all about Alastair Crane 𖦹

Alastair Crane is one of the two main characters in Post Tenebras. He is Iosif's tormentor, a forensic pathologist with the side hobby of torturing an array of victims in his home to later dispose of them. Iosif is one of these, and the story revolves around his unfortunate permanence with Alastair.

DISCLAIMER: I know this plot is cliche of cliches. I don't plan for any of this to be published, and these snippets were only born in the first place a few years back as a way for me to channel my thoughts into something healthier than ending up in psych. The focus now instead is just to write scenes in which I can evoke the strongest possible emotions in my mini fandom (shoutout to Ulisse and Slate), and toy with the dynamic between these two characters. It's just for funsies :) alright, back to business

Alastair is a tall, gaunt, gangly man, concerningly pale, and with long, ink-coloured hair. He wears half-moon glasses, and usually dresses very formally (as annoying as this is, if you're desperate to see his design you can check out my Tumblr, I'm having some trouble with image hosting sites). At the time of the story (1993), he's 26 years old and lives in Nottingham.

Born in '67 in London as the only child of an upper-class couple, in theory he was set up for success. In practice, he has virtually no memories of his mother's eyes without the glaze of antidepressants in them, and of his father he'd much rather remember nothing at all. In '84, a decade after his parents' divorce, he murdered his father in cold blood and gets away with faking it as self-defense, a year before graduating. In university (in which he studied medicine) he met Aurelius, the only man he probably ever came to consider a friend. Aurelius isn't part of Post Tenebras, but he's in a lot of the misc extras. 

Aurelius, a hybristophile ("Hybristophilia is the phenomenon characterised by sexual interest in and attraction to those who commit crimes"), is extremely interested in Alastair, and very insistently barges his way into his life. Encouraged by the fact that Alastair doesn't get caught while doing what he does, though, he attempted it as well, and was arrested in the span of very little time. He spent the rest of his life in jail and is technically still alive at the time of the story.

Alastair kidnapped Iosif in August 1993, and the story spans until April 1994, the month after Iosif's death, to then conclude with an epilogue in 2001: Alastair's death by accidental overdose alone, in his kitchen.

Despite the amount of victims he'd had prior to Iosif, something about how long he let the man stay alive (10 months, as opposed to the usual one at most) disquieted him profoundly. He took one other victim after Iosif, but it didn't feel the same. It felt dull, sickening.

Alastair is what clinically we'd call a sociopath: someone who entirely lacks the feelings of guilt, empathy, compassion.

While his actions and general behaviour might lead one to think he's got some kind of God complex, that isn't the way I'd define him. He's very self aware, and doesn't consider himself in any way superior to humans, nor does he believe he has any "right" to commit the atrocities he does. He is, however, extremely bothered by being human. He finds the body to be a horrible confine, and finds the basic functions necessary to sustain it (such as eating or sleeping) disgusting to partake in.

He treats his victims as medical experiments, keeping log of their progress in a binder complete with photographs; some he might alternate being horrible and being kind to, to see how they react; others, he might put them through incessant horrors to see how long it might take them to break. Each has a small goal or satisfaction. He does find the act itself of butchering a body to be very cathartic and relishes in the beauty of it.

He hates anything he perceives as "dirty", reason for which he hates his own vice of smoking so much. However, trying to quit would be admitting there's a problem in the first place and being vulnerable, so he pretends it isn't revolting to him.

That should cover most of the general info on him, I'll add things later if I forgot stuff :)