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Throughout his years in Hell, Alastor had grown accustomed to seeing some odd sights; anomalies that his once-mortal brain could never have imagined seeing. Yet over time, he had faced the fact that his concept of normal had been eternally altered — strange meant entertainment, and that was something that he could totally understand and enjoy.
But Talia... sweet, naive Talia, she was a whole other level of strange. His entire experience in the hotel had been exponentially made better by her presence, for Talia herself was an anomaly of a demon that he could not bring himself to separate from.
So naive, so expressive, so sweet and timid and wholly enthralling. It made his fingers twitch at the very thought of her, so utterly wrapped up in her every action and word. Her gaze on him brought forth the most exhilarating sense of euphoria, and a part of him knew just by her very stare that she did not belong.
An enigma begging to be unraveled, to be solved and explored. He wanted nothing more than to figure out every little thing about her, what made her laugh and smile and cry. He wanted that infallible mask to break. It was a facade, he had known from the very beginning that she had been far too good to be true.
When the opportunity arose, he had been overjoyed; the answer to it all had been presented to him on a silver platter the night she had mistakenly gotten drunk. The key was the diary, and he had not hesitated to take full advantage of the situation.
And now he knew.
He could say with the most profound sort of satisfaction that he knew her; his questions had been answered, the solutions to what had become his problems scribbled down on those yellowed pages. The reason why she did not assimilate was so blatantly obvious that he felt as if he should've known from the start.
But after the delight came the guilt — oh, how he had failed to anticipate the guilt, the nearly crushing remorse as he had held the doe's deepest secrets in his very hands. He did not deserve to bear witness to the laments of such a sweet, unsuspecting soul, he had been so suddenly aware of such a fact. He wanted nothing more than to have her, to take such purity and hold it securely in his arms.
Hold her securely and never let go.
She did not deserve the whirlwind which she had been forced into.
But fuck, was he glad that she was.
He wondered if she knew of the power which she had over him — she could ask him to burn the world to the ground, and he'd do so without hesitation and would revel in the stench of the ashes.
She had to have known, right? While he could imagine that her naivety extended to such a notion, he found it highly unlikely that she remained still unaware. Sighing to himself, he prayed to whatever being that would listen that it wasn't obvious, his ever-growing fascination with her; repeatedly assuring himself that she was nothing more than his newest source of entertainment, that the consternation stirring within his chest wasn't fondness, but mere amusement.
