Chapter Text
“An omega? Hah!”
Lucifer’s voice is loud and echoing in the cavernous space of the newly built hotel, and Alastor watches Charlie shift uncomfortably at the implications of her father’s amusement. A pity—he’s definitely not about to do anything to relieve that discomfort. Far be it from Alastor to care for the opinion of an alien from what may as well be a different planet for all that its celestial shadow floats perpetually over the pride ring like a replacement moon, but he’s hardly going to pass up an opportunity to needle the man. No, no: Alastor is going to push on this button, thank you.
He crosses his hands behind his back as he twirls his cane once, ponderous, and tilts his head to the side quizzically.
“What’s so funny, your majesty?” Alastor asks, smiling politely. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Lucifer finally stops wheezing long enough to look at the subject of his amusement. “You!” he says, utterly shameless and also utterly unaware of all the ways in which Alastor is leading him down the path of social faux pas. “The thought of you! As an omega! That’s what’s hilarious.”
Charlie is well on her way to setting a new local record for how hard someone can cringe. “Dad, that’s…you can’t say stuff like that.”
“Huh?”
“It’s—kind of offensive,” Charlie rushes to say, eyes flicking to Alastor’s perfectly polite smile (and increasingly narrowed eyes—he may not care about Lucifer’s opinion, but he’s well within his rights to be offended at this interaction) for a split second. “You shouldn’t perpetuate stereotypes…”
“Oh, come on,” Lucifer complains. “It’s not like I haven’t been an omega before—” What? “—so I know what it’s like! I’m just—you can’t tell me this man has a single nurturing bone in his body!” He gestures wildly at Alastor, who grins a smidge wider. “Look at him! Look at his evil little face!”
“Mm, yes,” Alastor says, making Lucifer twitch sharply—as he always does when Alastor agrees with him in any way. He lets his smile dim, looking awkwardly away from the father-daughter duo. “I’ve been told something to that effect in the past.”
“You see, dad? Your words hurt!”
“Oh, he’s not hurt—”
“—And it’s always been a little painful,” Alastor goes on, pressing a hand to his heart. “Right here. In this exact spot.”
Lucifer is just far enough behind his daughter that he can bare his teeth at Alastor without her seeing, which is doubly hilarious because he’s obviously assuming that Charlie is falling for this act hook, line, and sinker as he does so. Alas: Charlie’s mouth flattens for a split moment, and she visibly takes a breath before she turns to Alastor, just done enough with his shit that she can no longer hide it, but not quite so much that she will call him out on it when all he’s really doing is hamming up another person’s perfectly egregious misstep.
Charlie sighs. “We get it, Alastor. Dad, can you please just apologize?”
Lucifer’s brows rise into his hairline, which is a rather impressive feat considering his utter lack of bangs. “For what?”
“It’s rude to laugh at people like that!”
“He laughs at me constantly! He’s laughing at me right now, you just can’t see it—it’s in his eyes!”
Lucifer is not incorrect. Alastor widens his eyes, utterly innocent.
“That’s—you’re the one who taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right, dad! But—you shouldn’t announce people’s orientations like that, either.”
“Yes,” Alastor chimes in, because he doesn’t really have much else on his docket today and he feels like dropping a match into this mess is just the ticket for a lovely way to spend the rest of his evening. “It’s not that I hide it, of course—but it’s a sensitive issue in this day and age. Hardly a topic for public discussion. Why, I’m honestly curious how you even found out!”
Lucifer squints at him. “It’s not that private if I can smell it on you.”
Alastor jolts, spine straightening. Even his ears go point-up. When he next opens his mouth, his tone is utterly offended. “Excuse me?”
Lucifer’s wary expression is melting away, replaced by an utterly insufferable smugness as he crosses his arms, tipping his head back to stare up at Alastor. “You heard me! I’ve been smelling it all over the place for the past three days, I just didn’t realize it was you until you finally showed your face. You humans go nose-blind to it, walking around with your own scents all day, but it’s pretty obvious who’s who to all the hell- and heavenborn.” He wrinkles his nose. “Except the hellhounds. They smell even stronger than you people.”
Alastor blinks, and then turns to stare at Charlie, appalled. She smiles weakly, audibly chagrined. “Yeah, it’s—I mean, it’s normal for me? Vaggie can also tell. But you never tried to hide it, so—”
“—and it’s been all over the place the past few days,” Lucifer continues, waving a hand. “You and that beta that’s been circling the hotel like a shark. You’re probably going into heat, in case you didn’t know that already." How perfectly condescending for his majesty to let him know. Alastor doesn't bother stopping himself from rolling his eyes. "And maybe that other guy will stop being so nervous and finally check in, and we’ll get another guest, honey!”
He looks so proud of himself to be delivering the news. Alastor would be more irritated if he wasn’t reeling from that news himself, if not the aspect of it that Lucifer thinks is significant.
“A beta?” he asks, genuinely confused.
Lucifer squints at him. “Yeah. Thought it was part of your scent at first, to be honest. Started at basically the same time. Hey, maybe he can replace you!”
“Dad…”
“It’s fine, Charlie,” Alastor says, smile slowly spreading across his face. “Why, what interesting news this is indeed! Your majesty, you truly are the sleuth of the century! Congratulations on your incredible acumen.”
“Alastor…”
“A sincere compliment, my dear!” he tells Charlie, wagging a finger. “I promise! Now, I’m afraid your father was right: I’ve not a single nurturing bone in my body, and as such I will be leaving this social disaster squarely in your hands. Good luck!”
“Hold on—”
He melts into the shadows.
Another thing that Lucifer is not incorrect about: Alastor is very much going into heat. Just about gone into it, really—not that it’s any of the man’s damn business. He usually spends his heats comfortable and alone in his own quarters, which for the second time now is going to be at the hotel. Its recent destruction has rendered the space less…’homey,’ Alastor supposes is the word, and he’s been spending the last three days putting together a half-decent nest in the bed.
As usual, the process is made both easier and more difficult by an overly-invested second party. An alpha, dogging at his footsteps—or so he had always assumed. He had always smelled an alpha, in the past. Lucifer is right: it can be hard to tell unless one is intimately close to another. But this particular scent has always been overly strong and occasionally even rank.
As much as Alastor dislikes giving the king of hell credit for his observational skills, however, he does trust Lucifer’s uncanny and preternatural abilities. If he says their visiter is a beta, then it’s more likely than not that he truly is—and if he’s not, then it’s just more ammunition to needle him with later. Alastor simply has to find out, first.
So Alastor does the only reasonable thing there is left to do: he walks over to the outside-facing wall, and cracks open the window a smidge, thus temporarily breaking the eldritch warding around its edges.
Lightning immediately shoots through the crack, scarcely an inch wide but still wide enough for a bolt of electricity to dart through. Some people really waste no time!
“HAH!” The words crackle through the room before the shape that spoke them even finishes manifesting. Electricity condenses, a ridiculous, neon blue, into a familiar (and no less obnoxious for it) leer as Vox materializes on Alastor’s rug, hands posed dramatically on his hips as red pixels spill out of the side of his mouth. “The great Radio Demon, alone and defense—”
“Could you take a step to the side, please?” Alastor requests politely.
“...What?”
“You’re wearing your shoes, and you’re on my rug,” Alastor says.
Vox deflates, staring at him blankly. After a moment, he takes a single step to the side, onto hardwood—much easier to clean, that. When Alastor doesn’t comment further, he takes a deep breath, and starts again:
“As I was saying,” Vox says, teeth clenched. “The Radio Demon—”
“‘The great Radio Demon,’ I actually believe it was.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you!”
“Hah!” Alastor barks. “Now that’s a riot! What makes you think you can?”
“Because!” Vox says, pointing a finger at him and speaking rapidly, as if he’s afraid Alastor is going to cut him off again before he can finish. “Because you’re alone, and everybody knows omegas are vulnerable during their heats, and—”
“Lucifer Morningstar,” Alastor starts, proving that Vox’s concern was indeed correct, and delights in the panicked way that Vox’s face falls at the mere mention of another person at such a particular point in his monologue. The idea that Alastor is bringing that man up as any sort of retort to what Vox is saying chafes, though, enough that he can’t bring himself to lean into the joke. So he continues: “Says that you, old friend, are a beta! Apparently he can smell it on us lowly sinners at great range. Since we’re speaking of orientation, of course. Now, what do you say to that?”
Vox’s face glitches out for a moment, flashing a tricolor set of bars—purple, pink, and blue, which seems a rather far cry from true technicolor, but what would Alastor know—before re-appearing as his own face, teeth bared and shot through with visual glitching. “Fuxk you!” he spits, voice splitting apart harshly as he loses his control over it. “Wh-wh-whatzzzz it to you?!”
Alastor steps forward, catching the corner of Vox’s screen in two fingers as Vox tries to slap him away—and fails, courtesy of Alastor’s shadow twining up the backs of his legs, cackling madly as it wraps its hands around Vox’s wrists and perches its chin on the top of his head, leering down.
He tilts Vox’s screen this way and that, grinning in amusement. “Direct answers only, chum!”
“Or what!” Vox asks, discharging enough electricity—and more to the point, light—to half-blind Alastor and disperse his shadow entirely. “What are you gonna do, in your state—hrk!”
By the time Alastor blinks the shock of light away, unpinning his ears from where they plastered flat to his skull at the deeply uncomfortable sensation, Vox is staring down at his own leg in a panic. It’s caught in a dark tendril creeping out of an extradimensional portal, casually ripped into the reality of Alastor’s hardwood (still easier to clean than a rug), which is in turn winding its way up his ankle, rumpling his dress sock and dipping under the hem of his pant leg.
Vox swallows. “Um.”
“Don’t you use garters?” Alastor asks, bemused.
“What?” Vox’s eyes are blown wide, staring at him.
“For your socks,” Alastor clarifies, gesturing down. “Not that it’s my business to tell a man how to dress, but you’d look a lot snappier if your socks didn’t wrinkle so much.”
Vox buries his face into his palms. “Please,” he begs. “Please do not wrap me up in your tentacles and start talking about how you want to see me in garters.”
“Well, the point is rather that you don’t see—”
“What do you want from me!” Vox exclaims, dropping his hands. “Fuck—I should have known better. Why did you let me in?!”
Alastor takes a step back, blinking a few times. Vox looks a little…wild-eyed. Well, one can never really tell what is going on in that picture-box head of his, Alastor supposes.
“I believe I’ve been rather clear!” Alastor says cheerfully. “An answer, if you please, regarding my question.”
“Or what?” Vox demands again, apparently sufficiently recovered from whatever grasped him when he realized that Alastor had a shadowy grip on his person.
Well, that won’t do. Alastor lets the tendril tighten around Vox’s ankle, grinning at the wheeze that punches out of Vox’s chest when the bones underneath it creak.
“Or I sent you right back where you came from!” Alastor’s gaze slides to the window, now swinging open in the breeze. “Expeditiously.”
Vox swallows, screen fuzzing over with static. “I don’t think this threat is having the effect you’re going for,” he rasps, wiping his palms over the thighs of his slacks. “It’s—fine. Fuck. Fine.” He screws his eyes shut, rubbing at the flat space between them. “I’m a beta. Fucking obviously, apparently,” he adds, the last bit of it in a mutter. His shoulders are hunched, and he won’t meet Alastor’s gaze. It’s wildly different from his demeanor when he first entered.
It occurs to Alastor that Vox may have been deliberately intending to leave him with the impression that he’s been an alpha this entire time.
Well, as the saying goes: he doesn’t have time to unpack all of that!
“Perfect!” Alastor says, clapping his hands together. “Exactly what I needed.”
Vox jerks his chin up from where it had been tipping toward the floor. The expression on his face can best be described as ‘rather pathetic,’ though admittedly in a somewhat endearing way. Alastor does so enjoy seeing him low. “...Wait, really?”
“Of course!” Alastor sends another tendril up Vox’s other ankle, earning a yelp, which promptly turns into a cut-off shriek when a third, much larger tentacle bursts out of thin air to hoist Vox into the air, conveniently allowing the first two to yank off his shoes, before flinging him onto Alastor’s bed-turned-nest.
“Shoes off inside!” Alastor chirps before following him into the nest. “It’s only polite!”
“—the fucking fuck are you—oh my god, holy shit, is this your nest?”
“Obviously.” Alastor toes off his own shoes and sets about righting the various piles of blanket and pillow that Vox’s violent entrance had disturbed. He usually prefers his bedding on the sparser side, to be honest, but something about his omega hindbrain needs the space to be enclosed when he’s nesting. He’s tried fiddling with a canopy on the bed, which does help, but it’s like his instincts know that the curtain barrier isn’t solid. And so: a nest of pillows and quilts. He’s made most of it himself over the years, with some contributions from Niffty.
He’s also already made his trip to visit Rosie and even dared to knock on Mimzy’s door despite her rather offended exit from the hotel grounds last time he saw her. Requesting little tidbits for his nest turned out to be a peace offering of its own, as she was none-too-happy to see him after their parting, but softened up nicely when he smiled down at her and mentioned that he was wondering if his lovely, delightful, very dear friend could part with a feather boa or some such item for the next week or so.
As for the hotel denizens—he hadn’t even needed to ask. To be honest, he’s not sure who offered and who had their belongings nicked, but Niffty was in and out of his rooms just the other day to clean, and afterward Alastor found a little something tucked away from every person on the premises (except Lucifer). Husk probably wouldn’t appreciate the knowledge, and Alastor considered removing that particular scrap of bowtie, but…well, Niffty had gone to the trouble, hadn’t she?
He’d done the asking with Vox, a long time ago. The man had panicked the first time and rejected Alastor’s request, which left him feeling…oddly hurt, to be honest. Nobody had said ‘no’ to such a thing since before Alastor’s death, in no small part because Alastor never asked unless he was certain. But then the intrepid little picturebox had shown up the next day with a handkerchief that reeked of alpha, and it was a struggle for Alastor’s smile to not become a grimace as he accepted it. He’d thought the poor chap had a hormonal disorder of some sort! It certainly would explain the way that the scent Vox offered had changed over time, slowly but thankfully to the less egregious. Serves Alastor right for not prying—apparently the man had just been finding synthetic pheromones this entire time!
Alastor suddenly realizes that he might, in fact, be offended at the realization that despite his request, he had never once, a single time, actually been provided with the items necessary to include Vox’s real scent in his nest.
“Until now, I suppose,” he murmurs to himself, setting down the last pillow, and turns to look at Vox—and freezes.
“What,” Alastor says slowly, “are you doing?”
“Uh.” Vox stares back at him equally frozen with his shirt half-off. His tailcoat and the gaudy accompanying sweater vest are already flung over the side of Alastor’s nest, where his instincts itch at him to retrieve them and—he’s not sure if he wants them to stay or go. Depends on how much artificial alpha reek remains on them, he supposes. “Getting naked?”
“Why.”
Vox rolls his eyes and starts buttoning his shirt back up. “Alright, alright, forgive a guy for not realizing you wanna be wooed a bit when you literally pick him up with your giant fucking hentai tentacles and drag him into bed. Shit, Alastor, you’re lucky I’m not still trying to kill you!”
‘Wooed.’ Alastor’s ear flicks. “Why aren’t you, hm? I know exactly what I brought you here for, but you were very enthusiastic about my hilariously imagined vulnerability earlier.”
Vox grins at him, eyes narrowing. “Oh, that was before I realized there’s a much better way to dominate the Radio Demon. After all, you’re practically begging for it, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
Vox is crawling toward Alastor, reaching out—and maybe it’s the pheromones after all, because Alastor is too curious and bemused to bite off a finger or two as a nesting snack before Vox grabs him by the upper arm and pulls him in, rolling the both of them over until Alastor is on his back, Vox leaning over him on all fours.
“Maybe not yet,” Vox says slowly, low and rumbling. It’s an unfamiliar affectation. Perhaps this is what he sounds like in bed with Valentino. “But you will be. Baby, I’m going to have you purring—you’ll never want another alpha again.”
“Another alpha?” Alastor asks, amused despite himself. He’d known Vox was fickle, had been counting on his obsession with Alastor to be sublimating into violence only because he couldn’t have what he really wanted, but this about-face is turning out a lot more ridiculous in live time.
Vox grins down at him, wide and shark-toothed. “Any alpha. You want a knot, babe? I’ll give you a knot—I’ll give you two if you can even handle it. Mass market heat-assist synthetics have got nothing on the VoxTek proprietary stuff—Vel’s got it made special for me, it’ll have you panting in no time. And stamina—I know you’re an old-timey fuck, but you’re gonna really appreciate it when you realize that artificial’s never heard of a refractory period!”
“My, my,” Alastor says, laughing shamelessly. “How forward! You’ve really put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”
Vox’s grin dies down a little, expression turning more serious. “Fuck yeah, I have. This isn’t some—back-alley cologne bottle smuggled up from Gluttony’s hellhounds. I have the good shit these days. You’re gonna love it. I’m gonna fuck you so good.”
“You’re very confident in yourself,” Alastor murmurs, eyes going lidded. He lifts his hand, tracing the backs of his claws over the bottom of Vox’s screen.
Vox’s eyes shine with greed. “Oh, you bet I am. I can’t wait to have you crying for it, baby, I’m gonna make such a mess out of you—how long does your heat last? Three days? A week? Doesn’t matter to me, I’ll have you whimpering like a bitch with your eyes rolling up in the back of your head for—”
Alastor hooks his claws under Vox’s screen and yanks up, slamming the TV case that functions as his skull into the headboard.
Vox’s words cut out with a crunch and a mechanical screech, a pair of small cracks spiderwebbing across his screen as he collapses onto the bed to Alastor’s side with a mangled groan. The cracks are hairline little things and begin to heal almost immediately, sealing themselves with barely a trickle of sparkling, clear fluid leaking out. Alastor swipes a bit of it up before it fades away, curious, and drags his tongue over it.
“Bleh.” It tastes caustic and sour. Not one of Vox’s more human components, that much is clear even just visually, but he’d been hopeful.
Vox is still dazed, limp on the mattress, so Alastor rolls him over onto his back and arranges him just so: screen propped up on a pillow, legs slightly spread to accommodate Alastor’s body between them, and arms positioned such as to offer a comfortable cradle. Then he drapes himself over Vox, shoving his face into the crook of his neck where his primary scent glands are located, and takes a deep, exhausted breath.
“Mmm.” Alastor sighs, relieved. Lucifer had not been lying, or mistaken: faint though the scent is due to whatever Vox has been doing to himself to emulate alphas, he is clearly still producing beta pheromones. He smells clean and soothing, and Alastor burrows closer, until his nose is pressed into Vox’s throat, hands clutching at his shoulders as he slowly goes more and more limp on top of him.
This is exactly what he fucking needed.
Alastor has no interest in alphas. They are loud and brash and, frankly, all of the things that Vox typically is. Their pheromones rile him up during his heats, usually toward violence, and as he is less interested in laying with them than he is in eating them, they leave him uncomfortable and itchy in his own skin afterward, unable to relax in his nest and just luxuriate in the privacy of his own space. Even with alphas like Mimzy, he never takes scented items when his heats coincide with the hormonal traces of their ruts. It’s just not worth the fuss.
He spent his first heat in hell entirely with Rosie, tucked into the crook of her arm. He hadn’t had his own place back then, and no real nest to speak of. It’s a uniquely panicking experience, on a purely instinctual level, even if he objectively finds that fact silly. Her presence had been a balm, psychologically, but her alpha nature began to grate sooner rather than later. Regardless of the oft-usurped stereotypes surrounding the dynamics (honestly: Alastor, nurturing—hilarious, though he will never tell Lucifer so), the vagaries of their biology cannot be denied. Alphas have ruts, omegas have heats, and betas are, as far as Alastor is concerned, better than a goddamn benzo if he can get his nose close enough.
Unfortunately for him, Rosie is not a beta, and furthermore, Alastor does not make a habit of being dependent on his friends.
Vox, on the other hand…
If anybody is pathetically dependent in their dynamic, it is certainly not Alastor.
Vox groans faintly, the thin whine of rebooting electronics finally culminating in his screen flickering back to consciousness. “What the…”
“Welcome back!” Alastor chirps, perching his chin onto his own intertwined fingers, propping his head up to stare down at Vox from where he’s balanced on his chest. It’s a rather firm chest—not in a muscular way so much as a mechanical one. Fascinating! He thinks his elbow might be jabbing into a metal junction of some sort.
“What the fuck?” Oh, Vox sounds angry. Alastor’s grin widens.
“Good old percussive maintenance has yet to fail me!” Alastor says. Goodness, even angry, up this close, Vox’s scent is just soothing. Alastor can’t bring himself to rise to the other’s ire! “Now do calm down, my dear, you’re going to spoil the atmosphere.”
“The atmosphere?” Hands alight on his hips, gripping harshly. “Could you be less of a cryptic fuck for one second and explain what the hell it is you want? Because at this point I’d rather fry you than fuck you, you asshole.”
“I’d rather neither,” Alastor honestly says, relaxing back down to Vox’s chest.
Vox’s screen flickers between several still images: emotions, captured in split-second, frozen moments. Genuine irritation; senseless lust; then, most tellingly, resigned despair.
“What do you want?”
Alastor’s eyes flutter as he takes another deep breath, claws curling into Vox’s shoulders, and he presses his face up into Vox’s throat where his scent glands are. Oh, dear. Perhaps this whole mess of heat still has him behaving a tad…
Well, it’s not as though Vox has room to talk about being uncouth.
“This,” he hums, breathing out on the word as the weight of the world slides off of his shoulders along with the air out of his lungs. His exhalation makes Vox shiver, the claws gripping his hips tightening. “Just…this. Stay still, picture box. Let me rest.”
Vox swallows, throat bobbing. “I should—I should kick your ass. I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” Alastor murmurs, eyes closed. “Too busy chasing the image of the high-powered alpha to embrace your natural talents.”
Vox flinches. “Don’t you fucking mock me. I may be a beta, but at least I’m not an omega like you.”
Alastor opens an eye. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not even a good omega,” Vox goes on, gaining heat. His claws are really digging into Alastor now, painfully so—Alastor finds he doesn’t mind, but then he’s always been more than a bit of a sadomasochist. “Fuck, if it weren’t for your scent, I’d swear you were an alpha! Always prancing around like you’re hot shit—”
“I am hot shit,” Alastor points out.
“—you shouldn’t even be an overlord!” Vox blurts.
Alastor blinks at him slowly. He should be quite angry at Vox’s words, he thinks. But he’s too relaxed. Making a fuss about it would just…ruin this lovely mood he’s in.
Vox stares back at him, equal parts angry and terrified.
“My teeth are awfully close to your throat for language like that,” Alastor says. Vox’s expression tips a little closer to ‘terrified.’ “But you have your uses, so I will forgive you. You know, for someone obsessed with progress, you subscribe to awfully outdated ideals. I already knew that you have an inferiority complex, but I’d appreciate it if you could keep it to yourself so that I can at least enjoy the tiny amount by which you’ve risen in my estimations now that I know you are a beta for a day.”
“You…” Vox’s face does something very strange. “You wanted a beta?”
“Mm.” Alastor lets his eyes slide back closed, and lays his head down.
“This whole time, you wanted a beta. To—to cuddle, or whatever the fuck you’re doing now. Getting high on pheromones. This—you—I.”
Vox sounds almost like he’s about to have some kind of emotional moment, but manages to contain himself. Thank goodness: anger, Alastor can comfortably ignore, but if the man started crying then Alastor would have to remove him from the premises. That would simply be too awkward.
“Has nobody ever shared a blunt with you?!” Vox demands, half-hysterical.
Alastor raises his head to squint at Vox in disbelief. “My dear picture box.”
Vox makes a strangled noise at that, screen flickering again.
Alastor almost does not want to deign that comment with a response, but the reality is admittedly funnier than whatever assumption Vox will likely make, and so: “I’m not opposed to indulging in a jazz cigarette,” Alastor says slowly, “but I’m afraid that our friend Mary Jane tends to leave me fairly peckish.”
“Ah.” Vox’s throat bobs again, tempting now that Alastor has snacking on the mind. “Nevermind.”
“Mm. I find I prefer to stay in during my heats. It’s too much effort to go hunting for a snack at a time like this. Unless you’re volunteering, of course.”
“...You could just grab any beta off the street for this,” Vox says quietly. “Hell, Niffty would probably love to sit in your nest and steal bits of your hair for as long as you want her to.”
Alastor traces a claw over Vox’s shoulder, which Vox promptly slaps away, grabbing Alastor’s hand with an angry glare.
“Maybe I prefer you,” Alastor says. “Why not?”
“Because I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” Alastor smiles, not entirely kindly.
Vox twitches, shifting his glare to the wallpaper over Alastor’s shoulder. “You hate me.”
“No,” Alastor says, softer now. “I don’t.”
Vox’s mouth, previously a thin line, wobbles. “Liar.”
“If you say so.”
“Why would—that’s not—” Vox’s voice is wavering, pitchy. “You’re lying. Every time I think you’ve reached the endgame of being a piece of shit, you come up with a new and more creative way to be an asshole. Well, congratulations. It’s working. You got me. Now what?”
Alastor blinks slowly. “Now,” he says, curling his fingers in Vox’s grip until they are more or less holding hands, “you relax, so that I can relax. And we rest.”
Vox stares at him for a long second, and then lets his head collapse back on the pillow, taking a shuddering breath. It takes him a few moments of deep breathing before he collects himself enough to go on: “I don’t—understand,” he says plaintively. “Why now? What changed? How can you just—do this to me?”
Alastor sighs deeply, and lets his head sink onto Vox’s shoulder. He brings their hands down, leaving Vox’s on the bed so that he can stretch his claws out.
“This is my second heat since I returned from my…sabbatical,” Alastor says, watching the light play over his own claws. “With my first, after the way your delightful little greeting went, I hardly thought you would be back to circling my place of residence like a stray dog. But there you were, right on schedule. And here you are now. Perhaps it made me feel…nostalgic.”
A tentative hand touches Alastor’s hair, soft—gentle—like its owner is rightfully afraid of getting it ripped off. Alastor allows it.
“Nostalgic?” Vox asks quietly.
Hopefully.
“Regardless of what you tell yourself,” Alastor says, equally quiet, “I did value our friendship, picture box.”
“You missed me?” Vox asks. It’s a marvel, the way he can flip on a dime from incandescently angry to painfully desperate. Perhaps those emotions have always been two sides of the same coin, for Vox.
Alastor doesn’t reply.
Vox’s hands are back on his hips, digging in. “I missed you,” Vox blurts, speaking quickly. “I—I did. I always wanted to spend your heat with you, I just—I thought, omegas always want alphas, right? It’s betas always stuck with betas, and—I don’t care if we don’t fuck. I just want. I just want you—fuck. Fuck.”
Vox shudders underneath him, and Alastor is grateful that the angle of his face precludes him from seeing Vox’s undoubtedly vulnerable expression. It wouldn’t be entirely new to him, but that sort of thing always made him itch under his skin.
“I’m such an idiot,” Vox says miserably. “Forget I said all of that. Fuck. You’re really going to destroy me now, aren’t you? I’m so—Velvette always says I’m so fucking easy when it comes to you. I shouldn’t have come.”
Muscles tense beneath Alastor’s claws, and he presses Vox back down into the bed, raising his own head.
“Down,” Alastor instructs firmly. “You did come, old chap. No taking it back now.”
Vox’s face is a painting of misery. Perhaps an overly modern one—but there is no artificial design in this particular expression. It would be delicious, if it wasn’t so personal.
“What do you want?” Vox asks one last time, hoarse.
Alastor takes a deep breath and lets it woosh out, sighing. This has gotten so complicated so quickly. He had known it would—but his impulsive actions led him here nonetheless.
“Just this,” he tells Vox, laying back down. Even with all the awkwardness, pressing his face into the crook of Vox’s throat is a foolproof method for relaxation that he feels down to his bones. His eyelids droop, going lidded, and he winds his arms underneath Vox’s body in a loose hug, angling his antlers away so that he can get closer. They’re plastered together shoulder-to-hip, legs entwined, and Alastor has never been more comfortable during a heat before.
“Just this,” he murmurs again.
Vox’s chest falls and rises beneath him, the steady, on-and-off mechanical hum of his cooling system accompanying the flow of air through his modernized body. His hands wind around Alastor’s waist, as human as anything. Certainly softer than any of Alastor’s sharp edges.
“Okay,” Vox whispers. “Just this.”