Amy | 27 | she/her ✦ Hazbin Hotel oneshots ✦
Mostly focused on Lucifer x Female!Reader Minors do not interact — 18+ only
Updates when inspiration strikes
✦ blurb — You loved Vox before Hell feared him, before his name ruled every screen, before ambition turned him into something cold enough to break you. Years later, you return as an Overlord built from the wreckage he left behind, powerful, merciless, and determined to make him feel every wound he gave you. But revenge does not heal what love destroyed, and when Vox finally chooses you over his pride, his empire, and his oldest obsession, you’re forced to face the most painful truth of all: you never stopped loving him.
Before Vox became the face on every screen in Hell, before VoxTech towers filled the city with cold blue light, before his name meant power, control, and fear, he had a studio above an old entertainment street.
It was small, badly wired, and always too warm.
Red neon shone through the blinds and cut thin lines across the floor. Cables covered the room, tangled around chair legs and disappearing behind stacks of monitors. Some screens flickered. Others had dead pixels or distorted colors. Vox had repaired most of them himself, with burned fingers, cheap tools, and the kind of stubborn focus that kept him working long after everyone else would have stopped.
The air smelled like hot plastic, old coffee, and smoke.
You spent your nights there.
Vox worked until morning, surrounded by the low hum of his machines. His sleeves were rolled up, his tie hung loose around his neck, and one of his hands was buried inside an open console while the other moved across the controls beside him.
Blue light from his screen filled the room. It caught on the wires, the metal desk, the empty coffee cups, and the old monitors stacked against the wall.
Sometimes he muttered under his breath. Sometimes he cursed when the equipment sparked or refused to work. When he was tired enough, his confidence slipped, and you could see the frustration underneath it.
You sat on the edge of his desk with your legs swinging, holding a chipped mug of coffee that tasted awful, but had slowly become yours.
“You’re going to kill that console,” you said, watching sparks jump under his fingers.
“I’m upgrading it.”
“It’s smoking.”
“It’s supposed to do that.”
“It is absolutely not supposed to do that.”
Vox glanced up at you, his grin bright in the glow of the monitors.
“You worry too much.”
“You don’t worry enough.”
His smile stayed there for a second longer before he looked back down at the wires.
Maybe that was why you stayed. Because back then, he still smiled like that when you talked to him. Back then, Vox still noticed when you smiled.
He never said it out loud. He was not good with gentle things, and he was worse at admitting he needed them. But you could see it in small ways. His voice would become quieter. His shoulders would relax. He would move closer to your side of the desk without seeming to realize it.
Even in that crowded studio, with cables everywhere and monitors stacked against the walls, Vox always made room for you.
He was already ambitious then.
Not cruel. Not yet. But restless. He wanted more than a small studio above a dying street. He wanted his face on every screen, his voice in every room, his name spoken with respect instead of amusement. He wanted Hell to stop treating him like something new that would disappear in a few years.
Most nights, that anger came back to Alastor.
“He thinks I’m a joke,” Vox snapped one evening, pacing across the studio so fast the cables dragged around his shoes. “That smug radio bastard looks at me like I’m some cheap trick. Like television is nothing.”
You stayed on the edge of the desk, watching his reflection move from one screen to another.
“Vincent.”
“He’s old. That’s all he is. Old noise in a nice coat. Hell is changing, and everyone is still acting like he owns the future.”
“Vincent.”
“I’m going to make them choose me.”
Static cracked through the room. One of the monitors flashed white, then went black. Vox barely looked at it. His hands were shaking, but he kept moving, as if pacing faster could hide it.
You slipped down from the desk and crossed the floor. When your hand touched his arm, he stopped.
The room went quiet around him.
You did not grab him or try to force him to calm down. You only rested your hand on his arm, the way you always did when his thoughts started moving too fast. Your thumb brushed lightly over his sleeve, slow and familiar.
Vox looked down at your hand.
Then at you.
For a few seconds, the anger in his face weakened.
“You don’t have to become him to beat him,” you said.
His screen flickered once.
“I’m not becoming him.”
“Then stop talking like him.”
His mouth opened, ready to argue, but he stopped himself. You knew him too well by then. You knew when his pride was covering fear. You knew when Alastor had gotten too deep under his skin. You knew how to touch him without making him feel cornered.
Vox looked away, jaw tight.
“You don’t understand what it’s like out there.”
“Then tell me.”
He hated when you said that. Not because it was cruel. Because it made it harder for him to hide.
Most demons wanted Vox when he was loud, brilliant, and impossible to ignore. They wanted the smile, the voice, the promise of power. They wanted the version of him that could fill a room and make everyone listen.
You wanted him after the performance ended.
You wanted him tired, frustrated, quiet, standing barefoot in his studio with his tie loose and his hands still shaking from anger.
His shoulders lowered a little.
“They underestimate me,” he said.
“They won’t forever.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
You smiled and moved closer, close enough for your hip to brush his. Your hand slid from his arm to his chest, resting there over the low hum of static beneath his clothes.
“Because I believe in you.”
For a moment, Vox looked at you like he did not know how to handle being loved that directly. Then he let out a short laugh and looked away, pretending it had not hit him as hard as it had.
“You’re ridiculous,” he said.
“You love me.”
His grin flickered back, smaller this time, realer.
“Unfortunately.”
You rolled your eyes, but before you could step away, his hand caught yours. He pulled you back gently, just enough to bring you between him and the desk. His fingers slid around your waist, careful at first, then firmer when you did not pull away.
The studio was still a mess around you. Broken monitors, tangled wires, cold coffee, the dead screen smoking behind him. But Vox leaned down and pressed his forehead lightly against yours.
Neither of you spoke. You did not need to.
Back then, when the lights were low and nobody was watching, Vox still knew how to come back to you.
You loved him in those quiet moments.
Late at night, when the studio was almost dark and the city noise was muffled behind the windows. Between broadcasts, when Vox stopped performing for everyone else and let himself lean into you for a few seconds. You loved him before the towers, before the crowds, before his name became something other demons said with fear.
You loved Vox before he became an Overlord. You love him when he was still Vincent.
For a while, you thought that mattered.
Then the studio started changing.
The small room became three rooms. Then the whole floor belonged to him. The old monitors were replaced with clean, expensive screens. The broken console disappeared. New assistants came in every morning with files, schedules, and nervous expressions. Security guards stood near the doors. Investors in dark suits walked through the halls, speaking to Vox like he was no longer building something, but already owned it.
Vox stopped repairing the machines himself.
Now he stood in the middle of the control room and gave orders. He pointed at screens. Approved scripts. Rejected ideas. Changed broadcasts without touching a single wire.
His face started appearing across the city.
At first, it was one sign above a club. Then screens in bars. Hotel lobbies. Elevators. Street corners. Shop windows. His smile followed sinners everywhere, bright and perfect, always selling something. His voice played through advertisements, public announcements, interviews, and late-night broadcasts.
VoxTech grew fast.
And the bigger it became, the smaller your place in his life seemed to get.
You noticed it in small ways first.
He stopped asking you to sit in on meetings. When you entered the control room, his staff looked at you like they did not know whether they should move aside or ask you to leave. His nights became longer, but the hours he gave you became shorter. He still kissed you sometimes, still touched your waist when he passed behind you, still let his hand rest on your back in public just long enough for people to understand you were his.
But even when he touched you, his attention was somewhere else.
On the screens. On the numbers. On Alastor.
Old recordings played in his office late at night. Radio clips. Rumors. Interviews. Anything with that voice, that laugh, that smug, old-fashioned confidence. Vox replayed them until you knew some of the lines by heart, until the sound of Alastor’s voice made your shoulders tense before you even entered the room.
One night, the main control room was dark except for the screens.
Dozens of them covered the walls, all playing the same archived broadcast. Alastor stood on every one, smiling through red static, his voice distorted by the recording but still clear enough to fill the room.
Vox sat alone in front of them, perfectly still, watching.
You watched him from the doorway for a moment before speaking.
“Turn it off.”
Vox did not look back.
“I’m studying him.”
“You’ve been studying him for weeks.”
“I’m learning.”
“No,” you said, stepping inside. “You’re obsessing.”
His claws tightened against the console. On every screen, Alastor kept smiling.
“I’m learning how to win.”
“You’re not sleeping.”
“I don’t need sleep.”
“You barely speak to me anymore.”
That made him pause.
For one second, you thought you had reached him. You thought he would turn around and see you standing there, tired, worried, still loving him even after all the nights he had chosen a dead broadcast over you.
Then he turned his chair.
The blue light from the screens cut across his face, making every edge look colder. He looked at you slowly, from your face to your hands, then back again, like you were an interruption he did not have time for.
“You came all the way in here to complain about not getting enough attention?”
The words hit so hard you almost did not understand them at first.
Your mouth parted.
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“No?” Vox leaned back in his chair, one hand resting on the console. “Then what is this?”
“I’m worried about you.”
He smiled. Not warmly. Not like the studio, not like late nights, not like the man who used to pull you close when the machines sparked and laugh against your hair.
This smile was small, controlled, and mean.
“How sweet.”
Your throat tightened.
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m one of them.”
His eyes sharpened.
“One of who?”
“One of the people trying to use you.”
Vox gave a short laugh and turned his face slightly toward the screens.
“At least they’re honest about wanting something.”
The room went very quiet.
You stared at him.
For a moment, you could only hear Alastor’s voice coming from the archived broadcast, faint and crackling behind him.
“What is that supposed to mean?” you asked.
Vox looked back at you.
“It means you’ve been standing beside me for years, acting like you’re the only one who sees the real me.” His voice stayed calm, and somehow that made it worse. “But maybe you just liked me better when I was small enough to need you.”
Your chest hurt.
“Vincent.”
His expression hardened at the name.
“Don’t.”
You swallowed, but you did not step back.
“You are losing yourself.”
“No,” he said. “I’m becoming what I was always supposed to be.”
“You don’t have to become cruel to become powerful.”
He stood so suddenly the chair rolled back behind him.
The screens flickered. Alastor’s red smile covered every wall, surrounding Vox like a witness, like a warning, like something he had invited into the room and could no longer remove.
“You think this is cruel?” Vox asked.
His voice was still quiet.
That frightened you more than if he had shouted.
“I have given you more access than anyone else in this building. I let you sit in rooms where demons twice your worth would kill to stand. I let you speak to me like your opinion carries the same weight as mine. And now you walk in here and tell me I’m the problem?”
Your face went cold.
“Let me?”
He did not stop.
“You think because you were here at the beginning, you get to keep your hand on the leash?”
The humiliation burned so sharply that your eyes filled before you could stop it.
There were staff members outside the glass walls. Assistants. Technicians. Security. You could see shapes moving in the hall, slowing down, pretending not to listen.
Vox saw them too.
He raised his voice just enough.
“Is that what this is? You’re afraid there won’t be a place for you once I don’t need comfort after every bad day?”
Your heart dropped.
“Stop.”
“Why?” His smile returned, colder now. “Too honest?”
You looked at him, really looked at him, searching for the man who used to lean into your hand when the world became too loud. But all you saw was the blue glow of his screens and the red reflection of Alastor behind him.
“You sound like him,” you whispered.
Vox went still. For one second, there was nothing on his face.
Then something cruel settled there, deliberate and clean.
“Careful,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His voice was low now. Controlled. The kind of controlled that meant he had already decided to hurt you and was only choosing where to cut first.
“I know exactly what I’m talking about,” you said. “You’re letting him turn you into someone you used to hate.”
Vox laughed once, without warmth.
“I am building an empire.”
“No,” you said, your voice shaking despite how hard you tried to keep it steady. “You’re building something so big that nobody will ever be able to see how scared you are underneath it.”
For one second, his face changed.
It was fast, almost nothing, but you saw it. The anger slipped, and behind it was the same old wound you had seen so many times in the small studio. The fear. The shame. The part of him that still heard every laugh, every dismissal, every time someone looked at him like he would never matter.
You had held that part of him once. You had loved it. Then his expression closed.
“You liked me better when I was small,” he said.
The words were quiet. That made them worse.
“No,” you whispered.
“Yes, you did.” Vox stepped closer, and this time, you were the one who felt trapped. “Back then, you had a role. Sit on my desk. Smile at me. Touch my arm when I got angry. Tell me I was enough.”
Your eyes burned.
“Don’t do this.”
“But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” His smile barely moved. “You wanted me insecure enough to need you. You wanted me tired enough to come back to you. You wanted me weak enough that your love felt important.”
The words landed in front of the glass walls, in front of the staff still pretending not to listen outside.
Your humiliation rose so quickly you could barely breathe.
“That’s not true.”
“No?” Vox’s gaze dropped over you, slow and dismissive, like he was reducing years of intimacy into something embarrassing. “Then why are you here? To save me? To remind me who I used to be? To keep me humble?”
You reached for him without thinking.
It was muscle memory. Years of calming him down. Years of finding him through anger. Your hand moved toward his sleeve before you could stop it.
Vox looked at your hand.
Then he stepped back. It was a small movement. Barely anything. But it felt like a door slamming shut.
Your hand stayed there, suspended between you, useless and exposed.
For a moment, neither of you spoke.
Alastor’s red smile flickered across the screens behind him. Vox’s staff stood in the hall, watching through reflections, silent enough to make it clear they had heard everything.
Vox looked at your hand, then at your face.
“You’re holding me back.”
The room went still. The screens kept glowing. The old recording kept playing. Alastor kept smiling from every wall. But everything inside you stopped moving.
You waited. For regret. For panic. For the smallest crack in his face. Nothing came.
Vox turned away from you and looked back at the monitors.
“Close the door when you leave.”
So you left.
He did not follow.
Outside the control room, the hallway felt too bright. His staff quickly looked away when you stepped out, pretending they had not heard him tear you apart through the glass walls. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved to help you. You walked past them with your head high because pride was the only thing you had left, even if your hands were shaking at your sides.
The door closed behind you. That sound stayed with you.
Hell did not stop because your heart was broken.
The city kept moving. Screens flashed above the streets, brighter every week, cleaner every month, until Vox’s face became impossible to avoid.
You tried anyway.
You rented rooms with no television, no monitor, no working radio. It did not matter. His voice still came from outside, from shop windows and street speakers, from advertisements playing across the buildings. You heard him through thin walls while you sat on cheap beds with your coat still on, too tired to cry and too hurt to sleep.
At first, you avoided looking up.
Then you started looking too much.
Vox on towers. Vox in hotel lobbies. Vox above clubs, smiling down at lines of sinners waiting to get inside. Vox in shop windows, selling a future in the same voice that had once softened when you touched his arm.
Every broadcast hurt. Not because you wanted him back, you told yourself.
Because he had erased you. That was the part you could not forgive.
He had taken those early years and made them look meaningless. The late nights, the small studio, the bad coffee, your hand comforting him, your belief in him when nobody else cared. He had turned all of it into something childish. Something embarrassing. Something he had outgrown.
He walked into his empire alone in every story he told.
And you, the woman who had loved him before the world feared him, became nothing.
Love, you realized, was dangerous when you gave it to someone who needed power more than truth. You had given Vox everything soft in you. And he had used it to make you small.
Never again.
There was no ceremony, no dramatic goodbye, no great moment where the pain finally left you. There was only a rented room with stained walls, a cracked mirror above the sink, and Vox’s voice coming from an advertisement outside while you stood there in the half-dark, staring at your reflection until you could not stand the sight of yourself anymore.
You looked tired. Not sad anymore. Empty.
So you chose another name.
A name Vox had never said. A name he had never touched. A name that did not belong to the woman who had sat on his desk, smiled at him, loved him, and left his building with shaking hands while his staff pretended not to watch.
After that, you started listening.
Hell was full of secrets, and people were careless around you because they thought grief made you harmless. Men talked when they thought you were only standing there to look pretty. Overlords dismissed you when you stayed quiet. Assistants carried passwords in trembling hands. Debt collectors hid ledgers under loose floorboards. Lovers whispered betrayals in private rooms.
You collected everything.
Names. Numbers. Debts. Affairs. Locations. Weaknesses. The kind of information that could ruin a demon’s night, destroy a business, or make an Overlord lose sleep.
At first, you sold small things.
A name to the right enemy. A meeting place to someone willing to pay. A copied key. A private schedule. Enough to buy protection. Enough to buy better locks. Enough to make the first demon who tried to corner you regret putting his hands on you.
Your first deal was messy. Your second was cleaner. By the tenth, demons stopped smiling when you entered the room, and by the twentieth, they read every line of your contracts twice before signing.
You learned quickly.
Fear opened doors, but loyalty kept them open. Money bought service, but protection bought devotion. Mercy could be useful if you gave it once and made sure everyone understood you could have chosen violence instead. You learned which demons wanted revenge, which ones wanted safety, which ones wanted power, and which ones only wanted to feel important for the first time in their miserable lives.
You also learned where empires were weakest.
Service corridors. Private elevators. Forgotten maintenance rooms. Drunk security guards. Underpaid technicians. Jealous partners. Angry assistants. Cleaners who heard everything and were ignored by everyone.
You paid attention. Then your name began to spread.
A contract broker tried to cheat you and disappeared before sunrise. A Greed financier paid you to protect his secrets, then paid you more to destroy someone else with them. Three assassins crossed into your district and came back alive, but only barely, crawling on broken knees with your name shaking in their mouths.
Power did not make the pain go away. It only gave it somewhere to go.
For a while, that was enough. Years passed in smoke, neon, and blue light.
Your territory grew block by block. It was not bright and polished like Vox’s empire. It did not shine from towers or smile from advertisements. It was quieter than that. Harder to read. Built in back rooms, locked offices, private clubs, alleys with cameras hidden above the doors, and buildings where every window looked dark until someone crossed the wrong line.
Information moved through you before it reached anyone else. You own souls after souls and became an important Overlord.
Deals changed because you allowed them to change. Demons who had once ignored you stood when you entered a room. Men who would have looked past you years ago lowered their eyes before you even spoke.
One evening, you stood on a balcony above your district, your coat moving in the hot wind while the city glowed red beneath you.
In the distance, VoxTech Tower rose above the other buildings, tall, clean, and bright with blue light. Vox’s face covered the glass, smiling down at Hell like he owned every street beneath him.
You watched him for a long moment.
Then your signal reached the edge of his network. The screen glitched.
It was small at first, just a flicker across his eye, then a black line cut through his smile and split the image for half a second.
You did not move.
You watched until the screen corrected itself and Vox’s perfect grin returned.
Only then did you smile.
Vox heard about you before he knew who you were.
At first, you were only a problem in his reports. A sponsor pulled out hours before a major launch. A data broker who had worked with him for years sold information to you instead. One of his private broadcast lines collapsed in the middle of a meeting, cutting off his voice and replacing it with clean, empty static.
Then it kept happening.
Whenever your territory touched his network, his screens flickered. Deals he had already secured started falling apart. Demons who had been loyal to him stopped answering calls. Small pieces of his empire began slipping out of his hands, and no one could give him a name that satisfied him.
In his office, Vox stood in front of a wall of data, his jaw tight, blue light flashing too quickly across his screen.
“Who is she?”
Velvette sat in one of the chairs with her phone in her hand, looking more entertained than concerned.
“Mysterious, making your entire system glitch. Honestly, I’m kind of obsessed.”
Valentino exhaled pink smoke from the couch and smiled.
“Maybe you dumped her.”
Vox did not look at him.
“I don’t forget threats.”
Valentino laughed softly.
“Sure, baby. That’s what makes it funny.”
Vox ignored him and stared at the black symbol spreading slowly across one of his maps.
He did not think of you. Not once. And that was the final proof you needed.
Whatever small, stubborn part of you had still been waiting for him to remember finally went quiet.
You chose his rally for the reveal because Vox loved audiences. He could turn any wound into spectacle if enough people watched. So you took the crowd from him first.
The plaza was packed, every sinner washed in blue light from the screens surrounding the stage. Vox stood at the center in a perfect suit, arms open, smile magnified above him, his voice carrying through speakers with the same sleek command.
“Hell is changing,” he said, and the crowd roared.
You stood at the back beneath the shadow of a dead streetlamp. No one saw you lift your hand. The screens flickered.
Vox continued without missing a beat, but you saw the brief tightening of his jaw.
The main screen went black. Then another. Then all of them. The crowd’s cheering thinned into confusion.
Your symbol appeared in white static behind him.
Vox turned slowly.
“Well,” he said, smile sharp under the stage lights, “someone’s desperate.”
You walked forward.
Demons moved aside before understanding why. Cameras swung toward you and died one by one. Your coat dragged through the blue light. Your heels struck the stage steps with calm, measured sound.
Vox watched you with irritation at first.
Then you stepped fully into the light, and the expression on his face changed.
The smile stayed because thousands of demons were watching him, because cameras were still pointed at him, because Vox would rather bleed on live television than let the audience see him lose control.
But his eyes changed. For one second, all the noise around him disappeared.
The crowd. The lights. The music. The giant screens showing his face above the stage. He only saw you.
“You,” he said, too quietly for the microphone to catch.
You stopped beneath the stage lights, calm and still while the whole room waited to understand what was happening.
“Hello, Vox.”
He recovered fast. That had always been one of his greatest talents, taking a wound and turning it into part of the show before anyone could notice it hurt.
His smile widened. His posture straightened. The cameras adjusted to catch his best angle.
“Well,” he said, voice carrying through the plaza again, “I didn’t know we were inviting former staff tonight.”
Former staff. Not partner. Not lover. Not the woman who had known him before the tower, before the empire, before the whole city learned to fear his name. Not the one who had held his arm when his hands shook.
The crowd laughed because Vox smiled like it was funny.
You did not move. You did not blink.
“You still edit the truth before it reaches your mouth.”
The laughter faded. Vox’s eye narrowed.
“And you still make entrances bigger than your importance.”
You looked at him for a long moment, taking in the expensive suit, the perfect lights, the giant screens behind him, the empire he had built so high that he thought nothing from his past could reach him anymore.
Then you smiled.
“Let’s test that.”
The plaza went silent.
Vox’s microphone cut out in the middle of his next breath. His voice disappeared from every speaker at once, so suddenly that the crowd looked up in confusion, waiting for the sound to come back.
It did not.
The screens behind him went black. One after another, his face vanished from the towers, the stage, the drones, the shop windows around the plaza. The music died next. Then the recording lights. Then the security barriers. A clean wave of darkness moved through his system, precise and impossible to stop.
Vox turned toward the control booth, furious.
That was when your power spread. Not loud. Not messy. Controlled.
The screens around the plaza flickered back to life, but they did not obey him anymore. Black static filled them first, then your symbol appeared in the center of each one, sharp and bright, cutting through the blue glow of VoxTech like a wound.
The crowd started screaming. Your shadow stretched across the stage.
It should not have moved like that under so many lights, but it did. It spread beneath your feet and split into thin black lines, crawling over the polished floor, wrapping around cables, climbing the metal frame of the stage. Every screen it touched bent to your will. Every camera it reached turned toward you.
Vox’s eye widened. Only slightly.
You lifted one hand. The demons closest to the stage dropped to their knees, not because you told them to, but because your presence pressed down over the plaza, heavy and cold. Fear moved through the crowd before they understood where it came from.
You were not the girl from his old studio anymore.
You were an Overlord. And for the first time, Vox saw it.
He struck first. Blue electricity tore across the stage, violent and bright, splitting the dark lines of your power apart. The blast should have thrown you backward.
It did not. You raised your hand, and the static around you thickened. The electricity hit it and scattered, breaking into sparks that rained over the stage like dying stars.
Vox’s smile twitched.
You moved. Not fast like a performer. Fast like something that had already decided how the fight would end.
Black signal gathered around your arm, forming a long, jagged blade that hummed with stolen broadcast power. Vox met you halfway, his claws bright with electricity, his screen throwing flashes of blue across your face.
He was powerful, dangerous. But you knew him. You knew the angle of his shoulders before a power surge. You knew the way his gaze flicked toward the cameras, even now. You knew the side he protected when anger made him reckless. You knew how much of his confidence depended on being watched.
Every year of loving him had taught you something. Every year after had taught you how to use it.
He sent another burst of electricity through the stage. You drove your shadow into the floor before it reached you.
The whole platform cracked. Black lines tore through the polished surface and rose around Vox’s legs, locking him in place for half a second. He broke through them with a violent surge of blue light, but half a second was enough.
You were already inside his guard. His hand shot toward your throat. You caught his wrist.
The impact sent a shock through your arm, but you did not let go. Your power curled around his hand, dark static crawling over his fingers, forcing his electricity to flicker and stutter.
For a second, you were face to face. The screens behind him changed again.
They showed you. Not a blurred image. Not a stolen angle. You, standing beneath his lights, holding him still in front of the entire plaza.
The whole crowd saw the exact moment Vox understood what he had made. His grip tightened.
Your voice stayed low.
“You should have run after me.”
Something moved across his face. You did not wait long enough to find out what. Your blade drove beneath his guard and cut through his side. Blood splashed across the stage.
The crowd erupted.
Vox staggered, one hand clamping over the wound, his screen fracturing into violent static. He tried to straighten, tried to hold the image together, tried to remain the man on the screens even while every screen in the plaza betrayed him.
You caught his tie and pulled him down until his face was inches from yours.
There was no microphone now. Only Vox, bleeding under his own lights, and you, standing where he had never believed you could reach.
“This was only the beginning,” you whispered.
Then you let him go. Your shadow released him.
Vox hit the stage on one knee.
The screens above him showed everything: the blood on his hand, the crack running across his face, the fear he could not hide quickly enough.
Then your symbol replaced him. Black and bright across every screen in the plaza.
Hell saw Vox fall. And Hell learned your name.
Afterward, Vox locked himself in his office and watched the footage until the file corrupted.
He told himself it was strategy.
He slowed every frame, tracked your steps, mapped your attacks, studied the exact second his systems failed. He replayed the angle of your blade, the timing of your interference, the way you moved through his defenses like you had designed them yourself.
He rebuilt the fight across six screens.
One screen followed your movements. Another tracked the failure of his security system. A third replayed the exact moment his microphone died. The others slowed down the strike, frame by frame, until your blade touched his side again and again.
He tried to turn you into data. It should have helped.
It did not.
Every time he paused the footage, your face stayed on the screen.
Not the girl from the old studio, not the woman sitting on the edge of his desk with your legs swinging, smiling at him over bad coffee while blue light filled the room.
This version of you was colder. Sharper. Dressed like power and moving like you had already buried every part of yourself that could hesitate.
But your eyes were the same. That was what made him look away.
Because under the anger, under the control, under the Overlord standing beneath his lights with half of Hell watching, he still recognized the woman who used to look at him like he was worth something before anyone else believed it.
The thought came once, quiet and unwanted.
“Is this my fault?”
Vox shut it down.
The next night, it came back. Then the next. And while he sat alone in his office, replaying your face until the footage started to corrupt, you kept moving.
You did not attack him carelessly. You were patient.
A supplier changed sides without warning. Three informants disappeared before they could report back. A private broadcast collapsed mid-transmission, leaving his viewers staring at black screens while your name spread through the city in whispers. A sponsor withdrew hours before signing. One of his district managers resigned and entered your protection before Vox even knew she had betrayed him.
You chose where to cut. Revenue. Loyalty. Reputation. Control. You went after the parts of his empire most demons never saw, the quiet systems beneath the lights, the deals behind the broadcasts, the people who kept his power running while his face smiled above the city.
Vox became obsessed.
Not like he was with Alastor. Alastor was an old wound, a rivalry that had been fed for years by pride, humiliation, and rage.
You were different. You were personal. You were the past he had thrown away, standing in front of him with power in your hands and hatred in your eyes.
The second confrontation happened at the edge of your territory, inside a ruined relay station where one of his broadcast lines had gone dark.
There was no crowd this time. No stage. No cameras. No perfect light to make him look untouchable.
Only a damaged building full of smoke, broken screens, and blue sparks dying in the walls. Fire burned somewhere outside. The windows were shattered. Monitors hung crooked from their mounts, their screens split open and flickering weakly over Vox’s torn suit and the crack at the corner of his face.
He stood in the middle of the room, waiting.
“I came to talk,” he said.
You stepped through the doorway with ash on your coat and blood drying on one hand.
“Talk, then.”
His eyes moved over you quickly, taking in the dark coat, the calm expression, the power sitting heavy around you. For a second, he looked like he was searching for someone else.
The woman from the studio. The one who used to touch his arm. The one who used to believe he could still choose better.
Maybe he found pieces of her.
Maybe that frightened him more than the Overlord standing in front of him now. Vox straightened, even with blood drying at his collar and static flickering at the cracked edge of his screen.
“This war is wasteful.”
You stared at him.
“That sounds like a business complaint.”
“It’s an offer.”
Of course it was. Vox always knew how to turn damage into negotiation.
“A partnership,” he continued. “Equal terms. Your territory recognized. Your influence protected. My reach, your intelligence. We combine our networks, our assets, our people. Together, we could own half the city before anyone even understands what happened.”
Together. The word hit harder than it should have. Not because you wanted it. Because once, you would have.
Once, you would have given anything to hear him say it like he meant you and not your usefulness. Your mouth tightened.
“You don’t get to say that to me.”
His screen flickered.
“You wanted to stand level with me. I’m offering you that.”
“No,” you said, taking one slow step closer. “You’re offering me a seat because I finally became too dangerous to leave outside the room.”
Vox’s jaw tightened.
“That isn’t fair.”
You laughed once. It came out cold.
“Fair?”
The relay station groaned around you. Fire moved somewhere below the floor, throwing orange light through the cracks. Broken monitors flickered on the walls, cutting both of you into pieces of blue and black.
“You want to talk to me about fair?”
Vox said nothing.
Good. You wanted him silent for this.
“I loved you,” you said.
The words did not shake. That made them worse. Vox went completely still.
“I loved you when nobody was watching. Not the cameras. Not investors. Not Hell. Me. I was there when your studio was falling apart. I was there when you worked until your hands burned because you were terrified that stopping would prove everyone right about you.”
His expression shifted, barely. You saw it anyway.
“You don’t get to pretend you didn’t know.”
His voice dropped.
“You never said it.”
The answer almost made you smile. Almost.
“I sat on your desk every night. I drank your terrible coffee. I fixed your tie before broadcasts. I touched you when you were spiraling because Alastor had gotten into your head again. I stayed when you were angry, tired, unbearable, scared.” You stepped closer, your voice cutting through the static between you. “I didn’t need to say it, Vox. You knew.”
His screen glitched once.
This time, he looked away. That small movement hurt more than it should have.
“You knew,” you repeated, softer now, and somehow crueler. “You knew exactly what I gave you. You knew I loved the part of you that everyone else laughed at, and you still took that love and made it sound pathetic.”
Vox’s mouth tightened.
“I was trying to become something.”
“You were already something.”
“No,” he snapped, and there it was, the old wound, still alive beneath all that power. “I was nothing.”
“You were everything to me.”
The words landed between you and stayed there. For one second, Vox looked like he had been struck. You hated that it still mattered. You hated that part of you wanted him to understand, not as an enemy, not as a rival, but as the man who should have known better.
Then his face closed again.
“You don’t understand what it took.”
“I understand exactly what it took,” you said. “It took every soft thing anyone ever gave you, and you burned through all of it because softness didn’t look like power.”
His eye sharpened.
“That’s not what happened.”
“No?” You moved closer, and this time the shadows at your feet moved with you. “You used the same cruelty on me that Alastor used on you. You looked at me like I was beneath you. You made me feel stupid for loving you before the rest of Hell learned to fear you.”
Vox did not answer. The silence told you the words had reached him.
Too late.
“You told me I was holding you back,” you said. “So I became something you could leave behind.”
His voice came out quieter.
“I didn’t want this.”
“No,” you said. “You wanted me gone.”
For a moment, there was only fire, static, and the broken sound of the relay station collapsing around you.
Then Vox said your old name. Softly. Like he still had the right.
The room snapped.
Your power struck first, black static ripping through the floor and up the walls. Vox answered with blue electricity, violent and bright, tearing through your coat and burning across your side. You did not stop. Your blade formed in your hand and cut across his shoulder, deep enough to make his screen fracture with static.
Glass rained down from the broken monitors.
The floor buckled beneath both of you. This time, there was no stage. No audience. No clean message to send.
This was personal.
Vox caught your wrist and slammed you against a control panel hard enough to crack the metal. Sparks burst behind you. Pain shot through your spine, but you drove your knee into his stomach and shoved him back with a wave of shadow that sent him crashing into a wall of dead screens.
He hit hard.
Still, he tried again, your old name. You crossed the distance before he could finish it and pinned him there with your blade under his chin.
“Don’t call me that.”
His breath came broken with static.
“You’re destroying yourself.”
Your eyes burned.
“No,” you said. “You don’t get to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Sound worried. Sound sorry. Sound like there’s still something here you care about.”
His face tightened.
“I do care.”
You stared at him, close enough to see the damage in his screen, the blood at his mouth, the flicker of something almost frightened behind his eye.
Then you leaned closer.
“No, Vox,” you whispered. “You regret losing control.”
The words silenced him long enough for you to see the truth begin to form behind his eyes.
He was not ready to hold it. You left him bleeding in the ruins. The victory gave you nothing.
That was the cruelest part.
You had imagined revenge as a door. Vox hurt. Vox afraid. Vox finally forced to look at what he had discarded. You thought standing over him would release something.
Instead, the anger stayed. So did the grief. So did love, buried under years of blood and still somehow breathing.
You returned to your territory and stood before a broken mirror, hands stained red from his blood. Your reflection warped around the cracks. The woman looking back had dead calm eyes, a beautiful coat, and the kind of mouth that made demons lower their voices.
She was everything Hell respected.
You hated her.
At night, when your people thought you were planning, you cried in rooms with no screens. Not for Vox alone. For yourself. For the girl on the desk. For the hand that used to touch him gently. For every soft instinct you had strangled so no one could use it again.
Vox sent messages. Not through public channels. Not in threats. No branding. No performance.
“I heard you.”
You deleted it.
“I should have ran after you.”
Deleted.
“You were right.”
Deleted.
“I’m sorry.”
You stared at that one until the words blurred, then shattered the receiver against the wall.
Forgiveness was not a switch. Regret was not a cure. Still, something began to change.
Vox stopped striking first. His systems protected his borders, but no longer pushed into yours. When other Overlords tested your district, their communications failed at convenient times. An assassin sent after you died three streets away, killed by a security drone that vanished before your people arrived.
Vox never claimed it. That bothered you more than a boast would have.
You met again in the old studio.
You had kept the building standing inside your territory, though you told yourself there were practical reasons. Useful location. Sentimental value for leverage. Possible bait.
The truth waited in the dust.
The desk was still there.
So were the broken blinds, the stained floor, and the marks on the wall where the old monitors used to hang. Some of the wiring had been pulled out. The rest hung loose from the corners, dead and useless. The room was quiet now. No static. No machines. No low blue glow from the screens.
It felt smaller than you remembered.
You stood beside the desk, in the same place where you used to sit with your legs swinging, and tried not to think about how many nights you had spent there loving him.
Then Vox appeared in the doorway.
No cameras. No guards. No music. Just him, standing in the dust of the room where everything had started to go wrong.
“You picked a cruel place,” he said.
“You came.”
“I did.”
“You have five minutes to explain yourself.”
Vox looked around the studio. His eyes moved over the desk, the floor, the empty walls. For once, he had no stage, no audience, no screen big enough to hide behind.
“I was awful to you here,” he said.
You folded your arms.
“Yes.”
“I was scared.”
“That is not an excuse.”
“I know.”
He took one step forward, then stopped, leaving space between you.
“You loved me when I was nothing close to what I wanted to become,” he said. “I thought that meant you didn’t understand me. But I think the truth is worse. I think you understood me too well, and I hated feeling that exposed.”
Your jaw tightened.
“You made love sound like a weakness.”
“I know.”
“You made me feel stupid for giving it to you.”
His voice roughened.
“I know.”
You looked away first, because the room was too familiar and his honesty was coming years too late.
“This is all I wanted from you back then,” you said. “One honest conversation. One moment where you stopped performing long enough to admit you were hurting.”
Vox looked at the desk. Then back at you. The light in his screen had dimmed, softer than usual, almost careful.
“I loved you then,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t make me feel powerful. It didn’t make people look at me. It just made me feel seen, and I was too afraid of that to keep it.”
The words hurt more than another insult would have. An insult would have been easier. You could have hated him cleanly for that.
But this was the truth, and the truth reached places in you that anger had not managed to kill.
“You don’t get to love me now because I became dangerous enough for you to notice,” you said.
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have had to become this for you to finally look at me.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You shouldn’t have.”
The silence after that was heavy. You wanted to believe him.
That was the worst part. After everything, after the humiliation, the blood, the years of turning yourself into someone Hell would fear, there was still a part of you that wanted to step closer. There was still a part of you that remembered his hand on your waist in this room, his tired smile in the blue light, the way he used to lean into you when no one else was there.
But love from Vox did not feel safe anymore. It felt like something you had paid for with pain.
“I don’t forgive you,” you said.
His eyes lowered. “I understand.”
You held his gaze for one more second.
“I don’t reject you either.”
Hope moved across his face slowly, like he was afraid to show too much of it. That almost broke you.
So you left before it could.
After that, Vox became harder to ignore. Not because he made speeches. Not because he demanded forgiveness. Not because he tried to turn his regret into something public.
Because he started acting differently.
Alastor noticed first.
During a live broadcast, Alastor forced his way into Vox’s signal.
The screen flashed red. The image distorted. Then the Radio Demon appeared in the middle of the broadcast, smiling like he had walked into a room that already belonged to him. His voice slid through the speakers, old-fashioned, amused, and sharp enough to make every demon watching go quiet.
Hell waited for Vox to react.
Everyone knew how this usually went. Vox would snap. Alastor would laugh. The argument would turn into a spectacle, and the whole city would watch their rivalry tear another broadcast apart.
“Well, well,” Alastor said, leaning into the frame. “No sparks for me today?”
Vox did not answer.
He looked offscreen instead, listening to something one of his assistants was saying. A report from the edge of your territory. Movement near your borders. Trouble coming too close to you.
For a second, Alastor’s smile stayed fixed.
Then Vox cut the broadcast. No insult. No threat. No outburst. Just a black screen.
Across the city, demons stared at dead monitors, waiting for the usual rage that never came.
Alastor did not like that.
At first, he treated it like a game. He interrupted smaller broadcasts. Sent little bursts of static through VoxTech systems. Left old songs playing over dead channels. But Vox still refused to give him what he wanted.
No public reaction. No meltdown. No performance. So Alastor’s attention turned to you. He came to your office through the shadow of a dead monitor.
One moment, the room was quiet. The next, red light crawled across the walls, your screens flickered, and Alastor stepped out of the darkness with his microphone cane tapping softly against the floor.
“So,” he said, smiling, “you are the reason our dear Vox has gone quiet.”
You did not stand. You only looked up from the folder on your desk.
“And you are the reason he spent years acting pathetic.”
His smile widened.
“Careful, dear.”
“I’m not dear to you.”
“No,” Alastor said, tilting his head, “but you are interesting.”
The air in the room changed.
It became heavier. Colder. The red glow from your screens deepened, and the shadows behind him stretched too far across the floor. You could feel his power pressing against the walls, testing the room, testing you.
He was not attacking yet. He was measuring.
“You’ve made yourself important,” he said. “That usually ends badly.”
You closed the folder and stood.
“I’ve survived worse than someone’s attention.”
His eyes narrowed with amusement.
“Have you?”
He disappeared a moment later, leaving only red static behind. His laugh stayed in the room after he was gone.
The attack came three nights later.
Alastor chose a border district, one of the places where your territory crossed into old radio lines and broken VoxTech infrastructure. The streets were narrow there, packed with old buildings, hanging signs, dead screens, and wires stretched from roof to roof.
Then the radio static started.
At first, it came softly from the broken speakers on the street corners.
Then louder.
Then everywhere.
Windows shattered along the street.
The ground split open under red light, and shadows climbed out of the cracks, tall and thin, moving too quickly to look natural. Antlers twisted through the dark shapes before they rushed forward. Demons screamed and ran in every direction as the buildings shook, doors slammed open, and every screen along the district burst one after another, throwing sparks over the pavement.
You met Alastor in the middle of it.
He stood beneath a broken streetlamp, calm and untouched while the street collapsed around him. Red light moved over his coat. His smile was bright, patient, and cruel.
You did not rush him. You raised one hand.
The dead screens around the street flickered back to life. Black static spread across the cracked glass. Cameras turned toward Alastor. Old speakers hissed, then started whispering. Not music. Not broadcasts. Secrets. Confessions. Debts. Betrayals. Every hidden thing buried inside your territory started speaking at once, low and uneven, until the whole street sounded haunted.
Alastor’s smile widened.
Then his shadows lunged.
You cut through the first wave with a sharp movement of your hand. The screens flashed black, and blades of static tore across the street, slicing through the shadows before they could reach you. The second wave came harder, green magic ripping through the pavement, but you pushed your power through the broken monitors and made them explode outward.
Glass filled the air.
Static followed.
For a while, you held him back.
You forced his shadows away from you. You made him step out from beneath the streetlamp. You made his smile tighten just enough to prove he had noticed.
Then Alastor stopped playing.
You saw the change before he attacked again.
His shoulders lowered. His grip shifted on his microphone cane. The red light around him grew darker, stronger, spreading across the street until it covered the broken pavement beneath your feet.
When he moved, he was faster.
The next strike tore through your defenses and threw you backward. Your boots scraped across the ground before you caught yourself. Pain cut through your side, hot and sudden. You looked down and saw green magic fading from the wound.
Another strike hit the street beside you.
The pavement shattered.
You stayed standing, but each breath hurt now. Your power still moved through the screens around you, but the connection was weaker, flickering under the weight of his magic.
Alastor walked closer. Still smiling. Still calm. That was what made him terrifying. He was not angry. He was not desperate. He was enjoying himself.
You lifted your hand again, forcing the nearest screen to flare black, but your fingers trembled before the static could sharpen.
Then blue electricity split the street.
Vox appeared between the broken buildings in a flash of light, coat whipping behind him, screen bright with panic and rage.
“Get away from her.”
Alastor turned his head slowly. His smile became delighted.
“There he is.”
Vox did not look at him. Not once.
His eyes found you instead, bleeding, breathing hard, still refusing to fall, and for the first time in years, there was no performance on his face.
Only fear.
Real fear. For you. That was the opening Alastor had been waiting for.
The next strike came too fast.
You saw the green light form. You understood where it was going to hit. You tried to move, but your body was half a second too slow.
Vox was not.
He crossed the distance without hesitation. No time to think about pride, reputation, or the rivalry that had ruled him for years.
He stepped in front of you. The hit struck him full force.
For one second, the whole street flashed blue.
Vox’s electricity burst outward as Alastor’s magic tore through him. Every broken screen screamed with static. The windows still standing exploded from the pressure, and Vox was thrown backward through smoke, sparks, and falling glass.
He hit the pavement hard.
His body rolled once. Then he stopped moving.
Everything inside you went cold.
“No!”
You did not remember running to him. One moment, he was lying across the broken street, and the next, you were on your knees beside him, hands shaking as you reached for him.
His screen was cracked down one side. The blue light inside flickered badly, cutting in and out like it was struggling to stay alive. Blood ran from beneath the shattered glass, down his neck, and into the collar of his ruined suit. Torn wires sparked under your hands when you pressed them to his chest, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to fix damage you did not understand.
“No, no, no,” you breathed, your voice breaking apart. “Vox, look at me. Look at me.”
His eye flickered.
For a second, he tried to smile. He could not hold it.
“Saved you,” he rasped.
A sob tore out of you.
“You idiot,” you said, pressing harder against the wound. “You stupid, arrogant idiot.”
His hand moved weakly toward you. You caught it before it fell. His fingers were cold. Too cold.
“I love you,” he whispered.
There was no performance in it. No perfect voice. Just Vox, broken and bleeding in your hands, saying the one thing you had wanted from him years too late.
You shook your head, tears falling onto his ruined suit.
“Don’t do this now.”
“I do,” he said, barely loud enough to hear through the static. “I love you.”
“Stop talking.”
“I made you think love had to hurt.”
“Vox—”
“That was me.” His voice cracked, and the light in his screen flickered again. “I made you think you had to become this to be worth seeing.”
You bent over him, one hand still pressed to his chest, the other holding his cold fingers like you could pull him back by force.
“You don’t get to die after saying that.”
His eye stayed on you. Tired. Afraid. Honest in a way he had never allowed himself to be before.
“You were gentle,” he whispered. “And I punished you for it.”
Your face crumpled.
Behind you, Alastor’s shadow stretched across the broken pavement.
“How touching,” he said.
His voice was light, amused, almost bored.
You looked down at Vox’s blood on your hands.
For years, you had turned pain into control. You had taken every wound Vox left behind and made it useful. You had built power out of humiliation, strategy out of heartbreak, fear out of everything soft that had been taken from you.
But this was different.
This was not cold. This was not controlled. This was grief, so sudden and violent, filling your chest until there was no room left for fear.
You stood. The whole district went quiet.
Not because the battle was over. Because your power had changed.
The screens around the street went black at once. The sparks stopped mid-flicker. The broken glass on the ground began to rise, piece by piece, hanging in the air around you. Every speaker in the district hissed, then filled with voices.
Secrets. Confessions. Begging. Broken promises. Every hidden thing buried in your territory answered you at the same time.
The sound grew louder. The street trembled beneath your feet.
Black static spread from your hands, crawling across the pavement, up the walls, over the dead screens, swallowing the green glow of Alastor’s magic inch by inch.
Alastor’s smile thinned. For the first time, he did not look amused.
“Oh,” he said softly. “There you are.”
You did not answer him. You raised one bloodstained hand.
The entire street moved with you.
Remaining screens exploded outward. Glass shot through the air. Black static tore across the district in a violent wave, forcing Alastor back several steps. His shadows rushed forward, but your power ripped through them before they could take shape.
He lifted his cane. You struck again. Harder.
The ground split between you. The red light around him flickered under the pressure of yours. Every screen that still had power showed the same image now, your face, calm and empty, Vox’s blood on your hands, your eyes fixed on Alastor like nothing else in Hell existed.
No smile. No threat. No speech. Only rage.
You drove him back.
There was nothing graceful about it now. Nothing clean. The control you had spent years building was gone, replaced by something raw and violent that tore through the street with every movement of your hands. Black static crashed into Alastor’s magic again and again, breaking through his shadows, shattering the red light around him, forcing him to defend instead of advance.
Alastor fought back.
Of course he did.
Green magic split the air. Shadows cut across your arms, your face, your side. His laughter still echoed between the broken buildings, but it was sharper now, less playful, less certain. You could feel him trying to regain control of the fight.
You did not let him.
You stepped forward through the pain.
The screens behind you burned black. The glass around you spun faster. Every voice hidden in the walls rose with your power until the whole district seemed to scream with you.
Alastor’s smile stayed in place, but his eyes changed. That was enough.
At last, he stepped back. Only one step. Then another.
He looked past you, toward Vox’s body on the ground, then back at the blood covering your hands. Something like understanding crossed his face. Not fear, not exactly, but calculation. The fight was no longer amusing enough to be worth the cost.
His smile returned, neat and polished.
“Well,” he said, brushing dust from his sleeve, “perhaps another evening.”
You stared at him.
“Leave.”
Alastor held your gaze for another second, still smiling, but the silence around him had changed. Then he vanished into red shadow. His laugh followed him, faint and distant.
For once, it did not sound like victory.
The moment he was gone, your power collapsed.
The glass fell. The screens went dark.
You turned and ran back to Vox.
He was still alive. Barely.
You dropped beside him and pressed your fingers against his neck, searching for something steady beneath the blood and broken circuitry. His pulse was weak. His screen flickered once when your hand touched his face.
“Stay with me,” you said, your voice shaking. “Do you hear me? Stay with me.”
Vox did not answer.
You lifted him into your arms, ignoring the pain tearing through your side. Blood soaked into your coat. His head rested heavily against your shoulder, too still, too quiet, nothing like the Vox who always filled every room with noise.
You did not take him to VoxTech.
You did not take him to the Vees. You did not take him anywhere his injuries could become a story, a weakness, a headline, or a weapon.
You brought him to your lair.
The rooms that made demons lower their voices became silent as you carried him inside. No one stopped you. No one asked questions. One look at your face was enough to make everyone move out of your way.
You laid Vox on your bed and got to work.
His suit was ruined, burned through in several places and soaked with blood. You cut it away with shaking hands, careful around the broken parts of his screen, careful around the exposed wires sparking beneath his chest. You cleaned blood from cracked glass. You pressed cloth against open wounds. You patched what you understood and stabilized what you could, cursing under your breath every time his body jerked from pain.
Your hands had destroyed enemies. They had signed cruel contracts. They had held knives, secrets, and power.
Now they were gentle.
Vox watched you through the low light, his eye flickering, his face broken in ways no broadcast could hide.
“You should have left me,” he said.
You pressed the cloth harder against his side. He hissed.
“Say that again,” you said, voice low, “and I’ll make recovery worse on purpose.”
A weak crackle of laughter escaped him. Then his expression changed. The humor faded. Only exhaustion remained.
“I’m sorry.”
Your hands slowed.
Vox swallowed, struggling to keep his voice steady through the static.
“Not because I almost died. Not because I’m scared. Not because I want you to stop hating me.” His eye stayed on you. “I mean it. I’m sorry I used your love against you. I’m sorry I made you feel small because I hated feeling small. I’m sorry I let what Alastor did to me turn into something I did to you. I’m sorry I didn’t run after you.”
The room went quiet. You looked at him in the dim light. At the cracked screen. The blood. The ruined suit.
The man you had loved before the empire, and hated after it.
For once, anger did not come first. Only exhaustion. Only grief. Only the part of you that had survived everything and still hurt when he said your name.
“I understand why you did it,” you said.
Vox went completely still. You kept your hand pressed to his wound, but your voice softened.
“That does not erase it. It does not fix what you did to me. But I understand the fear. The obsession. The way you thought becoming more powerful would finally make you enough.”
His eye flickered. You looked down at the blood on your hands.
“You were wrong,” you said. “But I understand.”
His voice was raw. “I don’t want to be like that anymore.”
“Then learn.”
“I don’t know how.”
Slowly, you set your hand on his arm. The gesture was old enough to hurt. His eyes closed as if the touch had gone straight through him.
“One step at a time,” you said.
He swallowed. “Will you stay?”
You looked toward the window. Outside, Hell moved on. Sirens, distant screams, neon flicker. Nothing had forgiven either of you. Nothing had become clean.
“I’m tired of fighting you,” you said.
“So am I.”
“You don’t get my softness back all at once.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to turn this into some beautiful redemption story for your ego.”
His mouth twitched. “No cameras.”
“No spin.”
“No spin.”
“No audience.”
“Just us,” Vox said.
The quiet after that was heavier than any battle. You leaned closer. He watched you like hope itself might hurt him if he held it wrong.
“Love shouldn’t have had to turn into war,” you whispered.
His hand found yours, weak but certain.
“No.”
“But we survived it.”
His voice dropped.
“Together?”
You kissed him before answering. It was slow, almost careful enough to be painful. Not a conquest. Not apology. Not forgiveness wrapped in a pretty lie. Your mouth touched his, and for the first time in years, neither of you tried to win.
His hand rose to your cheek, then stopped.
Waiting. That almost undid you. You leaned into his palm. Only then did he touch you.
The kiss deepened, gentle and bruised, two demons in a dark room with blood between them and the world still burning outside. Nothing vanished. The past did not loosen its teeth. The woman he broke did not return whole. The man you loved did not become innocent because he finally bled for you.
But the war paused.
For once, neither of you reached for a weapon. Vox rested his cracked forehead against yours.
“I love you,” he said.
This time, you let the words enter. Not as a cure. Not as proof that pain had meant something. As a beginning, late and damaged, but real enough to breathe beside.
“I love you too,” you whispered.
His hand tightened around yours.
Outside, Hell kept roaring.
Inside, surrounded by ruined glass, old wounds, and the quiet glow of a screen that had almost gone dark, you stayed.
You had simply stopped destroying each other long enough to choose something else.
In Hell, that was not purity.
It was not peace.
But it was brave.
And for now, it was enough.
── .✦ ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
— Adam refuses to help you dig up a restricted Heaven report, until one shameless offer sends every thought in his head straight into free fall.
✦ pairing — Adam x female!reader
✦ warnings — none
Adam was enjoying this far too much.
He lounged behind his desk with his boots up, wings spread wide, halo glowing over his messy hair like he had personally invented divine authority. The report you needed was somewhere in Heaven’s archives, buried beneath golden seals, restricted access, and Adam’s unbearable need to be difficult.
“Nope,” he said, popping the word with a grin. “Can’t help you.”
“You can,” you said, both hands flat on his desk. “You just won’t.”
“Same thing, babe.”
“It’s important.”
“So is not getting yelled at by boring archive freaks.”
You stared at him. He stared back, smug, relaxed, entirely too pleased with himself as he tilted his chair onto two legs. He thought he had won. You could see it in the lazy curve of his mouth, in the way his fingers laced behind his head.
Fine.
You leaned closer. “If you do this, I’ll show you my boobs.”
The chair slammed forward.
Adam froze.
No laugh. No crude remark. No immediate bragging. Just wide eyes, parted lips, and one violent twitch of his wings as every thought in his head visibly died.
You raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
He blinked once.
“The report,” you reminded him.
Adam stood so fast his chair nearly fell over. “I can get that.”
── .✦ ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
✦ warnings — PTSD, trauma recovery, panic attacks, flashbacks, implied torture, implied physical abuse, implied captivity, manipulation, dehumanization, abuse by authority figure/employer, fear of touch, emotional distress, crying, dissociation, dark rooms/darkness as a trigger
✦ blurb — Seeing Fizzarolli again should feel like coming home. Instead, after Mammon turned his face into your worst nightmare, learning to trust the real Fizz becomes the hardest kind of healing.
The first time Mammon sent the robot, you thought it was Fizzarolli.
That was the part your mind never forgot.
Not the metal under the gloves, not the mechanical precision of its fingers, not the way its joints bent too smoothly when it stepped through the doorway of the dressing room. Not even the pain, though that lived somewhere deep in you too, coiled tight in the soft meat beneath your ribs, behind your knees, in your wrists, in every place a hand could close around you and turn you obedient.
No, what stayed was the moment before.
The impossible, stupid moment when you had looked up, bruised from rehearsal, shaking with fear because Mammon had gone quiet in that awful way of his, and you had seen a familiar face.
Fizzarolli’s face.
His sharp grin, his bright eyes, his clown-painted cheeks, his crooked kind of joy made into something hollow and wrong. The robot had tilted its head like him, laughed like him, stretched long arms toward you like an old friend asking for a hug, and your first breath had almost been relief.
Then it had grabbed you.
Years later, you still hated yourself for that breath.
You still hated that some part of you had been glad, for one heartbeat, to see him.
Mammon learned from that. Mammon always learned, not in the intention to do better, but with the bright, greasy curiosity of someone discovering which lever made the screaming louder. He learned that you froze when it used Fizzarolli’s voice. He learned that you cried harder when it laughed. He learned that you stopped fighting when it said things Fizz might have said, little circus memories scraped from somewhere, stolen and twisted until even childhood became something with painful.
“Aw, c’mon, don’t look at me like that.”
“Missed me?”
“You always were too soft.”
The robots were prototypes then, sleek and expensive and not yet polished enough for a stage. They lived behind locked doors in Mammon’s private storage, beneath tarps and maintenance lights, waiting to be useful. He had them before he ever made Fizzarolli famous, before his face was printed on cheap posters, cereal boxes, novelty cups, and every miserable corner of Greed. Before Hell started chanting his name, before the whole world decided Fizzarolli belonged to them.
Mammon owned the prototypes first. Then he owned you.
Your contract was a stack of paper thicker than your thumb and written in language designed to eat the desperate. You had signed because you were young, alone, and still coughing smoke from the fire that had taken the circus apart. You had signed because nobody came looking for you. You had signed because Mammon had smiled down at you with every tooth on display and promised work, shelter, protection, a future.
He had given you all of those things in the way a cage gave a bird somewhere to sleep.
You performed until your bones felt threaded with wire. You smiled until your mouth cracked. You swallowed hunger, exhaustion, insults, fear. When you stumbled, you were replaceable. When you complained, you were ungrateful. When you refused, you misbehaved.
And when you misbehaved, Mammon never touched you himself. He only sent Fizzarolli.
Not the real one. Never the real one. By then you had not seen the real Fizz in years, not since the fire, not since the smoke and the screaming and the last glimpse of him through heat-blurred air before everything became ash. You had heard rumors. Everyone had. Fizzarolli survived. Fizzarolli was famous. Fizzarolli was Mammon’s favorite. Fizzarolli was the greatest jester in Hell.
Fizzarolli was smiling from every poster while your hands shook too badly to button your costume.
Sometimes you wondered if he knew.
Most days, you hoped he didn’t.
It was easier to survive if you imagined him far away from all of it, unaware, untouched by the machinery wearing his face. It was easier to keep the child you had loved in a separate room inside your memory, one with sawdust floors and cheap circus lights, one where he still had both horns and quick little hands and a laugh that made your chest feel warm instead of cold.
You kept that version of him hidden from Mammon. You tried.
Mammon found him anyway, in the way you flinched. In the way your eyes followed Fizz’s posters with something worse than hatred. In the way you went silent when one of the robotic performers glitched in the same pitch as his laugh.
So he used it.
He used Fizzarolli’s voice to make you sorry. He used Fizzarolli’s hands to make you obedient. He used Fizzarolli’s smile until the real thing, wherever it was, became impossible to imagine without fear standing in front of it.
By the time Asmodeus bought your contract, you no longer thought of freedom as a door opening.
You thought of it as a trick.
Mammon summoned you after a matinee that had left your ankles swollen and your throat raw from glitter dust. You still had stage paint smeared under one eye when his assistant dragged you to the upper office, all green velvet, gold trim, and windows overlooking the carnival floor like a throne room built over a slaughterhouse.
Mammon sat behind his desk, too large for the chair and still somehow boneless with boredom, tapping thick fingers against a contract stamped with a seal you did not recognize.
“Good news, doll,” he said, smiling like he had already been paid. “You’ve been bought.”
Your stomach dropped so hard you nearly swayed.
There were worse demons than Mammon. Everyone knew that. Hell was full of owners, collectors, predators with polished shoes and kind voices. Contracts changed hands every day, and sometimes the new hand was worse. Sometimes freedom was only a transfer notice.
“Who?” you asked.
Your voice sounded far away.
Mammon’s smile soured.
“Ozzie,” he said, like the name tasted expensive and irritating. “Apparently he’s got a soft spot for broken little circus acts these days.”
Asmodeus, King of Lust, owner of Ozzie’s, the glittering heart of the Lust Ring’s entertainment scene. You had seen him once from a distance at one of Mammon’s pageants, huge and radiant under the lights, all feathers and flame and effortless power. He had laughed at something Fizzarolli said onstage, real laughter, warm laughter, the kind that made the cameras swing toward them like flowers following the sun.
Fizz had been there.
Fizz had been smiling.
You remembered staring at the broadcast from the corner of a greenroom with nausea crawling up your throat, unable to tell whether your longing or your terror was worse.
“I didn’t agree to that,” you said.
Mammon leaned forward, and the office seemed to shrink around his grin.
“You agreed to everything, remember?”
The pen was already on the desk. The papers were already signed.
You left Greed three hours later with one bag, one costume case, and a copy of your release that you kept folded against your chest until the paper softened from sweat.
Nobody stopped you.
That was the worst part. No alarms. No chase. No robot waiting in the corridor with Fizzarolli’s voice humming your name. Mammon did not even come to the door. You walked out of the building through the performer entrance, past a stack of old posters curling at the edges, and the sky over the Greed Ring was the same dirty yellow it had always been.
Freedom looked exactly like every other day.
You waited for it to hurt.
It didn’t.
Ozzie’s was too much at first. The club was light and heat and movement, music pressing against the walls, laughter rolling through the halls, performers in silk and leather and feathers calling to one another in voices that did not flinch before they rose. It smelled like smoke machines, perfume, clean sweat, hot stage lights, and expensive alcohol. Nobody screamed in the dressing rooms. Nobody locked the costume cabinets. Nobody told you to dance until your knees buckled. If someone was tired, someone else told them to sit down. If someone was hurt, rehearsal stopped.
You did not trust any of it.
Asmodeus met you on your first day in a private office with plush couches and soft lighting, his massive shape folded carefully into the room as if he was trying not to take up more space than necessary. He did not reach for you. He did not stand too close. He slid your contract across the low table, and for one horrifying second you thought he was going to ask you to sign another.
Instead, he burned it.
Hellfire took the paper from the edges inward, blue and clean, licking through Mammon’s seal until it curled black and collapsed into ash.
“You don’t belong to him anymore,” Asmodeus said.
You stared at the ash.
Your hands were in your lap, fingers locked so tightly together that your knuckles ached.
“Who do I belong to now?” you asked.
His expression shifted. Not pity. You hated pity. Pity was what people gave when they wanted to feel generous without doing anything useful. This was heavier than pity, quieter.
“Yourself,” he said.
You almost laughed. You almost vomited. Instead, you cried without making a sound, sitting perfectly upright on a couch softer than anything you had touched in years while Asmodeus pretended not to notice until you could breathe again.
The first few weeks were strange in ways you could not explain to anyone.
You learned that food could be eaten sitting down. You learned that a closed door did not always mean locked. You learned that rehearsal schedules were suggestions shaped by bodies, not bodies crushed into schedules. You learned that mistakes could be corrected without punishment. You learned that laughter from the stage did not always mean someone was about to be humiliated.
Slowly, dangerously, you began to believe you might survive this.
You joined the aerial ensemble because your body still knew the language of height better than speech. The rigging at Ozzie’s was pristine, polished black steel and velvet ropes, no frayed cords hidden under spotlight glare, no rusted clasps held together with threats. Your palms remembered the old circus anyway. They sweated through chalk. Your shoulders locked before drops. Some nights your muscles performed beautifully while your mind watched from somewhere outside your body, counting exits.
No one forced you to explain.
You liked that.
A sinner named Mara took you under one wing, blunt and kind in a way that did not make you feel hunted. She showed you where the quiet hallway was, which stagehands never knocked before entering, which dressing room mirror had the least cruel lighting. She told you Ozzie had rules about consent that applied to everything, not just the obvious things. Touch, scenes, costumes, jokes, hours, names. Everything.
You listened like she was describing another country.
“You’ll get used to it,” Mara said once, tossing a sequined robe over her shoulder.
You looked across the rehearsal floor, where dancers stretched beneath rose-colored lights and a musician tuned his guitar with his boots propped on an amp.
“Maybe,” you said.
For a while, maybe was enough.
Then Fizzarolli came home.
You did not know he worked there. Somehow, impossibly, nobody had said his name around you. The club was huge, schedules moved like tides, and Fizz was often away for shows, shoots, appearances, obligations that clung to fame even after Mammon. You had seen his posters in Lust, but posters were survivable if you knew where not to look. You had learned not to look.
That morning, rehearsal smelled like dust, hairspray, and fresh coffee. You were on the main stage with the aerial rig lowered, one foot looped in silk, body leaning into a stretch while Mara counted beats from the floor. Music pulsed low through the speakers. Someone laughed near the bar. Someone else cursed at a jammed spotlight.
For once, your body felt close to yours.
Then a voice called your name. Not loud. Not threatening. Bright with disbelief, cracked open by joy.
Your name, in Fizzarolli’s voice. Every muscle in your body turned to stone.
You looked over your shoulder. Fizzarolli stood at the edge of the stage. The real one.
You understood it later. You would remember the differences in pieces, the scarred nubs of his horns beneath the striped cap, the cybernetic limbs folded into their usual theatrical curves, the living tension in his face, the softness no machine had ever managed to copy. You would remember that he looked older. Thinner in some places, sharper in others. You would remember that his smile was not the fixed painted grin of the robots but something trembling and alive.
At the time, all you saw was the wrong face.
Fizz’s eyes went wide, shining.
“Holy shit,” he breathed, and then he was moving toward you, arms opening, grin breaking brighter with every step. “You’re alive. Fuck, you’re alive, I thought—”
The scream came out before language did.
It ripped through the rehearsal room so violently that the music cut off. Your foot slipped from the silk. You hit the mat badly, pain flashing up your hip, but you barely felt it. Fizz stopped dead, arms still open, smile collapsing in slow motion.
You scrambled backward on your hands, nails dragging over vinyl, breath gone, throat still tearing around the sound.
“No,” you choked. “No, no, no.”
Fizz’s face emptied.
He took one step forward.
You ran.
Not gracefully. Not like an acrobat. You ran like an animal fleeing a trap, shoulder striking a costume rack hard enough to send hangers crashing down behind you, bare feet slapping against the backstage floor, every hallway turning too narrow, every light too bright. Someone said your name. Someone told you to stop. You did not stop until you found a storage closet with no windows and wedged yourself behind a stack of prop crates, both hands clamped over your mouth to hold in whatever sound was trying to get out next.
For twenty minutes, you were sixteen again.
For twenty minutes, there was only darkness, metal fingers, Fizzarolli laughing without warmth, and Mammon’s voice outside the door saying, “Next time you’ll remember who owns you.”
When Mara found you, you hit her.
Not hard enough to hurt badly, but hard enough that shame returned before speech. She did not yell. She only sat outside the closet with her injured hand wrapped in a towel, speaking through the crack in the door until your breathing slowed.
“Fizz is gone,” she said. “Ozzie took him upstairs. Nobody’s coming in. You’re safe in there as long as you need.”
Fizz.
The name broke something fresh.
You folded over your knees and pressed your forehead to the floor.
“I know it’s him,” you whispered.
Mara went quiet.
“I know,” you said again, but your body kept shaking like knowledge had no authority there.
Outside, in the rehearsal room, Fizzarolli stood in the middle of the stage long after you disappeared.
No one seemed to know what to say to him.
He hated that most of all. Fizz could handle insults. He could handle hecklers, critics, executives, fans who grabbed too hard, cameras shoved into his face, Mammon’s hand on the back of his neck, the endless appetite of an audience that loved him best when he was bleeding under glitter. He could handle a room turning on him because performance had taught him how to turn anything into a joke before it became a wound.
He did not know what to do with silence.
“She was there,” he said.
No one answered.
“She was at the circus,” he said, louder, like maybe they did not understand. “When I was a kid. She was my friend. I thought she died in the fire.”
Mara looked toward the hallway where you had vanished, her mouth tight.
Fizz’s arms lowered slowly.
“Why did she look at me like that?”
Still, no one answered.
That was when Asmodeus arrived, summoned by someone with sense enough to know when a room was cracking. His eyes found Fizz first, and whatever he saw there made his expression change.
“Fizz,” he said gently.
Fizz flinched at the softness.
“What the fuck happened?” Fizz asked. His voice came out too loud, bouncing off the high ceiling. “I said her name. That’s all. I just said her fucking name.”
Asmodeus looked at Mara.
Mara looked away.
A sick feeling crawled into Fizz’s stomach.
“What?” he said.
No one answered fast enough.
“What?” he snapped, and the word broke high at the end.
Ozzie guided him away before he could start screaming.
You avoided Fizz after that with the precision of someone avoiding a blade.
You learned his schedule. You learned the sound of his footsteps, which was useless because his limbs could extend and retract and carry him strangely when he was messing around, but you learned the rhythm of his voice through walls, the pitch of his laugh from a distance, the way the air changed when people noticed him entering a room. Fizzarolli did not occupy space quietly. Even when he tried, he was made of attention.
You shifted rehearsals. Took meals late. Changed dressing rooms. Used back corridors. Once, you spent an entire afternoon in the laundry room because he was doing blocking on the main stage and every exit route brought you too close to him.
He tried, at first.
Of course he did.
The first time, he waited across the hall with his hands visible and his body angled away from you like someone approaching a frightened stray.
“Hey,” he said softly. “I’m not gonna—”
You dropped the costume box you were carrying and stumbled backward so fast your spine hit the wall.
Fizz froze.
“Okay,” he said, voice shaking despite the careful lightness he tried to force into it. “Okay, I’ll go. I’m going.”
He went.
You slid down the wall after he turned the corner, shaking so badly you could not pick up the spilled feathers at your feet.
The second time, he only waved from across the rehearsal floor.
You went cold from scalp to tail and left without a word.
The third time, you heard him laugh in Ozzie’s office and lost ten minutes behind the bar, staring at your own hands while your body prepared for pain that never came.
After that, Fizz stopped approaching.
He still looked for you. You could feel it sometimes, his attention landing and leaving quickly, careful not to trap you under it. That hurt in a way you had not expected. His restraint should have been a relief. It was a relief. It also felt like grief.
Fizz thought you hated him.
That was the conclusion he came to because pain liked simple stories, and that one was simple enough to hold.
You hated him because he survived differently. You hated him because Mammon made him famous while you disappeared into contract labor and punishment rooms. You hated him because he had not come looking. You hated him because maybe, somewhere after the fire, he had become something you could no longer forgive. He searched his own memory like a crime scene, picking through years blurred by surgeries, painkillers, contracts, cameras, and Mammon’s voice in his ear.
Had he seen you and forgotten?
Had you reached out and been ignored?
Had Mammon told him something? Had he laughed at some joke, signed some poster, stood on some stage while you were trapped behind it?
He did not know.
The not knowing ate him alive.
At night, after the club emptied and the glitter on the floor looked like dust from a broken star, Fizz sat in his dressing room with the lights off and tried to remember your face before fear.
You had been a little older than him at the circus. Not by much, but enough that he had considered you impossibly cool. You could climb silks before most of them were allowed near rigging. You had a wicked grin when you were about to do something stupid. You used to steal apples from the kitchen and split them with him behind the costume tent, always pretending you were not hungry even while eating too fast. You were the first person who told him Blitz was jealous because he was too good, which had made no sense to him at the time.
You had known him before the posters. Before the prosthetics. Before his name belonged to Mammon.
You had known his laugh when it was just his. Now you could not hear it without going white.
The truth came from Mara on a night when Fizz cornered her by accident.
He had not meant to. He only opened a backstage door, saw her inside marking costume repairs, and asked your name before he could stop himself. Mara’s face closed. That would have been enough on any other night to make him apologize and leave, but exhaustion had worn him thin.
“Please,” he said.
Mara’s scissors paused. Fizz swallowed. His fingers curled and uncurled at his sides, metal joints clicking softly.
“I need to know if I did something,” he said. “I won’t go near her. I’m not asking so I can fix it or make her talk to me or whatever. I just need to know if I hurt her and forgot.”
Mara looked at him for a long time. Then she set the scissors down.
“You didn’t hurt her,” she said.
Fizz’s chest loosened so abruptly it almost hurt.
Then Mara said, “Mammon did.”
The room became very still. Fizz waited.
Mara glanced toward the hallway, lowered her voice, and told him what she knew. Not all of it. She did not know all of it, and even if she had, she would not have handed someone else’s entire wound over without permission. But she told him enough. She told him about the prototype robots. She told him about Mammon’s punishments. She told him the machines had his voice, his laugh, his face, his body. She told him that when you stepped out of line, Mammon sent one to your room.
Fizz did not interrupt. He did not blink much either.
His face changed by inches, horror working through him slowly because it was too large to enter all at once. His mouth opened once, like he was going to say no, because no was the only word big enough for the first impact. Then it closed again.
Mara’s voice softened.
“She knows you’re not them.”
Fizz stared at the floor.
“That doesn’t matter to her trauma yet.”
His own face looked back at him from the dressing room mirror across the hall, painted grin half-finished from rehearsal. He looked at himself and imagined the door opening. He imagined you looking up. He imagined relief on your face for one heartbeat before his stolen hands became pain.
Something inside him went quiet. Quiet like a house after a fire.
Every time you looked at him, you were not seeing him. You were seeing what Mammon had done with him.
His face, his voice, his laugh, his name. All taken, copied, packaged, weaponized. He had thought Mammon used him badly before. He had thought he understood the shape of it, the contracts, the branding, the endless public ownership, the way his image had been stretched across Hell until he could barely find himself underneath it.
He had not known Mammon had used him like this. Fizz sat down on the nearest trunk because his knees had stopped feeling reliable.
Mara watched him carefully.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Fizz laughed once. It came out broken and sharp, nothing like him.
“Don’t,” he said.
Mara went silent. Fizz pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
After that, everything changed.
Fizz learned how to become smaller without disappearing, how to make himself known without making himself felt, how to be present at the edge of your fear and not demand that you reward him for being patient.
The next time you crossed paths, he was sitting on the far end of the greenroom couch, script in hand. You stopped in the doorway. He did not look up immediately.
“Hey,” he said, eyes still on the page, voice quiet. “I’m in here. I can leave, or I can stay right here and not move. Your call.”
Your hand tightened around the doorframe. The old answer rose in you automatically.
Leave.
Then another part, smaller and angrier and so tired of being chased out of rooms by ghosts, held its ground.
“Stay there,” you said.
Fizz nodded once.
“Staying.”
You crossed the room with your back almost against the wall, keeping every table between you and him. He did not move. Not when you opened the cabinet. Not when your hands shook too badly to find the right tea box. Not when the kettle slipped and clattered in the sink, making you flinch hard enough to hit your elbow.
He only said, “Can I tell you where the chamomile is?”
You hated that your eyes burned.
“Okay.”
“Top shelf, blue tin, left side.”
You found it. You left without saying thank you.
The next day, you found a blue tin of chamomile on the lower shelf.
No note. Just easier reach. It made you cry in the bathroom for reasons that felt stupid until you stopped calling them stupid.
Fizz asked everything after that.
“Can I come through?”
“Can I grab that prop behind you?”
“Would you rather I use the other hallway?”
“Is my voice too much?”
“Do you want me to stop talking?”
Sometimes the questions helped. Sometimes they made you feel like a cracked object everyone had been instructed not to touch.
Sometimes you said yes and still panicked. Sometimes you said no because fear was easier than wanting. Sometimes you snapped at him. Once, after a long rehearsal and a sleepless night, you turned on him so viciously over nothing that the whole costume room went silent.
“Stop asking me things like I’m going to shatter,” you said.
Fizz stood at the door, one hand lifted toward a rack of gloves he had been asking permission to reach.
His face flinched before he could hide it.
Then he lowered his hand.
“Okay,” he said.
That made you angrier.
“Don’t do that either.”
His expression stayed still, but his voice went carefully flat.
“I don’t know what that means.”
You knew he was trying. You knew, and still your chest was full of knives.
“It means stop looking at me like that,” you said. “Stop being nice because you feel guilty.”
Fizz’s eyes widened.
“I don’t—”
“You do,” you snapped. “Everyone does. You all walk around me like I’m a bomb.”
His mouth closed.
For one terrible second, you thought he would finally get angry. A part of you wanted him to. Anger you understood. Anger meant you could retreat into the shape Mammon gave you and know exactly where the next blow would land.
Fizz only nodded.
“You’re right,” he said.
You stared at him.
“I’m not doing it because I think you’re a bomb,” he continued, voice rough at the edges. “I’m doing it because I don’t know what hurts, and I don’t want to guess wrong.”
The room went quiet around you.
Your throat tightened.
“I don’t know what hurts either,” you said, so softly you barely heard yourself.
Fizz’s face changed.
You left before either of you could say anything else.
Healing was not a door opening either. It was a hallway you kept walking down and finding the same room at the end of.
Some days you managed ten minutes in rehearsal while Fizz worked across the stage, all elastic limbs and bright, falling into performance like he had been born from spotlight. His voice still made your pulse jump, but sometimes you could separate it from memory if he was singing, if the lights were bright, if there were enough people around that your brain could believe the room was real.
Other days, laughter from behind a closed door sent you into the nearest corner with your hands over your ears, heart kicking hard against your ribs, body convinced the dark was coming even under noon lights.
Fizz never told you to get over it. He never made his pain your responsibility, which was good because you could see it anyway.
It lived in the shadows under his eyes. In the way he turned away too quickly after you flinched. In the jokes that came a beat late. In the careful space he left around you, always wide enough to be safe and never wide enough to stop hurting.
Once, late after a show, you passed his dressing room and heard crying.
Quiet crying. The kind someone does when they are trying not to exist too loudly.
You stopped before you could stop yourself.
The door was cracked.
Inside, Fizz sat on the floor between costume trunks, knees drawn up awkwardly, cybernetic arms wrapped around himself. His makeup was half wiped away, leaving his face strangely young beneath the stage paint. Asmodeus sat beside him, massive and still, one hand resting on the floor between them but not touching.
“I look exactly like the thing that hurt her,” Fizz whispered.
You went cold. His voice cracked.
“How the fuck am I supposed to compete with that?”
Asmodeus did not answer immediately. The silence that followed was not empty. It had weight, the kind that held instead of crushed.
“You don’t,” he said at last.
Fizz turned his head.
“You don’t fight trauma,” Asmodeus said, voice low enough that it felt meant for the room alone. “You outlast it. You keep showing her that you’re safe until one day, her heart starts believing what her head already knows.”
Fizz wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
“It hurts.”
“I know.”
“What if she never gets there?”
Asmodeus exhaled, sad and careful.
“Then you love her anyway.”
Fizz folded forward like the words had gone through him.
You left before they could see you. That night, you sat on your bed with your knees to your chest and stared at your wrists.
The robots had always grabbed there first.
Not because wrists were the only place to hold someone, but because they were efficient. Mammon loved efficiency almost as much as spectacle. Wrists controlled the hands. Hands controlled resistance. Your body remembered the exact pressure, the too-smooth fingers, the cold imitation of gloves, the cheerful voice telling you not to make this worse.
Your wrists looked ordinary now.
Weeks passed.
You began collecting evidence.
Not for your mind. Your mind knew Fizz was real, that he had not sent the robots, that he had not known, that he had been a child too, then a victim in his own way, chewed up and sold by the same monster with a different contract.
Your body needed proof.
So you gathered it piece by piece.
Fizz announcing himself before entering. Fizz backing away when your shoulders rose. Fizz keeping his hands visible. Fizz setting props down instead of handing them directly to you unless you nodded. Fizz using your name gently, never through a door in the dark. Fizz letting silence be silence instead of filling it with nervous performance.
Your body did not trust kindness quickly.
But it noticed repetition.
One afternoon, you were repairing a torn aerial silk while Fizz rehearsed on the stage below. He was running a comedy bit with one of the dancers, all exaggerated offense and impossible contortions. At some point, he missed a cue, spun too far, and smacked face-first into a padded column with a squeak so ridiculous that half the room burst out laughing.
You laughed too.
It slipped out before you could catch it.
Small. Rusty. Real.
Fizz froze upside down, limbs tangled around the column.
His eyes found you.
The room held its breath.
Panic rose immediately, hot and humiliating, but before it could swallow the moment, Fizz grinned, soft and startled and nothing like the robots.
“Yeah, yeah,” he called, still upside down. “Laugh it up. Comedy legend suffering for his craft over here.”
The room laughed again.
This time, you did not run.
You looked down at the silk in your lap and realized your hands were shaking, but not from fear alone.
After that, things became more complicated because wanting entered the room.
Fear had been simple when it was only fear. It had walls, rules. Wanting was worse. Wanting had memory inside it. Wanting brought back apples behind the costume tent, shared whispers under bleachers, Fizz’s young face tipped up toward you with admiration so open it had made you pretend to be annoyed.
Wanting made you look at his mouth when he smiled.
Wanting made you hate Mammon with a fresh, vicious intensity.
Because Mammon had not only hurt you. He had stood between you and every version of touch that might have come after. He had taken Fizz’s face and planted terror there. He had made warmth suspicious. He had made longing feel like betrayal.
The first time you chose to sit beside Fizz, you did it badly.
He was alone in the greenroom, eating cereal from a mug. You entered, saw him, almost left, then crossed the room and sat on the opposite end of the couch with enough space between you for another person.
Fizz stared straight ahead.
His spoon hovered halfway to his mouth.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
His eyes flicked to you, then away.
“Can I keep eating cereal like a raccoon, or is that ruining the moment?”
Despite yourself, your mouth twitched.
“It’s already ruined.”
“Thank Satan. I love cereal.”
You looked at the television, which was playing an old rerun of some Lust Ring dating disaster show with the volume low. Fizz ate very slowly, probably so the spoon would not clink too loudly against the mug. The effort made your chest ache.
After a while, you said, “You used to steal apples.”
Fizz went still. You kept looking at the television.
“From the blue crate behind the kitchen tent.”
His voice came softer.
“You knew?”
“You were terrible at stealing.”
He huffed a laugh, barely there.
“You still ate them.”
“You always gave me the good half.”
Fizz looked down into his mug.
You could feel him trying not to make the memory too big, trying not to rush toward it with both hands open. You hated that he had to try. You were grateful that he did.
“I thought you forgot breakfast,” he said.
“I did.”
“Yeah, well.” His voice went thin for a second. “Couldn’t have the coolest acrobat at the circus passing out midair.”
The words lodged in you. Coolest acrobat. A child’s title. A silly thing. A sacred thing, somehow, because Mammon had not touched that memory.
You stayed on the couch for thirteen minutes.
Fizz did not move closer.
Two nights later, the lights died.
It happened after a show, when the club had emptied into the lazy, glittering exhaustion of midnight cleanup. Music still pulsed faintly from the main floor, softer now, the bass reduced to a heartbeat through the walls. Backstage was a mess of costumes, feathered headpieces, discarded props, water bottles, and performers too tired to be glamorous.
You were packing away costumes in storage because repetitive tasks helped after overstimulation. Fizz was somewhere on the other side of the room, sorting through a trunk of props with more care than anyone expected from him. You had been alone together for almost seven minutes. You knew because you had checked the clock three times.
It was manageable.
The lights flickered once.
Your hands paused on a sequined jacket.
Fizz looked up.
Then the room went black. Complete darkness.
For one frozen second, there was no sound at all. No music. No voices. No electric buzz from the ceiling. The kind of silence that did not feel like absence, but like something holding its breath.
Your body remembered before your mind did.
Your lungs seized. The jacket fell from your hands. The dark grew teeth.
You were back in Mammon’s circus, in the punishment room, in the locked dressing room, in the narrow corridor behind the stage where the light had gone out just before the robot stepped through and laughed with Fizzarolli’s mouth. Your wrists burned. Your knees weakened. Your back found a wall that was not there and then a costume rack that was, hangers biting into your spine as you slid down.
Somewhere nearby, Fizz said your name.
Panic detonated.
“No,” you gasped.
“Shit,” he breathed, and the small scrape of movement that followed made your hands fly up to protect your face.
“No, no, no.”
“It’s me,” he said.
The words were soft. The robots had been soft too.
“No—”
“I’m right here.”
That was worse. They had said that. They had always said that, voice bright and patient while metal fingers closed around bone. I’m right here. Don’t worry. You know me. You can trust me.
Your breathing broke apart.
“Please,” you whispered, though you did not know who you were begging. “Please, I’m sorry.”
Fizz went silent.
He understood then. You could feel the moment he understood because the room stopped moving around him. No footsteps. No reaching. No rustle of costume fabric. He became still with visible effort, somewhere in the dark where you could not see his face and therefore saw all of them.
“I’m not moving,” he said, very carefully. “I’m not coming closer.”
You pressed your fists to your temples.
“I’m sorry,” you choked. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
His voice shook.
“I know, sweetheart.”
The endearment went through you like a blade and a hand at once. You sobbed, sudden and violent, because part of you wanted to crawl toward that voice and part of you wanted to claw through the wall to get away from it.
“I know it’s you,” you sobbed. The words came out broken, dragged from somewhere deep. “I know you’re not them. I know, I know, I know.”
Fizz said nothing.
You hit the sides of your head with the heels of your hands, not hard enough to harm, just hard enough to feel something outside the memory.
“But every time I see your face…”
Your voice cracked open.
“Every time, I see them first.”
Silence.
Not empty. Not angry. Wounded. You heard Fizz inhale, and even that sounded like it hurt.
The darkness shifted with the faintest sound of fabric against the floor.
Fizz spoke immediately.
“I’m kneeling,” he said. “That’s all. I’m still not touching you. I’m in front of you, maybe three feet away.”
You could not see him. That helped and hurt.
“I’m gonna ask something,” he continued, voice thin but steady. “You can say no.”
Your teeth chattered.
“Can I hold your hands?”
The question hung there. Your wrists burned harder. No, said the punishment room. No, said Mammon’s voice. No, said every locked door inside you.
But beneath all of that was another memory. Fizz at nine years old, grabbing your hands after you landed a trick, jumping in place because he was more excited than you were. Fizz at eleven, palms sticky from stolen apples. Fizz at fifteen, fingers brushing yours behind the tent and both of you pretending it meant nothing because childhood was ending and neither of you knew what to do with the tenderness beginning to replace it.
Your hands shook in the dark.
“Yes,” you whispered.
Fizz did not move right away.
“Okay,” he said, almost inaudible. “I’m reaching now.”
His fingers touched yours like a question.
Your whole body flinched. He stopped immediately.
“Still okay?”
You forced air into your lungs.
“Yes.”
His hands closed around yours.
Not tight. Not restraining. Just enough pressure to tell your body where he was. His palms were warm, the cybernetic fingers soft, the structure beneath not like the robots because these hands trembled. The robots had never trembled. They had never hesitated. They had never waited for permission.
Fizz’s thumbs moved slowly over the inside of your wrists.
You nearly pulled away.
He felt it and stilled.
“Too much?”
You swallowed a sob.
“No.”
His thumbs resumed, light circles over the places where fear lived.
“I’m not them,” he said.
The words broke something in you because they were true and not enough.
“I’m Fizz.”
You squeezed your eyes shut tighter even though the room was dark.
“I’m the real Fizz,” he said, voice shaking now. “The one who used to sneak apples from the kitchen because you always forgot breakfast.”
A memory flickered through the dark, red peel under dirty fingernails, his grin bright with triumph.
“The one who laughed so hard he fell off the trapeze platform when you accidentally kicked Blitz in the face.”
A cracked sound left you, half sob, half laugh.
“He deserved it,” you whispered.
Fizz made a sound like the words had punched the air out of him.
“Yeah,” he said, crying now, no longer able to hide it. “He probably did.”
Your fingers tightened around his.
“The one who thought you were the coolest acrobat in the whole damn circus,” he said. “The one who used to follow you around so much you threatened to tie me to a tent pole.”
“You liked it.”
“I liked you.”
The dark went soft and terrible around you.
Fizz’s thumbs stroked your wrists again.
“I’m him,” he said. “I’m still him. I know I don’t look the same, and I know my stupid face got turned into something it never should’ve been, but I’m here. I’m Fizz, and I swear to you, I’ll never hurt you.”
Something inside you cracked. It broke like rotten wood under too much weight, like a door finally giving way after years of being braced shut.
You opened your eyes.
The emergency lights flickered on.
Dim red washed the storage room in low color, catching on sequins, metal racks, Fizz’s striped hat, the wet tracks down his face. He was kneeling in front of you, smaller than you had ever seen him, hands wrapped around yours like he was holding something breakable and holy.
For the first time, his face arrived second.
First came the circus. First came apples. First came a boy on a trapeze platform laughing so hard he could not breathe.
Then came the scarred, painted, living face in front of you.
Fizz.
A sob tore out of you. You grabbed the front of his jacket so abruptly he lurched forward, eyes widening.
Your fist hit his chest. Weakly. Once. Twice.
“You idiot,” you sobbed.
Fizz stared at you, stunned. Another trembling hit.
“So stupid.”
“I—yeah,” he choked, tears slipping down his cheeks. “Probably.”
“I missed you,” you said, and the words ruined you.
His face crumpled.
“I missed you too.”
Your fists lost their strength and curled into his shirt instead.
“I wish,” you tried, but grief stole the rest. You dragged in a breath that scraped all the way down. “I wish Mammon had never used your face.”
Fizz broke.
Not dramatically, not in a way that belonged on stage. He broke quietly and completely, his mouth twisting, shoulders folding inward, tears spilling over without permission. He leaned forward, stopped himself with a visible jerk, and even then, even through the worst of it, he asked.
“Can I hold you?”
You nodded before fear could answer first.
His arms came around you. Slow. Careful. Real.
You tensed so hard pain shot across your shoulders. Your body waited for the grip to change, for the warmth to become force, for the familiar betrayal of a beloved shape turning cruel. Fizz felt the tension and loosened immediately, making room for you to leave.
You did not leave.
Nothing happened. No pain. No laughter. No punishment.
Only Fizz’s arms trembling around you, his face buried against your shoulder, his breath breaking as he cried into the fabric of your shirt. Only warmth. Only the steady, living weight of someone who was just as ruined by the room as you were, someone holding you together while shaking apart.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so fucking sorry you had to go through that.”
You pressed your face into his jacket.
“It wasn’t you.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t you.”
“I know,” he said again, voice wrecked. “But it was my face.”
You pulled back just enough to look at him.
The red emergency light painted him in shadows. For a moment, fear moved behind your ribs, old and automatic, but grief moved with it, and memory, and something fragile that might one day become trust if neither of you crushed it by trying to name it too soon.
“It’s your face,” you said.
Fizz went still. You lifted one shaking hand, stopped before touching him.
His breath caught.
“Can I?” you asked.
He nodded too quickly, then slowed himself down.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
Your fingers touched his cheek.
His skin was warm beneath the paint. Not metal. Not molded material. Not some manufactured copy designed to perform cruelty with cheerful precision. Warm skin, damp with tears, alive beneath your hand.
Fizz closed his eyes.
You traced the edge of his cheek with your thumb.
“It’s your face,” you said again, less certain than before but wanting it to be true, choosing to put the words somewhere your body might find them later.
Fizz made a sound too small to be a laugh.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Mine.”
The lights came back fully five minutes later. Neither of you moved. Someone knocked eventually, far away through the door, and Asmodeus’s voice rumbled gently from the hall.
“Everything okay in there?”
You and Fizz looked at each other.
His hands were still careful on your back. Yours were still fisted in his jacket.
For once, you answered before he did.
“No,” you said, voice raw.
Fizz’s mouth twitched.
Then you added, “But we’re okay.”
Outside, Asmodeus went quiet.
When he spoke again, his voice was soft enough to make something ache.
“Take your time.”
You did. Healing did not happen overnight.
The next morning, Fizz’s face still made your heart race. His laugh still startled you when it came too suddenly. The sight of his hands moving too fast could still send cold through your fingers. Some days the robots got there first, stepping between you and the present with stolen smiles and remembered dark.
But not every day. Not every time.
Sometimes, before the fear, there was Fizz upside down on a trapeze platform. Sometimes there was a half-stolen apple. Sometimes there was the boy who used to look at you like you hung the stars over the circus tent with your own hands.
Fizz noticed the difference in tiny ways.
You stopped leaving every room he entered. You started answering when he asked simple questions. One day, without thinking, you handed him a prop directly instead of setting it on the table between you. Both of you froze. His fingers closed around it carefully, nowhere near yours.
You said, “Don’t make a thing out of it.”
His eyes shone.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He absolutely made a thing out of it later, silently, in his dressing room, where he pressed both hands over his mouth and cried for thirty seconds before fixing his makeup and going onstage like nothing had happened.
A week after that, you laughed at one of his terrible jokes.
Two weeks later, you sat beside him on purpose, closer this time.
A month later, during a late rehearsal, your hand brushed his on the edge of a prop table and you did not pull away immediately. Fizz went so still he might have been carved from wax.
You glanced at him.
“You can breathe.”
He exhaled all at once.
“Wasn’t sure.”
“I noticed.”
His smile was small and nervous.
“Can I hold your hand?”
Your body answered with fear first, because it always did. A tightening in the chest. A warning in the wrists. A door slamming somewhere in memory.
But fear was no longer the only voice in the room.
You looked at his hand, palm open, waiting. Then you placed yours in it. Fizz’s fingers closed gently around you.
Not restraining. Just holding.
Your pulse hammered. Your skin remembered. Your body braced for pain that did not come. Fizz sat beside you under the rehearsal lights, thumb still until you nodded, then moving in the slow, careful circles that had become a language between you.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I will be.”
Fizz swallowed, eyes bright.
“Yeah,” he said. “You will.”
Little by little, his face stopped belonging only to your trauma.
It did not become simple. It did not become clean. Mammon had carved too deep for that, and some wounds did not vanish just because someone kind laid a hand near them. There were still nights when you woke choking on the dark. There were still rehearsals when Fizz had to leave because his voice was too much and you hated yourself for asking. There were still moments when a reflection caught wrong in a mirror and turned him briefly into something your body wanted to survive.
But there were other moments too.
Fizz saving you the blue mug because he had noticed you used it on bad days.
You adjusting the bells on his costume because one of them kept catching and he was too impatient to fix it properly.
Fizz teaching you how to tell the difference between his real laugh and his stage laugh.
You telling him, quietly, that the robots never got his real laugh right.
He cried when you said that.
You pretended not to notice until he nudged your shoulder and accused you of being emotionally devastating on purpose.
“You’re dramatic,” you said.
“I’m a performer.”
“You’re a menace.”
“You missed me.”
You looked at him then, really looked.
His grin faltered under the weight of your attention, going softer, uncertain around the edges. There was fear in him too. You were learning that. Fear that he would move wrong, speak wrong, laugh wrong. Fear that one bad day would undo every good one. Fear that love would not be enough to outlast what Mammon had made of him.
You reached for his hand.
“I did,” you said.
Fizz stared at your joined fingers.
Then he looked at you like the stage had gone dark and you were the only light left on.
“I missed you too,” he said.
It was not a cure. Love was not a cure. Trust was not a door, freedom was not a door, healing was not a door.
They were all hallways. Long ones. Dark ones sometimes. The kind where lights flickered and old ghosts waited in corners, wearing familiar faces, using familiar voices, promising that the past was stronger than anything you could build after it.
But Fizz walked with you. Never ahead, pulling. Never behind, pushing.
Beside you, asking first, waiting when waiting hurt, staying when staying hurt, loving you without demanding that love become proof of recovery.
── .✦ ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
✦ blurb — When Lucifer finds you sick and burning up on the couch, the King of Hell can’t fix everything with magic. So he does the next best thing, he stays.
Lucifer came home talking before the front door had even finished opening.
“Honey, I’m home. I went shopping with Charlie. Some rude people out there! I can’t believe Charlie turns to me, completely serious, and says, ‘Dad, please don’t threaten the man with eternal consequences,’ as if that was not an incredibly reasonable response to someone cutting in line,” he called from the entrance, his voice bright with the kind of delighted offense only Charlie could bring out of him. “I mean, really, eternal was clearly an exaggeration, I was thinking three weeks at most.”
Usually, you would have answered from the living room before he even made it past the doorway. Usually, you would have laughed or asked what the poor stranger had done to deserve him, or told him that threatening citizens probably did count as abuse of royal power, no matter how creative the punishment was.
Today, there was nothing.
Lucifer’s smile faded before he realized it had.
The apartment was too quiet. Not peaceful, not comfortably still in the way it sometimes was when you were reading, but strangely heavy, like the rooms had been holding their breath for hours. He paused near the entrance, one hand still resting on the doorframe, his eyes moving from the untouched lamp near the hallway to the half-open book abandoned on the side table, then toward the living room where the faint golden glow of the fireplace stretched across the floor.
“Darling?”
No answer.
He found you on the couch.
You were curled beneath a blanket that had slipped halfway down your shoulder, your body tucked tightly into the corner as though you had fallen asleep trying to make yourself warm and given up before you managed it. A book rested open against your chest, one hand still loosely curled over the pages, and the mug of tea on the coffee table had gone completely cold, the surface dark and untouched beneath the dim light.
At first, Lucifer only softened.
You looked exhausted, a little crumpled, your hair messy against the cushion and your face turned slightly toward the fire, and for one quiet second he simply knelt beside the couch with a fond smile, already preparing some gentle teasing about how you had once again lost a battle against sleep.
Then he brushed a strand of hair away from your face.
His smile disappeared.
Your skin was too warm. Far too warm. His hand moved immediately to your forehead, then to your cheek, his brows drawing together as the heat beneath his palm confirmed what his heart had already understood.
“Oh… sweetheart.”
Your lashes fluttered at the sound of his voice, but you did not wake properly, only shifting with a small, uncomfortable sound that made his chest tighten. The book slipped from your hand, and Lucifer caught it quietly, setting it aside without looking away from you.
“Darling,” he murmured, softer now, one hand settling carefully against your shoulder. “Wake up for me, just a little.”
You stirred slowly, fighting your way through fever-heavy sleep, your eyes opening halfway before closing again almost immediately.
“Luci?”
“I’m here.” His voice stayed gentle, though the worry beneath it sharpened with every second. “How long have you been feeling like this?”
You frowned, as if the question had to travel a very long distance before it reached you.
“Like what?”
“Like a furnace in a blanket.”
You made a weak noise that might have been a laugh if your throat had not clearly hurt.
“I’m fine.”
“Of course,” he said, with the strained patience of someone who absolutely did not believe you. “That must be why you’re unconscious on the couch with tea you didn’t drink.”
“I was resting my eyes.”
“For several hours?”
“Yep.”
Despite himself, Lucifer let out a short laugh, though it did nothing to ease the tension in his face. You tried to push yourself upright, probably to prove some point neither of you had agreed on, but the moment you lifted your head, the room seemed to tilt around you. Your shoulders swayed, your hand missed the edge of the couch entirely, and Lucifer caught you before you could slide sideways into the cushions.
“Easy,” he said, one arm immediately braced behind your back.
“I’m okay.”
“You just nearly fell over.”
“I did not.”
“You did, majestically at that.”
Even feverish, you managed to open one eye and glare at him.
“That was rude.”
“That was accurate.”
He helped you sit back against the cushions, keeping one hand near your shoulder in case your body decided to betray you again, then reached for the cold tea, frowned at it, and set it aside with visible disapproval.
“When did this start?”
You blinked at him.
“Earlier.”
“Earlier when?”
“I don’t know, earlier.”
“Helpful.”
You coughed into the blanket, and the sound was rough enough to make his expression shift again, all humor thinning beneath something older. He touched your forehead once more, then your neck, checking your temperature with a focus that made you realize his slow panic was not the frantic uncertainty of someone who did not know what to do. It was the fear of someone who knew exactly why he needed to act.
“Did you eat today?”
You hesitated.
Lucifer’s eyes narrowed.
“Darling.”
“I had toast.”
“When?”
“Morning.”
“It’s evening.”
“I was busy being sick.”
“That is not a meal plan.”
You tried to protest, but another cough stole the words from you, and by the time it faded, your eyes had gone glassy with exhaustion. Lucifer’s hand found your back instinctively, rubbing slow circles between your shoulders until your breathing settled again.
“Water?”
“A little.”
“How much is a little?”
You gave him a deeply unconvincing look.
He sighed.
“I’m going to pretend that answer was less concerning than it clearly is.”
“I’m not dying.”
“I am aware you are not dying,” he replied, though his voice softened at the way your fingers had begun clutching the blanket. “But you are burning with fever, barely coherent, dehydrated, and very determined to annoy me by pretending you’re fine.”
You sank deeper into the couch.
“Sounds like me.”
“Unfortunately.”
His expression gentled. For a moment, he looked past you rather than at you, and something in his face changed, as though he had been pulled suddenly into another room, another century, another bedside. You could almost see the memory pass over him, the practiced movements returning to his hands, the careful voice, the quiet assessment of symptoms and blankets and water and fever.
Charlie, you realized.
Of course.
Lucifer had been a father long before he had been your lover. He had sat through childhood fevers, sleepless nights, tiny hands refusing medicine, stubborn little voices insisting they were not tired while already half-asleep. He knew this rhythm. He knew what came next.
That should have reassured you.
Instead, it made your throat tighten.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered.
His gaze snapped back to yours.
“For what?”
“Making you worry.”
Lucifer stared at you for a second, then shook his head with such immediate disapproval that you almost smiled.
“No. Absolutely not. We are not doing that.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“You’re sick, sweetheart, not committing treason.”
“Feels like treason.”
“That would be the fever.”
You tried to sit up straighter again, determined for reasons even you could no longer explain.
“I can go upstairs.”
“You can barely remain upright on a couch.”
“I can walk.”
Lucifer’s brows lifted.
“Can you?”
“Yes.”
He watched as you pushed the blanket aside and placed your feet on the floor, your jaw tightening in concentration as though standing had become a strategic military operation. You managed half a second upright before your knees softened, and Lucifer caught you before you had time to fall, one arm around your waist, the other steadying your shoulder.
He looked down at you.
You looked up at him.
“…Still feeling independent?”
You grumbled something into his chest.
“I’m going to assume that was a heartfelt apology for doubting me.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know.”
Without another word, he slipped one arm beneath your knees and the other around your back, lifting you effortlessly against him. You made a weak sound of protest, mostly because some stubborn part of you still insisted on being difficult, but your body had clearly chosen a side, and it settled against him with embarrassing relief.
“I’m not a baby.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to carry me.”
“I know.”
“You’re still doing it.”
“Absolutely.”
You rested your forehead against his shoulder, defeated by his warmth, by the secure hold of his arms, by the soft brush of his coat beneath your cheek.
“You’re impossible.”
“So Charlie keeps telling me.”
He carried you toward the stairs slowly, one hand rubbing gentle circles against your back while your head grew heavier against his shoulder with every step. You could feel the steady rhythm of him beneath your cheek, his breath careful and controlled, his grip firm without being tight, and for the first time since waking up, you stopped trying to prove you were all right.
You were not all right.
Lucifer knew.
And somehow, that made it easier to stop pretending.
By the time he reached your shared bedroom, you were almost asleep again, fever dragging you down in slow, heavy waves. He lowered you onto the bed with a care that made your chest ache, tucking the pillows behind you so you were slightly raised, then stepped away only long enough to move through the room with quiet purpose.
Windows opened just enough to let cool air circulate without turning the room cold. A fresh glass of water appeared within arm’s reach. A basin was placed discreetly near the bed in case your stomach turned. He removed the heavy blanket from your legs, replaced it with something lighter, then rested a cool cloth against your forehead before you could ask where he had even found one.
You blinked up at him, feverish and impressed despite yourself.
“You’re… really good at this.”
Lucifer paused while adjusting the edge of the blanket around your waist.
His expression softened.
“I had a lot of practice.”
You understood without needing him to say her name.
“Charlie?”
“She caught every cold imaginable when she was little,” he said, smoothing the cloth gently against your forehead. “I used to think she was collecting them out of spite.”
You laughed weakly, then winced when it made your throat hurt.
“I can’t picture the Princess of Hell throwing tantrums over medicine.”
“Oh, she absolutely did.” Lucifer’s mouth curved with fond remembrance as he sat beside you and lifted the glass of water. “She once accused me of betraying her because cough syrup tasted like banana.”
“That sounds like her.”
“It did taste terrible, to be fair.”
You accepted the water because refusing seemed impossible under his watchful gaze, and he only made you take small sips, patient enough to let you breathe between each one. When you turned your face away after a few mouthfuls, he did not force more, only set the glass back down and brushed damp hair away from your temple.
“Good.”
“That was barely anything.”
“It was more than nothing.”
“You’re easy to impress.”
“When you’re sick, yes.”
He brought broth later, warm but not too hot, and held the bowl while you managed a few spoonfuls. When your throat hurt too much to speak, he filled the silence himself, telling you little stories about Charlie as a child, about the time she insisted she was not sleepy and fell asleep mid-sentence, about the night she demanded five “last” bedtime stories and then cried because the characters in the fourth one did not hug at the end, about how she used to wrap herself in blankets until only her eyes were visible and declare herself a royal cocoon.
You smiled despite the fever.
Lucifer noticed every time.
He kept talking.
Not too loudly, not too fast, only enough to keep the room gentle, enough to keep you from sinking too deeply into the discomfort of your own body. Every few minutes he checked the cloth on your forehead, replacing it before it warmed too much, his fingers cool and careful against your skin. When you started shivering, he added another blanket. When the heat rose again, he folded it back. He seemed to know exactly when to intervene and when to simply sit beside you, present without hovering, attentive without making you feel helpless.
It was strange, being cared for like that.
Not because no one had ever helped you before, but because Lucifer did it as though your comfort was not a burden, not an interruption, not something he had to squeeze between more important things. He moved through every small task with quiet certainty, and each one said the same thing more clearly than any grand declaration could have.
I’ve got you.
At some point, when your fever made you restless and your eyes hurt too much to read, he picked up your abandoned book from earlier and began reading aloud. His voice was softer than usual, stripped of theatricality, warm enough to make the words blur pleasantly at the edges. You barely followed the story, drifting in and out while his hand rested near yours on the blanket, close enough that your fingers eventually found his.
He stopped reading for half a second when you held onto him.
Then he continued, quieter.
Night settled fully around the room.
You slept in fragments, waking every hour or so to water, cool cloths, murmured reassurances and Lucifer’s steady presence beside the bed. Sometimes he was sitting in the chair with your book open in his lap. Sometimes he was standing near the window, watching the city through the narrow gap in the curtains. Once, you woke to find him arranging a small row of rubber ducks on the bedside table, each one wearing a tiny nurse hat.
You stared at them.
He froze with one in his hand.
“…Y/n?”
You closed your eyes again.
“They’re cute.”
“They’re medical professionals.”
“Of course.”
“They went to school.”
“I’m sure they did.”
You fell asleep to the sound of him laughing softly.
Much later, sometime deep into the night, you woke shivering. The fever had started to break, leaving your skin damp and your body exhausted in a new, hollow way. The room was dim, the lamp turned low, and Lucifer sat beside the bed with his sleeves rolled up, hair slightly disheveled, book forgotten in one hand.
He looked up instantly.
“Hey,” he murmured. “There you are.”
Your voice came out rough.
“Have you slept?”
He blinked.
“I blinked for a while.”
“That’s not sleeping.”
“Almost the same.”
“Luci.”
He sighed, caught.
“No.”
You shifted weakly beneath the blankets, guilt settling heavily beneath your ribs.
“You should.”
“I will.”
“You won’t.”
“Eventually.”
“You’re impossible.”
“We covered that earlier.”
You looked at him for a long moment, taking in the tiredness beneath his smile, the dark smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, the way he still reached for the water before you even asked.
“I feel bad.”
His face changed immediately.
“Why?”
“You’ve been taking care of me all night.”
“Yes.”
“I’m ruining your week.”
Lucifer stared at you like the sentence made no sense whatsoever.
“You’ve improved it.”
You blinked.
“I’m feverish, not delusional.”
“I’m serious.”
“Lucifer.”
“I like taking care of you.”
The words came out simple, almost obvious, and that was what made them land so softly. He set the book aside, leaned closer and brushed your hair back from your forehead, his hand lingering there for a moment as if checking your temperature had become an excuse to touch you gently.
“I spent centuries trying to solve impossible problems,” he said, a small smile tugging at his mouth. “Making sure you drink enough water is refreshingly achievable.”
Your throat tightened.
“That’s a very strange way to be romantic.”
“I’m a very strange man.”
“You are.”
“And I love you.”
The words were not dramatic. He did not say them like a revelation, or a performance, or a desperate attempt to make the moment bigger than it needed to be. He said them like a fact, warm and steady, something that had already been true long before he gave it sound.
“As long as you’re sick,” he continued, thumb brushing gently along your temple, “let me take care of you.”
You closed your eyes, overwhelmed in a way the fever had nothing to do with.
“Okay.”
He leaned forward and kissed your forehead, careful and lingering.
“Good.”
You reached for his hand beneath the blanket, and he gave it to you without hesitation. This time, when sleep pulled at you again, you did not fight it.
Morning arrived softly.
The first thing you noticed was that your body no longer felt like it had been filled with fire. Everything still ached, your throat still hurt, and exhaustion sat heavily in your limbs, but the sharp, awful heat had faded into something manageable. The second thing you noticed was Lucifer.
He had not left.
He was asleep in the chair beside the bed, though calling it sleep felt generous. His head was tilted at an uncomfortable angle, his hair was an absolute disaster, his shirt was wrinkled, one sleeve still rolled higher than the other, and his hand remained loosely wrapped around yours as though even unconscious, he had refused to let go.
The sight made your chest ache.
You squeezed his fingers gently.
His eyes opened at once.
“Are you okay?”
His voice was rough from lack of sleep, and you could not help smiling.
“Good morning to you too.”
He straightened too quickly, winced, then immediately pretended he had not hurt his neck.
“Fever?”
“Better.”
He stood, leaned over you and pressed the back of his fingers to your forehead. The tension in his shoulders loosened almost immediately.
“Much better.”
You laughed softly, and this time it did not hurt as much.
Lucifer’s expression warmed.
“There you are.”
You reached up, brushing a messy strand of hair away from his face.
“You look terrible.”
“I’ll have you know this is the height of exhausted devotion.”
“It suits you.”
“Everything suits me.”
You smiled, then let your hand fall back against the blanket, too tired to keep it raised.
“Thank you.”
His expression softened so completely that for a moment, he looked almost shy.
“Anytime.”
He kissed your forehead again, then your temple, then your hand because apparently he had decided one kiss was insufficient now that you were well enough to notice. You let him, warm beneath the blankets, surrounded by water glasses, folded cloths, a half-empty bowl of broth and a line of tiny nurse ducks standing proudly on the bedside table.
Lucifer followed your gaze to them.
“They performed admirably.”
“I’m sure they did.”
A quiet beat passed.
Then his eyes brightened.
“So…”
You narrowed yours.
“…Yes?”
“I think you’ve earned pancakes.”
You stared at him.
“I thought you were going to say soup.”
“I considered it.”
“But?”
“Pancakes make people happier.”
“And that’s medical advice?”
“No.”
He smiled, tired and soft and entirely too pleased with himself.
“It’s husband advice.”
You tried to look unimpressed, but the smile betrayed you before you could stop it.
“Are the ducks helping?”
“They are supervising.”
“Of course they are.”
Lucifer turned toward the door, already halfway into planning breakfast, then paused when your fingers tightened around his.
“Stay a little longer?”
The request was quiet, almost embarrassed, but he heard it.
The pancakes could wait.
Everything could wait.
He climbed carefully onto the bed beside you, still in yesterday’s clothes, still exhausted, still watching you as though making sure the fever would not dare return under his supervision. You shifted closer, resting your head against him, and his arm wrapped around you with immediate, familiar tenderness.
Outside the bedroom, Hell continued being Hell, loud and restless and burning in all the usual ways.
Inside, there was only the cool morning light, the faint clink of tiny rubber ducks on the bedside table, Lucifer’s hand moving gently over your back, and the quiet, simple miracle of being loved exactly where you were, weak, tired, sick, and safe.
── .✦ ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
Here's another little sneak peek at some of the stories currently living in my queue.
✦ 𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘴 (One-shot)
Lucifer × Female!Reader
When Lucifer finds you sick and burning up on the couch, the King of Hell can't fix everything with magic. So he does the next best thing—he stays.
✦ 𝘞𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘍𝘢𝘤𝘦 (One-shot)
Fizzarolli × Female!Reader
Seeing Fizzarolli again should feel like coming home. Instead, after Mammon turned his face into your worst nightmare, learning to trust the real Fizz becomes the hardest kind of healing.
✦ 𝘋𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘨𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (Drabble)
Adam × Female!Reader
Adam refuses to help you dig up a restricted Heaven report... until one shameless offer sends every coherent thought in his head straight into free fall.
✦ 𝘉𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘉𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦 (One-shot)
Vox × Female!Reader
You loved Vox before Hell feared him, before his name ruled every screen, before ambition turned him into someone cold enough to break you. Years later, you return as an Overlord built from the wreckage he left behind—powerful, merciless, and determined to make him feel every wound he gave you. But revenge doesn't heal what love destroyed, and when Vox finally chooses you over his pride, his empire, and his oldest obsession, you're forced to face the most painful truth of all: you never stopped loving him.
As always, thank you for your patience while I slowly work through my drafts, requests, and ongoing series. I can't wait to share these with you. 🤍
✦ blurb — Vox has always known how to turn fear into ratings. But when one of his broadcasts sends you spiraling in front of him, he’s forced to face the damage his voice can leave behind.
The first thing you learned about loving Vox was that silence rarely existed around him.
Even when he wasn’t speaking, even when he wasn’t in the room, some part of him always was. His voice lived in elevator speakers, crawled through city billboards, flashed across every screen in the Vee Tower with the ease of something that had made itself impossible to escape. Vox did not simply occupy space, he broadcasted through it, filling every empty corner with news clips, jingles, interviews, breaking updates, public statements and advertisements so polished they almost stopped sounding like lies.
At first, it had unsettled you.
It was hard for it not to.
You had arrived in Hell already tired of loud things, already carrying too many memories of sirens, arguments, doors slamming hard enough to rattle walls, voices rising until your body learned to brace itself before your mind understood why. Hell was not kind to people like that. Hell was all noise, all hunger, all bright sharp edges and sudden movement, and Vox had built an empire out of knowing exactly how to make the whole city look up when he wanted it to.
Still, somewhere along the way, you had learned the difference between Vox on screen and Vox beside you.
That difference was why you were still here.
Tonight, he was in his office, seated behind his desk with one hand propping up the edge of his screen while the other flicked through messages on a glowing tablet. His tie was slightly loosened, not enough to look careless, just enough to prove the day had stretched longer than he had intended, and the harsh glow of his monitors softened every now and then when he glanced toward you on the couch.
You had claimed that couch hours ago.
It sat along the far wall of his office, expensive, uncomfortable in a way only designer furniture managed to be, but familiar enough by now that you had curled into the corner of it with your legs tucked beneath you, one of Vox’s spare jackets draped over your lap, your cheek resting against the armrest while the city shimmered beyond the glass behind him. A half-empty mug sat untouched on the low table nearby, steam long gone, and your phone lay facedown beside it because you were too tired to answer anyone.
Vox’s news played on the largest screen to your left.
It always did.
At some point, you had stopped asking him to turn it off, because the broadcast was less something he watched and more something he breathed through. Numbers, headlines, engagement rates, audience reactions, live comments, market shifts, public sentiment, all of it moved around him constantly, a pulse he never seemed to fully disconnect from. You didn’t like all of it. You never had. You had told him once that his network made everything sound like the end of the world, and he had grinned without apology, saying, “Yeah, sweetheart, that’s how you keep people watching.”
You had rolled your eyes.
He had kissed the side of your head.
That was Vox.
Cruel to the world in a way he called strategy, sharp enough to cut people apart from behind a desk, but strangely careful with you when no one else was looking. He remembered which lighting gave you headaches and dimmed the office without being asked. He lowered his voice when you were tired, even if he pretended not to notice he was doing it. He kept a drawer stocked with your favorite snacks and acted offended whenever you thanked him, as though basic consideration were beneath his brand.
You had learned to live with the noise because some part of it felt like him, familiar, constant, impossible to ignore.
Tonight, that familiarity almost comforted you.
The anchor on screen spoke in Vox’s polished cadence, one of his many employees trained to sound urgent without ever sounding uncontrolled. Headlines scrolled across the bottom of the broadcast, glowing red and white against a sleek black background, while footage of Pentagram City flashed in measured intervals behind him. Vox glanced up every few minutes, corrected a caption with a sharp gesture, sent a note to someone through his tablet, then returned to whatever report he had been rewriting.
“You’re quiet,” he said eventually, not looking away from the tablet.
“You say that like it’s suspicious.”
“It is suspicious. You usually complain at least twice by now.”
“I’m too tired to complain.”
His eyes flicked toward you.
“That bad?”
You shifted deeper into the couch, pulling his jacket a little higher over your lap.
“Long day.”
“Need me to fire someone?”
“No.”
“Threaten someone?”
“No.”
“Ruin someone’s week?”
You smiled faintly into the couch cushion.
“Tempting, but no.”
He hummed, clearly disappointed.
“Your loss.”
The moment passed softly, easily, the way your quiet moments with him often did when the world outside his office remained safely behind glass. Vox returned to work, you let your eyes drift half-closed, and the broadcast rolled on in the background, its rhythm familiar enough that you almost stopped hearing the words.
Almost.
At first, the change was subtle.
The anchor’s tone sharpened, rising just slightly beneath the polished delivery, while the music beneath the segment shifted into something lower, more urgent. You heard the difference before you understood it, the way the sound pressed against the edges of the room, the way the captions flashed faster, the way the footage cut more often between crowded streets, damaged storefronts, angry faces turned toward cameras.
You kept your eyes closed.
It was just another segment.
Vox always made everything dramatic.
A minor turf dispute became a citywide power vacuum. A broken window became evidence of collapsing public safety. One Overlord’s vague statement became a direct threat to every resident within broadcast range if Vox decided it would spike engagement. You knew this. You had heard him explain it with infuriating confidence, like fear was a color palette he knew exactly how to apply.
The anchor’s voice continued.
“—citizens are advised to remain alert as tensions rise across several districts tonight, with sources warning that violence could spread without notice—”
Your fingers tightened around the edge of Vox’s jacket.
“—unconfirmed reports suggest multiple groups may already be preparing retaliation, raising serious questions about whether anyone in Pentagram City is truly safe—”
Your breathing changed before you realized it had.
Shallow.
Quick.
Barely there.
You opened your eyes, blinking against the glow of the screen. The footage had changed again, showing a shaky recording of sinners running through a street while someone screamed off-camera. Flames reflected in broken glass. Sirens wailed beneath the anchor’s voice, layered low enough to feel distant but close enough that your body heard them anyway.
Vox was still working.
He hadn’t noticed.
“—officials are refusing to comment, which, frankly, should worry everyone watching—”
Your chest tightened.
Not pain exactly.
Pressure.
Like something heavy had been placed over your ribs and was slowly being pushed down.
You shifted on the couch, trying to sit up, but the movement made the room tilt just enough that you immediately stopped. Your hands felt strange. Too light, then too cold, then too aware of every piece of fabric beneath your fingers. The broadcast kept going, louder now, or maybe it only felt louder because your body had started listening to every single word.
“—if you live near the affected districts, ask yourself this, who is protecting you tonight?”
Your mouth went dry.
You tried to inhale properly.
The breath caught halfway.
Vox’s voice cut into the broadcast then, not live in the room but through the screen, his recorded segment taking over with that familiar confidence that usually made the entire city feel like his stage.
“Pentagram City is on edge tonight,” he said, his image filling the screen, grin sharp, eyes bright, voice rich with manufactured concern. “And maybe it should be. Because when the people in power start hiding answers, when threats build behind closed doors, when violence is a pattern, the question isn’t whether something is coming.”
The screen flashed red.
“The question is whether you’ll be ready when it hits.”
Your heart slammed hard against your ribs.
You knew this voice.
You loved this voice.
You had fallen asleep against this voice on nights when he stayed late in the office, had laughed when it softened in private, had heard it turn smug, amused, tired, affectionate, impatient, warm. But now it was everywhere, surrounding you, filling the office, filling your head, bending every word toward fear with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times and never had to think about the cost.
Your ears started ringing.
You sat up too fast.
The jacket slid from your lap.
Vox noticed the movement but not the panic behind it.
“You okay?”
You tried to answer.
Nothing came out.
He looked back at his tablet, distracted.
“Use words, babe.”
You pressed one hand to your chest, fingers curling against the fabric of your shirt. The room felt too bright. The screen felt too close. Vox’s recorded voice kept speaking, smooth and urgent, images flashing behind him like warnings you could not outrun.
“—because the next attack, the next betrayal, the next body on the pavement might not be in someone else’s district—”
You walked, or tried to. Your knees weakened immediately.
The couch caught you when you dropped back down, one hand gripping the cushion so hard your knuckles ached. Breathing should not have been this complicated. You knew how to breathe. You were breathing. Air was entering your lungs. It had to be. But it didn’t feel like enough. Every inhale came too fast, every exhale broke before it finished, and the more you tried to slow it down, the further away your body seemed to drift from you.
Vox finally looked up properly.
His screen flickered once.
“What are you doing?”
You shook your head, though you weren’t sure what you were trying to deny.
“I—”
The word collapsed into a sharp, broken breath.
His brows drew together.
“Hey.”
The broadcast continued behind him.
“—panic is not paranoia when danger is already at your door—”
You flinched.
Vox’s attention snapped toward the screen, then back to you, irritation crossing his face before concern could fully form.
“Can you not freak out right now? I’m in the middle of—”
You made a sound then, not a sob, not quite, more like your body trying to force air through a throat that had forgotten how to open.
Vox stopped.
For the first time, he actually looked at you.
You were hunched forward on the couch, one hand clawing at your shirt near your collarbone, the other gripping the cushion as though it were the only solid thing left in the room. Your eyes were wide but unfocused, fixed somewhere past him, your shoulders trembling with each shallow breath. The color had drained from your face, and when he said your name, you did not seem to hear him.
“Hey,” he said again, sharper now, standing from his desk. “Hey, look at me.”
You tried.
You really did.
Your gaze moved toward him, but the screen behind him flashed again, Vox’s recorded face looming over the room with polished urgency, and your body recoiled before your mind could tell it not to.
The realization did not hit him all at once.
It came in pieces.
Your shaking hands.
The broadcast.
His voice.
The timing.
The way your breathing hitched every time the segment sharpened, every time the words threat, attack, danger, body, unsafe crawled out of the speakers in his own cadence.
Vox turned slowly toward the screen.
His recorded self smiled back at him, perfectly lit, perfectly framed, perfectly in control.
“If they won’t tell you the truth,” the broadcast version of him said, “then I will.”
For once, the sound of his own voice made him feel sick.
“Oh.”
It was barely audible. But something in him changed.
The annoyance vanished from his face so completely it left him looking almost blank. He lifted a hand, and every screen in the office went dark at once. The silence that followed was immediate and brutal, the kind of silence that made the room feel much larger than it had been seconds before.
You kept shaking.
That was worse somehow.
The broadcast was gone, but your body had not caught up yet. Your breaths came in uneven bursts, too quick, too high in your chest, each one sounding like it hurt. Vox stood frozen for half a second longer, staring at you like he had just realized there was no script for this, no button he could press to cut to commercial, no audience to redirect.
Then he moved.
Too fast.
“Okay, okay, hey, it’s off,” he said, crossing the room quickly. “It’s off, you’re fine, see? Nothing’s happening.”
You flinched when he reached for you.
He stopped so abruptly the heel of his shoe scraped against the floor.
His hands hovered uselessly in the space between you.
“Shit.”
You squeezed your eyes shut, shaking your head.
“Can’t—”
“Can’t what?”
“Breathe.”
The word came out shredded. Vox’s chest tightened.
“Okay. Okay, you can breathe.” He crouched in front of you, then immediately realized that put him directly in your space and shifted back half a foot. “You can breathe. You’re doing it, just badly. Not—fuck, not badly, I mean—”
You made another broken sound.
He dragged one hand down his face, panic flickering across his screen in little glitches he couldn’t fully control.
“Great. Fantastic. Good job, Vox. Real comforting.”
You were not listening.
Your hands had moved from your shirt to your own arms, fingers digging hard enough into your skin that he leaned forward instinctively, then forced himself still before touching you.
“Hey,” he said, lowering his voice because the room had been too loud and he had been too loud and for once he understood that volume was not helping. “Look at the floor.”
You did not move.
“Not at me. Not at anything else. Just the floor. There’s a carpet. Ugly as hell, actually, Velvette picked it, don’t tell her I said that.”
Your breath hitched again, but your gaze dropped slightly.
Vox noticed.
“There. Good. Great. Floor’s still there. Couch is still there.” He glanced around, searching for anything, any instruction, any memory of something someone had once said about panic attacks that he had not cared enough to remember properly. “You’re in my office. We’re in the tower. The screens are off. Nothing’s happening.”
Your lips trembled.
“It feels like—”
“I know.”
He stopped himself. No, he didn’t. He didn’t know. That was the problem. His voice softened further.
“I don’t know,” he corrected, the words uncomfortable in his mouth. “But I’m here.”
Your eyes flicked toward him.
For a second, he thought you might pull away again. Instead, you whispered, “Too much.”
Vox nodded quickly, then forced himself to slow the motion when you winced.
“Right. Too much. I can do less.”
For a man who had built his entire personality on being too much, that seemed to cost him visible effort.
He dimmed the office lights with a small gesture, not fully dark, just softer. He shut down the scrolling data on his desk, silenced the notification pings from his tablet, and when the city outside kept flashing through the windows, he drew the blinds until the glass reflected only a muted version of the room back at you.
The quiet deepened.
You were still shaking, but the edges of the world felt slightly less sharp.
Vox sat on the floor in front of the couch, not touching you, close enough to be there but far enough to let you decide if you wanted him nearer. His hands rested open on his knees, fingers flexing once as though restraint physically irritated him.
“Okay,” he said, carefully. “I’m gonna breathe slower. You don’t have to match it if you can’t. Just listen.”
He inhaled. Too loudly. Too deliberately. You flinched. He grimaced.
“Sorry. Shit. Normal breathing. I can do normal.”
The absurdity of it might have been funny if you had not felt like you were drowning.
He tried again, quieter this time, drawing in a slow breath through his nose before letting it out through his mouth. He did it again. And again. No commands, no sharp instructions, no irritated edge when you could not follow immediately. Just breathing, steady and visible, his glowing eyes never leaving your face.
After a while, your breaths began to catch on his rhythm.
Not fully. Not cleanly. But enough.
The first deeper inhale hurt, scraping down your throat like your lungs had forgotten they could open that far. You coughed, tears slipping down your cheeks without warning, and Vox’s hands twitched again.
“Can I touch you?”
The question came out fast, then softer when he repeated it.
“Can I?”
You nodded once. Barely.
He moved like he was approaching something fragile enough to break if he breathed wrong. One hand settled lightly over yours, not gripping, not forcing your fingers open, just covering them with careful warmth. His thumb brushed once over your knuckles, then stopped, as though waiting to see if the motion made things worse.
It didn’t.
Your hand turned beneath his, fingers catching weakly around him. Vox went very still. Then his other hand lifted, slow enough for you to track it, and rested against your knee.
“There,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”
The words came automatically, and for once they were not branding, not performance, not the kind of thing he said because he knew exactly how it would land.
He meant them.
That frightened him more than he expected.
Little by little, your breathing steadied. The shaking remained, but it lost some of its violence, fading into tremors that rolled through you every few seconds. Your shoulders lowered. Your fingers stopped digging into your skin. You looked exhausted now, not safe exactly, not calm, but back inside your body enough to realize where you were.
Vox saw the moment you became aware of him again.
Your eyes lifted to his, red-rimmed and tired.
The look on your face nearly split him open.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered.
He stared at you.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“No.”
You flinched at the sharpness. He immediately softened.
“No, don’t apologize. Don’t do that.” His grip on your hand tightened, then eased when he caught himself. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
You looked away. He followed your gaze toward the dead black screen on the wall.
The office felt strange without it. Wrong, almost.
Vox had spent years surrounded by his own voice, by proof that he existed everywhere, that he controlled the conversation, that he could reach into every home in Hell and make people feel exactly what he wanted them to feel. Fear. Outrage. Hunger. Obsession. Dependence. He called it influence. He called it business. He called it staying ahead.
He had never called it harm.
Not when it happened to strangers. Not when ratings climbed. Not when the numbers proved him right.
Now the person sitting in front of him, the person he came back to after broadcasts ended, the person who knew what his face looked like when he was too tired to keep pretending everything amused him, had fallen apart with his voice still ringing in the room.
His own voice. His own words. His own machine.
“I did that,” he said quietly.
You did not answer. He wished you would deny it. You didn’t. That was worse. Vox looked down at your joined hands.
“I mean, not just tonight.” The admission crawled out of him slowly, ugly and reluctant, because every instinct told him to reframe, soften, spin, make it sound less damning than it was. He didn’t. “That broadcast, that whole segment, it was designed to do that. Maybe not to you specifically, but... yeah. Fear works. People watch longer when they’re scared. They click faster. They stay tuned. They buy whatever makes them feel prepared.”
His laugh came out empty.
“I know that. I’ve always known that.”
You closed your eyes.
He hated himself a little more.
“I lie,” he said, the words blunt now, stripped of their usual polish. “I exaggerate. I take something bad and make it sound worse because worse performs better. I make people feel like the world’s ending because panic is profitable, and I never cared what happened after they turned the screen off.”
His jaw tightened.
“Not really.”
The silence between you was heavy, but not empty. You sat with it because there was nothing kind to say that would also be honest.
Vox glanced up at you, and for once he looked almost afraid of the answer before asking the question.
“How long?”
Your brow furrowed faintly.
“How long has it been doing that to you?”
You swallowed.
The panic had left you drained, your voice rough around the edges when you finally spoke.
“I don’t know. A while.”
He flinched.
You looked at the blank screen.
“Not always like tonight. Usually it’s smaller. I get tense. I feel like something’s about to happen. Sometimes I have to leave the room, or I turn the volume down when you’re not looking, or I pretend I’m tired so I don’t have to keep listening.”
Vox’s hand went still over yours.
“You never said.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
You gave him a tired look.
“Because it’s your job.”
The words landed harder than an accusation. You weren’t angry. That almost made it worse.
“I knew who you were when I started loving you,” you continued, voice quiet, gaze lowered to where his hand still covered yours. “I knew what you did. I knew the broadcasts were manipulative, I knew you liked controlling the narrative, I knew you could make half the city panic with one headline if it suited you.”
He said nothing.
“I thought I could separate it. Vox on screen, Vox with me. I told myself those were different things.”
His screen dimmed faintly.
“Aren’t they?”
You looked at him.
“Sometimes.”
The answer hurt, and you could see it hurt, but he did not pull away.
You kept going because if you stopped now, the truth would only rot in the same place the fear had lived.
“Sometimes loving you means sitting beside the thing that hurts me most and pretending it doesn’t, because I know you’re not doing it to me. But my body doesn’t know the difference. It hears danger, and it believes it. It hears your voice saying everything is unsafe, everything is falling apart, everyone should be afraid, and it believes you.”
Vox looked like you had reached into him and pulled out something he did not want to see.
You breathed in slowly, still shaky.
“And then I feel stupid, because it’s just a broadcast, and it’s you, and I love you, and somehow that makes it worse.”
His fingers curled around yours. Not tight. Just enough.
“I don’t want loving me to hurt you.”
Your mouth trembled.
“It does sometimes.”
There was no cruelty in it. No punishment. Only exhaustion. Vox nodded once, though his expression had gone painfully still.
“Okay.”
You blinked.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” He looked toward the screen, then back at you. “Okay.”
“That’s not a very Vox answer.”
A faint, humorless smile flickered across his face.
“I’m trying not to turn this into a pitch.”
Despite everything, a tiny breath of laughter escaped you.
It was weak. Almost gone before it existed. Vox looked at you like it mattered anyway. Then his expression sobered.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m suddenly a good person because I had one emotional moment on the floor.” He glanced around the dim office with a tired, bitter edge to his mouth. “I’m still me. I still run a network. I still know what people respond to, and I’m not stupid enough to pretend Hell rewards honesty just because my girlfriend had a panic attack.”
You watched him carefully.
“But I can change what comes near you,” he said. “What plays in here. What plays at home. What I let my own voice sound like when you’re trying to rest.”
His thumb moved over your knuckles again, slow and grounding.
“And more than that, I can stop pretending fear is clean just because I don’t stick around to watch the fallout.”
Your throat tightened.
“Vox.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to use that shit on you.”
“You weren’t trying to.”
“I know,” he said, and this time his voice was sharper, not at you, but at himself. “That’s the part that sucks. I didn’t have to try. I built the whole thing so well it got you anyway.”
The office stayed quiet around you, no scrolling captions, no breaking news, no artificial urgency pressing at the walls. Vox looked strange without the glow of a dozen active screens behind him, less like an empire and more like a man sitting on the floor in front of someone he loved, realizing too late that control was not the same thing as care.
He lifted your hand, pausing long enough for you to pull away if you wanted to.
You didn’t.
He pressed his mouth to your knuckles, the gesture careful, almost awkward because softness was not something he performed often without making it theatrical.
“I choose you,” he said against your hand.
Your breath caught.
He looked up.
“I don’t mean in some grand, public, redemption-arc bullshit way. I’m not getting on air tomorrow to cry about ethical journalism.”
“That would be terrifying.”
“It would also tank my brand.”
You let out another shaky laugh, and this time his smile reached his eyes for half a second before fading into something more honest.
“But here,” he said, glancing around the office, then back to you, “with you, I choose you. If the noise hurts you, it goes off. If my voice makes the world feel unsafe, I shut up and learn how to make it feel safe again. If I forget, you tell me, and I don’t get to be a prick about it.”
“You’ll probably be a little prick about it.”
“Probably,” he admitted. “But less.”
“That’s your promise?”
“That’s my realistic promise.”
You were too tired to smile properly, but something in your face softened.
Vox saw it.
He always saw shifts in expression, micro-reactions, audience tells, emotional cues he had spent years exploiting. Tonight, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, he used that skill for something else. He used it to notice the way your shoulders still trembled when his voice got too fast. He used it to lower his tone before you had to ask. He used it to stay where he was instead of pushing closer just because he wanted to hold you.
“Can I sit with you?” he asked.
“You are sitting with me.”
“On the couch, smartass.”
You looked down at him on the floor, and something almost gentle passed through the exhaustion.
“Yeah.”
He moved slowly, carefully, climbing onto the couch beside you with none of his usual flourish. For a moment, he seemed uncertain where to place himself, which would have been funny under any other circumstance. Vox, who could control an entire broadcast empire without blinking, did not know how to sit next to his shaken girlfriend without looking like he was trying to defuse a bomb.
You solved it for him by leaning into his side.
He froze.
Then his arm wrapped around you.
The movement was tentative at first, then firmer when you did not flinch, drawing you against him until your cheek rested near his chest and his hand settled carefully along your back. His body was warm, solid, strangely quiet without the constant vibration of incoming messages and active feeds surrounding him. After a few seconds, his other hand lifted to your hair, not stroking yet, just resting there as if he needed the contact to convince himself you were still with him.
You closed your eyes.
Your body still felt wrung out, your limbs heavy, your chest sore from the force of breathing wrong for too long. Panic left behind its own kind of wreckage, invisible but exhausting, and you could feel it now in the tremor of your hands, in the hollow ache beneath your ribs, in the way every soft sound in the room seemed sharper than it should have.
Vox held you through it. No attempt to turn your recovery into something efficient. Just his arm around you, the low hum of his body beside yours, the blessed absence of his own voice coming from the wall.
After a while, he spoke.
Quietly.
“You should’ve told me.”
Your eyes opened. You started to pull back, but his arm tightened slightly, not trapping you, only asking you to stay.
“I know why you didn’t,” he added. “I’m just... pissed you felt like you couldn’t.”
“You don’t always make it easy.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
That honesty still sounded strange from him.
You let your eyes close again.
“I didn’t want to ask you to be someone else.”
His hand moved gently through your hair now, one slow pass that paused whenever your breathing shifted.
“You’re not.”
“I’m asking you to change something important.”
“You’re asking me not to hurt you.”
You went quiet. Vox looked down at you, his screen casting a faint blue glow over your face.
“That shouldn’t be a hard ask.”
Your fingers curled lightly against the front of his shirt.
“Maybe not.”
“It isn’t.”
For once, he did not sound like he was trying to win the argument.
He sounded like he needed you to believe him.
Minutes stretched.
The city carried on outside the blinds, Hell still loud beyond the tower, still violent, still hungry, still exactly the kind of place Vox knew how to command through fear. Nothing outside had changed. Tomorrow, there would be another crisis, another headline, another meeting where someone told him outrage was up twelve percent and fear-based retention was outperforming humor again. Tomorrow, Vox would still be Vox.
But tonight, the screen stayed dark.
That mattered.
He kept holding you until your breathing evened out completely, until the last tremors in your hands faded into tired stillness. At some point, his chin came to rest lightly against the top of your head, the gesture so careful it made your chest ache in a different way.
“I hated hearing my voice like that,” he admitted after a long while.
You shifted slightly.
“Like what?”
“When you were panicking.” His fingers stilled in your hair. “I hear myself everywhere. All the time. Usually I love it.”
“I know.”
“I sounded...” He searched for the word, and for once, none of the polished ones seemed useful. “Cruel.”
You did not answer immediately.
Then, softly, “You can be.”
He absorbed that.
“I don’t want to be cruel to you.”
“You weren’t.”
“The machine was.”
“You built the machine.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“Yeah.”
Your hand moved slowly over his shirt, not quite soothing him, not quite seeking comfort for yourself, something in between.
“You can build it differently,” you murmured.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can.”
You were quiet for so long that he thought you might have fallen asleep, drained by the panic and the aftermath, until your voice returned, faint but clear against him.
“No broadcasts in the bedroom.”
“Done.”
“No fear segments when I’m in here trying to rest.”
“Done.”
“And if I say it’s too much, you don’t argue.”
His mouth twitched faintly.
“Can I negotiate tone?”
“Vox.”
“Right. No arguing.”
You exhaled slowly.
“Thank you.”
His arms tightened around you in a way that felt less like possession than fear, less like control than the sudden understanding that holding something did not mean owning it, and keeping someone beside you required more care than confidence.
“Don’t thank me for the bare minimum,” he said.
A faint smile touched your mouth.
He stared at it like it was the first good rating he had seen all night.
The office remained dim around you, screens black, tablet silent, the whole empire briefly muted by one decision he had made without consulting numbers or projections. Vox’s hand moved slowly along your back, awkward at first, then steadier, learning the rhythm that helped your body settle. He had always known how to make people react. Tonight, he was learning how to help someone come back from a reaction he had caused.
It was clumsy.
It was late.
It mattered anyway.
Eventually, your breathing deepened, your cheek warm against his chest, your fingers still loosely caught in his shirt. Vox did not move, even when his leg started to go numb beneath you, even when a notification silently flashed on the dark tablet across the room, even when some restless part of him wanted to check whether the segment was still running successfully without him.
He stayed.
For once, he let the broadcast go on without his eyes.
Or maybe someone in the control room, sensing the sudden absence of direction, cut to another story. Maybe the city kept panicking. Maybe tomorrow he would have to untangle the mess, answer messages, rewrite scripts, make choices that would prove whether tonight had meant anything beyond guilt.
But not now.
Now there was only the dim office, the quiet after the broadcast, and you, exhausted but breathing steadily in his arms.
Vox looked toward the blank screen one last time.
His reflection stared back at him from the dark glass, softened by shadow, unlit by ratings, unseen by everyone except the person resting against him.
For the first time in years, he did not turn it back on.
ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
I'll be on vacation from Friday, July 17th until Monday, July 20th. I'll be spending a few days in Normandy, and I'm really looking forward to it!
During that time, I won't be checking Tumblr or replying to asks, messages, or comments. If you send me anything while I'm away, don't worry—I will get back to you once I'm home. 😊
After I return, I'll also be diving back into all of your 600 followers celebration requests. I can't wait to start writing them!
See you all in a few days, and take care until then. 🤍
— Blitzø is an impulsive disaster with questionable judgment and absolutely no sense of self-preservation. You wouldn't trade him for anyone.
✦ pairing — Blitzø x female!reader
✦ warnings — fluff
Blitzø was standing on his desk.
Not beside it. Not leaning against it. On it, arms spread wide, balancing on one foot while trying to prove he could throw a combat knife into the tiny gap between two ceiling pipes.
"Blitz," Moxxie said, pinching the bridge of his nose, "that is, by every conceivable definition, a terrible idea."
"Oh, relax, dad."
"You are going to lose a foot."
"I've got two."
Millie looked up just as Blitzø launched the knife.
It missed the pipes completely, ricocheted off a beam, clipped the office fan, bounced off the filing cabinet, sliced clean through a cardboard box labeled Tax Stuff, and buried itself in the wall barely an inch above Moxxie's head.
Silence.
Moxxie slowly turned toward Blitzø.
"...You missed."
"Barely."
Millie sighed, then glanced at you, who had watched the entire disaster unfold with your chin resting in your hand, the corners of your mouth lifted into a fond smile.
She blinked.
Then looked back at Blitzø, who was proudly pointing at the knife as though he'd planned every bounce.
Then back at you.
"...Are you sure he's the one?"
You didn't even hesitate.
"Absolutely."
Both of them stared.
You laughed softly, your eyes never leaving Blitzø.
"He's loud, impulsive, dramatic, and ninety percent of his plans should probably be illegal." You paused, your smile growing warmer as Blitzø looked over, grinning the second he realized you were talking about him. "But he's also the first person who ever made me laugh when I thought I never would again."
Blitzø's grin faltered into something smaller.
Something softer.
"...Aw, babe."
He jumped down from the desk, walked straight over, and kissed your forehead.
"Worth almost killing Moxxie."
"I WASN'T WORTH THE RICOCHET!" Moxxie shouted.
"You survived!" Blitzø called back, slipping his hand into yours with an unapologetic smile. "See? Great day."
ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
✦ blurb — Every Extermination follows the same routine: Adam leaves, you pretend not to worry, and you wait. When he returns later than usual, your carefully guarded composure finally breaks.
The archive was quiet on Extermination Day.
It was always quiet on Extermination Day, in that heavy, unnatural way Heaven sometimes got when everyone was pretending not to think about the same thing.
Officially, no one called it that. Not in records, not in reports, not in anything meant to be preserved. On paper, it was an annual cleansing operation, a controlled descent, a necessary intervention carried out under divine authority. Clean words. Careful words. The kind of words that made it easier to forget there was blood underneath them.
And every year, those words came to you.
Names, departure times, assigned squadrons, confirmed returns, injuries, losses, whenever Heaven decided to admit they were losses at all.
You were an archivist, not a soldier. You didn’t go down there with a blade in your hand, didn’t fly through ash and smoke beside the Exorcists, didn’t hear Hell screaming beneath a red sky. You stayed above, surrounded by marble shelves and glowing ledgers, waiting for the gates to open so the reports could start coming in.
For everyone else, Adam going to Hell was normal.
For you, it never was.
People talked about it like bad weather. Unpleasant, necessary, over soon enough. Adam always came back anyway. He came back louder than he left, laughing before the blood had dried, bragging about numbers, strategy, and how Hell still hadn’t learned a damn thing. He made survival look easy, like it was just another thing the universe owed him.
You knew better.
You had seen the pages before they were sealed. You had archived feathers that came back without bodies. You had written down the names of angels who had left Heaven singing and never returned at all. They were rare, but still…
Adam always came back, yes, but one day, statistically, someone didn’t.
That thought had lived in your chest for ages, and you never told him, because Adam would have hated it.
He hated the idea that anything could touch him. He hated being reminded that under the armor, the jokes, the noise, and all that impossible confidence, he was still something that could bleed. If you told him you counted the hours until the gates opened again, he would laugh. If you told him you checked the return lists before anything else, he would call you dramatic. If you told him every Extermination left a stone sitting in your stomach until you saw him alive, he would tell you not to worry.
As if worry had ever listened.
So you worked.
You sharpened quills that were already sharp, reorganized reports that were already in order, reviewed old casualty records until the words blurred beneath your eyes. You learned to look calm while your hands moved from one file to the next, learned to answer politely when other angels asked whether the ledgers were ready, learned to keep breathing every time footsteps echoed outside the archive doors.
The pattern never changed.
Adam left, you pretended not to worry, you worked until there was nothing left to work on, then you waited.
You had been doing it for so long that you sometimes wondered when the waiting had become part of loving him.
Not that you called it that. Not aloud. Not even to yourself on most days.
Adam was your friend. Somehow.
You had known each other long enough that he no longer knocked before barging into the archive, though "knocking" implied he'd ever cared about doors in the first place. He would shove them open with enough force to make every archivist look up in alarm, stroll inside like he owned the building, completely ignore the three different KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN signs hanging on the walls, then drop his mission reports onto your desk with all the grace of a collapsing bookshelf.
"You people seriously work in here all day?" he'd asked once, looking around the endless shelves with visible disgust. "No offense, but this place sucks."
You didn't even glance up from the ledger you were annotating.
"And yet you keep coming back."
"Yeah, because I'm interesting."
"You also need someone to file your reports."
"Damn right I do." He leaned both hands on your desk, grinning shamelessly. "Future generations deserve to read about how awesome I am."
"They're casualty reports."
"They're victory reports."
"They're paperwork."
"They're historical documents."
"They're paperwork."
"They're legendary paperwork."
You sighed, finally taking the folder from his hands.
"You know," he continued, watching you flip through the pages, "I bet mine are your favorite."
"They're the longest."
"Damn right they are."
"They're also the only reports where I have to correct the grammar."
"Grammar's for nerds."
"You wrote, 'Kicked ass. Ten outta ten. Would exterminate again.'"
"It gets the point across."
"It does not belong in an official archive."
"Says who?"
"Says me."
"Yeah?" He smirked, folding his arms behind his head. "Good thing you're cute."
You looked up at him, completely unimpressed.
"I was about to tell you your report is missing three pages."
His grin disappeared.
"...It is?"
"It is now."
Adam stared at you for two long seconds before letting out an exaggerated groan loud enough to make two junior archivists flinch somewhere behind the shelves.
"Oh, come on!"
"You shouldn't have called me cute."
"I was complimenting you!"
"You were distracting me."
"I was flirting."
"You were failing."
He barked out a laugh, loud enough to echo through the archive, then reached across your desk without a shred of shame and stole the apple sitting beside your ledger.
"That's mine."
"Not anymore."
"You've stolen my lunch three days this week."
"You keep bringing good lunches."
"You keep eating them."
"You'll survive."
"I'll file your reports alphabetically instead of chronologically."
Adam stopped halfway through his first bite.
"...You wouldn't."
You finally looked up at him.
"I absolutely would."
He pointed the apple at you dramatically.
"You're evil."
"And yet you still come here."
"Duh." He shrugged, completely unbothered a second later. "Nobody else gives me this much shit."
A smile tugged at the corner of your mouth before you could stop it.
Adam noticed.
His grin returned instantly.
"There it is."
"Don't."
"I made you smile."
"I regret it already."
"Sure you do."
He laughed again, loud, cocky, impossible to ignore, before wandering out of the archive still eating your apple, promising to "bring more victories worth writing about" next time.
The room felt strangely quieter after he left.
As always.
He filled every space he entered, whether that space wanted him or not. He could turn a formal council meeting into a personal performance in under five minutes, could make a room of disciplined soldiers laugh before battle, could infuriate Sera and charm half the court in the same breath. He was arrogant beyond measure, often careless, frequently unbearable, and beneath all of it, beneath everything he shouted over so no one would look too closely, he was the first person who had ever made the archive feel less lonely.
You balanced him, or at least that was what Lute said.
Adam stormed in, you gave him one dry look, and he lowered his volume by half an inch, which, according to everyone else, counted as a miracle.
He teased you constantly, about your books, your notes, your habit of correcting his grammar in official reports.
“You are going to be the reason I lose my position.”
“Bullshit. You love me too much.”
The words had been careless. A joke tossed into the air without meaning. You had looked down before he could see your face.
That was the danger of Adam. He said things without knowing where they landed, without realizing which words stayed lodged beneath your ribs long after he had moved on to the next joke, the next battle, the next song, the next stupid grin aimed at someone else across the room.
He did not know.
You made sure he did not know.
You had convinced yourself it was safer that way.
Love, when kept quiet, could not embarrass you. It could not ruin centuries of friendship, could not make him look at you with pity or discomfort, could not become another thing he laughed off because he did not know how else to hold it. So you kept it buried beneath routine, beneath teasing, beneath the careful professional distance of someone who signed return logs and pretended her hands did not shake until his name appeared in the correct column.
Alive.
Every year, that word saved you.
Until the year he came back late. The gates had opened hours after the expected time.
The first squadrons returned in groups, armor dented, wings dusty with ash, laughter rising too loudly as adrenaline carried them back into Heaven. Scribes gathered at the entrance hall with ledgers ready, healers moved through the crowd with practiced efficiency, and the returning Exorcists greeted one another with rough affection, comparing wounds like trophies while everyone else pretended the delay had not made the air feel thin.
You stood near the back with the return list clutched tightly in your hands.
Adam’s name remained unchecked.
Lute came back before him. That was the first wrong thing.
She crossed the threshold with blood drying along one side of her face, expression hard, jaw set, and when your eyes found hers across the hall, she looked away too quickly.
Your grip tightened around the ledger.
“Lute.”
She stopped, only for a second.
“Where is he?”
“He’s coming.”
That was all she said before a healer pulled her aside.
He’s coming.
Not he’s fine. Just, he’s coming.
The words sat in your throat like a blade.
More angels returned. More names were checked. More voices filled the hall, rising and falling around you until they became nothing but noise. You searched every face, every pair of wings, every flash of gold armor, trying not to imagine what the next report might look like if his name moved from one column to another.
Missing or deceased.
Then the gates flared again, and Adam stepped through.
The hall erupted before you could breathe.
Of course it did. Adam came back like a victory even when he looked like he had lost something.
His armor was scorched along one side, his hair disheveled, dried blood streaking from his temple down toward his jaw. Several feathers hung torn from one wing, the edges darkened with soot, and though he grinned the moment people turned toward him, the expression sat a little too tightly on his face. He lifted one arm as if greeting an audience, basking in the wave of relieved laughter and cheers that moved through the hall.
“Relax,” he called, voice carrying easily despite the exhaustion beneath it. “I know, I know, place looked boring without me.”
A few angels laughed.
Someone clapped him on the shoulder. He winced and you saw it but no one else seemed to. They saw Adam standing, Adam joking, Adam alive, which meant everything was fine.
But you only could see the blood. You saw the uneven set of his wings. You saw the way his fingers curled briefly against the edge of his breastplate, as though he needed to steady himself before straightening again.
The ledger slipped from your hand.
You crossed the hall before you realized you had moved.
“Adam.”
Your voice was sharper than you intended, too loud in the wide, echoing space, and several heads turned as you pushed between two returning angels and reached him.
His grin shifted the second he saw you, brightening automatically.
“There she is. Miss me?”
You did not laugh.
“What happened?”
His brows lifted.
“Damn, no hello?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I bleed. It’s part of the brand.”
“Adam.”
You touched his arm before you remembered where you were, fingers closing lightly around his forearm as you checked the long tear in his sleeve. The fabric was stiff with dried blood, though the wound beneath looked shallow, already half healed. Your attention moved too fast, from his arm to his temple, from his temple to the torn feathers hanging unevenly from his wing.
“Did a healer see you? Why are your wings like that? Can you move properly? Are you dizzy? Lute said you were coming but she wouldn’t—”
“Hey, hey,” he said, quieter now, the grin still there but strained at the edges. “Chill. I’m fine.”
“You are not fine.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“You came back late.”
“Had shit to do.”
“You’re hurt.”
“Barely.”
You reached toward his wing without thinking, fingers hovering near the damaged feathers, and Adam’s posture changed.
It was subtle, but immediate. His shoulders stiffened, his smile froze and the hall quieted.
Not completely, not at first, but enough that the change became impossible to miss. Conversations slowed around you. A few Exorcists looked over, then looked away, then looked back again. You felt the weight of their attention only after it had already settled, too late to stop the way your hand remained lifted toward his wing, too late to hide the fear on your face.
Adam noticed too. His eyes flicked over the room, then back to you. Something closed.
He stepped back.
“I said I’m fine.”
Your hand fell.
The distance between you felt louder than any shout.
“Adam—”
“Drop it.”
The words were not cruel, but they were sharp enough to cut through whatever had been left of your composure. Heat climbed your neck as you became aware of the angels watching, of the ledger on the floor behind you, of the way Adam’s jaw had tightened like your concern had become a hand around his throat.
He turned away from the crowd before anyone could say anything, his wing shifting close against his back to hide the torn feathers.
“Private,” he muttered.
You followed because you did not know what else to do.
He led you into one of the smaller adjoining chambers, away from the hall, away from the return lists and the healers and the eyes that had made him look suddenly less like himself. The room was empty, lit by pale gold through high windows, silent except for the distant echo of the celebration beginning outside.
The moment the door closed, Adam rounded on you.
“What the hell was that?”
You stopped. He had raised his voice before, thousands of times, but rarely at you like this.
“I was checking if you were hurt.”
“In front of everyone?”
“You were hurt in front of everyone.”
“I’m not fragile.”
The words came fast, bitter and hot, dragged from a place much deeper than the wound on his arm.
“I didn’t say you were. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t have to,” he snapped, pacing once before turning back, frustration twisting his face. “You came running over like I was some fragile little angel that needs coddling, touching my wings, asking a million questions, looking at me like I was about to drop dead in the middle of the damn hall.”
Your chest tightened.
“You were late.”
“And I came back.”
“You were bleeding.”
“I can handle myself in a fight.”
His voice grew louder, his tall frame towering over you now, wings tense, jaw tight, pride bleeding through every word because he could handle blood, pain, exhaustion, even fear if it was his own, but being seen as weak in front of the soldiers who followed him seemed unbearable.
“And you made a scene out of nothing.”
That landed.
For a second, you could only stare at him.
Nothing.
The hours of waiting, the unchecked name, Lute’s face when she looked away. The weight of every sealed casualty report you had ever carried through the archive.
Nothing.
You swallowed hard, trying to keep your voice steady, trying to hold yourself together because if you started crying now, it would only prove his point, would only make this feel smaller than it was, like worry had turned you foolish and public and embarrassing.
“Yeah,” you said, and your voice came out too controlled, too thin. “And I already said I was sorry.”
Adam’s expression shifted, but he said nothing. You nodded once, as if agreeing with something neither of you had said.
“Sorry for embarrassing you.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Sorry for being the shitty friend I am.”
His eyes narrowed.
“That’s not what I—”
“Sorry for worrying about your safety,” you continued, emotion slipping through despite your best efforts, words coming faster now because if you stopped, you might break completely. “Sorry for waiting for your return every single time with a rock inside my stomach, wondering if you’ll ever make it back, or if you’ll die in horrible suffering somewhere in Hell where no one can reach you.”
Your throat closed around the last words.
Adam went still. The anger on his face faltered.
You could feel tears burning behind your eyes, and you hated them, hated that they were coming now, hated that your body had chosen this moment to betray you after centuries of carefully pretending you were fine.
“Sorry,” you choked out, one hand lifting uselessly before falling back to your side, “for caring too much about you, you dumb jackass.”
Silence filled the room.
Adam stared at you like he had never seen you before.
His arms, which had been crossed defensively over his chest, loosened. His wings drooped slightly, the torn feathers no longer hidden quite so carefully. For the first time since he had returned, he looked less angry than lost.
“I...” he started, then stopped.
You laughed once, wet and sharp and nothing like amusement.
“Yeah,” you said, sniffing as the tears finally escaped despite everything you had done to stop them. “Silly me, right? What was I thinking, worrying over you in front of everyone? What an embarrassment that must have been.”
His face tightened.
“That’s not—”
“You’re Adam,” you cut in, hurt making you cruel now, not because you wanted to hurt him, but because you could not bear being the only one bleeding. “Of course you come back. Of course nothing can touch you. Of course the rest of us should just stand there and clap when you walk in covered in blood like it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It matters to me.”
The words were too honest. They slipped out before you could soften them.
Adam’s breath caught.
For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then his expression twisted again, not with anger this time, but with something overwhelmed and cornered, something that did not know what to do with your fear now that it had been placed directly in his hands.
“Would you stop...?”
The words were quiet. They hurt more than the shouting. Because after everything, after all the waiting and fear and love you had carried in silence, that was what he reached for.
Stop.
Stop worrying.
Stop crying.
Stop making him look at it.
You looked at him through the blur of your tears, and something inside you shut carefully, painfully, like a door closing before the storm could tear it off its hinges.
“Yeah,” you said, wiping at your face with the back of your hand. “I’m stopping.”
Adam’s eyes widened slightly. “Wait, that’s not—”
“I get it.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do.” Your voice was quieter now, drained in a way that made him flinch more than the anger had. “You hate being seen as weak. I know. I’ve always known. I just thought maybe, after this long, you’d understand that I wasn’t trying to make you look weak. I was trying to make sure you were alive.”
His mouth opened but nothing came out. You turned toward the door, you did not wait for him to follow. You did not ask him to understand.
You had spent ages waiting for him to come back from Hell, waiting for him to notice the way your hands shook when the gates opened late, waiting for him to look at you one day and realize that what you felt had never fit inside friendship. It had seemed possible once, in the soft spaces between jokes and stolen lunches, in the way he sometimes came to the archive for no reason at all and stayed until your work was done, in the way he remembered things no one else did and pretended he had not.
You had thought maybe one day he would understand.
It turned out you were wrong.
Your fingers touched the door handle. Behind you, Adam moved.
He crossed the distance faster than you expected, and before you could open the door, his hand closed around your arm. Not rough. Never rough. But firm enough to stop you, desperate enough that you felt it in the way his fingers trembled against your sleeve.
“Wait.”
You did not turn around immediately.
His grip loosened the second he realized he was holding you back, though he did not let go entirely.
“Please.”
That word made you turn.
Adam looked wrecked in a way the Extermination had not managed to make him. Blood still marked his temple, his wing still hung wrong, but none of that compared to the expression on his face now, stripped of its arrogance, stripped of its performance, left with something raw enough that you almost wished you had not seen it.
“I fucked up.”
You blinked. He swallowed, glancing down at his hand around your arm before slowly releasing you.
“I did,” he said, quieter, as if saying it louder might make it harder. “I fucked up. I was pissed because everyone was staring, and I hate that shit, I hate people looking at me like I need help, like I’m not—”
His jaw clenched.
“Like I’m not enough.”
Your anger wavered. Adam looked away, running one hand roughly through his hair.
“And then you were there, and you looked scared, and I didn’t know what to do with that, because nobody looks at me like that.” His laugh came out short and humorless. “They expect me to come back. They cheer, or they ask for numbers, or they ask if I killed anything worth bragging about. Nobody waits like you do.”
Your throat tightened. He looked back at you then, and the guilt in his eyes made your chest ache.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You never asked.”
“I know.”
He stepped closer, careful this time, as though you might disappear if he moved wrong.
“I should’ve. I should’ve noticed. You’re always there when I get back, always acting like it’s because of the reports or whatever, but it’s not, is it?”
You looked down. He let out a quiet breath.
“Shit.”
Your silence answered him. Adam’s voice softened, and somehow that made him sound more frightened than before.
“I hate being seen as weak. I do. It makes me feel like everybody’s waiting for me to fail, and I can’t...” He shook his head. “I can’t handle that. So when you came at me in front of everyone, I heard something you weren’t saying, and I got mad at you for it.”
“I wasn’t trying to embarrass you.”
“I know.”
“I wasn’t trying to make you look fragile.”
“I know.”
“I was scared.”
His face changed at that.
“I know,” he said again, softer, the words almost breaking. “I know now.”
You wrapped your arms around yourself, not because you were cold, but because everything inside you felt too exposed.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” you whispered. “You leave, and everyone acts like it’s nothing because you’re Adam, and Adam always comes back, and I have to stand there with the lists and the reports and the sealed casualty files, pretending I’m not imagining your name on one of them.”
He looked stricken.
“I never thought about you having to read that.”
“I know.”
“The idea of you...” His voice faltered, and he looked away, as if the thought had punched the air from him. “The idea of you finding out that way, reading some cleaned-up report about me not coming back, sitting alone in that archive with my name in the wrong column... fuck.”
Your eyes filled again, but this time the tears were quieter.
“Adam.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, then immediately softening because the word came out sharper than he intended. “No, I mean... I get it. Or I’m trying to. I didn’t think anyone waited for me like that.”
“How could you not?”
His mouth twitched with something almost sad.
“Because I’m me.”
That hurt too.
Because beneath all the arrogance, beneath the noise, beneath the endless declarations that he was the first and greatest and impossible to replace, there was a man who had somehow never believed anyone’s relief could be personal.
You looked at him for a long moment, tired suddenly, too tired to keep hiding, too tired to keep folding love into friendship and calling it safer.
“I’ve loved you for ages.”
Adam went utterly still. The words were quiet. Just truth, exhausted and simple, finally too heavy to carry alone.
“I never told you because I didn’t want to make things strange, and I didn’t want to be another person asking something from you, and I didn’t want you to feel trapped by it.” Your voice trembled, but you kept going. “I don’t want to cage you. I don’t want to make you less than who you are. I just... wanted you to come back.”
Adam stared at you like the room had changed shape around him.
“You love me.”
You gave a small, tired laugh.
“Please don’t sound so shocked.”
“I’m not shocked.”
“You look shocked.”
“I’m processing.”
“You’re terrible at it.”
“I just got emotionally ambushed.”
“You yelled at me first.”
“Yeah, and then you dropped a ‘loved you for ages’ on me, so I think we’re both having a night.”
A laugh escaped you before you could stop it, small and broken around the tears still caught in your throat.
Adam’s expression softened like the sound had undone him.
He reached for you, then stopped halfway, as though asking permission without knowing how to say it. You looked at his hand, then back at him, and the hesitation between you lasted only a second before you placed your fingers in his.
His grip closed carefully around yours.
“Hell doesn’t scare me,” he said, voice low now. “I know that sounds stupid.”
“It does.”
He huffed a faint laugh.
“But it doesn’t. Not the way it probably should. I go down there, I fight, I come back, and I don’t think about what it looks like from here because thinking about it means thinking about not coming back, and I don’t do that.”
You squeezed his hand.
“But the idea of you waiting here,” he continued, his thumb brushing once over your knuckles, “the idea of you sitting in that archive thinking I might be dead, or reading about it in one of those reports, or crying because I was too proud to let you touch my stupid wing in public... that scares the shit out of me.”
Your breath caught. Adam looked at you fully then. No grin. No performance. Just him.
“I don’t want to go down there if it means hurting you like this.”
“You can’t promise you’ll stop.”
“I know.”
“And I wouldn’t ask you to.”
“I know that too.”
His free hand lifted slowly, brushing a tear from your cheek with surprising gentleness.
“I love you.”
Everything in you went quiet. Adam swallowed, as though the words had cost him more courage than any battlefield ever had.
“I do. I think I have for a while, and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it, because loving someone means giving them a place to hit you, and I’m not exactly great at standing still for that.” His mouth tightened, not quite a smile. “But I love you. And I’m sorry I made you feel like caring about me was something you had to apologize for.”
You closed your eyes for a second. His forehead touched yours before you realized he had moved closer.
The contact was careful, almost uncertain, and so unlike the loud certainty he usually carried that it broke something soft inside you. Your wings brushed his, feather against feather, and he let out a breath that trembled more than he probably wanted it to.
For once, he let himself lean. Enough for you to feel the weight he rarely allowed anyone else to hold.
Your hand slid up to his shoulder, avoiding the worst of the damage to his armor, while his arm came around your waist and drew you close. He smelled faintly of smoke and metal, of blood that had dried before it reached home, of the cold air near Heaven’s gates. You hated it. You loved him. Both truths lived in the same breath.
“I’m still mad at you,” you whispered.
“Yeah.”
“You were an ass.”
“Massive ass.”
“You embarrassed me too, you know.”
“I know.”
“You made me cry.”
His arm tightened.
“I know.”
“You scared me.”
His forehead pressed a little harder to yours.
“I know,” he said, and this time his voice cracked around the words. “I’m sorry.”
You believed him.
Silence settled between you, no crowd, no hall full of watching angels, no applause or performance or pride standing tall enough to hide behind. Only the two of you in a quiet room, hands still tangled together, wings brushing softly whenever either of you breathed too deeply.
After a while, Adam shifted with a small wince.
You pulled back at once.
“Your wing.”
He sighed.
“Here we go.”
“Adam.”
“I’m kidding.”
“You need a healer.”
“I need you to not look at me like I’m about to shatter.”
You softened.
“I can try.”
He nodded slowly.
“And I can try letting you worry without being a dick about it.”
“That would be nice.”
“Look at us. Growing.”
You rolled your eyes, but you were smiling now, faintly, and Adam noticed. He reached up, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear.
“I can’t promise I’ll never go back down there,” he said.
“I know.”
“I can’t promise I won’t come back scratched up.”
“I know.”
“I can promise I won’t make you carry the waiting alone anymore.”
Your chest tightened.
“That’s all I wanted.”
His eyes moved over your face, lingering on the tear tracks, the exhaustion, the love he had somehow missed while standing in front of it for ages.
“When I leave,” he said quietly, “I tell you before I go. Properly. No bullshit. When I come back, I let you check if I’m hurt before I start running my mouth.”
“That may be impossible for you.”
“Probably, but I’ll heroically attempt it.”
“And if you’re late?”
His expression sobered.
“If I’m late, you’re allowed to worry.”
“I don’t need permission.”
“No, you don’t,” he admitted. “But I’m giving it anyway.”
Your fingers tightened in his.
The ache in your chest did not vanish, not completely. It could not. The next Extermination would still come, the gates would still open, angels would still descend, and you would still know too much about numbers and probability and names written in the wrong columns. Love did not make war gentle. Confession did not turn danger into something harmless.
But Adam knew now. He knew what waiting cost. And for the first time, that made it feel less like standing alone beneath a collapsing sky.
He pulled you closer again, this time without hesitation, his chin resting briefly against the top of your head while his wings curved around you with a protective warmth that made your eyes burn all over again. You let yourself hold him carefully, mindful of the injuries he would finally allow someone to tend to, while his heartbeat steadied beneath your cheek.
“I really am fine, by the way,” he murmured after a moment.
You pinched his side.
He yelped.
“Okay, injured, betrayed, attacked in my moment of vulnerability.”
“You deserved that.”
“I say I love you and this is how I’m treated.”
“You yelled at me.”
“I apologized.”
“I’m still deciding if it was enough.”
He smiled against your hair.
“Take your time.”
You did.
You stood there a while longer, holding him in the quiet, letting the fear drain slowly from your body now that he was here, alive, warm beneath your hands. Eventually you would make him sit. Eventually you would call a healer. Eventually he would complain the entire time while letting you fuss over him anyway, because he had promised, and because promises, when finally made honestly, had weight.
For now, you only held on.
Adam’s hand moved gently up your back, hesitant at first, then surer when you did not pull away.
“You know,” he said, voice low, “I always did come to the archive first.”
You lifted your head slightly.
“What?”
“After. Before the hall, before the reports, before Sera sometimes.” He shrugged with one shoulder, trying to make it casual and failing because you were close enough to feel the tension in him. “I told myself it was because you had the paperwork.”
You looked at him.
He looked away.
“It wasn’t.”
The confession warmed you in a way that almost hurt.
“Adam.”
“I think I liked knowing you were there.”
Your eyes softened.
“I was always there.”
“I know.” He looked back at you, and for once, his smile was small. “I’m gonna try being worth that.”
“You already are.”
He exhaled, almost a laugh, almost something heavier.
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
His wings brushed yours again, and this time neither of you pretended not to notice.
Outside the room, Heaven continued as it always had. Voices echoed faintly beyond the door, healers moved through the returning ranks, reports waited to be written, and somewhere in the archive, your fallen ledger still lay open on the floor, Adam’s name unchecked in your hand.
You would fix that later.
Returned.
Alive.
But this time, the word would not be yours alone to carry.
Adam bent his head, pressing a kiss to your forehead with none of his usual teasing, lingering there as if memorizing the quiet. You closed your eyes beneath it, fingers still linked with his, and when he pulled back just enough to look at you, the fear had not disappeared from either of you completely, but it had changed shape.
It had become something shared.
Something spoken.
Something that no longer had to rot in silence.
“I’m still gonna brag about the fight,” he said.
“I know.”
“And I still looked badass.”
“You looked half-dead.”
“Hot half-dead.”
“You looked terrifying.”
“Terrifyingly hot.”
You sighed.
“There he is.”
Adam grinned, but his hand stayed gentle around yours.
“Yeah,” he said, softer than the grin deserved. “Here I am.”
ʜᴇʟʟᴀᴠᴇʀsᴇ (you're tagged in everything Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss)
600 Followers Celebration ♡
Chosen prompt: #23 "I dreamed of your legs wrapped around my waist."
Requested by: @stormy-knight134
You fell backward onto the bed, and Lucifer's body immediately followed, covering yours as the mattress dipped beneath his weight. He settled naturally between your legs, his warmth enveloping you, and you slipped your arms around his neck, pulling him impossibly closer. A low, satisfied groan rumbled in his throat as he captured your lips again, kissing you with a hunger that had clearly been waiting far too long.
You had been circling each other ever since Lucifer returned to Charlie's life, ever since he had taken up residence at the hotel. The attraction had been immediate, undeniable, lingering in every glance and every conversation, but neither of you had dared act on it. First because he was the King of Hell, and second because Charlie had needed both of you. There had always been another crisis, another enemy, another reason to wait.
Now there wasn't.
No more excuses.
It had started in one of the hotel's quiet hallways. A lingering glance had become a smile. A brush of fingertips had become a hand refusing to let go. Before either of you truly understood what was happening, your back was pressed against the wall and Lucifer's lips were on yours, years of restrained longing finally collapsing between a single heartbeat and the next.
Now his body trembled above yours, an intoxicating warmth radiating from him.
"Lucifer..." you whispered breathlessly.
He answered with another quiet groan before trailing kisses down your jaw, across your throat, lingering against your pulse as though memorizing it.
"Y/N..." he murmured against your skin. "I've dreamed about this moment... more times than I'd ever admit."
Your fingers slid into his soft blond hair, gently curling around the strands until he lifted his head to look at you.
"Really?" you asked, surprised despite the teasing smile tugging at your lips.
A smile spread across his own.
"Really."
He brushed another featherlight kiss across your mouth before his hands drifted carefully over your sides, slow enough to give you every opportunity to stop him. Instead, you arched into his touch.
His gaze never left yours.
You had never seen him look at anyone like this.
Not with desire alone.
With awe.
As though he couldn't quite believe you were real.
"You've imagined this?" you asked softly.
He laughed under his breath.
"Oh, sweetheart..."
His forehead rested against yours.
"I dreamed of having your legs wrapped around my waist," he growled.
He rolled his hips against yours, and there was no mistaking it. He was hard, aching, more than ready for the next step. A smile spread across your lips as you caught your lower lip between your teeth, and his crimson eyes darkened with desire.
"And what else did you dream about?" you asked, arching your hips teasingly against him.
His breath caught.
"Let me show you."
With that, he undid his trousers before crashing his lips back onto yours, devouring your mouth while his trembling hands worked at the fastening of your own. Clothes disappeared one by one, discarded carelessly onto the floor as you became tangled together in the sheets, neither of you able to keep your hands off the other.
You let out a soft moan as he finally entered you, your fingers tightening in his blond hair. He buried his face against your neck with a breathless groan, his movements slow, reverent, as though he wanted to savor every second of finally having you in his arms. Each gentle thrust sent pleasure coursing through your body until stars danced behind your eyes.
Lucifer pulled back just enough to meet your gaze, his cheeks flushed, his golden eyes bright with wonder.
"So much better than my dreams," he growled before capturing your lips once more.
Since a few of you asked what else has been brewing in my drafts, here's another little preview of what's to come.
✦ 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘢𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 (One-shot)
Adam × Female!Angel!Reader
Every Extermination follows the same routine: Adam leaves, you pretend not to worry, and you wait. When he returns later than usual, your carefully guarded composure finally breaks.
✦ 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘯𝘦 (Drabble)
Blitzø × Female!Reader
Blitzø is an impulsive disaster with questionable judgment and absolutely no sense of self-preservation. You wouldn't trade him for anyone.
✦ 𝘋𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭 (One-shot)
Vox × Female!Reader
Vox has always known how to turn fear into ratings. But when one of his broadcasts sends you spiraling in front of him, he's forced to face the damage his voice can leave behind.
As always, I'm really excited to share them with you when they're ready. 🤍
★ This is not a request but inspiration from a post by @willoryn!! Please go and check out her blog!!
☆ Click here to view the original post!
★ Summary: Alastor and Lucifer's bickering finally reaches a breaking point. But without Charlie to calm him down, how will you snap Lucifer out of his demonic fit of rage?
☆ Word Count: 1, 162
★ Intended as Fem!Reader but could be read as GN as well! :)
── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──
You weren’t entirely sure how it got to this point. Lucifer’s temper could certainly be short at times, but never like this. All you could do was stumble backwards and watch helplessly as two sharp horns grew from his head and a spiked black tail whipped out from underneath his coattails. Your heart beat against your chest in a desperate attempt to escape your body, perhaps the situation, and something between fear and awe clung to your bones at the sight unfolding before you.
Those eyes you loved so much disappeared in an instant, instead replaced with ones of complete and utter fury. You frightfully watched the way they darkened to a deep red, the gold rings of his irises shining through Hell’s smoke-filled air.
You were looking at the King of Hell.
“Lucifer!” You tried to call out, but your voice was lost in the gust of wind that picked up around him. It whirled around the both of you and tousled your hair. It wasn’t particularly chilly, but it still sent shivers up your spine and spread goosebumps across your skin in its wake.
He bared his teeth in a low growl, and the wind burst into flame. The ground rumbled beneath your feet and you just barely managed to leap out of the way as a flurry of inferno shot past you and towards the Radio Demon. Alastor stood not too far away with that ever-present smile on his face twisting into a haunting grin.
There was not a trace of fear in that smug expression.
He knew how this would end.
He too was shifting into his own display of power. Black tentacles sprouted from his back and hoisted him into the air. His limbs extended in an unnatural manner, his demonic power a stark difference to the angelic ones Lucifer possessed. It was only a matter of time before their constant bickering erupted into something far worse. Far dangerous.
And Charlie was nowhere to be seen.
You realised her father grew noticeably taller in this demonic form as well. From the ground you had the perfect view of his now towering form and your breath caught in your throat. Lucifer’s claws swelled and doubled in size, poised for attack. Golden eyes opened up on the inside of his coattails and you gaped at the resemblance he had to a Seraphim. Sometimes you forgot he used to be an Angel.
The two demons were seconds away from breaking out into battle, and you knew this would end badly. Lucifer couldn’t actually harm sinners, but sinners could without a doubt harm him. Alastor especially. Everyone knew the horrors he could unleash with his power, and Charlie wasn’t there to stop it this time.
You had to do something, and quickly.
Without thinking it through, you scrambled to your feet and rushed towards Lucifer. Alarm bells blared in your mind as you practically threw yourself at him. He only had a split second to realise what was happening before you reached up to grab his face, then pulled him down to meet your lips.
The alarms stopped. Your mind went blank.
A surprised noise vibrated in his throat as you moved your lips against his almost desperately. It didn’t take long for him to begin returning the gesture, head tilting to the side as he relaxed into it and moved a hand to the side of your jaw. You could still feel the warmth of the flame in the skin of his palm and the sharpness of his claws against your skin.
You kissed him with desperation, yet he was kissing you in an almost feverish manner. Like a man starved. Like he hadn’t done such a thing in years. And perhaps he hadn’t.
It felt like hours before you finally pulled away to look him in the eye.
What the fuck did you just do?
He glanced at you through hooded eyes at first. You felt your veins burst to life at the sheer lust that burned within those crimson eyes. Until it dawned on him what just happened. His face immediately turned a bright shade of red and he stumbled over his words.
“I—What—You—”
Your words seemed to have failed you as well, because all you could do was stare back at him with your own wide eyes and hot cheeks at the realisation of what you just did.
“Oh my god—” You eventually managed to get out, stepping back nervously.
“I’m so sorry, I—I don’t know what I was thinking, I just—” It all came out at once in a word vomit of apologies and half-finished explanations.
He frowned ever so slightly as you backed away, words still spilling from your mouth. His demonic features retreated back into himself, and in the blink of an eye he was back to his normal self, carefully reaching out towards you.
He gently grabbed your hands in his, silencing the apologies spewing from you. There was a newfound look in his eyes—something you couldn’t quite place. They sparkled with their usual warmth, yes, but there was something else swirling around in them as well. Up close you could see the lingering redness of his cheeks.
You opened your mouth to say something, another horrified apology for your actions, but the words were sucked out of you as his lips met yours once more. The kiss was more deliberate this time. Slower. Soft. Your eyes fluttered shut. His hands rested on either side of your jaw to guide you through the movement, and yours pressed gently against his chest.
For the next few moments, you swore you’d walked through Heaven’s gates right then and there. Everything felt just perfect, just right. His touch was entirely too tender, holding you like you were the most fragile thing in all of creation. He moved closer. Your chests grazed one another. It was all so electrifying.
And then he pulled away.
There was a brief moment where the two of you were pressed together, nudging noses, breathless. Between the loss of his lips and your need for air, your mind was spinning out of control.
“I’ve wanted to do that for a while.” He murmured, resting his forehead against yours.
You almost jolted at his words, heart stuttering violently. You felt dizzy and likely would have already collapsed if it weren’t for his steady hands.
“Me too.” You whispered.
Lucifer broke out into a grin. And then he was laughing. You couldn’t help yourself, either. The two of you giggled together as he pulled you in for an embrace and twirled you around.
When you calmed down, he tucked a stray piece of hair behind your ear.
“Thank you.” He hummed, fingers caressing your face.
You cast a glance over his shoulder at the reminder of why the two of you were there in the first place. Alastor was gone. You returned your gaze to his and smiled.
Maybe Charlie should leave more often.
── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──
☆ I had two versions of this.... (this is also not really proofread lol)
