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The walk back to the Hotel is quiet. Odette and Clara don’t say much, but they do eyeball her wings nervously. That’s the reason she keeps them out. Not for Carmine’s daughters —not to intimidate— but because she needs Charlie to see them. To see her like this, an ex-Exorcist, a symbol of Hell’s yearly massacre. She knows what Vaggie is already, thanks to Adam and Lute, and the absolute betrayal in her eyes will haunt Vaggie for the rest of her life.
But she also knows her girlfriend. She’s kind and hopeful and wonderful, and while she did give Vaggie the most scathing look in their entire relationship —well-deserved, too— she forgives easily. She moves past things quickly, lays positivity down where she shouldn’t.
If Charlie forgives her — no, she doesn’t deserve that. If Charlie still wants her, she needs to want all of Vaggie. Everything. She needs to see, for herself, that the wings are still inside her, that her roots were still Heaven first. She needs to know what she’s holding onto, and maybe it’s a failing on her part to doubt Charlie because they both know she’s so, so intelligent and thoughtful, but some piece of Vaggie can’t shake it.
They meet at the gate. Vaggie sees her first, an army of cannibals behind her, Alastor and a woman she doesn’t recognize at her side. But she looks happy. Content. She’s chattering with them both as she walks, and Vaggie braces herself for the inevitable glare she’s bound to get when Charlie notices her.
But Charlie greets her with a soft smile that she doesn’t deserve, hasn’t earned, and Vaggie’s heart swoops.
She’s the first to speak. “Looks like you had a busy day.”
“You too.” God, she missed that voice. She’s missed Charlie all day, tied herself in knots over her all day. And here she is, and she’s being so much kinder than she should be.
“Charlie, I—”
“Hold that thought,” Charlie interrupts, fishing in her pocket for something. She pulls out a shrunken head on a keychain and the smile she gives Vaggie is blinding, all precious sharp canines and sparkling ruby eyes, the spots on her cheeks almost level with her eyes from how hard she’s grinning. “I got you a souvenir from Cannibal Town.”
She’s not usually prone to tears, but the relief that floods her pricks the back of her eyes. She should exercise more restraint, should wait until she’s invited, but like a magnet she’s pulled toward Charlie. When Vaggie flies into her arms, she’s caught just as tenderly. And when she breathes Charlie’s name, she gets another dazzling smile.
Charlie pushes her back, gently, as she grabs the top of one feathered wing. “The wings are new,” she says, observing them. This is why she needed Charlie to see. To touch, to know Vaggie. She’s kept this part of her hidden for so long and even if Charlie hated her, she deserves to know. But she doesn’t hate Vaggie —not yet, at least— and her smile turns wolfish. “You look nice.”
There’s a very clear undercurrent to it, but all Vaggie can focus on is the way Charlie looks at her. No malice, no hatred. Even the hurt from before is tempered — still present, but muted and covered by the unwavering affection she’s showered Vaggie in for their entire relationship. Since she found Vaggie on the street, honestly. They have a lot to talk about, she knows that, but this is the part that matters. Her very first reaction to seeing Vaggie’s wings isn’t disgust, isn’t hate, isn’t even hurt. It’s just pure, unbridled love.
She does not deserve this woman, but fuck if she won’t spend her life proving she does.
It’s not until they’re getting ready for bed that night that the doubts creep in again. Charlie may be okay right now, but what about later? What if, in a few weeks, she decides that she can’t do this? That Vaggie has too much blood on her hands, too many of her people dead at Vaggie’s spear? Surely she can’t be over it this quickly.
She hesitates at the edge of the bed, wringing her hands, watching Charlie skim through her phone with one arm behind her head and her hair down, her lip relaxed and her eyes a little droopy. She’s perfect, soft and sweet and gorgeous. Unsullied by the blood Vaggie has spilled so much of.
The irony of Charlie being the innocent one here does not escape her.
Charlie looks up after a moment, brows knitting together. “Hey,” she says softly, holding her hand out. Vaggie hesitates to take it and Charlie makes a grabbing motion, insistent. “C’mere.”
And, well. She’s never been very good at saying no to Charlie. She rests her knee on the bed, preparing to crawl up, when Charlie tilts her head and holds her hand up. Panic streaks through Vaggie. Is this where she’s told to leave? That, actually, this was too big a breach of trust? Charlie would have every right to. This was a big fucking secret to keep, one that Vaggie isn’t sure she could forgive if their positions were switched.
She drowns in Charlie’s eyes and quickly throws that thought away. No, if it was for Charlie, she could forgive anything.
“Can I…” she starts, biting her lip. Vaggie stills, knee still on the bed, hoping against hope that she won’t be turned away. “Can I see them again? Your wings?”
That is… not what she was expecting. Vaggie blinks once, twice. Charlie watches her, something in her eyes that Vaggie hasn’t yet deciphered, along with that precious bolt of hope that Vaggie so treasures.
She nods. Of course Charlie can see them. Charlie can have anything she damn well wants.
It’s still clunky, unfurling them from the pocket dimension of her spine, but the ache of freedom they bring with them is enough to make her sigh. She rolls her shoulders, stretching, and the long primary flight feathers of them brush the wall. She isn’t used to moving with them any more, but she manages to climb into bed without knocking anything over, and that feels like a start.
“Turn,” Charlie says, more authoritative than Vaggie usually hears her. “Can I touch?”
Her throat goes dry. She hasn’t — she usually preened them herself. Never felt comfortable enough with anyone else to let them touch, not unless there were particularly stubborn feathers. And even then, she kept if brief. They’re her soul, her essence, the thing that defines her existence. And she’s only just gotten them back.
But she finds that she’s desperate for Charlie to touch, for that closeness, and she turns her back toward her girlfriend, careful not to smack her in the face. Her answer is an affirmative hum; she doesn’t trust her own voice. Charlie shifts and settles into the bed behind her.
The first touch feels downright magical. Charlie spreads her palm across the base of Vaggie’s left wing, then her right, fingers digging into tissue and muscle and the ethereal essence of them. It’s not hard pressure, barely any at all actually, but it feels like fire and love and acceptance.
“Beautiful,” Charlie murmurs, so softly that Vaggie almost misses it. She swallows hard and fluffs them, repositioning, so that Charlie has better access. “Did you have these the whole time?”
“No,” Vaggie shakes her head, her brain hanging on by a thread under Charlie’s fingers. “Fuck, that feels good. No, they were—” she pauses. How much does Charlie want to know? How much is she willing to share? “I… lost them. For a while.”
Charlie chuckles behind her with another deep press of fingertips, working up into a massage. It feels absolutely divine and whatever Heaven claims to be, it’s not this. This is better. This is Heaven, her demon, her Charlie massaging her wings, the symbol of Hell’s brutality, and still loving her with her entire, perfect heart.
“How, exactly, do you lose wings?” she asks. “Like, these aren’t exactly small.”
It feels a bit like walking a tightrope, deciding what to say and what not to say, but the thought that roars above all the others is this: Charlie deserves to know. After everything Vaggie has kept from her, this is something she can share. Something she needs to share.
“Lost… may be a poor choice of words,” she starts, quietly. “They grew back well, but they’re different. From my original set.”
Charlie’s hands still. Vaggie stifles a frustrated noise. “’Grew back’?” she repeats.
Now or never. “Them —and my eye— were the price I paid for refusing orders.”
The room heats up. No, not the room — Charlie heats up. Vaggie risks a glance behind her to see horns and eyes drowned in red, black lips set in a deep scowl.
Her voice is a snarl when she grits out, “What?”
Well, good to know that she still deems Vaggie worthy of protection. She flutters her wings, hoping to distract Charlie from her own anger, and it works — barely. Her hands come back to Vaggie’s wings. She’s still seething, but at least having something to do with her hands is helping.
“I refused to kill a kid,” she says, slowly, carefully, gaging Charlie’s reaction. She stays quiet, her fingers pressing a bit more insistently on Vaggie’s muscles. She moves to Vaggie’s shoulders instead, hands hot and firm. “So Lute ripped out my wings and cut out my eye. The X is a reminder.”
For a few beats, Charlie is silent. She kneads Vaggie’s shoulders, the tension in them melting at the pressure and warmth, breath heavy. And, finally, growls, “I’m going to gut her like a fucking fish.”
Again, not what Vaggie expected, but the deep, otherworldly rumble in her chest is doing things to Vaggie’s carefully-contained libido. Charlie’s horns are probably still out. Her tail might be now, too — yep, there it is. Charlie wraps it around her waist and tugs her closer, tucks Vaggie’s back against her front and rests her chin on Vaggie’s shoulder. Sometimes, she forgets how fucking tall Charlie is. But in moments like these, moments where she honestly really needs the comfort… it’s nice, getting to feel small. Safe. Protected.
“Down, girl,” she says with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood a little as she reaches up. Her fingertips find the spot behind one of Charlie’s horns —called it— and scratch, and Charlie rumbles a pleased purr as she leans into it. Her cheek rubs against Vaggie’s affectionately, not unlike a cat, and Vaggie’s heart soars. “But… thank you.”
They stay like that for a while, Charlie’s arms folded across her. Charlie peppers kisses across her neck, soft ones meant to comfort, not arouse, humming under her breath the entire time.
“Would you have told me?” she asks finally, her voice soft. Vaggie bites her cheek. That question has haunted her for the better part of the week, since the moment she knew she was visiting Heaven and the very real fear of Charlie finding out was imminent.
She wants to say yes. She wants to reassure Charlie that of course, she just wasn’t quite ready, she needed more time. But that isn’t the truth.
“I don’t know,” she breathes, almost a prayer. “I… wanted to. I wanted to believe that it would be okay. That you’d still—” No, fuck, she’s not going to guilt trip Charlie like this.
“Love you?” Charlie supplies, and Vaggie huffs in frustration, because of course she finished the sentence on her own. “Of course I would.” She kisses Vaggie’s neck again. “I’ve loved you since the day I met you.”
“That feels a little extreme. I was half-dead.”
“Yeah,” Charlie nods against her skin. “And I loved you anyway.”
The tears spring back to her eyes, burning with the need to shed them. “Fuck, Charlie, you can’t just say things like that,” she manages, a little watery, as she extricates herself from her grasp. Charlie’s disappointed whine turns into a pleased hum when Vaggie only turns to straddle her lap. She rests her forehead against Charlie’s. “I don’t deserve you.”
Hands sink into the dip of her waist and then trail down her thighs. Charlie rubs patterns into her skin, the pads of her hands still warm but no longer burning. “I dunno,” Charlie smiles as she presses a chaste kiss to Vaggie’s lips. “You’re gorgeous and badass and clearly have a moral compass, even before your old troupe,” she grimaces, searching for a word, and spits, “banished you. You’re confident. You coaxed Carmilla Carmine into arming a bunch of cannibals for their Princess with silly ideas. I think, maybe, I don’t deserve you.”
There’s that seed of self-doubt. It pops up every so often, all the voices that have told Charlie she’s stupid and should give up drowning out her usual, bubbly confidence. Vaggie feathers kisses over her forehead, her cheeks, her nose. Drops to her jaw and presses a few there, too, for good measure.
“I wanted to tell you,” she murmurs, circling back to their original conversation. “And I was so, so scared I’d lose you. I—” she pauses, still, face buried in the crook of Charlie’s shoulder as she thinks. “I’ve shed so much blood. Taken so many lives.” When she pulls back, she forces herself to look Charlie in the eye. “I wouldn’t blame you at all for hating me.”
Thumbs rub circles into the soft part of her waist. For a beat, the only sound in the room is their breath. Something in Charlie’s expression changes, and Vaggie knows what she’s about to ask before she says it.
“How many?” she whispers. The fear lacing her voice is understandable and God does Vaggie hate that she’s the one who put it there. “What’s done is done,” she clarifies. “But I think… I think I need to know. To get past it.”
It’s a fair request, and it’s one that Vaggie has dreaded since they started dating.
“Six hundred,” she says just as softly, and Charlie flinches, her brows screwing up with the pain of that statement. Vaggie forces herself to say the last part. “Roughly. I… I started to lose track.” She knows that’s worse. She knows it the second Charlie’s face falls, the second she bites her lip and closes her eyes and breathes in, deep, through her nose. It’s not anger. It’s worse; sadness and disappointment. Grief. “I see their faces still. I can’t remember all of them, but they — they visit me. In flashes. I stopped counting because I couldn’t handle watching the numbers climb.”
Her voice breaks, horrifically. She swallows down the sob at the back of her throat and the tears threatening her eyes. This is for Charlie, not her. They aren’t hers to mourn; not right now, maybe not ever. Not when it was her hand that destroyed them.
“Yes, they are,” Charlie mumbles as she pulls Vaggie tight against her chest, and she realizes that she said the last part out loud. She has an apology ready on her tongue when Charlie presses her face into Vaggie’s hair and breathes deep. “These are your people now, too.”
“They’re gone because of me.”
“Have you ever known an Exorcist to stop?” Charlie pulls back and places her hands on Vaggie’s shoulders, searching her eyes. “Have you ever known one who even feels bad?” Vaggie shakes her head, silent, tears tracking down her cheeks now. Charlie wipes them away with her thumbs, her mouth drawn into a line in thought. “I don’t… I don’t know if I can forgive it,” she says slowly. Vaggie draws a deep, shuddering breath.
“Understood.”
“That’s a lot of souls. A lot of people.” Vaggie nods again. “But… I think you did something remarkable. You questioned. You refused to take a life.”
“After six hundred of them.”
“You still stopped, babe,” Charlie emphasizes, and the pet name lights something inside her. It’s going to take more than Charlie’s reassurance to get her through the horror of what she’s done. She might never be past it, the same way Charlie might never truly forgive, but they can handle that as it comes. Because she’s right, at least in this; Vaggie did stop. She questioned and lowered her spear, knowing she’d pay for it if she was caught. One spared life won’t undo the damage of her kills, but maybe, just maybe, helping souls Redeem themselves will be enough to atone for it.
Charlie’s eyes turn questioning all of a sudden. “Wait. Lute tore your wings off,” she says, her hands flattening across the base of them protectively. “How did you grow them back?”
“Oh. I thought about you.”
Charlie goes still, then wide eyed as she stares at Vaggie for a long moment. Her breath catches.
The kiss she pulls Vaggie into is searing, one hand cupping Vaggie’s cheek as the other spreads across her back to pull her closer, impossibly closer. Vaggie sinks into the feel of it, the way that Charlie’s hand roams her back, familiar but new, slightly obstructed by her wings, which…
“Leave them,” Charlie murmurs against her lips when she starts to pull them back in. “Please? I like them.”
Charlie gets what Charlie wants. Vaggie would offer her the world if only she knew how.
She punctuates her appreciation of those wings with her hand in Vaggie’s hair, using it to tip her head back gently to bare Vaggie’s throat to her. When she kisses Vaggie’s neck this time, it’s with intent, slow and languid, her teeth scraping against the sensitive flesh under her jaw. The quiet sound that escapes Vaggie pulls a responding one from Charlie.
“You like them, huh?” Vaggie asks, a little breathless.
“Mhm,” Charlie hums against her. Vaggie threads her fingers through Charlie’s mane and gently pries her back, waiting until Charlie can see her properly before she unfurls them in their entirety. Exorcists’ wings are freakishly large, built for endurance and battle, and the tips of them clear either side of the bed.
Charlie stares, drinking her in like a woman starved as she licks her lips. Her eyes flicker again, the internal battle clear as she wrestles control back from the brink. The sheer want written in them sings to Vaggie; Charlie wants her. Still wants her, even after learning about her, even like this. A reminder of everything painful.
Maybe she’s just a little evil when she stretches her arms over her head, her wings with them. She might be goading Charlie when she glances down through her hooded eye, through her lashes, and smiles.
Her eyes flash —yellow, red, yellow, red, red— and her control snaps. She drags Vaggie back to her, attacks her mouth with kisses deep enough to leave her breathless, and then she’s on to Vaggie’s neck, teeth sinking into her flesh. Vaggie has enough presence of mind to hold on for the ride, and not much else. Particularly not when Charlie’s claws rip clean through her blouse and her mouth drops to Vaggie’s chest.
“Pretty, so pretty for me,” Charlie murmurs, that otherworldly tumble underlining her words again, and Vaggie melts, sensation and praise mixing, dragging her into desire as Charlie skirts her fingers down Vaggie’s front, claws ripping everything else obstructing her skin along the way.
It’s something like relief that settles deep in her bones when Charlie touches her and presses their foreheads together. They move together as Charlie opens her, sets the pace for her with one hand on her hip and the other buried inside her, and Vaggie forgets everything else. There’s just this; Charlie’s touch and the breath between them, the low rumble in her chest and the rasp in her voice as she praises Vaggie —that’s it, come on baby, just a little more, so pretty, so perfect—
Belonging. That’s what she feels; she belongs here. To Charlie, yes, but also here, in this place, in this moment. Redemption, for her, is a bubbly demon with sunshine hair and an unyielding moral compass, with forgiveness and kindness baked into her soul.
Charlie’s hand brushes the underside of her wing and Vaggie groans, the shock of pleasure echoing the sensation between her legs. When she kisses Charlie, she kisses her softly, open-mouthed and desperate, more gasp than kiss, but Charlie is as wrecked as she is. Her tail wraps tightly around Vaggie’s waist, smooth and strong, the spade of it pressing into her lower abdomen and—
“Charlie,” she whimpers brokenly as she tumbles over the edge, wings fluttering behind her, hips chasing everything Charlie is willing to give her as one hand tightens on Charlie’s shoulder, the other gouging the headboard behind her head.
“There you go,” Charlie murmurs, soft and sweet, and nuzzles Vaggie’s jaw as the aftershocks starts to subside. “That’s better.”
Vaggie sags against her, boneless, hissing softly when Charlie slides her hand free. It earns her a chuckle that she’d rebuff any other time, but she’s content and loved. She presses her face to Charlie’s throat with soft, distracted kisses, still delirious with the pleasure, and lets her wings sag with the rest of her.
Charlie rubs her back and pulls the blanket up over them, cradling Vaggie against her the whole time. It won’t be comfortable to sleep like this the entire night, but for now, it’s perfect.
Vaggie is halfway dozing when Charlie’s fingers run through her feathers. She hums contentedly and Charlie’s lips curve against her temple, where they’ve settled.
“I really like the wings,” she husks, all desire and Sin incarnate, and Vaggie can only laugh.
“Yeah, I got that, babe.” She presses a kiss to Charlie’s neck and receives a pleasure purr in reply. She’s half-mumbling when she continues, “And it’s been noted. Should take you flying sometime.”
Silence, for a beat. And then, in her ear, so excited that Charlie might as well be vibrating, she says, “Holy shit would you?”
Vaggie grins against her neck. “Let me build the muscles back up. But yeah.”
“You’re literally perfect.”
She has enough energy to laugh softly and whisper, “No, you,” before she dozes off.
She sleeps better than she has in decades.