Chapter Text
꒦꒷𖤐ִ২ৈ𖤐ִ꒦꒷
Alastor was a shade; his shadow is as much something else as it is part of him. When he was alive, he consorted with things that were beyond the space of Heaven and Hell. They were somewhere between. He was devout to them, and they were his gods. They were Spirits, Ancestors, promises, old vows, and prayers. They were of many cultures, forgotten or cast aside by another ‘greater’ power. They were silenced by those who did not understand them.
His mother sought them through stars, eggs, bones, and blood. Alastor had consulted them through whispers at night, candles, and mirrors. He gave them animal lives like his mother before him and they granted him clarity and protection. They gave him the strength to do what he knew he needed to do, strengthened his convictions, and brought him confidence; the power to stop running. He found their soft voices to be like a static, buzz, that confronted him in his lonely existence.
The old gods were nature, they were cruel, swift, and vengeful. His ancestors had been slaves on one side. His mother’s parents had been blackened and burned under an unforgiving son but the whites, dared to say that they were being paid a living wage when their parents had been given nothing but chains. Forced to come and bleed on soil not their own, punished for their traditions that others could not understand. They tried to snuff it out, but it burned brighter the more darkness that surrounded it.
Whenever his father hit him for whispering to the stars.
They would whisper louder as if outraged on his behalf.
“It’s going to get you hung boy.” His father pushed his head back down to the bible. Holding it tightly there. He doesn’t cry because the man will just hurt him more for being a frail, stupid, colored, boy. One he can’t ‘educate’ the way that he wants. “There isn’t a place for that sorta thing in civilized society.”
“Then why did you contact, mother.” He hisses because he feels brave. It’s not the religion of slaves, it's not savage, it’s familiar, it’s comforting. It’s the only thing he has of her. It’s part of him. His father holds his head even harder, crushing the ears against his skull.
“Your mother found me. I told you that.” The man spat as if the idea of it sickened him. “Said she wanted a child. I gave her what she wanted and she gave me a good time. That was our deal, she wasn’t supposed to bother me after that, but she always knew where I was or moved, fucking witch.”
The Voices led him to question why it was that so many had tried to snuff out the old ways. Darkness held truths and Alastor, well accustomed to it, traveled in search of it. Search for more truths that his mother did not have the strength to tell him, of tales that she might not have known because the white man killed them. The man that he met in the deep woods worshiped them by consuming and sacrificing animals. Animals that just so happened to be of the more intelligent kind.
“Consult them with care.” His mother's voice is soft, it's always like this when they are in front of the small shrine that she has made, hidden under the house, only those that believe come here. They were safe here, no one could harm them. It was holier than any church she told him and he believed her. There were just some things that were meant to be felt. “They are not to be insulted, they are not to be denied. If you make them a promise you must fulfill it.”
“What happens if you don’t.” He was a little scared because all children should be fearful of God but not enough to not seek him in their time of need.
“I hope that you never find out.” She says looking at him. Her eyes are a little sad. Her hands are bleeding from her sacrifice. “I have not faced their wrath yet, and they have granted me such a gift even if the price was high.”
He doesn’t understand. He looks behind him quickly because that is where she is looking and there is nothing there. Not even a shadow is cast. No, it’s dark down here as it’s meant to be.
The Native man had tried to give Alastor to them and Alastor had finished the ritual bathed in gore and moonlight. Alastor consumed the flesh of humankind for the first time to preserve his life. The blood the second it passed his lips, burned in a way that he knew to be a curse, it fused to him, embedded in him. His eyes became more than just the deep brown, his ears became sharper, and he could see the shadows in more than their vapor trails.
He understood a lot more then.
He was finally free there in the deep woods, with a crimson knife clutched in his cold fingers.
When he died the Spirits he served must have wept, for he was their voice. He no longer granted them sacrifice, no longer could share their secrets, or commune with them. And he no longer carried out what they both would have deemed as justice. So they must have gifted him some of the powers that he carried on through the vale to Hell. A shade of his own, but that curse came with him. It came with him through all the fire too. He knows the price of consuming flesh. He knows his half-life was sealed when he continued to have to consume it. But each soul became part of his own and he could make them do what he wanted, force them into shadowed, stitched forms, like the dolls his mother told him never to meddle with.
He shifted, he moved, he breathed in the heavy tainted shadow, and he followed with it. While part of him held a screaming little girl the other part of him was searching, pushing past concerned and foolish imps and hellborn, flooding through the cracks in the foundations.
They are all scared of him since he had hijacked the radio waves, but they are more concerned when the blackness swims its way down forbidden passages but it's not like they can really stop him. The water of the bog coats their floors like blackened tar.
He twists deeper into the dark. The whispers are louder, there's heavy magic in the air and there is Lucifer. He’s in the water, deep within it, under the surface not breathing. Just floating like he’s trapped under ice.
Alastor pulls on the shadows, they relent, like a puppet, and he switches places with his other half. The shadow now guards Charlie and Alastor is there in a cavern, older than the Divine that floats in it, older than perhaps the things that crafted him in their image. His Spirits are here too, they are in the stone that mimics stars, and they are in the water, but there is also Lucifer’s magic. He can feel it in their bond, it runs up through him like lightning. He can feel their deal burning hot in his chest, Molton, pain, at Charlie’s continued distress. Every heartbeat sends that burning feeling in his blood through him.
He hates this man.
He has to save him.
The water…. His shadows tell him not to touch it. They scream in a static-filled crescendo of warnings and musical chants. But he has to because there is a girl that needs her idiot father, there are demons upstairs that are going to try and do something rash and stupid to comfort the crying child. As if they know what he is, what he is doing this all for.
He has to enter it.
He curses Lucifer.
He curses Lilith.
It doesn’t change what needs to happen and so he reaches in. Feels the water wash over him and the form he keeps buried be pushed forward. He feels his eyes water, the blackness starts to fall, unwanted, he pulls on the other with all his strength. Lucifer is heavy, saturated in magic, and moisture. He strains with even the other more cursed parts of himself. His antlers scrape against the top of the ceiling, his claws dig into the ground, and his teeth clenched so hard that they may crack.
He pulls and pulls and the other comes up, looking dead, before seeming to dry heave for several excruciating seconds before vomiting everything up. His face is red, burned-looking, sickly. That forced smile is gone, replaced with the broken look of a man who has lost everything and has nothing left.
Part of him takes satisfaction in that, because he put Alastor for the last few hours through actual hell, so much so that it feels like justice, for the other to fall apart after all the breakdowns that he has subjected Alastor through, and his daughter. But the other part of him feels a stab of something that must have been Pity because… this was a truly pathetic creature. Once the most divine, most pretty of angels, reduced to a shell that looks up at him with teary eyes.
Maybe that was what Lilith saw.
Maybe she was right to judge him harshly and unworthy of her daughter.
Maybe she was right to ask Alastor to steal her away.
Lucifer was self-destructive and he might just drag them all down with him. He might have been the safer option for now, but how much longer? Still, he has to do what the deal asks of him. What little of his conscience tells him that is the right thing to do?
“Thank you.” The voice is too soft to be that of a King or ultimate power. It’s too human. Still, it is said with such… fondness, and gratitude, that it takes him back, and makes him nearly fall to get away from it. He looks at him, he looks at him, and says his name as if he’s saying a prayer of his own. Like he cares so deeply.
“Alastor.” It's breathy, light, and strange. It makes his insides burn even worse than before but the worst part is it’s not pain or fear. He wishes it was anger that would be easier but it’s something else, something foreign and he doesn’t like the way that the weight settles.
They are not friends or anything so why does he feel anything at all when the other reaches for him? Reaches like Alastor is some sort of rock in a storm, this man had already drowned. He shouldn’t thank him for doing what needed to be done. Shouldn’t thank him when it was a deal that compelled him.
“Alastor.” He says it again.
More static, more strange, sharp, overwhelming sensations going up his spine. If he was over-stimulated before this, it's worse now. He’s almost grateful when the other fails to grab onto him and falls unconscious and without grace back onto the harsh ground that he had only partially risen from.
He's doing this for himself... And maybe Charlie.
He carries him back from the deep. He tries to ignore the way the other clings to him. He tries to ignore the weak wetness that stains the corner of Lucifer's dark eyelashes like rare stones that bleed against the breast of his shirt, forming dark bruises on the fabric.