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The fireworks had been Charlie’s idea, of course.
Cherri resented, with every cell in her body, whoever told the princess about Guy Fawkes night. For fucks sake, it’s a Brittish holiday and none of the hotel’s residents were from anywhere near there, however, despite Cherri’s lamentations, she found herself sat on the closest barstool to the wall with her hands over her ears and her knees drawn to her chest in a pathetic attempt to block out the sound and the memories associated with it.
Her desperate pursuit of self-salvation was quick to fail. This outcome had been inevitable from the moment she had tried to not let her past traumas get to her, but still she tensed as the vivid memory, scorched onto her very soul, flashed before her eyes as though she was dying again.
Chaos surrounded her, it was never meant to be peaceful, but the echoing hails of gunfire were a step too far. She had not stepped down. She wished she had. The iron of the lamp post she had climbed up on bit harshly into her fingers but she had not stepped down. Someone had grabbed her by the ankle, screaming at her to go but she had not stepped down.
Perhaps from another perspective she could find beauty in it. She had never stepped down, only fallen when the bullet had pierced her chest. It had been her own fall from grace, maybe even an insight into how Lucifer felt. Cherri, however, was a woman with an overwhelming one track mind, and she was not about to lose sight of her own self-pitying anguish just to see the beauty in death and damnation.
She curled tighter in on herself as she finally let out a choking cry, followed by another, until she was full on sobbing into her knees, trembling as each wail shook her body. Her nails dug harshly into her thighs, carving crescents in ivory flesh, as her teeth bit harshly down on her lip, inciting the all too familiar copper taste of blood in her mouth.
Husk decided at that moment, that he would rather be anywhere else in all of hell. He knew, of course, that his time in the army had left him with many scars, the physical ones hidden by the fur of his demonic body, the mental clinging to him like parasites desperate to make his afterlife his own personal hell, far worse than the one he was physically stuck living in.
As he watched yet another firework go rogue and explode far too close to him for comfort, one thing became gleamingly obvious to him. He needed a goddamned fucking drink.
He bit down brutally on his lip to stop its tremors and clenched his paws to hide their shaking as he failed to ignore the overwhelming emotions brought about by the bangs of the fireworks, before slipping off silently back into the hotel.
Husk’s cat-like senses had been blurred by the traumatic familiarity of the sounds, so he did not immediately notice that he was not alone in the lobby of the hotel, until a loud sob startled him out of his daze, alerting him to the presence of an all too familiar blonde woman sat at the bar.
‘Shit.’
Although he had cursed her presence unnecessarily loudly, Cherri did not notice him, but rather pushed her face further onto her knees as her trembling became more drastic. Husk found himself frozen on the spot.
The bartender found that he was actually very good at comforting people when he put his mind to it, but in this instance he was absolutely lost. Even Angel Dust himself, the crazy one-eyed bitch’s best friend had apparently only seen her cry twice in all their years of knowing eachother, and, according to the spider, both of those instances had been about something to do with Valentino, and Angel himself, so how the fuck was he supposed to console the girl now.
He slowly made his way around to the bar, taking a large gulp from a bottle of whiskey he had stashed under the counter for occasions such as this and opened his mouth to speak. It was just Husk’s horrible, horrible luck that he should be instantly cut off by several consecutive crashes of fireworks, causing him, and, to his astonishment, Cherri, to both flinch backwards.
Perhaps the moment Husk spent pondering a girl who quite literally had ‘Bomb’ in her name’s apparent fear of explosions was too long, as when he snapped his gaze back to her, the demolitionist had broken skin with the nails piercing her thigh and was bleeding small drops of violent crimson on to her tights. Right. Now Husk knew he had to intervene.
‘Hey, kid…?’ Upon being met with no response from Cherri Bomb, Husk cursed his voice for coming out so broken and shaky and tried again.
‘Cherri?’ His voice gained some clarity, but still the cyclops did not acknowledge him, he wondered bitterly if she was deliberately ignoring him, but, considering her pathetic state, the bartender did not think he could really blame her if she was.
‘Cherri Bomb?’ This, he managed to speak with some amount of gusto, although he could not disguise the tremor in his voice, but clearly it was enough, as the girl in front of him was finally alerted to his presence.
If it was possible, Cherri would likely have jumped out of her skin at the voice calling out her name, but, even in hell that was not a possibility, so rather her body’s natural reaction was to flinch even further backwards. This, due to her current position of being hunched over precariously on a bar stool, did not go well. Both sinners winced at the resounding crack of Cherri’s head hitting the wall as she fell backwards off the stool. Husk, finding this situation all too similar to that of watching his friends get brutally slaughtered in battle, instinctively leapt over the bar, propelling himself with his wings so he could make sure her injuries were minimal.
‘What… what the fuck?’ Was all Cherri could bring herself to say as she watched Husker, the notoriously uncaring, alcoholic bartender physically leap over the bar to reach her and place a hand on where she had injured herself.
Through her tears, and now potential concussion, the cyclops struggled to comprehend the situation she found herself in, but there was one thing that she would struggle not to notice, and that was the watery, far-away look in the cat's eyes. A look that she knew she too was sporting at that very moment.
The two stayed in silence for a long while, Husk checking her wound and Cherri watching him do so, until he finally removed his paw from her unruly hair and fell ungracefully into a sitting position beside her. The tears pooling on Cherri’s cheeks were far lesser than they had previously been, but still she could feel herself shaking harshly, rattling her very bones with her tremors.
Once again this change was met by a long silence, only disrupted by skittering insects and distant chatter from outside, until the peace was yet again disrupted by the machine gun fire of the display outside.
At the noise, Husk simply curled in on himself further, self defence was of the utmost importance of course, whereas Cherri on the other hand, took in a sharp breath and pushed herself into his side, her whole body going rigid and her arms crossing protectively over her chest.
The cat looked her up and down at this, she was clearly far more out of it than he was in that moment, and, when he properly paid attention to her chest for the first time, he felt he understood why.
It was not in Husk’s nature to look at other people’s chests, that was a given, so he had never before really noticed the symbol on the upper left of the demolitionist’s shirt, but now that he was observing it closely, he realised how similar it was to the scope of snipers he had used in the past. That explained a lot.
In hell, sinners would often show off their cause of death on their clothes, if their demon forms did not already do that, so it would make sense, especially with her reaction to the banging sounds of the fireworks outside that Cherri had been shot, which, in some twisted sense, Husk was glad of, as it gave him a better chance at empathising with whatever was going through her head in that moment as she clung to him like a frightened child.
‘So…’ Husk began, immediately finding himself fumbling for words. ‘You ain’t a fan of that loud shit either, huh?’
In any other case, Cherri would likely have marvelled at the display of what vaguely resembled care from the gambler, but right now everything in her was screaming danger. She opened her mouth to respond but found herself unable to push a single word out, so she settled for violently shaking her head.
The non-verbal response gave Husk cause to change tact, so he began to share his thoughts, and truly, he was not sure if it would help the cyclops but he supposed that it had helped Angel, knowing that someone understood, and if there was a chance that it could get her off him, he would give it a shot.
‘I was a soldier for a while back when I was alive, y'know.’ She stared at him sceptically, and he raised his eyebrows back at her. ‘Don’t give me that look. Sure it was absolutely shit, but it was character building or whatever. I guess it’s more like character demolition… Warzones fuck people up good and proper… but I guess you already know that…’ Husk found himself trailing off awkwardly, Cherri’s expression was absolutely unreadable so he was not sure whether he had helped her in the slightest, until she spoke up, glaring back down at the floor.
‘..ts fucking stupid…’
‘What?’
‘I said, this is fucking stupid!’ She raised her voice and practically barked out the last words, but still her gaze stuck firmly to the floor.
‘I’m sorry, how the fuck is being traumatised by gun violence ‘fucking stupid’ as you so eloquently put it?’ At this, Cherri pushed herself back from him, half scrambling, half falling away, until she crashed back into the bar stool. Her hands tangled themselves in her wild hair, yanking harshly on it.
‘Because I am not fucking traumatised!’
‘Are you fucking kidding me right now?’
‘No! I can’t be traumatised or whatever you think I am, because it goes against literally everything I do!’ At this point, she was full on shouting at him, tears falling again in streams down her face. She looked like a cornered wild animal and he couldn’t help but sympathise. ‘If I can’t handle one stupid firework then what in all of high fucking heaven is my life down here?! It’s all explosions and noises and shit! What even fucking am I if I can’t handle that?’
He watched her struggle with herself with genuine pity. True, she was brash, loud, short tempered, and a terrible influence, but really, she was just as fucked up as him. He carefully reached up to pry her hands from her scalp, before placing his paws carefully on her shoulders in an attempt at grounding her and hopefully keeping her from another panic attack, or whatever the hell she had just experienced, and striving to offer some words of advice from a place of emotional vulnerability which Husk knew he did not possess.
‘It’s not…’ He immediately hesitated, not liking how much this felt like he was tapping into his own issues. ‘It’s not always the sound… Or the smell, or the feeling… Sometimes it's the control.’ Cherri tilted her head in confusion but he continued, gaining confidence in what he was saying with each word. ‘In war zones, or… other… violent situations..’ He began, gesturing awkwardly to her chest area and feeling her tense up slightly as he did so, ‘you don’t have control of what happens. You can’t just fuckin’ ask the enemy side to cease fire, or tell the explosions to stop going off. You’re out of control. So, when you find yourself out of the control of something that reminds you of those times.. You find it affects you much more than when you are in control.’
Husk looked down at the blonde, watching her carefully for her reaction to his words, she grinned slightly and let out a watery chuckle.
‘How the hell are you smart with what you say, yet so fucking terrible with how you say it?’ A watery grin spread across her face. Husker opened his mouth to retort but was cut off by her face falling again. Christ, this bitch changed mood faster than Angel Dust.
A loud bang seemed to shake the very foundation of the hotel, causing Cherri to dissolve back down into sobs as she, to his genuine astonishment, threw herself around Husk in a tight hug. He tensed up for a long moment before slowly letting himself relax into the embrace, patting her back awkwardly. They stayed there for a while until the gambler heard Cherri mumble a quiet, shaky ‘...thank you.’ Before pulling away and scrubbing furiously at her eye, dislodging any scraps of makeup that remained there after her crying.
‘You know..’ Husk began, finding himself genuinely enjoying conversing with the kid, ‘when I first met you i had no fucking clue what Angel saw in you.’ Cherri raised her eyebrow at him in scepticism as they both picked themselves up off the floor.
‘I thought you were loud, hot headed, and irritating.’ Her expression changed to one of offence as she watched him pour her a drink.
‘And…?’ She prompted, gratefully accepting the beverage he had slid over to her.
‘And you are.’ Cherri immediately began to protest this with a string of denials, comebacks, and swears, but the cat cut her off quickly. ‘But. Honestly, you really aint that bad. You just gotta fix whatever crazy shit you got going on up there.’ He said simply, poking her in the head.
Cherri’s usual brash grin finally made an appearance for the first time that evening as she leant in mock-flirtation on the bar.
‘Takes one to know one, pussycat.’ She said with an over exaggerated wink. Husk immediately went to retort but she did not let him.
‘But, honestly, I think it’s pretty fuckin’ great that Angie has you. He looks genuinely happy when you’re around, and a friend of his is a friend of mine.’
Husk met her smile with a genuine, albeit small one of his own.
‘I’ll drink to that.’ He responded gladly, pouring them both a shot.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The fireworks celebrations had finally ended, and still all Angel Dust could think about was the continued absence of his two favourite people. Cherri had not joined them for the fireworks, Angel knew very well that this was due to how she had died, but Husk had also vanished at some point during the evening, leaving Angel to sit and ponder his absence.
Maybe the spider could have simply gone back into the hotel to check on the whereabouts of his companion, but truly he loved watching the colours and patterns of the fireworks far too much for that, and he ended up grateful for that choice.
Charlie led the small group back inside once all the smores and fireworks had run dry, but as she entered the lobby she froze, leaving Angel and Vaggie who were following close behind to bump harshly into her. He opened his mouth to protest this but was cut off by the princess frantically shushing him and pointing to the bar.
Angel's jaw dropped when he layed eyes on the sight before him, it was like all his dreams coming true, as his two favourite beings in all of hell were sat beside one another on bar stools, both fast asleep, resting weary heads on the counter top. He squealed at the sight and immediately snapped a picture. They were going to kill him for it tomorrow but it was so very worth it.