlie saw that look and managed to turn her smile into something hopeful. “I was also hoping that maybe we could be friends?” she tentatively added.
That question left Vaggie facing two possibilities. Either this Charlie was one of the stupidest demons in the entirety of hell or her kindness was an act designed to get her to let her guard down.
She was going to go with the more likely option.
“Don’t bother lying to me,” she ordered. “If you tell me the truth, I might make your death quick.”
Charlie’s expression crumpled.
Vaggie was easily able to discard the odd pang that emanated from somewhere deep within her chest. What she couldn’t ignore was the uncertain way the demon looked her over. It paired with the pain in her back and the nothingness where her halo should have been, reminding her of exactly where her place was in this situation.
As Charlie fretted over what to say, Vaggie realized that the demon didn’t have any reason to try and trick her into trusting her. There was no point, not when she could have guaranteed her death by standing by and refusing to lift a finger to help her.
No. She couldn’t let herself think that way. Just because the demon didn’t want her dead didn’t mean that she didn’t want anything from her. Certainly, it was more likely than a sinner being foolish enough to save her out of the goodness of her nonexistent heart.
“I’m not lying,” Charlie said, tender and earnest in a way that couldn’t be the truth. “I didn’t want to see you die, so I told Carmilla that I’d take you home.”
There were so many problems with her claim, Vaggie could laugh. She settled for pointing out the most obvious hole in her story. “What sort of demon doesn’t want to see an angel die?”
Charlie’s expression faltered. Vaggie could see it as she remembered the simple truth of the matter. She was looking at a higher being, one whose hands were covered in the blood of her brethren. Under different circumstances, any other circumstances, she would have killed her without a second thought. And now she expected her to believe that she didn’t want to watch her die.
For a moment, it looked like Charlie might collapse under the weight of her lie and give up the act. She found a second wind before Vaggie could experience any sort of satisfaction, tilting her head up and saying, “Demons aren’t a monolith. I know that it may be hard to believe, but a lot of us are good people.”
That was the worst lie Vaggie had heard yet. “They wouldn’t be in hell if they were good people,” she flatly said.
Charlie grimaced. “Okay, so they aren’t perfect. They’ve made mistakes, but who hasn’t!? I know they have the potential to be good people. Everyone does! I try to be a good person.”
“But doing things like saving random exorcists.”
“Exactly!”
Vaggie stared. When confronted with something so stupid, there was nothing to do but stare.
Slowly but surely, Charlie deflated once more. “I’m not going to be able to convince you that I’m telling the truth, am I.”
“I’m not stupid, so no.”
Vaggies words were meant to cut and rend. Instead, they seemed to renew the demon’s conviction. Determination blazed to life in her eyes and she slapped a fist into her open palm. “That fine, I’ll just have to prove it to you, then!”
She said it like she meant it.
Because she did.
Because she didn’t believe that Vaggie was actually going to hurt her.
Because she couldn’t. Her wings were gone. Her halo was stolen. She had no idea where her spear was. Vaggie may have been an angel, but for the time being, all that she had to offer were big words and empty threats. Charlie was the one who held all the power in this situation, and she was choosing to use it to spin befuddling lies that Vaggie refused to believe.
There would never come a day when Vaggie accepted defeat. Today, it had been thrust upon her whether she accepted it or not. The angel slumped down against the soft velvet seat she was sitting on. She realized why that was a mistake the second her back grazed against the seat, jerking forward with a pained hiss.
"Are you okay!?” Charlie cried. She was just smart enough not to try to grab at Vaggie again, but it was clear from the look on her face that she’d had to fight the urge to do so.
“Fine,” Vaggie spat from between gritted teeth.
“You know… There’s plenty of space on the other side of the carriage. If you don’t want me touching you, you could go over there and lay on your stomach. I bet it would be easier on your stomach.” Charlie nodded toward a long, plush red seat as she spoke.
Vaggie stared for a moment, then discarded Charlie’s concern in favor of doing something that she should have taken care of earlier: assessing her surroundings.
Now that Charlie had mentioned it, it was obvious that they were in some sort of carriage. It was large with pale pink walls, golden handles wedged into the doors, and silky rose-gold curtains covering the windows. They looked like they were silk. Vaggie tentatively pressed her fingers against the wall and found them smooth, sleek, and firm. Thick red carpeting covered the floor. Upon taking a closer look at the seats, which she already knew were soft (albeit, a treacherous voice whispered, perhaps not as soft as Charlie’s lap), she realized that they were covered in velvet.
This demon was rich.
“I can help you, if you want,” Charlie started up when she went too long without responding. “I’ll just guide you over there and—”
“Don’t touch me,” Vaggie growled. She stood up on legs that wobbled dangerously and made her way to the other side of the carriage in a few lurching steps. Rather than sitting down, she fell forward onto the seat, sending a fresh jolt of pain through her broken body. Only knowing that she couldn’t expose further weakness in front of a demon drove her to bite back a curse.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said as she positioned herself on the seat. “The pain killers are probably wearing off by now.”
“I don’t need pain killers,” Vaggie said.
“But they’d make you more comfortable, right?”
Vaggie didn’t dignify that with a response.
There was nothing in the world that could have made Vaggie content with her situation. However, she would have preferred to sit in silence until they reached their destination, wherever that may be.
Naturally, Charlie seemed to be allergic to peace and quiet.
“Sooo…” she began, managing to sound like she was on the verge of bursting out into song despite the blatant anxiety bleeding into her tone. “What’s your name?”
Vaggie turned her head to squint at her. “Why do you want to know?” she cautiously asked, already knowing that she was going to get a ridiculous answer.
Charlie started wringing her hands in front of her. “Well, I told you my name, so it’s only fair for you to tell me yours, right? Besides, it would be rude for me to just call you ‘angel’.”
Yep. Ridiculous.
“You don’t need to talk to me at all,” Vaggie said.
Unless talking to her was part of whatever mind game she was playing. Which, now that she thought of it, it probably was.
Charlie’s smile faltered, but she made a visible effort to keep it in place. It would have been endearing if it weren’t so pathetic. “That would be even worse than calling you ‘angel’. Besides…” She hesitated for a moment before meeting Vaggie’s eyes and gently asking, “I live alone. Won’t you get lonely without anyone to talk to?”
There was something very wrong with this demon to be making a play like this.
There was something wrong with Vaggie’s chest for it to be constricting the way it was.
She was just out of sorts because of— what had happened. Soon, she would pull herself together and start thinking with a clear head again. Soon, this demon would slip up and Vaggie would be able to figure out what her deal was. If she didn’t…
She lived alone. Vaggie may have been maimed, but she was still an angel. A demon foolish enough to try Charlie’s unbelievably friendship ploy was bound to make other mistakes. She might even be stupid enough to let her live long enough to heal. In that case, all she would need to do was wait for Charlie to make another mistake, then she would escape from her captor — for she refused to see Charlie as anything other than a captor. Perhaps she would even take the chance to remind her of her strength and—
No. Vaggie’s priority had to be getting back to heaven, there was no point in wasting time destroying some petty demon. Her mercy could be repayment for the service she’d done her, even if it was with some sick, unknowable mindset. She would escape without harming Charlie too severely, and then…
She’d figure something out. Adam and Lute would give her shit for being crippled at the hands of a sinner, but their mockery would pale in comparison to their fury when they realized that the demons were capable of harming them. She would be avenged. The demon who had done this would pay.
…Perhaps Charlie would be spared. It may have all been part of some sick game, but the fact remained that she had saved Vaggie’s life. Maybe she would be able to convince Adam to severely wound her rather than kill her on the spot, or maybe even bypass her house entirely.
Or better yet, she didn’t need to mention Charlie at all. Her superiors were already going to rub her failure in her face, they’d be even worse if they knew that she’d taken charity from a sinner, even if inadvertently. It would be better for everyone if they never found out that Charlie even existed. They might even be minimally infuriated if they thought that she’d made it back up to heaven entirely on her own.
“Um, miss— angel?” Charlie’s voice cut in, forcing Vaggie out of her thoughts.
“What?” Vaggie snapped. Even with the pain pulsating through her body, she wasn’t so far gone as to feel guilt when Charlie leaned back. Rather, she leaned into it, drawing her lips into a snarl and adding, “I’m not going to tell you my name.”
“That’s alright,” Charlie said with a strain that gave her discomfort away. “I’ll figure something out. I just wanted to tell you that we’ll be there soon.”
“Oh,” Vaggie muttered.
She eyed Charlie for a moment longer before turning her head to face the back of the seat she was laying on. She stared at it for the rest of the short ride, bitterly grateful that Charlie was letting them be quiet for once.
Charlie tried to help her out of the carriage when it rolled to a stop. Vaggie shoved her hand away and staggered out on her own, one hand grasping the door in a white-knuckled grip as she tried to keep herself upright.
It stopped being enough when she caught a sight of the massive building that Charlie had led her to. A towering multi-story structure at the top of a hill, it loomed over Pentagram City like a beacon. Vaggie’s grip on the door went slack, and the next thing she knew, Charlie was pulling her arm over her shoulders to keep her from falling down.
Vaggie didn’t have the presence to think to pull away. Openly gaping at the building, she demanded, “What the hell is that?”
“My house?” Charlie asked.
Vaggie looked at the sinner who had captured her. The sinner who had saved her. The sinner wealthy enough to have such a high-quality carriage. The sinner who she was beginning to suspect may be more than she seemed.
“Who are you?” Vaggie breathed.
“Oh! You… really don’t know, do you?” Vaggie got the feeling that if she weren’t already keeping her upright, Charlie would have offered to shake her hand. Or maybe she would have just kept smiling at her like she actually cared. “I’m Charlie Morningstar.”
For the second time in under twenty four hours, Vaggie felt her world shift.
Notes:
I'm considering removing the enemies to lovers tag. That was certainly the intended dynamic, but there's no real animosity on Charlie's part. Whoops!
Chapter 3: hope in hell
Summary:
Vaggie assesses her situation.
Chapter Text
Vaggie had been captured by the princess of Hell.
Every time she tried to make sense of the situation, she was floored by how absolutely fucked she was. It had been one thing when Charlie was just an exceptionally peculiar and potentially stupid demon. She posed a threat to Vaggie in her current state, but if she lived long enough to recover, she knew that she would have been able to crush her. Now, she was faced with the reality that her captor was probably monumentally strong. The only one who realistically stood a chance at beating Charlie in a fight was Adam himself, and she would never hear the end of it if he had to save her.
It didn’t matter if Charlie was an idiot. If a demon of her status wanted to toy around with a grounded angel, it wasn’t an act of stupidity. It was merely a predator playing with its prey. Vaggie had seen it plenty of times from Adam and Lute during the exterminations. Hell, she had even done it a few times at their urging. Now it was simply Vaggie’s turn to be on the other side of the claws.
Charlie was going to play her little mind games and Vaggie was utterly helpless to stop her. All that she could do was play along and hope pray to her home that a miracle would offer her a way out of this situation.
Vaggie had never been a good actor.
Charlie, on the other hand, was absolutely spectacular. She was all concern and compassion as she lead Vaggie up to one of the rooms of her utterly massive house. Her hands were deceptively tender as she re-dressed Vaggie’s wounds. When a whimper slipped past her lips despite her best efforts, she was quick to apologize and quicker to fetch more painkillers. After Vaggie had swallowed the chalky white pills, she waited until the effects had set in to get back to her.
The pills had an odd effect on Vaggie. Her sense of reason floated off to somewhere in the back of her mind, replaced instead by a disorientated floating warmth. It caused her to think of just how gentle Charlie’s hands were, how they’d probably feel nice against her skin if she weren’t in so much pain. Warm and soft and nice. They made her want to lay her head on the demon’s lap again. Worst of all, when she pulled back to offer her a tentative smile, they almost made her smile back.
“How do you feel?” the demon tentative asked.
“Bad,” Vaggie said, the syllables forming clumsily in her mouth.
Charlie’s face fell.
“It’s…” Not your fault.
Vaggie remembered that she wasn’t supposed to say that in the nick of time. Adam would throw a fit if he heard her reassuring a demon. Lute would be ashamed to call her her sister. They’d be really pissed if she reached out to touch Charlie’s weird-cute pink cheeks, so she definitely wasn’t going to do that. She was a good angel, so she did what a good angel should do in this situation and blearily said, “If you’re done, go.”
Charlie’s shoulders slumped further. She was really tall, but right then, she looked very small. It was funny except for the ways that it wasn’t. “If that’s what you want,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay to be alone?”
“I don’t want to be around a demon,” Vaggie said with all of the firmness she was supposed to have. She thought. Something about that way she said it felt wrong, or maybe even the words themselves, but her head was too fuzzy and cloudy for her to be able to tell.
Charlie bit her lip and looked away. For a moment, she looked like she was going to cry.
Vaggie hated it when the demons cried. Lute thought it was the funniest thing in the world, but to Vaggie it… it just wasn’t. She was too turned and achey to try to articulate why. It probably wasn’t important anyway.
Fortunately, some of the life had returned to Charlie’s blinding red eyes when she looked back at Vaggie. “Do you want to stay away from all demons, or is it just dangerous demons?” she asked.
Vaggie blinked blearily. “What?”
“Stay there,” Charlie said before rushing away.
In her absence, Vaggie wondered if she realized that even with the pills, she felt too shitty to move even if she wanted to. Was she such a strong demon that she didn’t even feel pain? That was scary.
Kind of cool, though.
Vaggie’s train of thought lingered for a little while, only to flicker out and die, leaving her to float dully in a haze of pain and numbness and weirdness. When the world started to wobble, she laid down on her side.
The bed was huge and soft. The blankets were soft, too. Thick, fuzzy, and pink, it was weird to find something so nice in hell. Idly, Vaggie started petting them and allowed herself to get lost in the sensation of… velvet? Fleece? Some sort of fur? She didn’t know, but it was nice. If she just kept petting it, she could almost stop thinking about how awful everything else was.
Or maybe that was the pills.
Vaggie was still lying there petting the blankets when Charlie returned with some sort of thing in her arms. Maybe a dragon, maybe a ram, definitely some sort of low-power demon. Vaggie squinted at the thing and tried to deduce why Charlie would bring it to her.
Was it supposed to attack her? Was this how she planned to finish her off?
Vaggie opened her mouth to tell Charlie that she could easily kill her little monster. She was stopped by Charlie plopping the thing down in front of her. It stared up at her with big, wet, pathetic eyes, and Vaggie was struck by the realization that maybe she couldn’t kill the thing.
Was that why Charlie had brought it to her? To mock her?
That didn’t work very well with whatever friendship manipulation… thingy… she was doing here.
Brow furrowing in bewilderment, Vaggie looked up at Charlie and dazedly asked, “What am I supposed to do with this…?”
“This is Dazzle!” Charlie cheerfully exclaimed. “He’s going to keep you company.”
Vaggie turned to blink at the fuzzy little monster-ram-thing again. It took a step closer, sniffing at her like a thing that didn’t plan on killing her. “Oh…” she murmured.
She could hear the gentle smile in Charlie’s voice. “Get some more sleep, okay? I’ll bring you something to eat later.”
A good angel wouldn’t have listened to a demon.
Vaggie was a good angel.
She was too tired not to listen.
*
Vaggie woke up to find her arms wrapped around a small, fuzzy demon. She pulled back immediately, disgusted with herself for getting so close to the creature. Of course, the disgust was dampened by the dryness in her throat, ache in her back, and pounding of her back.
“How did you sleep?” a gentle voice asked, reminding Vaggie of why she’d woken up in the first place.
Someone had opened the door.
Painstakingly, Vaggie sat up looking away from the fuzzy abomination looking at her in pleading betrayal to the beautiful one standing in the doorway. Charlie Morningstar watched her with a hopeful smile, a tray balanced carefully in her hands.
Vaggie didn’t smile back. She didn’t say a word.
If Charlie was put off, she didn’t show it. She walked into the bedroom and perched on the edge of V—
It wasn’t Vaggie’s bed. Nothing in this palace of a house belonged to Vaggie. This was Charlie’s domain, and absolutely everything within those gilded walls. In her twisted mind, that probably included Vaggie.
The question was whether it was in her best interests to let her keep thinking that.
She needed to get her bearings fast.
It was hard to think when her head hurt so bad.
“Did Dazzle help at all?” the princess asked, either oblivious to Vaggie’s increasingly sour mood or choosing to ignore it. “He’s a pretty good snuggler, if you ask me.”
“I don’t snuggle with demons,” Vaggie muttered.
Charlie’s smile twitched and a twinkle of mirth made its way into her unholy red eyes, reminding Vaggie that she had already seen her snuggling with the monstrosity.
Vaggie looked away with a scowl. “I don’t snuggle with demons when I’m thinking straight,” she muttered.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of!” the princess hurried to assure her. “I brought him here so you could have someone to sleep with. I won’t tell the other angels or anything.”
Vaggie’s shoulders tensed.
The motion sent a fresh wave of pain through her back.
She was too slow to stop herself from letting out a hiss of pain. Both of the demons around her jumped into motion at the sound. ‘Dazzle’ rose to his feet, inching toward her with a worried baa. Meanwhile, Charlie set the tray down on the bed and extended a hand. “Are you okay? If you need me to check your bandages again—”
“It’s fine,” Vaggie bit out, shifting a few inches away from the demon. It inadvertently moved her closer to the other demon, but she resolved to ignore the feeling of soft fur brushing against her arm.
“It doesn’t sound fine.”
“You have a lot of experience with serious injuries, princess?” Vaggie snapped, turning to glare at the demon who had the nerve to pretend she cared.
Charlie shrank back, and if she weren’t what she was, Vaggie would have felt like a little bit of a bad person.
“I do,” she forcefully continued. “Your friend permanently wounded me. It’s going to hurt for a long time. But I’m not dying, so it’s fine.”
Charlie looked down at her bedspread.
Vaggie didn’t say a word, too caught up in anxiously wondering if she had messed up by admitting that this was going to be a permanent injury. No demon had ever harmed an angel before, she might not have known that she was truly grounded. If Charlie had been operating under the assumption that she would have a fully capable angel on her hands sooner rather than later, Vaggie could have just royally fucked herself over.
Yet Charlie didn’t look like much of a schemer. When she looked up at Vaggie, it was with eyes that practically bled with sympathy. “Just because you aren’t dying doesn’t mean that you’re fine,” she said. “You’re from heaven. Don’t they teach you to take better care of yourselves up there?”
…Maybe Vaggie was wrong. No idiot could put on an act that convincing. Charlie may have been a fool for thinking that Vaggie would believe that she actually cared about an angel, but no one short of a genius could put on a performance to the extent of the one that Vaggie was seeing.
What could she do but play along?
“I’m an exorcist,” Vaggie said. “My job is to protect heaven, not myself.”
There wasn’t supposed to be anything that she needed to protect herself from.
Charlie’s face managed to crumple further. “What about the other exorcists? You look out for each other, right?”
“They don’t need to,” Vaggie said. As she spoke, she thought of Lute, or how she had taught her everything she knew. Of how she had always believed in Vaggie’s capabilities and helped Adam to see her true potential. Even Adam, insufferable as he was, could be encouraging in his own way. They didn’t protect her because they knew that they didn’t need protection.
They hadn’t come to her aid because they thought she was stronger than that.
They would be so, so disappointed when they found out what had happened to her. The mere thought of the work that she’d need to do to rebuild their trust filled Vaggie with an exhaustion and shame unlike anything she had ever felt before.
Hopefully she would be able to rebuild it. The thought of Lute looking at her like some useless, broken toy who she was foolish to ever call a sister…
She wasn’t going to think of it.
Meanwhile, the thrice-damned princess of hell was looking at her like she had been kicked.
“But—”
“Did I volunteer to answer your questions?” Vaggie snapped.
Charlie winced. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I understand if you don’t want to talk.”
Vaggie moved to say that she didn’t want to talk to her. The words came slower than they should have. In that time, Charlie excitedly asked, “Are you hungry?” and lifted the lid off the tray to reveal bread, two bowls of soup, and two bottles of water. “I thought that maybe we could—”
Vaggie grabbed one of the water bottles, tore the top off, and drank. Her throat ached with every swallow, but she didn’t slow in her quest to drain the bottle dry.
“—Eat together.” A tiny smile found its way back onto Charlie’s face. “Here,” she said, taking the second water bottle and handing it to Vaggie.
Vaggie grabbed the bottle without a second thought, but hesitated to actually take it, staring at the demon princess in befuddlement.
Charlie gave an encouraging nod. “You look like you need it more than me.”
“…Thanks,” Vaggie murmured. She set the empty husk of the first water bottle down before twisting the top off the second. This time, she drank slowly, only taking a few sips before lowering it back down. The second it was out of her hands, Charlie was setting a warm bowl of vegetable soup into her hands.
“I thought we should probably eat light, in case the medication upsets your stomach,” she said.
“Thanks,” Vaggie dumbly repeated.
It was thoughtful, for a demon. More thoughtful than what most of the angels she knew were capable of.
Credit where credit was due, Charlie was putting her full effort into whatever she was doing.
“You should try the bread if the soup turns out alright,” Charlie continued. “I got it this morning. There aren’t many bakeries in hell, and a lot of them aren’t exactly… excellent… especially around extermination day, but I heard good things about this one.”
Vaggie didn’t know what to say. Given her circumstances, that had to mean that the best option was to say nothing. She adjusted her grip on her bowl and lifted the spoon to her mouth, cautiously blowing at the light green broth before lifting it to her lips.
…It was good.
Of course it was good. Charlie was the princess of hell, she probably had an army of chefs to cook for her.
Vaggie continued eating. Charlie folded her legs, pulled the remaining bowl into her lap, and started working on her own soup. If not for the tangible suspicion crackling in the air, the quiet that settled over them could have been called comfortable.
It was shattered by Charlie setting her spoon back down in her bowl and asking, “You aren’t going to answer any questions about yourself, are you?”
“No,” Vaggie said. She poked idly at a piece of half-disintegrated carrot with her spoon. “You didn’t need to ask me to know that.”
“I guess not,” Charlie murmured. She started stirring her spoon along the rim of her bowl. “But, you know… you could ask me some questions, if you wanted.”
This time, Vaggie was quick enough to stop herself from stiffening. Instead, she eyed Charlie with eyes narrowed in a blatant display of suspicion. The demon met her with a hopeful smile, all but radiating the sort of desire that demons were never supposed to be capable of. It wasn’t lustful, domineering, or bloodthirsty. No, as Vaggie looked at her, she almost looked…
Sad.
So sad that she couldn’t help but hope for something to rescue her from that sadness. So hopeful that she could suffocate on it.
Vaggie dismissed the thought the second it evolved into a peculiar twinge in her chest. She knew better than to trust the demon, regardless of what she had done for her. She knew better than to bother asking her any questions. All that she would be doing was giving her the opportunity to feed her whatever story she wanted her to believe.
Unless…
If Charlie let a little bit of truth slip through, if Vaggie was able to decipher the act from whatever genuine feelings may reside in her murky depths, she might be able to do something with that. She might be able to use that.
It was all a matter of trusting her instincts to tell her what the truth was.
“Any questions?” Vaggie warily asked.
Charlie smiled like she had just promised to be her best friend. “Anything at all!” she exclaimed. “I mean, if you want to know Hell’s secrets, I can’t really help you — that sort of stuff is my father’s territory — but I’ll tell you anything you want to know about me.”
That sounded like it could have been a deflection.
It also sounded like something that she hadn’t put much thought into, a pointless sidebar. Which meant that while Charlie Morningstar was one of Hell’s strongest demons, it was very possible that she wasn’t a politician.
Which probably didn’t impact Vaggie’s situation either way, but it was still good to know.
“How many people work for you?” she asked.
“I don’t have any contracts,” Charlie said.
“How many employees do you have,” Vaggie clarified. “Who else lives in your palace?”
“I wouldn’t call it a palace,” Charlie said with an awkward laugh. “It’s more of a… Well, I don’t know what it’s going to be yet, but not that. And none.”
Vaggie blinked. “None?”
“None,” Charlie confirmed.
“But then… who made the soup?”
Charlie’s smile brightened considerably, drawing Vaggie’s attention to the fact that it had started to slip in the first place. “I did! Do you like it?”
Vaggie looked down at her bowl and pulled it a little closer. The warmth felt pleasant against her stomach. “Yeah,” she murmured. “It’s good.”
“Thanks! It’s really nice to have someone else to cook for for once. There’s Razzle and Dazzle, but they can’t tell me what they think.”
“So you live alone?” Vaggie asked, looking back up at the princess.
Her smile faltered. It promptly stiffened as she tried to shove it back into place, but the difference was noticeable.
More importantly, she was trying too hard to hide it for it to be an act.
“Yes,” she said, and Vaggie had no doubt that she was unhappy about it.
No, not unhappy, sad. It didn’t feel real, it shouldn’t have been possible, but the princess of Hell was alone and genuinely, crushingly sad about it. Vaggie saw the heartbreak on Charlie’s face, and for all of the lies that she had been spewing, she knew that there was no faking something like that.
“What about your father?” Vaggie asked. Because it was the smart, sensible, reasonable thing to do. If there was a chance that she was going to encounter the king of Hell, she wanted to know sooner rather than later.
Charlie kept trying to look like she was happy. In that instant, Vaggie knew that just like she would keep trying to act like she was unbreakable, the princess would keep trying to act like she was perfectly fine with her lot in life. That couldn’t mean that they couldn’t see through each other like panes of glass.
“My father lives alone,” Charlie said. “We’ve never been really close, and we haven’t spoken much since Mom left.”
Vaggie sat up so abruptly that pain shot through her back and a bit of soup splashed onto her front. She ignored both as she exclaimed, “Lilith’s gone!?”
Charlie wasn’t looking at her anymore. Her smile had faded. The knowledge that Vaggie could keep up her act for longer than the princess didn’t make her feel any better. “She disappeared four years ago. She’s… She’s fine, I’m pretty sure, but she hasn’t spoken to either of us since she left.”
Vaggie’s hand twitched. She didn’t remember all of the reasons she shouldn’t touch Charlie until she was already half of the way to reaching for her.
Quick as a flash, she clasped her hand back around her bowl of soup. “What about the woman who maimed me?” Vaggie asked. “She was a friend of yours, right?”
Her question got Charlie to lift her head again. She didn’t bother trying to smile as she said, “Oh, Carmilla.” She shook her head. “I was trying to convince her to work with me for an idea I had, but I think I might have actually made her my enemy.”
Vaggie could think of exactly one reason why that would have been the price.
It made her final question that much more pressing.
“Why did you save me?” Vaggie gravely asked.
Charlie’s brow furrowed. She opened her mouth, doubtlessly to regurgitate the same dreck as before, but Vaggie didn’t give her the chance. “Don’t say that you didn’t want to see you die. I’m an angel. I would have killed you without a second thought if I didn’t know you’re Lucifer’s daughter. You need a reason to save my life, let alone bring me home with you. Why?”
Charlie smiled sadly and looked away again. “I thought you’d figured it out by now,” she murmured.
Vaggie exhaled heavily. “You’re lonely.”
“It sounds kinda sad when you say it like that.”
Vaggie closed her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Charlie began.
There was a chance that she had been wrong about some things. There was no denying demonic nature, but it was possible that particularly strange individuals could feel loneliness.
“If you want me to leave you alone, I understand.”
She could not make the mistake of trusting Charlie, would not allow herself to believe that her kindness was completely genuine, but it was possible that she had captured her out of mere selfishness rather than something more insidious. That she saved someone who would kill her because she was that desperate for a friend, or whatever passed as one for a demon.
“I’ll just g—”
“Vaggie,” Vaggie said, opening her eyes.
Charlie blinked at her. “Huh?”
“My name is Vaggie.”
Charlie grinned with all the brilliance of Heaven itself.
Vaggie knew how she was going to get home.
Notes:
I'm worried that this burn might not end up being slow enough and then have to remind myself that I DON'T want this one to be 150k, lol.
Also! Is there more dignity in being a Homestuck or BBC Sherlock fan? The Adamsapple discord needs to know.
Chapter 4: killing time
Summary:
Vaggie heals. Charlie stays with her.
Notes:
Sorry for the delay in updating! I was doing South Korea stuff, as one does while on foreign exchange.
Thanks Hazel for betaing.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Vaggie fell back to sleep soon after eating.
Her second day in Charlie’s house wasn’t much better. What little time she spent awake was spent in a cloud of hazy fuzz. It kept her from thinking straight, but it also kept the pain in her back from overwhelming her, and for that, she couldn’t help but appreciate it.
There were brief moments of lucidity throughout her medicated stupor. Those moments were always marked by the pain starting to worsen once more. For that reason, she did not appreciate them as much as she otherwise would have. Yet she could not bring herself to tell Charlie when she needed more pain medicine. It was an admission of weakness that was utterly unacceptable for her to make around a demon, even if she was going to pretend that she was her friend. Luckily, there was little need to, as Charlie seemed to have a keen sense for when the pills were wearing off. But she was not perfect, and in those moments where Vaggie’s discomfort and mind both became sharper in tandem, she found herself searching for distractions.
Charlie provided them in the form of distractions.
The princess of hell was a constant presence by her side throughout that second day. She spoke the entire time, telling Vaggie long, rambling stories. She did not seem to mind that Vaggie wasn’t able to focus enough to truly absorb most of them. The simple act of telling them seemed to be enough to bring her joy.
In the moments where Vaggie found herself capable of genuinely listening, she found a trend in Charlie’s stories.
All of them were hopeful.
Most of them had happy endings.
Only one of them involved her.
Out of all the tales she told, that was the one to truly stick with Vaggie. She did not know why. There could be no doubt that the story of hell, as told by the princess, was a pile of nonsense. It was worse than blasphemous; it painted the king and queen of hell as good people. If Charlie was to be believed, Lilith wasn’t an ungrateful traitor who had turned her back on paradise, but a victim who had somehow been wronged by Adam and turned to the one person who actually loved her. If Charlie was to be believed, Lucifer wasn’t the epitome of all evil, but a well-intentioned dreamer who had made a mistake. If Charlie was to be believed, heaven had been wrong.
Charlie couldn’t be believed.
Still, it was a nice story.
As Vaggie drifted back off into a quietly aching oblivion, she imagined a world where the devil somehow was a decent person, and imagined that the world surely would have been better for it.
*
On the third day, Vaggie found herself lying on her stomach on the bed while Charlie sat above her. Her hands hovered above her naked back, close enough to her skin that she could feel the heat radiating off her hands, yet not daring to touch.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the demon asked for what had to be the sixth time.
“I’m sure,” Vaggie said.
“It might hurt without any medication,” Charlie warned for the third time. “If you want more—”
“I can bear it,” Vaggie interrupted. “I don’t want to risk getting hooked on hell drugs. Let’s just get it over with.”
“If you’re sure,” Charlie quietly said. “Let me know if it becomes too much, okay?”
“I will,” Vaggie lied.
She was already gritting her teeth when Charlie reached down to pull at the edges of the bandages wrapped around her wounds. Her jaw somehow found a way to clench even tighter at the feeling of cotton and gauze pulling away from her back. The feeling of the bandages gently tugging at her skin couldn’t come anywhere close to being one of the worst pains she had ever felt, but when combined with the steady ache in her muscles, it sent a wave of nausea through her stomach and made a headache burst to life behind her eyes.
“You’re handling this really well,” Charlie started saying before she had even finished removing the bandages. “I know you’re an exorcist, but… don’t take this the wrong way, but I still expected you to struggle with an injury like this. It’s incredible that you aren’t crying!”
Vaggie still felt nauseous. She also felt a peculiar warmth growing in her cheeks — probably a side-effect that she hadn’t previously experienced because she’d never been injured this badly before. “Thanks,” she muttered, voice hoarse and gruff.
“I’m not being sarcastic or anything!” Charlie rushed to add. Vaggie heard the quiet shifting of medical equipment as she set the dirty gauze aside and picked up a bottle of ointment. “I meant it. You’re really, really tough.”
“I know you did,” Vaggie said in that same odd, strained voice. “You don’t seem like you’re capable of sarcasm.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It is what it is.”
“I’m going to act like it’s good then.” Charlie paused. “Um, you’ll want to brace yourself — I’m going to apply some ointment now.”
Vaggie winced. “Thanks for the warning.”
“Are you—”
“Just do it.”
Vaggie could tell that Charlie was trying to be as gentle as possible as she rubbed ointment into the gaping wound. It still made Vaggie’s fingers clench around the blanket as an agonizing sting shot over her skin, through her muscles, and down to her very core.
There was also a whisper of something else, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise up and her mouth go dry.
It was probably just another new form of pain. The demon could try as hard as she wanted, but the fact of the matter was that she was still a demon. She could never be caring, could never nurture, could never fill the role of an angel.
But cast away into the depths of hell where, by all rights, Vaggie could not be able to find even an ounce of comfort, she found that Charlie was a decent enough mimicry.
For a moment, she was grateful to have her.
*
On the fourth day, Vaggie stared down at the plate in front of her and willed it to turn into something that was recognizable as food.
It continued to be a giant grilled grub plated on a bed of leafy greens.
“Charlie?” Vaggie asked, poking at it with her fork. It jiggled gently, looking for all the world like it was filled with some sort of liquid, or perhaps a viscous goo. Neither would have caught her by surprise, considering that it was a giant grub.
“Yes?” the princess of hell asked, looking down at her own plate with blatant excitement.
“What the fuck is this?”
Vaggie remembered a second too late that she shouldn’t tarnish her angelic image by swearing in front of a demon.
Charlie didn’t even seem to notice, looking up with an exclamation of, “Oh, right! I should probably introduce it to you first, huh?” She smiled sheepishly before gesturing at Vaggie’s plate. “This is a grilled monster grub. It’s one of hell’s specialties.”
“It’s a bug,” Vaggie flatly said.
“Yeah!”
“You’re trying to feed me a bug.”
Charlie’s smile faded. “Yeah…” She shifted in place. “I thought, since you might be here for a little while, I should maybe introduce you to some of hell’s culture. You know, the stuff that you can’t get in heaven. But… Um…” Charlie started to wring her fingers together. “You probably don’t want any of the stuff that you can’t find in heaven, huh? I guess I should’ve thought of that sooner…”
Vaggie was under absolutely no obligation to eat a fucking grub to make a demon feel better, even if it was a demon who had saved her life.
But her best way out of this mess was by pretending to be Charlie’s friend. Friends ate the things that their friends made for them, no matter how disgusting. And if eating the bug would make Charlie stop making that face, that was just a pleasant coincidence.
“It’s fine,” Vaggie sighed, adjusting her plate and psyching herself up for what was to come.
Charlie stared at her in delighted, hopefully glee.
Vaggie took a bite of the bug and…
God help her.
It was good.
*
On the fifth day, Vaggie woke up with not one, but two little ram-dragon demons curled up in bed beside her. She stared at them stupidly for a moment before scooping one up in her arms and climbing out of bed. The movement combined with the weight in her arms sent a fresh wave of pain through her back, but by now the pain had grown familiar enough to function through. She just had to move slowly, carefully, and purposefully. One foot in front of the other, pushing herself as far as she could, but careful not to cross the line into ‘too far’.
Not yet, at least. If the right circumstances arose, she wouldn’t hesitate to drive herself to the breaking point, but for now… there was no point in getting Charlie worked up when it could just as easily be avoided.
She didn’t have to go far to find the princess of hell. She was sitting on one of the couches in the enormous space that passed for a living room, carefully applying pink nail polish to one of her hooves. She could have passed for a normal girl if her feet didn’t have hooves.
Vaggie watched her for a moment, taking in the way Charlie’s tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth in her concentration, before clearing her throat.
“Vaggie!” Charlie gasped, scrambling to her feet and setting the nail polish down on the table. “You’re up! Are you okay!? Do you need—”
“I’m fine,” Vaggie interrupted. “I just wanted to leave the bedroom.”
“Oh.” Charlie’s gaze shifted down to the creature in her arms — the creature that Vaggie had no reason to be holding. Her lips quirked up in a tiny smile that Vaggie refused to find adorable. “Making friends with Razzle?”
“Razzle?” Vaggie asked, looking down at the tiny monster in her arms. It looked up at her with wide eyes and let out a quiet baa.
“The demon,” Charlie provided.
“I thought its name was Dazzle,” Vaggie thoughtlessly said.
“Dazzle’s the other one!” Charlie chirped. “The one you’re holding is Razzle.”
Vaggi looked back up to furrow her brow and frown at the princess. “Their names are Razzle and Dazzle?”
Now that she brought it up, that did sound kind of familiar. It didn’t make the naming scheme any more acceptable.
To her credit, Charlie’s smile turned sheepish. “I was little when I named them. I thought it was cute.”
“I see.” Vaggie started to bend down to release the beast in her arms, only for a veritable scream in her back to tell her that wouldn’t be happening. She stiffened up, fighting to hold back an expletive, failing to hold back a wince.
“Here,” Charlie said, walking over to take the demon from her arms. Vaggie let him go gratefully, a short, relieved breath escaping her mouth when the weight was gone.
“You didn’t need to carry him, you know,” Charlie said, setting the demon down. “He would have followed you if you called him.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Vaggie muttered.
Truly, she shouldn’t have been coddling the demon at all, let alone carrying it around, but outright saying as much wouldn’t help in her quest to become Charlie’s “friend”. There were few people who appreciated having their pets insulted — or whatever the tiny demons were to Charlie.
Razzle wandered over to the couch. Vaggie stared at Charlie, who stared back. The silence between them grew louder. Vaggie struggled to find something to say and found her head going emptier by the second. What part of her mind wasn’t clouded up by lingering grogginess and pain was caught up in the unfamiliarity of the situation.
Maybe she needed a little more time to plan. Maybe friendship, especially one with a monster, was something that was best approached with a thorough battle strategy. Maybe—
“Would you like me to do your nails?” Charlie asked.
“Huh?” Vaggie asked, looking between the open bottles of nail polish on the couch and the princess.
“I already have the nail polish out, and it’d be nice to practice on someone else! I bet you’d look great with a little color, too!” Charlie enthusiastically exclaimed.
Vaggie looked down at Charlie’s half-painted nails, then back up at the brilliant smile of the hellspawn herself.
“Fine,” she sighed.
Pink wasn’t Vaggie’s color.
It didn’t look bad when Charlie put it there.
*
On the sixth day, Charlie convinced Vaggie to watch a movie with her.
It was some sort of sappy rom-com that didn’t look like it belonged in the depths of hell. Charlie admitted that it had been a gift from a member of hell’s royalty. Vaggie was alarmed by the implications of such a statement… until the movie started, and her concerns over probably dubiously procured movies were replaced by awe over the saccharine ridiculousness of the movie itself. Not only were the actors objectively terrible, not only was the plot so generic that it could have come out of a tin can, but the writing was trying so hard to be sentimental that it edged into the territory of hilarious.
It hit a fever pitch when the love interest died.
Vaggie was trying to swallow back her laughter at the female lead’s overblown wailing when she realized that Charlie was crying. Really crying — glistening tears rolled down her cheeks, accompanied by a soft hiccuping as she held back her sobs.
It was probably no big deal for a demon to fake some tears.
Somehow, Vaggie didn’t get the sense that Charlie was faking.
Of course, it didn’t matter if she was faking or not. Her course of action had to be the same either way.
Reminding herself that it was for the sake of getting back home, that it was acceptable, Vaggie reached out and patted the demon’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” Charlie whimpered. “It’s just… They were so happy and… It’s so sad!”
The corner of Vaggie’s mouth quirked up. “There, there.”
*
On the seventh day, Vaggie woke up screaming from a nightmare of tearing metal and golden blood.
The bedroom door was thrown open before she even recognized that she was in a bedroom. Someone climbed into the bed beside and gently pulled her onto their lap, careful not to touch the still-healing gashed on her back. A hand ran itself over her hair, strong, warm arms wrapped themselves around her, and a kind voice began to hum wordless reassurances.
Vaggie shook. She gasped. She fought to regain control of her senses back together as the pain of freshly severed limbs faded into the familiar ache of healing. As recognition slowly crept back in, the all-consuming death released its grip on her throat, allowing her to shakily whisper, “Charlie?”
“Yes?” the princess whispered back.
Vaggie should have been ashamed. She should have been disgusted with herself. She should have pulled away from the demon and ordered her to go back to her own room. In the morning, Vaggie would give herself a fierce reprimand and remind herself of all that was right and good.
For now, she asked, “Can you stay with me?”
“Of course,” Charlie said.
In the morning, Vaggie woke up wrapped in a demon’s arms.
*
On the eighth day, Charlie received a letter from heaven.
Notes:
These bitches gay... good for them.
Chapter 5: holy words
Summary:
Charlie receives a letter from heaven.
Notes:
A sniffly and congested Museflight has no intelligent notes. Sorry that this chapter is so short, but hey, at least it's here?
Chapter Text
Vaggie walked into the lounge to find Charlie holding a letter like it was the heaviest thing in the universe.
The sight made her freeze up like little else could. She didn’t have a good excuse for seeking the demon out. She could have said that it was part of her plan to convince her that she was her friend, but truthfully, she hadn’t put that much thought into it. It was merely the result of restlessness and mounting boredom having their way with her. She had recovered enough that she was no longer in crushing pain or constantly exhausted. There was only so much time she could spend in the bedroom before she lost her mind.
Normally that wouldn’t be a concern. Normally Charlie would have come to see her at least once by this time – probably more. Vaggie hadn’t stopped to think about why she hadn’t.
As she watched Charlie stare down at the letter that she held in trembling hands, she realized that she should have. The demon’s feelings were none of her concern, of course, but in the name of strategy, she should have taken it into account.
“Charlie?” Vaggie called, hesitantly starting forward.
“Vaggie!” Charlie exclaimed, dropping the letter into her lap. It fell onto the couch as she jumped to her feet and hurried over to her. “Are you okay? I’m so sorry that I haven’t been to see you yet. Some stuff came up, but— oh, that’s no excuse. Do you need pain killers or food or—”
Vaggie held a hand up. Charlie’s mouth snapped shut immediately. She stared at it for an instant before meeting Vaggie’s eyes, a sheepish grin crossing her face.
“I’m fine,” Vaggie slowly said. “But… You don’t look like you are.”
It sounded awfully close to asking the demon if she was alright. If someone was listening in on the conversation, they might think that she was. But… it didn’t matter, did it? A sin was still a sin even if no one was around to witness it, of course, but any perceived kindness toward Charlie was in order to serve a greater purpose. A necessary evil, that was what Lute would call it. She and Adam participated in necessary evils all the time, so… that made it alright, didn’t it? If anyone knew right from wrong, it aught to be them.
“What, me?” Charlie asked, pulling Vaggie out of her thoughts. The demon’s smile went stiff as she tried to stretch it further, making her look more like a doll than a living being. Her laugh was manic and off-kilter, her dismissive hand-wave jerky as a puppet on a string. “I’m fiiiiiine. Just, you know, thinking about some stuff.”
“You mean the letter?” Vaggie asked, tilting her head toward the envelope sitting abandoned on the couch.
Charlie deflated. But she didn’t collapse, a quiet reminder that she wasn’t a doll, no matter how much she looked like one.
Vaggie didn’t know why she cared about that.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s big news, I think. I… haven’t actually been able to get myself to open it up.”
Vaggie furrowed her brow. In the short time that she had known the princess of hell, she had come across as many things, but a coward was not one of them. “Why not?”
Charlie opened her mouth, closed it, and offered Vaggie a weak smile. “Why don’t you come see for yourself?”
Before Vaggie could protest, Charlie had clasped her soft, warm hand around her wrist and was guiding her toward the couch. She didn’t think that she could pull away until she was already sitting down beside her.
Charlie picked the envelope up and handed it to her. It was made of rich, thick, creamy white paper. It had a familiar sweet, airy scent that made Vaggie’s breath get caught in her lungs. On the front, written in ornate gold handwriting, was the name ‘Charlie Morningstar’.
“This is…”
“A letter from heaven,” Charlie confirmed.
Vaggie moved as if the letter was on fire, pushing it into Charlie’s chest with a demand of, “Open it.”
Charlie took it back hesitantly, nibbling on her lower lip as she glanced down at it. “A—Are you sure that you don’t want to open it?” she asked.
Vaggie shook her head. “It’s addressed to you.”
“But it might be about you!” Charlie protested.
Vaggie’s heart skipped a beat. It rose up into her throat, momentarily choking her up. She had to swallow it along with the building wave of emotions before she could say, “We don’t know that. Besides, I’m right here. It—”
Doesn’t matter which of us opens it. Except it did, because the letter was addressed to Charlie, and even if the princess was a demon, Vaggie wasn’t going to sin by opening a holy letter addressed to someone else.
“Just open it,” Vaggie croaked.
Charlie nodded. Her hands were trembling anew as she worked her fingers beneath the mouth of the envelope, gently breaking the seal and lifting it up. That trembling morphed into a near-violent shaking as she lifted the letter up to read.
And then she went still. Still as a marble pillar, still as a tombstone, still as almost every sinner that Vaggie had ever killed on extermination day. A glassy sheen developed over her wide rest eyes. If she weren’t already white as snow, Vaggie was sure that all of the color would have fled her face.
The minutes passed by in a silence that felt like it lasted forever.
“Charlie?” Vaggie eventually called, lifting her hand, but not quite bringing herself to touch.
“They’re moving extermination day up,” Charlie croaked.
It was Vaggie’s turn to freeze. “What?”
Charlie looked at her with a frail smile. “I guess they noticed you missing,” she said. She sounded like a crystal on the verge of shattering, something beautiful and precious put under more pressure than she could handle. It was nothing that any demon should sound like, yet there she was. It was the voice of utter devastation, yet she was still trying to smile.
Vaggie opened her mouth, but no words came out. There were no words. The extermination’s date had been set for as long as she could remember. Longer than she could remember — the extermination had been unchanging for nearly ten thousand years. The notion that they would move the date up now was nigh unthinkable. She could only think of one thing that could possibly trigger this change, as Charlie had already pointed out, but—
Was it really possible?
Did Adam and Lute really care about her that much?
If they did, they had to think that she was dead. They would never take such drastic actions if they knew that she was merely trapped. But if her sister cared about her a little more than she had realized, if she held more sway with Adam than she knew, if Adam herself valued her more than she had thought, then her death might actually mean something.
But if that was true…
Just what would they do to hell in the name of avenging her?
“This could be good news for you,” Charlie continued, broken and breaking, but still trying so hard to hold herself together. “When the exorcists come down here, they’ll be able to take you back up to heaven.”
Vaggie snapped out of the haze that she hadn’t realized she’d fallen into, staring at Charlie like she’d grown a second head. “You’d be alright with that?” she demanded, perhaps a shade harsher than she meant to be.
“Of course,” Charlie said. Vaggie couldn’t tell if the strain in her voice was because she was lying or because of the impending massacre of her people. “I don’t want to keep you trapped with me forever. That… That wouldn’t be fair.”
Once again, Vaggie couldn’t find anything to say. She didn’t know what to think. In that moment, if Lute had spontaneously flown down from heaven and asked her what she thought of the Princess of Hell, Vaggie wouldn’t have known what to say.
“Besides…” Charlie wiped away the tears that were building in her eyes and sat up straight. “This has to be because you’re missing, right? Maybe they’ll push the extermination back when they find out you’re alive!”
She sounded hopeful in the desperate manner of someone who needed their words to be true.
Vaggie couldn’t blame her.
“Maybe,” she said, unsure if she believed it or if she was just trying to keep Charlie from breaking down in front of her. Truthfully, she wasn’t certain that there was anything in the world that could change Adam and Lute’s minds once they were set on something, but…
Regardless of her reasons, no matter how wrong it was, the fact was that Charlie had saved Vaggie’s life. She owed her… not much, but she owed her something. If the accelerated extermination schedule really was to avenge her, then maybe she could convince them to move the extermination back to its scheduled time.
Assuming that they still gave a damn about what she had to say once they learned how she failed.
Charlie forced her smile wider again, doll-like, yet fragile in a way that almost made her seem like a person. “Everything will be fine,” she said, all too clearly talking to herself as much as Vaggie. Even so, the first hints of an unshakeable determination crept into her voice as she continued. “We have six months, right? That’s six months for you to heal! If you’re fighting fit and ready to go home by that time, they have to move the extermination back!”
Vaggie’s heart skipped a beat.
She refused to allow such a flawed plan to make her hopeful.
Yet as she looked at Charlie’s determined smile and tear-filled eyes, she couldn’t quite help it.
Chapter 6: walk with me
Summary:
Charlie shows Vaggie around hell.
Notes:
Sorry for the long time without an update! I got pneumonia. I'm honestly still feeling pretty shoddy and it's midterms week, so the next chapter of Salvation on the Radio and then the next chapter of Burning Feathers may be a little delayed. But! I'm still here and I'm getting better.
Chapter Text
Despite the reality that she now faced, Charlie kept her chin up and continued her attempts to be kind. Vaggie would be lying if she said that she didn’t find it admirable. It was a lie so grievous that she couldn’t even bring herself to say it in the confines of her own mind, regardless of how much that she knew she should at least try.
Worse, she was finding it increasingly difficult to think poorly of the princess of hell.
Vaggie tried to tell herself that there was no reason to think too deeply about it. She was in the middle of an intricate act, trying to earn Charlie Morningstar’s friendship. It was only natural that she would start to get invested in the whole charade. It did not mean that any of it was real. It did not mean that she felt anything or that anything would change when she got back into heaven. The princess would experience heavenly mercy for helping Vaggie, but that was all. The instant that Vaggie had her halo back, she would return to heaven without a second glance, her relationship with the princess of hell would dissolve, and Charlie would be alone once more.
That was a good thing. Once she was out of this mess, she would remember that and be able to be happy about it.
But that was six months in the future. Six months was a disgustingly long time in hell, long enough that she could not afford to spend too much time looking toward the future. Instead, her days were filled by keeping meticulous track of her healing wounds, killing time with Charlie, and keeping a watchful eye out to make sure that her resolve wasn’t about to crumble under the weight of her horrifying reality.
There was no reason for Vaggie to do that, she knew. Lute would be appalled to hear that she was showing any degree of concern for a demon. It should have made her feel vile. On some level, it did. But… The fact of the matter was that Charlie was helping her. It was rooted in a demonic selfishness, yes, but it still counted for something. Kindness was kindness, even when shown by an inherently evil creature.
Vaggie was not inherently evil. She was an angel; good, divine, pure. If she wanted to repay some of Charlie’s kindness by keeping an eye on her mental health, wasn’t that in her nature?
What Lute didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And if Vaggie had her way, her sister would never find out that she had ever considered Charlie to be anything other than a tool. If she had her way, she would forget about it the instant that she was back in heaven.
For now, however, she was in hell, and her heart felt a little lighter when Charlie burst into her room with a radiant smile on her face.
“You’re up early,” Vaggie observed, drawing the blankets back with a yawn. It didn’t hurt very much to stretch her arm out any more. Progress.
“I didn’t sleep!” Charlie cheerfully chirped. “I was thinking that— Oh, crud, wait!” She drew a step out of the doorway with a remorseful grimace. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“I woke up a little while before you came in,” Vaggie assured her. “What were you thinking?” She hesitated for a second, before adding, “And why didn’t you sleep?”
“Because I was thiiinking!” Charlie skipped over to the bed and sat down at the foot of it. “You’ve recovered enough to walk around, right?”
“Yes,” Vaggie replied without thinking. Truthfully, she hadn’t done more than walk between the rooms of Charlie’s mansion, but it counted. She needed it to count.
Charlie’s grin widened. “Do you think you could handle walking around for an hour or two?”
“I’m an exorcist angel.”
Like a switch had been flipped, that smile dulled and morphed into an expression of concern. “Being an exorcist doesn’t mean that you can’t be vulnerable. If you need some more time, you can take it. You can take as much time as you need, I’m not here to rush you.”
“I’m fine,” Vaggie insisted. “What were you thinking?”
Charlie eyed her warily. Vaggie met her gaze head-on, jaw grit with the stubborn set of someone who had learned determination from the two most hard-headed assholes in heaven.
Charlie relented with a sigh. “If you’re up to it, I was thinking that I could show you around hell.”
“Oh.”
“What do you think?”
Vaggie frowned, briefly trying to figure out how to kindly say her next words before deciding that there was no point in trying to be kind. Charlie wasn’t as stupid as she seemed. She knew that she was an angel, therefore, she likely knew what she thought of her realm. There was no point in trying to sugarcoat a truth that they both already knew.
“Is there anything worth seeing?” Vaggie asked. “It’s hell. I already know it’s a shithole, it’s meant to be. I don’t actually like seeing people suffer.”
Charlie’s expression shifted into something strange, like she was trying to smile even though something far less pleasant was lurking beneath the surface. In that moment, she wasn’t looking at Vaggie like she was a friend, but like she was a predator.
She didn’t like it.
“The exterminations are different,” Vaggie muttered, looking toward the wall. “They’re necessary to keep hell’s population under control. That doesn’t mean I like it.”
“You don’t?” Charlie asked, her hopeful breathlessness making Vaggie shiver in a way that they absolutely shouldn’t.
“Not… always,” Vaggie said. “Not all of us.”
Just most of them.
Not that it mattered. They were killing sinners, horrible people who had already had their chance and thrown it away. A good person could kill a bad person without becoming a bad person. It wasn’t murder, it was necessary. They were performing a community service for the afterlife as a whole.
Vaggie’s eyes remained trained on the wall as Charlie exclaimed, “That’s good! That must mean… You must think there’s hope for hell, right? That it might not be entirely awful?”
Vaggie sighed. She had to force herself to look back at Charlie, who was leaning forward, gaze locked onto her with all the brilliant, blinding anticipation that she had feared.
“I don’t know. Is there anything worth hoping for?” Vaggie asked.
“Plenty!” Charlie exclaimed. “I know that hell isn’t exactly a great place to be, but it’s still a place where people live. We have an entire culture! People go to work, take up hobbies, make friends, and do anything that they’d do anywhere else. I know it might be hard to imagine, compared to heaven, but there’s happiness down here too.” Charlie grabbed Vaggie’s hand and squeezed it gently. “I could show you, if you want.”
Vaggie stared down at Charlie’s hand.
It was warm and soft. Gentle. There were goosebumps running up Vaggie’s arm where their skin touched.
She couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched her like that — gently, skin to skin with no gloves in between.
“Fine,” Vaggie sighed, looking up to watch Charlie’s eyes light up in a way that made them seem like they should be gold instead of red.
“Really!?” Charlie squeaked.
“Really.”
Charlie was practically vibrating with excitement. “You won’t regret this!” she exclaimed as she jumped off of the bed. “Let me— I’ll get you some clothes that aren’t pajamas! Be right back!”
One change of clothes later, Vaggie was standing in the streets of hell, feeling very much like she was going to regret this.
“That is one of our many food stalls!” Charlie exclaimed, pointing at a bright red cart with a black umbrella over the top. The top of the cart was flipped back to allow it to expel steam that smelled like a putrid combination of unwashed feet and morning breath. The proprietor of said cart was openly glaring at Vaggie and Charlie. Charlie either didn’t care or didn’t notice, eagerly continuing, “It sells— actually, let’s not worry about what it says. We can come back if you develop a taste for hell food later.”
Vaggie stared.
The cart owner stared back. One of his eyes looked like a goat while the other was a terrible black pit. He was covered in purple scales but had a feathered tail, leaving her with absolutely no clue what he could be.
After a moment, the cart owner grinned greasily.
Vaggie stepped back, lips curling back in distaste. She wondered if whatever he was selling smelled like feet because he was actually selling boiled feet.
“Come on!” Charlie exclaimed, grabbing Vaggie’s hand and dragging her down the street. “Tell me if you need me to slow down and we can! But— Oh, there’s so much that I want to show you!”
Charlie gave a little jumping dance before turning around to grin brightly at Vaggie.
Vaggie didn’t realize that she was grinning back until Charlie said, “You have a beautiful smile.”
Vaggie didn’t have a chance to tense up with Charlie pulling her along. She was barely even able to keep up with Charlie’s pace, although she would sooner face the demon who had grounded her again than admit that she was having trouble keeping up. Heck, it was probably good for her to be pushing herself a little. Healing was one thing, but she couldn’t afford to let herself degrade. She should thank Charlie for the exercise.
She didn’t. Vaggie didn’t say a word as Charlie guided her through hell, silently taking in the squalor and misery that the princess called home — and the undying affection with which she showed it off.
“That’s the Porn Studio,” she said, gesturing at a large, polished building that was in a significantly better state than many of the dilapidated settlements in hell. “It really is called that! I guess its owner isn’t very creative, but he also doesn’t really need to be, since he has the entire industry in the palm of his hand. I think. I don’t really know all that much about… that… stuff.” Charlie shrugged. “I’d bring you closer, but I don’t think it’s exactly… safe.”
Vaggie broke her silence to assure her, “That’s fine. I think I can do without a tour of a porn studio.”
“We might be able to manage the television studio!” Charlie eagerly said, swinging the hand that was still holding onto Vaggie’s. “The radio station has been out of operation for five years now, but business is booming in television.”
“I… appreciate the offer, but I think I’d rather keep my head low for now,” Vaggie carefully said.
Charlie’s eyes widened before sharpening into a wince. “Right, yeah, good thinking. We’ll stay away from other people. Let’s go… oh, this way!”
Charlie’s grip tightened slightly as she led Vaggie around a corner. She relaxed her hold a moment later, at which point Vaggie had to hold tighter to avoid slipping out of her hold as sweat gathered on their palms.
“Cannibal town is that way,” Charlie said, jerking her head toward a dusty red cobblestone street. “I heard that it’s actually a lot nicer than you’d think over there, but I don’t really want to risk it, you know?” She chuckled, rubbing the back of her head sheepishly. “I know that sounds a little… judgmental and intolerant of me…”
“They’re cannibals,” Vaggie flatly said. “It would say more about you if you didn’t judge them.”
Charlie winced. “Right…”
“I’m fine with not seeing cannibal town,” Vaggie continued. “I’m…” Tired, which she would absolutely not be saying. “…Fine with seeing whatever you want,” she lamely finished.
Charlie peered at her for a moment, eyes softening into something about as firm as sand. “Alright,” she said, giving Vaggie’s hand a squeeze. “Let’s just keep going then. The thing I wanted to show you is close by.”
“Sounds good,” Vaggie said, trying to sound excited, or at least neutral. Anything but worn out.
Charlie smiled faintly before she started walking again. Her pace was slower this time. Instead of walking ahead of Vaggie, she dropped back to move practically alongside her, only the short step ahead that was necessary to direct them. There was no reason for her to keep holding onto Vaggie’s hand, but she didn’t drop it. There was no reason for Vaggie to let her keep holding her hand, but she did not pull away.
It was fine. Friends held hands all the time. By letting Charlie do this little display of affection, Vaggie was further cementing her position as someone who she should care about. Which was good and fine and even righteous for her to do, because the deception served the greater purpose of getting her back into heaven, and that was all that mattered.
Gradually, the scenery of hell began to change. Uneven concrete streets gave way to worn dirt paths. The stench of fuel and oil and piss gradually faded, replaced by the thick, earthy aroma of rot and decay. Bits of grass and weeds sprang up around heaps of rubble. It was brown, patchy, and far longer than it would be if it saw even a little bit of care, but still more nature than she had ever seen in hell.
“Are we leaving the city already?” Vaggie asked.
She hadn’t expected Pentagram City to be that small. Certainly, it had always seemed huge during exterminations.
“Nope!” Charlie exclaimed. “This is a park! Well, sort of. This was an apartment complex that was next to the park. It got destroyed in a turf war, and we all sort of just… decided to let it become part of the park. The actual park is about half a block away.”
“Huh,” Vaggie blinked, peering around. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see how this could have been a building once.
“You’ve never seen this place during the exterminations?” Charlie asked.
Vaggie shook her head. “I went where the sinners were.”
“So if sinners tried to hide here…?”
“We would find them.”
“Oh.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way. Vaggie contemplated doing Charlie the favor of pulling her hand away. If she were the princess of hell, she wouldn’t want to hold hands with the person who had so thoroughly shut down her moment of optimism, no matter how lonely she may be.
Before Vaggie could commit to a course of action, the overgrown rubble beneath her feet gave way to a rough pebble path. The wild grass shifted into something that was far from maintained, but not nearly as unruly as the previous growth was. Vaggie even thought that she saw patches of green. There was no green to be seen on the bare, straggly trees that lined the streets, but their absence was made up for by the simple fact that they were trees. In hell.
Vaggie hadn’t known that it was even possible for trees to grow in hell. Now that she thought about it, it was a stupid conclusion that she had come to with no real basis, but it had felt right. The notion that any sort of genuine life could exist in hell was simply wrong.
Yet there it was, right before her eyes. There was even a greasy black bird perched in the tangled branches of one of the trees.
“Come on,” Charlie murmured, giving Vaggie’s arm a gentle tug. She was so caught up in observing her surroundings that she didn’t notice the rickety, graffiti-covered bench until Charlie was already leading her over to it. It took all of Vaggie’s restraint to keep from collapsing into it outright. It took more to keep her posture straight.
And it was all pointless, because Charlie just eyed her worriedly and softly said, “You can relax, you know.”
“I know,” Vaggie blurted out, because there would have been no reason for her not to know. That was stupid, and Vaggie wasn’t a stupid person. And she wanted Charlie to know that because… Because it would make her life easier, somehow. “I just don’t want to brush my back against the bench. Who knows what sort of hell germs could be clinging to it.”
Charlie’s face fell.
Vaggie wondered if maybe she should start choosing her words more carefully.
A second later, Charlie’s face lit up again, and Vaggie felt a warm bloom of relief. Of course she did; everything would go far easier for her if she didn’t irreversibly alienate her ticket back to heaven.
“Here!” Charlie exclaimed, moving to take her jacket off and drape it over the back of the bench. Vaggie opened her mouth to protest, but before she could get so much as a word out, the pristine red fabric was already draped over the filthy wood. “How’s that? Now you don’t have to worry about bench germs!”
Vaggie stared at Charlie, completely at a loss for what to think, to say, to feel.
Charlie bit her lower lip. “Is that okay?”
“It’s fine!” Vaggie rushed to assure her, perhaps a little faster than she should have. “Thank you.”
Vaggie slowly leaned back against the bench. She braced herself for a burst of pain when her back touched the wood, but all that came was a dull, easily-ignored ache. What she couldn’t ignore was the alien feeling of her spine relaxing into something other than picture-perfect posture.
Yet even that was nothing compared to Charlie’s smile.
Vaggie spoke quickly. “You’d think a princess would be more careful with her stuff.”
Charlie blinked. “What? You mean the jacket?”
“What else would I be talking about?”
Charlie laughed, waving a hand dismissively. “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re more important than a jacket.”
Vaggie looked away. The bird in the tree had jumped down to the poorly-maintained brown and green grass, where it stood pecking and clawing in search of morsels. “You’re kind for a demon,” she murmured.
“Yeah…” There was a bittersweet note to Charlie’s voice. “I like to think that I’m kind for a person.”
Vaggie swallowed, her hand fisting against the deep red fabric of the pants that she had borrowed from Charlie.
“What do people do here?” she abruptly asked.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, the old ache that had been haunting her a second ago giving way to good old fashioned confusion.
“The park,” Vaggie clarified. “What do people do here?”
“Well… It’s a park,” Charlie said. “Sometimes people come here to exercise and enjoy the outdoors, but a lot of the time they just come here to relax, look at the scenery, and… do nothing. You have places like that in heaven, right?”
Vaggie probably should have looked at Charlie.
She didn’t. She didn’t know what was stopping her.
She didn’t care to figure it out.
“Of course we do,” Vaggie said. “It’s heaven. We have plenty of places like that.”
“So why…”
“I don’t go to places like that.”
“But you… Do take time to relax, right?”
“Not really.”
No exorcist did. They had things that they did outside of work, of course — Lute had the time that she spent alone with Adam, Vaggie had her days spent training and talking with Lute, and the others had… whatever they had. But none of them ever spent time doing nothing. No one except for maybe Adam, but he more than made up for it on extermination day.
Vaggie would never be able to kill as many sinners as he did. She couldn’t afford to slack off like he did.
Her diligence was something that had only ever filled her with pride. Thinking about the extermination should have made her feel noble and fulfilled.
It didn’t feel good as Charlie’s eyes bored a hole into the side of her head. It didn’t feel good at all.
“We have plenty of parks in heaven,” Vaggie said for the sake of saying something. “I just didn’t expect to see one in hell. Or think that it would be used for normal… park… stuff.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “Well, it is.”
“Yeah. You said.”
Charlie gave Vaggie’s hand a squeeze.
Why hadn’t she pulled it away? They weren’t walking any more. It was time to take her hand away from Charlie’s.
She didn’t.
“Well, what do you think of hell’s nicest park?” Charlie asked.
Vaggie finally looked back at her, taking in her amused smile with an arched eyebrow. “This is hell’s nicest park?”
“The nicest one in the pride ring, anyway. I want to make a better one soon though. It’s just a matter of finding a good spot… and finding a way to keep people from wrecking it. Not a lot of people come around here, honestly.”
Something apprehensive flickered across Charlie’s face.
Vaggie gave her hand a squeeze. “I like it.”
Apprehension gave way to joy. “You do!?”
“It seems like as good a place to waste time as any.”
For an instant, it looked like Charlie might hug her. “Good!” she exclaimed. “We’ll stay here until you’re ready to go back to the mansion, then.”
“It won’t be long,” Vaggie said.
And it wasn’t. She felt like she could make the walk back to the mansion after about twenty minutes.
They stayed in the park for over an hour.
Chapter 7: no such thing as no limits
Summary:
Vaggie and Charlie learn a little bit more about each other.
Notes:
Sorry for the delay! I have college and roughly five million projects. I can't guarantee when the next chapter will be out, but it WILL happen. I have this entire fic outlined, which means it'll be completed Eventually.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Charlie’s gym looked like it had never been used. Taking a look at the princess, it was easy to see why. While not exactly scrawny, the demon couldn’t pass as buff by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Vaggie was all but certain that she had never worked out a day in her life.
Good. If Charlie didn’t work out, that meant that she wouldn’t follow her into the gym. Although her company was far from unpleasant — perhaps, in the quiet of her own mind, given the unique set of circumstances, she could even admit that she was starting to enjoy spending time with her — she didn’t need someone to bear witness to what was about to happen.
Vaggie could count the times someone had seen her struggle on the tips of her fingers. They had all been early into her training, when she had been working on pulling herself up from the bottom of the angelic ranks and molding herself into the killing machine that she was today. Lute had looked at her with worry every time she faltered, but also with a sort of relieved reassurance that her sister would never beat her out as the strongest exorcist. Adam had barely looked at her at all until she had stopped making mistakes. It was honestly a little bit of a relief to know that he probably couldn’t pin her fledgling missteps to her face.
That was when she was a freshly-created rookie. Now she was an experienced soldier trying to get back into shape after a debilitating injury. If Charlie saw her struggling…
She would tell her that it was okay. She would encourage her to take the time she needed and not push herself too hard. She would say that she should be proud of herself for the effort she was making instead of telling herself off for the points where she struggled.
Vaggie couldn’t let that shit into her head. She was already making enough mistakes, having too many disloyal thoughts, flirting too thoroughly with fire in her grand scheme to return home. The last thing that she needed was to go soft as well.
That left her where she was now: standing in the middle of the large, pristine, untouched gym that was the mansion’s basement. There wasn’t much in the way of equipment — a punching bag that looked like it had never seen a single first, a spotless set of weights, and a treadmill that had sat dormant for so long that dust had started to form along the handles — but that was fine. Vaggie didn’t need fancy training supplies. What she needed was space. Space, and perhaps a mat.
Fortunately, space was something that the large, empty house had in abundance, and she managed to find a soft green mat rolled up by the treadmill. Vaggie dragged it out to the center of the room, laid it down, and got to work on her warm-up.
A hundred sit-ups.
A hundred push-ups.
A hundred jumping-jacks.
A hundred crunches.
By the time she was done, her back ached, her stomach throbbed, and sweat was rolling down the sides of her face.
The discomfort was something to be ignored. This was a warm-up, not a genuine work-out, not something that she could allow herself to give up after. She had done more vigorous routines with Lute on their easy days. She had done this when she was a new recruit. There was absolutely no excuse for her to be struggling with it now, missing wings or not. Therefore, the solution was to push forward as if she was not struggling at all.
Vaggie grabbed her water bottle and took a long swig. Her stomach cramped and twisted upon her swallow. Vaggie pressed her hand against her mouth, swallowed again to truly force the water down, and walked over to the treadmill.
Ten kilometers an hour. One hours. It wasn’t even fast enough to be considered running, really. It was just a brisk jog, one that any exorcist should be able to accomplish in their sleep. Maintaining it for an hour was child’s play. She should have set it to thirteen or fifteen kilometers an hour to achieve a true sprint. Lute would have done that if she were in her shoes. Vaggie calmed the unease threatening to rise by telling herself that she would go faster tomorrow.
Faster, longer, harder. She would increase the intensity of her workouts every day until the extermination came. That way, she would be in top physical condition by the time Adam saw her again. It would not make up for the loss of her wings, there was absolutely nothing that could do that, but perhaps it would convince him to allow her to remain an active exorcist. If she was very lucky, maybe it would even keep him and Lute from looking at her like she was weak. Maybe it would stop them from looking at her with…
Pity?
Adam pitied people sometimes, but it was always the condescending, scornful sort. He valued Vaggie, maybe even cared about her, but she knew better than to expect it to go that far. The only person he cared about enough to genuinely pity was Lute, and her sister was too talented an exorcist to give anyone a reason to pity her.
Lute didn’t do pity. Period. The weak were written off with the scorn and disdain that they deserved and spared no further thought. However, Lute didn’t care about the weak in most circumstances. She did care about Vaggie. If something happened to her or Adam, perhaps…
No. Lute had never pitied anyone before and that was not going to change. Adam was too strong of an angel for anything to ever happen to him, and Vaggie may have been torn down from heaven, but she would not be the one to introduce her sister to that horrible emotion. She would show Lute that she was still strong when they met again, even if it was not a significantly more grounded strength.
An hour passed.
Vaggie jogged. She ignored the pain in her back, the way her stomach threatened to seize, the headache that had begun to form behind her eyes. She did not allow herself to stop to drink due to the risk that any sort of stall may mark an early end to her workout. It was only when the treadmill beeped to mark the end of the hour that she pushed the little red button that stopped the treadmill. The world spun around her after she stopped moving, but she paid it no mind. Grabbing her bottle and taking a drink triggered a fresh wave of pain in her stomach, but that wasn’t particularly abnormal.
She was almost done, anyway. Once she had practiced for her spear for a while, she would be able to take a break. She just needed to push herself a little further and she would be on the road to recovery.
Vaggie stepped off the treadmill and immediately crashed to her knees. The sound of the blood rushing through her head was deafening, yet she still managed to hear the alarmed cry of, “Vaggie!”
“Fuck,” Vaggie breathed.
Charlie was upon her in an instant. A gentle hand on her back and another on her shoulder, gently coaxing her upright from where she had doubled forward. Vaggie wanted to pull away, but her body was far too sluggish to obey her commands. Then, when she met Charlie’s wide-eyed, worried gaze, she found herself trapped for a different reason entirely.
“Are you alright?” the princess asked, moving her hand away from Vaggie’s back to brush some hair away from her forehead. Her hand was blessedly cool; it took a concentrated effort for Vaggie to keep from closing her eyes when Charlie moved it down to her cheek and allowed it to linger.
“I’m fine,” Vaggie said, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth was. “I just…”
“You pushed yourself too far,” Charlie surmised.
Vaggie inadvertently pulled back from Charlie’s hand when she looked away. The soft, cool touch of her hand was missed, but she could not bring herself to look at her to get it back. “That shouldn’t have been too much,” she muttered.
“You were seriously injured, Vaggie,” Charlie said, frustrated and impatient at the same time. “You can’t expect to be in tip-top shape immediately.”
“That isn’t tip-top shape,” Vaggie said, the urgency of her words forcing her to meet the princess’s gaze. “Charlie, what I was doing was nothing.”
Charlie looked like she wanted to argue. The words didn’t come. Instead, after a moment of peering at Vaggie, she hooked her arm around her shoulders and tugged her up with a murmur of, “Come on. Let’s get you back upstairs.”
The most humiliating thing about Vaggie’s situation was probably the fact that she didn’t protest. If she had protested, at least she would have been able to cling to the hope that she would get back to her workout after she’d rested for a little while, that she wasn’t really down for the count. By allowing Charlie to take her back upstairs, she was admitting defeat in every way that mattered.
But she let her. Vaggie leaned heavily against Charlie as she guided her back upstairs. The princess was practically carrying her by the time they reached the top of that seemingly never-ending staircase. If it was any strain to her, she didn’t mention it, instead leading her over to the couch with a patience that should have been reserved for the saints.
In a perfect world, Vaggie would have gracefully sat down on the couch. In the flawed, fucked up one that she found herself in, a living nightmare where she was wingless, locked out of heaven, and stuck with a demon who she didn’t actually hate, she flopped down on it bonelessly. The small relief that she felt at the lack of pain when her back bounced against the pillows was eclipsed by the abject frustration that she felt at the sheer exhaustion radiating through her body. With a groan, she laid her arm against her forehead, staring blankly up at the ceiling.
Charlie leaned down over her a second later, blocking her line of vision. “You really wore yourself out, huh?” she asked, the forced lightness in her voice not enough to hide her worry.
“I guess,” Vaggie muttered.
Charlie nodded. Her face was a fraught mess as she tried to hide her growing anxiety and failed miserably. “Wait right here!” she said with forced cheer. “I’m going to get something that will perk you right up!”
Vaggie turned her head to watch Charlie as she walked away. Her thoughts came slow and sluggishly, but once they had formed, they were impossible to ignore.
Her first was that Charlie really was a horrible liar. If there ever came a day where she had to deal with heaven apart from returning Vaggie, the angels would tear her apart.
Her second was that she hoped that day never came.
Her third withering, dismay-filled thought was that it was a good thing that Vaggie’s plan didn’t depend on Charlie finding her frightening, because that was never going to happen again. Realistically, seeing her maimed and almost murdered had already dragged her capability down a few pegs in Charlie’s eyes, but she could tell that she had intimidated the princess to at least some degree before. Now? Now, it was unlikely that the princess would ever see her as someone that she wasn’t perfectly safe around.
The thought didn’t bother her as much as it should have.
Charlie returned a few minutes later, a clear bottle filled with bright blue liquid clutched tightly in her hand. She grinned as she passed it to Vaggie, who accepted it with a pensive frown.
She sat up and turned the bottle over in her hands. The logo printed on the front was unfamiliar, but there was no mistaking what it had to be. Vaggie twisted the lid off the bottle, raised it up to her lips, and took several desperate gulps. The energy drink was sickeningly sweet, but she could feel her body’s desperation with every mouthful.
“Slowly!” Charlie urgently warned. “You’ll upset your stomach if you drink it too fast!”
Reluctantly, Vaggie pulled the bottle away from her lips. It was already a quarter of the way empty, but she didn’t feel like she was going to vomit yet. The churning of her stomach warned her that she’d reach that point eventually if she didn’t heed Charlie’s words. With a sigh, she set the bottle down to hold it between her knees and looked back up at the princess. “You work out?” she asked.
“Not really,” Charlie sheepishly said. “I just like how they taste.”
Vaggie raised an eyebrow. “You drink energy drinks for their flavor?”
“Yeah?” Charlie’s smile grew a little wider, straining at the corners. “Is that bad?”
“No. Just new.”
Charlie’s smile managed to grow wider yet. The difference was that now it was shining as brightly as heaven itself. “Every good thing was new once.”
“So were all the bad ones,” Vaggie said.
“Yeah, but… bad things don’t have to stay bad forever, right? Things – people – aren’t black and white, and they can grow and change and learn.”
Vaggie blinked. “We were talking about energy drinks, right?”
Charlie chuckled, rubbing the back of her head nervously. “R–right.”
Vaggie narrowed her eyes. That had to be one of the most suspicious displays that she’d ever seen from Charlie, but given that it was Charlie, it probably wasn’t anything harmful. Allowing her attention to wander away from the princess, she picked her energy drink back up and started drinking again, taking small sips this time.
Charlie sat down beside her, but waited for her to slowly drain the bottle to speak. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” Vaggie said, passing the empty bottle to Charlie.
She set it down on the side table with a gentle, “Good. I’m glad.”
They sat in silence for a while, Charlie fidgeting and gnawing on her lower lip, Vaggie staring at her for no particular reason. At some point, it dawned on her that she should probably say something. A moment later, she realized that she had no idea what.
Fortunately, Charlie broke the silence for her. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something…”
Vaggie tensed up. “What?”
“My dream.”
“Did you have a bad dream?” Vaggie asked, already knowing that that wasn’t the case in the ephemeral, indescribable way that one sensed something big on the horizon seconds before the first storm cloud rolled into view. Yet as Charlie looked at her, eyes glimmering, she knew that it could never be anything as dark, cold, and gray as a storm. She also knew, deep in the core of her being, that whatever it was would be ten time as powerful.
“Do you ever think…” Charlie paused, letting out a long exhale and shaking her head. “You aren’t going to agree with me,” she tried again. “I know that you aren’t going to agree. But… Vaggie, do you think you can try to listen to what I’m going to say?”
Vaggie was terrified. She didn’t know why.
She was excited. That one she knew she could have found an answer to if she searched, but the prospect scared her more than anything that Charlie was saying.
Her tongue was dry as sandpaper, her mouth tasted of copper, and she still managed to sound like everything was perfectly fine when she said, “Of course.”
Charlie smiled. There was some hesitation behind it, some uncertain worry that Vaggie may go back on her words, but she still clung to her optimism with all of the loving ferocity that defined her. She doubtlessly meant to be gentle when she took Vaggie’s hand. Her grip was tight instead, uncomfortable in a way that almost bordered on uncomfortable. Doubtlessly, Vaggie should have pulled her hand away. She squeezed Charlie’s back instead, a silent encouragement to keep going.
“I’ve spent my life in here,” Charlie continued. “It’s my home. I’ve gotten to know the people in it. They’re my people. And… Vaggie, they aren’t all evil.”
Vaggie’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart stuttered to a stop. The copper tinge in her mouth tasted like blood, and for a second, she felt like her hands might just be covered in it. She managed to shove all of those sensations aside, but she was not quick enough to stop the words that had no right to ever leave her lips.
“I know.”
Charlie sat up straighter, that flicker of hope in her eyes flaring into a blazing inferno. “You do?” she asked, sounding breathless in a way that Vaggie had never heard from her before — not when she was bleeding and at her mercy, not when she had threatened her, never.
It was enough to make her double down on words that she should have tried to walk back.
“I do.” Vaggie gave Charlie’s hand another squeeze. “You aren’t evil Charlie. And…”
She shouldn’t say it. She shouldn’t even think it. If Lute knew, she would be ashamed to call her sister. She would call her traitor instead, say that she had turned her back on all that was good. She would…
She would never know. Lute didn’t need to know about a single thing that Vaggie said or did within the confines of hell.
But Charlie would never forget the things that she didn’t say. And as she looked at the princess of hell, as she saw the way that she looked at her, she knew that she couldn’t let her remember her as a coward who couldn’t bring herself to say what she meant. Someone who had accepted her kindness, kindness that she now had no doubt was genuinely real, but had never once stopped to actually listen to what she was saying.
Vaggie did not smile. She did not tighten her grip on Charlie’s fingers, for she feared that she might just break her hand if she allowed herself to do so. But she didn’t look away as she finished, “…If you aren’t evil, I suppose some of the other hellborn might not be either.”
It was hard to describe Charlie’s reaction to her words. It was hope and disappointment wrapped into one, the understanding that she had said the wrong thing, but she was still happy to hear it.
A second later, Charlie confirmed her suspicions. “I’m really happy to hear that, Vaggie. And I’m glad that you’re comfortable telling me! That’s a lot coming from an angel, especially an exorcist. But… What do you think about sinners?”
Vaggie blinked. “Sinners?”
“Do you think they can change?”
Vaggie opened her mouth, but ended up working her lips wordlessly for a little while before finally admitting, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Are you okay to walk?”
“Yes.”
Charlie stood up without another word. Gently but firmly, she pulled Vaggie along behind her as she started toward the staircase. Up they went, down the hall, and past the room Vaggie had been staying in. When they stopped in front of a pair of grand pink doors, she finally thought to ask, “Is this your room?”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
She pushed the doors open to reveal an opulent bedroom. There was a large, plush red bed in the middle with matching curtains draping over it. It was covered in more plushies than Vaggie could count. A vanity that seemed to double as a work desk was pressed against one wall. On the far end of the room, a door lead to a large balcony. The room was positioned perfectly to allow the sunlight to stream in through the windows, illuminating the space a cheerful light red. And the walls—
The walls were covered in so many drawings that not a single inch of wallpaper peeked through. Drawn in bright shades of crayon and marker, they almost looked like a child could have drawn them. But there were no children in the royal family’s mansion — there was no one but the loneliest person in all of hell, who was now staring at Vaggie with open breathlessness.
Vaggie stepped closer to one of the walls. The longer she looked, the more the eclectic mess of colors began to make sense. Slowly, they shifted from child-like scribbles to actual pictures. The darker colors in the drawings were almost completely reserved for demons. Hulking, fanged, clawed, dangerous creatures — some of them were frowning, some of them were sobbing, but most of them were smiling. Some of the landscapes were crude depictions of the ruins of hell, but many of them were bright and cheerful, rainbows and clouds and sparkles and—
Vaggie reached out to take one of the drawings.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” Charlie said. “People don’t stop changing after they die. They keep learning and growing, and as long as they’re learning and growing, can’t they learn to be better?”
“Charlie…”
“I know what the rules say. If someone is a bad person, they go to hell when they die, and if they’re a good person, they go to heaven. But what if I bad person became a good person while they’re in hell? Then they’d belong in heaven, right?”
Vaggie stared at the picture in her hand. It depicted a demon standing in front of what could only be the gates of heaven, holding hands with an angel.
“For as long as I can remember, thousands of my people have died every year to make sure that hell doesn’t overflow. But what if there was another way to take care of the population problem? If souls could redeem themselves and go to heaven, then we wouldn’t need to have the exterminations anymore!”
“It’s not that simple,” Vaggie said, unable to look away from the drawing in her hand, from the depiction of an idea so unthinkable that no one had dared to voice her before.
Not until Charlie.
“But why not!?” Charlie asked. “I’m the princess of hell and you just said that I’m not evil. And we’re friends, right? If an angel can be friends with the princess of hell, how do you know that sinners can’t learn to be good people?”
Vaggie opened her mouth, but no words came out. There were no words that could begin to make sense of what was happening. She just stared at that drawing, trying and failing to make sense of the mess within her head.
A feather-light brush of fingers against her wrist finally claimed her attention. She looked up to find Charlie smiling at her sadly.
“People change, Vaggie. The souls down here deserve second chances. I know that one exorcist can’t change everything and I’m not asking you to do anything for me. But… I want to save my people, and I think this is how I can do it.” She paused, looking down at her own drawing. “…Is it really that bad?”
“No,” Vaggie whispered. “It’s not bad at all.”
“Do you think heaven would listen? If I get the chance to tell them about my plan?”
No. There was no way. Sinners were evil, plain and simple. They weren’t like Charlie, born into hell and damned for nothing that they themselves had done. They were in hell for a reason. There was no saving souls gone bad.
No. The exterminations were necessary. If heaven didn’t regularly cull hell’s population, it would overflow until it threatened heaven itself. They were the safeguard of all that was good and just. They were the reason for the exorcist’s existence. Adam would never agree.
No. Allowing sinners into heaven would throw the entire system into turmoil. It would mean change, and heaven never changed.
No…
Vaggie couldn’t think of a fourth reason to stay no.
Perhaps that was why, in a moment of weakness that she would never be able to excuse, however long she may live, she looked up at Charlie and said, “Figure out how you’ll redeem sinners, then maybe we can talk.”
Charlie smiled like she’d handed her the world on a silver platter.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Notes:
I'm re-organizing my server to be more Hazbin-friendly tomorrow! So if you're interested, consider checking it out. <3
Chapter 8: the line between you and me
Summary:
Vaggie tells Charlie a little bit more about herself.
Notes:
I am SO sorry about the massive delay in updating. I can't promise that it won't happen again, since I'm about to enter a very grueling semester, but I WILL keep trekking along with this fic. We get more plot-heavy next chapter too, so look forward to that!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Vaggie was aching for three days following the incident. Charlie forbade her from pushing herself further in that time. While it would have been easy enough to sneak around the Princess, when she looked at her concerned gaze, she found that she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
When she stretched that morning and wasn’t met by a bone-deep ache or overwhelming exhaustion, she felt a brief spark of relief. That spark faded and died an instant later, when she acknowledged the brutal truth that she now found herself face-to-face with. She may have recovered from pushing herself too far once, but if she did so again, she would wind up right back in the same position. Worse, if Charlie was to be believed, she may end up with damage that could set her even further back if she went too far past her limit.
Based on how worried she had looked when she said it, she was inclined to believe Charlie.
That meant that she had to take it slow, take it easy, and gradually work up to the level that she had been before. It was an easy enough solution in theory. In practice, Vaggie felt her heart beating a little faster every time she thought of it. Slow and steady was the exact opposite of what she needed right now. Slow and steady was for when you had hundreds of years to work your way up the ranks. It was for when you had an entire year to show only a fraction of improvement. If she wanted to return to her previous condition by the time Adam and Lute came down to Hell—
If she wasn’t able to get back into fighting condition by the next extermination—
Vaggie banished the thought before it could fully take root. It did not vanish completely, for it never did. It lingered in the back of her mind, threatening to well up and consume her if she let her guard slip for a little too long. That was fine though. As long as she didn’t work herself up first thing in the morning, she would be able to manage. As long as she didn’t send Charlie into a worried tizzy, she wouldn’t have anything to feel bad about.
Not worrying Charlie was the bare minimum of her goals. A higher, more acceptable bar was showing her that she was actually doing well, that she had no reason to worry about her. If she could get her to smile at her, to look at her with confidence and pride, then it would be worth waking up in the morning. For that reason, Vaggie didn’t leave her room immediately, despite the hunger in her stomach and the restlessness in her legs. She instead took the brush sitting at the vanity, sat down in front of the mirror, and got to work.
Every time she looked in the mirror, she couldn’t help but see the glaring absence where her wings and halo should have been.
She didn’t look in the mirror very often.
It didn’t take long for her to brush her hair. One of the advantages of the exorcist’s near-uniform bob cut was that it was easy to maintain. Or at least, it had been. Vaggie’s hair had already begun to grow out of it in the time that she had spent with Charlie. Soon, she would need to ask her about getting it cut. For the time being, there was something satisfying about looking in the mirror and seeing her hair laying smoother than it had since she had gotten trapped in Hell.
She didn’t know why the thought of Charlie seeing it generated an odd tingling in her stomach.
It was an odd feeling, almost uncomfortable, but not quite. Fortunately, it went away when she stopped thinking about Charlie’s reaction.
Unfortunately, it returned the second that she stepped out into the hallway and found her standing outside her room. It was accompanied by a myriad of other pointless thoughts. She was still in her pajamas; should she have gotten dressed before opening the door? Her hair was nice, but how frumpy did the rest of her look? Were her eyes too tired? Did Charlie care that she was in her pajamas?
The thoughts raced through her mind in a furious flurry, only to crash and burn the second Charlie smiled at her. “You’re up!” she exclaimed.
“I’m up,” Vaggie repeated. “Did you need something?”
“Nope! Well, I mean, sorta. I—” Charlie took a step back, worried at her lower lip, and then stepped forward to grab Vaggie’s hand. “Come on, I have something to show you.”
With that, Charlie set off down the hall, dragging Vaggie behind her. She let out a huffy, rasping breath as she hurried after the Princess, the corners of her mouth pulling up ever so slightly.
When they reached the end of the hall, she realized that Charlie was wearing her pajamas too.
When they started down the staircase, she realized that the cuffs of her pajama pants were wet.
“What were you doing?” Vaggie asked.
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, not so much as faltering as she continues pulling her down stairs after stairs.
“Why are you wet?”
“Oh, that! You’ll see in a moment.”
That sparked Vaggie’s curiosity. Curiosity and suspicion, although both feelings were overshadowed by the warmth that bloomed in her stomach as she took in the way Charlie’s hair trailed behind her as she hurried down the final set of stairs.
That warmth was still a strange feeling. However, it had been becoming more and more familiar over the past several days.
Vaggie didn’t mind it.
Charlie let go of her hand when they stepped into the basement gym. She stepped to the side at the same time, turning to face Vaggie with a breathless grin on her face.
Vaggie had to make a conscious effort to look away from that smile and pay attention to her surroundings.
When she did, she wasn’t sure that she was seeing right.
“Is that… a pool?” she dumbly asked.
“Surprise!” Charlie exclaimed, holding her arms out wide. “You need to strengthen your shoulders, right?”
Vaggie nodded, unable to tear her gaze away from the pool. The thing was large enough that it filled up most of the gym. She could see where several pieces of equipment has been moved closer to the wall to make room. It looked like it was about four feet tall, maybe four and a half. A far cry from the pool that she had sometimes trained in in heaven, but more than enough to swim laps in.
“Well,” Charlie continued, breaking into Vaggie’s stupor, “I thought that maybe swimming would be a good way to do that without pushing yourself too far.”
Vaggie took a step forward, not quite able to believe what she was seeing despite it being right in front of her eyes. “Charlie, this is…”
“It’s not big enough, is it?” Charlie dejectedly asked.
“No!” Vaggie exclaimed, rounding on the Princess. She took one look at the shame-filled pout that had overtaken her lips and reached forward to grab her shoulders. “Charlie, this is incredible! It’s more than anyone could have asked for!”
Charlie’s face lit up. However, her tone was soft and humble when she said, “You don’t need to ask, Vaggie. I care about you.”
Vaggie’s breath hitched. Charlie brushed her fingers over where Vaggie’s rested on her shoulder, and for a moment, there was only her.
Charlie dropped her hand, and the world started moving once again. “Do you want to try it now?” she asked.
Vaggie looked down at her pajamas, back up at Charlie, and hesitantly said, “I don’t have a swimsuit.”
“Oh, shoot, that’s right! Come on, I’ll buy you one after breakfast!” With that, she took her hand and dragged her back up the stairs.
*
The rest of the day was spent chatting and swimming. Vaggie didn’t get much actual exercise done with Charlie in the pool with her, but that was fine. She would have time to make up for it later. She wouldn’t get the chance to make up for the time that she could have spent talking to the Princess of Hell. There were only so many minutes that she could spend listening to her breathlessly talking about her dreams, the things that she loved about the terrible realm that she had learned to see as beautiful, and the stories of her life. She would only get so many opportunities to answer her questions and get her to see her as something other than an exorcist. Her time with Charlie was limited, and once she was back in Heaven…
Vaggie could go back to the basement and swim in the evenings. She was used to sleeping far less than she had been. At this point in her recovery, she could probably cut back on her time spent resting without doing herself too much harm. She couldn’t tell Charlie to go away and come talk to her later.
It was fun watching her try and swim, too. The Princess wasn’t a bad swimmer by any means. She was a far cry from muscular, but she wasn’t out of shape either. The problem was that Vaggie could swim three laps in the time that it took her to do one. At first, she felt bad about leaving her in the dust. Then Charlie stopped, and she saw the pout forming in her lips, the way her eyes welled up, the way the water glistened on her skin and made her hair glimmer just so, and couldn’t help but show off a little. Just a little, until the temptation to stop and actually talk to the Princess became too much.
They sat in that pool for hours, talking about meaningless shit that probably wouldn’t have any impact on Vaggie’s life whatsoever.
She hung onto every word.
When she finally went to bed, she was content in a way that she hadn’t been for a long time. It wasn’t exhaustion or pain that carried her to sleep, but a sense of deep, pervading peace. It followed her when she woke up to see the first light of dawn peeking in through the window. She couldn’t help but smile at the sight. Getting her exercise in before Charlie woke up was just as good as doubling back to do it, and it was less likely to make her worry about her. Stretching her arms high above her head, she got out of bed, pulled her swimsuit on, and started toward the basement.
She glanced at the sitting room as she passed by out of pure reflex.
When she saw Charlie sitting on the couch, she walked over to her out of reflex, too.
“You’re up early,” Vaggie called.
Charlie let out a little yelp and jumped to her feet.
Vaggie took a step back and held her hands up.
“Oh, Vaggie,” Charlie said, laying a hand over her chest. “You startled me. Did you know that you walk really quietly?”
Vaggie lowered her hands to her sides. “Sorry. It’s because of my training, I guess.”
Charlie nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Yeah,” Vaggie murmured.
Truthfully, she wasn’t paying attention to what Charlie was saying anymore. She was too busy focusing on the dark bags under her eyes and the red rims around their edges. Charlie was smiling, but it was worn down in a way that couldn’t quite be hidden. Her hair was frazzled, stray strands sticking out of her ponytail. The sun hadn’t even finished rising yet, but it was already in its ponytail. She was already fully dressed.
No, already wasn’t the right word here.
“Are you alright?” Vaggie softly asked, taking a step forward.
“I’m great!” Charlie said, stretching her smile a little wider. “Like I said, you just spooked me a bit. Nothing to worry about.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Vaggie walked over to Charlie’s side and slowly, hesitantly, laid a hand on her shoulder. She was barely touching her, her fingers were only brushing the fabric of her bright red shirt, but as soon as contact was made, it was all that she could feel. “Did you sleep last night?”
“Oh. Um…” Charlie looked away. “No. But it’s nothing to worry about! That just. Happens sometimes.”
“Right.” With a gentleness that no exorcist was ever supposed to show, Vaggie pushed down on Charlie’s shoulder. She took the cue and allowed herself to be guided down to the couch, where Vaggie sat down beside her.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“There isn’t really much to talk about,” Charlie said with a shrug. She was still looking at the wall rather than Vaggie. “I was just thinking about some stuff, and… I guess I thought about it so hard that I forgot to stop thinking about it and go to bed.”
“You could talk about what you were thinking about,” Vaggie said.
“Yeah. I guess I could.” Charlie pursed her lips. For an instant, Vaggie hoped that she might listen to her.
That instant ended when Charlie looked at her and brightly asked, “Can we talk about you instead?”
Vaggie blinked. “Haven’t we talked about me enough?”
“Kinda, but not really? We never talked about what your life is like up in Heaven. Could… we talk about that?”
Suddenly, Vaggie realized that her hand was still on Charlie’s shoulder. Slowly, she let go and lowered it into her lap.
“We don’t have to!” Charlie hurriedly added. “I understand if you don’t want to! You’re… And I’m…” She took in a shaky breath. Her smile remained in place, but there was a pained glimmer in her red eyes that told her of how she was struggling to keep it in place. Even that came to an end when she looked aside and said, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No!” Vaggie exclaimed. “I was just surprised! It’s… fine.”
Was it? Lute would be angry enough to know that she was being so friendly with a demon. Adam would skin her if he knew that she was considering telling her anything about Heaven, let alone the exorcists.
But… What Lute and Adam didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, and they would never know about this.
It wasn’t like she was revealing any compromising information anyway. Charlie would never ask to know anything that could be used to hurt Heaven or the exorcists, and even if she did, Vaggie wouldn’t tell her.
She wasn’t a traitor.
What she was was the person who put a gleam back in Charlie’s eyes, the one who got her to perk up in excitement where she had been wilting only a moment ago. “Really!?” she squeaked.
Vaggie grinned. “Really. Ask whatever you want, and I’ll try my best to answer.”
“Okay, um, wow, I really didn’t expect this. Let’s see… Uh… Oh!” Charlie snapped her fingers, squirming in her seat slightly in her excitement. She almost tripped over her own words with the speed with which she asked, “Do exorcists have families!?”
Vaggie’s immediate answer was, “No.”
Charlie’s face fell. “No?”
Vaggie opened her mouth to affirm her answer, only to realize that no, the answer wasn’t ‘no’. It was far, far more complicated than that.
“Sort of,” she said with a sigh. “It depends on the individual.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“Exorcists aren’t human souls. We were made to provide soldiers for the extermination. The only exception is Adam, but he hasn’t been in contact with anyone from his human family for… longer than I’ve existed.” Vaggie paused, wetting her lips.
Adam would be furious if he knew that she had just said that. Lute would have been furious. Vaggie was surprised that she wasn’t furious with herself. It wasn’t that hard to connect the dots of Adam’s estrangement from his original family, considering how much time he spent with the exorcists, but there was a bare handful of people who he had actually told about it. Not even a handful, just her and Lute. And now she had…
Charlie wouldn’t tell anyone. She wasn’t a gossip, let alone the sort of person who would weaponize the knowledge of Adam’s relative isolation. If anything, it would humanize the Head Exorcist a little, which could be helpful in the future.
It was fine.
She could keep going.
The rapt on Charlie’s face told her that she had to keep going.
“But some of us have made families with each other. They aren’t like you’d think of them, but… We have sisters. Lovers. Friends that we couldn’t love more if they were our own blood.”
Charlie leaned forward slightly. “Do you have anyone?”
Vaggie should have known that that question was coming. She should have been prepared to answer it. The words still came slow and heavy as she said, “Lute and… and Adam.”
Charlie leaned back and straightened up slightly. “Oh,” she breathed. “Isn’t Adam…?”
“Yeah,” Vaggie said. “I’m closer to Lute, though. She’s… She’s his Lieutenant.”
“I see.” Charlie bit her lower lip, looking off to the side. “Are you and Lute…?”
“No!” Vaggie exclaimed, far faster and louder than she had intended, and for no good reason at that. She felt the blush burning at her cheeks and forced herself to lower her voice as she said, “Adam and Lute are together.”
Not that anyone other than her officially knew that. It was probably Heaven’s worst kept secret, but it was still a secret, kept between her, Lute, and Adam alone.
And now Charlie.
It was fine. They would never know that she knew. What she was telling her tonight would never matter.
The tension disappeared from Charlie’s shoulders. “I see.” She furrowed her brow a moment later, tentatively asking, “If they’re Head Exorcist and Lieutenant, is that… allowed?”
Vaggie grimaced. “Technically, no,” she admitted. “But they keep it quiet and no one has the guts to stop them.”
“Oh.” Charlie brightened up. “Well, if they’re in love, no one should try to stop them, right?”
Vaggie stared.
Charlie’s smile faded. She started to shift uncomfortably in place. “Did I say something wrong?” she asked.
“No!” Vaggie hurried to assure her. “It’s just, if Heaven thought that way…”
The room was filled by a lingering silence.
“If Heaven thought that way?” Charlie prompted.
Vaggie shook her head. “Never mind.”
She wasn’t going to go down that path. She couldn’t go down that path. The relationships forbidden by Heaven were forbidden for a reason. Adam and Lute may have been able to get away with bending the rules to a certain extent, but that was because they played it safe and never went too far. Their minor breach of professionalism was ultimately harmless. The exorcists who engaged in relationships with their own sex were pushing their limits, but as long as they, too, kept their relationships in the shadows, there was no need for consequences. The veritable pandora’s box that could be opened if Heaven loosened all of its restrictions simply could not be fathomed.
Charlie was well-intentioned, but she was naive. She was a good soul, but at the end of the day, she was still a demon. She didn’t understand how Heaven worked and likely never would, no matter how hard Vaggie tried to explain. It was for the better that they just didn’t go down that route at all.
Charlie was still frowning slightly as she said, “Okay.”
“Is there anything else that you’d like to know?” Vaggie asked, eager to push the conversation forward.
“Yeah, actually.” Charlie glanced down at her lap and worried at her fingernails for a moment before looking up at Vaggie and asking, “Can you tell me about Adam and Lute?”
There was no ignoring the alarm bells that rang out in Vaggie’s head. Providing a demon, any demon, with information about the Head Exorcist and his Lieutenant was nothing short of treason. It was compromising information that could potentially cripple the exorcists if it got into the wrong hands. It could bring the exorcists to their knees, could reveal weaknesses that they couldn’t afford, could destroy them before they could even blink.
Vaggie should have shut the conversation down and left immediately.
Not very long ago, she would have.
Now, despite the screaming of her instincts, she hesitated.
Revealing too much information about Adam and Lute could be a crippling blow to the exorcists if it got into the wrong hands, but was Charlie the wrong hands? She may have been a demon, but she was also one of the single kindest souls that Vaggie had ever met. She dreamed of breaking the status quo, but only for the sake of establishing peace between their realms, not to bring them to war.
It would be treason to tell any other demon what Charlie was asking. But if Vaggie only told her…
“Why are you asking?” Vaggie asked, trying to keep the edge of wariness out of her voice.
“Well, they’re important to you, right? I want to know what they’re like. I want… I want to know why you love them, I guess.”
Vaggie let out the breath that she had come to hold without realizing it.
Charlie didn’t want to know about Lute or Adam’s weaknesses or fighting styles, she wanted to know about them as people. She wanted to understand them, to see them as Vaggie saw them.
Telling the Princess of Hell what the Head Exorcist and his Lieutenant were like as soldiers would be an unforgivable betrayal.
Telling Charlie Morningstar what Adam and Lute were like as people might just be a step in the right direction.
Vaggie opted to start with the easy one. “Adam’s an asshole. He’s rude, obnoxious, and acts like a fucking idiot. He’s not, but he acts like he is to piss people off and get out of things that he doesn’t want to do.” She paused, lips twisting distastefully before she darkly muttered, “The jackass likes to call me Vajjie.”
“Oh,” Charlie said, caught somewhere in the territory between shocked and appalled and trying desperately to remain polite. “That’s…”
Vaggie allows her scowl to fall away. “He’s also loyal. He’d go to the end of the world for the people he cares about. His eye for an eye bullshit goes both ways; he’s a vengeful dickwad, but… If he cares about you, he won’t let anyone hurt you.” She glanced off to the side. “I suppose he’s fun to be around, too, when he isn’t riding his own dick too hard.”
“Oh,” Charlie said, softer this time. “I think I understand. What about Lute?”
“She’s also loyal, but in a more… obedient sort of way. She follows the rules like they’re the fucking air she breathes. She’s a vicious hardass about it too. Part of the reason she’s Lieutenant is because she does such a good job keeping us in line.” Vaggie smiled slightly. “She keeps Adam in line a lot of the time, too.”
“She sounds kind of scary,” Charlie said.
“She is,” Vaggie said. “But she’s also the most devoted person you’ll ever meet. It’s hard to win her over, but when you do, she gives her entire heart to a cause. Heaven doesn’t have a more dedicated exorcist.” Although it could be argued that it was Adam that she was more devoted to, but… Charlie didn’t need to know that. It was just a theory, anyway, and one that would likely never be put to the test. “She doesn’t open up to many people, but she cares more than she lets on. She’s so reluctant to show her soft side, it’s easy to forget that there’s a person under her mask, but…”
Vaggie looked down at her lap. Suddenly, her missing wings and halo felt so much more vivid.
“But?” Charlie whispered.
“There is,” Vaggie softly said. “She likes long baths, horrible romance novels. But she doesn’t know how to relax unless me or Adam force her to, so I don’t think she knows much about who she is or what she likes beyond that, us, and her job as the exorcist Lieutenant.”
“That sounds really sad,” Charlie murmured.
Vaggie shook her head. “She’s happy. Everyone in Heaven is happy. She just pushes herself too far sometimes.”
A lot.
Too much.
Vaggie had to stop talking before she said too much.
Charlie solved the problem for her by saying, “It sounds like the two of you have a lot in common.”
Vaggie looked up. “What?”
“Come on, an exorcist who pushes herself too far and doesn’t like to show her soft side?” Charlie grinned. “You sound like you could be twins.”
“No way.”
“Okay then, name something that’s different between you.”
“I have better taste.”
“In?”
Vaggie stared into Charlie’s gleaming red eyes, bright as the sun and just as warm.
“Everything.”
She would never be caught dead with some of the books she’d caught her reading. Or touch her favorite wine, for that matter.
Notes:
If you enjoyed the chapter, please consider throwing me a comment or sending me an ask on tumblr! It really does wonders to help with my motivation to write.
Chapter 9: what you know
Summary:
Charlie receives a phone call.
Notes:
Hey! Sorry about how long it took to post a new chapter, and thank you for your patience! I hope you enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The weeks passed by, as they so inevitably did.
The more time passed, the more Charlie started to resemble an angel more than any of the people Vaggie knew.
The more time passed, the more she forgot that she wasn’t supposed to let herself think things like that. Or maybe it was that she had simply stopped caring. At this point, she wasn’t sure that it made enough of a difference to warrant her consideration. The thing that actually mattered was…
The more time passed, the more that she wished it would stand still.
It was a nonsensical sentiment, of course. She should have been looking forward to the extermination. She was looking forward to the extermination. The sooner that she was able to get in contact with Lute and Adam, the sooner that she would be able to go back to heaven. Hell may not have been quite as horrible as she had always been told, but it would never be able to compare to her home. There was nothing there that was worth staying for.
Nothing.
No matter how kind Charlie was.
No matter how much she would miss her.
It was a sentiment that she needed to quell. Even if Lute and Adam were understanding of her weakness, they would be bothered if they knew the true depth of her friendship with a demon. She would need to be grateful to Charlie and nothing more. She would be able to champion her cause, but as far as the rest of heaven had to be concerned, it would be out of a sense of debt, not because of any true feelings. It may have felt like Vaggie’s entire world had been tilted on its axis, but at the end of the day, she was still an exorcist and Charlie was still a demon. That would not change.
Time would not stand still.
She should not want it to.
She should not have wanted it, but she did. Adam and Lute would be furious if they knew, but what they did not know would not hurt them. Her desires would be unforgivable if anything would come of them, but nothing would, so they could be allowed to grow and perish in secret. Time would not stand still, but Vaggie took note of each passing instant, savoring them while they lasted.
There was nothing in hell that was worth staying for, but perhaps it was worth knowing, even if only for six months out of an eternity.
If there were a way that her wings could be restored when she was back in heaven, an achingly idealistic train of thought that she has refused to allow herself to seriously consider when Charlie brought it up, then maybe it would have been worth losing them in the first place.
Once she was gone, she would never be able to tell anyone that she missed Charlie.
She was growing increasingly certain that she would never stop missing her, either.
*
Vaggie was caught so off-guard when Charlie’s phone rang that she fell off the couch.
The Princess of Hell hadn’t received a single call in the time that Vaggie had known her. Emails, yes. Those were always updates from the mailing lists that she was subscribed to though, never messages intentionally written to her by another living person. Yes, she received alerts from the various social media apps that she would scroll for hours when she was exceptionally bored. But those were always to alert her to updates from the assorted accounts that she was subscribed to. She never received a private message from another member, for her list of friends and followers was utterly barren on every single website and application.
Charlie never received any phone calls, for that would require that there be someone other than Vaggie in her life to call her.
Yet one dreary Wednesday afternoon, her phone rang, and Vaggie flinched so sharply that she went tumbling off the edge of the couch.
“Vaggie!” Charlie yelped.
“I’m fine,” Vaggie groaned.
Her words went utterly ignored, of course. The Princess was already by her side before she had finished sitting up. A tiny smile crossed Vaggie’s face as she took her outstretched hand.
“I could have handled that myself,” she said as Charlie finished pulling her into an upright position.
“I know, but you don’t have to be everything by yourself,” Charlie protested.
Vaggie raised an eyebrow. “Do you think that sitting up is a lot to do by yourself?”
“O—Of course not!” Charlie sputtered. “That would be dumb, and you’re not dumb! You’re strong and capable and cool and… Oh, I don’t know. I was trying to be polite.”
She wasn’t trying to be polite. She was trying to be helpful, because she was so absurdly kind that she would always rush to the aid of anyone who looked like they could use it, no matter how small the problem really was.
Vaggie reached forward to pat her shoulder. “You’re already the most polite person I know. You don’t need to try harder.”
Charlie chuckled self-consciously. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, what are the odds of that?”
“You should meet the other exorcists,” Vaggie dryly said.
Charlie’s smile shifted slightly. It did not fade away. The sad hint that it took on managed to be worse. “I don’t think that would go well,” she said.
Vaggie knew how she wanted to respond. She had a hundred things that she wanted to say. The trouble was, she didn’t know how to say any of them.
She wanted to tell Charlie that even the most bloodthirsty of her sisters would come to like her once they got to know her. After all, she had.
She wanted to say that if anyone had a chance at getting through to Adam, of making the angels see that maybe not all demons were vile abominations, it was her.
She wanted to say that when the day came that Charlie met any of the others, Vaggie would be with her every step of the way. She didn’t know how, but somehow, she would find a way.
Vaggie’s chest throbbed with how much she wanted to say each and every one of them. Yet she knew that if she tried, she would mess it up beyond repair.
She had to say something, though. She needed to provide some sort of distraction to pull Charlie out of the pit that she feared she may be slipping into. That was another opportunity for her to fuck up; Vaggie had never been particularly good at cheering people up. But…
Charlie’s phone sat abandoned on the couch, but it was still ringing.
Vaggie pointed at the phone and asked, “Are you going to get that?”
Charlie spun to face it mid-jump. “Oh, right!” she exclaimed. “I probably should, huh?”
“It’ll stop ringing soon if you don’t,” Vaggie agreed.
“Right, so I’ll just—” Charlie cut herself off by grabbing her phone and answering it in a flurry of jerky motion.
“Hello,” she eagerly chirped, “Who am I speaking t— Dad!?”
Vaggie found herself grateful that she was already sitting down. If she wasn’t, she definitely would have fallen off the couch again.
“No, no, it’s alright,” Charlie hurriedly added. “I’m fine talking. Really! It’s— it’s great to hear from you.”
Despite her words, there was no missing the strain in her voice. It bled into her body language. When she sat back down, it was more like she collapsed into the couch, heavy and boneless. She leaned back against the cushions for a moment, only to sit back up seconds later, her back as straight as a sword.
Vaggie hesitantly sat down next to her. She could hear a voice on the other side of the phone. It was loud and somewhat high pitched, speaking at such a speed that his words turned into a rambling barrage. If she didn’t know better, she would have described it as manic. The thought was dismissed immediately. It was the King of Hell on the other end of that phone, the notion that he might be some sort of manic train wreck was utterly laughable.
It was the King of Hell on the other side of the phone.
Back when Vaggie had first started staying with Charlie, she had tried her best to deny her fear. Some acknowledgment of it many have managed to slip through, but she distinctly remembered trying to push her more cowardly feelings down and act like the cold, immovable, fearless exorcist that she was supposed to be.
Now, she had to admit that she had been afraid. She had to because she was suddenly very, very afraid again. She didn’t know when she had stopped being so scared, but now the it had returned, it was impossible to ignore.
Somehow, Charlie looked even worse.
She did not look scared, per se. In a way, it might have been better if she was scared. On her face was a combination of hurt, anger, and stress that felt like it was driving a hot poker through Vaggie’s chest. It was an unpleasant feeling to say the least, but enough to break through the fearful fog threatening to overcome her.
Charlie was holding the phone with the hand that was opposite her. That allowed Vaggie to take her free hand and give it a gentle squeeze.
Charlie didn’t look any less agonized when she turned to face her. However, a whisper of something warm managed to break through the pain. She offered Vaggie a small smile and squeezed back.
Neither of them noticed that Lucifer had stopped talking until he started again.
“Oh!” Charlie exclaimed, almost dropping her phone as she startled. “No, I’m still hear, I’m listening. I just— got distracted for a little bit.”
Vaggie couldn’t make out the words that Lucifer was saying, but the tone of his voice sounded questioning.
Charlie was already white as a sheet. If it were possible for her to go paler, then Vaggie suspected that she would. Her eyes went wide before slowly sliding toward Vaggie. Her lips trembled as she said, “I—Is anyone there? You mean, anyone other than me? Well, I mean, I—”
She didn’t know what to say.
Which meant that she hadn’t decided if she was going to tell her father about Vaggie, even though he had clearly just asked.
Which meant that she was thinking about lying to the King of Hell.
One half of Vaggie wanted to breathe a sigh of relief. Charlie was one thing, but she would be a fool to expect the devil himself to have mercy. The fiend may well kill her if he knew she was there. He could do worse than kill her. Every exorcist knew of Lucifer’s evils; if she invoked his wrath, he would make her life a living hell in ways that his realm alone could never hope to accomplish.
If Charlie lied to the King of Hell, then as long as she gets away with it, Vaggie would be safe.
If she was caught, neither of them would be.
Every exorcist knew of Lucifer’s evils. Who was to say that his daughter would be spared from his wrath? The monster had already abandoned her to live on her own in a large, lonely mansion. Those were not the actions of a good or loving parent. What was stopping him from hurting Charlie if he found out that she had lied to him in order to protect an angel? She might pull it off, only to be discovered years later. If there was one being in the entire universe who would not be made to forgive by the passage of time, it was the devil himself.
Charlie was still sputtering. It made her look very unintelligent.
She wasn’t, though. Maybe she wasn’t a beacon of blazing brilliance, but she was smart in her own way. When she put her mind to it, she was good with words. Vaggie would never expect anyone to be able to talk circles around the devil, but if there was anyone who could get him to at least listen, it would be his own daughter. Not necessarily because she was his daughter, but because Charlie’s kindness and willpower could move mountains.
“It’s okay,” Vaggie whispered.
Charlie’s eyes flitted over to her.
Vaggie forced a smile, as if she was not scared. This time, she did not try to tell herself that she wasn’t. She did not need to, for she knew that what was at stake was more important than any fear she may be feeling. “You can tell him.”
Charlie stared at Vaggie with hopeful trepidation. For a heartbeat, surprise left her unable to respond beyond that all too telling expression. Then she adjusted her grip on her phone slightly and mouthed, ‘are you sure?’
Vaggie smiled as if she didn’t feel like her body was made of pins and needles and nodded an affirmative.
Charlie’s bright, relieved, grateful smile made her discomfort with it. More than that, it made her hopeful that she had made the right choice and this wasn’t going to end in disaster.
“Yeah, actually,” she said. There was still a degree of strain and discomfort, but there was also something warm and bright. “I made a friend. She’s been staying with me for the past few weeks.”
There was a flurry of sound from the other end of the phone. It wasn’t inherently alarming in that it didn’t sound angry or dangerous. If Vaggie didn’t know better, she would think that Charlie was speaking with an ordinary, excitable person. The knowledge of who was on the other end of that phone made her stomach twist in apprehension, especially when Charlie’s eyes went wide in undisguisable alarm. “Wait!” she cried. “No, dad, you don’t have to—”
The line went dead.
Charlie dropped the phone into her lap, slumped backwards, and dropped her head into her hands with a growl of, “Satan fucking damnit.”
Vaggie was barely able to contain the tremor in her voice as she asked, “What is it?”
“He’s coming over.”
“...Oh.”
With that, Vaggie’s fear took on a life of its own. She had known that this was a possibility, of course; one did not deal with matters involving the devil without expecting the worst thing to happen.
Expectation was not always enough to overpower terror.
Hope that you may make it through the worst did not make it any easier to endure it.
There was an instant where the rest of the world fell away, leaving only Vaggie and the nightmare before her.
She zoned back in to the sensation of Charlie rubbing her hands up and down her shoulders. The gesture was brisk enough that it was as if she was trying to warm someone who was on the verge of freezing to death. She was pretty sure that it was meant to be comforting. Whether it was meant to be comforting to her or Charlie, she didn’t know.
“It’s going to be alright, okay? There’s nothing to worry about. He’s going to love you, and you’re going to get along great, and it’ll be… it’ll be great, okay! So don’t worry about seeing my dad. He’s just… He’s just…”
Charlie had been speaking at a relatively normal speed when she started. However, she got faster with every word out of her mouth until it was a jumbled, rambling mess by the time she trailed off.
Vaggie had accepted that she had no choice but to acknowledge her fear, but that didn’t mean that she wanted Charlie to see it. However, she was coming to realize that she didn’t have a choice in that, either. She was able to bring herself to meet her eyes, but she knew that when the Princess looked into hers, Charlie would not find an exorcist standing tall, but a weak, haunted girl. She reached her hand up to touch Charlie’s shoulder, but pulled back when she realized that it was shaking. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to make her voice anything more than a frightful whisper when she spoke, but it was too important for her to say nothing.
“He’s Lucifer Morningstar,” Vaggie said. “He’s the devil, Charlie. There’s nothing just about that.”
She was telling the truth. Lucifer was a monster, the being that had unleashed evil upon the world. Charlie may have been his daughter, but that only made it more likely that she understood the depths of his profanity. With how good she was, she simply had to.
Vaggie was only starting an undeniable fact. She had not intended to hurt Charlie. Honest though her words may have been, they never would have left her mouth if she thought that they would hurt her.
They said that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions. Hurt flashed across Charlie’s face, and Vaggie was hit by a sudden, desperate desire to rewind time for at least one minute.
“Hey,” she said, reaching those trembling fingers out to brush against Charlie’s shoulder. “You aren’t responsible for anything that he did. I know he’s your father, but…” Vaggie swallowed heavily and tried to smile. The best that she could manage was something thin and anxious. “You can’t control who your parents are. I don’t blame you for it.”
Charlie looked down at the ground.
Vaggie was struck by the sense that she had said something wrong once more.
“Right,” Charlie said, soft and dull. “Vaggie… how much do you actually know about my father?”
“I…” Vaggie dropped her hand to her side. It was a simple question, yet it felt like anything that she could possibly say would be wrong. Was it possible that, despite all of her goodness, Charlie was able to love a creature as Lucifer?
…Yes. Of course it was. Of course she did. Because Charlie was so good, it was impossible that she wouldn’t feel some degree of fondness for her own father. If there was even a flicker of light within the devil, there was no doubt that she would have been able to find it. It may have been a deception — it most likely was — but as long as Charlie thought that she saw it, if she had any hope that it was real, she would hold onto it as tightly as she could.
Lucifer was the devil, the man who damned humanity. Charlie already knew that. If she loved him despite that, there was nothing that Vaggie could say about that that would make her see the danger that they were in now.
So she said the only thing that might have a chance of getting through to her.
“I know that he left you alone.”
Charlie lifted her head to offer her an aching smile. Thankful and sorrowful all at once, it paired with the tired glimmer in her eyes into something as sharp as a dagger, piercing through Vaggie’s soul and cutting right to her core. Except she wasn’t the one who was hurting.
“Yeah,” Charlie quietly said.. “He did. But that’s not what I’m talking about right now. What do you know about him other than that?”
Vaggie hesitated.
“What did Heaven tell you about him?” Charlie pressed.
“I—”
Vaggie’s mouth felt like it was filled with cotton. The words should have come easily. She had been hearing tales of the angel who had betrayed Heaven and humanity ever since her creation. The tale was one as told as time, written into the bones of Heaven itself. Telling Charlie the truth should have come easily. It should have been welcome, for it would be a step toward correcting her misunderstanding and protecting her from her father.
So why was it suddenly so hard to speak?
Vaggie forced herself back into action by swallowing heavily and looking off to the side. “You already know,” she said.
She had to know.
Charlie may have been born in the pits of Hell, but it was impossible that this story had escaped her ears entirely. No matter how her wretched parents may have tried to obscure the truth from her, there was no way that they could have rendered her fully ignorant. Charlie was smarter than that, too curious, too brave. There was no way.
“I probably do,” Charlie said, the ache in her voice growing stronger with every word that left her mouth. “I want to hear it from you, though. I haven’t exactly had the opportunity to hear it from an angel before.”
Vaggie looked back at Charlie. She was still smiling, but the ache had fallen back somewhat to allow a spark of encouragement to take its place.
Charlie was hurting, she knew she was hurting, yet she was trying to make Vaggie feel better.
Why?
Why was she like this?
Why did she have to meet her here?
“What about your father?” Vaggie asked.
“He never… When he was around, he never liked to talk about his past,” Charlie said. “My mom told me, but…” Her smile almost fell. She caught it at the last second, stretching it out into something a little wider than it had been before. Yet no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t force her eyes to shine the way that Vaggie had come to so adore. “That’s what’s bothering you, right? That I’ve only heard the story from my parents?”
Vaggie looked down at her lap. “It’s not just a story,” she murmured.
“You’re right. And I’ve only heard one side of it. So tell me your side, and I’ll listen.”
This time, when Vaggie looked up, it was to look for the trick.
She didn’t find one. Truthfully, she should have known that she wouldn’t find one. Charlie wouldn’t lie to her. Charlie didn’t lie, not even when it would do her worlds of good. The notion that a demon, Lucifer’s daughter, was so readily willing to listen to an angel talk about why her father had been cast out of Hell, was simply unthinkable.
But Charlie was saying it. And if she said it, she meant it. From the sincerity in her expression to the way she reached forward to squeeze Vaggie’s hand, she knew that it was true.
It was real.
It was happening.
It was still impossible that Vaggie had to ask, “You mean it?”
“I do. But…” Charlie paused to squeeze her hand. “If I listen to you, I want you to promise to listen to me, too.”
The chill that came over Vaggie was akin to winter’s first chill. Slow, creeping, and inevitable. Yet with Charlie’s hand clasped in hers, it was not quite as dreadful as she would have expected it to be, as it should have been.
“Listen to you,” Vaggie repeated. “You mean listen to…”
“I want you to let me tell you what I was told and what my father is actually like.”
The devil’s daughter wanted to listen to her talk about her father.
She wanted to tell her the story of Hell that she had been told.
She wanted Vaggie to give her the chance to sway her opinion of the most evil being in the universe.
It was treason, plain and simple. It was vile, it was unforgivable, it was…
It was Charlie.
She shouldn’t have even considered it, but it was Charlie.
She should have written this off as a demonic scheme, the long game that the Princess had been playing ever since she took her in, but it was Charlie.
Vaggie shouldn’t have even considered it, but Charlie would be hurt if she didn’t.
“How long do we have until he gets here?” Vaggie asked.
“At least a few hours,” Charlie said. “Dad sounded worked up, but… That just means that it will take it longer for him to get here, I think.”
Vaggie nodded.
This was treason.
It would be treason if she was discovered. But if that never happened, if no one but her and Charlie ever found out about the conversation, how was it any worse than all of the other little betrayals that she had already committed?
Nobody needed to know.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll start.”
Notes:
Burning Feathers ended up lengthening by a chapter because of how this one ended. Womp womp.
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Raging_inferno_of_flowers on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Mar 2024 02:23AM UTC
Last Edited Thu 07 Mar 2024 02:23AM UTC
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darkecofreak1 on Chapter 1 Thu 07 Mar 2024 06:11AM UTC
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Supercorpforendgame on Chapter 1 Sat 09 Mar 2024 06:11AM UTC
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randomstuffs on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 08:49PM UTC
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Steph (Guest) on Chapter 2 Sun 10 Mar 2024 11:32PM UTC
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Museflight on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Mar 2024 12:13AM UTC
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GodzillaMaster on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Mar 2024 12:02AM UTC
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Museflight on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Mar 2024 12:12AM UTC
Last Edited Mon 11 Mar 2024 12:12AM UTC
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