Chapter Text
Every day was a slow day for the hotel. Katherine would be lucky if she got one guest a week. Usually, the only guests she ever got were the shady kind and only stayed for an evening, if they survived the ghosts. If her finances weren’t so deep in the gutter, Katherine would have turned away such unsavoury folk, but money was money.
The hotel’s reputation remained negative despite how hard Katherine worked to brighten the place and cater to every guest’s whims. The ghosts and Abaddon remained a problem.
However, Katherine had to give credit where credit was due; Abaddon had been causing less chaos with guests ever since that fateful day when he beat up that occult and saved them from an apocalypse. Instead of terrorising the guests by leaving squirrel corpses and bones in their beds and scaring them in the night, he had eased back to just maliciously staring at guests and making them uncomfortable.
The ghosts, however, kept to their usual antics. Nathan had done his best to negotiate with most of the friendlier ghosts, but the more malevolent spirits refused to reason.
Katherine had learned by now which rooms were extremely off-limits, only giving guests their least haunted rooms.
“Abaddon, do you see my pencil anywhere?” Katherine shuffled some papers around on the lobby desk, looking under books and even beneath the keyboard. She had been working at the front desk all afternoon, hoping to check a guest in. She had no idea where Nathan had roamed off to, her children were yet to return from school, and Abaddon had been oddly following her around for most of the day.
After not hearing a response from the usually silent demon, she bent down to look under the desk where he was sitting. She was not at all surprised to see the demon scribbling his sigil on the old wood.
Katherine sighed and grabbed the demon’s hand and tugged him out from under the desk.
“I’m busy!” Abaddon argued as he was practically dragged out, not entirely done with his work.
“No, you’re vandalising my property. I told you, if you want to draw, just ask and I’ll give you paper.” Katherine pried her pencil out of the demon’s hands, who tried his best to hold on as tight as he could.
“It is not drawing! I am making my mark!” Abaddon continued to argue, gasping slightly in horror once Katherine had successfully retrieved her pencil.
“You can do that on things that belong to you; this is my desk.” She placed the pencil behind her ear, far out of reach for the little demon. “I’m not arguing with you, Abaddon.”
Abaddon frowned up at her, his fists clenched, “You don’t let me do anything!” the demon complained, looking almost distraught.
“I said I’m not arguing with you.” Katherine reiterated firmly, folding her arms now as she held her stance confidently. She was in no mood to entertain the demon.
“I despise you.” Abaddon hissed before he darted off to a nearby vent, ripping it open and scrambling into it. The sound of his body clunking through the vent system echoed through the lobby.
If Katherine hadn’t already heard those exact words a thousand times, she may have felt slightly hurt, but being a mother of essentially three kids, hearing that phrase wasn’t uncommon.
She sighed and returned to her paperwork, which mostly consisted of working out her debts and taxes.
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Abaddon was not very observant; in fact, many things went straight over his head. However, he had noticed Katherine's increasing irritability lately. She seemed easier to anger, and her tolerance for Abaddon's disobedience had dwindled.
“She’s under a lot of stress, bud. When we’re under a lot of stress, we get easily agitated.”
The demon remembered Nathan explaining to him after Katherine had blown up at Abaddon about his recent decision to smear squirrel blood on the lobby walls.
Abaddon felt agitated himself; he had found that no matter what he did it somehow upset the Matriarch.
He could have easily used blood or burned his sigil into the table, but he had used a pencil, a tool he knew was normal to write with, yet even that was still wrong.
Abaddon had scrunched himself up into a ball in the vents, hugging his knees as tightly as he could while he enjoyed his dark surroundings. He’d sulk for as long as he wanted; if the Matriarch tried calling out to him, he wouldn’t answer. The demon had debated on just waiting out this period of ‘Pissy Kathy’, what Nathan had called her, and hope things went back to normal, where she wouldn’t reprimand him for the smallest of things.
He had no idea how much time had passed, nor did he really care. He stayed in the vents even when he had heard Esther and Ben return from their ‘prison’. Usually, he’d join Esther and listen to the retellings of her prison experience for the day and go threaten ghosts into doing her homework, but Abaddon wanted to keep sulking.
Abaddon had expected Esther to look for him, at least hear her call out his name, but there had been nothing. When he had crawled through the vent system to get to her room to inspect what had her attention, he could only frown in displeasure as he stared through the grate to see Esther happily talking on her ‘sell-phone’.
“Oh yeah, in science class, it was crazy how Mr Kruger reacted to your question. Your dumb, brilliant mind annoys everyone, Heather.”
The demon’s eyes narrowed as he continued to watch Esther laugh into the device, calling out Heather’s name. She had recently become more attached to that stupid new-world device and talking to Heather with it. Abaddon couldn’t understand it, but he knew it bothered something deep inside of him.
Abaddon turned tail and crawled back deeper into the vents. He wasn’t going to bother to look in Ben’s room; the teen had been completely focused on the ghost, Annabelle, more so than usual. He had been trying to figure out a way to transport the ghost with him to the prison where they would dance. The demon had no idea why they’d want to dance within the prison they attended every weekday.
Then there was Nathan. Abaddon usually didn’t mind tagging along with the parental-figure ghost as he wandered through the hotel and spoke to various other ghosts, but even Nathan had recently become obsessed with speaking with the deceased psychologist about all of his ‘feelings’. Abaddon couldn’t fathom why a dead man would bother talking about such meaningless things.
The demon came to a halt at a T-junction in the vents. His mind had slowly begun putting pieces together. Nobody had actually really been paying him any attention lately …
Abaddon did not appreciate the sinking feeling he felt in his chest.
I have spent years with myself, I DO NOT need their pointless attention.
Abaddon tried to convince himself as he took a right, crawling back towards the lobby. He had experienced such hellish treatment from many individuals in the past, some he honestly admired for their wicked tastes, but whatever the Freeling family was doing to him was far worse.
He had accepted that they saw him as ‘part of the family’, even though the demon had no idea what that really meant. He had tried to accept the no-strings-attached kindness that was shown to him so often. He had even come to like the pointless embraces.
But he hadn’t received any embraces recently.
For a demon who prided himself on his solidarity, the burning desire to be held was infuriating and downright disgusting. Nothing in Hell could equal the discomfort and pain in his chest.
If they had all just been a stupid, insignificant blip, Abaddon could have just killed them all.
But the thought of losing them hurt worse than the discomfort within him.
Perhaps he just needed to do something different to regain their attention. He wasn’t entirely sure what exactly, but he was confident he’d figure it out.
The demon blinked in surprise when he heard unfamiliar voices coming from the lobby. He quickly picked up his crawling pace to get to the grate of the lobby’s vent and peered out of it curiously. If it were potential guests, maybe he could completely leave them alone, and the Matriarch would reward him for his efforts.
He squinted through the grate, trying to assess the people he saw from above. He had always liked spying on new guests from the top vent; it was the best lookout spot.
There was a woman and a man, average-looking like every other human in Abaddon’s eyes. Their clothes looked modern and they lugged large suitcases behind them. Nothing was of interest to the demon until he noticed the woman placing down an odd-looking carrier.
Abaddon wasn’t listening to Katherine talking to them; he was far too horrified by what he had seen in the carrier.
It was a human infant, a thing far worse than a grown human. Infants were stupid, loud and just overall a nuisance. The demon had terrorised many infants in his years, but their wailing cries brought no joy to him, just irritation. He did, however, enjoy snatching things out of their grubby little hands.
It had been many years though since he had to deal with such a thing. If Katherine saw any sense, she’d turn them away and tell them to never come back.
“Welcome to the Undervale Hotel!”
Abaddon’s eye twitched dramatically as he watched Katherine hand the couple a set of keys.