it sure is patch time

NAME: [UNKNOWN INPUT]
OKAY, NAME IN COMPANY DATABASE, THEN: Patch
DESIGNATION: Sinner
AGE: 27 at time of death (2007)
PRONOUNS: She/her
SEXUALITY: Bisexual
OCCUPATION: Chew toy Personal assistant for Velvette-slash-general, all-around office employee at VoxTek
(read: grunt work, whatever I think is funny)[ hey this is my self-indulgent little hazbin-verse original character! yes, i needed a whole entire carrd just for her, because i love her to death and want to share her with the world! ]

BE AWARE: patch's bsky tag contains #nsfw #dubcon #gore

the short version: formerly-alive scam artist, current dead office job girlie. outwardly: whatever anyone wants her to be. inwardly: a jealous, petty, embittered jerk with a boatload of internalized issues. genuinely has no grasp on herself as a person or what her "core" personality beneath years of masks and false identities even is - not that she doesn't think that's normal. isn't that what everyone's doing all the time, unless they're a complete idiot who doesn't care about getting by? simultaneously smart and good at pulling peoples' puppet strings and also... kind of pathetic. down BAD for her direct boss, but that doesn't stop her from sleeping her way into the better graces of said boss's other two business partners. an absolute mess who mainly exists for me to put her in the emotional Pear Wiggler <3

backstory, pre-death

⚠️ before you read further ⚠️
these sections include non-detailed discussions of CSA, abuse, drug use, and a brief mention of suicide

1982 - 1993
Sarah Gabriela Finch was born in 1982 just outside of [Redacted], Pennsylvania, a semi-accidental but welcomed only child to her parents - Layla Marie Finch, a former waitress turned homemaker, and Patton Finch, an employee of an early ground-breaking software company. Her childhood was reasonably idyllic; the family could afford to live more than comfortably in such a nice area, and outside of the usual small dramas of elementary school friendships and a tendency to pick up and drop a series of extracurriculars and hobbies that never quite seemed to stick, Sarah’s early life was as happy as could be reasonably hoped for.A few fun facts about those first eleven years of her life: before everything suddenly changed, she’d managed to stick with soccer for a full six months and really enjoyed it, and her family had a tabby cat named Smoky.Summer, 1993
The proverbial shit hit the fan right before the end of Sarah’s fifth grade year. The company that her father, Patton, worked for experienced a domino effect of realizations regarding one of their star employees: not only had he fabricated his entire resume and degree in computer engineering, but he’d also been secretly skimming off the company's profits while holding a job several rungs lower on the corporate ladder than he reported in his personal life. Things did not look great for the Finches. On top of the potential jail time, they were looking at losing their home and going into severe debt, and to call Layla’s reaction intense would be putting it lightly. There were plenty of arguments that would often escalate into screaming matches and threats of divorce, and Sarah wasn't shielded from very much of it.In what would be the first of many such occasions, Patton decided that he had only one option: cut and run, rather than face the fallout. It wasn't much of a stretch to go from a faked diploma to securing fake ID papers, especially in a less technologically forward era. At the first crack of sunrise one morning when Layla had stayed overnight with a neighbor following a fight, he loaded up the car with the bare minimum of supplies and eleven-year-old Sarah, half asleep but excited to go on what she’d been promised would be a long father-daughter trip “while things here cool off.”She would never return to that town again.Patton hadn't had the time to ask his daughter what new name she’d prefer for her temporary identity, but at least he hadn’t picked something horribly embarrassing. At least “Ashley” was slightly more interesting than Sarah. Ashley as a person was, too. Moving halfway across the country gave her a certain mystique to the other kids in the park they’d rented a stationary trailer in. Ashley had been on an actual school soccer team at home, not just a kiddy neighborhood league anyone could join. Ashley knew about boys and had even kissed one - a story she’d stolen entirely from a classmate’s older sister.Ashley didn't last very long, though. She loved that park - it felt like summer camp - but if her father had wanted the bare minimum of living, he would have stayed and faced jail time, he told her. Ashley’s documents ended up in ashes in a neighbor’s fire pit as they packed the car again.1994 - 1999
Melissa in Wyoming.Kristy in Michigan.Chloe in Texas.At some point, the names blended together. She'd have to flip through her mental Rolodex on the spot - did she currently have a mother who’d died of kidney failure, or had that been Roxanne, three towns ago? The stories changed, but the process never did. Everyone has cracks you can work your way into, Patton explained as they sped down another highway. You've just got to look for the ones that are most obvious, and then all you've got to do is make yourself fit. Another move, another motel room. Within a week, Patton would almost invariably be able to spot a way they could configure themselves into the right shape to slip into another life. Within a month, unless they were incredibly unlucky, they’d be out of the rented room and enjoying the comforts of someone else’s home, never putting down roots, ready to slip away when people started asking too many questions or Patton sensed trouble brewing on the horizon.It wasn't exactly the most stable way to spend her adolescence, or the safest. Having a teenage daughter in tow limited her father's options much more than if he’d moved around on his own. Sometimes they'd lean into the sympathies of people who felt just awful for a single parent. It took her what felt, in retrospect, an embarrassingly long time to realize that they preyed on darker instincts, too. Eyes that lingered on her a little too long, a hand on the small of her back as a mark passed behind her. Nothing worse, not usually - her father had promised he'd never put her in real danger, and she believed him, to an extent.She'd never call what happened abuse. The word felt too heavy for moments she could shed along with the rest of an identity, moments that weren't that bad, really, the longer she had to rationalize it to herself. Later in her teens, she'd find herself seeing just how far she could push a boundary when it came to men who looked at her a certain way. If she started it, she could call the shots; she could say when to stop. She wasn't letting her father’s new friend get her drunk on wine coolers - she was stringing him along for free booze and he was dumb enough to fall for it. They'd see the naive little girl they wanted to see, and that lie felt like power.(I'm not really sure how to categorize exactly what this was, with regards to her and her father. It's definitely abusive to put your kid in the line of sight of a predator for your own gain, even if “nothing happened” physically that you know of, and she technically benefits in some ways (money, housing, luxury…) Not quite trafficking, but edging into that territory. Not really covert ince𝒔t, but also… kind of, to be able to see your daughter in that light? Regardless, it understandably messed her up in a lot of ways she doesn't fully realize. Not every person, or even most of the people, that they used as marks was any kind of 𝒔ex pest, but once was more than enough; upwards of three times is enough to seriously warp your thought patterns for life and beyond.)1999
Nearly a full year shy of her eighteenth birthday, on a morning like any other, she gave Patton a casual good morning hug on her way out the door to the part-time job the girlfriend they were currently living with had helped her get. Selling cones of soft serve at the mall, a summer job that any high school girl might have. And like any carefree high school girl, no one was particularly concerned when she never showed up for that day's shift. By the time anyone began to worry, she was on a Greyhound well underway to Vegas. It seemed like as good a place to strike out on her own as any.She’d learned well from her father how to set her sights on an easy target by that point; it was practically second nature to her. As a young woman on her own, she knew she could aim even higher than their father-daughter duo ever could. Forget McMansions in the suburbs; by the end of the week, she was rolling out of bed in the penthouse suite of an heir to a household-name company and into the passenger seat of the midlife-crisis-mobile speeding towards his family’s estate on the coast.1997 - 2007
It was incredibly easy to realize what other people wanted and become that if you knew what to look for.A minor socialite who’d let slip to her at a bar that she'd never had any girl friends, not really, her blatant desperation for that kind of connection coming off her in waves that alienated her high society peers - she'd jump at the chance to invite her new bestie crash at her place, it'll be like the best sleepover ever except you don't have to go home!A college boy she honed in on quickly in the stacks of his prestigious campus's library, full of self-aggrandizing guilt over his own privilege and a savior complex a mile wide. All she’d had to do was look up at him through her lashes, pretend to be fascinated by his aspirations towards bettering the world as though he wouldn't just end up in finance like the past four generations of his family, and one day “accidentally” admit that the reason she, a non-student, spent so much time in the library was because a vengeful ex had kicked her out of the apartment they'd shared and left her functionally homeless. How’s that for romantic mood-setting - he'd kissed her later that same day, as though the thought of saving a plucky dream girl who'd forever owe him was some kind of aphrodisiac.A couple just a few years older than her own parents would be now, their newly adult daughter’s recent suicide still fresh in their minds - it wasn't hard to piece together bits of the girl’s story from the local library’s newspaper archives, and it was even easier to buy a box of hair dye close to her shade and start showing up at their grief support group; a whole backstory about recently becoming orphaned ready to go. The father admitted that when they'd first saw her, they both thought they'd seen a ghost. Really, it was kind of her to let them think the universe had offered them a do-over to assuage their guilt.Honestly, it wasn't a bad life. She’d gotten into trouble a handful of times, but nothing with permanent consequences, and nothing that tied her down or prevented her from moving on at her leisure. And the benefits, if she was lucky, more than made up for all of that: flights on private jets, ski holidays (which she'd been utterly hopeless at, but in a cute and endearing way, at least) and beach vacations, enough decent 𝒔ex to outweigh the bad, and the freedom to go wherever she wanted as soon as she felt the need. Even the in-between time, nights spent in the kind of roadside motels that would give her usual marks a heart attack, started to feel like their own mini-vacation, in a way: alone time in relative peace and quiet, gas-station dinners in front of her room’s television and midnight swims in pools that she told herself for her own sanity had definitely been cleaned within the past year. Having come of age in an era where one of the huge cultural anxieties of the time seemed to revolve around the misery of a stagnant office job and the slow suffocation of suburban life, she felt that she had it pretty damn good, actually.Some additional fun facts about this period of her life:
- The early days of social media were life-changing for her. You can learn so much more about someone if they have an easily traceable Blogspot or MySpace or whatever.
- Even before she turned 21, alcohol kind of lost its mystique, and she wasn't a fan of the way it dulled her instincts; same with weed. She used both just as much as she needed to to sell a current persona, but her substances of choice were mainly uppers - Adderall and coke, still used in careful amounts to stay “in control” of herself.
- If anyone asks, she’s always hated Uggs and thought they were hideous. Untrue. She totally had at least two pairs.2007 - Death
If she'd had a chance to pick the method of her death, she definitely wouldn't have picked a car crash. And if she'd had any say over the details, at the very least, she'd at least like to have gone out with something more dramatic, like a high-speed police chase or an extreme episode of road rage. Nope. Texting and driving, like some sort of walking (well, “barreling into a tree” more so than walking, but) public service announcement. Dead on impact, her neck snapped, just far enough from the road that the wreckage wouldn't be noticed until hours later when the sun hit the fragments of her shattered headlight just right.Understandably, no one was able to claim the body. When no next of kin was found, it was cremated, and eventually, buried in a collective grave in the town she’d never made it to.

post-death & relationships

I honestly don't know how arrivals in Hell work, exactly, so this part is under construction until I can find more lore on that or more is explained.The short version of it: upon showing up in Hell, she figured that she could at least employ some of her old manipulations to make some sort of comfortable space for herself above the bottom of the pecking order, maybe get in a more advantageous situation - the thing is, it's Hell, and even if a lot of the people she’d dealt with on Earth were definitely going to end up there eventually, it's a way higher concentration of schemers and scammers and folks much scarier and more powerful than she'd ever tried to pull the strings on before. She found herself in deep trouble almost immediately, attempting to play multiple influential demons against each other to win favor with them.One of those demons was her current boss, Velvette, who offered her a chance to get out of that jam, for the price of a contract on her soul and a position working under her. She agreed - not truly understanding how much of herself she was handing over with that signature. Never having actually decided on an alias for herself in Hell, she hesitated for a moment, pen hovering over the dotted line.

Fucking Hell, don't tell me you're one of those idiots who shows up here not even knowing their name? Just write a name, it doesn't matter. You've got those stitchy bits - just write Patch or Patches, or something.

Patch it was. A little bit obvious, maybe, but nothing she couldn't replace later on, once she got tired of this deal and shook herself free. Famous last words: anyway, how horrible could a job as, okay, an extremely hot girl’s assistant be?

⚠️ before you read further ⚠️
holy shit someone please call HR about pretty much everything going on here.
consent is a huge gray area in the majority of patch's relationships
very little in them falls under the banner of safe or sane. (✿◠ᴗ◠)

Velvette: Patch’s employer, contract holder, and the object of her definitely unhealthy affections. Early on, Patch assumes it'll be easier to eventually cut and run (before finding out the whole "selling her soul" thing was extremely literal) if she just does what she's always done - making herself indispensable and hinting strongly at flirtation; not hard, because have you seen Velvette, and she's always had a bit of a thing for mean girls thanks to a combination of exposure to 90s-00s teen movies and not being able to act on that actual attraction when she was alive. Other “bitches” and social climbers and manipulators seemed too high risk, too little reward.It's not exactly winning Patch any points, no more than any of her other employees - Velvette’s still a demanding, difficult to please boss, and she's made no attempts to treat Patch any differently in that respect. She still keeps grueling hours, does demeaning grunt work, and it'd be easier to list the things she hasn't had thrown at her head; she brings the Vees their coffee, stays on-call with her ringer at max volume 24/7, and has even filled in as Vel’s living dress form slash model after her favorite girl quit/permadied/who knows. (The last did involve a work-mandated boob job. For the way the clothes hang, y’know.)The flirtation, at least, pays off: look, sometimes your boss needs to blow off steam, and you've got a warm mouth and knees to get down on, so hurry up with it already. I don't have any more delicate way to talk about this aspect, okay, they fuck. Not constantly, but often enough that it keeps Patch hung up on her and willing to humiliate herself for more.Eventually, Patch does develop genuine feelings for Vel - or maybe just the next closest thing, she's never had strong romantic feelings towards anyone, so it's not like she can know for sure that's what they are! It's hard not to feel like maybe there's some connection there, when she's able to be more of her cynical, calculating true self around Velvette, who doesn't bother to pretend that she's a good person either. It feels more honest than any relationship she had while she was alive. (When she does, eventually, let this slip, it only earns her laughter in her face, of course. Really, she should have expected that.)And when Vel isn't using her as a metaphorical punching bag for her own amusement, there are moments that they have a good time together, that feel like maybe they could be more than the world’s most fucked up HR nightmare. Inside jokes about the other two Vees, late nights out clubbing together when Velvette needs to let loose, ordering grease-filled fast food for delivery the morning after when they're too hungover to move. Maybe one day, it can be something more than a painfully one-sided way to pass the time. (It won’t.)_Vox: As she's borrowed or lent out for more tasks around the tower, Patch catches on pretty quickly that Vox is firmly in her comfort zone from how she got by back on Earth. Fragile masculinity and a huge ego that needs massaged over the smallest slight or frustration? She's very familiar. Of her bosses, he's the easiest to manipulate. There are moments of unpredictability, but mostly, all you've got to do is play a little dumb, sound interested and sympathetic while he runs his mouth, and it doesn't hurt to throw in a little male-fantasy sixties secretary bullshit. (Satan forbid anyone else ever catches her scrubbing off her lipstick and swapping out heels for her regular shoes after a visit to his creepy panopticon of a workroom.) Also, even though she's pretty comparatively unimportant in his worldview, that doesn't stop him from throwing his money and influence around to show off and impress her, and the perks from that aren't anything to scoff at. (TL;DR: 'men are stupid and I don't respect them; Tiktok audio goes here.)Valentino: Honestly, Valentino is the most daunting of her employers to deal with. He's prone to unpredictable mood swings and hair-trigger violence, and even if she's not likely to permanently die thanks to him, she'd like to keep her limbs attached, please. (Ha ha ha yeah about that - it's not going to happen.)He's also the most likely to pick up on the way Patch alters her personality to mirror what people want to see, which sets her a little on edge - they both get their moves out of a similar playbook. Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss, or whatever. (This is entirely based on my own headcanons re: Val being an actor/performer at some point, and the way it seems like he sometimes "code switches" - if that's the right term - with his accent and use of Spanish to present a certain image. The accent definitely seems to come out more when he's genuinely angry but you can see him also possibly intentionally letting it out more when he's trying to come off more seductive/convincing, or more dangerous. I think there's actually an interview where Joel Perez talks about this that I'll link here when I find it again.) Anyway, that means he's got plenty to hold over her head, and sparks a bit of envy in her - they're not all that different, and yet he's got all the power and influence he could want and she's photocopying his script revisions and running Frappuccinos to set. She has difficulty keeping her own petttiest emotions out of the way when it comes to him, and that could get her in a lot of trouble.The thing is, Patch, somewhere deep down in a self-destructive part of her, wants to run towards trouble, now she's already so deep into it with her existing situation. And into trouble's bed, if you're going to twist her arm about it, geez.Angel Dust: In another life, Patch and Angel could have been best friends. As it is: Patch does her best to keep an… at least neutral appearance towards him, but underneath it all, she kind of hates him. Even if he makes her laugh when they're around each other. Even if he occasionally says something that makes her think, ugh, stop making me like you as a person, you asshole. I guess “frenemies” would be the best descriptor for them. To Patch, Angel seems to have all the sway she doesn't - when things are on an upswing with him and Valentino, he's got the man absolutely wrapped around his little finger without even trying to. She's watched Val tear people to shreds (literally or physically? Well. Both.) for so much as looking at him wrong, and Angel doesn't seem to even care about that advantage. In her eyes, he's not using the potential influence he has, and she's not - she's not jealous, okay, but what a waste. It's very much a “Ew, he's fucking the text man for texts” - bitch who's fucking the power man for power issue in her brain, with bonus incredibly skewed and-not-endorsed-by-me-obviously victim blaming about Val’s abuse on top for extra horrible flavoring.Charlie: I haven't hammered it out entirely yet, but I absolutely think at some point Patch has been sent to spy on the hotel and Charlie in particular, and goddamn, can she not stand that girl. Clearly all that kindness and sunshine and rainbows and blah blah blah has to be fake, and she's got to be a catty, power-hungry manipulator under all of that somewhere, right? Meanwhile, Charlie absolutely believes that, like anyone else, Patch can be redeemed - she just needs someone to listen to her, and help her let down all those emotional walls! They're basically an "unstoppable force meets immovable object" sort of dynamic and I think that will be really fun to play with eventually - and then I can make them kiss like my own personal Barbie dolls.