Work Text:
The screen’s pallid light bleeds into the dark apartment. He taps the trackpad once; the page loads, and the result appears in clinical blue text. No fanfare follows. He exhales through his nose, the sound brief and unimpressed.
Near-perfect marks. Of course—it was always a forgone conclusion. He'd studied too diligently for that exam, incentivized by… by something.
Predictability doesn’t dull the satisfaction of success, but something else does, quieter and elusive. He stares longer than necessary, as though the pixels might reconfigure themselves and contradict him. Not out of fear, but from wanting something—anything—that doesn’t feel so profoundly boring.
He closes the laptop. The refrigerator hums, the pipes complain, and above him, rain begins whispering against the roof at an arrhythmic pattern.
Alastor sits very still, fingers steepled, waiting for the appropriate swell of pride to arrive. It doesn’t. Not really. Acknowledgment, yes—a sense of correctness, as though the universe had finally filed the right paperwork—but no triumph. And then the stray thought lands.
I wonder what she would say.
His shoulders loosen by instinct. Charlie. The name alone rearranges his breathing. He imagines her eyes widening first, surprise blooming into that unstudied, radiant smile she never guards. No envy. No agenda. Just approval.
A warmth catches low beneath his ribs, immediate and irritatingly pleasant. The body’s cheap chemical trick. He almost laughs at himself for indulging it. Still, the image persists: her voice bright with sincerity, telling him she’s proud.
He rubs the back of his neck, forcing the thought away. He’s not a man who needs witnesses. Or he shouldn’t be, but the silence disagrees.
He doesn’t call Rosie. Doesn’t tell anyone. Instead, he shrugs into his coat, walks two blocks through the drizzle, and buys a single bottle of wine—something decent, overpriced, chosen more for ceremony than taste.
Back home, he pours one glass. The wine glows dark and heavy; but he doesn’t drink it, only sets it on the table beside the closed laptop and waits.
Rain grows steadier, slides down the window in long endless streams. He watches the movement without really seeing it.
He looks at the untouched glass and feels a small, absurd desire for sunlight in the shape of a girl’s smile.
His phone buzzes on the table, cutting through the drone of the refrigerator. He almost allows it to ring out until he sees her name.
Rosie.
He exhales, runs his hand through his hair, and answers.
“Counselor,” she purrs. No other greeting, just the single word, thick with satisfaction.
“Premature,” he says.
“Oh, don’t be modest! My favorite monster made it through the maze! I’d congratulate you in person, but the ol’ ball and chain insisted on going to some nonsense charity—a real drag, I tell you.” Her laughter is loud through the receiver. “Though I suspect you’re content to celebrate in that illusion of solitude of yours.”
“You suspect correctly,” he replies. “Illusions are all that keep me civil.”
“Mmm. I’ll have a few cases ready for you soon, then. Let’s channel that civility before it curdles.” Cutting to the chase. Good.
“I look forward to it.”
“So,” Rosie continues, “what will you do now that you’re respectable? Hang up your evening hobbies? Stop making messes in alleys?”
“Perhaps.” Alastor’s smile bleeds into his tone. “The messes can be made legally now.”
“Oh, you wicked thing. Indulge a vice tonight. You’ve earned it, I insist.”
“Only one? How unambitious of you.”
“Ha! Surprise me then. Anything that’ll pull you out of that silly melancholy. You should be happy!”
“…I am a bit excited, I suppose.” He studies the condensation trailing down his untouched glass of wine. “The law, as it stands, could use a sharper set of teeth.”
A pause. Then Rosie’s voice, all honeyed finality: “Maybe you’ll finally learn that justice tastes better when it’s legal. Congrats again, kiddo. I knew you could do it.”
The line crackles. Alastor sets the phone down. The apartment feels too still. On the table, the wine still sits half full and untouched. Justice tastes better when it’s legal. He rolls the phrase in his head. He turns the glass once by its stem, watching the dark liquid spiral lazily.
Justice, he thinks, tastes better when it bleeds.
He cleans without thinking. The order of operations never changes. Counters first—wipe, rinse, wipe again with a cloth folded into perfect quarters. Then the desk; papers put away, surface cleaned. Next, the mirror, lined with a faint sheet of dust he knows exists even if he cannot see it. Then, the floor.
His mother’s table catches his reflection as he straightens. Oak worn by years of elbows and plates takes him back. The ring from her chipped mug is still darkened beneath the finish. He rests his hand on it, thumb tracing the old stain.
Helplessness returns in a metallic wash, sharp at the back of his tongue. How the law had failed her. How he had. All that knowledge gathered too late to matter. He studies the gleam of the surface, but nothing looks back.
He drifts to his desk. From the side drawer, he pulls a case file Rosie had slipped to him recently “for education.” A woman murdered by her husband, the husband acquitted on a procedural error—evidence barred, witnesses discredited, blood scrubbed clean by legalese. He turns the pages, looks through testimony, photographs. Imagines himself at the prosecution’s table. How easily he could have undone the man. How he could have cut through the theater, pressed in until truth bled out of him.
Rosie gave him others like this over the years. Men who smiled their way out of courtrooms, whose guilt was reconstructed into innocence via loopholes. He remembers their faces. Their grins.
Their addresses.
How simple it had been to follow them home and correct the record in red. The world insists on rot, and he is quite the germophobe. Is it so wrong that he might take joy in a bit of cleaning?
Then—unwelcome—another image intrudes: Charlie’s face if she were to find out. That small, exasperated frown. Disappointment. Fear—?
She won’t find out.
He exhales and closes the file. Hands fold together, one clamping over the other as if to physically restrain. How would some girl he’d run into at the bus a handful of times find out? She would discover nothing unless it were by his orchestration—or unless he slipped so terribly, he became front page news. Why does he care?
Despite his self-assurances, he feels a need to clarify.
“The law,” he mutters out loud to the room, as though she were there listening. “The law will do.”
He doesn’t know why he says it; he only knows he doesn’t believe it.
Perhaps a walk, he thinks. Just to exhaust the mind. He returns the case file to its drawer, spots his pack of cigarettes. That might help too.
Alastor leaves without an umbrella. The city glows in the gray, streetlamps casting halos that shimmer across the wet pavement, each ring fractured by falling water. He walks without direction, following the sound of his own shoes against the asphalt.
A neon OPEN sign flickers from a half-shuttered diner, its letters bleeding pink onto the slick sidewalk. From its cracked door, he hears some classic rock ballad from an old jukebox; the din of conversations—contented, careless.
He imagines stepping inside. Sitting at a corner table, pretending to belong to that easy warmth and normalcy. He imagines her entering to find him there, shoulders drawn tight against the chill, moving with that natural grace she doesn’t know she has.
I passed the bar, he would say. In his mind, she stops mid-step, surprise followed by cheer.
I knew you could do it. It would sound better from her lips.
He lets the fantasy linger a few seconds too long, then exhales, watching it dissolve into mist. Her life moves forward; his runs in circles. The boundary that once connected them has already been created and crossed, but he’d forced them to converge again artificially—but to what end? For what purpose?
He passes the diner window and sees himself reflected over the laughing silhouettes inside. For a moment, he exists in both worlds as a ghost and an observer. Listless. The cigarettes are burning a hole in his coat pocket, but he has no desire to partake.
Instead, he watches the living pass him by. It fascinates him—the way they gesture mid-conversation, their easy smiles, the lingering touches. Things he’d never really paid attention to before.
A bus exhales at the curb behind him, its hydraulic doors opening with a weary sigh. He turns, hesitates, then boards with no destination in mind.
Alastor takes a seat halfway down the aisle. The engine hums beneath him, steady and low. Sparse passengers—an old woman asleep against the window, two men murmuring near the front.
A brief opening in the clouds allows the light of the setting sun to spread into the dim. Water crawls down the glass in thin gold veins, streaking like falling stars. For once, the world feels distant—quiet enough to think.
“Excuse me! Mind if I sit here?”
He looks up at the sound of an angel’s voice. Charlie—damp hair tucked behind her ears, cheeks flushed pink, a tote clutched against her chest.
Her jacket’s too thin for the weather. Of course it is, she never plans for storms. He blinks once, twice, and color floods back into the world.
“Not at all,” he says, half-standing to make room. She smiles, that same open, guileless expression that’s haunted him for weeks, and sits.
For a while, only minor exchanges—
“How have you been?”
“Keeping busy.”
“Still working?”
“Waiting on a few things.”
Then he hears himself speak before sense can stop him: “I passed the bar.”
Shock flickers across her face, quick as lightning, then dissolves into something bright and whole. “You did? That’s incredible! I knew you would, Alastor!”
Her hand touches his arm—unthinking, devastating. Warmth travels through the wool of his sleeve like current, reaching places untouched by breath or blood. “Oh, you’re going to be a menace in court! In a good way, I mean—” Her laughter follows, genuine and delighted. She means every word. Completely.
Her joy feels too large for so small a triumph, spilling through him like light through an open door. He hadn’t realized how starved he’d been for it.
They banter on; he doesn’t know if it lasts five minutes or twenty. She tells him about some victory she’s secured over a snobbish salesperson, asks him when he’s going to ‘start lawyering.’ He tells her there are still a few classes he plans to take before starting his practice. She waves it away and tells him not to forget her when he becomes a hotshot attorney. As if he could.
Before he knows it, the bus slows and they reach her stop.
Charlie rises, gathering her bag, and he stands automatically, etiquette surviving where reason doesn't. She pauses in the aisle, one hand on the rail, looking at him with that sincere, unguarded smile.
“You should be proud of yourself, you know?”
Only because you are. The words nearly break free. But pride and vulnerability are old enemies, and he cannot betray either. Instead, he inclines his head, a ghost of amusement touching his mouth. “I’ll try.”
She wavers, blushing—on the verge of saying something, but shakes her head and smiles once more.
“Til next time.”
The doors hiss shut. The bus lurches forward.
He turns to the window, leans his temple against the cold glass, heartbeat quick and ridiculous, smile unstoppable.
For the first time, he feels—
He presses a palm to his sternum as though he can pin it down. His pulse refuses to still, and the warmth that spreads through him is terrifying, rises beneath his ribs like a tide of color.
Alastor breathes deeply and reconsiders the events of today with the golden lens she had unknowingly supplied him with. Passing the bar exam. His mother. Those strangers at the diner. His conversation with Rosie. His future as a prosecutor.
Maybe justice doesn’t need teeth after all.
Outside, the rain falls harder, cleansing and endless. The bus rumbles on through, carrying him nowhere in particular.
Not if it has her voice.