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Don’t fucking cry, you’re not that pathetic, is the mantra of the day. Figure this shit out. Crawl out of this mess you’ve made. Do NOT. Fucking. Cry!
Despite his best efforts, he keeps having to blink tears from his eyes… but hey, at least there’s nobody around to witness it, right? For the first time in a long while, there are no eyes on him. No viewers. No employees. No Vel. No Val. Not even that son of a bitch Radio Demon berating his every move and rubbing it in his face how much of a failure he—
Vox’s throat constricts—which doesn’t even make any sense, he doesn’t fucking have a throat at the moment. Fuckass Hell bodies. Fuck this shit. Fuck everything.
If he had arms, he’d be flipping over desks, punching holes into the wall, breaking everything he can get his hands on. Hell, he’d even break his own goddamn screen. He wishes they’d just killed him. Even that would be better than—
Don’t fucking cry.
It took so much effort to just get himself to the medical bay. He can hop on his head a little bit, sure—chipping and cracking the bottom of his casing, but whatever, right?—but not enough to properly get around. He eventually managed to get himself out of the corner where Valentino threw him to in the lobby, but that was about it. Too drained to travel through the electric wires, too short to reach the elevator’s buttons, and too miserable to find and yell at an employee to carry him. It took him over thirty minutes to get a drone to pick him up and carefully maneuver him through the tower and into the med bay, and another twenty to bring an assistant robot out of hibernation so his head could be hooked up to the network. (He disabled his Internet connection because he could not handle the idea of seeing what people were saying about him, he couldn’t, he couldn’t.)
Being plugged in helped regain some energy, but not nearly enough. Like being hooked up to an IV that’s slowly dripping meds into him—helpful, sure, but nothing like the surgery he needs.
But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? The thing that’s sending him into renewed spirals of panic. ‘Cause what the fuck is he supposed to do now? He’s not unfamiliar with the state of being without a body, but it usually only lasts for a few minutes, and more importantly: he always has his body on hand. It’s his head that he tends to change out, not everything else.
He is reasonably sure that even if he were just to wait it out, Hellish regeneration would ensure that a new body eventually grows out of his head—but that would likely take months. Unacceptable. But what's the alternative? Build a new android body for himself? He’s been playing around with the idea for ages, as a contingency plan… but since there was no rush, he never put in the real hours, never got to a working prototype. He has nothing but time now, sure, but he can’t do shit without his arms, without his wires, without proper assistance.
The easiest option would be to just reattach his head to his old body, of course. But they… It was left out there. He doesn’t know if it’s still intact at all. Maybe the angry mob destroyed it after Vox… after he… after all that.
For all he knows, Alastor ate it.
It would be nice if he could send out Val or Vel to check on it. Bring it back, if it’s still in a serviceable shape. But they aren’t talking to him. (Vox swallowed his pride and texted them both, but they left him on read.)
So here he is, lying on the sick bed with nothing but a bot for company, running diagnostics that just make him more and more anxious because everything is wrong with him, and he has no idea how to fix any of it. He hasn’t felt this vulnerable in… Scratch that: he’s never felt this vulnerable. Even when fresh in Hell, confused and disoriented and powerless, he still had arms and legs and claws and fangs to protect himself with.
And now he’s a disgraced vPad.
Don’t fucking cry.
“Look at you!” a cheerful voice exclaims, scaring the everloving shit out of Vox. “Didn’t I always tell you that you lose your head way too easily? Haha!”
“A-Alastor?!” Vox can’t see him, and he can’t look around: he’s just a horizontal television. But he can feel hints of the other demon’s signal in the air now, can see the eerily shifting shadows on the walls. “The fuck are you doing here? How did you even get in?”
A rush of cold, and the shadows coalesce into Alastor’s grinning form in front of him.
“I’m afraid your security is not up to snuff at the moment,” the man says, twirling his staff. “Not that I can’t always find my way inside if I want to, but I just walked through the main entrance this time. One of your little fish boys even saw me, and he just scurried away! You have to hire better staff, pal.”
Vox’s whirring thoughts come to a screeching halt at the implication that Alastor has been sneaking into V Tower even before his capture… but he quite literally does not have the brainpower right now to freak out-slash-mull over that. He pushes the thought away.
“Fantastic. And why are you here? You’re free. I don’t want to see your face. Get the hell out and leave me be.” So I can lick my wounds in private.
“Oh, you know,” Alastor sing-songs. He pulls up a chair next to the sick bed, hops down on it, and primly crosses his legs. “After spending so much time here over the last week, I think I’ve gotten used to your hospitality. Maybe I miss being around you already!”
Vox knows Alastor is being sarcastic. He knows. And usually, he’d be able to shrug it off.
But he’s so damn beaten down already, the words are like a knife to the heart, making him bleed.
“I don’t want your fucking gloating,” he snarls. “You won. Is that what you wanted to hear? You were right about me, and I’ve failed, again, like you told me I would. Big fucking hurray to you. Go celebrate your victory with Princess Friendship.”
He’s trying, so hard, not to show how affected he is—but his throat is closing up, his eyes are hot and stinging, and he has to bite down on his tongue to stop himself from saying more lest his voice break.
He can’t do this right now. He can’t. He’s too low and sad and upset and hurt to deal with Alastor’s gloating. He is barely holding it together as is: one shitty comment would make him lose it all over again, and he cannot afford to sob like a baby in front of Alastor, he can’t.
A moment of silence. Then: “That is quite rude. Why, I even brought you a gift!”
Alastor waves his staff, and a portal opens behind him. Tentacles erupt from his back and reach into the dark void, and just as Vox is about to start panicking about what he’s gonna pull on him now, the tentacles retract, holding up—
“My body?!”
“Mm!” Alastor hums. “I took the liberty of picking it up for you. While I was and remain in full support of Valentino’s quick thinking when it came to helping you cool your head off,” laughter erupts from his microphone, “I figured you’d need it. You know Hell is full of perverts; who knows what they would have done to your body had they gotten their hands on it! I saw Rosie eyeing it, too.” He glances at Vox’s decapitated body, then reaches out and pats its chest, as if brushing off dust from a suit. “I’m even willing to help you reattach it. I might not be familiar with cheap modern technology, but you know I am a dab hand at electronics!”
Vox’s head is reeling. Alastor… picked up his body? For him? And wants to help?
But he’s learned his lesson. “I don’t trust you.”
“Good! You shouldn’t! You wouldn’t have ended up in this mess if you were more wary of me.”
Vox cringes. Yeah, in hindsight… Alastor’s deal was too good to be true. He should have clocked that, but he was so high on the prospect of success he never thought to look deeper and question Alastor’s motives. He wants to hate him—and he does! But he’s also just sad and upset with himself for falling for it so easily.
He wonders what Alastor’s game is now. Why is he here, offering his help.
But can he afford to refuse it, even if he knows that is must be a trick?
“But you don’t exactly have a choice, do you?” Alastor continues, echoing Vox’s thoughts. “I suppose you could attempt to fix yourself alone, but it would take much longer, with a much higher chance of complications, wouldn’t it?”
Yeah.
And Alastor isn’t lying about being good at this. Vox tries, and fails, to not think back to past instances when Alastor helped him fix his cracked screen or change out frayed wires inside his head. Twice, he’s even helped with the entire head upgrade, despite his clear dislike of Vox wanting to go through the procedure.
“Alright,” Vox says with a deep sigh. “Whatever. It’s not like you can fuck me up any more.” He squints at Alastor. “No deals, though.”
“No deals,” Alastor agrees with a nod. “Just helping an old friend out!”
Vox’s throat clicks. That’s the second time Alastor has called him his friend today. An empty and meaningless filler word in his verbiage, but it still makes Vox’s soul ache with grief, like pressing on a bruise.
The tentacles coil more securely around his body and bring it to the sick bed, gently laying it down under Vox’s head. Then they start peeling off the tattered remains of his outfit, leaving it in nothing but his underwear. Vox pushes away the fleeting thought that he’s had many fantasies about this over the years, and focuses on angling the closest security cameras down so he can get a better look at his body.
Overall, it’s not in a bad shape. There are cuts and bruises all over it, and he recalls throbbing pain in his chest and being short of breath right before he was incapacitated, so there’s a good chance he’s got a cracked rib or two. But nothing is missing, and everything else should start healing once he is reconnected and Hellish regeneration kicks in.
“Let me see what we’re working with,” Alastor says as he kicks his chair closer and leans over Vox.
Vox is startled by the sudden proximity. The olfactory sensors he’s built into the side of his plastic casing are still functional, and he gets a whiff of Alastor’s strong dirt-decay-and-animal-musk scent. He is so close Vox can see the fine hair on his chin, the faint cracks on his lips, the surprisingly thick lashes fanning his eyes.
He averts his gaze and stares at the posters on the wall instead—but then Alastor starts fiddling with the wires spilling from the bottom of his head, and that’s how Vox discovers that he still has some touch sensitivity. He can feel Alastor’s fingers separating and pinching the wires to inspect them, the brush of his fingertips on the frayed ends, and he gulps.
At least his heartrate can’t spike while he’s still disconnected from his body.
“Some of these need to be replaced,” Alastor says after a moment. “It’s like a dog chewed on them!”
“Yeah, Val wasn’t exactly gentle when he tore my fucking head off,” Vox grumbles. “You can find spare wires and cables in the second left drawer behind you. Equipment in the big one in the middle.”
His head is turned upside down so the back panel can be removed to give Alastor access to his internal mechanics. Vox watches through the cameras and talks Alastor through the process—mostly for his own peace of mind, since Alastor does seem to know what he’s doing. It’s… intimate, and scary in its vulnerability. Nostalgic, too: something Alastor apparently agrees with, because he makes an offhand comment about how much the inside of Vox’s head has changed since the last time he’d been inside it.
You never left it, Vox refrains, barely, from saying.
Once the damaged wiring is replaced, Alastor makes quick work of connecting Vox’s head back to his neck. There’s nothing to be done about the organic parts, but those will fix themselves in time once his head is fully secured back to his body.
“Done,” Alastor says, leaning back. “Good as new, I should hope!”
Vox doesn’t feel any different. He tries lifting his head, then an arm, but nothing.
“I’m paralyzed. Shit.” This doesn’t usually happen—but then again, his head has never been yanked off his body so brutally. “I need to run an update. It’ll shut me down. Uh… Look in the middle second drawer, there should be a pendrive in there—those thumb-sized rectangular devices—labeled VoxERS.v85.03. That one, yes. Should I not come back online in ten minutes, plug that into my USB port, will you?”
“Noted.”
Vox downloads and runs the update, and when it’s done, he approves the reboot without a second thought. He’s usually mildly anxious whenever he has to completely shut himself off, but he finds that his nerves are mostly absent now. So what if he doesn’t come back? It wouldn’t be the worst thing. Hell, maybe he shouldn’t have given the flash drive to Alastor at all.
The world goes black, and he stops existing for a bit.
He blinks when his systems come back online. His internal clock tells him it took six minutes.
“Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty!” Alastor greets him with over-the-top cheer. “Well. I didn’t kiss you awake, so don’t get funny ideas.”
Vox turns his head and gives him a look. “Shocker.” Then he processes that he did turn his head. “I can move again.”
One by one, he raises all his limbs, curls his fingers, flexes his muscles. Everything responds as it should, but he can tell right away that something is still off: he doesn’t feel things. Oh, he can feel the pain in his chest: he indeed has a cracked rib, though nothing is broken, and his vents hurt with every exhale, which suggests there must be debris in them. But he can only faintly detect his fingers digging into his palm, or the coldness of the metal bed under him, or the fabric of his briefs tightening over his skin as he shifts his legs. He runs another round of diagnostics.
“My touch sensors need to be recalibrated” he says. “But vents first. There’s some debris in a couple of them, and it fucking stings.”
“Which ones?”
Vox extends a cable from his back and adjusts the bed so it’s in a half-reclining position instead of fully horizontal. He takes a few deep breaths and exhales slowly.
“Bottom left is the worst,” he says. “Can you grab my cleaning tools? They’re in the—” He cuts himself off.
Alastor has weaved a thin tentacle into the vent in question. Vox chokes at first, but then he can feel it sort of… spreading out inside him like spilled, congealed ink. It’s the weirdest sensation. After a few seconds, it pulls itself back together and pulls out—and Vox can see a handful of gravel held inside the shadowy appendage.
“What the fuck,” he mumbles. His hand goes to his vent to rub at the opening, but everything appears to be in order. “That felt so weird. Maybe ask next time?”
“You already accepted my offer to help,” Alastor says with a shrug. “Don’t complain about how I do it. It did the job, didn’t it?”
“…Yeah.”
“Good. So, where else?”
“Um.” Vox blinks, struggling to push away old fantasies about Alastor’s tentacles inside his body. “Middle and bottom on the right.”
Vox relaxes back into the bed and watches Alastor work. The man is surprisingly unchatty—but then again, he didn’t talk much over the last week, either, unless it was to egg him on. Vox can see now how everything Alastor has been needling him about was in service of agitating his insecurities, chipping away at his sanity and pushing him towards his power grab. Something Vox was going to do anyway, but… he wanted to be smarter about it. More careful. Taking less risks.
But Alastor made him lose his cool. He wanted Vox in that position, because…
“You said I helped you break a deal,” he says. Alastor’s eyes immediately flicker to his. “A deal that’s been holding you back for ‘quite some time’. What does that mean? Did you have a deal the whole time we knew each other? Was it a soul deal?”
Alastor lifts a brow. “Prying is an unattractive trait.”
“Like you care about that,” Vox shoots back. He won’t be deterred, not this time. His mind is whirling. “You said it was me being the most powerful sinner that voided it. You wanted Charlie to say it. Is that what it’s been about? You once made a deal to make you the most powerful?” It dawns on Vox then, just what this means, and he starts laughing. It’s an ugly, mirthless sound. “God, you’re such a fucking hypocrite. Giving me shit for supposedly trying to grow on the back of others when you literally made a deal with someone to cheat the system and get to the top with no effort. Maybe even sold your fucking soul for it. I at least never sunk that low.”
Alastor yanks his tentacle out of Vox’s vents. Not so rough that it would cause damage, but enough to make him yep in pain.
“And yet I’ve managed to solve my own problems and come out victorious and powerful,” Alastor croons, his voice dripping with honeyed poison, “while you, unchained soul that you are, are once again groveling at the bottom. Having lost even the meager amount of respect you managed to scrape together thanks to me giving myself up.”
Vox flinches. His breath catches in his throat as ice stabs into his chest.
“You absolute idiot. You moron. You pathetic amateur. You’re broken from the start. I didn’t realize you were so weak. Pathetic. Pathetic. Pathetic.”
Alastor wasn’t always this cruel as Vox’s captive. He had his moments, yes… but Vox also remembers friendly banter. Being held gently. Soothing warmth curled over his back.
“It’s fine. Come on, Vincent.”
Why does Alastor’s gentleness always have to come with spikes?
“Fuck you,” Vox snarls. He holds on to his anger to keep down his pain. “If not for your meddling, I’d be invading Heaven right now. I was so close. I almost—I almost had everything I’ve ever—”
He does get it, a bit. If someone walked up to him right now and offered him the chance to do this day over… hell, to do this week over… Vox would sell his soul for it.
Alastor’s eyes flicker down, then widen. Vox follows his gaze, and that’s how he notices that he has fisted his hand so hard there’s blood streaming from his palm. He unclenches his fist, grabs a cloth with one of his cables and dabs at his palm until the bleeding slows down.
Alastor’s eyes are fixed on his hand, on the blood. Vox wonders if he would lick it clean, should Vox offer it to him.
When Alastor raises his head, the heat is gone from his expression.
“Come on, sweetheart, we both know you were never going to achieve what you really wanted with all this.”
It kills Vox. That Alastor can call him things like ‘sweetheart’ and ‘baby’ and ‘darling’, but only when he’s being condescending. He never fucking did that when they were still friends. ‘Pal’ and ‘dear’, sure, but none of these.
He wants to lash out. Fight him, claw into him, hurt him until he stops smiling and feels a fraction of the despair Vox is dealing with right now.
But he’s so exhausted.
He clears his throat, but his voice still comes out hoarse as he says, “Help me recalibrate my touch sensors, and we’re done.”
Alastor is quiet for a moment, but goes along with the change of topic. “What do you need me to do?”
“I can feel stuff, but it’s all dull. Just—here, grab my arm and squeeze down, slowly increasing the intensity.” Vox doesn’t let his expression change when Alastor’s long fingers curl around his forearm, thumb resting on the sensitive inner side. “Okay, this is the baseline. Now start squeezing, slowly. And let me know when you reach the strength that starts tipping over into supernatural, bone-crushing territory.”
“Are we going to test that, too?” Alastor asks with a toothy grin.
Vox just gives him a look in response.
All in all, it takes about five minutes to fix it. He has Alastor go from light to strong squeeze; hold it; then slowly ease back up; then do it all over again two more times so he can fine-tune it. By the time Alastor removes his hand, Vox has bright finger-shaped imprints on his forearm, and the idea that Alastor’s touch might leave him with proper bruises short-circuits his brain for a moment.
He gently runs his own claws over the length of his arm, then pokes at his flank. The strength of the touches he exerts is proportionate to the sensory feedback he receives. All in working order, the—
Vox jumps when Alastor’s hand curls around his shoulder and squeezes it. His head snaps to the man. Alastor’s smile is teasing, red eyes playful, as his fingertips dance down Vox’s arm and then brush his delicate inner wrist.
Vox shivers. “What are you doing?”
“You’re still testing, aren’t you? I’m just helping.” His hand drops down and lightly squeezes Vox’s left thigh.
Vox jumps, face heating up. He’s suddenly very aware that he’s practically naked. And he is reminded of evenings from long ago—evenings when they’d be at bars together and Al would keep brushing against his shoulder, squeezing his hip while passing by him, pressing their knees together under the table.
“Don’t fucking do that,” Vox snaps, batting Alastor’s wandering hand away. “And this reminds me: it was so shitty of you to complain about me being handsy when you do this shit all the time. Like, the only reason I ever thought I had a chance with you back then was because you were so fucking touchy-feely with me. You made me think it meant something.”
“You fucking creep. You always do that, and I hate it!”
“And how dare you call me a creep when I—Even when—Even when I was afflicted and in pain from the stupid love potion, I very much did NOT touch you! You were my captive, I could’ve just used you… but I didn’t! You’re the one who decided to come over and fuck me!”
A record screeching noise cuts into the air as Alastor stiffens in his chair. “Excuse me? I did not do that.”
“You fucked me with a dildo—that amounts to the same thing, asshat,” Vox says with an eyeroll. “The point is, I didn’t fucking rape you!”
“Astounding feat. Do you want a medal for that?”
“No! I just want you to stop acting like I’m a creep who can’t keep his hands off you! Casual touching… Sure, I guess I do that. But newsflash, bitch: you do it all the time, too! And it never used to bother you!”
Alastor crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, that was before.”
Before Vox confessed his feelings and Alastor laughed at him. Before Alastor revealed that he’s always thought Vox pathetic and weak. Before their supposed friendship went up in flames and Vox spent the next several nights crying into his pillow. Before he swore to never let himself be so vulnerable again.
Vox draws up his legs, warps his arms around them and presses his screen to his knees. “I hate this. I hate everything. I want to st-start my day over. Start my fucking afterlife over.”
He’s getting choked up. Now that the memories are at the forefront of his mind, he can’t stop thinking about everything that went wrong—decades ago, over the last week, today—and he’s working himself up all over again. Even his cables extend and wrap around him in a facsimile of a self-hug, and he knows, he knows how pathetic he must look, how he’s validating everything Alastor has said about him… but he can’t stop it.
“Why ddddid you have to fight me,” Vox croaks, voice distorted, as he turns his head to glare at Alastor. “You got what you wanted from me by then. You were free—of me, of that other deal you had. Why couldn’t you just w-walk away and let me hhhave it.”
“And let you go through with your insane plan that could have very well annihilated all of Hell? That did almost do just that? I don’t think so.” Alastor’s voice is calm, but that just makes him sound cold and detached. “You needed someone to beat back your ego—you always do. I wasn’t going to kill you; just push you back to the ground where you belong.”
Vox—
Vox starts crying.
He doesn’t realize it at first. It happens silently. But he sees Alastor’s eyes widen and his ears pin down, and then he feels wet droplets hitting his bare arm. Startled, Vox reaches up to his face, and his fingers come away wet, shit, shit.
He quickly presses his face back to his knees, but the damage is done. And once he realizes he’s crying, it rapidly develops into full-blown sobbing, complete with wet hiccups and choked gasps that make his whole body shake.
He doesn’t know how long he weeps like that, curled up and feeling sorry for himself—but at some point, there’s a touch on his back. It’s tentative, and gentle, and Vox’s breath catches at the contact.
He stills even more when Alastor leans against him, the tip of a fluffy ear brushing the back of Vox’s casing. He doesn’t do anything else, just lays his head on Vox’s shoulder and rests his hand on his back.
“You are so confounding,” Alastor breathes.
A hysterical, wet laugh bubbles out of Vox. Him? Al thinks he is the confounding one?
“Why would you react like this?” Alastor continues, low and quiet. “You didn’t used to take my taunting to heart so much.”
“Bull,” Vox rasps. “I always did.”
Alastor doesn’t say anything to that.
But after a moment, he reaches out.
Not physically, this time—but with his signal. He raises his frequency to match Vox’s higher one and pushes against it hesitantly, like an offer of handholding for the brain. The whole time he was Vox’s captive, they have both been careful not to let their frequencies mix: Vox has only gotten a glimpse of it the very first night, when they were fighting and he electrocuted Alastor. It was sharp and antagonistic then.
It is meek and uncertain now. And Vox is too miserable not to take advantage before Alastor can change his mind: he grasps back with full force, tangling their signals together, greedy and clingy and pathetic.
Alastor doesn’t pull back.
The aching familiarity of it combined with the physical closeness prompts a fresh flood of tears. Vox keeps sniffing into his drawn-up knees as Alastor rubs his palm up and down his back, his head resting on Vox’s shoulder and his chest pressing into Vox’s arm whenever he breathes in. It’s soothing, warm, painful—and everything he needs.
Minutes pass like this. Alastor’s arm eventually wounds up around him, his palm on Vox’s right flank and his fingertips over his trembling abdomen. It’s intimate; it reminds Vox of Alastor curling around him, unprompted, when he was drugged up. Holding him from behind to ease the symptoms, pulling him close. Touching his cock.
Heat flickers through him—and to his shame, his dick responds.
With how entangled their frequencies are, there’s no way Alastor can’t tell. Vox tenses up, ready for his moment of serenity to be ripped away… but Alastor just huffs a little laugh.
“It appears you may have set the sensitivity too high, after all,” he says, sounding amused. “I barely touched you!”
Vox relaxes back a little. “It’s because it’s you, asshole,” he mumbles without heat. “You could pinch my arm and I’m pretty sure I’d get hard from it.”
He recalls how Alastor made him come just by squeezing his biceps. Sure, he was high on love potion then, but Vox doubts anyone else could have achieved the same result. Alastor has always been, and will always remain, his own category.
The man is quiet. His hand is still laid over Vox’s stomach, and that certainly isn’t helping with his sad little erection. Vox takes a deep breath, then shrugs off his touch and shifts, lying down on his side with his back to Alastor.
He thought the move was a clear enough indicator, but Alastor surprises him yet again: he slips an arm under Vox’s and wraps it around him. His palm brushes over the flat plane of Vox’s stomach, the muscles tensing and fluttering from the touch… and then he slides his hand down and cups Vox’s half-hard dick through his briefs.
Vox chokes. He feels a rush of disbelief.
Then exhilaration.
Then anger.
“I don’t need your fucking pity,” he hisses.
“Good. Because you don’t have it,” Alastor says, undeterred. He continues fumbling with Vox’s bulge. “I’ve heard orgasms produce serotonin. You certainly seem to be in need of it!”
Vox closes his eyes and considers letting it happen. Where’s the harm, really? When Alastor is offering? Would it really be that different from the previous time?
Yeah. It would be.
He takes Alastor’s wrist and pulls his hand away from his crotch. “It wouldn’t solve anything. I’ve lost everything and proved you all right about me being a failure. They’ll never take me seriously after this. Val and Vel aren’t talking to me. I wanna lock myself up in my surveillance room and never leave it again.” Vox takes a wheezing breath, his eyes stinging again. “You giving me a handjob ‘cause you feel sorry for me won’t fix any of that. Everything fucking sucks, and I wish I was gone.”
“You flew too close to the sun, my darling,” Alastor murmurs after a beat, twisting the knife with the tenderness of a caress. “You always want too much. You could be content, if only you didn’t.”
“You say that like you weren’t an ambitious motherfucker, too.”
“Ambition is good! Stupidity, on the other hand… There was no need to involve Heaven, or to chase the asinine dream of becoming God. That was just you grasping because your greedy little hands are never satisfied even when they are full. Merely trying to rule over Hell would have gone much better for you.”
“…Are you saying you’d have let me have that one?”
“Nope!” Alastor counters cheerfully. “But I’m certain you wouldn’t be quite so beaten down right now.”
Yeah. Drained powers, tanked ratings, masses who hate him, overlords who lost all respect for him, partners who probably also hate him now and are going to kick him out… He still has his souls, yes, but what fucking use are they if Vox is now the persona non grata of Hell? He’s never been so low. Never. Not even when he first arrived.
He’s never been anxious about socializing—he’s spent his whole existence on the stage, after all—but his stomach rolls at the idea of having to face anyone after this. He won’t be able to bear the ridicule.
“Do you really think I’m pathetic?” Vox hates how small his voice is, but he doesn’t dare to say the words any louder. “That I’m broken from the start? That I’ll never amount to anything?”
“Oh, Vincent,” Alastor sighs—and Vox’s heart twists and bleeds, hot and sticky in his chest. This is worse that the endearments. “Only you. Only you could be at the top of the world and still worry about what others think of you.”
“Not others,” Vox corrects hoarsely. “Just you. I just wanted to show you.”
“Show me what?”
Vox wraps his cables tighter around himself. “That I’m not a failure. That you were wrong about me. That I didn’t need you to succeed—just wanted you.”
Alastor is quiet. Vox can’t read his signal, and he can’t trust himself to read any real tenderness into the way he’s holding him. Alastor always has an agenda. Vox has just been reminded of this the hard way.
But it’s nice to pretend.
“I will only say this once,” Alastor says after a while. “Vox, you are a brilliant, clever, and remarkably competent man. I thought so then, and I think so now.”
Vox’s breath hitches. His antennae spark and his eyes go wide and wobbly. He inhales the praise like a starved man, soaks it in, clings to it like a lifeline. There must be a punchline coming, there must be, this is Alastor—but fuck if the words don’t make him teary again.
“Unfortunately for you, your massive ego combined with your crippling insecurities don’t let those characteristics shine. And you are without question a moron, too. Aim a bit lower, in the realm of sane goals, and stop caring so much about what others—what I—think. Trying to burn everything down, including yourself, just to get back at me?” The static lacing through his voice becomes heavier, and his fingers twitch against Vox’s stomach. “I didn’t think you would ever do that.”
Vox breathes in, two, three, four times. He feels so overwhelmed.
“Is that why you’re here?” he asks. “Guilt? It shocked you that I was crazy enough to try to kill myself and all of us over it?”
“Ha! That’s cute. I’ve never felt guilt in my life.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re an emotionless, heartless bastard.” Vox’s throat clicks on a swallow. “Who do you think gave me most of those crippling insecurities?”
Alastor shuts up at that, but Vox wasn’t expecting him to respond.
He also wasn’t expecting him to reach down and start clumsily pawing at his cock again, but that’s what he does.
“Wh—Al?” Vox sputters, tensing up. He tries peering back over his shoulder, but his television head combined with the position they’re in doesn’t really allow that. He can only see the top of Alastor’s red head. “What did I tell you five fucking minutes ago?”
“Let me do this for you.”
Alastor is rubbing and squeezing him over his briefs, slow and unpracticed, and it’s nothing like a proper handjob, but it still feels nice. Vox’s cock starts thickening back up. How can it not? Alastor is pressed up against him, warm and solid and real. He’s here—the only person who still is. He is touching Vox with his hand and soothing Vox with his frequency.
Vox closes his eyes. Remembers desperately yanking on his dick as Alastor held him from behind a few days ago, his breath warm against the back of Vox’s neck and his fingers wrapped loosely around the base of Vox’s cock. He should just let Alastor do this for him. He’s offered, for the second time now. And after everything that went down, Vox wants to feel nice so fucking bad.
…But he’s in so much pain. Not so much physically, but everywhere else. The parts of him that can’t be fixed with tools and patches and updates. And he knows that once it’s done, he’d feel even shittier. He’s like a crackhead about to get the next hit, and once the high of it passes, he’ll just want to die all over again.
His hand clamps down on Alastor’s wrist. “Stop touching me.”
“You are aroused.”
“Yeah, playing with my dick will do that. It’s—I’m not gonna come, Al, I’m a mess. Just drop it.”
A second, and another, and Alastor lets go. Vox releases his hand, and Alastor pulls it back.
Then he presses a small kiss to the back of Vox’s head.
Vox lets out a sound like he’s just been stabbed. He shrugs off Alastor’s touch completely and withdraws his signal from him. He squeezes his eyes shut and curls up into a ball, cables extending and coiling around him.
“Why are you really here?” Vox demands, his voice breaking. “Stop mmmessing with me. You always do this—give me just enough to keep me hooked. Just fucking—h-hurt me enough so I get over you already. Fuck. Fuck.”
He’s back to sniffing. God, he really is pathetic. He feels so wrung out, like he’s been run over a truck and then put into a meat grinder. There’s a gaping wound in his chest that pulses and throbs with every hitching breath he takes, and unlike Alastor, he can’t even stitch it up.
Alastor doesn’t say anything for a time. Then he murmurs: “Maybe you aren’t the only one who is unable to get rid of this. Persistent like a fucking weed.”
“What?” Vox croaks. “What’s ‘this’? What weed?”
Alastor doesn’t elaborate.
Always an enigma, the Radio Demon: his goals and motivations unclear to everyone but himself. He never does anything that doesn’t benefit him in some way. Vox always knew that.
But… He came. He helped. He didn’t have to help when Vox was drugged up, and he didn’t have to help now. Vox wants to believe that means something.
Swallowing around the lump in his throat, he pushes himself up and turns around on the bed. He avoids looking at Alastor’s face, but zeroes in on one of his hands and clasps it in his own.
Alastor tenses at the sudden contact, but before he can even think about jerking away, Vox rushes to say, “Let me—Just this, okay? Just shut up and let me have this.”
A beat, and Alastor relaxes. “Alright.”
He lets him. He doesn’t offer words of comfort, but he stays, and he lets him.
They sit like that for the next ten minutes. They don’t speak: the only noise is Vox’s ragged breathing and the wet little sniffs as he quietly weeps to himself. He whines when it seems like Alastor is trying to pull his hand away, but the man just threads their fingers together. The gesture punches a gasp from Vox’s throat and a fresh stream of tears from his eyes.
God, he’s never been such a fucking crybaby. The other Vees would never let him live it down. Hell, there’s a good chance Alastor won’t, either. But at least he’s not teasing him about it now.
“I wish I could stop being in love with you,” Vox rasps.
There. He said it. He always thought dropping the l-word would be scary and dramatic and impactful… but he just said it, with no fanfare, and he doesn’t feel any different for it. He might as well have commented on the weather.
They both knew already, of course. He’s said it in other ways. But having it plainly out is still freeing.
Alastor’s fingers don’t twitch around his own. There is no sudden movement, no flick of his ears; his signal doesn’t spike; the shadows don’t shift on the walls. But the air still changes. Vox keeps waiting for a response, some kind of acknowledgement… but seconds tick by, and Alastor doesn’t react.
Vox wishes he knew what was going on in his head. But it’s probably better that he doesn’t.
Eventually, Alastor gives his hand a squeeze and does pull away.
“You are clearly functional now,” he says as he stands up from the chair and summons his staff. “If you need any more fine-tuning, I’m sure you can handle it yourself. Toodaloo!”
Rather than just dissolving into the shadows, he starts walking towards the med bay door.
“Al, wait,” Vox calls out, hastily sitting up. Alastor doesn’t turn back, but he does pause. “What… What do I do now?” Vox asks, lost.
“Adapt! That’s what you always do,” Alastor says. Then he adds, low enough that Vox has to adjust his audio sensors: “It’s something I have always liked about you.”
Vox’s heart thuds.
Alastor leaves, and he stares after him. His fingers curl around the edge of the sick bed, claws clicking against the cold metal.
Adapt, huh?
Yeah. Yeah, okay. Vox can do that.