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]

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.

[americanvvitch]

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.

[devildo]

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."

[americanvvitch]

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."

[devildo]

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."

[americanvvitch]

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."

[devildo]

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?"

[americanvvitch]

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."

[devildo]

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

[americanvvitch]

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?"

[devildo]

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?"

[americanvvitch]

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.

[devildo]

"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."

[americanvvitch]

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."

[devildo]

"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."

[americanvvitch]

You simply did. It was true, and Lotte knew it as much as he did. Of course, that might not have been obvious here in this hellscape of a countryside, but Lotte was good at being a witch. Good at surviving, too, though there were plenty of times she'd doubted both.

"I was the one wrestling you to the ground, don't forget, and I'm only human. Sort of." Lotte pointed, and she sounded appropriately cheeky even to her own ears as she took the cigar from his fingers and stared at it. No one she'd known had ever had enough money to afford one. It seemed a pity not to take advantage of the offer and try. Lotte pressed the rolled end to her lips and tried to mimic the puff Alastor had taken from the thing, inhaling it sharply into her lungs only to cough it right back out. Lotte tucked her face into her elbow to cough up the smoke and prairie dust that always seemed to linger no matter how good the air got. Why did everything seem to want to choke her?

Stubbornly, once she had her breath back under her, Lotte took another puff from it, exhaled, and this time only the slightest weeze escape her lips with it. It tasted sharp and a little bitter, a little like whiskey too. Lotte was fairly certain if she kissed Alastor right now, he'd taste the same.

"Did I tell you how we figured out I was a witch?" Lotte passed the cigar back, breathing out her nose and letting the smoke settle into all her senses like a blanket. "You'd like the story."

[devildo]

A peal of laughter erupted from Alastor, as Lotte struggled with the cigar. It was so genuine and abrupt, it watered his eyes as he watched her. Far from the first time he'd seen such a sight, but it would never fail to amuse him. "Are you, now?" he asked her, on the tail end of that laughter.

His shadow rippled up from the floorboards where it hid beneath Lotte's narrow bed, curled around him like a shawl. He shivered slightly under its touch, more comfortable now than he had been before, more comfortable than he would have been if he nestled under the blankets.

"Please," he said, "tell me." And he gestured for her to go on, with the cigar that he plucked back from her blackened fingers. If there was a story, Alastor wanted it, wanted to revel in it and absorb it like water into his veins. And for a show of good faith, he wriggled back on the bed, propped her meager pillows against the wall and settled back into them, looking wholly amused with himself as another column of smoke rose from his lips with a puff from the cigar. He held it out to her - she was far enough away now, from his position settled back against the wall, she would have to come up and get it if she wanted it.

[americanvvitch]

Lotte was more human than him, the most human thing in this room, if nothing else. There was little doubt Alastor wasn't acutely aware of that, but still. Whether or not that put her at a disadvantage currently was less clear but certainly a card worth playing, if it were.

Alastor, clearly looking to earn his bed time tale, settled back into the bed of his own accord. Finally. If she'd known bed time stories was all it took she would have come up with a dozen things to lull him to sleep. This one, for what it was worth, was wholly and entirely true as far as Lotte remembered it. Memories were a tricky thing, she often thought, but she remembered this enough to make a story out of it for Alastor's sake.

She had a choice then, between staying where she was or getting up and accepting the offered cigar, dangled from Alastor's fingers in his new and cozy position against the wall. The more horizontal, the better, she reasoned and pulled her legs under her before pushing herself up and over to sit on the edge of the bed, one palm sinking into the mattress near his knee as she plucked the cigar from his hand.

"Once upon a time..." Lotte drawled with a smirk, taking a puff of the cigar much more gracefully this time before passing it back, "and all that other nonsense that accompanies stories about a child of fairy tales," Lotte tilted her chin up and exhaled the smoke out into the room, watched it curl toward the ceiling.

"A farmer and his wife were cursed with a child with hair the color of the devil's flesh." Lotte leaned back on the arm planted on the mattress. "They tried to love their unfortunate daughter, maybe, but before long odd and unusual things began happening around the farm house. Objects moving for no reason at all. And the little girl was often found sitting in a corner, talking to nothing - or something, and well, I don't have to tell you how farmers and their wives and their pastors react to children who speak to things that don't appear to be there."

Lotte looked again at her fingertips, her palms, dusted black.

"So, one day her mother dresses her up in the prettiest white dress she has, and braids her hair up like they're going to church, though they're not. Instead, the doting father takes his little girl to the river to go for a swim. They wade out into the water in all their clothes, which she finds very odd... but they wade out until her little feet can't touch the ground anymore. And it seems all very according to plan until her father makes the mistake of trying to drown her himself, instead of letting the river sweep her away and probably accomplish the task all on its own."

"But she doesn't drown. That's odd too, isn't it? No, she doesn't drown, because her hands turn black and anything she touches burns. So she grips onto her father's arms and hands and she burns him up until he lets go of her hair and her white dress and her throat and she burns up the water around her until it boils and she drags herself back to the shore and burns up all the water she swallowed too."

Lotte plucked the cigar from Alastor's hands and took a puff, exhaled harder.

"She figures out that she made it happen, and she starts making other things happen, on purpose." Lotte handed it back again. "You know the rest, more or less. They let her make things happen as long as it's convenient to them, the town looks the other way, until they find a more effective and lucrative way to get rid of her, and so it goes."

[devildo]

The story rolled through Alastor like wind, like shadow, like a warm crackle of energy. Her energy was in it, and he admired that she could tell the tale of herself with such power, a power normally reserved for the regurgitation of other's tales. It was always hard to speak about oneself so profoundly, with no boast, no contrivance. And she did it.

He settled back against the wall, letting her words wash over him, hanging on each one because it would be disrespectful not to. She was sharing a piece of her soul, when she didn't need to. She could have summarized it briefly, given him the major points of the plot, but she chose to gift him with this, instead: a recollection not just of facts, but of the feeling.

There was something intimate there.

Alastor wouldn't dwell too much on that. Of all the things he deserved, this wasn't one.

And still he reveled in it, his lips curling in a smile that remained etched on his face and just stretching the bounds of human, the longer she spoke. Each time she let him have the cigar back, he took a puff and held it in his lungs, letting the thing dangle from his fingertips loosely, so she could take it back with ease. It charmed him that she acclimated so fast; she would be a real sight in New Orleans, he would make certain she was.

He kept silent until Lotte finished speaking. And then he said, slowly, like waking from a dream, "And does the girl think it better? To have lived?"

[americanvvitch]

It was a story that Lotte wouldn't have been likely to tell to just anyone, not the way she told it to Alastor. No one else had ever been interested in it, in her, enough to care, to be fair. But knowing what she did of Alastor now, she knew he would understand it. The way it had felt, how that had carried her through to this very moment, perched on the edge of her bed next to him. These moments together were a direct result of what her parents had created that day in the river.

Lotte looked at him through the smokey haze of the cigar. Lotte had spent a lot of time living out spite, living just to prove to others that they couldn't do away with her so easily, that she was worth something whether they chose to acknowledge it or not. To force them to acknowledge it.

"Oh, yes. More than ever, as a matter of fact." Even if they never knew it, she knew she'd slipped their grasp, their attempts to snuff her out.

"And she plans," Lotte inhaled the smoke, blew it out slow in front of her, "to keep living - and burning up anything that tries to get in the way of it."

Her fingers reached out to brush over the shadow draped around his shoulders.

"Can't give them the satisfaction of anything less."

[devildo]

Alastor's shadow wriggled gently under Lotte's touch, a ripple coursing through it that made it almost shimmer. Beneath it, Alastor shivered and rolled his shoulders, the touch sliding through the shadow and down into him. He felt tired now, a little, the longer he sat. Still, too much adrenaline, or whatever passed for it in a creature like him, ran in his blood without dissipating. When it did, he would be dead to the world, he knew that much.

But for now, limbs heavy and eyes bright with curiosity, he leaned towards Lotte. "Anything?" he asked her. "Even me? Say, how would you go about that? If I crossed you, and you had to burn me all up to ashes, how do you imagine you'd get the job done?"

It was worth her consideration, just as the deal itself had been worth both their consideration, Alastor's careful use of words. For all she knew, he could become dangerous to her. He certainly was, to most everyone else. He'd never promised her some unending safety, only that he would get her to New Orleans and into her new home, unharmed.

He settled back again, nestling against the pillows with a look of smug satisfaction written on his face for having brought it up. "Now I, myself, think maybe you could if you put your head to it. But I wonder if you really believe that."

[americanvvitch]

Lotte watched her own fingers pass through the shadow, and noted that her touch translated from it to Alastor with no small amount of curiosity.

This close, she could smell the whiskey and smoke on his breath, only part cigar, though she kept her eyes on his, admired how they sparkled mischievously even now amidst their human limitations. She bet he was popular when he was alive, Alastor. There was something captivating about him, the way he phrased things, the way he hung on her every word. The sort of easy manners that made you want to engage, want to hear what he had to say and get happily lost in a conversation.

The sort of charisma that got people off their guard, too. She imagined that came in handy, as a killer.

Lotte planted her palm on the mattress closer to his chest and leaned heavily on it, inclining into his space like she was telling him a secret. "Even you."

She'd been prepared to do that when she'd first called him up, all those weeks ago. Lotte pulled back a little and stole the cigar once more, "How, though, I've got no idea. Sheer force of will?"

Smoking wasn't something she was used to, but she was catching on quickly enough. "You said yourself I can't be reasoned with." Lotte exhaled with a smirk as she recalled his earlier teasing. "Doubt I doubt outwit you, but you were seemed to have trouble keeping your composure around my blood. Maybe that's something."

[devildo]

And did he believe that she believed? Alastor wasn't sure, and he laughed with bright, quick mirth that lit the space beyond the purview of the low lamplight and the flicker of fire from the wood stove. And if she did believe, what did that matter? It would be interesting to see her try to kill him, though he had no sights on ever threatening her in such a way that would warrant it.

Still, one could never know what the future held. One could never know if she would one day become dangerous to him in such a way that he would have no choice but to try and eliminate the threat to preserve himself. And if he did, she would fight back. At this stage, he couldn't see which of them would prevail.

That uncertainty was more thrilling than it should have been.

"Maybe it is," he agreed, watching the shape the tendril of smoke from her lips took, as if he could divine their futures from it. It was hard to focus on now, with the whiskey swimming in his belly all the way up to his ears. "I can still feel it there, you know. In Hell. Waiting for us. Maybe it'll rot there!" he exclaimed with a sort of joy and pressed himself back tighter into the pillows, his shadow shifting around him to accommodate the further reclining of his position. "But not what's in you. Suppose I'll see it again? Your blood?"

[americanvvitch]

Lotte believed she'd put up a good fight. Believed that she wasn't afraid to fight if he ever tried to kill her, despite whatever growing fondness she felt for him meant. She didn't rightly know that she could kill him, but she also didn't feel like it would come to that. What reason could she give for that? Alastor was as much a threat now as he'd ever been, as likely to viciously preserve his life as she was. Was there a reason she didn't feel like that mattered, between them?

It simply didn't. Maybe it was the lingering high of besting the Queen together.

Lotte looked back at him, quirking a brow at the.... multiple admissions that slipped from Alastor's mouth, coated heavy in whiskey. The fact that her blood hadn't been used, but was still tucked away in wherever it was he called home in Hell. That he expected to be here long enough for it to go bad. And perhaps most curiously that he referred to it as waiting for them. Lotte chewed on that through her own haze of whiskey-induced maudlin.

She took another puff from the cigar before plucking it out of her own mouth and setting it back in his fingers to free up her own, tugging the well-worn quilt over Alastor up to his chest. Tucking it in required her to shift onto one knee to hover over him and maybe it was the whiskey too, to blame for how much she found herself enjoying this particular arrangement.

No, he wouldn't see that blood she'd already spilled for him for some time yet.

"Whenever you like." Lotte hummed, denying him her gaze as she tucked the smoothed the quilt over him. "I'd give you some right now, if you asked."

[devildo]

Tomorrow, if she came too close without Alastor closing that space first, he might balk inside, deftly side step her and avoid it. Now, he was too loose and fuzzy and unburdened to think it anything other than curious, the way his body sloped to one side and then the other on the unsteady mattress as it shifted back and forth with Lotte's weight.

He laughed again when she pulled the blanket up over him, drawing up one knee and noting with mild amusement the way his shadow slipped down from his shoulders to nestle itself into the space between quilt and mattress, seeking warmth it enjoyed but didn't need. The shape of Lotte hovering over him transfixed him, the motion of her dress and the way she momentarily blocked out the light from the stove.

She was bold, that was for sure. He took another drag from the cigarette, wondered how bold she really was, which one of them would cry off first if she kept crowding into his space and just barely not touching him.

And how he would play it off when it, inevitably, was him.

"Smoking in bed is dangerous," he commented mildly. And with a flick of his fingers, the cigar was gone again, leaving only the haze of heady smoke floating around them over the bed. "I'm sure you would, but I think I'd rather wait. And you seem keen on something else." On him sleeping, that was, but it amused him to say it so vaguely and see if she would flush the same colour as her hair.