""So anyway, what's your name, kid?"
The teenage boy in front of Stan was positively glowing, both metaphorically and literally, though the latter was only visible to the magically sensitive. Stan, of course, could see the vibrant pulsing colors clear as day, a reminder of an incident several lifetimes ago, of a soul forever altered by Stan's actions.
(A reminder of power that burned not only its victims but its all-too-eager user, of a lifeforce whittled away slowly but surely with every use, of how she passed on far too soon and left behind two who had to spend long years without the one who shone brightest of them all- of how it was all his fault, in the end, because he was the one who gave her that power in the first place, he was the one who should have known better...)
"My name is Andrew, Andrew Alcatraz!"
Andrew Alcatraz... Why did that sound so-
And suddenly he remembered the name, remembered it being shouted at him many times over- inside a limo with tinted windows, in any number of poorly-lit alleyways, from the other side of iron bars... Stan could feel himself tense up instinctively before realizing that he wasn't back there, not really. His prison days were long gone, lost even to living memory save for his own, and not a prison in the world could hold him now. The grimy streets that presently surrounded him were in Tijuana, not Colombia. This was the universe playing yet another cruel joke on him, nothing more.
"Why're you giving me that look?"
The words slipped out before he thought them through. "Has anyone ever called you 8-Ball?"
"No, why? Should they? That sounds kinda cool, actually-"
"No!" As young Andrew's eyes widened, Stan softened his tone. "Or, uh, maybe, I guess, no skin off my back either way- wait, do you even know what an 8-ball is?"
The long silence that followed would have been answer enough, but when Andrew squeaked out "...those things you shake and they tell your future?", Stan let out a long sigh.
"Kid, the day you beat me at a game of pool is the day you get to use that name- and not a day sooner, got it?"
(Stan would learn to regret his phrasing three years, four months, and twenty-one days later, when Andrew refused to give up the nickname he had rightfully won.)
If Stan had had to guess which traits of his great-nephew would be passed along to his reincarnations, "wanting to be on television" would have been far, far down on the list.
And yet here he was, watching Steve on television (or... it had some other name now, something that sounded like it was taken from an old science fiction book- holoscreen? holobox?- but it was similar enough to television that Stan still thought of it as such), one of the lead actors in the newest reboot of Poltergeist Botherers.
Steve kept looking over at Stan as the episode played on, his expression toeing the line between nervousness and excitement, and Stan kept staring back at Steve, distracted by a strong sense of deja vu.
It wasn't just the expression that was the same, or the soul behind it, either. A number of generations had passed, but he could still see it in the curl of his hair, the chestnut brown color of his eyes...
An old Pines soul in a new Pines body. It wasn't often that the two coincided.
Though, truth be told, it wasn't exactly a Pines body.
Not anymore, at least. Steve had been born with the surname Pines, had grown up with it, had used it for everything up until he realized his passion for acting and decided that his surname needed to be tweaked to better appeal to casting directors. Stan still called him Pines, though, when he mentioned Steve's last name at all. It wasn't that he forgot about Steve changing his name- he could never forget that- but that he preferred not to think of the memories that other name brought up.
The credits finally rolled, and Steve paused the television (or... whatever they called it these days) as it displayed the name STEVE PININGTON in large, blocky print.
"What did you think?" Steve's eyes were wide, his hands fidgeting as he carefully watched Stan's expression.
Stan coughed, though he hadn't needed to cough for centuries, just to buy himself a moment in which to think before responding.
"Well, it's not really my kind of thing..."
The smile on Steve's face started to shrink.
"But you did a good job in it all the same."
The smile on Steve's face returned, and Stan matched it with one of his own as he playfully ruffled the hair of his... great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew? Was that the right number of greats? Probably not, but hell, who cares, they were close and that's what mattered, not the number of links separating them in the family tree.
"Nice work, kid."
Stan was no stranger to prison cells by any means. He'd seen more than his fair share of them as a human, and as a demon he'd been called to a surprisingly large amount of makeshift summonings made by prisoners who figured they had nothing left to lose, who thought that nothing a demon could do to them could be worse than their current predicament. (An incorrect assumption, as it happened, but one Stan was generally willing to humor so long as it served his purposes.)
But it was rare that Stan entered a prison cell of his own free will.
Then again, the prisoner in this cell was no ordinary prisoner. Ordinary prisoners were locked up to protect others from them rather than the other way around. Ordinary prisoners didn't have multiple hits out on them. Ordinary prisoners were either going to serve their time or be freed, not be stuck in some strange combination of the two.
And, of course, ordinary prisoners didn't have souls with a spot on Stan's family circle.
"I hear they've finally figured out what they'll call me after the move to Milwaukee."
Stan raised an eyebrow as he looked back at the scrawny, bespectacled man before him. He really didn't look like the sort of guy who'd bring down half a town's mob on his own- but then, looks could be deceiving.
"Oh yeah? Some nerd finally threw a dart at a baby name book for you?"
"I think a computer does it, actually."
Stan waved his hand in the air dismissively. "Close enough. So? What's it gonna be?"
"Stetson Pinefield."
The name hung in the air for only a moment before the man soon to be known as Stetson added, "I know, a bit contrived, isn't it?"
Stan managed to summon up a grin before responding. "Yeah, you could say that."
The two of them were alone in the field, Stan floating under the branches of a tree while the human- who had short scraggly brown hair and thick glasses and kept scribbling things down in a notebook and really, all they needed was slightly worse fashion sense and the resemblance would be uncanny- had their back pressed against the tree's rough bark.
"I need to pick a name already and be done with it," they said.
Stan didn't respond, unsure if the statement was directed towards him specifically or whether they were just thinking out loud.
"I mean, you can't just call me 'kid' forever, right?"
Stan flashed the kid a grin. "Wanna bet?"
They threw a pen in Stan's general direction, and both of them watched as the pen passed through Stan's arm and fell onto the grass.
Stan watched as they wrote down one name in their notebook, then crossed that off and wrote another, which was in turn crossed off as well.
"You gonna change your last name, too?"
"No, my parents were good people, I owe that much to them. And besides, I'm having enough trouble thinking of a first name..." They rubbed one hand against their temple, their other hand tightly clutching their pen. "Nothing feels right, though. I mean, I want it to be leaning towards male, I think, but not- not too male, because I'm not male, not really, and- this doesn't make any sense, does it?"
Stan considered his words for a moment before he spoke. "Well, I'm not gonna lie and tell you I totally get it, because I don't- but I believe you, and I want to support you, and if that means figuring out a name that's male-but-not-male I'll do whatever I can to help."
They sighed, writing another name down in the book and scratching it off after only a few seconds' consideration.
"And hey, if it helps, I've had conversations that made way less sense than this."
"I'm sure you have." There wasn't much levity in their tone, but Stan thought he spied the beginnings of a grin on their face.
A short silence fell, the only sound coming from the tree branches swaying in the wind and pen scratching against paper, before they spoke up again. "Actually, if you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I don't seem to be getting very far on my own here."
It was then that Stan realized.
When he had first met the child that had then introduced themself to him as Becky Forrester, Stan had asked about relatives, friends, crushes, even baby names, waiting for the penny in the air to drop, for the universe to get on with it already, but nobody had had the name he was looking for.
(He had, however, managed to convince them not to name any future children Hephaestus or Mnemosyne, so that time hadn't been entirely wasted.)
But now he knew what the universe had been waiting for. Now Stan knew what he had to do.
He tried to make the suggestion sound casual. "Well, er, how about the name Hal?"
"Hal, huh?" They wrote the name down in their notebook, pen hovering over the word as they spoke. "Hal Forrester... has a nice ring to it..." Pen hit paper once more, but this time the name was circled, not crossed off. "You know, I actually really like that."
Stan tried to suppress a smirk as he muttered, "Of course you do."