Chapter Text
2017
Consider for a moment, what this concept of love truly is. A singular word that encompasses all the feelings of affection, adoration, admiration. It’s a jack of all trades. All the heart-throbbing backstories, tangled messes, and consequential dissolution.
We have but one lonely word for such a disarray of emotions, love. Let us delve deeper into this vagrant language of synonyms. Red, like his pinstripe fabric. Red as blood, a dying algae bloom, a freshly picked rose. A thousand other descriptions: cardinal, crimson, maroon, the wine sitting before him.
It’s raining outside. A million red rubies striking down on tinted glass. Interference. Radio waves don’t travel well in the water. A quiet static thrums throughout the room.
Alastor doesn’t notice, Husk doesn’t care.
We know the words for rain. Downpour, drizzle, precipitation. Every shade that passes in our view, aquamarine, indigo, scarlet. These are the blues, purples, reds, of everyday. Names for every color that can be found and then more. And somehow, in the entirety of our language, there are more words for color and rain than there are for this beating heart. Love.
His heart, some long word at the heart.
Tender passion, Cupid’s joyous arrows, a quickening of the pulse, a sweet despair. Frisson. Quel est ce sentiment? All the descriptors that can never measure up to a single, old word.
Can he love?
The question has troubled him every sleepless night, following around every wrinkled sheet and rocking chair. There is no definitive reply, no simple one-word answer like a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Reach into a sealed bag, pull out the truth. Is it red like an heirloom apple, or maybe blue like a hauyne gem?
Gray. Bleak, discolored, empty. A monotone filter that covers his eyes. He’s never seen the world in anything else, never felt this word of love. All of the colors he hasn’t seen, all the words he hasn’t felt.
Perhaps all of love are merely symbols, hints to a future diverging on myriad paths. Vagabond messages scribbled onto wood posts and checkered stones along a road traveled by many. By chance, do you know where these weary adventurers have gone?
Perhaps this sadness that so often falls between the two springs from the disappointment of a search characterized by unforgiving uncertainty. A level of distrust between himself and the surroundings. It’s hidden in the legs of a table cluttered by jambalaya and Merlot wine, hidden in an unused bed riddled with sanguine sheets, hidden in the night-colored coat Husk adorns.
Husk with those sunset eyes and ash-colored fur and ruby-tinted wings. He’s a creature of sin and gratification. The other, opposite.
Alastor is a creature of pattern, indulgence in the slightest. Yet in these late night moments, he wishes to feel the sensation of fabric on fur, electrical discharge sending infinite shudders down his spine. Feel it in an empty bed and stare into a set of honey eyes.
He doesn’t, he never does.
Husk is staring straight at him. Some nights, Alastor thinks he can almost find his own reflection in those drunken eyes. Embed the view into his eyelids, keep it inside.
“Why don’t you sleep?”
The situation has become commonplace. A small wooden table squirreled away in the corner of a dining room, illuminated by a single candle between the two. Wilting, it’s been burning for hours. They sit in the half dark. It’s hard to see Husk’s outline against the flickering light, brushing his face the way a lover’s hand might. The way his hand could.
The food, like always, has been jambalaya. Accompanied with a fine red wine chosen from Alastor’s personal collection. The taste of garlic still dances on his tongue, a holy trinity with andouille sausage and freshly caught crayfish. Focus on the taste, focus on the light, on anything except the question.
“Reasons.”
He breathes in and shifts his focus ever forward to the cat. His lips are stiff, forever curled. His eyes don’t close, forever open.
Can you read through his smile, his gaze?
“Yeah, yeah, the same damn answer every time. Gimme a reason then.” His voice is gruff, no fucks given.
You can’t run from a nightmare. It follows, shifts, morphing into some unknown entity that threatens to wreak havoc on an unconscious mind. It’s always something just at his heels. Sinister, fanged, tearing away the edges of a dream, forever present. Every time those scarlet eyes close, it draws ever closer, stalking.
“Simply don’t see a point, my dear. What if some demon were to sneak up on poor, unsuspecting, me? That’d be quite the situation, now wouldn’t it.” Half-truth.
He hopes to catch Husk in a bedroom for half a night.
He wishes he could tone down half these feelings.
Nightmares always. There’s been not a single night without nightmares, eating away through twisted corridors and resounding scratches. The last time he’s slept? 1973, sometime in the deep winter.
Winter in Hell has intrusive fingers, creeping into a building through every nook and cranny. You can find those bony lengths under every pane of glass or lingering on every golden doorknob. In his veins, his soul, shivering down his spine.
He’d left the window open, inviting the chill into the deepest recesses of his body. He’d left the bottle of wine still on a table, dirtied dishes still in the sink. He’d left his thoughts in a deal made that night, with a sad alcoholic character freshly arrived. Entertainment, is what he thought. Longing, is what he found.
He’d dreamt of the fields, large and devoid of life, nothing but rotting grass filling the expanses. A void in the chasm of his mind. Yet he still felt something watching. Something with sharp claws that tip-tapped with every step. An open mouth and dripping saliva and cutting fangs. Only a dream.
But in Hell, what is the difference between dream and reality? It could shift in an instant, waking up to find that same something at the foot of his bed. It’s the feeling of something that could be. That if he were to be caught, then there might be no waking moment.
Tired. He breathes in the smell of dying chlorophyll, decaying corpses of budding sprouts. He is still being watched. Be careful of those golden eyes. As beautiful as a sunset, as indulgent as sauvignon blanc.
“Y’know...I’d be willing to watch over if you wanted.” Glistening claws pick up an almost empty glass. Protective, but not intrusive. “In case, anything happens.”
Alastor fusses with the collar of his jacket, sleeves the subtle shade of Husk’s wings. Flaming, colors that could ravage his soul. Such a contrast, he thinks. Catch the two stuck in the intangible space of Alastor’s dining room. One foot inside the house, one foot outside the bedroom. He sips from the wine glass, leaning forward in a slight haze, eyes peering through the windows to a soul.
Sometimes, he’ll lean in a tad too far, find himself on the edge of a trichromatic experience. Did you know cats are thought to view the world in three colors? What would Alastor see through those lenses?
Please. “Don’t you worry about it, Husker.” The light flashes in front of him, decay of a red tide bloom. “Frankly, I’m not too enthusiastic about the idea of sleep. A waste of time, if you ask me.”
In the constancy of his damnation in Hell, Husk is the only fickle variable, ever changing. Husk, with his derisive attitude and mischievous mouth, everything he appreciates. The waves that crash on his beach, the big bang that jump-started his universe, his heart.
“I suppose.”
He watches Husk tilt back the drink, yellow heart teasing over the edge. A painting of unfiltered dejection. Perhaps they’re each straining against and beyond the other, grasping an infinitesimally small piece of a shadow that always turns the corner a step or two ahead of either.
Alastor inhales the void hidden in that fur, the feeling he would love of static electricity. The top hat he’s never seen Husk without, what’s under there? That Zellandine smile, worlds and circumstances separating the sensation of it on his lips.
Perchance, Alastor thinks, he should bargain with sleep for some time.
