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Charlie wakes up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever, and is a whirlwind around the hotel as she sets up the new redemption strategy she wants to try- a “sharing circle,” where people can share things about themselves and become closer. It’ll encourage introspection, and confidence, and socialisation, and they’re all going to become best friends and she is so excited!
As the hours pass by and it approaches eleven in the moring, the residents and staff slowly scuttle and slither and skitter out of their rooms, groggy and irritable and extremely uninterested in any sharing circles Charlie has planned. Charlie knows this. It does not deter her.
“As soon as we’ve all finished breakfast, head up to the lounge, okay?” She calls into the kitchen, hanging off the doorframe as she sticks her head in. Husk is chewing morosely on plain, unbuttered toast, while Angel shovels pure sugar masquerading as cereal into his mouth. Pentious is eating tiny pink mice out of a bag like they’re popcorn.
“We’ll be there right away, Misss Morningssstar!” Pentious grins, a tiny tail sticking out the corner of his mouth, and Charlie offers him an awkward smile and thumbs up as she leaves the room. The other two don’t acknowledge her.
-
Painful as it is, she finally wrangles everyone into the lounge by about midday, and their morning activity can finally begin. Angel is draped over the sofa like usual, Husk is glaring from behind the bar, and Pentious is coiled up on an armchair. Vaggie is begrudgingly sharing the couch with Angel, while Alastor sort of- well, flickers in and out of the room, occasionally popping in to see what’s going on, though they all seem to be rather boring today.
Charlie, as always, stands in front of them all, and claps her hands together as she starts to speak.
"Okay! Today we're talking about our happiest memories! Positive thinking is important, and knowing things used to be good helps us realise that they can be good again!"
The gang look back at her, faces blank, bored, or grumpy, save for Vaggie, who is giving her an encouraging thumbs up.
"This is stupid."
Vaggie elbows Angel in the ribs.
"Let her finish," she hisses.
"I can go first!” Charlie volunteers, keeping her enthusiasm up as high as she can manage it. “I remember the first time Vaggie and I went to the bloodfalls and got to kayak through the river styx! It was sooo much fun. Angel! What about you?"
"First time I tried crack.” His voice is flat and he doesn’t look up from his phone. “Best night of my life."
"Angel." Vaggie shoots him a violent look.
"Fine! Jesus.” He turns his phone screen off and folds his forearms across his chest. “I dunno, whenever I went out dancin', I guess. Good clean fun, I mean. No poles or nothin'."
"That sounds wonderful, Angel! We could hold our own dance if you feel-"
"Don't get carried away, toots. S'just somethin' I liked to do."
"Okay…” She looks over at Sir Pentious, who seems to be falling asleep in his chair, and feels bad about waking him and putting him on the spot. She scrapes her eyes over the group again, and finally settles on- “Alastor! Would you be willing to share anything today?"
"I beg your pardon, dear?" He blinks at her from where he’s just emerged from the shadows once again, clearly not expecting to be dragged into Charlie’s little activities.
"A happy memory!" She explains, slightly desperate.
"In hell ?"
"No- well, maybe, but- in your life!"
He lets out a long, theatrical hmmm , stroking his chin and looking out into the middle distance. His microphone plays dramatic, nostalgic music.
"Ah, where to begin? There were such joys to be had- why, I remember when I was only a boy, finding a beautiful rabbit sniffing around the porch-"
"That's wonderful!" She feels hope spark in her chest. Real progress!
"Yes, it was! I was able to chase it down, you see, and hoist it up over my shoulder- it was a large creature, for a boy- and played Doctor with it for hours!”
That hope begins to flicker dangerously.
"Doctor? Like... ha... pretending it was... sick?"
"No, no, perhaps doctor was the wrong term.” His grin grows even sharper than usual, and all the lines and shadows in his face grow darker and more sinister as he recalls the childhood memory. “Perhaps I should have said... surgeon.”
The sound of a buzzsaw emanates from the microphone. Charlie feels her eye twitch.
“That’s… great , Al, uh-” She feels less bad about waking Pentious up now. “Sir Pentious!”
The sinner jumps in his seat and his eyes snap open, as he releases a loud, startled hiss.
“Yes, princess?”
“A happy memory! From you! Please!”
He blinks at her, looking around the circle and taking in the satisfied, nostalgic expression on Alastor’s face, along with the mild horror on everyone else’s. He gulps.
“Ah, well, I- Hm.” He taps a finger to his chin. “The first time I made a death ray, I suppose-”
Charlie closes her eyes and smacks a hand to her forehead.
-
This time, she is sure, she can make a sharing circle work.
“Alright, everyone!” She stands before them all, once again, and claps her hands together once. “We’re trying the sharing circle again! But this time, we’re talking about times we’ve helped a friend . Okay?”
Vaggie nods encouragingly. The rest of them stare at her, not looking ready to engage at all- save for Alastor, who is as chipper as ever, grinning at her from behind the sofa.
“Why, yes, it’s always good to help a friend,” Alastor nods sagely. The others turn to look at him, slightly wary. Charlie tries to give him the benefit of the doubt. “A friend in need is a friend indeed, so they say! Yes, I took very good care of Mimzy when we were alive- ”
“You did?” Charlie asks, warily.
“Of course! The poor girl, she never did have good taste in men, and I was there every time things went awry.”
Charlie presses her hands to her chest, truly touched by the fact Alastor helped his friend through what sounds like a lot of messy breakups. Perhaps she misjudged him.
“That is so sweet. ”
“Yes, well, it was a lot of work chopping them up every time, but the police never so much as knocked at her door!”
He finishes his little anecdote with a good-natured laugh, and Charlie, if she had a soul, would be feeling it leaving her body. For fuck’s sake.
“Anyone else?” She asks, feeling slightly defeated.
“I help Cherri out all the time,” Angel pipes up from the floor, where he’s laying in his stomach and scritching Nuggets under the chin.
“...With turf wars,” Pentious points out. “Against me. ”
“Yeah?” He raises his eyebrow and looks up at the snake. “What about it?”
Pentious huffs and crosses his arms, turning defiantly away from Angel and towards Charlie.
“My egg boys help me all the time. Does that count?”
“Do you help them in return?” Charlie asks hopefully.
“Of course not! Can you imagine if I took orders from thossse morons?”
“They do think the government is run by lizards,” Niffty joins in, apparently appearing from nowhere and blinking up at everyone. “Which is silly, because everyone knows there’s no such thing as government in hell, and lizards probably don’t know what democracy is-”
“Lucifer is a snake though-” Angel muses, and Charlie groans and covers her face. This isn’t going to plan at all .
“Can we please stay on topic?” She groans, and Vaggie snatches up her spear as a warning, standing up. “We don’t need to threaten anyone-”
“Everybody SHUT UP! ” Vaggie barks, her one good eye twitching. “Stay on topic!”
“But we don’t have friends,” Nifty points out.
“Speak for ya’self,” Angel sniffs. “I’m drippin’ in friends.”
“Dripping in something else, too,” Husker snorts, and Angel raises a finger to flip him off.
“Of course you have friends, Niffty,” Charlie frowns, crouching down and sitting on the floor to stay eye-level with her. “Aren’t we your friends?”
There is a chorus of sounds from the group that range from noncommittal to uncomfortable, and Charlie looks over her shoulder at them all to glare.
“Hmmm. Well, Alastor’s my boss,” she starts, tapping her chin and clearly thinking very hard.
“That’s not the same thing,” Angel points out, and gets ignored.
“And I have lots of cockroaches that run from me when I chase them. Which is sort of like playing, except if I catch them, I stab stab stab! ” About halfway through the second “ stab! ” she catches sight of an actual cockroach, and all hopes of intelligent conversation evaporate as she pulls a giant needle out from her pocket and starts brandishing it violently.
As she scuttles away, Charlie sighs and turns back to the rest of the group.
“Does anyone else here… have… friends?” The question is kind of sad and pathetic to ask, even to her own ears, and nobody responds. Angel raises his eyebrows at her, very slowly, and blinks all eight eyes at her, slightly out of sync.
“Jesus Christ, you people are sad,” Vaggie sighs, slouching down in her seat.
“We got plenty o’ friends,” Angel defends the group. “They just ain’t the kind of friends you broads would approve of.”
“I don’t need friends,” Husk grunts from the bar, unwilling to participate but always willing to heckle. “I have beer. And wine. Whiskey, too.”
“That sounds like the start of a terrible drinking song,” Pentious mutters to himself, and the conversation only gets more scattered from there.
-
That afternoon, as Charlie and Vaggie are sitting at the kitchen table and searching for one-pot-recipes, Charlie puts her phone down and sighs.
“I need to find a new strategy,” she groans, hunching forward and resting her elbows on the table. “Sharing circles only work if the people in them have… well, nice things to share. And I don’t want to discourage them, and get them to stop talking completely, but they’re just so-” she cuts herself off and tries to communicate what she means by gesturing, a futile effort that ends with her balling her fists up and pressing her forehead to the table. “ Augh. ”
Vaggie looks on fondly as she talks, taking her hand up from the table and holding it in her own.
“I could start censoring them,” she suggests. “With extreme prejudice.”
Charlie gives her a look.
“Extremely… friendly prejudice. With a stick instead of a spear, even.”
That finally pulls a laugh from Charlie, and Vaggie smiles victoriously.
“We don't use violence on guests, Vaggie,” she reminds her.
“Half of the people talking are staff,” the angel retorts. “It’s workplace management.”
Charlie laughs again, and ends up leaning against her heavily.
“I don’t want to stop them talking entirely. I do want them to build better relationships with each other, and us! I just need them to do that in a way that requires… no talking.”
“Make them share an activity?” Vaggie suggests. Her eyes slide over to the pans, unopened jars of pasta sauce, and unchopped onions already on the kitchen bench. “I have a couple of ideas.”
-
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Angel snaps, damn near hissing as he swipes a bunch of spagetti out of Pentious’ hand.
“They’re too long to fit in the pot,” the snake explains.
“So you were gonna snap ‘em like a goddamn animal!? It’s bad enough we’re using the dried shit-” he elbows Pentious out of the way, away from the pot of boiling water, and arranges the pasta so that it stands in the pot in a swirl, half-in, half-out the water. “There! It’ll get soft in no time, just stir it in when it does, god .”
“No need to get so pissssy,” Pentious hisses. “Not everyone is a pasta connoisseur like you.”
“It ain’t exactly rocket science!”
“Boys!” Vaggie barks from behind both of them. “Play nice, or you both go to bed without dinner at all.”
“The Princess doesn’t approve of starvation,” Angel wrinkles his nose at her.
“Charlie isn’t here,” she shoots back.
The snake and the spider turn back to the pot with a huff.
-
Upstairs, it’s starting to smell ever so slightly of cooked garlic and onions.
Husk lifts his face ever so slightly, sniffing the air, just as Charlie skips up the hallway and into the foyer.
“We’re making dinner, if you want to join, Husker!” She calls to him as she bounds past him and towards the front door. “Let Alastor and Niffty know, too!”
“Where the hell are you goin’?” He asks instead of acknowledging what she’s saying.
“Angel says that it’s a crime to serve spaghetti without parmesan, so I’m running out to get some. Any requests?”
“A noose,” he says flatly, but she pretends not to hear him and gives a final wave over her shoulder before disappearing through the front door. Husk heaves a deep, bored sigh, and starts walking towards the kitchen.
-
“How did a pornstar become such a good cook?” Pentious asks, licking a sample of the pasta sauce from his fangs. His eyes are sparkling like he’s just met god.
“I’d love to know the same thing!” Alastor chimes in from behind all three people in the room, making them all jump. The door to the kitchen opens behind them, and Husk sticks his head in- until he sees Alastor, which makes him immediately close the door and walk back upstairs. “Why, it smells downright delightful in here, I must say!”
“Jesus, Al,” Angel curses, stirring the pasta sauce angrily.
“Just Alastor will do,” the radiohost chirps, stepping closer and leaning over the pan with interest.
“You’re both crowdin’ me!” Angel complains, but doesn’t stop Alastor when he materialises a teaspoon and takes a sample from the sauce, smacking his lips together loudly and humming and hawing like a wine tester. “I’m a good cook, is that such a goddamn surprise?”
“It kind of is,” Vaggie admits from her place sitting at the kitchen table. She’s on babysitting duty while Charlie’s out at the store.
“Thanks,” Angel grunts sarcastically, looking over to the pasta and checking to see if it’s boiled long enough. With a few stirs of the pot and a cautious bite of a boiling-hot noodle, he decides it is. “Alright, boys, get tha’fuck outta my way, I’m making plates.”
The two men step away, Pentious passing Angel plates as he holds his lower right arm out, filling them with pasta using his right forearm and sauce with his left. It’s a pretty efficient method, and he doesn’t splash a drop.
“I suppose we all misjudged you,” Alastor hums, though the remark is sort of condescending. That might just be his voice. “Who knew we had another cook in the building?”
“I ain’t a good cook,” Angel shrugs, filling a seventh plate with pasta and setting his spare arms free so he can carry as many plates as possible. “I’m just better than the store-bought shit the ladies were tryin’ to feed us.”
He shoots a derisive glare at the jar of pasta sauce, still sitting untouched on the bench, and Vaggie ignores him.
“I didn’t know you cared so much about food.”
“I’m Italian ,” Angel says, like that’s something they all should have taken into consideration when they thought about him.
“I thought you were American,” Pentious frowns, following the spider to the table with a bundle of cutlery in his scaly hand.
“I’m both,” Angel dismisses.
“You’re about as Italian as I am French,” Alastor snorts, making Angel fight between glaring at him and processing the new information.
“You’re French? ” Pentious asks, genuinely affronted.
“Don’t hold it against me,” Alastor says, turning away from them both to conjure a poker and tap at the large fire at the far end of the kitchen. “Niffty, dear! Dinner!”
The sound of the poker hitting the stone rings throughout the room, much louder than is natural, and a soot-covered shape scuttles out from the chimney moments later.
“We’re all eating together?” Niffty asks as soon as she’s shaken the soot off her like a dog with water, looking up with a large yellow grin. “Like a big happy family!”
Nobody acknowledges the family comment.
“Somebody go fetch Husk,” Angel orders instead, not directing it at anyone in particular. “We can’t leave that old furball out.”
“I won’t tell him you call him that,” Niffty giggles.
“Thanks, Niff.”
Alastor clicks his fingers, and suddenly Husker appears in the kitchen through a rift in reality, woozy and mid-way through chugging a bottle of cider.
“Will you stop doin’ that?” The cat growls at Alastor, narrowing his eyes at the red demon and gritting his teeth.
“No!” He chirps, walking towards the table as Angel sets the bowls of pasta down and Pentious follows with spoons and forks. “We’re eating.”
“Does the sauce have people in it?” Husk asks, approaching the table slightly cautiously.
“Unless tomatoes and onions count as people, you’re fine,” Angel dismisses him. “I made it, not tall-dark-and-spooky.”
“You can cook?”
“Why are you all so goddamn surprised!?”
The squabbling continues for another thirty useless seconds, until Charlie bursts through the kitchen doors, breathing heavily like she ran the whole way, brandishing a shopping bag.
“I got the cheese!” She announces, bounding inside and opening it proudly to show Angel. “Are these good?”
Inside the bag is a massive block of parmesan, as well as cheddar, mozzarella, two blocks of red leicester and six babybels.
“What the fuck is a babybel?” He asks.
“I’m not actually sure. But aren’t they cute?”
He takes the bag from her and smiles, feeling the weight of it in his hands. It’s sort of touching, the fact that she ran out and got all this just so he could make a meal.
“They’re sorta cute, sure.” He hooks the bag over one wrist and takes the block of parmesan out, unwrapping it. “You got a cheese grater?”
“Uhm…” Charlie looks around the sparse kitchen, and remembers that she and Vaggie had actually been pretty proud of themselves when they remembered to buy spoons . The chances of them having a cheese grater are very, very low.
“I can provide one!” Alastor calls from the back of the room, striding forward and clicking his fingers over his head, causing a grater to drop into his hand. “Terribly useful things, I wouldn’t be caught dead without one!”
“We’re all dead anyway,” Husk points out, and is ignored.
Angel takes the grater with a muttered thanks, and fills a bowl with the stuff, powdered as fine as he can make it. He scoops a spoon to sit in the bowl, too, because he’s happy to use his fingers with his family, but he has no idea where these fuckers’ hands have been.
“Alright,” he calls, turning around, carrying the bowl and setting it in the centre of the table. Alastor is sitting primly at the head of the table, as are Charlie and Vaggie along the left side, and Pentious on the right. Husk is, weirdly, nowhere to be seen, and Niffty is in the seat closest to Angel, with red sauce smeared all over the lower half of her face. “Niff!”
“I’m hungry!” She defends, gesturing with her hands, which are also covered in sauce.
“Jesus, someone get her a napkin?” He grunts, looking around for one, while Alastor leans over the table and starts mopping at her face with a black silk handkerchief, like a mother with a particularly messy toddler. Angel looks around for Husk again, kind of hurt that he seems to have left and not even touched the food he made for him, but his spirits lift when he hears a grunt and the sound of a door opening. Husk is grimacing, struggling to balance three bottles of wine in his arms, but he half-grins at him when he catches Angel’s eye.
“You gotta have wine with pasta, don’t you?” He asks.
“Husk,” Angel grins, touching his heart, “baby, this is why you’re my favourite.”
Vaggie looks at the wine slightly disapprovingly, but when Charlie nudges her lightly, her expression softens.
“I guess social drinking isn't the worst thing in the world,” she sighs, bringing a grin to the faces of everyone present.
Finally, everyone sits around the table and digs in.
Niffty has to be reminded to use a fork more than once, and Husker drinks more than he eats, and Pentious slurps his pasta louder than anyone Charlie has ever heard before. It’s sort of gross to look at. But they’re all together, having a good time- and they’re talking .
“If Molly was here,” Angel is saying, gesturing with his fork, “she’d have wiped the floor with me. Best pasta sauce I ever had. She used a fuckton of basil.”
“Ah! A garnish!” Alastor grins, conjuring a pot of basil out of thin air and picking a handful of leaves from it to put on his plate, before tossing it, pot and all, over his shoulder. “I very nearly forgot.”
“Drama queen,” Husk mutters from his place beside Angel.
“What was that, my dear employee?”
“Nothing.”
“Hm.”
“ Anyway ,” Angel continues, “She was real good in the kitchen, and I guess I picked up a thing or two.”
“That’s a wonderful memory, Angel,” Charlie smiles, genuinely invested. “I always wished I had a sibling to talk to, growing up.”
“Eh,” Angel shrugs, a fond smile still tugging at his lips. “She was okay, yeah.”
“Did you have any other siblings?”
“None worth talking about,” he shrugs.
“Vaggie had a lot of sisters,” Charlie volunteers, making her girlfriend raise her eyebrows and narrow her eyes as she’s pulled into the conversation.
“ Too many,” she adds, twirling her fork in her plate. “We weren’t close.”
“Really?” Angel asks. “Can’t imagine not bein’ close with your family. You live with em too long.”
Vaggie shrugs, and shoves another mouthful of pasta in her mouth. Nobody pushes her to elaborate, though Alastor does raise an eyebrow, taking note of the reaction.
“I never wanted siblings,” he hums, tapping his chin. “I suppose if I had a twin, I’d have eaten it in the womb.”
“How could you even know that, back then?” Husk asks.
“Well, you couldn’t! But I believe one ought to start as you mean to go on, don’t you?”
“Humans can eat eachother in the womb ?” Pentious asks, genuine horror dawning on his expression. He looks to Charlie, as if she’s the arbiter of human biology. “Is that true?”
“Uh,” she starts.
“Yeah,” Vaggie finishes for her.
“Oh good lord…” he mutters, horrified. “What if I could have had a twin!?”
“I mean, maybe…?” Charlie hedges, her shoulders raising to touch her ears. “Would that… matter?”
“I don’t want to be a cannibal!”
“Oh, please,” Alastor moves his hand like he's shooing the very idea. “It would hardly count.”
The snake stares down at his pasta, harrowed.
-
That night, they draw straws for who should have to do the dishes, and Husk is the unlucky guy. He plods over to the kitchen sink, a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves in hand, and finds a pile of sparkling-clean dishes already stacked on the drainer.
“Oh my gosh, did you want a turn at doing the washing?” Niffty asks, zipping down from where she had been perched on the top shelf of the pantry. “Sorry! I guess I was having such a good time I got carried away, I can dump them all in a puddle if you want a chance to clean them for yourself, I mean it seems kind of silly and redundant to do that, but if you already have the gloves-”
“Niff,” Husk gets her attention. “I think I’m good.”
He sets the gloves down on the counter.
“Can I just help you put them away?”
“Sure! If you really want to.”
The cat smiles, picking up the bowls and heading towards the cupboards.
-
Charlie and Vaggie brush their teeth side by side, looking in their shared bathroom mirror and blinking sleepily. Vaggie has already washed her makeup off and put her hair up in a ponytail, and Charlie has braided hers, to keep it from strangling her in her sleep. Its nice, and familiar, getting ready for bed and shutting all the lights in the room off, save for the lamp on Charlie’s side of the bed.
“Today was a good day,” she says, spitting the last of the toothpaste out her mouth and rinsing her toothbrush.
“It was,” Vaggie agrees, doing the same. “It’s almost… weird, how good today was.”
“I know, right? I mean, if I had known that just getting them to cook together would make them all get closer, I would have done this ages ago.”
“I think that might be it, though,” Vaggie muses, picking up a hoodie that was draped over the back of their laundry chair and pulling it on.
“What is?”
“The fact we didn’t know. We weren’t getting them to talk, or anything, it was all them.”
Charlie hums, and decides she might agree. Though shes a teeny tiny little bit of a control freak, it’s true that the conversation flowed a lot better when she didn’t have a mental script to compare it to. It was less like she was watching a play where everyone was saying the wrong lines, and more like an… actual conversation. Which was really nice, she thinks.
“I think you might be right,” she sighs, sitting down on the bed and feeling Vaggie crawl in behind her, wrapping her arms around her and hooking her chin over her shoulder.
“I’m always right,” she teases, tilting her head up so she can press a kiss to her cheek, making Charlie giggle and turn her head.
“When you’re not threatening to stab our guests, yeah.”
“Even then, I make some very good points.”
Charlie laughs again, flopping over onto the bed, and Vaggie follows her.
-
Charlie ditches the sharing circles idea. It’s too rigid, and awkward, and the staff and residents are equally sick of them already.
“So, I’m proposing we do something else instead! Nothing too involved, just once a week- I thought we could cook a family meal? Maybe? If you guys would like that?”
The residents and staff look between themselves. A silence stretches on just a little too long.
Then, at long last, a murmur of agreement ripples through them, and Charlie beams.