Chapter Text
It was the man’s former wife who introduced him to Alastor.
Although introduce might be the wrong word for it, as what Lilith had exactly said was:
“He’s depressed,” she said, a long finger playing with the rim of her glass, “Granted our separation didn’t help matters but he’s been depressed long before I even had the spark of thought about leaving. What I want for him is to repossess that energy to frolic in the garden and taste other fruits, so to speak.”
Alastor, already imbued with a few fingers of rye at that point, chuckled, “I’m sorry, my lady, but are we talking about your husband or your canine companion?”
Lilith laughed along with him, her soothing voice which he had sung praises of in his radio show reviews seemingly vibrating around him and through the other patrons in the bar who glanced furtively at the little nook the two of them occupied, “oh, there are so many other animals you can compare Lucifer with which would fit him more aptly than a dog.”
Alastor raised an eyebrow, “and those are?”
Lilith only tutted at him, wagging a long elegant gloved finger at his face. “You’ll find out if you meet with him.”
Alastor hummed. For a moment, he allowed his eyes to wander where Mimzy was enthusiastically dancing with a gentleman he knew will go home with her tonight (whether the man will see the light of the morning Alastor could only guess) and, just a little bit behind her, to where Rosie had her head tucked tight with one of her many other lady friends, most likely snickering about their first husbands. As if tugged on by an invisible string, Rosie’s head swiveled up and she curled her fingers in a cheeky wave in his direction. She was so full of it, having arranged this meeting with Lilith on her own this time. Alastor clucked his tongue, turning away from Rosie’s dark smile and towards the darker one of the woman in front of him.
Lilith hummed back as she sipped daintily on her chosen poison, something impossibly purplish with flecks of gold. It oddly made him think of the nail varnish Maman preferred.
“I still don’t see what I have to gain in this venture,” he drawled then, amused.
She shook her head, her closed-lip smile ever widening, “why, your entertainment of course, my dear! Isn’t that what you wish for these days?”
Well, that was true.
He leaned in, placing his elbow on the edge of their table and resting his chin on his palm, “you would offer up your husband to me as entertainment, my dear madam?”
“My ex-husband,” she corrected, tapping his nose with her index finger, “and you know what? I’ll sweeten the pot for you, Alastor. Just try to initiate contact with him about his…lessons and I will visit you in your booth for a little chat on air before I leave tonight.”
Tilting his head, he considered her from this new sideways angle.
Her smile never wavered.
Alastor was in fact very much bored in these trying times of peace. His radio show was the only thing keeping him afloat and with all the lack of more exciting news, Alastor had to turn to the higher arts for his muse. Lilith’s concertos were one of the highlights of his recent weeks. It was a shame he wouldn’t be hearing any more soon.
“You will sing at least one song?” He needled, fluttering his eyes at her.
“I will sing a whole set if you wish, dear,” she chuckled, “it would be my despedida party.”
He hummed again, that sounded heavenly, “and if I fail to talk your husband into taking his lessons as you call them?”
“No harm done,” she assured, “a little bruise perhaps to your ego but nothing more than that.”
She paused, eyes catching on to him mischievously, “unless you want more.”
Alastor let that last remark slide, “and corollary to that, I suppose I have no other reward if I do persuade him to take his lessons?”
“You’ll have the honor and entertainment of humbling a monarch,” she sipped yet again her garish drink.
Alastor turned his gaze down on his own glass of rye, thinking as he traced its smooth rim with his fingertip.
A finger, now gloveless and Alastor spied to have the same color of nail polish as its owner’s drink, curled right in front of his nose.
“Come now, Alastor,” Lilith crooned, “don’t tell me you’re afraid of meeting my Lucifer?”
Alastor laughed at the audacity of the thought. He offered his open palm out, fingertip grazing the air near those gloveless knuckles. Later, he would blame the rye, the sounds of Mimzy’s far away but still rambunctious laughter, and the way Lilith’s smile was both consoling and challenging, for what he said next.
“Fine, it’s a deal then.”
A harmless little deal.
Just for fun.
Nothing would go wrong.
Alastor was sure of it.
What Lilith failed to mention was the ducks.
And the barely out-of-teens adult daughter hovering at the door, worrying at her hands as if Alastor were a nun come to assess her father about the accusations of demonic possession.
But the ducks were a more worrying symptom.
Alastor nudged the blanketed lump on the bed with the foot of his cane. The patterns on the blanket were cartoonish ducks of all colors in the rainbow. How horrifying. He might need to bleach his eyes after this whole ordeal. Niffty would know where to get the chemicals in bulk volumes.
With the tip of his cane, he poked at the lump again in disdain.
When no response came forth from either gesture, Alastor moved to the windows. Deftly sidestepping the mounds of ducks of varying heights—there were at least six piles just between the left foot of the bed and the nearest window—he grasped at the heavy curtains and jerked them open. The resulting midday sunlight filtering through the thick stained glass almost blinded him. And yet, that did nothing for the pathetic lump remaining still on the disgustingly extravagant four poster bed.
Alastor narrowed his eyes, there was no wonder why Lilith chose to separate with this man.
“Um, Alastor?” The girl, Lilith’s daughter Charlotte—who preferred to be called Charlie of all inane sobriquets—hesitantly called from the door, “perhaps we could reschedule?”
He decided to not hear that and instead stalked to the bed.
Well, there was only one way left, no matter how distasteful.
Mustering his resolve, Alastor gathered that childish duck-patterned blanket in his hands and pulled.
The resulting wordless screech from the former lump of ugly blankets revealed to be the former King of Eden—now so-called ambassador in Pride City when in fact he was nothing but an exiled monarch—Lucifer Morningstar, was very…satisfying to Alastor.
“Good morning, Your Majesty!” Alastor greeted brightly, the corner of his lips digging into his cheeks, his teeth bared, “I’m your new language and communications expert!”
“No.”
Lilith’s husband was an idiot.
“No, no and, NO!”
Sure, he was powerful, politically and, most probably, ability wise.
“Nuh-uh!”
But sadly, that did not stop him from being a buffoon of a magnitude inversely proportional to his stature as a man.
“No!”
Current case as an example.
“No,” the man said for the fifth time in a row, shaking his head vigorously. He hadn’t moved an inch from his unmade bed, in fact he was clutching at his duck-shaped pillow as if it would save him from the reality of his situation (read: Alastor), “not happening!”
Fortunately, or perhaps depressingly for Lucifer Morningstar but amusingly so for Alastor, the man had gone to bed fully dressed as such Alastor only had to suffer the sight of him with tousled hair and uncannily bright blue eyes with heavy bags underneath. No distressingly bare flesh in sight. Alastor may yet to survive this without feeling thoroughly harassed himself.
“I saw your fiasco at the opening of your daughter’s hotel yesterday!” Fiasco was what Alastor could charitably call that opening speech the man had made extolling the virtues of his daughter and her hotel of rehabilitation for the poor and needy. However, unhinged torment inflicted on the unwilling masses by publicly comparing the shape of duck penises to how roads to ‘redemption’ work would be a more apt description to what happened yesterday. Alastor truly pitied the dregs of the society who had to go through that torture known as Lucifer Morningstar’s stuttering welcome speech that not only lack cohesion but also the wit and charisma Lilith said hides within the man.
Perhaps, he conceded, they were now burrowed deep within the man.
“There was no fiasco!” The man gritted out, looking so much like the misshapen golden anatid headboard behind him.
Alastor nodded, he imagined he could brine the wit and charisma out of Lucifer Morningstar the same way his Maman harvested those razor clams on that special day she took him to the beach. The bayou holds warmer, fonder memories for them than the beach but he would never forget how those clams looked like wriggling out of those holes, tormented by the pure salt with no way but up to where greedy hands are waiting for them to rise.
“A little mishap, we would call it then, I suppose,” Alastor agrees, the tip of his tongue gliding behind the seam of his grinning teeth. Hmmm, those clams melted in his mouth exquisitely too, soaked in the primal terror only a living creature hunted by something it could not understand can feel. They seasoned themselves well, mucking through the salt which made them wretched so.
“But in the spirit of magnanimity which your exemplary daughter wishes upon our great city, I have decided to offer my services gratis to better your skills in the arts of public communications!”
Alastor stamped down on the urge to grin wider at the revulsed look on the man’s face, urging his face into a milder smile. He shouldn’t give away the game so quickly now, should he? But some of his mirth might have shown regardless of what he thought because the childish scrunch of the man’s nose sharpened, hardened into something more neutral of a mask. A clam, retreating into its shell upon contact to fresh air.
Look at that, he did have a spine. And here Alastor was thinking Lucifer Morningstar was just a fancy blue-blooded worm. Alastor smiled deeper as Lucifer frowned at him equally as deep. He would enjoy pulling that spine out and whetting his incisors on it.
“Speech language pathology isn’t just for people who stutter, Dad,” Charlie intervened, surprisingly emotionally cognizant of the impending meltdown her father seemed to be hurtling towards the more he stared at Alastor’s face, “I think it could also help you develop receptive skills and build…other abilities to help you get…”
Charlotte trailed away, looking at Alastor. Alastor blinked back at her, still smiling. The girl, finding no respite with him, sighed before rallying herself up and gesturing at the open window pouring light into the bedroom, “you know, out there?”
“There is no need for me to go out of there, Charlie,” the man replied, tone infinitely gentler than when he was talking at Alastor, “I already know what I’m going to find…out there.”
“Dad, please. I’d really like you to try,” She moved to stand beside Alastor, hands clasped in front of her chest as if in a prayer, “with the hotel kicking off, I’m going to have to step more in public.”
Her voice lowered, fingers clenching around her own knuckles, “and I really want you to be there with me.”
Alastor’s eyes were drawn between her large shining eyes and her father’s increasingly thinning lips, a spectator in the losing war that was Lucifer Morningstar’s conviction against his daughter’s pleas.
Interesting.
Lilith didn’t seem to be prone to child coddling, barely even mentioning her daughter in passing. Of course, it could be that she simply didn’t trust Alastor with the knowledge. Alastor wouldn’t blame her for that. But he did remember her late night concertos, her lavish after-parties that may extend for days and nights, and the political meetings she glazed with a flirty coating of social visitations. She had been doing all of those for the best part of the decade Alastor had known her, maybe even before that. Doing the math, Charlotte Morningstar must have spent most of her late childhood without her mother.
And yet it was the father who was melting faster than an éclair against her despite what must be his own reservations to this pursuit Alastor was proposing. It reeked of overcompensation and guilt typical of negligible parents. Alastor tapped his fingers excitedly on the head of his cane.
Very interesting, so very interesting.
The man on the bed sighed and, with a half-hearted glare at Alastor, relented with a small nod at his daughter.
Surprise, surprise.
With his teaching efforts supported by the darlingest Charlie, Alastor found himself living in her hotel on the wing straight opposite her father. The distance, he presumed, was one of the man’s stipulations in agreeing to his lessons. But it rather suited Alastor’s purposes well.
He hummed as he strolled along the hallway which slithered from the door of his room and meandered through several other functional rooms. But only the library—yawning before him with its toothy concentric archways, its walls filled to the ceilings with bookshelves encasing dusty tomes no one bothered to crack open despite the little reading alcoves dotting the path—interested him. Alastor made a note to himself to check out the red-tinted glass section temptingly barred with a heavy, ornate French lock.
Seven gaping archways later, the hallway sank into a forked waiting room of sorts. On his left hand squatted the lobby of their illustrious hotel. Alastor could already hear his dearest chum Husker partaking in the nearest, and most likely cheapest, bottle of alcohol at the bar near the concierge’s desk.
(Alastor was so thrilled when Charlie allowed him to invite Husker and Niffty into the hotel. In fact, she begged him too! Her foolish father had funded the purchase of the land and the construction of the building but then had locked himself up in his own hotel room and forgotten that it would also need people other than his daughter to maintain it. Charlie was loathe to remind her father of that, out of some misguided attempt not to look like a child of nepotism for sure, but she and her partner weren't able to keep up with the needs of such a large facility. Enter gracious Alastor, who aside from volunteering his aid in teaching her father how to talk properly in public also called in some favours with his precious friends to make life in the hotel more exciting! Truly, what an altruistic pursuit Alastor found himself on.)
It would seem remiss of Alastor to remind the sourpuss it was too early for such drinking when the man was clearly having fun, no?
Alastor turned to his right instead, where another hallway lies. This one, he has been told, was where the majority of the rooms rest, including those of their singular resident effeminate Anthony and the shared rooms of dear Charlotte and her Vagatha.
Glancing at the carpet along that path, Alastor could see a trail of stabbed roaches leading to an ajar janitorial closet where giggles and metallic clicking noises were emanating.
Niffty appeared to be hard at work.
Alastor didn’t want to bother her at the moment as well.
Instead, he journeyed forward towards the hallway gaping open in front of him. It led him directly to the empty entertainment room with its singular pool table and a window deck meant for board or card games. Alastor flicked the white queen on the chessboard, watching with glee as it rolled to the edge of the board, only stopped from further motion by one of the black pawns left on the edge. He drummed his fingers along the display case of various ceramic figurines depicting circus performers, eyeing them with distaste before his eyes landed on a radio propped at its end.
Unused and slightly rusty, it still turned on when Alastor switched it open. He left it on the channel he was going to air on tonight.
He moved on to where the entertainment room branches out to a communal bath Alastor has interest in neither exploring nor using. The bath then merged into an indoor courtyard filled with nothing but apple trees that Lucifer Morningstar apparently had ordered to be transplanted from the Morningstar estate. There was a closed door on the left hand side of the garden, something Charlie unsubtly skipped over the first time she toured Alastor.
Naturally, Alastor gravitated towards it now, undeniably disappointed but unsurprised to find it firmly locked and unyielding to his tricks.
Having that avenue unavailable (for now), Alastor continued his leisurely stroll. He sidestepped several large stains of dubious brown source on the floor and headed straight on where the tail end of this winding hotel hid his target.
Entering a small hall, he followed the red plush carpet until he came face to face to a familiar door with a golden duck acting as a door knocker.
Alastor rapped the wood with his knuckles instead, skitting around the tawdry bauble.
No answer.
He knocked again.
Still no answer.
The duck glinted like golden teeth at him, damning in its gaudiness.
Ensuring his smile was still wide and bright, Alastor curled a solitary middle finger around the knocker.
He tapped the door with it, once, twice, then thrice. Almost immediately, a small thump could be heard behind the thick door. Alastor felt his lips twitch at the thought of having to use a duck door knocker for the foreseeable future.
When the door opened, a Lucifer Morningstar clad in a soft robe the color of young roses welcomed him with a grimace. Alastor almost grimaced back, his mood plummeting, but he salvaged his expression with the finesse of having to do it in front of entitled white rich men countless times before.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” Alastor greeted, his smile splitting his face, “my, you look positively rested!”
Lucifer, for what he was worth, simply rolled his eyes, further accenting the eyebags beneath them before letting Alastor inside his room.
Alastor swept the ducks on the floor to the side with an efficient, well-aimed motion of his left feet. Once he cleared a path to the less overrun with ducks coffee table, he did not waste time setting up for their first lesson. The clink of glass on wood caught the other man’s attention.
“What are you doing?”
From the corner of Alastor’s eye, he saw Lucifer Morningstar’s eyebrows rise in a disjointed manner.
“I would have thought it was obvious, Your Majesty,” Alastor said, dropping one smoothened stone on the empty brandy glass he procured the night before. Then, he dropped another, then another, and another. When the glass was three-quarters full, Alastor stopped and offered it to the man. “Your first elucidation lesson.”
Lucifer did not take it, electing instead to sneer up at Alastor like all the meretricious high-browed people did, “I don’t take my brandy that dry.”
“Quite the contrary, Your Holiness,” Alastor grinned back, pushing the stone-filled glass onto Lucifer’s clenching fist, “you are not to swallow.”
The man fumbled, ears reddening cryptically, and he ended up catching the glass on instinct.
Taking advantage of the weird way the man was caught off-guard, Alastor unfolded a note from breast pocket and held it in front of the pitiful man’s face, “read this.”
Lucifer’s eyes skimmed over the paper, eyes catching near the end. When he made a move to open his mouth, Alastor cut in with a sharp cackle.
He wagged his forefinger at the man’s face, “With the stones stuffed in your mouth, your highness.”
“With the what stuffed in my what?”
Funny, how the ex-King could speak so directly without any bluster or segueing to cursed duck trivias when he was flabbergasted. Alastor’s smile spread across his face like blood from a wound as he looked on the flush spreading equally as quick on Lucifer Morningstar’s paper white face. He tipped his head politely, “I didn’t know His Majesty also suffers hard of hearing along with the troubles of his mouth.”
“I am not!” The man sputtered, “I’m just not fucking—!”
With the hand clenched around the stoned-filled no-brandy glass, he gestured at the note Alastor was still holding between them.
“I’m not fucking stuffing myself with those balls!”
“Again, your majesty,” Alastor crooned, “you are not to swallow these ‘balls’. This technique helped Demosthenes overcome his stammer—”
“He’s Greek,” hissed Lucifer, “of course balls in his mouth will help him with anything!”
“Well, if it makes you that uncomfortable,” Alastor said, holding his hand palm up between them, “I guess I should just tell Charlie you’re not ready for the soiree this weekend.”
That made the man freeze. Then, Lucifer glared at the glass in his fist and then to the note in Alastor’s hand. Alastor helped him decide by leaning down and plucking a stone from the glass to press it lightly against the corner of Lucifer’s lips. The man looked up balefully at him.
But he opened his mouth.
The stone went in with a soft click against Lucifer's teeth.
Oh, Alastor shivered, this would be so fun.