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“Alastor!”
Alastor’s shadow startled as the door to his sitting room was flung open and Charlie stormed inside. Alastor himself remained sat at his writing desk, hunched over yet another ruined piece of parchment, his fountain pen clutched in one fist, a handful of his hair in the other. He responded with a vague grunt, eyes remaining zeroed in on the blob of ink smudged across the paper where he’d accidentally dragged his wrist across it, obscuring the word beneath.
This was particularly unnerving, as he did not do many things by accident. What was more disturbing was what the word spelt out.
“Alastor!” Charlie huffed again, her breath wheezing in and out of her as she stumbled over to his side. Only when her hand clapped down on his shoulder did he look up into her frazzled face. She practically stuffed a fistful of crumpled paper down his throat as she said, “We have a problem.”
Internally sputtering, Alastor grabbed the papers from Charlie to examine. She left him at his desk to pace around the room, raking her fingers through her hair and tugging it loose from her ponytail. As Alastor looked over the papers in his hands, he realised just how true Charlie’s words were.
He was looking down at sheet after sheet of failed drafts he’d been scrawling out all night, each one more unintelligible than the last. They all began the same: My dearest Lucifer, then descended into madness from there. His flowery prose quickly devolved into misspellings and words crossed out with harsh black lines, until they were nothing but drawings of frantic smiley faces by the time the bottom of the page was present. There truly was a problem if Charlie had just stumbled across these.
“Charlie,” he began in a casual tone, at odds with the screeching inside his skull. “Aha. Where did you find these?”
Charlie paused her incessant pacing to whirl on him with a wide-eyed look. “I saw Niffty taking a whole bag of them out to the garbage earlier. One fell out and when I saw what was on it, I didn’t know what to think. Then I saw there were more and I-“
“What do you think now?” Alastor interrupted, causing Charlie to clamp her mouth shut.
She stared at him quizzically, oblivious to the fact that Alastor was hanging off of her every word. It was ridiculous to even think he needed Charlie’s input on this, but then again, it was pertaining to her father, so maybe her opinion was rather vital in that regard.
“Why aren’t you freaking out right now?” Charlie asked instead of answering his question. She stalked across the room to tap at the corner of one of the abandoned letters in his hand. “Didn’t you read them? What can be read, anyway. They’re all love letters! To my dad. Shouldn’t you be concerned that he has some kind of secret admirer? And one that apparently can get letters inside the hotel?”
Alastor frowned as Charlie went back to fretting, the first worm of irritation burrowing its way through the cloud of confusion and befuddlement that had been plaguing him for some time now. He continued to drum his claws along the desktop, leaving sharp little indents in his paper as Charlie squeezed his shoulder even tighter.
“You’re really not reacting as strongly as I think you should,” she said crossly. “What’re you even doing right now?”
Without waiting for an answer, Charlie swiped up one of the half-formed letters from beneath Alastor’s elbow, bringing it up to her nose to squint at in the dim candle light. He watched her frown quickly smooth out, replaced by a gawking look, her eyes shaping into two perfect circles.
It was with some level of offence that Alastor cleared his throat and said, “I wrote those letters. Or was attempting to, at least.”
Charlie blinked at him. Alastor stared back, crossing his arms in a huff. Really, was it so hard to believe that he was capable of a little written affection?
“I don’t believe it,” Charlie said in awe. “Why?”
Alastor struggled to keep from bursting right out of his skin in an explosion of shadows. It really was starting to feel rather hot, what with the hellfire flickering in the fireplace and Charlie’s scrutinising stare on him. He itched to tug at his collar to relieve some of the uncomfortable warmth building up beneath his clothes, but refrained, keeping the appearance of cool nonchalance as he shrugged.
“I simply needed to get some thoughts in order and the written word has been known to offer some assistance in that area-“
This time it was Charlie’s turn to cut him off with a light scoff. She shook her head, blonde hairs flying in every direction, then stared back down at the papers in her hands. “You mean you really wrote: My dearest Lucifer. I have so treasured our time together these past few years. It has made me look to the future for the first time since I awoke in this realm-“
“You really don’t need to read it aloud,” Alastor snapped, rising from his chair to snatch the page from Charlie’s fingers. His face was a blazing inferno as Charlie continued to stare at her empty hands. It was one thing to write such intimate expressions when he assumed Lucifer would be the only one reading them, but Charlie?
Eck. He should’ve tossed those scrapped letters into the fire where they belonged.
“Alastor,” Charlie said in an entirely different tone than the frantic one she’d had just a few short minutes ago. He resolutely avoided looking into her big eyes, sparkling with earnestness, instead scrunching the letter up into a ball and shoving it into his pocket. “That’s so sweet! I didn’t know you were such a romantic.”
Alastor’s lip peeled back from his teeth of its own accord. He could sense his shadow was beginning to stretch across the wall, rumbling feedback filtering through his head as it regarded Charlie with growing disdain. Best to wrap up this whole unfortunate interaction as quickly as possible.
“Yes, well,” he began flippantly, taking Charlie by the arm and dragging her towards the door, “it is approaching the third year of your father an I’s union, so I thought a little note would appease him instead of some uninspired box of chocolates or dying flowers. All he needs to know is that we ought to continue as we have been for the rest of time.”
Alastor smiled to himself as they arrived at the door. A perfectly reasonable and sensible explanation for his actions.
So, why then was Charlie staring at him like he’d just revealed some grand secret to life itself?
“ALASTOR!” she burst out loud enough to make his ears rattle. She seized him by the shoulders, shaking him wildly and decidedly not helping his baffled condition. “Holy shit! Do you even know what you’re saying? It sounds like you- Like you wanna propose!”
Only once she released him was Alastor able to blink his vision back into focus. His brain, however, was another matter entirely. He squinted at Charlie, who was bouncing on the spot, her hands balled up into twin fists beneath her chin, her grin threatening to split her face in two.
“Propose?” Alastor echoed, the words not quite computing yet in his scrambled mind. “As in…to be wed?”
“Yes! Exactly like that!” Charlie squealed.
She threw her arms around him, squeezing him tight and lifting him clean off the ground. His feet kicked weakly at the air as Charlie hugged him hard enough to bruise his ribs. Alastor could do nothing but wheeze out a choked sound. Charlie set him back on his feet and he dragged in a desperate lungful of air the moment his chest was no longer being compressed to pancake levels of thinness.
“Let’s not go quite that far,” Alastor said around a feeble cough as he fought to straighten himself up. “I have no intention of proposing such a thing.”
Damn it. There was that word again. Now that Charlie had said it, he couldn’t shake it from his head.
“Why not?” Charlie instantly fired back. “It’s just like you said, you and my dad have been together for years now. You want to spend the rest of your life with him. You’re basically already married, so what’s the issue?”
Alastor raised a finger and opened his mouth to reply before he realised he didn’t have a rebuttal and quickly zipped his mouth shut. Drat. Why did Charlie have to make so much sense?
Still, he shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “No. No. It’s preposterous to suggest such a thing. We haven’t even discussed the subject before.”
This wasn’t entirely true. Lucifer would often joke about Alastor being his ‘hubby’ and how he ‘really should’ve put a ring on that by now’, but Alastor had always laughed these comments off as the jests they were. But now, with Charlie’s elated face and his own pile of aborted emotional gestures forming a mountain under his writing desk, he began to wonder. Would it be so bad if Lucifer were serious? Would he object to Alastor being the one to bring such a subject to the table?
“Then now’s the perfect time!” Charlie exclaimed, grabbing Alastor’s hands. There was such open adoration in her face as she gazed up at him, a sheen of wetness over her eyes the telltale sign that she was on the verge of bursting into tears. “You know he would say yes. He thinks the world of you, Alastor. You two are so good-“
The door suddenly blew open at their sides, hard enough to slap against the wall with a crack.
Speak of the devil.
Alastor instantly froze as Lucifer stood there, a plate piled high with sweet-smelling pancakes balanced on his palm.
“There you two are!” he bellowed. “Didn’t you hear me calling that lunch is ready?”
He was smiling wide, practically radiating good humour with his ducky apron on and a line of flour smeared across his cheek. His grin dimmed some though as he took in Alastor and Charlie remaining rooted to the spot, staring at him like a couple of miscellaneous animals in the headlights.
Charlie swooped in before the moment could stretch into suspicious territory. “Sorry, Dad!” she said with a put-upon laugh, releasing Alastor’s hands to grab her father’s shoulders instead, steering him back around and away from the door. “We were just busy talking.”
“Oh, yeah?” Lucifer asked, his eyebrows rising with interest. He flicked his gaze back and forth between Charlie and Alastor. “About what?”
Charlie’s expression instantly grew stricken, and Alastor saw his signal to take his turn to swoop in.
“Oh, nothing important,” he said smoothly, joining the two royals in the hall. With a snap of his fingers, his door slipped shut behind them with a click, hiding his shameful pile of letters from view. He really would have to burn them later. “What’s this about lunch?”
Lucifer squinted at him, his golden eyes narrowing to slits. Alastor smiled placidly back. Even threw in a few bats of his eyelashes. Lucifer hummed dubiously before turning back around, allowing Charlie to lead them down the hall.
Internally, Alastor let out a small sigh of relief. He knew Lucifer wouldn’t quite let that one go, but for now he was safe. His mind, however, was another matter entirely.
As he paced down the hall, half listening to Charlie and Lucifer’s idle chatter, he couldn’t stop replaying his and Charlie’s conversation. Proposing. Marriage. It was all so ludicrous. And yet…
He folded his arms behind his back, turning the possibilities over in his head like a particularly troublesome puzzle box, one step behind his beloved. It did make sense. That, if nothing else, he couldn’t argue with.