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He doesn’t let his eyes open when he wakes, doesn’t let his breathing change. Maybe Valentino will let him rest a little longer.
It’s only been two weeks, and he’s already more exhausted than he ever was before. It’s not even as bad as it was before, and he’s still so tired. Val’s been nicer, recently. Feeling guilty about the whole ‘letting Vox mind control Angel into betraying his only friends’ thing. And Angel can’t even appreciate it. Ungrateful fucking whore.
He’d been almost grateful when Val destroyed his phone. No contact with Cherri or Husk or Charlie or any of the rest, but no contact with Vox either, not unless he goes over and stands in front of the wall where Val and Vel hung him up well his body grows back. He’s got another inch of neck this week, at least that’s what he thought he overheard.
Angel fantasizes about taking a pistol and one of the leftover angelic bullets from Carmilla into the lounge and putting one between Vox’s glaring red eyes. He’s weak now, and Val gave Angel all his security clearance back. There’s nothing to stop him but the consequences.
Valentino has forgiven him a lot of the years, but he could never forgive Angel this. He’d join Vox in oblivion within the day. There wouldn’t be anywhere to run. The Hotel won’t take him back, not after everything he’s done, not now that he’s proven himself as useless as Val always said he was. But why would he run, anyway? There’s no-one now, no-one but Val. He’s met overlords and cannibals and killers and the devil himself in the past year, but Angel can still say with confidence that he’s only met one person he hates more than Valentino, and that’s Vox.
Look at him, dreaming about a murder. Charlie couldn’t seem to get it through her skull, couldn’t seem to recognize what Angel is. He wasn’t just lying to her, he was lying to himself, pretending he could ever be something other than what he was. But he’s never changed.
All his eyes are closed, but as he rolls over on the couch, still feigning sleep, he can feel that he’s being watched. After all these years with Val, with Vox, with Vel, he’s got a sixth sense for it. He feels it like some sort of missing piece – not one he needs, exactly, but he almost feels happier, knowing that there are eyes on him.
As much as the drink and drugs, the watching was something the Hotel was also weaning Angel off, though he didn’t know until he left. Now he’s back in the tower and he’s sick with it. Angel hasn’t gotten back on to the hard stuff yet, hasn’t started drinking as much as he used to, but he’s getting used to being watched again, to the feeling of unsympathetic eyes on him at all times.
He wonders if he can guess who it is with his eyes closed. It’s not Valentino, because Angel can’t smell him, that indelible mix of cherry candy and cigarettes and cum that no amount of washing can ever get out. And it’s not Vox because it can’t be, not anymore. Not as a severed head with three inches of neck. And it’s not Velvette, because she’s just not patient enough. If she needed something from him, he’d be awake already, and there’d be rage and violence – yelling and a backhand, or maybe a boot, if she was in a bad mood, or a sharp pinch and a few comments about his weight, if she was in a better one.
So it has to be some sort of flunky, new and probably not going to last, too awed by Angel’s star power to wake him up. He’s probably already late for some meeting or something.
Without opening his eyes, Angel groans and uncurls, letting his head stretch over the arm of the couch. It’s dark when he opens his eyes, all the overheads off and only the light coming in through the open door, but the clock glows blue and Angel reads it upside down: 7:34 PM.
He sits up to look for the flunky and immediately finds Vaggie crouched on the opposite arm of the couch like some enormous bird of prey, still and silent and impossibly out of place in Val’s trashed penthouse. “What the fuck?”
“Um,” Vaggie says. “Hello.”
“… did Charlie send you?” Angel manages. He’s still sick with sleep, his tongue like a dead slug in his mouth.
Vaggie seems to think about this for longer than Angel really thinks she should need to. “I’m here because of Charlie, but she didn’t ask me to come. She’s worried about you. Husk and Cherri and all the rest. I think I even heard Alastor say something.” She spends a moment chewing on the inside of her cheek. “I was worried about you.”
His eyes fall to Vaggie’s spear, the stern black haft and the head sharper than any razor and impossibly more lethal. For once, it’s not innuendo. “So, what – you’re here to mercy kill me?” He means it as a joke, when he thinks it, but when he says it, it comes out flat and awkward and much too real.
Angel is surprised to see the hurt show on Vaggie’s usually stony face. “No.” She says. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Really?” Angel asks. He knows by now that Vaggie doesn’t hate him, but she surely doesn’t like him as much as she loves Charlie – and why shouldn’t she see him as just another piece on the board? He’s never done anything for her.
She reconsiders. “I wouldn’t do that to you if I had any other options, and I’d look hard for something else first.” She falls silent for a breath. “And I think that if you really wanted to die, we never would’ve met.” Another beat. “You’ve always been tough, Angel.” Admiration and grief. A compliment from Vaggie to someone other than Charlie must be rarer than a winning lottery ticket and all Angel can think is that if he was a little less tough he wouldn’t have ever gotten so deep in this shit in the first place.
He sits up and sighs, grabbing a near-empty bottle of painkillers off the minimalist black end table and dry-swallowing two, then he pats himself down, trying to find his cigarettes before remembering he left them on set. “If you’re not here on a real mission you should probably get the fuck out before Val comes back around. I don’t want to have to hurt you too.”
“You really think you could hurt me?” Vaggie asks, momentarily distracted. “Anyway, I have a plan. I oweAlafavornow,” she says, so quickly Angel can barely understand her, “And he’s doing something downstairs now. Val and Velvette went to deal with it, and Val stopped to check on you before he went out. He won’t be back until after he’s done with – whatever he’s doing.”
If Angel strains his ears, he might be able to hear evil laughter and gunfire, but in Hell that could really mean anything. “Ok, let’s get this over with. You’re going to ask me to come back to the Hotel, and I’m going to say no, so we can just skip all that and get to the part where you leave.”
“No.” Vaggie says, which Angel thinks could be a little more clear.
“No?” he asks.
“As in, no, I’m not asking you to come back to the Hotel. You’re allowed to make your own decisions, Angel.” She sounds annoyed at him. Just like always. “Might be nice if you told us why you left, though. Husk and Cherri aren’t saying anything.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Angel asks, impatient. “I left to keep all of you safe. From them. From me, from them using me to hurt you.”
Vaggie laughs, startled – but hard and cruel too. For a moment, he can see how the grinning death-mask she used to wear would have fit her face. “Hurt us? We’re invincible.” Her fist clenches around the haft of her spear, and Angel can hear how her bones seem to creak under her own monstrous strength. Vaggie spends so much time chasing after Charlie that it’s easy to forget she’s as bloodstained a soul as any overlord – and she must have enjoyed it once, too. “They couldn’t beat us with Vox. They can hardly beat us without him.”
It’s easy to forget that Vaggie has followed Charlie down almost every road, at least in all the ways that matter, and there’s a certain kind of madness needed for that. They didn’t beat the Vees, they just decided to fight another day – and a few more bad breaks and things wouldn’t even have gone that well. But Vaggie would kill for him, die for him, even. Angel can’t let that happen. It’s horrible – he’s become someone who can’t bear to lose any of them. And that is why he must leave. But someone like Vaggie won’t ever understand that, so he just says, “I’ve heard plenty of people say that and they’re all dead now. You’re not going to change my mind.”
She scowls for a moment before shrugging. “I wasn’t really expecting you to. But I wanted to make sure you’re still alive, and that you weren’t being tortured,” there’s a little hitch in her words, “any more than usual, at least. And I wanted you to know that you’re always welcome, back at the Hotel.”
Angel knew that they wanted him back, but there’s a difference between just being the missing piece that completes the set and being welcome. When all he does is fuck up and disappoint people. Everyone else, he would’ve used up his second and third and fourth chances a long time ago. “I’m not going back,” he says, and he’s already sick of saying it. “… but tell me what’s happening, anyway.”
Her one eye is impossible to read. Angel thinks it’s safe to assume she’s pitying him. “It’s going well. Got a lot of new signups. Alastor is back and more obnoxious than ever. Me and Charlie worked some things out,” she taps a gilded nametag made of hard plastic pinned over heart that says ‘Vaggi, Hotel Manager’, “so hopefully we’ll do right by you when you come back. Better than we did, at least. Both of us.”
He’s faintly offended that Vaggi assumes he’ll come crawling back to them sooner or later, even as the thought fills him with longing. No. He can’t ever go back. If he loves any of them (he loves all of them) he will never go back. None of that comes through in his voice when he says, “Finally got your name worked out, huh? Not much of a change, really. I gotta say, I’m not impressed.”
Vaggi just blinks at him. “Yeah. I’m not always sure I like it myself, but it’s a part of me, and I’m done letting him have that power. Especially since Nifty fuckin’ killed his ass.” Almost against his will, Angel wonders if he’d keep Angel Dust if he got free of Valentino, but he kills the thought almost before he can finish it. There’s no point in wondering, because it’s never going to happen.
“… it’s probably time for you to go.”
A grunt. “Probably. Here,” Vaggi digs a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket and presses it into Angel’s hand. “Cherri got a list of all the numbers she thought you might want. You don’t have a phone anymore, do you?”
Angel blinks away the memory of Val breaking his phone with the butt of his pistol and says, “No.”
“Well,” Vaggi says, brusque and uncomfortable with whatever she heard that he didn’t say. “they will be there when you’re ready. And I already know you’re good at hiding things.”
Something that would have pissed him off not so long ago already feels like an old joke. “Don’t sell yourself short. I’m a whole lot better at hiding things than I used to be.” Their surveillance net makes the Vees lazy. Vaggi, whatever else might be said about her, is never lazy, and was always willing to crawl down vents and unscrew lightswitch covers. He takes the paper and tucks it away into his chest fluff. Whatever the exact trouble with Alastor is, he knows Val won’t be in the mood when he gets back, and that’ll give Angel a chance to find a proper hiding spot.
Vaggi tilts her head, listening for some distant sound. “It’s really time for me to get going now. If I wanted to smash stuff without making you look suspicious, where should I start?”
She’s already made him look suspicious. With Vox gone and Alastor back at the Hotel, there’s only really one reason for him to be here. “Just start breaking shit as soon as you get out the door. I have a plan.”
“Really?” She’s obviously concerned for him, and that’s exactly why he can’t let her stay.
“Yeah. Don’t worry about me.” He doesn’t really have a plan. His plan is ‘hey Val I obviously didn’t leave with her and she was obviously pissed on the way out, and I’m here and I love you just like I always did so please don’t hit me too hard and/or blame me for this.’ It is, admittedly, not the best plan he’s ever come up with, but it’s far from the worst. Thank you, sobriety.
Though he’s about to wreck that too. When Vaggi nods at him, lieutenant to captain, taking her leave, he waits until he can hear her spear scraping across the hallway walls outside before he springs to his feet and tries to find some of the good painkillers, something better than the over-the-counter stuff. He knows there’s a bottle around here somewhere, and he’s going to need them soon.
And maybe, when he sleeps tonight, the pills will let him leave the fresh bruises behind and dream of the Hotel.