Author's note So sorry for basically disappearing I had to take care of some real-life issues and lost a lot of motivation things are better now anyway it's my birthday today so I thought I would give you all a new chapter I am now 33 yes I am old
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Another year came and went in New Orleans, bringing with it fireworks, cold weather, blood on the frozen ground of Alastor's killing cabin, slipping victims on the frost that gathered all around. He had gotten confident enough to bring minor mafia cronies to his cabin, and like a winter rose, Alastor blossomed.
He laughed, chest-puffing chest with some of the most important and filthy men in the city.
He dug deeper into Montenegro's life, like a knife that could only groove into flesh, impossible to remove. He was scarcely asked to do much more than promote certain products on his radio show, or, mainly to look the other way when something strange happened, or a fight broke out, or someone got their brow split and nose broken at a casual party.
Average, normal people activities, of course. The beginning of the new year marked, also, the solidification of Montenegro's attachment to Alastor, and his first real, messed-up request.
Alastor had been wondering what he would do when Montenegro ultimately did ask him to do something that would go against his own very personal, very biased standards.
But he sent him to capture a man who'd cheated him out of some money — a minor task, usually left for a trusted crony, not for a man as respected as Alastor. But it was the first hands-on, gruesome task he had prepared.
Alastor considered that an ally as refined as himself would have no need to prove himself in such a manner, but then he realized Montenegro must've noticed a certain degree of savagery in him that would allow him to get his gloves dirty, whereas the others did not.
That Montenegro needed to be watched and considered carefully: Alastor couldn't afford the negligence of assuming him to be just another money-hungry imbecile. He did as he was told, the thief was delivered safely into Montenegro's hands, bruised up and a little broken as could only be appropriate to present him, and Alastor was in — in. The only thing that frequently stumped him was the occasional meetings with Anthony.
It was a strange dynamic that had been established between Alastor and Montenegro. Both wife and husband cherished him, trusted him to no end (even more than they did, apparently, their children), and somehow solidified his chivalry with Anthony's overdose and how Alastor had stepped in to 'save' him.
As if his motivations had been any other than getting Anthony to safety. Ashton kept well out of his way after the little episode at one of the previous parties, when Alastor had shut his mouth quite well but perhaps with an excess of violence. It had put into perspective just how worthless Ashton was, and how he understood his worthlessness.
It was clear that not even his father trusted him with most things, and though he was always at the table, and interacting with the guests, and from the outside might've even been perceived to be deeply involved in his father's affairs, Ashton wasn't so much as allowed to sit in on a meeting with Montenegro's most important customers and allies. The boy was an imbecile.
He had absolutely no social tact, no true idea of the world, just spite and violence and a raw sense of entitlement.
He was exactly the type of person that Alastor hated, and he was quite gratified to know that everybody else in the family did, too. It must've hurt Ashton quite a bit to be dismissed not only by his father, who he worshiped but by his younger sister as well as a brother who he perceived as nothing more than a junkie and a fruit.
Molly always threw longing and sad looks in Alastor's direction, but she didn't do much more than that, however. He also didn't see her quite as frequently: she was the star child, brilliant and applied and endlessly academic, learning all sorts of languages and instruments, and doted on by her parents so much that they barely saw her.
It was a strange sort of irony, but still, Alastor couldn't help but feel pleased at seeing a young woman being so thoroughly educated in this age and time. And then there was Anthony. Whenever they crossed each other's paths in the Montenegro home (where Alastor now frequented a bit more), Anthony would sulk and hop to another section of the house, or perhaps Alastor would do so.
They mostly avoided one another, incapable of facing anything. Molly watched their awkward non-interactions from a distance, up until the day when it became a real interaction.
Which was chaos, and only made things worse for the both of them. It was New Year's, at the same party where Montenegro would eventually summon Alastor and make his request, and initiate him into the year.
Alastor had downed a champagne flute or two and was feeling its bubbly, warm effects. Still in control of himself, and making some very valuable connections, he saw no reason not to do so. It was well into the evening, too, past twelve, past the countdown, and everyone else was painfully drunk.
Despite the insane amount of bathrooms available at the Montenegro house, some had even had to form queues due to vomiting or incessant peeing from all the drinking, sometimes even holding the line up to 'powder their noses'.
Alastor had been heading to one of the more secluded bathrooms when he suddenly caught Molly rushing in the opposite direction, cheeks flushed, hair a mess despite her beautiful outfit for the festivities. She was walking so purposefully that Alastor assumed she would sweep right past him since her purpose surely couldn't be associated with him.
But she stopped and made him halt beside her. "Alastor!" She said, truly addressing him other than a nod for the first time in months. "Molly," he replied, partly in greeting, partly in shock. "I need your help," she said, grabbing him by the hand and speeding him towards the same direction he had been going towards. "I— well, of course, what do you need?"
He asked, sprinting to catch up with the girl. "It's Anthony," she said curtly, shooting a look back at him as if measuring his reaction. He didn't know what she saw on his face, but she turned away a moment later, pace just as determined.
He had barely seen Anthony at this party, only having been afforded one sulky look, and always at the bar, or with Molly. In a short time, they came upon a closed bathroom door, which Molly opened without so much as knocking. Sprawled on the ground like a pink and white dishrag, Anthony was curled around the toilet bowl, groaning.
Ignoring Molly for a moment, Alastor dashed to his side and knelt so close to him he could feel the roiling hot waves of sickness emanating from the boy. "Anthony, Anthony," he said, gently placing a hand on his back as Anthony groaned, sitting upright as best he could.
He didn't even seem to realize it was Alastor who was holding him. "What happened?" Alastor asked Molly as Anthony's head lolled to the side, resting on his shoulder. "I just think he's had too much to drink?" Molly said though it was more of a question than a statement.
There was no way to know whether Anthony had mixed alcohol with another substance, but knowing him, it was more than likely. At that moment, he suddenly straightened up, looked around, a little bit confused, and proceeded to hurl violently into the toilet.
The smell was nauseating, but the look on Anthony's face, one of pure terror and pain, kept Alastor glued to his side, his gloved hands keeping his hair away from his face. "Should we call your… parents?" Alastor asked with a cringe.
He knew very well that Molly of all people would be aware of the exact nature of Alastor's betrayal of Anthony, and just speaking those words out loud made him revisit his mole behavior. But he didn't know what else to do. Thankfully, Molly didn't look disgusted with him, as Anthony surely would have in the same circumstance, if he had been conscious at all as opposed to just retching into the toilet. "I… once he stops puking I'll get him into bed," was all she said. Alastor nodded.
He didn't need further confirmation that it wouldn't be a good idea to bring this to Montenegro's attention. It seemed that the only circumstances in which it was justified to call them would be when Anthony was on the brink of death. And though the thought that Anthony would probably recover from this, likely some form of alcohol poisoning and another drug that sat badly in his stomach, it was still a bad omen.
He still couldn't believe that it would've been a good idea to send Anthony to that terrible jail rehab center, but this wasn't much better. He was still doing the same things he had been doing before, he just hadn't gotten his hands on any stronger drug.
Yet. It worried him to no end, but he also recognized that he had no place worrying for Anthony, anymore. But even if Anthony didn't want him, and didn't want him to be 'babysitting' him, as he had called it, Alastor couldn't help but care, couldn't help but worry.
The realization twisted in his gut, and he felt like he would start throwing up soon enough. After about half an hour, which stretched out in Alastor's memory as being years and years, Anthony appeared not to have anything else in his stomach for him to puke out. He crumbled into Alastor's chest, weak and semi-unconscious, looking spent.
The bright lights of the bathroom shone on him, making him all the more beautiful despite it all, so fragile, so vulnerable, and chipping away at himself day by day. "I'll carry him to his room," Alastor said gruffly as Molly moved forward, evidently intending to remove Anthony now.
She was grateful for Alastor's interference, and knew that Anthony wouldn't like it when he came to — but who else could she run to in a situation like this? All of the people at this party were already in Montenegro's pocket (including Alastor), and who else could she appeal to?
Not her parents, certainly not her brother. As she watched Alastor pick Anthony up with the tenderness one might use with a child, she found herself fully forgiving Alastor, and wishing in her heart that he and Anthony could remedy it all.
Surely when it was so plain that they cared for one another something could be done, couldn't it? Thankfully, Anthony's room was quite out of the way from the other partygoers, and Alastor successfully got him inside the room without much hassle.
Molly hadn't realized just how strong he was until he picked up Anthony like he was a little doll. She thought it was strange — he wasn't particularly muscular, so what exactly was giving him this preternatural strength?
She had witnessed big, hunky men struggle to pick up another grown man at all, and Alastor could carry Anthony like a damsel in a fairytale? She watched, chewing on her low fingernails as Alastor lowered Anthony onto his pink-and-cream bed, the younger man shivering and mumbling as if he had a fever. In Alastor's grasp, he was hot and frail as a baby bird, and he was painfully reminded of the night Anthony had overdosed, and how he'd hauled him into the car, the pain he'd felt.
If Alastor had been a more immoral person (at least, immoral in a different sense), he would've thought of placing a spell on Anthony, to make him incapable of drinking, incapable of jabbing a needle in his arm, or snorting powders.
But he could not take his will — after all, it was the only thing Anthony had, and likely the reason why he acted that way at all. Once Anthony was trembling on his luxurious sheets, Alastor sighed, looking down at him with worry. "Thank you," Molly said, coming up closer to Anthony and taking off his shoes.
She wouldn't have been able to get him all the way here without getting noticed all by herself. "Of course," Alastor looked back at Molly as if suddenly remembering that she was there with them.
They shared a look as if Molly knew more than she was letting on, and Alastor was aware of it. "How have you been?" He asked, his voice a little choked off. He regretted the wavering in his relationship with Molly — she was a sweet girl, but she was too much of Anthony, and he couldn't have remedied his relationship with her any more than he might have the others. "Alright," she said brightly, with a large smile as she struggled to prop Anthony up a little so she might take off his dinner jacket.
Alastor helped her, but now that he wasn't holding him anymore, every time he touched Anthony felt like… well, it felt too much. He looked around the room as he held Anthony's light body up. He had never been here, he realized. Everything was tailored as he was, in the same color scheme, just as chaotic and beautiful in its maximalist style.
He smiled to himself when he thought that it was a room that probably had a great deal of hiding spots, that could conceal many treasures, big and small. "How have you been?" Molly asked Alastor, side-eyeing him as Anthony was left only in his dress shirt, a dangling pink heart pendant dangling in the hollow of his throat. "I've missed him," Alastor replied before he could question it before he could stop himself.
He was not used to being honest, and ever since he had been banished from Anthony's group, he had grown out of the habit.
But being in this room, and holding him, it was like being imbued with Anthony's very essence. Molly nodded with understanding, never judgment, and he remembered why he had felt comfortable with his partial honesty. "I think he misses you, too," Molly told him, pressing her lips together, and looking from the mumbling Anthony to Alastor. "I—" Alastor began, but then Anthony's eyelids flew open.
His eyes were unfocused, and drunk or high, clearly delirious. "All—actor?" He drawled. "I'm here," Alastor said quickly, kneeling by his bedside. Anthony's eyes rolled around, and barely registered Alastor. Perhaps he thought he was in a dream. "Allaystour, I knew ye-ye'd come fr, for me," he mumbled, eyes shutting and opening like a malfunctioning toy.
Alastor smiled through his pain. "Of course, I would. I always will." He couldn't help it, he took Anthony's hand and watched as his body slackened, relaxed under his touch. The boy fell asleep as Alastor watched, counting his breaths, counting his lashes, counting his blessings. Eventually, he realized Molly was staring at the two of them, quite intently, her eyes wide and full of wonder. Alastor felt something like panic — though he was rarely subjected to such a thing — surge within him.
He dropped Anthony's hand all of a sudden, abashed. "Well," he said dismissively, hating the transparent way she was staring at him. "Seems like he's alright. I'd best get going," he said, already turning away towards the door, not even sparing another look at the drooling Anthony.
Molly was about to say something to him as he turned the handle of the door, but he didn't give her a chance. "I'd tell you to take good care of him, but I know you always do. Perhaps I'll see you again, later tonight," Alastor said, though he would not meet her eyes as he made his escape.
Later that same evening, Montenegro summoned Alastor to his study, and made his request, and initiated him; a cold winter breathed its fetid life into the new year. Alastor was a bit more attentive about not being alone with either Molly or Anthony after the little sequence in the bathroom.
It was quite easy. The winter moved slowly, as it always did once the excitement of the festivities passed, and people just started getting cranky with the seemingly interminable cold weather. Montenegro was also slow in his requests as if he and the general mafia had become frozen together with the weather.
Alastor was mostly left to his work, and to his killing, which were also caught by the flurry of slowness. If he dared too much, killed too much, or stalked too much while things were dull, he would bring too much attention to himself.
One of the reasons that he had moved to New Orleans in the first place was the chaos of the city, and how he would be imperceptible in it, but even in a place like this a certain degree of caution was necessary. And the current depression the world was in did not help. His work had scarcely been affected, as people still listened to the radio, now more than ever — there were even upticks in the more desperate crimes, like theft and prostitution.
Every day, especially now that it was winter, he thought he saw more people in the streets, though he could scent the despair and grime of great economic collapse. He had even come across corpses that people hadn't realised were corpses, and he always took the time to take them to a hospital, or a police station, even if the smell lingered on his hands.
He would wash them and then make bread, and hand out the bread to the sad children living in the streets around his apartment. He made sure to befriend them, so he knew who abused them, and could gut them.
The avenging neighborhood fallen angel.
He slept alone, in his room, without meeting anyone. Sometimes he cradled the orb that had brought him in and out of countless lives, its mystery still on him, still unrevealed. He had offered himself as a temporary home for stray cats and dogs that needed homes, so every once in a while he found himself with a furry companion — he preferred cats and other critters of their sort, however. Dogs gave him a weird, dark premonitory feeling.
He spent winter evenings reading or sipping the stock he'd made during the hot seasons (human bone broth, the best of all — no broth jiggled like that made of human bone), and entertaining himself by visiting the wonderful inventions of the age, even as society appeared to collapse.
He especially enjoyed the fact that, just now, humans had discovered that they could slice bread. When winter was melting, and with it its desperation (though systems were still collapsed, and the people still struggled to find jobs, food, or place in the world), Alastor began to get more jobs from Montenegro, and he found himself enjoying the slow transition into the busy season, he found himself outside more since he had read so much during the winter, he now had to replenish his shelves.
He would spend hours browsing through new and used bookstores since God knew that booksellers needed the extra money, as books were the first 'extravagance' to go when people didn't have any money.
He had discovered, with quite some curiosity, that there were quite a few Muggle book shops that sold unMuggle-like content. He first came across what was undoubtedly a magical book in a used store, with a cooky old shopkeep. At first, he had assumed that the shopkeeper was a wizard, but when he took the book up to the register, the man didn't react at all, as if he didn't see anything weird about the book, he started to doubt.
He thought it would've been obvious if this man were a wizard, as Alastor had already been able to sniff them out on several occasions, and steered clear of them. The magical book in question was nothing too serious, just a glossary on certain creatures and their maintenance, though nothing belonging to this world.
When the man didn't react, only told him the price of the book, Alastor thanked him and took the book back for inspection in his home. Passing a hand over it, he discovered that it was imbued with a certain form of glamour, which meant that Muggles just brushed over the books and didn't notice anything about them, as well as not being compelled to throw them away, but also not to buy them.
This first acquisition was one of many to come. One of his hobbies, now, was to come through every old, slightly suspicious-looking bookshop in search of magical books that had been left there accidentally. And he found a surprising amount.
It was quite nice to think that things like this could still be mixed up and that books were traded so frequently to make such a thing happen. He bought any magical books that he found, though they rarely ever interested him. They seemed things that he had learned in some of his first years at Hogwarts, or might have assumed simply through common knowledge.
Then again, he had spent many, many hours studying a deeper kind of magic in the room of the Guill's house. However, when spring was finally breathing its first breath, he found his first real book — the first truly relevant one, at least.
At first, it only looked like yet another compendium of certain alchemical processes and objects that existed or had existed sometime in history. Granted, it was a little bit more interesting than other books that Alastor had been reading because some of the objects and processes weren't exactly… light magic.
But what caught Alastor's eye was the illustration of a certain orb. He had been casually scrolling through the catalog when his eye caught the very simple picture of a black sphere.
He stared at it, hard. It occupied a third of its page and was not given any more relevance than other objects did. 'Dubbed "Satan's Orb" or "Devil's Orb" Fabrication unknown Current whereabouts unknown Powers unknown.
Said to transport users across time, space, and through hell. Unconfirmed sources' Alastor's breath hitched as he read those words 'Said to transport user across time, space, and through hell.' Even with magic abounding in the wizarding world, when had he read an explicit mention of a place like hell? There was nothing else, on the orb, no matter how hard he looked, it was all the information the book provided.
He marked the page and flipped to the book's cover so he might look at the author's name. Killian Bane, it was credited to. Alastor bit the inside of his cheek. Would it be worth it to expose himself to a wizard just to get some answers? He certainly felt he couldn't ignore this — not in all his time here, looking through books, nor in the Guills' place, poring over grimoire after grimoire, had he ever found mention of the orb, or his condition.
He thought back to the Muggle bookstore he had bought it from, but it was one he frequented, and he was certain that its shopkeep was a regular old Muggle man — a kind but simple one, at that.
He was considering what to do when he heard his fax machine get to work. He was against fax in general, as a principle, but he was even more against giving people his phone number, so most people that wanted to reach him (which wasn't a great deal of people) faxed him.
He stood up, rubbing at his temples, and read it. His head throbbed further when he realized who it was from. Ashton Montenegro, inviting him personally for a drink and a chat at the Montenegro house. No space for rejection is included.