Chapter Text
The Monster of Heaven
Sera is not truly awake for the next few days, after the impossible happened, after her understanding of the universe shifted in the span of seconds.
She does not sleep, either.
She wanders, moving through the world at a kind of unpace, detached from the momentous events occurring around her. All of Heaven is in an uproar; the revelation of the exterminations had already been the single most disruptive event in all of Heaven's history, but this second revelation- that sinners can become Winners, that they can be redeemed , a word that echoes in Sera's head like the tolling of a bell- makes the upheaval of the first seem almost tame. Everyone in Heaven has an opinion on the matter, often two, sometimes three, and everyone was arguing about it. Lute and her forces were claiming the new arrival was an enemy, a spy, a fifth column; others were upholding him as the best of the best, or trying to claim he was some impossible exception to the normal rules.
And a few, like Emily, understood what it actually meant, and were promoting that truth to the public- that redemption was possible.
Sera knows that to be the truth, too.
And that means that everything she has done
everything
Has been
evil.
Something very small in Sera breaks, in those hazy days.
(She thinks it was her soul.)
*************
Sera, like most people, did not decide to go to Hell.
Not really.
There was no... decision. Not... not in the way she has done things for all her life, with careful consideration that she now views as cowardice. She did not sit down and think about it, she did not rationally consider all her options before picking this one, she did not make a conscious decision at all.
It was simply a matter that she could not stay in Heaven.
The purity of the world around her feels mocking, now; she cannot stand it. She cannot stand the sight of herself, once one of her favorite sights; she had taken comfort for long centuries in her holy purity, in her angelic beauty, in her grace, viewing it as a sign of her inner goodness; and now she sees it for the narcissistic vanity it was, and she hates it, hates herself, she went into a fit and smashed every mirror in her house with her bare knuckles, cutting her fists apart, dripping golden blood from her hands from a rampage she does not even remember doing. She simply awoke in the aftermath, awoke and saw what she had done, and broke down crying.
All the holiness she had once taken comfort in now... hurts. Hurts, because she is not worthy of it.
So she goes someplace she does deserve, without saying a word to anyone. Emily doesn't need her, never did; Emily is better than her, always was, and who knows how much she might do without Sera to stand in her way? If she had not viewed her with condescension, if she had consulted her on this matter when Adam first proposed it so long ago, if she had...
... If.
Sera hadn't known two little letters could be so haunting.
And so she leaves, calling on her angelic power to portal herself directly to the Pride Ring of Hell, to the site of her crimes. It is foul and horrible and vile; the chaos of it is worse than the darkness of it, the evil, the unholiness.
But it does not hurt like Heaven does, and so she descends on it, cloaking her presence as best she can. She cannot look at Lucifer now, nor Charlie; she cannot even look at herself.
(And worse, she fears they will forgive her, offer redemption, the way they have to everyone... and she knows that some part of her will never survive such kindness. She flees it as a fate worse than death.)
She comes to the blood-stained, stinking streets, to a place so vile that it makes her gorge rise- and it is one of the nicer places here, it is almost not a slum. She is hidden, cloaked by illusory light, but that is expensive to maintain, a burden on even her heavenly might... but it is so good, to look down and see none of herself, none of this angelic glory she has no right to, that she should have no part of.
And so thinking, she looks for things to cover herself with, finding rags that are... not clean, but clean enough, things she can quickly and swiftly cleanse with short bursts of power. She never finds an entire article of clothing in good enough condition, nor in her size- she is tall, even by Hell's literally higher standards- and so she makes herself a makeshift thing, stitching with magic a kind of ragged bandage to wrap around herself, coating her completely save for her eyes. It is a coat of many colors, a thing she thinks that nearly shatters her again, reminder of what she has lost and what she has done; but she presses through.
And when it is done, when she is dressed and no longer has to look at herself, ever again, she does the only thing that makes the screaming inside her skull stop.
She wanders among the sinners she once condemned, and she helps them.
*************
Helping in Hell makes her an oddity.
Even with all that Charlie is doing, even with Lucifer finally taking the reins of Hell after what was apparently a prolonged absence from the helm, much of the Pride Ring is still caught up in turf wars and general day-to-day atrocities. Not everyone sent here is a condemned innocent; there are quite a few real bastards in the mix, too, who make things worse for everyone. Lucifer is also busy in other Rings, because apparently all of Hell has went somewhat off the rails since he went into retreat and Lilith disappeared; she hears rumors on the streets of what happens in those other places, where sinners cannot go.
But those matters are for others to tend to. Sera's work is here.
She tends wounds, of the body and the mind, because when she patches up a hurt sinner, or counsels them with the issues of their heart, it... helps. It helps with the disassociation, it helps with the guilt, it helps with the... the nightmares. Angels do not need to sleep, not really, and Sera has never been more grateful for that resilience than she is when she discovers that pleasant dreams are now beyond her grasp. Every time she even tries to sleep, she sees the exterminations, and she sees the blood on her hands- her coward's hands, worse even than Adam.
Adam, after all, had been an honest monster, had slaughtered for the joy of it, had killed with his own hands.
But Sera is a coward, and removed herself from the violence, as though her orders were not a part of it, as though just because her hands never killed anyone, she was innocent, somehow.
But she cannot be that person anymore. She refuses to be that person anymore... because being that person hurts, it hurts so much.
So she heals with holy light, and she counsels with wise words, and she takes care of the sinners whom she once killed with Adam's hands.
(It helps.)
She gets attacked a lot, of course. This is Hell, after all, and violence is simply inherent to life down here. But she is an angel still, undeserving as she is, and her attackers always lack angelic steel; only two Overlords have much access to Heaven-forged equipment, one an arms dealer and the other more recent, the leader of Cannibal Town, whose troops picked up quite a bit of divine weaponry in the aftermath of Adam's final battle, and she deals with neither.
So the attacks do not hurt her, and mostly she is left alone when her would-be assailants find they cannot kill her, injure her, nor capture her, all bonds shattering with a flex of her power.
But she does not resist when they attack, either.
They deserve to get a few good punches in, even if it amounts to nothing but a moment's discomfort.
She lets them hit her, and then she asks if they need help; and that is so bizarre down here that more often than not, they say yes.
*************
She wanders the streets of Hell, still only half-lucid at the best of times, only able to focus on anything but the stew of self-loathing and sobbing disgust inside when she is assisting a sinner. The different territories have subtleties to their awfulness; the Vees' territory is all bright lights over filth, while Zestial's territory is a ruined land that gives a feeling of a haunted house.
But everywhere she goes, there are sinners in need, and she tends to them.
They talk as she does this, and so she hears the latest gossip; and she watches the news, from time to time, when a television or radio nearby is playing it, and she needs a rest from her endless, aimless walking.
The gist of it is that there is trouble in Heaven and Hell... but more so the former than the latter, for once. Sera's absence apparently led to an uprising, by Lute and the Exorcists, and angels in agreement with them; Emily leads the rest of Heaven against them, though things have been fraught. Some report that Charlie Morningstar went up to Heaven to assist, along with her father and purportedly a small army of the damned; the news reporter, one Katie Killjoy, took great glee in reporting that Heaven needed Hell's help, something her coworker in the gas mask cracked up about. Even the scroll at the bottom was having fun at Heaven's expense, in between rumor-mongering that Charlie had finally asked her former Exorcist girlfriend to marry her.
The fighting in Heaven is probably Sera's fault, too; Lute had gotten too used to what she was, what she was doing, too used to bloodshed and battle. By allowing it to go on so long, Sera gave Lute a chance to develop a taste for wickedness, and for inflicting it; no wonder she rebelled when Emily was the only one left.
Though vaguely, through the haze of guilt and abhorrence that dominates all her thoughts now, Sera is a little proud of Emily, whom the reports seem to show has come into her own; news out of Heaven isn't perfect down here in Hell, but Emily seems to be showing strength and leadership Sera never would have suspected.
She has been wrong about so many things; it is not surprising she was wrong about this, too.
(Had Emily not already proven she was the superior Seraphim, a thing the universe confirmed when Sir Pentious arrived?)
The news also reports on Sir Pentious, dubbing him Sir Re Pentious, but it hurts to look at him and so Sera turns away, only catching the smallest of news as the newly-holy serpent waves awkwardly at the reporters' cameras; something about him building a hotel in Heaven for fellow ascended demons, that he visits Hell regularly, that he has a girlfriend who tried to blow him up once or something.
Sera tunes it out.
Heaven is not her home anymore.
She has no home anymore.
She doesn't deserve one.
*************
It takes longer than she expected to be found by an Overlord.
Perhaps there is such a thing as honor in Hell; or perhaps it is motivated by pragmatism. The sinners she heals have not spilled the beans about her presence; they keep silent about the strange tall woman who listens to their woes and tends to their wounds. They feel gratitude, perhaps, or simply want to keep her around as a useful resource; it's probably a little bit of both for most, with more of one than the other for some. The sinners are a varied lot.
(As she would have known, if she had considered them anything but enemies, if she had never listened to Adam, if she had... but that's a thought she thinks a lot these days. If. )
What reveals her is that, in her only semi-lucid wanderings, she finds herself meeting guards armed with angelic steel. She has entered Carmilla Carmine's territory, which is small and tightly controlled; her area is actually almost pleasant, reminds Sera of Heaven, in a way. It is more orderly, but not in the artificial, bright-lights-and-brilliance way of the Vees' territory; no, this is more real, purer. There is less trash and blood in the streets, and the people here are not so frightened or paranoid.
There is little need for her work here, for this task she does that quiets the horror in her mind, so she tries to pass through quickly and without notice.
She fails. The guards apparently reported her to someone, and that someone has finally put two and two together about her resilience and her abilities.
It's not a surprise that it's Carmilla Carmine. Sera always had thought of the Hispanic woman as the smartest of the Overlords, except maybe Zestial- and it was hard to tell with Zestial what was intelligence and what was simply the wisdom of long experience.
So one day, as she is nearly out of Carmilla's territory, the Overlord herself confronted her- seemingly by herself, though Sera didn't doubt she had guards stationed nearby.
“To think the lost Seraphim of Heaven was here in Hell,” Carmilla said, shaking her head. “Like finding out Lilith was in Heaven.”
...Ah. Sera had... forgotten about that. Some deal Adam had made, that she'd signed off on without thinking about it. She'd already told Adam he could commit genocide; she hadn't cared, seven years ago- or was it eight, now? Nine? How long had she been in Hell?- when Adam asked for a personal favor. She'd had other things on her mind.
No matter now. Nothing in Heaven mattered to her now, and so she did not dwell on it.
“...If you wish to kill me,” Sera said instead, slowly unwrapping her bandages to reveal her neck, “then I will not resist.”
Carmilla's eyes widen, and she tenses into a fighting stance, clearly assuming it's a trick; but Sera is nothing if not honest. She left her duplicity behind in Heaven.
She kneels down, stretches out her neck so Carmilla has a clean shot with her bladed shoes, and waits, with a surprising sense of... hope.
This will put an end to things.
This will quiet the screaming in her head.
This will be justice done, at last.
After a long few moments, Carmilla Carmine moves, lashing out with a kick fast as lightning. Sera does not flinch as the angelic steel touches her neck... but she is confused, because that is all it does. It touches her neck, it does not slice through it.
Carmilla had checked her blow, and after a moment withdraws her kick, never completing it.
“You didn't move an inch,” she says, with something like awe, and the Overlord shakes her head. “Not an inch...”
“Why would I?” Sera asks her, and she sees something like... pity... in the woman's eyes.
“...Live,” Carmilla finally says. “I will direct my guards to leave you alone.”
“Please, don't- don't, ” Sera begins, but Carmilla silences her with a shake of her head.
“Somebody has to help people,” the arms dealer says softly. “Hell needs it. So keep doing what you're doing.”
“It will never be enough,” Sera moans, unable to stop herself.
“Good,” Carmilla responds. “I'm not the Princess... so I'm glad it torments you. Hell has to live with what you've done, after all.”
She turns away.
“Now you do, too.”
The Overlord leaves the Seraph, shattered, behind her... and is true to her word; Carmilla's forces leave the homeless angel alone. No one else approaches her with knowledge of her true self.
It is the cruelest thing anyone in Hell has ever done to her.
************
In time, Sera recovers from her meeting with Carmilla Carmine, to the extent that she recovers from anything . She strives to heal, using Carmilla's area as a base of operations, a place to retreat to when the pressure on her is too high and her work gets interrupted. She consoles the wounded in heart and comforts the wounded in body; she does what she can to ease the pain of sinners, no matter the cost to herself.
And always, always, she tries to send them towards the Hotel. Towards Charlie, and redemption, towards those neon lights promising a better future.
Towards all the things she stole from so many.
Sometimes she is asked why she does not go herself, by those demons she directs to go; curiously, it is most often those who actually do go, who take up the offer, who leave the bloody streets behind for streets of gold, that ask her this question. Perhaps it is a sign that something in them is different, perhaps it is a sign that they will be worthy, someday, perhaps the concern they show their would-be benefactor is a mark that Hell has not eroded all the good inside them, not yet.
But she always says that it is no place for her.
The Hazbin Hotel is for demons, after all.