Chapter Text
꒦꒷𖤐ִ২ৈ𖤐ִ꒦꒷
Charlie wakes up screaming and crying. It’s the first time that it's happened in weeks. Alastor had started to get used to the rib-kicking and happy sounds she made when she was fast asleep. Toddlers had a few moods, and he’s spent months cramped into bed with her, because no matter how he moved, she was somehow right next to him. Pillows didn’t put a barrier strong enough, and Razzle and Dazzle gave him a lot more breathing room since they had seen his other form.
He’s heard her cries before, but this one… oh, it’s cutting right through everything, singed down the bond that they held. Her distress startles Alastor so badly that he nearly falls out of the bed. He clutches his chest, antlers sprouting out of his head far more tangled and grotesque. He’s scrambling for what he doesn’t know, sweat beading on his forehead. His claws dig deep into the mattress.
A nightmare?
He doesn’t know what has her tossing that way, but he soon can hear the loud crackling of thunder and rain.
It’s a storm.
Oh. He breaths, catching his breath. Closing his eyes and just breathing in again. His eyes adjust to the dark, and without his glasses, things are a little blurry, but he doesn't have to look far to start to try and put things right.
Yet the next bang rattles the entire house.
It’s a storm, like that back on earth. The wind’s howling something fierce, but in the end, that's all it is. Noise.
He reaches out a hand and tries to run it through her hair, but she pulls a bit away from him. Crying even louder and screaming as the booms seem to just get closer and closer to them. There had been a few tropical storms here and there on the beach, but this was what he might have imagined a hurricane to be like outside. The waters pounding on the roof, with the loudness of thumping hooves. It’s a river, roaring angrily. The sliding glass windows blow open by the force. The curtains pull back, the white moving like wraiths as the dark sky comes alive in large flashes.
Bright, burning light streaks across the sky.
Like a falling star.
It’s not normal… Sloth has a naturally pink sky, but it’s a deep, raging, purple now. Thick blackened clouds roll over the artificial moon. It’s like the sky is splitting with jets of red. It is horrifyingly, hauntingly beautiful the sort that isn't easy to look away from.
This noise is… It’s deafening. His sensitive ears flatten unbidden down to his head. It’s like… all of hell is rumbling. His furs rising, something primals sinking past his defenses.
It’s a quake?
He reaches for her and pulls her into his arms. She doesn’t fight him, seeming to sense his growing unease. His large, shadowy tendrils reach for the new microphone. Branding it like a spear in the one, he takes several large breaths. Pushing through the fuzz and the crackling. The static builds up in his throat, and then it comes out in a soft note.
“Hush, little one.” Big, large orbs look at him, but they keep leaking, and she grabs him tight to him. He grits his teeth in his smile.
“Al-la-tor.” She wails.
“Hush, little one, don’t cry.” He repeated. Ears turning, listening, straining. But there are no footsteps. No one is coming. They’re alone. He breathes again, with his chest rising and falling, calming himself between each one. His stupid prey heart, that wanted to beat too hard against the bone, like some fleeing Buck. He’s not prey!
He’s NOT.
His cursed instincts want to run more than they want to fight. There’s nothing to aim at, though. He can’t fight a storm, not in any meaningful way. It could hurt the if they were out in it, but it wasn’t a direct threat with the enchanted walls that held over them.
Still, it feels like the world is ending…Sounds like it. He hasn’t felt fear like this in a long time. It’s making his eyes turn back, because as fearful as he is. There is something to protect here.
He’s in Sloth.
He’s several rings down.
They’re several rings down.
It was supposed to be safe down here, wasn’t it?
Where’s Lucifer?
Charlie’s claws grow out, and they dig into him, but he lets them. He’s admittedly… so woefully unprepared for this. It’s too hard to move at the moment; tense with his own newfound adrenaline.
Something's wrong.
Very wrong.
He’s going to have to try and get up.
He has to know.
He can’t protect them if he doesn’t know.
That helps.
One small movement at a time.
He puts himself on bent, drawn-out limbs, the creature part of him raging. Becoming more and more twisted as the rooms are empty. The home itself is surprisingly, horribly, silent. Alasor has a toddler clinging to his antlers, balanced on a larger, thicker skull, and 2 beasts slinking at his heels that seem to be equally disturbed by the large booms.
Belphogor is there in the main entryway. She’s looking at the rain with the door open, and the corner beside her has a roaring fire that burns green, with hell’s most corrupted fire. It dances with black highlights, and the shadows are long and stretched. All her many eyes are a gleam, and they shift to look at him. Demons have many forms, and they both look at each other in their more monstrous of them. She has her little servants huddled in a nook. But they aren’t going to fight, no,o she looks at him and Charlie, and there’s a defeatedness there.
A pitying look.
“He went to Pride.”
Even in this form. Alastor was nothing if not polite; he has that way about him. He keeps his face as straight as possible, normal, a smile stretched past thin lips, straining at his now freed gums.
Now, though, he has a voice. He wants to use it to scream. He wants to pull out his hair in frustration. He wants to dig his claws so deep that it will cut out the pain, trying to crawl up his throat.
Lucifer! Cryptic, always do it alone, knows what's best, Lucifer.
The cry comes out as a record scratch that goes over the rain. Sharp and he forces a breath past teeth so clutched that black leaks down his chin, splotches against the carpet.
"He what now?" He asked because his ears must have been failing him. The static is building, and his heart's beating again fast, but for a completely different reason.
The thought slipped past his anger, his fear.
Sends something that hurts so very badly, rippling up from the cavity in his chest. Past the guts that never seem to digest anything well.
"He went to Pride. Heaven has ended what it can of the war, and he went to negotiate. It's not going well by the looks of it." She says, and it enters his ears, it flickers there, like a bad signal.
Yes... Well... and dandy. He just failed to mention it to Alastor, who was supposed to be his consort, that he was going to end the war. He was going to go up there to face heaven. Leaving his crying daughter with no idea where her father was, and Alastor with the thick worry of whether anything would... could happen to the other. He had fallen, so there had to be someone powerful enough in heaven to cause him problems. And he went without a word.
He went and left him down here with a Sin to watch over him?
His anger is only curbed because Charlie’s pulling at his hair, still horrified by the storm.
The betrayal is hitting him, though, moving past the shock of it.
He’s going to kill him. The thought came soft at first. Impossible.
But it builds like a compulsion.
When Alastor sees him again. He’s going to knock that stupid hat off his head. He’s going to put his claws through those pretty eyes. He’s going to crush that stupid skull of his. He’s going to rip him open, spread out all his innards. Cut him, gut him, expose all that mess to the light of day. So that he would feel an ounce of what he was putting him through. Maybe think next time!
Alastor’s going to eviscerate him, and even if he can’t really scratch the other.
He’s going to find a way.
But for now... he's going to sit down. Lucifer had not wanted his help and so all he can do is wait to kill him.