Chapter Text
"I will always be there, I will say to you, the next time. Even after the door. It's neither a gift nor a promise. It's a natural phenomenon."
Hélène Cixous
Two years later, Angel shows up at the Hotel's doorstep, slow-blinking and muted.
It's late, hanging on the last seconds to midnight and Husk feels the bends of him go bruised with a longing so animal it sets teeth in his gut.
He's thought of this. Dipped into daydreaming when past the neck into five bottles of bourbon, hypnotized by the flickering sway of liquid around the brim. But the blood-haze of the lights through the windows is too vicious, the walls too grimy, and there's too many people about to know this is the real fucking deal.
Husk's stomach twists sharp like a car in a U-turn.
Charlie's the first to get her feet steady. “Angel! You're back!”
“What the fuck, Angie?! I ain't hallucinating you, right?”
“No, he's really really here!”
“My, my! Look what the tide has brought in, even if the cargo seems quite roughened.”
Husk snarls at that one.
It's been two years, yeah, and it shows in the pitch of Charlie's voice, in the wet-eyed grin Cherri can't quash down, in the distressing squeals that snag at the silence when Nuggs barrels forward like a cargo train.
Angel walks in dressed in clothes that are more underwear than practical, a violent glint buried in his pupils. Fuck, Husk's missed those eyes, the blinkered beauty of them. The way they used to slice through his ribs to disturb the silence behind.
Seconds warp his breaths, turn them warm.
Husk should– he should go there, should move. Say hi. Hey.
Welcome back.
“Glad to see ya back,” Husk says and almost winces at the way it lands, sending shrapnel. There's no pet names attached, and he feels their weight beneath the tongue. Bygones of a bygone time.
Angel just nods at him, like a stranger, face unreadable. Quickly looks down to Nuggets to retrieve him from the floor with a mouth that trembles around a smile that flickers unsure before disappearing. He holds Nuggs in his hands, squeezes a little before pushing him back to Cherri.
He's gotten himself out. As Husk knew he would. Doesn't mean that guilt ain't clambering up from Husk's gut to knot in his throat, pushing behind his eyes. Because it's been two years of distance, of keeping himself reined back and tethered to a thousand bottles and a smoke-full mattress, just because Angel told him to stay the fuck away.
He doesn't need to see Angel's eyes to know that he's here for good, to stay, that his contract is gone, god knows how. The princess had had a plan, and Husk had helped with it, hoped on it, saw it progress in small increments. Useless, all of it. Because Husk tastes it on the air, on instinct, on the lack of that itching sweetness that used to follow Angel around.
Valentino's gone for good.
Everything scrapes in the minutes that follow. Laughter and words, so many fucking words from so many fucking people, the chittering skitter of the bugs making camp under the plaster. Husk wants it all gone, wants a second to reassess, to search Angel's face for any type of acknowledgement. Wants a second to say sorry– I'm fucking sorry.
I should've been there.
Angel disappears up the stairs, behind the door of a room Niffty has guarded like a Chihuahua with an attitude, untouched and unchanged.
The silence breaks in a million follow up sentences from Charlie, mainly. From Cherri. From Vaggi.
From fucking Alastor.
Husk can't deal with it.
He rips up the stairs, and doesn't care if anyone needs a refill, if he's letting it all show, if all the people down there can see the mess bundled in Husk's insides.
He needs a fucking minute.
Because Angel's back and Husk's scared of the two years resting in his joints, in the places they can't see. Because Angel didn't smile for real downstairs, and his eyes seemed dull like tin and just as fragile.
Husk's scared because he's gotten unused to this closeness, and he feels his breath rattle, knees unstable though he's plopped down on the bed. It's so sudden it feels like any unremarkable night, even if he's hurting from the inside out, anew. Because Angel's back and there's so much he wants to say, with no words to say it, so he sits there and aches, with a torrent of things streaming up, thinking he's back, he's here, he's finally fucking back, and Husk feels it– that long-lost, wounded love of his beating back in the grave.
Takes Husk about a week to realize there's something off with Angel. Husk’s given him a wide berth each day– if for his own comfort or Angel’s, he doesn't really want to think about it.
He thinks of the last time they saw each other. Remembers it somedays. It's what loops around his ankles stopping him from reaching out because he wants to but he has no idea how to navigate that minefield. Why the Hell would it be easy to relive it? To say sorry? To swallow around the hurt Angel had settled between his ribs, inadvertently? It’d never been easy, not in the past, not with the collars on their necks. Not for him, not for Angel, not at those weird moments that seemed somewhere between dreams and reality and memories that always involved pain and someone screaming, blood and sharp edges.
It wouldn't be easy.
He's seen Angel in slivers these past days: a flash of fur here, the slant of a boot there. Husk knows he's avoiding him, scrambling around Angel and drowning in the scent of him in the dry air of empty rooms: all warmth and skin and sweetness, and something else, something closer that makes Husk think of places he has no memory for.
Husk misses him. But he ain't sure Angel needs him close, needs anyone close. Husk hasn't missed the glaze in his eyes when he thinks no one's looking. Banked to ashes.
Maybe he just needs time. Maybe Husk needs time too.
The highball in his hand slips when Cherri plonks down on a barstool without any finesse. “Why the fuck are you still here and not there where he needs you.”
Husk gets her, the anger that simmers beneath. Doesn't stop him from hardening his jaw until his molars ache, choosing to deflect because it's easier. “Don't know that drink. Ya can try at another bar.”
“Shut up.” Cherri leans over the bartop. It's real magic how she conveys so much with just one eye and a brow. Husk's learned to read her well through endless nights side by side hurting in all the same places. She taps at his chest. “You know what I'm talking about, you moggie fucker.”
“Do I, really? ‘Cause last time I checked I wasn't a goddamn teep.” Husk bats her hand away. “Calm your ass down. Speak plainly, okay?”
She folds down. Reflexively, he offers her a beer, watching her face go pensive, shaded across the cheeks. They've done this before in the last two years. Keeping each other company when the days dragged, substituting absence with silence and booze, with peppered words that hadn't been much at first. Until they were.
They're friends now.
“I'm worried about him,” she says, sounding serious enough Husk feels his stomach clench, full of the crowded need to run back to Angel. But he waits. Breathes slow while she follows, “He ain't– he ain't the same. He's just–” Cherri puffs out, fingers following the wavy grain of the bartop. “Not really here, you know?”
“Can ya blame him? Kid's gone through a goddamn nightmare.” There must be some truth there, yeah? Husk grabs the rag only to dislodge the anxious fizzing with some kinetic tugs of the fleece over the edge of the sink. “I don't think he needs us hovering like drunk choppers."
Cherri frowns. “He has eaten maybe five meals since he got here, what do you say to that?”
Husk chills from toes to tail. He's missed it, when he wouldn't have missed it before. And he knows he's gone back to the miles of space between them from that first year, before songs and knowing. When standing at the margins of Angel had felt so easy.
It's anything but, now.
“Fuck.” It hisses out through the gaps in his bite. He wrings the rag, tosses it and hears it land with a wet squelch in the sink. “Okay, look. You're preaching to the fucking choir, but I don't know what ya want me to do. Talk to him? I wouldn't even know what to say. What if I fuck it up?” They're so different already. Husk flips eyes down to the bar, to the place that once, long ago had cupped them together. Beneath the gunk of grief, Husk hopes it might still be there. “It's been two years.”
The words suck up all the air in the lobby. He feels them slashing at his throat.
“I don't think you'll fuck up, not more than I have.” Cherri exhales a sigh, presses her eye shut, then flicks it open. “I've… tried, and he ain't telling me a word. I can't just bomb my way in, it ain't the way.” She catches the side of Husk's fingers and a quick squeeze follows. She releases him swiftly, because there's certain things everyone is cagey about in Hell. “You, though. He always listened to you.”
Husk swallows around the wound in his mouth. “Way back.”
“Just– try, okay?”
Lying would be easy, it's what Husk does best even after all this time. Easy words buoying to keep him away from anything meaningful.
Doing it here feels fucking abominable.
“Okay,” he says, a shiver scattering down his spine. “Okay, I'll go.”
Cherri smiles for the first time in the night. “Good.”
Husk waits for everyone to vacate the bar, the lobby, knowing Angel is still in the kitchen. He’d seen him shuffle there an hour ago, and he hasn't left yet.
Husk closes the bar with scrupulous cowardice, delaying it. It's close to two in the morning, and it's easy to imagine he's in the goddamn boondocks, surrounded by nada and misery, like one of the countless times in his plural memory of them, back when he could've walked the small space between their bodies, and easily fall into one of Angel's smiles.
It feels so daunting now.
Heart in his palate, throbbing like a wound, Husk treks into the kitchen. Angel's there, sitting unmoving at the table, bowl full of mac and cheese that's gone cold and lumpy.
He tilts his head when Husk enters, eyes holding all the light in the room in a borrowed spark. It's better than dullness. Husk gets lost in him, like before, for seconds.
“Husk.”
Shouldn't make his breath rasp like savouring the brutal bite of a single-malt. Husk has the urge to hear it again, like the urge you sometimes get to press on a bruise, to scratch around the edges of an open cut. Make it hurt, make it worse.
Angel's wearing a simple pink crop top and loose black sweats. In Husk's gut, something awakens, dormant and tender, like new skin free of scar-tissue. Angel's shoulders are set free, rounded in curves that go up unbroken to his jaw, his neck, pale and goddamn touchable. It ain't lust or need, but something more twisty, the same unmanageable craving of seeing Angel fit to fucking bursting with life.
Husk breathes. The back of his thighs go shaky. It feels like walking on the organic drift of a graveyard recently shoveled.
It's overwhelming to find himself back in Angel's orbit. He's lost practice, how to tame the thrum of his heart, the surge of warmth chasing up his spine. How to exist with that longing making dents in his skin.
But he breaks the glass, pitches forward into the depthless gravity of Angel. “Gonna need some reheating for that if ya keep waiting.”
“Uh.” Angel's eyes go back to his bowl. Beneath the flicker-shimmer of his eyes, his cheeks are all crumpled in white, like paper. “Nah, it's fine.”
Husk shuffles to lean back against the counter, facing him. “How uh, how are you doin’?”
“Fine.” Not even a shrug, not an iota of wasted motion.
“Haven't seen ya around much since ya got here.”
God, what a lame fucking line.
Angel rolls eyes up at him, bleak gems in a sky all fogged. “I was catching up on some sleep, I'm still deep in the red.”
He sets the tines of his fork in the soggy pasta. Moves clumps around the walls of the bowl. Aloof, personal space drawn around him like armor. He feels untouchable, like the sky and freedom, like too many nights and days in Husk's past that he's forgotten.
“That's good.” He wrenches the words out of his gut, pulling a chair by the back rest. He sits on it, across from Angel. “You uh, you got yourself free. Must've been a tough row to hoe.”
The corner of Angel's mouth lifts a fraction. “Practically’s got my name in it, don't it? No better hoe than yours truly. Was donezo before I could think what the fuck I was doin’.”
“How did Val take it?”
Angel's whole face shutters. “Val has shit to say.”
The two years telescope to this moment. Who gives a shit if Valentino is dead in a ditch somewhere, sitting in pieces, or if he's still back in the tower howling his loss. Angel's here, undisclosing, but that's the least of the barriers. Husk feels hypoxic with waiting, words jamming his mouth for endless days, and he feels them froth between his teeth, thumping at his throat.
“Angel, I should've–” His sentence fragments. Husk swallows, his mouth tasting like tin. “‘M sorry for staying away, for not reaching out–”
“Don’t, we’re fine.” Angel shuts him up decidedly, brows in a vee. He ain't looking at Husk yet, slim fingers tracing the rim of the bowl. “Ya did what I asked you to, ya just did what I asked. Ya have any idea when was the last time a man cared ‘bout what I asked?”
Husk splays his palms down on the table. He ain't never been the one to fold, but if he would, it’d be for this man. “I was helpin’ the princess to find a way to get ya out.” Naked down to the heart, scared of it, Husk adds, “We all were.”
Angel swerves lanes, violently. “Nugs. He's in your room, yeah? Couldn't find his bed.”
“Yeah, he's bunkin’ with me, but I can take–”
“No!” Angel bursts loud, then catches himself. Reassesses in a way that feels far too controlled to be normal. “No, leave him with ya. For now at least.”
A glutton for punishment, Husk looks down at the plate. It's barely disturbed. Just a few dents made in the yellowy heap.
“Ain't ya gonna finish that?”
“Not really in the mood for it. I thought I was but eh.” Angel rolls up his bare shoulders and pushes away the plate. The silverware tinkles like a warning against the rim. “Guess I fucked up again.”
Husk's ears flick. There's something buried between the letters. Something bruised and unpleasant about it that has Husk's fur standing on end. But he can't tease it out of Angel like before, with a smile, with a drink and a joke, with the brush of a touch that fell between denial and wish.
Husk stands and the chair scrapes across the floor. “Tell ya what. I was just coming here to grab some grub.” He paces to the counter again, not looking at Angel. “I can make ya a sandwich if ya promise to wolf it down like there's no tomorrow.”
There's a beat, then Angel says, whisper-quiet, “A turkey one?”
Husk feels the sizzle in his chest from putting a paw on a good scare card. All satisfaction, that is. “Sure.”
He works in silence. Reaching for the wonderbread Charlie keeps over the fridge, retrieving the mayo from within just because he remembers how it couldn't miss on Angel's sandwiches. There's a deep stack in his mind he won't touch most days, full of details that Angel had left peppered across nights at the bar. Husk doesn’t dwell there. Takes it like it is. That he's carved out a space for Angel inside him that has no lease, that's there to stay.
He piles up the lettuce, the slices of tomato, the cut of meat. Adds pepper and a sheet of cheddar because Angel had raved about it the last time Husk made him one just like this. Takes Husk five minutes to have them ready, crust on the sides gone too. Perfect for him.
Plates in hand, he shuffles to the table, sets them down, pushing Angel's close.
Angel looks down at the plate. The pink edges of his mouth tremble. “Don't know if I can do a whole sandwich.”
It sounds thoroughly fucking dejected. As if Angel, of all people, could be beaten by a piece of bread with filling. Cherri's words knock back in Husk's skull. They circle and circle and circle. Husk feels his bones vibrate with worry, like a tuning fork.
“C’mon, you ain't making me work hard for nothing, right?” Husk can't rip loose in pieces, not now, when Angel is teetering on the edge. “I'll fight Charlie off your back if you do, what d'ya say?”
Angel snorts, and Husk's belly untwists. “Spoken like a true Nevadan.”
“And ya goddamn know it.”
Whatever has set pressure on Angel's shoulders uncoils and slips. His eyes flicker, shivery-bright, holding Husk by the heart again.
“Okay, you're on, Whiskers.”
Husk lets himself look. The soft curve of the muss of his hair, the unguarded bend where his shoulders tip up to his neck, bare and long. It’d been common ground before, to let himself steal glances. Walking up the next step seeing himself fold hands round that waist, enjoying the way the heat ramped up in his body.
It's miles distant from watching Angel now, sinking teeth on the soft crumb, tongue peeking out to lick at the white drops of mayo that hang like stragglers on his lips. Husk sees red flood his cheeks. Paint the slash of his neck. Between bites, Angel's eyes go hooded.
Enjoying the taste. Enjoying the experience of a goddamn sandwich Husk's put together for him.
“That's it, very well done, ‘s easy”
Husk’s breathing sharpens. He pinpoints eyes on Angel's mouth, in the soft push of teeth. Beneath his breastbone, he feels something twitch. Feels it build and mat with a heat that surges like a rush.
Too fucking raw.
It frightens him. Husk springs back up, with the quick beat of his heart in the brasstacks. “Want some tea?”
Angel nods, undisturbed. His eyes glow through the gloom of the half-lit kitchen, hazy, while he keeps eating.
Husk blinks away the sudden dizziness. He tugs the fridge open again, and pulls out a bottle of tea. The plastic fits cold and welcome in his palm. He turns around, dispelling thoughts with a step back to Angel. He sits again, and sets the tea next to Angel's plate, now empty, scattered with breadcrumbs.
Angel’s smile is gauzy-soft when he tilts eyes up. “It was really good. Had forgotten ya got all them trump cards hidden.”
He uncaps the bottle, and drinks half of the tea in three chugs, then pushes it aside.
It's good to see Angel like this, to have him close with more concrete ways of doling out peace without him kicking back.
“Ain't you gonna finish the tea?” Husk can feel the vibration of his own words like the trill of shelled creatures hidden in the dark.
Angel palms his forehead. “I’m gettin’ all groggy.”
“You can be tired after finishing it,” Husk says, firm but not unkind. It feels important in a way he can't explain, like watching a bottle of Jack get drained dry. “It's called hydration. C'mon, baby, just a little sip, yeah?”
Angel's eyes sparkle.
Feels like nosebleed stakes to remain here, watching Angel flushed and worn-down in softness. To remain stapled to this floor, calling him baby pretending no time has passed. To feel that old intimacy of pared down walls and pared down silences swell between them again.
Husk aches inside.
“Okay,” Angel breathes, and tips the bottle back, drinks it all down in two long drains.
Husk's claw ticks against the table watching the soft bob of that throat. Long, soft like new felt and just as promising.
God, he needs to hit the hay.
He needs to tide himself over in the burn of a half-liter of bourbon.
He smiles, though, when Angel tugs the bottle down.
“There, see? Ya scarfed it all down.” Husk wants to reach, to set a paw down on Angel's thin hand where the watery rust-tinged light melts into the white of his fur. But that ain't doable. “I'll put a word down for ya to get the princess off your back for a bit. You did good, baby, ya deserve some rest.”
Angel sways upright without the need to be coaxed further. It should mean something, right? What it shouldn't do, though, is make Husk's heart pick up like mad.
He watches Angel sway to the door, say over his shoulder, “Thanks, Whiskers.”