Chapter Text
Alastor clawed at his shredded coat like a wild animal, feeling his hand come back slick with his own putrid blood. It tacked to his skin and fur, drying and clumping in disgusting flakes. Alastor had never been one to blanche at blood – he wouldn’t have made it far if he did! – but his own was always one that caused him pause. It was unnatural, to bleed. This was the thing flowing through his veins, keeping him alive. Why was it leaving him, so easily? So freely?
Why was he bleeding? He needed that, did he not?
He thought he grew out of it, this childlike fear when it came to injuries. The last time he remembered the feeling curling in his chest he could have been no older than thirteen, after he fell out of the large southern live oak near their trailer, staring blankly at the bone piercing his own skin as his mother rushed him to a hospital that would be no help beyond the necessary. That had been so long ago. He had thought he was dying.
Alastor huffed, leaning against the crumbling stone wall, trying not to let his shaky legs fold beneath him. The hotel shook beneath him, and a roll of vertigo went through his body, catching like wildfire.
Alright. He might be dying.
If Alastor were being entirely honest, there hadn’t been many times in his un-death where he thought he was truly dying. Once, maybe. Or twice, if he thought back to those very early days where he had nothing but the clothes on his back that were much too small for his new, gangly limbed body and a smile plastered on his face.
He can’t say much for when he was alive; he doesn’t remember much of that, now. It’s been so terribly long.
But now. Now he was entirely sure he was dying, if the way he had to hold his own guts back into his body was any indication. The gash over his chest and stomach was wide and gaping, and he had to hold the skin closed with his fingers, pinching just enough for a hiss to escape his clenched teeth. There was something wet and squishy against the palm of his hand, and he didn’t want to wonder what it could be. His intestine? His kidney? His heart that felt like it had dropped to the pit of his stomach?
The hotel shook again, groaning and creaking as if it were alive. As if every blow to its surface pained it in some horrible, incomprehensible way. The battle carried on around him, the sounds of angry yelling and anguished cries and the cruel noise of flesh ripping from bone and blades piercing skin and layers of meat. Oh, what horror! Shame that Alastor was dying, he quite liked witnessing the horrific misfortune of others.
The roof sunk under his knees, and for a grim, fleeting moment Alastor thought it was going to fold in on itself and drag him down with it. Something bullying and the back of his mind — something small and fearful and prey-like that had him grinding his own teeth because that is not who he was. He was not some frightful deer fleeing on fast hooves, startled by the sound of a boot breaking soil. No, he was a demon. An Overlord. A monster.
And he was afraid. Afraid to die. Always so afraid to die. He dragged himself to his feet, clawing at the shaking ground.
Maman, I’m scared. He had said as she carried him to the hospital, slung under her arm as he bleeds out. Maman, I’m scared. He chokes down now, staving of his own blood and insides with just his hands, lungs wheezing around broken ribs.
He wills the last dregs of his powers, feeling his shadow curl around his ankles. His staff hung limply from where he held it in the hand that isn’t trying to keep him from folding inside out, broken and spurting blats of static and stuttering songs. It certainly wasn’t all of his power – no, no he wasn’t that much of a fool – but he had spent the better part of a century channeling his shadows into it, creating a conduit for himself. Back then, he had no idea how useful it would be, with a deal sapping his soul like a greedy leech. Now, this staff was very well all he had.
The shadows were about to engulf him, he could feel it. They would carry him – not far, not enough, but to somewhere safe. His radio tower, maybe, if it was still standing after all of this.
Alastor felt it, unfathomable coldness seeping into his skin, tugging him down like quicksand. He was close, so close. He would be gone, he could recuperate, and no one would know.
(He was dying, and no one would know.)
A scream pierced the hotel grounds, and he froze.
It cut through the sound of the battle like a gunshot; rang in his ears like the aftermath of a gong. It wasn’t even particularly loud, but for some incomprehensible reason, it was a scream he hadn’t expected. Hadn’t even considered.
Alastor shook away the shadow at his feet, neck twisting around wildly until he finally found her.
Charlie, on the other side of the roof – a distance so short but so impossibly far away – held by the throat, suspended in mid air by the First Man. Her hooves kicked wildly, her claws scraped at his fingers. He could hear her choked, fearful gasp as he squeezed tighter, cutting off her airways.
Charlie.
Charlie.
Alastor acts before he thinks.
Shadows engulfed him and he shot across the roof like a wild bullet. He could feel his powers strain like a stretched rubber band, trying to get him as far as it could as fast as possible. Further, he urged desperately. Why was he desperate? He wasn’t sure, but Charlie was crying. He could hear it. He could hear her sobs. Further. Faster.
He materialized, pulled out of the shadows like a harsh yank to his collar, barrelling into Adam like a heavy weight. They tumbled in a tangle of limbs, and Alastor was so disoriented he couldn’t tell where he started and the First Man ended.
There was yelling, he understood dimly. In his face, a mouth screaming at him, spitting on his cheeks. Vile.
Alastor reeled back, kicking his hooves as hard as he could muster and hoping it nailed somewhere sensitive.
The overlord scrambled back, feeling his own guts try and escape his gaping wound. He tried to hold it closed as he stood on unsteady legs, shaking like a newborn fawn. One of his antlers was broken, he realized faintly as his neck bent horribly to the right, trying to accommodate the unbalanced weight. His eyesight was blurry and fractured, his monocle strewn somewhere he didn’t have half a mind to remember.
He looked down at the crumbled man before him, snarling around golden ichor and a broken nose. Shame he hadn’t hit the balls – that man had to have far too many children by now.
The man looked back up at him. Just that, a man. No angel nor divine being – just a waste of air.
“Won’t give up, eh?” Adam said with a cruel grin, lapping up his own blood to talk like a beast.
Alastor rolled his jaw around his smile, painful and splitting. “Unfortunately not,” he hummed, raising an eyebrow at the forgotten angelic axe discarded closer to him than it was the First Man.
He snatched it with a grunt, heaving it up with both hands, and quickly understood why most blades Carmine produced had leather hilts.
Because the axe burned.
Blistered to the touch. Lit his skin aflame. He was entirely sure there was a smokey, fleshy smell wafting from it. He hissed, instinctively gripping it tighter.
Around the blinding pain, he considered the blade. He would have preferred to rip the man to shreds – he would have even taken a rifle, if anything else. Aimed the barrel between the First Man’s eyes like a pig to slaughter.
But this will have to do.
He stumbled over to where the man was crumbled, far too preoccupied with dabbing his broken nose and wincing when it hurt. Alastor held the blade above his head, and there was only a split second for Adam to noticed his demise before it swung down.
It crushed his ribs with a sickening crunch and a horrible wail, nestling in its place right where his lungs should be. Bright, wide eyes looked at Alastor from behind a cracked mask like he couldn’t understand why he was killing him. As if he could not properly fathom the idea of dying, like a child who knew no better.
For a fleeting moment, Alastor could comprehend that this man had started naïve and vulnerable, knowing nothing but a garden and a wife and beings beyond his understanding. Alastor could comprehend it, he just didn’t want to.
He swung, slicing his heart.
He swung again.
Again.
Ichor stained his coat, splattering like shimmering paint.
Again.
Again.
Charlie’s sobs rang in his ears.
Again.
Again.
In the black spots growing in the corner of his vision, Alastor could still see the hand around Charlie’s throat. He could still hear her choked cries.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Charlie cried, Charlie cried, Charlie cried.
“-lastor! Stop, please, Alastor please!” Hands, untouched by the horrors of the afterlife, grabbed and tugged at his coat. Desperately pulling. Charlie cried.
He stopped mid swing, axe held far above his head, surface burning his flesh to char. Radio-dial eyes snapped to look at a tear-streaked face. She was begging something, but he couldn’t quite hear from the ocean drowning his ears.
The battle axe fell from his grip, clattering to the floor. “Charlotte,” he breathed the word as if it were the air he needed to live, pulling her close like the enclosure of his arms could keep her safe. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. He wiped the tears from her cheeks with bloodstained hands, muttering broken sentences in a language he’s sure wasn’t English, slurred and tired.
He held her close to his mangled chest, falling to his knees as he buried his face in her hair. She smelled of fire and brimstone and irony blood and had swiftly healing bruises on her neck but she was alive. Blissfully.
“Il est mort. Il est parti. C'est bon, c'est bon.” He said in his mother tongue, whispered like prayer into her knotted blonde hair, wild and escaping her carefully crafted braid. He rocked them back and forth and back again, broken songs humming from his chest like a lullaby. “Personne n’ te fera de mal, ma douce fille. Ma fille. Ma fille douce et courageuse.”
Ma douce fille, because even his lies were riddled with so much truth he himself could barely tell the difference. He had said, once, weeks ago that now felt like it was eons away, that she was his daughter. Or the closest thing.
At the time it had been nothing more than a remark to rile up the king. But now, with the adrenaline and blood and guts leaving his body, he wasn’t quite so sure. He presses a firm kiss into the crown of her head as every thread of his straining consciousness slips through his fingers like running water.
It’s almost like a goodbye, and she must know it, too. She must feel the blood staining her dress, must feel his wheezing puffs of air because soon she’s crying out. Yelling. “Dad! Help, someone please. DAD!”
“‘m right here,” he mutters, trying so desperately to hold on but his limbs feel so heavy. It would be easy, to let himself slip into oblivion now. Adam was dead. Gone. He could not hurt her.
Logically, he knew the words weren’t for him. He was not her father, but he was also selfish. So incredibly selfish. And very foggy headed, because blood loss did that to you.
“Charlie?” A voice much too close for comfort calls back; Alastor tugs her closer to his chest. “Charlie, oh Father-“
“Help him, dad. Please. Oh, god he’s-“
“Alastor-“
Alastor snarled, holding his girl closer to his chest, static popping and cracking around him like wild growls. Pale porcelain hands reached to take her away but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t let them-
He went to bite and snap and rip apart the insolent wretch that dared to rip Charlie away but fell short.
Because in his blurred, dying vision, he saw an angel.
Bright and beautiful and haloed by hells horrid red sky. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew this man. But his thoughts flowed like molasses, into one ear and own the other, fleeting but so incredibly slow he couldn’t grasp the concept of them before they were gone. But this was an angel, he knew. He knew. And they were beautiful.
“M’ ange?” He muttered, fighting weakly as Charlie extracted herself slowly from his hold. He was laid down on the ground, his only consolation the hand she held firmly in his own. As if she was afraid to let go. Such a bleeding heart. “Je suis ‘n train mourir,”
“Oh great, he’s fucking delirious.” The angel swore, and Alastor laughed. It hurt, incredibly so. He could feel his own ribs dragging against his flaying skin, but he laughed, because who had ever heard of an angel swearing?
A hand smoothed his hair back, and it felt like how his mother would test his temperature when he had the flu, and it felt like reverence.
“Tu n'es pas en train de mourir,” the angel spoke in his mother tongue before saying something in English to Charlie, which Alastor didn’t have half a mind to pay attention to.
He lifted the hand grasped in his own, pressing his lips to the knuckles, a goodbye and promise all at once. He was dying, he knew, but the angel said he would not. Angels were their enemies, but he trusted this one, and they said he wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t die.
It was quite a conundrum.
The hand on his forehead pressed firmer, and something like grace seeped from them and urged him to sleep. Alastor could not fight it, and he did not want to. He was so incredibly tired.
“Thank you, Alastor, for saving my daughter.” The angel whispered before the grasping claws of darkness enveloped him.
“Always,” he murmured, the words a terrible, disgusting truth.
He leaned into the touch, humming as he closed his eyes, and promptly passed out.