Once Upon A Time [Hazbin Hotel] [Alastor x Reader]

Chapter 12 - Things could be better

Warning - The following may include explicate and language and profanity. All characters besides you belong to Viviane Moreno. You belong to you. Story belongs to me besides the story that had been included in the series.

❗Not suited for younger readers❗

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You like to think you're a good person. That there's a little bit of good in everyone.

When you were little, you dreamed of being human. More specifically, a human psychologist. A human therapist. You wanted to help, to heal, to mend. To stop people from continuing to come to hell, even if it would mean you would have to work with bad people. It would be worth it, if it meant you could help them avoid the fate that would await them down here.

The overpopulation problem here in hell has been going on for decades. Being a child, hearing the screams of you people outside your window at night.... It wasn't something you enjoyed. Growing up in hell, you grew desensitized to everything and anything. You had to. You wouldn't have survived otherwise. That doesn't mean you enjoyed witnessing such things. Or that you could live the rest of your life with the sounds of tortured souls screaming for mercy, for a second chance, attacking your mind.

You've always been a bleeding heart. When you heard those screams at night, prayers for a chance to give others an opportunity to redeem themselves filled the darkness of your room. For the first few years of your life, you cried yourself to sleep. It wasn't even that the sounds of hell were audible from your room, not to normal denizens. But for some reason or another, your senses have always been several hundred times stronger than anyone of your station should have. You were easily overstimulated as a kid, whether it be from bright lights or sharp sounds, intense smells or bad textures. It's why Charlotte remained relatively unbothered, she didn't have that. Your parents even tried soundproofing your room.

It didn't work. Even if you didn't hear their pain, it was like you could feel it. An excruciating emotional, bordering on physical pain that set your nerves ablaze, that made mere existence a kind of new torture in and of itself. The misery and exhaustion and terror that is these lost souls. Sure, not being able to hear their screams as they slowly tear their vocal cords to shreds helped, but even then, you couldn't help the tears that would constantly flow from your eyes on a day to day basis. The other kids called you a crybaby. Octavia, she was your best friend. Was, in the sense that she got tired of you. You don't blame her. Charlotte is the only one who has stood by your side, and even she got irritated by your tears from time to time. She never yelled at you. But you could tell from the tightness of her lips when she smiled and the exhaustion in her eyes when she saw the tears begin to form.

So you stopped. You just had to deal with it. Hell isn't a place for sensitive people. It isn't a place for crybabies. As you got older, you got more accustomed to the misery consistently evading your senses. But learning to ignore the pain isn't the only thing that you learned as you got older. Once you reached your adolescent years, you began remembering things. Things from... before. Your past life. Which is ridiculous, as you were born in hell. And yet, still, visions of white and gold and hundreds of eyes and multiple heads began to flash before your eyes, without rhyme or rhythm.

You could be doing anything, and suddenly you would be bent over gasping for breath as a memory of joy and warmth and effervescence flash through your mind, allowing temporary reprieve from the constant emotional and physical torture you can still feel, even now, despite how accustomed you are to it. Those visions would leave you sobbing, desperate to feel that peace again, to escape this hell that is living. Those visions gave you a tendency to fall into these episodes, these fits of rage and agony, where all you could do was rock yourself for comfort and claw at any skin you could reach, your hands, your face, your arms, your legs, in a desperate attempt to escape your own body, escape this pain.