Chapter Text
Alastor opened his eyes and was immediately struck with the very peculiar experience of having no goddamn clue if he had just woken up or just fallen asleep and begun to dream.
He was in his apartment—there was no reason why he shouldn’t be. He knew, he knew, he’d gone to bed exactly where he was the night before, with plans to get up today, do some necessary domestic life maintenance as one must when one lives alone—leave some things off at the cleaner’s, pick other things up, run by the grocer’s—attend to some business matters at the station, then maybe go out for a drink, see where the night might take him.
And yet….
He knew with equal certainty that he had not set foot in this apartment for almost a century.
Because he had been dead for almost a century.
Yesterday had been an ordinary work day at the station, but yesterday he had been at the Hotel, spent much of the day playing referee between Charlie and Niffty’s clashing visions for the in-progress lobby renovations before being gladly dragged off in the evening by his dear Angel for a rendezvous of their odd little intimate triumvirate.
He sat up in bed, a sick sinking feeling clawing at his heart, and ran both hands over his face, up through his hair. Nothing but a slight tangle of bedhead obstructed combing fingers—no cervid ears, no antlers.
But of course not, he didn’t have those. Humans didn’t have those. And that’s what he was: human. A normal, living human.
Well, “normal” may have been a stretch, but human, certainly.
Shaking his head to clear it, he got up and started coffee. Good lord, he needed coffee.
He’d always been prone to vivid dreams. It was rare that he remembered his dreams, but when he did, they were whole worlds, full of color, texture, taste, and smell—how many mornings had he spent describing the rich tapestries of his dreamlives to his mother, or else listening to her describe her own?
Surely that’s what this was, just another elaborate concoction of his unconscious mind.
But…
No.
He sighed into his coffee.
Fanciful as he could be, there was too much to this “dream” that he would not have imagined for himself. Decades of technology and fashion and slang. Friendships and falling outs of sorts he had no reference for in this life. The physical sensation of kinds of violence it was not possible for a human body to enact. The many-months-long process of falling into something a few feet to the left of love, finding not just himself happy there, but his partner—his playmate—more than content.
It had to be real.
And that…
He didn’t know what to do with that.
Existential crisis aside, there were still errands to be run, so Alastor set about them, moving through the city in a sort of half-fugue, much of his mind occupied with trying to reconcile the fact of his being alive, here in New Orleans, today in 1933, with the afterlifetime of memories now knocking around in his brain.
He needed to talk to—
There was no one for him to talk to about this.
His first impulse was Rosie, but she’d be decades dead already and had never met him.
If—if things played out as he remembered they would, then he’d be meeting Rosie in sixty hours or so, but that was no help to him now.
His mother, dead more than a decade herself and not where he’d get to see her again even once he followed suit.
Even Mimzie was in the ground already.
Angel—Angel would be alive now.
Alastor’s chest tightened along with his grip on the rail of the trundling streetcar.
He would be alive, yes, but the Angel—the Anthony—running around today in the ganglands of New York was not the friend and partner Alastor wanted.
He wouldn’t even be twenty yet, if Alastor had his dates right. It would be some fourteen years before he was scheduled to make his debut down below.
Magic being what magic was, Alastor reasoned that, whatever the cause of his inexplicable return to life with all his memories of Hell, if Angel were to have a similar experience, it would be fourteen years hence, the day before his expected demise.
Fourteen years.
Alastor had so many decades of existence knocking around in his brain now, a mere fourteen years should not have felt that long. But fourteen years without the beautiful darling scoundrel who only last night, lifetimes in the future, had lain boneless in intimate bliss, gazing up at Alastor with a trust that offered everything and asked only for that which Alastor was happy to give….
The tightness in Alastor’s chest seemed to rend like a failing levee, letting a cold, filthy, roiling rush burst through and fill his lungs where air should have been.
If Alastor was a little distant, a little off through his business dealings that afternoon, well, he had a reputation for being odd already.
His dutiful secretary, Ester, lingered by her desk, meeting notes already filed away as Alastor saw the money men out with much performative tittering all around about the sad state of the economy.
When he turned back, she asked, “Sir, is something the matter?”
For half a heartbeat, he considered telling her the whole truth—here and now, Ester was truly the closest thing he had to a friend and the urge to talk, to chatter through the whole day’s dissonance, use her as a sounding board for what to do was very strong—but he really did not need her thinking he was a committable flavor of insane. So a partial truth would have to do.
He waved a dismissive hand and laughed, crossing back through the small smoky front room of the station. “Nothing for you to worry yourself about, my dear. I had a bit of an odd dream last night, that’s all, and I admit it has me missing someone.”
Ester’s expression warmed softly. “An old friend?”
“Something like that.” He’d been aiming for casually evasive but his tone had landed somewhere closer to wistful, which, oh, he didn’t think he liked how that sounded. Regardless, he leaned comfortably at his office doorframe and very pointedly ignored the spark of curiosity Ester was facing him with. “I have a few more things to tend to here, but you go on home, dear. I’ll lock up when I’m done.”
“You’re sure?” Ester asked, but she was already reaching for her purse.
“Quite!” Alastor confirmed, and there was the jaunty attitude he meant to have just now. “Indispensable as you are I can manage without you for an hour, I should hope! Go, see to it that your little gremlins haven’t started hunting each other for sport in your absence.”
With a chuckle, Ester agreed, thanked him, wished him a good evening, and saw herself out.
Alone in the quiet studio, Alastor let out a breath, ran a hand through his hair, and turned to let his body go through the motions of his professional housekeeping, setting things ready for the next morning’s broadcast while his mind ran away again.
By the time he’d finished, it was still barely evening, the Autumn sun low but still just peeking over the rooftops to the west across the river. There was no reason, no reason at all, he couldn’t fix himself a quick supper and go out like he’d planned to, but what then?
He remembered—hazy with distance, past now premonition—the narrow-faced man with a northerly accent making crass jokes at the bar, needling at Alastor, trying to get him to play along, or else give himself away as an unacceptable variety of pervert. How easy he had been, would be, to lure away with promises of local knowledge and willing girls. How satisfying to watch that narrow face contort with shock, horror, pain, and rage that gave way to helpless terror and terrible knowledge that this was the end.
Alastor curled his fingers against his palm and licked his too-dull teeth. He wanted to. The promise of that thrill was extraordinarily tantalizing, knowing there would be appropriate game if he went.
But if he did, that created the problem of tomorrow. A kill meant a body he’d have to do something with and—
He didn’t want to die.
Tomorrow night, if he went to dispose of the corpse in his habitual manner he would end up dead as well, throat ripped out with a bullet in his skull.
Even knowing the power and prestige he could and would amass….
He rubbed at his throat, swallowed hard, and dropped his face into one hand with a breath of manic laughter.
“Maybe I am a coward,” he muttered to no one.
He ran through other options—chiefly, one he previously would not have considered at this point in his existence. He was only one person, though, it would take too long to get through a hundred-plus pounds of meat, and his modest apartment was not equipped to store, let alone process and cure, a whole carcass.
Maybe if—
No.
No, the risk of alerting the neighbors was too great, and it seemed remarkably foolish to tempt fate on the day already slated for his death.
Every tactic he considered brought him back to the same conclusion: it wasn’t worth the risk.
He opened the false back to his desk drawer, poured himself a glass of whiskey and, on an impulse he refused to examine, settled with the office phone. For a moment, he drummed his fingers against the desk, a contemplative tick he’d had since childhood now haunted by the phantom clicking of claws that were not there, then—fuckit, he could afford the rates for one call, whatever they were—he knocked back his whiskey, poured another, and dialed in to the long-distance switchboard.
“I’d like to place a person to person call to a Mr. Anthony Deangelo in Brooklyn, New York,” he told the operator. “I’m afraid I don’t have the phone number.”
With all professional efficiency, she got him through to the local operator, who then informed him that she had three different Anthony Deangelos in her directory.
Pushing up his glasses to rub at the bridge of his nose, Alastor asked, “Do you have a Henrion Deangelo?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“That’ll be the same household.”
“Shall I ring that line, then, sir?”
“Yes, please.”
The few moments it took for the operator to ring the number, have someone pick up, and go through all the usual “New Orleans, Louisiana calling” seemed to drag on for eternity.
Alastor sipped his drink.
“Anthony Deangelo is unavailable at the moment, sir,” the operator informed him, “but there is someone there to take a message. Would you like me to connect you?”
Through a spike of uncertainty he crushed like a bug under his shoe, Alastor answered, “Yes, thank you.”
Once he was a patched through, a young woman’s voice answered with a pronounced Brooklyn accent, “Hello, you’ve reached the Deangelo household.”
“Hello,” Alastor returned, a fond smile splitting across his face at that oh-so-familiar accent, “is this Miss Molly I have the pleasure of speaking to?”
“Yessir, it is,” Molly said with a hint of laughter. “You’ve got a message for Anthony?”
“I do, dear. My name is Alastor, A-L-A-S-T-O-R,” he said, too used to the final syllable his name being misspelled. “I admit, your brother doesn’t actually know me yet, but I’m a friend of a friend of sorts. I,” he faltered slightly, “just wanted to make sure Anthony knows that he has a friend down here in New Orleans, if he ever needs one. Someone who appreciates his more unorthodox interests, with regards to fashion and the like,” he said carefully. “I believe you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Molly said, sounding just as careful, “I got some idea at least.”
“I admire him for it,” Alastor confided honestly, then took a breath. “I don’t expert a thing from him, I’m not asking any favors, as I said I just wanted to be sure Anthony knows he has a friend here to call on if and when he needs.”
He gave her his address—well, the address of the station; it was more reliable—and exchanged a few more pleasantries, which she capped off with, “Y’know, Mr. Alastor, you’ve got a voice for radio, I could listen to you talk all day.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “Happily, I am employed in that very industry!”
“Oh, good!” Molly laughed, too, then settled. “Well, I’ll give your message to Anth as soon as he gets home, whenever he gets home…. Thank you for calling.”
“Thank you for taking my call,” Alastor returned. “It is truly a pleasure to speak with you, Miss Molly.”
“You too,” she said, gentle and earnest. “Goodbye, Mr. Alastor.”
“Goodbye.”
The line went dead and Alastor hung up.
Well.
He’d said he’d be here, so now he just had to make sure he survived tomorrow.