Chapter Text
Charlie wanted to go into Pentagram City and help as many people as they could.
Her father wanted them to move further away from it in the name of staying as safe as possible.
She had thought that she was making headway with him. Yet no matter how hard she pushed or what pleas she made, he wouldn’t budge. They went around in circles until he finally offered a compromise: that they try to avoid civilization until the worst of the virus had passed, then go back in and see if there was anything they could do.
It was a terrible compromise.
It was the only one that she was going to get.
Charlie knew that she would never forgive herself for running.
Her father’s love and fear ensured that her guilt wasn’t enough to keep her rooted in place.
*
They settled on the very edge of the Pride Ring, if one could call it settling. It was more accurate to say that Lucifer found a crumbly little mountain for them to camp out on. Prior to their arrival, there were no buildings, streets, or any other signs of life anywhere in sight. Charlie knew that they would probably find them if they left the mountain and walked more than a few miles in any given direction, as was the nature of the Pride Ring and its massive population. It was as close to isolated as they could get within this part of hell though, which was apparently enough to satisfy her father.
Charlie was glad that he hadn’t dragged her to another ring outright. She was too scared to ask why.
The day they arrived at their little mountain was a blur. It was a while after the star had fallen. She thought it was three days, but she couldn’t know for sure. Time didn’t have much meaning at that point anyway.
Charlie was exhausted but couldn’t stop crying. She wanted to save her people but knew that she might well be helpless even if Lucifer was willing to let her go. She kept starting to ask why heaven had done this, only to skirt away from the subject the second she came close to an answer.
Her father did everything he could to make the situation better, apart from the thing that he was utterly unwilling to do. He called upon what little magic remained available and created a little shack for them to live in. He created a stream clean enough to drink without complaint even though it clearly strained him to do so. Every time they ran low on food, he created more out of nowhere. When the nights grew too cold, he created blankets. Blazing heat was met with gusts of air with no distinct source.
Lucifer kept his chin up and tried to act like he was fine. Charlie knew better than to believe it. Their first year after the falling star was full of her trying to convince him to take it easier on himself. She couldn’t count the number of times that she tried to convince him that they could take the risk of voyaging into the closest down to get supplies. He shut her down each and every time.
The continuous use of his powers drained Lucifer more and more with each passing day. Those days passed without any care for him or anyone else trying to survive in what hell had become.
Charlie didn’t know what hell had become. Every day that passed without her seeing anyone but her father was a day where her heart sank a little lower.
She tried not to let it get to her. It made logical sense for the mountain to go untouched for so long. It was on the absolute edge of nowhere. There was no point in voyaging out to this part of hell, for there was nothing to find. Anyone trying to flee from whatever hid in the depths of hell would only damn themselves to a world of thirst and starvation. Unless they possessed the ability to create something out of nothing, their bodies would weaken the longer they stayed until they were inevitably forced back into hell itself.
Lucifer had found a good place to hide. Only the truly desperate would risk running so far.
Eight months after the star fell, Charlie met someone truly desperate.
*
Eight months. It was little more than the blink of an eye in the span of eternity, but trapped at the edge of the world with only her father for company, it may as well have been an eternity in and of itself. Charlie blamed that for why she reacted the way she did. It didn’t make it any more forgivable, but she hoped it made it understandable. If nothing else, she needed it to be understandable.
When a scream split the air, it was the first new voice that Charlie had heard in eight months.
When a scream split the air, the first thing she felt was excitement.
It was only a flash. The second it ended, she was moving. She knew that she didn’t know what she was running towards, but she didn’t care. She knew that it was dangerous, but she didn’t care about that, either. There wasn’t any room for thoughts in her head. There was a person somewhere nearby, they were in trouble, and she had to do something to help. It was as simple as that.
Unfortunately, ‘as simple as that’ wasn’t very simple at all. She had been halfway up the rocky slope of the mountain when she heard the scream. The voice sounded like it had come from several dozen yards down at the very least. Charlie ran as fast as she could, but she had to rein herself in so that she didn’t lose her footing. She had to pivot around naked, spindly trees and every rock that was too large to be stepped over. Her heart was hammering harder than it had since that day, yet it felt like she was taking forever while getting nowhere. After a point, she realized that she wasn’t sure that she was even going the right way anymore.
Then there was another scream. It was close, enough so that she could identify it as a woman. It was followed by a man shouting something.
The next few moments blended together into a blur of movement. A man shouted something; Charlie saw a flicker of movement through a copse of barren trees. She heard the sound of a gunshot; she plunged her hand into her pants pocket to grab the dagger that her father had created for her back when this first started.
She charged into the trees and almost collided head-first with an exorcist angel.
Charlie didn’t immediately recognize her for what she was. She saw the silvery grey hair, the yellow eyes, and the distinct white and black wings. What she didn’t see was a halo. Where an exorcist should have worn that unmissable uniform, this woman was clad in ripped, dirty jeans and a tattered shirt. Her features were the right color, but her hair was matted and her eyes shone with terror rather than the hatred she was supposed to see.
Each and every one of those details was jarring, but not inexplicable enough to make her doubt the reality playing out before her eyes. She was certain that she could come up with a solid explanation for the woman’s state if she stopped and thought about it for a little while.
What she couldn’t explain was the way that she dragged a horned, red-skinned sinner behind her like her life depended on it.
The man was in an even worse condition than the angel. They both staggered to a halt to avoid running into Charlie, but she saw the way he limped in the seconds before that. He leaned heavily against her shoulder in the instant they stood still, not so much an intentional pause as something forced upon him by the exhaustion that had so clearly wracked his body. Exhaustion and worse. Judging by the scrapes and scratches that mottled him, including a horrid bleeding gash in his forehead, Charlie could only imagine what he had been through.
Despite it all, he held a rifle in a death grip, finger on the trigger with one hand while the other held it steady.
The rifle’s muzzle possessed the same dangerous gleam as the machete held in the angel’s free hand.
Said angel did not look alarmed to have a sinner with an angelic steel rifle so close to her. If anything, the look of terrified, bleeding concern that she shot him suggested that she was more scared that he wouldn’t be able to use it.
Charlie didn’t know what was happening.
She didn’t know how the individuals before her could have ended up in a position for it to be happening.
She didn’t need to know. A snarl and the sound of shuffling feet sounded from somewhere behind the pair. Terror spasmed across the angel’s face for an instant so bleak that it would be carved into Charlie’s memory for all eternity.
It was soon replaced by desperate determination.She shoved her machete into a holster on her belt, pulled the sinner closer so that her arm was wrapped around his shoulders, and shoved Charlie out of the way with a shout of, “Run!”
Charlie was stunned.
She was beyond stunned.
She couldn’t afford to be stunned.
“Wait!” she shouted, turning to race after the angel. She looked like she was moving as fast as she could. However, between the near dead weight that was the sinner and a faint limp in her own right leg, that wasn’t very fast at all.
Charlie was stopped by the angel’s snarl of, “No! We don’t have time to—”
The sinner said something. It was too quiet for Charlie to make out the words, but there was no missing the way the angel shouted, “No! Don’t you fucking say that!”
No sooner had the words left her mouth than the sinner’s legs buckled beneath him. He started to slide out of the angel’s grasp, only for her to yank him back up with a strangled cry. Charlie heard his protests for what they were even though she could not hear the words themselves. She saw the way that the angel refused to be deterred, drawing him closer so that she could drag him outright. Her wings fluttered and flexed as she dragged him forwards. The movement made Charlie notice the odd bend and stiff motions of the one on the left.
She would never claim to be an expert on angels. They had seemed so distant as to be untouchable for most of her life, and by the time she discovered that she was dating one, it was too close to the end for her to have been able to ask many questions. However, she knew a flightless bird when she saw one.
She knew the snarl of a rabid predator when she heard it.
A man was standing behind them. There were wrinkles around his eyes that may have once been laugh lines. His right eyebrow was pierced with a little ball. It was covered in a mottled layer of grime, but she thought that it may have been a pearl beneath it. A crucifix still hung from his neck. The dazzling silver managed to shine through past the filth covering it.
All of those details made him a person.
His eyes were glazed over with a murky haze, like the woman she had seen on that terrible night eight months ago. The foam bubbling around his mouth was tinted a pale pink. His lips were cracked beyond repair, but none of them bled despite their heinous depths. Charlie glimpsed teeth beyond them, each and every one of them stained a rotten black. Dried blood cascaded down his chin and throat to stain his shirt and pants. Some of the other stains had to have come from his own body. She was certain of it, for his skin was sloughing off in great, decaying clumps. The decay wafted off him in a nightmarish stench, strong enough to make her want to gag even though he stood several yards away, swaying unsteadily.
All of those details made him something worse than dead.
She wanted to hope that somehow, some way, it wasn't too late for him.
For the sake of the people behind her, she could not allow herself to hold onto hope.
Charlie could have written what she and her father had seen on that first night off as a fluke. It had been eight months ago and they had sequestered themselves away from the entire rest of hell. Things could have changed since then.
She could have dismissed the sinner’s fear as someone being scared of something that he didn’t understand. His horrible condition could have been because he had gone about things the wrong way.
She could have attributed the terror and fury on the exorcist’s face to the way they had been taught to see the worst of hell and nothing more. Her injuries could have been because she decided to lash out at a hell that now knew how to defend itself.
She couldn’t turn a blind eye to the hysterical desperation with which the exorcist tried to get the sinner to safety. There was no ignoring the soft, loving tones that the sinner spoke to the angel with as he tried to convince her of something, something that only made her shouting and struggling all the more frantic.
Charlie would be a traitor to everything she stood for if she denied that the two of them cared about each other, impossible though it may have seemed.
She wanted to hope that they had come to be in this position because they had naturally come to see the good in each other. It would be so beautiful if she could believe that this was a sign that, even as it fell apart around her, hell was moving forward.
With her fingers clasped tightly around the hilt of her knife and an impossibly sick man snarling at her with a viciousness that left no room for intelligence, Charlie knew better.
It felt like she was standing there for minutes. Those minutes might have been better described as hours. Hours, for the first time in so very long, felt like that might as well have been days.
The rotting man lurched forward, decrepit legs carrying him forward with a speed that she never could have anticipated, and Charlie realized that it had been seconds. Because those seconds had passed, there were no more to waste. There was no time to plan. There was no time to think of a way to help that dreadfully sick man without endangering the lives of the people behind her.
Charlie raced forward with her knife braced by her side.
“No!” the angel shouted after her. “They can only be hurt by angelic steel!”
Charlie jerked to the side right as she was about to collide with the man. The sharp, sudden motion sent a burst of pain flaring up her right ankle. That ankle, screaming at her in a hungry demand for attention, was forced to stay standing as she twirled another few steps to the side.
The man followed her movements, snapping at her with ravenous jaws.
Her steps came closer to staggering with each one she took. She kept moving regardless, drawing the crea— the lost soul further away from the sinner and the exorcist as she shouted, “Hey! You don’t have to do that! I know you must be in a lot of pain, but—”
“It can't understand you!” the exorcist shouted. “You need to r—”
A rock wiggled loose beneath her foot. It sent a fresh jolt of pain up her already aching ankle, one that would not allow her to stay upright no matter how she tried. Charlie was meant to be running, but the next thing she knew, she was laying flat on her back, the man who couldn’t have been dead descending on her in an instant. The pain that raced up her spine and the back of her head was nothing compared to the agonizing pounding of her heart as she watched death descend on her.
Descend.
His unsteady, decaying legs could carry him faster than she would have believed if she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes, but they were still unsteady and decaying.
With a swift seep of her uninjured leg, Charlie pushed the man’s legs out from under him.
He fell face-first. Charlie reacted on instinct. One of her hands reaching up to grab his shoulder. The one holding her knife came up in an unforgiving arc aiming straight for the space between his shoulder and his collarbone.
His mottled, stinking flesh looked like it should have been soft and spongy.
The blade of her knife bounced off of him as harmlessly as it would have any exorcist when it made contact. The force of it sent it flying out of her hand to go skittering across the ragged stone of the mountain.
Charlie barely managed to grab the man’s other shoulder in time. Her arms shook with the exertion of trying to hold him up. He thrashed and snapped his teeth in her grasp, the sheer force causing him to sink lower and lower despite her best efforts. Ropes of bloody saliva dripped down from his mouth to pool on her clavicle.
“No,” she whimpered. “Please, you don’t need to do this. We can still t—”
The man jerked sharply to the right. A jolt of pain shot sharply up her arm as her muscles strained in her attempts to keep him away from her.
The pain made her whimper.
The feeling of her elbows buckling made her scream.
The spray of blood and brains that splattered her when a bullet shot through the man’s skull probably should have made her cry.
Charlie’s mind had staggered to too much of a stop for her to think of all the reasons why she should have been crying. Her eyes were too dry for her to possibly summon any tears. Cheerful clouds speckled the pale red sky, drifting by the same way that they always did, a corpse that had started rotting long before death lay on top of her, and all she could do was stare.
She didn’t know how long she remained in her stupor. If not for the hand that grabbed her upper arm, the answer may well have ended up being forever.
She was yanked to her feet roughly. If not for how tired the speaker was, the murmur of, “Come on,” that accompanied it would have been gentle.
Charlie looked up to find the exorcist holding her up. Despite holding her so tightly that it hurt, she wasn’t looking at Charlie at all. Her gaze was locked immovably on the man who may well have died long before his body fell still. It wasn’t just her eyes that weren’t moving; every part of her was stiff as a statue save for the hand holding her gun, which was shaking like a leaf.
The world was still too hazy for Charlie to manage anything close to conscious or intelligent thought. Her lips moved without it. “We should get to–”
“Roxanne!” someone shouted. Charlie flinched so sharply that she almost tore free of the exorcist’s grip. If not for the angel’s hand clenching around her arm, she would have. The pain barely registered past the breakneck flurry of her brain trying to come back to life and make sense of what was going on around her. Her eyes were trying to tell her, but the pieces refused to come together, for a piece of her was still under–
Him.
The creature.
The things that her people had become during the extermination. The things that she had apparently left them to devolve into for nearly a year.
While her mind ran in loops as it attempted to process something too horrible to be a nightmare, she saw that the sinner from before had been left to sit on the cliffside with the hatchet. As she watched, he struggled to his feet, very nearly collapsing the moment he got upright. The close call did little to deter him. Hobbling forward, he shouted, “Roxy! Are you–”
The exorcist sprang back to life in a flurry of motion. She marched forward, dragging Charlie behind her like she was nothing more than a particularly unwieldy suitcase. “Don’t you take one more step!” she shouted. “I swear to fuck, Ethan, if you hurt yourself any worse I’ll–”
“Kill me?”
The sinner said it was a pained, awkward smile.
The exorcist froze like he’d said the unimaginable. Charlie heard her loud but shallow intake of breath, felt her grip on her upper arm loosen, saw a grief too raw to describe cascade across her face.
The sinner dropped his hatchet and stumbled forward with a curse. “Roxy, I didn’t mean–”
Charlie started moving again when the exorcist dropped to her knees with a broken wail.
*
“But you could still–”
“You can’t. Once someone’s infected, the only thing you can do to help is kill them. I know you’ve never been smart, but if you try to do your sweet little savior act now, all you’ll do is get yourself killed and force them to–” Roxanne’s stream of venom ended in a strangled sound that was only half an inch away from the sob that she was so clearly holding back.
The sinner, Ethan, had been laid out on Charlie’s bed. Now that things had settled down some more, she could see just how injured he really was. From deep cuts on his stomach to a broken leg and a myriad of other injuries, he was in an absolutely miserable state. The sight of him moving enough to take Roxanne’s hand in his made Charlie wince.
Roxanne stiffened at the touch. “You’re supposed to be sitting still.”
Ethan made a noise that tried its very best to be a chuckle, but was ultimately too pained and uneven to meet the mark. “You think moving my hand is going to make me fall apart?”
Roxanne looked down at him with a scowl that didn’t match the fondness lurking around the edges of her pale yellow eyes. “It could. You sinners are fragile.”
“Isn’t everyone fragile these days?”
“I don’t know. Are they?” Lucifer asked.
Exorcist and sinner alike stiffened. Roxanne drew her hand away from Ethan and stiffly turned back to the king of hell. “Haven’t we told you enough?” she asked.
“Not really. You’ve kinda been dropping chunks of information in between getting derailed and going on rants and… you know.” Lucifer gestured at Roxanne weakly. “I’m not saying I blame you. I mean, you usually only kill people once a year–”
“He wasn’t a person anymore.”
“Right. Yeah. Are you going to tell us what you mean by that?” Lucifer took a step away from the wall he was leaning against.
Charlie started toward him, only to pause when he held his hand up. She looked between him, Roxanne, and Ethan, muscles growing tenser and tenser as she tried to think of a way to make things better.
She wasn’t going to. For that, Charlie would have to be able to think in the first place. Her mind filled with the sound of gunshots and smell of rotting flesh every time she tried.
Charlie may not have been able to think, but she could watch. She saw Roxanne try to glare her father down, only to break and look away after a little while. “I meant what I said. That thing wasn’t La– it was a walking corpse, not a person.”
“He wasn’t,” Ethan softly said. “You never would have hurt him, Roxy. Lance knew that.”
Roxy nodded.
Her wings were trembling.
“You did everything you could to save him,” he said.
A whimper forced its way out of her throat.
“Roxanne, you didn’t kill–”
The exorcist broke down sobbing. It was briefly interrupted by watery curses of protest when Ethan pulled her into his arms despite his wounds, but that, too, soon fell away in the face of her grief.
Charlie watched long enough for the sight to score itself into her mind for what she knew would be the rest of her life.
It didn’t take long.
The next thing she knew, she was taking her father by the hand and pulling him from the room.
It brought her no joy to see the hollow defeat in his eyes. However, it told her that he wouldn’t argue when she forced a smile and said, “I’m going to try and think of some ways to make our guests more comfortable.”