Thank you @ViZionShark for giving this wonderful idea (and of course again @ jayeeeelinhiding and her beautiful comic for sparking this awesome discussion). It's super funny how different Alastor look with different hair.
What If Orb AU + Eve!Lilith!Alastor AU (more context): here , here
Pomni in Hell AU info: here, here
-------
"What a mess..."
The thought had barely formed before Pomni hurled herself sideways.
A whip of living shadow cracked through the air, carving a razor-clean trench through the wall exactly where her head had been half a heartbeat earlier. Stones exploded into dust. Masonry rained across the floor.
She hit the ground in a graceless roll, scrambled to her feet, and didn't dare stop moving.
Alastor had gone completely, terrifyingly, catastrophically berserk.
And honestly?
For Hell, that was really saying something.
-------
It had all started at Vox's rally.
The massive, overcrowded, aggressively branded political circus had already been teetering toward a riot before Heaven decided to make an entrance.
One moment: campaign slogans, blaring speakers, Vox grinning for every camera in Pentagram City.
The next: a radiant portal split across the sky and angels descended.
Uninvited. Unannounced. And somehow still not the biggest disaster of the day.
A lot had happened after that.
Arguments. Accusations. Enough emotional trauma to keep several therapists employed for centuries.
Then the Seraphim herself had stepped forward.
Sera had opened her mouth and detonated reality with a single sentence.
Alastor was a reincarnation.
More specifically, the reincarnation of Hell's long-lost queen, Lilith Morningstar.
Except, and this was where the story stopped making any kind of sense, Lilith wasn't actually Lilith.
Her real name had been Eve. The Eve.
That Eve.
Apparently, thousands of years ago, the woman history remembered as Eve had made a choice that neither Heaven nor Hell had ever uncovered. When judgment came for the Apple incident, she had refused to let her sister bear eternity's punishment alone.
So she'd switched places with the real Lilith. Quietly, without anyone realizing, and walked willingly into damnation. Into exile. Into disgrace. An eternity in Hell while her sister remained in Eden under a borrowed name.
She had never once looked back.
Pomni's brain kept catching on the most deeply uncomfortable implication hidden beneath all of that.
Eve had chosen Lucifer over Adam.
Not because she'd been forced. Not because she'd been tricked. Not because it was her punishment.
Because she'd loved him. Really loved him.
She had seen all of him.
His impossible brilliance, his reckless ambition, his dazzling charm, his spectacular capacity for catastrophically bad decisions, and the crushing self-loathing he papered over with circus acts, rubber ducks, and jokes that stopped being funny the moment nobody laughed. Every jagged crack. Every desperate performance.
And she had loved him because of those cracks. Perhaps especially because of them.
Hell's greatest love story. Who would've guessed?
Unfortunately, that love story hadn't been allowed to end naturally.
-------
Roughly a century ago, Heaven had committed something that even by celestial standards bordered on monstrous.
They had stolen Hell's queen.
Not to imprison her. Not to execute her.
They had reached into Hell itself, ripped her soul out of eternity, and forced it through reincarnation. Every memory, every scar, every triumph, every mistake, every precious moment she'd shared with Lucifer, every joyful moment she had with Charlie.
Gone, scrubbed clean until nothing remained.
As far as Pomni could piece together, Heaven's justification had been an uncomfortable blend of theological obsession and breathtaking divine arrogance.
They wanted the so-called Mother of Humanity back.
Ascended. Redeemed. Theirs.
Never mind that history had apparently gotten the title wrong.
"Lilith was the one who actually had children with Adam," Pomni thought absently, vaulting over an overturned truck a fraction of a second before a shadowy tentacle obliterated it into splinters.
"Eve somehow got blamed for everything anyway."
Typical.
The end result of Heaven's centuries-long interference was currently over seven feet tall, wreathed in crackling eldritch static, reality distorting around every furious step.
The Radio Demon tore through the streets like a living natural disaster.
And judging by the sheer, focused fury behind every attack, two lifetimes' worth of grief, betrayal, and stolen love had finally decided they were done waiting their turn.
-------
Alastor, it turned out, had not taken the revelation particularly well. Which, in retrospect, probably shouldn't have surprised anyone.
Sera, apparently deciding the best way to fix a catastrophic mistake was to make another one in real time, had immediately attempted to awaken Eve's dormant memories right there in front of everyone.
Her reasoning, at least as far as Pomni could piece together, wasn't entirely irrational.
Even a soul that had been wiped clean never truly started from zero.
Something always remained.
Echoes. Impressions. Like scar tissue.
Invisible from the outside, perhaps, but forever woven into the soul beneath. No matter how thoroughly Heaven had scrubbed away Eve's memories, they couldn't erase the shape those memories had carved into her.
Sera had reached for those invisible scars and pulled, hoping that somewhere beneath Alastor's borrowed identity. Some fragment of Eve would answer.
That she'd remember. That there would be closure.
For whom, exactly, remained a mystery.
Pomni had her own theory.
She'd caught the look on Sera's face. That single, infinitesimal crack in the Seraph's immaculate composure before the mask had slammed back into place.
It hadn't looked like hope. It looked like guilt.
Old guilt.
The kind that settled into your bones, rotted there for decades, and quietly convinced you that if you could just fix one thing...
Maybe you'd finally deserve to sleep again.
Whatever Sera had been trying to accomplish, it wasn't for Charlie. Not for Lucifer. Not even for Eve herself.
It had looked suspiciously like a desperate attempt to absolve the only person she still had the power to forgive:
Herself.
Unfortunately, the soul she'd tried to awaken wasn't sleeping.
It had been screaming.
-------
Anyway, that had been fifteen minutes ago.
Now the consequences were everybody else's problem.
Which, Pomni reflected while ducking beneath another lance of living shadow, felt deeply on-brand for Heaven.
The Vees had been the first casualties.
Not dead. Just spectacularly unlucky.
They'd happened to be standing closest when Alastor's composure finally gave way. In hindsight, that had been an objectively terrible place to stand. The VoxTek employees and most of the rally attendees had scattered during the initial explosion of chaos, fleeing in every direction before they fully grasped what was happening.
What remained behind was a considerably less fortunate collection of people: The Hazbin Hotel crew, the circus gang, and Lucifer Morningstar himself.
King of Hell, former seraphim, creator of the Seven Rings, and currently running completely out of ideas.
Together, they scrambled through collapsing roads and buildings around a Radio Demon trying, and failing, to remember who he was.
Pomni risked another glance toward the angels.
"...Seriously?"
The instant everything went catastrophically sideways, Sera had grabbed Emily and Lute by the backs of their collars, seized Abel with her remaining hand, and bodily hauled all three of them back through Heaven's portal. The gateway snapped shut and the golden light vanished.
Just like that, Heaven closed its doors and left Hell to clean up the mess.
Again.
"...Wow." Pomni couldn't help the deadpan thought that slipped through her mind.
"Thanks. Super helpful.”
-------
Through some minor miracle and the deeply reluctant, historically unprecedented cooperation of Jax and Ragatha, who had extracted what amounted to a blood oath of silence from every surviving witness before agreeing to work together. They had managed to get Alastor contained.
It had taken far more effort than anyone wanted to remember.
Half the hotel was in ruins by the time they collectively herded him through the shattered back entrance and into his room.
"C'mon, Al!" Charlie had begged through tears.
"Move, move, MOVE!" Jax had shouted as another burst of shadow ripped through the hallway.
Ragatha had somehow kept everyone coordinated while simultaneously trying to stop them all from dying.
Meanwhile, Caine had done something.
Pomni still couldn't explain what she'd watched him do. He'd snapped his fingers, laughed like he'd just thought of the funniest joke imaginable, and suddenly the room itself had stopped obeying reality.
Walls refused to crack. Furniture refused to splinter. The floor no longer acknowledged concepts like impact or structural integrity. The entire room had become indestructible in a way that went far beyond architecture and wandered into the territory of "because Caine said so."
Pomni didn't understand it but she appreciated it anyway. It kept Alastor contained in one place.
Contained, however, did not mean calm.
The rampage never stopped. Behind the warded door came another deafening crash. Then another.
The walls shuddered beneath impacts that shook the whole building. Static-laced screams bled in and out of existence like a radio caught between stations, fractured into dozens of overlapping voices that sounded too old to belong to any living thing.
Beneath them all lurked something worse.
A low, resonant wrongness. The sound of ancient grief trying to tear its way into the world.
Lucifer had layered protection after protection across every inch of the room. Even those strained under the punishment. The glowing symbols flickered with every impact.
They had tried everything. Absolutely everything.
Charlie. Vaggie. Angel. Husk. Niffty. Even the circus troupe had taken turns standing outside the door, hoping some familiar voice might break through.
Nothing worked.
-------
Lucifer had tried.
That had somehow made everything worse. The instant the thing behind the door sensed the King of Hell nearby, the destruction exploded into something almost feral.
Walls shook harder. The screaming became raw. Furniture that couldn't technically break somehow still managed to explode. Whatever remained of Alastor reacted to Lucifer's presence with enough agony to make everyone instinctively step backward.
That was a much bigger conversation that nobody had the luxury to unpack right now.
Even Charlie couldn't reach him. Charlie.
The one person both versions of Alastor had trusted without reservation. The one person who had loved him before any of this madness. The one person he'd willingly called family.
Nothing. No response.
Whatever raged behind that door no longer recognized her. Or perhaps it recognized her far too well.
Pomni honestly couldn't decide which possibility was more horrifying.
And the math wasn't encouraging. An overloaded soul burning itself apart wasn't a metaphor; it was real and it was happening right now. Souls could collapse under enough strain until there was simply nothing left.
If this continued much longer, there wouldn't be an Alastor left to save.
Charlie had gone silent, cried until there were no tears left, and now stood frozen in the hallway staring at the door. She'd lost her mother once. Now she knew where her mother had gone, who she'd become, how much she'd suffered. The weight of it sat on her like something physical.
Lucifer stood a few feet away. He hadn't cried.
Somehow, that worried Pomni even more.
He stood before the warded door with his hands clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone pale, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the wood, beyond the room, beyond the present. Whatever haunted him from those years with Eve, he carried it entirely alone.
-------
Nobody could reach Charlie or Lucifer.
Pomni stood at the end of the hallway. She looked at the shaking door. She looked at Charlie. She looked at Lucifer.
Then she made what was, without question, the stupidest decision of her life.
She sprinted straight toward the door.
Because she'd been in Hell long enough to learn one universal truth: being reasonable had never solved a single problem down here.
"WAIT!" Charlie screamed.
"STOP, POMNI!" Ragatha shouted.
"FUCK! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Jax yelled, abandoning every ounce of practiced sarcasm.
"Pomni!"
"COME BACK!"
The voices crashed together behind her in a wave of pure, undignified panic. She heard every one of them. She didn't slow down.
The warded door swung open and she crossed the threshold at full speed.
Chaos greeted her.
Shadow and crimson static churned through the air like a living hurricane. Reality bent around them in impossible angles. Radio frequencies screamed past the limits of sound until they dissolved into raw distortion.
Something enormous moved inside the storm. Not quite Alastor, not quite Eve, something caught between them, burning at the seam.
Pomni never gave herself time to hesitate.
She hit the floor running.
A claw of living shadow swept toward her head. She ducked. A wall of black tendrils erupted from the floor. She vaulted over them. An overturned bed frame spun through the air; she planted one foot against it and used it as a springboard, buying herself two seconds of flight.
Then she threw herself forward, arms wide.
No plan. No backup. No idea whether this would work.
She simply wrapped both arms around the raging nightmare in front of her and held on.
