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zaebeecee · 2 months

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Untitled CasinoBomb one-shot •

TW: ADDICTION, ALCOHOL

Husk was a gambler.

This was not new information to anyone who had known Husk for more than an hour. It wouldn’t surprise anyone, either, to learn that he’d played his first hand of poker before he was seven years old. Cards and dice had followed him his entire life, both to his benefit and to his detriment, as he followed the call of illicit games in the back rooms of speakeasies through the streets of Atlantic City to the shiny new casinos popping up all over the Las Vegas strip. He had won and lost more money, he thought, than Rockefeller had ever had in his accounts.

He wasn’t proud of his habit—he wouldn’t call it an addiction, not out loud, not to anyone else, not even to himself—but he wasn’t really ashamed, either. What was there to be ashamed of, really? It was a vice. He was in Hell. Everyone had at least one vice in Hell.

It’s funny, Alastor had once said, his eyes creased with mirth and his smile stretched near to the corners of his eyes, his usual malicious cruelty sharpened with intent as he stared at Husk without blinking.

Husk didn’t want to know, so he didn’t want to ask, but he knew the Radio Demon wouldn’t leave until he did. What is? he asked, putting every iota of how little he cared into those two words.

A gambling addict who works as a croupier, Alastor had answered with a laugh in his voice that was echoed by the distant ghosts of the live studio audience he carried with him everywhere. I have it on good authority that a drug dealer is expected not to rely so heavily on his own product.

Husk had snarled, which had done nothing, but he couldn’t have answered if he had wanted to. It was correct, after all, and Husk didn’t need Alastor to remind him of yet another way in which he was an idiot.

Because he knew. He had known when he was alive, and he had known after his death, too. It had been his entire existence, so much so that his body even took on attributes of the casino, and wasn’t that a reminder he didn’t need every time he looked in a mirror.

Everyone thought gambling was about winning. Whether it was Charlie trying to sus out if he was open to the group therapy sessions, or Angel Dust asking him why the hell he had kept playing after he lost, they all thought that winning was the point of gambling. You bet your money, you put it on red, the roulette favors you, and you walk away richer than you were when you sat down.

It wasn’t about winning. If it was, it wouldn’t have been so difficult to stop. It wasn’t about losing, either, though Husk had wondered if that was part of the problem in some of his lower and more pessimistic moments. No, gambling was about the moments that existed in between.

It lived in the way the dice rolled across the felt tabletop.

It lived in every tell of another player, every call and every raise, every new card dealt and every hand revealed.

It lived in the moments of the roulette wheel’s slowing momentum and the little ball searching for the pocket that would tell you if you won or if you lost.

Risk. That was what gambling was for: the thrill of the unknown, of taking a chance, of betting your rent or your food for the next week or even your fucking house on a game that could set you up for life and ruin you and you would never know which one it would be until you played. Husk had won, and he had lost, but every victory and every defeat was nothing but a little change in the long road that was the risk.

If Husk was honest with himself, he would have admitted that gambling was the only way he felt anything anymore.

Of course, Husk was never honest with himself.

The Hazbin Hotel was, for a multitude of reasons, somewhere safe for a sinner like him to set up shop. Vices were discouraged, and Charlie didn’t permit gambling for money, so the only gambling they ever did was to pawn their chores off on each other. It was almost like Alastor had done him a favor, dragging him through the ether by the throat and lashing him to the bar, even though Husk would chew his own wings off before admitting that. And the residents, too, were safe for one reason: they were predictable.

Alastor was volatile, of course, but Husk had known him for years and was fairly sure of the things that would set him off. He liked his creature comforts, he liked his schedules, and he didn’t like people disturbing his routines. Predictable.

Niffty, too, liked her routines, though they more manifested in the form of a regular rotation of cleaning duties and a fairly strict mealtime schedule that only grew erratic when someone else wanted to use her kitchen. Aside from inappropriate comments that could come from nowhere, she didn’t shift much, and she could usually be found stabbing bugs or cooking. Predictable.

Charlie made schedules for everyone constantly, always wanting to try new group building exercises and never springing unexpected surprises on them. She took everything in stride as best she could, and her meltdowns were always private and controlled. Predictable.

Vaggie was measured, strict, and always adhered to her own moral code. If something happened and it involved Charlie, she would be by the princess’s side throughout. If it did not involve Charlie, Vaggie probably didn’t care. Predictable.

Angel Dust was also volatile, of course, but it was always in the same way. He would get angry at any insult to his profession or anyone removing his indulgences, and everything else would be met with either vulgarity, sarcasm, or some combination of the two. Predictable.

Sir Pentious was paranoid and enthusiastic, quick to anger and always taking it out on his Egg Bois. He cried at the drop of a hat and seemed, even now, to really want to be an overlord despite the fact that he didn’t have the stomach for it and would always opt for a less violent option unless he was trying to impress someone. Predictable.

But the hotel had more foot traffic than simply the staff and their two residents, though most didn’t come through very often and few stayed for any length of time. Of course, among those few was Angel Dust’s best friend and supposed partner in crime, who was stopping by the hotel with increased frequency to check up on the spider demon and get into whatever else she could find while she was there.

Cherri Bomb.

Cherri Bomb was not predictable. Or, rather, she could be relied on to be unpredictable, if that made any kind of sense at all. No one, not even Angel Dust, seemed to have any sort of idea how her mood would hold up from minute to minute and what sort of erratic change might follow. She might stab someone over an insult one day and shrug the same words off the next. She might agree with you one minute and shout at you the next, even if you hadn’t changed what you said. If she stared at you with a stony gaze and invited you to keep making your point—always a threat, in Husk’s experience—you had no idea if she was furious, or if she would start laughing and inform you she was just fucking with you.

Husk had learned more about how they cussed in New Zealand in the past month than he had in the century he had existed, all of it from sarcastically calling Cherri Australian.

At first, he hadn’t known what to expect from her. She was hardly the first one to introduce herself to the hotel’s residents by blowing up a wall, so that wasn’t even notable, but everything else made her complicated in a way that Husk hadn’t let himself contemplate in a long time. For a while he was convinced that the issue, where she was concerned, was ensuring that no one did anything to set her off and create a chain reaction that would inevitably lead to more damage to the hotel. It wasn’t long before he realized the problem was that they couldn’t make that assurance.

Cherri’s presence in the hotel was unpredictable. It was a risk. And that made it exciting. The first time Husk had that realization, he had drunk an entire bottle of Alastor’s rye to drown the thought without care for the inevitable consequences.

It hadn’t worked, because the next morning, he had a headache that rivaled those from his youth and he was still just as confused and frustrated as he had been before.

Even though Cherri had declared that she was not, in any way, interested in redemption, that didn’t stop her from coming to the hotel with increased frequency. She would often leave to Angel Dust’s room and spend hours up there with the spider demon, but sometimes, the two of them would hang out at the bar. Husk served them drinks—Angel Dust his martinis according to the extremely strict regimen Charlie had set, Cherri vodka blushes and dishes of lime that she ate down to the rind—and listened to them as they talked about their nights out and Angel bitched about his job and Cherri occasionally mentioned someone named Izzi that she never dwelled on and neither of them seemed to like. Sometimes, Sir Pentious would discover that Cherri was in the hotel, and would proceed to make an ass out of himself before retreating into his basement to hide until she was gone.

Husk wondered if he should talk Pentious through a method of actually seducing Cherri, if he was that set on it. Maybe then Husk could stop thinking about… well. Anything else. Of course, Husk barely knew anything about actual seduction himself. He hadn’t been with anyone in decades, and before that, there had been less courting and more blunt sentences that led to one night stands with people whose names he didn’t remember because he hadn’t known them in the first place. Pentious was probably better off with his fumbling on his own than taking advice from Husk, because he was likely to get the snake slapped or worse.

The air was heavy with acid rain one evening as Husk took inventory at the bar. Even with so few residents, he found himself needing to take stock and submit orders to Charlie almost as much as he would have at an actual club; these sinners were clearly taking advantage of the fact that their livers couldn’t give out, and the princess wasn’t any better with her straight Mephistophelian absinthe shots. He was almost done when he heard someone pull out a bar stool, his left ear twitching when that someone sat and began patting their hands on the bar top. “Hold your horses,” he grumbled, doing math in his head as he wrote out the whisky order.

“Look at you, so responsible,” a familiar Kiwi-accented voice said, and Husk’s ears twitched again, but he didn’t turn around. Instead, he simply tried to gauge Cherri’s mood without looking at her face. “You’re not closed?”

Husk shook his head. “Nah. I just do inventory while these assholes are otherwise engaged before Angel Dust can come along and start saying numbers at random. That wasn’t a suggestion,” he added firmly.

Cherri laughed, just a little. “Wouldn’t dream of throwin’ you off,” she said, so innocently that she wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that she was full of shit. After that, she went quiet, tapping away on her phone while waiting for Husk to finish his work.

The cat demon signed off on the order and ripped the page from the notepad, pinning it up for Vaggie to grab the next time she passed by. Husk then turned to Cherri, taking up a glass, some vodka, and a bottle of grenadine. “Angel snubbing you? I was pretty sure he came back from work.”

“Oh, he’s in his room,” Cherri said. “But he’s busy. Said I could either wait down here for him or go home.”

“Busy?” Husk echoed, frowning at her, before the light went off in his head. It didn’t help his frown. “Oh. Alastor.”

“Do you have any idea what they’re doing in there?”

“No idea,” Husk confessed, slicing up a large lime and making sure it hadn’t dried out. “Angel told me to mind my business, but I think they’re plotting something. At least, I hope they are, because anything else isn’t worth considering.”

“I don’t like him,” Cherri grumbled.

Husk smirked. “Get in line. Nobody does.” He pushed the drink and a plate of lime slices towards her. “I’m guessing you decided to wait.”

“Have you seen the weather?” Cherri snapped, gesturing sharply towards the nearest window. “You think I wanna melt my skin off?”

Husk felt the fur along his neck and the backs of his arms standing up a little. He didn’t know if that was a reflex on his part, or a response to the way the air began to smell like nitrate when Cherri got worked up. “I think you do whatever you feel like doing no matter what the weather is like.”

She stared at him for a moment before she smirked and picked up a lime slice. “Thanks,” she said, before biting into it and stripping the fruit cleanly from the rind. Her wince looked satisfied. “What do you do when the weather’s shit?”

“What I always do,” Husk said, returning to cleaning the outsides of all the liquor bottles, just in case of any alcohol on the necks. “Fuck all.”

“Do you ever leave?”

“Only under extreme duress.”

“That’s not healthy, Captain Buzzkill.” Cherri leaned on one elbow and twirled a bare lime rind between her fingers, her x-shaped pupil watching Husk contemplatively. He didn’t rise to the bait, just continuing his work and waiting her out. Finally, she said, “You should come out with me sometime.”

Husk snorted in mild amusement. “What would you want to hang out with an old curmudgeon for?”

Cherri shrugged one shoulder. “I dunno, because you could stand to loosen up and I have to deal with you every time I come here, so you might as well remember how to have some fun.”

“I don’t do fun.”

“You’re gonna.”

Husk raised an eyebrow at her and leaned one hand on the bar. “You plan to make me?”

Cherri grinned, all sharp teeth, but Husk wouldn’t have defined it as a smile. “If I have to.”

It was a surprise to both of them when Husk actually chuckled, the sound as low and rusty and unused as it was on every occasion he laughed, rare as they were. “I’d love to see that.”

Suddenly, Cherri’s expression turned serious. Suspicious, almost. “Are you hitting on me, Husk?”

Once again, the air immediately felt dangerous, and once again, Husk felt the fur on his neck standing up. Cherri wasn’t blinking, and she wasn’t speaking. Any answer he could give had the potential to offend her. Husk felt oddly exhilarated, hesitating long enough to savor the feeling that he was gambling something more vital than money. Finally, he admitted, “…frankly, I got no idea.”

Cherri’s brow furrowed over her eye, her lips pursing, before she burst into laughter that instantly destroyed the tension and told him he had won that hand. “Fuck, you’re funny,” she said in a voice that was almost fond. “Come on. Come out with me some night.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Come on,” she wheedled.

“It’s the best you’re gonna get,” Husk warned, and she rolled her eye dramatically but seemed to drop it as she took up her drink. “You gonna drag me to some of those seedy dives you and Angel haunt?”

“Maybe,” Cherri said. If Husk was being generous to himself, he would call her tone flirtatious. “You’ll just have to take a chance.”

Husk found himself smiling, though why, he had no idea. “…well. That happens to be my specialty.”

-fin-

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