continuation for devildo || its terrible potential has begun

[americanvvitch]

[continued from here]

The ending came quickly, as they so often did.

Little fanfare surrounded Alastor's exit... no floating appendages, no jovial crackling of her radio. Only the quiet ringing of piano keys to play him off as he vanished from sight, the last notes of a doleful wake. It seemed an inappropriately sober outtro, in contrast to the tone of the rest of the evening.

With Alastor gone, deep silence settled over the cabin. Save for soft footsteps while the flour and whiskey were tucked away, and the creak and latch of the door. The radio show he had pulled into existence dwindled away by the time she had finished, and then all that was left was the sound of grit and sand as it blew over the horizon and the occasional pop of the fire in her hearth. Little by little each trace of him faded, unsustainable without his magic, but even as his essence seeped out of the world, Lotte felt the creature take root in her mind. The worn mattress beneath her gave no comfort or relief. The red stag and the thrill and terror of it might very well haunt her for the rest of her days.

The feeling that had long plagued her, of feeling somewhere lost between this world and another was only intensified now. Time would flow, dawn would come, nothing in her little home would stretch itself larger than its physical shape ought to have been, and the world would return to its previous state. All would mend itself now.

All but her.

The idea that she could not be the same after what she'd done followed her, like her own gauzy shadow, through the following week. The days rolled in and out, hazy with dust, fragrant loaves of fresh bread and the slow drying of the original, ordinary bottle of whiskey that predated the harvest night. Lotte had never missed anyone, so she couldn't really say for sure that the strange restlessness she couldn't quite shake was covetous. Or that it had anything to do with Alastor in particular. If she had called something else up, would it have been such a distraction? Well, there really wasn't any way to know with Alastor and his like down there and Lotte wasting away up here - and that was just how it would have to stay.

She had no excuse to call Alastor and what good sense she possessed (along with pride, perhaps) prevented her from making another social call. She was stalwart in that, or so she thought.

But Lotte was not any great mountain or a deeply-rooted tree. She was kindling, and a spark of fire and a rush of air was all it ever took to change her course.

∅ ∅ ∅ ∅

Near a week and a half had passed, before the storm hit. It wasn't a surprise - this was probably closing in on the fiftieth storm Lotte had weathered in this place. The static electricity had woken her before dawn and she'd wasted no time tugging on her boots and wrapping the bottom of her face with a double piece of old cotton before she ventured out of the cabin to check that each sigil at the edge of town was intact. The farmers had instructions on how to refresh the sigils placed at the center of their acreage and along the borders - they would be on their own with no car or horse at her disposal to check them.

Surrounding the town itself, there were three. The head of the triangle lay about two miles up the road, just off a crossroads. She'd noticed early on that most of the storms rolled in from that direction, and so she'd created the barrier's tip there with some hope that it would slice through the force of nature and help distribute the power along the sides of where the barrier ran, rather than letting it hit them head on. That one had to be checked first, then she'd double back along the fence line to the other two.

After that, things had happened fast. Dark clouds had rolled in on her way to the last sigil point, and cast a shroud over the land that turned it black in a matter of moments. There'd been no choice but to run for the last sigil and then pray the storm held as she ran harder back through the fields to the shack, sparks of blue flame snapping at her her hair from along the fence line as she went.

There hadn't been enough time to seal up the shutters, plug the cracks in the door with rags and blankets and scribble a sigil on the door as she normally might have. Instead, she'd had to disappear into the basement with little more than a blanket to shield from the dust.

Dust storms came and went quickly, at least.

The cleanup had taken longer. Several hours of sweeping the sand and dirt from surfaces, dragging all the linens out to hang outside and beat the dust from them - because the barrier couldn't keep a storm out entirely. No, it only curbed the force, mitigated the damage.

It was well into the evening by the time she'd finished that, eaten some cold stew, a piece of bread, and settled in at her table with the whiskey Alastor had given her.

She'd earned a bit of celebration hadn't she? She'd managed to get a fire going, all the doors and windows were open to air things out, and she did have a little cough that needed soothing.

Of course, Lotte planned to make the bottle to last, so she hadn't poured too much. Which was.. admittedly hard to do after tasting it for the first time. Little favors allowed her to be alone for the coughing fit that followed her first sip. It was smooth, very smooth, but also by far the strongest thing she'd ever put in her body.

But it was good. Very good, really.

So good that Lotte didn't quite notice the warm, easy slide that took her from pleasantly tipsy to quite drunk all in her first glass.

And how she'd gone from the cheery warmth of sitting by her fire, reading a book by candlelight and listening to the radio to painting a rather large, improvised sigil on the wall of her shack well.... she really didn't know. She felt warm and loose all over, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea to invite Alastor back for a chat and a drink. Why shouldn't she?

He had been more of a friend to her than anyone here! He was clever, had more than a bit of wit, and she missed the particular heat and bite of his magic. Like cinnamon and clove in mulled wine.

Lotte stepped back, wiping the blood on her pale green dress before her eyes fluttered closed and she called. This sigil was not so carefully crafted, but she felt no lack of magic in it, if anything, she felt like she knew how to call for Alastor better. Not at a physical place, so much as a wavelength in the magic, her intuition told her that this sigil was right for what she sought, and it was nothing to funnel her own magic through it to create a proper invitation. A door. All he needed to do was step through, because that was what she wished.

Why don't you come join me for a drink, Mr. Radio Demon?

Comments

[devildo]

Time passed, for Alastor. There was no notable difference in its passage now, to what there had been before, but that was not to say he wasn't keenly aware of Lotte's absence from his life, which was as sudden as her presence had been. The idea of "missing" something that had taken up a mere hour of his life (no longer, yet, than a more fortunate mortal man's might have been) was incomprehensible, and so he would not say that he missed her. Still, those garnet-colored vials of Lotte's blood sat upon the shelf by the fireplace in Alastor's front room, and he gazed at them nightly. Some nights, the temptation to pop the corks, hold the glass in his hand, swallow them in one hot mouthful like a shot of fine brandy, was almost too strong to handle. When it did happen, he did exactly that - took a mouth-filling gulp of brandy and stared at them while he did so, imagining the difference between the two, the sharpness that would settle on his tongue when he finally deigned to drink the blood, in contrast to the burn of alcohol in his mouth.

The light would catch on the vials, shining through them like stained glass, when he lit his fire. This was every night, and it made every night agonizing. If anyone asked (which they didn't), he would say he was only playing a little game with himself, seeing just how long he could deny himself the pleasure of the drink before it drove him insane and he had no choice but to indulge. He would not say, for he did not believe, that it had anything to do with the company of the woman who slashed her wrists and bled for him.

And yet, inarguably, he thought of her: the flames dancing in his hearth, all cliches aside, resembled the color of her hair in the lamplight. The pull of his summoning, the few times it took place in the weeks since his visit with Lotte, sent a flare of curiosity through him - each time, he wondered if it might be her. Each time, it wasn't. (And each time, in truth, he knew better. The feeling of a more practiced act of black magick was incomparable to the artless reaching of someone like Lotte.) Therefore it must be true, in some way, that it was her absence that he missed when he thought of the blood slipping thick down his throat, coating his stomach, settling softly there. Perhaps he would warm it, he thought, before he finally drank it. Doing so would pale in comparison from harvesting it straight from its source, but even the imitation had its worth.

How long he intended to leave those vials there, gazing at them every night from the safety of his favorite armchair, he wasn't sure. The occasion would feel right, one night, he was sure. Or perhaps, some particularly wrought transaction would take place between himself and some insufferable mortal soul who called him up from Hell. Then, he would feel he deserved it, had earned it, could spare the finest vintage in his cellars. So far, the time wasn't right. The days passed, just the same as every other series of ten or so days, in and out, dull and uneventful.

This was the reason for this feeling akin to longing, when he looked at her blood in the firelight. The evening Alastor spent with her was the first in a long time that didn't feel just like the others - the first with a spice, a panache, that the ordinary rhythm of his days just couldn't match. He spilled blood, struck deals, grew interminably and intermittently stronger, but nothing happened.

The blood on the shelf, in itself, was not maddening, but tantalizing. The maddening thing was his sudden awareness that there was no end to this stream of days, repeating endlessly, over and over again. It called to mind an awareness of his youth. There were things here, so many, far older than Alastor. What would be his lot, when he reached their age? Would his mind dull, bashed in by the drudgery of thousand, million, identical days? The thought sent a shudder through him. If he'd contemplated it before, in his time here, it was never with such sincerity.

He wasn't willing to admit this was it.

The night Lotte called for him again was just like any other.

He sat in the same armchair, the same snifter of brandy pressed to his lower lip, poised between sips, the same amber glow shining through the steadily darkening blood on the shelf by the fire. His legs were crossed in the same way as always, one dangling over the other's knee, the same shoe planted in the same pile of the same rug. Light danced off the lacquered shine of his coffee table, tickled at the edges of his vision where it caught the gold leaf in the wallpaper, and dissipated to almost nothing, in the far corners of the opposite wall.

All of this was the same, and he was caught in the same lull of normalcy that nearly every evening possessed, when a heat gripped his chest.

A living man might have thought he was dying. Alastor was startled by it, but no more than that. He looked around, ears craning behind him, listening out for the sign of company at his front door. But it wasn't that. The company was closer, and much more foreign.

Across from him, the barely familiar and yet unquestionably identifiable blackness was growing in the corner of the room. His ears perked, his hair stood on end. If this wasn't Lotte again, he'd be damned. He could swear that it was, the opening between the worlds felt so similar. Racing ahead of him, his shadow slithered across the floor, towards the growing shadow of a doorway on the wall. It wanted to go. It was sure of something he told himself had no reason to be true.

But he stood, setting the glass down and following it. One moment, the fire was crackling behind him, the next, it was in front of him, as he stepped through the passageway, and back into Lotte's familiar home.

She swam into focus in front of him as he parted the veil, the fuzziness of the light bouncing off her curls in that familiar, golden way, until it focused down to a faint back light, a soft halo around the strands of hair that frizzed up from the rest. But she looked wild tonight, her eyes bright and manic, her smile easy. Alastor spied the whiskey bottle on the table, from the corner of his eye. Ah, there was the reason. She'd been enjoying herself, without him.

His feet fully met her floor, bringing him solidly into the room, just a few paces from her. His smile, though practiced and automatic, was genuine. It was a delight to see her so undone, so filled to the brim with the extra boost of confidence that good whiskey would bring. "Good evening, my dear," he purred, and his throat was so hot with the words it was as if he hadn't spoken in a week. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

[americanvvitch]

Alastor didn't keep her waiting, and she found that quite good of him on such short notice.

There was that familiar shift in the fabric of things, the air sucked out like a vacuum and then rushing back in. It was the shadow that emerged first, pouring out from the lines of the sigil on the wall like hot tar, but the sight of Alastor himself stepping through the sigil, so much simpler this time, sent a thrill through her that rippled up the length of her spine. It intensified the warmth already bubbling and threatening to spill out from her very skin, if that were a thing that could happen. Maybe it was? Who could say, given the the day she'd had.

Still, he was here again, and the buzz of magic set her hair on end. Had it been simpler for him this time? It seemed so. Perhaps it was just the adrenaline that lingered after surviving yet another storm (this had been fifty-two, she'd counted her log - a series of notches on a beam in the basement), but the whole affair felt effortless. She did hope he'd notice.

With any luck it would make up for the state of her home this time. A fine dust still hung in the air, that would linger for a day or two, but the fire was warm and she'd swept out most of the dirt. At least in any spot Alastor was likely to inhabit. If he looked outside he'd notice the dirt hungrily encroaching almost up to the threshold of the door, porch all but gone, and her clothes, along with the bedding, hanging on the line to air out in the breeze. She'd given them a good whacking earlier, but if they didn't shed all the dust by tonight, she'd have to drag her mattress to the fire and sleep there. Better than waking up covered in a layer of sand. It really did get into everything.

The familiar crackle of radio static preceded and accompanied his words, and it was so welcome Lotte had to suppress the giggle that fluttered into her throat because it was real. His presence now thwarted any lingering notion that what had happened was a dream (though the proof of that seemed irrefutable even in his absence) fairytales had a way of getting into your head and taking up residence. To someone who hadn't lived it, all this might seem like a particularly twisted little tale.

Not only that, but she'd managed to be interesting enough that Alastor had accepted a second invitation.

"Evening." She purred, and a grin curled on her lips, pulling the corners of her mouth up. "Just a social call, if you're not too busy for it."

Moving right now felt a lot like floating, but the space wasn't that large and she probably could have navigated it blind she was so used to it by now. An easy wave of her hand opened one of the cabinet doors as she reached it, and she plucked a glass from a shelf before sauntering back toward the table.

"Drink?" The question was asked, but Lotte didn't bother waiting for him to answer before she poured him a bit of the whiskey. If he'd actually been busy, she doubted he'd have come at all. And since he clearly wasn't otherwise occupied, he could certainly stand to have a drink with her!

"We had a dust storm today. Real nasty one too," she explained as she pushed the cork back into the bottle with a resounding pop before gesturing to the horizon beyond the open windows of her weary cabin. "...and - here we all are. Not dead! Thanks in no small part to yours truly."

Lotte swiped the glass up from the table and closed the distance between herself and Alastor without an ounce of hesitation. "So I figured a little celebration was in order."

"Care to join me?" She was close enough now, that she needn't even stretch her arm out half way to offer the glass - anymore and she might have touched him, and she hadn't had quite enough whiskey for that.

[devildo]

It was simpler, and the thing that made it so was Alastor's shadow pushing ahead of him, eager like a pet, a senseless animal that craved attention above safety. The trouble was, it was no such thing. It was his point creature, his lookout. It sensed trouble before Alastor ever did, astute as his wits may be, and relayed it back to him. His shadow was not, in fact, senseless; if it surged forward, it was only because it knew the way was safe, and would pave it for him.

The shadow rippled out ahead of him and dug its way into all the creases between the floorboards again, so that it nearly took up the entire floor, in its own way. It settled deeply into them, a smooth, black mortar plugging up the holes, pushing out the dust. That was no exaggeration - the dust did, indeed, clear where the shadow went, and it filtered not just through the spaces between the floorboards, but up into the joins in Lotte's walls, to the frames of her windows, making itself comfortable and eradicating that which was unwanted.

Alastor, on the other hand, felt wholly welcome. Disturbingly welcome, if anything, for there was, as there had been the last time, no suggestion that he was needed for anything. He could always tell. There was a bitterness hung about in the air like cobwebs, when he was called to make a deal, something desperate and sour, tinged with longing and regret. Those humans were frantic, no matter the degree of their bravado, rehearsing their lines long before he appeared, practicing just the way in which they would ask, to make sure they asked the right thing and didn't find themselves saddled by some unfortunate loophole. Some, of course, were not so smart, and the loopholes were there, loose enough to hang them with. But that was their problem, not Alastor's.

Here, despite the dust, the air was clear, not sour with desperation. He looked around the room like he was seeing it for the first time, taking in the unfiltered quality of the atmosphere, clouding everything in a haze that was even more visible to him than it would have been to Lotte's human eyesight. This was a shame, a really wretched thing, that someone could live in such dry and aching squalor. He wondered again, why she didn't meet him with that familiar desperation. But no. She was only offering him a drink from his own supply.

"Never too busy for you," he said, and he supposed it was true. Why should he be? She offered the drink, and he nodded in agreement. He would have joined her at the table, but she was too swift, prattling on about her unfortunate circumstances while she approached him with the glass outstretched. He took it. Should he show her that he could step beyond her bonds? Was it too soon? He'd been aching to show her, despite the thrill of knowing it was a secret he kept from her, last time.

"Why," he said, "you are a more remarkable lady than you give yourself credit for! I would certainly like to see my way around these parts, see what stock you've got to pride yourself on." He took a sip from the glass. It went down far more pleasantly, of course, than her dirt water of a whiskey she'd plied him with, before. "Does that interest you at all? Showing me around?"

[americanvvitch]

Alastor's words were another shot of whiskey, and they settled warm in her stomach, sated the gnawing hunger that she'd never imagined she'd be free of.

Lotte chased it down with another sip of whiskey, because oh what a novelty it was to feel full. In the absence of hunger, well she couldn't remember for sure, but hadn't it been a lot like this, this heaviness in her stomach? Heaviness and the want to curl away somewhere in a nest of blankets - but strangely it was nowhere to be found now. She wanted to move. To dance or run through the fields and feel the sharp prickle of static up the length of her fingers, twisting and tugging the hairs at the back of her neck up until she had a halo of red all around her like a bloodied saint.

A laugh bubbled up out of her, and Lotte crouched down so the hem of her dress just barely brushed the floor, letting her fingers splay along the grain of the wood. They traced the cracks of the floorboards where the shadow had settled. There was a warmth to it, too, to the magic that created and sustained Alastor's strange companion, that was palpable beneath her finger tips. Though she couldn't properly see it like this, there was no doubt it rested there, like the weight of the air before a large storm.

"If I do, I'm not sure you'll find it very remarkable." Of course she wanted to be remarkable, but not on some false pretense. Still, even if there was precious little here to protect, Lotte was protecting it. She pushed herself back up to meet him face to face, worried at her lip as she considered that set of questions. Everything about having Alastor here interested her, there was no doubt of that. It probably made her far too agreeable - but the voice in her head that reminded her he was a demon was quickly hushed. They were acquaintances now, at least! Wouldn't it be rude not to give him a tour? She felt quite sure he'd do the same for her, after all, had she any inclination to bargain her soul away.

A part of her, less and less dusty the more that Alastor existed in her life, craved to see him move through the world. Would he interact with it as she did? Would the magic in the air bend and bow around him as it did her? He wasn't a witch, but he was more like her than anyone else she'd ever met, infernal or not. If Lotte, in her limited capacity and understanding of what it meant to be... this, could stand before a storm and rip from the very fabric of the air enough power to spare this place from death's blackened scythe, what could Alastor do?

It was probably not Lotte's place to even invite such a creature deeper into this world... but rules be damned. Lotte'd never learned a single one, she wasn't about to speculate on them now. The soft, hazy lines of the world under the spell of her hard-won libations had her feeling quite accommodating, anyway. And what kind of hostess would she be to refuse?

"But I'd be more than happy to show you around, if you'd like." Her eyes slid down to the circle on the floor, and she swayed a little as she contemplated the most pressing issue with this little plan, tapping the glass with a nail. "Well, except... I've honestly got no idea how to get you out of there."

[devildo]

What did remarkableness matter? Perhaps it mattered to Lotte, in her short life, to be remarkable. It didn't matter much to Alastor. What mattered to him was difference, which begat intrigue. A thing needn't be remarkable to possess those qualities. Hell was remarkable, for sure, but it was also powerfully dull. Anything Lotte could show him was scads apart from that.

His shadow misted up like seafoam, where her fingers reached out to touch it, prancing around her grasp in mid air, thin threads of sentient smoke. It licked at her fingertips and darted away again, as if shy, though it wasn't a shy thing, at all.

Its consideration, as always, mattered to Alastor. Its touching at Lotte's fingertips reassured him that he was correct, that he could step beyond the bounds of the circle, without ill effect. It went into the spaces between the floorboards because it was comfortable there, of course, but it also went, as always, to step in front of him and be sure that the way was safe. Without it, he would surely have fallen into many a dull or even dire situation, in times passed. While they were, in ways, the same creature, still he owed it his life for keeping the lookout for him. And it hummed now, through the static that surrounded him, that there was no magic here that would seek to obliterate or harm him if he chanced to move forward as he so desperately craved to do, like a fire in his blood.

And oh, he craved it. The desire bubbled in his blood like laughter, buoyant with the idea that she would recoil in alarm when it was finally revealed to her. He could imagine it now, the way her eyes would widen again like dinner plates, the way her pulse would dance in her veins like a caged thing, when she knew he was not, himself, so caged as she thought.

"Ah!" He exclaimed. "That's certainly no trouble! No need to worry yourself with that, dear, I've got it all taken care of. If you'll only step back -" He motioned with his hands, brushing towards her, to shoo her slightly away from him. "I'll take care of the rest."

Here, then, was the moment.

It was nothing for him, but he supposed it might be everything, for her. The urge was there, to raise his claws to the edge of the circle again, as he had on his former visit, but his shadow hissed at him that it wasn't necessary. This was the same magic, and he was as acclimated to it as he had been, before.

He need only take a step forward, and then another, narrow feet silent on the floor. And then he crossed it.

There was a wavering in his shape again, a shudder that ran through Alastor and shook his shoulders. He shivered and righted himself. Here, now, on the other side of the circle, standing on bare floor, Lotte was even clearer than ever, and his smile widened, ah, he was so pleased with himself. It comforted him, that pleasure, warm like a drought of hot cider pouring down his throat. He leered at Lotte with all his teeth on display. "Simple as pie," he assured her.

[americanvvitch]

There was a difference, between the Alastor that existed in the circle and the Alastor that existed outside its confines. A revelatory fact Lotte only became aware of as he took long strides forward and simply... passed through the barrier of the circle as if it weren't there. And to mortal eyes, it wouldn't appear to be there at all, but Lotte knew that it was. And she knew that what was inside it, wasn't supposed to move beyond it.

Or so she had thought, prior to this very moment.

The sound of her glass of whiskey as it clattered to the floor was background noise, no more discernible than the crackling of the fire. She couldn't even recall when exactly it had started to slip loose from her fingers, and she didn't bother scrambling to retrieve it. Lotte was frozen in place like a doe in headlights, stared with wide, awestruck eyes as Alastor became part of the world properly. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, very very far from the forefront at the moment, she'd wonder how much exhilaration a heart could take before it simply gave out, because she might be very well close to the limit, the way it rabbited wildly in her chest.

"Could you always do that?" Lotte took a step to each side, as if to check that he wasn't simply some apparition, but she found him to be wholly, entirely there. Standing in the middle of her home as if he'd walked in through the front door.

Though she hadn't realized it before, while confined to the circle there had been a sort of film over him. She had seen everything important - his eyes, his teeth, the crepe paper curl of his skin when he smiled too much, but not nearly enough. Like this, every thread of his tailored coat was visible, every strand of hair, the subtly worn leather on the tops of his narrow dress shoes.

It didn't escape her, now, that Alastor appeared quite pleased with himself, and so it wasn't hard to put together that he had clearly always been able to leave the circle, he simply hadn't wished to before this moment. Manners? A game? Lotte supposed it didn't matter. A girl couldn't very well invite a trickster into her home and then be surprised when tricks were played, could she?

Every inch of her burned with an intense, undeniable urge to touch him. Well, not like that. Not in any sort of inappropriate way, really, but simply to confirm what her eyes perceived. Lotte had never in her whole life touched another magical thing, and her fingers twitched around swollen but wretchedly empty air while her curiosity burned through her hotter and harder than the whiskey.

When she'd finished devouring each new detail of his sharpened image, her eyes found his again and she grinned, so very pleased at this turn of events now that the shock had worn off.

"If I had a mother worth her salt, she'd tell me to watch out for you," Lotte hummed, and it had precious little to do with the fact that Alastor was a demon. "Well then! You've seen the house... I suppose you're probably more interested in what's going on out here."

She turned and walked through the threshold, the only warm and golden thing in view once she'd left the cabin's hearth-lit haze. The horizon was inky black and indigo, the light struggling to pierce through earth strewn into the atmosphere for miles and miles, as far as the eye could see. The fields and fence lines that streaked across it were like bloody red gashes, festering and angry, battle scars haphazardly stitched back together after the storm.

Lotte stepped down off the porch, boots immediately sinking several inches into the dirt and sand that covered the ground. As she waded out into the land before the cottage, she glanced back at Alastor, ruddy skin and hair catching the light from the cabin. "What would you like to see?"

[devildo]

One of Alastor's ears cocked towards the floor and the sound of the glass clanking against it. How delicious, that sound; it was just as pure a sound of shock as Lotte could have made with her own mouth. It was the sound of Alastor affecting his surroundings without ever reaching out to touch them. The remainder of the liquid splattered across the wood, and his shadow reached out fingers from its places between the cracks, to soak up the whiskey. Waste not, want not.

Alastor's pupils were wide and dark, subtly spiraling in the yellows of his sclera, while he watched Lotte. He bent just a little at the waste, keening towards her and the sound of her frantic heartbeat. Just close enough that he could smell her more clearly, smell the dust that clung to her and shrouded the scent of her fear in a layer of earthy drabness. But he could smell beyond it, catch the scent of her pulsing blood. His nostrils flared, and his eyes fluttered shut for a beat.

"Not always," he said, with a wave of his hand, as if to say that it was nothing, surely not as remarkable as anything Lotte herself had done. But he thought what she said next was true - she should have been warned away from him. Someone should have loved her that much, but they hadn't. There was no one to raise her up without the desire for otherworldly things, and no one in her life now to warn her off what she'd done. No one to question whether summoning Alastor was a poor decision. This suited Alastor just fine. It might be the source of Lotte's eventual ruin, but it was to his own advantage.

He downed the remaining whiskey in his glass, and set it politely on the table, before he went to follow Lotte to the doorway. His shadow followed him, first picking up what was left of the girl's spilled glass, and place it likewise on the table. A polite guest would never leave such a mess.

Lotte went ahead of him quickly, and Alastor was in no rush, anyway. Hands clasped behind his back, he took the time to enjoy the leisurely pace of his walk from the table, through the doorway, into the slightly cooler air outdoors. Cooler, but no clearer. Worse, in that department, really. He lifted his hand, two fingers raised, and swirled them in a flourished, semi-circular pattern above his head. The dust came together in their wake, sucked up as if by a magnet, and cleared the air in a sort of bubble around himself and Lotte that extended several meters above their heads. It greatly improved the view of the night sky, at least to his eyes.

"Whatever you'd like to show me." His shoulders shrugged, and he meant what he said. He was quite amenable to anything Lotte might have wanted, him to see. "What are you most proud of? There must be something."

[americanvvitch]

Lotte felt more than saw the dust as it was pulled from the air, because the rush of clean air into her lungs was so entirely unexpected she choked on it. Her face tucked into her arm as she coughed hard, took a few deep breathes until her body acclimated to the thinness of clean air. She turned back to Alastor, following the line of his arm into the air and above, feet spinning her in a circle as she took in the air around them, clearer than it ever was, even before a storm. The next breath she took was sweet and full like fresh milk, and Lotte let her eyes slip closed as she took in the feeling of it all. The swell of her lungs, the coolness of the clear air against her outstretched fingertips, and she couldn't help the smile that spread over her lips.

He could say whatever he liked, everything Alastor did was much, much more than nothing at all to her.

Like this, the harsh lines of the horizon were even more visible, but no stars. There probably wouldn't be stars for a week or two, and they were one of the things Lotte missed most when they were gone.

Her arms fell back to her sides, and she turned to look at Alastor thoughtfully when he asked what she wanted to show him. What she was proud of.

Wasn't that obvious to a thing as clever as he was?

Lotte, filled to the brim with air and whiskey and delight at knowing something Alastor did not, enjoyed the ringing laugh that tore from her throat, "Well you've already seen that."

Her hands came to clasp behind her back, and she looked at him, let herself be well and truly pleased with the fact that he was here and she was the reason for that. That being here seemed to please him as well, for some reason she couldn't quite figure just yet. Wherever that led her, Lotte'd made the choice herself... and she loved herself for it, at least in this moment.

"It's you. I would have thought that was obvious."

[devildo]

Alastor could breathe as surely as anyone else, but it was a comforting habit rather than necessary for his continued existence. Watching Lotte take in the clean air caught him by surprise, served up a memory of what it felt like to be running, out of breathe, grateful and hungry for the relief of finally taking a clear breath when the pounding pace of his feet came to rest. Some elements of the memory were pleasant, others less so. It called to mind a million mundane moments, happy summers as a boy, sailing buoyant through the row of conjoined yards behind his mother's home, alongside other moments, fraught with panic and then the crispness of relief. And then others, when the relief never came.

But these things, even his own memories of panicked fear, washed over him and passed like the ephemeral things they were. Those things weren't worth remembering. What was worth it, were the moments where he knew he had felt as Lotte looked now, wholly human in a way that, while fragile, seemed blessed with possibility.

At first, when she said he'd seen it before, he wondered what she meant. Her house, perhaps? It was surely to be proud of in some small way, a place that he could feel in every board was her only haven in this world, the place that was the safeguard of her powers, smelling of herbs and woodsmoke, holding in its bowels a carefully curated collection of the belongings that enabled her to sustain herself, out here. That was something to be proud of, to live and grow and survive against the odds of the place and the will of the people around you. That, too, he understood. He would have found it an acceptable answer, but then, she continued speaking, and that wasn't so.

A shock rippled through him like a thin finger of lightning. This, her words, shouldn't be true, but the sincerity in them was unmistakable. The corners of his smile curled in a feline way, too sharply upturned for a human mouth. He tsked at her, his tongue clicking against his sharp teeth.

"That's a sin, you know," he told her. "To take pride in something you didn't create. Is that what you'd call me, my dear? Some creation you take the credit for?" He shook his head, but it was insincere mocking at best. His long shoes padded across the dry grass brimming with settled dirt, stepping towards Lotte and around her in a half circle. He adjusted his monocle and stared out past her, into the dust-shrouded dark. "Should a man be proud of himself for God's answer to his prayers?"

[americanvvitch]

Alastor approached, and Lotte felt that instinctual flash of tension that came from being a thing being preyed upon, when his footsteps traced that little half circle around her, cat-like smile carved into his expression. The sharpness of it made it look false, even beyond the exaggerated ways that every part of Alastor suggested something slightly more, or perhaps less, than human.

"Oh? Are you the answer to my prayers, then?" Lotte watched him, even as his own eyes stayed fixed on the horizon beyond her. Could it still be called praying when it was for a demon, for that matter?

Lotte was certain she was guilty of plenty of blasphemous things, her odd acquaintanceship with Alastor not the least of them. Some would happily say that her very existence was spitting in the face of God, that she was an abomination, unholy, profane.

"I'm sure I'll commit plenty of sins, and I doubt I'll apologize for most of them," she admitted. "I certainly have no intention of apologizing to anyone for bringing you here."

There were so many reasons she might have been proud of Alastor's presence here, but none of them included taking credit for him. No, to be that vainglorious was something even two very full glasses of very strong whiskey couldn't muster out of her. Lotte doubted she had it in her to dream up something like Alastor, anyway. He was so much more extraordinary than she'd expected, and so much more ordinary too. After all, what stood beside her was not some crazed, infernal beast, but a man. And as much as she was sure Alastor would have liked her to believe he was truly that wolf in sheep's clothing, he simply seemed far too... human.

That wasn't to say Lotte thought him gentle or domesticated by any means. Every invitation was the flipping of a coin, and there was no guarantee her luck would hold.

But there were moments - for every truly odd or supernatural thing Alastor did, he did something contrarily human. Whatever Alastor truly was, whatever he was made up of, at the core of it was something that had once been as much a man as she was a woman.

"I wouldn't presume to take credit for you, but there's some pride to be had in praying for what you want at all, isn't there?"

Her eyes followed his out to the horizon and Lotte grinned a little. "If you tell me you make a lot of return social calls to other witches, I'll be very down in the mouth."

[devildo]

People prayed for lots of things. What God sent was another matter. He surely didn't send demons, and didn't answer most requests, at all. It was up to creatures like Alastor to pick up the slack, to bestow the gifts God wouldn't, or was too busy to. There was not rhyme or reason he could see, to which prayers were answered by the Divine. It had nothing to do with the wickedness of the request, it seemed. He'd been called up by plenty of people looking for nothing more than an escape from a bad situation, a cure for some ailment. And plenty of others who never called him, who did receive these things from their God.

It seemed to Alastor that God was a fickle and capricious being who didn't operate within the bounds of any understandable rules. That was crass, if true. Alastor at least had the decency to hold himself to certain standards. That was more than he could say for the truth of God's involvement with the human race, as he knew it.

They were pathetic creatures, in need of care. Alastor cared for them, did he not? He came when he was called, he played by the rules, he kept up his end of the bargain, and the bargain was always clearly delineated, easy to understand, easy to consent to, or refuse. Was that not more benevolent than the whims of God? He thought so.

"I would very much like to hear you pray." He regarded Lotte from the corner of his eye, fire-read behind his monocle. She didn't pray. He couldn't imagine it, couldn't imagine her begging or prostrating herself. Wouldn't want to, anyway. It didn't really suit her. He would rather see her wreathed in frames, demanding. Taking what she knew she deserved.

"Can't say I do," he chirped with a little bounce in place. "But then again, the repeat customers are few and far between." Once you sold your soul, after all, what else was there to barter? People didn't think to offer anything less, most of the time. They went straight for the big sell, like it mattered.

He spun back around to face the house, a little swirl of dust kicking up from the ground and spinning around his legs. He pointed towards the near-buried garden. "Is that all you've got? Or do you have a real garden, 'round the back?"

[americanvvitch]

Oh but she was a heretic child, wasn't she? Of course she didn't pray. What would she pray to? If there was anyone up there listening, surely they wouldn't answer her. There was no church with a pew for her in it, no hymn that wouldn't turn to ash on her tongue.

No, Lotte didn't pray. She wanted things and she clawed and scraped them together from the earth and the air and made them into whatever she wished, whatever she could manage. The others here might have prayed to God, but it was Lotte that answered their prayers for the storms to spare them, for the illnesses to seep from their bones, for the land to yield what crops it could. A better witch might have been able to do more, but all there was was Lotte - for better or worse.

If God found his way to striking her down for her insolence one of these days, Lotte wouldn't cower then either, nor pray for mercy. She wasn't the one who owed some higher power an explanation for the state of things, or for the choices she'd made to survive this place. It was almost a shame she wasn't going to go to Heaven, now that she knew it existed, she had more than a few questions for whoever was in charge.

Alastor spun around and gestured back to the house, the pathetic, suffering tangle of branches that couldn't really count as a garden so much as a stationary tumbleweed.

"A garden?" Lotte laughed again, shoulders shaking as she trudged through the dirt toward the house, happy to show him. "I doubt there's a garden within a hundred miles of here. I don't waste what I can manage on myself, anyway, the crops get all my attention."

Around the back of the cabin were a few empty plant beds, where once a garden might have thrived, long dead and suffocated with sand.

"I wasn't always this bad with plants... but I don't know how to make something from nothing." Lotte put her hands on her waist, huffing a sigh. "Sometimes I wonder if it's just my own stubbornness. The magic's always been like that... if I don't want to do it, deep down, it won't come out."

She took another deep breath, savoring the smoothness of it and raised her hands up, spinning in place on her heel. No silt or sand hung in the air to rub her skin raw, but electricity still ripple in the air and it prickled and crackled around her fingers, danced in her hair. "I guess I'll find out. If it keeps getting worse, I'll either figure it out or we'll all starve!"

Her feet came to an abrupt stop, and her head gave a shake as she got her bearings back, before looking at Alastor, considering him curiously. "Is there anything you miss eating? Do you eat normal food or is it feasting on humans and all that nonsense preachers cry about?"

[devildo]

The tip of Alastor's claw tapped his bottom lip. His ears rotated owlishly out to either side, to listen past the left and right of Lotte's property. Only at the very edges of his hearing did Alastor begin to register sounds that indicated another human living space. The closest thing, as far as he could tell, was the business-he-didn't-know-was-a-fuel-station and its constantly creaking sign. It had to be a business, and not a home - both times Alastor had been here, the only sound coming from it was the creaking. No humans moving around, no conversations. It was past closing time.

Lotte had already been quite clear that no one came to visit, that no one was particularly interested in her unless they needed her assistance with them. She'd reiterated she had no friends or family to notice if anything here was any different than it had ever been. If the houses Alastor heard were as far away as they guessed (he could tell better if he started broadcasting and really felt for them, but there was no need), no one would pass by Lotte's by accident.

Having confirmed this to his satisfaction, he rounded back to Lotte, the tails of his coat flicking out behind him with a snapping sound. "You?" he laughed. "Only doing what you want? I can't imagine it!"

He watched her spin, a childish kind of delight flashing around her as sharply as the static in the air. Had she been alone so long she forgot how to do even this, to dance, to move for the joy of it? Humans lost what was precious to them so easily, they shed loves and simple joys and old familiar paths home from school and former favorite songs as easily as they shed hairs from their heads. It was wasteful.

As if he owned the place, Alastor gestured for Lotte to follow him and started walking along the side of the little house, to its back yard. While he walked (keeping a slow pace so that Lotte could traipse after him at whatever pace her current level of intoxication would allow her to), he answered her question, saying, "Miss it? Of course not. If I miss a thing, I just get!" One pointed finger punched into the air to emphasize this point. Self-deprivation, after all, was only another way of proving mortal moral superiority. In death, it was utterly useless. "I eat every day - it's unhealthy not to."

The back of the house was no better than the front. Gray, lifeless, otherworldly in a way that unnerved Alastor - the thick dust motes in the air, the silt piled up everywhere between the blades of yellow grass with broken backs, none of it was like anything he'd ever seen, on earth or in Hell. He raised both hands in front of him, at right angles to his elbows, the two fingers in the center of each hand slightly lifted from the others. "Tell me," he said, both to Lotte and to the dead grass, "what do you miss sinking your teeth into?"

[americanvvitch]

Lotte just gave a mirthful shrug at Alastor's little jab about doing what she wanted. Why should she do anything else? When, as he so aptly gleaned, no one was very interested in her well-being or what she wanted. She wasn't here by choice, after all, and no one else was going to care what she wanted or how she felt. That was Lotte's burden and bounty to shoulder. Which meant, as far as she was concerned, she could do as she liked.

And really, she had tried at first to save the crops and the land, but her family had sold them a young, untrained witch. Lotte had barely been an adult when she'd been brought here, and she'd raised herself the way she knew how, only the tenants of magic to guide her.

Nothing was given without something being taken in return.

She followed Alastor back behind the house, gliding through the sand rather than trudging (because she felt very wonderfully light and fluid anytime she moved at the moment) and wondered what it would be like to simply have anything she wanted, at any time. If that was part of being blessed with infernal magic, she could see the appeal. After all, Alastor didn't have to give up his soul or blood for each and every whim - he wouldn't have any left if he indulged every day, as he claimed. Lotte noted he didn't go into what exactly he indulged in, but she figured it was better to let that lie. It was enough of a mystery to wonder what he'd done with that blood of hers. There were the obvious suspicions, of course, but not having a real answer was fun. Something to chew on when she didn't have anything real to chew.

Everything looked the same as it always did after a storm - gray and still. The sand would blow away, sucked back up into the air to form some other storm that would hit, again and again until it obliterated them all, eventually. For now, Lotte wouldn't give this wasteland the satisfaction of erasing her along with everything else. There was more for her out there, and it had never felt more clear than with Alastor standing at her side.

"Everything." Lotte grinned, looking up at him with a sharp hunger. That wasn't a fair answer, of course, and Lotte was reasonable. If, as it seemed, Alastor was poised (quite literally) to bestow some gift upon her sad little garden, she might as well ask for what she wanted. "Apples, tomatoes... strawberries."

[devildo]

Fair answer or not, Alastor chuckled, his nose twitching like a rabbit's for a moment. If Everything had only been a real answer, he could have snapped his fingers and made it so, littered the earth as far as her eye could see with every dish he could think of. That would be shocking, but...dull. A cheap party trick, useless in every conceivable way, since such an amount of food could never be eaten by one woman with no icebox, anyway. Besides, most of the time, that sort of thing was half illusion. No one would ever bother to try and eat every food you could think to conjure, so half of them needn't even be real.

This place, to be frank, needed something real. It was rare that Alastor got to do anything sturdy and simple, anymore. He could have made it happen with the blink of an eye, but he wriggled his shoulders, and turned his palms over, pointing those slightly extended middle fingers towards the ground. Far, far below, deep into the ground, the tendrils of his shadow and his much-less-visible infernal energy groped for water. It was deep, but it was there. His fingers curled towards his palms, drawing it forward and amplifying what was there.

"Trees," he said, "some old busybody will notice." A tree didn't leave quite enough room for reasonable doubt. Not a tree large enough to grow apples, anyway. If he was going to bother making something, it ought to at least get some use before it was stolen from or chopped down for its clearly unnatural nature. A garden, though? Someone could have simply not noticed that, before.

He took a deep breath, leaned forward, and blew. It wasn't forceful, but long, far surpassing any amount of air a human could have held in their lungs. The movement of air rushing forward cleared not just the atmosphere for several yards outside of the bubble, but all the dust from the grass below them, which was steadily livening, knitting itself together, blushing green. The dust vanished, when it was blown away - a cloud at the end of the yard, and then nothing. It wasn't piled up anywhere, wasn't floating higher into the atmosphere, simply wasn't there, anymore.

Alastor straightened, and looked back at Lotte, his hands briskly turning upright again, and flicking towards him at the wrists. In the instant his wrists snapped up, so did two neat, mounded rows from the earth (rich, dark now, full of moisture and all the things plants needed, to thrive), and from these mounds coiled the pale shoots of infant vines. "Now, a few tomatoes? No one will see that." The shoots continued to climb steadily out of the ground, the bright, hard bulbs of unripe tomatoes beginning to pop from them now and swell, turning redder by the second.

[americanvvitch]

Indeed, Alastor had been about to do something, but Lotte found herself just as interested in watching Alastor perform magic as she was in the potential of something other than a boiled potato. The way his hands moved, and the way he simply willed things in and out of existence. Lotte felt something shift the earth deep, deep below them, and she felt, too, the way the sand simply ceased to exist. Unlike the barrier that shielded the town from storms, which simply dispersed the energy and force of the sand, Alastor simply rid himself of it entirely.

Her eyes were so fixed on the curl of his fingers and the flip of direction of his palms, the flick of his wrists that it took her a moment to realize something had been pull up with the motion. Her head snapped back to the garden where thick, black, wet soil was bubbling up from the ground, followed soon by sprouts and branches that peeked forth from the dirt. The grass around them, too, began to color and Lotte turned in place, watching the world come back into color around her.

There were likely more than a few witches and wizards in the world that would have been envious, taken offense, that Alastor had this power and they did not. But what did it matter who wielded the power, really? Alastor's hand had done it, but Lotte had brought him here no differently than he pulled these vines up. Together, now, the first living thing that had graced this land was blooming before their eyes. Lotte felt no envy or jealousy, only the thrill and satisfaction of creation.

She looked up at him, eyes brimming with life and possibility and all the things she couldn't help but feel whenever she looked at Alastor, before taking a step forward and sinking down onto her knees in order to lean in and take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of fresh soil and the savory tang of the tomato leaves. Her herbs and spices were all long dried, meant for spells... but this was life, pure and simple and real beyond any shadow of a doubt.

The tomatoes continued to swell, bending the branches of their vines as they matured until they were ripe and red. Lotte gripped one and picked it, the long forgotten snap of freshness ringing through the air, and it made her laugh. She wasn't even sure why, really, but it didn't delay the first bite or the flood of ripe juice that spilled into her mouth and down her chin. The rolled sleeve of her dress was gladly sacrificed to wipe her chin clean, before Lotte rolled back onto her heels and tipped her head up as she swallowed, savoring even the tiniest sensation that came from eating something fresh and healthy and good. There wasn't a honey cake in the world so satisfying as that first bite of tomato.

Lotte hummed, holding the tomato in her palm as she considered it. "They never tell you whether or not Eve regretted eating the forbidden fruit." Her fingers pressed into the flesh of the tomato, watching it drip down her wrist. "Probably cause they don't want anyone to know that she didn't."

A grin crept across her mouth and she stood up, taking another bite before turning to him.

"Can we make strawberries too?"

[devildo]

Once, magic was something Alastor was required to practice. Something that came from outside of him, for which his body was a conduit. (This was not the say that the human body was not innately holy on its own - it must be, to conduct power beyond itself.) When he was saddled with this, with being ordinary, there was an ache that came with the completion of his spells, a feeling of letting go, of being unable to do (or go) farther. After a point, the success of what you'd sown was up to the power of something much greater than you were, by far. That never fully sat right with Alastor.

Of course, he denied it, when he was living. It would have been sacrilege not to, and more importantly, it would have been disrespectful to his mother, who did her best to teach him everything she knew, and the best to instill in him a proper reverence for the earth and for every living person who walked its paths before him. He never told her, never revealed the truth of how he felt, because what would it do, besides hurt her? In some way, perhaps, this was why Alastor eventually took his fate into his own hands.

Because the type of magic that relied on something else to bring it to its conclusion was not enough.

It was nothing like Alastor's magic now, that was for sure. This came from inside himself, seeped from his very pores, was now embedded in every cell of his body, in a way it never was, when he lived. It was as if life, itself, had been traded for raw force. This, the instant conjuration of something so benign, so nothing, at the end of the day, as a few tomato plants, was infinitely more to him than any working he'd ever been a part of in life.

His eyes narrowed, and his fingers tightened, his grip on the air strangling the ether pressed between his fingers, while Lotte sank to the ground and bit into the tomato. In the moonlight (now visible and silver, cutting and cold, in this dust-less bubble around them) highlighted its color and tinted it the ruddy-black of blood, in the dark. If not for the seeds sliding haphazardly down one side of Lotte's chin, caught in the elbow of her soiled dress, it might have been too easy to imagine it was a heart she sated herself on, arterial blood that dripped down her chin and stained her pale throat.

Alastor cleared his, one loose fist coming up to his mouth, to cough politely. "Hm," he said, "if that's what you wish. I think you're onto something, about Eve. They won't tell us a thing about her, either!"

He shrugged - he wasn't truly convinced Eve was ever a person who existed, anyway. If she was, wouldn't she be down in Hell, too, with all the other fools who were only doing what God asked them to? If she was, he'd never met her. His fingers, pointed now like a pistol, flicked out from his body, and in their wake, two of the tomato plants folded over on themselves, disappeared under the earth for a moment, and with another flick of his wrist, reappeared - this time as strawberry plants.

These plants popped up in kind, extending a few more feet down the yard, until there was an equal number of each type of plant. "How's that?" he asked, watching her keenly, waiting for that new burst of juice to wet her face.

[americanvvitch]

A quick flick of his wrist, a change in the position of his long, clawed fingers was all it took for tomatoes to disappear, immediately replaced by strawberries to Lotte's utter delight. Lotte finished the tomato, strolled over to the strawberries and plucked a few, looking them over. Perfectly red and ripe... "I would think scripture has to rely on not telling you a good deal of what really was or is. Too much knowledge and you start to wonder what else you're not being told."

Her teeth sunk into the plump strawberry, so ripe the juice flooded her mouth and coated her fingers, and Lotte had never been so pleased to feel a mess. Maybe she'd simply never felt this pleased at all! She swirled each finger in her mouth to suck them clean once she'd swallowed the fruit itself, perfectly careless about the traces of red liquid that stained her lips and rested in the little upturned divots at the corners of her mouth.

"You remain, far and away, my favorite thing I've ever done." She hummed cheerfully, a well-earned, genuine admiration in her tone along with that liquored smoothness, that tipped up as a bright grin split her face. He was very impressive. The concept of magic like this would have been beyond her imagination a few weeks ago. Yet here he was, conjuring things left and right. And he hadn't asked for a single thing in return, this time. "I bet you really could bring this whole place back to life like it was nothing if I asked you to."

Lotte plucked a few more tomato leaves, taking in the spice of their scent as she walked back over to him, turning on her heel to stare at the garden she'd come into possession of with a little wobble. Truth be told she was tempted to eat every single piece of fruit this very instant but she was used to eating so little it, in combination with the whiskey, might have made her sick.

"Alastor..." Lotte began, then paused, swaying a little as she considered the tomato leaves. "Why did I get you? When you came that first time, was it dumb luck? Or did you choose to come?"

[devildo]

Ripe as they were, those berries would stay that way for days, untouched by time until just a little too far past their natural inclination. And new ones would sprout where the stems were empty, over and over again just a little too fast, until the first frost of the winter. By then, if she had any sense about her, she would have canned them, and Alastor thought of her next spring, opening those jars, inhaling the scent, thinking of him.

And where would he be, then? Precisely nowhere, uncorking those bottles of her blood and doing the same. Or perhaps he would have slurped them down by then, and this would only be a memory, like so many other strange and pleasant moments in his life, which were too few and far between. Hell was so strange, in such a particular way, all of the time. It didn't hold any of the mystery the living world did. It wasn't nearly so unpredictable.

He watched Lotte's fingers disappearing into her mouth, a move that should have seemed pointed, lascivious, uncomfortable. Maybe it was meant to be, how should he presume to guess? But coming from her, it only looked as innocent as everything else she did, innocent in how genuine it was. She was really enjoying herself to that extent, the extent that she didn't care how she looked, or perhaps didn't even notice it. That was something. That was a kind of wanton abandon you never saw in Hell.

"I could," he purred, his smile close-lipped and coy, his eyes a little narrowed, the corners curling and feline, again. "I could do anything you asked me to, and then some. I'm remarkably cunning. But then, so are you."

He considered her question, curling his tongue around itself inside his closed mouth, his cheeks sucking in as he did so, the hollows beneath his cheekbones darkening to bruisey, unearthly depths. In truth, he didn't know the answer any more than Lotte did. The question was, whether or not to admit that. But he'd already promised her he was no liar. "Who can say?" he asked her, with a shrug. "I was minding my own business, enjoying my fireplace, you know, and then I saw you."

[americanvvitch]

Lotte considered what that could mean, pure chance that they were connected, or something more? Of all the demons that played this game, Alastor had come to her, and they got on so well! Lotte hadn't specified what or who she wanted to call, but she wondered if there wasn't something about them that rang on the same wavelength. A reason why they'd locked in on one another. Perhaps Alastor was as lonely and bored as she was. Otherwise, why would he have time to come and pay her calls?

Or perhaps he simply wanted more than what the world around him had to offer. Lotte couldn't imagine that hell could be boring, but it seemed possible that it could have been as mundane to him as this place was to her.

"Am I cunning?" She hummed and turned in a circle, letting the leaves flutter to the ground and watching them as they did. Cunning was not how she would have thought of herself - after all she had no ulterior motives in calling Alastor, or allowing him to do this work. She had no grand design. Her want came and went and she indulged it if and when she was able. More so now than she might normally have, but what could it hurt? A little whiskey never hurt anyone.

"So all this... is this to tempt me to use you for something with a little more grandeur?" After all, it would make sense if he wanted to more to do.. wanted more from her. Be that blood or a soul, though to his credit he wasn't pushy. In fact, given her current state of inebriation, he was being quite the gentleman.

Lotte walked a few steps away and then turned back to him, hands clasped behind her back. Her chin stuck up a little and she smirked back at him, teasing. "If you want more blood you can just ask me, you know~"

[devildo]

Alastor raised his hand in front of himself, palm facing Lotte, and shook it lightly from side to side, in time with the shake of his head. "No, no," he assured her, "I would never presume to impugn on a lady's honor like that. Nor at all, in fact!" His smile opened up, brightened. This was the truth of both matters - if she wanted to sell him anything, be it her blood or her soul, she would have to want to do so for herself. It was a dime a dozen, crossing paths with those who wanted to sell. That wasn't worth anything, for as often as Alastor saw it.

Not, of course, that her blood was worth nothing. The way he kept it, like a precious thing, impossible to replenish, indicated otherwise.

"But say," he said, gesturing widely to the space around them with open arms, "Say you could have anything you wanted. What would you have me do? Mend this whole place, take you out of here, smite the ones who wronged you?"

He smile narrowed, turned sly. "Surely there must be someone. Your parents who won't write, perhaps?" And they weren't here, so that would be a new adventure, in itself. He spun on his heel and turned to walk the length of the row of plants he'd called up, running his hand through the air above them, fingers outstretched. The reverberation of their life force hovered in the air, rising with the warmth it possessed, to touch his fingertips. The earth was supple, now, beneath his feet, and his shoes sunk into it with every step.

"Tell me," he mused, bending to touch the plants he'd created. Touching them sent a little thrill through him, even though he could only just feel the texture through his gloves. "Let's play a little game, again, shall we? I'll ask you something, you can ask me. What did they do to you?"

[americanvvitch]

"Mend this place...." Lotte sighed and swung her arms around her. "But this place is so awful! And if I were going to kill someone... well, I think I'd want to do it with my own two hands... or at least my own magic. I can't imagine the reward is as satisfying when someone else does the dirty work," she purred.

The bitter, ragged rage of her parents' carelessness had haunted her for a long time, slowly dulled and smoothed out by the endless barrage of sand and silt. Still, somewhere deep down, it smoldered, awakened now by Alastor's query.

"What did who do to me?" Lotte watched him walk the rows of plants, touch them, saw them respond to their creator in turn, the way they arched toward him, the source of his power.

She walked along with him in parallel, boots kicking up the dust as she looked up at the sky. "My parents? They used me happily to keep their own little village alive, tending to their crops, making them remedies. It wasn't hard, the area wasn't hit nearly as badly as this place. They ended up with an excess of crop just as all the prices dropped... wheat that should have sold for sixty cents a bushel selling for ten, maybe... and then what else of value did they have other than their darling, witch child to sell at that point?"

Lotte dug her heel into the sand, crushing something under her boot that couldn't have been seen by the naked eye even if it were truly there.

"They told this town that the surplus was all my doing, that I was a miracle worker... when they came to collect me, my parents hadn't told me a thing. Dragged me out of my bed in the middle of the night with only the clothes on my back and shoved me into the back of a truck. They were kind enough to send most of my journals and supples for spellwork with me. No goodbyes. Just let me scream and scream and cry until I was out of sight."

Whenever she thought of it, Lotte felt a fire build up in her that was hard to tame. The very tips of her fingers began to turn black, and she held them up as little sparks of flame spit and hissed around her nails.

"I tried to escape more than once. State troopers kept bringing me back. They locked me in this cabin, nailed the shutters and the door closed, for about a month until I gave it up. Threatened to tar and feather me, burn me at the stake... throw me to the witch hunters to be kidnapped and raped if I tried to run off. 'Course they wouldn't. Witches are expensive... I'm too valuable to give away, but I didn't know that then. And I wouldn't damn another poor girl to live here now."

Her fingers curled closed and she extinguished the flames, smoke curling up from her hand. No one was going to touch her with lust or threat of violence. She'd made that clear early on.

"My parents did send a letter once! I threw it into the stove without opening it, and I'll likely sentence them to a similar fate if I ever see their faces again." If she saw them again... who knows what urges might overtake her good nature. Lotte looked over at him, still burning up with righteous anger, a want for vengeance deep in her belly.

"But if I could have anything... I'd go far away from here. Somewhere lush and brimming with life and magic and things like us! If such a place exists." She exhaled, could almost feel the ash and smoke seep from her belly full of embers and hot coal. "My turn! Who were you when you were alive?"

[devildo]

Well, Alastor wanted to say, but didn't, this place may be awful, but Lotte lived here. So what did it matter that mending it would affect other people, who didn't deserve it? If a person had to live somewhere, they may as well enjoy it. And so he watched her, bemused, his hands once again politely folded behind his back, while his shadow reached out to investigate each leaf of the plants he'd brought to life, in turn. Slowly, as it moved its way down the line, each leaf was gently flicked and raised, caressed by the darkness that emanated from him, and determined worthy the continue on. In one place, his shadow sprung fingers, and dipped into the dark and fragrant earth, feeling it out, nudging at the depths of the strawberries' roots.

"Yes," Alastor did say, toeing through that same dirt. He kicked at it gently, with the pointed toes of his shoes, upturning it in bumpy little rifts. Hell was all pavement, nothing you could sink into like this. Hell smelled like the exhaust of a thousand cars, a thousand bonfires, which at times had its appeal, but it was nothing like this, the dense, dark softness of fertile soil. "Your parents."

And she answered him, and he nodded along, made soft sounds of agreement where it was appropriate to do so. It wasn't until she mentioned the state troopers that he bristled, looking up from the plants to try and meet her eyes again, only to find that they and her fingers were dark. His nerves sparked, hair stood on end along his spine, to the carefully concealed tail beneath his jacket, which bristled at the thought of Lotte in the back of the paddywagon like some common criminal. What had become of this earth, while he was gone? What good could he have done, if he'd never left? He never had such cause to wonder about it as he did now, looking at her, knowing that what she said was so far out of line with what was fair.

His eyes followed the plume of smoke from her fingertips, into the sky, gently polluting the clean bubble of protected air around them. If he could have blown it away, without seeming disrespectful, dismissive of her magic, of her emotions, he would have. But her emotions were hers to feel, they were not Alastor's to take away, nor to try to unburden her.

"I know a place," he said. He was watching her intently, bright eyes glowing red and fixated on the blackness of Lotte's fingertips. "I was born in New Orleans, it's beautiful there. You'd love it! Not a speck of this dust in sight." Quite the opposite - the air there was warm and wet. At least, it was as he remembered it. A momentary streak of panic ran through Alastor when he wondered if, somehow, against all odds, his home had lost itself to some similar fate as this place, in the decade he was gone. "I was myself," he told her.

And that was true. Was anyone not? Dying didn't make you any less who you were. "I owned a bar, you know, when that was downright illegal. They never did catch onto me for that, I was quite selective about my patrons. If I said I could take you away, would you do it? Answer me, and it's your turn."

[americanvvitch]

Alastor's eyes were on the blackened tips of her fingers, and she followed his gaze to stare down at them. Lotte had long thought it an omen of her eventual fate - fire or hell or some similar type of inferno. A warning against the consequences of her own actions, but she had no proof in support or argument of that theory. No one had been around to tell her why they turned black or how, after all. It didn't happen with normal, everyday magicks. The inky blackness only crept onto her skin when she was angry, and only ever in this way.

"New Orleans?" The name slipped out, repeated after Alastor uttered it with no shortage of curiosity. She'd heard of it, seen it mentioned in journals as a hub of great magic along with places like Salem... somehow it seemed fitting Alastor was from a place like that (not that she had any real idea what a place like that was like, really). Why, she couldn't say, but it would have surprised her to hear he was from some nowhere little town like her. There was a style to him, something that could have been honed, perhaps, but not learned. Not the way it dripped from him, even in quiet spaces where a conman or someone putting on an act might not have thought to fill.

As soon as she'd digested that fact, Alastor dangled another before her, and though it was clearly meant to dodge her actual question, she couldn't help but take the bait.

"You owned a bar during prohibition. In New Orleans." A brow quirked, and Lotte grinned a little. "Sounds dreamy."

Eras and decades were defined by their highs and lows and prohibition, the roaring twenties were probably no different. Day to day life for most people was somewhere in the middle, no doubt. Still, Lotte imagined what a time it must have been, to have been old enough to enjoy the way the world changed. Alastor must have had a front seat, which was plenty to chew on by itself, but it also gave her another interesting bit of information about Alastor - he wasn't all that old, for a demon, anyway.

Lotte was quiet as she considered the question asked with his turn, watched the black seep away from her fingers like ash blown away from a hearth, like the dust Alastor had cleared from the air.

Her eyes met his again, crimson red and glowing, staining the air around them like blood in the water.

"Leave here with you? I'd do that in a heartbeat." It wasn't a hard choice. Lotte had dreamed of escaping every night since she'd arrived.

Her turn.

"What did they catch onto you for?" He had said no one found him out about the bar, specifically, which seemed to imply he'd been found out about something else.

[devildo]

With her own two hands, Lotte had said, a moment ago. Alastor thought of it, as he looked at her darkened fingers. The soot-blackness of them wrapped around the throats of her oppressors crept into his mind, and he wondered if she'd really have the mettle. Could she, truly, squeeze until there was no squeezing left, until muscle and bone and skin compressed together so tightly that nothing could get through, until she and her victim were one, the impression of their throat imprinted on her fingertips as surely as those fingertips were imprinted on the throat. He pictured them, dark like this, against the pallor he imagined her parents to possess.

"Hm," he trilled, eyes tilted skyward, no longer actually focused on Lotte herself, so much as the image in his mind. She was speaking, he heard her, but he was looking at something that wasn't there.

And then he became too aware of it, and leveled his gaze back on her, over the rim of his monocle.

"Ah," he said, "a dream itself is but a shadow, dearie, there's nothing to it. This was real, better than that." What good were dreams, anyway? They ended quicker than anything, all created and destroyed in an instant. The better thing, by far, was to live a life you chose for yourself, create a paradise you could wake to, not one you need escape to, in sleep. He'd done that. He'd done that he thought, in bitterness, his fists clenching at his sides, his fangs baring.

"Dreams are stuff and nonsense - you know that's true, or you wouldn't say you'd go with me." And she wasn't lying, he didn't think so. For better or worse, he trusted that she'd said she, too, was no liar.

But liar or not, she certainly was curious. Alastor paced around the row of plants, back to Lotte's side. She looked ordinary again, but no less entrancing, with her fingers returned to their usual color. He was almost grateful - if she'd gone on looking too strange, he might have doubted his own senses, believed himself in Hell still. "Nothing you need to worry yourself with," he told her. "Suffice to say you can only kill so many people, unnoticed."