Chapter Text
There was someone new at Alastor’s favorite butcher shop. He was certain of it. Alastor made a point of keeping track of whomever found themselves in “Boucher’s Butchery” at the same time as his near-religiously regular Wednesday visit at half past noon. It was a man of some obvious, obnoxious wealth and a young teenage girl Alastor could only assume was his daughter, based on the resemblance. Both patrons were blonde, white, and had a flush across their cheeks that Alastor suspected of being the result of sunburn. The man was carrying a cane with a an apple as its knob and was dressed in pristine white, the daughter was in a plain red dress with a white shirt underneath.
The young lady was gazing around the shop with an odd disturbed fascination that suggested she’d never actually accompanied someone to a butcher shop before, shifting between curiosity at the variety before her and disgust at the implied carnage, the viscerality of all the raw flesh set out on display. Her father had all the disgust- not just at the flesh but at the shop around him, barely holding back his obvious distaste at being forced to interact with the world outside of a pristine, shiny bubble.
Hardly a pleasant addition to his Wednesday routine, to be sure. Alastor comforted himself with what was obviously true: this pair almost certainly would not be customers here for long- either they were here for a short term visit, or they just hadn’t gotten around to hiring whatever ‘staff’ they needed at whatever renovated plantation the father had purchased, and Alastor would be sharing space with one of this man’s employees every week, rather than having to watch the eponymous Charles Boucher watch his shop be looked upon with contempt.
So Alastor waited, smiling placidly while the ‘gentleman’ collected his order, smiling slightly less placidly when the young lady saw and then waved goodbye to him on the way out- the child had been admittedly entirely pleasant throughout the transaction- and then widened his grin into one of genuinely delighted familiarity as he approached the counter.
“Chuck! Hello, my friend, what do you have for me today?” Alastor asked, and allowed the familiar selling point of this or that just got in, the cow was practically still breathing, and just for Alastor he had a friend who had shot a lovely buck and was looking to see if anyone was interested in any of it.
Alastor had made less circumspect cocaine purchases, honestly, but regulations were what they were and so long as he got what he wanted he couldn’t complain- honestly, he rather enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger nature of it all.
So, altogether, not the best way his day could have started, but not the worst.
-
He had work that evening- four to ten, Monday through Friday, like clockwork. The show started at five, but he was expected to arrive an hour early to be lectured at by Gabriel for 20 minutes and then spend 40 minutes pretending to memorize programming notes with a passive smile on his face while actually stewing in resentment at having to adhere not just to reasonable standards and practices limiting everyone in the industry but indeed to the personal whims of a crass man and his crass money.
Denise, Gabriel’s secretary, a delightful woman with thin wired glasses and curly black hair pulled into in a tightly styled bun who was about 20 years older than Alastor, typically poked her head in to get money for when she fetched his dinner for him at this point, which had the dual purpose of reminding Alastor that he did indeed also still need money to eat.
It was worth it, ultimately, for the moment when he counted himself down and the heady rush of his introduction carrying into the ears of his listeners.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Alastor Toussaint speaking, we have a delightful evening of programming in store for you this evening, sponsored by-”
Alastor spent the evening bouncing between political and sports news and coming up with friendly, comfortable patter to fill in spaces between songs, three hours later spending the one half hour long break afforded to him by a Mystery House rerun tiptoeing as fast as he could out of the studio without getting caught on the record’s microphone to gratefully take the dressed peacemaker- unlike him, he normally preferred red meat- out of Denise’s hand- “I beg you to excuse my manners, dear Denise, I haven’t eaten since this morning-” too busy nearly unhinging his jaw to inhale the sandwich to come to a proper end of his sentence.
“Think nothing of it but don’t choke, Alastor! You don’t want to miss your plans tonight, do you?” Denise asked, handing him a cup of coffee to wash the bread down with.
Alastor chewed, swallowed, drank. Speed aside, he was not letting bits of food fly out of his mouth while he spoke to a woman to whom he currently felt he owed his life, “Funny, I don’t recall having told you I had plans this evening, Denise.”
“No, but I’ve known you going on five years now, and were I the betting woman I’d bet on you finding someplace hot to go after work nine times outta ten.” Denise had her own po’boy she was eating with a great deal more grace, and she punctuated her sentence with a bite that meant she felt the need to daintily hide her smile behind her hand.
“You make my life sound terribly exciting.”
“Is it not? Mark and I are too old for that kinda thing these days, but you seem like you have fun.”
‘Fun,’ was a word for it.
“A friend of mine is performing tonight,” Alastor replied instead, as if Mimzy wasn’t performing something, somewhere, most nights ending in ‘y.’ “ And of course, I have to keep up with the industry.”
“Oh, sure,” Denise said, with a little fond click of her tongue.
-
It was Zazzy’s Lounge Mimzy was playing that evening. Gabriel decided that he wanted an extra 27 minutes- Alastor had kept track- of his time after the show ended than usual, so her set had begun by the time he was able to make his way across town at a trot, trying not to look like he was running from something untoward. The last thing he needed was to explain that he was simply making his way to a friend’s home to a squinting policeman trying to decide if he was the sort of person who deserved the benefit of the doubt in the dim streetlamps.
They knew him at Zazzy’s, at least, so when he rushed his way through the ridiculous handshake that required he touch the tough outside’s sweaty palms he wasn’t made to suffer through it a second, slower time.
Mimzy saw an opportunity to boss him into buying her an apology drink for his late arrival, and four drinks and a bump each later she bullied him right back out on the dance floor.
He was, it must be said, a very willing victim.
They danced, they laughed, either himself or Mimzy would occasionally make a grand show of having not heard some other prospective partner looking to speak to either of them.
The night went on.
-
The nights went on.
-
The father and daughter were there again the next Wednesday. They took the last filets Chuck was selling.
It would be ridiculous, of course, to dwell on it.
-
Mimzy wasn’t actually in town that week. She’d booked several very exciting performances in Chicago and had left that past weekend. Still, he sidestepped Denise’s questions about where he was going that evening, only to hop between several different establishments. The atmosphere didn’t feel right, or the band was terrible. Something inside him was hungry for something more.
He was, generally, quite content with his ‘social circle,’ or lack thereof. A friendly relationship with the salespeople of or waitstaff of every business he frequented, a deep silent useless hatred of Gabriel, a delightful friendly coworker in Denise, and Mimzy’s company otherwise. Mimzy was a perfect friend for Alastor- a talented woman, a shared taste in music, no desire to stretch their friendship into something it wasn’t. Comfortable conversations in bars and a familiar, competent dance partner.
People often insisted that time should equate to intimacy, insist on an honesty to the relationship that Alastor wasn’t interested in giving- and couldn’t give even if he were, at risk of police attention.
Or, worse, admiration. A desire to join in. He wouldn’t put it past Mimzy- a certain delight at seeing others squirm was why they got along so well- but he couldn’t imagine inviting a third into his intimate evenings out in the swamp.
It had been some time since he’d indulged in that particular ritual. Unthinking, he realized he’d made his way to the nearest place he’d last seen a sign posted, a family asking for knowledge of the whereabouts of one Arnold Walker, last known location blah, blah, blah. The family member- his brother, almost certainly, the only variable Alastor had had to concern himself with.
The ‘Last Seen’ date was sixteen months ago. He wasn’t sure he’d ever taken a break this long.
It would be another week, at least.
-
The daughter seemed much more comfortable in the space, on this visit. She turned and visibly recognized him, waved hello.
Shocking, that the man who saw her waving and immediately steered her bodily to another end of the counter was able to raise such a polite young person.
-
Alastor couldn’t recall if Mimzy had mentioned how long she would be gone. These engagements were normally only a week or two.
Alastor just went home.
-
Alastor got there before them, the following week. The sound of the bell wringing behind him bumped his shoulders up by a hair, and Alastor heard the father say, “You can wait out here if you want, sweetie, but stay in sight of the front window.”
A sort of furtive, clingy protectiveness.
The man was quite short. It had always been obvious, but something about turning around with his order in his arms to see the man had come up behind him drove the point home as he looked down, down at him.
Polite smile. Always the smile. A nod.
Outside the shop the daughter was to the right of the door playing with a length of string, doing cat’s cradle style games with herself. He stopped outside the door, looking through what he’d gotten today, mentally composing a list for the grocers and hum-singing “Oh when you’re smiling, hmhmmhm, oh when you’re smiling, hmhmm, the whole world smiles with you-”
He preferred Armstrong’s version of the song, but in his own voice it came out more like Ellis.
There was an excited, chirpy, “Oh!” from his right. He looked down, and her fingers had gone limp, loosening the pattern of string.
“Are you on the radio?” She asked.
In a sense, but he assumed she meant, “Oh, well, although I appreciate the compliment to my singing voice, I’m not part of any music group, no, young lady.”
The girl rolled her eyes. “No, not singing. You talk in between the songs, right? At night, while dinner’s getting made. You’re Alas- uh, Mr. Toussaint?”
Goodness! He couldn’t say he’d ever had someone recognize him by his voice like that, what a novel skill!
“Alastor Toussaint, yes! A pleasure to be meeting you, miss, quite a pleasure!” His skin scrunched up under the monocle in his right eye, such was the genuine stretch of his smile as he held his hand out for the girl to take. “And you are?”
“Charlie!” She said, reaching out to grab his, “Charlie Mo-, uh, Magne, I really like-”
“Charlie!” The father had presumably finished his purchase and come out. “What are you doing? You can’t go around just touching strange people, you don’t know where he’s been!”
He bustled through, and got between the two of them before they could shake hands. Alastor had half a second to feel shell shocked before taking several steps back, carefully distancing himself from them as quickly as possible. “I didn’t mean to intrude, of course, your daughter is simply a fan of my radio show, you see.”
“Radio?” The man’s eyebrows scrunched together, and he shook his head, settling a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, “Yeah, whatever, hey come on Char-Char we gotta head home, mmk?”
Alastor watched them leave.
It was nothing, of course. A small, everyday indignity, a remarkably delightful interaction spoiled by a small, snobbish little man. If he allowed himself to become riled up over every moment someone made clear they thought he was beneath them, he would have murdered half of New Orleans by the time he’d reached his eighteenth birthday. It had been a stupid thing to do, offering the handshake. A spur of the moment bit of friendliness.
It was a spur of the moment bit of malice that had him follow after the pair, at a distance.
-
He had to leave to go to work, of course- Alastor did not, as a rule, hunt men of Magne’s means for a reason, and changing his schedule at all would not make this any better an idea. Gabriel was, at least, somewhat more tolerable to deal with with the looming promise of a release of tension ahead of him.
His sandwich was roast beef, today, and he ate it alone- Denise had dropped food off and then been immediately sent off on some other errand by Gabriel. That was fine. A half hour alone to think was just what he needed.
Alastor was not what you’d call an endurance predator, he didn’t tend toward studying his targets long term before striking, but he really ought to take some time with this one. His typical targets consisted of workmen, laborers, the sorts of men he was at all likely to ever rub shoulders with enough for them to offend his sensibilities- Gabriel was the closest thing to a ‘sophisticated’ man he ever spoke to on the day-to-day, and of course that was only if you ignored that his money largely stemmed from criminal enterprises. The radio paid for itself in sponsorships, but largely it was a hobby for the man.
Also possibly a money laundering scheme, Alastor hadn’t looked into it.
Point being, if someone of Magne’s means went missing- Alastor had discovered he lived in the Garden District, no surprise there- the police were much more likely to pay attention than they were Alastor’s other victims.
There were some upsides, though. Near as Alastor could tell, the man was somehow subsisting with no everyday service staff whatsoever. Alastor had no idea how- the massive, Greek Revival mansion with its huge front porch and balcony had to have at least half a dozen bedrooms and probably a dedicated ballroom. The idea of just the man and his daughter- along with two small terrier dogs he heard Charlie shouting for, calling ‘Razzle,’ and ‘Dazzle,’ when they arrived home and a black cat he spotted in the window- living in such a space was outrageous. But it did seem to be the case.
That night, after work, he made his way back to the Garden District. It was then that he discovered a charming little habit of Magne’s that was, Alastor thought, precisely what he needed. At 11pm, less than half an hour after Alastor managed to make his way onto his street- not a place he could be seen milling around in for too long after dark, anyway- Alastor watched as Magne, visibly from what lamps were lit the only member of the household still awake, stepped outside his front door and walk, alone, on a long meandering route around the neighborhood that took him close to several dark, closed commercial streets.
Alastor returned the next night. Same thing. He left after the walk, and after a pick-me-up he made some arrangements nearby.
One had to balance caution with the risk of being spotted in a part of town where he would be decidedly unwelcome, or suspected of taking an interest- he didn’t know the man’s first name yet, and he didn’t mean to go asking around after it. Also after over a year of tedium he wanted to do this with the sort of mad, desperate hunger that wasn’t so different from how he’d heard other people sometimes describe the desire for sex. On Friday, Alastor brought a large luggage trunk, a rag he would be happily burning later, and a bottle of chloroform. He did not go to the mansion tonight, but instead found an alley behind a closed tailor shop that Alastor had seen him pass quite close to the previous two nights, and waited.
When the telltale clacking of the short man’s slightly-higher-than-was-plausibly-fashionable heels on the street, Alastor prepared himself and, when he saw the flash of his always pristinely white suit, struck. He came at him from behind, wrapping his arm around Magne’s neck and putting pressure on that oh-so-handy artery. The chloroform was for making the unconsciousness stick, not the initial knockout. The man stilled- freezing completely for an odd moment before he started to struggle, as if he needed a moment to realize what the proper response to being accosted was. When he did start struggling for the few seconds between that and his falling unconscious it was a weak, feeble thing. Alastor dragged the man further into the alleyway, nearer to the trunk, surprised at his weight- the man felt heavier than could be justified by his size.
He’d left the trunk open, and dropped Magne’s unconscious body in before he coated the rag in chloroform and pressed it to his mouth, to make sure the man stayed down. This took a solid several minutes, which was why he’d wanted the man already helpless before administration. Then Magne was tied up, gagged, and locked in the trunk.
In a perfect world, Alastor liked to do this next part out in the wilderness somewhere, but Alastor was also very aware that he did not live in a perfect world. Dragging an unwilling body in a trunk all the way out of the city from this deep into it had never been in the cards. There had been a warehouse fire not too long ago, and after some exploration Alastor was fairly certain the manager had, for whatever reason, insulated his office almost entirely from sound. Said office had mostly survived the fire, and it would do for his purposes until the man was a much more easily transported corpse. Alastor had double checked last night, and installed a deadbolt on the door with a manic anticipation brought on by the chemicals he’d used to keep himself on task.
Transporting the body even a short distance was nerve wracking- it was a quick walk, but he only expected the chloroform to keep him down for half an hour or so, and that was assuming he had understood the concentration correctly. This was hardly his first time using the substance for this purpose, but it had been over a year and he was not a chemist.
Only once he’d ensconced himself and his prey in the office did he allow himself to believe he had actually done it. He opened the trunk, dragged the man’s body out and dropped it onto the soot stained floor with a sort of immature glee at the streaks of black staining the impossibly perfect whiteness of the man’s suit.
There was a poem there, but not one written by the sort of artist he had any kind of respect for.
He was alert in a way he hadn’t been without chemical assistance in months, his heart a skittering hopeful beat in his chest. The perpetual, pleasant smile on his face was wider, sharper, he imagined if he looked himself in the mirror he would find his eyes bright and alert. A thought has him removing his monocle- the world goes blurry in a disorienting, unbalanced sort of way, but it’s better than some bit of desperate flailing managing to get glass in his eye. He left an arrangement of knives here last night, after he installed the lock, and he unrolled the wrapped kit they were in for ease of access.
He waited.
He waited slightly longer than anticipated.
Once his pocketwatch marked that it’d been forty minutes since the initial dose, he reached down to check Magne’s pulse and, when that seemed promisingly normal, slapped at his face a bit. The idea of his victim dying before he got to spend some time with him fills Alastor’s gut with a sort of terrible hollowness all over again.
But the slapping seemed to do the trick, because almost immediately after Magne starts shifting and opens his eyes. Alastor had tied him up thoroughly, a gag in his mouth, legs tied together from ankle to knee and arms bound tightly behind him. He gave the other man a moment to take in his surroundings, his circumstances, and waited for the fear to enter his eyes as he realized how helpless he was.
It never comes.
Certainly, Magne seemed to understand what was happening- he sat up, looked at the office, looked at Alastor, his eyes were alert and focused. But the fear never came. He simply sat there, waiting patiently for Alastor to say or do something.
“Magne, is it?” Alastor said, trying to get something to drive itself into the man’s placid, patient expression. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea whatsoever what your first name is.”
A raised eyebrow, a nod downward to signal the obvious to Alastor- Magne was gagged, he couldn’t reply.
“You should know that this room is insulated against sound. Do feel free to scream anyway, if you like- I’ve always found useless, desperate screaming rather entertaining,” Alastor said, and then finally reached forward to untie the gag.
Magne cleared his throat, tensed and untensed his jaw a few times. Alastor waited with a gluttonous anticipation.
“No thanks,” Magne said, “I’m good. It’s Alastor, right? Toussaint? I’m Lucifer. Uh, really, before you think I’m fucking with you, that is actually the name I was given when I was born.”
“Truly?” Alastor asked. This was going very differently than he expected it to. He couldn't decide if he liked it- a lot of the appeal of giving his victim a chance to speak was the novelty of the different ways people responded to the inevitability of death, and he couldn’t figure out if this was a sort of denial or acceptance.
“Yeah. So, Alastor,” Lucifer said, “I think maybe we got off on the wrong foot on Wednesday.”
… Bargaining? Was this what this man’s version of bargaining was? He’d gotten bargaining from victims before, and it typically involved a lot more desperate begging than this.
“I’m not sure what it is I did to piss you off- like, I get that your usual victims aren’t kids, but I think ‘has to have not killed 17 people, even if those people were adult men’ is actually a pretty low bar to have for people who wanna hang out with my kid, y’know?”
…
wha-
what the fu-
“What the fuck?” Alastor said. Asked? His smile remained firmly affixed in place but it had gone from sharp to bemused.
“Like don’t get me wrong, very impressive piece of shit human behavior, you don’t normally see those numbers out of people who aren’t like, tricking themselves into doing government sanctioned murder instead of the freelance hobbyist stuff you seem to be into,” Lucifer continued.
Alastor finally regained control of his limbs enough to take a wobbling step forward, and then another, until his hands were at Lucifer’s throat and he was bodily shaking the man, making his head jerk in a way that had to be uncomfortable. Lucifer’s eyes- what an absurd name, Alastor couldn’t decide if it was true or Magne was trying to convince him he was some sort of supernatural thing. His throat felt enough like a man’s under Alastor’s hands, his pulse going from infuriatingly calm to a fluttering, jumpy thing as he lost oxygen. His smile was a bearing of teeth, no longer the predator, now a trapped snapping animal. “Shut up. How do you know that?”
Lucifer wheezed, but managed to choke out, “Do you want me to shut up, ehhck, or do you want me to-”
Alastor shoved the man back down onto the ground by his throat and then, once he’d gotten Lucifer where he wanted him and straddled his chest to keep him there, removed his hands. “Answer the question.”
“I, ahem, I mean. Anyone with the nose for it can smell it on you, Mr. Toussaint.” Lucifer was smiling. It wasn’t right, for Lucifer to be the one smiling while Alastor struggled to keep his wavering mouth open and bared around his teeth. “It’s obvious.”
An involuntary snarl bursts from his throat. He twisted to look behind him and grabbed a hunting knife, taking it in hand and then slamming it down into Lucifer’s thigh in one swift, unhesitating motion. Even Lucifer’s attitude, determined not to acknowledge the seriousness of his situation, couldn’t hold back the cry of pain and surprise that bubbled up out of his throat. Alastor untwisted his torso to look the other man in the face, taking in his twisted, pained mouth and wincing eyes. That was a little better. “A better explanation than that, if you please.”
“I- ahaha, oh FUCK that smarts- I don’t know what to tell you, man, I don’t uh… have anything else for you.” Lucifer adjusted his position slightly, winced again. Alastor twisted the knife just to hear the resultant high pitched whimper. He has had his mouth open and has been panting for breath ever since the knife first got driven into him, “It’s really obvious to me that you’ve killed seventeen people- first one was when you were like, a teenager or something? Last one was like, a year, a year and a half ago? Something like that. No one else knows, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
By the end of his statement a thin trickle of drool had spilled out of the corner of his mouth from holding it open, panting and in pain for so long. Alastor looked into his eyes- a sort of warm amber-brown, like honey. They were watery but not crying, and he didn’t have the manic animal fear that he ought to have right now. He did not give the impression of someone telling Alastor whatever he wanted to hear to keep himself alive.
And surely, if he was, he wouldn’t be telling Alastor that he was the only person out there that knew what Alastor was.
“What are you doing here?” Alastor asked, baffled.
Lucifer looked equally baffled. “Uh? You choked me out and then took me here? Obviously?”
The smart thing to do would be to torture some more information about how he knew what Alastor was out of him. If Alastor had ever before considered having to torture someone for information, rather than fun, before he might have done it.
Alastor yanked the knife out of Lucifer’s thigh without giving the short man a chance to prepare for it, and listened to the punched-out breath push itself out of his lungs. It wasn’t that Alastor wasn’t hurting Lucifer. It was that Lucifer’s understanding of how much danger that pain represented seemed… wrong somehow. He scooted down a bit so he straddled the top of the other man’s thighs and brought the knife up, cutting Lucifer out of his waistcoat and shirt.
He hadn’t done this in so long. He hadn’t even picked a target he normally enjoyed doing this with, this time- Lucifer’s reasons for wanting Alastor to keep away from his daughter were much more reasonable than the racism Alastor had initially understood it to be. But he needed to die now, of course, and the stretch of pale flesh revealed by the knife sent a heady rush that he felt as heat through his face, a shiver that flowed across his shoulderblades and down his spine.
“... lots of reasons, I guess.” Lucifer continued. Speech made his belly jump a little, clenching on the indraw of breath in spite of how softly he spoke the words. Alastor leveled the tip of the hunting knife against the spot between where his pubic hair became sparse and his belly button. “Sometimes it feels like I arranged for a train to explode. Like I arranged for every train ever to eventually explode but you all keep getting in trains anyway, because you don’t have a choice, and maybe it won’t explode on this trip. I think part of me figured I deserved to be on the train when it exploded, for once.”
This incoherent little monologue clearly wasn’t even properly directed at Alastor. Lucifer’s eyes were half glazed and focused at some random spot on the ceiling. His golden blonde hair was grayed by the soot on the floor, and the area around his mouth was shining and damp.
Alastor stabbed down, not hard enough to perforate organs but deep enough to the initial layer of skin, muscle, and fat, and then drew the knife up sharply, stopped only by the fork of Lucifer’s ribcage.
Which, if nothing else, drew Lucifer’s attention back to Alastor. He wasn’t certain why that mattered to him- it never really had before, beyond them knowing who was killing them and why they were dying. Perhaps because Lucifer apeared not to be actually guilty of the behavior Alastor normally yearned to repay with violence and fear, perhaps because he was the only person Alastor has ever known who understood precisely what sort of things Alastor had done, with numbers and a sort of casual, uninterested acceptance. The sudden, shocked scream as Alastor opened up Lucifer’s insides was intoxicating, and Alastor hooked his thumb into flesh to draw it aside and look in at the jumping, pumping, wet mass of flesh and organs underneath. Lucifer wiggled and strained underneath him, letting out a sort of whining keen but not screaming- Alastor’s eyes darted away from the feast before him to take in Lucifer’s face, weeping and wincing, like his hand was being held to the surface of a stove but he couldn’t draw his hand away.
Wouldn’t draw his hand away?
No. He couldn’t, of course. Alastor wouldn’t give him the opportunity. Alastor reached his other hand down and cupped Lucifer’s cheak in his palm, felt a tear well up underneath his thumb and followed a curious impulse to bring it to his lips, salt bursting on his tongue as he made long, lingering eye contact with Lucifer, weeping wetly beneath him.
It had been disappointing and confusing, at first, when Lucifer had not behaved as Alastor expected a victim to. But he yearned so ardently for novelty.
“You’ve given me a gift,” Alastor stated, slipping his hand into the other man’s guts and sliding his fingers through the wet, hot meat of them. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything so beautifully new.”
Lucifer let out baffled, confused laughter interspersed with high pitched whining screams that made his insides jump and slip around Alastor’s fingers. Alastor repositioned himself so he could begin pressing his hand upward inside of Lucifer’s abdomen, slipping underneath his ribcage. Part of Alastor wanted to draw this out as long as possible, watch Lucifer squirm and weep and scream underneath him for as long as Alastor could draw it out. But with his belly split to the open air, there was only so long that could last- it was astonishing that he had not passed out already from the pain- and what Alastor wanted even more than for this to last was to hold Lucifer’s jumping, beating heart in his hand and squeeze.
He was experienced enough at this by now to find it blind, a hammering jerking rabbitlike lump of muscle cupped gently in Alastor’s palm. He drifted the hand gently cupping Lucifer’s cheek down to his chin and gripped it, forcing him to look Alastor directly in his eyes. He squeezed.
The thrashing, straining movement this caused Lucifer to give, bucking and straining against his bonds, was wholly involuntary and animalistic. His eyes light up bright and alert for a moment until they begin to fade into wet, glazed, unfocused death while Alastor watched this strange, incomprehensible man fade away.
There was a pang of regret. That had never happened before.
And then Alastor began to dress the corpse properly.
-
The weekend is spent consumed by a sort of bubbly, whole body high that nothing else in the world can give him.
-
There wasn’t really a need to go to Boucher’s Butchery the following Wednesday- Alastor had more meat than he knew what to do with- but, again, best not to break the schedule. He only planned on purchasing a small order, and will imply he intends to eat out a fair bit more than usual the following week if Chuck asks. He is in the best mood he’s been in months, even though Mimzy has still not returned- he had received a letter at least announcing she was still alive, but had managed to leverage Chicago performances into ones in New York, and would be gone for some more time yet.
He rounds the corner to look through the shop’s front window, anticipating the rush of excitement that will come when he sees that there is no white suited gentleman at the counter, the physical effect of Alastor’s actions making a mark on the world, on his own routine.
Nothing could have prepared him for the cold shock of terror he receives instead, when he looks through and sees Lucifer happily chatting with Chuck about his purchases. As Alastor watched, the short man spotted him in the shining glass in front of Boucher’s displayed meat and spun in place, giving him a friendly, wickedly smirking wave through the window.
Utterly detached from his own body, consumed by dissociative terror, Alastor felt it lift a hand and wave in return.