Blackened Feathers

Alpha

Alpha closed his eyes and smiled as he flexed his fingers.

Fucking hell, this felt so good. In the back of his mind, he knew it wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. This dreamscape was the only place these days where he felt whole and truly happy, so he would try to stay here for as long as he could.

With his trusty old Gibson, he sat on his sofa and went through the warm-up exercises he must have done a million times during the life he had lived before being sent to the Pit.

His fingers effortlessly moved from one chord to the next and he didn’t even need to think about where he placed them on the fretboard; his muscle memory guided them to where they needed to be and he sighed as he found his happy place.

Playing the guitar had always calmed Alpha down. It was the one thing he knew he could rely on when he’d fucked up everything else in his life because of his temper.

He had always been a natural. From the moment he picked one up, it had just felt right. Before the anger had become all-consuming, he could usually take himself off to his room after one of his outbursts and just lose himself in the music for a while. Some of his best solos for the Ghost Project songs had been born when he was coming down from a fiery rage.

Alpha watched as his fingers moved fluidly along the neck of the guitar. In this place, he was still complete. His missing fingers were still there and he didn’t have to compensate for the lack of digits when he was playing.

He’d started having these dreams not long after they brought him back from the Pit. The first couple of nights, nightmares and flashbacks of his time there haunted him, but when Seren hung the magical pendant around his neck, all of that stopped. He had found himself transported here every night, to this place where he was still him.

A movement in the corner of his eye drew his attention away from his thoughts and he jumped when he saw the dark figure standing in the corner of his room.

This was new. Alpha was always alone with his guitar when he came here. His instincts burned now though as his inner fire recognised its origins. Inigo, the All-Father of all the fire demons and ghouls, was watching him intently. The flames in his eyes flared when their gazes met and Alpha felt his own eyes glowing hot in response.

“Hello, little Flame,” he purred.

Alpha frowned. This didn’t feel like the dreams he usually had here, dreams where he knew this wasn’t real and just enjoyed the feeling of being whole again. This felt suspiciously like magic.

“Fuck’s sake," he muttered under his breath.

Before he could even register that the demon had moved, he found himself pinned down on the sofa. Inigo loomed over him with his hand around Alpha’s throat. The heat that rolled off his body was intense, even for a fire ghoul, and it scorched his skin. Inigo brought their gazes level and looked him right in the eye as he sneered. His sharp teeth glinted in the low light of the lamp that glowed above them.

“Oh, I’m not someone that you want to be disrespecting, ghoul. You are family to me and I love you the same as I love all of my little sparks, but I demand that even family give me the courtesy of treating me accordingly. Try again,” he gritted out.

Alpha couldn’t help the sharp intake of breath that he took as Inigo’s searing hot hand closed around his throat a little tighter.

“Hello, Inigo,” he breathed out.

The fire demon laughed, letting go and stepping back.

“I always did like you, little Flame. You are closer to the chaos than most fire ghouls usually are. If I had it my way, you would all be that way, but unfortunately that is out of my hands,” he said with regret.