Work Text:
♜
Velvette fell in lust with the Queen of Hell the first time she left a smudge of black lipstick on her felted cheek.
It was, by far, the most embarrassing thing that could have happened to her, all things considered, and she would absolutely say it embarrassed her far more than falling twenty bloody storeys straight into a shark pool and having to slink away from a fucking battle royale with her dignity in tatters, so don’t even ask, Vox. Not that she would have told Vox, but he was standing right there when Lilith pressed that kiss to her cheek in delight at her first design offerings.
”Can they be in purple?” She had asked, as if she was just another client, as if Velvette wouldn’t have thrown an entire mannequin at anyone else’s head for daring to suggest she change the color on her fall designs, like fuck you fuchsia is in this season you gaudy twit.
But for the Queen of Hell, she’d just pursed her soft lips and gave a terse, abrupt nod and tried not to look like it caused her pain to do so. See? I’m trying, babes. Get off my arse about it already.
And then Lilith had clapped her hands once, bent practically double, and kissed her on the cheek with enough force as to leave a mark, leaving her dumbfounded as she rushed off to tend to something else, like being kissed by the Queen of Hell wasn’t supposed to be life-changing.
They might as well change her tombstone. That was the moment she well and truly died.
And then, to piss right on top of her new grave, Vox had leaned down to whisper “Down bad” in her ear and she had responded, quite succinctly, by punching him in the dick and stalking off to deal with her emotions the way any rational Millennial when faced with the agonizing ordeal of being known would- scream into a pillow and then break out the vibrator.
It didn’t help. Lust brand vibrators couldn’t mimic the exact way Lilith curved her fingers to beckon that sent a knot right straight to the core of her being and left her teetering with her face buried in her tablet so Lilith wouldn’t look down and see the way she was sweating with the exertion of keeping her legs enough apart that she wasn’t trying to seek friction. There was nothing that smelled like her specific brand of perfume- ancient lilies straight from Eden, an impossible fragrance conjured up by arcana and sense memory and more than once Velvette had considered stealing a few sprays for, um, personal reasons. Every bit of sex paraphernalia and otherwise she’d cabbaged away could not conjure up a fantasy worthy of the real thing.
She was frazzled from sleeplessness, the threading along her lips shredded from the amount of times shit bit them. Vox had to help her fix her face because she couldn’t trust her own hands to make the precise stitches.
“You know, their relationship is open. Ish.” Vox said, as he clipped the last of the threads with his talons. Velvette parted her lips to test the give of the stitches and then opened her palm mirror so she wouldn’t have to stare at him.
“Ish? Why ish?”
“I mean, no one’s actually gotten them into bed, but I’ve been out enough times with them to know they don’t get weird about anyone flirting.” The smugly self-satisfied tone to his voice made her want to throw the mirror at his screen.
Instead, she just snapped it closed and leered at him. “I’m so sorry I forgot that I’m talkin’ to the luckiest knob this side of Pride. It must be so nice to be effortlessly close to the King and Queen of Hell. Tell me, babes, what’s it like being a drooling dogsbody?”
Vox started to speak, cut himself off with a crackle of static, and then arranged his pixels into a pout. “You’re sexually frustrated and because of that, I’m not going to take any of that personally.”
“Piss off,” she muttered.
“You’re welcome for the lip job by the way.”
She rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Vox. You are the best bloody seamstress ever. You missed your calling in my department. Now will you piss off?”
He left, chuckling, and, once more, Velvette was left alone with her thoughts, horny and otherwise, and no real way to do anything about any of it except woman up and start actively flirting. What was the worst that could happen?
The list her brain gave her kept her up half the night. The other half of the night was spent doing something far more productive.
♜
Like most young women with a blind, furious disdain for older women that bordered on homoerotic (or just completely forewent bordering to schedule an active invasion), Velvette had a poor relationship with her mother. As such any woman with competence, age, and a sense of style and ruthlessness that wouldn’t say no to a Jimmy Choo pressed against the hollow of someone’s vulnerable throat was simultaneously The Enemy and the thing Velvette longed for most of all. Yes, yes, how wonderfully bloody cliche! The tough as nails #girlboss wanted to be stepped on by a mommy dom, because her own fucking mother had micromanaged her from birth to death until she associated praise and validation from older women with the same emotions that controlled all her simpering, desperate fantasies.
Pull another one. This one’s crusty.
It was, unfortunately, true, and cliche or not, Velvette couldn’t shake it. So she bullied, she threw her weight around, called other women hags, which wasn’t very feminist of her, but whatever. Be less of a slag, and maybe she wouldn’t claim she could cure a potato famine by planting seeds in the furrows of some bitch’s brows. Any way she could throw off the scent of what she really wanted, she did, because letting it out was the fastest way of ending up precisely where she was before she died. Val always told her she protested too much, that he could smell her kinks on her like his own pheromones. She’d told him to shove it or she’d be incorporating his fur into her next line.
It killed her how much she missed Valentino in these moments. He would have teased her for this whole thing with Lilith, a person she couldn’t bully the way she did Carmilla, because playing nice was the difference between frequent visits to the royal palace and a future fashion line worn by the Queen of Hell, herself, or back to a rat hole making apps that charge a soul for just a few more jewels to keep playing those silly little mindless merge games. No thank you. She had her taste of better and she wasn’t going to lose it.
But she’d lost so much already. There was a gap on her right where Valentino used to stand and Vox was screen-deep in kissing ass, wallowing to get his clout back. She and Val had always been too proud to grovel for anyone. They’d both done their time in the trenches and as annoyingly insufferable as he was, he got it in a way that Vox didn’t. He would have given her advice on how to handle this without losing her pride.
In the end, she figured it out on her own, but it took her longer and with three times as many steps along the way and the rationalizing she did came from a dark place she tried to avoid. What had worked on her mother? What had released all that fucking dopamine and made her look at her like the beloved child that she was proud of and not her little money maker?
Results.
That was how, after a horrifically sleepless night, Velvette walked up to the room in the hotel that Lilith and Lucifer shared and shoved a sketchbook at the Queen of Hell’s chest. “You wanted purple, yeah? Didn’t specify which shade, so I had a lot of wiggle room.”
There were striations of different shades of purple lead practically ingrained into the felt of her bare arms now from hours of meticulously coloring in each little detail. Rather than hide them, she wore them proudly. Lilith wasn’t her mother. Lilith wasn’t going to drop the sketchbook and refuse to look at it until she made herself presentable.
Lilith took the book inside, but left the door open wide for Velvette to follow her in. She flipped through each page as she circled the room, eyes scanning every inch of the designs before turning to the next. By the halfway mark, Velvette’s patience ran thin and she snapped from the corner she’d stationed herself in to stay out of the way of the queen’s aimless pacing, “Well? What d’you think?”
“You did all of these last night?” She asked, purple eyes dropping immediately to the stains on her arms. This time, she did cross them to try and keep them out of sight.
“Yeah? So what? I couldn’t sleep.”
“You must have really wanted to impress me.” Lilith had a smirk that simultaneously made Velvette weak in the knees and brought her hand to a fist. It was a know-it-all look, the kind that said she saw through to the core of her. The kind that Velvette saw on a white woman and immediately wanted to start screaming over until her throat bled.
She worried the fresh stitches on her lips, fighting to neither waver nor scream. “I don’t need to impress anyone, babes. I’m fuckin’ mint.”
“You are.”
Velvette’s scowling derision and defensiveness turned to liquid and ebbed away like a retreating tide. She blinked a few times. “What’s that then?”
Lilith plopped down on the fainting couch and patted the spot next to her. As if there were hooks in her gut, Velvette followed, yanked along by only the absolutely infuriating romance novel impulse to do whatever the sexy empowered person asked of her. Fucking mad, that was, but she did it, anyway, and maybe she didn’t even hate it.
She pointed to the drawing on the page- a gorgeous purple dress made out of thousands of living butterflies. “Did Vox tell you I liked butterflies?”
One would think that a doll with viscera that was as much sawdust as it was biological matter couldn’t turn red or flush with embarrassment, but that was just one more trick of Hell. It found ways to make things make biological sense. The heat rushed to Velvette’s cheeks and she jerked her head away.
“Bit obvious, innit? I’ve seen some of the shite you wear.”
“You don’t like what I wear?” She was teasing her. She knew it. She damned well knew it and therefore knew not to respond to it like a fucking twat, and yet she still jerked her head back and let herself trip over her words.
“It’s all right! I mean, you’ve got a decent sense of style. Obviously, you’re seven years out of date with the trends, but you’re the Queen of Hell. You set trends, you don’t follow ‘em.”
“But if I did want to follow the trends…” And here Lilith rested her hand on her chin, studying Velvette, not like some cute little doll or anomaly or as a means to an end, but as something that wasn’t entirely unlike how Vox and Val first looked at her- like someone who was capable of bringing something to the table, like someone who stood on equal footing, instead of just to left in the shadows when she wasn’t shoved in front of a camera. “You’d be the one I’d ask, right?”
And Velvette, grateful she was sitting because the articulated plastic joints in her knees had just given out entirely, gave her a wicked grin and only a small fraction of her wondered if she’d just held out her head for a leash to be clipped to her collar by some other woman and she’d end up thanking her for the opportunity to be overshadowed by her.
Somehow, despite her fears, she knew better. “Oh sweetie, you’re in the best hands.”
♜
The royal palace was a crown jewel in the half-gnawed plastic candy bracelet of the Pride Ring, a spectacle that made the rest of it look all the more wretched standing in its wake. When Velvette first arrived in Hell, spat straight onto the streets of Avernus like the chewed up cud of the influencer scene she was, she had pressed her face to the gate and wondered what it took to be inside those walls.
Evidently, all it took was losing everything and swallowing a bit of ego for the opportunity to have it all back with interest. She still shivered with anticipation as she followed Lilith up the perfectly maintained cobblestones leading up to the grand spires and garish cherry red accents of the palace. Lilith didn’t knock on the door to her own home, merely placed her hand on the knob and whispered a sweet little nothing to it and it fell open with a sigh, welcoming her back.
Velvette half-expected it to be dusty or disused given how often Lucifer and Lilith spent at the hotel, but inside was a bustle of activity as maids and butlers kept things like clockwork. A rotund imp with a bald spot and a pencil-thin white mustache sauntered up to Lilith and took her hands in his.
“Welcome back, your majesty. As you can see, we’ve made a lot of progress on putting the palace back together.”
“You really have. Thank you so much, Barbas. I’m sorry we don’t spend as much time here.”
“Oh no trouble, no trouble at all. We enjoy having the work and having the room to throw extravagant secret parties.”
Lilith chuckled, leaving Velvette wondering if he was joking or if Lilith would have even cared if he wasn’t.
She left him to his work, declining needing any assistance, and headed up the huge stairs, worthy of a movie setpiece. Velvette paused at the bottom and watched Lilith walk up, captivated by the sway to her hips. In her head, she was Rhett Butler, leaning on the balustrade, watching Scarlet O’Hara walk away from her or she was Rose staring up at Jack, waiting for him to look back and ask her if she wanted to go to a real party.
Lilith did turn back to raise an eyebrow at her, expectantly. In that horrible moment, she realized what she was doing and started to blush and stammer. “It’s a nice stair case, innit?” She muttered, half-under her breath to hide the slip of her accent, tapping at the golden swirls of the balustrade with a sharpened fingernail.
“It is. But I think you’re going to be more interested in what’s in my closet.”
Velvette swallowed a keening sound and stomped up the stairs behind her. “Right, then. Let’s see what you dragged me out here for.”
She followed her up the stairs and down a long hall with plush red carpeting and walls with portrait after portrait, some family, some cutesy couple ones, but a few of Lucifer or Lilith or Charlie on their own. Velvette ignored the ones of the king and princess and traced the history of the Queen of Hell, watching her go from warm smiles to a quiet desperation that even a painter or a photographer couldn’t help but leave in to preserve the honesty of her expression. One of the last portraits in the hall looked more like a candid shot blown up to fit a frame. There was a glare from the vanity mirror and a slight glimpse of the King of Hell with his cell phone raised in the reflection and Lilith, herself, was glancing back, as if caught by surprise by her husband sneaking in to take a picture of her. She was trying to smile fondly at him, but there was an edge to it, like somewhere deep down she resented him.
It reminded Velvette of the last photo taken of her before her accident. She hadn’t known at the time it was going to be the last, of course. Seconds after meeting Vox she demanded his access to Living World internet and began a frantic search to see what people were saying about her now that she was gone. That had been months later and the death of a media darling had faded into oblivion. She had to dig to find the Twitter thread where her mother- of course- made the announcement.
At the top of the thread had been that photo- a picture of her with a full face of make-up pretending to have just rolled out of bed and staring at her mother with so much contempt behind her eyes, because she wasn’t supposed to be in her apartment and she had forced her way in to make sure that Velvette was committing to her brand. She had died that afternoon, hating her mother and hating everyone who saw that contempt and labeled it “Black girl sass” or a slay, instead of the desperate, trapped rage that it was.
Lilith doubled back to stand behind her. “He liked that this one was honest. He spends so much time being associated with lies, that he values the truth over all.”
Velvette, practically sulking for reasons that only had half to do with Lucifer’s continued existence as Lilith’s husband, muttered, “You look like you hate him.”
“I probably did at the time.” Lilith lifted a gloved hand to stroke the tiny reflection of Lucifer in the mirror and Velvette watched for any lingering sign of that disdain in her eyes. There was none- just love and fondness and understanding.
It infuriated her. “What the fuck changed? You got sealed in a stick for seven years, yeah? Not a whole lot of time for open and honest communication.”
“No, but a lot of time to think. And miss him. And understand what being trapped really is.” She let her hand fall away. “There’s a lot of different kind of cages… and some only feel that way because you haven’t had enough room to grow yet. I went from Eden to Hell and even traveling the Rings, I felt like there were walls on every side that I would run right into if I tried to move too far. The world was always…”
“Too small,” Velvette finished for her. And then, without thinking, she added, “I know the feeling.”
“I thought you might.” She crooked her fingers again that come hither gesture that turned her insides to lead and all she could do was follow her into a room at the end of the hall that opened up into a private sitting room with a door on the left that led to the most spectacular walk-in closet Velvette had ever seen. The kind that only existed in movies, not even in her most ambitious storage rooms where everything was mostly kept away in boxes to be summoned up with a thought and a bit of spellcraft, rather than hung up to be displayed and wandered through. Corporate was clinical and necessitated space-saving. She learned to live without seeing her designs every day when she wasn’t preparing for a shoot. Progress meant not lingering on your darlings after they were created. Most every Velvette design was meant to be out of fashion a week after it launched to make way for the new line. Planned obsolescence was the way of the future to keep people buying, buying, buying…
There was love in her creations, sure, but she knew they could only be loved for a short time before something else came along. She understood that because she, herself, had once been a product rapidly aging out of marketable childhood. Every step in her growth was a new way to sell her to the highest paying advertisers. She could never afford to be one thing for very long.
Lilith’s closet was a shrine to lost styles, things that had come and gone with seasons and decades and fallen into and out of fashion and nothing seemed shoved into the corners to be forgotten. Fashionable sixties dresses that were too uniquely suited to their time to be considered ‘adorably vintage’ were held in a place of pride alongside floral rompers and sundresses; costumes from shows were wrapped in plastic with playbills attached to showcase why they were worn and when; hats and shoes of all styles and shapes and sizes were perched on high shelves beyond Velvette’s reach… It was all too much and part of her wanted to run back into the sitting room to take a breath, lest she be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of visual stimuli and part of her wanted to keep going down this impossible maze until she found the end. Ten thousand years of clothing were collected here. Lilith had kept it all. Loved it all.
“I think the first time I realized I wasn’t what I was supposed to be was the moment I discovered I was uncomfortable being naked all the time,” Lilith explained, fingering the silk of one of her many, many purple dresses- how could Velvette’s sketchbook even bring a lick of a difference to someone who had seen every kind of fashion in her long years. “Adam and Eve discovered shame after the apple, but it wasn’t exactly shame that I felt. I saw Lucifer in his layers and his flowing robes and wondered why I couldn’t have that. I wanted to drape myself in soft fabrics to keep the grass and insects off my skin. I wanted to control the reason why people stared at me. Lucifer’s circus was the first time I really felt like I had that. He wanted me to have everything I couldn’t have in Eden.”
She let the silk slide back into place, turning fully to face Velvette. “Of course it wasn’t enough, in the end. I always want too much. I always want what I don’t have. It took those lost seven years for me to realize that I had plenty, that I was never as trapped as I thought I was.”
Hell had been freedom for Velvette too, but had that corporate mindset she had fully been indoctrinated into- long before Vox, even- been her cage? Had she been stifling herself all of this time?
Lilith held out the sketchbook again while she pondered that, screwing up her face to avoid the emotions welling up inside of her. No longer just lust for the lovely queen, but something else. “These aren’t the designs of someone who just wants to be famous again. What do you really want, Velvette?”
She was quick to answer, less quick to take the sketchbook. Her hands hovered just shy of snatching it out of Lilith’s hands, “Everything.”
“You had everything.” She took her hands in hers and gently wrapped them around the edges of the sketchbook. “What do you want now that you’ve lost it?”
Velvette popped the stitches in her lip again as she ground down with her little porcelain teeth to avoid saying the words, to avoid showing the Queen of Hell her belly, even as she wanted to show her her throat. In the end, it was a lot harder to lie with your seams showing. “What no one let me have when I needed it most.”
“Freedom,” Lilith answered, nodding. “The first women were born in bondage. We’ve been seeking liberation ever since.” She leaned down to gently trace her lips with her finger, sealing the stitches back into place with a little bite of magic. Velvette felt her knees start to wobble like one of those collapsible dolls, like Lilith had pressed her finger to the button that made the bits that held her joints together give way. “I love these designs. I’d love it if you stayed here to help me make my comeback. I think we can figure out how to feel less trapped together. Hell’s not a cage- it’s my kingdom. And there’s always been room in it for lost souls who felt like the living world was never going to be kind enough to them and Heaven would never want them.”
She scoffed, finding something to hitch her vitriol to before the overwhelming emotions got to her. “What about your daughter, then?”
“Charlie has her way of saving souls and I have mine. And I can’t expect her to save every soul that’s caused her and hers pain. She values you as a soul, because she hates what it makes of her to not do so. That doesn’t mean she’s the right person to help you grow.” That infuriating, lopsided, gorgeous smirk again that made Velvette want to die in her arms. “What do you say, Velvette? I can’t let the boys have all the fun. I could use a partner.”
She didn’t hold her hand out to be shaken on a deal, which was the most extraordinary part of this. That was true freedom- the ability to walk away if she decided she didn’t like it. The ability to make her own mind up without feeling like she was locked into a contract. She used to trick people because she had been tricked. All was fair in that game, babes. You learn to pay closer attention or you perish.
But Lilith didn’t play like that. She didn’t punish people the same way she had been punished. She left gaps in the fence to get out again.
So she smiled and hugged her sketchbook to her chest. She had been in lust with the Queen of Hell before and now she was certain she was falling in love with her. Dammit. “All right, but you best consider yourself fuckin’ lucky I like purple.”