Chapter Text
“Do you see this man?” an elderly gentleman, all salt and pepper hair and crinkled kind eyes, spoke in a tone that was only His ; all-loving, but one could never seem to understand the intentions behind. The kind of tone one would speak to an estranged son with.
A snap of His fingers, and the pale, tear-streaked face of a youth appeared in his guest’s chalice of wine.
“Poor boy,” the guest ; a lanky Demon, raised a dark eyebrow in mild interest as he peered at the conjured reflection, “this one? Really!”
The Great I Am nodded, narrowing His eyes at the sight of the yawning demon before Him, Mephistopheles fully stretched out on the chair as if it were a bed. Behind him the angel Mikhail, His personal attendee, rolled their eyes.
Maybe this trial could humble His lost son.
“A refill, my Lord?” they mumbled, but the Lord waved them aside.
“Make him like you ; a spirit who denies. Then I will grant any single thing you please.” Jehovah spoke again in that sacred, ominous tone, his eyes glinting at something ancient and all-knowing. Something that, if Mephistopheles had not seen many times before, would have made the demon shudder.
Demon and deity locked eyes, and when the Lord looked again, the child of Hell was no longer standing before him.
Heinrich, or as he deigned to call himself, Hal Faust was definitely not his father.
Johann Georg was decisive and noble, if noble meant deliberately infecting a poor family with the plague so he could study the symptoms. For the greater good, Hal’s father would say.
Johann Georg was clever, for he left university early to make his way in the world but earned a golden, glowing reputation to his name as a professor. He was so confident with his knowledge.
Johann Georg also insisted he has a daughter named Agatha, a lovely young maid with fire spun in her auburn hair, the only remaining bit of his beautiful wife across the seas in India where she had come on the Silk Road, he would describe to his students in hope of making a match. The professor denied the fact that his late wife ever bore him a son.
(Of course, Hal was the far opposite of all three. Soft and trembling and desperately wishing as he watched his father turn away from a woman dying in childbirth, reading his father’s books voraciously yet never getting the chance to be anything, binding his chest and hips and cutting and dyeing his hair from red to brown)
Still, Hal found himself at his grave, if only for the fact that the house ; once filled with the noises of his experiments and dabbling into alchemy, was now silent. No one sat across the young brown-haired boy at dinner. The servants looked at him with pitiful glances, whispering in low voices of “poor Herr Faust, so young to lose his father”.
“What do I do, papa?” Hal Faust’s voice was a bit shaky as he spoke, almost willing the cross bearing his father’s name and the mound of dirt and the dried flowers to respond. “You never cared for a son, but..”
Speech failed him, then. Reasons filled his head on why Johann was definitely not a feasible, pleasant man, but Hal could not hate his father.
While Johann couldn’t have been bent to understand that a person could be born with breasts and a vagina yet still be not a woman, it was his father who had showed him how to draw blood and cure a fever. Who had allowed him, eleven years old and excited yet astonished, to watch as he performed surgery. Who had told him he was clever, that he could learn anything in this world if he wanted to.
“Well, that hardly matters now, does it!” the words came out more angrily than he had originally meant them, but it was not as if his father could hear. No matter how much he wished to learn, how clever his father claimed him to be, no one would care enough to teach him. Not while his only legacy was Agatha Faust, the daughter of Johann Georg Faust.
“God, I’d sell my soul to not be just that.”
(Hal was none the wiser to the sacredness of his words ; or that, far, far above, Someone listened to his prayer.)
A low-growing, wilted rose bush planted at a nearby grave rustled, and Faust turned sharply, breath hitching, to see the snout of a water spaniel poking out. The rest of the dog soon came tumbling, as if out of nowhere, its tail wagging and its tongue lolling out in the way of all dogs ever since the first wolf accepted scraps of meat before a warm fire. The dog barked and reared, pushing its nose against his cheek, evidently as alone and lost as he is. A childhood friend of his, Gretchen, now a baker in the city square and married, had a dog once, a little ruddy thing with yapping barks and the tendency to roll around in the snow.
Hal could’ve sworn that the little paw marks left hissing embers on the earth, but that’s just insane, isn’t it?
“Well,” the young doctor shook his head, and when Faust looked into the dog’s eyes, the doe orbs gleamed of something like odd encouragement, “hello there, little friend.”