Chapter Text
“Uh, it says ‘massive, non-survivable injury’ is a ‘contraindication’.”
“He’s a fucking demon, Vel, what the hell does non-survivable even mean?”
“Sir, please pay attention to what you are doing. Ma’am, with all due respect, please stop backseat driving.”
“Wh—who do you think—”
“The fucking surgeon, Velvette, she’s the fucking surgeon because I am not a fucking surgeon so shut the fucking fuck up!”
“...Sorry.”
“—VoxTek presents a new flanker to Love Potion! Trust us to make YOU smell literally irresistible! This time with cherry—“
“Skip, skip, skip, skip, override, SKIP! Why the fuck does the video chat have a commercial?!”
“I thought you liked commercials!”
“Not while I’m sticking my hands into someone’s chest! Or—someone who I give a fuck about!”
“Aw, that’s cute.”
Something bumps against Alastor’s chin. It’s a new sensation that is only notable because it’s the only one that isn’t characterized by overwhelming agony. Actually, it just feels like a bit of plastic and metal applying pressure to one of the few parts of his body that isn’t actively in pain at the moment. Despite everything, he finds that he feels rather at peace. There’s a sort of haze of inevitability over him—like there’s no sense in fighting, and no sense in complaining about it, either.
“Okay,” comes one of the voices again. It’s fritzing through with static, a hollow echo of frustration. “I put the phone down, hands are free, ribcage is—I don’t think I’m gonna have to do any of the pulling-open myself, this is a mess. I can see his fuckin—lungs and heart and shit. Fuck, I think it’s still beating? What next?”
“It says—”
“The trauma surgeon, Velvette!”
“You’re so pissy from this angle. It’s very unflattering.”
“Sir. If the ribs are fractured, be sure not to cut yourself. Please push the lung down and to the side, and—”
“Oh, fuck on a stuck.”
“—see if you can locate the wound in his heart.”
“There’s blood fucking everywhere!”
“Try to plug it with your finger. It should be anterolateral to—”
“I don’t know that that means! My finger?! I thought you were a surgeon—”
Pressure. The voices fade out for an eternity that simultaneously feels like no time at all. When Alastor next tunes into reality, there’s little fizzles of music playing, snatches trailing through the air as he flits through radio stations without any control as to where to stop. He can feel solid wooden flooring beneath his head. Everything is deeply cold. His chest is a massive, gaping vortex of misery.
His heart is beating. It was beating when he passed out, but something about the way it is doing so now feels—newer. More precarious. Not entirely under his own power. Not entirely something his body has the power to do anymore.
“—kay. Okay. Just. I think I got it. It’s going again.” The voice cracks. “I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.”
“That’s what I’m here for, sir. Thank you for trusting me.”
“You get a raise. You get the biggest raise. Where did Vel go? Hey, do you wanna work for me instead? I’ll pay you double. Triple.”
“With all due respect, sir, you couldn’t afford that. I’m a consultant, not a salaried employee.”
“Consultant? For what?”
“...Collaborations. Between Velvette and Valentino. My real contract is with the fallen seraph.”
“Ugh. Fucking of course it’s Val’s fault. Hold on, you work with Lucifer?”
“No.”
“Then who the fuck—shit, wait! He twitched! I think the music’s getting clearer.”
“That’s good, sir. It means you’re doing everything right. He’s a powerful demon—the fact that you were able to do this at all is a testament to his supernatural survival abilities. It is, in fact, possible he may regain consciousness soon.”
“Oh, fuck, you didn’t say that could happen.”
“I also didn’t tell you that you mentioning that this patient doesn’t need to breathe is the only reason I decided there was a chance of any of this working.”
“Wh—”
“Don’t worry about it, sir. Just keep doing what you’re doing. In cases like this, all you are trying to do is to keep his heart beating until his supernatural healing factor kicks in and scars around the angelic wound. You’ll likely have to withdraw your hand quickly at that point to avoid some nasty complications.”
“This whole thing is fucking nasty.”
“...I’ll be on standby. Just keep pumping and call again if anything changes for the worse.”
“You’re not even gonna stay on the line?”
“You are not my only client, Mr. Vox.”
“Wh—oh, she hung up. What the fuck? What the fuck? Is this why they say all surgeons are assholes?”
“Look who’s talking,” Alastor croaks, finally managing to pry his eyes open. It feels like unsticking himself from a glue trap. “Hello, Vox. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Vox’s speakers shriek microphone feedback. His face looms over Alastor, bright in the relative darkness of the broken radio tower that Alastor faintly recalls crawling into after his battle with Adam. He must have passed out—though he’s surprised that Vox is the only one here, if the direction of his escape was so obvious that he was found at all.
Then again, Vox always watches him so very intently—even when the only thing to see is a faint bit of video artifacting on his spybots.
Vox looks—peaky. His screen is desaturated, what Alastor guesses is his version of wan, and speckled with blood in several places. Alastor can’t move his head very well—can’t move anything very well—but from what he can see from the angle he’s sprawled at, both of Vox’s hands are disappearing directly into the—
Alastor blinks.
—the open cavity of his own rib cage.
What a curious place for Vox to be, given that Alastor hasn’t seen him in—oh, since their last depraved tryst, actually. Since Vox’s so-called love confession, which was weeks of absolute radio silence and steadfast avoidance ago. For once in his unholy unlife, Alastor had made a concession on the subject of what kind of closeness, what kinds of liberties he is willing to allow another person. He shouldn’t have been surprised to have been made to regret it.
But then Vox shouldn’t be surprised that Alastor is going to make him regret it more.
Who the fuck does he think he is, turning his back on Alastor? Who the fuck does he think he is, showing his undefended back to the Radio Demon?
A smile spreads across Alastor’s face, wide and shark-like, as he remembers why he’s not feeling very kindly disposed. “Why, Vox. Are you holding my heart in your hands? How terribly romantic.”
“Are you making fun of me right now?” Vox demands, eyes brightening with incredulous anger. “Are you seriously fucking—I’m keeping you alive, asshole! This is the most stressful fucking day of my existence including the one when I died, and yes, I’m holding your fucking heart in my fucking hands because it’s not fucking beating on its own! I was literally in the middle of some hot fucking makeouts with Val before this, you know! I could have been having a really nice evening right now!”
The tightness in Alastor’s chest stutters, making his breath hitch, as Vox rages at him. Vox dims immediately, gasping in surprisingly candid terror, and refocuses his gaze on Alastor’s chest.
The steady rhythm of Alastor’s heartbeat—of Vox’s hands on his heart—resumes.
Alastor wishes that he had the nerve endings to feel the way the keen edges of Vox’s claws curl carefully, fearfully, around the organ keeping Alastor alive.
“How sweet,” Alastor says. He’s slowly regaining some feeling in his extremities, and his hands claw steady gouges into the floor at his sides. “Come a little closer and I’ll show you nice, Vox.”
“...What is wrong with you?” Vox asks, animated mouth twitching into a grimace. “Did that Adam guy get you in the fucking head, too?”
“Nothing is wrong,” Alastor says. He tries to raise his arms and promptly realizes that only the right one will move. Hauling it up takes all of his concentration and energy, but he still manages to hook his claws into the suit jacket of Vox’s shoulder. The motion makes Vox’s hands move slightly, creating a very uncanny squishing noise, accompanied by a sensation Alastor would best describe as ‘getting his chest ripped open all over again.’
“Why would something be wrong?” he asks after he blinks the spots out of his vision. He’s not sure how much time has passed.
“...Well, I’m sitting here with my hands in your chest,” Vox says. “But I’m starting to feel like this is somehow not your top priority of wrong things. For some reason. Some really, really insane reason.”
“I didn’t ask you to save me,” Alastor grits out.
“Oh, well, fucking sorry for not fucking abandoning you, then!” Vox shrills. “Why is this the conversation we’re having right now?!”
“There’s no need to apologize,” Alastor tells him, switching to a pleasant tone like flipping a switch in the face of Vox’s hysteria. “It would hardly have been a change.”
Vox falls silent for a long moment. Alastor’s vision goes hazy for several seconds, and when he manages to focus on Vox’s face again, he doesn’t remember why he’d grabbed the other man. He tries to squeeze his claws into Vox’s shoulder—but he can barely leverage enough pressure to leave pinpricks on the fabric of his suit.
“...I didn’t abandon you,” Vox says eventually. “What the hell?”
Alastor blinks up at him with a placid smile. So this is the game they’re playing. “Of course you didn’t.”
“You think I abandoned you.” Vox frowns. “Why—Bambi, there was nothing to abandon!”
“Do not—” Alastor snarls, and—oh, there it is. Dark magic sparks through his veins, sizzling through his blood, and his claws squeeze into Vox’s shoulder, piercing straight through fabric and into flesh. Hot blood spills under his nails, trailing down his wrist. There’s torn scar tissue under his claws, a reopening of the same wound he’d gnawed into Vox’s miserable carcass once already. “—call me that! Let go of me!”
Alastor shoves himself upward, his left arm heaving in a profoundly impossible way. Vox tumbles back onto his ass, the most controlled fall Alastor has ever seen the man manage, all so that his hands remain in Alastor’s chest, wavering for a moment, but keeping up that same steady beat. One hundred beats per minute, like clockwork. It doesn’t feel fast enough. It doesn’t feel angry the way that Alastor’s rushing magic does.
“I can’t!” Vox says, frantic, scrambling to kneel at an angle that doesn’t tug Alastor anywhere. “I can’t, Al—fuck, ow, ow. You’ll die!”
“I refuse to die,” Alastor says, squeezing harder, and finally rips a piece of Vox out of him. It’s a measly sliver of flesh, tacky with sticky blood, but it should be enough for his purposes. “But it’s hardly any of your business anymore, is it?”
“Augh! What the fuck is wrong with you? Was it ever?!”
Alastor nearly flinches at that—narrows his eyes instead, his lips stretching back until his grin is a snarl. “Maybe it wasn’t.”
“Why do you even care?!” Vox demands. “It’s not like you love me! Can we have this conversation and preferably also the vindictive mauling when you’re a little less—ohfuck!”
Alastor eats his prize. Vox is a powerful demon in his own right, loathe though Alastor is to acknowledge the fact most of the time. His flesh holds enough of that power for Alastor’s magics to hook into—and the sweet taste of meat and blood on his tongue blooms like a spring orchid, vivid and colorful as the gray haze leaks from Alastor’s eyes. There’s something wrong with his heart—the wound on his chest isn’t healing on its own, won’t close even with the infusion of power. He feels better, but Vox is still the only thing keeping his heart beating.
Fucking angelic steel.
“So that’s what that was for,” Vox wheezes.
Alastor shoves Vox to the ground.
Vox yelps as he goes, unable to break his own fall—apparently genuinely unwilling to just let Alastor bleed out, even as it knocks his mechanical skull roughly against the floorboards. Alastor ends up on top of him, blood dripping in thick, regular rivulets down Vox’s wrists and onto his torso with every manual beat of Alastor’s heart.
“Very well,” Alastor says slowly, tipping his head to the side as he wraps his claws delicately around one of Vox’s bloody wrists. “I suppose you do deserve some credit. Or a reward, maybe?”
“I—I mean, I didn’t really do it for a reward,” Vox hedges, then visibly second-guesses himself.
“No,” Alastor hums. “You did it because you love me.”
“Unless you mean a sexy reward. I’d definitely take one of those.”
Alastor’s mouth ticks up at one corner, derisive. “Of course you would.”
“Seriously,” Vox asks, eyes flicking between Alastor’s face and his chest, “what is your problem?”
Alastor presses a palm to his mouth, coughing once. Some blood spills out—Vox’s, by the taste of it, which apparently leaked into his lungs instead of into his digestive tract. He’s still got a few more holes than is ideal, then. He wipes it off on Vox’s jacket and tries to pretend he’s not using his hands on Vox’s chest to keep himself upright. His knees are splayed on either side of Vox’s stomach, unable to support him at all. Fuck, he needs more to eat.
“Why do you care?” Alastor asks, too tired to not be genuine. “We haven’t spoken in weeks. I thought you simply found a new project to obsess over. I was still debating whether or not to figure out what it is and rip it out of your hands so that I could crush it in front of your helpless eyes.”
“I mean!” Vox startles at the question. “Because—I just needed some time to process—that’s kinda flattering, actually. I hate that I find that flattering. Why do you care! You don’t love me!”
“Maybe I do.”
“Bullshit.”
Alastor bares his teeth down at him, and for once, Vox snarls back. “Oh, don’t you fucking start with this. You’re just pissy you lost a favorite toy for a few weeks, that you’re not the center of attention for once. You think I’m so obsessed with you! Well, at least I’m actually capable of fucking love, Alastor!”
Alastor blinks.
Something clenches in his chest. It’s not Vox’s hands, though the way the man’s screen immediately freezes in place alerts Alastor that he’s at least aware of—whatever just transpired between them.
Alastor stares down at him for a long, long moment. He’s so fulminantly, intolerably angry—at Vox, at that miserable excuse for a ‘first man,’ even at the cloying group of has-beens that nearly murdered him tonight with their—family. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s ever been this angry. It’s the sort of anger that, when he was alive, led him to go outside at night with a clean pair of gloves and a shovel.
Things were more complicated back then, but also so much easier, in many ways. Murder was harder, if only in how many steps it took. Catharsis, much simpler.
And the concessions he had to make on this particular front, much less significant, because—
Vox isn’t wrong. Hasn’t Alastor proven that to himself? Over and over and over again?
Still. Even the loveless have a choice to make, sometimes.
He softens his smile, leans down so that Vox isn’t stretching himself quite so far to keep Alastor’s heart beating. His bloody hand trails tenderly along the edges of Vox’s wound, brushes against the edges of his screen.
“But I am capable,” Alastor says gently. “I love you very much.”
Vox gapes up at him. “...I. Fuck you.” His voice is tight, strained. “I don’t fucking believe you.”
Alastor feels his smile thin. “Well. That’s just dandy, then, isn’t it?”
“I mean!” Vox looks like he’d rather be literally anywhere else. He looks, more than he ever has at the mercy of Alastor’s sadistic machinations, afraid. “Did—did you mean it?”
“Of course I didn’t fucking mean it!” Alastor snaps, feeling his antlers crack through reality as they grow into large arcs over his head. “But how the hell else do you want me to prove myself to you?!”
“I—”
“Should I befriend you?” Alastor demands. Blood flows in rivulets down Vox’s forearms, staining his sleeves. “Cater to your deranged fantasies? Put on a dress and dance for you? Should I stitch together the scars your teeth left in me in a mirror of my own signature on your body?”
He digs his thumb into Vox’s shoulder, watches the way Vox bites down on his lip and shudders in an attempt to not yelp in pain. His mouth is bloody. Alastor remembers when just the sight of it would have made him want to lick it clean. It wasn’t very long ago at all, in the grand scheme of things. Now he just wants Vox to hurt.
“I thought,” Vox gasps when he regains himself, eyes bleary with tears of pain, “you said the dress wasn’t for me?”
Of all the ridiculous—“Who else would it have been for?” Alastor hisses. He finally releases Vox, earning himself a gasp of relief, and tangles the hand into his own hair. “What the fuck do you want from me?!”
“Nothing!” Vox cries out. “Fuck, Bambi, I don’t want anything!”
“Liar.”
“I mean.” Vox rolls his eyes. “Obviously I want some things. But I don’t need anything, and—can’t you just let me love you?”
“Liar.” Alastor’s breath wheezes in his lungs, his heart giving a single, desperate heave between Vox’s palms. His insides are knitting together, slowly but surely—the wounds remain as they are, but his flesh is binding around them, large, hideous, ropey scars that will keep him alive under his own fucking power and nobody else’s. “You don’t love me. You just want me. You’ve always just been a jealous, needy—”
His heart heaves again. And then a third time. And then—
Vox yanks his hands out of Alastor’s chest as Alastor coughs, hacking up what must be half a gallon of vivid red blood—and his heart stutters back into rhythm, finally finishing the process of scarring over. He manages to lean over to the side as he coughs, regurgitating it onto the floor rather than Vox’s face, and Vox wriggles himself into a sitting position as he steadies Alastor by the shoulder.
“Shit,” Vox says as Alastor shudders, gasping for breath he doesn’t need. “You look horrible.”
“Fuck you, too,” Alastor says, hoarse. “What does love even look like to you?”
Vox’s mouth twists, hesitant.
“That was not a rhetorical question,” Alastor says, and coughs once more. He jerks his shoulder, knocking Vox’s hand away. “Because you have far overstepped your bounds, Vox.”
“That’s not what you thought before,” Vox says quietly. He shifts, scooting away just enough to give Alastor some space. For all of his bombastic, blinding personality, he looks quiet and uncertain.
He doesn’t say the question out loud, but Alastor hears it anyway. He snarls in blind rage, clawing into the floor, and heaves himself up to his knees.
“Because I was a fool,” Alastor says, “and I shouldn’t have expected more from you. It’s not like we made a deal.”
“I’m sorry,” Vox says.
Alastor freezes.
“I’m sorry,” Vox repeats, grabbing his arm. He leans into Alastor’s space, just far enough that Alastor can see his screen—his expression is plaintive, genuinely regretful. It’s pathetic and trite. He’s so fucking emotive that it’s ridiculous. “This is gonna sound like the most kindergarten horseshit ever, but I think we’re pretty much at that level of emotional maturity at this point, actually, so: I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“My feelings—”
“—and I didn’t mean to be a piece of shit about—whatever fucked up friend-lationship we have going on,” Vox goes on, interrupting. “I got up in my own head about it, and your weird fucking attitude didn’t help, but I should’ve told you I wasn’t just ditching you instead of figuring you wouldn’t give a shit if I did. I’m really, really sorry.”
“You think I would call you a friend?”
“...I really hope you would,” Vox says. “I mean. You could also chill for like thirty seconds for once and talk things out instead of flying off the fucking handle, which would be really helpful, because I’m gonna be real with you, Bambi: I am not qualified to be the one with his shit together in a relationship! Do you know how many times me and Val have broken up?”
“I don’t care,” Alastor bites out. “This is not the same—”
“I get that!” Vox throws his hands up. The jerking motion splatters blood onto Alastor’s face, which he immediately looks chagrined at. “Uh. Whoops. I’m trying to say that I’m sorry I called you incapable of love. That’s. I mean. I kind of believed it.”
“...”
“But.” Vox sighs, gesturing vaguely with one hand as he crosses his legs. “Demonstrably not the case, now. I think.”
“I’m not in love with you,” Alastor says defensively.
“Whatever.” Vox sounds tired. “You sure are fucking something, though.”
“I hold my friendships to high standards,” Alastor warns him.
“You’ve let Mimzy walk all over you metaphorically since the day you died and probably before that,” Vox shoots back, “at least until the fuckin’ hotel came around, and you let that weird little one-eyed freak walk all over you literally.”
“Niffty is a charming and very funny young woman,” Alastor says, offended.
“She spent three days standing outside of V Tower waiting for Val, and he was so scared of leaving the building that I had to go buy him food myself so that he wouldn’t starve to death,” Vox says dryly.
“As I said. Hilarious.”
“...Which makes me feel even more like a piece of shit,” Vox continues, undeterred, “for managing to not meet your actual standards. Or even paying attention to them, I think. And I get that I’m a piece of shit in general, like, that’s not really in question and I’m frankly pretty proud of the upper echelons of shittiness that we’ve managed to achieve at V Tower most of the time, but—I wasn’t trying to be a piece of shit this time. And I’m sorry that I was.”
Alastor is silent. His claws are still digging into the floor, and he feels the inexplicable urge to look away. He forces himself to meet Vox’s gaze instead, steady and unerring.
“This is the part where you say ‘I accept your apology, and I’m also sorry,’ by the way,” Vox says.
“What do I have to be sorry for?” Alastor asks, narrowing his eyes.
Vox pauses, rolling his eyes. “Uh. Well, there’s…” He trails off, genuinely thinking about it. “...Nevermind. I can’t think of anything I care enough about to turn into an issue. Can we at least have a dramatic make-up kiss, then?”
Alastor hesitates. Vox, apparently now keenly in-tune with the significance of moments when Alastor doesn’t say no, brightens.
“Oh, fuck yeah,” he says, and scrambles onto his knees. He reaches for Alastor’s face—bloody hands and all—and it’s Alastor’s turn to roll his eyes… but he doesn’t move away when Vox cups his jaw. “I’m officially the first actual guy in walk-all-over-Bambi town, aren’t I? Pucker up, baby, this is gonna be the cutest, most weirdly fucked up kiss—”
“If you don’t get on with it,” Alastor says, “it’s going to be nothing.”
Vox shuts up and kisses him.
It’s kind of sweet, if Alastor thinks about it from a certain angle. He’d started making a habit of keeping his eyes open when kissing before Vox’s little sabbatical, if only because it apparently freaks Vox out, and now it lets him observe the way Vox’s own eyes squeeze shut. His face is one of furrowed concentration, relief evident in the corners of his eyes. His teeth are sharp, but he’s more cautious than usual about keeping them to himself right now, and—honestly, the whole kiss is fairly chaste. Whereas Vox usually delights in jamming as much of his tongue down Alastor’s throat as he’s physically able, now he barely brushes it against the seam of his lips.
It’s quite possible that he’s trying to be tender, Alastor realizes. How fascinating. He probably shouldn’t be letting this happen right now, to be honest. Everything in his chest feels like a violently turbulent slop of feelings, and only about half of them are to do with the fact that he’s recently been carved open like a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s hardly a responsible state to be making relationship decisions in.
(Since when was he so forgiving? Surely he can’t have always been like this. Surely it’s different from his behavior with Mimzy, with Niffty—they’re ladies, and it’s only right for a gentleman to differ his approach to the fairer sex.)
(Who the hell is he trying to kid?)
After a few moments, Alastor does part his lips—and is overcome by a wave of dizziness when Vox does give up the ghost and try to French him. Something about the fizzy battery-zap sensation of Vox’s tongue is different today, and Alastor finds himself raising a hand in warning to Vox’s uninjured shoulder.
He ends up using it to balance himself, instead, swaying heavily into Vox as his ability to stay vertical starts to rapidly leave him.
“Mmph,” Alastor tries to explain, and Vox pulls back, frowning.
“What—”
Alastor blinks slowly as the rest of Vox’s words garble into something he can’t decipher. There’s a bit of spit that stretches between their lips, glimmering a faint but extremely familiar pink color that Alastor has seen on many a gaudy billboard.
Ah.
He supposes it wouldn’t be a surprise that Vox would be immune to something like this, mechanical as he is. Unfortunately, Alastor can’t say the same in his current compromised state.
“V’l,” Alastor manages, wrangling his vocal chords into some bare amount of obedience before he tips over, woozy.
Vox’s eyes go wide as he lunges to catch Alastor. “Oh, shit—”
And that’s the last thing that Alastor hears before he finally passes the fuck out.