Work Text:
Alastor is irredeemable.
He always has been.
Alastor is irredeemable.
Other boys at school tease him for being different.
Alastor usually just pushes them away.
One day, one of them pushes him into the ground. He scrapes his hands and falls on his knees.
The boy starts to kick him.
Alastor leaves him bloody. Red red red on his face. The boy screams and screams and screams, like he didn’t hurt Alastor first.
The school calls Alastor’s mama. They have a talk in the principal’s office while Alastor waits just outside the door.
“Irredeemable,” Alastor hears through the door.
Alastor doesn’t know that word. He makes a note of it, and looks it up the next day in the dictionary.
He reads past a few definitions that have to do with money, wondering if that was what the principal was talking about, but then he reads it:
"being beyond remedy : hopeless
irredeemable mistakes"
That makes sense. Irredeemable.
Alastor closes the dictionary and kills some ants at recess, pressing a stick into one and watching it thrash half-squashed until he kills it and does it again and again until the feeling inside him like hot water bubbling on the stove goes away.
He doesn’t really understand why he does it while he’s doing it, and he doesn’t really understand afterward either. Maybe it has to do with being irredeemable.
The other boys leave him alone now.
If that’s what being irredeemable means, Alastor is OK with that.
Alastor’s dad is yelling the way he knows means he’s in for a beating soon.
“Useless, good for nothing, IRREDEEMABLE…” Alastor hopes he will hit him soon and get it over with so he can go be by himself in his room.
When his father does, there is the relief that it’s starting, so it can be over soon, hopefully.
Irredeemable. Irredeemable. Irredeemable. What does he have to be redeemed for anyway? Who said there was something wrong with him?
His daddy. His teachers. The other kids at school. Everyone. Even his mama thinks something is different about him.
As he grows up, he thinks the way he kills small animals after his dad does something like that probably is part of that. It’s probably all part of being irredeemable.
Irredeemable.
Alastor’s dad calls him a lot of things as he grows up, but irredeemable feels different. Maybe if he was just broken, or lazy, or stupid, or selfish, he could fix it; if it were just that he’s queer he’d know what it is.
(Something is wrong with him there too-- he doesn’t like boys, but he doesn’t like girls the way he’s supposed to either. At school they whisper that something is wrong with him; at home his father openly says it. Even his mom says he will meet a nice girl, if he can be good. His dad says that of course someone like him can’t love anybody. Wrong wrong wrong. Probably part of being irredeemable.)
Irredeemable-- by definition, he cannot fix it, because he is unfixable.
Alastor thinks maybe his dad just regrets having him, and that’s not his fault.
When Alastor kills him, he wonders if that’s irredeemable too. Even though he hurt his mom, not just him. Alastor is irredeemable; it must be. But he and his mom are safe now.
Alastor is killing another man now.
He has killed a lot of men.
They all did things like his father did. Worse, some of them.
Is what Alastor is doing still irredeemable, then? If what they did was irredeemable?
It’s OK. Alastor is irredeemable anyway. He can do this for other people who aren’t. They don’t have to be irredeemable too.
Alastor likes being irredeemable, if it means he gets to see the moment when someone irredeemable in a way Alastor isn’t dies.
Charlie is prattling on and on about redemption.
“I believe everyone is capable of redemption!” she says brightly to her audience in the lobby consisting of himself; Husker; and that resident she’s rustled up, Angel Dust; and of course her ever-present girlfriend, Vaggie. Niffty is probably scurrying about cleaning somewhere out of view.
Vaggie gives Alastor quite a lot of side-eye considering she only has the one.
“Well, almost everyone,” Charlie amends with a look to him. There it is. “You have to want to…” she starts up again, but Alastor has already tuned out.
He’s in Hell. Is he not finally allowed to be irredeemable?
Alastor is where he belongs, because Alastor is irredeemable.
He always has been, anyway.
He might as well play the part.