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The extermination is lighter on her people that year. She doesn’t know if there’s any delineated pattern to it: if the angelic legions take turns drawing out maps, calling dibs on the Rings, handpicking sinners they have personal grievances against.
Not very angelic, the latter, but not entirely out of the question. Highly probable, really. Heaven is filled to the brim with righteous killers more bloodthirsty than any wayward soul having made their home in her quaint quarter. Murder in the name of a loving God. Performative justice. Tales as old as time.
But however scarce the casualties, there’s always work to be done when her sinners die. They have wills, some of them, they have families. Honorable agreements, arrangements, marriages of love and convenience, inheritances, property taxes, the whole nine yards, yapping little skeleton house pets to take in and rehome. They leave bodies behind too, of course, her people, and those don’t go to waste in her territory. Up for grabs, gone quick like hot cakes.
She’s a busy bee most days, but most days are slow, sticky like molasses, the way she likes them to be in her town; a little bit hazy, a sweet, secret nook lost in time. So it takes a toll, the cleanup, the pace of it, the break in routine.
When she finally collapses that evening onto the sofa in the back room of her shop in a particularly slobbish, unladylike sprawl, Alastor is there with her, sharing in her melancholy with blood in his teeth and her very best wine in his glass. His fourth now; they’re on their second bottle, a third lying in wait, a siren song whispering their names.
“Terrace, you said.”
Rosie hums. “Terrace Wallace. Been down here two years, just about. No kin. Little bedsit over on the corner by the barbershop.”
Good meat on his bones. Not too fatty, not too stringy. Minimal carving, minimal garnishing, and decent flavor too, may his soul rest in peace now, wherever he’s gone, wherever they all go to, dead twice over.
“Not too bad.”
Rosie hums again in assent. Then: “He always reminded me of my second husband. From up there. His looks, not his personality, goodness no.”
“The one who ended up in the Mississippi, was it?”
“That’s the one.” She takes a sip of her wine and dabs at the corner of her lips with her napkin. “Most of him did, at least. He was such a charmer, at first, you know. An awful bastard, but you could never hope to guess, just looking at him. Always prim and proper, just the perfect gentleman. A great pretender. Then once he had a ring on you, got you tied down to him—a godawful kisser, a horrible fuck, too, mind you. And then he starts raising his hand to you. Just as susceptible to arsenic as the rest of them, in the end, bless him.”
Her head knocks against Alastor’s shoulder. She slumps into his space. They’re just inebriated enough, loose-lipped and loose-limbed, for Alastor not to mind the encroachment. It's all gone glowy, the room, soft edges on the furniture and specks of dust in the air glittering like diamonds.
“Looking back on it,” she murmurs, “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of a nice enough fuck with any of the miserable duds I married. Some of the flings, maybe. Never the grooms. You go through all that trouble—and for what.”
“Awful taste in husbands, Rosie, dear.”
She gives a mean masterclass in romance, the revered guru that she is, an unparalleled matchmaker for everybody but herself.
“Oh, I know. I know.” And she laughs—“Tasted awful, too,”—and drops her hand to Alastor’s knee, and he laughs too, joins in, leaning into her, comfortably close. She hiccups and her drink sloshes. “Oh, shoot, sorry, darling.”
The sofa is soft with age, cushions well-worn. She teeters, balancing her glass, and picks herself up to deposit it on the side table, to pat at the spill. She tosses the napkin aside, the damage minimal, and sags back down, feet up, tired and aching all over. So, so improper. Her mother would have had a conniption. Her governess too. Beth. Oh, how she despised Beth.
“That’s the thing about men, the men that go after women like they’re prizes to be won and then tossed into a dusty corner once the novelty wears off—they’re useless when it comes down to it. You could give a man a map and directions to the letter, and he's still clueless about where to put his sorry tongue.” She titters, eyes drifting shut. “And I mean wherever. In your mouth, on your c—oh, I’m sorry, dearie, you’ve gone all tense on me. I’m rambling.”
“Oh, don’t mind me. Complain away.”
Rosie laughs again, an harsh exhale through her nose. A little nonsensical, musical hum. She has a good head on her shoulders, and normally two, three bottles between friends isn't in the slightest excessive, isn't anything at all to frown upon. Still, she's had too much; a little too much, the day a little too long, her stomach a little too empty, save dear Terrace.
The fire crackling on its iron grate is red-orange like the sunsets are upstairs and Alastor is warm against her side, a rare companion, one of a handful of men that doesn't drive her right up the wall a month or two down the line, claws at the ready and teeth sharpened. She feels boneless, lax and sleepy; she has half a mind to call it a night and drag Alastor to bed with her to curl up, but thinks better of it. He might get the wrong idea this time around and bolt, the poor sod, now that she's gone and made the situation sticky.
Her bad. She forgets herself, runs her mouth like a broken record about her misfortunes in love.
Her sweet Alastor—he becomes uncomfortable when certain topics are brought up in certain degrees of detail. The words don’t scare him; he’s not a veteran reduced to tears when so much as a firework goes off. Sex is just fine in theory. A non-issue. It’s the practice, the particulars, that get to him. He indulges her prattling, engages in her little conversations, and grinds his teeth all the while, red hot at the edges, flushed and uneasy, and thinks she can't tell.
She can most certainly tell.
Rosie understands repression. She hails from a decade or four before his time, if her numbers are correct. Laces pulled tight and tidy gloves to the elbows, stockings like armor and modesty the highest virtue of them all in a lady's arsenal.
What Alastor seems to struggle with, she’s come to realize, is something else entirely. He’s as proper as they come, but hardly inhibited. He has a filthy mouth and a foul temper, a sweet smile, certainly, but enough blood on his hands to keep her town sustained through a drought and then some.
He lacks—delicately, now, Rosie—an understanding of certain pushes and pulls. He’s got the definitions down pat, but no formal practice in the art of desire. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t see the world in reds and pinks, doesn’t bother with attraction, doesn’t flirt with affection beyond that of a friendly nature—and even that is a treat in and of itself, that she's managed to wrap him tight enough around her little finger to dare call it fondness, what they share now.
She’ll pinch his cheeks in lieu of hellos and scratch at his ears as he lays in her lap, and he’ll return the favor: tuck her hair behind her ear when it slips loose from its coils and wipe blood from the corner of her mouth with the pad of his thumb. And all of that—it could be construed as romance in the most traditional understanding of it, a unreservedly intimate companionship, no two ways about it.
But none of those things, their little acts of shared tenderness, are more to Alastor than merely a display of trust, a startling degree of it for a notorious lone wolf of his caliber. That’s all it is: camaraderie, his heart bared for his dearest friend. Either that’s all he sees her as—and here Rosie’s unsure of the specifics; she’s working on unravelling that particular knot—or he doesn’t realize in the slightest that his gentle affections border on something as sweet as courtship.
“No, no. I’m sorry, darling,” she tells him softly, pulling herself out of her thoughts. “I’ve put my foot in it and made you uncomfortable. We’re supposed to be having a nice time. Today was horrid, and I'm piling onto it.”
“I’m enjoying myself perfectly.”
“Sure, hon. You’re stiff as ice, Al. I’ve gone all woeful on you; do forgive me,” she apologizes. “I’ll say, though—you’re one lucky bastard, thinking with your head rather than what’s in your trousers. That’s one kind of trouble gone from your repertoire. Just leaves all the rest, but—at least you don’t get hurt,” she finishes glumly. Clicks her tongue. “Would you look at that, I’ve put my foot in it again.”
Alastor, for a little while, says nothing. He relaxes against her in increments in wake of her astute observation, forcing his muscles soft, one by one. Silly man. Her sweet, silly fool of a man.
“I don’t see the appeal,” he admits finally. A little hum, a sip of his wine. A burst of radio static, a quiet buzz of it, then another, contemplative, almost timid in its flatness. “I’ve been deficient in that respect, my dear, for just about as long as I can remember.”
His tone is calm, melodic as ever, but with a bottle and a half of red in his bloodstream, it’s a fine line he’s tiptoeing, a frozen moment in time before it all goes morose.
Rosie sits up in a flurry and wields a poorly coordinated hand, smacking Alastor hard on the bicep.
“None of that. Not here, not in my shop,” she scolds. “There’s nothing wrong with you, sugar. Nobody thinks you’re faulty just because your interests lie elsewhere.”
“Rosie, dearest, they don’t lie anywhere.” He’s smiling, eyes hazy. “I’m afraid that’s the crux of the matter.”
“Oh, shush, now. Elsewhere—other fields of interest, sweetheart. You’re a star in the kitchen and on the parquet; you’re a star on the radio, a born performer.” She taps his shoulder with a flourish of her fingers, commending. “You’ve got a knack for styling a lady’s hair better than any parlor I’ve ever been to, dead or alive. You don’t need a missus of your own—or a fella, for that matter—to be whole. And, hey, if you’re ever curious, I’m right here, dearie,” she laughs. “Just plant one on me.”
A joke is all it is, at first, well-intentioned but poorly timed, even more poorly executed. She ought to keep her tongue behind her teeth this late into the evening.
Alastor’s darling smile flickers, the spark fizzling out behind his eyes, gone dark like a bucket of water sloshed over the embers.
Oh, Rosie, you yammering fool.
His gaze holds for a few seconds, bless that mulish ambition of his, then makes its escape somewhere over her shoulder, travels across the room and settles on the fireplace, the dancing sparks. A coiled tension in his shoulders, ears folding back, twitching, teeth burrowing into his bottom lip, gnawing, nervous. The poor thing.
They’re drunk enough, she thinks, that he’s considering it. And that’s—surprising to an extent. She half-expected a rebuttal, a dismissive wave of his hand: oh, Rosie, you kidder, you.
But no harm done. She offered. She meant it. He’s the dearest thing to her black heart here in this realm of everlasting damnation; she’s quite fond of his raucous laughter and his charming smile, the blood behind his fingernails and the bodies in his wake, all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly, the sweet way his eyes go half-lidded when he looks at her in the dim overhead light once the Emporium closes and it’s just the two of them lingering about behind the counter, gossiping like wretched old harpies.
There's no need at all for that senseless, obstinate battle he's fighting with himself day in and day out, when it’s so simple, the out Rosie's handing him on a silver platter. Peace, not surrender. Give it a try, a taste, sate your curiosity once and for all, darling, and go from there where you will.
“Oh, come now,” she whispers to him, careful not to disrupt the fragile silence. An easy thing to shatter if you don’t cradle it just right. “It’s all right, hm?”
An inquisitive little hum, inviting, and with the back of her thumb on his chin she turns him back around to face her.
His eyes are narrowed and his expression pinched, wary like cornered prey.
Rosie tilts her head, gently beckoning, and Alastor's gaze flutters down to the tip of her nose first, unsure, then her mouth, dark with rouge and sweet with Pétrus, the whole of him shuddering in some sort of nod, an anxious, determined acquiescence.
“Oh, come here, dearie.”
She plucks the wine glass out from between his white-knuckled fingers and reaches blindly to the side to slide it onto the table. It clacks on the polished wood, clinks against her own like a wind chime.
Alastor doesn’t flinch when she takes him by the cheek, fingernails in the coiled hair at his nape, her thumb in the divot behind his jaw. Docile as a house cat, he lets her draw him in and bump their noses together, and she closes her eyes and smiles and feels his cheek bend up beneath her palm, too, and she kisses him, sweet and chaste.
He does jump when their lips meet, barely, something small and soft as a heartbeat, a hiccup, nothing as unsteady as fear, and then he melts, going lax against her fingers.
The fireplace crackles, once, twice, and they part for a scrap of breath before Rosie moves back in and takes his bottom lip between hers, and Alastor's hand curls around her waist, unpracticed, pure instinct; it must feel right to lean into her space just then, to dig his fingernails into the small of her back and pull her closer. Testing the waters, slow and steady, searching for whatever it is he wants to find.
He's a natural. A gem amongst men, truly, a would-be libertine with a little more drink and a little more practice.
There’s a warm, pleasant buzz echoing about Rosie's skull when they break apart, like she’s heavy underwater and the light is growing smaller, the surface slipping further away; there's scant inches between them, and a tingling in her lips that she has half a mind to raise a demure finger or two to, scandalized by what she’s just done.
Alastor keeps his gaze low, fixed somewhere on the cushions, on Rosie’s lap. He lapses into contemplative silence, indecipherable, but the devil’s in the details, it always has been and always will be; his ears, down flat on his head in mild apprehension, a rhythmic thump-thump-thump pattering against the sofa like a heartbeat, the happy, excited flicking of his tail, she’s quite certain. So, so honest, that part of him.
She titters, exhaling through her nose, and her fingers flutter up to her mouth entirely of their own accord to mask that unladylike burst of amusement. Old habits, so the saying goes. You can take a girl out of the past, and so on.
“My goodness, I’ve gone and rendered the chatterbox speechless,” she laughs. “That good, that bad? Come now, give me some feedback, hon.”
Static, a riff of swing jazz plucked out of thin air, then Alastor clears his throat. He’s a bit red around the edges, knocked off-kilter. Such an adorable little thing.
“I suppose that was—pleasant enough,” he says finally, quietly. His voice is stripped bare to the bone, no accent, no filter; a special, rare treat, that.
“Oh my, quite the compliment. You sure know how to flatter a gal.”
“It’s not polite to tease, Rosie, dear.”
“Teasing,” she gasps, hand over her heart. “Who’s teasing? I’ll have you know, mister, you did a better job than a third of the dogshit fellows I’ve dallied with in my time.”
“You are impressively cruel.”
Rosie barks out a laugh, swats Alastor across the shoulder again. His hand is still on her waist, fingertips hovering just so as though held in place by little magnets helpless against an unforgiving pull.
The ruby flush high in his cheeks makes him look radiant. So, so lively. She wonders—no, she shouldn’t, but she's a raving romantic at heart—what things might have been like had they met in another life, on another plane.
“I’m going to refill your glass, sweetheart. You look like you need it,” she tells him. She waggles a finger in his face and his mouth twitches into a smile, eventually, crooked and gorgeously genuine, and his eyes sparkle with delight, and she really, really does love the bastard. “You’re not leaving here until you spill your guts, dearie, I'm afraid. Metaphorically, of course—this time, at least. You’re going to tell your Rosie all about what’s going on in that pretty, little fawn head of yours right now, and—”
And the gentle fingertips turn to claws—pretty bruises blossoming like flower petals, droplets of hot blood welling up and soaking into Rosie’s skirts—as Alastor pulls her back in for another taste, a second opinion, and she laughs against his lips and cradles his face in her hands, and—to hell with another plane, she thinks, when they have this one.