Hello how are you I'm good and I'm happy that I managed to make you feel better and honestly your work is great one of the reasons I request so often is because your work is fun to read like right now and sorry I'm not great at trying to say that your cool it just looks like I'm rambling.
Okay you know how alastor was a radio host when he was alive I feel like he would have a journalist that was part of his radio station that would always get the best stores for his radio broadcast and they were basically best friends we even knew that alastor was a killer type close often helping him hide the bodies and when we eventually land in hell alastor you know strong as fuck and becoming the radio demon but he practically abandoned us in hell saying we were nothing but a street rat kinda similar to vox and alastor relationship but instead of obsessing over al we actually do mange to climb up the racks as well just differently because lucifer found us and saw our usefulness and made us his right-hand man after we gained his trust which took a while but we did manage to do it in the end basically being the guy that could get information on anybody even on overlords because that was our job in our past life we just still had it and not many knew about us only the sins and Charlie because we worked behind the scenes and when lucifer finally went to Charlie hotel it surprised alastor to see that we were still alive let alone being lucifer loyal right hand only ever hearing stories and alastor basically tries to become buddy buddy to us after all this time but we would just try to ignore him i mean we we polite but we never brought up the past simply being polite while also spending most our time with lucifer since we were actually friends much to alastor annoyance and I feel like al would try to make be think bad about lucifer but it never worked since i gently cared about lucifer so instead he would make sure we were always working where he was since he was the hotel host i feel like he would have the power to ask Charlie to change my schedule and of course Charlie would do it trusting alastor for whatever reason and is it okay if you make them non-binary and thanks for listening and sorry if this long as hell
The idea is great! I could do a secound part where Y/N is more open and not so cold. Becoming clear about feelings and stuff. Maybe Aastor and Y/N stick together more in a plaonic way. I mean it would make sense about his cannon sexuality.
Any way, thanks for the request and now read! I am so happy to offer this to you!
Frequencies from the Ashes I Alastor x non-binary!Reader
Part I – New Orleans, 1933
It's an art, being invisible.
Not literally. But in the sense that you can walk through a room, and afterwards nobody remembers your face, but everyone remembers the feeling of being watched. I'd perfected that since childhood. I never stood in the center. I always stood beside it, where you could see everything without being seen.
Alastor had hired me for exactly that reason.
"You have a talent," he'd said, on my first day at the station, with the wide smile the whole city knew. "For people. For information. For finding out things others would kill for."
"Kill is an interesting word."
He'd looked at me. Sharp, brief, weighing.
"Yes," he'd said. "It is."
I worked for his radio station for three years, but the word employee never quite fit. It was something harder to name. I wasn't his assistant, not his colleague, not his staff. I was what existed between all those categories and didn't care about any of them.
I brought him information. That was the core of it.
Names nobody said out loud. Connections that officially didn't exist. Conversations held behind closed doors by people who were certain nobody was listening. I knew the right people in the city – not because I liked them, but because I'd observed them long enough to know what they wanted and what they feared. In most cases it was the same thing. Money. Power. Image.
Alastor broadcast what he wanted to broadcast. With charm, with that radio smile, with a voice New Orleans loved like an old melody.
What New Orleans didn't know: he didn't broadcast everything.
Some things he kept for himself.
I'd known for a long time. You notice it in small things, when you've learned to pay attention to small things. The evenings he showed up to work later than announced. The times his shoes were clean but his cuffs weren't. The way he'd sometimes pause and stare into the middle distance, as if locking something away inside himself.
I didn't ask him, figured it out myself. As always.
I was good at knowing things and still leaving them alone.
Until the evening in October.
He stood at the edge of the city park, looking down at something I'd rather not have seen. I was there by coincidence – or coincidentally enough that neither of us asked questions. I stood there, assessed the situation, assessed him. The body.
Then I picked up the shovel. I mean, if I'm already here, might as well make it fun.
"You're insane," he'd said.
"Both of us," I answered.
He'd laughed. Really laughed, briefly, genuinely, in a way I'd only rarely hear from him again. That was the moment we actually became friends – not coworkers, not people-who-knew-about-each-other, but really, in the only way that counted for someone like Alastor:
He trusted me with something that could destroy him.
In the following years we became a well-oiled system. A system that killed people.
He delivered the broadcast, the voice, the presence. I delivered the information, the connections, the silence afterwards. I knew who to call to make a name disappear. I knew which official would accept a certain sum and which preferred information instead. I knew how to tell a story so that afterwards everyone believed they'd always known it.
Alastor was good at reading people. I was better at reading systems.
Together we were hard to beat.
We also found a language for the other part – for the evenings with shovels and air that was too warm. No explanations, no justifications. I helped because I thought it right to uphold our agreement, and he upheld his end by never demanding anything from me I wasn't willing to give.
It wasn't a normal friendship.
But it was something real.
Dying is strange, when I think about it.
You have all the time in the world to look back, and still none of the thoughts make complete sense. I remember light, then none, then a red that was too bright to be the sky.
My first thought: Ah. So really.
And when I landed on the ground of reality, my second: Of course.
Hell looks like a city that actively hates itself. Sky like curdled blood. Noise from all directions simultaneously, and nobody seems bothered by it because it's normal background here. Screams of the dying.
Instead I found his reputation.
Had I mentioned? Alastor was shot. Tragic. I kept living, well – until just now.
You heard the Radio Demon everywhere before you saw him – in the fearful whispering of souls who'd already encountered him, in the reverent murmuring of souls who hadn't yet. He'd built power from nothing, fast, brutal, and with a smile that all the reports consistently mentioned. Overlords eliminated. Territories claimed. Contracts paid for with souls.
I finally found him in an alley south of the main district. The static was the first sign – a soft crackling in the air, like interference between stations. Then the smell of ozone.
Bigger somehow, or denser, with a presence that occupied physical space in a way people didn't. The eyes were red. The antlers surprised me briefly.
"Al." My voice was calmer than expected. "I'm glad I–"
"Ah." He turned around. The smile was wide, wider than in New Orleans, too wide for a normal mouth. His eyes moved briefly over me, sorted me. "You."
"You look," he said with the radio voice, which sounded even more theatrical here than it ever had, "like a stray that wandered into the wrong alley."
"I have no use for strays here," he said. Not cruelly – that would have almost hurt less. Casually. As if it wasn't a decision that carried weight.
"This isn't New Orleans." He was already half-turned away. The words came over his shoulder. "Different rules here."
And then he was gone. Not walked away – simply no longer there, vanished into his shadow.
I stood in that alley for a long time.
Long enough to run through all the reasonable reactions. Anger, grief, the urge to follow him and say something that would change the situation.
None of them really came.
What came instead was this: clarity.
Alastor had decided who I was. Stray. No use.
Then I would decide who I was. Again.
Hell has an order – you don't realize that immediately because the chaos is so convincing. But chaos always has structure if you look long enough, and I'd learned to look long.
Overlords, their territories. Souls who traded or had to serve. Alliances that were more fragile than they appeared. Secrets the powerful had to protect at any cost.
That was my craft. Always had been.
I sat in bars that smelled of cheap whiskey and old debts, let conversations flow around me. I learned names, connected information, built, quietly and methodically, a network of knowledge that was no territory and no army, but in Hell actually more valuable than either.
Lucifer Morningstar found me on a Tuesday.
Or I found him. That was hard to tell apart afterwards.
He stood in a back room in the south of the city and looked like someone who'd had a very long and very frustrating meeting behind him. Shorter than expected, but with something tired in his eyes. Something lonely.
His eyes found me immediately, which was remarkable, because I'd spent years practicing not being found by eyes.
"You're the person everyone talks about," he said.
"I'm the person nobody talks about," I corrected. "That's the point."
He said nothing. But smiled, thinly.
The first year with Lucifer was the hardest.
He tested me. Not covertly, not with fake traps – I respected that, because it was honest. Lucifer planted false information to see if I'd pass it on. Gave me tasks where failure would have had costly consequences.
Once I was wrong. I sat across from him and explained exactly where the error in thinking had been and what I'd do differently next time. He listened without interrupting.
"Most people lie to me when they've made mistakes," he'd said.
"That would be pointless," I replied.
"Yes." Lucifer leaned back in the armchair. "But they do it anyway."
I looked at him. "I won't lie to you. That's the only thing I can promise you."
Trust grows slowly when it's real.
There was no defined moment when I became his right hand – it happened in steps that only formed a picture in hindsight. Extended tasks. Longer conversations. An evening when he asked what I thought about a particular situation and then actually listened.
What I did for him was exactly what I'd done for Alastor – just for different purposes.
I observed the Overlords. Quietly, invisibly, from positions nobody considered threatening because nobody knew I was there. I gathered what they protected, what they feared, where their power had cracks. Which alliances were stable and which would break under light pressure.
I passed everything on to Lucifer. Without detour, without filtering, with my own assessment attached, which he listened to and sometimes adopted, sometimes didn't. Either was fine.
Only the sins knew about me. That was his decision, and it was the right one. I worked in the background – visible to those who needed to know, invisible to everyone else. Charlie found out about me when Lucifer told her, which surprised me.
"Dad said you're the most reliable person in Hell," she beamed, when we met for the first time.
She laughed so loudly and suddenly it seemed to echo through the room.
"I like you," she declared.
"Doesn't matter." She shrugged with a wide grin on her face.
What surprised me most about Lucifer was that he was good.
That sounds naive. But I'd learned to read people, and what I read in him wasn't evil, wasn't indifference either – but someone who was fighting under the weight of his own history. Who had made mistakes and couldn't, or wouldn't, forget them.
Who loved his daughter so much it paralyzed him.
He had bad days. On those he was harder, more jagged, wrapped in a heaviness he couldn't shake off. He'd sometimes come by, sit down, not talk.
I let him sit, without asking questions.
At some point he asked: "Why do you never ask what's wrong?"
"Because you'll say it when you want to."
Lucifer thought about it. "Most people ask anyway."
"I know. It annoys you." I gave him a sideways grin.
We kept sitting in silence, and at some point the heaviness was a little lighter.
Part IV – The Hazbin Hotel
When Lucifer announced he was visiting Charlie's hotel, I was coming along.
He said it casually, but I knew him well enough to hear the nervousness underneath. Charlie's hotel meant Charlie. Charlie meant all the things he wanted to do better and simultaneously didn't know how.
"She'll be glad you're coming," I said, placing my hands on his shoulders.
"Probably," the king said with a slightly trembling voice. "And what do I say then?"
"The truth." I didn't need long to think about it.
Lucifer looked at me uncertainly. "That's not helpful advice."
"It's the only advice that works. Because the truth always works."
The hotel was exactly what I'd expected: a mirror image of Charlie. Loud, colorful, chaotic in its own way. Something was happening everywhere simultaneously.
Charlie saw us and beamed.
She hugged Lucifer with a force that visibly surprised him – he returned the hug awkwardly, too stiff, then right. I watched it, said nothing.
Then Charlie looked at me. "You're really here." As if that was still a surprise, even though she'd known.
She shook my hand with both of hers. "I'm really glad. Dad has said so much–"
Subtle. Almost imperceptible. But I knew it, and my nervous system knew it too, somewhere below the level of consciousness.
Alastor was standing behind us.
Walking stick, antlers, the theatrical smile – all there, all exactly as expected. He let his gaze move through the room, methodical, registering: Lucifer – brief freeze of the smile, then wide again, but colder – Charlie, the other residents –
The smile didn't move. But his eyes did. A small shift, barely visible if you didn't know how to look.
"Mon Dieu," he said very quietly.
"Alastor," I offered as a greeting.
A pause that lasted a moment too long.
"You're alive," he said. Half statement, half something I couldn't name yet.
The smile changed. Smaller, brief, and underneath – relief. Real, unperformed relief, visible for a fraction of a second before he packed it away again.
Then he looked past me to Lucifer. The smile went wide and cold again. But it looked more like he was gritting his teeth.
"Lucifer." The name sounded like an apology you said because you had to.
"Alastor." Lucifer's tone was that of a person who had noticed an insect and wanted to kill it.
So I took a small step to the side, away from the line of fire between the two of them.
The next hour was politeness as full-contact sport.
I watched Alastor and Lucifer and drank the tea Husk had wordlessly placed in front of me, with an expression that said I see it, but I'm not commenting on it.
He'd given me a brief nod. That was probably something like sympathy.
Towards evening, when Lucifer and Charlie had sunk into a conversation that was officially about the hotel and actually about fifty other things simultaneously, I stood in the hallway. Listening to conversations behind the doors.
Alastor appeared beside me, as he always had – soundlessly, out of his shadow.
"Lucifer's right hand," he said without preamble. The title hung in the air.
"Yes." Arms crossed, I leaned against the wall.
"I wouldn't have expected that," Alastor said casually, inspecting his cane-microphone.
"A few years." I looked at him. "You had informants." I grinned at him wickedly.
"They were obviously wrong." He looked at me, almost defeated.
He was quiet. The cane turned slightly in his hand. "You spy for him."
"I do my job." The grin left my face.
"For him," it came with emphasis.
"I've always done my job for someone," I said calmly. "Used to be for you," I hissed.
That landed. He didn't show it, but I saw it.
"The Overlords don't know you exist," he said. It sounded like a statement, but the tone had something probing to it.
"No." I left it at that. He didn't need to know how much I already knew about him.
He studied me with an expression that wavered between calculation and something more genuine. "He's using you."
"We use each other. That's called collaboration." I rubbed salt into his obvious wound. Serves him right.
"He is–" the Radio Demon began.
"Alastor," it came sharply from me.
"I know what you're going to say," I said. "I'll tell you before you say it: I know him. You barely know him. That's a relevant difference."
The static was louder than usual.
"You've gotten more direct," Alastor grinned broadly.
"I had time to practice." I replied, grinning too.
He looked at me, and beneath the theatrical smile something was briefly visible that I knew from New Orleans – the expression he had when he was really looking at someone instead of categorizing them.
"How are you?" he asked then. Just like that.
I studied him for a moment.
"Good, and you?" I played along with the small talk. Pushed off the wall and walked down the hallway with Alastor. The conversation behind the door wasn't interesting anyway.
"Excellent, as always. Thank you for asking." He looked at me, satisfied.
"Of course." I smiled and rolled my eyes.
Part V – Program Disruption
Lucifer stayed a few days. I stayed because Charlie needed me, but also because some things here deserved attention. Alastor.
The dynamic between Lucifer and Alastor in a shared room was – interesting.
They rarely ignored each other directly. That would have been too obvious. Instead they talked past each other, in conversations officially directed at Charlie or the other hotel guests, but with a subtext so loud that I sometimes wondered whether the others heard it too.
Lucifer placed the Deer Season mug on the kitchen table, visible from practically every angle.
Alastor held his Duck Season mug in his hand.
I drank my coffee from a plain white mug and let them do their thing. Men.
The attempts came subtly.
At breakfast, casually: "They say the First Revolution would have gone smoother without Lucifer's involvement."
"People say many things," I replied, not looking at Alastor.
"This one is well documented," the Radio Demon continued.
"By whom?" I asked, disinterested.
"That's–" Alastor faltered.
"The most relevant part," I said. "Exactly."
He quickly changed the subject.
Two days later, in the hallway: "He takes more than he gives, you know. That's his pattern."
"That sounds...like a description of you." I grinned broadly, ready to push his buttons.
"I'm worried," he then breathed, in a different tone.
"No," I said pleasantly. "You're worried about your influence. That's not the same thing."
I left him standing with that.
Then the schedule changes.
Charlie came one morning with a restructured work program that routed my paths through the hotel along routes where Alastor was demonstrably present, and shifted my tasks into rooms where he was regularly found as well.
"Alastor said it would be more efficient," Charlie said.
"I believe you," I said, but rolled my eyes when she turned away.
I let it run for three days. Watched how he behaved when I passed him on schedule. The satisfaction he poorly concealed. The small, plausible pretexts for conversations he initiated when I was nearby.
On the third evening I sat down at the bar.
Alastor looked like he hadn't expected that.
"You know that I know," I said.
The smile stayed exactly in place. Too exactly. "I don't know what you're–"
The static shifted its frequency.
"You've gotten smarter," he said finally, approvingly.
"I was always smart. You stopped noticing." I leaned back slightly. "What do you want?"
"What do you really want. No embellishment. Direct."
The Radio Demon was quiet.
That was unusual. Alastor didn't go quiet out of embarrassment; he did it out of calculation. This looked different.
"In New Orleans," he began finally, each word measured with the care of someone unsure they're taking the right path, "you were the only person I trusted."
"I know." I tapped impatiently with my fingers on the wood.
"Not strategically. It wasn't–" He paused. "It wasn't because you were useful, even though that was also true. It was just like that."
"And I–" He didn't finish the sentence.
"You sent me away," I said for him. Calmly, without charge. "That happened. I'm not here for revenge."
"Why not?" came almost surprised from Alastor.
I thought about it. "Because it wouldn't achieve anything. And because I have no interest anymore in things that don't achieve anything."
He looked at me. "And Lucifer?"
I answered directly. "He's my friend. Not because he's powerful. Not strategically. Because I know him and he knows me, because that grew over years of honest collaboration." I looked at him. "That doesn't change. Not through rumors. Not through shifted schedules. Not through you."
"He's not what you think he is," Alastor said through gritted teeth.
"I don't think anything. I know. That's the difference between us."
"You're not afraid of me," he observed, half fascinated.
"Nope." I grabbed a few of the nuts.
"You were never afraid of me."
"No." I stood up. "That was one of the reasons we were friends."
I left him sitting alone.
The static stayed in the hallway a little while, then faded.
Part VI – Same Frequency, Different Station
Lucifer stood at the end of the hallway, leaning against the wall. Coffee cup in hand, looking at me with an expression that was half amused and half careful attention.
"Everything alright?" he asked.
"Yes." I said curtly. Ready to disappear.
Lucifer handed me the coffee. I took it and we went to his room.
We sat for a while in the silence of the room, while somewhere in the hotel Charlie laughed.
"He told Charlie to change the schedules," I said after a while.
"I knew it." He looked pleased, then uncomfortably sheepish. "Do you want to go home?"
"No," came out surprisingly fast from me.
"Because of Charlie?" the king pressed.
"Because of Charlie. And because I'm not finished here yet." I held the cup with both hands. "I don't leave things unfinished."
I pressed my hands so hard against the cup I felt like it was about to shatter.
Lucifer nodded. Understood without me having to explain more. That was one of his best qualities.
"He'll try again," he said then.
"And I'll deal with it." I looked at Lucifer. "That's my job."
The king looked at me for a moment. "Not for me. For yourself."
"For me too," I said finally, with resolve.
He smiled. Slim and genuine.
The following weeks were quiet. Almost suspiciously quiet.
Alastor left the schedules alone. No casual comments at breakfast, no hallway conversations with intent. He was simply there – present, polite, with the smile that was always there and revealed nothing.
I observed this with the attention I gave to everything I found interesting.
I couldn't say exactly what. It wasn't a big difference, not a dramatic break. Just a small hesitation sometimes when he saw me. The way he'd occasionally start to say something and then leave it. The static that had grown quieter – not gone, but dampened, as if someone had moved the transmitter to a calmer frequency.
The actual beginning started on a Wednesday, with a small thing.
I was sitting in the kitchen, late evening, with a notebook full of information I was evaluating for Lucifer. The hotel was quiet – as far as that was possible. Somewhere above me someone shuffled through the hallway, and Husk's bar was still faintly lit.
Alastor appeared in the doorway.
He saw me, then the notebook, then me again.
"Still working?" he asked.
He came in. Without invitation, naturally – that wouldn't have been Alastor. He sat down in the chair across from me, placed the Duck Season mug on the table, and went quiet.
I glanced at him briefly. Then kept writing.
We stayed like that for a while. He drank his tea, I worked. The static ran in the background like a clock you'd gotten used to.
"What's in Sector Seven?" he asked at some point, without inflection, like he was talking about the weather.
I briefly stopped writing. "Why do you want to know?"
"I've heard reports. Movements that don't make sense."
"Then stop listening to reports and look for yourself."
"I could." He turned the mug in his hands. "Or you could tell me what you know."
"I'll tell you that it's not your area. And that you know that," I answered, without looking up.
"You won't give me any information."
"Even though it would help me."
"Even though it would help you." I closed the notebook and looked at him. "That's not personal. Those are boundaries. They exist now. I don't work for you anymore, after all."
He studied me with the expression he had when he was categorizing something that resisted his usual categories.
"You used to share everything," he said.
"I used to work for you," I hissed, biting my cheek.
"And if I–" the Radio Demon began.
I leaned slightly forward. "I'm telling you this once, so it doesn't need to be said again: I don't share information that belongs to Lucifer. Not with you, not with anyone. That's not an invitation to discussion."
The static briefly shifted its frequency. Grew louder–
Then he nodded. "Understood."
I looked at him. He meant it – you could see that.
"Good." I opened the notebook again.
That surprised me for a moment, but I allowed it.
At some point, just before I stood up, he said without warning: "In New Orleans I would have had the Sector Seven report in three days."
"Two," I corrected automatically.
He laughed. Briefly, unexpectedly, in a way I recognized.
I stood up and left before he could see that one corner of my mouth had pulled upward.
Part VIII – Static on a New Frequency
It developed slowly. Very slowly. In a way I didn't want to admit to myself, until it was too obvious to ignore.
Alastor would sometimes sit in the kitchen in the evenings when I was working. Not always, not on schedule – just sometimes. He didn't talk much. He drank his coffee, I did what I did, and the static ran in the background like a station you hadn't switched off.
Once he brought, without comment, a second cup of coffee when he got his own, and placed it next to my notebook.
I looked at the cup, then at him.
He'd already sat back down and acted as if nothing had happened.
"I didn't ask for that," I said.
"I know." He drank his coffee.
The problem was this: I still knew him.
That should have stopped being a problem. I'd had enough time for it to stop. Years, to be exact, in which Alastor had been nothing but a name appearing in reports, an Overlord among Overlords, someone whose movements I only tracked for professional reasons and no others.
But I knew the way he held himself when he was thinking. I knew the difference between the smile he had for the public and the smaller, more genuine one he showed when he actually found something funny. I knew the static and how it changed depending on his mood.
The knowledge was simply still there. Stored, uninvited, useful in a way I hadn't needed.
That annoyed me and drove me absolutely mad.
"You're annoyed," Lucifer observed one evening. We were sitting in his room, me with my notes, him with a duck hat prototype he'd pulled out again for unclear reasons.
"More than usual." He looked at me over the brim of the hat. "It's because of Alastor."
God, that little king looks ridiculous.
"It's because of an overlap between old knowledge and the current situation that I find inefficient."
Lucifer put the hat down. "That's the same thing."
"What's he doing?" he asked then, as neutrally as possible.
"Nothing." I put my pen down. "That's exactly the problem. He's not doing anything. He just sits there, drinks his coffee, sometimes brings me one, and–" I stopped.
"He brings you coffee," he pressed, more to himself.
"He brings you coffee without being asked." He made that his final conclusion.
"That's not relevant information."
"Alastor," said Lucifer in a tone that wavered between amusement and contempt, "brings another person something without being asked. That's the most relevant information of the month."
"You're exaggerating." I waved it off, wanting nothing to do with this situation, even though I was probably the center of it.
"I never do." He picked up his duck hat.
I gave him a look that made clear the hat was pretty excessive.
"What do you want from me?" he asked, amused, apparently not caring about my look.
"Nothing. I just wanted to say it out loud."
"And now that you've said it out loud?"
I thought about it. "Now I know it annoys me even more."
Lucifer laughed. Briefly and genuinely. "I don't offer advice where I don't have a qualified opinion."
"Since when does that stop you?"
"Today." He put the duck hat on my head. "Because I think you need to figure this one out yourself."
I looked at him. "That's the most useless sentence you've ever said."
"Thank you." He grinned broadly.
I found Alastor the next afternoon on the rooftop terrace.
He stood at the railing, looking down at Pentagram City, his cane leaning against the railing, the antlers against the red sky. He didn't hear me coming – or acted like it. With Alastor that was sometimes hard to tell.
I leaned against the railing beside him.
We stood for a while without saying anything. The city beneath us was loud, garish, and completely indifferent to everything that was or wasn't happening on this terrace.
"You stopped planting information about Lucifer," I said finally.
He turned his head toward me. "Because it didn't work. And because–...because you were right. It wasn't productive."
I looked at him from the side. "So you admit it." A smile played around my lips.
"I admit things when they're obvious." He glanced at me briefly. "That was obvious."
I turned back to the city. "What do you want now?"
"I already told you that."
He was quiet for a moment. The static ran steadily, without frequency shifts near me.
"I don't want to pretend New Orleans didn't happen," he said. "Neither part of it. I want–" Alastor searched for words, and I let him search, because it was important that he found them himself. "Something new. With you. A fresh start."
"That doesn't sound optimistic."
"It's not." I let a short pause sit. "It's a statement."
Alastor looked at me, and then, slowly, the smile spread – not the radio smile, not the theatrical one for the public, but the smaller one I knew.
"You're still unbearably direct."
"I know." I pushed off the railing. "Always was." I smiled at him.
Epilogue: Fresh Start, First Attempt
The next few days were strangely uneventful.
No big event, no defined line being crossed. Alastor was simply... there. More than before, but different too. He appeared in rooms I was in with plausible pretexts that I didn't comment on, because we both knew they were pretexts and neither of us wanted to spend the energy pretending otherwise.
With the restriction I'd set for myself: No information belonging to Lucifer passes on. No loyalty that shifts. No nostalgia used as a compass.
Everything else was negotiable.
I was sitting in the hotel library – which actually existed, tucked behind a door with a sign claiming Storage Room, which was a lie, but apparently bothered nobody.
He saw the book next to my notebook and his smile changed in the way that meant he wanted to say something.
I got there first. "Don't."
"You're making the face."
"You always make a face before you offer an opinion nobody asked for." I looked at him. "What's wrong with the book?"
He sat down, with the dignity of someone who planned everything. "Nothing's wrong with it. It's just–" He glanced at the title. "A strange choice."
He raised an eyebrow. "You read books about demonology for relaxation."
"I read books about demonology because I live in Hell and knowledge is useful." I leaned back. "Besides, what do you read?"
He looked away. "Cookbooks."
"I enjoy cooking," he said, with dignity.
"You cook." The word pressed through my barely-contained laughter.
"The ingredients are unconventional, but the principle stays the same." He looked at me, slightly defensive. "That doesn't need commenting on."
"I'm not commenting." I commented with my barely-suppressed laughter.
"You're commenting by laughing," he said, irritated.
"I'm just sitting here." I pressed my lips together.
Alastor crossed his arms, turned away. But stayed seated.
Two days later a plate appeared on the kitchen table.
"Seriously?" I asked, but the demon waved me toward the chair with a hand gesture.
So I sat down, eyeing the plate with suspicion.
It smelled good. Shockingly good for a kitchen in Hell.
Alastor watched me. The small smile was immediately there.
"Don't say a word," I said when I was done.
"I'm not saying anything." He grinned, satisfied.
I pointed at him. "That was good," I admitted.
"Of course." He sat down, completely pleased with himself, in a way I'd only seen too often in New Orleans. "Would you like to know what was in it?"
"–completely harmless, in the sense that none of it was alive."
I looked at him. "That's a low bar."
I pushed the plate aside. Picked up my notebook. Pretended to work.
He poured himself tea and pretended not to be reading my expression.
We sat like that for a while.
"There could also be cookbooks in the library," I said finally, without looking up. "Next to the demonology. I checked again today. The 'storage room' has space."
"That wasn't an offer," I added, when he said nothing.
Charlie noticed first, naturally.
She had eyes that saw people before people saw themselves, and an enthusiasm for interpersonal developments that was well-intentioned and occasionally exhausting.
She found me in the hallway in the afternoon.
"You and Alastor," she said, in the tone of someone making an observation that's actually a question, that's actually an invitation to talk about it.
"You had breakfast together this morning."
"We were both in the kitchen. That's not shared breakfast."
"He produced excess that I happened to benefit from." I shrugged.
Charlie looked at me with her mother's expression, the one she had sometimes when she knew exactly that someone was talking nonsense and still stayed polite about it.
"That's nice," she said then simply. No analysis, no curious follow-up questions.
"Don't tell your father," I leaned down to her, warning.
"He probably already knows."
She smiled. "Promise." And walked on, with the energy of someone who had three things planned simultaneously.
He probably already knows.
I pushed the thought away with the professionalism of years of practice and went back to work.
"Deer Season," Alastor said two evenings later, tapping at Lucifer's mug standing on the kitchen table.
"I'm not touching it. I'm...observing."
"Your observing has a tone."
"Tones don't have tones."
"Yours does. You're tapping the mug." I glanced at him briefly. "It stays where it is."
"This is the communal kitchen, things tend to disappear here."
He raised his hands slightly. Innocent. The Duck Season mug sat on his side of the table.
"You're both grown, powerful beings and you're having a mug war." I rubbed my temple, annoyed.
"It's definitely a mug war." I leaned back. "I don't want to know how it started."
"I really don't want to know." I stopped the demon.
It wasn't a return to New Orleans.
That stayed true, every day, as a verified equation that held.
But it wasn't the alley anymore either.
It was somewhere between the two, unfinished, unnamed, with boundaries I knew clearly and he knew and that we both – surprisingly – respected.
I still didn't know exactly what it was.
But that evening, when Alastor appeared in the library with a cookbook under his arm, sat down in an armchair three shelves away from my things, and simply read, without saying a word, without an agenda I'd need to read –
That's enough for now. But someday I'll want more.
