Little Fiery One

Alastor continued to avoid looking at Manea when her tired eyes, bloodshot and bleary from crying all day, turned up to stare hard at him. She didn't stop him from touching their newest family member, so when he felt the soft downy fur of her puppy coat beneath his rough paw pads, some of the tension carried in his shoulders melting away. He missed Manea dismissing Irilyth, the blonde fae slinking back out to give the alpha pair their privacy. Manea admitted that she hadn't named their child yet. For some reason, this surprised Alastor. He assumed she would have just taken care of everything, like she had with their other children, like she did with everything. He heard the rough and broken edges of her voice, thick with emotion, but he couldn't bring himself to feel any sort of sympathy for her in this moment. This had been her doing. Yes, he knew what he'd been signing up for when he agreed to be her mate, but he had also been a vastly different wolf then. More ruthless, less feeling, a carnivore bent on death and destruction and debauchery. Domestic life had tempered that beast, caged the animal inside him that seldom saw the light of day any longer. This, however, had broken that new Alastor, and through the fractures some of the old Alastor began to peer through.

Manea said she couldn't name their daughter without him and he merely scoffed. Of course she could have. What would she have done if he hadn't come back at all? What if one of the many bears or walruses or boars or elk he'd slaughtered out in the wild lands had been his demise? Would she have simply crumbled and collapsed? Manea's posture tensed, and her voice shifted as anger flooded her words, chastising him for daring to accuse her of not caring. His head gave a bit of a nonchalant tilt when she asked if he thought she wanted or enjoyed killing their children. "Maybe," he murmured with a dark inflection to his deep voice. "You do take pride in your work and your beliefs." It was a cold accusation for sure, but seeing her snap their children's necks so readily after how she had behaved with their twins, it left the brute with doubts. He hadn't wanted to believe that Manea took any pleasure in doing what she did, but it had to take a certain kind of demented to end their lives after carrying them for weeks with such love and joy. Either Manea had enjoyed it, or she was so deeply ingrained into her beliefs that she would have done anything instructed of her. Alastor didn't know which made her worse.

His train of thought was derailed when he felt her leonine paw smack his away from their daughter then, turning irate eyes up to glower with lethal anger at her. He saw how drained and beaten she looked, haggard and threadbare. But by doing so, Manea would also see the emotion he was fighting to hide. Feral rage, crushing heartbreak and reviled uselessness swarmed in his empty eyes like a vicious maelstrom. He'd allowed Manea to kill his children for her asinine beliefs because he had been weak. This was his fault and he paid the price for it in his blood. He'd had all the chance to stop her, yet he'd done nothing. He'd allowed himself to fall to inaction because he supported her, wanted to believe for her, and all he was left with was two dead pups and a broken mind. He felt no closer to the salvation she spoke of with his soul, no more worthy of an afterlife with her or his family. If anything, he felt further away from it. So how could she lie there, claim the same devastation he felt, all while also believing in this fictitious paradise in the otherworld waiting for her when all he knew he would face was oblivion.

Manea explained why she had to do it and Alastor stared at her hard for a long, silent minute. Then he gave a hard, manic laugh, his expression contorted into that crazed smile of a madman that she'd met him with all those years ago. "For her soul?!" he repeated in hard incredulity. "Manea, we have no souls." Alastor rose to his paws and stormed away from her again, moving back to the shelves so he could pick up two more vials, downing their contents quietly before tossing them aside to shatter with a crash against the far stone wall. "Each and every one of us is damned. Me for the plethora of sins I've committed. You for the gleeful infanticide you commit. Our children are the only ones with hopes of any kind of afterlife that doesn't involve darkness or fire, and you just snuffed two of them out. Why?" He turned to sneer at her, onyx lips pulled back from pearly white fangs as black fire smoldered in his berserk eyes. "Because everyone else expected you to. You have no proof of any of these claims you make. Not you, not one member of your family—no one! You say these pretty words and make your incantations and rituals, but you have no evidence. Nothing to show that our children are somewhere better. Nothing to prove your soul is worth anything more. And nothing to prove that mine isn't destined for the same damnation."

Alastor growled low in his throat, pacing against the far wall while he sought out another vial of the medication Irilyth had made for him in secret. When he found the vial, he downed its contents, feeling the drugs tugging at the splintering parts of his mind. Clutching to the glass bottle in one large black paw, Alastor slammed it down on the ground, shattering the glass with a crunch and embedding the shard into his paw pads. The pain was barely felt compared to the other wounds he bore, but the sting remained as he bled. "Look at me, Manea. Look at me!" He turned his head slowly to set his trembling gaze on his mate, still smiling that manic smile, but the look in his eyes entirely different. They were pained, desperate. "I'm a monster. I'm broken. And joining your family didn't fix me. My soul is so far beyond being saved. There is nothing left for me. I will never see my children again, and no amount of bloody rituals is going to fix that." The multitude of drugs Alastor had downed in the span of a few minutes were beginning to kick in, sedating the wild wolf to the point where he slumped back on his haunches, barely holding himself upright. Or perhaps that was the blood loss; it was difficult to say for sure. Alastor's eyes fell from Manea to their sleeping daughter again, feeling each beat of his heart send more blood rushing through his veins to spill from the numerous lacerations on his body, leaving trails of crimson splatters on the den floor. "You have your beliefs and your family to fall back on for comfort. For justification. I have nothing, Manea. I watched you slaughter our children and all I have now is nothing." Alastor's shoulders slumped further, his posture weakening by the moment. A sadness uncharacteristic to him crept over his expression as his eyes darkened further. "You should never have taken me as your mate."

"Alastor Mendacium"