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In a life long aged but not forgotten, Alastor learned to sew. Now, the Radio Demon proves himself a seamstress, though only the fortunate are permitted to call him such a thing. “Why visit a tailor, then?” Some might ask— (some, in this case, being a child on the street that follows at his heels, or a man in Cannibal Town that thinks they are alike because he’s worn a bowler hat once) —and Alastor’s response is always a bright and chipper, “Back in my day, social calls were as important as breakfast! There’s nothing quite like the bonds we make!”
Social calls are what make a man and a sinner; how can you sin without a man? Ambivalently so, the world and Hell, and presumably Heaven, are full of men. Masculine, tax-paying, conforming men and weak-willed, street-corner lingering, paying-for-overpriced-restaurant-meals men. Men who wear hats but don’t tip them, and men who wear dresses but don’t pull them up by the hems and twirl them when greeting a respectable lady. Men are a variety while also the same; except for Alastor, of course, who is better than every man. Better, but generous.
So generous that he’s sewing up the rudimentary plans of Charlie’s ‘get-along’ shirts. Making heads or tails of her designs has been the easy part, but bringing them to life presents an almost-challenge, but he’s a master of turning imperfection into perfection.
It’s a late afternoon. He’s conjured up a clean desk and chair for him to sit, one leg crossed over the other, sewing away. His monocle’s stretched out to a low-sitting set of spectacles, lighting up the path of his work. Angel Dust is out, leaving no room for his irritating opinions on the tightness of the shirts around the waist; Husker is dead-asleep at the bar, as every man like him should be; Niffty is ruining the livelihoods of various bugs, making him proud; the snake and his eggs are, hopefully, struggling to figure out how to unlock their bedroom door; and the Princess and her bride are somewhere upstairs.
The bottom stair creaks. He swivels his ears back.
“Charlie!” He greets her warmly, with his finest smile, like one would salute or tip their hat. “Come for an update?”
Charlie’s frozen where the stairs become floor, looking at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Last he checked, he hasn’t bothered to grow a second head.
“Is something the matter?” he asks.
“It’s just…” Charlie tries, and fails, to look away from him.
Alastor quirks an eyebrow. “Well? I can’t pause forever, you know. I’ve got a rhythm going!”
Charlie hisses through her teeth, fiddling with her hands in that way oh-so-Charlie and oh-so-nervous. She treats him like the alligators from old-home, reproachful when they snap a horse’s leg from its body but unwavering in their loyalty when the call comes to shoot them; ‘They’re home, too! You can’t have a bayou without its ‘gators!’
As silence persists, Alastor wiggles his finger and, poof, a second seat is beside him. His eyes slide shut, though she doesn’t truly leave his sight, from staircase to a stiff seat in his offered chair. When he opens his eyes next, he thinks of another facet of old-home; children, and the way they would look at the alligators.
“Okay. I’m just gonna say it.” Charlie taps her hands on her knees. “You look like a dad.”
Alastor’s grin vanishes behind a tight-lipped smile and he squints at her. What a ridiculous remark.
“You don’t normally look like that, it’s- you’re wearing glasses,” she says, slower, “Sewing a shirt on your lap. And your ears go like this,” She holds up both pointer fingers, forming a triangle as she touches the tips together, “when you’re concentrating.” After a sizeable silence, she adds, “I mean it in a nice way!”
He flexes his ears, asserting their neutral stance, and resists the fleeting urge to rip up his project before it can take flight. A father— what a naive notion. Naive little Charlie, up-in-the-tower Charlie, so blind to her own issues that she’ll see a mentor in anyone. He wears glasses because they ensure he won’t prick his own fingers, and he uses the flat of his thigh as a table because it’s the malleable way to work. He’s sewing these shirts because her project, this hotel, this frivolous activity is his objective. There’s nothing fatherly about that.
But naivety is good. Naivety is easy. He lets the comment about his ears slide, for the sake of that naivety.
“You have a strange eye, my dear,” Alastor’s smile drops its tension, and he resumes sewing, “but an endearing one. Like a lamb in a wolf den.”
“Thanks… I think.” Charlie’s lip twitches. Her fingers rattle like rice in a bottle. She pulls at her sleeves. He feels the question before it comes, a peeking lamb, “When you were alive—“
“—I prowled the woods and ate the men who entered them. I lived in a cabin with a cauldron full of eyes and fingernails, and I told women what they could and couldn’t wear.”
The air buzzes lowly.
She grins a crooked, sweating grin. “You don’t— I know you did some stuff, but you didn’t eat...”
He lets her anxieties fester until they’re fit to burst, then laughs and cuts his current thread of string on his teeth. “No, I didn’t. My taste was rather bland back then.”
She’s barely able to contain her sigh. It flows out of her as easily as her worry, her joy, her hope, like a waterfall of poor self control. In the face of his teasing, she doesn’t lose her smile; Alastor likes that about her. She doesn’t always sport a smile on her cheeks, but it’s inside her. Always on the cusp of coming out, should something strike her fancy.
He holds the shirt by its sleeves, using her as a distanced mannequin and making a show of it with hms and hahs. Adding it to an ever-growing pile, he offers her his sewing needle, a silver ant between his mountainous claws.
She hesitates, eyes skirting away. “Oh, Alastor, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. I’m not going to sit here and teach you. Someone with your attire knows their way around clothing! Humor me, and I’ll tell you something about myself.”
Charlie takes it like a jewel from his grip, and he hands her a shirt he’d botched, sewing gone awry when he’d been distracted by an incessant buzz in his ear. She situates herself with the thread, holds the needle like a pen, and begins. Curiously, she doesn’t unwind his work, though he supposes she never has. Alastor places curtains, and Charlie decorates them with stickers. Alastor decides a room is better fit to be circular than square, and Charlie helps sand out the edges so they’re perfectly round. It’s about adding, with her, never taking. The startled sway of his stitching diagonals back to its proper path, though an unmistakable tremor remains. Imperfect, still, but in a way so enchantingly homespun.
Alastor leans back and makes a claw with his hand, summoning shadow-puppets to the table. Two take the front of the stage, a small pup and a large doe, while the back is populated by thin, spindly dogs. He allows Charlie to watch them dance before he speaks, like one might tempt a child with a jovial song before revealing it’s about having them clean up their mess.
“My mother was a wonderful woman,” he says, the shape of the doe outlined with a fond pink, “And she was unlike the world. You might have been taught to think differently but, in my time, and I’m certain others’, it was no different there than it is here.” In the back, the dogs form a writhing mountain in search of a single bone. The small pup turns its head to watch, but doesn’t stray from the doe, who tugs it closer by the ear, away from those filthy, needy mutts. “She taught me right from wrong. She knew right and wrong, better than anyone, but she was too wonderful to act on it.”
The needle is neglected, shirt remaining half-sewn. Charlie’s focus is solely on his play.
“My time had deals of its own to offer.” He curls his nails to the tender skin of his palm, asking the scene to switch. Merry jazz flows across the table. The doe and the pup meld into the form of a tall, slender figure with eyes like crescent moons and a large, static smile. The dogs become men and women and dogs in groups, drinks in their hands and legs dangling over bar-stools. The smiling man dances lonesome, but not unhappily. “But none that caught my interest.”
“As you know, a sinner without a deal must mean something unfortunate. Back then, I was told the same thing.” The jazz slows and deepens. The men and women twist into furniture, a grandfather clock and a table and a stove with a bubbling pot, as the smiling man holds out his arm and brings a shorter, pink-lined woman to dance with him. “But my mother knew right from wrong, and she told me that not every deal is the same as another. That the right deal for me, my deal, would come to me at the right time. Until then,” The two shadows spin, and the shadows sink down into the table, “I’d just have to look the part.”
One shadow is cheeky, twirling forth to poke and dissipate on the tip of Charlie’s nose. She blinks a few times, and shakes her head, like she’s been woken from a watery-eyed dream. Her inner smile blossoms and she says, “She sounds really nice. But, um… Did you find your right deal?”
Alastor draws out a hum, tapping the left side of his glasses. He doesn’t have an answer for her, but a little make-believe keeps her faith in him high. “I believe I did, eventually,” he lies.
Charlie’s eyes light up, and a stampede of questions stop before every crack between her teeth, just at the cliff’s edge. She’s filled to the brim with assumptions, as is the way of it all. Her view of the world is like a set of rose-tinted glasses, and he imagines she sees balloon animals instead of shadow puppets. He spends the next ten minutes entertaining her astray curiosities, alluding to a figure she’s conjured in her mind; of a woman, or a man, or anyone that he would take the hand of and kiss gently up their arm. She leaves him with an unfinished shirt and an emboldened stride, thinking she knows something others don’t.
It must be night by the time he receives another visitor. The room is dark, save for the green glow of his table and chair.
He was lonesome.
“Alastor.” Niffty’s eye glows like a lamp, half-obscured by the edge of his table. “I can’t sleep.”
She sounds the part, knives in her voice gone to bed. It’s something that gnaws at his ribs like a toothy leech, telling him, A bloodbath would make her smile, but then he thinks of Charlie’s funny concerns and shelves his usual method of tiring out his charge. Niffty’s a better sport than most, deranged but delightful, and smiles the same whether it’s with a sizzling pan in her hand or a blood-spattered blade. They’ve seen the breadth of Hell together, in select increments, but ones that’ll trump out any working week.
“Neither can I! That’s quite the coincidence!” Alastor keeps his laugh track quiet. “Would you like to practice your sewing?”
“Oh, yes! Yes!” She scrambles up onto the table, reaching for the half-sewn shirt.
“Ah- not that one.” He lifts it into the air, shadows working to fold it neatly and pop it away. “That’s not yours. Here, I have the perfect one for you.”
A smaller, red and white shirt with a drawn on smile lays flat on the table. Maggots squelch and wiggle under the fabric in straight, dotted lines, and Niffty brandishes her needle like a silver sword, moth to a necrotic light, getting to work with a manic squeal. Bug-muck smell fills the air like a candle’s aroma, and Alastor takes a deep breath, resting his chin on his knuckles to watch the entertainment.
“Niffty,” he says, once she’s speared up to the collar, stitchwork slimy and perfect. His voice is discreet, unfiltered, like he’s sharing a secret. “Do you think these glasses make me look like a father?”
She looks up at him, eye like a beacon in the dimly lit lobby and grin reaching up to her eyelashes. She laughs, “You always look like a father, sir!”
Alastor is speechless while she vanquishes the rest of his guidelines, until her shirt’s a bloodbath of several generations’ worth of fly larvae and his smile is like a caress on his jaw. They chat a little about the plotline of her next puppet show— (Niffty has, for lack of a better comparison, only one eye for writing; that is to tell a long, drawling, tedious tale that he, in all his self-taught admiration for brevity, can’t get enough of) —and then he scoops her up with his antlers and they roam the halls like oddly shaped phantoms, all the way to his room, giggling like children up past their bedtime.
“Are you sure?” She asks this three times before he answers. In his mind, she shouldn’t need to ask once.
“You can’t perform at your best without a good night’s rest, my dear, and I can’t have this hotel looking ratty! What would the public think of us then, hm? No, it’s no trouble at all. I’ll wake you up bright and early.”
“But,” Niffty continues to stress, even when he’s snapped his fingers to secure the door behind them and prepared cosy, green home-lights. “You don’t like people in your room.”
“Nonsense, Niffty, you aren’t ‘people’! Why, you’re the most depraved little creature I’ve ever met!” He holds a hand over his heart with a hearty laugh, depositing her on his favourite patch of grass in the bayou and settling down onto his side. The grass is drier, as she prefers. It’s a long-made and unspoken agreement that she waits for his antlers to settle back to forks on his head, for his ears to drop to either side, for his fingers to lose their poses as claws. Once they do, she adopts a curl against his chest, and allows him to shelter her, arms folded over her and knees caging her in. His ears droop completely.
Alastor wouldn’t describe himself as cuddly. He wouldn’t describe himself as even slightly inclined to touch, preferring it as words spread through the fingertips: I am grabbing your shoulders, I am in control. I am tilting your head up, I am the one in power. And, maybe, there’s a facet of that to this. I have enveloped you, and you are mine. Though, there isn’t much to disagree with his ownership of Niffty, nor is there anyone in the room to be convinced of this. Her soul has been sold to him for longer than he cares to exhaust himself remembering, and there’s never been contest.
(Unfit among the mutts. Like a hunting dog with dysfunctional ears, or a nose too pale to point. The other Overlords don’t want her. Alastor decides she’s worth thousands more than any of their own charges).
The reason may lie in the fact that he can feel the fast pace of her heart when she’s so close. Hearts are another joke of the circus of Hell, not a suffering but a simple, grim laugh; demons shouldn’t have hearts, but why not have them anyways? And Alastor loves a good joke, but Niffty’s heart is not one. It’s a routine, a lovely morning one, like pruning rose bushes; knowing that hers is beating, because he can feel her soul but a soul is a matter of business, a matter of meeting, a matter of professional connection, and a heart is a matter of the heart. Her heart beats because he keeps her soul safe.
(And, for as long as his soul is not his own— horrible business, that —he may look the part as a large doe and she the wily pup, too precious to be like the other dogs).
It’s nothing fatherly, of course. Any good Overlord endeavours to protect their power. He’s not fit to be a father, he’s never wanted to be a father and never would be a father, but he hasn’t switched his spectacles out for his monocle, and he’s demanded the fireflies to dim so that Niffty can sleep well.
“Goodnight, sir!” she says, already stifling a yawn.
“Goodnight,” Alastor says, switching channel to a gentle, rumbling lullaby.
He watches over her until morning comes; and, in what he’d claim as a mistake, he lets her sleep in for a while.