#proverbially

No title yet; though I was inspired by the song Friendly Neighborhood Poltergeist by Rory Webley

Potential CW/TWs for the first arc: Alcohol, PTSD (Military flashbacks; WWII specific), Nazis, Period-typical racism, Period-typical homophobia, light violence/descriptions of death and gore. I don't write smut so there would likely be implied sex but no details. General TW for Valentino but he will be OOC from hellaverse (i.e. not abusive and rapey); Period-typical American patriotism; Police being Police (ACAB)

WIP Tags/Characters/Ships, etc.: RadioStatic; Chaggie; HuskerDust; Minor StaticMoth; Lucifer, Vox, Alastor, Charlie, Vaggie, Husk, Angel Dust, OCs used as plot devices/background characters (no major role in the story), Niffty, Rosie, Mimzy (Mentioned as of right now, not sure if she will be important yet), Valentino, Velvette.

Obsessive Alastor; Obsessive Vox; Demiromantic Asexual Alastor; Bisexual Vox; Protective Alastor; Human AU (kinda); Alastor Can't Control his Shadow; Alastor and his Shadow are different entities (but are still the same person); Possession.

(Can't think of any others right now)

Brief summary for what I'm going for: Vincent Olcott (Vox, though I likely won't be calling him that in this fic) gets home from the European front and wants nothing more than a shower and to curl up in bed with his beautiful wife, but he's rebuffed at the door and forced out on the street. Grappling with his demons, Vincent tries to move on and ends up with a job at the local paper. Just when his life is looking up, he's transferred to a neighboring state and forced to rebuild his life all over again. He catches his big break with a story on a serial killer, exposing police incompetence and helping to catch the person on the loose. But he quickly becomes more trouble than he's worth, and he's forced out of the paper. Vincent bounces around the midwest for a bit, chasing cold cases and selling his stories to the highest bidder, until he ends up in New Orleans with his biggest mystery yet.

Alastor Wiles is shot and ripped apart by dogs while disposing a body one evening in the muggy Louisiana summer. He doesn't expect to wake up, as one usually doesn't wake up from a bullet to the head. But awaken he does, with a new body and a whole host of powers to boot. It isn't long before the old house he's tethered to– his old house– is sold, and his first ever roommate is surprisingly easy to possess. With free rein of New Orleans once more, Alastor and his roommate team up to lure all manner of bad men to the cottage at the edge of the woods. Because who, really, would miss them if they were to disappear off the face of the earth? Tenants come and go. Some stay for longer than others, some end up buried in shallow graves just behind the treeline. It seems that even in undeath, a higher power is allowing Alastor to continue his righteous mission to eradicate the scoundrels and scum of the earth, and who is he to look a gift horse in the mouth? But his newest tenant is sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and threatening to unravel the tenuous house of cards that Alastor has only just erected.

Excerpt:

1945 - May

The war was over– well, the war in Europe was over. Vincent breathed a silent thanks to whatever higher power may be listening that he had been stationed in France for the past year and not the Pacific front. He’d heard horror stories through the grapevine about the kinds of things that were happening to the men over there, and he really didn’t want to find out if they were exaggerated. 

He had been all smiles coming home, picking up a bouquet from the florist almost as soon as he’d gotten off the train, and walking with the faintest skip in his step through the streets of Chicago. He could have hopped on a streetcar, but his house was only twenty minutes from the station and he was relishing in the smell of clean air and smiling faces in every window, American flags billowing in the wind.

An involuntary shudder wracked his frame as his gaze slid over a dilapidated row of brownstone townhomes. Shadows flitted across the darkened glass, ghosts of people he’d never known, voices he’d never heard crying out in pain. A sharp grin, a red armband, the glint of cold steel and the flash of gunpowder. The countless lives of the innocent occupied just as much space in his mind as his fallen comrades. 

Vincent hadn’t realized he’d been staring at the cold and empty window until he was jostled forward by a passerby with a grumble. He didn’t realize he’d been crying until the tears dribbled off his chin and splattered against his navy blue suit. Shaking away the ghosts of his past, he set back down the sidewalk. The skip in his step was gone, his smile was fading. The stems of the rose bouquet in his hand had broken under his grip, but it didn’t matter. Eileen would want to cut them to fit her favorite vase anyway.

Inspo playlist [Spotify]