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americanvvitch) wrote2020-08-22 09:58 pm
americanvvitch) wrote2020-08-22 09:58 pm
Entry tags:
continuation for devildo || its terrible potential has begun
[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?
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?
no subject
"What do you know about what I'd find interesting?" Alastor drawled. She was wrong, of course; everything about her was interesting, and he found it the opposite of that, quite boring in fact, that she didn't know that.
Any burn Lotte sustained would find itself healed by morning, too, but Alastor didn't feel the need to betray this information. He sighed and stretched, rolling his shoulders, looking as much as he could the picture of disinterest in the whole tableau before him, this pitiful room full of pitiful belongings. The bed he had no need (in his estimation) to rest in.
"Show me," he insisted, meeting Lotte's lean with one of his own, until their noses were too close and the whole shape of his smile was surely mangled in her vision, askew and impossible to look straight at. The smell of her blood and sweat and heat-ruptured skin bubbled up to him - he inhaled deeply, his eyes fluttering shut for a beat.
She was right that he could wait, but he was choosing not to. "Show me, and I'll go to sleep. I'll be perfectly content."
no subject
She'd really have to deal with this development and soon. Lotte steadfastly reminded herself that Alastor only seemed so interested in order to avoid going to bed. And that just wouldn't do.
But first, there was the more pressing issue of getting a particularly ornery demon into said bed.
"I highly doubt you've ever been content, Alastor."
She leaned back a bit, heaved a long-suffering sigh, "but if you insist and it'll get you to sleep a little, I'll appease you."
Lotte turned and walked away from him, and she could feel her hair catch against the fabric of his shirt at his shoulder as she did. A few steps took her to the center of the room and Lotte grasped at the circular latch that sat atop the door leading to the small cellar underneath the cabin. It took a few pulls to wrench it up, and she descended the stairs, conjuring a bit of flame in her hand to light the way.
From the depths of the cabin appeared half a dozen jars of strawberry jam as Lotte lined them up along the mouth of the basement's opening.
The next item that appeared was a jar about half the size, covered in sigils, and filled three quarters of the way full with Lotte's blood.
She finally appeared herself a moment later, a sharply curved sickle grasped in her hand. Lotte climbed back up the steps and pushed the cellar door closed, setting the sickle on the table.
"...I may have downplayed the level of interesting here, come to think of it," Lotte hummed, looking the sickle, back at the jar of blood and then finally up at him. chuckling a bit.
no subject
Oh, he could see it. He didn't need to smell it, though he could do that quite well, too. The thrumming pulse of Lotte's blood was so palpable, quick, where it rose to the surface and coloured her skin. Even so close, her features unfocused and hazy in his sight, Alastor could see that.
When she moved away, the glimpse was all the better. Intense, vibrant, the flush of her cheeks nearly matching the crown of her hair. "Haven't I?" His voice was a purring trill of elation, a thrum that matched the heat of her face. Oh, Alastor had been content. Perhaps never so much (or at least never greater) than now.
He straightened up again, sat at attention with his foot tapping lightly against the floorboards, while Lotte moved to the basement. The basement was a source of curiosity to him; his only real knowledge of it was that his shadow had deemed it Safe, for all the more that meant. With rapt attention and a hearty dose of amusement, he watched Lotte pull her belongings up from the depths underground. He would have loved to go down there himself but, well. That wouldn't be any more polite than rifling through the witch's dresser drawers.
"And how," he said, rising from the table. He took another cigarette from the case inside his vest as he crossed the room and crouched, sharp-kneed and long-limbed by the edge of the hole, looked down into the dark. "Say, what do you use this blood for?" She'd asked him, hadn't she? It was only fair. The flame on his fingertips sparked to life and a white plume of smoke unfurled into the gaping opening to the cellar.
no subject
Lotte had asked him, and also remembered quite well that he hadn't answered her. Still, she wasn't likely to get him to bed without a satisfactory response.
"Just when I need to give things a boost." Lotte explained, watching him. "Spells, hexes, sigils for the storms... protection."
She followed him back to the entrance of the cellar and sat heavily at the top of the stairs. "Never worked on plants, though. Not sure why."
The cellar wasn't particularly large or deep, and even in the dark the shallow stone walls were visible. Alastor's head might still have peeked out the opening, were he to stand at the bottom of it. There were a few handmade talismans, crafted with sticks and horse hair, animal bones and herbs that hung, along with a few pelts and half a dozen or so additional jars.
"You know, when I first called you up, I used it to paint a sigil on the ceiling of the cellar, under the floor boards. In case whatever showed up wasn't friendly... I left part of the circle open, so I'd have had to get down there to finish it." She leaned back on her hands, staring down into the darkness. The thrill of the not knowing, that night remained with her, even now.
"Not the most practical solution. I don't rightly know if it would have worked, either, but I figured it was better than nothing. That sickle always scared off any men who came sniffing around well enough, but I didn't know how it'd fare against a demon."
Things would be different now, wouldn't they. No more having to scare drunk men off her land, threatening to gut them with that sickle. Holding up afterward and praying they didn't come and burn the place down around her.
"Figured I'd bring them both. Proof of the past once this place is long behind me."
no subject
If these things were his own to touch, Alastor would have gathered them all up, left nothing pertinent of himself behind. But if Lotte wished to do so, that was her business. He preferred this level of mystery to her, this unfathomable bit that he couldn't decipher, this odd lack of pride in her work, even when it was successful.
Perhaps he seemed more complicated, more valuable to her, than the work she'd done to protect this town. Or maybe it was only that she viewed him as the one thing she'd done for herself. A pity. Alastor itched to tell her that she could have done so much more here, if only she'd wanted it.
"Oh, they don't hold with that." The ripples of laughter kept bubbling up from him, fueled by the dizzying combination of frayed nerves, whiskey, and mania. "Plants want your light," he said, more reasonably, smoke curling from his mouth after a drag on his cigarette. "They're tetchy things, can't be reasoned with. Like you!"
His eyes sparkled; they might have spun, if he was in his right form. A wave of static rolled through his shadow, an echo of his own laughter. "I jest," he said quickly, a wave of his hand through the little smoke cloud lingering about him, before she could protest. "I should so love to see you threaten some wanton ne'er-do-well. That's no joke." If she thought he was lively with laughter now, it would be nothing compared to the sound he would make if some fool did chance across them while Lotte was armed.
no subject
Her brow quirked, and she opened her mouth very much prepared to protest before he waved it off with a laugh. All the gusto she'd mustered up in an instant, deflated. Lotte huffed out the breath she'd sucked in rather anticlimactically and ran her fingers through her own tousled hair.
"Well that explains it." She hummed, took in a breath of the smoke from his cigarette, thick and a little bitter. "Not sure I have much light to give, they must have known."
Giving light to something else probably would have required someone who hadn't spent the past five years stubbornly, angrily, bitterly keeping this town alive. It wasn't that she'd withered away here, exactly. No, she'd simply become something else. Something other than the girl that had been dragged her against her will but that still had hope. Anger, too, but hope that the sheriffs would understand she'd been kidnapped. That they wouldn't bring her back. Then, that if she was successful at working with the land, she could get away without having to run. That the men who dropped off her measly bag of potatoes or what have you wouldn't try to force the door open and overstay his welcome.
"You laugh, but what else could I do?!" Lotte protested, looking over at him and choking down her own creeping laughter. "I'm all alone out here! You think anyone would have cared if some man forced his way in here and did whatever he liked to me?"
She watched his eyes sparkle, with mirth and magic and more than a little bit of intoxication, found it hard to look away.
"The stupid ones don't understand magic, so it doesn't always scare them. But flying out of that door, swinging that thing around? That's a universal language!" Lotte scoffed, "Maybe I should have brought it along when I took you from the Queen. Could have saved us some time."
no subject
One day, Alastor thought, Lotte would hold onto that breath of fire and light into him. When it came, it would be delightful - and the more time passed without it, the more delicious when it came. He could spend years wondering when the moment would come, when her voice would truly raise, when her ire would stay in her voice instead of blowing itself out on a sharp release of breath.
Still crouched, he folded himself forward to peer as far into the cellar as he could, one last time, before standing. Could she have really gotten down there before he smote her, if he'd posed any threat that first night? He wondered. It would have amused him to see her try.
Unfurling himself from the ground, he crossed back to the bed and sat on its end, without showing any signs of the intent to rest. "No joke, didn't I say?" His palms spread in an exaggerated show of honesty. "I'm sure you were fearsome. I'd love to see you cut one down. Say, maybe we can arrange that."
Unlikely, of course, and a joke. He smiled at her and peeled his glasses from his face with his free hand, to rub the glass on the bedspread and clear some of the lingering dust from the road. "Not against the queen, of course. Just someone looking to make trouble. You wouldn't believe the types out there."
no subject
Lotte didn't move, but her gaze and chin followed after him as he moved back to the bed and sat down on it, looking more animated than ever.
"Don't tease me. I might have cut a man down for less. You don't really know, do you?" Lotte hummed, looking back down at the cellar.
Had Alastor ever actually asked her if she'd killed someone? She couldn't rightly remember, at this late hour after all the excitement of the evening and the several shots of whiskey they'd shared this evening. Maybe he had. Either way, the answer was the same.
She hadn't, but not for lack of wanting.
The only thing that had stopped her was the knowledge that she wasn't likely to escape retribution out here. If Alastor hadn't come, if she'd failed to pull up anything at all... in a few years, who knows what lengths she'd have gone to, to take back some of her power. Lotte wasn't sure she had many limits, if pushed to the brink. She certainly wouldn't spare a single crumb of pity for the type of people she'd been subject to here.
"Wouldn't I?" Finally, she pushed herself up and closed the cellar up, scooping the jars of preserves and her blood into her arms and carrying them over to the table. She wrapped each in some old newspaper she had stashed in a drawer before tucking them into her bag.... her eyes wandered to the sickle, but she left it out.
Just in case anyone came a'knocking for Alastor during the night.
"Sickles are very messy, though, you know. Would be an awful lot of cleanup to worry about in a city. Out here, the animals or the storms handle that for you. If you even find the body." Lotte sat herself in a chair and took hold of the dress Alastor had fixed once again, laying it out in her lap and brushing her fingers over it.
"Do you plan on killing people, once we're there? Making more deals?" She thought about how the red hadn't fully seeped out of his eyes when they'd been up close, how clear it was that this just a skin stretched over the thing that was Alastor, still nearly bursting at the seams. Lotte didn't rightly care if he did either, particularly, but she was curious what plans he had for himself now that he was free.
no subject
"Would you?" he echoed back, rhetorically. There were unsavory people everywhere, a curse of humanity, but there just weren't many at all, out here, so Alastor had a hard time imagining Lotte knew the full width and breadth of humanity's indecency. There were no cities here, no strong-armed criminals, no folks who made a career out of maiming any weaker thing they could get their hands on. Not to the scale one saw in cities, anyway. The victims were too far and between, out here. Pain was inflicted on those closest to these mundane criminals, their wives and children, mostly. Sometimes witches who roused their ire.
"True enough," Alastor agreed with a nod and a shake of his foot, dangling where it was crossed over his opposite knee. "But I know plenty of places to hide a body. It isn't only this grave of a place that's good for that." In fact, though he didn't doubt her estimation of the place, he imagined it only got by on its sheer vastness, unchartedness. Everything here was so flat and featureless, there weren't exactly many intentional dumping grounds, that he could tell.
But then, as he'd observed to himself so many times before, he didn't know much about this place. He was glad, in a way, not to know it.
At her question, his foot bounced again, and he sucked at his bottom lip, sliding his glasses back onto his nose. They were hardly necessary, anymore, but he didn't feel quite himself without them. "I don't suppose I have any need of that," he mused. Not to strike up any new bargains, anyway. And that wasn't to say that he wouldn't, only that if he did, it would be purely by his own devising. There would be no more calling him up from Hell against his will. He simply wasn't there. "But if a man wants killing, I suppose I'll have to oblige."
no subject
Lotte couldn't know the true depths of depravity that could exist in a place like New Orleans, she supposed, having never been there. Having never been much of anywhere. She knew cruel men, callous women, corrupt lawmen. The desperation that came with hunger and scarcity and the fear of an uncaring god. People out here killed each other, stole each other for anything that might help them survive. But in the end, that was part of why she hadn't just burned this place to the ground.
Humans were no better than animals, most of the time, when they were fighting for survival. The closest she'd come to malicious, intentional ne'er do wellers had been sad, angry, drunk men who thought they might take advantage of an unprotected girl. The witch hunters, too, but Lotte'd managed to avoid a skirmish with them. Each was a form of evil, to be sure, but if there were men that made careers out of evildoings, Lotte hadn't come across them.
The way Alastor said it, Lotte thought was rather like her asking about the houses in New Orleans. She'd simply have to see it, to believe it.
"An act of public service, hm? How very considerate of you. It appears I've done New Orleans a favor, unleashing you upon it once more."
Lotte draped the dress over the back of the chair again, before sliding around to face him.
"After that cigarette's out, I'm putting you to bed, just so you know. Consider this your fair warning."
no subject
Alastor leveled a challenging look on Lotte. Did the prospect of sleep bother him? Not really, he was more interested in the degree to which she meant to keep good on her threat. He was on the bed, technically near to position, but he wondered what she thought she could do to make him relent and take the rest his body was clamoring for.
"You have," he agreed, ignoring her second comment in reply, though not at all in mind.
"They were better off in my clutches." She might think it posturing, but it wasn't. This was his true belief, and he smiled around the cigarette between his lips, blowing out another puff of smoke that intensified the haze in the air. "You must think I'm evil," he said. "Demon does imply it, doesn't it?" That it did, but only to those who didn't know any better, those who were still alive. "I should say you're wrong, but I won't. You're free to think it. I've been nothing but rational and reasonable, in life or otherwise."
And if humans were not so intent on maligning one another, there would have been no need for him. Maybe that would have been better, on the whole. Maybe he would still be home and alive, or maybe he would have gone on to be with his mother, if he chanced to die. But they were, and he didn't. He longed to tell Lotte the whole story, it bubbled in his gut and he wondered if this was a true desire, or some whim of the fleshiness of his body.
no subject
Lotte stared back at him, unblinking, in answer to his challenge. He was limited in what he could do right now. How much, she couldn't say, but she was fairly certain between his more physical form and pure exhaustion she could wrangle him into that bed and keep him there if need be. Alastor liked games and technicalities - so she'd humor him for a bit longer - but seeing him so vulnerable at that crossroads... there was a gnawing instinct to care for him still.
Lotte perched an elbow on her knee and rested her chin in her palm, listening.
"I don't know that I think you're evil, no."
Perhaps she should have. A good girl would have, but a good girl Lotte was not. Of course she knew precious few details of Alastor's life when he was alive, so perhaps she was wrong, but murdering bad people didn't seem particularly heinous to her. That wasn't to say she could have done it herself. Killing a man in self-preservation or protection did feel different to her than killing someone who didn't pose a direct threat to her... but for every instance Lotte had escaped violence, certainly there were girls who had not. She thought it quite reasonable indeed, that such people be punished. Was that evil?
When the lawmen were complicit, or at best indifferent, who did people have to turn to but someone like Alastor?
"Then again, maybe you are. Maybe I am, too. The law usually falls woefully short of delivering justice to those who need it most. If murder creates a net good.." Lotte shrugged, "I can't find much fault in that."
"I actually like the idea I got to play a small part in it." What positive impact had she had on the world so far? What had she done, really, other than protect a few hundred people from storms for a few years? People no one knew, who wouldn't be remembered. What Alastor would do, though? That was something that could make a better, if bloodier, mark on the world.
no subject
Alastor chuckled and shrugged. "Free to think what you will," he repeated. She might not think it now, but she would, one day. If she didn't think it now, it was only naivety, he imagined. He'd proven he could do anything he wished, been transparent that he was a killer. There was nothing to think but that he was evil, in his own estimation.
Slow, he stretched himself out on the bed, though his legs still hung over the edge. He sprawled at an odd angle, his waist bent just a little too sharply, even in this form. The cigarette vanished in the air after one more drag, and Alastor sighed at the ceiling, before turning to Lotte again.
"The law doesn't have anything to do with it," he told her. "Plenty of lawmen are evil. You've seen that. The law is irrelevant to justice, you know." But he said this as lightly as if he were commenting on the weather, tapping his foot up and down, folding his hands behind his head, and turning back to the expanse of the ceiling. His shadow rose there like smoke, filling in the corners of the eaves.
"Evil is hard to judge," he admitted, through the faint haze of whiskey billowing around his too-human head. "You see yourself that way, you are. Others see you that way, well, that's less cut and dry, isn't it? They don't know you."
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Of course she was free to think as she would. Even Alastor in all his seemingly limitless power couldn't affect that. Lotte would do and think as she pleased, she didn't need his leave for that.
" I do know it." Lotte had said as much, hadn't she? She wouldn't have trusted any lawmen, even if her life depended on it, and she trusted the system in place to enforce or prosecute people in the name of justice even less. After all, a system developed and run by men was as susceptible to corruption as the man himself.
"Everything's subjective, anyway. There's always at least two ways of looking at anything. Those men that rove around hunting witches, the ones down south that hunt anyone with darker skin... some of them probably know what they're doing is evil. Some of 'em genuinely think they're doing the work of god." Lotte got up, walked over and poured them both another glass of whiskey. "And if you asked around here I can tell you what people's opinion about it would be."
She grabbed the glasses and made her way over to Alastor, handing him the glass before tapping them together and throwing her own back. It would have to be her last, or she might not be able to keep her head about her enough to get Alastor to bed.
"But somewhere else, somewhere in a bigger city, somewhere where everyone didn't look the same... it might be a different story."
Lotte leaned heavily against the dresser, holding herself up on it by her elbows as she looked at the ceiling.
"All you can do is what you think is right. You think it's right to kill a certain type of person, and I don't disagree with you." She shrugged, running her nail around the rim of her glass. "Whatever we are, we're probably going back to hell one of these days."
Her eyes slid down to him on the bed, and she huffed a laugh. "Well, I am anyway. Maybe you're not, now that I've gotten you out."
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The proffered glass was unexpected but welcome; Alastor propped himself up on one elbow to drink from it, listening to Lotte and nodding along with her as he did. Something about this felt familiar - not in the sense that time spent with the witch was familiar, but farther back. It felt like nights spent too late in the courtyards behind jazz clubs, like the last refrains of improvisational jazz filtering out to Alastor and his circle of friends, long after the dancing had ended.
He sucked down the whole glass and nearly floated up from his body. It was careful work to lay the glass itself back down on the floor. He managed, just narrowly, without knocking it over. His fingers were fuzzy. "Is that what you think?" There was no sarcasm in it, only genuine curiosity. He pushed himself up again, sat and looked square at Lotte with her pale and freckled skin. There was less stark a contrast between the two of them days ago, when he was fully demonic. "That they don't mind, in the city?"
Again, no malice, it was genuinely curious to him, to meet someone who was so...aware of her privilege, while naively assuming the danger to people unlike herself lessened, the farther one traveled from these boondocks. "What do you see when you look at me? I'd love to know." His fingers curled, drummed silently in the air, and paused tucked beneath his chin. "It's no different, in the city."
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The offering of another shot, now that he was horizontal (mostly) had been intentional and, frankly, calculated. If she couldn't get him to agree to sleep, the whiskey would help things along more naturally. The unfocused glint of his eyes, altogether different than the eerie spin from when he'd been an undead thing. More human. A little endearing, too, when combined with the careful way he set his glass down to ensure it didn't tip over or wobble.
Her face turned to him when sat up and - oh for fuck's sake. What did she have to do to get the man to stay parallel on that bed? Pin him there herself??
But she set that aside for the moment and looked at him, because it was an odd question to ask, unless there was something there to be uncovered.
And the more she stared at Alastor as this version of himself, the carefully styled wave of his hair, the tone of his skin, flushed with the appearance of life now but still a pointedly different shade than her own. There were hints, if one really looked. Would she have gotten there had he not led her so willingly, perhaps, perhaps not, but Lotte couldn't imagine how she'd missed it now and the realization was clear and bright in her eyes.
"Well out here you might have been drowned at birth, if you even made it out to begin with." Lotte lowered herself to sit against the dress, setting her glass next to his and pulling her knees in close to her chest.
"That's disappointing... I figured people there would be different. More tolerant, maybe." Lotte leaned her head back against the wood, looking at him. It certainly didn't change her opinion on him... if anything it was the opposite.
"Guess it's a good thing we're going back, then. Sounds like someone needs to teach them a lesson."
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Even if Alastor wanted to sleep, Lotte was simply too interesting to allow it. It was hardly his fault, was it, if she wouldn't stop saying things that sparked his curiosity, that begged another question, that made him want to reach out his thin fingers and grope inside her brain to see the way it all worked together, that wheel of naivety turning in time with that wheel of fierce fire that propelled her.
He chuckled darkly. "And how I'd love to see them try to drown me. All the better for them, if they had." Alastor's father, in his last days, said he regretted his son. And Alastor always thought that was quite a curious thing to claim, to regret the child, but not the action that begot it. As if it was the child's fault, somehow. As if it could have prevented the mistake of its own conception.
"Do you think," he asked, leaning intently towards Lotte, though his eyes were nearly back to swirling again, with the alcohol, "your parents made a mistake when they birthed you?"
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Lotte watched him lean in, amused. They'd had more to drink than this before, hadn't they? And yet she'd never seen him anything approaching drunk, but there was that telltale fuzziness in his eyes that said otherwise now. The whole thing ought to have been preposterous - here she was drunk in her home with a man - not so much as a man as a thing that looked like a man - talking about murder and race and all sorts of things she'd never imagined talking with anyone about. Yet here they were, oddly two of a kind in their own ways.
"I don't see how being born could be my mistake. Pregnancy could be a mistake, I guess, depending on the circumstances... but my parents did want a child. They just didn't want this child." Lotte sucked the remainder of the whiskey from her lower lip, still mulling over her answer.
"No." She sat up a bit, leaning into him as well. That fire was back in her eyes, and her fingertips felt hot, though even he wasn't sure if that was from the drink or her own power manifesting. "I think they made a mistake when they treated their child like chattel. It's just lucky for them I'm too far away to claim payment for that mistake in blood."
Lotte considered another shot, thought better of it before her fingertips reached the bottle.
"Thinking your parents made a mistake giving birth to you because you held them responsible for sins they committed against you after you had already been born...?" Lotte shook her head, messy curls bouncing around her. "No. Sounds pretty damn feckless to me."
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Against his better judgment, Alastor reached down for the bottle on the floor, and took a drink straight from it. Or rather, against any judgment at all; he didn't think about it, just did it. There was a heady indulgence in this, in deciding he didn't mind losing some of his faculties. And really, it made the rest of it more bearable. If he drank, he wouldn't notice the temporary weakness in his magic, the feeling that if something tried to break his body now, it might achieve its goal, if only for a brief period of time.
"It can be," he mused, his tongue briefly touching the mouth of the bottle. "It's all a choice, isn't it? Keeping a pregnancy, keeping a child alive. They're frightfully easy to dispense with, you know."
Tomorrow, things would be different. He would be strong again, less human than he was at the moment, and so that, the moment, felt like something to savor. There was only a slight paranoia bubbling in him that anyone would come for him soon. They were all compelled to finish their ride, and so he had the night. Nothing he did now mattered, and that was a freeing thing. There would be no one like Lotte to pull any of them from their horses, to give them the freedom to pursue him, if they even thought to dare. My, but how the queen must be fuming.
"Right you are," he agreed. "That's no small part of why I did away with my dear father."</p
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Lotte watched him navigate all the heaviness that came with being human, found it interesting to think about how he moved, how he handled objects like this rather than when he'd been fully something else, something a bit more infernal. It wasn't surprising that there was still a style to how he moved - she wondered how much of it was leftover muscle memory from being alive, or if it was just another sort of costume. Was this what he'd have been like, drunk and sluggish when he was just a human?
It was, at least, the closest she'd ever know to that version of him, and she committed each movement to memory, just in case it never happened again.
"Was he the first person you killed?" Lotte took the bottle from him, taking another small swig. Her lips covering the same glass his had moments ago, and when she licked them dry it felt some kind of intimate.
"How old were you?"
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Another thing to keep locked away in Alastor's mental file of acutely vivid mental images of Lotte: the way she held her poise as she drank, the way it never seemed to affect her. He was sure this was all carefully planned on her part; he saw that delicate sip from the neck of the bottle sliding down her gently pulsing throat. Ah, yes. Pulsing. He fixed his eyes on the beat of her heart there for a moment, his chin in his hand, his elbow on his knee, his lips smashed against his fingers.
"Twenty-three," he answered her in reverse. The number would always stick out in his mind. It was his favourite, he planned it that way. And he reached his slender fingers out towards her, wriggling them in the air for the bottle. She hadn't said she cared how he got to sleep, had she? That was her mistake.
"Yes." And he admitted, "I didn't plan a career of it - that would be silly." But once you got the taste for such things, it was impossible to rinse it out of your mouth, no matter what you drank, and how much. "I don't fancy myself silly. But I did it anyway. How's that for absurd?"
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Lotte rubbed her thumb over the curve of the glass bottle. She had little real concept of holding her liquor well - she certainly felt drunk, like the world was warm and fuzzy and a little less hard than usual, but she didn't feel as slow as Alastor looked to her, despite the fact that she'd gone through as much physical exhaustion as he had. Or nearly. Drunk felt to her like being curled up on something soft near a fire, like the pleasant burn of the sun when walking along the black asphalt on a warm day, prickling just underneath her skin.
Even back then, when she'd summoned him after having a few drinks of the whiskey, she'd managed to keep her wits about her and her feet planted under her firmly. They'd made a whole deal, like that, hadn't they? The idea of being better at this rather mundane thing than him was funny somehow, and a snicker slipped out from her as she passed the bottle back to him.
"Planning a career as a murderer doesn't seem very silly if you discover you're very good at it," she pointed out.
Lotte leaned back against the dress, curling her palm around her neck and rubbing a bit of soreness out of it.
"Speaking of, I think I'm better at drinking than you." She didn't bother hiding the grin that accompanied that assertion.
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"How would you know," he asked with a coy glint in his eye and a curl of his lips, "after one go of it?" And that was as true of murder as of anything else, Alastor thought. One success could be pure luck, nothing at all to do with your skill. In most hobbies, most professions, there were ample texts to study, degrees to be had, mentorships to take on. If you happened to discover your calling was to rid the world of men who never should have graced this earth in the first place, where were you to go?
There were no signposts, no guides.
Alastor laughed at that, on the tail end of another drink from the bottle's mouth. He could almost taste Lotte there, now, he thought, and he pressed the back of his hand to his lips, to stifle any further cackling, so that he could get his words out. "I think not. I'll show you up soon enough, you've caught me at a disadvantage. Is that honorable? I don't think so."
He hoped she enjoyed this, this ephemeral and false sense of having the upper hand over him. It was false enough that he could find amusement in it, rather than alarm. She couldn't really harm him, nor could she really outdrink him, if he was in his proper faculties. He shrugged and handed the bottle back to her. "But I don't mind."
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Lotte wanted to like his laugh less than she did, desperately, but that ship had well and truly sailed, lost at sea as soon as it tore from him. There was a hopeless effort on her part to ignore it as she took the bottle back and wrapped her lips around it, let the liquid slide down her throat and sit molten in her belly.
"How does anyone know they're good at anything? How did I know I'd be able to call you up again, that second time?" Lotte shrugged, looked at the black that still tipped her fingers on each hand.
"I'm at a disadvantage too, you know."
It could have been chance the first time, but she'd had no doubts the second. Would anyone try something twice, if they didn't think it suited them just a little? And she had been good at it, clearly, whatever this was, her dealings with this - her - demon.
Lotte let her head drop to the side, cheek heavy on her shoulder and she peered up at him with a smirk.
"Guess that just means we'll have to do this again, so I can best you properly."
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"You simply do." From anyone else, that might have sounded like an empty platitude, but from Alastor, he clearly believed it. He was too self-possessed not to. No one else had ever had to tell him he was good at something; he knew when he was, and he knew when to change course, when he wasn't. He wasn't one for hammering away at something that didn't come naturally to him, and it was natural enough, to slit his father's throat and cut him into pieces and leave him in the swamps. It was natural enough, everything that came after that. If it hadn't been, if the learning curve was too sharp, he might have stopped.
He gestured vaguely in the air and thought, ah, might as well, and conjured up another smoke without removing the case from his pocket. This one wasn't a cigarette, but a proper and stiff cigar he'd left lying on the end table in his sitting room, back in hell. This time, he blew on the end to light it, the brimstone of his breath springing it to life. And after a puff, he offered it to Lotte, just to see what she would do.
"What disadvantage do you fancy for yourself, my dear? You're clearly doing better than I am." Was he mocking her for implying as much? Maybe. His glasses glinted in the firelight, spreading a bright and colourful crackle of light over his eyes. "We can do it as many times as you like."
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