#I've always loved how indigo plays with spacing in her songs

[shinynewboots]

Sweet Nothings: An Alastor Story (18+)

Summary: Alastor loved his wife. His beautiful, angelic wife with the perfectly imperfect chip in her front tooth. His poor wife, who whispered sweet nothings into his ear as he killed a man.

Warnings: DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT: Angst, assault, implied sexual assault, murder, blood, gore, mutilation, death, corpses, hallucinations, decomposition, Alastor before Hell

AN: Definitely one of the darkest things I've ever written. I hope you all enjoy it!

AO3

Alastor entered the house, discarding his shoes as he always did lest his wife playfully scold him about the dirt and mud he was liable to track into the foyer. She was right, of course, as Louisiana found itself stuck into the crevices and empty spaces of his shoes, skin, and soul. His mother used to scold him for the same thing (never his father however, and so she spent most of her days sweeping the house free of the bayou rather than face his wrath). 

He dutifully went to the kitchen and began to prepare them a pot of coffee to wind down and discuss their days over. The kitchen was tidy, as his wife preferred it that way. 

“What if we have guests, Alastor? I can’t have them thinkin’ we’re livin’ in a pig stye.” She replied whenever he felt she was working too hard on the housework and expressed as much to her. They never did have guests, but he appreciated the sentiment 

He grabbed the two mugs of coffee, his black and hers a creamy tan color (5 sugars and 2 dashes of cream). She preferred the sweeter things in life. He had no idea why she had chosen to marry him, as his soul was as bitter as the black liquid he held. 

“Here you are, darlin’,” He said, dropping the ‘g’ like a sticky southern night as he set the coffee beside her chair. She sat quietly, watching the fireplace. The radio that sat on the side table played gentle static. 

“How was your day, cher ?” He asked, dropping in the chair beside her and facing the fireplace. He looked over at her and took in the delicate softness of her face, the gentle lines that crinkled when she smiled at him. Her wispy blonde hair glowed against the fire and it took everything in him not to brush it behind her ear just as an excuse to touch her. 

She didn’t answer him. She rarely did when they were alone anymore. Not that this bothered Alastor, he could talk enough to appease the both of them. She preferred it that way anyway, listening to him talk. She was always more reserved, a bit of a wallflower. 

“Well, the show went well, darlin’, as always. Though I know you listened to it. I did play a new song by that Ellington fellow.” Alastor said, taking a sip of the bitter liquid. “ Mood Indigo. A tad somber, but I found I quite liked the mystery of it.”

She didn’t respond, but he could tell by her expression towards the fireplace that she agreed with his assessment. 

“I did also run into Mimzy, oh don’t give me that look,” He jested as he thought he saw her expression drop. “You know she adores you. She asked why she hadn’t seen us at the club in a while.”

Another sip. “Oh course, I gave her your condolences and alluded to your health. I hope you don’t mind darlin’.”

Of course, she didn’t mind. She would be up in arms if she had. 

Alastor smiled at her, a bright brilliant smile, more genuine than the one he wore around town. He reached across the table and grabbed her hand, his large hand completely covering her small, bony one. 

“I do so enjoy our evenings together, darlin’.”

His enchanting wife had been eager to accompany him on his unsavory nighttime activities. She always had an eye for finding his newest victim. Her preferred targets of choice were men who harassed women on the street. Men who got a little too handsy with a young lady who was too far deep into the giggle water. Men who found pleasure and little shame in antagonizing the women of New Orleans. 

Alastor found he agreed with his wife’s choices. Even if she hadn’t egged him on, he would have come to the same conclusion of victim himself. He could still remember the day he had saved her from being a victim of an unsavory character himself. 

He had heard her call out from a New Orleans sidestreet and by the grace of some divine being, he had managed to find her with a man’s hand around her throat and his hands under her dress so far that he could see her cotton slip. She had screamed and struggled against the assailant, her cherubic face contorted into terror. 

The noises, the high-pitched scream she made as the man attempted to violate her in the most unimaginable way would visit Alastor in his sleep. It was the worst noise he had ever heard in his life and they haunted him. The fact that he was almost too late to save his beautiful mourning dove haunted him (in an even worse way than the way his mother enduring his father’s abuse stuck with him deep in his bones).

She had been radio silent since the assault, except when she went with him on the prowl for their latest victim. Alastor relished these moments when his angel of a wife would whisper her sweet nothings in his ear, goading him into murdering these dregs of society. 

“Slit his throat, my love,” She whispered, her breath sweet like muscadine wine as she stared at Alastor with the reverence reserved for a saint. “I want to watch’m bleed.”

And what could Alastor do but oblige when his wife asked him so sweetly, her doe brown eyes afire with blood lust. 

“Please,” The pathetic man begged in front of him. Alastor stared down at him, his smile wide and maniacal. How he loved when they begged for their worthless lives. She never said as much, but he knew his wife loved it as well. “Please don’t kill me.”

The man in front of him had followed a girl, no older than 17, as she walked down the street in the moonlight, out of the safety of the street lights. The man had approached her, leering at her as he pulled the girl closer to him, his hand cupping her breast as she cried fat tears and let out panted breaths.

“A perfect victim,” His wife had said as she pointed out the man. And that was all it took. 

“You’ll have to beg better than that,” Alastor laughed, his knife teasing at the man’s throat. Alastor had already cut at the man’s thighs, striking him down to save the poor girl. Blood seeped through the man’s trousers, and he could swear he could smell piss as well. 

“Please, please sir, let me go,” The man cried. 

“Alastor, please,” His wife asked. And like a good husband, he did as he was told, and slid the knife across the man’s throat. Blood poured from the man’s neck as he let out a distraught scream and tried to fight against Alastor who moved to stand before him like the devil himself. 

The man struggled, crawling towards Alastor while he held at his slit throat. His efforts were in vain as she crumpled to the ground, his eyes turning glassy as he stared into the New Orleans night sky. 

“Stand back darlin’, wouldn’t want to dirty that pretty white dress,” Alastor said, moving towards the man to gather the body and take him to their dumping grounds. His wife smiled sweetly and moved so that the blood pooling in the alley wouldn’t dirty her. 

Alastor’s brown suit was utterly stained, but his wife had been good about teaching him how to get out the best of stains. She would accompany him on his kills but never clean his clothes of their evidence.

“Your mess,” She would say with a teasing shrug. 

Alastor gathered the body as his wife stood in the shadows and the two made their descent into the bayou to gut and dispose of their latest victim. 

Like the skilled precision of an untrained surgeon, Alastor would lay the victim in the mud of the bayou and begin extracting the organs. He had always been fascinated by anatomy as a child, and perhaps if his family had enough money he would have gone on and become a surgeon. But as it were, he was a radio host and so he would have to make do with the diagrams he learned from in the anatomy books. 

“And what’s that, my love,” His wife would ask, bending down while he worked. The victim’s abdomen had flayed open (with the use of a midline vertical incision from the xiphoid process to the pubic bone). Alastor had gone to work, taking stock of the organs at his disposal. He had learned that he typically had about 2 hours before the body began to stiffen, so he would make work as quickly as he could. 

“That, mon cher, is the liver,” He said, pulling the large organ from the abdominal cavity. “It’s the largest solid organ in the body.”

“Well now, you’re just showing off.” She said, laughing with her mouth open wide enough so that he could see the small chip in her front tooth that he loved so much. She had always been self-conscious of it, and would rarely smile with her teeth out as a result. But he loved that endearing imperfection that added character to her features.

Blood coated his arms, his legs, and his abdomen as he laughed along with his wife. Blood had spattered on his face, drying with the air and beginning to flake. 

He and his wife would continue their morbid trivia, her asking about a particular body part and he answering until the man had been completely gutted and buried beneath the bayou.  

The truth of the matter was that he did not save his wife that night.

No. 

He had found her body splayed out for all of New Orleans to see in an alley when she had been on her way home from the butcher while buying ingredients for dinner. 

Her doe brown eyes looked up at his with no thought, no emotion. Glassy and dead. Her throat held angry purple bruises as he realized she had been choked to death by an unknown bastard who deserved the eternity of hellfire. 

The beautiful white dress she had worn was filthy with blood and dirt. She would have hated being found in such a state. Embarrassed. Full of shame.

And the blood. The warm, copious amount of blood that had poured down her legs told him everything he needed to know about what had transpired. And so he had gathered his beautiful wife in his arms and cradled her close. 

His heart was broken when his mother died. His heart ceased beating as he held his precious wife. His large tears began to coat her face as he sobbed against her body. Blood coated her mouth, trailing down to her chin and dripping on the beautiful white dress. 

He leaned down and kissed her bloodied masterpiece of a mouth, and felt her taste upon his tongue for the last time. The iron and copper taste filled his senses as he tasted the last evidence he had of her being alive at one point in time. 

The last tears fell from his cheeks before he wiped his eyes and cleaned the blood from her mouth. He shrugged off his overcoat and used it to cover her body, gathering her in his arms to take her home. She would want to be at home.

With her covered and his arms, it was as though she were asleep. 

Of course she was asleep. 

He had carried her in such a way many times when she had fallen asleep in front of her beloved fireplace. This was no different. 

He had gotten her home with none the wiser and ran the tub. He knew she hated being dirty and so he would remedy the situation. 

“My day was rather subpar, darlin’. You know Night & Day by Fred Astaire has been one of the most requested songs even this year, and I must confess I tire of it, my darling.” He said as he scrubbed the blood and dirt from her body. Her head had fallen back against the head of the tub, as though she lay in relaxation while being pampered. 

He took great care to clean under her fingernails, scrubbing until the blood was gone. Bruises dotted the inside of her thigh in the shape of handprints. He chose not to see that. He cleaned the dried blood from her wispy blonde hair, already fretting about the styling that would need to be done once she was out of the tub. 

Perhaps she could fix it later. 

He continued to tell her about his day as she gently cleaned her. The water ran a rusty color and the dirt collected at the bottom. He would have to scrub that out once he was done. She despised a dirty tub. 

He pulled her from the tub and dried her off. Her body was already beginning to stiffen and so he had to work fast. He grabbed one of his favorite dresses of hers from the closet, a beautiful red number that paired beautifully with the rouge and red lipstick she wore. 

He set to work covering her body with her undergarments, the brassiere covering her perfect pale breasts, and the bloomers covering her unmentionables. He had even been proud of his attention to detail as he slid the stocking and garter up her legs. He threw the slip over her before finally finishing the outfit with the red dress and red heels to match. 

He tried his best to apply the rouge and lipstick as he had seen her do a thousand times. He was somewhat proud of himself, though he knew she could fix any imperfections.

He sat her in her chair in front of the fireplace in the family room. She loved to relax in front of the fire when he came home from work and ask him about his day. 

She would be happy there. Content. 

Alastor never did know who had broken and murdered his perfect wife. However, the week after finding his wife, he came across his first victim, a piece of shit man harassing a woman on the street. And his wife had appeared for the first time and begun to whisper her sweet nothings in his ear. 

“Maybe this was him, my love,” She said, her words tickling his soul. 

And he would kill every man in New Orleans if it meant he avenged his beautiful wife.  If it meant he could see her one more time. 

On the night Alastor died, he felt more at peace than he had felt in months. 

He stood in the dark of the bayou, shoveling to make a hole deep enough for his next victim. His beautiful wife stood to the side, watching him with a peaceful smile.  He had killed fourteen men since the death of his wife. 

The news outlets had started catching wind of the disappearances, especially when Alastor became particularly sloppy with one fellow and had buried him too shallow.

The Bayou Butcher, they called him. 

The notion caused his wife to tease him in his hallucinations, and laugh at the moniker. He could only grin at the sound of her laughter. Her voice had started to fade, become distorted like the lost signal on a radio broadcast.

His memory of her voice had begun to fade, and he found himself growing more brutal in his kills just to hear that twinkling sound once more. She always talked to him more the bloodier he got. But the sound of her voice still began to fade. 

He had been rather surprised when he was shot in the head. The gunshot rang out through the trees, quickly followed by the sound of hunting dogs. 

Alastor’s eyes widened as blood began to drip into his eyelashes, distorting his vision. But he could still see her. His beloved wife who had driven him to madness.

“Alastor,” She whispered, her voice fading and her small smile turning into a frown.

“My love,” He tried to say but the words wouldn’t come out. His vision grew black and he could no longer see the ghost of his beautiful wife.

“Goodbye, Alastor.” The wind whispered as he fell into the half-dug grave of his last victim. 

The Bayou Butcher had a total of fifteen victims, according to the newspaper. Once the police had found the identity of the despicable man, they raided the house and found the horrible sight of his last victim, his wife. 

The corpse sat in front of the fireplace, the decomposition of her body pooling around her as she rotted into the chair. Her body was dry, almost mummified as she was positioned in such a way that it looked as though she were simply staring towards the fireplace.

Her eye sockets, the eyes long gone, stared forward as though to gaze at the wedding photo of her and her husband, Alastor.  In the photo, Alastor stood brightly at the camera, his grin wider and more genuine than any could ever remember on the man. And to his right stood his beautiful wife whispering sweet nothings into his ear.