BILLY LOOMIS & STU MACHER X SHY Photographer MALE READER

CHILDREN OF THE O.D.D. alastor

In his seven years of absence, Alastor calls on you and collects you.

tags: radio, literary references, developing relationship, temporary amnesia, mental torture, alastor love you but can’t resist causing a little emotional damage, wendigo, dark magic, hurt/comfort

It was not your intention to make any sort of detour after work. Always the string of home pulled you back in like a faithful dog returning to the outstretched hand. You trudge, like a ghost shackled by unfinished business, to the space underneath your shower head. To watch ebony red and wood brown slip into the drain; the filth of blood under fingernails and the sleeves of dirt upon your arms ebbing away.

This detour is unexpected and odd. Breaking a cycle that you had never strayed from, it is undernerving to you. Still –You put your fingers over your lips and frown. You are looking for something; that is as much as you are able to deduct. 

The homemade yard-sale sign is crumbled and ruined. A slab of cardboard folding in on itself because of the rain from yesterday. In streaks, the markers bleed like branching veins across the surface. You actually took a wrong turn because one of the arrows was so wet that you could not decipher if you were meant to walk right or forward. The skies still remain a blanket of nebulous gray and black, thick with potential rain.

Really, you should head home and ignore this detour, you judge just as you step into the backyard sale. Logic tries as it might, you are grappled by this ardor. Entering the mouth, you realize you are here, looking for something. Something that has leashed you subconsciously.

Yard-sales hold a wild assortment of things: dusty books, a splintering wooden bow with arrows included, outgrown clothes, etcetera. An evil secret here or there? You chuckle at the ridiculous thought. 

Rummaging around in dirt was your past-time, rummaging around in strangers’ belongings felt unusual. Mindful of your unclean hands, you simply float around the tables and piles of things. When someone lingers behind you, you move quickly because you are browsing while others are hunting. Truly, you do not yet know what you are planning to sink your teeth into. Your little routine continues, floating around and bouncing out of the way when it looks like someone is interested in the pile you stand in front of. Deeper and deeper, you wander into the labyrinth of unwanted things. 

Perhaps you could pick up something for Alastor. That harrowing need to find something was starting to dim inside you. 

Just as you start browsing for him, that feeling returns tenfold. The peach pit of your stomach feels like a mixture of drain cleaner and bleach. It burns you. Whatever that something is, it is upset to be ignored and hooks itself into your abdomen pulling. 

“Turn left then straight.”

You jump at the sudden voice. And a shudder runs down your spine because they were close enough that their breath tickled your neck. In the labyrinth’s heart, you glance around for the individual that was talking to you. Hm? No one is looking at you. Everyone is nose down in their own business, browsing tables. 

Tentatively, you rest an ice cold hand on the spot where you definitely felt someone’s breath. Odd. You take a step to the right. 

“Left then straight.” You stumble in your walk as if you were a newborn in heels. 

What? You shake your ankle as you restabilize yourself. It felt as if someone had snatched onto your ankle when you moved. Another shudder joins your first. This time you decide to heed that voice. If your subconscious pulled you into the yard-sale, it can definitely direct you. Different from your previous lazy tumble, you move with purpose to that ‘left then straight’ direction. 

But as you take that left turn, you feel an uneasy cocoon itself over your previous headstrong annoyance. You slow your pace. Those previous sensations had been very odd. Someone’s breath on your neck. Someone’s hands around your ankle. You shudder one last time and move straight, searching.

A slumbering nest of snakes starts to squirm in your stomach. The real snake though – the ouroboros ring on your ring finger – is scorching instead of slittering. Like red hot iron to a horse flank. Knowing it is impossible to take it off, you rub cold fingers over it. Worrying hands joined at your chest, you look left and right for the item that has ensnared you. Long ago, the ouroboros ring had ensnared you in the same way, pulling and tugging at your intestines and bones like a magnet grabbing at its opposite pole.  Remembering that, you grow even more uneasy. 

What are you looking for?

You realize it as soon as your eyes fall on it.

The spiritual itch is finally scratched. The last piece is thumbed into the puzzle. The starved man has finally been given food. Before your mind catches up, you have already reached the plastic folding table and are touching your something. Heat from the ouroboros ring ebbs softly.

The woodwork is beautiful like a stained catholic mural. The single diamond eye of brown bakelite and wood blinks at you, surprised to be touched. Gilded brass is tickled by your experimenting hands as you turn its knobs. Wires spread over the speakers like a spider-made ribcage start to beat flustered at your presence. When you run your fingers over the ridges and arches, it leans into your touch. Though it is an entirely inanimate piece, it has so much character. An authentic radio, probably dated 1910 or 1920s. Worrying a bit about its fragility, you do not dare to pick it up no matter how it pleads and flirts with you to do just that. It is certainly a bewitching beauty. So, this is your something; this is what you were looking for. 

But – a delicate frown moves your lips. You have no use for a radio like this in your home. Heavens know you have enough radios at home. Can this really be what your heart wants? When you move your hands off the woodwork, it feels as if your ring grows a circle of spikes that sink into your skin and collide at your fingerbone. You yelp and quickly put your hands back on the yard-sale item. Your heart does want this … apparently …

“Okay,” you whisper as if that will appease your heart, your subconscious, and your ring – all three holy spirits of your body. “Okay.” Gingerly, you lift up the hulking mass and start back towards the entrance. Well, Alastor can simply deal with another radio. And you are slightly elevated to bring it back home. Elevated enough that when you reach home –

You kick off your shoes by the entrance and sing out, “Alastor, I’m home.”

Radio cradled to your chest, you listen intentionally to the suspicious silence. You wonder how he will greet you this time. Sometimes, there are bumps of furniture or he simply slips in front of you. You can never truly predict Alastor’s moods. He is something volatile; he can either be as sweet as a dream or dangerous as a nightmare. For a few moments, you wait for the other shoe to drop. And when he arrives in your sight, you wear your best smile to greet him. 

“Hi honey,” you say and kneel down. You balance the heavy radio on one of your knees. Reaching out one dirty hand, your faithful cat Alastor nuzzles into the skin, ignoring the dirt and blood. You scratch behind his ears as his purring starts up.

You named him after King Alastor from the game Painkiller: Battle out of Hell. When he was just a kitten, you wrestled with two names Alastor or Asura from another video game. Why did the name of a final boss win over a hero’s name? You had no idea but your heart guided your decision and four years later, it fits your mischievous bengal cat perfectly.

“I know, I know,” you medicate when he starts meowing for food. “I’m twenty minutes late coming home and that means two hours to you. But look Alastor! Another radio! This one is too heavy for you to knock down so it’s perfect.” Your enthusiasm is met by louder caterwauling.

Wilting at Alastor’s lackluster reaction, you gently set the radio on the long dining room table. It was lined with six chairs that no one besides yourself used. On the wooden surface is a Christmas rug-runner and stacks upon stacks of mail asking you to open a new credit card. A few unwashed plates stand in a stack of six, grease of meals shining luminous off them. May’s sun pours in to brighten all of the radios that you have collected on your table. 

Your new radio nestles itself snuggly into your little home. Though you were not able to bargain the price you exactly wanted, you were glad to have it at all. The condition is remarkable for something coming from a yard-sale. Annoyed at your admiration, your bengal cat lays himself over your socks and bites your toes.

“Alastor,” you scold, scooping up your noisy cat. “Be nice to your parents. Where are your manners?”  

With a boop on the nose and a kiss on the cheek, you bring Alastor into the kitchen so you can serve him Purina kitten chow and ruffle his fur when he nuzzles into you. Then you will wash away all your filth and sleep. 

It has been seven days since you bought the radio. 

For something you were so enraptured over, you had no urge to try working with it. The owner remarked that it only works for AM radio broadcasting. After a century, those channels never changed and were opertable during power outages. Their frequency could be picked up anytime, connecting themselves to the skin of your radio like a lovely little kiss. Since no natural disasters were happening, the most entertainment you could get from AM radio was the morning’s traffic. Enthusiasm washed out of you after a week of showers, you found yourself kicking yourself for giving in so easily to temptation. 

“And my more-having would be as a sauce to make me hunger more,” you mutter Macbeth as you lace up your boots. 

Today, your boss has scheduled you and your groundskeeping company to plant a dozen trees outside of a mail office. You enjoyed the small business as a landscaper; being the leader of a whole team had some perks too. 

Louisiana was always pleasantly warm. Never did you have to gripe over blizzards causing traffic nor bringing an extra coat to weather the weather. Most days you manage to just walk to and from the sight your boss assigned. Life was good and life was simple. 

You finished with the final knot on your Timberlands. Hesitantly, you cast a look towards your new radio, standing out among the rest because of its antiquity. Hearing a bit of the weather might be the perfect test to see if the radio worked, if all vacuum tubes and components were clean. Stomping through the kitchen into the adjacent dining room, you quickly turn the gilded knob and wait.

A mimicking hiss of a vexed Alastor and a sizzle of eggs poured into a pan is the first sound your new radio blesses you with. Resolutely, you flicker with the knob. The sound of a million pieces of hail falling on your roof. The singing of a mixed bowl of frequencies. The caterwauling of – oh! You finally found a coherent station.

“With highs reaching ninety, we can expect a beautiful Thursday ahead of us. Now, we do have some cumulonimbus clouds making their way down from the north-east.  That thunderstorm from Mississippi should be reaching us in –” Satisfied, you click off the radio and head out the door. 

“NO! NOOO!” When you are pulled up by the waist, you only scream louder. “NOOOOO!” You scream like a deer with its leg snapped and broken in the jaws of a bear trap, desperate and tormented. 

“(Name)! (Name), stop this! (Name), calm down,” your mother pleads. 

The woman who baked you under her pie crust skin for nine months is devastated to see you so upset. Her own flesh and blood, curled tightly in her arms, wailing like a hunted deer. You cry loudly as if you have broken a bone or been stabbed. “I know, baby. I know,” she tries to console and move your crying face into her neck. A piercing yell in her ear causes her to wilt and shudder. 

“(Name) please.” Your mother has already passed the point of angrily yelling back at you. The crescent shape of her acrylic nails still present on your tiny wrist. Given up that fight, she tries desperately to figure out why you refuse to leave the pawn shop. 

Gore cakes your tiny, wailing face. A scream so loud had one of the vessels in your vocal folds erupting open; a vocal cord hemorrhage which will cost your mother a month of bills for vocal therapy for her four year old child. Red oil glides out and down to vinyl floors. Around the mouthful of blood, you still scream no no no as your mother tries to walk you out.

There are no words to explain what you are experiencing. Even if you were not so young, you doubt that you could relate to anyone what you felt. As the distance between you and entrance grew smaller, a stabbing pain in your gut emerged. A simple tummy-ache. Then it grew. Tummy-ache evolving into a fever; fever blossoming into a stab wound; stab wound maturing into a pain that felt like some invisible hands were trying to tear your soul from your body. When you toed your foot on the entrance, everything exploded in one culmination of white pain and you lost yourself to the possession of something otherworldly. 

Defiant, your limbs move in a hurricaning, thrashing windmill. You squirm like a fly blindly trying to escape out a window as bang bangs of a person’s shoe follow its erratic track. A strong kick into your mother’s pancreas has her stumbling. Relenting, she drops your mercurial body. 

Your mother falls to her own knees with you. She considers telephoning your father, telephoning her own parents, telephoning a medical professional. Anyone who can come and save her: a scared, new mother who has never seen her child act out this.

Hundreds of eyes are staring at the volatile display. Guests who want to enter and buyers who want to leave, all stare at her hunched form as you caterwaul. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I just don’t know what’s wrong,” your mother mutters helplessly. By now she is starting to suspect that you might be seriously injured in a place she cannot see. Something beyond the blood in your mouth. “God please.”

Finally, someone heavensent steps off the background and taps your mother on the shoulder. Her desperation causes her to turn at a neck-breaking speed. 

She never remembers the face or gender of this person when recalling the story. She recalls only a shudder of terror. Spindly and crawling terror, pianoing itself in a rapid flight up her body like a bumblebee. A symphony of fear, she recalls. Gently, the person takes one of the hands she had put around you protectively. In it, a ring is dropped.

An ouroboros ring – the image of a snake eating its own tail. 

Fumbling with disbelief, your mother glances around to see that the person is gone. She sets her sight back on you, worried you might have disappeared along with the person. There you are – all forty inches of you, shivering, water and blood falling down your face in rivulets. She glances helplessly at the ring and then –

When she drops it into your hand, the pain goes away. Yet, stricken by such an endeavor, your eyes roll back in your head. Past the billowing tears and red veins, up and up. Like a puppet cut from strings, you promptly pass out. Squeezed tightly in a rigor mortis grip, the ouroboros ring stays with you. And when you feel that thousand feet plummet into oblivion course through you, your body in the waking world springs up, face stained with warm tears.

That memory again. 

How many times have you dreamed about it?

How many more times will it be in your dreams?

Chilled fingers run across your damp face, drying it. The head of the iron snake kisses a stroke from eyelid to eyelid. You suppose the ring will always remain with you, in dreams and in reality. Tired eyes glance at your bedside alarm clock: 1:11. Trust your intuition and listen to your heart. You climb out of bed, mindful of Alastor even with limited vision.

Often, your body moves disconnected from the kingdom of your mind. Without even being aware of it, you will pull yourself back from danger (a falling tool at the job site, a misplaced nail, etcetera) and chalk it up as extreme good luck. Leaving words unsaid, you laugh at all the random occasions of self-saving, pointing your thanks towards God.  

You are not slow though. After a while, anyone would start to suspect it. You know it is something else other than luck. Something that has shadowed you since birth.  

Pulled towards it like a magnet, you sit on the dining table chair. Everything in your house is shrouded in nebulous dark. Silver light shines down from the moon, past a window’s filter, onto the radio. An evangelical interruption? Like slippery fish-oil, silver glides over the rich brown of a ribcage and heart and skin. The scene looks disrupted like fragments of reflection in a dirty mirror. Sleeping moonlight brushes over your fingers, nuzzling into your ring.

Timidly, you extend a hand and flick on the dial. A short buzzing hum greets you. “Hello?” You turn the knob some more, searching. Your face is still damp from previous tears. “Hello?” And though there should be more than a dozen A.M. frequencies that your radio can tune into, all that you hear is everlasting static.

None of your strawberries tasted like fruit this morning. Where they should be rich with juice flowing in your mouth when you bite, they are dry. It is the entire quart of strawberries that you bought had been replaced with foam copies, a facsimile of themselves.

Everything that has been feeling imitation of itself. Yesterday, you swore there was someone standing behind you while digging a tunnel for a septic tank and distribution box. Yet at each wild turn, no figure was hovering off you. This morning, you woke up dreaming that dream again. You carefully spit your strawberry into a napkin. Ugh, what was happening to you?

When you discard them into the trash-can, Alastor stirs and gives you a look before returning to his food. You nudge him with your foot and move across the kitchen. Leaning down into the fridge, you search for the carton of milk. In the recess of your mind, you halfheartedly listen to your radio.

Your new family member plays something vintage this morning. You had no idea A.M. frequencies did old radio series like this anymore – you had only heard about The War of the Worlds radio drama due to a parody and its natural popularity. In today’s modern age, you thought podcasts were the only echo of radio dramas, a cheap imitation. You luckily caught this radio drama at the very beginning, perhaps only two or three minutes in.

The radio drama was about a husband and wife. Aboard With the Lockharts was the name. The wife, Kathleen Lockhart, had finally persuaded her husband that they would take a cruise to Europe, after some womanly envy, and her husband conceded to come. It is the end of the first episode:

“There we are, dear.”

“You’re the nicest husband a woman ever managed!”

“Well, I-uh I guess every husband would be nice if he had a wife like you. Now, let me study that circular a bit and see what we’re going to get. And, uh, turn on the radio, dear.” A flow of music follows.

The cheapest you can get a gallon of milk in New Orleans is at Aldi’s for only three dollars. You had heard almond-milk was statistically better for your health. As a groundskeeper, you knew maintaining that was entirely important for your job but double the price for a quart rather than a gallon. Well, you knew your –

“Tour Europe with us! Seven glorious countries! Why, you have just started to go aboard with the Lockharts … We thank you for tuning in listeners. The day is May 10th, 1931. The weather forecaster is sunny with –” 

As Alastor stops hissing, angered at how rapidly you run from kitchen to dining room, you hold the knob in your hand tense. Challenging, the eyeball of your radio stares back at you. 1931? 1931, ha. You sigh at your panic. It was probably prerecorded. Even if the day and month were the same, there is no reason to get so out of sorts. Ugh, what was happening to you?

As you towel off yourself, the radio program you had turned on plays. You were so ashamed that you had gotten worked up over nothing. After listening to a few more radio dramas, it turned out that they were cut and played from previous tapes. Of course the dates and times would remain. 

Though why when you used your car, (Name), did you not find that station? Did any other A.M. frequencies play returns of old 1920s and 1930s radio drama, hm?  Not a single one.

You scrub your towel harder into skin, ignoring yourself. There was no intelligent reason to be worked up over a station that played love stories. Love was the least malice part of life after all. Not that you would ever know, you mourned. You got ghosted more than you would like to admit. 

The program on the radio almost seems to mock you:

“Because I love you myself I suppose.”

“You do, Jeanie?” The woman murmurs a yes. “How long has this been going on?”

“Ever since I helped you with that tire.”

“You know maybe that was why I was kind of relieved when Roberta told me we were all washed up.”

“Frank!”

“It’s true. I’ve been kind of dreading marching down that aisle with Roberta for some time now. You know, someone else seemed to fit better into that picture.”

“Who?”

“A hitchhiking blonde I picked up once. She was bound for New York. Funny if she ended up in London on our honeyman.”

“Oh Frank.”

“Oh (Name) darling.”

The towel falls to the ground, heavy with the weight of water it has absorbed off your skin. Nude, you stand with a breath locked and keyed away in your lung. Alastor sleeps soundly on your comforter, ignorant to your distress. You push a hand to your chest, steel band cold on your skin. Yes. It is beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. 

“Go to bed, (Name),” you instruct yourself. 

When all the lights in your house are flicked off, you make sure to put the radio into the kitchen. Your bedroom is right adjacent to the dining room. At least with some distance between you and it, without true separation, you might get some sleep. 

You stare at your ring as you pet up and down Alastor’s spine. Some distance but never fully separated. 

You rush into your home as if someone is chasing you, snapping and swiping at your ankles. “Shit, double shit,” you curse, throwing your closed umbrella down to the ground. Loudly, the door is banged shut to the point where the tiny window on it rattles. Water has soaked you down to the bone marrow. 

“Fucking shit,” you gripe as you take off boots filled with miniature ponds. If only the rain was not coupled with sparks of lightning, you would have been able to use your umbrella. 

Ugh, what a goddamn mess. You strip off the soaked bomber jacket. That depth of rain was so bad for the fabric. Defeated, you hang the Clavin Klein jacket on the nearby hook and go to venture deeper into your home when you pause. 

You had forgotten you left the radio on your kitchen table. The presence of it startles for a quick moment. Surely, the need to strip off the wet clothes you are in wins over. Truthfully, besides a few odd glitches of words, it has been harmless. Falling back into your typical dismissal cope, you move to go into the dining room. 

The power in your house goes out. 

“Double fucking shit.”

A power outage would have been a minor inconvenience if you were not blind. The entirety of your house is cloaked in a nebulous black, not even a flicker of the microwave clock. You pause in your footfall, still as a tree. Hands clenched by your side, you rationalize it all. Lightning must have caused a fallen wire. One of your hand pats around to find a wall. Get to your hung jacket then you can use your phone to navigate in a much clearer fashion. 

You just hoped Alastor would not be causing a fit in the deep sea darkness. “Alastor, honey?” Thankfully, your hand falls on the circular kitchen table. “Alastor?” Slowly, you round the table and start to finger the walls. Just ten or so steps forward and you will be standing right by the entrance. 

Though, Alastor being this quiet was unnerving. You move towards the door – Huh?

The table rattles unsteady as you are pushed into it. “Ugh, what the –.” The breath is punched out. The scream that comes out of you is inhuman and animalistic, full of fear. Groaning muscles wilt as you are thrown into one of your kitchen chairs, seated forcefully. 

You barely recover your mind, barely recover yourself to worry about your safety, when something chills you to the bone.

Up, the scream of an injured cat pierces the formless black innards of this haunted house. It almost sounds fake like a horror movie sound recording. Then the clattering rain of a handful of objects hitting the ground pierces your ears next. Those coupling sounds … the horrible thought that someone has thrown Alastor into something. The horrid, bone-chilling thought that someone is hurting him.

“Alastor!” You jump off the chair, guided by instinct. Swiftly, you are back down in the chair. “Alastor!”

A mimicking hiss of a vexed Alastor stabs the air … except it is not your cat. You know because it sounds like the sizzle of eggs in a pan too. Your bottom lip trembles wildly. Luminous white from a flash of lightning splats onto the kitchen then shrinks away in seconds. You refuse to look at it though. Calm down. AM frequency works during power outages, this radio is unlike your others, you rationalize, but you never turned the knob for it to reach any sort of frequency. 

“...Alastor,” you try again, voice trembling. Oh you stupid cat, just come when called. You sit mournful and yearning that Alastor will come to prove he is safe at the very least. 

Not stuck with silence for long, the radio sings out. The words and instruments broken up by flaking static like kintsugi pottery, a second melody backdropping the noise: Hey, hobo man; hey, Dapper Dan; you've both got your style but brother – then an anguished scream breaks the voice of Donald Craig and the musical number. You shrink into the chair, face aghast and jaw slack. No. No. NO!

You stay silent the entire broadcast, horrified. 

A woman’s voice: “– he gives me the glad news that I have a growth in the back of my eye and he wants to cut it out. Only it’s too close to the brain, and he says if it isn’t cut out, this growth might cut off my sight, and leave me up on the high wiRE –” 

A plea: “GOD HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME! GOOOOD!”

The wail of a pipe organ piano follows this demonic symphony. Rustic and deep, it billows out. Echoes of the sound flicker and decay across your walls; the reverbs are rich and dark like shadows; the start of Bach’s Toccata. 

A man’s voice: “lying on the floor, two feet away, with a broken neck. With a broken neck, and his left hand – Well, he put the golden ring on his little finger of his left hand – the way his arms were spread out –” 

The chugging grind of a car that would not start – stubborn coughs and wheezes – assaults your ears. You cradle your head tighter, praying that hardwood will morph into quicksand. 

A cry: “MERCY PLEASE! MERCY! AAAAA!”

Three separate voices overlapping all at once: “Help me! Help me! We belong dead!” — “Oh well, I am just not appreciated around here. Dirt under the feet. That’s all I am.” — “Please, kill me! KillmeKillmeKillme! I just want to die! I can’t — anymore —“ Then the shriek of a deer who has its foot caught in a bear trap. It is your voice as a child, crying out. A masculine voice in a fatherly rhetoric shouts over your infant wails, “You should have never been born, Alastor!” Then, as if lightning had torn down the broadcasting tower, all the cacophony on the radio fell silent, lingering on that horrible name.

The Earth holds its breath in anticipatory silence. 

A merry tone starts up – the melody of a saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet all hugging into one another. It moves amatory in humid air. Jazz. Your favorite genre despite the fact you were born in the year 1998. Swing and blue notes fill your heart like honey on the tongue, familiar and comforting. From the warmth of continuing jazz, a woman’s voice pops out like a flower bud emerging on a spring morning.

“666 A.M.” No that is wrong – the station was 833.3 A.M. (how do you know that?) “-- the Voice of the South; radiophone broadcasting station of the New Ear, New Oreleans, Louisiana, announcing the one who needs no introduction, our one and our only Alastor Melsar.”

Somewhere far away, deep below, a hostaged crowd rises, pulled by the hooks in their napes to start a thundering, happy applause. Someone’s lips are even voodoo-ed to move into an adoring wolf whistle. 

“Hello, hello, is this thing on?”

Your stomach falls to your feet like a rock dropped from a bridge. It explodes, breaking every ice-layered bone in your body. Jazz withers away but the familiarity stays. Because you know that voice, intimately beyond what New Orleans knew about it beyond the ribcage of a radio. You had been ribcage to ribcage, heart to heart with that odious man before. Only you had forgotten. Until now.

You remove your hands from your ears, listening in rapture. 

“Now, I know the broadcast you want to hear comes from Center Theater studio, but today we are coming at you straight from Hell’s very own Pride Ring. But I will bring back our favorite broadcast, for my dear listener. (Name). My love, this one's for you.”

i. Papa nou ki nan syèl la, [Our heavenly Father,]

Alastor hates his father.

This is as established as the hues of flora or as the physics of energy. It is a sentence that will never change under any variables or phenomena. If emotions could become fact, this is one instant of such a time. It is a sentence that you sympathize with as you hated your father too. Oddly enough, you two meet on Father’s Day. Both of you illegally drunk in the height of prohibition, escaping to an abandoned bayou. A shared sentiment connecting your wayward souls: there was no better day of the year to get wasted besides Father’s Day. 

“Oedipus was such an unlucky bastard.”

“How so?”

“He gets to kill his father and doesn’t even know it. The man who left him stranded on a hill to be eaten by wolves. And how does Oedipus repay this? His revenge is killing him in a duel like he is another thug, a nameless person.” You gulp down a sizable sip of your bathroom-made gin. “Just no satisfaction in it.”

“Yes, but wouldn’t you suppose it’s better than not getting to commit patricide? Poor Hamlet. His father harks him about vengeance. And he cannot even get that annoying parasite off his shoulder as Claudius had already killed the King.” Alastor takes a much more measured sip from his whiskey. 

“A dead father is better than a ghost father … I suppose.”

You give a mischievous smile to the stranger sitting with you.  He is quite handsome, bronze brown skin flawless without a drop of sweat. If this were any other day, you would try flirting a bit but today is June sixteen so …

“How’d you kill yours?”

“A shotgun. Then I cut him up and ate him.”

“Serve him to your mother?”

“Oh, I would never taint her darling palette with such horrid meat.”

You start laughing as the stranger asks you the same question, you in jest and him in sincerity, “How’d you kill yours?”

Smiling, you reveal, “I drowned him in this very bayou.”

“This very one?”

“This very one.”

The stranger smiles at that. His smiles are nice. Wide winks of yellowing teeth that seem to engulf his entire face. There is something charming about smiles that show all your vulnerable enamels. 

“I suppose that we drink from the same bottle.”

“We do … I suppose,” he copies your earlier pattern of speech. 

You smile back as you two clink your glasses together. It sucks that after today you two will never see each other again. You have never felt so kindred to another person. New Orleans is so vast. Both a blessing and a curse, certain that your paths will only cross this once.

ii. Nou mande pou yo toujou respekte non ou. [We ask that they always respect your name.]

Names are so significant. It is the equivalent of slicing off a cut of your soul and sharing it. It is the word used to beckon one in a call. And, reconnecting, Alastor and you give your names to each other easily, smitten in a butcher shop. 

iii. Vin tabli gouvènman ou, [Come and establish your government,]

The company Alastor kept was odd. Men who wore sunglasses at night and women who laughed like rusty doors. Human beings that seemed more like monsters with human skin pulled over them like an ill-fitting nightgown. Demons and witches, a cruel part of you speculated.

You had underestimated the vileness of them. They were beyond witches and demons.

You cannot even settle into the place you are sitting. Instead, you collapse into it like a body thrown off a ledge. Vocal cords pinch and tighten under your skin. Awful wheezes plume out of your throat. Amidst this destructive hyperventilation, tears pour down the curvature of your face in steady beads. Your trembling hands gather them up as you curl into the brick wall outside of The Dog House. Ugh, what is happening to you?

The door to the jazz club’s back-alley opens tentatively as you wallow. It is only a sliver of space, not even enough to poke a head through much less an arm or leg. From the slit eye of a shy door, your boyfriend says, “Should I come back at a later time?”

The care of his question only makes you sob harder. Respecting previously set boundaries, the timid door does not fling open and Alastor does not move an inch to step outside – though, the doorknob does wilt and ache under the mounting strength of his grip. He relaxes when the sound of your voice (strained and trembling but no less beautiful) asks, “Do you think I’m silly?”

“Why, dear, you are the unfunniest person I have ever been acquainted with,” Alastor smiles. “Unhumorous and beautiful, like always.” A hazel eye peaks out through the space. It is a talent how much emotion he can translate into each facet of his body. A simple upward crinkle of his eyes, a tiny gleam, and you know his aim is to make you laugh.

Instead, you are compelled with the urge to smack him on the shoulder. 

Taking that angered energy, you grip the bottom half of the door (you still stay seated on infectious, wet pavement). As you push it open, Alastor slinks out into the back-alley. One hand, one foot, a shoulder and chest, until he finally joins you. He sits shoulder to shoulder with you in your hiding spot behind The Dog House. 

“Now, can I ask what made you so out of sorts, dear?”

“You would find it silly. This is all so silly.” You harshly scrub your tearful face, wishing it would restore itself to the dry skin you were accustomed to. “I’m sorry.”

“Now, (Name), we just established that you are unfunny.” With him so close, you do whack him. Nursing his shoulder with a laugh, Alastor continues, “So whatever needs to come off your chest, be out with it. Climb off it.” He looks upon you patiently.

“Mimzy.” His face makes no change in expression, imploring you to continue. “And Harlord. And Lawrence and Evelyn. Oh, Alastor, all of your friends are just so cruel.” Shameful of your confession, you hide back into your knees. The geyser of tears that you had capped with your thumb is starting to billow and leak. “I just cannot see how someone like you can keep such horrid company.”

It was almost like someone had prematurely told them every single insecurity you had. 

The left side of your abdomen still aches from where Mimzy took her nails and dug into you. Lawrence had hooked a finger under your necklace and pulled a bright, suicidal mark on your nape. After repeated use, those insectual insults crawled under your skin, a horde of ticks. Weak defense laughs eventually stopped coming from you altogether when you realized this was not a hazing mechanism. Hate bled from every millisecond of their actions – such a quick switch, all because Alastor left to use the washroom. 

“Oh, dear, what happened?” Alastor wraps an arm around your shoulder, pulling you in close.

“I don’t know. Perhaps, I did something to offend them. What they said was so true, so spot on. They just –”

“No, you’re perfect. Hey. Look at me. You are perfect.”

“Alastor, maybe, I don’t belong here. I just cannot fit in with them and I–”

“Dear,” here he takes both your hands and squeezes them tight. “I have felt that sentiment of yours my entire life. I have been so ostracized for so long before I met you. Never knowing someone who could relate to what I have been subjected to. If they cannot see how perfect you are, then that is sincerely their loss.” 

“But Alastor, they’re your friends. I want them to like me!”

“Dear, we need no one but each other.”

iv. pou yo fè volonte ou sou latè, tankou yo fè li nan syèl la. [to do your will on earth, as it is done in heaven.]

Your nighttime routine is a bit strange. To be truthful, your entire life was wandering a little bit out of the quotidian fences on the roaring 20s. 

The most startling difference was your romantic courting compared to the entire United States. You and Alastor had lived together before marriage. His house was empty – mother and father dead – and you wanted out of that odious prison called home. 

Yet, by now, the two of you had established a nighttime routine like one which a married couple would have. 

Before Alastor stepped into the shower, you checked the expanse and plain of his skin for any ticks that might have made their home there. After, you brewed Alastor coffee instead of tea as a nighttime drink as the shower ran. Then, you freshened yourself and Alastor penned down his next broadcast before you two joined in the dining room, stomach already full of dinner. 

He takes the photograph of Papa Gede out of his study after locking away his papers. On the dining table, his golden eyes cut through you. You always felt nude under that gaze. Parallel to what a dog must experience before being hit. Gazes locked, you hear the repetitive motions of Alastor as he collects all he needs for the ritual. 

Papa Gede’s, the corpse of the first man who ever died, painted form stares at you. Alastor was very keen on this man who represented the powers of fertility and death. A psychopomp believed to wait at crossroads to take souls into the afterlife. You had no idea what Alastor spoke in Creole to him when you two did this before bed. All you knew is those gleaming, almost alive eyes unnerved you to the point where you wanted to turn tail and flee, doe-like.

“Dearest.”

You shudder, disrupted like a still lake attacked by a falling rock, and finally tear your eyes away. The comfort of his arm across your back is warm. You lean into him as he quotes Hamlet to you, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“Sorry.” You place a kiss on his cheek. “Sorry. I know, I overthink too much.”

This is the part you hate the most.

“I quite adore your mind.”

“Thank you, Al.”

He kisses you on the lips. “No, thank you.” And before you can comprehend, like a child getting his tooth pulled on two instead of the promised count of three, Alastor has already run the blade over your palm. 

Alastor goes back in for a deeper kiss as you wince and wilt. Pressing himself hard against you as an outlet to your pain. And then, after a good enough amount of your blood has fallen into the vial, Alastor, in his native tongue, starts to pray that when Papa Gede sees you at the crossroads, he will send you back into the living world. 

v. Pen nou bezwen an, ban nou li jòdi a. [The bread we need, give us today.]

The geography of hearts are all the same.

When Alastor brings home a dead deer, you can tell what his gullitoning Shibazi cleaver is striking down on. Yet — when it all cleaned up — fur and hooves off the table. You can almost pretend you have any species on the table. 

As mammals, we all have four chambered hearts.

Silver light from an oil lamp folds itself over Alastor and where the silver is not, shadows snuggle into Alastor. He is an autopsy photo, too gruesome yet necessary to examine. From his hands, the slick pulse of meat being cut talks to him. Unforgiving, his hands move like headstrong lightning, slicing and dicing.

He opens the whole heart like a scroll or a book. 

You had been apprehensive about consuming deer hearts. The heart was the zenith of evangelical symbolism in literature. Were you or Alastor worthy to consume such a part of the body? It was if you were dissecting an angel and feasting on their piety. 

The geography of hearts are all the same.  

As mammals we all have four chambered hearts. 

He opens the whole human heart like a scroll or a book. 

vi. Padonnen tou sa nou fè ki mal, [Forgive all that we have done wrong,]

Alastor was not an active participant in his own religion. When he did, it was often out of your sight and always out of the public’s eyes. He kept religious scriptures and paintings locked in a safe then additionally locked in a study room. A scandal such as performing in the Haitian religion would pinch out the fire that was rising up his radio broadcasting fame like a hot-air balloon. 

Today, you are positively giddy and positively ready to puke when Alastor invites you to join him to celebrate St. John’s Eve. A holiday in June he rarely went to.

Ditching your shared car, Alastor makes you walk hand in hand with him to the celebration after pink twilight skies drift into charcoal black hues. You have no idea how he can navigate so clearly in such darkness. Trusting him, you follow over moss and soil. Both of your white attire was probably stained from the journey. None of that mattered. You could not stop yourself from smiling. 

The night is wondrous. You will never understand such a beautiful celebration could be so abhorred. Reaching impressive heights, the humongous bonfire casts warm hues of amber over the white attire of all who attain. Your body spins and leaps with positive energy – everyone is so friendly – no one wears glasses at night and they all laugh like humans, humans! You and Alastor dance, painted in the bonfire’s warmth and laughing in addition to all the other people. At one point in the night, Alastor says to you, “They say bathing in the gorge is supposed to preserve the health of your body and the good condition of your skin. Not that you need anything to add to your beauty. However, I would be grateful if you —”

“Yes! Yes, I’ll join you.” You have been that way all night, eager and absent of your usual anxiety. You strive to enjoy this – enjoy the world he lives in spiritually due to the stinging rejection of his friends. Something to keep you two close and tethered together.

He takes your hand and brings you waist deep in the water. All the while, you cling to him, arms around his neck, smiling and kissing his cheek repeatedly. He preens under the attention. 

“So, is it like a baptism of sorts?”

“I’ll dip you under the water briefly, yes.”

“Ok,” you are still giggling, not even having a sip of anything. “Ok. Can I go first?”

Adoring Alastor brings his hands up to the sides of your face, running his thumb over your cheek. What a shame that you will not be smiling so wide soon. The flame of you has to be extinguished same as the roaring bonfire on the shore. He pecks you on the lips. “If you want to go first, I have no gripe over that, dear.”

Don’t worry, Alastor thinks as he dips you down into the murky, nebulous water, he will relight you. 

You hold your breath as you go under. The water chills the back of your ears, sliding itself through your hair, then covers over your eyes. Alastor’s hands rest in a triangle of your upper back, steadying you so you do not fall back. One involuntary shiver moves you then you fall still. You take your breath and cup it in your chest like a pearl. 

Weightlessness is a rare sensation. There is something tranquil about being enshrouded in water and able to feel like you are slipping away somewhere. Like the ribbon pulling on your heart at all times has eased and unraveled itself so instead of a bundle it has become a slippery eel. 

You are so grateful that Alastor is sharing this with you. You felt bad for not making a connection with his friends. You hoped nothing ever breaks your connection with Alastor.

After half a minute or so, you lean a bit up to signal to Alastor that you want up. Oddly, there is no pressure on your back from Alastor pushing you up. You lean yourself up a bit more, then with the speed of a cobra striking, a pressure pushes you down. Fingers on your throat. The pearl in your chest slips out. With a muted, submerged shout, you push your hands up hoping to break the water surface, feel dry air. Nothing, all your panicked hands slide through is water.

AlastorAlastorAlastor – the pearl grows spikes like a urchin and pierces you, a debilitating pain in the chest as water floods through. You hack up what you swallow and yet swallow some more. Previous cold water feels as intensely hot as the bonfire you were dancing in front of before. 

Everything is dark.

Everything is burning.

Everything – you gasp as Alastor pulls you out. You cough like you are trying to expel a hairball or demon out of you. Your body shakes and pounds with each forceful push. And in the midst of that, Alastor holds you by your waist and worrying over you, your hands around his neck, you start to sob.

“A-Ah, Alastor.” Your smile is gone.

vii. menm jan nou padonnen moun ki fè nou mal. [as we forgive those who hurt us.]

“Promise me you will not leave me.”

“I promise.”

“No, be serious.”

“I am being serious, haha. I promise. Hey. Hey? … Hey, I promise to never leave you, Alastor Melsar. No need for tears, love.”

viii. Pa kite nou nan pozisyon pou nou tonbe nan tantasyon, [Do not leave us in a position to fall into temptation]

Injuring Alastor is no easy task. He takes impeccable care to never be on the receiving end of any harm, but this amorous injury is different.

In the back of a drunk mind, Alastor senses the trail of warm blood running down his lats to his spine. Three evanescent droplets riding down and down. Sweat is outshone by the iron beads. He focuses his mind gently on where you scratched him, the injury it caused, and the blood curling around the brown curvature of his abdomen muscles. How he wishes you two drew each other’s blood more beyond this and rituals to Papa Gede — at a later time, he will ask you if you want to engage in anything more with blood.

“Oh fuck, Alastor. Oh fuck!”

Yes, at a later time would be more appropriate. He cannot properly engage in conversation which he is grunting so heavily.

Gently, Alastor rubs a thumb into your skin, studying the harsh bone of your pelvis. You tremble when his palm goes down and pushes up your left leg. Knobby knee touching your breast, you shriek at how more palpable you are to his efforts.

Alastor does not particularly like sex. He shared no interest in it like his acquaintances and rather seemed repulsed by it. He performed and acted on this sweaty stage because it made you happy. Yet, now that you have drawn his blood —

The speed at which his head pounds into your spongy inside gradually starts to pick up. You two are clashing your hips into one another like vengeful knights crossing claymores. Instead of the racket of piercing metal sparks, the noise of wet skin slapping and patting against one another billows up and up in volume. He fucks you hard, an executioner stealing the last drops of your life away. 

“De-Dearest,” he pants, hoping to grab your attention.

All you do is dig your nails into his shoulder blade deeper, anchoring yourself feebly to a ship caught up in a storm. Alastor has never been so rough before. His force punches the words out of you, mouth hanging open in involuntary cries. 

He pushes your knee down harsher into the globe of your breast. Your nails dig in deeper. Cut more skin, please, Alastor wants to beg but his own voice is withering from him now too.

“Fu-Fuck! Fuck!” You shred another part of his skin like a cat slicing up curtains into decorative ribbons. He feels it. The waterline of blood bubbling before it spills over like tears of a face.

“Oh Hell, (Name),” Alastor moans.

He often had problems coming to his release. Now, he worries that he will come before you are satisfied. Your previous cut has trailed down, colliding at the spot where the two of you are joined together. His worries are meaningless. At the sound of his voice, trembling and wanton, the violin strings of your consciousness are slit down the middle. Mind plucked out of your body, you cannot control your voice and groan a loud “Mmmmmpfh!” as you throw your head back and orgasm. 

Your warmth squeezes around him and he loses that hold on your leg. Collapsing down, he moans and keeps thrusting in. Greedily, you roll your hips up. Slick, wet suctioning noises lose their space between one another fast like counting lightning that is rapidly approaching.

Into raw bloody flesh, your nails burrow. Alastor comes with a grunt of your name. 

ix. men, delivre nou anba Satan. [but deliver us from Satan.]

It is an inconvenience of an illness that has befell the Meslar house. Really, you should be resting your body and he should be resting his voice. You stumble in your chores, body humming with a furnace warmth that rivals New Orleans summer heat. Alastor stumbles in his broadcasting, throat expelling out body-jerking coughs like plumes of brimstone smoke. He jokes that it would be more fortunate if you two swapped illness before curling into himself, hacking. You nod your agreement before curling into yourself, brain sitting in your head like a popsicle on a summer’s sidewalk.

Eventually, you two have to concede that you cannot keep on like this. Your shared stubbornness to push through a lingering illness will do you no good. Alastor calls out of work, you dismiss yourself from your household duties. Finally, you two rest.

Alastor loves having windows open. He pulls the woven horsehair screens away from their pins. Let spiders and flies enter your humble abode, meet their two caring hosts. Refreshing air snakes a tranquil pattern through the kitchen and dining room. Sunlight warms wood of a dining table and back of chairs. In the forty second breaks Alastor gets before his throat punches him, he nestles close to an open window and breathes in rich Earth. 

You are resting in the open living room, passed out on the uncomfortable sofa. He had taken care to wait on you as you had taken care to read Hemingway aloud for him. Yet, soon syllables started to slur into a rainbow of ums, mhms, mmms, until you fell into a cavernous sleep. 

Content, Alastor drinks his coffee (absent of the sedative, amobarbital, and the awful taste of tea) and gazes out on nature. Drugging you is not so gentlemanly of him. However, who can truly blame him, watching his beloved drag themselves to get the one last load of laundry folded or scrub a stove that would be fine with a day of neglect. 

“Such a stubborn donkey, that one,” Alastor chuckles, taking a gracious sip. 

His sleeves are rolled up and cool air breezes over the mark drawn on his inner forearm. Cornmeal and wood ash grounded up into a pallid gray. The symbol sticks to his skin fairly well. The symbol is an open diamond with a long line running through it, elbow crevice to wrist, with a tapered end like that of a ½ beat note. The voodoo symbol of good health. You have one drawn on your comatose arm too, sleeves rolled up. 

He did not see the need to call upon Damballah for healing properties. A simple incantation and a longer than natural sleep should get you back to your natural self. Alastor always promised himself that he would care for you. He would keep you away from dangers always, even a mischievous viral infection swimming in your body. 

Maybe he should tell you, maybe open up just a bit about his – 

No. He had labored a fine scheme to make you afraid of what his religion and his friends had to offer and that fear would be a coin to cash in later. If everything else around you was horrific, he would be a certain tunnel to run towards – leap into his open arms so he may protect you from Death, the Devil, and beyond.

All you need, all you would see, all of it: him, him, him.

x. Paske, se pou ou tout otorite, tout pouvwa ak tout louwanj, depi tout tan ak pou tout tan. [For to you be all authority, all prayer, and all praise, forever and ever]

“Honey, I just don’t think he is right for you.”

“That Al, he is a bit eccentric. A little birdie tells me that Edward thinks you’re butter upon bacon! And Ed’s quite cute!”

“Is there a leak in your attic, (Name)? Alastor, really?”

He’s absolutely perfect for you. His eccentricities had bewitched you. And if there was a leak in your attic, you hoped it showered over you forever. In your rose-tinted eyes, no one could hold a candle to your Alastor. He was it for you, until death and perhaps even beyond. You know this to be a universal truth – if emotions could become fact, this is one instant of such a time – especially true as he proposes to you.

“Yes, of – of course, I will,” you tumble over your words. A showman until the end, the long, heartfelt speech that Alastor had voiced in that honey intonation had you quite speechless. He knew exactly where to praise and where to kill your insecurities. “O-of course.”

He has to pinch the center of your hand, thumb on bone and index on palm, so he can slide the ring on your shaking hand. You truly are a mess in his presence, so in love. 

It takes a few moments to find your voice. Alastor kisses you in front of the crowded restaurant, people clapping. You two sit back, still having untouched desert waiting for you. As the waiter shakes the hand of the most famous radioman in New Orleans, you sit wide-eyed, glancing between tiramisu and champagne, waiting to fall out of this daydream. 

“An ouroboros,” you murmur after the waiter leaves. Giddy smile on his face, Alastor raises an eyebrow at you. “It is an ouroboros.”

“Yes, I figured a literary master like you would love the symbolism. Does it please you? I was apprehensive of choosing something that did not have a diamond.”

“The self-eating snake.” Smitten, you rotate around your left hand to greet all the angles of the creature with enraptured eyes. “The eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth. Transmigration of souls.”

“The eternal cycle of our love.”

You flush and smile. “You’re being too charming tonight, Alastor.” 

xi. Amèn. [Amen]

“Alastor,” you whisper into the dark after he finishes saying your wedding vows. The name is much heavier on your tongue. It no longer belongs solely to your sweet bengal cat. The name you sing out to grab a cat’s attention or scold him for swatting something off the counter – “Alastor.” – the name is now shared with your dead husband. 

Bone-deep shivers run through you. Dead husband. Your dead husband who is broadcasting out to you, voice rich and recognizable. The most chesired prayer you had ever heard in your past life, bleeding off into radio-waves. “Alastor.”

“Yes, dearest?” His intonation holds the patience of an enraptured man. He is smitten and at the ready to lend you his ear in a much more tangible Van Gogh way than in the literary sense. “Would you care to share your vows too? I always did love hearing French-creole roll off your fumbling tongue.”

“No, I –” 

You feel dreadfully faint. All of it rushing back to you; it is a miracle that you have not faint or turned into a vegetable. You stare at the brown husk of a radio where you should be looking at the brown skin of your late husband’s face. A miracle is too angelic. A curse. This is a curse.

Something boils unpleasantly in your gut. This house. It was Alastor’s. Even after being born in a different square of New Orleans, you found your way back to the house. 

Found your way to the ring. Found your way back to the radio.

“Why?” It is the only word that you can manage to form.

“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality” 

“Death is a supple suitor, that wins at last.”

“Love is anterior to life, posterior to death”

“Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.” 

“A wounded deer leaps the highest.”

You two cannot keep quoting Emily Dickinson at each other. Burying your head in your hands, you sigh deeply with the strife and age of an entire already lived life. You miss the flash of lightning that illuminates your kitchen, the shadow of a wendigo stamped on the floor where the kitchen table’s circular imprint should be. 

As the light leaps back out the window and you raise your head, Alastor hums at you lovingly. “Now dear, you know I hate to see you so despondent. It breaks my heart … well it would if I still had a beating one.” 

Laughter follows and you startle in your chair. It sounds so intimately real that you almost thought the crowd of a comedy show was dropped and placed in your kitchen. Your shield falls as the noises wither away. 

“Why now?”

“Dear, this interrogation is so harsh. I thought you would be overjoyed to be reunited. You said yourself that you never wanted to live without me. Aren’t you even going to say it?”

“Alastor. I love you.” Those words come as easy as the last puzzle piece. “Why now,” you press stubbornly. 

The dark space around the radio almost echoes with the deep sigh Alastor gives you. There is the sound of some tinkering, a few knocks of wood and clanks of metal. “Why now, dear?” The noises grow in volume and rich jubilation breathes itself through Alastor’s voice. “Why now indeed! Well, dear, I have just happened to secure your place in Hell! Right alongside me! Please, please, hold the applause.”

There is no applause besides the one he is controlling and manipulating to move to his whims. 

Why would he think that was pleasing news? Vexed, you straighten up your posture and go to ask, “Alastor, why —“ and then your words get caught in a spiderweb. “Alastor!” 

Uncaring of your blindness from the power outage, you jump up and rush towards your bedroom, in search of Alastor. 

You make it about halfway into the dining room when the bengal cat is suddenly deposited in your arms. Alastor is shaking up a storm. Protectively, you wrap your arms around him, wary of whatever nebulous thing held him in their clutches. Your empty glare falls off your face as you are suddenly roller-coastered back into the kitchen. 

“That was quite rude of you.”

“You’ve been quite rude this entire month.” 

“Well, I simply cannot pop out of nowhere. I do still have my affliction for showmanship. Something that was a trait loved by my dear spouse.”

“Showmanship, he says,” you grumble, petting Alastor gently. His tremors are still so extreme. “Ouroboros. Transmigration of a soul.”

“Well if I tether you to me, there is this little political game called Extermination that would have been a threat to you. If you were to die of natural causes, you would have gone to Heaven. Keeping you human was the best choice until I came to collect you.”

“You’re collecting me to bring me to Hell?”

“Quite correct. Yes, I am.”

“And if I don’t want to be collected?”

“HAHAHA, and do you not want that? Truly?”

“No … if anything … I’m more pissed you didn’t arrive sooner.”

A flash throws itself into the open space of a kitchen. This time you are able to see it. Up the wall, between the space where you keep an ancient television set and the place on the wall where a rotary phone rests is a shadow. Ignoring its definition, the shadow is built from no imposing object or body sitting in your kitchen. Instead of a physical presence, the stamp of long antlers and a sharp angular body are its own body. Gone as soon as the lightning flash flees. 

You miss it barely but you saw the shadow of a hand reaching out to you. The something you had been searching for, finally here to call and collect you. Come home, dear, it calls out in gravel static. And you answer.  

I reread All for the Game again and wow, the brainrot is still strong. I can't stop thinking about this mouthy asshole. I want to draw specific moments from the series, but for this study I just had fun playing around with the many faces of Neil Josten!

Writing Prompt #14

"You foolish, stupid child," Vlad hisses, pinning Danny to the wall. Danny's eyes turn green as he wraps both his fists around the one Vlad has clenched in his collar, his feet dangling in the air. Vlad leans in, his own eyes burning red.

"When, exactly, did you plan on telling me your biological father was Bruce Wayne?" he says furiously.

Danny's hands drop in surprise. "W-What?" he gasps.

Vlad drops him unceremoniously and he lands on the floor in a heap. Vlad claws at the air in frustration.

"Don't lie to me, boy." Vlad says, omitting his often used possessive "my" in front of "boy".

"How do you know that?" Danny asks warily, propping himself up. He watches Vlad push a shaking hand through his hair. The man looks down at him before dropping in an ungainly squat beside him.

"Of all the sperm donors, Bruce Wayne, Daniel? Really?" The man asks, despairingly.

"I didn't exactly choose him, Vlad."

"No, I suppose you didn't."

"Seriously," Danny says, watching the man rock back on his heels as a growing pit forms in his stomach. "How did you know about him?"

Vlad's mouth twists bitterly. "Because he now knows about you."

"What do you—"

"Vladdy! Danno! What are the two of you doing on the floor?" Jack flops down beside them, a tray of freshly prepared fudge in his hands. "We having a heart-to-heart boys? Let me in on this!"

"Jack," Vlad says. "If you truly want to have a heart-to-heart with your son, I suggest you tell him the real reason I've come over today."

Jack's face falls.

"Vlad," Maddie says from behind him. "Thank you for coming. We're grateful for all you've done, but I think we can handle it from here."

"Madeline," Vlad says, rushing to his feet. "I must insist—"

"And I must insist you see yourself out," Maddie smiles tightly. "You know where the door is, don't you?"

"Mads," Jack says gently, looking between the two.

"I can show him out," Danny says, getting up as well.

"That's alright, Danny," Maddie says. "Why don't you go get your sister? We need to have a talk...as a family."

Danny glances at Vlad.

"Now, Danny," Maddie says. Danny heads for the stairs, pit growing ever larger.

--

The next time they meet it is Danny who has Vlad pinned, the gaudy chandelier above him shaking with the force of his rage.

"You should've told me," Danny growls.

"I thought your parents had you informed," Vlad says, utterly unbothered by the teen cracking what is thankfully not a load-bearing wall of his mansion. "Honestly Daniel, we could throw around allegations of deception on both sides, particularly mine as I assume you've known for quite some time now, if not the entire time, about your father hmm?"

Danny's eyes flick away in an obvious tell.

"Yes, I thought as much. But rather than whinging about being blindsided, I suggest we focus our energy on the solution."

Danny drops Vlad, barely biting back a snarl when the man lands gracefully on both feet.

"Which is?" Danny asks.

"First of all, your well-meaning but frankly moronic parents seem to believe that they can make a case for your custody without the assistance of my legal team. It is in both of our best interests to dissuade them of this."

"They don't like feeling indebted, Mom in particular."

"Well, to be crude for a moment Daniel, tough shit. Yes," Vlad says in response to Danny's widening eyes, "I said it. Bruce Wayne has the best of the best on his payroll and your parent's rinky-dink attorney from the local practice won't stand a chance against Friedman & Sons. Especially once he establishes paternity."

"He can do that?" Danny asks. "I mean I'm almost eighteen, can't I just refuse?"

"The keyword here, Daniel, is almost. As in, you are not. The judge can take your wishes into consideration, but I suspect Wayne will make a case for an unsafe living environment alongside his paternity to win his petition for full custody."

"Un-unsafe living environment?" Danny sputters. Vlad eyes the boy dryly before gesturing to all of him, currently clad in silver and black hazmat. Danny drops the transformation with a wince.

"In fact, I suspect that's the main reason the man filed in the first place," Vlad continues. "Lord knows he doesn't need anymore heirs to fight over his fortune once he passes—"

"Jesus, Vlad,"

"—so I believe he did some digging and found your home to be, well, wanting. On paper, Daniel, your parents sound eccentric at best, dangerous at worst. Pull the right strings, and hospital records just fall into laps. He probably thinks he's rescuing you." Vlad sneers. "If only he knew how quick you are to spit in the face of one offering you a comfortable and wealthy home."

"Fuck off," Danny says. "Is that what this is about? If you can't have me, no one can?"

Vlad rolls his eyes. "Come now, Daniel. Are you really intending to keep up this pretense?"

"What are you talking about?"

"We agreed a long time ago that no matter the nature of our quarrel, we would leave the Justice League out of it," Vlad says, taking a menacing step forward. "You think I, running in the circles I do, would have no knowledge of Bruce Wayne's alter-ego?" He takes another step, voice rising. "I have avoided drawing The Batman's attention for years, no matter how often our paths crossed. I stayed under his radar for decades, and now, BECAUSE OF YOU, I AM ABOUT TO BE RUINED."

With a creak and a groan, the chandelier drops, landing between them with a crash. Danny coughs from the dust as Vlad takes a heaving, calming breath.

"Then why get involved at all?" Danny asks, staring at the ground.

Vlad sighs, clapping his hands twice. Several ghosts dressed in service uniforms fly out the woodwork, gathering up bits of chandelier as others begin to mop.

"Because, little badger," Vlad says, walking away from the mess. "If we lose this, he'll have you in the palm of his hands. Which is infinitely worse."

Entering the kitchen, he pulls an open bottle of white out of the kitchen fridge and pours himself a glass, throwing a Fiji water to Danny who takes it for the peace offering it is.

"He won't."

"Won't what, Daniel? Please speak in full sentences."

"Won't have me," Danny says, letting a thin coat of frost spread over the bottle. He tips the freezing cold water into his mouth and wipes his face with his sleeve, mostly to see Vlad grimace.

"Why, because you'll run away if he wins? Until you turn eighteen? I won't have you fail to complete your education because of a cockamamie scheme, Daniel—"

"Because I have a solution, Vlad, one that doesn't involve the courts or running away."

"And what is that, exactly, Daniel?"

--

"You're going to leave my family alone."

"Danny," Mr. Wayne says, blinking in surprise at the boy on his doorstep and miles away from Illinois.

"I mean it," Danny says firmly. "You're going to drop your petition and whatever smear campaign you were planning on and leave the Fentons alone."

"Danny...why don't you come inside?"

Danny takes a step back from the manor's large doors. "You want a relationship with me? Brute force isn't the answer."

Bruce takes in the teenager, lanky but almost to his eye level. His eyes are clear and sharp, his demeanor forcibly calm.

"I debated whether going through the court was the right thing to do," Bruce says slowly, matching calm with calm. "But I wanted to be above board."

"Because my adoption wasn't?" Danny says, arms crossed. "Yeah, I'm aware. Kinda hard to adopt a kid that doesn't legally exist. And I know what you're going to say, the Fentons should've reported me to the system, but they didn't do it because I begged them not to. Because I didn't want my biological parents to find me."

"Danny..."

"You can swing your dick around and get your way, exactly the way I thought you would do things," Danny says, "Or you can have a relationship with me on my terms. A relationship where I don't despise you because you took me away from the people who've loved me no matter their faults."

"You're asking me to choose your happiness over your safety." Bruce says carefully.

"That's bullshit," Danny says. "I had a lab accident when I was fourteen and went directly against my parents' instructions. They trusted me, and I made a mistake."

"It's not a matter of trust. You were a child, Danny, and you almost died." Bruce says, not bothering to feign ignorance. Footsteps echo behind him.

"Bruce?" A voice calls. "Is that..?"

"Your son did die," Danny says. "He took a flight with your credit card to Ethiopia and got blown up. I bet you trusted him too."

Bruce reels back as a hand lands on his shoulder, the other on the door.

"Whoa, whoa, uh, Danny, right? I'm Tim, I'm—"

"I know who you are," Danny says, clenching his fists. Powering through the hurt he is causing. "I didn't come here to point out what a total hypocrite you are. I just want you to back off. And if you give me your number, we can text and I'll come to Gotham for Thanksgiving or the ski chalet in Vermont or your villa in where-the-fuck-ever and you can be Uncle Bruce that I maybe even tolerate being around once in a while. Just leave my family alone."

"Bruce, what is he talking about?" Tim asks. "Back off of what?"

"Your Dad is suing my parents for full custody," Danny says when it becomes clear Bruce isn't answering.

"What?" Tim hisses, turning to Bruce. "That isn't what we talked about!"

"Danny. I..."

"Here," Danny says, thrusting an index card forward that he's scrawled his phone number and email onto. On the other side is the past participle conjugation for 'venir'. "I won't answer until you drop the custody petition. Which I expect you to do by tomorrow morning."

"Done," Tim says, stepping past Bruce and taking the card. "Give me about noon to get it all squared away with the lawyers. Do you have a hotel? A way home? I'd be happy to reimburse your flight and accommodation."

"Overstepping already."

"Fair enough," Tim says coolly, raising his hands. "Our lawyers will reach out when it's settled."

"Great. Bye." Danny says, turning to leave. He waits until he hears the manor door close behind him before pulling out his cell phone.

Ring!

Ring!

"Hello?"

"It's done."

"What's done? Again, little badger, full sentences, I beg of you."

Yandere Stu n Bill with a killer! Reader —?

ONE, TWO,THREE NOT ONLY YOU AND ME ...

Oh dear, what a wonderful thing you are. Stu is hugging so hard, spinning you around and overall enjoying the news

Billy, more quiet than his companion and lover, took the news with more composure, but he was elated the same, and he told you so by making short compliments

They would accompany you to your murder spree whenever you went out, but after seeing your absolute brutal side, oh darling, you're going to become part of the team

It doesn't matter if you want or not, you will don the mask of ghost face, and please do kill Sidney with them, please darling

The two of them as yandere may balance each other out. Stu is more the adoring and worshipping type, while Billy is the possessive one.

You can reason with one of them at least, who in turn may reason with the other. Anyway, you will be granted a little bit of space. Just a little

Because they're packed with cash, you will be spoiled with the best weapons you may want: knives, guns, batons, bats. Ask and you shall receive

Please don't get hurt, cause you will have two lovers who will fret about and probably panic. One visibly,the other internally

You will have a strange way of giving gift to each other... Severed limbs, a heart, the eyes of someone who gazed at you far too long....

But, hey the night is young. Let's have some fun, shall we?

The parallel that had me thinking for days

kazzle dazzle

happy bday babygirl

My story is The Raven that found a Fox Den!

I know that it’s not the best story and I need to go over and change a lot of it but I was just writing it for fun! It’s my quarantine fic!

do u know fics like “Blood and Smoke” by andreil ? i’d like to read more fics where neil has a twin haha

Hello there!  Yes, we can indeed rec some fics like ‘Blood and Smoke’!  In fact, one of the fics below was inspired by it.  Plus, we have a few other fics and tumblr prompts where Neil has a twin. - S

For fics where Neil has a sibling, but not necessarily a twin, check out these posts:

Neil with a brother/sibling here

Neil with a sister here

Neil with a half-sister here

Blood and Smoke by andreil [Rated M, incomplete, last updated Oct 2018]

After being blinded in one eye by Riko, Neil and his twin brother Nathaniel strive to find a place where they belong.

tw: implied/referenced torture, tw: implied/referenced abuse, tw: implied/referenced nonconsensual drug use, tw: violence

Heathens by Stormsong [Rated T, 12916 words, incomplete, last updated June 2017]

inspired by ‘Blood and Smoke’

Mary Wesninski had twin boys. Abram and Nathaniel. Both were supposed to go to the Moriyama’s Exy team The Ravens. After their tryout with Riko and Kevin Mary ran with Abram.

tw: panic attacks, tw: implied/referenced abuse, tw: implied/referenced torture, tw: violence

The Raven that found a Fox Den by ExyDownUnder [Rated T, 73459 words, incomplete, last updated June 2020]

What if Neil Josten had a younger twin brother that was given to the Moriyamas in a way to prove the familyʻs loyalty?

This is a sort of retelling of what it would be like for, Kit Josten.

tw: implied/referenced self harm, tw: implied/referenced drug use, tw: panic attacks, tw: alcohol

you’re not the boss of me (i’m sick of twins) by itsoundsgreen [Rated M, 26533 words, incomplete, last updated May 2020]

Nathaniel has a fraternal twin brother named Abram that was raised by the Hatfords until he was thirteen. Nobody else knows of his existence or his relationship to the Wesninski family - otherwise the Moriyamas would have killed him.

Neil and Alex Josten have been living in Millport for just over a year. They get recruited to join the last ranked team in collegiate Exy, the Palmetto State Foxes, and together, they throw themselves into playing, hoping they can survive for as long as possible.

tw: canon-typical violence, tw: implied/referenced child abuse, tw: implied/referenced rape/non-con, tw: implied/referenced character death, tw: implied/referenced csa

That TFC Sibling AU series by HonoraryFox [Rated G/T, 3780 words, incomplete, last updated June 2020]

Fics set in a sibling au verse set pre, during, and post series as and when I get inspired

Part 1: That Sibling AU (T, 1074)

Neil has a sister and she comes storming into PSU

Part 2: Neil's Birthday Betting Pool (G, 1300)

Nat arrives in January to wish her brother a happy birthday and the Foxes make a new bet. Exactly how old is Neil Josten?

Part 3: Driving is a life skill, Abram (G, 1406)

On their 14th birthday Nat, currently Amy, convinces Nathaniel, Adam, that driving is an essential life skill and they should learn it. Well, she should learn it, she is six minutes older, after all.

It is Easier to Run if the World Thinks You Stayed Behind by strawberryproblems [Rated T, 942 words, complete, 2018]

Neil is talking to Andrew, telling him his story of his secret twin brother, and how he was left behind.

if you read the books than you probably will be okay because most of it is referenced pretty lightly, like as if Neil doesn’t think twice about it, except one scene.

This is basically a Neil monologue, I formatted it similar to the format of a long poem w/o rhyme.

tw: implied/referenced rape/non-con, tw: implied/referenced nonconsensual drug use, tw: implied/referenced abuse, tw: implied/referenced domestic violence, tw: implied/referenced torture, tw: implied/referenced character death

Neil's twin Liam by @whatmack [tumblr, 2019]

“I just took a nap and dreamed that like, Neil had a twin who had run with them but then decided to stay with Stuart but he was still really sweet and when Neil tells the foxes everybody loves him??”

Neil's twin Liam pt. 2 by @whatmack [tumblr, 2019]

“What about in that Neil twin fic, Neil gets insecure about Andrew wanting his twin instead and Andrew comforts him ❤️”

Neil's twin Liam pt. 3 by @whatmack [tumblr, 2019]

“hi im so invested in liam. how was his life with stuart? what's his favourite colour? does he enjoy watching films? which kind? how languages does he speak? does he listen to musicals? is he lgbt? what's his favourite subject? does he celebrate his birthday (if so it's be the same as nathaniels- would neil and liam have different birthdays despite being twins????”

Neil's twin Liam pt. 4 by @whatmack [tumblr, 2019]

“If you were considering writing more (but it's absolutely not an imposition, do whatever you want with this, you're amazing either way) maybe just him and Neil bonding? Or Andrew warming up to him? That'd be nice, I mean, what is Andrew even thinking here?”

I have never seen anything more true written on this website

Now i am sure this has been said before

But

Inej Ghafa and Kaz Brekker are just the straight version of Andrew Minyard and Neil Josten

Yandere Stu n Bill with a killer! Reader —?

ONE, TWO,THREE NOT ONLY YOU AND ME ...

Oh dear, what a wonderful thing you are. Stu is hugging so hard, spinning you around and overall enjoying the news

Billy, more quiet than his companion and lover, took the news with more composure, but he was elated the same, and he told you so by making short compliments

They would accompany you to your murder spree whenever you went out, but after seeing your absolute brutal side, oh darling, you're going to become part of the team

It doesn't matter if you want or not, you will don the mask of ghost face, and please do kill Sidney with them, please darling

The two of them as yandere may balance each other out. Stu is more the adoring and worshipping type, while Billy is the possessive one.

You can reason with one of them at least, who in turn may reason with the other. Anyway, you will be granted a little bit of space. Just a little

Because they're packed with cash, you will be spoiled with the best weapons you may want: knives, guns, batons, bats. Ask and you shall receive

Please don't get hurt, cause you will have two lovers who will fret about and probably panic. One visibly,the other internally

You will have a strange way of giving gift to each other... Severed limbs, a heart, the eyes of someone who gazed at you far too long....

But, hey the night is young. Let's have some fun, shall we?