Chapter Text

I.

A smile couldn’t save you. It was for you, for your own dignity. A way to say "You didn’t hurt me" to someone busy sticking a knife in your guts.

Cuckoo—Gretchen Felker-Martin

Niffty is nearly finished sewing him up for the fifth time in as many days when she pauses and says, "You’re glowing."

"Hmm?" Alastor is only half-listening, staring intently at the flickering flames in the hearth to distract himself from the snick of needle and thread winding through his flesh.

"You’re glowing," Niffty repeats more insistently. "Deep inside, like a lightning bug! Did you swallow one?"

Alastor chances a slow, measured glance down his chest to where Niffty and her tools are occupied. The wound is there, a long, jagged mouth stretching from sternum to sacrum with ragged red lips that refuse to stay closed. The raw tissue beneath is tender and uncomfortably hot, slick with blood still welling up from deep within the gorge. Just below the gaunt curve of his ribcage, pulsing sluggishly against the glint of Niffty’s needle from within torn flesh and seared muscle and the arched cathedral of his bones, is a faint golden glow.

Well. Damn. The corners of his smile twitch in dismay, but he schools his expression before any of the ethereal stitches in his cheeks can pull. He hums instead, low and disinterested like this is old news and not a very unfortunate complication. "Quite so, my dear. I thought the extra light would aid in your work."

"Huh." Niffty scoots up the arm of the chair and presses her face close to the wound, squinting at it appraisingly. "Can you feel it in there? Is it uncomfortable? I could get it out, if you want. I never like it when bugs get under my skin." She raises the needle in invitation; Alastor is quick to wave her off.

"That’s quite alright! Nothing I can’t handle. Just the rest of the stitches, if you please."

Niffty doesn’t look quite convinced, but she resumes her sewing without complaint. Alastor watches her face to keep from looking at the needle and the hot little pinpricks of discomfort that follow its path, admiring the little furrows over her eye, the thin purse of her lips. It’s rare to see her so still and focused, no manic tremors in her shoulders or nervous giggles fluttering in her throat. He can almost glimpse the powerful creature she must have been in her prime: the clever, patient woman who’d smiled and cleaned and plotted until she could slip a knife through her husband’s ribs, before they’d dragged her away and jammed an icepick through her skull and let her seize and thrash and asphyxiate in a puddle of her own sick.

One of the many ways they share a kinship; so much of their potential has been stolen by needles.

Later, once Niffty’s finished her work and scuttled back into the shadows, he leans back in the chair and considers the glow beneath his skin. Lingering holy energy no doubt; most likely the reason why the damned wound won’t heal. Right now it’s too faint to be seen with the wound closed, but now that he knows it’s there he can feel it nestled deep within his insides. Getting warmer. He’ll have to get it dealt with before it melts him down into slag, but doing so will require burning humiliation of a different sort. There’s only one individual in the hotel who deals in holy energy.

(For a moment he considers asking her, but no, no. He can handle this on his own. He can’t bear the thought of more stitches.)

Either way, a problem for tomorrow. Alastor forces himself upright with a low grunt and flicks a whisper of power at the radio on the dresser until it starts playing, a low crackling voice undercut with crooning strings. It’s more difficult without his staff and with holy energy smouldering in his guts, but things being difficult has never stopped him before.

The fire crackles. The radio sings. On the other side of the room, where the floorboards peel away and the walls fade into swaying cypress branches shrouded in thick Spanish moss, a cloud of fireflies drift lazily over dark, still water.

I never like it when bugs get under my skin.

Alastor clenches his fists and tries to curl his lip in disdain, but the sickle-sharp edge to his smile never falters.

~🪡~

The next morning, Alastor does something he never thought he’d stoop to and goes looking for the King of Hell. Lucifer has become a regrettably permanent fixture in the hotel since the reconstruction, flitting around like an overgrown gnat imbued with a disgusting amount of power and truly horrendous interior design opinions. Alas, much like the pest he is, he’s constantly underfoot when unwanted and entirely absent when one goes looking with a jar of Paris Green in hand. Alastor strides from rooftop to library to hotel office, but his quarry remains irritatingly elusive. To add insult to grievous injury, everything in this new hotel is far too pristine. There’s no grime ground in the carpet, no dust to dull the shine on the excessive gold filigree. No intrigue, no character, no patina! Alastor abhors it.

By the time he makes it to the bar on the main floor, his chest is twinging and his patience is wearing thin.

Lucifer remains nowhere to be found, but Charlie is huddled in a corner booth with a swath of papers spread across the table, both hands fisted in her hair as she mutters wildly to herself under her breath. Oh dear. A stressed and frazzled princess, in urgent need of a guiding hand to steer her in a more…favourable direction.

Alastor polishes his smile until it gleams in the low light, then sweeps in silently beside her. After all, a proper hotelier never shirks his duty.

"Bee in your bonnet, princess? Don’t tell me your sparkly new hotel’s giving you trouble already." To her credit, Charlie doesn’t scream at the sudden bright buzz of his voice. Her shoulders jerk sharply once, then she straightens her back and slowly lowers her hands to the table.

"Good morning, Alastor," she says, only a little unsteadily. When she lifts her head to look at him, her smile is firmly in place. Good girl. Alastor lets his expression soften incrementally in approval. "Things are fine! It’s just, the other overlords are finally talking to me which is great, but the Sins also want to meet about possible repercussions for the other Rings and those meetings always take hours, and the hotel construction isn’t done yet, and we still need to go out and actually find more guests and—!"

Alastor clicks his tongue, balanced daintily on the line between sympathetic and condescending. "So many responsibilities for one person to take on! And where is His Royal Golden Highness your father in all this? I was under the impression you’d finally convinced him to help."

"He is helping! He’s helping so much." Charlie clasps her hands under her chin, even more disgustingly earnest than usual. Alastor smothers a twitch of irritation. "I mean, we wouldn’t even have a hotel without him, especially since you…Well, anyway." The slip-up is almost too swift to notice, but Alastor still feels it catch like a meat hook in bone. Since you weren’t here. Since you let yourself be split open and ran squealing like a gutted pig. Since you’re weak, since you failed, since you’re trapped like a fly in a glue trap and you’ll never be free—

Lost in brooding, he nearly misses his opening when Charlie’s voice goes soft and melancholy. "I’m really glad he’s here. I just…I just wish my mom was here too."

"Oh?" Alastor quickly shoves the self-loathing back into its neatly labelled compartment and pastes on his best active listening face. "I suppose incompetence is only preferable when compared to absenteeism. This hotel was Lilith’s project before you took it over, wasn’t it? I can only imagine what she’d think if she could see what you’d done with the place, haha!"

Charlie regrettably doesn’t rise to the bait, not even the false laugh he’d stuck on the end like a thumbtack. "It’s just…She was so good at this, the meetings and the talking and just, everything. People listened to her! And I’m trying to get them to listen to me, but she always made it look so easy and it’s not. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Dad tries to help, but…" Sighing heavily, she slumps against the booth and tips her head back with a tired sigh. "Do you miss your mom?"

"Pardon?" Of all the things Alastor is expecting her to say, this isn’t one of them. He flexes his fingers where they’re clasped behind his back; he wishes he had his microphone to hold onto but it’s still broken, like the equipment from his old radio tower and the ruin of his chest.

"Your mom," Charlie persists, as infuriatingly tenacious as ever. "You’ve only talked about her a few times but she’s not…down here, is she?"

The suggestion is so absurd, it takes him a moment to process it. Of course his mother isn’t in Hell! His mother was the last drop of goodness in a dry, shrivelled world drained to its moral dregs. His mother was the reason he…

The thought melts and distorts, slipping from his mind like warm lard. He hums in its place, tapping his claws against his wrist. Three short, eight long. 92 code: No more—The end. "Ah. No, I suspect not."

Charlie blinks at him earnestly. "What do you do when you miss her?"

It’s a disgustingly invasive question, and Alastor wants to treat it with the hissing offence it deserves. Only the most clueless of impertinent little fools would dare to ask him something like that. Only a spoiled, blue-blooded royal would presume to expect an answer. For anyone else, he’d have bitten off a finger for the question alone.

But it’s not anyone else. It’s Charlotte Morningstar, Hell’s perfect shining princess with her perfect shining hotel that gleams at the edge of the realm of the damned like a weeping sore. It’s Lucifer’s daughter, caught in the centre of a razor wire snare too finely woven for her to see. It’s Charlie, so genuine and hopeful and full of care and compassion and love for all the people around her, even the truly unredeemable ones, it feels like he’s constantly being dragged over the edge of a cliff. He can’t deny her anything; the geas hooks caught in skin and bone and some aching abscess in the vicinity of his chest won’t let him.

His stitches prickle. His wound burns. Alastor reaches deep into the sucking mire of his memories and reluctantly offers her a handful.

"I cook. I listen to her favourite music. I…" What else does he even have to remember her by? Warm brown eyes, sweet jasmine perfume, dark hair meticulously straightened and styled into a soft bob. A sonorous voice singing along to the scratchy radio between Hail Mary’s as long, calloused fingers move along a worn rosary. White candles flickering over the Virgin Mary, the gleaming scales of a brass snake. He doesn’t even have a full picture of her anymore. He has fragments, disparate parts broken by time and circumstance and…

The thought dissolves, ripples in an otherwise still pool. He shakes his head. "Well, it’s all irrelevant anyway. Let’s get back to…"

His words die off as Charlie —of all the nerve!— leans out of her seat and rests her head against his arm. Alastor tenses reflexively, then forces himself to relax as his wound flares with sharp pain. Charlie, pest that she is, takes this as invitation to keep talking. "I think Mom would be proud of me if she knew what I was doing here," she says, and how can she make something so patently untrue sound so real? "I have to believe it. And I think your mom would be proud of you too, for helping."

Wretched, wretched girl. She should be torn limb for limb for that, and yet he can’t even bring himself to push her away. Can’t even bring himself to sneer and offer the sentiment the derision it deserves. Can’t even swallow back the sickly-sweet feeling in the back of his throat that tastes almost like hope—

(Sometimes he thinks he wouldn’t be able to deny Charlie even without the contract, which is...No. he won’t even entertain the thought.)

His claws dig into his arm deep enough to draw blood. His wound burns. His smile, flat and hollow and perfect, never wavers.

"She did always enjoy a good spectacle." She’d loved the opera, he remembered that, all the costumes and elaborate sets and the drama of a bel canto cadenza. White powder masks, dramatic scarlet rings of red-painted lips. His chest aches. Why can’t he remember her face? "Please excuse me."

It’s not a retreat because he does not retreat, and if the click of his shoes against the gleaming new tile taps a faster staccato than usual, it’s only to match the furious pounding of his heart. How dare she? He wants to rip out the princess’s tongue, to pluck those wet entreating eyes from her skull and squeeze until they pop like grapes. He wants the warm pressure of her head back against his arm. He wants to hear her say again, I think your mom would be proud of you too.

No, enough. Hissing out a rush of static, he throws himself into the shadows even though they chafe against his wound like crushed glass. He needs to get ahold of himself. He’s been teetering dangerously ever since the angels descended and Adam —mocked-laughed-immolated— forced his retreat, he needs to regain control. Control of this hotel, control of his power, control of the inconvenient emotions that keep scuttling out from under his ribs. He’s the Radio Demon and Hell is his stage; he needs to get back into character.

He steps back out onto the mezzanine (ignore the ungainly stumble, ignore the half-aborted gasp, ignore how thick and sluggish the shadows are and how they don’t move like they should) and immediately comes face to face with the ostentatiously massive Morningstar family portrait that now dominates the upper lobby. It had been moved there from the palace after Charlie had spouted some sweet meaningless drivel about how this hotel is our whole family’s dream now, Dad, we should have something here that represents that! Lucifer had acquiesced like he always does when faced with the opportunity to pretend to be a good parent by granting one of Charlie’s inane requests, and now Alastor is forced to look upon their royal tableau of placid condescension every time he sets foot in the main hall.

Alastor had laughed when he’d first seen it, head thrown back and teeth bared. Six months of slow careful work easing himself into the very bedrock of this hotel, curling his power through every dilapidated crown moulding and peeling corner of wallpaper, making himself invaluable to building and occupants both until bones and baseboards all resonated at his frequency, and for what? Adam had struck him down, then struck down his stronghold as an afterthought. The gaudy, hollow shell Lucifer erected in its place is a mockery of everything Alastor had worked so hard to achieve, and this gilded golden portrait is its epitome.

He cannot hurt Charlie or her family, he cannot willfully damage the hotel or anything that represents any of the above. But his chest is burning and his patience is at its limits and Charlie and her disgustingly earnest questions have rattled something loose that’s usually bolted down tight. Hissing out a snarl through his smile, Alastor slashes a hand at the painting.

Too late, his shadow shrieks and tugs back on his arm with cold, frantic scrabbling. Too late, as his claws bite through oil paint and thick canvas and hit the wooden backing beneath and…

Not a hair on her pretty head, my pet, or a scratch on that hotel. We both know what will happen otherwise, don’t we?

His power flares, which is always the worst part of activating his contract because for a moment it makes him feel powerful, like he’s as magnificent and unrestrained as he used to be when screams still sang on the airwaves. But then the surge reverses, a sucking electric riptide that snaps back like an elastic band and pulls. The stitches in his shoulders blaze brilliant green and snap taut, his hand curls back with jerking spasms. His whole body tenses as thread twists itself along sparking nerve endings and twitching muscles and the rigid corners of his rictus grin, and he does know what will happen but that doesn’t make it hurt any less, doesn’t stop the screeching feedback squeal of panic from catching in his throat as the contract clamps down on the radio transmitter hidden within the soft meat of his chest and silences—

His wound screams, so hot with pain it feels like Adam’s blade has reburied itself in his guts. There’s a flare of holy light muffled beneath layers of clothing and bandages and rent flesh, the smell of seared meat as acid-bright thread and white-hot fire tear at each other with his helpless corporeality ensnared between them. For one crystalline moment, Alastor almost welcomes it. He never asked for this, never asked to be marched into the middle of this age-old conflict on marionette strings. Let it tear him apart in the middle of the Morningstars’ glitzy new hotel! Let it reduce him to nothing more than a meaty splatter across their lordly painted faces and just see if they can ever cast aside the dark stain of him ever again…

And then the contract threads snap, and the surge recedes. Alastor collapses to his knees, choking for breath. His limbs feel like unspooled rubber, his blood is rushing in his ears and trickling down his chin from where his magic pulsed in his sinuses. A punishment like that usually leaves him mute and helpless for hours afterwards but there’s no trace of it left, other than the residual weakness and the pounding of his heart. The contract activation was cancelled, and besides the pain Alastor’s mind feels clearer than it has in weeks.

Clambering unsteadily to his feet, he brushes shaking fingers across the tattered rips in the painting and considers this latest revelation. The contract sutured through his soul is made of demonic magic.

The holy wound smouldering in his chest burns away demonic magic.

Alastor’s smile goes wide and sharp, even as his wound throbs hard enough to make his breath catch. There’s so much more to consider than he first thought.

~🪡~

Alastor is twelve when the shadows in the bayou first speak to him. It’s early fall, the air beginning to cool and crisp with smoke, and his mother is hard at work with the neighbours preparing a massive pot of gumbo in their tiny houseboat kitchen. Alastor had helped for a while, mincing and chopping tomatoes and garlic and peppers even though the knife Tante Eva had handed him was a little too big to hold comfortably. But soon enough the massive pot was simmering away, and the adults had settled on the aft stoop into drinking and gossiping about things he didn’t care about, so he’d grown bored and wandered along the bank to where the ground grows soft and marshy and the trees crowd in close to the dark, still water. It’s a spot outside of time: hushed from lush vegetation, thick with humidity, mirrored on itself between the stagnant surface of the water and the long gnarled fingers of the trees and the flat disc of the sky overhead. Maybe that’s why it still burns so vividly in Alastor’s memory. It’s a place that exists everywhere and nowhere, in childhood memories and city suburbs and the enchantment in his room at the hotel, all at once.

He’s on the hunt for skipping stones in the reeds when Louis and a few other children come stomping over through the tall grass. A few are clutching oyster shells, but Alastor knows better than to hope they brought any for him. Louis lives up the street in a fancy real house, and leads the other children on the block with the same combination of self-proclaimed authority and ham-fisted violence as his policeman father. He’s also twelve but nearly six months Alastor’s senior, with several inches of height on him and shoulders twice as wide across. His hair is very blond, his eyes are very blue, and he’s disgustingly smug about both. He and Alastor have despised each other since birth.

"Heard your daddy got shot down in France," Louis says by way of greeting. It’s spat out like a barb, intended to wound, but Alastor only shrugs. As far as he’s concerned, getting shot down in France is both the only thing of value his father has ever accomplished and proof that all the allowance he’d spent on black candles hadn’t gone to waste.

This clearly isn’t the response Louis is looking for. His heavy brow furrows, his hands ball into fists as he takes an aggressive step forward. In earlier years he’d have been already throwing punches, but the polio wave a few summers ago had left him with a weak left leg and persistent tremor that means Alastor can easily outrun him now. The other children are still hanging back, far more willing to witness a spectacle than incite one. All Louis has to fight with are words, a weapon he’s never been particularly adept with.

Still he tries again, sneering and spiteful as only spoiled children whose parents don’t love them enough can be. "And I heard your mama had to get a job. As a maid."

Alastor shrugs again and bends back down to search for stones, even as he keeps the other boy carefully in sight through his reflection in the black mirror of the water. "There’s nothing wrong with honest work. Not that you’d know anything about that," he says in his best radio accent. He used to broadcast on a little homemade rig before the government banned amateur radio on account of the war, and is pretty good at mimicking the voices on the more popular northeastern channels. He likes the feel of the accent in his mouth —the sharp, crisp consonants; the round, resonant vowels; the showmanship and cheery nonchalance it exudes— and he likes how angry it makes Louis even more. Three years ago Alastor had broadcast his subpar exam scores to the entire city, and Louis has never forgotten.

"Like you would, you mudbug," Louis snaps, predictably heated. Alastor smiles and starts humming cheerily under his breath, just to twist the barb a little deeper. He misses the radio. "You and your poor widowed mama and the rest of y’all squatting out on the bayou like vagrants, drowning the rest of us in filth. My daddy says the city’s gonna clean this place up and clear you all out real soon! They’re working on the papers and everything."

"Whoosh! No more houseboats!" Alosia, one of the younger children proclaims gleefully, slurping an oyster as punctuation.

"Mmhmm. I’m sure." Alastor slips his hand under the murky water and trails his fingers through the silt. His reflection distorts as he does; for a moment his smile is unnaturally stretched, the tree branches above his head grafted to his skull like a crown of antlers. His thumb bumps the edge of something hard and he wraps his fingers around his prize; a fist-sized stone, somewhat flat, only jagged on a few edges. Perfect.

Louis dares another step forward. "And y’know what else my daddy says? He says proper upstanding ladies don’t work as maids. So what does that make your mama then?"

This makes Alastor pause. Insulting his father is fine and all but encouraged, and insinuating things about the floating community moored on the bayou is old news at this point. But even Louis usually knows better than to go after his mother. The last time he had, Alastor had bit his ear so hard he’d needed stitches to reattach the lobe.

"A proper upstanding lady," he says, his affected accent smearing into a low drawl as, beneath the water, his fingers clench tight around the rock. Something flits along the back of his hand, slimy and shockingly cold. "Wouldn’t you say?"

Maybe it’s the venom in Alastor’s voice that does it. Maybe it’s the judgemental stares of their onlookers, or the way the water is blacker than midnight even with the pale morning sky gleaming through the gaps in the trees. Whatever it is, it makes Louis square his shoulders and step forward one last time. He’s wearing the expression from their younger years that had made Alastor hate him the most, the expression he’d wear while stealing pralines from smaller children or pulling the wings off mosquito hawks. It’s the expression of someone who thinks he can ruin the life of creatures less powerful than him and is revelling in it.

"I’d say your mama better not work too hard or it might darken her complexion," Louis says. His voice probably didn’t actually change in the moment, but in Alastor’s memory it’s always spoken in the exaggerated upper class accent of one of the old money families from uptown, slow and syrupy and full of vicious glee. "Might make some folks double-check that old census data saying your mawmaw’s Italian. Might put a black smear on her reputation. You get what I’m saying? After all, no one loves spending their days hunkered down in the mud more than a mulat—"

Alastor’s vision flashes red hot as the water around his fist goes icy cold. He launches up from the bank like a gator ambushing a muskrat, droplets of water scattering in his wake as his arm flies forward and his clenched fingers loosen and he whips the rock with all the rage-borne strength of an angry twelve year old at Louis’s stupid sneering face.

He can never quite remember what happens next. Maybe Louis turns his head and steps back with a smirk. Maybe he flinches, all the power of his inherited class privilege fleeing and leaving a scared boy in its wake. However it might have started, it always ends the same way. Louis’s weak leg gives out, causing him to stagger. The rock strikes him clear across the temple with a bright wet crack and sudden bloom of claret. Louis drops like a shot mallard facedown into the shallow water.

Time slows to a treacle crawl. Alastor remembers the moment in fragments: bubbles in the dark water, the way Louis’s bad leg is twisted beneath him. The stillness of the hulking trees standing sentry, the far-off clatter of horse hooves on the street beyond the bayou. The other children’s eyes, pale and still as the blank sky reflected in them. The way that, throughout the whole slow-motion montage, he doesn’t feel anything but faint satisfaction.

Alastor watches the bubbles. The other children watch Alastor. Louis twitches a few times, the reeds swaying gently along the edge of the bank, but everything is otherwise still.

Eventually, the bubbles stop.

"Louie?" Alosia finally asks, voice wet and wobbly. "Louie, are you…?"

Silence, broken only by the slow gurgle of the bayou. Alastor shuffles a little further down the bank and pokes Louis with the toe of his shoe. There’s no movement, apart from the other boy sinking a little further into the muck. Who’s hunkered down in the mud now, Louis ol’ pal? Alastor has to fight back the urge to laugh.

"Louie!" Alosia is shrill now, on the verge of frantic. She’s halfway through taking a step forward when Alastor looks up, but when his gaze settles on her she freezes like a possum about to be splattered by an automobile. The other children are still locked in stiff pantomime behind her. "You—you…he’s…!"

He’s what, Alosia? A sickly sweet voice in Alastor’s head wants to say. Go on, say it. Make it real. You won’t, you spoiled little coward. Suffering is just a stage-play to people like you.

Say you’re sorry, another voice, one that sounds suspiciously like his mother, coaxes. We don’t hurt people, boo, not even when they hurt us first. We have to be better than them.

(Not that being better than them ever helped. Not that it ever stopped the sneers, the whispers, the endless scrutiny. Not that it ever stopped his father.)

"My, what a mess you’ve made, pet," comes a third voice, a burbling, sibilant gurgle from deep within the bayou itself.

Alastor still can’t quite describe it, even after all these years. It’s both many voices and none, a dead static so loud it buzzes in his molars and a susurration so quiet he has to strain every filament of his being to hear it. It sounds like salvation and it sounds like calamity and it sounds like every organ in his abdomen twisting together in a tight, writhing knot. His throat clamps down on itself like a vice, a frantic laryngospasm like he’s the one lying facedown in a pool of murky water. Just like Louis, it doesn’t help.

"Don’t you worry, darling. Let me make it all better."

The smooth surface of the water ripples as something shifts beneath it, a long sinuous whip. Alastor’s seen watersnakes here before, slipping through the water like silk ribbons or sunning themselves on low branches, but this is much longer, much darker. The shadows seem to be clustering in even closer, like the trees are huddling down to block out the sky. Alastor’s ears pop like when he was seven and accidentally broke a plate while washing up and his father held his head under the dish water until black spots burst behind his eyes. Just like when he was seven, when the water finally recedes it leaves him shivering and gasping and at the mercy of a monster.

The water is black black black, impossibly black, a tenebrous void so devoid of light it makes his eyes ache to look at it. He looks at it anyway because something is writhing beneath it, like the shadows below the water have gained sentience and are struggled to escape their liquid encasement. There’s a horrible smell brewing there too: heat and rotten eggs with the acrid edge of old blood. When one thrashing limb breaches the surface of the water, the air shimmers around it like a heat mirage. Alastor can’t pull his gaze away even though he desperately wants to, even though the trees are rustling and the back of his neck is prickling and he’s sure that if he could just turn his head there’d be something unfathomably horrible lurking behind him, something even worse than the whispering blackness stirring beneath the bayou. He stands frozen instead, watching numbly as the thing wraps itself around Louis and drags his unmoving form under the water.

Alosia lets out a noise, a sort of low hitching moan, and it finally lifts Alastor from the trance he’s mired in. Swallowing heavily, trying not to choke on the thick sour air, he forces his stiff neck to turn, his leaden gaze to drift from the water to the other children standing back by the trees. Their eyes and mouths are all open wide, tears streaming down their cheeks and spittle dripping from their lips. Beneath the water the thing undulates, rippling in hypnotic waves, and the children shudder in unison. Resonating.

Slowly, the ecstatic terror fades from their faces and leaves them empty, serene. Slowly, their shoulders loosen and their hands go slack. Slowly, they turn and vanish silently back into the trees, ghosts that never were. It’s just Alastor and the monster now, and the empty place where Louis fell.

Somehow, Alastor finds his voice. "What did you do to them?"

The voice beneath the bayou laughs, water sloshing against the bank in humming fractal patterns. Watching them makes Alastor horribly dizzy, but he swallows back the metallic taste at the back of his throat and refuses to look away. "I made them forget. It’s best not to do these sorts of things with an audience, sweet thing. Aren’t you lucky I was here?"

"I…" It’s hard to think, with the rippling water eroding canyons into the back of his skull and that horrible odour scouring his lungs, but Alastor still manages to jerk his chin in a nod. "Yes. Thank you."

If there’s one thing his mother taught him that he’s always heeded, it’s to always be polite to spirits, no matter how odious. Is this one odious? He can’t decide. It’s helping him. It didn’t hurt anyone. Did it?

(It made them forget. What did it do to you?)

It’s so hard to think.

"And so polite too! I like you, pet. I see the potential for great things in you." The voice is getting louder, like it’s crawled inside his ears and curled itself around the tiny vibrating bones within. Alastor can feel the horrible thrum of it against the back of his skull. He blinks rapidly, trying to fight back the vertigo and the feeling of viscid swamp water sloshing through his sinuses, and for a moment he thinks he sees a figure standing among the shadows. Long hair, longer beckoning arms. The air smells of rotting fruit now, fermented and sickly sweet.

"What kinds of things?" Alastor asks despite himself. He doesn’t want to know. He can’t bear not knowing. The voice latches onto his desire like a lamprey and presses in even closer.

"Things that need to be done. Things that prevent people like him from running around as they please. Wouldn’t you enjoy that?"

Black candles burning on his windowsill. The rough edges of the rock against his palm, the anger, the release. The bloom of scarlet. The cessation of bubbles.

"I didn’t…It was an accident." It’s not true and he and the thing in the bayou both know it. If Louis had tried to get up, Alastor would have shoved him right back down into the sucking mud.

"Come now, pet." The voice isn’t any louder, but the intensity has built almost too much to bear. There are methyl orange sparks cascading along Alastor’s corneas, burning like lightbulb filaments. It feels like there’s a swarm of cicadas trapped under his teeth. "Don’t lie to me. I know you prayed for the bullet that took your mean old papa out. I know you smiled when that rock hit its mark. I know you have a big empty pit inside you and this is the first time it’s ever felt full. Aren’t you tired of being hungry?"

The figure leans forward, a siren draped in a veil of hair and buzzing darkness. It holds out a hand, and a cold burning point deep within Alastor’s chest wants nothing more than to stagger forward to clasp it, heedless of the murky water or the carrion lurking below. It would be so easy to reach forward. As easy as a whispered curse, as a rock set free, as the bright, heady burn of satisfaction singing in his blood. No one would look down on him ever again. No one would treat him as lesser, no one would dare to—!

"Alastor!"

His mother’s voice rings through the trees like a cathedral bell and just like that, the spell is broken. Alastor shakes his head fiercely and steps back from the water. "I…I have to go."

"She can’t keep you fed, sweetness. Not like I can," the voice croons, but whatever power it had been weaving has receded along with the lapping water. It sounds diminished now, dry and papery against the muffling damp of the bayou. When Alastor peers into the shadows he can see the figure recoiling, its grasping limbs curling back like a dead spider.

"Alastor!" his mother calls again, closer this time. "Time to come home, baby!"

She’s right. There isn’t anything he wants here.

"Coming, Mama!" he shouts, and then he turns his back on the water and heads into the trees.<

The bayou laughs behind him, one last lingering gurgle. "Stubborn little thing, aren’t you? Very well. Until next time, darling. You’ll come back to me eventually."

Alastor doesn’t turn around.

"Do we have ancestors in the bayou, Mama?" he asks later, when they’re settled on the squished little sofa in their tiny living room. He must have said it in a different accent, worn softer and smoother with use and genuine emotion, but the feel of it in his mouth is as lost to his memory as the shape of his mother’s smile when she replies.

"In the bayou? None I know of, mon petite bebette. No one looking out for us there but Saint Jean himself."

And the shadows, Alastor thinks but doesn’t say. His hand still stings where the sharp edges of the stone dug into his palm. His cheeks itch at the corners of his mouth, but he doesn’t yet know why. He hunches down over his book and tries to focus on the words on the page, even as sinuous black shadows keep flickering in the corners of his vision. His mother is mending a shirt beside him, the needle gleaming in the orange light as it flits back and forth in her dextrous fingers. He tries desperately to look at her face, to remember the shape of her chin and how her eyes crinkle when she smiles, but there’s nothing there. Only the needle, and the flickering shadows, and the phantom edges of a bloodstained rock in his hand.

Snick snick snick goes the needle. Alastor’s skin prickles in tandem.

Snick snick snick.

~🪡~

"More bugs today," Niffty is muttering when he comes back to himself, her needle darting through his chest in hot little pinches. Snick snick snick. "Too much light! Too many legs! How did they all get in there? Is it the swamp’s fault?"

Alastor flicks his gaze over to the swamp in question. The dark water is still, the shadows no deeper than usual, but appearing safe has never been the same as safety. His wound is burning hot and sharp, his memories are clouded with shimmering black oil slick, and at least one of these things is the swamp’s fault. 

"Niffty. A moment, dear." Niffty obediently pauses her sewing. "Do you remember when we cooked for everyone last week?"

Niffty’s face lights up. "Of course I do! You chopped and I stirred and I stabbed six bugs and you let me add my favourite to the stew! It was magical." She gestures wildly with the needle as she speaks, a flashing point of silver that Alastor does not flinch back from. He softens his smile instead, quaggy and warm enough to sink into until your feet are trapped. 

"That’s right, darling. It was a nice night, wasn’t it? And you remember it so well!" Niffty beams, and Alastor lets himself feel one slow syrupy bubble of mild regret at what he’s about to do before he shoves it down under the murky water with everything else unsavoury and focuses on the task at hand. With a flick of his wrist, he summons Niffty’s chain. 

Niffty immediately drops the needle and presses her fingers against the weight around her throat. She giggles, her eye dropping to half-mast as she flops back contentedly against his shoulder. Alastor clenches his teeth and adjusts his grip on the chain, ignoring the hot swell of pain under his ribs from the activation of power. 

(Ignoring the part of him that wants to pin her down and rip her spindly little limbs off one by one for daring to feel safe with a collar wrapped around her neck—)

"Listen carefully now," he tells her, static sizzling in his throat. Niffty nods and giggles again and he has to wipe that serene look off her face before he loses it. Stupid girl with her soft little heart, leaning into her restraints like they’re supporting her instead of holding her back! The buzzing in his throat rises into a drone. "That night in the kitchen? That lovely memory?" 

The drone sharpens to a feedback screech. He leans in, antlers stretching, smile so sharp it makes the insides of his cheeks bleed. 

"I want you to forget it."

Niffty’s eye goes wide, then glazes over. She nods slowly, jaw falling slack, then jerks back upright in one sharp jolt like a switch has been flipped off and back on again. A beat. She blinks, hums, then reaches for the needle still dangling from Alastor’s half-closed gash. 

Alastor pushes her hand back before she can grab it. "Did you do as I asked?"

"Hmm?" Niffty is only half-listening to him. Her gaze tracks the needle as it swings, gleaming red-gold from the light pulsing deep within his chest. The stitches above it pull a little as it moves; Alastor claps a hand over it and fights back the urge to claw the whole stringy mass of it back out of his skin, to stay focused on the task at hand. 

"Last week in the kitchen. Remember?"

Niffty cocks her head to the side. "…I cleaned under the range hood?" Her eye is wide and guileless. Something deep within the smouldering hole in Alastor’s guts clenches in grim delight, like the first bite of a choice cut of meat, the first shlick of a knife.

"No, darling, when we cooked." He pauses for dramatic affect, stretching his face into a caricature of admonishment. "You don’t remember?"

Niffty stiffens like he’s slipped a shiv into her back. She blinks, staring at him entreatingly, waiting for his face to crack and reveal the joke. When he doesn’t move, she wrings her hands together and starts babbling. "No, I…I—I’m sure I…We probably made…soup? No, something else—something…something! I’m sure I can…I have to…!" 

She’s starting to shake, her little clawed fingers digging into her scalp like they can somehow unearth the memory that’s been plucked loose. Alastor fingers the needle tucked against his palm, imagining his words as the same piercing metal, the same sharp jabbing point. It’s cruel. He doesn’t take any pleasure in it, but he doesn’t comfort her either.

Niffty shivers and swallows, fighting back tears. Alastor hefts his icepick and swings down the hammer. He needs to know. He needs to be certain. "Oh dear. You’ve forgotten, haven’t you."

The tears spill over as Niffty starts to wail. "I’m…I’m sorry, Alastor, really! I d-didn’t mean to, I never mean to for the important stuff I just—just—just—"

She’s distraught now in a way Alastor knows she can’t fake, her tiny shoulders shaking with sobs as she chokes and scrabbles bloody furrows into the thin skin below her eye. Her distress doesn’t unearth the memory any more than his prompting did; it’s well and truly sealed behind the contract, no matter how much she fights for it. 

Alastor’s lip curls in bitter satisfaction. He has his answer. Time to tidy up this mess.

"Shhh, none of that now. Let me help you, darling." With one hand, Alastor gently pulls Niffty’s claws away from her eyelid and brushes away the tears. With the other, he grasps the chain and gives it a quick tug, undoing the knot he’d tied in it. "We made seafood stew with spiny crawfish and your prize catch of the day. Do you remember now?"

"I—I…" Niffty hiccups and scrubs at her face but then pauses, eye going wide. "I do! It was magical." She smiles wobbily and glances up under her wet eyelashes, still tremulous in the wake of her distress but trying desperately to settle, to satisfy him. When Alastor smiles his warmest smile and smooths back an errant piece of hair, she melts back against his side like he’s subjected her to the full heat of a sticky midday sun. 

She can never be more than this, he realizes in a cold swell of bitter resignation. She has an empty pit inside her too, but it’s gouged deep into the delicate folds of her brain and whatever once filled it has been lost forever. If there was ever a version of Niffty who could survive in Hell without a chain around her neck, she was never given the opportunity to try. 

I’m sorry, is what he should think, but doesn’t. You brought this upon yourself, is what he thinks but doesn’t say.

"Absolutely, my dear," is what he says instead, swallowing back all the other toxic sludge to fester among the popping coals in his chest. "Magical indeed."

He looks to the bayou as Niffty finishes the rest of his stitches, narrowing his eyes at the dancing fireflies reflecting against dark, still water. I’m onto your tricks, you putrescent hag, he thinks viciously, and he hopes it’s loud enough to reverberate through his stitching and echo its way into her ears. You made them forget and now you’ve made me forget too. But now I know. I’m going to burn you out of me and take back what’s mine. 

Snick snick snick goes the needle. Somewhere deep within the shrouded folds of his memory, his mother laughs. No matter how hard Alastor concentrates, he still can’t recall her face.