Chapter Text
B-b-b-beep!
...
B-b-b-beep!
...Something was beeping.
B-b-b-beep!
Something was beeping, and Vox felt like shit.
B-b-b-beep! B-b-b-beep!
Seriously, what the fuck was that?
B-b-b-beep! B-b-b-beep!
With a soft click, Vox fed a signal to his internal relay and his screen roused from standby mode. Somewhere in his head, a couple of fans whirred to life.
Monitor Status
Active
Input: VOX
B-b-b-beep! B-b-b-beep!
“̷̷S̷̷h̷̷U̷̷t̷ ̷t̷̷H̷̷E̷ ̷F̷̷u̷̷C̷̷k̷ ̷U̷̷P̷ ̷...!” Vox’s voice came out as a crackling snarl, warped with oscillation - and muffled into soft fabric. He shoved himself upright...which was, coincidentally, how he realized he’d been lying down. Sleeping?
B-b-b-beep! B-b-b-beep!
Now that his screen was on, words flashed in one corner of his display, accompanied by the shrill beeping he now recognized as his alarm clock.
ALARM
9:15 AM
Vox-Mail Meeting
Re: Data Breach Report
Fuck. What time was it–?
8:55 AM
“Oh come on!” Vox fought his way free of shredded sheets, staggering to his feet. “How the...? What did I...?” He was still (mostly) fully dressed for fuck’s sake. What the hell had he gotten up to last night?
This was definitely one of his rooms - so whatever it was, he hadn’t gotten so sloppy he couldn’t get home. No one else was there, thank fuck, so he hadn’t been dumb enough to bring some bitch back here to get laid, either. If this was the result of another one of Val’s shitty drug cocktails, Vox was...going to...
Oh wait.
Oh no.
Last night’s memories asserted themselves all at once. He might've hoped it was a fever dream if he hadn’t been staring down the evidence. Instead, Vox looked at his ruined sheets with new, horrible understanding. Something in his head clicked, audibly, and his fans started to whir.
Valentino had– and then Vox had– and then Valentino had–
Fuck. Fuck his life.
B-b-b-beep! B-b-b-beep!
Vox killed the alarm and pressed the heel of one hand to his screen. His thoughts scrambled. Meeting. Right. He could push the meeting back. Or cancel it entirely. He’d done so for less, before. No one would bat an eye - hell, his employees would probably breathe a sigh of relief. Then he’d be free to deal with...with...
No, no, no. The meeting would be...good. It’d help him get his shit together, and honestly, he could use the stress relief of ruining some employees’ lives right now.
It was time for a bit of - of strategic disconnecting. He was prioritizing.
Vox’s eyes swept over the wreck he’d made of his bed. Then the wreck he’d made of himself. Electricity sparked in his hands, surged up his antennae. Shit.
He'd deal with the events of last night, later. Right now he had a meeting to get to, and less than ten minutes to make himself presentable.
Vox spent the next couple of hours internally seething behind a broad, razor-sharp smile. The minutes trickled by, only made bearable by channeling his fury into blunt, scathing, and downright cruel responses to the techs who'd been assigned to his company’s latest shitshow.
“–all said and done, sir, we're looking at approximately ten thousand confidential account breaches, rollbacks across the board, with an estimated loss of–”
Vox’s claws drummed on the tabletop. His other hand cradled a cup of cold, untouched coffee. His tongue ran along the backs of his teeth.
...Tasted like fucking cherry. His stomach twisted, and he interrupted the current speaker just to have something to do. “Hey. I have a question for...hm, how about...you.” He jabbed a claw at one of his employees - some fishy nerd - at random.
“Ah! Yes, sir! M-my name is–”
A loud, blaring buzzer sound effect cut the techie off. “Nice try!” Vox said. “But unfortunately, that wasn’t the question. What I want to know is: which worthless, soon-to-be-dead failure was in charge of our last security update?”
“O-oh.” The guppy-looking motherfucker fidgeted with his papers. He kept shooting desperate looks at his coworkers’ downturned faces. “I-i-i-i-i-i-it...th-that’s, that is, it’s a-a-a-a, a bit, a bit complicated, a-a-and–”
“A-a-a-and? Nevermind, shut up,” Vox snapped, his grin thinning - much like the ice these idiots were walking on. He sucked in a deep breath, let it back out. “Fine. Since the collective competency level in this room is apparently somewhere between barely-functional and entirely useless, allow me.”
Vox’s antennae sparked as he accessed the VMail servers via his personal connection. He dug through system files and root folders, pulled up the most recent vtek.mail.update.exe, and did a quick scan of its properties.
The last of his smile evaporated. He tossed screenshots of the files up over the last person’s powerpoint, still displayed across the far-side wall. “So when you said ‘complicated’ what you meant was, ‘we don’t know.’ Some fuckup on your team caused a security breach that is going to set VMail back months, and...we don’t know who’s responsible? We don’t know how it even happened?”
“We’re working on it, sir!” squawked another tech. His eyes cut over to her. Some sort of bird. “The access logs were scrubbed, but we’re restoring them now. We anticipate having the full metadata by the end of the week.” Vox’s expression narrowed, and the tech added, “...at...at the latest!”
Vox looked down at his coffee, tracing a finger around the rim of the mug. “...Do you know what we do to people who can’t pull their weight in this company?” he asked, thoughtfully. When he looked up, his left pupil pulsed spherical black waves. A faint, oscillating note pierced the air.
“Yes, sir!”
“...That was a rhetorical question, you idiot.”
The bird tech seemed to shrink into the fluffed feathers at her neck. “...oh.”
Vox swept his gaze over the room. The terrified expression on each tech’s face felt good, like a soothing balm to his frayed mood. He could use his programming mode (or hypnotism, or mind control, or brainwashing, or whatever the other idiot Overlords called it nowadays) on them. Their contracts with VoxTek meant they would always be susceptible to it. But he didn’t have to. They knew their places. They knew exactly who was in control.
“Hey.” he said. He leaned back in his chair and gestured broadly. “You know what? Don’t worry about it. I mean, what would any of you know about rhetoric or proper monologue composition?”
The techs sat in cowed silence.
Vox pointed across the table. “Ex-actly!” he said. His grin returned. He blinked, and his eye returned to normal. “Now you’re getting it!” His employees were at attention, eyes on him. Every one of them feared they’d be called out next, and that Vox would find them wanting. That was how it was supposed to be. “See, that’s why you’re the ones running code, and I’m the one running the show. Now, I expect that metadata to be in my inbox by tomorrow morning, got it?”
Silence.
Vox grinned bigger. Meaner. “That one wasn’t rhetorical.”
A chorus of stuttering, panicked, “Yes, sir!” filled the room.
“Good!” Feeling better, Vox took a sip of his coffee. He promptly spat it back into the mug. “Gah, fuck - who the fuck made this?”
No, wait. He’d made it. Hours ago, before the meeting started, hands shaking as he...compartmentalized.
“Nevermind,” he said, loudly, before a peon could think to speak up. “You, Stutter Guy. Get me a new cup of coffee. And it better be good, or I’ll have you answering IT support calls for the next decade.”
The stuttering fish-nerd stared at him in what Vox could only assume was paralyzed fear. There was certainly no other good reason he was just sitting there.
“...Now,” Vox said, a single blip of electricity arcing between his claws. The techie scattered his papers as he scrambled from his chair and out of the room.
Vox swiveled in his chair to watch him go. That’s goddamn right.
After a suitably dramatic pause, he turned back around. “The rest of you, let's talk damage control. We need to make sure none of our customers see this as negligence - or hold us liable. We already sell most of these assholes’ personal data to the highest bidder, and they sign waivers for that, right?”
“T-that’s right, sir.”
Just like that, Vox was back in his element: clever, corporate manipulation of the masses. Vox populi vox dei. ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ And by the time he was done, Vox would be the voice of the people, whether they knew it or not.
The day proceeded in its typical rush - packed to the brim with meetings of one kind or another. His mood brightened with each cozy reminder of how Hells's citizens saw him - powerful, competent, dangerous. And it darkened during every single lull in work, when his mind would, unerringly, return to the night before.
His neck still ached, where, beneath his shirt and the tight loop of his tie, a ring of vivid bite marks marred his skin. His wrists were bruised stratos blue. Vox found himself adjusting his collar and tugging on his shirt cuffs throughout the day.
Eventually, his five-o-clock broadcast had wrapped up, and Vox had nothing left on the day’s docket. A weight settled on his shoulders, heavy and foreboding.
...No. There was definitely something left to do. There was always something. Some scripts to approve, some ratings to compare, some products to review. Cameras needed surveilling, pockets needed lining, money needed spending. VoxTek didn’t move, didn’t breathe without his say-so. Vox was VoxTek Enterprises.
That...other thing, it could wait. Business first.
Vox didn't sleep for a week, pouring himself into work with a ruthless dedication that left his staff exhausted, and sinking every free minute he had into personal projects. He'd panned through surveillance feeds until they all started to blur together. He'd sent out his signals to every piece of VoxTek technology on the network, threading the same encoded message into every phone, screen, and speaker, again and again: Trust us. Trust us. Trust us. He tore through tech proposals, leaving manic commentary and feedback in the margins of the digital documents. He spat out new ideas and concepts with no real regard to coherency, and occasionally woke employees at three in the morning to demand they work on something that had caught his attention.
It wasn’t often that he got like this, but it had happened before. In a way, he relished it. If he didn’t want to stop, he didn’t have to stop. Topside workaholics didn’t have shit on him.
Whenever his energy flagged, he grabbed a handful of uppers or a gram of coke and washed them down with coffee - or whiskey. Whichever was in his mug at the time. When those didn’t work, he plugged himself into the network and leached energy from the grid until he was too amped up (literally) for sleep to be a remote possibility.
He’d sleep when he was double-dead. Or, at the very least, when he’d run out of work-shaped issues to chew through.
Maybe then he’d be ready to deal with Valentino.
The piece of shit himself. Val had been looking for him. Vox knew that because he knew everything that happened in his business - and he’d been watching the feeds when the moth pimp showed up uninvited to a few VoxTek locations. Asking if the boss was in. Once, he’d turned up at the right office, and Vox had vanished into the wiring rather than risk interacting with him.
Vox didn’t have the bandwidth to handle Val right now. He was letting that problem simmer; he’d work on it once he’d reduced it down into simple, actionable components. And once the memories stopped making his heart jump. And once the marks had faded.
In the interim, he kept Valentino on a monitor at all times - just in case. Just in case the prick got it in his head to brag about what he’d done, or got frustrated enough to threaten to spill the details. Just in case Vox needed to drop what he was doing and commit murder.
The smug prick had ruined their long-standing equipoise in a single shitty night, he wasn’t about to ruin Vox’s reputation, too.
But, no. Valentino seemed content to continue business as usual. It’d be a relief, if it didn’t mean Vox was keeping a feed open that was a wonderful, 24/7 reminder that Valentino fucked. And he did it a lot. And when he wasn’t fucking, he was usually directing other people fucking.
Every time Val pinned one of his whores against a door or jammed his dick in an open mouth, the power surged in Vox’s office. Every time the moth’s mouth pressed to another’s, Vox could taste cherry, and static swept across his screens.
It was a nightmare. Vox wasn’t desperate - wasn’t stupid. He’d never before, not in life and not in Hell, tried fucking around with someone if he couldn’t control them afterward. What the fuck had he been thinking?
Vox glared out the window as dawn slunk in, muddy and orange. He barely tasted the acidic dregs of his coffee as he downed another mug. His circuits were humming, buzzing, scrambled with mixed frequencies and noise created by his own erratic power consumption. Something beyond fatigue was setting in. He’d hit a lull in his workload, and found himself pressing a claw to the aching wound at his neck, thoughts comfortably absent.
With more than a little frustration, he set himself to writing scripts for new commercials - stubbornly ignoring the way his processes lagged behind each internal command.
...Fuck, how much had he had to drink?
Vox looked down at the glass in his hand. It was full, but the buzzing in his head assured him it wasn’t his first of the night. He was at a private table, seated in a barrel-back chair upholstered in dark crimson. Thick curtains were pulled back to either side of his alcove, offering the possibility of privacy, if desired. A soft haze clouded the edges of his vision, smeared the club’s - was it a club? - lights in bleary halos. Music thudded through his skull, some electronica mix that had his heart pounding along in time with the relentless four-on-the-floor rhythm.
Where...?
He looked up. A long, cherry-pink runway and stage stood in the distance, lit to blinding with recessed LEDs. A stage pole stood at the end of the runway, straddled on all sides by more red chairs. Definitely a club. Pinks, deep reds, and hearts. Had to be one of Val’s. Why wasn’t someone up there, dancing?
Actually, no one was there at all. No strippers, no dancers, no customers, no staff. The club was empty. Closed? Why was he still...?
“Vox.”
Vox blinked. He tilted his head back.
His reflection stared down at him from a set of rose-tinted, heart-shaped glasses. “Oh,” he said. “Val.”
Or. Did he?
Well, he thought he said it, anyway.
The moth loomed over him, lower hands braced on the arms of his chair. Valentino was grinning, amused, his fedora at a jaunty angle and his antennae curled forward. He had his cigarette holder cradled in one hand; a pink haze drifted from the slow-smoldering tip. It flared briefly as Val brought it to his mouth and took a drag.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked on the exhale. Smoke billowed from his red grin, curled around the edges of Vox’s screen. He looked good. “You haven’t even touched your drink.”
“Of course I have.” Hell, he was pretty sure he was blackout drunk.
Vox lifted his drink, looked at it. “Oh. I mean. Not this one.” He brought the glass to his mouth to correct that mistake, but paused. The glass wasn’t, as he’d originally thought, full of whiskey. Instead of amber gold, the liquor was pink - bright, viscous, and familiar.
A flush of electrical heat tinted Vox’s screen cyan. Something hot twisted in his gut.
“This is...?”
Valentino’s warm chuckle cut him off. He draped two arms over Vox’s shoulders. Long-clawed black hands swept across his vest. He’d always had that easy, natural confidence. Vox could fake it - broadcast a smile and perform with the best - but Valentino...
“Live a little, Voxy~” he said, voice honey-warm, his words spoken softly to the back of Vox’s screen.
Vox’s heart hammered in his chest. D-dum-d-dum-d-dum-d-dum. Four on the floor, just like the music, never missing a beat.
He couldn't. He couldn't.
Why can't I? he thought, suddenly furious with himself. He tossed the drink back like it was a shot, not a full glass of–
It tasted like cherries. Like roses and cigarette smoke.
A hand reached up - and gripped Val’s arm. A blue-clawed hand. His hand. Vox sighed, tipped his stupid TV monitor back until it hit the chair. His head buzzed; warm, heady.
“I,” said Vox.
Or. He wanted to say it.
“Val. I want you to...”
“I know, I know~” Valentino said. He leaned in, grin razor-sharp. “I got you.”
On day nine, Vox startled awake with a gasp, heart racing.
His systems were chugging, his brain fried from the week-long work-bender. It took him a moment to realize he was waking up - that he had been asleep. He was slumped facedown, screen buried in his folded arms.
Vox sat up and established that, yes, he had passed out at his desk. Cables still connected him to his network, and pages of feverish notes spanned every monitor in the room. His neck and shoulders ached like he’d been in a fucking coma.
And, also, he was hard.
The lingering fragments of his dream - a club, a glass of pink, Val leaning in - were enough to set his antennae sparking, and Vox shot out of his chair so fast it tipped over backward and hit the floor.
“Come ̷O̷̷N̷!” he screeched, audio blaring, fury grinding his voice into a robotic mess. “̷R̷̷e̷̷a̷̷l̷̷l̷̷y̷?!” Claws shrieked across his desk, then reached up to grip the sides of his monitor. “The first time I sleep?! We’re doing ̷t̷̷h̷is?! ...Okay! Okay. Calm down. I'm calming down. I’m calm. Deep breaths.” Vox breathed in. Out.
‘You know, if you wanted a little attention yourself, aaaaall you had to do was ask.’
In, out.
‘Oh, really? That doing somethin’ for ya, Voxy?’
In, out.
‘Hold still, hm? Daddy’s working.’
in, out, in out, in out in out–
‘Good boy, Voxy.’
Once they’d started, the memories kept coming, looping, restarting, recursing with no end condition, flooding his RAM with garbage. Vox panted, leaning over his console for stability. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he reminded himself, out loud. “I'm just... I'm tired! I’m overworked. My brain was just trying to process the problem in my sleep, and it failed, and it got weird. It's not a big deal. It doesn't mean anything, and I'll get – I'll get over it. I’m gonna get over it right now!”
Vox faintly registered the manic grin on his screen, aware of it like it belonged to someone else. He straightened up and smoothed his hands down his shirt - wrinkled beyond any hope of salvation and thick with static cling.
Righting his chair, Vox sat and rolled back to his desk. According to his internal systems, he’d lost a solid day (explained the stiffness in his neck). And, of course, VoxTek had floundered in his absence. A truly impressive number of emails filled his inbox, increasing in urgency the later in the day they had arrived. His phone’s voicemail was full, which he didn’t even know was possible. He’d missed a meeting to discuss the renewal of a long-running series, and according to a panicked text from his secretary, the series’ lead writer had taken his lack of attendance so poorly he’d thrown himself out a window.
Which, honestly? Was pretty hilarious. And good riddance. Vox didn’t need anyone who couldn’t handle a bit of ambiguous pressure. If the guy recovered (the text wasn’t clear if the writer was a sinner or hellborn), Vox would stuff his ass in the editing department or something.
It was 7:44 PM - too late to salvage any of the work day’s messes, so Vox sank his attention into damage mitigation for the morning. He replied to emails, culled his voicemails, and read through resumes for possible lead writer replacements.
All the while, he ran a search in the background. He needed a bar, club, or hangout completely off Valentino’s radar. Somewhere he could pick up some warm bodies and work through his current...hangups. Letting the problem simmer hadn’t worked - so he’d boil it. That’s what you did to disinfect things anyway, right?