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It is an eventful day in the Radio Demon's broadcast studio. His guest for the day is a lungful little thing, with the most incredible screams he has heard in a long time.
Despite having a wonderful time, that night, after sitting down in his chair with a book and drinking a little too much wine, Alastor dreams of a scream he hasn't heard in a lifetime – since long before waking up here, before the jazz parties and the rituals, before the radio and New Orleans, just before Alastor the boy became Alastor the beast: the night his mama left him forever.
His little obsession with screams started precociously, before he even had the capacity to understand it himself. Where others were disturbed by screaming, with time he grew to enjoy a good scream, whether his own – a mighty powerful tool every boy is born with, capable of instilling so much discomfort in adults they hurried to find any solution to make the sound stop, whether that be nursing him or beating silence into him – or another's.
There were some he didn't like very much. In youth, a child's scream brought him delight, made him feel grandiose if Alastor were the cause for them; as he grew older, the song of children lost its charm, rather becoming irritating and, sometimes, familiarly disturbing. The last one he liked to think was simply due to inevitably ending up on the other side of the fence, evolutionary responses getting the better of him one way or the other – as much as it didn't work in leading him to aid for a child and instead avoiding it, the mechanism that made him feel perturbed by it still worked, in stark contrast to what he felt when he heard more adult-sounding screams – but deep down he knew: they reminded him too much of a time he didn't see the point in ever remembering.
Another type of scream he didn't like very much was that of sopranos – as much as he liked their soft singing, their lullabies especially – which was a shame, as so many women, including truly despicable ones, fell into that category.
Those had the tendency to make his hairs stand on end, to push him over the edge of his violent impulses; to make his heart race for all the wrong reasons. Worse, instead of being a mere annoyance he could walk away from, like children's wailing, their screaming pleas pierced so deep into his bones they sometimes had the power to make him act like a good Samaritan – saving little lambs off the dirty hands of hogs on impulse for no incentive, like a fool.
They were exactly the sorts of screams that plagued his nightmares, much different than the ones in his dreams.
He always woke up from them wishing he could scrub the memories from his brain forever, but then where, or when, would he even start? He can't even remember the first time he heard mummy's cries, both the more quiet ones from when she could withstand to attempt muffling them for his sake (usually when she and that horrible man, in a good day when he still cared for decorum, thought Alastor would be able to hear, which they were right about; but that did as much for him as the thin walls) and the louder, more anguished ones, when she would beg at the top of her lungs for that bastard to stop, to at least save Alastor from hearing it – to which his white-skinned demon of a father would tell her to shut the fuck up or he'd make that abomination she called a son scream too, he was doing enough for them to do whatever he wanted.
There were indeed times when he would make him scream, but at the time Alastor always told himself he was shrieking by choice, taking control of the situation by being the loudest one in the room; as he grew older he came to accept that it was as much of a choice as any single-option choice could be – a child is too weak to fight back with anything other than screams, even their teeth and nails and limbs too small and harmless to be useful. Soon he grew out of that, as he learned there was much more power in having the wrong reaction to a situation: silence during pain, laughter in the face of horror.
“Keep up the beautiful little screams, bitch. Do it louder so everyone can hear you, so they know who you belong to,” Alastor often heard the demon whisper to her. “They won't come for you. Do you know why?”
Along with the slapping sounds Alastor took too long to realize were not only from actual slapping but also the horrible sounds of sex, this was the part he hated the most. The screams, he had learned to tolerate, after learning intervention made it worse (only one time did it make it all better, forever, but by then it was too late). But when he started to insult her kindness, to say that no one cared for her – with crude words Alastor can't bear to remember even in the privacy of his mind without feeling horror and shame – this was when he felt the most rage.
“No one could ever care for someone horrible like you. That's why. This is all you're good for, and everybody knows it.”
It made tears boil in his eyes when he said those things. He wanted so badly to barge in and yell that it was not true, that his mother was the most kind, good-hearted person Alastor had ever met, and that she is loved by everyone, or if she isn't she should be because Alastor loves her so much he can't see why someone wouldn't.
But he was too weak, physically and mentally, to do anything about it. For all his transgressions, when it came to things that matter Alastor had been born a coward, and only after she was already dead did he manage to grab the axe and bring it down on the lying motherfucker.
The nightmare is kind to him today, however.
“Alastor? God, what have you done?”
He is covered head to toe in blood that had spattered on him while he brought down the axe, standing still over the deformed, barely identifiable as human body.
“Mama,” Alastor turns around in disbelief, “I thought he'd killed you.”
“No, baby, I'm here. I'm right here.”
She walks closer to hug him, seemingly uncaring of the bloody pulp on the floor or the viscera covering Alastor.
If he ever had the fortune of dreaming of her alive and well, there were only two possible routes the dream could take. In one scenario, she would berate him, cry and shout in horror at what he has become – a demon, a full fledged, disgusting, deformed demon, something she tried so hard to prevent him from growing into; and in the other, she would simply thank him, and forgive him: for killing that demon, for having been weak and cowardly when he had all this potential inside him.
He can never figure out which scenario hurts him more, and as she opens her mouth again, Alastor cannot decide which one he longs for or fears hearing her say most.
But tonight, he doesn't need to. Instead, she stays silent and continues to hug him tight, until finally Alastor wakes up again in his bayou-room.