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Alastor couldn't stand himself. The words that he had just said were still repeating in his mind, the way that he had yelled at Charlie. He was trying to continue on with his day, act like nothing happened, despite the fact that there was an event at the Hotel that night and mentally he wasn't sure that he could take it.
He straightened up a tablecloth, still thinking about what he had said. "Just because Sir Pentious was dumb enough to let Adam kill him, doesn't mean that redemption is actually a thing! Every sinner down here is awful scum, and you are doing nothing but enabling them with this stupid project of yours!" It's not like he lied. Redemption wasn't worth his time, he knew that.
Charlie had her horns out. Her sclerae were a bright red, black lines appearing above and below her eyes, her hair naturally falling out of its braid. "Then why are you here, huh? If you actually think it's just enabling bad people, what does that say about you? You're the one who is here for your entertainment!"
Her air quotes couldn't help but make the demon chuckle. So innocent, so pure... such a waste. But it was weird to see Charlie being so angry. Maybe she was finally getting jaded. It's not like Alastor was never like Charlie. He had just moved past it. "This is Hell! What more am I supposed to do than entertain myself with these wastes of life! We're here amongst the filth, so we might as well enjoy!"
The demon tried to keep his cool, tried to not show how absolutely angry he was. He kept his demon form at bay, tried to make his smile even bigger. "Why, Alastor. Why do you gain such pleasure from hurting people? If everything down here was so bad, than we might as well try to make people as happy as possible- you know what. I'm tired of you loving others' suffering!"
"Then be tired of it! That is what you get when you waste your time and your daddy's riches on something as stupid as this!" He waved his hand around, this time standing in his own room. Unlike the last fight like this. "There is not a good sinner down here, that's oxymoronic. And maybe it's time you realize that and, I don't know, go on to help the insufferable scum born here! This Hotel will only make things worse!"
There was a gust of hot wind, seemingly carrying embers towards Alastor, the rage in Charlie's face only growing, her one hand turning monstrous. Alastor still had no idea where that came from. "What is wrong with you!" She snapped. Before Charlie slowly went back to normal, back to being composed. "Alastor, you only got defensive when I suggested that you could get redeemed. Why is that?"
"Oh, here we go with your psychoanalysis, 'oh, Alastor is such a poor soul, he's just a broken sinner, maybe if I love him he'll want to get redeemed!' Maybe you need to stop looking for things that simply are not there!" His sclera suddenly turned black, red radio dials taking the place of his irises. "The biggest waste of all would be you trying to redeem a demon like me. There is no humanity left in me. There's nothing."
His voice was glitching, his body growing, leaning towards Charlie with his antlers long and spiky. His stitches were showing, something that he was all too sensitive about, something he noticed. As soon as he noticed it, he felt his emotions slip away, being dimmed out again, everything fizzling out as he went back to his normal form, normal smile, normal Alastor.
A happy song played over his radio, the demon calmly adjusting his bowtie. "Anyways, why don't we get ready for this party. After all, might as well let these losers think that there's any hope left for them! Who knows, maybe some of them will have the luck to not be murdered by next year's overly eager exterminators!" He hopped into his shadows, teleporting downstairs.
When Charlie came down a few minutes later, he couldn't take his eyes off of her. Of course he didn't actually believe in redemption. This was Hell, and everyone had their whole lives to turn it all around. But then there was Sir Pentious. He died for his friends. Maybe that was the key to Charlie's pipe dream.
Not that Alastor wasn't almost in the exact same place. Maybe if he hadn't used every last ounce of his power, he'd currently be pounding on Heaven's gates, trying to get out of there and come back down to where he could be him. It was his playground. It was a playground full of broken souls, broken souls just like him, and he had risen to be the master of many of them.
There wasn't anything for him in Heaven, anyways. It wouldn't be as fun. He was too far gone, he knew that, he accepted that, even if there were times where he wanted to make Charlie happy. Make Charlie happy? Who was he turning into. He was getting close to her. That just wouldn't do. This was all for his entertainment and- "Niffty!" He overheard Vaggie yelling at the maid, just before she knocked a pile of plates over.
His head snapped up to the sound, ears quickly raising. He hadn't even realized that they were down. He had felt himself slipping more lately, not always fully paying attention to everything around him. He had to fix that. He caught a stray, angry look from Vaggie, probably because of what he had told Charlie.
He looked down at the tablecloth, which at some point had gotten all messed up again. Had he done that? He didn't know. He tried to take a deep breath, to stabilize himself, but he suddenly felt tightness in his lungs. He tried again. He couldn't breathe. He subconsciously reached for his chest, recoiling when he accidentally rubbed against his wound.
Alastor knew that he had to get away. He couldn't be seen by everyone like this. He tried again for a proper breath, and it didn't work. He tried to actually move, and that failed, too. Bouncing slightly in place, he closed his eyes, going back into his shadows, the closest thing that he had to a safe place nowadays, and reappeared in his room. He didn't notice Charlie watching his shadows melt away.
The demon immediately walked over to his bayou, crouching down on the bank of the water. He looked into the water below him, it was murky and filthy, which there was a cruel irony to it when he thought about it. He saw his reflection, and it was undisrupted by any sort of ripples. The water was uncharacteristically still today. Exactly the opposite of his heart, which he felt like might just beat out of his chest.
He reached below him, his hand falling into the bulrushes, realizing very suddenly that he couldn't quite feel them. He pulled his hand out, staring at it. It seemed distant. He didn't like that feeling. It was all tingly and numb, and he could feel the blood pulsing in it with every time his heart thumped. He felt like he was not in control of his own body. He needed to regain control.
But every attempt at regaining control, every attempt at figuring out why he even felt this way and why the world felt so far away and why his body felt so numb- it only served to make everything worse. The muggy air probably was not helping his inability to breathe, and his position on damp ground was not making his shaking any better. He was better than this and he knew it. But he couldn't stop.
Alastor wasn't even sure how long he had been there. It felt like it had been hours, but it was probably truthfully only a few minutes. That's when he finally heard something other than the sound of the cicadas and the blood rushing. He snapped to the sound, the sound of a door opening, the sound of footsteps entering his room. He noticed Charlie standing there, but he didn't really see her or process her.
She stared at him for a moment, her form blurry from the tears in his eyes that he didn't realize were even welling up there. She closed the door behind her, and she looked... the only thing that Alastor could describe it as was scared, not that he trusted his own judgement on people's facial expressions on a good day. "Alastor?" Her voice was soft and sweet, and even a bit shaky.
"Go... go away," it took him a moment to respond, a moment to force his words to actually work and go from his jumbled head and down through his mouth. "I don't want to see you," he felt the words catch in his throat, briefly sobbing. He couldn't control it. He had no control, and Charlie was seeing him like this. He looked so foolish, especially after the fight that they had just had.
"No, I'm staying. It's ok, it's all ok, just take a deep breath," Charlie was getting closer to him, which was only unsettling him even more, and making him shake harder. He was able to move slightly away from her, trying to keep his distance and his sanity. But Charlie got closer still, before crouching down next to him. She originally reached an arm out to touch him, but then thought better of it, just watching him for a moment.
Alastor couldn't respond. He tried, but nothing really happened, besides a squeak of static that was most definitely unbecoming of him. Not that he could help it. He felt like his world was crashing down, like his bayou was only managing to get further away from him despite how he hadn't moved. At least, he didn't think that he had moved. Everything felt off and dull and spinning and wrong.
Charlie moved backwards a bit, letting the demon have some space. She was trying to contain her own panic. "Alastor! Hey, can you hear me?" She called out to him, but he didn't respond to her. She waited for another moment, watching him curl himself up into a ball, protecting himself, his hands pressed against his ears and keeping them down. "Hey, Alastor, it's me, Charlie. You're safe, we're in your bayou, ok?"
At first, the demon still didn't respond, at least verbally, only humming with every time that he rocked his body back and forth. It sounded strained with every breath. But, the more that Charlie repeated her comforting words, the reminder that he was safe and that she wouldn't leave him, that she was there, oh, she was there, he could make out more and more of his surroundings.
He looked up at her, tears still streaming down his face and his eyes still visibly puffy. He was still curled up, but at least air seemed to be entering his lungs at a somewhat decent enough rate. He looked over his other shoulder, embarrassment suddenly hitting him, as well as the realization that he hadn't managed to stop crying yet. Not that he could. "Why are you here?"
"I just wanted to come check on you. You seemed a bit upset and spaced out and then you vanished," Charlie raised her hand, stretching it out towards him, silently asking whether or not she could touch him. He pulled away, brief panic on his face before he tried to cover it up, the same mask that he had used for all of his life and afterlife. He felt like the mask was cracking.
"You don't have to let me touch you, it's ok to not want it," the Princess put her hand back down. She was taking in the bayou, her first time really inside of it completely. It was warm and muggy, but overall it was nice, and she couldn't help but wonder if this was what Earth was like. She had been to the swamps in Greed before, but even they weren't this nice.
"Look, I know that I said some messed up things. I..." Alastor wanted to say that he didn't mean it, that he didn't actually really mean what he said, but he couldn't bring himself to. He knew that, to a degree, he did. Not what he said about Charlie, not how her project would only make things in Hell worse, but his thoughts on sinners, and, maybe more glaringly, his thoughts on himself. "I'm sorry."
Charlie smiled, nodding gently. It was like she knew exactly what was going on in his head. "I get that you don't have the best impressions of other sinners. Or yourself, for that matter. But I think that there's some good down here. And I definitely think that there's some good in you, even if you can't see it."
She would be lying if she said that she wasn't hurt, and that what her hotelier had said wouldn't be looping in her mind for weeks to come. She would be lying if she said that she wasn't angry at him. She would be lying if she said that there were moments when she really had to look hard to find that spark in Alastor. But she knew that it was there. Even if he did everything in his power to hide it.
He raised his eyebrows, nodding a little. He didn't look at her. He didn't want her to have the gratification of seeing him any more vulnerable that she already had. He hummed a small response, one that signaled doubt, but she seemed to ignore it. "I do care about you. I care about you a lot. You don't have to care about me in return, you don't even have to accept that I care. I just want you to hear it."
"Thanks," his voice was almost numb. He was still having a hard time feeling, hard time placing himself in the middle of everything. It was better than before, but somehow, those words, the reminder that she cared, they didn't make thinking any easier. "I fail to... understand it, you know. I find this whole redeeming sinners thing rather silly. I do not know why you would want to redeem someone like..." his voice trailed off.
"Like you?" Charlie saw the glossy look in his eyes and started to ease up on her words. She wasn't sure why the attention, the explanation of care, made the demon so uncomfortable, but it quite clearly did. She wondered about his past. He had never once talked about his human life beyond just murderer and radio host from New Orleans. But she had a feeling that he would never talk about his life before that.
Alastor shot Charlie a glance, not exactly liking her question. But the words kept looping in his mind, the fact that she even noticed that he was so broken and so obviously awful that even she thought he couldn't get redeemed and- no, that's not what she had said. "I suppose that you could say that," he tried to think up a snarky remark, but the only thing that came out was a choked sob.
Charlie offered hm a soft smile. She could see the anxiety briefly crossing his face before settling himself. "For what it's worth, I think you could get red-... I think that you are a lot cooler than you give yourself credit for, Al," he scoffed at her comment. Cool. That was far from a word that he would ever use to describe himself, but he did appreciate that Charlie said that about him. A compliment for sure.
"You're worth it, just so you know," now those words caught Alastor off guard. He immediately looked over at her, seeing the same, comforting look on her face, even if the way her hand was pressing against the wet grass underneath her said otherwise. "You're worth fighting for. You are worth me fighting for, and quite frankly, you are with yourself fighting for."
"I see that you are just full of kind words tonight," Alastor said. He flipped to his knees before standing up and then extending a hand to Charlie, offering to help her up. She reached out to it, before realizing that it was damp and dirty, to which he laughed, summoning a towel. "For you, Princess. Must stay proper for tonight's festivities!"
She wanted more time to talk with him. She wanted more time to drill it into his head, to show him just how full of worth he was. But she could also tell that he was getting worn out. She had never discussed anything of this manner with him before. Maybe it was just absolutely exhausting to him. But that didn't mean that she wouldn't continue to try.
After wiping her hands, she took his hand in hers, using it to help her stand, but then not letting it go. She squeezed it, softly enough to not bother him, but enough that he jumped a bit, not expecting the sudden additional force. She pulled away when she could start to sense his discomfort increasing. "I know that you're just going to blow what I said off, but it's true. You are loved, Alastor. Now, let's finish setting up, we are so behind!"
Alastor laughed, taking a few steps behind after her as she dashed out of the room. "Coming, Charlie!" He called. But the second she was out of his sight, he froze, a loud ringing in his ears going lower, reverberating into his head and soon he felt like his whole body was vibrating with radio static. You are loved, Alastor. "You are loved, Alastor," he muttered, not even realizing that he had said it out loud.
Loved. What a word. He'd heard Charlie say it before in passing, typically when he'd done something to help out. When he pulled the right strings, sometimes he got a shallow, "oh, I love you!" as Charlie hugged him and then ran off. He'd heard Rosie call it out to him as he walked out the door of her Emporium. A quick, "love ya, hun!" as he left. He'd heard plenty of sarcastic "loves" from Husk. But never anything quite like that.
He wasn't sure what there truly was to love. Out of all of the things that he'd said to Charlie, the thing that he agreed with most was that there was nothing left. He didn't even know if there was anything there to begin with, or if it had been stripped away from him. He wondered the exact moment in which it was taken from him.
Then, he realized that he was still standing there, prone in the middle of his room. He snapped out of his thoughts, taking another step towards the door, shaking his head, trying to get rid of the static that often accompanied moments like these. He also tried to put the fact that Charlie said that she loved him on the back burner. The last time that someone had genuinely said that they loved him...
That was for later. When later would come, Alastor didn't know, and he didn't want to think about it. He had to go and finish setting up, smile, and act like nothing had ever happened. Even though, with every passing moment, he felty more and more shame about Charlie having seen him in that state. If he had any luck, she wouldn't bring it up ever again. But this was Hell. It wasn't known for its fortunate things.
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