Chapter Text
It had seemed, at the time, one of Lucifer’s more genius ideas. Come live with Charlie and her rag-tag group of unlikely heroes! Connect with your daughter after all these years! Learn about her interests! Chat to her girlfriend! Use your whiz-bang magical gifts to build a new hotel and fix any new problem and, in the process, maybe even patch over all those years of being a failure who could hardly bear to look at the person you loved most because she reminded you of yourself when everything seemed possible and you dreaded the day she would come to understand the utter powerlessness to fix things no matter how much sorcery or power or influence you had and if it had broken him so much what was it going to do to his darling baby girl who cared even more than he had and he couldn’t look at her or he would start sobbing and what sort of role model was that and he was such a fucking fucking failure and fucking God why—
Ah. Anyway.
Charlie’s determination with the hotel and eventual success against heaven had helped Lucifer more than she ever knew. Here was proof, finally: demons could change the status quo if they tried hard enough. And Lucifer was buoyant, so fucking happy and hopeful again, and in that moment ideas sprung like stars on the back of rainbows from every orifice, and one of these grand ideas was yes, it’s time to wade back into the world again.
That was the problem with genius ideas. Your dumb former self, all giddy with anticipation, didn’t have to see the idea through. Didn’t have to deal with any consequences. That was all due for current you, the fucking chump.
The thing was, the itty bitty thing was, that after a looooooooong long longity long time living alone in a mansion with no one but cute duckies who did not talk back for company, a busy hotel took a bit of getting used to.
Two months after the rebuild, there were dozens of new residents and plenty more wandering in every day to apply for their shot at redemption. Great for Charlie! She was blissful and determined, checking soul after soul into the hotel, designing tailored redemption plans for each. His little girl could fill oceans with her zest and he would finish off the job with tears of happiness and pride for her achievements.
But with a lot of souls came a lot of eyes to stare at him. Which, you know. Fine. He was the King of Hell; being stared at came with the territory. If he didn’t get stared at every time he slunk down a corridor or ducked out for milk he’d worry about what else was capturing their attention: maybe a massacre, or a just-announced clearance sale which, in a place like Hell, was bound to lead to the same outcome. But it was still. Uh. A bit icky, to feel so many pairs of eyes (or singular eyes or sextets of eyes, he wasn’t gonna assume!) following his person around.
People also talked to him, once they’d got over king-of-hell-related awe. There was never much of that awe, and truly Lucifer liked it that way, liked that no one in hell gave a shit about authority unless they were forced to (see: soul transfer, overlords trying too hard to stake a claim on their patch of land, other bs). But there were times when Lucifer would have appreciated a bit of, uh, space. He could stay in his room, but that went against the whole purpose of his grand plan to reenter the world. So instead he pasted a huge smile on his face and affixed his top hat like armour and strode around the place for as long as he could manage, and every time some random soul came to chat up ol’ Luci he tried to be hip and cool and not show how the conversation dug a chink in his resolve that was weaker than any physical structure he could build because all the magic in the world couldn’t fix the deficiencies of his oh god stop moaning about yourself.
Anyway, after an hour or two of this, it would even become taxing to talk to the hotel staff, Charlie included.
Particularly because the hotel staff were more likely to touch him as they talked to him. And touch was, somehow, the worst of all.
Niffty jumping on his shoulder to proudly show off a captured dead rat, violent green foaming from its mouth and eating into Lucifer’s clothing before he magicked the creature away. Angel prodding with any of his hands to get Lucifer’s attention and show off some photoshoot he really wished he could un-see. Husk’s tentative pats on the shoulder when Lucifer came down to the bar in the middle of another sleepless night. Charlie’s big bear hugs, encompassing like she could spread love through their whole kingdom if she just reached her arms far enough.
He loved Charlie’s hugs, he truly did. Well. At least, he loved the idea of the hug, that she wanted to hug him, that he hadn’t ruined their connection even after his best efforts.
It was just. Now. On top of everything, when he was trying to get used to this hotel, to having no privacy, after too many years of too much privacy, with his skin crawling from the stares and the voices and the people crowding his space with their scents and fabric and clammy skin… Now, even his favourite person in the world was too much.
He imagined it. The next time Charlie came to hug him, saying, Sorry, sweetie, please take your hands off me, I love you but for reasons I can’t properly understand I can’t bear to have you touch me, it’s too much and I’m actively holding back the urge to hurl. Charlie would stare at him with those big soulful eyes brimming with tears and think, he has spent his life keeping me at a distance and now he’s doing it again. Charlie would give up on him — Lucifer just couldn’t help his nature as the scum of the earth below earth — and would tell him to leave the hotel and her life forever.
Totally unacceptable.
He could do this. It was nothing! Literally just showing up and talking to people and letting his daughter hug him. C’mon, loser king, the bar is so low you’re gonna trip over it. Don’t fuck this up alongside everything else.
And, he had to hand it to himself, he was doing sweeeeell. Every day for two months now, chatting to the masses, helping Charlie with whatever task she had planned for the day. Hanging on by the very edge of his incisors, but hanging on nonetheless. Still counted. Still got it, baby!!
Lucifer had one main fear. One little hiccough that could turn all the progress into a flaming pile of turds that he was forced to eat poop by poop. His fear? That the creepy, eternally-smiling overlord-and-facility-manager-and-radio-presenter (and really, that guy? Waaaay too many jobs to be healthy, was work/life balance not a thing in the 1920s?) might get in on the let’s-crowd-Lucifer party. Because it was one thing to be touched by his daughter or the other friendly hotel staff, but when Lucifer was this tightly wound by all the agony-no-let’s-say-discomfort he was putting himself through on a daily basis, he 100% could not cope with someone he detested adding more of the same. That asshole extraordinaire was still actively trying to take Lucifer’s place as mentor figure to Charlie, meeting with her every second day to talk about so-called hotel business that Charlie said Lucifer would find “boring”. Alastor was up to no good, Lucifer was sure of it, and the moment Lucifer found out what it was and could convince Charlie of this villainy, the radio demon would find himself tossed onto the nearest street corner and/or have his essence obliterated by Lucifer’s wrath.
But until that point, Lucifer had to be very careful, because Charlie liked Alastor. If Lucifer killed or even hurt Alastor, Charlie would never forgive him.
Anyway. If Alastor happened to touch Lucifer when he was feeling particularly vulnerable (these days: most of the time), Lucifer feared that the final threads of his composure would snap wide open, and he would get all big-angry-demon-daddy and rain down hellish punishments on this sinner, and that would nooooot be good, no siree, because Alastor wouldn’t survive that. He was an overlord, sure, but Lucifer was Lucifer, and also Alastor had a massive angelic-weapon-sized hole in his stomach that he was trying to hide from the rest of the hotel staff, and it wouldn’t take much more angelic power to tip him over to life-threatened zone.
But, thank everything that was sinful, the radio demon hadn’t yet tried to touch Lucifer. It was weird, because Alastor was relatively touchy-feely with the rest of the hotel staff. People didn’t come up and touch him so much, but Alastor seemed a big fan of the one or both hands on shoulder motion, would even sometimes initiate a hug. Not that Lucifer had expected Alastor would try that on him, of course! But maybe flick dust off Lucifer’s coat to imply he was a filthy mess or shake his hand with just too much force or touch his back while shooing him toward the hotel door. None of that, nada, zip. Indeed, the radio demon was barely talking to Lucifer these days, the only exception being when Lucifer spoke to him first. The only sign he could catch at all that Alastor even noted his existence was Al’s Eldrich-ass shadow, sometimes crawling along the wall or floor nearby. But the shadow probably did that with everyone. No, Alastor was definitely ignoring him.
Lucifer didn’t understand it.
After some weeks of confusion, he now had a working hypotheses: Alastor had figured out that Lucifer knew about his injury. If Alastor’s rivals knew the radio demon was more incapacitated than usual, they might take their chances to claim his souls and territory. Perhaps Alastor was wary that Lucifer would try and use this secret as blackmail material if Alastor gave him a reason by, oh, being his normal level of awful jerk.
If this was Alastor’s thinking, it was pretty stupid, because Lucifer had no interest in bartering off his secrets to other overlords. Getting Alastor hurt indirectly was still getting Alastor hurt, and Charlie was going to feel the same way about it and cast Lucifer from her life completely. But hey, if this is what was keeping Alastor from the handsiness and, thus, keeping Lucifer teetering on the right edge of sanity, Lucifer wasn’t about to tell him otherwise. Love that status quo, am I right?
Then things went deeply to shit on the movie night.
Charlie had invited all the hotel staff, plus its OG guest and OG guest’s best friend, to the hotel’s new “recreation room”. Lucifer had built this space in a touch of exhilaration-laced inspiration following Adam’s long-overdue demise. It was precisely as big as an indoor lap pool, and you could judge this for certain, because there was a swimming pool on the ceiling. (You reached the pool by climbing a ladder up to the halfway point of the room, at which point gravity would reverse and you could leap down into the pool. There were three guests and two rats swimming when Lucifer arrived for the movie night. (Niffty had started throwing captured rats in the pool after Charlie forbade use of clothes-eating poison, but the rats actually seemed to appreciate the exercise.))
Other features of this games room included: a VR space which currently showed live footage from daily life in the other Rings (not exactly Lucifer’s fave thing to watch, but the sinners were weirdly keen to learn about what went on in the parts of hell they couldn’t visit), ping-pong table, mini-arcade, and a full 8-row tiered cinema in the far corner. The latter is where Lucifer assumed they would convene tonight, and he was chill about the whole thing, really! Crammed in a small space with multiple people and unable to leave for 2.5 to 3.5 hours (in hell, movies all ran the director’s cut), he was already squeezing an extra strong duckie like a stress ball as he swung open the door to the rec room. But on the plus side, they had individual seating! A little bit of space!!
Except that when he arrived, Charlie, Vaggie, Angel, Cherri, Husk, and Niffty were not in the theatre.
The gang were in a totally different corner. They were in the “retro hang-out” zone, a space littered with bean bags and pillows piled next to one-another, all surrounding a grimy square 1990s television (the latest model Alastor allowed in the hotel), a VHS player, and a handful of old-school consoles.
“C’mon, dad!”
Charlie was waving him over with an N64 controller. Lucifer forced his lips to mirror hers and his legs to swing his suit of skin over toward the group. He clutched the stress duck like a lifeline, ensuring his coat sleeves were extra long so the reinforced yellow rubber wouldn’t be seen. “What’s this, sweetie? Weren’t we going to watch a movie?”
“Absolutely we are!” She tossed the controller on the ground and brandished two video cassettes. “The Shining. Angel said it’s about a hotel!”
Lucifer’s smile fixed halfway to appalled. A movie about a father turning slowly insane in a hotel. Great choice, Charlie! No, don’t deride her attempts for bonding, you asshole. There’s no way this is a dig like it would have been for Lilith. Charlie doesn’t have a malicious bone in her body. Be supportive. “Uh. Are you sure that’s the right vibe for the first of these movie nights?” No, stop, in what way is that supportive? “Because it’s such a vibe! A great vibe, ha ha! Love that vibe!” Oh, for fuck’s sake, that sounds sarcastic, you idiot! God, can a single thing that escapes your mouth not be trash for once in your life?
“I tried to suggest something else, Sir,” said Vaggie, soul of reason, precious fellow fallen angel, ideal girlfriend for Charlie and honestly one of the best people in existence, “but she argued that hell is the perfect place for a horror movie, and she’s not exactly wrong.”
True. Lucifer could concede that.
“Well. Swell!” Lucifer was squeezing his stress duck rhythmically. “Then, shall we head over to the theatre area? I can make that movie play on the big screen, kiddos! No need for this old media!”
“Nah, short king.” Angel stretched on the bean bag, arms flaring, and a fingertip brushed Lucifer’s knee coquettishly. Lucifer barely avoided shuddering. “It’s much more comfortable here. You can stretch right out. Everyone can see all the goods, too.” He made a minute thrusting motion, then fist-bumped Cherri. Niffty giggled; Husk sighed with some mixture of exasperation and fondness.
“Like a slumber party!” announced Niffty. “So cute!”
Stars grew in Charlie’s eyes. “Oh,” she cooed. “I never had one of those, I always wished that I could — I mean, don’t get me wrong, great childhood, ha ha!”
You weren’t there for her to even ask about things like slumber parties.
Lucifer’s claw pierced the stress duckie; he and it both made a sad wheeze as it deflated. Lucifer vanished the thing. Vaggie was saying, “I never had a slumber party either,” and Charlie was holding both of Vaggie’s hands in hers and they were smiling as if they held the keys to each-other’s happiness. He’d felt that way about another person, once upon a time.
Fine. Bean bags and cushions, squished next to other people while watching a movie where a father goes off the rails (check) and hurts his family (check, for psychological damage — but never again!!).
Lucifer steeled himself, stiff shoulders and wide stance, like he would in the early days of battle against heaven.
“Oh, wait!” Charlie leapt up. “I forgot the chair!”
Charlie ran over to the tea-party area, apologising for interrupting the two short imps seated there. (They must have been on a romantic evening together. One imp had speared a cupcake with a dagger and offered it toward her partner; he was leaning across the table and biting little pieces of cupcake from the knife. It looked like the scene might quickly turn R-rated, and Lucifer heavily hoped they would get one of the many hotel rooms, but at least the different sections of the rec room were soundproofed.) Charlie grabbed a pink iron-lattice chair and carried it back to the bean bags, setting it just to their side with a hmph of satisfaction.
Lucifer stared.
A seat was…possible?
Like a lost seaman adrift on the open ocean spying a floating plank of wood, Lucifer approached the chair. He reached out a hand. Salvation had arrived.
“Oh!” Charlie looked awkward, yet determined. “Sorry, dad. That’s Alastor’s chair.”
And the wood sank to the depths of the ocean the moment Lucifer laid hands on it.
Teeth gritted through his smile, Lucifer said, “How come Alastor gets a chair when the rest of us are sitting on the ground?”
“On beanbags, dad. And he just does.”
“Oh. He just does!”
“Dad.” Charlie was exasperated with him. He was making his little girl annoyed. “Don’t make this a you versus Alastor issue, please.”
“I’m not!”
“Yeah, you are.” Vaggie was standing up against him and supporting his daughter! The care, the devotion! He was so happy for their love. It was a shame he now suffered for it.
Charlie wasn’t going to budge on this. Alastor would get the prize of sitting apart from everyone and Lucifer would have to slum it with the masses.
Well, it would probably be good for Alastor’s wound to remain straight-backed. The chair would help with that. Lucifer doubted Charlie knew about the injury, but the effect was the same.
Goddamn it, Lucifer was going to have to do this.
Well, if you’re gonna drown anyway, you might as well dive right in.
He plonked down on the available bean-bag nearest to Charlie. She squealed in happiness and pulled him into a hug. He smiled wide and hugged her back. He could handle it. He’d do it for her. He had to. She was all he fucking had left!
“Now,” said Charlie. “Let’s start this off exactly how slumber parties normally go!”
“Uh,” said Angel, “sure you wanna get naked with your dad here?”
“Group hug, everyone!”
“Ohhh. Right!”
After only a couple of moments for scoffs, complaints, laughter, Lucifer was in the centre of a group of people all hugging him. From every side he was covered and compressed by hands, by skin, by scratchy fabric and leather and hair and jewellery, by perfume and cologne and sweat and fresh soap. It was all too much, every single little bit, he couldn’t handle it, he was whimpering he was starting to hyperventilate no he had to keep it together he couldn’t ruin this moment he’d already ruined Charlie’s childhood he wouldn’t do anything that she didn’t want ever again. Not breathing was a way to avoid hyperventilating, right? Lucifer gulped a breath and held it, and kept holding it, waiting for this to end, it had to end, right? How fucking long did group hugs go for? It had to end soon, or he was going to, he was gonna, he couldn’t stand it he was teetering on the edge of—
“Oh my. What a sight all you cheery fellows are!”
The filtered tones of the radio demon.
Charlie pulled away from the group to wave at Alastor. The rest soon followed suit.
Lucifer shudderingly released his breath. Taking advantage of everyone’s distraction, he looked down, top hat helping to cover his face and it stayed on his head despite the angle because it knew what trouble it was in for it if fell off. He took long, slow breaths. Brushed away some unshed tears that tickled his eyelashes. That could have been capital-B Bad.
While he was pulling himself together, Charlie was showing Alastor the video and explaining the idea for the evening.
“And we even have a seat for you!” she said with a flourish at said chair. “It’ll be fun! So please, Alastor, join us!”
His baby girl, forced to act like a car salesman in an attempt to convince the true conman to deign to participate.
Alastor considered the chair, that stitched-up smile not shifting.
His gaze drifted across the seated group, pausing for a smidgeon of a second longer on Lucifer than the others, probably just because Lucifer was actively glaring at him.
Then Alastor said, with a shadow of surely-false apology, “I must admit that the title chosen for today’s screening leaves something to be desired, my dear Charlie. On reflection, I have decided not to attend this evening’s festivities.”
Charlie’s face fell.
So. It wasn’t enough to steal the only chair in this evening, thus ruining Lucifer’s evening? Now the radio demon was going to ruin Charlie’s evening too?
Incensed, Lucifer rose from his position and rounded on Alastor. “You already agreed, facility manager. They even put out a chair for you. Sit and watch the movie.”
A muscle twitched in Alastor’s cheek.
“Yes. Well, Sire. It is generally perfectly acceptable to change one’s mind about a preference, if only that is adequately communicated to those around one. I have experience in these things. As, let us say, a professional communicator.”
“More like a professional asshole,” Lucifer spat, which wasn’t his wittiest retort but he wasn’t exactly at his best right now.
Charlie ran a hand through her hair. “Let’s just try to get along, please? This was gonna, is going to be a fun night.”
“Right,” said Vaggie, frowning between Alastor and Lucifer. “Fun.”Fun, or else, was the subtext.
“Fun!” said Niffty.
Cherry: “Fun? Nothing’s even getting blown up.”
Husk: “You sure about that?”
Niffty: “Fun, fun!”
“Perfectly fun,” Alastor concurred, hands clasped neatly before him. “But it will be equally so without my presence. And then your father can sit on this chair that you generously provided, and his minute stature might not struggle to see the screen—”
“Shut the fuck up about my height—”
“Or, judging by his pallor, are you certain that he is entirely well? Wouldn’t want him to pass on any sickness around the hotel management.”
“I’m fine,” Lucifer growled, and then realised there was a shadow of harmonic in his voice and he was starting to see in spectrums that only his red demon eyes could parse.
He forced them back to normal.
“Dad’s fine,” Charlie coaxed. “He can’t get ill, Alastor, it’s part of his job contract, why there’s no sick days allocated.” Lucifer winced; he knew that lie he’d used to get out of seeing his adolescent daughter’s stage play would come to bite him in the ass one day. “Look. We were having a great bonding moment earlier, Alastor. Now, obviously I’m not saying you need to be in on the group hug, but if you could come and give dad a hug—”
Oh fucking hell no.
“Absolutely not!” said Alastor, and Lucifer breathed the tiniest bit easier. God, was it a relief to have someone else who hated him in the room.
“I’m just saying,” Charlie said, frustrated, “that this is a night meant for bonding. And sometimes, when tempers are frayed,” she smiled and opened her mouth wide, and Lucifer could feel a song brewing, “sometimes you just need a hug to be okay.”
No. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stay for a song about hugs.
“I realised I have a thing!” Lucifer said, panicked, and turned and began walking away at a speed he could hopefully convince everyone wasn’t a run. “A big, important thing, sorry! Enjoy tonight!”
“Dad, please!”
Alastor said quickly, “Now Charlie, I would not advise—”
Without warning, arms wrapped tight around Lucifer’s waist and squeezed.
And a bowstring that had been wound very tightly, over a very, very long period, decided that this was the perfect point to snap, right, open.
“Get off me,” Lucifer snarled, in all the octaves and harmonics and registers in and outside of all known human hearing, and there were no longer arms around his waist because he was rage and pain and terror, and his wings had manifested and with a force drawn right from his essence he had thrown the threat up high, high, high…
…until Charlie got caught by the shifting gravity in the room and, with a huge splash, fell into the pool on the ceiling.
There was then a long silence.
Eventually, into that silence, someone started screaming.
Oh, no. That was just in his mind.
People stared from Charlie to Lucifer, Charlie, Lucifer. No quip, no crack at either of their expense. No words could accompany something this, this, this this this awful.
Charlie swam — thank fucking God, Charlie could swim; Lucifer couldn’t even remember her learning, he couldn’t even remember — past the rats doing laps, to the side of the pool.
Charlie grasped the ladder and began to climb up/down, until gravity asserted itself in the regular pattern again.
She dropped to the floor and huddled on the side of the rec room, wet clothes and hair pasted to her body, making a steadily-increasing puddle on the floor.
“Charlie!”
Vaggie ran over to Charlie and, no hesitation, pulled her into her arms. “Are you okay, baby? Are you hurt?”
“Fine, f-fine, I’m not hurt.”
But Charlie was shaking, either from the cold water or the shock or the, the, the betrayal…
Lucifer was shaking too. By now he was his usual size again, small but he felt so much smaller, like a speck on the floor, some dust that Niffty could spray and wipe away, take care of him like she had taken care of Adam, because he wasn’t any better because he’d just—
He half-tripped over the bean bags speeding toward his daughter.
“Charlie, I, I’m didn’t mean — I’m sorry—”
On the next step forward, Vaggie’s head flew up. “Stop right there, Sir,” she snarled, around bared teeth, and Lucifer froze. Vaggie’s eyes were like diamonds and her hands clenched like if she would draw a weapon if she weren’t so focused on Charlie’s wellbeing. “I think you should leave.”
“But I—”
“Now.”
“Vaggie, it’s okay.”
But there was something quiet and heartbroken in Charlie’s tone, and Lucifer’s heart broke a hundred-fold in turn. He had caused that pain. He’d hurt his family, again, just like that fucker Jack Nicholson, just like himself, every single damn time.
“Right.” Lucifer stepped back. “I’ll just.” He swallowed. “Leave, then. See ya, uh, pals, bitches — oh sweetie, I’m so, so sorr—”
He opened a portal and threw himself backwards into it.