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Hell had weight to it.
Not in the fire. Not the in the belligerent noise. Not even the brimstone screaming cries that scrutinized the atmosphere.
The weight was in his back.
Husker rolled over in the hotel bed he lay in, one wing caught half-open beneath him, feathers dragging rigidly across cheap sheets. Even in sleep they were heavy as fuck. They were massive, dark, and mostly useless in the way irony usually was.
He’d once thought hell was a place on earth.
Turns out earth had just been the rehearsal dinner.
He drifted under before he could reach for the bottle on the nightstand.
And Vegas came back to him.
🌇🩶☕️🥃🃏
It was always hot in that apartment. Las Vegas Nevada may be the only place on earth actually as hot as hell, if not, hotter.
Dry heat. The kind that pressed hard against your lungs like it was trying to crawl inside and set up camp. The kind that baked the neon lights outside his window into a constant migraine of a glow. An unforgiving heat, about as unforgiving as any a folk to have ever gone after him while he was still alive back up topside.
The thud that followed was aggressive and came hard, shaking an harsh yet thick rattle against the glass of his bedroom window. Husker for better or worse was a light sleeper. Hyper-vigilant is the fancy name he’d recently learned for it.
Husker shot upright before he was fully conscious, hand already buried inside the worn pillowcase. The steel revolver slid into his palm like it always belonged there. Safety was turned off. Two-handed grip, he got out of bed. He lunged in a jump backwards, swiftly gaining his footing on the hardwood ground. Back to the wall, up against it.
Silence.
His breathing was steady. Always steady.
He moved like a man who’d learned the hard way that hesitation gets you killed. Deep calm natural sounding breaths, and counting down came next.
‘Three.’
‘Two.’
‘One.’
He pivoted into the window, gun raised…
He froze.
A dove. It was an actual fuckin’ dove for fucks sake.
White, except where the desert had stained it tan. One wing was bent wrong. Feathers ruffled in frantic, useless attempts to balance. It kept bumping the glass like it didn’t understand why the sky had turned against him. Like it betrayed him.
Husker stared at it for a long moment silently.
Then he swore under his breath, flipped the safety back on, and shoved the gun away.
“Idiot,” he muttered, though he wasn’t sure if he meant himself or the bird.
He simultaneously undid the lock latches and then slid the window open.
The extra dry heat rushed in first in full force. Then came the gimpy fluttering.
Up close, the wing of the dove was worse than he’d thought. Not snapped clean, just twisted. Strained. Hurt.
The bird tried to flap when he reached for it. Disregarding the obvious pain it must've been in out of fear or adrenaline.
“Easy,” he said automatically, voice his usual deep baritone. Only this time it came out smoother, less gruff, more soft like.
He wasn’t sure who had taught him to use that tone. Surely it was self taught, given his history with “people skills”.
It worked anyway.
He cupped it carefully, broad and scarred knuckled up hands still surprisingly gentle. He’d even broken bones before. Set a few, too. Patch jobs on himself mostly, since half the time he’d been to stubborn to give anyone the opportunity to even try “fussing” over him. The wing on the dove definitely wasn’t beyond saving. not for someone like him.
So, he brought it inside.
That was just how it started.
🕊️🎇
In the dream, the apartment stretches far beyond softer than it had been. Less lonely. The couch so blurred in faint memory that now it isn’t stained. The sink isn’t full of empty or old unkempt used glasses. The air smells less like whiskey and more like something warm. Maybe during that time it was like that to him, more so than normal. But he wouldn’t bet money on it.
Memory lies kindly sometimes.
He made a birds nest in a cardboard box lined with one of his old flannels. He properly cleaned the wing. Wrapped it.
He secured it, making sure it wasn’t too tight, that it didn’t cut off any circulation.
“You’ll fly again,” he told it.
He didn’t know why he sounded so certain. So sure sounding.
The bird stayed with him after that for weeks, though in the little bubble of the apartment and routine change, it felt like months.
It perched on the back of his big chair when he played cards alone at the kitchen table. It watched him from the counter when he poured his first drink of the night. Sometimes it fluttered up to the windowsill and tested its balance.
He never closed the window. Even if he wished he could. But really, he just knew that he wouldn’t do it.
Not once.
He could have. It would’ve been easy.
But he wasn’t that kind of man.
He’d sit there some evenings, elbows on his knees, watching it breathe. He’d watch its small chest rising and falling. Knowing it would surely leave the moment it could.
Still, he fed it. Tended to it. Talked to it sometimes in that low, rough voice he never used on real people.
For the first time in a long while, sleep came without a fight.
He’d wake and see something living still there. Something that wasn’t a possible threat.
It mattered to him probably more than he let himself admit back then.
♥️♠️🩹🥃
Back in Hell, in his sleep his wings twitch.
Feathers scrape sharply against the mattress like pinpricks on his old fried nerves.
The irony is cruel.
Because now he is the bird.
Massive wingspan. Heavy. Unfolding whether he wants them to or not at times. Something higher up decided that was funny as fuck, apparently. Give the man who always let things fly away from him have the burden of carrying his own weight of flight quite literally on his back. Shit was a pain in the ass to try to fight off in his body language to maintain his well trained poker face. He eventually got the hang of his demon bodies new “tells”.
He can’t even use them properly to their full potential as far as wings go. Sure he can fly, but for the most part it’s not easy.
Its heavy at times.
They just hang there. A reminder.
🎇🕊️🩶🖤🌆
September in Vegas always carried a shift.
The southern wind would roll in late evening, warm but keeping you restless. You could feel it in your bones.
The bird’s wing had healed a bit crooked, but still strong.
It hopped onto the windowsill late that night and it didn’t look back at him.
Husker stood a few feet away, hands fisted in his pockets. Jaw tight. He’d known this was coming. Had counted down the days like he always did.
“Go on,” he said. it took a small step forward. He’d watch smiled, but his smirk didn’t meet his eyes.
The bird hesitated only a second before the wind finally caught beneath its wings.
And it flew.
Not perfectly. Not gracefully.
But it flew.
Husker stayed there long after it was gone, staring at empty sky. The room felt bigger without it. Quieter too.
He didn’t cry at first. No, he hadn’t remembered physically crying, not really.
He poured a drink for himself instead.
Then another.
By the time the sun started bleeding into the horizon, he’d convinced himself he’d expected nothing different.
That this was how it always went.
Find a bird at your window.
Mend it.
Love it.
Watch it leave.
♠️🩹🩶
Lovers had followed the same pattern.
Different faces. Different birds of all the same types of feathers.
Some came to him already broken. Some broke while they were there, not by him per say. Usually they had their own shit. Some were just passing through and needed somewhere warm to land for a bit.
He gave what he had. All of it.
Food. Shelter. Steady hands. Loyalty.
He never built cages. Not even gilded ones.
That wasn’t love.
Love was an open window and the understanding that the wind always wins eventually.
They’d stay until they were strong enough.
Then September would come.
And they would fly. Fly away from him.
He’d be left staring at the space they used to fill, chest aching like something had been hollowed out with a dull knife.
He’d drink until the ache blurred.
It was easier to believe hell was something waiting for him after death than admit he’d been living in it the whole time.
♠️🩹🩶
The dream shifts.
He’s standing in the Hazbin Hotel lobby now, but the neon from his old life in Vegas bleeds through the walls. The broken-winged dove sits on the front desk, looking older somehow. Watching him.
He looks down at himself from his reflection in a mirror in the same room.
His wings are wide, dark, and even heavier looking than he’d ever thought possible..
The dove tilts its head at him.
“You think you’re the only one that ever flew away?” a distorted voice murmurs, though it doesn’t sound like the bird.
It sounds like a memory.
It sounds like regret.
Husker wakes with a sharp inhale. Hyperventilating as he reacquainted himself back into reality.
The room is dim. Early.
The weight is still on his back.
For a moment, there’s disorientation — Vegas blending with Hell, heat blending with brimstone.
Then he hears faint movement down the hall. The hotel haunting old creaks and his now thankfully slowing breathing. Someone is laughing softly down the hallway. He feels calmer from it, un tensing faintly the slightest bit.
Something living is still there with him now even in hell. In this Hotel. A certain Spider demon whom he can’t get his beautiful genuine laugh, smile, and gorgeous heterochromia eyes out of his head these days. He wouldn’t have that any other way.
Sure he doesn’t like “Angel Dust” the mask, but he understands it much better now, he knows that Angel needs it as a way to protect himself. He gets it, and he really is a little more than just growing fond of the “real” Angel that he’s had earned the honor to have gotten to know now. Angel is unlike anyone he’s ever known, but in the best way.
He sits up slowly.
Runs a hand over his face roughly.
He thinks about open windows. About mending wings. About how he’s always been a man of his word, even if that word was scarce.
He never promised forever.
He just promised care.
Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe loving something knowing it might leave isn’t a curse.
Maybe it’s proof he was never meant to be the cage. (Or even an Overlord in Hell for fuck sake he thinks to himself)
He shakes his head a bit.
His wings shift behind him, still heavy, and still there.
He doesn’t reach for the bottle this time. Not that there’s been one with anything but water in it for a couple weeks now, anyway.
Instead, he stands.
And for the first time in a long while, he leaves the window of his room open. It’s not for something to escape from him.
But in case something chooses to come into his life and chooses to stay.
In case he needs to let someone in.