Chapter Text
In his office, there is a calendar. It is, for the most part, filled with official duties - nothing but meetings and court dates - but today’s date has a circle around its number alongside the usual scrawling reminder.
One year.
One year since he’d agreed to that accursed deal.
It had been simply a normal day in the hotel when Lucifer had pulled him into one of the meeting rooms.
“Alastor, I have a deal for you.” Lucifer had sounded gravely serious. “And no smart talk, okay?”
He’d been surprised, and slightly wary, but all he had done was merely smile, inclining his head in curiosity.
“A deal with the devil, my, my. Are you sure you have something tempting enough to suit me?” Alastor taunted. “I’m not sure rubber ducks are really my thing, unless you’ve found another inane hobby to pass your endless time.”
“How would you like to be King of Hell?”
He’d been taken aback, staring at Lucifer, who looked more stoic than he’d ever seen him.
“It hasn’t been the same without Lilith, and Charlie…well, she’s got her own stuff going on for now. She needs to focus on the hotel, and I’d like to help her, but someone needs to manage things, and I can’t harm sinners.” Lucifer sighs. “And I don’t trust you one bit, but I’ve seen how you are with her, and I’d like to step up myself and spend more time with my daughter. I’ve never really wanted to rule, either. It’s always been more of a punishment than anything. And I really do believe that you’d make a good king. You at least have the patience for it.” He held out his hand. “So, put her there, pal.”
“Are you sure you won’t regret this, Your Majesty?” Alastor had asked, softly.
“Certain. Who better to keep sinners in line than the Radio Demon?” He laughed. “Ah, I’m just fucking with you, but…the power of the throne is yours, if you want it. I want you to be able to protect Charlie, and I can’t do that myself.”
Fool he was, he’d take the hand, drawn in by the overwhelming might of what was being offered, laughing at Lucifer’s stupidity, assuming that the king had given up as he usually did in the face of all of Hell knowing his overwhelming vulnerability. He hadn’t even thought twice about what it could mean until Lucifer began laughing, angelic magic swirling around their hands, twisted in shadow and locking Alastor in place as Lucifer slipped through.
“Thank you so very much, Alastor!” He’d flown backwards, gleeful. “Oh, I do hope you enjoy ruling Hell, I really do, but for someone so adept at deals, you’re awful at asking after the fine print, aren’t you? And I didn’t even have to lie! No, you’ve been getting kind of dangerous recently, and I can’t harm sinners, it’s true, but neither can you.” Lucifer grinned, delighted with himself. “The King of Hell can’t harm the sinners under his rule, you idiot. That includes Charlie’s new friends, of course….the uh, bartender and the maid? But also, do you really think Charlie will keep trusting you now that you’ve taken the throne out from under me? I love my daughter, and I will do anything for her to keep her safe. She is more important to me than anything, and you…well, you were a little too dangerous for my liking. So, congratulations on the immortality, and give the fine print a read, why don’t you? It’s in my office. Well, your office, now.”
Alastor snarled, lunging forward as he cracked open into a bigger, nastier form, grasping claws and shadows reaching with intention to maim if not rend, and Lucifer disappeared with a hoot of laughter into a flash of flame.
Being outwitted was not a pleasant memory.
It had been a year, Alastor thought to himself irately, as he and the Sins filed out of the courtroom. A year of empty halls, long meetings, and chains he had not been able to break.
A year since he had made the foolish mistake of trusting the Devil, and found himself King of Hell. He gritted his teeth as he walked down the hallway, Beelzebub floating near his side companionably.
“I guess you’ve not heard anything from Lucifer?” she asked, breezily. “Well, not that it makes much of a difference. I think you’re doing a pretty good job anyway.”
“Oh, yes, I make a fantastic puppet king. I’m sure he would find that incredibly amusing.” Alastor gripped his cane.
“Well, whatever game he’s playing with you, it’s more action than I’ve seen him take in centuries,” Bee said, shrugging lightly. “And having you here on the council isn’t too bad. You’re alright at managing things, and it’s kind of nice to have a new face after all this time. Not like that happens too often.”
She’s sweet enough in her way, a little too sweet, but then that encapsulates her perfectly. And having someone to talk to in this whole fuck up is better than nothing, he supposes.
“I still do not know where he’s absconded to. Charlie even reached out to me after all that to ask if I’d seen him. She hasn’t seen him in months.”
“You mean when she kicked you out of the hotel?” Bee asks.
Alastor grimaced at the memory. It had not been...the best experience. Charlie had been angrier than he’d ever seen her, sobbing about how she had trusted him, and he had gone ahead and stolen the throne. No matter how he had tried to explain, she wouldn’t listen to him, and Lucifer was of course, nowhere to be found. Not at the palace, not in the hotel, and from what he found later, not in Heaven. Vaggi had nearly skewered him on the way out, and the goodwill he’d suffered to build up for his own purpose as well as Rosie’s orders had been shattered, most likely irreparably.
“Yes.”
“Tough break.” Bee flits upwards, stretching. “I can see if any of the hellhounds have seen him, if you like.”
“That would be…kind.”
“Yeah, well, it’s different if he’s absent from duties and we know where he is, but this is…” She wiggled a hand. “Nice to see you, anyway.”
She was the only one who seemed to think that. The rest of the Sins hadn’t been quite so welcoming to their new sovereign, especially Satan himself. According to the contract he had gone over in extreme annoyance, the Sins were equal to each other, except for Pride, which held sovereign status due to the role previously being Lucifer’s. With Alastor in the seat that Lucifer had abandoned (save for a cobwebbed note and a rubber duck) Satan had been the de facto leader. Alastor had no intention of changing that, but the fact he had the ability to do so despite being a mere sinner seemed to irritate the Sin of Wrath to no end. He’d engaged mostly in polite small talk, keeping his distance and doing his job where necessary, which mostly consisted of offering an affable version of his opinion on matters and reading the paperwork before meetings.
In a way, it was not unlike his work at the hotel, handling something that with the right touches here and there was mostly self-sustaining. Some matters were distasteful, such as the trials in which Satan came down like a hammer upon those who were found guilty, or the presence of the birdlike royalty who sneered and preened from their vantage points. He particularly disliked a couple of them, and he was aware how they might feel about him, but for the most part, his work was meeting with the Sins and going over the business of the various Rings. He was interested to find out that angelic weaponry including rope was circulating around Wrath, and that there seemed to have been some sort of public incident due to this. He supposed that if he had been vindictive enough, he could have used the angelic weapon unleashed upon Heaven as precedent to topple Carmine’s meticulous empire, and had even considered the novel possibility, but instead, he’d offered his opinion that angelic weaponry was in limited supply, and that he could set up a meeting with the Overlord most familiar with its use to see if they could address the issue in some way together. That they’d only sat up and taken notice of the matter when one of the Goetia had nearly fallen to its use had not escaped his notice. Likely, if it had been one of the many Hellborn creatures not fortunate enough to curry favour with the nobles and assorted royalty of Hell, they would not have made such a fuss.
In short, he played the diplomatic regent, smiling as he observed the inner workings of a truly expansive kingdom. Pentagram City, with its seething mass of sinners, was a drop in the ocean of the true expanse of Hell. Usually, a sinner would have no chance of seeing the rest of Lucifer’s kingdom, but for the time being, the crown rested on Alastor’s head, and the smallest side benefits it offered truly were interesting. Carmilla’s empire had reached its roots beyond the Pride Ring, something he would admit to being impressed by. He was a little more annoyed to find that Velvette’s Love Potion had seeped like a poison from the Pride Ring, but that wasn’t too much of a surprise. What was a pleasant surprise was that Asmodeus, as distant as he had been to Alastor, had expressed an utter abhorrence of the drug. Small mercies.
Meetings were extensive, important, and exhausting. The fact that Lucifer had dipped out on them for so many years was even more irksome, as Alastor could now not be seen to do the same. In a fallen angel and the first king, such habits were terrible, but it being a pattern would be untenable.
He loathed bureaucracy. He had an aching fondness now for the Overlord meetings, which would be easily ended when somebody’s ego was bruised or an old grudge threatened to boil over. If he wanted to get out of one of those, it was easy enough to needle someone into losing their temper with their shared history. Why, some barely lasted five minutes, and not even by his own hand. (At least he could thank Velvette for something.)
But the Sins? Well, annoyingly enough, they were a seamless team even in disagreement. The only creatures of their kind, each entirely unlike the other, they flowed in a way that spoke of familiarity, acknowledging grudges and moving in a practiced dance even in disagreement. Even when they held different opinions, they still held respect for each other, with no foothold for any type of festering grudge - and they deferred to Satan as though his word was absolute. Without Lucifer’s presence, it likely had been, and it reminded Alastor of nothing more than the eldest sibling stepping up to the plate in the absence of a parent, furious and dutiful.
As amusing as that might be, it made him feel horrendously out of place. There was no way to be accepted, and all he could do was the job in front of him, one step at a time. Lucifer’s job, which he would be forcing the man to take back as soon as he found the wretch.
He had, at least, been able to redesign an old room in the palace to suit his needs. The place was far too large for one man, and even for a family of three it must have been overkill, but he’d chosen a room that must have been at one point intended for guests, letting his magic wreathe and change the furniture into something more befitting of his taste. It was an oasis of his own in a vast marble sea of gold, apple-red, and white.
Collapsing into a large armchair next to the fireplace, he sunk his head into his hands as he hissed through his teeth. He had only just thrown off his chains, becoming free, and Lucifer had led him by the nose into the biggest collar that existed in Hell. He had wrongly assumed that Lucifer was the only one to be punished by Heaven, but there apparently existed restrictions on a cosmic level from on high, woven into the very fabric of Hell. The pit of the damned required a sovereign at its very core, as much as a body required a beating heart.
And he was fool enough to step into those shoes.
The contract was lengthy and explicit, a stack of glowing gold that seemed to have been written and rewritten over many years. It had taken him some time to go through it all. The newest pages were rescinding the order of extermination in light of the efforts of Princess Charlotte Morningstar, detailing that Hell would now be beholden to assisting its residents in ascending to Heaven. And on the very last page…
Well, that had been a nasty surprise, to say the least. Different handwriting made up the many pages, mostly a pleasingly delicate hand that he had figured out quite quickly belonged to the puffed-up Head Seraphim, while a bolder hand would appear to be Lilith’s. Other voices chimed in throughout the centuries-long conversation of the contract, but those two had gone back and forth, with Lilith’s hard-won additions always in Hell’s favour. The handwriting on the last page, however, matched that on the other documents on the desk in what had become his office.
Alastor, the Radio Demon, is now sovereign of Hell and all its Rings. His name and title were tauntingly in a deep blood red, before the script went back to its usual gold.
He’d had no word from Heaven. He didn’t know whether they’d even seen the change in what must be a mutual contract. If they hadn’t, he didn’t look forward to their finding out, not when the leash he’d been put on was so tight. He’d thought that Rosie had been annoying, but now, he had a little more perspective on the matter. He felt rather like Atlas, tricked into holding up the sky.
That fucking snake.