Chapter Text
Six hands was a lot. Some would say too many. They would be wrong; it wasn’t enough, because with two wringing his fingers together, one tugging at his hair, one at his mouth so he could gnaw at his nails and ruin a very expensive manicure, one grabbing anxiously at his chest fluff in a doomed attempt to self-soothe and another clutching his phone while it vibrated as though it were full of angry bees, Angel had no hands left to open the fucking front door.
Swearing with more colour than Charlie’s redemption handouts, he lifted one booted foot and kicked at the door handle, staggering over the threshold and shutting the door behind him with another kick. Fuckin’ door should be damn thankful. Getting stepped on by Angel Dust for free.
The lobby was empty; thank fuck for small mercies. Angel beelined for the kitchen. He hadn’t eaten in… in… a while. He hadn’t had lunch, obviously, not with Val breathing down his neck all day. Had he had breakfast? Did coffee count as breakfast? There might have been an apple too, unless he was thinking of yesterday. Might as well be. Fuck, morning was forever ago—
His phone buzzed in his hand again, and he actually jumped, as though it might bite him, and immediately felt his face warm in embarrassment. Val wasn’t here, he reminded himself, and neither was anyone else. The hotel was the only place in Hell where he wasn’t constantly watched, there was no one around to see him flinch like a kicked puppy every time his phone rang. Good. No one around to comment on the fat lip or the bruises around his throat, either—even better.
He chewed on a hangnail, wincing as blood stung his tongue. He’d fucked up. Big time. The worst part was he thought he’d gotten away with it; it wasn’t until he was climbing out of the cab that his phone lit up, sending such a violent jolt through him that he fumbled his footing and almost got a faceful of the hotel’s gravel drive.
There was no hope of appealing to reason; Val’s anger came in only two settings: Bad and Worse. All Angel could do—all he could ever do—was try to stop the former turning into the latter. If he ignored the calls, Val would either vent some frustration on whoever was nearest—hopefully Vox—and Angel might get away with a few slaps next shift (Bad), or he would stew, probably spend most of the night smoking and coking, fucking marinating in his own indignation, and stomp onto set tomorrow steaming like a ten-foot teakettle with an attitude problem (Worse). If Angel picked up the phone, if he played his cards right, he might be able to head off the storm with the promise of making it up to you later (Bad), or, given the opportunity to remind himself and Angel exactly why he was so furious, Val might get worked up enough to come down here and drag him bodily back to the studio (So Much Worse).
He sighed heavily as another call went to voicemail. Silence reigned for a little while—that meant Val was leaving a long one, though Angel never bothered listening to more than the first five seconds. Not for the screamers, anyway. Val always started how he meant to go on.
Untangling the anxious mess of his limbs, he started rummaging through the fridge. Vaggie’s overnight oats, half of a tuna mayo sandwich (that had to be Husk, he was such a cat), a few yoghurt pots, a carton of juice (mostly empty), and assorted ingredients, including several packages wrapped in butcher paper with ‘Alastor’ written on them in a squarish, spiky hand. Angel didn’t even want to know.
He snagged a yoghurt and was licking the lid when his phone rang again. God, nothing was ever easy, was it? Was it too much to ask to eat his fucking yoghurt in peace?
Scowling, he snatched up the phone and swiped his thumb to answer it. “Val, I—”
“Where the fuck are you?!”
Angel winced. He’s not here, he’s not here, he told himself, trying to calm his rabbiting heart. “I, uh, I’m home, Val—” Mistake. Val hated it when he called the hotel ‘home’. “You said we were done, I—”
“I said the shoot was done, babycakes. I didn’t say you were done, did I?”
No, he hadn’t, and Angel was well aware of the distinction at this point, well aware of exactly what kind of overtime Val had in mind. But Val hadn’t ordered him to stay, not directly, so he had plausible deniability in grabbing his shit and hightailing it out of there while Val bitched at Travis about something or other.
“I’m sorry, Val, I thought—”
“Ohh, you thought, did you? What did you think, huh? Think you can just kick me to the curb like some cheap fucking whore, after everything I’ve done for you?”
The voice was so venomous he half expected pink spit to come flying out of the phone’s speaker. Angel bit back a sigh and dragged his fingers through his hair. He was so fucking tired. He just wanted to eat something, shower, hug his pig and go to bed. He didn’t even know what time it was; didn’t want to check.
“You listening to me, bitch?!”
“Yeah—I, yeah, I’m here, Val, I’m sorry.”
“Are you fucking high?”
“I am not!” He barked, made all the angrier by how much he wished it wasn’t true. And how hypocritical it was of Val to even care. And how hungry he was, goddammit, and all he had was a tiny fucking yoghurt—
“I don’t know why I fucking bother with you,” Val was saying. Angel opened a drawer and grabbed a spoon. “I try and put together something nice for you, even though you’ve been phoning it in all week like a fucking newbie—” Angel rolled his eyes and spooned yoghurt into his mouth—“and you ditch me for your stupid drugs?!”
Angel bit down on the spoon, metal grinding against his teeth. But here was an in, or maybe an out—here was fucking something he could use. “Oh c’mon, Val,” he said, pulling a lopsided smile onto his face and running a hand over his chest. All instinct, autopilot; there wasn’t anyone around to watch the show. “You know you’re the only drug for me.”
“You’re such an ungrateful fucking slut, Angie, you really think you can sweet talk me after today?”
Why not? Angel thought, jabbing the spoon into the yoghurt pot with far more force than necessary. You do it to me all the time.
“Val, I didn’t—I mean, you called me into work, I worked, and I went home, I don’t know what—”
“You think you’re hot shit, don’t you? Just because you’re playing house with the princesa—”
And off he went. Angel dumped his spoon in the sink and the empty yoghurt pot in the bin.
“—take anything seriously, like this is all a fucking game to you—”
His eyes fell on the fruit bowl by the microwave, and he took a banana. He could grab a bottle from the bar, too, something nasty that would get him drunk quick, maybe tequila.
“—think I haven’t noticed you putting on weight, baby, you’re really letting yourself go—”
He grimaced and put the banana back.
“—because I care about you, but you make everything so fucking difficult—”
He filled a glass with water and drained it, relishing the coolness against his throat, which suddenly felt like it was lined with sandpaper.
“—come down to that shithole and drag you home by the dick—”
“No!” He choked on his water, spluttering, the glass slipping from his hand into the sink, where it shattered. Fuck. “N-No, Val, Daddy, c’mon, you don’t have to do that. I’ll do better tomorrow, I promise, just gotta recharge a bit, y’know?”
“You’ve been saying you’ll do better for forty fucking years, Angel, and I’m fucking sick of it. Pack your shit, your tantrum’s over. I’ll send the car.”
Shit. Shit. “Val, please, it’s the middle of the night, can we talk about this in the morning?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Angel.”
“Charlie’d flip her shit if I just ran off,” he tried desperately, not even knowing if Charlie, mild-mannered as she was, had any shit to flip. “You—you don’t want that mess, Val, it’s not worth it.”
“You think I’m scared of that bitch? If you know what’s good for you, you’ll tell her to leave me and my things alone. Now are you going to behave or do I need to come over myself?”
Angel tugged at his hair, frantic. “That—That’s not a good idea, Val, just—please—”
“Or what? Huh? What are you going to do, Angelcakes?”
He looked frantically around the gloomy kitchen, as if the answer could somehow materialise from the shadows, like—“A-Alastor!” he cried. “Alastor’s here, he’d—he’d get real mad if another Overlord showed up, Val, you shoulda seen what he did to these loan sharks the other day—”
“Are you fucking threatening me? With Alastor?”
Mistake. Mistake. Big mistake. But the words tumbled out of his mouth anyway, spurred by sleep deprivation and terror and sheer, uncut desperation: “You don’t wanna come round here, Val, he’s real mean when he wants to be, it won’t be pretty.”
It was true. Alastor made a lot of noise about being the ‘host’ of the hotel, but everyone knew he was basically an attack dog in a sharp red suit. The kind you didn’t turn your back on, even when it was playing nice, because you’d seen it bite before, and could tell it liked the taste.
“You think that stuck-up prude gives a fuck about you? He’d probably be grateful to have a shitstain like you out of his charity project—”
“Damn right, Val, it’s his place, and he’s real protective of it, so you should just stay the fuck away.”
A pause, just long enough for Angel to contemplate how monumentally he had fucked up, because a pause from Valentino was never a good thing, a pause from Valentino meant he was wearing that awful venomous grin and twitching his fingers like he wanted to wrap them around a certain someone’s skinny white throat.
“Angel, baby,” he purred. “Want to run that by me again?”
He swallowed. No point trying to back out now; he’d dug this grave, might as well bury himself in it. “You shouldn’t come here,” he said, trying (and failing) to hide the trembling in his voice. “Because if you do, Alastor will bite your fucking head off—” okay, maybe that was overkill, the grave didn’t need to be filled with barbed wire, and why was he still talking?—“and I'd pay to see that.”
Silence from the end of the line. Angel panted as though he’d run a mile, his pulse thrumming in his temples.
“That wasn’t very clever, was it, Angel?” Valentino’s voice was flat, promising pain.
Oh believe me, I know. “Sure,” he ground out, swiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Whatever.” The anger was leaving him now, too quickly, leaving only cold fear in its place. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Call time’s at four.”
Val hung up before he could. He stared at the blank screen of his phone and heaved a shuddering sigh. Stupid. So stupid. He should have just stayed, why didn’t he stay, why the fuck did he think he could get away with it? However bad it would have been, it couldn’t be worse than whatever fresh hell was waiting for him tomorrow. Probably waterboarding again, Val still hadn’t gotten that shit out of his system.
“Fucker,” he hissed at his phone, voice low as if Val could still hear him. But there was no bravado in the word, his nerve well and truly gone. He knew for a fact he was scheduled to start at noon tomorrow, not four, and knew Val knew it too. He could either show up at noon and submit himself to an extra four hours of torture, or show up at four and face the punishment for being late.
Dickbag. Shithead. Knock-off drag queen blowing smoke up his own flat ass.
He muttered obscenities under his breath as he picked the broken glass out of the sink, hardly caring when he nicked his fingers. He was so tired his eyes ached. He gnawed on his lip, forgetting the backhand from earlier, and set the bruise to throbbing again.
Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck everything. Fuck his stupid shitty afterlife and fuck his fat, stupid mouth and fuck Val and fuck redemption and—
“Burning the midnight oil, I see!”
“Jesus—!” Angel smacked his head against a low-hanging cabinet and yelped as pain spiderwebbed across his scalp.
Canned laugher echoed off stainless steel countertops. “Ha-ha! Not even close!”
He glared at Alastor over his shoulder, a hand rubbing at the rising bruise under his hair. “You—you fuckin asshole—”
“Closer!”
“You scared the shit outta me!”
“My deepest apologies,” Alastor said, unapologetically. Those red eyes and that Chesire cat grin glowed softly in the half-light. “My ears were burning, and I simply had to see what all the fuss was about.”
“…What?”
Alastor nodded pointedly at the phone still in Angel’s hand. He shrunk back, like a child caught with a rock next to a conspicuously broken window. “Oh. Uh. You heard that?”
“You were not exactly quiet about it.”
Angel took a deep breath and told himself it would be a special kind of stupid, a suicidal kind of stupid, to piss off another Overlord tonight. He swallowed down the dozen or so retorts that sprung to his lips—look at him, emotionally regulating like a pro, Charlie would be so proud—and said carefully, “I’m sorry for bothering you.”
“Not at all, my dear, not at all! Not your usual kind of late-night show, I’m sure, but entertaining to watch, all the same!”
“Oh fuck you,” he spat, emotional regulation well and truly gone, along with his sense of self-preservation, apparently. “We can’t all be fancy-talkin’ murder broadcasters. Some of us have real jobs.”
“Quite! And I have just heard a most interesting addition to my job description.” Angel instinctively stepped back, for all the good it did him; Alastor matched it with a step forward, that smile turning distinctly sharper as the air between them buzzed with static. “I don’t appreciate being volunteered to clean up your messes.”
“I—fuck, Al, it’s not like that, I just—he—” He cringed away as the static heightened, so strong he could taste the sharp tang of electricity on his tongue. “I’m sorry, I… am I—am I in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” Alastor sing-songed, abruptly shifting back to normal (Had he really grown a foot in the last couple seconds? Had his shadow really spread like ink over the walls?). He glanced at Angel’s phone again. “Are you?”
Angel forced a laugh that was about as convincing as Alastor’s ever-present smile. “I—it’s nothin’. Just my boss bein’ pissy. It’s been a long week. Month. Whatever.”
“Mm.” Alastor hummed. He watched Angel with his head cocked to the side, like a cat contemplating how best to disembowel a bird. “Should I expect a visit from him tonight?”
Angel cringed. “No, no, he’s… he won’t come here, not—he won’t.”
He hoped it was true. It should be; even at his most incensed Val wasn’t stupid enough to waltz into Alastor’s territory alone. Unless he wasn’t alone; Vox certainly didn’t need much of an excuse to launch himself at Alastor like a poorly socialised chihuahua. At least if Vox did show up—and he wouldn’t, Angel hoped; the TV creep didn’t share Valentino’s enthusiasm for Angel moving back into Vee Tower—Alastor wouldn’t be able to keep himself from stepping in. And winning. Preferably with extreme violence.
“Splendid!” Alastor’s tinny voice jolted Angel out of his own thoughts. “In that case, I shall bid you goodnight—or, perhaps more accurately, good morning.”
“Uh, sure thing, Smiles. ‘Night.”
Alastor didn’t walk away, just melted into the dark in that creepy way he did. Angel stared at the spot where he had stood, still kneading his sore scalp. He was going to have one motherfucker of a headache in the morning, no thanks to Alastor. Creepy bastard had probably been lurking in the shadows since before Angel walked through the door. Did he ever sleep? Angel tried to picture Alastor in pyjamas—in anything other than his usual red suit—and snorted.
He swung by the bar on his way across the lobby and grabbed a bottle of rum to take up to his room. Maybe if he drank enough he’d double-die in his sleep and not have to worry about whatever the fuck Val was cooking up for the shoot tomorrow.
Stupid. Stupid him with his stupid fat mouth. He’d been getting way too sassy lately, and Val had noticed. It was easy to bite back when Val was too far away to slap or punch or bite him, and… well, shit, maybe the hotel was giving him ideas. Dangerous ideas, like maybe not every disagreement had to end with a bloody mouth or a blackened eye. Even Husk—and he’d been real shitty to Husk in the beginning, he knew that now and he knew it then—had never clocked him one, even when Angel would have freely admitted he deserved it. He’d almost wished he would, it would have made everything easier, given him a script to follow instead of floundering blind all the time through all this ‘feelings’ bullshit. It was exhausting. How Charlie expected him to live like this for eternity was beyond him.
Sighing, he unlocked his door and stepped inside. His black mood lifted slightly when Fat Nuggets hopped from his bed with an excited squeal and ran to nuzzle against his leg.
“Hey, baby,” he said softly. He bent to scoop the pig into his arms, pressing a kiss (mmmwah!) to the space between Nuggets’ ears. “Missed ya. What a fuckin’ day.” He unscrewed the cap from the rum with a free hand and chugged a few mouthfuls, grimacing. Rum in a daquiri was great. On its own? Not so much. He sighed as he set the bottle down on his nightstand, knowing he’d reach for it again in the morning and maybe hating himself for it, a little bit.
Nuggets twisted in his arms, pressing his snout into Angel’s chest and snorting. Angel smiled and gave him one last scritch on the head before depositing him on the bed. The pig snorted indignantly at the loss of Angel’s warmth. “Just gotta shower, Nuggs. Gimme a minute.”
Normally, he showered at the studio, but he hadn’t wanted to compromise his escape attempt today. So he’d come home all stinky and sticky and didn’t even have anything good to show for it. Story of my fucking afterlife, he thought, turning on the shower and cranking up the heat. He washed quickly, wanting the stench of sex and sweat off off off. The remnants of the day swirled down the drain in spirals of sweet-smelling bubbles. Head pounding too hard to bear the noise of the hairdryer, he roughly towelled himself off and ran a brush through his damp fur. Scrubbed the last of his makeup from his face. Brushed his teeth. Clipped the nails that he’d chewed into jagged talons.
When he emerged from the bathroom, Nuggets was curled up on his pillow. “Nuh-uh, lil guy, I need that.” He clambered into bed and pulled the pig close against his chest, where he snuffled softly and went back to sleep.
Angel lay awake in the dark, one hand automatically petting along Nuggets’ bristly back. He hated nights like this, when his body ached with bone-deep exhaustion, somehow too tired to sleep. There was a buzzing, staticky feeling in his limbs. He pulled the blanket tighter around himself and drew his knees up to his chest. One finger picked at a hole in the sheets.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Growling, Angel silenced it and tossed it across the room. It landed on the carpet with a thud. He threw himself back down on the pillows, ignoring Nuggets’ squeak of indignation as he was jostled, and scowled into the dark, eyes burning with unshed tears.
He should get up. Check his phone. If there was one thing Val hated more than being left on read, it was being ignored entirely.
Instead, he screwed his eyes shut and hugged his pig closer.
Wasn’t like anything he did now could make tomorrow better, anyway.