Chapter Text
Sometimes the scariest thing is how easy it is to
stand still while life moves on around you.
by: xxPLACEBOxx
Alastor was a man who believed in standards.
Not trendy standards. Not “self-care Sunday” standards, and certainly not the sort that ended in everyone congratulating each other for trying.
He believed in proper standards: punctuality, presentation, good music played on real speakers, and the general principle that one should not conduct one’s life like a shopping cart with a broken wheel—where you’re always pushing just to stay straight.
He believed these things not because they were fashionable, but because without them people had a tendency to crash out.
He had seen it happen to friends, to coworkers, and, at one point, if he was being honest, to himself.
For that reason, he also believed very firmly that social media was a disease of the mind.
People did not need to know what you ate for breakfast. They did not need to watch you cry in your car, nor did they need twenty-seven angles of the same face in the same lighting while someone mouthed lyrics they did not fully understand.
Civilization had survived without such things, and in Alastor’s opinion, civilization would continue to survive without them.
Because he intended to be part of that surviving civilization, just not too close to its worst habits. He believed in showing up without being consumed by the occasion, in doing what was required without letting it swallow the rest of one’s life. One could, after all, acknowledge the existence of a dumpster fire without climbing into it.
That was how he justified owning a smartphone.
He only had one because his job required access to the year 2025.
Alastor made careful distinctions between tools and indulgences, between what was necessary and what was ever allowed to matter.
That was why the record player was treated almost like a sacred object, why the guitar remained tuned despite the fact that he never touched it, and why a small collection of vintage radio parts sat hidden in a box labeled MISC. at the back of his closet, as though categorizing them could keep them from becoming nostalgia. The whole lot was shoved behind a line of suits that had cost more than his rent, which was a fact he refused to examine too closely.
He did not, however, possess much of a sense of direction.
That was the part no one saw, or rather the part he preferred to avoid in daylight, when it was easier to pretend it did not exist. Because if he looked at it too closely, he would have to admit an unpleasant truth: somewhere along the way, he had stopped working toward something and had simply become a man who worked.
There were mornings, rare but frequent enough to sting, when he would wake, stare at the ceiling, and realize he was almost forty and had become everything he once swore he would never be—not a villain, which might at least have implied passion, but something worse: a respectable adult with a calendar full of obligations and a life that looked perfectly fine from the outside. Fine enough, at any rate, that no one ever thought to ask if he was drowning in it.
He got up anyway.
Standards, after all.
And today, unfortunately, was about to be the worst day of his life.
It began, as many disasters did, in a kitchen that smelled faintly of burnt toast.
This was not unusual. Alastor burned toast with the same consistency he burned bridges—accidentally, and then pretended it was intentional, because pretending was usually easier than admitting failure.
His girlfriend sat at the table with a mug in hand and her posture perfectly straight. Her hair was done, her makeup immaculate, effortless in the way that required considerable effort. She had the look people got when they had been rehearsing a speech in the mirror for days and were now emotionally several miles ahead of the person they meant to deliver it to. Her coat was already on. Her suitcase stood by the door. She had prepared for this moment the way sensible people prepared for bad weather.
“I’m going to stay somewhere else for a while,” she said the moment he sat down across from her.
Alastor blinked once, not in shock, but in the way one paused when a sentence ended earlier than expected.
They stared at each other for a few seconds.
“You’re… staying somewhere else,” he repeated, because he was a polite man and liked to be absolutely certain he had understood correctly before he did something inappropriate, such as laugh.
“Yes.” She exhaled slowly. “I can’t keep doing this, Al.”
He waited. He had always been very good at that. It was a skill one developed when one preferred other people to run out of words first.
Usually, they did.
She did not.
That, more than the suitcase, was new.
So he kept waiting. Waiting had become one of his defining traits over the years, right alongside punctuality and the ability to look deeply invested in conversations he had already mentally checked out of.
“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” she said at last.
His shoulders loosened a fraction. Ah. That speech.
“It’s just that you seem to care more about your job than you do about me,” she went on. “And if it isn’t your job, it’s this place, or your music, and when it isn’t those, it’s…” She gestured vaguely at him, as though he were some unresolved problem she had grown tired of trying to solve.
Alastor looked down at himself.
“That seems unhelpfully broad.”
“I think,” she said carefully, “that you’re a very kind man who doesn’t know how to be present anymore.”
Alastor tilted his head slightly, the way a painting might study its viewer.
“I am present,” he said. “I am here.”
She smiled then, faintly and without malice, but with a weariness that was somehow worse. “You’re physically here,” she said. “Emotionally, you are very far away.”
He considered this. It felt like something he ought to apologize for, or at the very least respond to in a way that suggested he had been raised properly, which he had. His mother had always expressed pride in him. “I do make time for you,” he said. “I attend events. I remember birthdays—”
“No, love,” she corrected gently. “You remember dates. You set reminders. You remember what your calendar tells you to remember. You even make it an appointment to see me... and we live together.” Her voice stayed soft, which was frankly the most offensive part. “You–you schedule me like I’m an errand.”
“That is not—”
“And you never talk about anything real,” she said, the words coming faster now, as though she feared she might stop if she slowed down. “You don’t let anyone in. You don’t need anyone, do you? Lately, I don’t think you even need me.”
That stung more than he expected. He filed the sensation away for later examination, fully intending, of course, to forget to examine it.
A more emotionally available man might have lied then. He might have offered comfort to the woman who had stood beside him for years. He might even have noticed the way her hands had curled into the fabric of her coat, the knuckles pale with strain, as though holding on to the material was the only thing keeping her upright. But Alastor did not lie, so instead he said nothing at all.
“You schedule affection,” she continued. “You pencil people in between obligations. And when I’m with you, I feel like I’m interrupting something.” She looked down at her hands. “I don’t think you mean to make people feel that way. I just don’t think you notice when you do.”
“That is not my intention,” Alastor said.
“I know,” she replied. “That’s the problem.”
She took a breath, gathering herself.
“When we first started dating, you were different.”
He frowned, not defensively, but with real confusion.
“Was I?”
“Yes.” She laughed softly, though there was very little amusement in it. “You talked. You had opinions. You were sharp. Curious. Angry about things in a way that felt alive. You kept me on my toes.”
He searched his memory.
He found nothing.
“I don’t even remember why we started dating,” he admitted, and meant it as a statement of fact rather than cruelty. It came out sounding like the latter anyway. The moment her expression changed, the moment her face fell and her gaze dipped, he realized that might have been better kept to himself.
“That’s my point,” she said, setting her mug down with care, as if sudden movement might break whatever fragile thing was still left between them. “I feel like I’ve been dating a man on autopilot. Like you checked all the boxes—job, apartment, routines—but somewhere along the way you stopped wanting the same things.”
“I do want things,” Alastor said, more sharply than he intended.
She waited.
So did he.
Neither of them spoke.
She nodded once, slowly.
“Do you?” she asked. “Tell me one thing you want at this point in your life that includes me.”
Alastor opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
He searched himself for an answer that was not theoretical. There had been a time when he would have argued, when he would have turned the question around, dissected it, and won on technicality alone. Now there was only a blank, echoing space where desire ought to have been.
“I… don’t know,” he said.
She looked at him then, not with anger and not with accusation, but with something far worse than pity.
“You know what I want?” she asked quietly. “I want someone to love me equally. Not someone who doesn’t even know why they’re here.” She sighed. “And I can’t keep waiting around, hoping you wake up one morning and realize you want that life with me too.”
Alastor nodded, because nodding was easier than feeling.
“Alright,” he said.
“I don’t think you mean to hurt anyone,” she went on. “I think you just disappeared underwater. I think you let yourself sink because it was quieter down there, and I don’t want to drown with you.”
That was the moment.
Not a dramatic one. No collapse, no slammed hands, no revelation so large it demanded spectacle. Just the quiet understanding that whatever he had lost, he had lost it long before she decided to leave.
Her eyes shone for a moment, and some mean little part of him thought—briefly, unfairly—that it would be easier if she started yelling. Anger, at least, was interactive. Anger could be answered. But she only stood, slipped the key from her ring, and set it on the counter like a period at the end of a sentence.
“I hope you find yourself again,” she said. “I just can’t be here while you do.”
Then she left.
He watched her go and discovered, with a clarity that would have been useful much earlier, that he did not feel heartbroken.
That, in retrospect, was the most damning part.
There was no slam, no raised voice, no last-minute turn in the doorway. Only the soft click of a closing door on a life Alastor had somehow assumed would continue by default, whether he participated in it or not.
He stared at the key for a long moment before picking it up between two fingers and dropping it into the junk drawer with the rest of his small, unimpressive evidence of human attachment: spare batteries, a bent spoon he did not remember keeping, a restaurant loyalty card that had never once brought him joy, and a single guitar pick he refused to think about.
After that he stood alone in the kitchen, listening to the refrigerator hum and the clock tick.
The toast finally popped up, burnt and irrelevant.
He did not eat breakfast. Hunger was an inconvenience, and he did not have time for inconveniences.
He did, however, stand in the middle of the living room and stare out the window like a man in a music video who had been accidentally assigned a real life. Outside, his neighbor was walking a pet pig down the sidewalk while wearing hair rollers, a pink widow’s robe, and eight-inch heels, all while arguing loudly with someone on his phone.
The pig looked happier than Alastor felt, and the universe itself seemed to be enjoying that fact.
Alastor decided this was unacceptable.
So he went to work, because that was what one did when one’s personal life fell apart without permission. One put on a better suit. One kept one’s voice smooth. One maintained one’s standards.
And for a few hours—only a few—he managed to convince himself the morning had been some kind of misunderstanding.
The office noise helped.
It was a respectable firm in a tall building with glass walls and neutral carpets, the sort of place where everyone wore competence like a uniform and measured their worth in quarterly performance and the weight of their business cards. Alastor had learned the rules quickly. He was very good at numbers, very good at patterns, and exceptionally good at sounding confident while telling people what they wanted to hear about their money and its future.
It paid very well, which had been the whole point in the beginning, or at least the point he had repeated often enough for it to become one.
So he kept going.
When his coworkers spoke, he answered. He smiled when appropriate. He did not allow the words I’m leaving to echo too loudly through his skull.
At lunch he walked to the nearest café, not because he liked it, but because he liked the routine of it. He ordered an espresso and a grilled cheese sandwich. The barista drew a smiley face on the lid. Alastor regarded it with the deep suspicion one reserved for personal insult, then threw it away without drinking it.
Later, back at work, he performed competence like it was a religion. He held a meeting in which he spoke for fifteen straight minutes without saying anything that could be used against him emotionally. Someone complimented his tie. He thanked them and felt nothing. He corrected someone’s grammar out of spite, replied to an email with per my response below, and felt briefly, gloriously alive.
By the end of the day he had adjusted three portfolios, reassured two clients, and not once thought about radio frequencies, or playing the piano, or the guitar in the closet, or the version of himself who had once believed a voice could matter.
You seem to care more about your job than you do about me.
The thought returned at last, fully formed and unwelcome, and landed with infuriating precision. He dragged a hand down his face.
That man—the one she had fallen for—had been packed away with most impractical things. But her words would not leave him, and after a while the question came back with them, quieter than panic and somehow more humiliating for it.
Is this it?
It wasn’t dramatic. Not in a my life is over way. It was worse than that. It was quieter. Smaller. Like standing in the middle of the life you had fought to build and realizing, with sudden embarrassment, that you no longer knew why you had wanted it.
Is this what I fought so hard to become?
He remembered being young and furious and alive, a person with opinions sharp enough to cut glass. He had cared deeply and loudly about art, about music, about politics and fashion and whatever fresh absurdity the twenty-first century had coughed up that week. Once Myspace disappeared, he had been quite sure the end was nigh.
He remembered swearing he would never become just another man in a chair behind a desk, another boring wage slave with a pressed collar and a schedule he hated.
He remembered believing adulthood would feel like freedom, not… whatever this was.
He tried not to think about it.
He was successful at not thinking about things. That was his greatest talent.
Then, at precisely the hour he signed off for the day, when the universe apparently decided subtlety had had its chance, his phone rang.
It was his mother.
He answered on the second ring, because ignoring your mother was not a standard he was prepared to abandon.
“Baby!” she sang, with that unbearable brightness that meant she was either about to share wonderful news or terrible news, and experience had taught him that with her the line between the two was distressingly thin. “How are you?”
“I am perfectly well,” he lied, because he was not a monster, and worrying his mother ranked high on his list of things one simply did not do.
“Oh, good! Good. Listen, I won’t keep you long—”
Historically, this was always a lie.
“I just wanted to tell you,” she continued, “that Richard and I are moving.”
Alastor stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk. A man nearly collided with him. Someone brushed past, muttering. He did not apologize.
“Richard,” he repeated slowly, as though saying the name aloud might conjure meaning where none currently existed.
“Yep!”
“Mother,” he said, adjusting his grip on the phone, “who's Richard?”
There was a pause on the other end, the kind that suggested she was actively reviewing her recent life choices and discovering she might, perhaps, have omitted a step.
“Oh!” she said brightly. “I thought I told you.”
“No,” Alastor said. “No, you very much didn't.”
“Well, we’ve been seeing each other for a little over a year now,” she said cheerfully, as though she were describing a new hobby. “Time just slips away when you’re happy. He’s wonderful, honey.”
Alastor felt his soul make a serious and immediate attempt to leave his body.
“A year,” he repeated.
“Yes!”
“And you didn't think to mention this?”
“Well, you’ve been so busy,” she said gently, which was not technically untrue, though it still carried the faint sting of accusation wrapped in lace. “I didn’t want to be a bother. And you know, I am getting on in the years. The last thing you need is your mother crashing your style–”
Alastor’s grip tightened around his phone. He considered, briefly, launching it against the concrete. It wouldn't help, but it would be satisfying.
“Where,” he asked, “are you moving?”
“Florida!”
Florida, he scowled, where Florida Man was less a person and more a genre.
He inhaled slowly through his nose, the way one did when confronted with an animal one was not permitted to shoot.
“And when did you decide this?”
“Oh, it’s been a little while,” she said. “We wanted to wait until we were sure.”
“Of course,” said Alastor, because apparently today had been set aside for restraint and suffering.
Then another sound entered the call: airport noise. An intercom. The squeak of rolling luggage. A beep, and the broad chaos of a terminal.
He frowned.
“Mother,” he said very carefully, “where are you right now?”
“At the airport!”
Alastor stopped walking again.
“You are at the airport?”
“Yep! Boarding starts in about fifteen minutes. Oh—hold on—Richard wants to talk to you! Putting you on speaker!”
Her laugh suggested she considered this charming.
A man’s voice came through, warm and clear and offensively cheerful. “Hey there, Al! Great to finally talk to you, sport!”
Alastor’s eye twitched.
“Richard, I presume,” he said, tasting the name like poison. “Charmed.”
Richard laughed as though he had been sincerely complimented.
“Your mom tells me you’re a big music guy,” he said. “Love that. Love a man with passion. Can’t wait to have you down! We’ll go fishing! Or, uh—whatever you’re into. Museums. Jazz bars. Fancy coffee. We’ll make it work.”
Alastor’s mouth tightened. If Richard used the word passion again near the vicinity of his mother, Alastor might not be at fault for his actions.
His mother laughed. Richard laughed. They sounded, together, unbearably happy—so much so that even the world seemed to be laughing with them.
Alastor’s smile sharpened into something that might have scared a weaker man. In fact, a man passing him on the sidewalk broke eye contact and crossed the street.
“Mother,” he said, ignoring Richard entirely, “you are moving to Florida with a man I have never met, and you are telling me this while boarding the plane?”
“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds dramatic,” she said, offended on behalf of her spontaneity.
“It is dramatic.”
“Allie,” she said, taking him off speaker, her voice turning softer, warmer, and infinitely more dangerous for it. It hit him the way her voice always had when he was young: like a hand on the back of his neck, like kitchen light spilling down a hallway, like being called in for supper before the world taught him to sharpen himself against it.
“I’m happy,” she said. “He makes me happy.”
And just like that, he froze.
Because despite the surprise, despite the audacity, despite the nauseating romantic-comedy energy of older people finding love and acting as though that were not fundamentally embarrassing for their children, his mother deserved happiness. She deserved a life that did not fold itself around his expectations. And Alastor did love her. He simply preferred to do so from a safe distance, where the people one loved could not spring life-altering news on you from Gate B12.
“He’s so excited,” she said. “We found this darling little place near the water, and Richard’s sister lives nearby, and—”
So he listened.
He really did.
He simply did not trust the man who had inserted himself into her life with such seamless confidence, because men who seemed that comfortable were either genuinely decent or guilty of several crimes and very good at hiding them.
On the basis of one short phone call, Alastor could not prove Richard was shady.
Which only made him more suspicious.
“You’ll visit,” his mother said finally.
“Yes,” Alastor said automatically. “Certainly.”
“Promise?”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
“I promise.”
“Now don’t do that,” she said at once.
“I didn’t—”
“You did,” she said. “That little pause. You used to do that when you were seven and about to tell me you’d broken something.”
“I am standing perfectly still on a public sidewalk,” Alastor said. “I am doing nothing.”
“Well,” she sighed, and there it was—that sigh, the one that always meant she was about to say something perfectly reasonable that would make his life worse. “I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to worry about me.”
His jaw tightened.
“I do worry about you.”
“I know,” she said gently. “That’s why I didn’t say anything.”
“That is not how that works.”
“I didn’t want you rearranging your life for me,” she continued. “You’ve worked so hard. You finally have everything just the way you like it.”
Everything.
The word settled between them like a carefully placed knife.
Because everything was not a life. It was a schedule. A routine. A neat little perimeter he had drawn around himself and then mistaken for stability.
“You didn’t tell me,” he said quietly.
“Oh, honey,” she said, immediately softening. “I didn’t want to take anything from you. You already gave so much.”
Alastor nearly laughed.
He gave schedules. He gave check-ins. He gave holidays arranged three months in advance and bills paid on time. He made sure she would never have to worry about financial security.
He had not realized she meant presence.
“I raised you to be independent,” she went on, warm and proud and devastating. “And you are. You always have been.”
Yes, he thought. That was, in fact, very much the problem.
“And Richard really makes me happy,” she added, as if by accident, though the words landed directly in his ribs. “I wanted to choose something for myself, just once, without worrying whether it would inconvenience you.”
Alastor swallowed.
“I am not inconvenienced,” he said automatically.
She hummed, plainly unconvinced.
“You don’t have to sound so brave,” she told him. “You’re allowed to be surprised.”
He hated that she was right.
“And you’ll still call. And visit. And I’ll still be your mother. I’m not disappearing.”
But it felt, in some unnameable way, like she was. Not because she was leaving, but because she had done it without him.
“I just thought,” she said at last, softer now, “that you’d be proud of me.”
Alastor closed his eyes.
“I am,” he said, and it was true. It simply hurt.
“Oh good,” she said brightly, immediately relieved. “Because Richard was worried you’d be upset.”
Of course he was.
“Put him on the phone,” Alastor said.
“What?”
“I would like,” said Alastor, with terrifying politeness, “to speak to the man who has taken my mother without my knowledge—”
She laughed. “Oh, not now, dear, we’re boarding!”
Naturally.
“Alastor,” she added then, her voice warm and familiar and dangerous in its sincerity, “you know I love you, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“And you know I didn’t do this to you.”
“I know.”
“Good,” she said, satisfied. “Then we’ll talk soon. I’ll send pictures!”
The line went dead before he could object.
Pictures.
Alastor lowered the phone slowly.
He stood there on the sidewalk with the quiet certainty that his mother had not abandoned him. She had simply moved forward. And he, for reasons he did not yet know how to name, had not.
He stood very still for several seconds, as though he could pause the world by refusing to participate in it, staring at his reflection in a dark storefront window. The part of him that had built a life around being needed—around being the one thing she could count on—did not know what to do with love that no longer required him to survive.
He barely recognized himself. The man looking back was well-dressed. Composed. Controlled. Not a hair out of place. Alastor briefly considered advising that man looking back to get it together.
Breakups happened. Mothers moved to Florida with men they forgot to mention until roughly boarding time.
This was normal.
He told himself that twice, just to be sure.
Then he resumed walking—because his life had always been held together by the simple belief that if he kept moving, nothing would catch him.
He was wrong.
By the time he arrived back at the Hazbin—an apartment building with charming brickwork, questionable plumbing, and residents who behaved like a social experiment—his patience had worn down to a thin, brittle strip.
He opened the front door and was immediately greeted by chaos, as always.
A glittery wall of flyers was taped to the mailboxes and lobby wall:
TENANT MEETING TONIGHT!
COMMUNITY!
TOGETHERNESS!
THERE'LL BE SNACKS!
Alastor tore the one covering his mailbox down the instant he passed it.
In the hallway, someone nearly body-checked him at full speed.
“Mr. A!” a voice shrieked.
He caught the girl by the shoulders on reflex, steadying both her and the alarming number of grocery bags swinging from her arms like trophies.
She was seventeen, technically—emancipated and legally an adult, a college student by some miracle of paperwork and pure force of will. She wore ripped tights, combat boots, and a cropped jacket covered in enamel pins, and her hair was currently dyed a color not known to nature and, by all appearances, updated weekly out of spite.
“Hi hi hi!” she said. “Oh good, you’re home!”
“Why,” Alastor asked carefully, “are you moving at that speed indoors, Niffty?”
She beamed.
“For efficiency and for science! Baxter bet me I couldn’t get all the groceries upstairs before the elevator broke again.”
“Did it break?”
“Not yet!”
One of the bags sagged dangerously. Alastor caught it before gravity could claim the contents.
Niffty gasped. “Wow. See? That’s why you’re the emergency adult.”
“I am not—”
“Emotionally available?” she supplied brightly. “That’s okay. You don’t fall apart. Or panic. Ever. That’s why I like you.”
He handed the bag back. “Why are you delivering groceries for half the building?”
“Pays extra.” She shrugged. “People forget stuff. Or don’t want to go back outside. Or they’re sad. Also Ms. Rosie tips in cookies.”
“…What kind?”
“Snickerdoodle.”
He nodded once. “Acceptable. Ask for double.”
Niffty bounced on her heels. “Oh! Charlie wants me to remind everyone that community engagement builds trust, and trust builds happiness, and happiness builds—”
“No.”
“—a healthier living environment,” she finished anyway. “She made a chart.”
Of course she did.
Niffty tilted her head, studying him more closely now. “Oooh,” she said. “You’re having a day.”
“I am fine.”
“Mmm. No. You’re doing the thing where your smile is polite but your soul is buffering.”
“That is not a real medical condition.”
“It totally is. The pretty rocks in my pocket are picking up on it. Baxter says that happens when your brain has too much going on.”
As if summoned, a door down the hall cracked open.
Baxter—tall, lithe, and permanently sleep-deprived, wearing a hoodie advertising a programming language Alastor refused on principle to learn—stuck his head out without looking up from his phone.
“The Wi-Fi is down again,” he said mildly. “But I’ll have it back in ten.”
“See?” said Niffty proudly. “My boyfriend is a genius hacker.”
“It's just engineering.” Baxter rolled his eyes.
“Nerd,” she said with the serene certainty of someone who had attained ancient wisdom.
Alastor sighed. “Do not access the building’s main router.”
Baxter smiled faintly. “Too late.”
Niffty clapped her hands. “College!”
Alastor pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Oh! Angel said to tell you he’s definitely not hosting poker night tonight, and most certainly not inviting you, and also that you should stop glaring at him because it’s bad for your complexion.”
“I do not glare,” Alastor said, glaring.
“You do. Your eyebrows give it away.” She paused, then softened a little. “Anyway, if today gets worse, there are popsicles in the community freezer. Red ones work best.”
“Work for what?”
She shrugged. “Big stuff. Small stuff. Everything.”
Then she was off again, bounding down the hall and calling, “Delivery!” while Baxter followed at a much calmer pace, already typing with one thumb and throwing Alastor a peace sign with the other.
Alastor stood there holding a grocery receipt that was not his for reasons he did not care to investigate. When Niffty reappeared, he handed it back.
“Thanks, Mr. A!” she chirped, throwing one arm around him in a side hug. “You’re the bestest!”
“…I did nothing.”
“Don’t need to,” she said. “You’re always reliable in the little things no one notices.”
Then she disappeared down the stairs.
Alastor resumed walking, because stopping had not yet improved anything.
Not willing to risk the elevator, he took the stairs with the resignation of a man heading toward his own execution—one foot in front of the other, posture intact, expectations lowered. The stairwell hummed faintly with life behind closed doors: muffled laughter, a television far too loud, the distant crash of someone dropping something they absolutely should not have been carrying.
Normal chaos.
Familiar chaos.
He reached the second-floor landing and stopped.
His cat was sitting just outside the apartment, broad-shouldered and bicolored, with one torn ear and a tail that twitched like he was fully aware he had done something wrong and had chosen, on principle, not to care. Husk was not inside the apartment, where he had been left.
He was outside.
Like a disgruntled bouncer who had escaped containment and immediately decided the hallway was now under his authority.
As Alastor approached, Husk looked up with half-lidded yellow eyes full of judgment so personal it almost felt rehearsed.
“Husk, you are supposed to be inside.”
The cat blinked once and turned his head away with the deliberate contempt of a creature who understood rejection on a spiritual level and used it recreationally.
Alastor sighed and reached down, fingers brushing briefly at the scruff of his neck.
“Do not do this,” he said. “I am not in the mood.”
Husk growled and twisted neatly out of reach.
The moment Alastor unlocked the door, the cat shot past him with his tail in the air and padded inside as though he owned the apartment and Alastor was merely a temporary inconvenience.
“Unbelievable,” Alastor muttered, stepping in after him. “No respect at all.”
He paused just long enough to take stock of the room—listening for the unmistakable sound of something broken, spilled, or on fire.
Nothing.
No shattered glass. No suspicious silence. No smell of liquor where liquor should not have been.
Acceptable.
Which meant Husk had gotten out somehow. Alastor did not yet have an explanation for how, which suggested either a flaw in the apartment—or the cat.
He stepped fully inside, reaching back to close the door—
And stopped.
Across the hall, seated against the door of the empty apartment opposite his, was a small figure.
She occupied the space in the unremarkable way a chair or a potted plant might have occupied it, which somehow made the sight of her more jarring rather than less. Not because she was making noise. Not because she looked frightened. Simply because she appeared to have been there for some time, and Alastor had no explanation for that.
He stared for half a second before his mind caught up.
That was a child.
Seven or eight, perhaps. A small backpack sat neatly beside her. She wore a hoodie several sizes too large, the hood pushed over a mess of dark curls that fell into her eyes. Her knees were drawn to her chest, a tablet balanced on top of them, as though she were trying to fold herself into something small enough the world might overlook her.
Beside her sat a unicorn plush, one ear bent and its white fur dulled from age and handling. It was clearly not new, but it was being held with the kind of care children reserved for things they did not believe the world would replace if lost.
She looked up.
Her green eyes were sharp, but not frightened. She had the air of someone who had been waiting and did not intend to waste the opportunity now that it had arrived.
Husk, traitor that he was, chose that moment to stroll back out, sit directly in front of her, and begin grooming himself as though the presence of a mysterious child in contested territory was of no concern whatsoever.
And Alastor stopped.
His first thought was: This is not real.
His second was: Not my problem.
His third, which he found both unhelpful and deeply irritating, was: Why is she here?
They looked at one another for a beat, and then the girl stood.
Alastor cleared his throat.
“…Hello,” he said, because whatever else failed him, politeness usually remained functional.
“Hi,” the girl replied. Her voice was steady. Small, serious, and carrying the unmistakable sound of someone who had practiced being taken seriously.
Alastor glanced once down the hall. It was empty. No frantic parent. No explanation in motion. No universe rushing in to correct itself.
He looked back at her.
“Are you,” he asked carefully, “lost?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Which, frankly, made the situation worse.
“And you are waiting here because…?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a photograph.
It was old, a little bent at the corners, the kind of photo that had been carried rather than framed. The sort people forgot existed until they found it in the bottom of a drawer years later and were briefly ambushed by a version of themselves they no longer recognized.
Alastor recognized himself immediately.
He was younger there. Softer, somehow. Grinning beside a woman whose smile tightened something in his chest before he could stop it.
The girl stepped back as she held the photograph up between them, studying his face and then the image with visible concentration.
It is worth noting that at this moment Alastor had not yet raised his voice, lost his composure, or abandoned his principles in any meaningful way. He remained standing, impeccably dressed, fully possessed of his manners and, for the most part, of sound mind.
This would not last long.
The girl tilted her head, an angle of consideration he recognized with faint and instant dislike because it was his own habit reflected back at him.
She closed one green eye. The tip of her tongue peeked out slightly in concentration. She tucked a lock of wavy hair behind her ear, and Alastor had the deeply unpleasant realization that he had once woken every morning beside those same waves.
Then she pressed her thumb to the photograph, nodded once, and said with the quiet certainty of someone stating a fact she had already verified several times over:
“Yep. You’re Alastor.”
He nodded.
“I think,” she said, “you’re my dad.”
Alastor blinked.
Once.
Twice.
The world did not end.
Which, he would later reflect, was almost insulting.
He had been promised standards.
No one had mentioned children.