The Shattered King’s Waltz
A Hazbin Hotel / Princess Tutu Crossover AU
I expanded my ask from here : kitsunesongs ask
Prologue: On the Nature of a Broken Heart
There is a particular cruelty in being immortal and heartbroken.
Humans, at least, are granted the mercy of time. Their wounds scab over, soften, fade into something distant—an ache that only stirs on quiet days, when memory grows bold enough to knock. A bittersweet thing, manageable as an old scar.
The dead are afforded no such kindness.
In Hell, grief does not age. It does not dull. It festers—patient, insistent—picking at itself until it becomes something sharper, something louder, something impossible to ignore.
And Lucifer Morningstar—King of Pride, Father of Sin, the once-bright Morning Star himself — had been grieving for a very, very long time.
Long enough to redecorate the palace three times over, each iteration more elaborate and more hollow than the last. Long enough to craft hundreds—thousands of rubber ducks, each one stranger than the one before, until even his own bottomless imagination had started to repeat itself. Long enough to collapse face-down upon the marble floor of his throne room and simply remain there for what might have been three days, or possibly six months.
Time had a tendency to lose meaning when one stopped caring whether it passed at all.
His daughter, his bright, impossible girl, had followed her dream halfway across Hell with stars in her eyes and redemption on her lips, chasing something so ridiculous and so perfectly her that it made his chest ache just to think about it. She had left him behind with the best of intentions and the kindest of smiles, the way sunlight leaves a room: gently, without malice, utterly indifferent to the darkness it leaves in its wake.
And the universe had continued on quite happily without him.
Lucifer, unfortunately, could not do the same.
He could not die. He had established that thoroughly enough.
He had tried despair, which proved tedious.
He had tried rage, which proved exhausting.
He had tried drowning himself in busy work—filling the palace with enough rubber ducks to constitute a legitimate safety hazard—which had proven mildly entertaining, but insufficient.
In the end, there remained only one logical course of action.
A former angel’s precision. A king’s resolve. A desperate, ridiculous man’s last resort.
Lucifer reached into his chest.
His fingers closed around the source of his suffering—small, fragile, unbearably loud—and, without hesitation:
For a moment, he simply held it there. Trembling in his palm like a living thing, which it was, after a fashion. Crystalline. Ancient. Still faintly warm.
It trembled in his grasp.
And then he closed his fingers around it—and shattered it.
The sound was not loud. No thunderclap, no divine chorus—just a soft, crystalline crack, like glass giving way under too much pressure.
For four blissful seconds, Lucifer Morningstar felt nothing at all.
No grief. No longing. No low, persistent ache in the place behind his ribs where something important used to live.
Just silence. Just peace.
Then the shards slipped through his fingers—
Chapter One: Pieces of a Terrible Idea
The heart of Lucifer Morningstar was not, strictly speaking, a heart.
It had once been something far older. Far stranger.
A crystalline thing forged from the very first love in all of creation — the love that had inspired a rebellion, that had chosen humanity over obedience, that had burned bright enough to cast an angel out of Heaven and send him tumbling, singing, into the dark.
It was not built to remain whole.
And once broken, it had absolutely no intention of staying in one place.
The shards tore through the Pride Ring like celestial shrapnel, scattering in every direction. Each fragment was drawn—inevitably, instinctively—toward whatever sinner happened to be burning brightest with feeling in that particular moment.
The results were immediate.
And they were, by every conceivable metric, a complete and utter disaster.
==================================
-Carmine Industrial District-
Carmilla Carmine was in the middle of an arms deal when it happened.
She was mid-sentence, something dry and precise about delivery timelines, when the shard found her. It hit without warning, without so much as a flicker of visible impact, and buried itself somewhere beneath her sternum with the quiet finality.
The shard that chose her was sharp and steady. It pulsed with a fierce, devouring kind of love. The sort that guarded, that sheltered, that would happily tear the world apart for the sake of something small and precious.
She finished the negotiation with her usual composure, signed the necessary documents, dismissed her associates with polite efficiency, and returned home without so much as a flicker of outward change.
And did not stand up again for several hours.
When she did, something had shifted. Something quiet and fundamental—barely perceptible until the moment it isn’t.
Over the next two weeks, Carmilla Carmine built a fortress.
She constructed a fortified perimeter around her daughters’ suites that would have withstood a minor siege. Security systems layered atop security systems. Wards and counter-wards and redundancies upon redundancies, each one more elaborate than the last, none of them ever quite enough.
She had always been protective.
She had always been a mother first, and a weapons merchant second.
That has always been true.
But this was something else.
Something closer to a wolf that had forgotten how to stop baring its teeth—even when there was nothing left to bite.
Odette and Clara could not pick up a pen without Carmilla appearing at their side, asking whether it was sharp enough to pose a risk. Meals were inspected before they reached the table. Doors were checked. Checked again. Windows were reinforced against threats that existed only in the restless, cataloguing dark behind her eyes.
Every shadow was evaluated. Every visitor was a variable. Every variable was a threat.
Zestial, her oldest confidant and most trusted ally, knocked on her door twice.
The locks were changed before the third attempt.
Not out of malice. Not out of distrust. But out of a quiet, suffocating certainty that she could not afford to let anyone close enough to become a variable.
She loved her daughters with every atom of her being.
And that was precisely the problem.
The shard had taken something beautiful and turned it past the point of reason. Past the point of recognition. Into something that looked, from the outside, almost exactly like fear.
==================================
And yet, she was not the worst case.
==================================
An unnamed sinner, once an Overlord of respectable, if unremarkable standing, had always relied on anger as his primary professional asset. A temper with a reputation. Useful. Controlled. Occasionally theatrical for effect.
The shard that found him did not simply amplify that anger.
Distilled it down to something clean, absolute, and unstoppable.
Anger with all the impurities burned away, anger that had forgotten how to be anything else, anger that did not need a reason because it had become its own.
Within forty-eight hours, he had reduced four city blocks to rubble and declared war on three neighboring Overlords. None of whom had, technically, done anything to provoke him. One of whom had, as far as anyone could determine, simply been standing nearby at an inopportune moment.
During one particularly unfortunate encounter, he had managed to make Satan seem like the more composed party.
Satan, the guy who is the literal embodiment of wrath.
Within a week, Hell’s more pragmatic residents had begun rerouting their daily commutes to avoid his territory entirely. Delivery services updated their maps. Street vendors relocated. Even demons with nothing to lose decided, collectively, that they had something to lose after all.
Within two, the Overlord Council convened an emergency session.
No one was willing to be the one to approach him.
==================================
Still, the shards continued to fall.
==================================
A silver-tongued manipulator found their words honed to something almost unbearably precise—dangerous and persuasive in equal measure, quietly rewriting the structure of Hell’s shadow economy with a few well-placed conversations and a smile that had learned to mean exactly what it intended.
A sinner prone to quiet nostalgia received a shard steeped in longing, and collapsed inward entirely—drowning in memories that refused to loosen their grip, some real, some not, all of them vivid, all of them tender, all of them in ways he couldn’t quite articulate and couldn’t let go.
A habitual gambler was gifted reckless, radiant hope and began, impossibly, to win. Consistently and endlessly perpetuating the need to risk everything because winning has started to feel like proof of something.
==================================
Lucifer, naturally, knew none of this.
He was lying on the floor again.
Sprawled inelegantly across polished marble, one arm tucked beneath his head, the other dangling limply at his side. The throne room stretched out around him, vast and quiet, filled with the faint ambient glow of a palace that had forgotten what it was built for.
Hollow, in a way that was not entirely unpleasant.
The constant, gnawing weight of feeling—that exhausting, relentless thing that had pressed against the inside of his chest for longer than most civilizations had existed—had vanished.
Leaving behind something quiet. Manageable. Distant.
It was, he told himself, an improvement.
Lucifer Morningstar, King of Hell, Ruler of the Pride Ring, Father of the Morningstar line, allowed his eyes to drift closed and breathed, content in the simple, blessed absence of pain.
He did not notice the silence for what it truly was.
He did not notice that the reason the ache was gone was because he could no longer remember, precisely, what it had been for.
He did not notice that the warmth he’d always associated with a certain bright, impossible girl had gone faintly distant
He did not notice any of this.
But that revelation would come later.
Chapter Two: The Storyteller Makes an Offer
The Storyteller did not have an office.
The Storyteller did not, strictly speaking, occupy space in any consistent or reliable way.
They existed as certain ancient things did—deliberate, patient, and inconveniently omnipresent. They appeared when they wished, vanished when it pleased them, and, once they had decided to involve themselves in something, became quite impossible to dislodge. Like a splinter. Like a song you couldn’t place. Like the nagging sense that the story you were living in had already decided how it ended.
Which was how they came to be sitting in Alastor’s broadcasting booth.
In a chair that had not been there a moment ago.
They had chosen the location carefully. Not because the Radio Demon was difficult to find. He wasn’t, particularly, not to something like them. But because it was important that he felt found, rather than summoned.
Alastor, after all, had a notoriously complicated relationship with anything that resembled a leash.
“I have a proposition,” the Storyteller said.
No preamble. No pleasantries. No performance of an introduction neither of them required.
Just the offer, placed neatly on the table between them like a card turned face-up by someone who wanted you to know, from the very beginning, that they held the rest of the deck.
“A number of objects of considerable metaphysical importance have recently scattered themselves across the Pride Ring,” they continued, in the mild, unhurried tone. “I require someone to retrieve them.”
Alastor turned from his equipment, smile already in place—bright, polished, and entirely insincere.
It was the expression of a man who categorized every interaction as either performance or trap. Determining which this might be.
“How delightful,” he replied. “I am quite certain there are any number of capable parties who would be simply thrilled to assist with something like that, and I would be more than happy to recommend several—”
The interruption was abrupt and precise. Delivered without flourish.
Not obviously. Not in any way a casual observer might note. The smile didn’t move. His posture didn’t change. His hands stayed exactly where they were.
But the air shifted, just slightly, like a string pulled too tight.
“Nullified upon completion,” the Storyteller continued. “Your standing as Hell’s strongest sinner—untouched. No renegotiation. No hidden clauses. No clever reinterpretations buried in the fine print.”
A pause. Measured and tense.
“Your freedom will not come with strings attached.”
“The work itself,” they added lightly, “is the string.”
To the untrained eye, it might have looked like consideration. The kind of thoughtful, deliberate pause a reasonable person takes before making a reasonable decision.
To anyone who actually knew Alastor, it was something else entirely.
Fast. Precise. Relentless. A mind running cost-benefit analysis at the speed of a broadcast signal.
“And the catch,” he said at last. Not a question, precisely. More of an acknowledgment.
“The shards embedded themselves within sinners at moments of heightened emotion. To remove one—” a slight deliberate pause “—you must reach that same depth.”
Their gaze held his. Unblinking. Certain. The gaze of something that had watched enough stories to know how this particular scene ended.
“And they must open their heart willingly.”
Alastor’s smile did not falter.
But something behind it sharpened, the way a knife sharpens when it’s being pressed against something that isn’t giving way.
“The extraction method,” the Storyteller continued, “is…a dance.”
The word settled between them.
Ridiculous. Absurd. Completely unacceptable.
“An emotionally sincere one,” they clarified, before he could recover. “You cannot fabricate it. You cannot perform your way through it. You cannot apply technique where technique is not the point.”
A slight tilt of the head. “The shard will know.”
They spoke with the quiet authority of someone explaining basic procedure.
“You must connect with each sinner genuinely. You must, for at least a moment, feel as they feel. You must allow yourself to be—”
The silence that followed was not empty.
The kind of silence that settles when something deeply offensive has been introduced into the room and refuses to leave.
If translated into more practical terms, it would have resembled a man being calmly informed that he would need to perform surgery on himself.
Alastor’s smile remained. It always did.
But it had taken on a quality — edges a touch too sharp, surface a shade too fixed, the performance of pleasantness stretched just barely thin enough to see the tension underneath.
“I would—” he said carefully, with gritted teeth. “ —sooner meet my second death.”
The Storyteller reached into the folds of their coat and withdrew two objects with the casual ease of someone who had never once been inconvenienced by reality.
The first was a small, neatly folded garment.
The second was a crystalline case, resting in their palm with an unnerving stillness—catching no light, reflecting nothing, and yet managing somehow to convey the distinct impression that it was paying close attention.
“The case will indicate your progress,” they said. “Each shard you recover will settle within it. You’ll know when the work is done.”
“I have also prepared a disguise,” they added. “To preserve your reputation throughout the process.”
Alastor accepted the garment. Unfolded it.
Then, with immaculate, deliberate composure, refolded it. Carefully. Along its original creases.
“This,” he said, in a voice of extraordinary control, “is a dress.”
“Yes,” the Storyteller agreed, without hesitation, without irony, and without a single trace of shame.
“A magic dress,” they elaborated pleasantly, “which will adapt into the optimal dance attire for any given encounter. Quite practical, really.”
“I am going to require,” he said, after a pause of considerable weight, “a more thorough explanation as to why a disguise necessitates—”
“Your chest fluff can fill in as breasts.”
The interruption arrived with no warning and absolutely no apology.
“You will find it quite convincing.”
But one of remarkable density. The sort of silence that suggested several things were being reconsidered at once—morality, existence, and whether or not this entire conversation could still be salvaged.
The deal, after all, had already been made.
Alastor had agreed the moment the words your deal with Rosie had entered the air, and the Storyteller had known that long before they chose to appear.
What followed now was merely… staging.
“One question,” Alastor said at last, gathering what remained of his dignity.
“Why,” he continued, voice perfectly level, “am I not simply being asked to locate these individuals and retrieve the shards by force?”
A reasonable question. A practical question. A question that belonged comfortably to the version of Hell Alastor understood:
The one where power was currency, where leverage was language, where everything could be taken if you were simply strong enough and clever enough and willing enough to reach out and take it.
The Storyteller regarded him for a moment.
And for the briefest instant, something in their expression softened.
It might have been sympathy. Or something else, it might have looked almost like pity.
“Because the shards are Lucifer’s heart,” they said quietly.
The room seemed to still at those words.
“You cannot take something like that.”
“That,” they added, almost gently, “is rather the point.”
Not flippantly. Not dismissively.
But with the careful attention of someone recognizing, perhaps for the first time, the exact shape of the trap he had stepped into.
And is deciding, in real time, what to do with that information.
“…Right,” he said at last.
Not the brittle thing from before but something sharper. Brighter. Broadcast-ready.
“I suppose,” Alastor continued, smoothing his sleeves. “I am in the business of collecting hearts now.”
The words settled into the room.
The implication followed a moment behind, quiet and inevitable.
And then, he laughed. Soft and genuine and faintly delighted, like a man who has decided that if he must suffer—if this is truly, unavoidably, the shape his freedom is going to take, then he will at the very least make it worth watching.
The Storyteller watched him.
But if one looked closely, if one happened to catch the precise angle of their expression in the moment before they chose to look away.
It might have seemed, just faintly, like the beginning of a smile.
Chapter Three: The Radio Demon in a Dress (Of Sorts)
The disguise was, by any reasonable standard, absurd.
That, perhaps, would have made it easier to dismiss.
Easier to file away under ridiculous and move on with whatever fragments of dignity remained. Inelegance could be tolerated. Sneered at. Kept at a safe, comfortable distance.
The silhouette was tall and deliberate, cut from deep crimson and black that drank in the light rather than reflected it. The sort of fabric that did not merely catch the eye, but claimed it outright. The gown fell in clean, sweeping lines to the floor, the skirt shifting like pooled shadow with every movement, never quite settling into stillness.
The sleeves trailed behind his arms in long, dramatic arcs, whispering faintly against the air.
The collar rose high, framing his jaw in lace that was far too intricate—
—and, insufferably, far too tasteful—
for how he felt about any of this.
This, apparently, was merely the default.
According to the accursed Storyteller, the garment would adapt itself to suit the “needs” of each dance.
Alastor had categorized this information as profoundly unhelpful and moved on.
And in their place—a tiara.
As if he were some manner of storybook princess trapped in a particularly ill-conceived fairytale.
His hair had lengthened as well, falling in a cascade of auburn waves past his shoulder blades. It had been styled—he noted, with no small degree of irritation—in a way that could only be described as romantic.
His face, however, remained unchanged.
His eyes were still his own—sharp, knowing, and entirely unimpressed.
His smile, when he tested it, was exactly as it had always been.
His voice, when he spoke—unchanged.
The disguise consisted of a gown, longer hair, and a deeply questionable redistribution of his chest fluff that he was going to think about as little as possible.
Alastor raised a hand, examining it with clinical detachment.
Still his hand. Still his claws.
Still, unmistakably—irreducibly—him.
Just… arranged differently.
“Nobody will know it’s me,” he said flatly.
The Storyteller, who had chosen to exist draped halfway across a chair that may or may not have been real, tilted their head.
“Nobody will be expecting it to be you,” they corrected.
“Which is, functionally, the same thing.”
“You are the Radio Demon,” the Storyteller continued, voice light with quiet amusement. “The cognitive dissonance alone will serve as an adequate disguise. People will dismiss the possibility before it fully forms.”
“The mind,” they added, almost fondly, “is remarkably committed to its own assumptions.”
That, unfortunately, was not incorrect.
Alastor lowered his hand slowly, the fabric of the sleeve whispering after it like an insult.
“I would like it formally noted,” he said, each word precise with restraint, “that I find this arrangement deeply undignified.”
“Noted,” said the Storyteller, with no visible concern whatsoever.
“If it offers any comfort,” they added, “you are not required to enjoy yourself.”
A pause settled between them.
“The first shard,” the Storyteller said, tone shifting with quiet finality, “has settled within Carmilla Carmine’s sector.”
Of course the first one was Carmilla Carmine. An arms dealer. A warlord in silk. A woman who conducted negotiations with impeccable composure and the unspoken certainty that she was the most dangerous entity in the room.
Alastor’s smile sharpened.
Not the bright, broadcast-ready grin.
The kind that belonged to a man already thinking three moves ahead.
“I would recommend something slow,” the Storyteller continued, offering practical guidance. “Measured. Intentional.”
Alastor’s gaze flicked up at that.
There, for just a fraction of a second—interest.
“I know how to waltz,” he said.
He knew dozens of dances. Hundreds, perhaps—catalogued across a lifetime, a death, and however many years had followed. Every step precise. Every turn controlled. Every pause, every suspension, every breath between movements—understood as a system.
Variables. Inputs. Outputs.
He knew how to make it look like something. He was exceptional at making things look like something.
The Storyteller’s expression did not change.
“I know you do,” they said.
Their voice softened. Not kindly. But pointedly.
“I am asking you,” they continued, “to mean it.”
The quiet that followed was the kind that has texture.
Alastor looked at them for a long moment.
His smile stayed exactly where it was.
His eyes did something else. Something small and complicated and quickly, efficiently contained.
“Right,” he said at last.
He reached down and smoothed an already-perfect line of fabric along his sleeve.
Picked up the crystalline case. Turned it once in his hands. Watched the light not catch in it.
“I suppose,” Alastor said, “that a waltz is a perfectly reasonable place to start.”
He did not say: I’m not sure I remember how to mean anything.
He did not say: I’m not entirely certain that isn’t the same problem.
He turned toward the door instead, the gown moving with him in a sweep of shadow and crimson, and did not look back.
Behind him, the Storyteller watched him go.
Because some things, they had learned over a very long time, are better said by the story itself.
Chapter Four: Rules of Extraction (A Field Guide to Hell’s Most Reluctant Magical Girl)
The rules, as Alastor came to understand them over the course of his first few attempts, were as follows:
First: A shard could not be extracted through performance.
He tested this immediately.
The hypothesis was obvious. The experiment was necessary. And Alastor had never been the sort to accept a constraint he had not personally verified.
The initial subject was a minor sinner—petty jealousy, simple in structure, almost elegant in its lack of complexity. It should have been the easiest possible introduction to the process. A proof of concept. A calibration exercise.
He approached it with flawless precision.
Perfect timing. Perfect posture. Every step placed with the confident exactitude of someone who had long ago made performance a second language. The cadence was immaculate. The frame impeccable. Each turn landed exactly where it should.
The entire thing was, in the most complete and irrefutable sense of the word—hollow.
The sinner had, after a long moment of silence, simply asked if he was feeling all right while looking at Alastor as if he had gone crazy.
It had not, as far as Alastor could determine, even considered moving.
It had, if anything, seemed faintly unimpressed.
He had filed this information under ‘noted’ and moved on.
==================================
Second: each shard resonated with the emotion present at the moment of its embedding.
To reach it, he would have to locate something within himself capable of matching that frequency.
Not a reconstruction assembled from memory and technical skill.
The shard was not interested in being fooled. It would not accept the performance of feeling as a substitute for the thing itself.
Harmonic, the Storyteller had called it.
In the tone of someone entirely aware it would take him longer than he preferred to understand what that meant in practice.
The shard was not listening for imitation.
It was listening for sincerity the way a tuning fork listens for vibration—patient, indifferent to effort, responsive only to resonance.
You could not trick it. You could not approximate it. You could only find the note, somewhere in the complicated and largely uncharted interior of yourself, and sound it.
Alastor had found this information professionally offensive and personally inconvenient.
He thought it might have shown anyway.
==================================
Third: The dance itself could take any form.
Slow or quick. Formal or loose. Structured or improvised.
The dress adapted. The music found them. The space between two people rearranged itself into something that could hold what needed to happen. The form was almost incidental, in the end.
But it always ended the same way.
Not the absence of movement, but the presence of something too large for movement to contain.
Their hands, clasped between them, caught in a moment that felt too small for what it carried.
The way breath sometimes syncs between people who have, for a moment, forgotten to be separate.
If the connection had been genuine, if the frequency had been found and held and not flinched away from at the last second—
Not extracted with the clinical efficiency Alastor would have very much preferred.
It surfaced the way a splinter works itself free of skin—slow, inevitable. Bright. Luminous. Briefly warm against his palm.
Something that had been lodged somewhere it didn’t belong, finally, gently, released.
Folded into the crystalline case with a soft chime that Alastor had made a private and ongoing decision not to find satisfying.
(He always did anyway.)
==================================
Fourth: Alastor remembered everything afterwards.
Every conversation. Every hesitation. Every unguarded truth—spoken in that particular way truths tend to be spoken when music is playing, when hands are held, when the careful architecture of a person’s defenses has, for a moment, been made permeable.
The Storyteller had mentioned this, casually, in the tone of someone adding a footnote to a document
“Some residual memory is common,” they had said. “Normal, even.”
As though it were incidental.
As though it were not, in fact, a structural complication of the highest order.
Alastor had looked at them for a long moment.
Some battles, after all, are not worth the opening move.
He remembered everything.
Every single time.
==================================
The case, for its part, remained elegantly unhelpful.
The shards within shifted in luminosity as the collection grew—dim at first, barely there, then gradually warmer with each new fragment that settled into place. Coaxing themselves toward something. Embers that had not yet decided what they intended to become.
What the case would not tell him was how far he had to go.
No indication of how many shards remained. No progress bar. No percentage. No thoughtfully provided map.
Just the slow accumulation of warmth and the stubborn, unhelpful silence of a magical artifact.
He held the case up to different light sources—lamplight, hellfire, the flickering glow of a neon sign at an hour when most of Hell had the decency to pretend to sleep. He turned it at precise angles, observing refraction, testing reflection, attempting to extract meaning through geometry, pattern, and sheer persistence.
The Storyteller would almost certainly have found this amusing.
They were definitely watching.
==================================
By the third attempt, Carmilla Carmine had stopped treating him like a curiosity.
That was the first sign that something had shifted.
A curiosity could be examined, categorized, filed away. It occupied a neat, defined place in the architecture of threat assessment: Interesting, potentially useful, worth observing from a comfortable distance.
She had stopped doing that.
She had not, to be clear, lowered her defenses. Not in any way that would register on a tactical evaluation. The wards were still up. The exits were still mapped. The part of her mind that ran perpetual security protocol was still running it, because it had been running long enough to become structural, to become her, and it did not know how to stop.
But the music had found a way in anyway.
Not through the wards. Not through the paranoia or the careful mathematics of a woman who had survived long enough to know that survival is, at its core, a discipline. Through something older than all of it. Something that had been there before the weapons trade, before Hell, before whatever she had been before she was this.
The rhythm didn’t break through.
They were mid-step when it happened. One measure from the turn, two from the resolve. The waltz doing what a waltz does when it is functioning correctly—making the mechanics of closeness feel, if only briefly, like something other than risk.
“I just don’t want to lose them,” Carmilla said, quietly.
Her feet didn’t falter. Her frame didn’t collapse. The muscle memory was too deep for that, the discipline too total.
Her voice caught on something small and human. Entirely out of place in the controlled elegance of everything else about her.
“I can’t—” A breath. Sharp. Unsteady. The kind that comes when something held too long slips, just for a moment. “I can’t be the thing that loses them.”
Alastor, who had spent the better part of this entire enterprise looking for a workaround.
Who had been running contingencies since the first shard, cataloguing angles, testing approaches, searching for the edge case that would let him satisfy the terms without paying the full price they were asking.
Found with the particular and infuriating quietness of a door swinging open—
Not because he lacked skill.
Not because he lacked strategy, or patience, or the considerable toolkit of a man who had spent decades learning to navigate the interior lives of others for leverage.
But because he understood.
He had made his peace with the absence of that particular mechanism a long time ago. Catalogued it, set it aside, concluded it was not a variable he was equipped to work with and moved on accordingly.
But the structure beneath it.
The deeper, older mechanism that love was, perhaps, just one expression of.
The way the hands tighten around what they’re holding when they’ve learned, at some foundational level, that holding is not a permanent state.
The way the mind runs its calculations faster and faster, because if it can just account for enough variables, if it can just control enough of the landscape, then maybe….
The certainty, quiet and rational and inescapable, that loss was not an event.
And that every fortress ever built is, in the end, a response to it.
It rose the way they all did.
Unhurried, inevitable, like something that had been waiting for exactly this and had known, with more patience than Alastor was currently capable of feeling generously about, that it would come.
A small thing. Barely visible. But it was the blink of someone surfacing.
Of a room that had been slightly, imperceptibly tilted for long enough to feel normal suddenly finding its level again.
She looked at her hands, then at the space around her, then at him, with the quiet, uncertain expression of someone trying to account for a feeling they can’t quite place.
Not metaphorically. Not as a literary flourish.
Lighter, in the specific, atmospheric sense. As though something heavy had been present for so long it had become ambient, and its absence was only now, retroactively, legible.
Holding a fragment of someone else’s fear-shaped love in his gloved hand.
Alive in a way that sat at the particular intersection of beautiful and deeply uncomfortable.
Pulsing with something he had spent the last several minutes understanding far more precisely than he had intended to.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he placed it, carefully, into the crystalline case.
He decided, with full awareness of the irony, not to examine the fact that his hand was very slightly slower to let go than it needed to be.
He had a great deal to think about.
Carmilla Carmine is, very slowly, beginning to remember how to let Zestial knock on her door without her hand drifting instinctively toward the nearest weapon.
It is not forgiveness. Not precisely.
It is not the dismantling of the fortress so much as the careful, reluctant acknowledgment that perhaps one window might be left unlatched. That perhaps proximity is not, in every case and without exception, a prelude to loss.
The exits are still mapped.
But something within that structure has… shifted.
She has not unlocked the new deadbolts.
But she has stopped replacing them.
It is, by Carmilla Carmine’s metrics, an extraordinary concession.
==================================
Somewhere deep within the Palace of Pentagram City, Lucifer Morningstar is a little more hollow than he was yesterday.
That is, perhaps, the most precise definition of the problem—this hollowness has no edges he can trace, no shape he can map, no contour he can press against and name with any certainty as loss.
A faint, pervasive wrongness.
The psychic equivalent of a sound just below the threshold of hearing—too quiet to locate, too present to ignore.
Everything is where it should be.
Nothing feels like it is.
The world is slightly less sharp than it used to be.
Colors bleed a fraction duller. Sounds arrive a half-second too late, as if reluctant. Even the sensation of caring, something he had never thought to examine while he possessed it, has begun to thin, stretching into something fragile and indistinct.
Today, he has made four new rubber ducks.
They sit in a perfect row on his worktable, lacquered to a soft shine, each one precise, identical, and entirely without purpose.
He cannot remember why he started making them.
In the idle, unfocused way of someone reaching for a word that hovers just out of reach, he traces the habit backward.
Day by day. Action by action.
Searching for the origin, the moment it first mattered. The impulse, the reason, the spark.
Or worse, he finds the outline of something that used to be there. A hollow impression where meaning once rested. And because the absence has no name, no shape he can hold onto, he lets it go.
It is easier to move forward than to stand still in front of something he cannot understand.
The portraits do not help.
There are so many of them.
Lining the corridors, watching from the walls. He moves among them the way he moves through everything now. Present, but unanchored.
Aware, in some distant and abstract sense, that something is being asked of him.
Something he cannot give.
Two women appear in many of the paintings.
Always near him. At his side, or just ahead, or turned toward him with an expression that suggests familiarity. Intimacy, even.
Their faces stir something faint and incomplete, like a memory seen through fogged glass.
And so he moves on.
==================================
Near the end of the east corridor, there is a smaller portrait.
Bright-eyed. Laughing at something just beyond the frame. The artist’s hand was more careful here.
The brushstrokes are finer, softer, as though shaped with the quiet reverence reserved for things too precious to risk mishandling.
She seems almost alive in it. Caught mid-motion. Mid-becoming.
Too large for the frame, somehow, as if the world could barely contain her.
Lucifer pauses here, too.
He looks at her the way he looks at everything else. Quietly, distantly, searching for something he cannot define.
“Biological daughter”, a detached corner of his mind supplies. The information arrives flat and clinical, like a document filed correctly and felt nowhere.
The word passes through him.
And leaves almost nothing behind.
He knows, somewhere, that it should.
That it should mean something.
That it should anchor, or pull, or ache.
Instead, in the space where that feeling ought to live, there is only a dull, ambient warmth. Like something once burning, now cooled to the temperature of the room.
Just no longer recognizable as his.
He finishes the fourth duck.
Sets it carefully in line with the others, nudging its angle into place with quiet, automatic precision.
Four small, lacquered, irreproachable rubber ducks.
He cannot remember why he started.
The thought flickers, brief, insubstantial. It dissolves before it can take shape.
He reaches for the tools again.
Because finishing is something he can still do. Because doing, at least, has structure—has weight, has sequence. Because a task can be completed, even if nothing else can.
Doing is the shape of a day.
And the shape of a day is, for now, the closest thing he has to the shape of himself.
He does not yet have a name for what is happening to him.
He does not yet know that somewhere, far across the Pride Ring, a crystalline case is growing warmer by slow, deliberate degrees.
He does not know that this emptiness has a shape after all.
That it is not gone. Only scattered.
Fragmented into something luminous and strange, dispersed through Hell in quiet, unknowing vessels. Tucked behind ribs that do not recognize the weight they carry. Beating in chests that have never learned to call it by its proper name.
He does not know that someone is gathering it.
One measured step at a time, like a waltz performed in reverse—each motion precise, deliberate, drawing something lost back toward its origin.
He does not know any of this.
So the ducks continue to take shape beneath his hands—patient, purposeless, and still, somehow, made with care.
Perhaps that is the most honest thing left.
The hands remember, even when the heart does not.
Even when the heart is, technically, elsewhere.
==================================
The crystalline case glows warmer now than it did at the beginning.
Not warm enough. Not even close, by any honest accounting.
Inside, the shards turn against one another in slow, luminous rotation.
More than there were, less than there need to be. They cast a light that has no discernible source and lands on nothing in particular, patient in the way only things without a concept of time can afford to be.
In the most infuriatingly incomplete sense of the word.
A fraction of something. A direction, if not yet a destination.
Alastor lifts the case to the light anyway.
An old habit, now. A ritual he refuses to name as such.
He watches the glow shift and settle, shift and settle like an answer that has not quite decided to become one.
Then, with the same deliberate lack of ceremony, he lowers it.
Slips it back into his pocket, where it rests warm against his side.
He does not examine too closely why that warmth has become so easy to recognize by touch.
==================================
In a dress that fits him with a precision that continues to feel less like coincidence and more like commentary, sleeves drifting like ink dissolving in still water with every movement he makes, the fabric having apparently decided that if it must be worn by someone deeply resistant to the experience, it will at least be beautiful about it.
With hair that falls past his shoulder blades in auburn waves he has privately conceded is not the worst aesthetic inconvenience he has ever endured and has absolutely no further comment on.
With a crystalline case warm in his pocket and an unknown number of emotionally sincere waltzes still standing between him and the thing he bargained for.
Or is the beginning, with the slow, reluctant comprehension of a man watching an unwanted proof resolve itself into inevitability.
To understand what the Storyteller meant.
You cannot take something like this.
At the time, he had categorized it as a logistical inconvenience. A rule. A mechanism of acquisition. Something procedural and irritatingly specific, like a lock designed to open only from the inside.
He understands it differently now.
Because the rule does not apply solely to the shards.
You cannot perform your way to something real.
You cannot construct the frequency from the outside in.
You cannot reach into someone else’s carefully defended interior and retrieve what they’re holding without first, however briefly, however inconveniently, opening something of your own.
The shard listens for sincerity the way a tuning fork listens for vibration.
And a tuning fork, he is learning, does not distinguish between the note you intend to sound and the one that resonates in spite of you.
==================================
The Shattered King’s Waltz has only just begun.
The shards remain scattered. The king remains hollow. The collector persists—pretending, with steadily diminishing conviction, that he is here only for the terms of a deal.
For leverage. For control. For the clean, uncomplicated logic of a bargain.
Not for anything that might demand a more inconvenient kind of honesty.
Ancient. Intimately familiar with ruin in every variety and register. Acquainted with destruction both catastrophic and mundane. Fluent in every dialect of things falling irrevocably apart has never encountered anything quite like this.
There is no crescendo. No violent unraveling. No operatic fall of something doomed from the start.
This is quieter. More precise. Something unmaking itself gently.
In the space between one measure and the next.
In the suspended breath at the end of a waltz.
In the lingering warmth of a crystalline case held just a fraction longer than necessary.
Hell knows how to survive an ending.
But it has never been especially skilled at recognizing a beginning.
And beginnings, like everything else, have their own inevitability.
Hell simply hasn’t learned how to hear it yet.
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