Chapter Text
Alastor had run away. He was angry.
His mama had left him with a man she said was his father, but the man was a pale stranger he was very certain he'd never met before and anyhow Alastor didn't know what a "father" was. He didn't know what a "vacation" was either, except that apparently it entailed being abandoned in a strange house filled inside and out with strange people with weird voices who sometimes spoke in unintelligible gibberish and looked at him like he was supposed to understand them, in a strange land where all he could see was grass and trees and the houses were sparse and lonely, and he would never see his mama again. She'd already been gone for multiple days, maybe even three. So he wasn't keen on this whole "vacation" concept, and he liked this "father" person even less.
So he had run away.
Somewhere out there his mother had to still exist, along with his home on a nice straight even street where the houses were snug and secure against each other and he recognized most of the faces he passed. He'd thought maybe he could find them through through the trees—the trees had to be tall enough to obscure the buildings he knew existed somewhere. When his father had dragged him outside for a picnic (another new concept he was already hostile to), Alastor had waited until his father was distracted and then taken off for the trees as fast as he could run. When he heard his father start shouting for him—his father called him "Alastor," but Alastor had decided secretly this morning that he wasn't going to answer to anybody who didn't call him "Ally" like his mama did—he ran farther between the trees, ever farther away from the light of the clearing, and he kept running until he stopped hearing his father call for him.
So here he was. Everything had gone exactly according to his meticulously plotted plan. He was by himself, hidden and shaded beneath the boughs of enormous trees, far from the strange lonely houses and far from the menacing gibbering strangers.
He had never been this terrified in his life.
He sat on the ground and wailed at the top of his lungs until his throat gave out and tears stopped dripping from his cheeks. But his mama didn't come. Nobody came. Not even his father.
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The more he wandered, the more certain he was that he'd stumbled into some sort of realm of pure endless trees, and that he'd find neither his own home nor even the clearing where he'd last seen his father ever again. It was a realm without food, without water, and without toilets. At least the third problem solved itself eventually; but no matter how bad the twisting stabbing gnawing feeling in his stomach grew, he never reached a point where his hunger and thirst suddenly snapped and the problem solved itself.
In desperation, he tried picking up leaves off the ground and eating them; they tasted disgusting, so he stopped. Later, when his hunger was even worse, he tried again. They were still disgusting but he didn't care anymore. The leaves hurt his stomach.
His shoes felt uncomfortable and tight. He tried to get them off, but no matter how he stuck his fingers in the sides and pulled or how he clawed at the laces knotting them on, they wouldn't come free.
By the time night fell, he was too exhausted and empty to even cry anymore.
He might have slept, passed out on the ground among the bugs and rocks and thorns; or maybe he only imagined that he was sleeping. At some point during the night he thought he dreamed he threw up until there was nothing left to come out.
When the darkness started to abate, he was on his feet, wandering again. He didn't know when he'd gotten up. He wasn't even sure whether the sky was really getting lighter or if it was another dream.
###
The plants were wet in the gray pre-dawn light. Alastor plucked up leaves and grass and tried to lick the dew off of them. If it helped, he couldn't tell.
Exhausted and starving and so miserable he was numb to it, Alastor was still wandering aimlessly when he stumbled on a god.
He had not yet been formally introduced to the concept of gods. Church was just a building he was taken to every few days, where he usually napped against his mama's side. But that sense of awe, of epiphany, of jubilation—of having encountered something infinitely great and timeless—this was a feeling that many humans associate with religious experiences, with divine encounters; and a human doesn't need to have been introduced to the concept of a god to have the emotional reaction associated with meeting one.
And Alastor, bleary-eyed and tottering on his feet, momentarily forgot his hunger, shivered in wonder at the godly sight in front of him.
A creature taller than Alastor, one he'd never seen before, like a dog but with spindly nimble legs and branches curling proudly above its head. It raised its head and regarded Alastor with alien calm, regal and at peace, the most sublime entity on the planet. Alastor was so amazed his knees gave out and he plopped onto his butt in the wet dirt.
Once the sublime creature had looked through Alastor's skin, weighed the worth of his heart, and decided that he was deserving of the right to continue existing, it bowed its head down to continue its meal: flesh ripped from the side of a second member of its kind.
Alastor watched in amazed silence as the creature cannibalized its duplicate. After watching the blood dripping from the creature's mouth, it dawned on him that the creature was communicating with him, teaching him how to save himself. He crawled up to the carcass, bent down next to the larger creature, and bit into the torn flesh.
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Everything was hazy and bright in the forest when Alastor was woken by the sound of something crashing through the brush. He heard someone call his name.
He peeled his blood-sticky cheek off the god carcass, sat up, and looked around. It didn't occur to him to respond to his name, so he sat there until two strangers found him leaning against the dead creature.
The first to see him gasped and swore, "Jesus Christ!"
The second one laughed so hard he had to put his hands on his knees to keep himself upright. "G... good lord, boy!" He gestured at Alastor, wheezing. "You hunt that buck down all by yourself?"
Alastor didn't understand the question, so he nodded in agreement.
The second one wheezed, his voice going up higher. "Did you?" he asked. "With your bare hands?"
"Yeah," Alastor said.
"Well, I'll be damned! You're a regular Davy Crockett, aren't you?"
"Come on." The first stranger picked Alastor up, separating him from the carcass. Alastor didn't fight. "Let's get you home. Your papa's been worried sick about you."
Alastor dozed in the stranger's arms as he was carried. At some point, he woke from his doze to find that he was out of the trees and in his father's arms.
He was sick in bed for days.
He dreamed of having horns like branches and eating deer alive.