Alastor's smile stretched across his face like a crack in the world-unnatural, too wide, but impeccably controlled. He leaned back against the velvet couch, the gramophone's jazzy holiday tune curling around the room like smoke from a chimney. The air smelled of sugar with a faint undertone of burnt cookies— Nifty's overenthusiastic baking attempts. The firelight danced along the walls, warming the shadows that always seemed to cling to him.

You sat beside him like a child who had stumbled into the wrong storybook. It wasn't often Alastor found himself at a loss for words, but there was something disarming about the way your gaze latched onto the Christmas tree, all starry-eyed wonder. The gold star reflecting in your eyes.

"You know," he began, voice as smooth and sharp, "I've always found these festive gatherings to be a peculiar sort of farce. A celebration of unity in a place built on misery: Hell? Quite ironic, don't you think?" His words dripped with his usual sardonic humor.

You always had a way of making him feel something akin to... pity? No. That wasn't right. He didn't pity anyone. Sympathy, then? Discomforted interest?

Your expression gave him pause. There was a fragility to you, a delicacy he found perplexing. How could someone sent to the underworld still find a way to look at the world...well, Hell, with such... hope? It was infuriating.

Admirable, perhaps. But mostly infuriating.

The room seemed to shrink as the party buzzed on. Angel Dust dangled mistletoe over Husk, while Vaggie muttered something about "holiday clichés" to Charlie, who merely laughed in her usual bubbly way. But his focus was on you, the peculiar little creature who had somehow wormed your way into the folds of his impenetrable world.

"You're awfully quiet tonight, my dear," he said, his tone light but probing, like a fisherman testing the waters before casting his net.

He felt that strange twinge again— like hearing a long-forgotten melody.

Maybe, just maybe, he'd grown fonder of you than he ever intended.