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Katherine knew that Abaddon said he didn’t need to sleep, being a demon and all, and honestly, that information has only caused her more problems than anything else. Katherine and her kids were still human beings, and ergo, needed to sleep. But that also meant that she had to willingly leave Abaddon to his own devices every night while they were unconscious, and wake up to whatever demon-caused disaster that awaited her when she woke up.
She tried getting Nathan to keep track of him during the night, seeing as he didn’t need to sleep either, but he wasn’t very good at staying on task, so to speak. She supposed Nathan’s ADHD carried over even through death.
So imagine her surprise when she looks under the sink for some glass cleaner, and discovers a certain demon child curled up under the pipes, eyes closed.
“Abaddon?” She asked. He didn’t respond.
Abaddon didn’t need to sleep, so he must either be ignoring her, or somehow found a permanent solution to his immortality. And as much as that may lessen the amount of problems created for her in the long run, Esther, Ben, and Nathan wouldn’t be very pleased if she suddenly announced that their resident demon friend had suddenly died and is now buried six feet under the driveway.
When he didn’t respond, she was almost sure that he was ignoring her, but then his eyes blinked open, irritated by the light bleeding into the cabinet from the rest of the kitchen. He first saw Katherine peering in at him, then rubbed his eyes, blinking. His eyes then shot up as he realized that he had been caught.
“Do you require something of me, matriarch?” Anyone could tell by the tone of his voice that he was taken off guard, like he was trying to cover up something embarrassing.
“...Were you sleeping?”
“No. I do not need sleep.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“Merely resting my eyes.”
“So, you were sleeping.”
“I told you, I do not need to sleep. Are you having trouble hearing? I recall being told that the older humans get, they can lose sense of the functions in their ears.”
Katherine’s eye twitched, “No, Abaddon, I am not losing my hearing. I was just wondering what you were doing if you said you weren’t sleeping, but you’re lying limp in the darkness of the cabinet with your eyes closed.”
“I was not sleeping.”
“Whatever you say.”
Katherine overlooked it. She didn’t have time to question it, she had other things to do.
While the incident was strange, and certainly gave her something to think about during the day, it was far from the weirdest thing she had witnessed Abaddon doing.
But it was also far from the only time that something like this happened.
Sometime in the near future, she had just been vacuuming the main lobby, when she was about to get the little area under the couch in front of the fireplace, when she drove the vacuum cleaner forward and hit something under the couch. For a moment, she thought it must have been some random puzzle or board game, but she hit whatever was under the couch once more, and this time it responded with a grunt.
Oh, what the fuck.
She turned off the vacuum to listen closer, only for the couch to give a groan of pain??--- what in the actual hell—
But then, low and behold, Abaddon scurried out from underneath it like a raccoon that had been caught digging in the trash.
“Abaddon, what the hell? How’d you even fit under there? There’s like less than a foot of space under that couch.”
“I have my ways.”
“Not encouraging,” She deadpanned, “Mind telling me what you’re doing hiding under the couch? Are you hiding broken glass in the cushions again?”
“I am doing nothing of the sort. I was merely “hanging out”.”
“We’ve gotta get Esther to stop teaching you slang from this century.”
“But Esther said that I sounded “hip”. I am unaware of its meaning, but I assume it translates to handsome and intimidating.”
“I assure you, you do not. Now, I’ll ask again, what were you doing?”
Abaddon looked uncomfortable, “Nothing of your concern.”
“Abaddon, literally everything that you do is of concern to me. You could step on a bug and bring about the end of the world for all I know.”
“It is strangely reassuring you believe in my ability, Katherine.”
“That’s not what I— What were you doing hiding under the couch? I won’t ask again.”
“I was not hiding, I was merely listening to the vacuum. The sounds of the dust screaming from within it when they are sucked up inside are pleasing to me. The sound is similar to that of the screams of sinners down in hell.”
“You were hiding under the couch because you liked the sound of the vacuum cleaner?”
“Correct. I was doing nothing else of any importance.”
Katherine sighed, “Okay, that sounds suspicious as hell, but I don’t care anymore. As long as you're not hiding something inside the cushion.”
The interaction didn’t seem that different from any other weird thing that Abaddon had done in the past, so in all honesty, she had forgotten about it.
That is, until the next week, when she noticed that the blender was missing again. She groaned in annoyance, and headed over to the vent in the hallway that just-so-happened to have an electrical cord sticking from in between the grating and plugged into the wall. If that weren’t enough of a giveaway, from somewhere within the vent, there were the tell-tale signs of the blender being active in there. She could literally hear it.
She sighed and uncrewed the vent grating off the wall with a quarter in her back pocket. She took the hunk of metal off the wall, only to discover the blender turned on, and what looked like Abaddon’s head laying on top of the buttons on the control panel. He didn’t seem to be moving, but his body was on its side, and he didn’t seem to register the light coming in from the hallway.
Katherine merely unplugged the cord from the wall and pulled on the other end of it to bring the machine towards her and out of the vent shaft. At the sudden action, Abaddon’s head shot up in panic, only to see Katherine holding his beloved blender. He scowled, but seemed surprised.
Upon seeing the genuinely-taken-off-guard look in Abaddon’s eyes, she was confused. Had he really not been ignoring her when she opened the vent? What else could he have been doing?
“I was using that.”
“Sure, for what? Cuz I think we agreed that if you were going to blend anything, the blender had to be in the kitchen with the rest of the appliances.”
“And I conveyed to you that the idea is ridiculous.”
“Lots of rules are ridiculous, but we follow them anyway, as will you.”
Abaddon grumbled, but did not argue more than that. Katherine took the blender back to the kitchen, and she was about to put it back in the cabinet with the others, when she had a thought.
What had Abaddon really been doing with the blender in the vent? He’s told her in the past that its high-pitched sounds remind him of the screams of hell, which she now realized was the same thing he said about the vacuum cleaner. And when she opened the vent, Abaddon should have seen the light come in and acknowledged that she was there, but he didn’t. And laying on his side, listening to a machine that made noise that sounded comforting to him, and not acknowledging when light showed up…
Could he really have been sleeping?
At first, the idea seemed impossible, but the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Abaddon said he doesn’t need to sleep, but he still lived in the body of a human host. So that human host, regardless of his demonic traits, would still need to sleep every once in a while. Though, since Abaddon is still technically a demon, he may not have to sleep as often. But if he did need sleep, it would explain these weird hiding periods.
In those next few time gaps, whenever she thought back to it, she began thinking about sleep patterns. Ben usually couldn’t sleep without some kind of noise in the background like rain or a white noise machine. Esther didn’t have problems falling asleep, but staying asleep had been a problem since the divorce. She’d have nightmares about arguments Kahterine would have with Ron or nightmare-ish scenarios where bad things would happen to the family. She didn’t know for sure. Esther never talked about it. She took meds at night to help with the nightmares.
And when Nathan was alive, he never slept without his stuffed tiger that he found at a garage sale. He had named it “Tiggy”, and if he didn’t have it within a few feet of him, he would not sleep. That’s just how it was their whole childhoods. She’s sure that Tiggy was packed away in some storage box these days.
As for herself, she had trouble falling asleep, so she often resorted to overworking herself until the point of physical exhaustion. But after enough nagging from Nathan saying that that wasn’t healthy, she started taking melatonin at night and putting in earplugs to drown out the sounds of the wailing ghosts wandering the halls. (Because, really, what does the hallway shrieker need to be screaming at the top of her lungs at three in the morning for?)
White noise, medication, and comfort objects.
Abaddon had supposedly been sleeping next to the blender. An object that he had taken a liking to since the day he figured out how it worked. A comfort object, no doubt.
The blender had been turned on, and the demon had said it reminded him of screaming voices in hell, but the sound a blender makes is also a very good example of white noise. Same with the vacuum cleaner.
She didn’t know if Abaddon had taken any medicine or chemical of some sort that would make him sleepy, but she wouldn’t exactly put it past him if he did something like that.
Her main question was why Abaddon kept denying that he was sleeping at all, when it really looked like he was. Although, she supposed it was just a theory, in the end.
She forgot about it until Esther told Abaddon what “sleepovers” were one night, and insisted that they have one. Katherine mostly left them to entertain themselves, but made Esther promise no black magic or seance stuff (she couldn’t believe that she had to say that to her own child, good lord).
But when she headed upstairs to do her nightly sweep of her children’s bedrooms, she opened the door to Esther’s room, only to discover that the two had somehow built a tent out of blankets and pillows, and she could hear Esther’s snoring from inside.
Not only that, but she also listened in to hear another series of light snores.
It clicked inside her head that every time she had caught Abaddon “resting his eyes”, he had been in some kind of small or confined space, which she had read once helps some people with sleeping.
She carefully closed the door so as to not wake them up.
“Hey Kathy, how’s their sleepover going? No shenanigans yet?” Nathan appeared out of nowhere, greeting her, but she shushed him urgently, pointing at Esther’s door silently and then signaling him by putting her finger against her lips. Quiet. “Oh, gotcha,” He whispered.
Nathan peeped his head through the wall, and pulled it back out looking like he was about to explode with cuteness. Katherine led him back downstairs, and then he squealed at the top of his lungs.
“That was the most adorable thing I’ve seen in my entire life! Even more than when I learned that sea otters hold hands while they sleep!” Nathan squealed, “Wait, doesn’t Abaddon not need sleep?”
“He said that he doesn’t need sleep, he never said that he doesn’t sleep.”
“Whaaaaaaaat”
Katherine ended up explaining the whole thing to Nathan (especially since he wouldn’t shut up until she did). At that point, Nathan actually had a few stories of the same thing.
“I really don’t know why it happens in such odd places, but when I saw him laying limp at the bottom of the stairs, I honestly thought he was dead.”
“That’s what I thought when I found him in the cabinet! He said he didn’t need to sleep, yet there he was, out like a light.”
“Weird.”
~ ~ ~
One night in November, Nathan said he was gonna watch his favorite movie. That one movie, Con Air. The one that he’d never shut up about. Then, weirdly, Abaddon followed him without eating much of his dinner. Katherine didn’t think much of it, Abaddon didn’t seem to have that mischievous glint in his eyes that he got when he was about to do something chaotic, like setting something on fire or biting someone.
Whatever happened with those two after that, she had no idea. Quite frankly, she didn’t want to know. All she knew was that when she went into the lounge about two hours later to ask Nathan how to get the boiler ghost to stop fucking with the washer, something had changed.
The first thing she noticed as soon as she opened the door was the salt. It was everywhere.
“Hey Nathan—”
She was shushed.
Katherine was about to chide her brother for his rudeness, but stopped as soon as she saw his face peeking at her over the back of the arm chair. Nathan had that look in his eye where his pupils dilated and seemed to hold a distinctive sparkle of wonder, like he had witnessed something completely and utterly precious.
It was only then that she saw the unconscious form of a certain demon child curled up in the chair. He was settled right where Nathan’s lap would be, leaning his head against the arm rest.
Nathan, even though he was noncorporeal and literally couldn’t wake Abaddon up by accidentally moving, refused to move even an inch. Katherine crept inside, just to be sure that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.
But nope. No tricks. Light snores came from Abaddon’s sleeping form. He was actually asleep.
She was afraid to question the nature of the light tear tracks she had spotted running down his cheeks, though they looked like they had long gone dry. When she signalled to Nathan about it, she noticed that her brother’s face had a few streaks as well.
What the hell had happened in here?
Nathan, being annoyingly vague, waved her off as if to say “it’s not important”. While she wanted to protest, she looked down at the unconscious form of Abaddon again.
…She supposed he did look rather peaceful as he slept.
She sighed, and gave up. She left the room, setting a mental note to remember the mess of salt that had been left in the lounge. Just another mess to clean up.
But a small, petty part of her was satisfied that her theory was correct.
But she questioned how it was possible in the first place, so to speak. Every time she had caught Abaddon supposedly sleeping, he had either had a comforting item, a comforting sound, and/or been inside an enclosed space of some sort. In the lounge, he had none of those things. In her mind, it weirdly seemed impossible for Abaddon to sleep at all, but when he did, he had to have some kind of comfort with him.
Could it be that maybe… being near Nathan, or even just being in the hotel, was a solution in itself? A comfort setting.
Katherine knew that Abaddon was a problem child, the bane of her existence, and a little shit starter. If he had always been like this, she wouldn’t be surprised. But that also meant that every past owner of this hotel had had to deal with him, and may not have treated him… the same as she does. Though, admittedly, she could still use a little improvement in her own damage control strategies, but her point still stands.
Katherine doesn’t seem like she notices, but she does. When Abaddon purposefully breaks things or makes messes or just exists as a nuisance, it all seemed like he was just doing it to annoy her, to make her snap. And in those moments, that was all she wanted to do.
But the more she practiced not reacting, she realized that Abaddon seemed confused when she didn’t yell or get angry. That’s when she figured out that he had been testing her. Testing if he could be safe here.
She found herself wondering if he had ever had that before. She didn’t know much about Abaddon’s experiences with the past, but this hotel had always had a pretty dark history. A history that Abaddon had lived through.
Perhaps Abaddon hadn’t “needed” sleep because he just… didn’t, in the past. In a place like an asylum or a prison, she couldn’t imagine feeling safe enough to sleep at night. But now that it’s just a hotel, with most wandering ghosts choosing to leave him alone, and humans that accept him at the very least…
~ ~ ~
“What is this device?”
“It’s a noise machine. These buttons make sounds like white noise.”
“Noise can have color?" He asked, confused. “What is the point of this ‘colored’ noise if I cannot see it?”
“No, it’s just called that. Look—” She pressed a few buttons. “It helps people sleep.”
“But I do not sleep.”
She sighed, a smile on her face. “But you do like the sounds that the blender or the vacuum cleaner make, right?”
“Correct, but I fail to see…”
Katherine pressed a particular button on the small machine, and Abaddon’s gaze seemed to lighten as he heard it.
“These sound waves are… satisfactory.”
“I’m glad you like it. And I know you said you don’t sleep, but while I was out, I also got you this.”
“A cloth sack stuffed with cotton?”
“A pillow, but sure.”
He took it, hesitantly. “It squishes.”
“It does.” Katherine smiled, “And it’s yours now. So if you ever decide that you want to sleep, you can lay your head on that. Or use it as a back rest, whatever you want. Just don’t cut it open or all the stuffing will come out.”
“Do the interior stuffings provide this ‘pillow’ with its squishiness?”
“Yes.”
“Then I shall not tarnish it.”
“Good. Oh, and also, the noise machine is powered by batteries, and NO— you can’t eat them. If you come to me asking for more batteries, I’m gonna ask for the dead ones back.”
Abaddon grumbled, “I still do not understand why you withhold the batteries from me.”
“Because I don’t care if the battery acid tastes good, batteries are still expensive. Got me?”
“Yes, Katherine. I do believe I have ‘got you’. I… appreciate the gifts.”
“You’re welcome, Abaddon.”
The demon child scurried off into the vents with his new presents, heading for a particular spot in the system.
Whether an error was made by the man who installed them or not, it gave Abaddon a small workable space to settle his belongings within the vents. It was a section of the vent that was a bit bigger than the rest of it, allowing him to take advantage of his own personal space. Esther would call it a “hide-out”. He had known of its existence for ages, since his first exploration of the hotel and its territorial limitations, shortly after it was built.
He would often use the space as a haven of quiet, for when he needed time to himself or just needed to think through something. Most of the objects he stored in here were just small things he kept secret in case he needed them, or memorable objects. Like a couple paperclips, some balls of lint, and the skeleton of a rat that had dwelled the vents years ago.
This rat, dubbed “Atticus” by Abaddon himself, was a brave and loyal ally until one of the old owners tricked him with a deadly trap. He had died after investigating the promise of food, but finding only poison. Rest in peace, Atticus. Abaddon kept his skeleton as a memento to remember him by (He had been wondering if he could get Esther to perform some kind of necromancy spell on Atticus, though he’s not sure if a spell like that would work on only the skeleton. If it did work, perhaps he could dig up Jarbon’s corpse from the yard and reawaken him as well).
He made sure that Jessica knew of the existence of this little room, as she is a fellow dweller of the ventilation system. The two had formed an alliance ever since Abaddon started feeding her the remnants of some dead animals or different kinds of human food, like leftovers he had found in the fridge (She had a particular fondness for chicken wings). She would leave his territory alone, and it wound up sparking a sort of mutual respect between the two.
He enjoyed having free reign over the vents, and especially having his own little spot that he could call his. A patch of territory that no one else would dare mess with.
He settled into his usual spot, a corner of the air duct, and contemplated what to do with the pillow and the odd machine the matriarch had given him.
It… he didn’t…
He hadn’t intended to sleep at all, and especially not as much as he had been, but…
…he’s tired.
He had taken care of the cult and prevented the apocalypse just under a month ago, and any time before that, he had been too focused on figuring out how to solve it that he…
He had truly underestimated the mental toll that the resets had taken on him.
There were many times during the later resets that the child’s soul trapped within him began beckoning him to rest. But to sleep meant vulnerability. Abaddon was not vulnerable, he couldn’t afford to be, not with the objective he had to fulfill.
He was not weak, he would tell himself. He didn’t need to sleep.
But even after he had solved the cult problem, he had begun just… finding himself waking up. He never remembered the process of falling under the influence of sleep, all he’d recall was feeling tired, and then suddenly he’d wake up and begrudgingly realize that his vessel had betrayed him again and fallen asleep without his permission.
He hated to admit that every time he did awake from his non-consensual slumber, his vessel felt… better? It held a bit more energy than before, and it almost felt… refreshed?
He still had trouble understanding these human feelings.
The human feelings that he should not have—
But nonetheless, at first, he did not know what was happening. He thought his body was under the influence of some kind of sleep curse. He knew such things existed, he knew a few of them himself, the only problem was that most of these kinds of spells were meant to cause sleep in bulk, or very long durations of time. And anytime Abaddon found himself waking up, he would come to find it had only been for a few hours at a time.
He was suspicious that one of his rivals was trying to catch him off guard.
This led him to staying awake at all costs. He refused to let his eyes droop, even for a second.
He was terrified of falling asleep.
Unfortunately for him, though, the longer he managed to ward off the awful curse, the more tempting it became. And the more he began waking up in seemingly random places. An example being when he had woken up face down at the bottom of the stairs, as if he had fallen unconscious while actively descending them.
Waking up after such occurrences was nothing short of humiliating. Especially the times in which Nathan would be wandering the hotel and find his motionless body at the bottom of the stairs (The stairs scenario happened more than once).
But none of these occurrences had been expected, and he hated it. Each one was completely spontaneous, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop it from happening. After settling himself under the couch, he found the confined space to be strangely peaceful. After stealing the blender and hiding away in the vent to terrorize the oranges, he found that the sounds that the blender made were quite soothing. After his altercation with Nathan, he had found that the “crying” made one’s eyes very dry. He supposed all of the times he had accidentally fallen asleep, he never intended to in the first place, he just…
Curse this human vessel, plagued with fatigue.
Abaddon simply didn’t like sleeping. At least, in the past, the state of rest had never benefitted him. Being in a state of sleep left him vulnerable to the intentions of one of the old owners of the building, back when it was an asylum for the mentally insane. Abaddon, being a demon, had a bad habit of driving the patients to the brink of insanity, and preventing them from getting better, despite the fact that there wasn’t any “getting better” for those humans in a place like that.
Abaddon had unknowingly fallen asleep one night, and then woken up confined in a wooden box six feet under the ground. He had been buried alive.
He did escape eventually, but the process of doing so had been quite an ordeal. From breaking the wooden crate to clawing his way to the surface, had Abaddon not been immortal, he would have suffocated on the contents of the earth ten times over (Which, he did, he just didn’t perish, as the asylum owner probably hoped he would).
And any other time in which he did wake up from a slumber he hadn’t known had started, it hadn’t been a peaceful awakening. The other downside to being trapped in this human vessel is that he was able to dream, an experience he had never had prior to his possession of the boy. But most, if not all of those dreams didn’t remain dreams for long, transforming into terrifying visions of his torment throughout his years on earth. He knew that Esther had them as well. She called them “nightmares”.
He hated those damned night terrors. He hated sleeping because without fail, terror followed.
…Until he began to fall asleep at random and found that if there was an outside factor to distract him, the terrors would be held at bay. When Katherine woke him up from under the couch, he hadn’t even realized he had fallen asleep. But afterwards, he also hadn’t initially noticed that he hadn’t woken up with a racing heart or a scream in the back of his throat waiting to jump out.
At first, he excused it as Katherine waking him up before the terrors had time to possess him…
…but it kept happening. He’d fall asleep at random, but the terrors wouldn’t follow him. He found that the noise of the vacuum or the blender helped, or the confined spaces, or even just…
Just being in the hotel, strangely, held an air of safety to it. He couldn’t understand it.
Abaddon set the pillow in his favorite corner, and just looked at it for a moment. Was this how it was supposed to work? Is he supposed to lay upon it?
He did so, flopping forward like a dead fish. His head landed right on the middle of the cotton sack, making the bulk of the interior fluff retreat outward, but unable to escape the confines of its fabric walls. It made a light “fwoof” sound as he landed upon it.
This was… strangely pleasant.
The resulting impact of years of survival of human history since being trapped in this form, he had grown accustomed to circumstances such as sleeping on the floor (He’s told that that’s why his posture is rather skewed). He was used to the hard, cold, surface of the floor. So much so that this “pillow” almost felt unnaturally soft. Inappropriately soft, like lying his head upon an abnormally large marshmallow.
He turned to the small device, warily.
Abaddon did not like the technology of this current time period. He had spent millennia observing humankind, but by the time humanity began to evolve, so did their technology. And it turned out that the evolution of technology moved along so fast that Abaddon could blink and the world would go from just having invented sound in human films, to suddenly these intelligent telephones and the prison box controlled by the buttons on the magic wand.
As he picked it up and started pressing random buttons, each one made a different sound. He passed through each one, until a certain sound wave struck his ears, and he didn’t feel like switching it. He had never been aware that noise could almost mute the thoughts of the listener in such a way.
He set the device off to the side. He laid upon the pillow again.
He was unsure why the matriarch felt the need to bestow these things to him. Not that they weren’t appreciated, he found himself unusually content with the noise device next to him and the soft cotton sack beneath his head. Katherine would just… not traditionally go out of her way to provide him with things. Sure, she provided him with the vest, and the dinosaur stickers, but he knew those were just methods of keeping him under control more than anything else.
He knew that the items provided had brought him comfort. He wondered if that was Katherine’s intent behind giving them to him. Most things he could get his hands on were used to perform his darkest deeds, and would often end up causing some kind of destruction, or the objects being destroyed themselves. He wondered why the matriarch would willingly trust him with such things, knowing what he could do given even something as small as a toothpick.
He found himself questioning it less and less, though, as the child within him beckoned “Sleep”, and he found himself unwilling to retaliate. His eyes drooped, and a feeling of contentment washed over him as they shut completely.
Perhaps if he… got this “sleeping” business out of the way, the fatigue would weigh down his vessel less. The humans of the hotel woke during the day and slept through the night to replenish their energy. Perhaps that was what he had to do, excluding the day and night cycle.
This is ridiculous. I am a demon! I do not need to sleep! A little voice in his head whispered.
Well, up until a few days ago, Abaddon had thought that he couldn’t feel human feelings or have human reactions either. But that was clearly not the case, or else that whole ordeal with Nathan never would have happened.
But another little voice in his head began to worry.
Human feelings, reactions, tears, and now the need for sleep? He did not understand, he’s not human. He’s a demon. What could…
Perhaps he’s a little more human than he thought, being trapped in a vessel like this.
He didn’t have time to question it though, as the noise machine began to drown out his thoughts more and more until they faded out completely. His consciousness joined soon after, as he fell into the abyss of sleep.
And he decided this was okay.