Chapter Text
“What have you done?” The Hunter asks him, aghast, voice trembling with the strain of keeping the shock filling his eyes back. “Alfred, what have you done?!”
Alfred looks briefly down, at the gloved hands clenched on the wads of his overcoat, fingers trying to encircle his biceps, and a thought briefly appears in his mind: he’s filthy. Her cursed blood soaks his clothes, Her cursed flesh taints him.
That thought, instead of disgust, brings him joy.
“I’ve done it!” He says, laughs, shouts it for all to hear. There are splinters of bone on his tongue. “I’ve done it! The cursed creature will taint this world with Her presence no longer!”
“Alfred, what have you…” The Hunter tries to shake him, but his heart is obviously not in it, he barely pushes the Executioner back a step.
Do you not see? Alfred wants to ask. All around us, Her! That stained throne and the bloody puddle at our feet, Her! The high and mighty Queen of the Vilebloods turned into a stain to be washed off by the servants!
He wipes some of the blood and gelatinous flesh before it falls into his eyes and thinks, hysterically, it’s Her !
“She’s dead!” He howls instead, insides burning with the fire he’s never felt before. It’s what the Saints must feel, he reasons, the Martyrs and the Righteous, the Holy fire of the Healing Church's justice! “Now my master can rest in peace and his Martyrdom will be uncontested!”
The Hunter, however, does not look as overjoyed at these news as he should be. His hands drop from Alfred’s shoulders like dead weight and he takes a measured step back. He tugs the mask down - and Alfred sees for the first time that his face is hardly fit for a man.
Ah, he thinks, too late now for that…
Such a damn pity, he thinks.
He watches, instead, how the off-coloured eyes take in the scene, how they widen at the sight of the throne painted with its Queen, at the Wheel dripping with pus and the strands of hair caught in the axis - to finally stop at him.
Strangely, there’s no joy in them - neither the grey one, nor the yellow one are alighted with the same internal flame that Alfred imagines bursting out of his every pore. The Hunter takes another step back.
“Alfred,” his lips move, but for some reason the voice sounds distorted, stretched out. Maybe because the light is so bright around them now, maybe because all other sounds have disappeared - everything is just fire and lack of Her heartbeat. “What have you done.”
I have saved us, he wants to say, I have saved them!
I have done my sworn duty, why are you not sharing my joy?
In his life, admittedly short when compared to his master, he’s had people look at him with fear. He’s experienced common folk looking at him with awe, with jealousy, with thinly-veiled hate, even. That’s why it startles him that he can not decipher the look he’s being regarded with now.
“Alfred, not you…”
After all, he has never thought himself pitiful.
But, however unpleasant that thought is, it dies in the holy fire with all the others.