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1 - 1908
Calixte is a pretty girl, or so Maman says. Alastor himself has no opinion on her prettiness, but he likes her well enough. She’s nicer than most and she sings better than most and she’s smarter than most, which is honestly a relief. Alastor can tolerate a lot, but he does get tired of the way his thoughts and those of the other kids seem so different most of the time.
They play together, he and Calixte, in between school and music lessons and chores and the like. Her home is just a street away, and so whenever she or Alastor are bored, they head over to see what the other is up to. The adults think they’re cute, and they aren’t yet old enough for thoughts of propriety to interfere, so Maman says, and so everyone lets it happen.
Alastor isn’t quite sure what propriety means. He’s curious, he’s always curious, but looking it up in the school’s dictionary doesn’t help. He always tries to be proper and polite, and so does Calixte (mostly), so he doesn’t understand how any such thing will become an issue.
It continues like this for a couple of years, but then Calixte’s father finds a job in Chicago, and with that, she’s moving away.
Alastor doesn’t want her to go, and he knows she doesn’t want to go, and so on her last day, he dutifully brings her some candy that he’s scrimped to purchase in the hopes of making the journey a little sweeter for her.
She blushes at his gift, which is an odd reaction, but what’s odder still is the way she fidgets with the bow in her hair for a moment before leaning in and pressing her lips against his. It’s quick, this unexpected kiss, just there and gone, and then Calixte too is gone, and Alastor is left staring after her, wondering what in the world just happened.
2 - 1927
Claude is a decent horn player and decent company on long, somewhat drunken walks home from the speakeasies of the French Quarter and Tremé up Esplanade and then along the bayou. They’ve walked this way plenty of times, enjoying the camaraderie and increased safety inherent in having an escort through neighbourhoods sometimes a little too occupied by bored, also-drunk white men and other neighbourhoods occupied by desperate men of any race.
All that changes when Claude suddenly pulls Alastor behind a tree, pressing him up against the wide trunk of it and kissing him.
Alastor is stunned for a long moment, standing frozen as lips he’d just seen coax beautiful melodies out of a muted trumpet are now on his while a tongue that has no business being anywhere near him tries to coax his own lips to open.
He recovers quickly, shoving Claude away from him. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’ve noticed something about you,” Claude says, recovering from his stagger backwards, and smirking like Alastor just needs to be convinced. “You never look at dolls like other men do. You dance with them, but your hands never stray. You smile and flirt with them from the safety of your piano bench, but you never go home with them. And yet here you are with me, spending time with me.”
Alastor shakes his head, staring at Claude in apprehension and not a little horror. It’s not the first time he’s been mistaken for… well, something he’s not. He can’t make himself perform the uncouth leering and ungentlemanly touching that seems to be the norm for virtually every other man once the illicit booze really starts flowing, and so it probably won’t be the last time, either. His notable disinterest in leering at or touching men is no help, since for some stupid reason that Alastor can’t fathom, men with such desires have to hide them, which puts Alastor in the position of being indistinguishable from them.
It’s not even Claude’s mistaken impression of him that has him so angry. He doesn’t want to be kissed, but that’s hardly the main issue. It’s that the idiot has kissed him here. In the open. Where anyone could see them.
While Alastor has no issue with homosexuality himself and frankly couldn’t care less who anyone sleeps with as long as it’s not him, he’s well aware of how those accused of it, guilty or not, are treated. His music gigs would disappear, his dream of his own radio show -- barely a possibility in the first place -- would blow away like magnolia blossoms in the wind. He’d be at risk of beatings wherever he went, not to mention the risk of going to prison.
Prison may indeed be in his cards, but he’ll be damned if he's sent there for something he hasn’t done.
He’s taking too long to respond.
“You want me,” Claude insists. “You want me like I want you.”
Alastor shakes his head again. “You’re a fair musician, you can carry a conversation, and you live close to me, that’s all it is. I wanted nothing more than that from you, and now I want nothing at all from you.”
Claude’s eyes narrow. “You’re rejecting me? After leading me on for months?”
Alastor doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. “By existing near you? By breathing in your direction?”
“Fuck you,” Claude snarls, grabbing the back of Alastor’s suit, dragging him away from the shelter of the tree and toward the bayou proper, swollen with the recent floods. “I won’t have you blabbing this to anyone.”
The thing about floods in Louisiana is they don’t just bring water but also everything that lives in the water. The gators are more plentiful this year; he can see their eyes glittering in the moonlight. The deeper waters have allowed larger ones into the city than they’d typically see.
Like the gators this year, Claude is unfortunately significantly larger than Alastor.
However, Alastor is significantly scrappier. He’s also experienced in overpowering men larger than himself.
He wins that fight, as do the gators.
Mimzy is annoyed that she has to find a new horn player, though she’s never quite sure why.
3 - 1932
The interview is fantastic. Alastor had known the starlet was an excellent singer alongside her growing promise as an actress, but it turns out she can carry out delightfully entertaining and witty repartee as well. It’s exhilarating. Time flies by. If every celebrity Alastor interviews could be as good at it as she is, well, he’d never have to complain about having to share the booth with inane morons again.
The interview had barely been allowed. If it was anything but radio, it most certainly would not have been. However, Alastor’s popularity and growing fame, the amount of money he brings in for his employers, and the fact that much of his audience regularly forgets they’re listening to a mixed race man all leads to the exception being made. As does the starlet having specifically asked for him and accepting no one else. She’d heard Alastor’s show, she’d liked Alastor’s show, she wanted to be on Alastor’s show and, because she’s from England where skin tone is most certainly still an issue but the laws and social customs are vastly different to those of good ole New Orleans, she hadn’t been best pleased to hear she wouldn’t be allowed to be on Alastor’s show. And so she’d pressed and pressed and pressed until she had been.
The audience, of course, is assured that everyone is kept at a ‘proper’ distance apart, although a proper distance in this case is the addition of a bit of plywood ensuring their knees can’t touch as they lean into their mics. She laughs about the idiocy of it with him during the commercial break.
And afterward, when the sound technicians are busy with wires and the producers are busy discussing follow-up with her agent and no one at all is looking, she leans over and presses a furtive kiss to his cheek.
“I’d like to invite you out for a drink and whatever might follow,” she says under her breath, her smile coy and not a little sad. “But I know that’s far too dangerous for you.”
Alastor doesn’t know what to say. He’d never have accepted, even if it wasn’t a delusional, dangerous pipe dream. He’s still not interested in that sort of thing. But it flatters him nonetheless.
He’s somehow both surprised and not that it takes 35 years and both of their deaths before such a thing even becomes legal, never mind safe.
4 - 1971
Alastor is drunk.
Vincent is also drunk.
This has never previously been a problem. Alastor can handle his drink, and he can handle Vincent, and Vincent tends to fall asleep before doing anything truly stupid most of the time.
But Alastor has one drink too many and Vincent has one drink too few and then there’s an awkward confession, a slow motion lean in, and a kiss that Alastor doesn’t think fast enough to avoid and most certainly doesn’t reciprocate.
Luckily, Vincent does follow through on the falling asleep thing directly afterwards, and Alastor lies awake for a long time and then pretends not to remember anything in the morning. It’s not hard, his hangover certainly lends plausible deniability to the situation. Vincent seems embarrassed and never mentions it again.
It’s another five months before their relationship, if one could ever call it a relationship, completely blows up, with Alastor having lit the wick that leads to the gunpowder underlying the lack of compatibility only he seems to recognize. But it’s the kiss that places the charge.
5 - 2024
Alastor is on his way back from Cannibal Town, having just passed the turn from the city centre to the hotel, when he’s set upon by Angel Dust, who is breathless, disheveled, and highly agitated.
“Smiles!” Angel greets. “Thank fuck!”
“Hello,” Alastor responds, unsure why Angel suddenly seems so pleased to see him rather than his usual stance of brassy and boorish ambivalence
“Can you go along with this for like two minutes?” Angel asks, stepping farther into Alastor’s quite well defined personal space than he ever remembers him trying before. “And maybe not kill me after?”
“What?” is all Alastor has time to ask before Angel’s top set of hands are buried in his hair, his bottom set are tugging at his waist, and his lips are on Alastor’s, hot and wet and disturbing.
Alastor feels his feedback screech as Angel murmurs “Sorry, sorry. Please!” into the kiss and then whatever (violent) response Alastor is working up to is derailed as five armed demons barrel around the corner.
“There he is!” one of them yells, as Angel thankfully detaches himself from Alastor’s face. “Who’s he with?”
“I told you boys I already had plans for the night,” Angel drawls, turning so that only two of his hands remain on Alastor, one still circling his waist and the other cupping the back of his neck. Both are shaking, Alastor notes. “I can’t go cancelling on such a powerful date, can I?”
Ah, Alastor’s the date. Grand.
He’s beginning to understand what’s happening here.
He doesn’t like it.
“Is that the Radio Demon?” A second demon asks. Judging by the quaver in his voice, he may be the most intelligent of the bunch.
“That I am!” Alastor responds brightly. “Salutations! To what do I owe the pleasure of interrupting my—“ and here he manages an appropriately lascivious leer at Angel Dust, if he does say so himself. “—fun?”
The way Angel swallows loudly is highly entertaining.
“We saw him first, old timer,” says a third demon, one Alastor recognizes as a minor wannabe Overlord, which perhaps explains why Angel was running rather than just shooting them all for their incivility. If all of these are up and coming near-Overlords, then they do rather outmatch Angel in terms of power. “If you back off now, we might leave him for you when we’re done.”
Ah, delightful.
“Darling,” Alastor says, letting his smile broaden as he straightens one cuff, then the other. “I thought I told you not to bother buying me dinner first?”
And Angel laughs, half in humour, half in relief, Alastor thinks as he lets his bones start to lengthen and his antlers out to play. “What can I say, Smiles. I like ta be a gentleman.”
The second demon does run first, proving he is indeed the smartest.
He’s also the tastiest.
+1 - 2026
It’s not a particularly different situation to those Alastor has been in before.
It’s late and too many drinks have been consumed and the room is too warm and the jazz is too smooth and the settee is too soft. Alastor is pleasantly buzzed, leaning on a shoulder that he’s turned into a pillow and watching the green flames leap and crackle in his fireplace. The crickets are chirping in the bayou behind them and the glow of his conjured fireflies reflect in the mirror on the mantle.
Everything about this is different, it turns out, due entirely to the being who owns the shoulder he’s leaning on.
He’s not sure when things changed, why this warmth in his chest won’t dissipate and why he doesn’t even want it to. He’s going soft, he thinks. He should be more worried about that than he is.
“Hey,” Lucifer says from somewhere above him, and ha, isn’t that an odd concept. Lucifer above him.
Alastor tilts his head and blinks blearily up at Lucifer, who in turn is blinking a bit blearily down at him. “Hey.”
“Can I kiss you?” Lucifer asks.
Alastor thinks about this for a moment. It’s not really something he does, not willingly, not knowingly, not by choice. But the fire and the liquor and the warmth in his chest are all conspiring to make him languid and why not, he thinks, for possibly the first time in his life.
The kiss is lovely, a chaste press of lips somehow even warmer than his own. He enjoys it, even murmuring a bit in disappointment when it ends. He blinks his eyes back open to find Lucifer still gazing down at him.
“I’d like to try that again in the morning,” Lucifer says, his finger running pleasantly along Alastor’s jawline. “If you’re still willing when that whiskey of yours is no longer affecting either of us.”
And Alastor nods because that seems wise. Then he tucks his face into the crook of Lucifer’s neck and lets himself contentedly drift off towards morning.
***
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