Dead Air Between Us

by Kindra6216

Summary:

Seventy years after a single laugh rewired his entire being, Vox finally has Alastor exactly where he’s always wanted him: restrained, cornered, and unable to walk away. What begins as a “conversation” quickly unravels into a meticulously engineered descent through spirals, frequencies, and memories sharpened into weapons. Vox’s obsession has had decades to ferment—and Alastor’s mind is the canvas he intends to carve his ending into.
What breaks first: the body, the mind, or the myth of the Radio Demon?

OR

What I thought was going to happen during s02e04 It's A Deal.

Whumptober 2025 Prompt Day 10: "There's nothing you can ever say, nothing you can ever do." | Without Consent.

Seventy years was long enough for affection to ferment into something poisonous.

Long enough for a moment—one bright, careless, devastating laugh—to metastasize into obsession.
Long enough for rejection to cling to Vox like a glitch in his code, humming beneath every broadcast, every update, every synthetic heartbeat he had never desired but had been cursed to keep.

He replayed it every night.

The nervous fuzz sparking along his frame as he confessed.
The stutter he’d never shown to anyone else.
The trembling vulnerability he’d tried to delete from himself afterwards.

And then—

Alastor threw his head back and laughed.

A clean, delighted bark.
Cruel in its casualness.
A sound that sliced into Vox’s mind like a skipping needle gouging deep into vinyl.

A sound that rewired him.

Tonight, at last, Vox would rewrite the ending.

Alastor sat bound to a sleek black swivel chair—four wheels, smooth bearings, designed explicitly so Vox or any subordinate could push, drag, or parade the Radio Demon through the tower without resistance.
A device of convenience.
And humiliation.

His wrists were yanked behind him, locked in front of the backrest by black-metal cabling that pulsed with low, electronic warmth. More cables pinned his torso, crossing brutally tight over ribs and shoulders, carving raw, angry trenches into skin and muscle. His once-sharp suit was in tatters where the restraints had ground through cloth and into flesh.

The studio lights beat down in cold pulses—a synthetic, mechanical heartbeat synchronized to Vox’s emotional frequency.

Vox leaned against his desk with languid ease, ankles crossed, posture relaxed but predatory. His eyes devoured every detail.

Euphoria hummed beneath his plating like a fresh surge of power.

Alastor lifted his chin. Slow. Stiff. Pride forcing his spine into brittle straightness.

He was exhausted—visibly, deeply—after enduring Vox’s “day of celebration,” forced to watch every second of Vox’s explicit, triumphant display with the Moth Overlord. It had knocked the breath from him and made his stomach feel sick once. Just once. And Alastor despised himself for that tiny crack.

He refused to give Vox anything now.

“Now,” Vox purred, pushing off the desk with smooth, electric grace, “we can finally have a real conversation.”

Alastor’s mouth curved into a thin, papery smile. “Mm. ‘Conversation’ implies choice, does it not?”

Vox clicked his tongue.

Then he stepped directly into Alastor’s space—close enough that the static bleeding off his body brushed Alastor’s ears. The twitch that followed was minute, involuntary, humiliating.

“You know…” Vox murmured, lowering his voice until it vibrated like a warm, vindictive current, “I’ve waited for this moment for almost seventy years.”

Alastor hummed in response.
Low. Disinterested.
Engineered to provoke.

Vox’s jaw flexed sharply.

He closed the remaining distance until he was standing toe-to-toe with the bound Overlord, shadow falling cleanly across Alastor’s lap.
No pacing.
No circling.
Just presence — a wall, unyielding and impossible to ignore.

“I just want to understand,” Vox said softly, though his voice carried an edge honed by decades of resentment, “what the pathetic little princess offered you that I didn’t. Why would the great RADIO DEMON debase himself helping run a hotel?”

Alastor angled his head away—subtle, deliberate dismissal.

Vox’s clawed finger was there instantly, hooking beneath his chin, dragging his face back front and center with a practiced, almost mechanical certainty.

Alastor’s gaze snapped upward, locking onto Vox’s bright neon stare.

“There he is,” Vox crooned, thumb grazing the line of Alastor’s jaw with intimate cruelty.

He kept his finger in place, tilting Alastor’s chin up another precise inch as he leaned in.

“Or how,” Vox whispered, breath static-warm against Alastor’s cheek, “some washed-up serial killer from the ’30s managed to claw his way into becoming one of Hell’s most powerful Overlords.”

Alastor smiled—polite, cold, stubborn—but the muscles along his jaw twitched once.
Just once.

Vox felt it.
Felt it tighten under his fingertip like a plucked string.

“Tell me,” Vox breathed, lowering his face until their noses almost brushed, “how you did it.”

The studio lights dimmed in a synchronized pulse, as if the room itself braced for violence.

Alastor rolled one shoulder—a small shrug, constrained by cabling grinding into tendon. “Mm, no. Our deal was for me to sit here and be your captive. Not to tell you anything that would feed your ego.”

Then—purposefully, defiantly—he turned his head aside again.
A slow, dismissive glide of motion.
Mockery made physical.

Vox’s finger snapped beneath his chin instantly, dragging him back with more force.

A correction.
Not a request.

The screens surrounding them jittered, pixel edges fracturing with digital irritation.

Vox rapped his knuckles once against the desk—a sharp, electric crack of temper. “Seriously? You, of all demons, have nothing to say?”

He leaned in, neon eyes blazing inches from Alastor’s.

“Then again,” Vox hissed, “being a brat has always been your THING, hasn’t it?”

Alastor chuckled—a single, brittle note.

It wasn’t loud.
It wasn’t bold.
But it carried that same infuriating self-assured tilt, that same effortless dismissal that had branded itself into Vox’s circuitry seventy years ago.

The sound re-opened every old wound as easily as reripping a seam.

Vox’s fingers twitched at his sides, a tiny static pop snapping from one knuckle. That laugh—that laugh—had been playing on loop in the back of his processor for decades. It had followed him through upgrades, through reboots, through entire eras of technological evolution. And hearing it again now, up close, still hurt him.

Still humiliated him.

“I tried to make this easy,” Vox muttered, voice strained as he lowered himself into a crouch right in front of the chair. His knees didn’t touch the floor; he balanced with a predator’s poise, all taut lines and humming voltage.

He stared up at Alastor’s face—exhausted, still somehow irritatingly composed. “A little honesty. A hint of respect,” Vox continued, leaning in until the glow of his screen washed blue over Alastor’s collar. “Maybe even gratitude for all my effort.”

Alastor’s lips curved faintly—thin, papery, a smile made of tired breath rather than mirth.

Not mocking.
Not triumphant.

Gentle.

“You are not entitled to any of that,” he said softly.

The sincerity of it hit harder than laughter. A kindness he had no right to give. A pity masquerading as civility. As if all of Vox’s decades of unresolved agony were nothing more than an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Vox’s screen froze mid‑expression—flatline, blue, empty.

Then he rose.

Slowly. Mechanically. Like a machine coming online for a single, deadly purpose. Each joint hummed with building voltage. His gaze never left Alastor, laser‑tight and unblinking.

“There’s nothing you can ever say,” he whispered, his voice shaking beneath the weight of history, “nothing you can ever do, to take back what you did to me.”

Alastor held his gaze.

Not defiant.
Not amused.

Compassionate.
Understanding.
Pitying.

That—that—was what finally snapped something structural inside Vox.

The wall speakers cracked violently, jittering with a surge of audio feedback. The air sharpened with ozone, prickling across both their skin.

“Oh, do NOT look at me like that,” Vox snarled.

He moved.

A split-second lunge, fast enough to distort the air, and his hand fisted in Alastor’s hair. He wrenched his head backward, viciously hard, slamming it against the metal headrest.

The chair rang—a hollow metallic BONG that vibrated through Alastor’s skull.

Pain rippled through his jaw. His teeth clicked together. His face tightened—an involuntary grimace he couldn’t completely swallow down.

Vox’s other hand rose, open-palmed, trembling with voltage so dense it made the nearby screens flicker in sympathetic pulses. Blue arcs danced across his fingers, casting jagged shadows over the planes of Alastor’s face, carving him into light and darkness.

“You laughed at me,” Vox hissed, bringing his face close enough that Alastor could feel the searing hum of static crawl along his cheek. “You humiliated me. I spent decades wondering what I did wrong—why I wasn’t enough.”

Alastor’s pulse jumped visibly at his throat.
He drew in a steadying breath, controlled, deliberate, fighting the tremor of pain.

“And now,” Vox spat, “you act like I’m unreasonable?”

Alastor’s throat bobbed once—an involuntary swallow that barely moved, but betrayed everything.

His breathing eased after, slow and measured, the deliberate kind of calm he weaponized. When he lifted his gaze back up to Vox, there was no wicked grin, no jaunty amusement, nothing remotely performative. Only that carved composure he wore like a shield.

“Because you are,” he said quietly.

Not a jab.
Not a trick.
Not a mask.

A truth, delivered without ceremony.

And it slid into Vox with surgical precision—clean, cold, buried to the hilt. Something in his chest cinched tight, like the world narrowed to the shape of that single sentence.

The air stilled around them.

Vox’s expression emptied—not into shock, not into pleasure, but into something eerily quiet. A drained, distilled calm. Like a blade just before it falls.

The kind of calm that meant a decision had been made.

“You don’t get to walk away from me this time,” he whispered. No rise, no snarl—just the soft vibration of static threading through the words. “You don’t get to pretend I meant nothing.”

He didn’t wait for a retort. Didn’t even look to see if Alastor had one ready.

He didn’t wait to see if Alastor flinched. Didn’t look to confirm whether the Radio Demon had another smirk loaded behind his teeth.

He moved.

Three long, decisive strides carried him across the studio—coattails snapping with each step—and his hand slammed a heavy brass lever downward.

The world ignited.

Every screen in the broadcast chamber erupted in instantaneous, synchronized life. Wall-mounted monitors. Ceiling panels. Floor tiles beneath Alastor’s boots. A full sphere of glass and circuitry, blooming outward in spirals of serrated electric blue.

They rotated in perfect, predatory harmony—rings of light sliding in and out of phase, mathematical and merciless.

Engineered patterns.
Coded angles.
Wavelength traps designed to catch an optic nerve like a hook.

A subsonic tremor rolled from the high-torque speakers. Not a sound—an impact. A pressure wave. It shivered up the metal legs of the reinforced chair, thrummed through Alastor’s ribs, vibrated behind his molars like invisible fingers prying at his jaw.

Alastor’s breath hitched—barely—but Vox caught it.

The first pulse hit a moment later.

Warm at first. Then hot. Then invasive—like a smear of living static sliding into the base of the skull, creeping along the inner curve of the brainstem.

Alastor’s lip curled, his voice strained and sharp. “You think hypnosis will work on me? You think a few party tricks will—”

“No,” Vox breathed. The softness made the word land harder. “Not yet.”

He approached slowly, each step measured to keep Alastor’s eyes trapped between the spirals and his approaching silhouette. The conflict in the Radio Demon’s focus—tracking Vox, resisting the light, fighting the pull—was almost balletic.

Vox stopped beside the chair, leaning down with meticulous control. His thumb dragged along Alastor’s cheekbone in a featherlight stroke—too gentle for the situation, too intimate for the restraints. It made the leather straps cinching Alastor’s wrists feel suddenly suffocating.

“First you’ll resist,” Vox murmured, his lips nearly brushing the fine fur at the rim of Alastor’s ear. “You’ll fight. You’ll scream.” His voice crackled softly with static—an undertone like arcing electricity. “You’ll make it interesting.”

He reached without looking and turned a dial.

A quiet click.
A soft whir.
Then—

“But everything breaks with time.”

The spirals flared—an electric whipcrack of light.

Alastor jerked, pupils contracting violently. His eyelids fluttered and locked open by reflex as knives of blue-white brightness carved across his retinas. A second frequency activated under the first—thin, sharp, drilling behind the eyes at the precise angle of the optical chiasm.

It felt like someone twisting a screwdriver into the center of his skull.

A hiss slid from his teeth—not a conscious sound, but something dragged out of him by the pulse. His ears flattened back. His shoulders coiled against the restraints, the cords in his neck standing out in stark relief.

Behind him, Vox worked the console. Hands moving fast, precise, confident—tuning frequencies, adjusting waveforms, aligning output. The ease of it was chilling; he wasn’t experimenting. He was refining something he had already perfected.

“You’ll love me,” Vox whispered. And it wasn’t taunting. It was reverent. “You’ll look at me with admiration. With belief.”

Alastor’s jaw clenched so hard the muscles trembled beneath the skin. Pain lanced behind his eyes—bright, instantaneous—forcing his fingers to flex helplessly behind the chair. His lips peeled back in a snarl that kept collapsing into a grimace.

“You’re wasting your—hh—time,” he forced out through gritted teeth. “My mind is not—some toy—to—ah—rewrite—”

Warm static ghosted over the back of his neck as Vox leaned in again, close enough for Alastor to feel the buzz of electrical charge on bare skin.

“I waited seventy years once,” Vox murmured. “I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

He twisted the dial past its safety limits.

And then he twisted it further—until the metal gave a warning whine, until the panel lights stuttered under the strain of the overload.

The pulse hit like a sledgehammer to the skull.

Alastor’s entire body snapped forward as if hooked, then slingshotted violently back—spine bowing into an unnatural arc. The restraints bit deep into his arms and torso, leather creaking, metal brackets rattling against the impact. A strangled gasp tore out of him, the breath shuddering hard enough to splinter.

His pupils blew wide.

Then collapsed into pinpoints.

The world doubled—tripled—fractured into cascading copies of itself, spiraling inward like a collapsing star.

Edges of thought dissolved as though acid had been poured over the seams.

Memory fragments ruptured loose, flashing with no chronology:

—Charlie’s bright hand on his sleeve—laughter fizzing in static—trees dripping red in the Louisiana dark—Vox’s rectangular glow cutting through shadow—radio dials spinning out of control—someone screaming (was it him? was it someone else?)—run—run—no escape—

His fingers twitched where they were bound behind the chair. Not purposeful—reflexive, jerking, the way the body moves when it has no footing left in its own nerves.

Vox watched with something close to hunger—rapt, enthralled, almost reverent.

“Just give in,” he breathed. “Let me inside.”

Alastor sucked in a ragged, half‑broken breath. His voice cracked like a frayed wire. “You want… obedience.” Another breath, shaking. “You will NOT have my heart—”

Vox’s smile sharpened into something merciless.

“Then I’ll take whatever parts of you I can break.”

He seized the final dial with both hands—fingers tightening until the synthetic skin over his knuckles creaked—and forced it through the hard stop. Metal teeth snarled, scraped, then gave way with a shriek like something dying inside the console.

The room detonated.

Not with flame—but with light.

A rupturing blast of white-blue tore through the studio in a single, blinding wave. It hit Alastor first as brilliance, then as impact—a concussive wall that slammed into his skull and wrapped around his mind with crushing, merciless pressure. The sound that followed wasn’t sound at all but vibration, a sub-frequency shock that made the air itself seem to buckle.

The spirals on every screen accelerated past perceptible motion, spinning so fast they became bands of raw radiance. Patterns dissolved into pure sensory assault—too fast to form shapes, too bright to be color, too loud to be anything but pain. The light carved into Alastor’s retinas like serrated blades, burning afterimages into every blink he couldn’t force shut.

Alastor screamed.

Not a cry.
Not a shout.

A deep, primal eruption ripped out of his chest—uncontrolled, uncaged—as every muscle in his body seized at once. His back bowed so violently the reinforced restraints strained, leather stretching, metal bolts grinding in their housings as if moments from shearing loose. His legs spasmed, heels slamming against the floor in frantic, involuntary kicks.

The spirals swallowed his vision—then memory—then identity.

They sank talons into the architecture of his mind, prying apart the seams. Overwriting. Scrubbing. Re-formatting him to Vox’s cadence, Vox’s frequency, Vox’s design.

Thought unraveled.

Only fragments survived, flashing and scrambling:

—stop stop stop—too bright—can’t think—TOO LOUD—don’t take the hotel don’t take her smile STOP—why am I begging—who said please—stop—STOP—Vox get out GET OUT GET OUT—

A sudden warmth slid from his nostril.

A bead of red.

It trailed down to his upper lip—thick, metallic-scented warmth against suddenly cold skin—before slipping down his chin and splattering onto the collar of his shirt. His breathing hitched around it, each inhale shallow and trembling, each exhale breaking off halfway, like his lungs were forgetting how to function.

His eyes jerked, flickered, fluttered—shuddering between unwilling consciousness and enforced silence.

Vox stepped closer, drawn as if by gravity toward the unraveling collapse in front of him.

The light pulsed again.

Harder.

And something inside Alastor cracked.

The pulsing didn’t relent.
If anything, it thickened—each beat a heavy shockwave thudding through the floor, up the chair, and straight into the base of Alastor’s skull like a wire heated and pulled taut until the flesh around it blistered.

Vox exhaled, slow and reverent. The kind of breath someone gives to a miracle beginning its first heartbeat.

Alastor wasn’t gone.

Not yet.

Resistance still sputtered through him in small, frantic bursts. His fingers curled and uncurled behind the chair—sharp, jerking movements that had no rhythm except desperation. His shoulders trembled, straining against the straps with twitchy, broken persistence. His jaw clenched, muscles spasming in rapid little stutters as he tried to keep himself tethered to something—anything—inside his own head.

His breathing faltered, steadied, faltered again—like a radio signal trying to lock onto a station and failing every time.

He was slipping.

But he was fighting the whole way down.

His head jerked suddenly to the left—an instinctual attempt to break eye contact with the spirals. The restraint caught instantly, leather snapping against the metal mount, forcing his gaze back into the storm of electric blue.

The pulse sank deeper.

Deeper still.

His teeth bared in a silent snarl—ragged defiance, the last flicker of a predator refusing to bow—

—and then his entire body sagged.

Not gradually.
Not weakening.
But dropping all at once, as if someone had cut a cord inside him.

His spine collapsed back against the chair. His arms slackened. His legs fell still, toes curling faintly as the last remnants of tension drained out of them.

His chest rose in small, trembling breaths—barely enough to keep him conscious.

His eyes fluttered open again.

Glassy.

Unfocused.

Searching—slowly, blindly—for a reality that no longer lined up with what his senses insisted on feeding him.

A soft, confused crease tugged at his brow, as if even the act of trying to understand the world around him required wading through thick, drowning static.

Vox moved with unhurried precision, descending into a crouch before him like a worshipper kneeling before an altar he’d built with his own hands. He raised one hand—deliberate, savoring every inch of the movement—and slipped two fingers beneath Alastor’s chin.

The Radio Demon’s head followed the contact, but sluggishly. Heavy. As though those two fingers had to lift not bone and flesh but an entire collapsing frequency.

“Look at me,” Vox whispered.

Not loud.
Not sharp.

Soft—yet threaded with a command frequency that hummed through the air like a subsonic current, curling under Alastor’s skin and up the back of his spine.

Alastor’s eyes dragged upward.

Not smoothly.
Not obediently.
Every inch of the motion looked wrenched from him.

His gaze stuttered as though moving through molasses, pupils shivering against the pull. The air between them felt thick with resistance—silent, frantic, instinctive. His breath hitched, a thin, strangled sound scraped from the back of his throat as he tried to tear his focus anywhere else.

And Vox watched—hungry, breath catching in his chest—as the eyes that once burned with a predator’s wild, laughing ferocity now flickered like a dying signal.

Because Alastor resisted.

His body told the truth even when his voice couldn’t.
A minute tremor crawled down the tendons in his neck, subtle but violent beneath the skin.
His jaw twitched—tight, locked—like he was clenching around the last unbroken scrap of defiance he still believed he could protect.
His fingers curled slightly where they lay, an unconscious attempt to gather leverage, to anchor himself against a pull no anchor could resist.

His unfocused red gaze wavered, veering left—toward the dark, toward anywhere but the spirals—

Then lurched right, his breath catching as the world seemed to tilt—

Before the spirals behind Vox pulsed with sudden precision.

The rhythm snapped tight.
Perfect.
Merciless.

The pattern hooked him.

It was visible in the way his pupils tremored—caught, snagged.
In the way his shoulders sagged a fraction, as though a string tied behind his eyes had been yanked taut.
In the way his breath faltered—once, sharply—like something inside him recognized the moment it lost ground.

Dragged him back.

Reeled him in.

Like a barbed line buried deep into the center of his mind, tugging with slow, inevitable force.

And Alastor obeyed.

Not smoothly. Not quietly.

Slow—like surrender being carved out of him in real time.
Reluctant—every muscle in his body broadcasting a silent, futile no.
Shattered—because whatever part of him still fought was drowning under the spirals’ relentless, suffocating pull.

Vox inhaled sharply.

The sound cracked—half triumph, half awe, all hunger. His eyes gleamed with something electric and feverish, reflecting the spirals’ glow as though the victory itself lit him from within.

“There you are,” he murmured, voice soft in a way that bordered on reverent. “So much quieter now.”

He lifted his hand with deliberate care—not slow, but measured, intent thrumming in every movement—and set his thumb along Alastor’s cheekbone. The skin there was cool, pulled tight over sharp angles, carrying a faint smear of dried blood.

With a slow drag of his thumb, Vox smeared it further—turning the pale skin beneath it into a streaked, darkened canvas.

Alastor didn’t flinch.

But a thin ripple passed through him—a swallow he fought too late to hide, the last physical whisper of a mind still trying, still failing, to resist sliding fully under.

“Now,” Vox said softly, “say my name.”

The words didn’t need volume.
They carried weight—frequency—pressure.

Alastor’s lips parted.

For a moment—half a heartbeat—nothing emerged.
His whole body locked around the effort of withholding the sound.

His chest tightened, ribs trembling with the strain.
His throat convulsed on a static-laced breath as if he were swallowing glass.
His gaze wobbled, pupils fluttering wildly as he tried—desperately—to anchor them to anything but Vox.

He was still fighting.
Still clawing for control.
Still refusing to give the simplest command he had ever been asked.

Just a little longer.

His breath crackled—the faintest bleed of radio static leaking through the cracks in his concentration.

Then, finally—slowly—inevitably—his voice bled free.

Thin.
Strained.
Frayed at the edges like a broadcast dragged through too much interference.

“Vin…Vox.”

Vox’s breath stuttered.

There it was.

The arrogance—gone.
The smug composure—gone.
The feral defiance that had defined him—obliterated.

What sat before him was not the Radio Demon.
Not the rival he spent decades hating.
Not the enemy who smiled as he said no.

What remained was a blueprint.
An outline.
A hollowed figure waiting to be rewritten from the inside out.

Vox’s hand rose—steady, savoring—and cupped Alastor’s face.
His thumb brushed the high, sharp line of his cheekbone, tracing the faint tremor still lingering there, the last echo of resistance trapped beneath the skin.

“Alastor,” he whispered, voice trembling with seventy years of hunger, “look at me.”

The command struck him like a tuning fork driven straight into bone.

Alastor’s head jerked upward.
Reflexive.
Automatic.
As though his body recognized the command before his mind even understood it.

His pupils blew wide, swallowing the red until only the spirals remained, reflected and replicated infinitely in the hollow black.

Something inside Vox nearly short-circuited.

He leaned closer—close enough that the low mechanical hum in his core resonated through Alastor’s ribs.
Close enough that the spirals’ glow painted shifting patterns across Alastor’s skin.
Close enough that the static radiating off his own systems ghosted along the points of contact: jaw, temple, the base of the skull.

“Alastor,” Vox murmured, each word dipped in low-frequency control, “tell me who you belong to.”

Alastor’s lips parted again.

A tremor shivered through them—small, involuntary.
His breath hitched, thin and static-frayed, as though the simple act of breathing now required swimming against a riptide.
The corners of his eyes tightened, red irises wobbling in a last-ditch attempt to break free of the spirals’ pull.

His throat worked once.
Twice.

A strangled sound pushed upward—hoarse, fractured—like a drowning man’s desperate final gasp for the surface.

But he never reached it.

The spirals pulsed.

Slow at first, deliberate… then locking into a flawless, surgical rhythm.
Each beat synced with the frequency riding beneath Vox’s voice.
The air hummed—alive, resonant—each wavelength sliding deeper beneath Alastor’s skin.

They threaded between thoughts.
They unwound the parts of him still fighting.
They pressed inward, merciless and perfect.

Like a thumb pushing into soft, wet clay.

Something inside him yielded.

A crack.
A slip.
A soft collapse of will.

His breath left him in a shudder—broken, unwilling, utterly surrendered.

“…you.”

The word escaped fragile and thin—cracked down the middle, pried loose instead of offered.
It hung between them like a severed thread, too small for the demon who once made entire rooms fall silent.

Vox closed his eyes.

Not in weariness—never that—but in immersion, letting the sound sink.
Letting it pulse through the circuitry laced beneath his skin, letting it reverberate in the hollowed places seventy years of hunger had tunneled out inside him.

It filled him.
Seeped into him.
Settled in the cavity where resentment had once been acid-sharp and where longing had long since congealed into something molten and corrosive.

By the time he opened his eyes again, the glow behind them had intensified into a steady, devouring burn—clean, focused, almost eerily serene in its clarity.

He lifted his hand.

Slowly.
Deliberately.
Each inch of motion measured like ceremony, like ritual, like he was drawing out the moment to savor the inevitability of it.

His palm came to rest against Alastor’s cheek.

The contact was soft only in the way a hand pressing over a fault line is soft—control wrapped in gentleness, pressure hiding steel. His fingers curled along the sharp plane of cheekbone, traced the edge of the jaw, then settled with confident weight. Beneath his touch, Alastor’s skin quivered—small, involuntary, a tremor buried too deep for pride to restrain.

Claiming.
Centering.
Fixing him in place as though Vox were aligning something that had always been meant to click neatly into his grip.

“Good.”

The word slid out low and resonant, a hum threaded with heat and reverence. Not approval casually tossed out, but praise shaped for a creature finally bowed—not broken, not yet, but yielding—after decades of barbed refusals and teeth bared at every outstretched hand.

Vox leaned in.

The shift of his body was smooth, predatory in its certainty. The faint mechanical purr from his core deepened as he closed the distance, humming through the air until it nestled straight into Alastor’s bones. The spirals’ glow washed over both of their faces, carving sharp shadows and gilded highlights across skin and static.

And when he spoke again, Vox didn’t just aim his words at Alastor’s ears.

He sent them straight into the hollow chamber the hypnosis had scraped clean inside Alastor’s mind—into the quiet, compliant space where resistance had once lived.

“Obey me.”

The command did not hang, did not wait.

Alastor responded as though pulled by an invisible hinge.
No recoil.
No twitch of defiance.
No flicker of the old, rakish smile threatening to break through.

His body moved with eerie, slow precision—as though his limbs were reading from an old script his mind no longer authored. One measured step forward. A subtle tilt of the head. Shoulders lowering in a graceful, unnatural descent until he bowed—fluid, elegant, and utterly emptied of self.

“Yes… Vox.”

The words escaped in a tremor.

Not fear. His eyes were too glazed, too distant for fear to spark.
Not pain. He had sunk too deep for nerves to warn him of anything.

The tremor came from the stripped-raw honesty of obedience, from vocal cords straining to articulate what the rest of him had already surrendered.

Vox’s exhale shuddered through him.

A sound dragged up from somewhere electric and starved, from the aching void where hope and fury and obsession had fused into a single relentless drive. His shoulders unlocked; the tension coiled beneath his skin unwound in a slow, almost disbelieving release.

His thumb brushed along Alastor’s cheek in one unhurried stroke.
Not gentle.
Not cruel.
Simply his—a touch shaped by possession and long-denied triumph.

Finally.

No flippant grin tossed over a shoulder before vanishing.
No jaunty bow masking refusal.
No slippery escape from the jaws of consequence.

Alastor did not walk away.

And Vox… Vox did far more than win.

He rewrote the ending—and the Radio Demon—with his own hand.

Notes:

Thank you so much for reading my tenth Whumptober 2025 story—and my fourth Hazbin Hotel fic!

I apologize for being extremely far behind in this year’s Whumptobor; I’ve been extremely busy, so please don’t be mad.

If you enjoyed the story, feel free to leave a comment or a kudos—I’d really love to hear what you think!

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 10 of Whumptobor2025