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All dreams are mocked to death by time, thinks Alastor. The great unmaker, slow and patient. It erodes all one loves and knows, with the quiet persistence of water against stone. One day, his accomplishments and his glories and his sins will all be worn away, no matter how deeply he carves them into the earth.
The overlords who rose in his absence flinch at the sound of his name. He knows the day where he is forgotten will come, but it will not be today, nor tomorrow, nor for the next century. It is a relief, for all that this world he has returned to has offered him so few.
"You're back. You're back," says Vox, as if repetition will anchor the moment to reality. And then, softer, a third time. "I can't believe it. You're back."
The entire far wall is a prison of reinforced glass. The sleek grey forms of Vox’s sharks glide past in a silent procession. Their dark, doll-like eyes seem to track Alastor with a passive hunger.
"An astute observation, old friend." His voice is dry. It scrapes his throat.
They sit shoulder to shoulder on Vox’s couch, without touching. It feels very nearly ironic, this closeness that suggests familiarity, yet feels more like some mocking farce of intimacy. Strangers performing the motions of friendships, the steps drilled into muscles even as hearts falter.
"Seven years is a long time, Al. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m slow to accept it.”
Alastor’s eyes trace the shape of Vox’s new head. It is sleek, and symmetrical, and his eyes trace it again and again, searching with a desperation foreign to him for impurities in the glass that do not exist. The only constant he finds is crimson hair and a smile that splits a face reflected back to him in the gleaming surface.
The differences stack higher, and higher, and higher. Vox’s posture is a little straighter. His gaze is a little steadier. His suit is custom-tailored— the VoxTek logo stitched into the cuff leaves little room for doubt— and fits him perfectly. There is no hint of the ill-fitting canary sweaters, the crimes of fashion that had been endearing in their audacity.
“You’ve traded in your wardrobe, I see,” Alastor remarks. His fingers twitch where they are placed over his knee. “No more… mm, bold statements?”
“Yeah,” Vox’s voice is quieter, now. “Yeah. Vel sorted me out there.”
“Val?” He should’ve known the other overlord had a hand to play.
“No, Vel. Uh, Velvette. New member of the Vees. She’s… fashion. And other things!”
“Of course she is.” The edges of Alastor’s smile twitch, though the movement doesn’t reach his eyes. “What are the Vees, these days? Tech brand? Media conglomerate? Cult?”
Vox laughs. The sound is smooth and practiced. Alastor idly wonders if it’s the same laugh he uses in his business interviews. “You know, you could be one of us, Al. You’d be perfect. I mean, I guess we wouldn’t really be the Vees unless you were inclined to change your name, but— hey, that’s flexible! The offer’s there.”
He means it. Alastor can hear the sincerity, somewhere deep beneath the salesman’s lilt, the search for a constant in a world that changes so quickly.
Alastor, alike, seeks comfort in what he knows. But even the highest towers crumble, and so the Vox Alastor knew is seven years dead and six feet under time and distance.
“You and me. Like old times?” Vox’s voice is warm. His eyes are round and wide and so fucking artificial, but they mimic softness so well Alastor cannot find the threads where illusion and humanity are stitched together.
When he tilts his head to the side, waiting, Alastor instinctively searches for the mechanical hitch of servos in his spine, but there is only the silence of smooth hardware. Just one more nail in the coffin, he supposes.
He knows what the question really means, under the veneer of joining the Vees. Well, he’s sure Vox wants him to join the Vees too, but there is more to it.
The world has changed, Alastor. Have you remained a constant?
He wants to say yes. He wants to say it so very badly that his mouth opens halfway before closing again, as if he is some rusted hinge. “You’re different,” he says instead.
“Upgraded.” Pride drips into his words with the thick texture of cough syrup, sweet and cloying. “I didn’t— lose anything. I’m just more efficient!”
“Must’ve hurt,” Alastor says. He hopes it did.
Vox hesitates. His eyes are still soft and round where they are animated on his screen, mismatched sclera searching for Alastor’s even as Alastor does not grace him the dignity of a glance. His screen dims a fraction. “Only a little. But it was a good trade.”
Alastor doesn’t respond. But inside, something hot and bitter coils tight in his gut.
So comes the end of those who are swallowed whole by the monster of their own ambition. Alastor’s pride is his greatest sin alike. But, he thinks, his own pride has always anchored him to himself, where Vox’s is a pliable thing that molds him for the world’s approval.
He cannot see his friend in the creature that sits beside him now, cannot see the man who he’d shared both a cigarette and the secret of his first kill with, with who he’d watched confession and smoke mingle. This is a thing with a face quite literally shaped for billboards, a voice sanded down in the way business demands: warm enough to feel like the truth, practiced enough to mean nothing at all.
Time has spared him, but he cannot say the same for Vox. He does not know what he would have preferred to come back to: his Vox, preserved in amber and just as brittle, or this entity of relentless hungry modernity.
He is so lost in his thoughts that he doesn’t register Vox leaning in until the action is complete.
“God, you’re still—” Vox’s voice hitches, and he clears his throat with a burst of static. “—the most stunning thing in any room. Hell, any dimension! Even when you’re looking at me like you’re, uh, deciding which organ to remove first.”
A single cool claw traces the line of Alastor’s jaw with a familiarity that Vox no longer deserves. He allows the touch as his mind works several steps removed from the physical sensation.
He wonders if this is what the old Vox always wanted. That man’s hunger had been a thrilling, tangible, mirror to his own, ever strengthened by how he had never deigned to satisfy it.
“A tempting thought,” he says. “I’ve always wondered what powers that silver tongue. Perhaps a unique gland.”
This new thing is a little more— acquisitive, but the root, perhaps, is the same. He feels the corpse-sluggish crawl of his heart picking up as it pumps clotted black blood through his veins, finding the same thrill in this hunt.
Vox’s hand slides from Alastor’s jaw to the back of his neck, pulling him closer until they are face to face. The glass of his screen is cool against Alastor’s temple. “C’mon. Let me show you how good we used to be.”
He wonders, now, which of his organs Vox will deem worth the price of admission. The heart, perhaps? Too sentimental. The liver? Already pickled. The tongue? Maybe, as the one part of him that ever could hurt Vox.
One last tribute to the ghosts, then. Paid with his dignity.
Alastor tilts his head in a silent toast, and he waits for the memories to be content with this placation. “And what, precisely,” his voice is low, “does used to be entail? A refresher course seems in order.”
“Don’t start on the wordplay, Al.” Vox pulls a few inches away, so they are no longer pressed into one another.
“Why ever not? Has your new format done away with nuance entirely?”
“I’m trying to be serious here.” A flicker of— irritation, perhaps?
“And I,” Alastor says, his words dripping with honey-thick curiosity, “am trying to ascertain whether there’s anything left behind that screen worth being serious with.”
“Ouch. You sure know how to hit a guy where it hurts.”
“Several places come to mind,” says Alastor, and his smile pulls a little tighter at the edges, “but do enlighten me.”
“Come on, Al, just answer me. It’s yes or no.” Vox’s tone has circled back around to pleading, and Alastor feels a quiet thrill at the realization that Vox’s frustration is a form of devotion— that he would never truly be irritated with Alastor. Only ever at his own inability to hold him.
Alastor considers him, head tilted. He wonders if this—thing of vulnerability will make his Vox show, but he cannot find it in himself to predict the outcome. The result, he thinks, will carve something out of him either way.
“Very well.” He takes Vox’s hand from where it rests at his side, and gives it one firm shake. “Yes. There, then. A deal struck.”
For a moment, he is faced with the faint realization that his failed theatrical ploy has made him look rather silly. Then, energy crackles between their clasped hands, blooming outwards into a brief vibrant flash that fills the room. The depths of Alastor’s radio-sick green power meet the red of Vox’s in a silent shockwave, as the lightbulbs flicker and the air hums with ozone and the fur on Alastor’s forearms stands on end.
A deal struck, indeed.
Vox jerks his hand back from Alastor’s, as if the handshake was an electric shock. Well, maybe the metaphor doesn’t stand when it’s directed to a man with electric powers. “What the hell was that? A handshake? We’re not making a soul contract!”
“Are we not?” Alastor’s smile is placid, content. “Your terms seemed as equally binding. The potential for hostile takeover appeared roughly equivalent.”
“You’re impossible, you know that? What the fuck did I just agree to, actually?”
“You’re due to show me how good we used to be, I believe.”
“That doesn’t even benefit you!”
“I find my amusement where I can, my dear fellow.” Alastor’s voice is that of a man explaining a simple joke to a child. He lets his smile widen, all mockery. “Maybe I thought it would be funny to watch you try to calculate the odds of this ending well for you. It was almost worth the inconvenience.”
“So this is just a joke to you, huh?” The glow of his screen dims, a fraction, and the hunger deep inside Alastor yawns awake, pleased by the offering of Vox’s disgruntlement.
Alastor’s smile is the edge of a razor. “Isn’t everything?”
They both know well: it’s all a joke, until it isn’t.
Alastor ends up on his back, arms awkwardly folded over his stomach, head bent against the armrest at an angle that would be inhospitable for any less malleable sinner. His unguligrade legs dangle off the other side, ever inconvenient. Vox is situated above him, balanced on one elbow as he cups Alastor’s face with the other, as adoring as if he is a priceless artifact unearthed from an ancient ruin.
Vox kisses him.
It is slow and gentle. His mouth moves against Alastor’s with a sort of languid fervor, the intensity of the moment cradled within the veneer of unhurried ease. Vox, like Alastor, knows too well: a deal made is a deal kept, no matter how informal. And so he indulges.
Somewhere over the years Vox has gained a low electromagnetic current, which Alastor first registers as the tingle that courses through his lips and settles beneath his skin, and then as the pins and needles that pool in his limbs. The current tugs at his muscles with the puppeteer’s invisible thread, and the dead thing nestled in the cage of his ribs picks up its sluggish rhythm.
Traces of ozone, acrid and metallic, fill his mouth where their mouths meet, making wet noises that send a cold queasy flicker through his gut. He feels— not entirely in control of his own actions, some spectral observer watching a show play out. Clumsily, he attempts to mirror Vox’s movements in a way he thinks the other man will enjoy. At some point, his hands have landed on Vox’s shoulders.
Vox shifts his weight to remove his hand from cupping Alastor’s cheek, carding a hand through Alastor’s hair to cradle the back of his head. His palm is warm and broad, and the involuntary little gasp it pulls from his lungs is swallowed whole when Vox winds his fingers into his hair and tugs hard enough to lance pinpricks of pain into his scalp. It’s less of a kiss, and more Vox bullying his tongue into Alastor’s mouth and sucking on his bottom lip.
The lights above are pinpricks swimming in the periphery of his vision, contributing to the muffled quality the room has taken on. Vox’s mouth against his own, and Vox’s hand in his hair, and Vox’s presence above him.
Alastor lets his hands drift upwards, from Vox’s shoulders to the back of his head, skimming over the plane of hardware. He traces the seams, concentrates on following his claw over to the junction of two insulated conductors. The physical sensations under his fingertips are easier to catalogue. They tie him to his body.
Vox shudders under his touch, full-body tremors that betray the intensity of the sensation, but keeps kissing him.
Wondering whether it’s a power button, Alastor toys with what passes for a sleeved switch. One claw tests the give of it, pressing just enough to feel resistance, but not enough to engage. It depresses minutely, the barest flex beneath his fingertip.
Upon failing to provoke a response, he switches to another. His claw circles it delicately, as if he is a child tracing the rim of a distant planet through a telescope. He supposes he may very well be on a different planet now, for all the uncharted waters he has steered into.
All good things, they say, must come to an end. The calm before the storm cannot last forever. Only long enough to make a man forget what storms feel like, thinks Alastor.
“Enough of that,” Vox mumbles, breaking the kiss. The sensation of the electricity lingers, teasing his skin with static, and the fine dark hair on his forearms is standing on end.
And so comes the storm.
Vox’s hand slides down, pulling him into a more vertical position. Blood rushes from Alastor’s head for one disorienting second. His back presses into the firm arm of the couch as Vox leans into him, bracing one hand next to Alastor’s ribcage.
He is—boxed in. His shadow thrums and twitches in the corner of his vision.
Vox’s free hand moves to the fastening of Alastor’s pants. His claws snag on the button, and the metallic click is perhaps the most terrible sound Alastor has ever heard.
His shadows, deceptively slender, close in a singular black arc around Vox’s wrist. There is no monstrous transformation: his eyes are the cold of a dead man, blank and red.
"My, my, so impatient!" Alastor chirps, bright and crisp, and his smile sharpens to a knife’s edge. "We haven't even settled on a rating for this evening's programming. I was thinking a hard M for mature themes. You, on the other hand, seem to be angling for outright pornography."
Vox’s frown clips off his screen. “C’mon, Al. Don’t be like that. We both know where this is going.” He tries to pull his wrist free, but the shadows hold true.
“Do we?” Alastor’s voice slowly drops its playful cadence, until it is as flat as Vox’s screen. “I was under the impression I was here for a conversation. A reckoning, even. I think you’ve more than showed me how good we used to be.”
“You’re here because you want to be here.” The insistence gives Vox’s voice a staticky edge. He gauges his strength, testing the give of the shadowy restraint. “You could vanish into a puddle of shadows if you really wanted to! So I know you’re choosing to stay, Al. Don’t pretend you’re above this.”
The shadow constrict just a touch tighter, drawing out a grunt of pain from Vox.
“I am not above anything.” Alastor’s words are the wet soft separation of a suture, leaning in. The static around him begins to rise, crackling faintly with the sweet fetid scent of rot. “I am simply— selective about what is beneath me.”
With a last painful warning squeeze, he dissipates the shadowy tendril, dropping Vox’s hand. Vox jerks it back, cradling his wrist, where dark bruises have begun to bloom illuminated by the light of his screen.
“Fine. Okay. Fuck,” Vox bites the words out, the pixels swirling with contrition. “Message received. No more advances! Unless you, uh, change your mind!” He trails off.
One hand comes up to cup Alastor’s jaw, thumb pressing hard into the soft vulnerable skin that connects his jaw to his throat in a demand for attention. Alastor leans into the pain, and his silence is his answer.
“So,” says Vox, “do you want to suck my dick?”
“I’d rather not.” Alastor’s voice is flat, but he allows Vox to gently thumb at his jaw and tilt his head back to expose the long line of his throat.
Vox laughs, low and glitchy. His claw moves over the pale, unmarked column of Alastor’s throat with a pressure just shy of breaking the skin. The flesh depresses as he maps the fragile anatomy beneath, and shivers run down Alastor’s spine when a thump dips into his jugular notch. “Do you want me to shove my dick down your throat so hard you choke?”
Alastor gives a non-committal shrug shaped somewhat like consent, which is the closest he’ll deign to giving Vox approval.
He gives no protest when Vox pushes him down: he settles on his knees, between Vox’s legs. A hand cards through his hair with the intimacy of sewing autopsy stitches on a subject that is still breathing.
Alastor wonders, sometimes, whether Vox is trying to map the boundaries of what he will endure, to find the point where his pride will shatter, to see if the Radio Demon will finally, truly break for him. The thought is unsettling. He does not like the idea that the old Vox would have taken the same surrender given the chance. It is easier, perhaps, to treat his friend’s shortcomings as a fault of modernity.
His cheek is pressed into Vox’s thigh. The rough material of the slacks grates against his skin, and his ears twitch, involuntary, flattening before he forces them back up.
Vox tugs his pants down a few inches, reaches into his briefs to pull out his cock without fanfare. It’s the same electric blue as the tips of his claws, and a little longer than Alastor would have expected if the saying compensating for something carried weight. He wonders whether this is the singular part of Vox that’s remained the same over the years. Or perhaps not. He wouldn’t put it past the other man to replace— well, more than one type of head.
Vox’s hand is wrapped around the base, and a few pale droplets of precome already bead at the tip. Alastor catches himself hoping that it’s indicative of a quicker climax, but chides himself at the childish notion. The ghosts will have their appeasement, one way or another.
“Nice and easy.” Vox murmurs. His thumb brushes Alastor’s lower lip, nudging his mouth ajar. “Just open up. I’ll do the rest of the work, okay? Uh, keep your teeth out of the way though. Replacements are expensive as fuck— you know, I’m actually convinced that’s why Val keeps breaking them.”
Tentatively, Alastor relaxes his jaw. His eyes remain open, watching through his lashes as Vox guides himself forward, pressing his dick against Alastor’s lips before pushing in. The weight is heavy, slick against the concave of his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Vox holds it there, and when he looks down his eyes are full with adoration and something on the verge of reverence. As if he is defiling a god, thinks Alastor.
“Fuck,” he breathes, and his fingers tighten with a fistful of Alastor’s hair. “Can’t believe you’re letting me do this. You’ve given me, like, twenty fucking years’ worth of blue balls.”
Alastor’s mouth is saturated with saliva and a faint sweetness from the precome. He suckles lazily on the head of Vox’s cock. Patience is a virtue. Not that he has many of those in Hell, but the sentiment stands.
“You’re so fucking cute,” Vox croons. He drags a singular claw over Alastor’s cheekbone, tracing the curve of his face until he reaches the base of his eye. “Has anyone ever told you that? Big, bad, Radio Demon— but, fuck, you’re like a baby deer or something. It’s criminal, you know? Terrifying and adorable. Makes a guy want to ruin you.”
His jaw twinges with strain, but it’s really not so bad if this is all there is to it. Perhaps Angel Dust’s complaints were oversold, though he supposes the excessive monologuing would get tiring after a few hours.
“Tap my thigh if you need to tap out,” he adds. “Wait— shit, do you even know what that means? I guess it’s nineties slang but —” he is cut off by force of Alastor’s glare. “Uh, just— tap. If you want to stop.”
He promptly shoves his cock down Alastor’s throat.
Alastor’s tail flicks pin-straight against his coat as he gags, raw and violent. The muscles in his throat convulse around the intrusion, and the pathetic little gasps that escape him as wounded animal noises that only make Vox’s cock twitch against the soft inner lining of his esophagus. The only thing he can hear is his heart, drumming the frantic wild rhythm of a bird beating itself bloody against the bars of its cage.
He forces an inhale through his nose, deep and slow. His throat clicks wetly as he tries to swallow, his tongue pressing uselessly up, his hands fisting the rough material of Vox’s slacks. His core winds ever tighter. Breathe in, breathe out.
Every muscle in his body has gone stiff when Vox finally bottoms out. Alastor’s nose is crushed awkwardly into Vox’s pelvis, and he finds he cannot inhale, his attempts at calm lost to the thud of his own traitorous heart.
His chest convulses with a kind of primal urgency, aching for air. At some point his lungs begin to seize up with phantom pressure, heaving against the absence of oxygen. He tells his lecherous corpse that he does not need it, but his hands still claw at Vox’s knees with the thrashing desperation of a drowning man as his throat tightens pleadingly around a moan. He wants to— peel open his ribs. Let his lungs meet the air, bright and bloody.
“Oh, fuck.” Vox’s voice has taken on a ragged, pleading, edge. “That’s it, baby.”
Vox pulls back just enough for Alastor to choke in a wet, strangled, gasp, before slamming in again. The ragged sound of him choking the second time seems to please Vox immensely. Saliva dribbles from where his mouth gapes open, hot and damp where it soaks Alastor’s pants, but he is beyond caring. His head feels fuzzy at the lack of oxygen, or perhaps he has simply been concussed with the force of the pounding.
“I must be filling you up so good.” He pants, and his hips stutter. “Fuck, your throat’s perfect—”
Alastor taps— he supposes taps is a generous way of putting it— Vox’s thigh when he chokes for a third time, for his stomach wrenching as bile burns his throat, for the tears threatening to leak at the corner of his eyes. It is the lesser of the two weaknesses.
His nails rip through the tailored wool of Vox’s slacks, carving deep grooves into the skin. Blood leaks with the blue tinge of cooling fluid, trickling down Alastor’s claws with a repulsive viscousness he cannot mistake as anything other than unnatural. His palm is coated with the sheen of the mercury-thick oil, slowly seeping into the sleeves of his suit jacket. The dread that pools in his stomach is for the inevitable dry-cleaning bill, he tells himself.
Vox yelps, jerking back, and Alastor gets some measure of wretched satisfaction from the sound, some small increment of payment for the humiliation he has endured. “Fuck, I said tap me, not maul me!”
His cock is shiny and slick when it pops out of Alastor’s mouth with a wet sucking noise that reminds him of raw meat being vacuum sealed at the butcher’s. Fat globules of spit still coat the shaft as a few beads of pre-come leak from the tip, dribbling down the head to tug at the strand of saliva that still connects his lips to Vox’s cock. He drags his head back, and the strand stretches for one humiliating moment before breaking against his chin.
He feels— debauched. Spit-slick, eyes watering, every bit the star of one of Angel’s filthy films.
Disgust coils in his stomach, spreading in nauseating waves throughout his body, for the slimy fluids that still coat his mouth and chin, for the tears that are dangerously close to spilling, for the heat lingering beneath it all. He squeezes his eyes shut.
“Hey. Um. Are you— good?” Vox’s voice is still heavy with panting arousal, but there is a twinge of what Alastor thinks might be genuine concern.
“Mhm,” manages Alastor. His teeth chatter, clinking together without his approval. He clenches his jaw until the raw grind of enamel against enamel sends jolts of pain into his skull and the sour metallic taste fills his mouth.
His skin is clammy, gooseflesh prickling up his arms. He tries to focus on the raw ache of his throat, the sting that still lingers in his scalp, the floor digging into his knees. It grounds him.
“Okay,” Vox says. “Okay, Al. If you say so.”
He can’t quite recall when Vox’s cock got back in his mouth, but he notices the change the instant that Vox’s claws in his hair loosen with pleasure— only in its absence can he truly appreciate that anchoring curl of pain, the hands that steadied him into the rough treatment.
The force of Vox’s thrusts driving into his mouth whips his head back and forth, and the world smears across his vision. He thinks he feels his brain rattling in his skull as meat in a pressure cooker. His thoughts spill sideways and the only thing keeping his teeth from clacking together is his jaw locked open, muscles bound so tight he cannot remember how to release them.
Vox’s hips jackhammer erratically, losing rhythm as his hand shifts from Alastor’s hair to the delicate shell of his ear. He pinches the oversensitive cartilage, sharply wrenching Alastor’s face flush against his pelvis, where a whine in the catches in the back of Alastor’s mouth.
Release comes in a hot sick flood. It fills his throat, and then it claws up his sinuses. The pain is searing-sharp as semen erupts from his nostrils in choking ropes, brimming with an acrid bitterness.
His eyes prick with tears, and he gags, but there is only Vox’s spend to console him, sticky and reeking as it beads at the top of his upper lip, before trickling down his chin in a slow obscene dribble. Breath hitches in wet gasps around Vox’s twitching cock, throat working helplessly to expel the liquid invasion. Inhaling drags the stench of ozone into his lungs, where Alastor is certain it will remain imbued for all of time. His claws clench and unclench in protest, but Vox simply holds him there, grinding deeper, forcing him to endure it, to choke on the evidence of his own humiliation.
Tears and snot and spend. Filth. Shame. Alastor is drowning in it.
“Uh, that doesn’t normally happen,” Vox says, a little breathless. His voice is on the border between awe and concern. “Don’t let it put you off blowjobs forever!”
His cock slides free with a lewd, wet, pop. Alastor sags forward, catching himself with one hand, coughing violently, strings of viscous white fluid still clinging to his chin and nose, choking in fast frantic inhales. He spits, but the taste is seared into his tongue.
“Hey, hey, you’re okay.” Vox’s voice has shifted into something appallingly tender. He pulls Alastor up by the shoulders, sitting him on the couch, ignoring the way he stiffens. “Just breathe.”
A thumb, surprisingly gentle, swipes through the mess on his face, rubbing it into his skin. He cringes; it traces the line of his mouth and drags a slick trail down his throat.
Sharks drift closer to the glass with a ritualized kind of grace, ghosts in a cathedral, and skin is cut through with same cold scars of circuitry as Vox. A thought surfaces, quiet and unwelcome: they are not the only captive predators in the room.
His shadows curl in, thin and deliberate, beckoning him with the cool clean promise of oblivion.
A deal made is a deal kept, no matter how weak the chains. Alastor can see how this will end. Vox will be nice, in his own cloying, possessive way—clean him up, hold him, pretend this was intimacy. The thought is more suffocating than the come in his sinuses.
“Come on, you’ve been so good to me. Let me take care of you.” Vox murmurs, and the words are slick and self-satisfied, as if he’s already won.
Alastor nods, because that is the only thing he can do.
He must still look stricken, pale and trembling, because Vox misreads the disgust carved into every line of his body for insecurity. “Look at you. A mess. My mess— hah! It’s kinda hot, actually. Proof you can take it all.”
He strokes a hand down Alastor’s back, patronizing, until his breathing eases and the liquids on his face dry and his heart slows. His eyes trace the line of Alastor’s mouth, his lips, his throat, again and again, the same way a parasite memorizes the pathways of the only host that could ever sustain it.
Eventually, Alastor let his head loll back against the couch. The movement agitates the bruises inside the tender flesh of his throat. “It would seem the worst has passed,” he manages, the words loose and slurry. “How— fortunate.”
“I knew you’d see things my way eventually, Al.” Vox’s claws prickle over the knobs of Alastor’s spine. “Time for round two! Gotta make sure my good work really sticks, yeah?”
He finds his shoulders wrenched back, Vox pressing his forearms together and holding them with one hand. Claws dig threateningly into the small of his back. Alastor plays the part of the ragdoll: limbs pliant, letting Vox maneuver him as he pleases.
With a few impatient tugs, Vox undoes his pants, peeling the fabric of his trousers and briefs down his hips until they pool around his thighs, leaving him exposed to the cool air. There is a beat of silence, then an incredulous chuckle that seems to vibrate against his back. “Holy fuck,” says Vox, “so that’s why you never seemed to be hard around me.”
I never seemed to be hard because I was never hard, you ill-mannered picture box, thinks Alastor. The retort is a razor-sharp blade sheathed behind his teeth.
His other hand lands possessively on his hip, his television head a cold, heavy, weight on Alastor’s shoulder, the metal edge digging into the tender skin of his neck. “All that performance. The big, scary, Radio Demon, and this is what you’ve got to show for it?”
The humiliation is a cold, distant, thing. He supposes his heart is too petrified to bleed for the opinions of a glorified toaster.
Vox’s grip on his wrists tightens almost thoughtfully, and his tone borders on vindicated. “I bet you couldn’t even fuck someone with it!”
Alastor shrugs as best he can in the tight grip. “I suppose you’re correct. Not that I’ve had any particular need to do so, but I digress. Continue with the verbal mockery, old friend. It is marginally more entertaining than the alternative.”
Vox blinks at him, his screen flickering. “Well, now you just wrecked the mood!”
“I don’t think there was a mood to be wrecked in the first place.”
“I fucking hate you sometimes. I’m good at this! Val criticizes everything but even he doesn’t have any complaints about my performance. But you just— you deflate everything!”
“Fishing for an ego boost, are we?” Alastor’s voice crackles with dry static.
“Yeah, well, they do say an ego correlates to dick size.”
“No,” says Alastor, “I’m quite sure the phrase is an ego compensates for lack thereof.”
Vox hums, noncommittal, though his screen glitches faintly. “Well, you’ve always been an exception to rules. Guess not this one though.”
“You’ll have to tone down the flattery lest I grow conceited about my modest endowment,” Alastor says dryly.
“Aw.” He pulls Alastor closer, the glass of his face cold where it clinks against the vertebrae of Alastor’s spine. “But you know I love hearing you talk. All those big, fancy, words to dress up such a— modest little package!”
“How much longer do you intend on keeping this going, pray tell?”
“As long as it takes to get a reaction out of you. Fuck me for thinking it’s cute, huh? Your little cocklet.”
“I don’t think that’s a word,” says Alastor. He’s confident his voice could teach a masterclass in weaponized monotony.
“No, it’s— cock, and then let is the diminutive suffix. It works the same as, like, piglet. Fuck, it’s probably after your time anyway.”
Vox doesn’t give him the time to come up with a witty retort, leaving only the physical reality of their position, the ache of his shoulders as Vox still presses Alastor’s forearms to the small of his back.
A hand roams a few inches down his thigh; teasing, and the way his hips snap forward is— not completely involuntary. The tight coil in his gut, the heat stewing miserably in his core, his erection leaking with the proof of its arousal— every cell in his body screams with hate for the despairing bag of flesh he has been reduced to. He wants to watch his form bleed. He wants to sever the connection between mind and body. He wants this humiliating, traitorous, release, over with.
“You look so good like this, baby.” Vox purrs, voice dripping with a possessiveness that makes Alastor’s skin crawl.
A comeback forms, then dissolves, replaced by the silent seething shame of his body’s response so undeniable.
At some point Vox’s hand moves over to the concave of his stomach, thumbing the divots of his ribs. The man wraps his fingers around the smallest part of Alastor’s waist and squeezes. Vox’s fingers very nearly touch at the small of his back, and a whine is born and dead in the back of his throat.
“Pretty,” Vox murmurs, and the praise is ash in Alastor’s mouth.
He makes a tight circle with his forefinger and thumb, small enough to cradle Alastor’s cock, holding it out a few inches from his dick.
“You look like you want something,” says Vox.
“Your hand, if you will.”
Vox raises an eyebrow— well, Alastor can’t actually see his face from where it rests on his shoulder, but he gets the impression that Vox raises an eyebrow. “Come on, you can do better than— that!” He wheedles. “My hand could be anywhere, baby. You gotta be specific.”
“Don’t push it,” Alastor warns. Static creeps into his voice as the vine that crawls up the tower, unnoticed until it is all-consuming.
Vox makes an amused chortle, visibly suppressing a continuation to the intermission of sentimentality, and finally deigns to touch him. He curls his forefingers and thumb around the shaft, and the way Alastor’s cock twitches at that slight bit of stimulation is profoundly unbecoming. There isn’t much length to work with, so he rotates his hand in a tight, practiced, circle. Alastor chokes on his own inhale as it bobs and leaks precome incessantly, smearing across Vox’s fist.
The motion is— efficient. The application of friction, designed to elicit a biological response. Vox catalogues his every twitch and tremor, adjusts microscopically. In truth Alastor feels a bit like a machine being tested for optimal function.
His shoulders ache with the strain of the position. He tries to think of anything besides this torment, the way his hips buck forwards, into the hot wet tight cradle of Vox’s fist, then away. Heartbeats drum the rhythm of the death knell, his panting loud and wet as sweat gathers on his skin. All the heat in his body is pooling in his limbs and ice scuttles with many legs across his heart.
In the small dark place between the sensations, Alastor searches his memory for the good times. He lands on a day they fed Vox’s poorly performing producers to his sharks, long before the years that had buried them both, Vox six feet below corporation and him six feet below his own pride, when VoxTek was nothing more than a glimmer in their shared ambition, and care little more than an abstract notion to Alastor.
He tries to relive that moment: the aquarium chill filtering through the vents, and the low metallic scent permeating the air, and the glass diffusing the patterns of sharkskin into a calm blue light. He tries to recall the cadence of Vox’s voice as he promised that someday he’d be an overlord and have a tank vast enough for the monsters he contained, and Alastor’s own smile sharpening to match those of the sharks.
He tries to clutch the cold, and the silence, and the feeling of having an eternity ahead of him, drunk with the iron-sweet scent of blood that soothed the gnawing hunger cradled in his ribs, the sensation of being untouchable by time and death alike.
Vox’s breath, hot and wet at his ear, Vox’s screen, digging sharply into his collarbone, Vox’s hand wrenching his arms back. He is being eaten alive, piece by piece.
The sharks, and the cool blue light, and Vox’s box-shaped head silhouetted against the tank are lost in the deep well of terror for what lies ahead, and he resigns himself to facing his fate without subterfuge.
He closes his eyes. The wet slapping sound of skin against skin consumes his world. The shameful twist is that he finds himself wishing Vox would just say something— for all his complaints of excessive monologuing, now he would cherish the interruption.
At some point Vox gets bored with jerking him off, and cups the soft fuzzy weight of his balls, pushing upwards with the textured pad of his thumb to crush Alastor’s weeping cock against the concave of his stomach.
He squeezes. The pain is bright and clarifying. It is an anchor to the reality that rapidly spirals around him.
Alastor thinks he can feel every droplet of sweat that rolls down his back, each one burning him with a red-hot rod that traces his tensed muscles. The wires in his brain have been crossed: the mess of pain and humiliation overlaps with the terrifying reality of pleasure.
“Again,” rasps Alastor. “Harder.” For the first time since the ordeal began, the words feel like his own.
“Fuck, I should have known you’d be a masochist. You and your fucking… suit straps, that’s basically like wearing bondage gear all the time.” Vox groans, and his voice is thick with renewed arousal. Alastor doesn’t even have it in him to be annoyed that he spent all that time getting the man off just to have him worked up again.
He squeezes once again, blessedly much harder. The pain punches into Alastor, sharp and blinding, before curdling into a deep ache that seeps into his guts. It coils inside him like something parasitic, squirming into the hollows of his abdomen and kissing his organs with a slavering, obscene affection. His stomach clenches, as if trying to expel the hideous torment writhing in his guts and gnawing at his innards with needle-teeth.
He fights against the tilting world as bile burns behind his clenched teeth, bites through his lip with the wet grind of enamel against enamel. Hot blood fills his mouth, but where the familiar coppery comfort would normally ground him all Alastor can taste is the salt of his own sweat and the meaty slickness that clings to his tongue like rancid fat. It pools under his tongue, viscous and heavy, where he is so reminded of the bitter tang of Vox’s spent seed that he cannot bring himself to swallow.
The world is silenced to the noise of his own head: his breath, ragged and moist; his heartbeats, pounding loud and desperate against his ribs; the high, thin, whine of static that fills his brain.
His lip stitches itself back together with neon thread as he finds it in himself to call upon some paltry dredge of his power, responding to his desperation as a trapped animal seeing the hunter approaching gnaws its leg off. The flesh sews together, slick tendrils of sinew wriggling towards each other like worms, pulled taut with garish light.
And so the silence shatters, and the roiling ocean breaks over him in a single ice-cold wave, in Vox’s wet gloating breaths and the hum of his screen and the filthy noises of their coupling. The cold seeps deep, where he thinks he would taste the chill if he shattered his bones and drank deep of his marrow, skin pebbled with gooseflesh as sweat drips down his back.
He thinks it is only Vox’s hand, razored fingertips digging into the flesh of his hip, that keeps him from slipping away entirely. Into the welcoming embrace of the shadows, or, oh, he thinks he maybe he will simply die.
Vox squeezes him again, and the pain jolts into him with the same abruptness as his climax. His body arches, back bowing taut as a wire, every muscle locking up as he is violently emptied. Vox keeps rubbing Alastor through his climax, wringing him out for all he is worth.
The hand keeps moving over the softening flesh of his cock. It is a raw, grating, sort of friction, on nerves already stripped bare. He thinks he is being peeled, dry twisting motions entirely reminiscent of all those he’s flayed on his broadcast, worn down to a bloody nub. Alastor’s hips twitch, once, twice, trying to escape the friction, but Vox’s grip is a vice and so he endures.
He is being jostled loose from his own being. There is the body he wears, sluggish and obedient, and then there is him, reduced to the animal binary of pain and pleasure.
He died, once. He’d always imaged it as some— grand spectacle drenched in glory and viscera, the proper theatrics of a finale. Instead, he had died like a dog, quietly, in the filth, forgotten by morning. A small death; unceremonious. A smudge on the great timeline.
He remembers thinking as he bled into the silence, this is the end of the world. Surely. Cities should be flattening. Mountains should be blowing through the air like ash. Continents should be crumbling into the sea.
Then and now alike, the world refuses him. With him or without, the machinery of existence grinds forward, blind and deaf.
Today, a lifetime later, he thinks the very same thing. Somehow, it all goes on.
His eyes pull open, pupils blown wide with a pain so profound it borders on ecstasy. Alastor comes again with a dry, painful, shudder that wracks his spent corpse. He still has enough seed left in him to dribble from the tip of his cock, where Vox’s grinding hand smears it into the fluff of his thighs.
“Holy shit, I can’t believe you didn’t try to claw my face off for that.” Vox’s voice is awed, though the crude undertone offers little in the way of consolation. Thick spurts of come paint his palm, the testament of Alastor’s pleasure, which the man promptly licks off his fingers about two inches from Alastor’s face with a wet lapping sound. He is so queasy that it is just one more raindrop in the great storm of his disgust.
He is boxed in, stuffed in a crate too small to stretch his limbs. Vox holds him close, and his shoulders ache as claws dig into his forearms and limbs tremble with exhaustion. There is so much oxygen and yet he is suffocating.
The disgust boils beneath his skin. There are maggots in his marrow and bile in his blood.
“Fuck, Al, you have no idea how hot that is. I would’ve hit on you, like, ten times as often if I knew you were packing something so cute.”
Something vast and wet inside him coils, aches to crunch his bones and split his ribs open like petals. He feels the bulk of his true form, shuddering, folded in on itself. He is too small for what writhes inside him.
Kin-eater, thinks Alastor, overlord so great and so reviled, harbinger of dead things in the water. The madness beckons him with open arms.
Bone creaks, and flesh stretches. He is beyond pain, and the body holds.
For what feels like several minutes, Alastor exists in the world of aftershocks. His heart slows to its sluggish corpse-crawl, his breathing eases. Eventually Vox seems to remember to release his forearms. Sensation floods back, and he pinches his wrists to distract himself from the different, unwelcome, pain of being returned to his own violated body.
As if seeking another outlet, Vox cups his limp cock and balls, passing a claw-tip over the abused slit. Alastor twitches and his tail stiffens against Vox’s stomach. His own body does not know predator from Vox, and for good reason. He only forces himself to relax when he’s beyond sure Vox only intends to cradle him. One last act of possession, he supposes.
He is a— mess. Fluids dry tacky on his thighs; his hair is matted; his nasal passages sting. He feels as flayed-open and raw and used as those on his broadcast, though fed not to his hunger but the ever-grinding gears of Vox’s desire.
Vox gives his soft penis a dismissive little flick, the final punctuation mark of his treatment. It doesn’t hurt, but he still flinches, a full-bodied spasm of nerves and pride. He shudders, and his body goes rigid before he collapses backwards, turning to thump his forehead against Vox’s shoulder.
The world has not ended in a grand spectacle of fire and crumbling continents to match his internal annihilation. Time rolls forward with deafening indifference.
He wonders if all regrets can be lived with.
“Vox. Please.” The word tastes foreign. Once known, now dead and digitized.
“Hm?” His hand, tracing the jut of Alastor’s hipbones, moves to cup his cheek. The gesture is oddly tender even as the brightness of his screen sears into Alastor’s eyelids. “Do you— want to get off again?”
“No. No!” He chokes out his denial with a frantic gasp. His fingers twisting in the fabric of Vox’s coat are those of a drowning man. His pupils are dilated with a terror unrelated to any physical pain. “Make me forget.” He shakes Vox slightly. “Use the hypnosis. Or— I don’t care what you do. Get it out.”
Vox’s screen flickers, stuttering blue and black, and his smug grin is wiped off his face so fast Alastor cannot remember it ever being there. His voice is so very terrifying in its newfound intimacy. “Is that the— first honest thing you’ve said all night?”
Alastor thinks he can feel the smile sloughing off his face like burned skin, and putrid rot spilling from where his seams are torn apart. “What other truth would you have me offer?”
He tears Vox’s coat a little in his haste to clutch at his own arms, dragging thin lines down, but even the sharp sting cannot anchor him to this world any longer. Alastor doesn’t notice the blood— his own, black and sluggish, and Vox’s, a dried sheen of oil— on his claws until Vox grabs his wrists, pulling them away.
Avarice is replaced by a flicker of cold bright anger. “Okay,” says Vox, and his voice is flat and free of distortion. “Okay.” He shifts them both, sitting back down on the couch and pulling Alastor into his lap, one last parody of comfort. “Let’s make it go away, then.”
Alastor finds it within himself to notice that Vox has positioned them carefully. His thighs frame the other man’s hips, but his core is kept free of friction. He supposes he is grateful for that, when this new Vox has offered him so little in the way of blessings. With a steady hand, Vox reaches for his trousers, pulling them up from where they pool around his hips and buttoning them with a distinct gentleness. It is more violating than any measure of cruelty, thinks Alastor.
“C’mon, baby,” Vox murmurs, and his voice is a low hum. He tilts Alastor’s chin up with a single claw. “Look at my eyes. Look at me.” His screen brightens, and the spirals in his left eye spin ever faster, pulling Alastor in, demanding focus.
Alastor had wondered, a long time ago, why anger was so often equated with insanity, why a fury was so casually described “going mad”. It had seemed a mere linguistic flair, then.
Now, he thinks he understands. The anger in Vox’s eyes is very much a— madness. Insanity swirls, pure and vile, in the degraded stream of data. It pulses outwards from his left eye, corrupting his digitized expression with flickering red spirals.
Nausea rises as bile in his throat, for the visceral wrongness of it all. It’s as if something at the very core of what is human has been unspooled. The waves come in surges, crashing against the inside of his skull, the distant noise of static filling his senses.
He thinks he feels his eyes bleeding. Pressure builds in his skull like overripe fruit, until tissue has ruptured; a hot, sticky, trickle leaks down his cheeks. The slow release of warmth carries a copper stench.
“Uh, baby, you’re crying.”
He blinks, slowly, and the world smears into pain as his head throbs. Some last-resort prey subroutine in his brain takes hold, and his eyes fall shut to avoid the intensity of Vox’s stare.
“Al—Alastor, just look at me!”
He can hear Vox’s breathing, low and heavy, and the man’s hands migrate from his face to trace his sides in a motion Alastor thinks is at attempt at being soothing, stopping at the jut of his hips.
He feels himself being gathered up, one arm under his knees, the other behind his back. When Vox lies him down again, the sheets are cool against his bruised flesh. He curls in on himself, tucking his knees up to his chest in a feeble attempt to shield his core. When he reaches out he can’t sense Vox’s presence around him, only the low constant hum of the airwaves.
Idly, he wonders if Vox has gone to fetch Valentino— the great Radio Demon, all weak and defenseless in his bed, would certainly pique the other overlord’s, say, professional interest. The thought of more violation is a cold distant horror, the sort of threat he recognizes yet cannot muster the energy to fear. And so he waits.
The bed dips beside him.
“Valentino?” He winces at the hollow rasp of his voice, stripped of all its theatrical flair.
“What?” Vox pauses, utterly still for a heartbeat. He leans over, where Alastor can see the pale blue light of his screen even through his eyelids. He scrunches his eyes closed harder in dismay, nose wrinkling. “Do you genuinely think my first reaction to fucking you up would be to— run a train on you?”
Blearily, he manages: “I didn’t know locomotives were involved.”
“There are so many things wrong with what you just said that I don’t even know where to start, Al.” The sound of Vox breathing out is a burst of frustrated static. “Fuck.”
A soft touch brushes the sweat-matted hair back from his forehead. Somewhere very deep inside him, memory stirs: his mother, nursing a fever. He is lucid enough to banish the thought.
Cool damp fabric wipes the blood from his cheeks, the semen that dried on his upper lip, cleaning the tacky trails with a focus that has circled back around to reverent. The cloth moves to his split lip, dabbing carefully at the swollen flesh in a contrast so bizarre to the violence that preceded it.
“I’m not gonna hypnotize you, Al.” The anger in Vox’s voice has been replaced by something unnervingly sober. “We all do things we regret. I mean, you should see all the shit I got up to when I first landed in Hell! Better hope that stays between me and God, huh? But, uh, I don’t think trying to wipe your memory is the solution. Also, being fully honest here, I don’t actually know how to do that.”
Alastor opens his eyes. Vox just sits on the edge of the bed as a silent looming sentinel, haloed in the half-light. He doesn’t know how to parse that confession, and closes his eyes again, retreating into the dark behind his eyelids. “Humility doesn’t suit you.”
When Vox speaks again, his voice is uncharacteristically tentative. “Fuck. Okay. What— what can I do to make it better for you next time?”
Alastor’s hands fist in the blankets, knuckles bleaching white. “There’s not going to be a next time.”
The hum from Vox’s speakers cuts off abruptly, as if someone had yanked a power cord, and his words come in a glitchy burst. “Wait—what?” He shifts on the bed, the mattress creaking. “I thought we were— I thought we were okay now? I cleaned you up! I’m sitting here! I can’t believe— after all that, you’re just—?” His voice pitches up into a staticky whine, and somewhere in the mess of wounded ego and genuine disbelief Alastor can spot the same man who had a very public meltdown and blew out all of Pentagram City’s power grids in fit of pique. “What was it all for, then?”
Alastor shrugs at that, languid and one-shouldered. “Whatever you need it to be, I suppose. A lesson. A mistake. A moment of weakness. You asked for the one thing I never gave you, and I obliged. Take your pick.”
“It’s— you didn’t even like it?”
“Why, my dear, do you think I asked you to hypnotize me?”
“I don’t know! I thought you were just, like, fucked up due to subdrop!” Vox’s voice crackles, all defensive frustration. “Al, fuck, I’m sorry for making fun of your dick. It, uh, it was probably really shitty of me to poke your insecurities. Look, I’m sorry! Don’t do this to me over your fucking pride, okay?”
“It is not my pride,” says Alastor, and when his eyes open radio dials tick and tick and tick, “that you should be worried about.”
Vox moves to pinch approximately where the bridge of his nose would be, claws clicking against the flatness of his screen. “Okay. Okay! You didn’t like it, and you don’t want to talk about it, and you don’t want to do it ever again, that’s fine. It’s all so fucking fine!” His screen dims as the high whine of his voice is smoothed into something a touch more careful. “Just tell me what to do. Can I— fix this?”
Alastor turns his face into the pillow, and his words come out muffled. “It is fine, Vox. There are some things that cannot be fixed.”
The room is filled by the sound of their breathing. Then, the mattress dips as Vox slides down to mirror Alastor’s position, curling inward. Tentatively, he buries his head in the space between Alastor’s shoulder and neck, his screen cool against Alastor’s skin.
“I’m never going to meet someone like you again, am I?” His voice is a whisper, bordering on childlike, against the fabric of Alastor’s shirt.
“There are no men like me,” agrees Alastor, placing a hand on Vox’s screen to push him away, “there’s only me. But that is no excuse to be pathetic, my dear.”
Vox does not take the hint, tossing an arm over Alastor’s chest and curling deeper into his side. “I don’t know. I thought that once everything blew over that we’d be the same again. Guess I was wrong.”
Alastor raises an eyebrow at that. “I fail to recall the same including this particular brand of intimacy.”
“A guy can dream,” mutters Vox, his voice muffled. His claws curl, pulling wrinkles into the fabric. “We were good together. Before, uh, everything.”
“I’ve been thinking recently,” says Alastor, “that time changes things quite a bit.”
“More pretentious moralizing, huh?” Vox shifts, unburying his face to look up at Alastor with bleary eyes, his screen dimming. Alastor wonders whether it’s an unconscious change or if he spent the last few minutes deliberately trying to look as pathetic as possible.
“I thought I may come back to a world that no longer feared me. Time has been a cruel mistress throughout my life, but I suppose she has been kind in this regard.”
“Time is a cruel mistress,” echoes Vox. Finally he pulls himself off Alastor, sitting up to tuck his knees to his chest. He hasn’t changed out of the pants Alastor got his claws into, stained with blue-tinged oil of his own blood. “Glad I never swung that way.”
Alastor glances at him and for once it is not Alastor who won’t meet Vox’s gaze. “I’m rather certain you’ve mentioned having a girlfriend or two.”
“Fuck me for wanting to make a joke, Al.”
They lapse into silence. Alastor is distinctly aware he has left his role unfulfilled— he’d say I’m sure you’d like that, and then Vox would made another ribald quip, and they’d lapse into banter and the hollow space between the sluggish arteries and gristle of his heart would feel full.
It’s always a joke with Vox, until it isn’t. Alastor wonders how long ago that line was crossed.
“Sorry. Fuck.” Vox’s hand reaches his screen, knocking the side of his head as if he is an overheating computer. “Let’s try all this again. How’s life, Al? What’ve you been up to, these last, oh, seven or so years?”
Alastor brightens, superficial. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the new hotel at the edge of town that I’m, ah, sponsoring. Run by the Princess of Hell, no less!”
“That’s why you left?”
“Ah. No.”
“Then stop dodging the fucking question!”
His smile holds, calcified. When he moves to respond, he feels the neon green stitches that bind him to his power pull taut, his lips locked in their eternal grin as black bile rises in his throat. “It was not for any reason that concerns you.”
Vox’s breathing stills to slow, controlled, drags. His fists clench, before he eases them open. “Okay. Okay, that’s fine. Don’t tell me.”
“Perhaps I’ve overstayed my welcome, then,” says Alastor. “Glad to have known you, old pal, but I think it’s best I be leaving now.”
Vox laughs, short and sharp. "Haunt me, then. Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you." He smiles, as if it is a joke. It’s still a joke to him.
“Bronte,” says Alastor. His gaze remains fixed ahead, tracing the edge of a wall.
“You were gone for seven years, Al. Do you know what that does to someone? For everything to be fine one day and the world upside down the next? I guess you just— stood up and left without a fucking goodbye. I thought you were dead.”
Alastor does not spare him a glance. “The Vox I knew is dead.”
“That’s what this is about? Me getting a new head? Well, forgive me for not dressing in the same clothes as— fuck, the 1950s— and refusing to adopt new technologies, but I’m the same fucking person!”
“I’m not particularly worried about the change of head.”
“Then what?”
The pause stretches on a little longer than strictly appropriate. “There is no then what. This isn’t an interrogation.”
“I’m not interrogating you, I’m asking for honesty for once in your fucking life!”
“You’ll find that I have very little to give, then.”
“Maybe I should be,” Vox manages. “Maybe I should be dead. You can pretend it’s a lesson in modernity fucking you over, even! Seems like it’d be easier for you than whatever the fuck I am now.”
The silence is flat. It is crisp and sterile and absolute.
Alastor wonders if he was wrong after all. If Vox’s appetite was not the same all-devouring black hole as his own, and more a breathing thing that drifted between the stars. If, in Alastor’s absence, it had simply consumed what was placed in front of it.
He wonders, now, if he has mistaken evolution for erasure. He does not quite know what to make of the answer.
“I thought you’d prefer a littler death,” he finally says, and shifts on the bed. He pushes Vox down with a hand on his shoulder, knees framing Vox’s hips. His claw glides, feather-light, over the claw marks he left in Vox’s thighs. Blood drools where he nudges the wounds, slow and sluggish. The man exhales shakily, squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t protest, but neither does he lean into the touch.
Vox’s voice is low and a little strained. “Al. Stop it.”
His hand stills, poised with a surgeon’s precision just a few centimeters from the waistband of Vox’s slacks. “Mm. And here I thought you wanted this! You certainly fooled me into thinking you were enjoying yourself earlier.”
“You know—” Vox’s breath hitches. “You know that’s not what I mean.” His chest rises and falls with fast shallow breaths. When he flicks his eyes open, his pupils are blown wide-wide-wide.
Alastor finally deigns to cup him. The weight is hard and solid in his hand, and he wonders idly whether Vox’s arousal was retained from their earlier activities or summoned now. “Enlighten me then, my good fellow.”
Vox catches his wrist, wrenching it away sharply. And then he softens, always softens— twines his fingers through Alastor’s in apology. “Fuck, Al, stop it! I know and you know I want to fuck you, but not like this. Not if you don’t want it. Not if you’re just— using it as a way to get out of actually saying anything real!”
Alastor flexes his fingers. The weight of Vox’s hand against his is a little too much at the moment, and he pulls it away, curling his wrist into his chest possessively. He’s still on Vox’s lap, cannot dredge the ruins of his pride enough to move his body again. “I don’t think,” he measures the words carefully, “that you want something that I can give you.”
“Because it’s so fucking hard to just talk to me, huh?” His eyes are pleading, stripped of every ounce of bravado. “I just— fuck, it sounds so stupid, but I just want us to go back to how we were before— everything, I guess. Please. We don’t have to fuck ever again, just tell me what I can do to fix this.”
Green stitching is pulled tighter and tighter until his lips have peeled back in a snarl over his gums. His head grows heavy with the weight of branching antlers, born from his skull in twisted ribbons to encircle his head as a thorned black crown.
Alastor thinks that even where pride holds them both true, their shared sin is gluttony. For him: the yawning hunger nested in his ribs, swollen by sacrifice, whether that be the iron-sweet gift of blood or the quiet offering of Vox’s misery. And Vox: a desperate marrow-deep avarice, through and through. This is a man with a city at his fingertips, still starving for the one thing Alastor has always denied him.
“You were always like this,” says the Radio Demon, and the humanity drips off his face like droplets of water off a clay mask. “A creature of insatiable want. It’s merely that I found your hunger for the new and the next more entertaining when it was directed at me.”
The two of them, damned, not for their pride but for their endless, ravenous appetites.
He thinks he understands, now. The man he knew was always this— being of terrible starving modernity. The boxy head and the canary turtleneck were nothing more than a charming vintage casing. The heart of Vox is, and has always been, a bottomless hunger. Exhilarating, when directed to match Alastor’s own. Exhausting, when directed to the soulless march of progress.
Time does not announce its thefts with fire nor fury. Dreams die in the quiet erosion of water chiseling away the riverbed, sink into the deep darkened earth. There is no single, shattering, loss to mourn, but the tedious ache of years. He wonders, now, if the time to start mourning Vox was decades past.
“There is nothing to fix,” says Alastor, cannibal, overlord, friend, “so I think we are done here.”
The shadows roil, and he feels himself being pulled into the static at the edges, his power carving through the empty pools where light goes to die.
“You don’t have to fix this.” The energy in Vox’s voice is long gone, leaving behind only a profound tiredness. “Just— stay?”
Alastor stills, poised mid-retreat as the shadows swirl in wisps around his limbs, chewing away the edges of his corporeality.
“I don’t need fucking romance.” The words spill out in a rushed stream and Vox’s fans whirr on, as if he fears silence will make Alastor bolt. “I can’t do this again.” He gestures vaguely at the space between them. “I can’t— spend another seven years just waiting and wondering. I’d rather you hate me!”
The sniveling, and the pleading, and the raw, undignified, need is repulsive. The gluttony that lives in the hollow of his chest slavers at the weakness, wishes to twist the knife deeper, to see how far he can take this game. Alastor wonders, if it came down to it, whether Vox would prostrate himself at Alastor’s feet and beg like a dog for him to stay.
“I’m a fucking black hole. I pull everyone in and— crumple them up. Fuck, sometimes I wonder why even Val and Vel even put up with my shit. You're the only constant in the godforsaken universe. So yeah. It's you. It's always been you. Happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear?"
There is a part of him, wearier, that tells him he is not a slave to his hunger. There is no amount of blood, nor violence, nor misery that will satiate it. It will always demand more.
“Does my misery amuse you? Truly? Then stay. It’s a front-row seat, Al. Don't go. That's it. That's all I've got. Please."
Vox’s gluttony might be louder, and brighter, but they are two sides of the same coin.
The terrible intimacy of being the singular unwavering point of obsession—he wants it. Now, and forever. Not the physicality and the sentiment that comes attached, but when has Vox ever been able to deny him?
Slowly, deliberately, Alastor relaxes. He lets himself spill off Vox’s lap and sink back into the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. He cannot bring himself to look at Vox, but he folds his hands over his stomach and counts the fiberglass tiles in the ceiling.
After a long moment, Vox shifts beside him. He has the sense not to try to touch Alastor, but settles in, mirroring Alastor’s position, lying on his back beside him. His fans whirr off, and they are left in the silence.
“The hotel,” says Vox, and his voice is quiet even in the dimness. “Uh, the Princess’s thing. How’s— that going?”
Alastor’s smile pulls up at the corner. “It is a spectacular exercise in futility. The theatrics are diverting.”
“Yeah?” Vox turns his head on the pillow, the blue light of his screen casting a soft glow across Alastor’s vision. “You gonna let me sponsor an episode? VoxTek’s Hour of Redemption? Demon Tide laundry detergent for washing those sins away?”
A genuine static-laced chuckle escapes him. “I’d rather be dissolved in the acid rain.”
“Thought you might say that,” Vox replies, and the low thrum of cautious victory returns to his voice. “Offer’s open. If you ever want to— co-host something? We could do a podcast. That’s vaguely a middle ground.”
And so the world ticks onward.