Fanfic / A Peaceful Afterlife

He just wants to live a quiet life

A Peaceful Afterlife is a Fusion Fic of Hazbin Hotel and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable by WriteAnon.

Yoshikage Kira winds up in hell and, unsurprisingly, doesn't much care for it. With his new home totally incompatible with his preferred lifestyle, Kira is left with few options. But news of a hotel, one that redeems sinners, promises an alternative.

This is the first entry that started the Reaching Heaven Through Hell series. Which is composed of the other stories being: Helluva Job, Only the Results, Get Out Alive, and Overdrive.

Archive of Our Own link here.

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A Peaceful Afterlife provides examples of:

• Affably Evil: Most of HOLY DIVER's crew have an airy sort of good humor about them, but Moonshine (Impostor Captain Tennille) is easily the most outright jovial. Be it his good relations with Cherri Bomb or his politeness towards Charlie, even when killing people he strives to be friendly.
• Agent Peacock: Kira is a tall pink cat man who loves wearing tailored Valentino suits and is much tidier and well-groomed than most demons. He's still one of the most dangerous people in Hell.
• A Love to Dismember: Kira's MO when alive. He nearly relapses several times with Charlie.
• Ambiguously Bi: Kira may be bisexual, as he does seem receptive to some of Angel's advances. What makes it unclear is the blurred line between Kira's sex drive and urge to kill, and the fact that the furthest they got was when Kira was very drunk, drugged, and sexually frustrated.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After Kira confesses to being a serial killer at dinner, Charlie asks him he ever sought help. Kira simply states there's no helping it, and that it's in his nature, to which Charlie asks if he ever tried. This actually makes Kira consider why he came to the hotel in the first place and decide that, yes, he would like to (It also stops him from detonating Bites the Dust, which he implanted on Charlie just before his confession).
• Ascended Extra: Many of DIO's men go from one-off villains to members of his elite gang. The biggest examples are Gray Fly and the fake Captain Tennille, who are recurring antagonists and much more powerful than in canon.
• Bait-and-Switch: After Chapter 12 ends with HOLY DIVER giving The World to God Given and a mission to abduct Kira and Charlie, Chapter 13 begins describing four demons with a mission, presumably HOLY DIVER's Quirky Miniboss Squad, approaching the Hotel. Turns out they're just Cenobites trying to spread the gospel of Leviathan.
• Beast Man: Hell is populated by such creatures, naturally, but Stand Users appear to possess traits from their Stands, in addition to inheriting their powers. Kira, naturally, is a pink cat-man.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In the first chapters, Kira's demon neighbors tell him to "unstraighten it up and sin a bit" because his deliberately normal life is creeping them all out. Kira was a Serial Killer in life, and in Hell he was a notorious hitman for HOLY DIVER prior to breaking it off. He obliges by murdering them all with Sheer Heart Attack.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Charlie might be a sweet princess, but she's a sweet demon princess. When pushed to her limit, Charlie kills the exorcists God Given created with his powers and holds him in place to let Kira's final attack kill him.^note God Given cannot manage to get out of her grip despite Charlie being frozen in time.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Kira dies at the end, but he does so saving the others. Unlike other demons, his soul, represented by gold smoke, ascends away and he meets with a being who may be God. He is told he is not redeemed, but proven himself redeemable, and he is reborn as his JoJolion counterpart. From what we know from canon, it is a Foregone Conclusion that he will earn his way to heaven this time around.
  • For the others, their friend Kira is dead. But they see how his death is different from others. They don't know he has been reborn, but they have hope he escaped hell and received some form of redemption.
• Came Back Strong: Stand Users in Hell tend to expand upon their abilities during their stay. Kira's powers are essentially the same, albeit with more creative applications as time goes on, though he does discover new variations as time goes on. Most notable is HOLY DIVER (AKA none other than DIO), who can now stop time for an undefined period, and can even create 'bubbles' of frozen/unfrozen time to restrain people or have someone else move about in the frozen time. Combine that with the fact that he's inherited The World's strength and speed, it's easy to see how he became a lord of Hell itself.
  • God Given (AKA Donatello Versus) has essentially the same powers as he did on earth, but since this is Hell he can freely summon an army of Exorcists to do his bidding, making him one of the most outright deadly demons in Hell.
• Chekhov's Gun: In Chapter 1, Kira gets mugged by a demon with a shard of an Exorcist's spear. After dealing with the mugger, he pockets the shard. In Chapter 15, he accidentally cuts himself on the shard, giving him an idea. In Chapter 16, he uses his power to blast it into God Given's head, who couldn't avoid it even in stopped time due to Charlie's unbreakable grip, killing him.
• Climax Boss: God Given's attack on the Hazbin Hotel qualifies, as several of HOLY DIVER's other lieutenants join the raid, resulting in the cast ultimately finding themselves facing one of them each. It also showcases the culmination of Kira's work to redeem himself, and Charlie coming to terms with her approach on redeeming demons (while recognizing that some are just too far gone).
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Vaggie is this to Charlie, though she has a legitimate reason to dislike Kira, him being a Serial Killer and all. She gets better once it becomes clear that Kira is striving to be a better person.
• Character Development: All the hotel staff, save Nifty, grow significantly as people.
  • Angel Dust starts taking redemption and Charlie's feelings more seriously. He turns down drugs at one point when he realizes he doesn't want to disappoint her.
  • Charlie never stops being kind and continues to believe in her patients, but she can indulge their jokes and better talk with them, as seen when she plays along with Angel Dust's joke about whether its gay to have sex with a clone of yourself.
  • Vaggie becomes more trusting of Kira and begins to think that anyone who tries hard enough can be redeemed, just like Charlie.
  • Husk stays the most like his canon self, but he gets to show a brighter side. He ends up respecting Kira, gets to show how savvy he is, and he decides to pour out a drink rather than get drunk when his friend dies.
  • Kira himself goes from (barely) tolerating the antics and drivel of the other characters to genuinely caring for them and striving to protect them.
• Contrived Coincidence: Kira meeting HOLY DIVER, aka DIO, a man who employed Kira's father Yoshihiro, immediately upon death is acknowledged by HOLY DIVER, who sees it as fate.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Several, but most spectacular is Charlie reaching her Rage Breaking Point and single-highhandedly eviscerating God Given's army of Exorcist constructs and smashing the ever-loving shit out of him.
  • Kira also gets one in on God Given when the latter foolishly challenged him to a one-on-one fight. Kira even throws in a mocking 'WRRRYYYYY' as insult to injury.
• Detachment Combat: Bug Boogie, formerly Gray Fly, has a head made of an entire stag beetle that can detach from his body and attack like his original Stand.
• Didn't Think This Through: God Given originally thought Charlie as a spoiled princess. He admits to himself that he should have remembered that she was the princess of 'Hell', and despite her disarming attitude Charlotte Magne is the daughter of two of the oldest and most powerful beings in creation. With all the power such breeding entails.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Kira loses his left hand in his first fight with HOLY DIVER'S crew. While it does grow back eventually, it's not fully healed by the time the gang raids the hotel, leaving him unable to use Sheer Heart Attack against them.
• The Dreaded:
  • News of HOLY DIVER's return to Hell inspires an Oh, Crap! reaction from everyone who hears it, even Alastor is implied to be distressed by the thought of HOLY DIVER resurrecting his empire, not that he ever lets on.
  • Kira's persona of Mr. Clean is seen as this: a demon no-one's ever met, but is credited with making his Boss's enemies disappear by the thousand. Upon learning of this, Angel is terrified, pondering how easy it would be for a nobody like Kira to touch a doorknob, or pose a mailman or delivery boy, or even just brush by someone on the street, and vaporize them completely. Not to mention his ability to use Bites the Dust to scout out a given location to make his definitive move. Mr. Clean was essentially the Boogeyman of Hell.
• Eating the Eye Candy:
  • Charlie and Angel Dust adore Kira's abs. Even after Charlie and Vaggie make out, Charlie admits she wants to eat off of them. Even Vaggie admits that Kira is incredibly handsome, noting she's gay, not blind.
  • Angel Dust is more concerned when Kira's abs and pecs are cut up than he is with losing an arm and the hotel taking major damage.
  • Kira, unsurprisingly, spends much of the first half of the story boggling at Charlie's hands, her being the most humanoid thing in hell and quite attractive to boot. He gets over it completely once he starts caring more for her well-being than his own redemption.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Husk is openly against kicking Kira out of the house, as the next likely thing is HOLY DIVER snatching him up again, by force if needed before conducting a purge of the squatters in his old territory. Husk views the subsequent death as being on the hotel's hands in such an event and refuses to let it happen.
  • Angel Dust draws the line at incest, and finds the Cenobites to be "too creepy to screw", stating he'll do anything for money, but they do it for fun.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: When God Given arrives at the hotel to capture Charlie and Kira, he finds that Kira offered to stay behind to distract the Stand Users while Charlie and the rest of the staff/guests escaped. Rather than believe Kira had a change of heart and is providing a distraction for people he cares for, God Given assumes that Kira did it simply to spite him, since showing up with only one of his intended targets would shame God Given in the eyes of HOLY DIVER.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response:
  • God Given bluntly admits that he's scared of Kira, and that he'd be stupid to not fear the guy.
  • Being frozen in pants-wetting terror in the presence of HOLY DIVER is considered to be an acceptable response, though he considers it impolite to continue to do so when he wants a conversation.
• Foreshadowing: In chapter 8 Vaggie says "If you think 'kind' means 'weak', you're in for a nasty surprise." Come chapter 16 when Charlie's berserk button is hit hard enough to make her unleash her 'real' power on a suitably terrified God Given.
• From a Single Cell: Very few things can permanently kill demons, as they'll eventually regenerate. It's to the point where decapitation is seen as a valid way of restraining someone.
• Gargle Blaster: Angel Dust's 'wine'. It's actually a mix of grape juice and rubbing alcohol, but demon physiology allows drinkers to withstand the poisonous elements and merely become profoundly drunk.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Downplayed. Charlie fumbles with this as the explanation for why she kissed Kira after killing God Given.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The same knife HOLY DIVER used to mortally wound Kira is what ultimately spells his doom, as Kira had made himself into a contact bomb. The instant HOLY DIVER touched the knife, his fate was sealed.
• Horrifying the Horror: Kira is this to much of Hell due to his abilities and anonymity, but even he regards Cherri Bomb with a healthy amount of respect, referring her as 'the scary one with the eye'. Though that doesn't stop him from threatening to give her a "new and intimate understanding of what it means to explode" if she ever tries anything as brash as drugging him again.
• Improbable Weapon User: Kira can turn anything into a bomb. In the first chapter, he kills a mugger with the money the guy was trying to steal, and later he uses peanuts as bombs.
• Insistent Terminology: The boss's name is "HOLY DIVER", case sensitive, and he does not allow it any other way. Even if people addressing him just say it aloud, he can tell if they're not using all-capital letters, or even if they catch and correct themselves as Husk finds out.
• Ironic Hell: Hazbin Hotel's chaotic, rough, and degenerate setting is pretty much exactly this for Kira, who's now living in exactly the type of environment he hates most and has no real chance to live the peaceful life he wants above all. If he attempts to fade into the background by being unremarkable like he did before, he's extremely noticeable by anyone living near him and will be inevitably annoyed or attacked by his neighbors.
• Licked by the Dog: Played with. While acknowledging that Kira's been rehabilitated through his deeds, God's pretty sure that he's still going to be "a prick" in his new life.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Demons have From a Single Cell levels of healing. Kira's ability to completely vaporize someone makes him capable of killing demons without Seraphim weapons.
  • Donatello Versus/God Given's powers now allow him to create constructs based on memories, rather than just outright replays. This does away with his previous weakness of recreating the circumstances of the original survivors, but people can conduct actions and receive results that were not part of the original memory^* For example, if he once again conjured the plane crash memory he used against Jolyne, doing what she did and sitting in the seats of the original survivors would not guarantee safety, the victim could hypothetically stop the crash altogether.. So while finding the right hiding place can't be used to avoid the Exorcists he creates, the constructs can be fought like normal, allowing the gang to survive until Kira kills God Given.
• Made a Slave: In chapter 4, Poker Face uses his power to enslave Sir Pentious to Cherri Bomb.
• Major Injury Underreaction: All over the place. Justified, in that demons can regenerate from just about anything given enough time, and therefore tend to regard things like dismemberment and decapitation as inconvenient. It's telling that Angel is more peeved about blood on his favorite top and his hairdo being ruined than he is about losing an arm.
• Morality Chain: Kira and Angel end up as one for each other when Kira chaperones the latter to a bar to meet Cherri. Angel actually intervenes to stop Kira from murdering a violent patron, who himself only turned violent because Angel resisted the temptation to take some cocaine he was gifting him.
• Morphic Resonance: Stand Users tend to retain traits from their Stand in their demon forms, like Kira being a pink cat demon, Grey Fly having bug attributes, and HOLY DIVER wearing The World's armor.
• Morton's Fork: At the end of the story, Kira reveals that HOLY DIVER has been subjected to one: either his mother is in Heaven and he can never see her again, or she is in Hell with him, meaning she is not as pure and good as he remembers her as. Kira heavily implies it is the former.
• Mr. Fanservice: Kira is quite handsome, and actually takes measures to make himself look nice. Angel Dust much appreciates it, as does Charlie.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Every JoJo character and OC are named for songs or musicians. Three guesses who HOLY DIVER is.
  • The infamous Duwang is mentioned when Vaggie tries looking up Kira's history.
• Mugging the Monster: In the first chapter, a demon tries to mug Kira. It ends about as well for him as you'd think.
• The Nicknamer: Angel Dust has a field day with Kira, eventually settling on Killer Queen, ironically.
• Nothing Is Scarier: This is the big fear factor with Kira's Mr. Clean persona. He's some demon no one's ever met more than once who can make people vanish with an ability no one's ever heard of. Charlie has Kira take an interview and spread his identity to defy this trope. He goes from a complete unknown who makes people disappear for HOLY DIVER to just some (powerful) demon. This takes away the main reason HOLY DIVER wants him back under his employ.
• No-Respect Guy: God Given is this in spades. Almost everyone who knows him mocks him for his Entitled Bastard motives and generally Jerkass personality. Though even the people who mock him to his face freely admit he's one of the most powerful demons around.
• Odd Friendship: Angel Dust and Kira. Angel Dust goes from an annoyance to Kira to the man's undisputed best friend.
• Oh, Crap!: The Demons who had the misfortune of staging an intervention on Yoshikage Kira barely have time to have this reaction before they (and the apartment building) get blown to kingdom come.
• Original Flavor: The author does an impressive job of keeping the tone of both original series. The majority of the story keeps with the debauched, comical nature of Hazbin Hotel, but the fights manage to incorporate the Outside-the-Box Tactics and Indy Ploys of JoJo.
• Outside-Context Problem: Stand powers are this to Hell. Nobody in Hell has any idea what Stands are (when Vaggie looks up Kira's history, she thinks that 'stand' refers to the musical term), and Stand Users keep their Stand's power after death, so Stand Users have abilities nobody is looking for, like Kira's power to make anything he touches explode.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Stand users in Hell have their Stand's power, so they have a real leg up with this. Kira and HOLY DIVER are standout examples.
• Physical God: Charlie turns out to be this. When forced to fight, she proves to be possibly the physically strongest character in the setting. She is Lucifer's daughter, after all. Holy Diver is worryingly implied to be on a level beyond even that when he effortlessly freezes her in place during the final chapter.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: After a few failed attempts with other enemies, Kira lands on an effectively laconic one for God Given.
  God Given: Look at you! Your guts are practically hanging out! What could you possibly do?!
  Kira: Relapse.
• Psycho Rangers: The showdown between the Hazbin Hotel staff and God Given's hit squad boils down to this:
  • Moonshine is God Given's personal confidant and fights with a spear, mirroring Vaggie's relationship with Charlie.
  • Gray Fly/Bug Boogie is an insectoid hitman who causes a lot of collateral damage with his powers; and ends up facing Angel, a spider-themed demon who settles his problems with More Dakka.
  • Poker Face is a master gambler; it was inevitable that he'd decide to settle things with Husk - a clever card shark, himself - through a card game.
  • God Given himself applies as this to Charlie; they're both heirs to powerful overlords of Hell, and find themselves struggling to escape the shadow of their sires.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Kira ends up delivering a rather piercing one to HOLY DIVER at the end. The end of it is particularly brutal, as Kira gleefully punches his target's hidden Berserk Button regarding their daddy issues with Dario Brando:
  Kira: You may not have found your mother, Dio, but at least you can live the rest of your afterlife knowing you made your daddy so proud!
• Sequel Hook: Even before the sequel fics came out, the epilogue contained a scene where Trouble/Pucci, Crossroads/Vanilla Ice, and Boadicea/Enyaba reflect on how HOLY DIVER's death doesn't mean the end of his master plan. As Rose/High Priestess retrieves Poker Face's soul-chip, Trouble concludes that their pursuit of "Heaven" is not yet over...
• Serial Killer: Kira, of course, but unlike in life, in Hell he was a hitman for HOLY DIVER.
• Ship Tease:
  • Kira is immediately attracted to Charlie's hands but eventually forms a sort of emotional connection with her, although it's far from a proper "romance". Charlie herself is outright stated to be physically attracted to Kira, but doesn't seem to consider Kira as anything but a patient.
  • Angel Dust is constantly hurling come-ons and innuendo Kira's way, and comes close to seducing him on several occasions. In the end, though, they remain just friends.
• Show Within a Show: It's Dahm Good is mentioned several times during the story, most memorably with Dahmer saying "With a positive mental attitude and a sharp knife, any sidewalk can be your grocery store."
• Shout-Out: When Cherri questions how Holy Diver is back after being taken to heaven by Exorcists, Poker Face asks if he was supposed to go to Detroit.
  • In a later chapter, Kira and Angel Dust are playing a game that's heavily implied to be Doom (2016).
• Side Bet: When Kira first arrives in the Hotel, Vaggie starts a betting pool over what he's in hell for. Vaggie bets on Serial Killer, Razzle and Dazzle on Unit 731, while Husk bets on pedophile. Vaggie wins.
• Slipping a Mickey: Cherri Bomb slips some MDMA into Kira's drink to loosen him up and make it easier for his old allies to come fetch him. They get a little more than they bargained for when it turns out that being high also loosens most of Kira's inhibitions about gruesome explodey murder. Everyone in that club would probably have died if Angel hadn't intervened and dragged Kira away.
• Story-Breaker Power: Kira's erasing bombs are to Hazbin what time manipulation abilities are to JoJo, making him one of the few things in Hell that can perma-kill demons. It's no wonder he's so doggedly pursued by his old boss. Balanced by Kira's general aversion to conflict and later dedication to redeeming himself.
• Straight Edge Evil: Kira. It actually creeps his demonic neighbors out that he doesn't do drugs, isn't casually violent, never has sex, and generally lives a simple, crime and vice-free lifestyle. Everyone knows that people who are actually that clean don't go to Hell, so they either think Kira is trying to hold it over them, or that there's something really bad under the neat exterior.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Kira is the main protagonist after all. The fact that his bombs can kill demons by completely destroying them makes him one of the most dangerous beings in hell.
• Supreme Chef: Everyone at the hotel loves Kira's cooking. Even Alastor, who admits he usually prefers western food, likes it.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!:
  • Inverted. Kira trying to maintain the lifestyle he had on Earth by doing the exact same things he did to go unnoticed while alive makes him stick out like a sore thumb in Hell.
  • Played Straight with Kira's Mr. Clean persona. Angel Dust notes how a nobody like Kira could easily brush up against a target, boobytrap a doorknob, or deliver a package to blow someone up without them ever seeing it coming.
• Too Kinky to Torture: After getting a little drunk while talking on the hotel rooftop, Angel volunteers to let Kira do to him what he's done to many of his victims, which leads to Kira strangling Angel Dust. Ironically, this triggers one of the first stirrings of conscience as Kira realizes this goes against his desire for redemption, causing him to stop, much to Angel's chagrin.
• Vader Breath: HOLY DIVER has this as a result of taking on traits of The World. His breathing relies primarily on the tank on his back, and it makes a pronounced hiss and click as the air cycles through the tank.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Adult cartoon source material aside, the fanfic largely indulges in the sense of humor from Hazbin Hotel's pilot episode, with Kira as a magnificent Straight Man to everyone else's eccentricity. HOLY DIVER, however, is a bona-fide Knight of Cerebus whose every scene is dripping with fear and tension. Husk's flashback to his first encounter with him at a poker game spells out how terrified he is of the guy (keep in mind he was able to casually mouth off at Alastor in the pilot for comparison).
• Villain Respect:
  • While not the villain of the story, Kira is an unrepentant serial killer with a penchant for hands, but even he can muster a modicum of respect for Angel Dust's commitment to maintain his appearance.
    No matter the situation, Angel took care to look exactly how he wanted, and even when disheveled and degraded he strove to look his best. Kira could respect that. Almost enough to not be completely disgusted.
  • Just about everyone in HOLY DIVER's gang has this for Kira AKA Mr. Clean, if only because they're piss-terrified of the guy.
  • Kira and Alastor express a mutual example in the latter's one scene, both fully aware of the other's reputation. It leads to one of the most casual conversations Kira has had since coming to Hell.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Kira kills Anubis shortly after landing in Hell.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: God Given is wholly consumed with earning his father's approval, to the extent of disobeying orders and recklessly endangering himself and his team on multiple occasions.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: As times goes on, Kira slowly but surely develops attachment to the others in the hotel, eventually becoming outright affection. Fittingly enough for Kira, this newfound regard for the feelings and wellbeing of others is initially met with confusion and annoyance, though he comes to grudgingly accept it as a positive change.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: This is Charlie's theory about how things like addictions work in Hell. Since demons no longer have a physical body to develop dependence on things like drugs or have mental disorders, they're just acting like they still have the problems out of inertia, and they can be trained out of the habit.
• You're Just Jealous: Husk is convinced this is why Vaggie is annoyed with Charlie spending so much time with Kira. While it's definitely a factor, Vaggie is more concerned about Kira being a serial killer who fetishized his victims' hands, due to losing her fellow prostitute friends in life to murderous Johns while living in fear of the same happening to her.

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