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It said a lot about how morose Charlie was feeling when the normally exuberant woman couldn’t even muster enough energy for a groan as she landed face first onto her half of the bed. Even the sigh that came out of her was more of a result of the impact than anything else.
Not that anymore— outside of certain parts of Hell’s population —could truly blame her. It had not been a good day.
Everything that could go wrong did so with extreme prejudice. It seemed to Charlie that every single choice she’d made today had been wrong. She either misspoke, misstepped, misunderstood, or all three at once! Now it felt like everyone in the hotel was mad at her for one reason or another. They hadn’t gained any new patrons lately, either. Or successfully redeemed anyone beside Sir Pentious. That one redemption should have boosted her confidence about the hotel and its mission but she has no idea how it actually happened or how to make it happen again so instead it almost felt like a fluke! And if she doesn’t figure it out soon then it’ll be Extermination Day again before she knows it and more people will die because she didn’t save them and it will be her fault for not figuring it out in time and what kind of a princess fails her people this badly, it’s no wonder everyone hates her-
Charlie felt the far side of the bed dip down, causing her train of thought to trip up slightly.
Everyone didn’t include her; right?
As the movements came closer to her prone form, the demon dared to turn her head enough to the side to allow one eye to peek out.
There, crawling atop the covers towards her— to her expectation and relief —was the form of her partner, her love, and her best friend.
Vaggie.
The former exorcist twisted her body, dressed in her usual night gown, so that she was now half propped up against their headboard, her face always pointed towards Charlie. The demon feared what she would see when their eyes met, but when Vaggie saw that she had the blonde’s attention she simply gave her that same warm, soft smile she always gave her.
The one that said, ‘you’re safe’, and ‘I’m here’ and ‘you’re being a little silly right now, but I love you all the same’. When the angel held up her left arm, Charlie hesitated only for the split second it took for her to rock her body into the motion needed to wiggle into the safety of the smaller woman’s arms.
Wrapping her arms around Vaggie’s waist at the same time the angel’s own curled around her shoulders, Charlie felt the dam inside of her, that had held strong all day, finally crack and crumble, releasing a torrent of tears. Her sobs tore through the air even as she tried to smother them into Vaggie’s bare shoulder.
“It’s okay, Charlie,” Vaggie murmured, pressing a kiss into shaking golden locks and tightening her hold.
“N-No it’s nooooot!”
“...Okay, yeah, no; today fucking sucked,” the angel admitted with a small huff. “Lesson learned: Husk is very flammable. And Niffty is too small to use a fire extinguisher. And Alastor can and will just stand there and laugh as the whole lounge area catches on literal fire! Puto pendejo-”
Charlie sobbed again and dug her face even harder into Vaggie’s shoulder.
“-Bu-But it’ll be alright! Your dad already fixed the lounge— after we finally pulled his attention off of berating Al at least —Husk’s fur will grow back, and Angel-”
The blonde whined.
“-and Angel can always get a new skirt. Honestly, I swear he already has more skirts than the two of us combined, I really don’t so what was so special about that one-”
The whine increased sharply in pitch and Vaggie decided perhaps the best thing to do would be to simply hold her girl.
They laid like this for quite a while: Charlie shaking the bed with every cry and hiccup, and Vaggie running her fingers through her hair in the way she knew she liked. KeeKee joined them at some point, deigning to wedge herself in an opening formed by the girls’ tangled legs, purring up a storm.
Eventually the sobs began to subside, though the tears streaming from Charlie’s eyes seemed infinite. In the silence of the room, she finally spoke again, her words so quiet and scratchy that even Vaggie, laying right beside her, nearly missed them.
“What am I even doing?”
“Hm?”
“With- All of this!” Charlie swung one arm out, gesturing to the room at large and startling KeeKee. “I try, so hard, to help people- To try and get them out of literal fucking Hell, and what do I have to show for it?! Everyone hates me!”
“Wha- No one-”
“I’ve gotten Angel in trouble at his work before, Husk and Niffty are only here because Alastor forces them to be-”
“-Hun-”
“-and he’s only here for ‘entertainment’, not because he actually believes in me! Cherri just steals our food and alcohol, Baxter just wants to study us, and I got a whole bunch of cannibals, all but one of the Egg Boiz, and Sir Pentious killed!”
“Okay- Yeah, but-”
“And sure he got redeemed in the end, but I have no fucking idea how, so it just feels like one big fluke, and all of Hell knows it! Knows the truth, the real truth, and that is I’m really just a massive, fucking, failure-”
“Now wait a fucking minute!”
KeeKee launched herself off the bed and Charlie flinched with a whine at Vaggie’s harsh tone, glancing up at her angel with wide watery eyes already prepared to double the amount of tears already flowing down her cheeks. She buried her head back into the shoulder bared by Vaggie’s nightgown, when two fingers dug under her chin and gently tilted it back up.
“Now you listen to me, Charlie Morningstar,” Vaggie continued in a slightly softer but still firm voice as soon as Charlie met her eye, “You are a lot of things— brilliant, talented, gorgeous, and yeah, a little naive at times-”
Charlie whimpered again at the last one, but Vaggie refused to let her duck her head again when she tried.
“-but the one thing you are not is a failure. No, you haven’t redeemed anyone since Pen, yet, but the fact that he got redeemed at all is nothing to brush off. You did that! Everyone, even Lucifer and the fucking High Council of Heaven, thought it was impossible! But you proved them all wrong! That’s amazing!”
“Snf- Ye-Yeah, but-”
“I’m not done,” Vaggie cut her off, cupping her cheek afterwards in apology for her harsh tone. The angel took a deep breath before she continued.
“Do you know how many Sinners I killed every Extermination?”
Charlie gasped and tried to sit up and out of Vaggie’s hold, “Vaggie, you don’t have to-”
“Stop. I do. I need- I need to own what I did,” the gray woman sighed, “And you need to hear this. Okay?”
“...Okay...” the blonde conceded, allowing Vaggie to pull her back down fully into their previous position.
“...Every year, during the Extermination, I would kill at least one hundred and fifty Sinners-”
“Y-You kept count?”
“We all did,” Vaggie admitted, pulling Charlie close enough that she could rest her chin atop her head. “It...It almost felt like a game, Charlie; one that every single one of us wanted to win. ...Including me. And I- I was good at it. My best was two hundred and eighty five...”
She paused, taking a few steadying breaths and smiled when she felt the princess in her arms hug her just a little tighter. She pressed a kiss in silent thanks to blonde locks.
“But the fucked up philosophy of Heaven’s Army isn’t why I’m bringing this up, cariño.” Vaggie brought the hand that had been cupping Charlie’s cheeks up and began carding it through the hair on the back of her head again.
“I’m bringing it up, because if you multiply my average by an entire army? You get a lot of dead Sinners every single year. Until this one.” The angel pulled back so she could meet Charlie’s gaze once again, smiling at just seeing her love’s face; nevermind that it was blotchy and covered in tears and not a small amount of snot.
“Thanks to you, only a few score of cannibals died, and we put a sizable dent into the exorcists as well! Charlie, you cut the losses to Hell, to your people, down to an absolute fraction of what they could have been! Those bitches would have been pissed even if we hadn’t kicked their asses back upstairs!”
“...Technically they retreated-”
“They ran away! Which is something that they have never done before! Charlie, don’t you see?” Vaggie smiled at her girl, her princess, her love, “You’ve accomplished so much. You even managed to convince a fallen exorcist to fight for the other side.”
“You were already a good person!” Charlie argued with a wet looking pout.
“I actively partipated in a massacre for years, hun. Good people... Good people don’t just do that. And they sure as Hell don’t enjoy it.”
Vaggie’s mouth dipped into a small frown, before her girlfriend copied her previous actions and cupped one of her cheeks tenderly. She nuzzled into the palm and her smile slowly returned.
“I’ve...made progress, I guess,” Vaggie admitted, forcing the words through a slightly tense jaw, “But I’m still a long way from being redeemed. Metaphorically, that is; I have zero intention of ever setting foot in Heaven again. Unless, it’s like, a work thing. And only if you’re up there with me.”
Charlie stared at the fallen angel, chin wobbling as her eyes yet again filled with tears even as she smiled. Vaggie felt her cheeks darken and heat up at the sheer amount of love she saw shining in those ruby-red eyes.
“So- Yeah. Don’t knock your accomplishments, okay? Just because we’re not where we wanna be yet, doesn’t mean we won’t get there eventually. And if this hotel doesn’t work out? We’ll try something else. And we’ll keep trying until something works. Okay?”
Charlie sniffed and gave a nod, her smile growing warmer by the moment.She scooched up the bed just enough to press their foreheads together.
“What did I do to deserve you?”
“I ask myself that every single day,” Vaggie returned as easily as breathing.
They laid there together, simply breathing in each other’s presence, for some time. At one point they shimmied themselves under the covers and further down the mattress so their heads were actually resting on their pillows.
They stayed in touch the entire time.
“...Why don’t we sleep in tomorrow,” Vaggie mumbled after they’d finally settled, the words more a quiet thought than a full suggestion, but breaking the comfortable silence all the same.
“Snf- Wh-What?”
“Yeah... In fact... Fuck it! Let’s play hooky.”
“Hooky?”
“Not work. Take the day off and just, stay in the penthouse all day. Hell, we could even just stay in bed all day,” the gray woman grinned, waggling her eyebrows playfully.
Charlie giggled at her face, as expected, but her frown was quick to return.
“But- The others-”
“-Will be just fine on their own for one day,” Vaggie assured her, gently cupping one cheek with a hand that was instantly nuzzled into. “I can text all of them right now in the chat to let them know. No lessons, no outings; they can do what they want and we can do what we want.”
The blonde hummed thoughtfully. It did sound nice...
“We’re no good to anyone if we burn ourselves out, and you’re clearly running yourself ragged. Mentally, at least,” she said with a small wince before her face softened again. “We’ll rest up tomorrow, and then the day after we’ll jump right back into work.”
“...Just one day?”
“Or more, if you’d like,” Vaggie promised, “We can decide how we feel tomorrow.”
“...I have heard that burnout can be pretty bad...”
“Muscles need rest just as much as exercise to heal and grow.”
“Pft- Okay; if you of all people are saying I’m working too hard, then it’s probably true,” Charlie chuckled wetly.
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment of my work ethic,” the smaller woman quipped back with a grin, before gowing slightly more serious. “...So? What do you think? Day off?”
“...Yeah. Day off,” the blonde nodded. “Just the one, though!”
“Just the one,” Vaggie nodded back, “Just a nice little break from the craziness that is our lives. It’ll be just you and me.”
“Mreow.”
“And KeeKee,” the angel amended as the cat in question finally hopped back up onto the bed. As Charlie cooed at the cat, daring to loosen one hand from Vaggie’s waist so that she could offer scritches, Vaggie used the opportunity to stretch her own arm off to the side and pluck her phone off of her nightstand. Mindful of the shorter-than-she’d-like cord— and reminding herself again to get a longer one —she drafted a text in the group chat for the hotel residents after turning off all alarms for tomorrow.
“‘We’re taking tomorrow off,’” she said, reading what she’d wrote aloud, “‘No lessons. Feel free to do whatever, just don’t destroy the hotel.’ How’s that sound?”
“Mm. Lose the ‘destroy the hotel’ part?”
“‘Kay,” her thumb tapped at the screen a few times. “‘Feel free to do whatever.’ Better?”
“Much.”
“So...”
Charlie took a deep breath.
This wasn’t giving up, wasn’t failing; it was just...a little break. A quick recharge so that they had the energy to keep going, to keep trying.
She wasn’t giving up; just getting ready for the next round.
“...Send it.”
Vaggie smiled, and pressed a kiss to her girl’s nose at the same time she tapped the send button.
“Annnnnd we are officially on vacation.”
“Vaggie! It’s just one day!” Charlie giggled, KeeKee not helping by rubbing her head under the blonde’s chin.
“Maybe. But I get to spend it with you either way. And that’s what makes it so great.”
Charlie felt tears return to her eyes; happy ones this time.
“I love you,” she breathed as she leaned over to give Vaggie a kiss. KeeKee meowed in discontent at being dislodged but otherwise conceded to the motion.
“I love you, too. More than anything.”