Chapter Text
Charlie had her loose hair floating in the warm evening air, walking slow but relentless steps towards the object of her fury.
She was a sight from a different dimension even for Hell, the powerful beauty of a goddess descended to pass divine justice upon sinners, with her horns out and her eyes blood-like red, her voice ringing out filled with rage.
“YOU FUCKING TRAITOR!”
She was furious, like none of her friends had seen her before, not looking a bit like the naive, sweet Charlie they used to know: the picture of the legit Queen of Hell, ready to smite a sinner and end their afterlife for good in a heartbeat.
“You can mess with me, you can hurt me, but don’t you dare touch MY FUCKING FAMILY!”
Fury distorted her voice as she spoke, while her trident lit up sparkling explosions in the ground as she gestured with it.
A dozen feet away, Alastor was on the ground, trying to get on his feet after Charlie had slammed him into the wall of the tall building behind him, causing him to fall from a considerable height in a cascade of bricks and debris.
Some bones had to be broken, he thought—his whole body stiffened as a sharp pain shot through his ribs, and he cursed under his breath, struggling way too hard to get up.
He glanced around quickly, realising he’d lost his staff. He must have dropped it after taking a punch as hard as the one her father had dealt Adam months earlier.
His eyes flew back to Charlie and the rest of the gang standing behind her—Husk, Vaggie, Cherry and even Niffty were there, watching him get beaten by Charlie with expressions that ranged from disgust to satisfaction.
The Princess of Hell was now just a couple of steps away. His staff, instead, had fallen a couple meters from him, on his left side.
“Charlie—wait. Why don’t we just… talk this out?” he tried to say, hoping to calm her down and buy himself some time, his usual grin never left his face, only his eyes giving away that he was scared like he’d never been in either his life or afterlife.
“Talk this out!?”
Charlie’s eyes filled with literal fire.
“You lost your chance to talk the day you chose to betray us.”
Her sentence earned Alastor disapproving looks from the rest of the gang.
“…The day you decided to manipulate my mother into giving you more power so you could ‘protect me’…” she said, each word slow and deliberate, her rage barely contained.
“And how did you use it?”
Alastor’s smile stretched thinned as his eyes glanced desperately left and right, looking for a way out of the situation, but finding none.
“…To trap and torture my father’s soul. Remember? I’ll make sure you’ll never fucking forget that.”
Another disgusted look from the crowd.
If Alastor had any trace of concern for what others thought of him, he could have crumbled under those gazes alone.
Because it was true. He had done all that.
He’d had no consideration for Charlie’s feelings, nor cared that he could hurt her in his attempt to make Lucifer pay for getting on his nerves one too many times.
But after all, there were no friends in Hell.
What did they even expect from him? It wasn’t like he hadn’t always said the only reason behind everything he did was entertainment.
And trapping the soul of the King of Hell had been definitely entertaining.
Only, when all was said and done and Lucifer wasn’t around to tell him to use coasters anymore. When people at the hotel started asking questions about his disappearance, and Alastor knew it was just a matter of time until Charlie found out… it didn’t feel as fun.
He’d always known that doing that meant the end of his time at the hotel and of his friendship with Charlie. It was a price he was willing to pay. It was never his choice to join the hotel anyway.
He also knew that the gang would stand with her, and that he would eventually have to fight the whole group.
What he didn’t expect, though, was Charlie to be this powerful. Even against him, even with the new power he had acquired.
He had probably underestimated how much power a hybrid of a seraphim and the most powerful demon in Hell would actually possess. In his defense, he had not once seen Charlie use it with the intention of hurting someone.
Until now.
At this point, he just wanted to melt into his shadow and disappear. To avoid being smitten by Charlie, clearly, but also because the way her and the gang were looking at him felt… heavy.
But he couldn’t just teleport away and leave his staff behind. He should have done so before realising the battle with Charlie would take this turn. He cursed himself for having underestimated an opponent with angelic powers for the second time.
He tried to take his last chance at retreating, collecting all of his strength to push himself towards his staff in an attempt to reach for it.
But Vaggi moved faster, leaving her position a couple steps behind Charlie to fly and pick it up before he could.
“Not so fast, traitor,” she said coldly, looking at him through narrowed eyes as she threw the staff in Charlie's direction, who caught it promptly.
“You're incredible—” Vaggi scoffed. “Even now, all you care about is your power. Apparently, you really are nothing without it,” she added calmly, looking at him with a mixture of disgust and pity.
“Yeah, about that… don’t even think you were going to keep it anyway,” Charlie added, holding out Alastor’s staff with both hands and snapping it in two over her knee before tossing it aside.
Alastor felt that physically, most of his powers leaving him and his breath catching for a couple of seconds, the pain from his wounds feeling suddenly worse.
Charlie reached him, and the Radio Demon managed to collect all his left strength to push himself up, in a position that was something between sitting and kneeling.
She grabbed him by his collar, lifting him in front of her with her arm stretched out, forcing him to stand and stare in her red eyes, filled with fury and… tears.
“I trusted you,” she said, her voice uneven.
“I thought you were our friend, that you were my friend. I cared about you!”
Looking at her now, Alastor realised that Charlie wasn’t just angry because he’d hurt her family. No, she was angry at herself for letting him close to her friends, giving him the occasion to hurt them all with his betrayal.
She felt guilty.
“Charlie, I—” Alastor tried to say, raising his hands instinctively as if pleading for mercy.
But Charlie wasn’t listening.
“And I shouldn’t have done it!” she shouted, slashing across his torso with her claws and pushing him back.
Alastor impacted against the building, and once again his knees gave up, so that the wall behind him was the only thing preserving him from collapsing to the ground, his head throbbing relentlessly from the impact.
There, unable to move, with the group’s eyes pointed on him, he felt pathetic.
He wanted to speak, to try to manipulate Charlie, or at least come up with a sassy retort. It was unlike him to get beaten and have nothing to say.
Blood had started pouring from his wounds, soaking his clothes.
But what could he say?
He was struggling enough just to keep breathing, but also the situation felt too… serious.
Even for him.
I’m sorry, anyone else would have said.
Yeah, as if.
Words like that would never leave the Radio Demon’s mouth, even if they could save his life.
Even if they were sincere.
But he knew those words couldn’t change things, anyway, not at that point. With his actions he had broken limits, and most importantly, he had broken Charlie’s spirit.
An almost impossible task.
So he stayed silent, his ever-present grin never leaving him, only his eyes screaming that he was in pain.
Fuck, he thought, when he realised one of Charlie’s claws had sliced open a wound in his throat.
Through his blurred vision, he saw Vaggi step closer to Charlie and hold her arm. She was shaking and breathing unsteadily, the tears in the corners of her eyes now streaming down her cheeks.
Husk and Cherri also stepped next to her, and Husk placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go Charlie, it’s not worth it. You taught us that yourself,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, you’re better than him. Let’s go home. We’ll find a way to free Lucifer,” Vaggi added.
Charlie let out a long, shaky sigh, before finally murmuring “Okay.”
She turned and walked away, while the others shot Alastor one last pained glance before following her.
Niffty looked at him with her single eye filled with tears as she reached for Husk’s hand, before turning away.
“Disappear for 7 more years, fucker!” Cherri shouted, showing him both of her middle fingers before she joined the others.
Alastor glanced away, unwilling to capture the humiliating sight of his former group leaving him like that, but still pitying him enough not to finish the work.
When he lifted his gaze they were finally gone. With that, the strength he had been holding on to keep up his façade left him completely, and he just collapsed to the ground, unable to keep his eyes open or breathe anymore.
The last thing he saw before blacking out was a drone flying quietly in the red sky, passing rapidly overhead and disappearing behind a tall building.
///
Vox sat beside Valentino in the front row seats facing the runway stage. Upbeat music played while the models walked in a neat line in colorful, shimmering dresses, catching the light of the cameras flashing around them.
Vox didn’t usually attend Velvette’s fashion shows, but for this one he’d made an exception and helped her out with the organisation.
It was just one out of the long list of things he had done to make up for his ‘little stunt’ in the eyes of his friends, after that one time he almost blew the entire city up just to get things over with a certain deer demon.
The models split into two separate groups at the end of the T-shaped stage, leaving the center open for Velvette to step forward and say a few words about the launch.
It was always nice to witness the enthusiasm she put into creating her collections.
When the crowd finished clapping and the music grew louder, Vox made his way towards Velvette, who had begun releasing interviews to a small crowd of journalists.
He pushed through the crowd and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“May I steal her for a second? She’ll be back before you can say, ‘I’ll buy three of those!’” he said, flashing the journalists one of his signature smiles.
“What do you want, dumbass?” she asked, her bright smile betraying her attitude.
“I have some work to finish in my office, but I’ll be back before the party’s over. You and Val try not to miss me too much, alright?”
Velvette pouted briefly. “You always have work to do! See you later, then?”
“Count on it.”
Vox headed to his office, glad to finally get some time away from the crowd and the flashes, and finally free to unbutton the jacket of the tight, shimmering white suit Velvette had made for him for the occasion.
When he got in, he finally relaxed into his chair and turned on his computer to read the draft of a contract with a company VoxTech was trying to acquire.
He opened his mailbox, but his gaze fell on a red warning pop-up in the corner of the monitor.
‘Alastor’s injured!!!’ it said in big letters.
‘Break out the popcorn!’, said a smaller description.
Vox's heart skipped a beat. He had set that notification himself, back in the day.
With the entire city’s security under his control, of course Vox had sometimes— okay, more than sometimes— used it to spy on his archenemy.
And after not being the first to know when the Radio Demon came back after his seven-year disappearance, he’d decided to set a notification to know the overlord’s every move whenever he left the Hazbin Hotel. For VoxTech’s system, it was a piece of cake to cross-reference the data from the security cameras and the drones patrolling the streets, notifying him in real time of Alastor's location.
After their last fight, though, he had disabled it, in an effort to forget about the Radio Demon once and for all.
That night had marked a turning point, and after the weeks it had taken to mentally recover from the darkest period of his afterlife, Vox had decided his obsession with Alastor had to end.
Only, he had forgot to deactivate the second notification he had set after Alastor’s fight with Adam, to get notified whenever Alastor got into a fight, because if he was to ever get beaten like that again, he wanted a fucking front row seat.
But now, months had passed since their last fight, and Vox was different; or at least, he was trying to be.
Nothing about forgiving Alastor or things like that: he still hoped for karma to turn around and bite him in the ass one day, but he had figured that if he wanted to be happy, he had to stop falling for the other demon’s teasing and ragebait.
He had to stop obsessing over him, stop spying on his every move, basically going ‘no contact’, as Velvette called it.
Hard couldn’t even begin to describe the few months that followed his breakdown, and Vox wasn’t even sure whether he would still be an overlord, if it weren’t for the support of his friends during those dark weeks.
He closed the pop-up, pushed his thoughts aside, and finally opened the pdf with the draft. He had already wasted too much time on the matter.
He couldn’t tell if it was the contract’s intricate and deliberately confusing language, but he just couldn’t focus, and he found himself re-reading the same sentence over and over again.
His mind kept drifting to Alastor and that stupid notification.
Was he injured? Who could have managed to injure the Radio Demon after he had acquired even more power?
Could he be… dead, even?
And if Alastor was dead, would Vox be happy?
He tried his best to concentrate for a few more minutes, but at some point he stood abruptly and began pacing around his office, trying to release some tension.
Working on the computer was just too much of a distraction at that moment, he reasoned. So, he left his office and crossed the hallway, heading to the elevator to join the others at the party.
He pressed the elevator button, and within seconds the doors opened on his floor.
He stepped in, about to press the button to the runway’s floor.
But… his hand stopped.
“Ow, fuck…” he groaned, throwing his head back as he walked out, heading back to his office.
Just one little sneak peak and that’s it, he thought.
Then he would close the tab and go back to the party.
He deserved to see Alastor getting beaten after everything he’d done to him, didn’t he?
And, of course, he’d get rid of those notifications once and for all while he was at it.
With that, he stood in front of the desk, his chair pushed aside, leaning over the keyboard as he opened VoxTech’s security software.
And… the image that appeared before him was unlike anything he had ever imagined.
On his screen was a clean, non-glitched image of Alastor, lying unconscious in a puddle of blood and wreckage.
To Vox, karma didn't seem to taste as sweet as it should have.